Author Topic: The Battle of Midway  (Read 1843 times)

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Offline Splashdown

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The Battle of Midway
« on: February 01, 2011, 12:21:46 PM »
I'm reading Herman Wouk's War and Remembrance.

A big part of the book are sections of historic discussions on different aspects of the war. Two of the most interesting to me are how the Holocaust cost Germany the war (a huge drain of men and material, etc.) and the Battle of Midway.

The argument goes that if Spruance lost the battle of Midway (as, apparently, he should have, being outclassed and outgunned by the Japanese), the Japanese would have had a clear shot at Hawaii and the West Coast of the U.S. Roosevelt would have been forced to change the Germany First doctrine to protect the American Coast, and Germany would have had time to shore up Europe and crush Britain.

The inference in the book is that Midway was the turning point of the war, one of the most important days in the history of Western Civilization.

I ask those of you with military experience and a historical background--Is that overstated? Did Spruance basically save WWII?
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Offline BlueStateSaint

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Re: The Battle of Midway
« Reply #1 on: February 01, 2011, 12:42:35 PM »
I'm reading Herman Wouk's War and Remembrance.

A big part of the book are sections of historic discussions on different aspects of the war. Two of the most interesting to me are how the Holocaust cost Germany the war (a huge drain of men and material, etc.) and the Battle of Midway.

The argument goes that if Spruance lost the battle of Midway (as, apparently, he should have, being outclassed and outgunned by the Japanese), the Japanese would have had a clear shot at Hawaii and the West Coast of the U.S. Roosevelt would have been forced to change the Germany First doctrine to protect the American Coast, and Germany would have had time to shore up Europe and crush Britain.

The inference in the book is that Midway was the turning point of the war, one of the most important days in the history of Western Civilization.

I ask those of you with military experience and a historical background--Is that overstated? Did Spruance basically save WWII?

This is just my two cents, but Midway did do a lot towards keeping the heat on the Germans, at least from the west.  Let's remember that Hitler's divisions were fully involved in the Soviet Union at the time.  The Soviets would have had a much tougher time of it, but in the end, they would have prevailed against the Germans.  The fact that most of the Wermacht (sp?) was involved in the Soviet Union would have kept a bunch of divisions in the east; divisions that could have been used to overrun England.
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Offline Airwolf

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Re: The Battle of Midway
« Reply #2 on: February 01, 2011, 01:36:38 PM »
This is just my two cents, but Midway did do a lot towards keeping the heat on the Germans, at least from the west.  Let's remember that Hitler's divisions were fully involved in the Soviet Union at the time.  The Soviets would have had a much tougher time of it, but in the end, they would have prevailed against the Germans.  The fact that most of the Wermacht (sp?) was involved in the Soviet Union would have kept a bunch of divisions in the east; divisions that could have been used to overrun England.

Not neccessarily. I know of someone that has played the Germans in the board game "Axis and Allies" and has won . He had at the time I last saw him a standing bet that no one could beat him. I know its just a game but if he could figure a way out to beat the Russains with all the advantages they had then anyone could. 
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Offline TexasCop

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Re: The Battle of Midway
« Reply #3 on: February 01, 2011, 01:45:31 PM »
The Japanese never had plans to invade Hawaii.  Had they won at Midway, they weren't on the proper footing to follow through with such invasion plans.  The US would have had plenty of time to compensate and I'm sure the Japs knew that.  It would have sucked, though, had we lost the island of Midway because that would have put Hawaii within Jap bomber range.  They would have hurt us, but they wouldn't have come any further.

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Re: The Battle of Midway
« Reply #4 on: February 01, 2011, 02:02:49 PM »
The Japanese never had plans to invade Hawaii.  Had they won at Midway, they weren't on the proper footing to follow through with such invasion plans.  The US would have had plenty of time to compensate and I'm sure the Japs knew that.  It would have sucked, though, had we lost the island of Midway because that would have put Hawaii within Jap bomber range.  They would have hurt us, but they wouldn't have come any further.
Indeed.

It would not be worth Japanese manpower and resources to invade the US but they could have assumed a containment posture.

Of course that would assume the US did not re-arm over the ensuing years and return with a vengeance.

Ironically, I would think that had Japan prevailed in the Pacific it would have hastened the demise of Germany as the US would accept containment on 1 front allowing them to focus on the other. We were fighting a 2 front war and that always requires concessions to both efforts.

Would that we could have dealt the death blow to Germany while Russia was still be rocked back on its heels.
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Offline RightCoast

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Re: The Battle of Midway
« Reply #5 on: February 01, 2011, 02:27:44 PM »
The worst case I could see with the loss of midway would be the remainder of the US pac fleet operating primarily out of California thus significantly reducing effectiveness until such time as we could retake the lost midway. Hawaii potentially could have fallen but only if the pac theater strategy became one of defense only. As long as we were bent on retaking operational losses and keeping the Pacific open the overall outcome was never really in question. One of the main reasons for the attack was simply to keep the US out of Japan's Southeast Asia operations, it was not about Japan trying to invade or even attack the US mainland.     
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Offline DumbAss Tanker

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Re: The Battle of Midway
« Reply #6 on: February 01, 2011, 03:25:32 PM »
Midway was indeed a turning point, but the outcome would've been the same, it just would have taken longer.  The Japanese had a 'Brittle' order of battle, i.e. they could not replace their losses the way we could in terms of ships, aircraft, or skilled crew like pilots.  After Pearl Harbor, they were able to finish exactly ONE more full-size fleet carrier during the entire rest of the war (The Taiho, sunk on her first war operation in 1944 at Philippine Sea).  The US had already launched the first hulls of something like 17 Essex class carriers, though they didn't join the fleet until 43 and later.  Although two of them were very badly damaged toward the closing stages of the war, we did not lose any of the Essex class ships, and two of the six fleet carriers we started with (Enterprise and Saratoga) were still fighting at the end.

Both sides had technical and doctrinal weaknesses and strengths at the start of the war, I could write a 5,000 word essay on it, but the bottom line is we were a hell of a lot better at fixing our weaknesses and playing to our strengths than they were, adn they fell farther and farther behind in both areas, drastically so from Guadalcanal onward. 

They couldn't have invaded Hawaii if they'd won Midway, and the carrier battle was only the first phase of the operation, they still would have had to take the damn island, hold onto it, and somehow keep its very-isolated garrison supplied through a gauntlet of US subs that were also pouring off the ways like a river of steel.  Thanks to early and overwhelming victory in the carrier battle, the invasion of Midway never got to Phase II and beyond.  Bottom line, even losing the place to them would have at most prolonged the war by about six months, and taking Midway instead of coming up short there would have been their high-water mark.

Reading Wouk, you have to remember that he brings his own freight to the work, though he did a great job of researching the military history he put into it.  On top of that, he uses the literary device of excerpting the writings of a fictional military historian for exposition of the history involved, and he cranks the prejudices of that fictional author into the excerpts.

The "His own freight" applies to the Holocaust part.  It's very PC with modern historical writers, especially Jewish ones, to claim the Holocaust cost the Germans the war, but while it was basically insanely murderous and vile, it's basically balderdash.  There were a variety of gates they could have taken to more successful outcomes, but the last one of those closed on them on December 10, 1941, when Hitler declared war on us.  After that, it was only a question of how long it was going to take and how costly it was going to be.       
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Offline thundley4

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Re: The Battle of Midway
« Reply #7 on: February 01, 2011, 03:34:56 PM »
I had read somewhere this morning that there was a squadron of US planes that basically got lost, and just by chance happened upon a couple of the Japanese carriers while they were reloading and refueling their planes.  The fortuitous timing allowed that squadron to take out the two carriers.  Damned if I can find the article now.  :banghead:

Offline DumbAss Tanker

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Re: The Battle of Midway
« Reply #8 on: February 01, 2011, 03:59:39 PM »
I had read somewhere this morning that there was a squadron of US planes that basically got lost, and just by chance happened upon a couple of the Japanese carriers while they were reloading and refueling their planes.  The fortuitous timing allowed that squadron to take out the two carriers.  Damned if I can find the article now.  :banghead:

It wasn't as blind luck as that sounds, the TBDs had found the IJN carriers right where they were supposed to be, but failed to hit with any torps and almost all of the obsolescent Devastators were shot down.  However, that pulled the enemy fighter CAP down to the deck and they were not in place to interfere when the dive bomber wings showed up high overhead some little bit later, at the limit of their range and unsure of the target location below the scattered clouds, but they were spread out and some of them did spot the Japanese fleet and vectored in the rest when they dove their SBDs in to drop.  The first strike took out three of the four Japanese carriers, the fact they were swapping ordnance on the decks at the time sure didn't help things, but Japanese damage control was never up to the standards of the USN, either.  Kaga, Akagi, and Soryu all went up in flames to the bombs of the Dauntless pilots, but Hiryu was in a rain squall at the time the strike went in and escaped unscathed.  She launched the strike that took out Yorktown, and then a second re-armed strike from Enterprise and Hornet cleaned her clock.
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Offline T-Monay820

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Re: The Battle of Midway
« Reply #9 on: February 02, 2011, 01:54:29 AM »
I'm not as well read up the subject as I once was, but as I recall, the Japanese object was always to keep America out of the Pacific by whatever means was necessary. But since the US refused to allow the Japanese unlimited freedom in the Far East, they chose the strategy of crippling the US Pacific forces (Pearl Harbor, Philippines) and consolidating their positions with their own blitzkrieg strategy. Then they hoped that the US didn't have the guts to fight an entrenched enemy over thousands of miles of ocean and basically give up Asia in exchange for peace. Through some luck and fortune, we were able to survive the initial assaults enough that we felt we could fight back. Someone please correct me if my history is a bit rusty.

Offline DumbAss Tanker

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Re: The Battle of Midway
« Reply #10 on: February 02, 2011, 11:25:10 AM »
T-Man, you're basically correct; that was the Japanese strategy, and it was a stupid one based entirely on their misreading of American will.  Their 'Limited War' strategy crashed headfirst into a 'Total War' strategy on our side.   They had convinced themselves we were weak, decadent pushovers, and totally underestimated the consequences of getting us solidly pissed off.

Both Gemany and Japan seem to have completely blanked on the problems of taking on powers with many times their population and truly overwhelming industrial capacities. England alone, not even counting the Commonwealth, nearly matched German industry and substantially exceeded Japan's.  The Japanese blindness to this fact of life is particularly surprising after the spanking the Soviets administered to the Japanese at Khalkin Gol in 1937, where a multi-division mechanized force under Zhukov pretty much slaughtered a couple of Japanses corps.  All they seem to have taken away from that was 'Don't screw with the Russkiis,' without apparently causing them to reflect at all on why they got spanked so hard.  Fortunately for us, they proved to be not real good at learning from bad experience during the war.

The screwy thing about the Japanese strategic vision (Which was formulated by the Army, not the Navy) was that they viewed the 'Real' war to be in China to almost the bitter end, the reason they went to war with the Western powers was for the limited strategic aim of getting the oil resources of the Dutch East Indies so they could continue to prosecute the war in China after we cut off our oil to them.  We thought cutting off the oil would force them to stop the war in China, but they regarded it as a national imperative to continue that war at all costs, which we misread; for their part, they decided they needed the oil, would seize Dutch holdings to get it, and that attacking the Dutch would therefore involve war with the US and UK, IMHO I'm not sure we or the Brits would have actually gone to war with them over Dutch colonial territory in 1941.  War with Japan was an 'Unintended consequences' situation and a complete misread of strategic interests, capabilities, and positions on both sides.

But as far as 'Luck' goes, luck is good and makes winning come quicker and at a lower cost, but the Japanese weren't going to actually win it no matter what happened after December 7th.  They could have sunk the entire Seventh Fleet including the three (IIRC) fleet carriers that operated out of Pearl that year, none of which happened to be home on December 7th, and it wouldn't have changed the ultimate outcome.  Every major ship sunk at Pearl Harbor was refloated except Arizona; Oklahoma was judged to be too damaged to get back in operation in Hawaii, and was lost at sea while being towed back to California.  All the rest of them were repaired, modernized, and delivered immense punishment to the Japanese for the rest of the war.  Of course there was already a series of US emergency naval building programs dating from the late 30s, when the Washington Treaty expired, bearing fruit in the US.  Those program eventually lead to new construction of three classes of modern battleships, the Essex class carriers, the Independence class light carriers, light and heavy cruisers, and literally hordes of destroyers, 'Jeep carriers,' and long-range subs of the Tench/Balao/Gato class.  None of the major units had yet been finished to the point of joining the fleet at Pearl on December 7th 1941, but they were in the pipeline in crushing force.   
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Offline Splashdown

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Re: The Battle of Midway
« Reply #11 on: February 02, 2011, 11:29:20 AM »
See, I knew I came to the right place!
Let nothing trouble you,
Let nothing frighten you. 
All things are passing;
God never changes.
Patience attains all that it strives for.
He who has God lacks nothing:
God alone suffices.
--St. Theresa of Avila



"No crushed ice; no peas." -- Undies