It’s been a while since I read Shattered Sword, but a large part of his argument rested on ship design, standard operating procedures, and training records. As I recall, he made a very good case that given the amount of time it took to recover, rearm, and refuel the planes, it simply wasn’t possible for them to be ready for another attack. There are only so many trained men and so much equipment and space available, and it was physically impossible for them to ready the planes any quicker.
In addition, Fuchida’s account of the Pearl Harbor attack is also riddled with inaccuracies, probably to hide the inefficiency of various air groups. He seems to have been very comfortable altering facts to meet his preferences.
- Railroads are very hard to bomb. They are narrow, and difficult to destroy unless you hit them directly. WWII bombers were of dubious accuracy from high altitude during the day and at night could hit nothing smaller than a city.
The Allies built a lot of bombers, but Europe is a big place, so they had to be selective in what they bombed. The British did not have effective precision bombing capabilities and ended up choosing to burn and blow up cities on a large scale, while the USAAF decided on different targets to crush the German economy like oil and industrial production.
The Allies certainly did go after railyards to some extent and once they achieved air supremacy their fighter bombers would regularly destroy trains.
My grandfather destroyed several trains in his Tempest V, and was subsequently shot down by another. (He survived.)
- The Allies did have air superiority by the time the Battle of the Bulge happened. Tactical air support was not generally possible when weather was bad but when it was good the Allies owned the air. The Germans had a joke that went “If you see white planes they’re American. If you see black planes they’re British. If you see no planes, it’s the Luftwaffe!”
The linked PDF is 12 pages , which means that you likely have spent more time arguing the point than reading the evidence. 
This is not something they did lightly and they documented their evidence very well.
Fukuda lied about a number of things concerning the war, and Parshall and Tully spent years gathering the evidence showing that he had indeed lied. As Parshall says:
Among other things, after the two authors had become convinced that Fukuda was lying, Parshall (or perhaps both of them, I don’t recall if he said “we” or “I”) had a chance to discuss this with Japanese historians, and they said they had known for decades that Fuchida was lying.
Japanese carrier could not spot planes on the flight deck while simultaneously recovering other aircraft. The CAP records show time of the launching and recovery of the fighters during the morning and show conclusively that there wasn’t enough time for the large group of aircraft to be spotted. They demonstrate the length of time that takes and such. As was mentioned by @gnarator they also have photographic evidence that the decks did not have the supposed strikeforce.
The evidence is conclusive.
@TokyoBayer has an excellent post, just a few more supporting details. The air group records from the Japanese carriers survived the battle. You can see an example of one of these kodochoshos from Akagi here: http://www.combinedfleet.com/fuchida/images/AkagiKodo_060442_1.jpg
(caution, combinedfleet.com is a great place to lose an entire day)
These are the records for each flight of aircraft with everything from take off/landing times to the weapons loadout. Using these, Parshall and Tully were able to reconstruct the timeline of carrier ops for the Japanese at Midway. This showed conclusively that no Japanese aircraft could have been on the flight deck at the time of the 1020 US attack.
A second supporting point for the fact that the Japanese flight decks were empty was the delay in in the launch of Hiryu’s counterstrike. Had the aircraft been on the deck and launching almost simultaneously with the US attacks as Fuchida claims, Hiryu’s strike should have been outbound on the heels of the US aircraft fleeiing for home.
As it was, Hiryu didn’t launch until almost 1100, some 30 minutes after the US strikes ended. The 30 minutes it would normally to take to get aircraft up from the hanger, warm-up engines, and then launch aircraft.
The details of whether the planes were on the deck or below deck seems a bit of a nitpick. The larger question to me is did the Japanese, in their rush to re-arm and refuel planes, skimp on safety procedures?
Were the Japanese carriers wrecked because they just really sucked at damage control and, while it was business as usual for them, a few bombs was all it took to wreck them? Or, were the Japanese lax about usual safety procedures in all the rush and, when the bombs hit, those bombs found carriers unusually vulnerable to such attacks?
One major problem on the Akagi and Kaga is that they were trying to repurpose their B5N (“Kate”) squadrons. They had initially been armed with torpedoes in case USN fleet units were encountered, but when it was decided that a second Midway attack was necessary they had to be changed over to level bombers. This involved not only removing the torpedoes, but changing the mounting brackets because the level bombs had a different shape. In addition, the torpedoes that were removed couldn’t be struck below to the magazines while the level bombs were being brought up. The discovery that the USN was present, and later that there was a US carrier in the area, only added to the confusion. So I suppose one could say they were “lax about usual safety procedures,” but unlike the British at Jutland it was a matter of trying to do too many things at once.
As far as damage control was concerned, they certainly did suck compared to the USN. And their ships were designed with an emphasis on offensive capability, often at the expense of survivability.
Design flaws, or simply the sober realization that Hood, a battlecruiser launched in 1918, was bound to be at a disadvantage if set against a generic “German battleship.” Keeping in mind that whereas the other WWII-era navies had battleships and/or battlecruisers still in service from WWI and interwar years of the 1920s and early 1930s, the Germans were by necessity limited to a handful of relatively new capital ships. So someone serving in an older ship like Hood would have to know for certain that if they did end up going toe-to-toe with a “German battleship” that could really only mean one of the two Bismarck class ships or maybe–depending on how generous they were with the term “battleship”–the two ships of the Scharnhorst class.
While Bismarck’s dispatch of Hood was perhaps swifter than expected, and of course it was not a single ship-on-ship duel, it’s hardly surprising that officers serving in Hood would have had serious doubts about their ships ability to go up against either of the two ships of the Bismarck class, being launched twenty years apart.
So while I’m not saying Hood didn’t have design flaws, I would simply highlight that to the extent your grandfather’s “good friend” story might well be substantially true, it’s not necessarily on account of “design flaws” that the officers in questions may have had misgivings. Because, again, there’s “design flaws,” and then there’s age and advances over time.
Knowing atomic bombs were coming on line, about a half-dozen cities – including Hiroshima and Nagasaki – were left untouched so an assessment of the bombs’ effectiveness could be made.
The target selection was subject to the following criteria:
- The target was larger than 3 mi (4.8 km) in diameter and was an important target in > a large city.
- The blast wave would create effective damage.
- The target was unlikely to be attacked by August 1945.[76]
There’s a kernel of truth to the design flaw idea. The Hood’s design predated the Battle of Jutland, where RN battle cruisers fared poorly, so she was modified during her construction to add more armor. Even so, there were some deficiencies in the design. The rest of the ships in her class were canceled, with the RN deciding to start over with a clean slate (those ships were canceled due to the Washington Naval Treaty).
The *Hood * had several refittings and modifications over her service life. Advances in naval gunnery were to lead to another rebuild in 1941, but the outbreak of war kept her in service without any upgrades.
Drachinifel makes the case that it was essentially a lucky shot.
My understanding was the Royal Navy ships at Jutland faring poorly was due to demands on the crew to be very fast at reloading weapons. As a result, crews got in the habit of skipping safety procedures and things like ammo and propellant were left exposed in the various spaces so they could be quickly sent to the guns when a reload was needed. As a result, a hit in the right spot would detonate that stuff lying about and bye-bye ship.
It’s not the ship design that was bad. It was the training/culture aboard those ships.
The problem is that gasoline is extremely flammable. The USN ships had better firefighting equipment by 1944, but in 1942, if you hit an American or Japanese carrier while it had fueled aircraft aboard ( Wasp, Akagi , etc.), it was screwed. If you hit it while the gas was secured ( Yorktown, Shokaku, Hornet ), it could take a lot of damage and stay afloat (although Lexington didn’t).
Even with 1944-level damage control, Franklin was nearly lost to a flight deck/hangar fire, caused by a bomb that would have done much less damage, had there been no fueled aircraft nearby.
Jellicoe’s official report blamed thin turret armor for the loss of three battle cruisers–each of the British battle cruisers was penetrated through a turret roof and her magazines ignited by flash fires passing through the turret and shell-handling rooms. The German battle cruisers had thicker turret armor and more deck armor, so Hood’s design was modified to giver her 5,000 tons more armor.
The poor cordite handling no doubt was the real cause, but both Beatty and Jellicoe blamed thin armor.
This completely misses the significance of the elementary but fundamental principle of carrier navigation. Carrier planes cannot take off from the hangers below deck. Simply not possible.
The false claim was that the strike force was spotted on the four IJN carriers and that the order to launch had been given. Given that strikes from Hiryu, the one Japanese carrier that survived the initial deadly US assault, knocked out one of the three USN carriers, it can be assumed that a combined attack from all four carriers would done substantially more damage.
But for those five minutes! Had Fuchida’s account been true, and had they been able to launch the planes five minutes earlier, then the course of the war would have been changed. It was one of the greatest “what if” stories of the war, and seemingly the most plausible.
But it wasn’t true and Fuchida’s account was simply that of a bullshit artist. (Of course, it wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the war, anyway.)
This is one of those cases where the answer to an “or” question is “yeah.”
As noted by @OttoDaFe, Japanese damage control lagged that of the US. It was also early in the war and everyone got better as time went along, although the Japanese never got as good as the USN.
Carriers were floating bombs. They had substantial quantities of bombs. planes, and AV gas stored in close quarters. As @DesertDog notes, AV gas was highly flammable, while the ship’s fuel oil was not as much. Ships also contained a lot of flammable material, including furniture, the flight deck, bedding, paperwork, etc. Japanese carriers had wood floors in the crew quarters. Gas explosions were also serious issues.
Princeton (CVL-23), a light carrier, was lost in 1944 after being hit by a single 450 kg GP bomb.
The fire started by the gas from the plane eventually got out of control and they were forced to abandon ship and scuttle it. This was in 1944, after damage control procedures have been improved over the start of the war.
The point is that sometimes it only took one (un)lucky hit. However, there were other attacks where the crews were able to control the fires.
For the four IJN flattops, Kaga was hit by five bombs, four of which were placed along the length of Kaga’s upper hanger. It was gone.
Soryu was hit by three bombs in the upper hanger and possible up to 1/3 of the crew may have been dead by the time the last of the dive bombers completed it’s attack.
Akagi was hit by only one hit, but that landed in a location which also doomed the ship, right on top of a Kate bomber, fully fueled and loaded with a torpedo, with another 17 around. It’s possible that had the damage-control teams been able to react swiftly and appropriately, the Adm. Nagumo’s flagship but that would have been difficult, and within minutes the flames were getting out of hand.
Hiryu was hit by four 1000-lb bombs and although the damage control teams actually battled well, the damage was too great.
Fukuda = Fuchida? And is this the same guy who led the Pearl Harbor aerial assault?
This thread has a lot of new (to me) and interesting stuff.
The very same. Alan Zimm’s book, “Pearl Harbor: Strategy, Combat,Myths, Deceptions” explains that he was in charge of the after action report and photo analysis, and makes a very good case that he lied extensively, mostly to credit dive bombers with kills that they did not earn.
I highly recommend it- it really dismantles the myth of hyper competent Japanese military. In reality, Pearl Harbor was a high stakes gamble that very easily could have gone the other way. They never even made a contingency plan for if the fleet was detected before the attack!
Yeah, sorry. It should be Fuchida.
Reading about him, I found an interview with the Christian magazine Guideposts which says:
While it’s true that he was indeed injured from a bomb blast while on Akagi and then was taken along with Adm. Nagumo to the light cruiser Nagara, it didn’t stick around to watch the carriers sink. Nagumo actually lead the charge to attempt to close in with the US carriers and engage a surface action and left some destroyers to tend to the three burning carriers while Hiryo initially was able to go along with the force lead by Nagumo.
Soryu and Kaga were scuttled around 1915. Akagi Nagara was a long distance away. Akagi wasn’t actually scutted until 0520 the next morning when Nagara carrying the now disgraced Nagumo along with Fuchida were retreating to the west. Hiryu was also scuttled by torpedo about that time, but didn’t actually sink until around 0910. The final survivors were adrift for 14 days until rescued by some Americans.
Obviously, Fuchida did not witness this, so this was just another lie.
Going back to:
As has been shown before, the records were actually made accurately, in the battle and not some form to fulfill Navy bureaucracy. There is no reason to believe a bullshit artist whose claims can be proven to be impossible.
Ditto the recommendation. A lot of popularly known “facts” about the war are incorrect or not as cut and dried as is thought, and it’s interesting to dive into those.
IIRC it was specifically this that my grandfather’s friend related to him (that all the officers on board knew a single direct hit on a turret would be the end of it), I assume my grandfather was not the only one to hear this so that could have influenced the version of events in the official report.
Outstanding. Thanks!
What I was mainly curious about was whether the American dive bombers happened upon the Japanese carriers when those carriers were particularly vulnerable or if it didn’t matter at all? Whether the planes could have dropped three bombs on a Japanese carrier at absolutely any time, in any conditions, and the carrier would have suffered the same fate.
One of the things Drach mentioned in an episode on damage control last year was that while both the IJN and USN had specially trained teams, any American sailor could handle a fire hose or do basic dewatering while Japanese, not so much.
More than one IJN ship was lost when the DC team was in the wrong compartment at the wrong time and wiped out while a USN ship may well have survived a similar hit because of that training.