This 100%

Ordered Shattered Sword

It’s not always the machine gun toting stud that makes the difference.

Nerdy code breakers played a huge role.

this is one of the authors of Shattered Sword... U.S. Naval War College

Same here.

I recently saw him on a Drachinifel YouTube.  Very enjoyable.

Ordered, thanks.


ETA: Having a hard time putting it down. Waldron's torpedo planes have just been wiped out and Gay is in the water.

I'm so confused...are we talking to ourselves now?

Call it luck or fate or unknown intervention or God, American history is full of extraordinary and unusual circumstances that has helped protect the US. It appears to me that some power sometimes protects this country. Look for it when you read US history.

And no, that does not diminish the brave men who defended and protected this country.

Midway was 60% lousy Japanese planning and 25% Joseph Rochefort's sigint.
15% Execution.


1.  If you look at the Japanese battles at Coral Sea and Guadalcanal, this
was a one-off.  They didn't follow their own SOPs and paid for it.

They usually sent an advance guard forward of a light carrier and escorts.
The cruisers with recon float planes should have been 100 miles in front of
the main body, not alongside.  There should have been a
screen/reconnaissance/counterscreen in front of the main body, which didn't
need to be leading the way into the fight. The Alaska operation should have
been cancelled and a light carrier or two out front.  This is how the
Japanese fought their other carrier battles of 1942.

A night bombardment of Midway by Battleships would have made more sense. The
Japanese brought six and didn't use them.  They didn't need to commit their
aircraft for that task.

The Japanese had three tasks.
Bombard Midway to draw out the US carriers
Find the US carriers
Sink the US carriers

The Japanese tried to use their carriers for tasks 1 and 3 and under
resourced the second.  They had enough combat power to do the first two
while keeping their main body back and hidden, ready to strike US carriers
when someone else found them.

On the US side the plan was brilliant.  Let Midway do the long range recon
and absorb the first strike, pinpointing the Japanese carriers, and strike
from a flank with US carriers.  Unlike other battles, the US didn't have to
use their carrier scouting squadrons for recon.  They had long range B-17s
and PBYs from Midway to do that.


The US wasn't perfect. They poorly executed a great plan, which reflects
that tactically they were far behind in 1942.

Five of their sixteen squadrons were obsolete: 3xdevastators, 1xbrewster
buffalo, 1xvindicator.  
Two were tactically poorly deployed: B-17s bombed from way too high and hit
nothing of importance
Three x US fighter squadrons didn't do a good job escorting strikes.
Two x squadrons from Hornet got lost due to ineptness.
Four squadrons of SBDs from Enterprise and Yorktown did almost all of the
effective strikes.

I think the US Army should have done a better job putting aircraft on
Midway.  I wonder if there were more P-40s or B-26s at Hawaii that could
have been sent over.

It is astounding to me that Rochefort faded into obscurity until history resurrected him,
while Ring and Mitscher of Hornet became admirals. Go figure.

The miracle re-fit of Yorktown in time for the battle is a story that needs more telling.

That's my impression also.  Basically, the decision to attack the island led to a series of bad decisions.  The Japanese might have fared way better had they prepared for other carriers.  Or so that's how I remember it. It wasn't so much "luck" it was just that the Japanese picked the wrong battle to fight.

I'd say the US got lucky, they had several runs and missed every time until the one where they got it right.

The Japanese radar development was far behind ours, so they weren't able to detect incoming aircraft as quickly, and their reconnaissance was outright incompetent in Midway.  They missed the allied carriers entirely, which led to the IJN getting caught with their pants down when the dive bombers hit.  The Japanese had planes fully armed and fueled sitting on the deck when the bombs hit, which was catastrophic.

Well worth the watch:

original paint

That looks like the War Eagles Museum in Santa Teresa.

(EDITED:  Maybe not.  I don't remember it having an upper tier.)

Depends what you mean by lucky.

1. Two IJN carriers scratched from the Midway Operation due to damage at Coral Sea.
2. Breaking the Japanese code before the battle.
3. Japanese unable to pass on information that the US carriers were NOT at Pearl Harbor as expected.
3a. The quick repair of the Yorktown was not passed on to the IJN Fleet so there was an unexpected US carrier in play.
4. American torpedo bombers, as disastrous as their attack, happened upon the Japanese carriers just as they were deciding whether to land their returning Midway attack force or launch their next US carrier attack force.
4a. Japanese Admiral vacillated over the decision delaying action.
5. The Japanese CAP happened to be at sea level downing US torpedo planes leaving the dive bombers almost unmolested over three IJN fleet carriers.

It's not like any of this was purposefully planned. A lot of things had to fall in place for the perfect defense

Pensacola NAS

The Avenger was huge


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The Dauntless and F4F Wildcat are all about courage

My mom was an RN in 1939 at Norfolk General Hospital, the Head Nurse was the wife of Lieutenant Commander John C. Waldron, the girl's all dated the boys in VT-8. One of my mom's best friend, "Betty" was engaged to Ens. "Whitey" Moore. All the girls dated and ate dinner on the Hornet.

Betty became a second mom to me. Before she died in 1999 she gave me all her things from "Whitey."

There's more to this stroy. Betty later met and eventually married Lt. Melvin C. Roach who was also killed, at Saipan, more on this later if anyone is interested.

Here's some pics of Ens. Ulvert "Whitey" Moore . . . .

Attached File


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I always wondered how many of our own men and ships were hit by friendly fire during enemy air attacks. It has to come down somewhere.  The amount of outgoing shells was insane. I don't know how any planes even made it through

Japanese technology wasn't all that fantastic. The zeros range speed and maneuverability all came from lack of armor. Thier carriers were thirsty and required alot of oilers thus more ships to really reach out. They had no concept of proper damage control and often the crews themselves dealt the final bow to ships that should have survived to fight again.  When the battle finally did close indecision on the part of Nagaumo led to His carriers being tinderboxes of fuel and munitions when the dive bombers did find him.  Radar would have let them know a strike was inbound long before Our planes got within striking distance.  We just had to learn not to fight Japans fight.  As alot of posters have pointed out Japan had no hope of winning a protracted war with the US (and Australia and Britain) logistically it just was not possible. Their hope was a quick series of blows and a negotiated peace that left the empire with a swath from the Philippines to Burma  and northern China. All the places they conquered had to be garrisoned and China was not conquered. It was unrealistic from the get go.

The reason they didn't know their code was broken was arrogance. It was their code, made by high ranking officers. The Ami Gajin couldn't possibly break a Japanese cipher! Now, there cryptos in the IJN that knew perfectly well, that in time any code can get broken. But they did not have the rank to go to someone that did have the rank, and say, "Sir we believe this code is compromised and should be changed,." because that would cause the superior to lose face by accepting criticism from an inferior.

Yamamoto nailed it eerily accurate. He did not want the war at all, he went toi Harvard and knew America and and Americans, unlike the majority of his peers. "If I am ordered to attack, I shall run wild for six months or a year, but I have no promises after that."

Most thought the Americans would fold, but he knew better. "I fear all we have done is awakened a sleeping tiger, and filled him with a terrible resolve."

Nailed it.

That Dauntless was flown by a Marine squadron at Midway...and is the sole survivor of the planes that flew there that day.  That airplane saw things...

Did any of the land based medium/heavy bombers ever make any significant hits on IJN ships?  I know they did a great job of harassing naval vessels, but don't recall reading where they actually hit anything of value...

B-17s managed to sink a destroyer at Guadacanal, the Japanese skipper observed that "even the B-17s can hit something sometimes".

B-25s eventually had some good results against Japanese ships, after they developed the tactic of skip bombing - flying in low at high speed, then dropping the bomb before pulling up to pass over the ship.  The bomb would skip on the water and then hit the side of the ship's hull.

The B17s didn't hit anything.

The six B-26s didn't hit anything.  They had torpedoes, though.  One B-26 nearly crashed into the Akagi's bridge so realistically, if it had a bomb it would have been a hit.

Japanese AA was very very bad; almost all kills were from Zeros.

Same arrogance was at play during the atomic bombings.  Their military leadership was in denial that Hiroshima had been hit by an atomic bomb (their bomb development program had not produced a bomb, so there was no reason to believe the Americans could develop one).  When they got confirmation from an inspection team, that the bombing had involved an atomic bomb, they insisted that the Americans would not be capable of producing another atomic bomb for several months, due to the difficulty in processing the core material.

The idea that the Americans had been developing two separate types of atomic bombs in parallel development programs, and one of them turned out to be much quicker and easier to manufacture cores for, was something they would never even consider.

I'm pretty sure I've read the Japanese changed their codes during the war... as in we partially cracked them, then they changed them out on a schedule and had to start over.. at least partially..

Yea....um except for no radar which allowed our planes to be on top of them without any warning.  As well as them not launching an all out attack on midway and no third wave at Pearl.

I don’t call that luck.  I call that mistakes catching up.

yep, she's got lots of patched bullet holes on her skin

and spent years under lake michigan

Indeed. Highly introspective. The US seized the initiative and maintained it throughout the action. Lots of sacrifice from the early bomber crews that went after the Japanese carriers, brave men.

It was lucky for the Japanese that all 4 of their carriers weren't sunk outright. If TF 16 had been operating at anywhere near the efficiency of TF 17, the battle would been over at 10:30 and Yorktown would survived.

Things very much went our way. It's very likely that the Kido Butai could have sunk a number of our capital ships with massive casualties in deep water had it survived Midway. Still though, that victory wasn't purchased for free. Men, and splendid ships, died to create that luck. It didn't happen out of nowhere.

I don't remember the precise quote or who said it, and my timelines may be off. Something like:

"She needed 6 weeks in the Yard. They gave her 36 hours."

Strategically, our massive air presence in the Philippines was a cancerous tumor they couldn't ignore forever. You simply can't expand your empire while allowing a huge air power node to sit in the middle of your "Aorta" so to speak, to all those resource rich conquered lands in SE Asia.

@RV-1

This deserves a thread of its own.  Very cool!

Always heard that the Japanese mentality would not tolerate rotating your best soldiers home to be instructors. They must fight until victory or death. We culled our very best, and brought them back to North America to instruct the next generation, repeat and repeat. The backbone of Jap air power was broken at Midway, and they didn't have the capability to train competent replacement pilots or construct replacement ships.

The introduction of intentional Kamikaze missions was preceded by green pilots being shown how to conduct their suicide attacks by having them sit in a cockpit facsimile, and another man would swing a photograph of an American ship toward him on the end of a stick to simulate a fast approach. That, and they had no fuel left at all.

If anything it enhances their story.

Coral Sea was a strategic victory for the US and both sides got beat up pretty badly.  Other than that the carriers had only done a few minor but successful raids.  The surface ass kickings started later.

The IJN didn’t have better detection equipment.  They had better training and therefore reacted to contact more decisively and effectively.  We had superior radar even in 1942, but few officers understood how to use it.

That video led to another Naval War College one with NSA historian David Hatch that goes more into the intelligence and the history that led up to it and the screwing of Rochefort.
Anyone really interested in this most crucial contribution should read Admiral Layton's book "And I was There".

They were smart enough to recognize that a long war did not benefit them, but foolish/arrogant enough not to prepare for that possibility.  Their shipbuilding program at the beginning of the war was a joke.  They couldn’t train replacement pilots quickly and made little effort to recover the ones they had when they were shot down.  They didn’t prepare adequately to defend  against submarine warfare or air attacks on the home islands because their navy was supposed to keep us out of range.

They found the Yorktown 3 miles down
https://news.mit.edu/1998/mindell-0610

@digitalebola

Good idea!

Two threads, or one?

one for Ens. Whitey Moore and one for Lt. Melvin C. Roach?

@RV-1 Which ever way you want to go - just be sure to tag me so I can read them.

I look at it like when my grandad would tell stories of old times - stories of yesterday year. They may or my not be book worthy - but they pass the time and honor the days of yore!

@digitalebola

how do I tag you?


Betty, my mom's friend was dying, she was alone, I had no job, so I went and stayed with her for over a month until the end.

Me? I hope I have someone at the end . . . anyway, her mind was like a computer, and she was as sharp as a razor, could tell you any detail about any event in her life, what she was wearing, the day of the week . . . the whole time I was thinking: "Wish I had a job to buy a video camera!"

She told me about Ens. Gay . . . . the truth about him. WOW!
She knew the entire squadron of VT-8.

Melvin Roach had for confirmed kills and two unconfirmed . . . I have his flight log book . . . had Melvin lived he would have surely become an Ace at Saipan.

anyway here's a pic teaser for you . . .

Oh, Melvin was also at Midway, often wondered how I could find out where he was when Whitey was killed?

Also, I had a boss once, a retired Navy Capt. Mick Rooney, we used to talk navy all the time . . . he told me once: "It is a hard life when the high point comes at age 22 and you never again get to a similar height" He was a pilot at Midway. Later became C.O. at Oceana Naval Air Station. When he died they gave him a flyover.

The teaser . . .

Attached File


Another to wet the tongue . . .

Attached File

Cool! What is the story on Ens. Gay? I am related to him (though it is through a connection many generations ago) When ever Midway would air on TV my classmates would ask about a relation (same last name).

Total someone you just put the “@“ in front of their name.