Midway= 75 years ago today

For the first 6 months of the  Pacific War, the Kido Butai, the Japanese Mobile Force carrier fleet, ran wild across a third of the globe, sinking Allied ships, downing Allied aircraft, striking Allied bases, and not losing a single ship.

After the tactical draw at Coral Sea, the Japanese Imperial Fleet planned a decisive battle, with the assault and occupation of Midway to be the catalyst. The Japanese planned to crush the remnants of the US Pacific Fleet, and essentially deny the Pacific Ocean west of Hawaii to the Allies.

Thanks largely to the efforts of Fleet Radio Unit Pacific’s cryptology, the commander of the US Pacific Fleet, ADM Nimitz, had a fairly clear picture of the Japanese intentions and order of battle. He even had a very good idea of when the battle was to take place.

Nimitz faced an enormous fleet. Behind the Kido Butai was a huge fleet of battleships, and a large invasion force.

Nimitz scraped together virtually every ship in the fleet to face this onslaught.

Enterprise and Hornet were ready. USS Yorktown, badly damaged in the Battle of Coral Sea one month before had only just limped into Pearl Harbor. At a minimum, it would take three months to repair her.

Instead, a near superhuman effort patched her up sufficiently in three days to allow her to sortie with the fleet. That amazing story can be read here.

Just knowing the Japanese plan was necessary, but not sufficient to achieve success. The US had to detect and localize their fleet, parry the thrust at Midway Island, and then counterstroke against a numerically superior fleet with arguably better materiel.

Entire books have been written about the battle itself, so we shall not attempt to do so here.

Suffice to say that a combination of solid intelligence, sound operational and tactical thinking, astonishing personal courage, and no small amount of blind luck led to the smashing of the Kido Butai, with four of the finest carriers of the Japanese fleet sliding smoking beneath the waves. Equally important, their aircrews were dead, either shot down, killed aboard their ships, or left to drown in the  Pacific vastness. They were an irreplaceable asset, and the quality of Japanese naval air crews would decline through the rest of the war, whereas US aircrews would improve in quality, training, and numbers.

While the Imperial Japanese Navy would never recover from the disastrous defeat at Midway, it was still a formidable force, and the US Navy would have to fight bloody battles against it for three more years.

But without the stunning victory of the US Navy over the Kido Butai seventy five years ago, that long road to victory would surely have been longer, and far bloodier.

Comments

[Captain Ned]

The Douglas SBD Dauntless. Marginally obsolete when the war started, but still proved better in combat than its supposed replacement, the Curtiss SB2C Helldiver.

For those who want the correct version of Midway (IMO), look no further than Parshall & Tully's "Shattered Sword".

[Quartermaster]

Someone in the Imperial navy produced a plan to produce 120,000 pilots, but the plan was shelved and ignored. The pre-war production rate of about 100 naval Aviators (According to Saburo Sakai) a year would never suffice. We proved that you could produce quality pilots at high rates. At least one Jap naval Officer knew that as well.

[KenH]

Reading it again now, it never gets old. It's always got something you forgot about. And seeing Yamamoto, Nagumo, Yamaguchi as they WERE , not portrayed in lousy movies is delicious

[CT II Raven]

Cap Ned - excellent read! The IJN never learned the concept of concentrated force. The Northern diversion force was a waste of assets

[curtis]

bz

[Esli]

Interesting observation on Dauntless v Helldiver. I hadn't heard that before. They certainly look better, but I was not aware of a performance advantage.

[Captain Ned]

Esli: On paper, the SB2C was a far better plane than the SBD. Crews hated it. It was unreliable and unstable in a dive (sorta the point here) compared to the SBD, plus it was far more maintenance-intensive. It was also one of the last products out of Curtiss, whose skills in aircraft design and manufacture were about to hit the wall (they spent most of WWII as a contract manufacturer).

There's a reason it came to be called Son of a Bitch, Second Class.