Is it true, as I once read, that the Japanese had war-gamed Midway and the officer that played the American side played the actual American strategy and won, but his strategy was thrown out as unrealistic?
Yes. (post 473)
My apologies. The snark was unnecessary.
Drach has mentioned “The US Navy’s Essex 3-D printer” in other videos.
The Japanese had a habit of examining a situation, figuring out what needed to happen for victory to occur, and then treating those conditions as a given. They had to, because if they didn’t, they had already lost. The Pearl Harbor attack, for example, had no contingency plan for early detection- if they lost the element of surprise, they probably would have attacked anyway and gotten massacred, I suppose.
This is somewhat understandable when you realize how dysfunctional they were politically. The only logical course of action, giving up on the conquest of China, was a literal death sentence for anyone proposing it.
They knew victory was a one-in-a-million chance, but they went for it anyway, because admitting defeat (at least publicly) was unthinkable.
Yes and no. A wargame was played and the officer playing the USN did place his carriers where the real ones were in the actual battle. The Japanese got creamed so they weren’t able to game the actual invasion or how to protect the invasion force.
This would have let the gaming’s purpose go incomplete so the umpires reset the forces saying, “Okay, let’s play the part where we actually invade the atoll.”
This is a point I think a lot of people don’t get. Wargames are not supposed to be like playing a game of Monopoly. You don’t win the game and then everyone congratulates you and goes home. These wargames are training exercises. It’s normal for them to be reset in the middle of the game and for forces that were eliminated to be brought back into the battle.
True.
But even a result that makes them reset the wargame should make them ponder about what happened that forced the reset.
At least, I would hope so.
The first sentence is correct, but I don’t know if it would actually shorten it.
Occupation of Midway would not have been likely, but it wouldn’t have been impossible with a different strategy. It’s a small atoll, and had limited space for defenders. Had they thrown everything that had at Midway, with a far higher number of attackers, more carriers, etc., etc. it may have been possible.
However, once Japan occupied the atoll, the situation would be more like Wake rather than Guadalcanal because the Japanese couldn’t reinforce it and probably would not have become the sinkhole that the latter became.
Guadalcanal was a protracted fight because of its proximity to other Japanese air and naval bases and the size of the island. It was within bombing and fighter distance of Rabaul, which allowed the Japanese to keep up daily air attacks. Because of the alarm raised by coast watchers, the US planes were able to launch and get up to altitude before the Japanese planes arrived, which allowed them to not be caught on the ground.
With Henderson Field, the US had control of the surrounding waters during the day, but the IJN was able to bring its supplies at night. The night battles there are among the most interesting aspects of the war. IJN warships would come in and attempt to take out the airfield, but wasn’t able to completely knock it out long enough and it would get rebuilt each time.
Because Midway wasn’t close to any other Japanese held islands, the greater distance would have made it that much more difficult for the IJN to resupply the island. The US would have surrounded it with sufficient subs. It was in range of American B-17s which would have been able to destroy Japanese airplanes and fuel. Wake also had this problem and the US simply bypassed it.
The other reason that Midway wouldn’t be the same situation as Guadalcanal is that the latter is large enough for each side to have around 25,000 troops each. Midway was just too small.
What would the US do? It would be difficult for the US to invade as well, but easier than the Japanese. With the famous Amtrac amphibious landing craft, the US Marines could have handled the reef where the Japanese Daihatsu could not.
How in the world did the US ever take islands from the Japanese?
Not saying it was easy but certainly doable.
Midway is stupidly small. The Japanese had more than enough at Midway to take the island (assuming they got rid of the US carriers).
I’m still not convinced the US carriers could have kept up operations non-stop against the Japanese.
No one has really said how much lasting power those carriers had. Fuel for the planes. Ordinance. Pilots flying non-stop. Every sortie will lose more planes and pilots.
There are limits.
It was worse than that. The judge ruled that the proposed attack was “impossible” and reversed the damage.
In a later scenario involving an attack from Midway, the roll of the dice* indicated nine hits, sinking Akagi and Kaga. Admiral Ugaki (Yamamoto’s chief of staff) stepped in and arbitrarily reduced the hit count to three, refloating Akagi. And apparently Kaga was “only mostly dead,” since it was present immediately afterwards when the IJN attacked Fiji and Samoa.
The Midway wargames have been held up by several historians as a textbook example of how not to conduct such an exercise. Any result which deviated from Yamamoto’s plan was nullified out of hand, leading to increasing indifference among the participants and adding to the “all we need to do is show up” attitude.
* It always strikes me as odd to use dice in a military exercise, but it is a good way to introduce a necessary element of random chance.
Put yourself in Yamamoto’s shoes. The Americans have sunk all your carriers. You don’t know how many they have left, but it was enough to sink one of your huge cruisers, and cripple another. More carriers may be on the way. They have planes on Midway, and can send more from Oahu. You don’t know how many battleships they have, or where they are. They have submarines near Midway, and more will come. Their PBY patrols will keep your whereabouts known, while your own search capabilities are weak. Once your landings begin, the Americans won’t even need search planes, you’ll be easy to find, right next to Midway.
Edit: you’re a looong way from home.
The best strategy for the Americans might have been to not invade Midway. Let the Japanese keep possession of the island. Just send a lot of submarines to the area around the island and use the Japanese garrison as a magnet to draw in Japanese shipping, which would attacked.
From my readings on the subject, Yamamoto almost immediately realized the enormity of the defeat. He realized he had lost not just a battle but essentially the entire war. And he pretty much had a mental collapse. While he remained nominally in command, he stopped making significant plans and his staff took to issuing orders in his name. It’s ironic that the Americans set up an elaborate plan to kill Yamamoto in 1943 because he had really ceased to be a factor in the war.
Midway is 1500 miles from Hawaii. 2500 from Japan.
In that day and age I am not sure that makes a difference. A B-17 bomber could barely make the roundtrip from Hawaii. No fighter cover could. So, it is all shipping.
Midway would be an unsinkable carrier smack-dab in the middle of the Pacific. That would have been a HUGE benefit to the Japanese. Everything heading west would now need to skirt a thousand mile perimeter around Midway which was, almost literally, midway between the US and Japan.
Could the US work around it? Sure. But it makes things a lot harder for the US. Well worthwhile for Japan to hold it.
In hindsight they should have nabbed it just after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Maybe a reason to go all in. You are fucked anyway.
Now that his carriers were gone how much value was the rest of his force if not to take Midway? They all run home, get scattered and lost here and there? Maybe better spent doubling down.
I’m a little surprised that happened. Some time before Pearl Harbor but when the US was putting the squeeze on Japan, Yamamoto was asked by his superiors his estimate of how a war would go. Having been in the US and knowing our industrial capacity he replied he’d be able to run the table “for six months, maybe a year;” after that Japan would lose.
This was the short end of his estimate (discounting a buncha cruisers and destroyers at Guadalcanal).
That’s easy to say in 2021; it was not anywhere near close to true in June 1942. Japan still had a navy that was the equal of the US Pacific Fleet, and force conservation is an important part of fighting wars. There will still battles to be fought elsewhere.
As noted in the post just before yours Yamamoto knew they would lose a long war. The US could simply out-produce and out-last Japan. And he knew it.
There is rather a significant difference between that recognition and engaging in a preposterously suicidal assault on a little atoll that doesn’t have a great deal of value. Let’s avoid the fallacy of the excluded middle; it’s not like Japan just sat around waiting to lose. The point of the battle was to destroy the American carriers. They failed, so the correct thing to do was withdraw and seek another opportunity to win a tide-turning battle.