Yes. But the original statement was:
**AK84 **
“Hitting ships at sea is not easy and on 7 Dec 1941 no capital ship had ever been destroyed from the air alone.”
whereupon I countered with this list:
Battleships:
Ostfriesland , 1921
Alabama, 1921
Kilkis, 23 April 1941
Marat ,23 September 1941
Conte di Cavour, & Littorio 11 November 1940
Didnt the IJN use a modified naval shell as a AP dive bomb?
As bad as the losses were at PH, the attack on the PI demonstrates exactly how unprepared the US military was for war. Despite knowing that the Japan would be attacking PI next, the US command simply did not know how to defend themselves, and consequently most of the planes were destroyed on the ground. The peacetime thinking was too strong. Fighter squadrons had come back then had sat down for lunch before the attack on Clark’s Field that wiped them out.
Of course the US fighters couldn’t engage the Japanese land based bombers. In training exercises, these slow climbing aircraft weren’t able to engage US bombers flying at 20,000 ft, either. That would not have been the case at PH, where the Japanese level bombers where at 10,000 feet and the “low and slow” torpedo bombers where sitting ducks.
As noted previously, the other material difference is that the Japanese did not have fighter escorts for their bombers at PH. Their radios were terrible so it would not have been likely to obtain help.
Those were the special AP bombs specifically for PH attack and dropped by the level bombers. I’m not certain that they never developed any during the war, but they didn’t have any at the beginning.
My Dad was in Dugout Dougs command HQ. His theory was that Doug had been ordered to let the Japanese take him by “surprise”, that the US knew of a impending IJN attack, but assumed it would be in PI, not HI. The idea being that the US voter might not support a war vs Japan over PI, unless by “sneak attack”. His other theory was that Dougout Doug was just a idiot, made into a cardboard hero at a time when the uS needed one.
Or, if “Tora, Tora, Tora!” is to be believed, they had wooden fin contraptions that kept the torpedoes from diving too deep before leveling out.
Yup… after Pearl Harbor, the USN’s main combat strength in the Pacific was in the carrier groups, and the admirals had to rethink how to fight a war using that, as even the next four battleships under construction were due to be commissioned between March and September of 1942, which was a long way out.
That had multifaceted advantages; they could produce carriers faster than battleships, and they had the ability to strike at much longer ranges- effectively rendering battleships obsolete except for being big targets.
I remember you mentioning your father being on MacArthur’s staff before. When was that? Interesting for a staff officer to suggest that he was just an idiot, and he wasn’t the first to make that comment.
More than one historian have suggested that MacArthur become overwhelmed that morning, with many suggesting that he had a (minor?) nervous breakdown for the critical several hours when no one could get permission to launch an attack on Formosa.
While he did have orders to not provoke the Japanese into attacking, he also had explicit orders to launch a counter attack if the Japanese attacked first. Which they did at PH and Wake Island. There should have been no question concerning that.
With his close personal a professional ties to the Philippine president Manuel Quezon, certainly his conflict on interest cannot be ignored.
As much as I dislike the general, the failure was not entirely his. Everyone was bad, with no one in the command structure prepared for an attack. Again, it was a peacetime organization which was suddenly thrust into war.
I forgot all about the Maine. 
My Dad was a Senior NCO. He arrived in PI in Dec 1941, just in time to get Malaria and get invalided home before the Japanese invasion was in full force. My Dad had the PI Defense, Liberation and Independence medals. After he was sent back to the States he was assigned “Repl-Depl” to the 10th Mtn, but then was sent back to Australia then New Guinea “by personal request” of some high ranking staffer of the “Bataan gang”. Dad never quite figured out why. Yes, he could type, drive and knew a little Japanese and Tagalog, but nothing unique. Dad did say he “knew the secret of Dugout Dougs escape”, he apparently knew the B17 crews that flew MacArthur out in the second leg. He was cicialian aircrew for Boeing before the war. I think he arrived as a civilian in a B17, volunteered on Dec 8th, then got sick. His records show he started as a Corporal?
Yes, the Japanese developed a wooden frame that attached to the torpedoes. The British had a wire that attached the torpedo to the plane for the first part of its drop and made it land on the water flat rather than headfirst.
I disagree on that point. I think the fault was almost entirely MacArthur’s. He had been in command in the Philippines since 1937 and had made the command structure into what he wanted. And what he wanted were officers who were subservient to him. Anyone who showed initiative or independence was weeded out.
So on December 8, you had an entire command structure which wouldn’t do anything until Douglas MacArthur told them to. And MacArthur himself had collapsed and wasn’t giving any orders. The entire military was paralyzed.
No one needs to go to a movie for that information. It’s well documented.
Many people believe that the Japanese got their idea for this modification from the British attack on Taranto. Here is a typical quote.
Yamamoto had already been thinking of attacking PH, and modifying torpedoes was something they had already considered. The Japanese had already added wooden breakaway fins to their torpedoes in 1936.
Tora, Tora, Tora has added to popular misconceptions concerning the attack. The first is the manufactured quote attributed to Yamamoto concerning his fear that all they did was awaken a sleeping giant. Although initially opposed to the war, he personally forced the IJN into carrying out the attack.
Another was Air Commander Fuchida’s spurious claim that he argued for a third strike again the oil tanks. He was a technical adviser for the film and an accomplished liar by this point in his career. He mislead historians for decades concerning the state of the Japanese carriers at Midway and found other ways to lie as well.
Yes, that quote is very nice but doubtful. Hower, he was quoted:
*"If we are ordered to do it,” Yamamoto had answered, “then I can guarantee to put up a tough fight for the first six months, but I have absolutely no confidence as to what would happen if it went on for two or three years.”
Yamomoto states this in 1940 to the then prime minister, Fumimaro Konoye. This was long before the Pearl Harbor attack . Again in September 1941 he made a similar prediction:
“For a while we’ll have everything our own way, stretching out in every direction like an octopus spreading its tentacles. But it’ll last for a year and a half at the most.” SEPTEMBER 1941"*
I’d be interested to hear more about that Fuchida info.
Although the FEAF disaster on Dec 8, losing half the B-17’s on the ground and a lesser but significant % of the fighters on the ground, was also partly bad luck: fog at the Japanese fields on Formosa delayed their attack till US planes had to land after being launched to avoid being caught on the ground at dawn.
I was focusing on the aspect of the FEAF fighters being occupied in combat by the Zero escort on Dec 8, which they were. It’s true P-40’s also had lackluster altitude performance but an overstatement to say they couldn’t intercept IJN twins at ~18-20k ft (bombers over Clark at 5.5-6km). They did in later operations, as for example 49th FG defending Darwin Australia in 1942. But it required a coordinated air warning/direction system for one thing. The FEAF fighters had only practiced this a few times and found in this case US (ground) radio’s being used didn’t really work. Again, general unreadiness.
But if Hawaiian AF fighters had risen to meet the meet the incoming PH raid in numbers they too would probably have been heavily engaged by the Zero escort, which certainly did exist, 45 in the first wave 36 in the second (albeit not as big as the 87 Tainan/3rd AG Zeroes accompanying the missions over Luzon Dec 8). The PH Zeroes met no opposition at first, so went immediately to strafing. That allowed P-40’s taking off later to pick off a few attack planes without interference.
*the FEAF’s fighter contingent included many brand new P-40E’s. The pilots had a reasonable degree of flying experience in general but very little in those new a/c, which also had some teething problems. The HAF’s P-40B/C’s had been flown for awhile like the FEAF’s P-40B’s. The HAF’s P-36’s were also closer to being competitive with Zeroes than the FEAF’s P-35’s. There were a small number of completely obsolete P-26’s in both cases.
For WWII dive bombers it was the other way around, the plane had way more sectional area for its weight especially with dive brakes to slow it down. A bomb could be going supersonic speed if dropped from high enough, as would be an AP shell. As was mentioned, modified battleship caliber AP shells were used as AP bombs.
This was the dilemma trying to kill battleships with bombs. A dive bomber had a good chance of a hit but from too low to give any chance of penetrating a then-modern battleship’s main armor deck. A level bomber at 10 or 20k ft could get the penetration, but was very unlikely to get a hit on a moving ship with an unguided bomb. The most elegant solution was a guided AP bomb dropped from high altitude, the German Fritz X which sank the Italian battleship Roma, besides of course torpedoes*. AP bombs of the type dropped by US dive bombers on Yamato would only work fully work against lighter armored ships like cruisers. None of the bombs dropped on Yamato penetrated the armor deck (some were general purpose bombs anyway), though they caused serious fires above it.
*two other approaches: the US Army trials in the early 20’s (against moored obsolete US and more modern German battleships) tried another method which was 2000# non-AP bombs to inflict underwater damage by shock from near misses, but battleship underwater protection was very strong by WWII
And the Germans had rocket assisted unguided AP bombs to boost the speed when dropped by a dive bomber at low altitude.
I think it was explained that firing up boilers would take too much time. And towing them initially out when they are are anchored side-by-side was hard. So the logical hindsight solution was to install anti-torpedo nets. So they could have been kept from getting torpedoed but as to how it could defend against dive and level bombers, it couldn’t, as long as they were in the harbor.
Interesting in a possible sad way, given that the entire world, including even you here! (before doing the sensible thing)–becomes accustomed/reduced to Google-borrowing the class notes of someone who doesn’t get it.
Oldendorf’s BBs are often given credit for winning at Surigao, but the Japanese ships were sunk by destroyer torpedoes, not gunfire.
Love this thread!!! Many interesting points have been made.
To repeat what many of said, if the battleships had made it to sea before the attack, it is most likely less of them would have been badly damaged, but if any had been sunk, there would have been no way to salvage them. The repaired ships played important roles later in the war, against shore and sea targets. (Your BB does not have to sink the other ship to be effective.) Distracting the other side from attacking your smaller ships (not to mention damage you cause when your big shells do hit), makes it easier for the little guys to press home their attack.
If you look at the damage the Taffy 3 DDs and DAs caused without big ship support, imagine what they might have done if they had a couple BBs (or even heavy cruisers) on their side.