NimitsTexan
Posts: 63
Joined: 4/30/2004
From: United States
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quote:
ORIGINAL: freeboy
ok, final comment re Midway, Add two, the US did get lucky, or God intervened in the TACTICLE battel, but one could argue ineptitude and pride in the Jap commanders, if that is fair I do not know.
If you look at the quality of planes pilots and ships available, between the two sides, any realistic replay with FOREKNOWLEGE allows the japs to crush the US..
If you allow them to add the two carriers attackingthe Alutioans, sp?, then they would have an even greater advantage. I challenge anyone here to a game of Carriers Midway to see ! if we ever get this released!
I completely disagree. For one thing, based on numbers alone, the forces were evenly matched for a carrier battle; the IJN had one more carrier but the US had the airbase at Midway and a slight advantage in planes. Had the IJN brought along Shokaku or kept Hiyo and Ryujo in the Mobile force, things might have been different, but that would have required a change in Japanese carrier fleet doctrine I doubt they were capable of making prior to Midway. But, numbers aside, the USN, while still the tactical underdog, was much less at the mercy of "miracles" than most think.
1: The idea that there was a vast qualitative disparity between the IJN and USN carrier forces in early 1942 is one of the most common and pernicious myths of the battle. If you were to actually examine the components of those carrier forces, you will find they were much more evenly matched. The USN Yorktown carriers were better designed, carried better AAA, and had much better damage control capabilities than the IJN Akagi, Kaga, and Hiryu classes. To top it, the USN carriers and cruisers also carried air search radars, allowing FDOs to scramble and control the CAP and use the radio to vector fighters against incoming raids. The IJN fleet had no radar and ship to plane radio communications were extremely poor; so that often IJN CAP, dependent on visual reports and flag hoists from outlying destroyers, often scrambled late and simply flew towards the nearest flak bursts in an effort to spot incoming bombers.
The IJN aircraft were overall slightly superior to those of the USN, but that advantage is again often exaggerated in the popular perception. The Zero was better fighter than the F4F Wildcat, but only by a small margin. The Zero was faster (slightly), more maneuverable (particularly at lower speeds), and much longer ranged, but the F4F had a better armament, more armor, self-sealing fuel tanks, better speed in a dive, and a decent roll rate. As dive bombers were concerned, the SBD was superior to the D3A despite being slight slower and less maneuverable, as it was longer ranged, better armed and armored, and carried a higher payload. The D3A's only other real advantage over the SBD was that it was supposedly more stable in the dive, allowing for better bombing accuracy. Only in torpedo bombers did the IJN have a clear advantage, the B5N being much longer legged, and faster than the TBD, and, most importantly, carrying the aerial version of the Long Lance torpedo, which was faster, more dependable, and had a better warhead than the that toted by the TBD. The American aerial torpedo at this point in the war was so unreliable that it almost rendered moot whether or not the TBDs actually survived to make their run or not.
In terms of pilots, the USN and IJN were again more evenly matched than is generally acknowledged. The USN fighter pilots of early 1942 were, as a group, probably the best trained set of pilots among the Western Allies, and were just as good as the IJN's Zero drivers. According to John Lundstrom's research (in which he went back and compared kills claimed to those the other side actually recording loosing), in the period of Feb-Jun 1942, the USN F4F pilots actually had a positive kill ratio against the IJN's A6M2 and A5M4s, so it could be argued that the USN fighter pilots actually had an advantage over the IJN. The IJN dive and torpedo bomber pilots were, on the other hand, more effective than those of the USN, but again if you were to compare accuracy rates (allowing for the fact that USN torpedoes often missed their target even if dropped perfectly), the difference would not be extreme.
2. As far as battlefield "luck" went on June 4, the IJN actually had more than its fair share up until the Enterprise and Yorktown SBDs arrived overhead. First, the carriers had survived unscathed the attacks of few dozen TBFs, B-26s, SBDs, SB2Us, and B-17s from Midway. Second, the famous Tone scout had sighted the American carrier forces precisely because it had taken off late and flown the wrong route; had it taken off on time and flow its pattern correctly, the USN task force would not have been spotted until much later, if at all. Thirdly, somewhere between a fourth and a third of the USN strike against the Japanese carriers flew off in the wrong direction and completely missed the IJN task force, with all the fighters and several of the dive bombers being forced to ditch from lack of fuel, while another flight of escort fighters attached itself to the wrong TBD squadron and never got involved, so that of 3 flights of fighters, 5 dive bomber squadrons, and 3 torpedo bomber squadrons, only 1 escort flight, 3 dive bomber squadrons, and the 3 torpedo bomber squadrons got in action. Finally, two of the torpedo bomber squadrons arrived well ahead of the dive bombers and without fighter escort, so that the IJN CAP were able to annihilate most of them before they could even make a run.
< Message edited by NimitsTexan -- 4/16/2007 6:51:02 AM >
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