Excellent essay, remarkable how many problems were papered over. Especially interesting tidbit on how Tsushima impacted their naval doctrine in general. If you haven't already seen it you might enjoy this low budget but very high effort video recreation of the Battle of the Midway, also told from the perspective of the Japanese.
Could you add more on the Japanese public getting sick of the war with China? My impression is that while modern Japanese are mostly uninterested in most of the possessions of the Japanese Empire, there is still a strong nostalgic sentiment for Manchuria in particular.
So far, much of the essay is a summary of Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway (as the essay implies). Though I don't think the part about Japanese public opinion is covered. I would highly recommend the book if you are interested in this subject.
So far, much of the essay is a summary of Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway (as the essay implies).
Sorry, I should have been clear. This is 100% correct, it's mostly just that. But Shattered Sword is somewhat lengthy and has details only nerds would really care about. I'm trying to cut down on some of the things I think people would not be interested in, like the whole section on Japanese carrier-based aircraft. That section is necessary to understand later arguments, but not to the level Parshall and Tully imply.
Though I don't think the part about Japanese public opinion is covered.
Excellent essay, remarkable how many problems were papered over.
Oh, we're just getting started. This is going to be like watching a train crash.
if you haven't already seen it you might enjoy this low budget but very high effort video recreation of the Battle of the Midway, also told from the perspective of the Japanese.
I have seen that! Montemayor is one of the greatest video creators out there, marred only by the fact that he doesn't upload a video a day for me at his usual quality! It was actually that video that led to me reading the book in question.
Could you add more on the Japanese public getting sick of the war with China?
They cite Pearl Harbor by H.P. Willmott, the 2001 version that includes an essay by Tohmatsu Haruo. I can't find this book via libgen, but if you can, they cite pages 178-80 for part of it, so I'd start there.
+1 Tsushima provided false weight to japan (and everyone else kinda) re. decisive battle doctrine.
Some other things weighing in on decisions (IMO): the perpetual and inevitable rise of gearfuckery. Our planes are so pretty, they fly so high and fast, their cannons are so BIG and STRONG and ERRECT! Our ships sail so well, are so beautiful, surely nothing could oppose them!
Helped along by the fact that they were early adopters and actually did lead the world for quite a while in naval aviation (and military aviation in general, arguably). Just not by as much or for as long as they may have thought.
The navy itched to demonstrate its parity/superiority to the white powers.
They were desperate. The oil embargo + the Dutch East Indies also embargoing them + the Americans planning to build ten fleet carriers in 1942 and a hell of a lot of escorts and battleships meant they had limited time left to act before they got crushed. Roosevelt was clearly moving towards war with Japan, as could be interpreted from his rhetoric, rebasing the Pacific fleet to Pearl Harbour, the oil embargo, US volunteers in China, B-17s being deployed to the Philippines and the gargantuan military build-up. The US negotiating position was pretty heavy-handed too, demanding unilateral withdrawal from China, Manchuria and Indo-China.
Plus Japan fought well at Midway and lost the battle due to factors beyond their control - the US having broken their codes and the dive-bombers appearing out of a cloud at the absolute worst time.
Do you think it was luck that german and japanese codes were broken? Just one of the myriad of easily predictable weaknesses the axis leaders had to ignore before embarking on their doomed adventure.
When the US makes a “heavy-handed” demand that Japan leave China, it is not merely a question of the morality, of whose right it is to occupy the country. The real question is whose will is backed by superior might. And clearly, the japanese miscalculated. They were as wrong as one can be, and even they knew it. Surprised Drmanhattan didn’t give that yamamoto quote: ‘“In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain, I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.”
One can talk of the memory tsushima, of the luck of the dive bombers (forgetting all the things that did go wrong), of the parallel operations, of the crippled aircraft carriers that didn’t get swapped, but really, the whole war was stupid and decided before it began. If it wasn’t midway, it would have been another, even more dominating one. I think nimitz was crazy to give battle at merely better than even odds. Why give them the ‘decisive battle’ they want for some useless bait like midway, literally the only way they could possibly eke out a limited win, when the alternative is far more punishing for them? Just sit back, strangle shipping with ironed out sub torpedoes, fight purely training & PR battles until every battle odds estimate reads north of 95%. The fabian strategy doesn’t require weakness.
And although the difference in battleships & carrier production is stark I find the immediate and ever increasing disparity in Escort Carriers and Destroyers to be the most damning.
Do you think it was luck that german and japanese codes were broken? Just one of the myriad of easily predictable weaknesses the axis leaders had to ignore before embarking on their doomed adventure.
How could they possibly know that their codes would be broken? What could they have done about it? If you told Hitler 'oh the Poles have stolen one of your enigma machines and somehow managed to get it to England, a submarine will get boarded and they'll capture another one + the Allies have unprecedented electronic technologies you don't know about...' what is he supposed to do? They did add an extra rotor in '43. How is this remotely foreseeable? It's just bad luck, like when their magnetic mines got captured and countermeasures developed shortly after being deployed. There were many legitimate Axis errors like the bad plan at Midway, or Germany not fully mobilizing its economy sooner. Failing to perceive massive Allied codebreaking operations is not one of them. If the Cold War went hot in the 1980s and the US lost because of this guy, that's not really a US error (though trusting a felon with such important information is a dubious decision): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Anthony_Walker
Japan rolled a dice stacked against them and lost, they thought they had no other choice but to go in at Pearl Harbour or otherwise they'd certainly get crushed.
It is worth noting that the Japanese were not actually aware that carriers were in the South Pacific until the Battle of Coral Sea. They initially assumed that land-based aircraft were attacking them in a prior operation.
I can hardly fault them for thinking that maybe, just maybe, the carriers of the US were engaging in their own operations and it was just happenstance that the two forces happened to meet. But it's the job of military planners to assume the worst, so the Japanese definitely failed to be good analysts in that regard.
How could they possibly know that their codes would be broken? What could they have done about it? If you told Hitler 'oh the Poles have stolen one of your enigma machines and somehow managed to get it to England, a submarine will get boarded and they'll capture another one + the Allies have unprecedented electronic technologies you don't know about...' what is he supposed to do?
I wonder is it just a chance or have their politics impacted them. How likely it is that false claims of their racial superiority, rampant oppression and doing everything to ensure that everyone hated them impacted their intelligence? Note German spies in UK that proceeded to immediately defect. In fact some became spies so they could escape Nazi Germany!
Japan rolled a dice stacked against them and lost, they thought they had no other choice but to go in at Pearl Harbour or otherwise they'd certainly get crushed.
Well, they could also stop empire building and realize they are not some superior race. Reminds me about poor innocent Russia forced to invade Ukraine (while they could just realize they are not superpower).
You’re missing the forest for the trees. Intelligence is like scientific research, Bletchley park is another manhattan project. From their poor scientific production the japanese could and should have inferred an intelligence deficit in every battle.
Japan rolled a dice stacked against them and lost, they thought they had no other choice but to go in at Pearl Harbour or otherwise they'd certainly get crushed.
Option A: vacate a few overseas territories. Option B: vacate all overseas territory, lose all industrial capacity, country under occupation, lose three million people . They went with option B, naturally.
Those militarists never have a choice, do they? They charge towards their own destruction like a mindless beast every time. Only the US has the ability to make choices.
How are they supposed to know their computing technology is worse than the US's? THIS IS SECRET RESEARCH!
Option A: vacate a few overseas territories. Option B: vacate all overseas territory, lose all industrial capacity, country under occupation, lose three million people . They went with option B, naturally.
Option A: roll the dice and see what happens, depending on a host of unknowable fog-of-war matters
Option B: vacate China and Indo-China, resulting in massive rioting and the collapse of the government since the public won't be happy about admitting defeat after tens or hundreds of thousands have died in the war.
Suppose the Chinese completely obliterate the US military, using amazing advances in hypersonic weaponry, satellites, cyberwarfare, drones and so on, along with their US+EU sized manufacturing sector. They capitalize on their advantage to occupy Japan, Australia, the Pacific and bring the US to its knees by blockading all its ports.
Should we say 'oh the US was completely retarded going to war over Taiwan and losing 5 million men, all its prestige, overseas territories, alliance networks'. No because this wasn't a reasonably foreseeable outcome. Nobody knew beforehand that the Chinese were so capable, only with hindsight does 'oh their manufacturing capacity is so enormous' really become obvious, since people are assuming a short war fought in a single decisive battle. Only with hindsight do we know they had backdoors in all this critical infrastructure, that they'd stolen the specifications for US weapons, that there were 5th columnists feeding them intelligence. Only with hindsight would we learn that, since there hadn't been a naval war for decades, the meta had changed decisively in ways that benefitted the Chinese and obsoleted US strategy.
It's actually even more complex than that! After breaking the code, we intentionally obfuscated our responses to keep the Axis from identifying the leak.
A briefing included the designated cover story for the source of the intelligence stating it had come from Australian coastwatchers,[5] who supposedly had spotted an important high-ranking officer boarding an aircraft at Rabaul. Several historians say that the pilots were not specifically briefed on the identity of their target,[8][9] but Thomas Alexander Hughes wrote that Mitscher told the assembled pilots it was Yamamoto, to "provide additional incentive" to the fliers.[10]
‘“In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain, I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.”
That quote would be more fitting for the final part of this series, which will include a small point about Midway's nature as a "decisive" battle.
Just sit back, strangle shipping with ironed out sub torpedoes, fight purely training & PR battles until every battle odds estimate reads north of 95%. The fabian strategy doesn’t require weakness.
Firstly, it was not until the end of the war, nearly 3 years after Midway, that the Mk. 14 torpedo became "reliable". That's a long time to be waiting to strangle shipping. Leaving the Japanese Merchant Marine alone to fuel their war machine is not good.
Secondly, the US may have been unthreatened by Japan, but China, Burma, the South Pacific, and even Australia were in danger. Leaving the Japanese to use their carriers with impunity elsewhere meant devastating strikes that could force the Allies out of their strongholds. Operation MO failed, but a second one with more carriers might have succeeded.
Ultimately, Japan's carriers represented an incredibly valuable national asset that cost that country a tremendous amount. America had pilots confident and capable of dive-bombing or torpedoing them. Nimitz knew his enemy's plan. I think his risk was justified as it would ultimately put the Japanese on the defense going forward.
If they could take valuable targets, they wouldn’t have needed to attack midway.
Firstly, it was not until the end of the war, nearly 3 years after Midway, that the Mk. 14 torpedo became "reliable".
I got November 43, less than two years. Even with the malfunctioning torpedoes and slow gearing-up the japanese merchant fleet was down 25% from the start in 1943. 1944 would be the biggest year ever for anti-shipping before they ran out of targets.
I think his risk was justified as it would ultimately put the Japanese on the defense going forward.
Why is that good? They were already spent, they should have been left free to overextend further into the jungle before the hammer came down. The last thing the US should want at this point would be to get the japanese to switch to their “fortify and make them pay for every inch” strategy. Perhaps if americans had waited until supremacy to engage instead of sending every ship into battle right off the line, the whiplash would have broken the japanese, while minimizing casualties and any japanese chance of winning a limited war in the process.
Everyone thinks about WWI for generals sending men to their deaths for useless dirt, but the case is equally strong for WWII pacific. Given how it ended, any soldier who lost his life in guadalcanal and most of those grinds was wasted. But the brass needed a ‘fair fight’ over one neat island or other for those little stars to mean something. Hard to brag about winning the battle of the philippine sea or an even more lopsided battle in a wargame.
If they could take valuable targets, they wouldn’t have needed to attack midway.
Maybe so. But remember, the Japanese Navy had given a great deal of control over to Yamamoto, and it was he that insisted on sinking the American carriers. The others wanted to strike elsewhere.
Why is that good? They were already spent, they should have been left free to overextend further into the jungle before the hammer came down. The last thing the US should want at this point would be to get the japanese to switch to their “fortify and make them pay for every inch” strategy.
For one thing, leaving them alone means Japan can and would start threatening the America-Australia routes. Lose Australia as a war partner and the US has a much harder time staging land invasions, or even just the ability to resupply vessels from a nearby friendly port.
I won't comment on the loss of life in the island-hopping campaign, but the costs of losing four heavy carriers and all the experience ship crew, mechanics, and officers, were hardly replaceable to the Japanese.
Perhaps if americans had waited until supremacy to engage instead of sending every ship into battle right off the line, the whiplash would have broken the japanese, while minimizing casualties and any japanese chance of winning a limited war in the process.
Carrier warfare at the time was about launching your strike first. Nimitz knows the Japanese are coming. He gets confirmation when Midway-based scouts report that the attack is happening. His own vessels are precisely where the Japanese aren't expecting. He took his opportunity and it paid off. Yes, it relied on quite a bit of luck to make victory possible, but that is hardly an excuse to not try.
Moreover, the morale impacts cannot be understated. We are sitting 80 years in the future and know both sides of the war, I don't think the American public would have been quite aware of just how much the Japanese had overextended. They might very well insist that the navy start fighting back more aggressively if all they saw was Japan attacking national allies and taking US soil (the Aleutians and Midway Island) while the US just waited for the Japanese to overstretch.
Lastly, preventing further naval offensives had a positive moral effect as well. Let us not forget how brutally conquered civilians were treated by both the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy. You say that America should have left Japan to wear itself thin, but they were certainly willing to be monsters regardless of the nature of their supply lines. It may not be a thing to consider when planning, but it should be a positive added to the list after the fact.
The oil embargo + the Dutch East Indies also embargoing them + the Americans planning to build ten fleet carriers in 1942 and a hell of a lot of escorts and battleships meant they had limited time left to act before they got crushed.
History backs Nagano's view that Roosevelt would not have been able to justify way to the American public if it was only to protect the colonies of other nations. Had they avoided fighting America (leaving the Phillippines at their throat, yes), they might very well have avoided their disasters.
Plus Japan fought well at Midway and lost the battle due to factors beyond their control - the US having broken their codes and the dive-bombers appearing out of a cloud at the absolute worst time.
The skill of individuals on the Japanese side was high, but they absolutely failed to fight as well as they could have. Many of the decisions made during that battle make no sense even by the standards of what the Japanese should have known at the time.
The skill of individuals on the Japanese side was high, but they absolutely failed to fight as well as they could have. Many of the decisions made during that battle make no sense even by the standards of what the Japanese should have known at the time.
I only have a passing knowledge of this part of history (the Pacific war), but did Japan not get quite unlucky as well with scouting and with loading times of bombs/torpedoes?
Scouting is always a roll of luck in the age before satellite and radar. I plan to cover the Japanese scouting efforts in part 3.
It is not luck when we talk about loading bombs and torpedoes. That stems from design philosophy, since the carriers have to be built to a specific requirement before you train people on how to work aboard them.
Sure, it wasn‘t literally pure fortune, but is there not another definition of luck were decisions made have unforeseen effects?
If thievery is only caught 5% of the time, then a first-time thief getting caught would be quite unlucky. Much in the same way, the French were astonishingly incompetent in the Battle of Agincourt, but they were also unlucky with the weather.
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Notes -
Excellent essay, remarkable how many problems were papered over. Especially interesting tidbit on how Tsushima impacted their naval doctrine in general. If you haven't already seen it you might enjoy this low budget but very high effort video recreation of the Battle of the Midway, also told from the perspective of the Japanese.
Could you add more on the Japanese public getting sick of the war with China? My impression is that while modern Japanese are mostly uninterested in most of the possessions of the Japanese Empire, there is still a strong nostalgic sentiment for Manchuria in particular.
So far, much of the essay is a summary of Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway (as the essay implies). Though I don't think the part about Japanese public opinion is covered. I would highly recommend the book if you are interested in this subject.
Sorry, I should have been clear. This is 100% correct, it's mostly just that. But Shattered Sword is somewhat lengthy and has details only nerds would really care about. I'm trying to cut down on some of the things I think people would not be interested in, like the whole section on Japanese carrier-based aircraft. That section is necessary to understand later arguments, but not to the level Parshall and Tully imply.
It's a small snippet in that book, actually.
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Oh, we're just getting started. This is going to be like watching a train crash.
I have seen that! Montemayor is one of the greatest video creators out there, marred only by the fact that he doesn't upload a video a day for me at his usual quality! It was actually that video that led to me reading the book in question.
They cite Pearl Harbor by H.P. Willmott, the 2001 version that includes an essay by Tohmatsu Haruo. I can't find this book via libgen, but if you can, they cite pages 178-80 for part of it, so I'd start there.
Thanks, and definitely looking forward to the next installment.
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Good post, I like the straight Japan perspective.
+1 Tsushima provided false weight to japan (and everyone else kinda) re. decisive battle doctrine.
Some other things weighing in on decisions (IMO): the perpetual and inevitable rise of gearfuckery. Our planes are so pretty, they fly so high and fast, their cannons are so BIG and STRONG and ERRECT! Our ships sail so well, are so beautiful, surely nothing could oppose them!
Helped along by the fact that they were early adopters and actually did lead the world for quite a while in naval aviation (and military aviation in general, arguably). Just not by as much or for as long as they may have thought.
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They were desperate. The oil embargo + the Dutch East Indies also embargoing them + the Americans planning to build ten fleet carriers in 1942 and a hell of a lot of escorts and battleships meant they had limited time left to act before they got crushed. Roosevelt was clearly moving towards war with Japan, as could be interpreted from his rhetoric, rebasing the Pacific fleet to Pearl Harbour, the oil embargo, US volunteers in China, B-17s being deployed to the Philippines and the gargantuan military build-up. The US negotiating position was pretty heavy-handed too, demanding unilateral withdrawal from China, Manchuria and Indo-China.
Plus Japan fought well at Midway and lost the battle due to factors beyond their control - the US having broken their codes and the dive-bombers appearing out of a cloud at the absolute worst time.
Do you think it was luck that german and japanese codes were broken? Just one of the myriad of easily predictable weaknesses the axis leaders had to ignore before embarking on their doomed adventure.
When the US makes a “heavy-handed” demand that Japan leave China, it is not merely a question of the morality, of whose right it is to occupy the country. The real question is whose will is backed by superior might. And clearly, the japanese miscalculated. They were as wrong as one can be, and even they knew it. Surprised Drmanhattan didn’t give that yamamoto quote: ‘“In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain, I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.”
One can talk of the memory tsushima, of the luck of the dive bombers (forgetting all the things that did go wrong), of the parallel operations, of the crippled aircraft carriers that didn’t get swapped, but really, the whole war was stupid and decided before it began. If it wasn’t midway, it would have been another, even more dominating one. I think nimitz was crazy to give battle at merely better than even odds. Why give them the ‘decisive battle’ they want for some useless bait like midway, literally the only way they could possibly eke out a limited win, when the alternative is far more punishing for them? Just sit back, strangle shipping with ironed out sub torpedoes, fight purely training & PR battles until every battle odds estimate reads north of 95%. The fabian strategy doesn’t require weakness.
I've always found this analysis enlightening: Why Japan Really Lost The War. The economic disparity between the U.S. and Japan is staggering.
Military History Visualized depicted this disparity in production quite well.
And although the difference in battleships & carrier production is stark I find the immediate and ever increasing disparity in Escort Carriers and Destroyers to be the most damning.
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How could they possibly know that their codes would be broken? What could they have done about it? If you told Hitler 'oh the Poles have stolen one of your enigma machines and somehow managed to get it to England, a submarine will get boarded and they'll capture another one + the Allies have unprecedented electronic technologies you don't know about...' what is he supposed to do? They did add an extra rotor in '43. How is this remotely foreseeable? It's just bad luck, like when their magnetic mines got captured and countermeasures developed shortly after being deployed. There were many legitimate Axis errors like the bad plan at Midway, or Germany not fully mobilizing its economy sooner. Failing to perceive massive Allied codebreaking operations is not one of them. If the Cold War went hot in the 1980s and the US lost because of this guy, that's not really a US error (though trusting a felon with such important information is a dubious decision): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Anthony_Walker
Japan rolled a dice stacked against them and lost, they thought they had no other choice but to go in at Pearl Harbour or otherwise they'd certainly get crushed.
I think the blob says how they could have known:
_
If my adversary has broken my codes then I'd avoid orchestrating a large military operation that relies on my adversary not knowing it is a trap.
It is worth noting that the Japanese were not actually aware that carriers were in the South Pacific until the Battle of Coral Sea. They initially assumed that land-based aircraft were attacking them in a prior operation.
I can hardly fault them for thinking that maybe, just maybe, the carriers of the US were engaging in their own operations and it was just happenstance that the two forces happened to meet. But it's the job of military planners to assume the worst, so the Japanese definitely failed to be good analysts in that regard.
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I wonder is it just a chance or have their politics impacted them. How likely it is that false claims of their racial superiority, rampant oppression and doing everything to ensure that everyone hated them impacted their intelligence? Note German spies in UK that proceeded to immediately defect. In fact some became spies so they could escape Nazi Germany!
Similarly how Jewish physics has bitten them ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik ). Turn out that denying reality does not work well.
Well, they could also stop empire building and realize they are not some superior race. Reminds me about poor innocent Russia forced to invade Ukraine (while they could just realize they are not superpower).
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You’re missing the forest for the trees. Intelligence is like scientific research, Bletchley park is another manhattan project. From their poor scientific production the japanese could and should have inferred an intelligence deficit in every battle.
Option A: vacate a few overseas territories. Option B: vacate all overseas territory, lose all industrial capacity, country under occupation, lose three million people . They went with option B, naturally.
Those militarists never have a choice, do they? They charge towards their own destruction like a mindless beast every time. Only the US has the ability to make choices.
How are they supposed to know their computing technology is worse than the US's? THIS IS SECRET RESEARCH!
Option A: roll the dice and see what happens, depending on a host of unknowable fog-of-war matters Option B: vacate China and Indo-China, resulting in massive rioting and the collapse of the government since the public won't be happy about admitting defeat after tens or hundreds of thousands have died in the war.
Suppose the Chinese completely obliterate the US military, using amazing advances in hypersonic weaponry, satellites, cyberwarfare, drones and so on, along with their US+EU sized manufacturing sector. They capitalize on their advantage to occupy Japan, Australia, the Pacific and bring the US to its knees by blockading all its ports.
Should we say 'oh the US was completely retarded going to war over Taiwan and losing 5 million men, all its prestige, overseas territories, alliance networks'. No because this wasn't a reasonably foreseeable outcome. Nobody knew beforehand that the Chinese were so capable, only with hindsight does 'oh their manufacturing capacity is so enormous' really become obvious, since people are assuming a short war fought in a single decisive battle. Only with hindsight do we know they had backdoors in all this critical infrastructure, that they'd stolen the specifications for US weapons, that there were 5th columnists feeding them intelligence. Only with hindsight would we learn that, since there hadn't been a naval war for decades, the meta had changed decisively in ways that benefitted the Chinese and obsoleted US strategy.
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It's actually even more complex than that! After breaking the code, we intentionally obfuscated our responses to keep the Axis from identifying the leak.
Always practice your OPSEC!
Also, part of gathered intelligence was not used - and some real info was deliberately leaked.
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That quote would be more fitting for the final part of this series, which will include a small point about Midway's nature as a "decisive" battle.
Firstly, it was not until the end of the war, nearly 3 years after Midway, that the Mk. 14 torpedo became "reliable". That's a long time to be waiting to strangle shipping. Leaving the Japanese Merchant Marine alone to fuel their war machine is not good.
Secondly, the US may have been unthreatened by Japan, but China, Burma, the South Pacific, and even Australia were in danger. Leaving the Japanese to use their carriers with impunity elsewhere meant devastating strikes that could force the Allies out of their strongholds. Operation MO failed, but a second one with more carriers might have succeeded.
Ultimately, Japan's carriers represented an incredibly valuable national asset that cost that country a tremendous amount. America had pilots confident and capable of dive-bombing or torpedoing them. Nimitz knew his enemy's plan. I think his risk was justified as it would ultimately put the Japanese on the defense going forward.
If they could take valuable targets, they wouldn’t have needed to attack midway.
I got November 43, less than two years. Even with the malfunctioning torpedoes and slow gearing-up the japanese merchant fleet was down 25% from the start in 1943. 1944 would be the biggest year ever for anti-shipping before they ran out of targets.
Why is that good? They were already spent, they should have been left free to overextend further into the jungle before the hammer came down. The last thing the US should want at this point would be to get the japanese to switch to their “fortify and make them pay for every inch” strategy. Perhaps if americans had waited until supremacy to engage instead of sending every ship into battle right off the line, the whiplash would have broken the japanese, while minimizing casualties and any japanese chance of winning a limited war in the process.
Everyone thinks about WWI for generals sending men to their deaths for useless dirt, but the case is equally strong for WWII pacific. Given how it ended, any soldier who lost his life in guadalcanal and most of those grinds was wasted. But the brass needed a ‘fair fight’ over one neat island or other for those little stars to mean something. Hard to brag about winning the battle of the philippine sea or an even more lopsided battle in a wargame.
Maybe so. But remember, the Japanese Navy had given a great deal of control over to Yamamoto, and it was he that insisted on sinking the American carriers. The others wanted to strike elsewhere.
For one thing, leaving them alone means Japan can and would start threatening the America-Australia routes. Lose Australia as a war partner and the US has a much harder time staging land invasions, or even just the ability to resupply vessels from a nearby friendly port.
I won't comment on the loss of life in the island-hopping campaign, but the costs of losing four heavy carriers and all the experience ship crew, mechanics, and officers, were hardly replaceable to the Japanese.
Carrier warfare at the time was about launching your strike first. Nimitz knows the Japanese are coming. He gets confirmation when Midway-based scouts report that the attack is happening. His own vessels are precisely where the Japanese aren't expecting. He took his opportunity and it paid off. Yes, it relied on quite a bit of luck to make victory possible, but that is hardly an excuse to not try.
Moreover, the morale impacts cannot be understated. We are sitting 80 years in the future and know both sides of the war, I don't think the American public would have been quite aware of just how much the Japanese had overextended. They might very well insist that the navy start fighting back more aggressively if all they saw was Japan attacking national allies and taking US soil (the Aleutians and Midway Island) while the US just waited for the Japanese to overstretch.
Lastly, preventing further naval offensives had a positive moral effect as well. Let us not forget how brutally conquered civilians were treated by both the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy. You say that America should have left Japan to wear itself thin, but they were certainly willing to be monsters regardless of the nature of their supply lines. It may not be a thing to consider when planning, but it should be a positive added to the list after the fact.
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History backs Nagano's view that Roosevelt would not have been able to justify way to the American public if it was only to protect the colonies of other nations. Had they avoided fighting America (leaving the Phillippines at their throat, yes), they might very well have avoided their disasters.
The skill of individuals on the Japanese side was high, but they absolutely failed to fight as well as they could have. Many of the decisions made during that battle make no sense even by the standards of what the Japanese should have known at the time.
I only have a passing knowledge of this part of history (the Pacific war), but did Japan not get quite unlucky as well with scouting and with loading times of bombs/torpedoes?
Scouting is always a roll of luck in the age before satellite and radar. I plan to cover the Japanese scouting efforts in part 3.
It is not luck when we talk about loading bombs and torpedoes. That stems from design philosophy, since the carriers have to be built to a specific requirement before you train people on how to work aboard them.
Sure, it wasn‘t literally pure fortune, but is there not another definition of luck were decisions made have unforeseen effects?
If thievery is only caught 5% of the time, then a first-time thief getting caught would be quite unlucky. Much in the same way, the French were astonishingly incompetent in the Battle of Agincourt, but they were also unlucky with the weather.
To be clear, you are referring to the scouting efforts? As you'll see, the Japanese tempted fate.
Both.
But I would defer to any expertise on this, I don’t know much of Midway.
I think you'll find part 3 interesting, then, as I plan on addressing the scouting efforts and Japanese weapon arming.
Looking forward to it.
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