Ouch. Apparently they learned nothing about Beatty’s battlecruisers at Jutland.
Maybe you could clarify some more. First, I really disagree with your earlier comment:
My bolding.
The USN in 1942 was a mess, disorganized and not ready for prime time. See the disaster of the Battle of the Java Sea in February 1942 and the naval battles around Guadalcanal, such as the disorganized melee that went by Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, 14–15 November 1942.
The idea of using cruisers, destroyers and subs to soften up an enemy fleet was actually the IJN’s doctrine for their final battle, to have the smaller ships and sub attack and weaken the US fleet as they came. However, the Japanese plan was for night attacks, and they spend years developing their superior night fighting abilities. The US simply wasn’t ready to challenge the IJN at night.
In Pacific Crucible, Ian Toll quotes Lt. Commander Thach’s recollection of his conversation with Adm. Spruance concerning the latter’s plan to withdraw the US forces to the east during that night rather than pursue the Japanese ships. As Ian writes, “Spruance’s prudence was consistent with Nimitz’s desire that he should avoid ‘exposure to attack by superior enemy forces without good prospect of inflicting, as a result of such exposure, greater damage to the enemy.’”
Continuing, Ian writes,
As far as subs go, they were there all along attempting to attack, with disappointing results. The US sub commander got better as the war progressed, but it was still in the early stages. There wasn’t an ability to coordinate them in the attack.
For these reasons, I can’t see how this would be “trivial.”
Can you be more specific for what you mean by “sustained attack”? When, where, what and how? Are you proposing that the entire fleet, including the two carriers, take the fight to the Japanese, as Thatch proposed? Or perhaps split off forces as our @Capn_Carl is questioning? Is this at night?
This seems to be a commonly held misconception. While the codebreakers back in Hawaii and Washington had broken parts of the IJN code, it was not possible to read all orders in real time. As best some could be read within several hours, but those orders would not be completely understood.
The US did not have the detailed plans for the attack. They knew it was big, they were able to figure out that many ships were involved, but they did not have all the specific orders. Famously, while Rochefort, officer in charge of Pearl Harbor’s ``Hypo’’ code-breaking station was able to deduce that Midway was the target of the attack, the question remained concerning the timing of the attack. Hypo initially believed late May or early June and OP-20-G, the unit in Washington which was tasked with interpreting the data, believed the attack would be in late June.
The intelligence they had was not specific enough for them to find the task forces, for example. They still needed to search for the groups and to then identify the composition of ships.
Exactly.
As has been referred to many times in this thread, the authors of Shattered Sword wrote the alt-hist scenario where the Japanese defeated the US, still had their carriers and their airpower, but would not have been able to take Midway. That is the definitive answer to the question.
A nitpick: the 407 Japanese casualties in the first attempted raid were not the Special Landing Force troops but navy personnel from the two IJN destroyers sank, one by bombs and the other by artillery.
In the chaotic few weeks after Pearl Harbor, US made the difficult and painful decision to abandon Wake and her brave defenders to their fate. They lacked everything, including barbed wire and sufficient personnel.
In contrast, Midway’s defenses were augmented prior to the attack, it had sufficient defenders with enough time to properly prepare for the defense.
Part II
You know this, of course, but to add to this, on the second try, they made unopposed night landing, which were their forte. With only several hundred defenders, it was impossible for the US Marines to cover the entire shoreline. In contrast, the plan for Midway was a daytime assault against dug-in troops.
Response Part II
I found the numbers.
I’m not absolutely certain of the amount they were able to read by Midway. The intel before Coral Sea was much more sketchy and incomplete.
ETA: Pacific Crucible says that the change to JN-25 came one week before Midway, again making Japanese radio intercepts indecipherable.
JN-25C
That’s not what you wrote:
No, they really could not have bombed and strafed the island to nothing with conventional weaponry from carrier based craft.
There was a voice trying to go if in my head that the SNLF hadn’t even attempted a landing the first time around at Wake but it got overwhelmed by what a beautiful counterpoint the numbers made. Got to listen to the voices sometimes.
Air support is a lovely thing against a maneuvering army. Troops, tanks, and supplies are all out in the open and exposed. Against dug-in troops air power is much less effective. The Japanese pilots were the best in the business in June 1942 and their first attack on Midway Island had little effect on the islands’ defenses. It did fairly serious infrastructure damage, destroying water and fuel lines/supplies and several buildings but I don’t think any of the gun emplacements were destroyed. IIRC, the marines only suffered a handful of casualties from the strike so few of the bunkers, dugouts, and foxholes were even touched.
The Japanese timeline didn’t allow much room for Nagumo to just stand off and pound Midway into submission, either. He had a day for air strikes and bombardment then a day to occupy the island. Troops were to be landed on June 7. Three or four ever weakening airstrikes (the first strike of 110 aircraft had something like 25 aircraft destroyed or heavily damaged) throughout the day was not going to soften up the island for a successful assault the next morning.
Remember, if the USN is not in the area, Nagumo is still under orders to hold half his force in reserve so those 100 aircraft are not available to attack Midway. They sit on the carrier waiting in case the USN turns up early.
If the day goes as it did historically, but with the IJN decisively defeating the USN carriers, how many aircraft are left to do the job of softening up the island? Based on how the attacks went for both sides, not very many.
Besides the later date OP-20-G also maintained the assault would be in the Aleutians, not Midway. The IJN sent a diversionary force sent up there to hopefully draw attention away from Midway but it was small potatoes. OP-20-G did not appreciate having egg on its face.
When Nimitz recommended Rochefort for a Navy Distinguished Service Medal, Rochefort said that it would only “make trouble”.[21] Other sources suggest Rochefort received no official recognition during his lifetime because he was made a scapegoat for the embarrassment of OP-20-G. Redman (whose brother was the influential Rear Admiral Joseph Redman) complained about the operation of the Hawaii station; as a result, Rochefort was reassigned from cryptanalysis to command the floating dry dock ABSD-2 at San Francisco.
Cite. US Navy bureaucracy at its finest.
Posthumously, Rochefort got his DSM and was inducted into the NSA’s Central Security Service Hall of Fame. Redman has not.
The Aleutians being a diversion was one of the myths put to rest in Shattered Sword. It’s main purpose was to deprive long range US bombers of a staging ground for strikes against the Japanese home islands.
This is called a “Argument from Authority”. While that is certainly a great book, and one can certainly quote the many solid facts the book mentions, such as the great difficulties the Landing force would have found, one does not settle a argument in GD by referring to a opinion by a authority.
While it is clear it would have been no walk in the park, and would have taken longer than planned- I think that if the IJN had thrown enough resources at it they could have taken Midway. Would they have wanted to spend the time and resources? That is a fair question, and I think not. I do agree that without the carriers, they could not have done it at all. Even with the carriers the losses would have been high and the results problematic.
Certainly, pretty much anything can be taken if the attacker is willing to spend the time and resources to do so; unfortunately for Yamamoto, time and resources were two items in short supply where Midway was concerned. For one thing, there were no reserves, so in the quite likely event that the Marines repelled the IJA and IJN assault forces with heavy losses, there was no redo — the Japanese would have to start the operation from scratch. For another, the naval forces were pretty close to the end of their logistical tether, and a significant percentage of them were slated for operations in the South Pacific (taking Fiji, Samoa and New Caledonia in order to sever the US-Australia supply line) immediately after AL/MI.
Parshall and Tully do not say that the Japanese couldn’t take Midway: what they do say is that the June 1942 invasion, as constituted, was almost certainly doomed.
At least the first attempt, I will grant that.
Even on the eve of battle, the Japanese expected:
- No USN presence;
- A few hundred Marines on Midway, armed with nothing more than light WWI-vintage weapons;
- A couple dozen obsolescent planes;
- No fortifications to speak of;
- No awareness of the coming attack.
If those had been the actual conditions, I’d guess there was a pretty good chance they could have taken the islands (although the idea that the airfield would have been usable the next day was asinine: if nothing else, the fuel supplies were rigged with detonation charges and would have been blown up). But supplying the garrison would have been a logistical nightmare, and the US could have chosen the time to take them back.
(One of the ironies of the story, IMHO, is that reports from the one part of the pre-battle reconnaissance plan which did work — surveillance from I-168 — either didn’t get through or were ignored. Had they been heeded, the Japanese might have realized that Midway wasn’t the “sleepy backwater” they assumed it to be.)
So a second attempt at a landing? With what?
Naval troops. Reserves. How many they had, i dunno.
Listen to the voice!
Not that much is written about it, but Robert Cressman in “A Magnificent Fight” The Battle for Wake Island mentions that the rough seas had overturned the landing boats almost as soon as they were launched. I’ve seen that in other cites as well, but without details. At any rate, it appears that they quickly withdrew and didn’t even get the landing boats loaded, let alone made an assault on the beaches.
Something interesting about Wake I, the Oops (from the Japanese point of view) was that the US marines noticed how poorly the shore bombardment happened. Because the ships were firing at the naval standard low trajectory, the shells were frequently under- or overshooting the atoll. It seems certain that the IJN would not have made changes to their doctrine so this would also impact Midway. (Or, rather wouldn’t impact Midway. Ouch.) This is similar to the difficulty of getting onto a green with a low numbered iron.
I believe it’s already been mentioned in this thread that much later in the war, the US found that low trajectory rounds did minimal damage to reinforced positions because of deflections, and made the changes necessary to allow high trajectory shelling.
This is where I miss @Dissonance and his encyclopedia knowledge of the war, especially the European theater, but IIRC in the fall of France, one of the many disadvantages the French army had was that they also had little ground support doctrine for their air force. That was what the artillery was for. They were also hampered by the lack of communication equipment in individual tanks and simply that there were not coordinating ground and air forces. The Germans had that ability down to a science, which allowed local units to call in air support. (I may have these details wrong.)
This is exactly the same problem that the Japanese would have faced in a theoretical invasion. Not only would the initial airstrikes be ineffective, the ground troops would not have been able call in for help.
Simply letting the Japanese take Midway and then retaking it a year later after the new carriers started coming off the line was a viable option, but the chance to ambush the IJN carriers was an opportunity Nimitz didn’t want to miss.
One reason I really love Shattered Sword is the thorough analysis, and their examination of why it was likely that Nagumo saw the report but failed to act is another outstanding read.
Alt-hist scenarios suffer from cherry picking, in which very specific problems are identified and ask what if, but fail to see that the changes would nullify the whole question. As @Dissonance often would write, Hitler could do X, Y or Z, but that that would mean he wasn’t Hitler.
A major reason that this plan was contemplated, approved and enacted was that the Japanese held the US forces’ abilities in contempt. Parshall and Tully argue that Nagumo saw the reconnaissance report and shrugged. Yamamoto also would have seen the report and not let that phase him, although he seemed almost delusional at this point. What the Japanese managed to accomplish in the first six month seems unbelievable, and for the victors to not acquire “Victor’s Disease” may have been asking too much. Just as the Western Powers had hopelessly discounted Japanese abilities pre-war, six months and their astonishing run of wins later, they had started to believe they were invincible.
At Pearl Harbor, one knock against the Japanese was that they failed to attack the oil farm (leaving aside if it would have succeeded or not), but as one Japanese officer said post-war that if logistics were being considered that carefully, they would never have started the war in the beginning.
Not only were the Japanese attempting to invade and hold Midway, they were also moving forward with plans to invade Hawaii, which was delusional.
If they weren’t delusional, they would have understood that they needed a better grasp of the situation on Midway, before they started the attack. But if they weren’t delusional, they would have done the math and realized it was impossible.
The dependence on this one source is starting to raise my eyebrow.
The source has lots of good facts.
However, it has also opinions.
Their opinions are just that- opinions, even if based upon their research.
If anyone is interested in further details as to the difficulty of naval bombardment (issues that seem to have continued throughout the war), I found a dissertation that makes good reading.
The American Doctrine for the Use of Naval Gunfire in Support of Amphibious Landings: Myth vs Reality in the Central Pacific of World War II.
It addresses several issues that @TokyoBayer mentioned regarding the difficulty of shore bombardment by naval ships as well as some of the issues aircraft faced. Trajectory has already been mentioned, that high velocity naval guns tended to be great for targets that presented a vertical target, but against defiladed and reverse slope positions they were ineffective. It took a couple of tries for the USN to learn to use partial instead of full charges when firing so that shot would fall at a higher angle.
More relevant to our discussion is the comment of Adm HF Kingman, Commander of Battleship Div 2 at Tarawa (p126)
- From an observer’s viewpoint, after witnessing the aerial
bombardment, the surface bombardment, and aerial strafing, it
seemed almost impossible for any human being to be alive on BETIO
Island. Ton after ton of explosives was rained upon an island less than
0.4 miles square, and yet, when bombardment was stopped, Japanese
manned machine guns and literally annihilated the first two assault
waves.
Superficial examination of BETIO after its occupation revealed that
military installations, bombproofs, and machine gun emplacements
were, in most instances, practically intact. Our HC [High Capacity]
projectiles, with superquick fuzes, made a grand display, but
accomplished little if any real destruction of installations or
personnel….
There is no reason to believe that a Japanese fleet whose doctrine and armament was hyper focused on the decisive naval battle would have drawn up an effective bombardment plan for Midway Island.
Shattered Sword was the first popular book to come out that focused on the Japanese side of the battle and put into words (with citations) many of the Midway myths others of us were struggling with.
As you must know, popular history authors don’t rigorously research every single detail from primary sources. A storyline develops and subsequent authors pass along that theory without challenging it, because of the challenges of researching, especially in a difficult foreign language such as Japanese.
A couple of common myths that were retold by countless authors are the one that the large coastal guns of Singapore couldn’t be turned to face inland and that the atomic bombs were the sole cause of Japan’s surrender. For the former, the problem was that they mostly had AP armor-piercing shells rather than sufficient HE high explosives, as well as overall incompetence. For the latter, the Soviet entry was also a major factor, yet popular authors more often than not avoid the complicated answer.
The idea that the Aleutian campaign was a diversion actually dates back to the wartime itself and continued through the 90s. It was challenged by others prior the Shattered Sword but those authors laid it to rest.
More historians now are accepting the idea that the Aleutian campaign wasn’t a diversion but a complementary campaign. Here is an article by *Samuel J. Cox, Director Navy History and Heritage Command. If you aren’t familiar with them, they are
Anyway, the article:
Another article which goes further in depth as this to say:
Ian Toll in his 2012 Pacific Crucible accepts Pashall and Tully’s arguments that the Aleutian account was the product of the Naval General Staff without a clear strategic relationship to the Midway operation.
What is the reason for raised eyebrows here? As @txtumbleweed says, Shattered Sword a popular historical account which provides the Japanese side of the battle. It is well researched and provides solid arguments for its conclusions. More importantly, the authors’ findings have found acceptance within community of historians.
In this thread, the chief “dependence” has been Tully’s and Parshall’s examination of a hypothetical invasion in an alt-hist scenario where the Japanese defeat the US carriers and then attempt an invasion. The reason that is being cited so frequently is simply it’s the only authoritarian work available. Most books simply give the numbers of the defenders, guns and planes with brief accounts of the defenses. This account is well researched.
What’s more, the conclusions in Appendix V are well supported by other sources. The problems with navy bombardments has been researched extensively. The logistics issues as well.
The pisspoor planning of the Japanese is well documented. In the second part of his WWII trilogy,* The Barrier and the Javelin: Japanese and Allied Strategies, February to June 1942*, H.P. Willmott points out that
More importantly, if there are valid arguments against the conclusions, let’s see them. The problem isn’t with those of us quoting the professions, it’s the people who close their eyes and say “I don’t think so.”
OK, if you don’t think so, why not?