Midway

Hard to believe it’s been three quarters of a century since the battle. And that it was only two years later that we invaded Normandy. When I was a kid, hearing my parents talk about it, I always thought of WW II as being a long war, but America was only in it for three and a half years. Of course, when I was a kid, three and a half years seemed like a long time.

[Monday-morning update]

Why Japan lost the battle.

[Bumped]

30 thoughts on “Midway”

  1. Hard to believe it’s been twenty years since the Festivus episode of SEINFELD was first aired. I was watching it last night when I saw the 1997 copyright at the end.

    Of course, Midway was more important.

  2. Midway was just under a month after the Battle of the Coral Sea, when we scored our first strategic victory by preventing the Japanese from invading Port Moresby, and keeping two of their carriers from participating in the Battle of Midway. While we lost the Lexington, the Japanese thought they had also sunk the Yorktown. (It was the first naval battle in history in which the combatant ships never saw one another.) Yorktown made it to Midway, and served as a punching bag while Enterprise and Hornet wiped out the Japanese fleet. Had even one of the Japanese carriers from Coral Sea made it to Midway, the war might have turned out dramatically differently.

    1. “Had even one of the Japanese carriers from Coral Sea made it to Midway, the war might have turned out dramatically differently.”

      The battle might have turned out differently – but not the war.

      Given the enormous industrial, resources, and population differential between Japan and U.S., the war was lost for Japan the moment the first bomb fell on Pearl Harbor. Japan had a small window before the Essex class carriers and the rest of the fruits of the Two Ocean Navy Act began reaching commission in earnest in 1943, and once that happened, it was just a question of application of force. Winning or losing at Midway could not have altered the result, just the details of how American warmaking power would reach it.

      Launching a preemptive war on the U.S. must count as one of the most foolish strategic decisions in human history.

  3. Technically we were only in it for 3.5 years, but war was almost continuous before that (especially for pilots in both world wars and between.) Americans fought in China in the early 30s.

    Wars may officially start and end on specific dates but actual fighting starts politically long before the bullets fly.

    A lot of people in America were on the German side before the tanks and Stukas flew. Most of those people didn’t disappear, they just learned to be quiet.

    Today, this very moment, millions of Americans think communists are great people. Often supporting one tyrant over another… real tyrants, not imagine one’s like Trump.

      1. Claire Chennault arrived in China in 1937. He served as a military advisor, but he must have fought the Japanese in airplane combat to have formed the air combat tactics he advocated. His memoir Way of a Fighter chronicles that the Chinese air force had been destroyed in combat by the time he turned to his own “private air force” in the form of American mercenary pilots, mercenaries with secret backing from “the cowboy Roosevelt.”

        These pilots, the American Volunteer Group (AVG) were forming and training, but owing to snags and delays, they did not actually engage the Japanese until after Pearl Harbor, at which time their renegade status didn’t make any difference to their Japanese adversary, to whom they were American pilots serving a country that Japan was at war with. They remained “renegades” far as “our side” was concerned, or at least until the following July 4 (1942) when they were made a regular and regulations Army Air Corps unit, which induced many of the AVG veterans to leave.

        Do Ken or Rand have in mind other Americans fighting the Japanese in China apart from Chennault and his AVG? For what I know, Chennault and his AVG were the only ones engaged in air combat.

        1. Yes, there were American pilots in China before AVG.

          During the Chinese civil war (1927-1937) Americans on their own flew in china before the flying tigers.

          The 8 nation alliance included Americans.

          China was very open to Americans after 1912 to 1949.

          History seems to have forgotten since then. Missionaries were in China in the 19th century. In the 20th, American pilots saw it as an opportunity to gain skills. AVG was a late comer.

          Not all Chinese saw Americans as foreign devils.

  4. Recommended Midway books:
    “The First Team” by John B. Lundstrom. Published: 1984. Comprehensive history of USN carrier fighter ops from Pearl Harbor to Midway. Detailed description of Jimmy Thach’s combat near the Japanese carriers where he first employed the “Thach Weave.” Also provides high-level info about the search, dive bombing, and torpedo plane ops.

    “Shattered Sword” by Parshall and Tully. Published: 2005. Excellent overall description of IJN carrier aircraft ops, and detailed descriptions of IJN Midway search and attack missions and the damage to and sinking of the four carriers.

    1. “Shattered Sword” really did more to revise my thinking about Midway than any other book I’ve read on the subject. Highly recommended.

  5. Hillary had an alternate book title in mind had she won the election, viz “God is my Data Analytics Guy.”

    1. Considering how Midway was won by cryptanalysis (well, also some luck and incredible bravery), that phrase is applicable there too.

  6. A worthy addition to Blue Moon’s reading list is ‘A Dawn Like Thunder: The True Story of Torpedo Squadron Eight’ by Robert Mrazek, 2008.

    Contra MfK, it was the Enterprise and the walking-wounded Yorktown that accounted for most of the hell visited upon the Imperial Japanese Navy at Midway. Most of Hornet’s potential contribution at Midway was wasted due to the arrogance and incompetence of her air group commander, Stanhope Ring. Despite more or less complete U.S. intelligence superiority, Midway was a damned near-run thing owing to unforced errors by the USN, the majority of them Ring’s.

    As at Samar, the failings of higher-ups were rendered of no ultimate account by the courage and self-sacrifice of men in the lower ranks, most especially the commander and men of Hornet’s ill-fated Torpedo Squadron 8.

    Ring, as has too often proven the case in U.S. military history, was rewarded for his multiply-fatal bungling by eventual promotion to flag rank, honorable retirement after a long career and a peacetime death in bed.

    1. Fortunately, the USN had just enough sharp capable men in the right place at the right time to offset the errors of Ring and Mitscher – Joe Rochefort, Chester Nimitz, Ray Spruance, John Waldron, Richard Best and Wade McClusky, for example.

      We could have won the war without their contributions that day, thanks to our overwhelming warmaking power. But their success made it happen sooner, and at lower cost.

      1. Yes. Reading about Midway is like reading about the Trojan war – a rare gathering of heroes.

    2. The Battle of the Coral Sea also has some examples of poor leadership that lead to many deaths.

      1. The early days of WW2 were not a happy time for the U.S. military. MacArthur’s derelictions in the Philippines during the first 24 hours after Pearl Harbor, for example, should, by rights, have gotten him cashiered at a minimum. Both the Army and the Navy of the time were top-heavy with peacetime chair polishers unsuited for combat command. It took longer than it should have to weed them out and replace them with fighters.

        The wretched performance of Vice Adm. Robert Ghormley in the South Pacific during half of 1942 was a case in point. After three months of allowing the Guadalcanal campaign to be mishandled by bickering subordinates while he remained far behind the lines, and often out of communication, Ghormley was finally booted by Nimitz and replaced with Halsey. After that, things began to look up for the U.S. effort.

  7. Today, this very moment, millions of Americans think communists are great people. Often supporting one tyrant over another… real tyrants, not imagine one’s like Trump.

    Today, this very moment, millions of conservatives think authoritarians like Putin are great people. Despite the number of sleazy Russian oligarchs and mobsters that keep cropping up in the circle of Trump associates. I remember the good old days when conservatives railed on Obama for not taking a tougher stance on Russian involvement in Ukraine. Strangely those voices are all now silent.

    1. Today, this very moment, millions of conservatives think authoritarians like Putin are great people.

      No one thinks Putin is great people. Recognizing that he is a strong leader does not mean that anyone “likes” him. Democrats are great at bastardizing the English language, either as pedants or as definitional and linguistic relativists.

      1. Recognizing that he is a strong leader does not mean that anyone “likes” him.

        Conservatives were loving that shirtless pony-show as some kind of anti-Obama statement of “strong leader”. When Trump proves that he can’t pronounce one small criticism of Putin, Russia, or Russian foreign policy, no conservative takes notice. Business as usual when fleecing the rubes.

        1. Loving Putin? No. Contrasting his ostensible “manliness” with President MomJeans? Yes.

        2. Sorry but Putin is a stronger leader than Obama was. That doesn’t mean I like either one. I am not sure why Trump needs to jump through hoops just because Democrats suddenly have the grand Russian delusion. Democrats are not demanding criticism, they are demanding he act as a jerk in every situation for no reason.

          Don’t forget, the Democrat’s core ideology was implanted in them by the KGB and the Democrats have been Russian apologists for decades. Remember the 1980’s called?

          It is nice to see Democrats finally see that Russia is a threat but you haven’t cleaned your party of their ideology. Sanders almost won the nomination and probably would have if the primary wasn’t rigged. Critical theory and identity politics are still supreme. The Russian view that the USA is always to blame is still the Democrat’s guiding light.

          You guys even have black clad paramilitary forces that help organize and fund your activism. These people also engage in terrorism to foment socialist revolution and prevent non-Democrats from exercising their constitutional rights.

          When will Democrats take their Russian problem seriously?

    2. Today, this very moment, millions of conservatives think authoritarians like Putin are great people.

      A lot of Trump supporters may, but they’re not conservatives.

      But we understand that you are too much of an idiot to know the difference.

    3. No, “millions of conservatives” don’t think thugs like Putin are “great people.” Millions of conservatives voted for Donald Trump despite his apparent Putin-philia, not because of it. Had the Democrats not run someone so obviously unsuitable as Hillary Clinton, things might have gone a bit differently.

      The definition of a “Trump associate” also seems pretty elastic. Trump and his organization had dealings with unsavory Russians because there are essentially no other kind of Russians in any position of consequence in Putin’s Russia. None of Trump’s Russian dealings were about matters related to U.S. national security. His defeated opponent, in contrast, brokered a Russian acquisition of a sizable fraction of U.S. uranium reserves. When it comes to “associations” with sketchy Russkies, Trump is a distant back-marker to Hillary Clinton.

      If you think conservative voices have fallen silent about Ukraine, you’ve got your fingers in your ears.

  8. Dave, you are engaged in a fallacy common to the mentally retarded unstable lying left. Despite the number of sleazy Russian oligarchs and mobsters that keep cropping up in the circle of Trump associates.

    People comprise a network. Everyone is connected to everyone else by a chain of associations. I was married to a Russian woman that lived in the Crimea. Does that make me a Russian spy?

    The left doesn’t care about the truth. They only care that they can smear with unsubstantiated innuendo. People on the left have been forced to concede there is nothing in the Russian allegations, but since that doesn’t work for the left they ignore it. It’s totally manufactured crap.

    Meanwhile treasonous ACTIONS factually confirmed are completely ignored. Did Hillary sell out this country? From Chinese missile technology to the Clinton foundation they’ve been engaged in treason for decades. Watch the reaction of the left’s talking heads when the subject is broached. They go into complete panic mode claiming that’s not the topic and… squirrel.

    Acknowledging tyrants to be ‘great’ leaders doesn’t mean they aren’t also evil adversaries.

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