I’m OK with what you wrote up until here. The USS Constitution shouldn’t be in any ship’s shadow.
Like how the Guadalcanal campaign was a disaster (or didn’t happen at all) for lack of carrier support. Because Yorktown was stateside having its Coral Sea damage repaired.
If your point is that by the time Midway rolled around, Enterprise and Yorktown were not fungible due to Yorktown’s preexisting battle damage, then I agree. Enterprise was already, even before Yorktown’s loss, the more important of the two according to the historical record. So we are lucky indeed CV-6 was not lost in its place.
I looked at google maps for a “largish city near Buenos Aires that might have a ship named after it” and didn’t pay attention to national boundaries. I have no excuse for my ignorance, and throw myself on the mercy of our future Argentinian overlords.
So no tears for you from Argentina, either.
My point — to the extent that I had one — was that if Yorktown had survived Midway it would have been withdrawn to repair her Coral Sea damage properly. Had Enterprise been sunk instead, the USN would have been down to one carrier (Hornet, whose performance at Midway had been somewhat less than exemplary) until Wasp arrived from the Atlantic. I can’t help but feel this would have affected the existence, not to mention the outcome, of the Guadalcanal operation.
Two carriers.
Saratoga was on her way from the West Coast and made port in Pearl Harbor on June 6th; she ferried planes to Enterprise and Hornet after the battle was over. She participated in the early part of the Guadalcanal campaign where, true to form, she was hit by a Japanese torpedo and forced to go to the West Coast for repairs.
Would the U.S. have attacked Guadalcanal with just two fleet carriers, plus Wasp, and only a badly damaged Yorktown in reserve? The alternative is to allow Japan to finish the Lunga Point airfield, which would make future offensives in the area difficult at best. I kinda think that Nimitz would roll the dice here, as long as there were enough land based air assets to keep Pearl Harbor safe, but that’s a WAG at best, and since the Solomons campaign was so close-run to start it really might have ended very differently.
I’m sure that in late 1942 Nimitz would have agreed with the OP that CV-6 was the most important navy ship of all time…
You better pray that Argentina has already anexed Uruguay (“La provincia rebelde”) by that time, if it has not and the Uruguayans are in a position of power they would not forgive you for thinking Montevideo is a city in Argentina… And you don’t want a powerful Uruguay angry at you believe me…
(You should’ve gone with Bahia Blanca)
I feel like we’re only one stray comment away from devolving into a discussion of the South American dreadnought race…
Hmm…now I’m tempted to nominate the dreadnought HMS Agincourt* solely on the basis of it having the absurd number of 7 twin-12inch turrets all in the centerline and thus capable of firing broadside.
*She was part of the South American dreadnought race, having been ordered by Brazil only to be sold to the Ottoman Empire while under construction when it proved too expensive for Brazil to afford when their rubber boom ended, only to be seized by the British when the Ottomans sided with the Central Powers in WWI.
I’m afraid you’ve got that backwards. The Ottomans sided with the Central Powers in WWI when the British seized two ships meant for the Ottomans, in breach of contract. Or so the story goes. And of course the higher ups found a way to cast most of the blame on some hapless officer charged with letting two German ships escape pursuit in the Mediterranean by going over to the Ottomans. But I think that’s a bit disingenuous and self-serving on the part of the British government.
My bad, thanks for the correction.
I’m not sure it was so cut and dried, the Ottomans were in some ways under German influence, (but in other ways under British influence), if the ships had not been seized they may have stayed neutral, or they may have joined the central powers if they thought they were winning at some point.
The seizure of the ships sure precipitated that, I agree, by both infuriating them and also providing an excuse to join the central powers.
Dammit. I’ve been insanely busy the last couple of days and had intended to post this very page and make the same argument, although not as elegantly, of course. (But, of course, in far too many words. . .)
The old saying that gets trotted out as a quick sound bite, “amateurs talk strategy and professionals talk logistics” does apply here. Japan’s front lines were hopelessly over extended and shipping became increasingly larger of a problem the further they expanded.
Japan didn’t have enough shipping to handle their own civilian needs (including the war industry) prior to the outbreak of hostilities with the Western allies, and when the Imperial Japanese Army requisitioned civilian ships for its needs at the beginning of the war, that put them in even that much more of a hole.
I’m posted this in other threads, but in the summer of 1941, six months prior to Japan’s attack on the US, Tokyo was running into a problem with the inability to collect night soil as sales of gas for civilians was severely restricted and they could no longer use trucks for that purpose. This affected their manufacturing capacity as well. Their conquest of NEI allowed them to continue to war, but they never had enough gas for the war industry as well as civilian use.
They were running out of scrap iron for manufacturing as well as experiencing other shortages for years. All of this was because of the ongoing, unwinnable quagmire in China. Once they got into war with the States, the eventual decay became unstoppable, regardless of any successes on the battlefield.
Japanese strategy was fundamentally flawed. They would have been much better off fortifying their inner positions rather than continue to expand out further and further. Each mile they conquered added two miles to their logistics nightmare. There is no indication that even more success in the earlier stages of the war would have led them to prepare their defenses better.
I don’t believe that the loss of just Enterprise would have led to any significant lengthening of the war.
The basic constraints that dictated the duration include Japan’s early successes, the fall of the territories and colonies, regrouping by American forces, the Doolittle Raid which tipped Japanese strategy towards Midway, Midway itself, Guadalcanal, the various naval battles around there in which the USN had a steep learning curve on modern fighting doctrine, then the recovery year of ’43, island hopping to get to Saipan and Guam, the development of the B-24 bomber and the firebombing campaign, Okinawa, and during all that the submarine warfare and the fiasco of the Mark 14 torpedo and finally the development of the atomic bomb and the end of the war in Europe which allowed for the US to allocate more resources as well as the entry of the USSR into the Pacific War.
It’s easy to overlook the land war Japan was stalemated in over in China. That sucks manpower and resources that Japan could have used against the States. They would have lost anyway, but they could have made it more painful.
Despite all the hard, bloody fighting on land, at sea and in the air, Japan didn’t surrender just because of their military defeats. The moral of the civilians was at the breaking point, and that directly affected the Emperor’s decision to take his extraconstitutional intervention to end the war as well as for certain members of the Big Six to accept their defeat.
Agree 100% with all that.
But there’s quite a difference between discussing whether Japan was doomed from the git-go, or whether CV-6 was the most important USN ship of the war. Given how thoroughly incontrovertibly true the former was, CV-6 could simultaneously have been the most important USN ship, and also completely irellevent to the final outcome & largely irrelevant to the timeline.
There is a rule of thumb in ground warfare. Given like for like tech at the point of the battle, the attacker needs to outnumber the defender by 3x to have a reasonable expectation of winning the battle.
A similar rule of thumb can be applied to a war. If the aggressor outnumbers the defender by 3 to 1 they stand a decent chance of winning. But they need to outnumber by 3x in populace, GDP, and military hardware and prowess. And not be too disadvantaged by geography, culture, various Achilles heels, etc.
By those standards, Japan fell woefully short on every possible relevant metric. Meaning that them opening hostilities was an act of supreme military incompetence. Germany didn’t look much better when they first opened hostilities either. And only got worse as they widened who they were fighting.
Oh, I agree with that completely, but I was disagreeing with @What_Exit that the loss of CV-6 would have protracted the war for several years.
While @What_Exit has made a good case for Big E’s importance, he’s missed some of the most significant contributions and included others which were inconsequential.
First, he completely overlooked what was among Enterprise’s greatest contribution, participation in the early raid of the Pacific War. The forward to an interesting read:
In early 1942, the USN really did not yet understand what it took to fight a modern naval war, let alone a carrier-centered one.
In the series of raids, the US started gaining the hard-earned experience which would allow a strategic victory at Coral Sea, despite losing Lexington and the damage to Yorktown, and that in turn contributed to the victory at Midway.
Looking at the Doolittle Raid, it had a seeming more significant role in the war than these raids, yet without the raids, the US would not have developed the experience needed for success in further battles. Spring training may not seem as important as real games, but just try and skip it one year and see what happens.
Looking at Hornet, CV-8 made a major contribution to the war with the Doolittle Raid, yet did perform well at Midway, including the infamous “flight to nowhere.”
Alternately, a case could be made that the ship which had the most impact on the Pacific War was Yamato, because without the superbattleship, the Japanese perhaps would never have started the war.
Of course, MPVs are almost never picked from losing teams, and Yamato never accomplished much during the war. It’s probably more important to pick a ship that helped win the war than one which helped start and lose it.
Can you say Bismarck? 
Actually, in many ways the Iowa class were the best Battleships of all time. It had to do with the combination of Speed, Accuracy and especially rate of fire. Bismarck & Yamato were bigger but not better.
True. But for ships that didn’t accomplish much (or any) actually battling, they (Yamato & Bismarck) sure occupied a disproportionate amount of their enemies’ planning time and attention. “Fleet in being” and all that stuff.
The difference is that Germany would have gone to war with or without her battleships, but I really don’t know what Japan would have done without hers.
All of 1941 was a very interesting period in Japan and a fascinating slow motion train wreck, until you think of the tens of millions of people who died horribly because incompetent military leaders put avoiding momentary discomfort above the suicide of a nation.