I was not asking for every cite that ever existed.
If the research on this is as pervasive as you suggest (to support your argument) then a few cites should be no problem.
That is usual for this message board.
I am not disputing your claims but I’d like to see citations for them.
ETA: You have provided some and I’ll check them out. Main point here is if you make an assertion backup citations are a good thing. If you can establish your own expertise in the subject then that is good too.
Intelligence was a dead-end career choice. Promotion boards favored folks who operated in “real” commands (i.e. ships and squadrons), not something administrative, and the career minded officers knew this. This probably was a major disincentive to get into Intelligence and code breaking.
This is described here: http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/events/wwii-pac/midway/mid-1m.htm
In a nutshell, the Japanese were divided into several different task forces. One to the Aleutions, one (the Kido Butai) carrier strike force, one was the trasport force with the Midway invasion force, and the “main” force (where Yamamoto hung his cape) with the battleships. Midway order of battle - Wikipedia
The Catalina’s were sent against the occupation force, at night. Scored one hit.
One of the errors the Japanese made was to divide their superiority into forces that were too far apart to support each other.
Most folks know that the main carrier strike force had four carriers in it. (Kaga, Akagi, Hiryu, Soryu)
There were also the Zuiho, Hosho, Ryujo, Junyo CVL types (granted, these are slightly slower 20-25 knot ships), and three capable float plane tenders that could have beefed up the aerial scouting assets.
No plan survives contact with the enemy. The Japanese should have kept it simple.
I agree that splitting up the Midway task force was a disaster for the Japanese. What on earth did the Japanese stand to gain in the Aleutians? They managed to capture some woirthless (strategically) islands-which tied down several crack army divisions-for no gain whatsoever.
The Japanese naval command seemed to follow the same idea over and over:
“gee, if we can lure the US Navy into a decisve battle, and sink their carriers, the Americans will sue for peace”.
Nope, never would have happened. Meanwhile, the IJN was strung out over islands thousands of miles apart, and relying in the navy to supply them-which lost steadily to S submarines in this role.
The telling thing-by 1943, Japanese forces on Guadacanal, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands were eating rats and whatever they could scrounge.
Unfortunately, the intelligent navy command (Adm. Yamamoto) had no power over the insane army commanders-which led them into disaster after disaster.
There’s a school of thought that says that it was diversionary, but it sort of makes sense if you’re Japan to take the Aleutians, just because it would protect Hokkaido, and, in fact, after the Americans retook the islands, bombers were based there to strike Hokkaido.
An elaborate (read: overly complex) plan that involved dividing their forces was practically a requirement for any plan put together by the IJN throughout the entire war.
The most amazing thing to me is that the Japanese never figured out their codes were broken. The Pacific is a BIG ocean, yet everywhere they went, there we were waiting for them.
Also, there overly complex plans worked beautifully for them early in. Odds are, had we not known the gist of their plans they would have worked at Midway too. Come to think of it, odds of them succeeding were very high even though we DID know their plans.
I think they needlessly reduced those odds by seperating their forces so widely.
The idea was not to get the USA to sue for peace, but to destroy the aircraft carriers so Japan could win the war. The carriers had already proved to be a menace at the Coral Sea and an embarassment in the Doolittle Raid; without them, the U.S. Navy simply would not have had any effective means of stopping Japan from doing as it pleased.
Japan’s intent with regard to the spring offensive was to force the U.S. carrier group into battle in a place of their choosing. As has been pointed out, the Pacific is a big place - indeed, unless you leave the planet, it’s the biggest place. Allowing the U.S. fleet to attack at a time and place of its choosing was not going to be a winning approach, since it’s difficult to impossible to guess where it’ll be; the U.S. could simply jab and retreat whenever it pleased, especially after Coral Sea sort of nixed any hope of advancing into Australia (a plan the Japanese weren’t especially keen on, anyway.) Midway was intended to force the carriers to be in a known place so they could be destroyed.
Yamamoto’s intention was that an attack against Midway would draw U.S. forces to it after the fact, placing his task forces in position to close and destroy the American rescuers. Had that been the case the Japanese would have had a significant advantage in terms of tactical readiness and the opportunity to gather intelligence on the location and order of battle of the American forces moving into the area. What messed his plan up was the Americans - quite famously, of course - knew the plan ahead of time and, consequently, were already there, lying in wait.
On top of that, the US force was larger than Japanese intelligence beleived it so be, since they thought Yorktown had been destroyed.
The Japanese plan was perhaps overly complex, but it’s hard to say if combining their forces would have made a difference. If the battleship group was a few hundred miles forward, so what? Unless battleships have a magical way of finding enemy carriers two hundred miles away one would presume the battle would have proceeded more or less as it did and the Japanese would still have lost three carriers in fifteen really horrible minutes, at which point the entire force has to run away anyway, which is what they did; the battleships could not have remained in the area without air support.
The Pacific battles demonstrated time and again what is still true today of naval warfare; if you’re seen first, you’re dead. If you read a full account of the battle, things happened as they did more or less because the Americans found the Japanese carriers first. The planes that would sink Kaga, Akagi and Soryu were in the air before Nagumo made any of the critical decisions that morning.
I hear that a lot. Supporters of this idea make it sound like Nagumo should have stayed in his cabin, listening to smooth jazz.
Nagumo could have made decisions that might have changed the outcome, but the critical fact was that he was detected first.
Can you still win? Sure. Is it one Christ of a lot harder? A lot harder.
The telling thing for me was that the Japanese didn’t try to hastily rebuild a new air wing for the Zuikaku (out of the survivors of both her own group and that of her damaged sister ship Shokaku after the Coral Sea). But of course we run into that doctrine thing again-unlike the Americans, they simply didn’t swap air wings around, as they were considered “married” to their carrier.
Heh, beat me to it. Mac’s airforce being caught on the ground was sort a trademark…a problem he made for himself repeatedly with great stubbornness. Note he was also surprised by the Japanese landings in the Philippines, allowed the Japanese to seize his undefended heavy equipment by positioning it too far forward while keeping his troops well back, and failed to score any hits at all with the largest submarine fleet in the world. He was later surprised by the Chinese intervention in Korea (twice!)
That’s not his fault. He did not excercise tactical control of the subs in the Phillippines.
That was the job of Admiral Thomas C. Hart, Commander, U.S. Asiatic Fleet.
The reasons for the failure of the subs to stop the invasion of the P.I. were several. Off the top of my head:
Overestimation of the effectiveness of Sonar and air power. This lead to the sub commanders to be “overly” cautious. The commanders stayed submerged longer, did not close the enemy as closely as they did later in the war. (The majority of hits would be scored under 1500 yards or so, although there are some impressive lucky long range hits.) This caution was drilled into the commanders heads by prewar exercises.
Overestimation of the effectiveness of [sub] attacks made by passive sound tracking only. Prewar training emphasized the minimum use of the periscope. (C.O.'s getting “poor” marks for unnecessary use of the scope in prewar exercises.) But water bends sound in funny ways, and understanding of this was rudimentary at the beginning of WW2.
Faulty equipment. The Mk14 torpedo had several design faults: Poor depth keeping (they ran deeper than set), faulty magnetic detonator, faulty contact detonator.
Enemy action/Poor supplies. The Japanese (probably unknowingly) scored a major “victory” when they bombed Cavite Navy Yard, destroying a major stockpile of torpedoes and spare parts for the subs.
Lack of experience. Submerged torpedo attacks rely (pre radar) on good observations of the target. Errors of a few degrees in angles, or a few knots in speed will mean a miss. It’s hard to really fault folks on this one, but it affected shooting anyway.
You’re peering through a scope. You see a target, or at least parts of one. You must estimate target course, speed, distance. If you think a target is 500 feet long as it moves across the field of view, you may get a speed estimate. If the target was actually 350 feet long, it may be moving slower than you thought [I think], resulting in your torpedoes crossing ahead of the target. These periscope observations [that the estimates are based on] must be quick, like no more than 10 or 20 seconds of exposed scope time. robby will probably correct me here. No calculators (other than the TDC), math must be done long hand or with slide rules.
They also were using the old S class tubs, whose only virtue was good underwater speed (11 knots). In any event the war winning doctrine simply wasn’t in place yet (as mlees said very eloquently).
I may be misremembering this, but IIRC they had the additional virtue of older torpedoes with the older style contact detonators. This made them considerably more reliable than the new torpedoes with magnetic detonators that failed most of the time through the first year of the war.
That’s because we’re busy forgetting that a similar number of people were murdered on 9/11.
Oh shit, I forgot to forget it.
Now I’ll have to start all over again.
:rolleyes:
“sufficient” warning would not have mattered. the US was not psychologically prepared to meet a massed carrier plane attack. they would have needed more than 3 days for all the ships to clear to blue water.
regarding that comment that 2,000 planes would have been in the air, this is what happened just before the attack: the escorting zeros were already hovering above the harbor. p-40s were circling below them FOR A FULL 10 MINUTES. the zeros didn’t attack because they were ordered to wait for the bomber force. the p-40s simply didn’t know what to make of things. remember, there was no declaration of war. even if an attack was eminent, they would have scrambled up to meet the zeros and leave the harbor free for the dive bombers and torpedo planes to plaster.
similarly, the fighter force that attacked clark field in the philippines saw american fighters and bombers circling the field below them. neither side did anaything for more than 10 minutes. and they knew fully well that pearl harbor was destroyed nearly 3 hours earlier. only when the betty bombers arrived did things get exciting.
so a planned attack, kept secret as much as possible, during peacetime, is hard to deflect. pearl harbor and clark were inevitable distasters, IMHO.
my other rant is the defense of the philippines. i believe macarthur could have built up a mechanized and armored force strong enough to repel any invasion force the japanese could have thrown in (not more than 4 infantry divisions or 40,000 men.) seems doug wasn’t really that good when it came to mechanized fighting.