It's at least comparable.
And given what the Japanese have, that means it's not going to fall on June 4-6, 1942.
Combined Fleet destroys USN at Midway? Effects?
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It's at least comparable.
And given what the Japanese have, that means it's not going to fall on June 4-6, 1942.
Medals for everyone and you’re all going on war tours or to training units!
Not to mention each and every new US carrier air group making a graduation raid or two on the island...
Even some Japanese admirals (Kondo was one of them I believe) thought Midway itself was pretty much a booby prize - too far forward for them to support and too easy for the US to pound on and eventually retake when they got around to it.
Midway itself was valuable as a landing field, apparently the Japanese wanted to turn it into a larger airfield from which to attack Oahu. Ernest King discussed sending the Yorktown to Seattle and focusing the defenses around Oahu (https://www.historynet.com/miracle-men-of-midway.htm) - it has been said that a catastrophic defeat with additional carrier losses could give the Japanese control of the Pacific essentially all the way to the US west coast. Newer carriers would start becoming available en masse in 1943, but before that Japan would have a lot of free reign in the Pacific. Instead Nimitz proceeded to reinforce Midway to the 1500+ Marines and 1000+ Army along with 2 extra batallions noted there at the time of the attack (3100-4100 total; https://www.history.navy.mil/resear...er-5-of-the-campaigns-of-the-pacific-war.html) and luckily Japan was handily defeated and made to retreat.
The Japanese could destroy the fleet opposed and would have to destroy another one in a year or maybe even a little less.
It is not as if the Atlantic required tons of capital ships and carriers anyways for the USN.
Do I think Midway could have been taken? Possibly, with more time. But I am not sure the Japanese force assigned to the operation was sufficient in OTL. Getting a force ashore would require silencing the coastal guns first, which would require obtaining air superiority and dealing with the land based aircraft and AA guns. The landing force involved needed to be bigger as Midway is not exactly difficult for the garrison to move around on even when under aerial attack.
It is not as if the Atlantic required tons of capital ships and carriers anyways for the USN.
Do I think Midway could have been taken? Possibly, with more time. But I am not sure the Japanese force assigned to the operation was sufficient in OTL. Getting a force ashore would require silencing the coastal guns first, which would require obtaining air superiority and dealing with the land based aircraft and AA guns. The landing force involved needed to be bigger as Midway is not exactly difficult for the garrison to move around on even when under aerial attack.
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Thus forcing Kido Butai to hang around, which is already low on avgas and ordinance. They will more than likely have to leave before the job is finished.
Not to mention every US sub available will be heading to Midway with all those juicy targets hanging around.
There are two misleading links there. One is King suggesting relocating Yorktown to Puget before he was aware of the extent of its battle damage ( which could be repaired at Pearl, overnight basically) but debarking the air group as it would be more useful in the pacific than in Seattle.
The second is pretty irrelevant to any argument you are marking. All it says is the US were starting to get ground forces coming out of their ears.
The Problem is the Japanese do not have free range in the Pacific. At Midway they have at most 3 days on station before having to retire to refuel. At Guadalcanal later they advise that they can sortie for 2 weeks maximum due to fuel considerations. That's what they have in their bunkers. They are capable of undertaking a raid. The Problem with that is any raid puts the raiding force at risk. The Air defences of even a carrier group are known by the IJN to be entirely porous. In the Indian Ocean raid features an attack by Blenheims and the first KB knows about it is when the bombs land around them. Approaching any Allied air base risks the same thing and the kind of bombing raid KB can deliver is not going to supress an airfield for much longer than duration of the raid itself. The actual raid on Midway being a case in point.
Any major damage to a ship during this raid is likely to lead to the loss of the ship as allied air and sub forces in range will be converging to kill the cripple and you do not have fuel to hang around to cover the withdrawal.
Launching an attack on a land base requires troops and shipping to move them. The available troops are 1x BDE and 2x RCT ( one of which is used at Midway) The available force, 17th army is a corps command of two divisions unfortunately the two divisions are scattered from Midway to New Guinea by way of Palau, Sumatra ( where it is having to steal food from other Japanese troops to eat) the PI and part committed to an overland attack on Port Moresby. It takes the IJN months to provide the shipping to lift those forces to Rabaul.
This applies to any garrisoned Island base, including Guadalcanal.
And the US still has two carriers, and probably gets reinforced by RN fleet carriers if they lose enough at Midway. Up to Midway itself they had been gainfully occupied in raiding various Japanese held islands. This is not make work. What they are doing is attacking the IJN defensive structure forcing a reaction and in particular, briefly, blinding the IJN is specific places. What is demonstrates is, contrary to Japanese pre war planning a US force can approach attack and retire prior to the IJN reserves arriving. That's critical as the whole of the IJN strategy is to attrit the advancing fleet prior to committing their own, by detecting the USN advancing moving reserves ( air and subs) to the threatened location and attacking the USN while it is still approaching. While they can move the aircraft and limited stores they cannot move the base organisations quickly. So every raid damages forward based recon ( which is very expensive and rare in 1942 terms) and the ability to support forward based recon or the reserve force forcing a rebuild of the forward base.
To do this the IJN has two useful naval bases. One is the Home Islands, the other is Truk. If the US ever gets in range of Truk its useless as a fleet anchorage as its under permanent threat of air attack which forces the fleet, and reserves to withdraw so far west it cannot then intervene as the USN advances. Protecting that requires Rabaul and the North Coast of New Guinea as if the Allies can establish bases there they are in range of Truk. But the Solomons and South coast of New Guinea are in range of Rabaul and if Rabaul can be blinded by land based air the US carrier force can at least raid the anchorage and attrit any forward deployed IJN units.
So to Protect Rabaul you need to take Southern New Guinea and the Solomons. This is not on the prospectus the IJN had for war in the Pacific so the IJA and Japanese government now is told it has to find forces, after they have been committed to conquering the DEI and Burma and China which is the point of the war in the first place to add festering islands of no inherent value because the IJN concept of operations is in fact a total crock.
And that's the context for Guadalcanal and the reason for the US to occupy. If the IJN carrier force is in a position to intervene its suicide. But if the IJN carriers are not able to intervene, and they can only do so a very few days at a time. Traffic analysis by the US is pretty good and they tend to have a handle on where the IJN forces are most of the time and know where they need to be in order to intervene so can scout it.
Once the US has an airfield on Guadalcanal it can largely protect itself form anything but a major landing KB simply cannot hang around long enough to permanently destroy the base or prevent resupply and every time it tries it runs the risk of losing units to US air or flotilla forces. And its in range of Rabaul. To take it is a non issue, The question is whether to take it now or later which will be harder.
Or completely ignore the place and go the central pacific route.
And as I’ve mentioned, sometimes the Mk 14 actually worked! All it takes is one lucky break and you’re down a carrier or fast battleship!
Not only that, but more torpedoes will be fired. More duds mean the sub's skippers will be demanding someone's head for them risking their lives with a malfunctioning weapon!
But Operation MI was far less about the island - which, let's be honest, is postage stamp sized - than it was an opportunity to draw out and destroy the Pacific Fleet's carrier force. That was the point of the operation. The island was just an excuse.
Even with a larger airfield, you're still limited by the range of your aircraft. It's 1,300 miles from Midway to Oahu. A G4M Betty could reach that, just barely, but almost nothing else will. And anything you put at Midway has to be brought there from very far away (nearest real base was Truk). It's not just about lengthening the runways. You need fuel farms, too. Planes need fuel. And spare parts.
And even all that (unlikely as that kind of buildup would have been had Japan actually somehow taken the atoll) was never going to enable raids on the American West Coast. You're not going anywhere near that until you've taken Oahu. Which, by summer of 1942 was basically Sealion-impossible.
There's this whole mythology that has grown up about Midway, and it distorts our understanding of what it really meant, and what it could make possible, especially for the Japanese, who were much more logistically constrained than most appreciated at the time. It becomes easy to misread contemporary utterances or actions like Ernie King's in that link, which was based on uncertainty about Japanese capabilities (and as Gannt says, a misunderstanding of how badly Yorktown was damaged) as it was anything else. Midway *was* a big risk that Nimitz took, after all, using three carriers (one of which was badly banged up) against what *could* have been the whole Kido Butai, and not just Cardiv 1 and 2. Nimitz was banking a lot on Rochefort's intel being accurate as to not just time and place, but force composition, too. He won because he had some luck, but mainly because Rochefort turned out to be correct.
Geon
Donor
Given that manpower was becoming a serious issue for the Japanese in the Pacific a question. Could they transfer a division or two from their China front to the Pacific to help bolster their manpower needs and possibly provide the troops necessary to take New Guinea and other islands while turning the Chinese front into a holding action? It would occur to me from the Japanese perspective the Pacific was now the major front.
Exactly so.
The Kido Butai was somewhat like the Army of Northern Virginia in this respect: a brilliant and nimble force capable of great feats in combat, but logistically, quite feeble. It was not capable of long sustained campaigns far from its bases in the way that the USN's Third/Fifth Fleet was later in the war. ALL of its great feats were just oversized raids: Pearl Harbor, Darwin, the Indian Ocean Raid - and each of these raids in turn was at the outermost limits of its logistics as it was. To stick around for weeks to support an amphibious operation against a defended objective was simply not something it was capable of, any more than the ANV could have sustained (say) a long siege against Washington, DC or a full scale invasion of Pennsylvania.
This is not meant as a harsh criticism of the IJN, to be sure: There was not a single Navy in the world capable of that kind of thing in 1942. It only became a reality for the first time when the U.S. Navy developed its support fleet trains in 1943-45. Even the British Pacific Fleet in 1945 had to lean hard on those trains when it joined the campaign agaist Okinawa: it was beyond their experience, too. It had always had the benefit of a whole series of bases close at hand from which to operate.
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Difficult, but not *impossible.*
Units were eventually drawn from Manchukuo, for example, as the war turned against Japan in the Pacific. 1st Tank Brigade at Guam, for example, had been pulled to defend the Marianas in early 1944. You can find many such instances in 1943-44, actually.
If you can take Port Moresby early enough in 1942, you can basically secure New Guinea. I would say that the real value of pulling Japanese units from China/Korea/Manchukuo is in fortifying and garrisoning all the key places in your defensive perimeter, to make their attempted capture by the Americans (which is inevitable as their rearrmament reaches full tide) as absolutely expensive as possible. As the war went, this was only done very late in the game. Japan could have done a lot more to make the Marianas more defensible (and expensive to take) than it actually did.
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Which would be what Nimitz would almost certainly do in a scenario where he loses Midway.
Which is not to say that MacArthur would not do so. As he attempted whatever form of EKTION III he would try here, Rabaul would still get neutralized, but only from one axis of attack, rather than two. What would be missing here would be Halsey's drive up the Solomons in 1943.
Yeah, and it mostly happened once it was clear to everyone that Japan wasn’t winning. The army is going to regard this as the navy wanting to steal resources from their war for more worthless pacific islands. Early 42 is much different from 43-44.
And don't forget Nimitz was willing to lose all three carriers, if he could sink three Japanese. Its less of a risk than it appears. The US knows close enough when the IJN will arrive. The IJN plan assumes the US will only sortie after they have attacked Midway. The US has a lot of land based recon to find them first and knows the general direction to look in. It can broadcast findings while the Carriers remain silent while the Japanese are dependent on limited ship based recon initially looking in the wrong direction. If the US carriers detect first the lessons of the pre war exercises and war to date are that the first strike will kill at least one enemy carrier and at any point the US have the option that if detected then can retire, there is nothing inherently valuable about Midway itself.
Probably more at the impossible end. Its a shipping consideration the IJN does not have the sealift, and the prospectus of the plan does not initially call for rapid expansion of the defensive perimeter so they will be going back to the IJA and demanding more troops they cannot shift around to do something they never thought they needed to do 6 months ago.
Basically in order to stop the Americans we have just said we have to attack or we lose China, we have to lose China.
The Key issue for the IJN planner is the raid on Rabaul which a) raids Rabaul and b) shoots down most of an air wing in the process. The Key selling point for the IJA is the Doolittle raid which proves to them that a US carrier can go where it likes and do what it likes. End result is the IJN get to use Ichiko Butai.
Oh, I agree, that politically, it is harder to manage early in the war. No question.
Of course, if you get down to it, most of the forces used in those early conquests in Malaya, the East Indies, Philippines, New Guinea et al had been originally deployed in Manchukuo and China, so... the Army is not being fully rational here (not that anyone ever accused the Kwangtung Army's leadership as being terribly rational!).
But that is unfortunate for Japan, because after Dec. 7, 1942 its only real mortal foe was the United States of America. You picked the fight with this collosus, and now that must take priority. You strip whatever you need out of the Kwangtung Army and you fortify the living daylights out of your key island bastions, and you do it as fast as possible, because the U.S. Navy *is* coming once it has got all that new hardware coming down the pike, in 1943-46.
Unfortunately for them, they so badly underestimated the American reaction to the war. By the time they realized it was wrong, it was too late. Not that that they had a chance to win the war in any event, but they could have made it longer and more expensive for us.
Geon
Donor
If I were Tojo I would be agreeing with Athelstane's assessment. Right now the British aren't a major threat, the majority of their forces are tied up in Europe. The Chinese front is manageable and we can go on the defensive there for a while. The U.S. is the problem. With a capital P! We expected they would come to the negotiating table after a few bloody noses (Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Midway) but they keep coming back at us (Doolittle Raid, Coral Sea). We need to push our perimeter out as far as possible to keep them from our sea lanes and our bases. We need to fortify fortify fortify our perimeter to make things as bloody as possible for them. We need to find ways to lure in and destroy their major sea assets. IF we can do this maybe we can persuade them to come to the negotiating table.
The last sentence sounds like wistful thinking from our perspective today. But, Tojo really hoped he could do a deal with the U.S. if he made things bloody enough for them.