By actually invading. Otherwise there was no reason for assault troops to be there in the first place. The idea was to invade Midway, win (fat chance) and thus force the US to respond. With the distraction of the Aleutians going on as well, it was hoped the IJN could ambush the US Navy and eliminate a threat, as well as getting a (very) advance base against Hawaii.
Needless to say, IJN Naval High Command had scored some really good weed, because almost none of that was even remotely feasible.
So the USN was to come to the rescue of a successfully invaded Midway?
I think the OP has been really well answered at this point…some of the best WWII posts about the Pacific I’ve seen in fact. As for the why of Japan wanting to take Midway, or more plausibly use it as a lure to engage and destroy the USN in a series of battles, you have to look at what their overall strategy was wrt the US. Flawed as it was, you still have to look at what they were trying to achieve, which was basically to buy time for them to fortify their perimeter and, hopefully, hurt the US enough that we would simply sue for peace. It goes into the thinking of the time, which was that the US was a corrupt and flawed country who’s people were merchants and didn’t have the will or stomach for a fight, and that if we were pushed we would fold. Even our allies thought this to an extent, certainly our enemies did. So, to the Japanese it wasn’t about winning the war outright through conquest of the US, it was about pushing the US back, fortifying the perimeter and then hurting us enough that we simply wouldn’t be willing to pay the price to dig the Japanese out of their expanded empire. Maybe to buy us off as well, sweeten the pot for our merchant souls with large bribes during the peace talks.
It’s a valid strategy, if you don’t know much about the US and our people, and if you think your assumptions are correct. It could work. The key though is the IJN and the Japanese leadership never though they could defeat us completely outright…they merely wanted to make the price we’d have to pay so high we’d be willing to meet them at the peace table, where they would get some or most of what they really wanted, and then we’d start trading with them again as if nothing happened.
It wasn’t a totally idiotic idea. If they could have captured and held Midway, the US would hopefully expend all of their resources trying to retake it, only to be whittled down by the more powerful Japanese fleet. This strategy worked well later in the year for the Americans at Guadalcanal. The difference, of course is that the US had the industrial might to replace those resources; the Japanese did not.
As was working with China, perhaps.
Americans have a lot of cultural mythology built up about the unity and morale of their country and its armed forces, during the World War 2 period. The thought that the US would possibly take a negotiated settlement, rarely enters into many postwar analyses. While at the same time those analyses are spilling a lot of ink over the feelings of isolationism in American popular culture and foreign policy.
I think the odds of the US dropping out of the Pacific War are less than, say, the British signing an armistice if Dunkirk turned into the Western Front’s equivalent to the Kiev encirclement of 1941—with Churchill promptly getting No Confidence’d out of office and Lord Halifax taking the keys. But I don’t think they’re zero. Not with a midterm election approaching, and assuming as I wrote above, a complete ass-kicking by the Japanese, with all carriers sunk, not a scratch on the IJN, and Pearl bombed or shelled again.
Shock can kill a body, even if the trauma causing it wouldn’t by itself be fatal. Same thing is true for groups.
As to why not invade Midway, or just bombard the island, also remember that naval leaders at the time were incredibly gunshy about getting capital units anywhere under someone else’s aerial supremacy. Everyone had HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse on their minds.
It would have been a bigger thorn in the Japanese side. Bombing campaigns consume a lot of resources. Not just the bombs and fuel but also planes and pilots. Bombing campaigns are essentially attrition warfare; you’re hoping the amount of resources you’re destroying is greater than the amount you’re spending. Or you hope that at least the other side runs out of resources first.
The United States could afford to conduct a bombing campaign. Japan couldn’t. Especially not a long range one and one that would have been directed at a peripheral target like Hawaii.
Oh, I don’t think the odds were zero, though the way that Japan brought us into the war made it fairly improbable. Certainly there are lots of cultural mythologies that each culture has. The Japanese had several themselves, which segues into the earlier discussion as to how the Japanese could possibly think their force enough to take the island through a direct assault. Sort of like the French idea/ideal of elan, the Japanese just felt they were superior to everyone else wrt fighting spirit, and that this would always carry them through to victory. And at this stage of the war, they hadn’t often had evidence this wasn’t the case. Regardless of the disparity of force, the Japanese elan could and would carry them to victory, especially against the Americans, who were weak and flawed and would surrender if pressed.
While true, I don’t know that the Special Naval Landing Forces ever practiced that. Most of their landings were done with a lot of emphasis on deception and speed. Lingayen Gulf, Attu. When that didn’t work, and they had to take a strongly contested beach like at Wake or Corregidor, they had a bad time, and required amazing superiority in both numbers and firepower to achieve the landing. I guess they could have tried at Midway, but I think they would have gotten absolutely crushed by the defenders. And as silenus noted, the island wasn’t the point, the carriers were.
EDIT: Crap, wrong quote. I meant to quote you lower in the post, when you were writing about the Japanese believe in spirit overcoming all.
And I agree with that point. It wasn’t about taking Midway, it was about the systematic destruction of the USN in the Pacific. Midway would have been nice to grab, though as other posters noted up thread it would have been a logistical nightmare to support had they gotten it, but it wasn’t the primary goal.
That said, and while what you say here is totally true wrt their actual capability, I think THEY thought they could and would take the island anyway, regardless of the numbers, regardless of whether they had trained for it, practiced for it, or had equipment for it…they would win anyway. I agree that their experience in the battles you mentioned SHOULD have made them understand how impossible it really was, but I’m not convinced they learned the right lessons that deception and speed were the key, as well as overwhelming local superiority in numbers.
As silenus has pointed out, an option was to take Midway, but Yamamoto and his staff concluded the US Navy couldn’t even allow that to be a possible outcome. They didn’t have to invade, they just had to make it look like they might. Forcing the USN to give battle in a particular place would take away the American’s ability to go wherever they wanted and attack what they pleased, which in the Pacific Ocean in 1942 meant they were effectively unfindable.
The (probably too elaborate) Japanese plan wasn’t about taking Midway in particular; it was about attacking Midway because Midway was, conveniently, reasonably important but really far from supporting air forces from any nearby base. Midway is much too far from Hawai’i for the forces there to help. Attacking Pearl Harbor again was not considered a viable option.
To Gray_Ghost,
The problem with that analysis is that it assumes the IJN wins everything. That is, you have to believe that, having basically lucked into the optimal result at Pearl Harbor, they would then obtain the same improbable victory about ten times in a row. I suppose, in theory, anybody can win any war if you assume they win every battle with no casualties, but that’s not a realistic policy.
In practice, the Japanese basically lost every major engagement and quite a few minor ones - despite really having some additional massive strokes of luck. MacArthur completely flubbed the defence of the Philippines, that ponce Percival panicked at Singapore, and the Bureau of Ordnance engaged in such lazy arse-covering that the Mk. 14 Torpedo was useless for the balance of the war. Even with all of that, the IJN still couldn’t win. At some point, you have to believe they invented a magic forcefield to make themselves invulnerable to attack in order to come out with a scenario where they win.
I wrote a bit about the (dis-) function of Japan’s wartime government, but I deleted that in order to roll back and focus on a specific point brought up earlier: The Japanese leadership, such as it was, assigned America an identity in their own plans and created a kind of “role” they thought the United States should play. Specific analysis of the diplomatic situation was somewhat beside the point; having talked themselves into going ahead with a major war, the leaders realized that certain things had to be done, including the neutralization of the United States in the Pacific. In order for that end to be accomplished, we would have to act accordingly - so they assumed that we would do so. This behavior continued in different ways throughout the war, including making battle plans under certain assumptions and then failing to change them when those assumptions proved wrong or even make plans for what might happen if we did not respond as the plan dictated. The plans were not necessarily bad per se, but they tended to carry dreadful risks because the IJN wasn’t able to honestly assess those risks.
The Japanese were used to winning. They defeated Russia and were in the business of defeating the immense country of China. When Hitler heard about Pearl Harbor, he exclaimed, “Japan hasn’t lost a war in a thousand years!” I imagine they thought there was no way they could lose.
To this point, I recall reading — I believe in Walter Lord’s Incredible Victory — that on the afternoon of the 4th a Japanese scout plane reported a sighting of TF16 (Enterprise and Hornet). When it sent a corrected position a little while later, the second report was taken to be a separate group and that there were four US carriers and their supporting ships heading toward what was left of the IJN strike force. It was an indication of the disarray among Nagumo’s staff that nobody even thought to ask for a clarification: the immediate reflex was to get the hell out of Dodge.
Agreed, the Japanese leaders except Yamamoto were deluded about their chances. I was only trying to point out what I think they might have thought they could accomplish around the time of Midway. Change the timing of the Japanese and American air strikes, give Nagumo some better Intel about the carriers’ location (flying boat observation, sub sees them, whatever), and maybe it goes differently than 4-1 USA.
You’ve no doubt heard of the, perhaps apocryphal, story of the Japanese staff Red Team that wargames likely US responses, given the Pearl Harbor raid? (I forget how successful the Red Team predicted the raid would be.) Supposedly, they predicted the course of the Pacific War, right up to invasion of the Home Islands in 1946. Obviously they couldn’t predict nukes. The Japanese leadership read their report, swore the Team members to secrecy, and buried it.
Khalkhin Gol as a vital exception. God, Japanese armor was just awful.
There’s the thing, though. Sure, Midway could have gone better for the IJN. But the best realistic outcome was a war of attrition - which they would lose. From the American perspective, the Battle of Midway was a battle we could lose. And we could afford to lose the battle after that, and the one after that, and the one after that. Japan couldn’t afford to lose, once. The U.S. could afford to repeat the Battle of the Coral Sea far longer than Japan could. So Japan wagered everything on what was ultimately a meaningless victory trying to fulfill their Decisive Battle doctrine. The problem was, the U.S. wasn’t going to give up that easily and we were already building the fleet needed to destroy Japan. The IJN didn’t need to win a smashing victory at Midway - they needed to win ten such battles in a row without losing a ship.
I have heard the story of the wargames. It would not be surprising if it were true. However, if the Japanese did any such analysis they did it far too late.
It’s likely that the Japanese assumed* the Midway landings would be more on the order of Lingayen and Attu rather than Wake or Corregidor. Remember, the hapless US was supposed to be unaware of the assault until the first air strike was in progress; therefore the landing would be opposed by 700 or so USMC with little or no heavy weaponry, perhaps as many USN, and a handful of obsolescent/obsolete aircraft that would be destroyed on the ground. The actual landing was probably looked upon as more of a mopping-up operation.
* There’s that word again.
Midway was a useful forward base for the US, and if the Japanese held it it would be a problem for shipping from Pearl Harbor to Australia and the south Pacific. The US would have to fight for it.
Naval officers, both American and Japanese, had studied the work of Alfred Thayer Mahan, and his idea of the “decisive battle” was part of Japanese Naval doctrine. The Japanese were successful in the Russo-Japanese war destroying the Russian fleet at Tsushima, and the bold strike that would cripple the opponent was the basis of both Pearl Harbor and Midway.
The attack on Midway was supposed to be a surprise, so the invasion force would have plenty of time to attack and take the islands while the fleet prepared for the USN to retaliate. A cordon of submarines would whittle down the USN, air attacks would cripple it, and finally the battleships would destroy the remnants of the US fleet.
As pointed out above, the plan was over complicated, scattering the IJN all over the central and northern Pacific, and it made the fatal assumption that USN would do as expected.
Russian officers were worse. Were it not for a chance meeting between Zhukov and one of Stalins old drinking buddies, Zhukov would have been purged and whatever fool officer remained wouldn’t have dared risk it all on a Khalkhin Gol. He would have penny packeted his tanks and been beaten solidly by the Japanese army.