Japan wins sea battle at Midway but loses the invasion
- Thread starter Johnrankins
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- japan pacific war world war 2 ww2
That radio link for fire support - that would also have been something the Japanese couldn't have done at Midway.
Shoup and Holland Smith looked at the carnage at Tarawa and declared that Tarawa just was not worth it. And maybe, just the intrinsic value of the airfield at Betio and the staging area wasn't worth the cost per se. (Though I think it was closer to being worth it than Pelelieu, which has to be the greatest mistake Nimitz ever made.)
But you catalog all the mistakes made, like the ones you list here with the radios, gunfire support, tactical air support, and if you tally up the lessons learned, and employed later in the Marshalls, the Carolines, the Marianas, Leyte, Luzon, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa (or if it had come to it, OLYMPIC and CORONET), you have to think how many marine lives were saved in those places, thanks to the bloody lessons learned at Tarawa. If you don't learn those lessons at Tarawa, you are going to have to learn them at Eniwetok, Makin, or - God help you - at Saipan.
Which in turn was based in large part on their success in getting the US and UK to insert that prohibition on fortifications on West Pacific possessions in the Washington Naval Treaty.
Which allowed them to run wild, Wake aside, for those first several months, because their landings were almost always unopposed, or when they were opposed, only working with hastily dug field works (Lingayen, for example).
But this is why life would get rougher for them once they reached their initial perimeter, because they would be facing having to take places where the Allies had had the chance to reinforce, and fortify, for several months. You know, like New Caledonia, Fiji, Samoa, Tongatabu, Efate, Upolu, and yes, Midway. And they would be doing it without any real doctrine for opposed amphibious landings, and none of the hardware that goes along with that.
Actually, this is drastically undercounting USMC firepower on Midway. They had:
2 - 7" batteries (4 guns)
3 - 5" batteries (6 guns)
8 - 3" batteries (28 guns) [6 USMC defense battalion batteries of 4 guns and 2 USN manned batteries of 2 guns]
Plus the machines guns you mentioned.
Don't forget all the machine guns that can be scavenged from written off aircraft...which would be a fair few assuming they have some spare tri/bipods to mount them on.
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So basically the more and more you look into it the worse and worse it becomes for the Japanese. I can't see how it can't be a slaughter.
I imagine some DDs and CLs go down too...maybe even a CA. That would probably hurt worse than Ichiki's force in the long run.
Its far easier to replace light infantry as compared to gunners, engineers, navigators, etc. not to mention the fact that Japan had only 18 heavy cruisers with a grand total of 2 more barely starting construction at the time of Midway
Thought we'd covered this, Eddie Albert, not Eddie Arnold. And IMHO, neither was a singer...
Eddie Albert did sing in musicals like Oklahoma and The Music Man; he wasn't ever a recording artist like Frank Sinatra. I remember seeing him as a kid singing at the St. Louis Muni in The Music Man.
Yeah, the heavy cruisers Japan started the war with were the only ones she was going to have. They were, literally, an irreplaceable resource.
One does wonder why the IJN didn't lay down four to six heavy cruisers in 1940/early 1941 to replace their inevitable war losses...probably due to the army using up way to many resources in China
I wonder if a different strong willed Japanese commander,after looking at a map,decided to go on the defensive. Use what fuel and slave labor they had to fortify anything that could serve as a airbase by the USA,load them up with troops and provisions. On islands they couldn't defend,sow them with germs,infected livestock,infected prisoners...Probably not possible given all I've read about the worldview of the Japanese Army.
Well...limited slipways, limited resources.
Just another manifestation of how Japan was only set up for a short war.
Japan knew it was screwed in a long one, that if it didn't win quickly the US would overwhelm it.
And yet, strangely, they seemed so very confident that they could avoid a long war.
True enough, it sure kicked them in the butt when they counted that possibility out.
McPherson
Banned
Does one want to give the AMERICANS a truly legitimate and LEGAL excuse to really amp up some of the horrendous war crimes they thought they needed to commit to claw ashore on the Kanto plain? Not that Unit 731 was not an excuse, but there has to be some real stupidity BY EITHER SIDE to go into the next step in what was already a horrific and miserable exercise in human insanity. (See next for why professional militaries do not like WMDs.).
There is a very practical reason for why germ warfare and chemical warfare and weapons of mass destruction make no sense at all to sane professional militaries; besides the international law and basic humanitarian ones. It is called BLOWBACK after the WWI phenomenon of having the poison gas one side just dropped on their enemy, blow back into their own sorry faces because their incompetent "gas warfare experts" forgot that since the weather is variable, the wind can change direction.
Might also look at the WWI example, of inadvertent GERM WARFARE, called the Influenza Epidemic of 1918. American soldiers caught the flu and returned to America with it. Sure made things worse back home. (About 800,000 DEAD.). Now imagine some WWI lunatic releases a biological weapon on the Western Front and infected soldiers, regardless of which side, are sent home sick and bring it with them to BOTH sides? Or imagine the ANTHRAX blowback the IJA Kwantung Army experienced in WW II when some of their units were accidentally exposed in the "expert bombings" the IJAAS carried out against the Chinese? Whoopsie?
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One unnamed cruiser was scrapped before completion, the other (Ibuki) was selected to be converted into a carrier. That work was started but she remained unfinished at the end of the war.
I agree, Japan could use more CA's but jut didn't have the shipyard space or resources to do so. And building Yamato and Musashi took away a lot of what they did have.