There were fewer guns on Wake island, but they sank two Destroyers, two patrol boats and ten Aircraft.
And hey, it’s the 79th anniversary of the start of the battle!
Rule of thumb is shore batteries can take a lot more abuse than can a ship carrying the same guns. Shore batteries are in most cases more heavily armored than the same size gun on a ship. And usually have a much deeper magazine.
In either case you’re trying to hit a target moving relative to you, but the shore battery has the huge advantage that its platform isn’t also rolling, pitching, yawing, swaying, surging, and heaving while it’s trying to aim.
Shore batteries are point targets while ships are to some degree a line target, and especially so when broadside to maximize their own firepower.
All of which says a simple comparison like [3" guns on shore vs 5" guns on ship → ship wins] is bogus. If the ship’s larger guns can deliver well-aimed fire from a longer range than can the shore battery, just as a matter of kinematics, not aiming, they can stand off and suppress the shore batteries as long as their ammo holds out. Which might be enough cover to get a landing force ashore. But then what?
Islands don’t sink.
Coming back to this question again.
Taking an alt-hist scenario where the US carriers are sunk (because an invasion would be impossible in the historical reality where there are US carrier present and the Japanese are sunk) :
Although the number of IJN warships was impressive, there are questions about how much effective firepower that actually translates into.
First, the Japanese fleet was anticipating a surface encounter against USN warships and consequently most of the shells for the big guns would have been armor-piercing, rather than the fragmentary shells used for shore bombardments.
AP shells would bury themselves into the ground before exploding, making shore bombardments considerably less effective, as the British discovered in Singapore, where their large guns had AP shells, not anticipating a role in a land-based attack.
Looking around, battleships typically carried around 100 to 120 projectiles and propellants per gun, and Wiki seems to indicate that the Yamamoto class BB only carried 60 per gun, but that they were stored in the turret’s rotating structure to allow faster loading.
In the bombardment of the Henderson Airfield in Guadalcanal, the two Japanese battleships, Kongo and Haruna, fired 973 14-inch (356 mm) shells, or about 60 per gun.
Given the supreme (over)confidence of the entire mission which was to lure the American capital ships out to fight while taking the success of the invasion as a given, my WAG is most of the shell by the battleships and cruisers were AP.
Had the Japanese sunk the US carriers, I presume they would have still expected the USN fleet to sortie from Pearl Harbor, so they would not have “wasted” AP shells on dry land.
None of this really matters because even had the US carriers been sunk, they couldn’t have taken Midway, and with the carriers they obviously (and wisely) didn’t try.
QFT.
Between the wars, the various navies conducted tests to determine the amount of damage needed to sink battleships. The US Naval War College maneuver Rules and Fire Effect Tables of the period had that it would take seven to 14 penetrating hits of a 16" shell to sink a battleship. In planning the Pearl Harbor attack the Japanese believed that it would take 12 to 16 hits to sink the American BB and that their specially modified AP shells to bombs would have a similar effect.
However, a hit in a magazine could sink a BB if it set off an explosion and giving that 23% of a battleship’s target area were magazine areas, six hits had a 79% chance of sinking the ship. (Ref. Attack on Peral Harbor: Strategy, Combat, Myths, Deception by Alan Zimm) Other vulnerable areas included the engineering rooms. Many ships were lost because of damage to the rudders forced the ship into circles.
Kirishima, for example, was hit by nine primary and seventeen secondary battery projectiles and the damage was sufficient to sink her.
People seems to have forgotten all the aircraft on those Japanese Aircraft carriers that in alt hist had survived. Certainly, just like with Wake island etc, the Japanese could have taken Midway had they have sank the US carriers. If they won, Midway was doomed. But they lost, and as been asked and answered here, the surviving Japanese fleet, as powerful as it seems on paper - would have failed.
Agreed on all points, but there’s solid evidence, from IJN records and wreck analysis, that Kirishima was hit more than 9 times.
http://www.navweaps.com/index_lundgren/kirishimaDamageAnalysis.php
Interesting! Thanks!
It took me awhile to get back around to this thread:
First, I am rather aware of the discrepancy in surface ships in the forces.
Second, I think you misunderstood my point. Had the IJN pulled every ship into one force and hurled it at Midway, then yes I agree that likely would have been far too much firepower to risk exposing USN surface ships. I didn’t mention that possibility explicitly, but it would have been a huge target for the remaining air power, and a fun few hours of pilots shooting up everything in sight.*
However, you were talking about the use of battleships. I understood there was a possibility, which in reality Yamamoto sensibly declined, of pushing forward with the Battleships with what would, in normal operations, be considered insufficient support, and using them to attempt a bombardment. Based on the positions of the IJN ships, they could not have grouped them all at Midway without taking much more time than would have been available, whereas the USN formation was tighter and had a massive scouting advantage. Under those circumstances, the possibility of ship losses would have been a reasonable risk for the USN, since they potentially defeat exposed Japanese Battleships in detail. This would naturally have involved combined air & sea power.
*Sarcasm. In reality it would have been a tense nightmare of flak and shellfire, but without fighter cover an IJN naval detachment would have been at a severe disadvantage. They might not specifically lose a single ship, but sustained fighter/bomber runs could likely have done horrific damage. Attacks of this nature could force ships into port for repairs for months or years, or render vessels more of a drain on resources than a help going forward.
The US has 6 cruisers and 9 destroyers. On paper, that’s superior to the weakest IJN fleet present, the 4 cruisers + 2 DDs of Kurita’s Midway Support force. But that’s assuming Spruance is willing to remove all escorts from his carriers. He won’t, so any realistic force he can send to cover Midway at night will be smaller than that. Let’s say he sends the 5 bigger cruisers with 5 DDs. Again, on paper, it would look like an even match. But we know some things that they didn’t: the IJN had the best night-fighting ships in the world, and the USN ships either had no torpedoes, or had ineffective torpedoes.
The USN had also broken the IJN’s code and was reading Yamamoto’s messages.
Also, just in case it wasn’t clear:
I am not saying it would necessarily have been a good idea, or would have worked out well, to move in a surface force to support Midway. Just that under certain circumstances it might have been a reasonable possibility and there’s a realistic battle plan with the information the USN had at the time.
I’m having a hard time envisioning this defeat in detail surface on surface action of yours. What portion of the IJN surface fleet do you think the US ships on hand might have gained local superiority over and thus potentially defeated without assuming obscene levels of risk?
I just looked at the list of 8 cruisers under Spruance and Fletcher. All would later see combat with IJN cruisers and destroyers off Guadalcanal. Four would be badly damaged there. The other 4 would be sunk.
Not a chance. The Japanese lacked the training and equipment to make an amphibious assault into an organized defense. Midway was anything but an undefended beach and unlike Wake was protected by an atoll the Japanese landing craft couldn’t cross.
And Wake wasn’t exactly a ringing Japanese success. The invasion force for Midway was closer to the first attempt at Wake than the second.
Pulling numbers from Wikipedia, the US had about 450 Marines on Wake.
The first Japanese force to try to invade consisted of 450 troops. 407 of them are listed as casualties.
The second landing attempt wasn’t until about 2 weeks later when the Japanese put ashore some 1500 troops (there’s that 3:1 attacker to defender number again) suffering just 144 casualties.
The 5000 man occupation force sent to Midway (and a landing force that was actually only about 2500 or so) was not going to take the island from 3500 angry, heavily armed, dug in Marines on an island with what was basically a deep moat around it.
At best the IJN may have been able to bombard Midway, putting the airfield out of service for a day like at Henderson Field until the shell holes could be filled. They did not have the logistics chain for the warships to to stick around 2-weeks.
I’m not even sure the IJN had the sea lift to ship the 12000 troops minimum across the ocean to Midway that would be needed to make the landing a success.
True, the Japanese learned a lesson on Wake.
But with some 200 aircraft they could have bombed and strafed the island to nothing.
I totally agree that what was left of the task force would have failed, but if the IJN had won, it would have been different.
Not a chance.
There’s always somebody in the Air Force (or Army Air Corp or Naval Air Corp back then) who thinks you can win a ground war from the air. It has never worked.
With an atoll, I suppose had they possessed nukes, they could have utterly destroyed Midway but there was no way they were going to bomb/strafe the island into submission and simply land some troops to take over. That’s never worked out. With anything short of nukes or perhaps modern guided munitions, a fortified bunker survives and the ones inside make life a living hell for anybody trying to land.
No, you can’t win the battle with nothing but air support, but air support can & has meant the difference between victory & defeat.
Note the Stuka and the many calls for air support form the army in Europe, not to mention Patton praying from clear weather so he could be air support.
If the First Fleet or the Second Fleet were to advance without substantial support, in my view they risked coming under sustained attack. remember that the fleets were not in one location - First and Second alone were separated by many miles of open ocean. it would certainly have been possible to gather up the IJN forces and then attack, but it would give the USN much more time to regroup as well.
As per post #333, use OttodDaFe quoted Shattered Sword: