You may remember that a few days ago, I had some broadband issues.  The powers that be sent a technician to the apartment complex, so as to discover just what was going on.  I gather they found nothing out of the ordinary, so the technician came into Pond Central to investigate.  When I got home some hours later, there was a note on my door, saying that there was a signal strength issue and the tech needed access to the cable outlet.  I groaned at this; the cable outlet is behind a bookcase in my living room... a bookcase overfilled with books.  While I knew this was going to be three different levels of hell to deal with, I did realize that I had been presented with a great opportunity.  For years, I've meant to get all my military history books out of my bedroom and into one of the big bookshelves in the living room... well, here was my chance! 

I should have known better.  Almost every time there's a broadband connection problem, the techs say there's a signal strength issue.  As I was getting the books out of the bookcase, my broadband connection came back.  Yay, I guess.  Still, I wasn't going to just fill the thing back up again, in case there really was a problem (for once), so I let it sit for the weekend... and the books that had been in it stacked high on my coffee table.  While it made watching TV a little difficult (read: impossible), and folding laundry a  challenge (read: are you kidding?), I put up with it until Monday.

That night, I came home from the Duck U Bookstore, changed into the grubbiest clothes I had, and began moving books from the bedroom to the living room.  Grubby, because some of them were going to be dusty as all get-out.  It took an hour, and I still haven't gotten around to organizing them other than by size, but I now have my military history reference library all in one place, where I can easily peruse them.  Before this, they were in three different bookcases AND stacked on a dresser in four piles AND stacked on top of two other bookcases.  Yeah, this works much better.

1 Every time I read about HMS Rodney, I think of Sir Rodney from Wizard of Id. And then I suppresss a grin.

2

A very nice looking collection indeed.  I have my collection overflowing my bookcase and into boxes and onto various shelves.  I also notice we have many of the same titles, too.

Looking at that picture is sure fun at figuring out what is in your collection.  Paperback copy of Castles of Steel, correct?

I really want to get my hands on Combat Fleets, since I have my doubts about some of Norman Polmar's works and it is comparable to Jane's.  But unfortunately, crack is cheaper in this case, and so would be a copy of Blu-Ray set of Kara no Kyoukai Aniplex released last year...

Then there is Garzke and Dulin's Allied Battleships which has sadly not been reprinted since the early 1980s...

C.T.

3 Ack, forgot to re-link to the bigger picture after having to delete the original small picture.  Should work now...

CT, no, no Castles of Steel, though I'm aware of the book.  And gold is cheaper than some of the Jane's Fighting Ships editions.

Steven, now I'm never going to get that connection out of my mind.  Thanks so very much.

4

Not including any of the Tom Clancy books or the books I have given up on, number of titles in both our libraries is in the double digits.

In retrospect, I should have realize that was a copy of Victory at Sea, and not Castles of Steel.

I also noticed that your copy of Kaigun is sadly missing its dustjacket...

5 I do not understand how a cable connector can be behind a shelf. The socket is small, but the connector and relief slieve stick out quite a bit, and the cable should not be bent hard or else it creates internal reflections, which ruin the signal. I always had to plan shelves a cabinets so that they avoid leaning against cable outlets that are in use.

6 Pete, the plate is actually behind the bookcase, which is three or four inches away from the wall so as to match with the TV stand.

CT, yeah, I was a little unhappy about the missing jacket m'self, but on the plus side it was only $35.  A quick glance at amazon right now shows the cheapest you can get it is for $75.  For $40, I'll live without a dustcover.

I'm not surprised there's a lot of overlap between our collections.  There aren't many obscure books in mine, and a lot of the "must-haves" (Shattered Sword, Fire In The Sky, Frank's Guadalcanal, Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, etc etc etc...).  There's just a LOT of books.

I mean, for a non-professional.

7 Do you have "Soldiers of the Sun"? If not, you should.

8

Japan's Imperial Army by Edward Drea is a more recent take on the subject.  It is very good and makes for some rather startling revelations.

But how can any collector's shelves be without Japanese Cruisers of the Pacific War?  You do need a coffee table to put the book, because if the book falls from any place higher than a coffee table, it might kill someone on the way down.

Sadly, Fire in the Sky is one of those books I am unlikely to touch again.  Eric Bergerud's tendency to switch into the first person grated too much, and it happened far too often for a professional work.  What is really odd is that Touched With Fire is many ways, a much better written book despite being published earlier by Bergerud.

9 cool collection, seeing Tom Clancy takes me back. I got into Tom Clancy when I was in 5th grade and this lead me into military history books in the 6th grade (I'm pretty sure I've read some of books in your collection) but my local library had so few books of that type that I quickly had to move into SF which was a much more plentiful (and cheaper) genre to read.

10 "I haven't quite figured out how I intend to organize them yet... do I alphabetize by author? Arrange by category (with Midway books on top)? By size? By spine color? The world wonders."

I have mine organized by size on shelves like this.  That's due to weight, not any "real" organizing scheme.  The bottom shelf (and on some units, the middle thru-shelf that splits the side uprights) can hold about half-again more weight.  The heavier books always end up there.  It's inconvenient, but it still beats overloading the shelves.  You can see it in the picture; the second-from-bottom shelf looks like it's got a noticeable sag in the middle, in the gap between Dogfight and Artillery.  Since the shelves aren't secured along the back, it always makes me nervous when I see that happen in my own bookcases.

11 All of the shelves save the bottom one are adjustable on this bookcase, Rick... and the only reason you're not seeing sag on the other shelves is because I flipped them over.

Oddly, the OTHER bookcase, with the manga, DVR, and ducks doesn't have nearly as much warping, despite being at least as heavily loaded.

1 Well, it beats trying to start forest fires in Oregon.

2 If they'd pushed the issue they could have done that attack much sooner, several pre-war classes of their subs carried 1-2 planes. Other, less optimal planes were available, but even the Seiran's first flight was in '43.

As to the admittedly brief respite the blowing of Gatun Dam  would have gained them (a year at the very most) a few extra months breathing time before the B-29 raids essentially stopped domestic production could have complicated things for the allies. Historically, a whole slew of advanced fighters as well as several ships including the 16 Unryu class aircraft carriers and a gazillion fast coastal defence subs were halted or delayed when bombers got within range of the home islands, often within a few months ( or weeks) of completion or in the case of the high performance aircraft, just as production was spinning up.

A few extra months of training for the new generation of carrier pilots might have made a great deal of difference at the battle of the Philippine Sea (or whatever took its place).

A few extra months of unmolested Japanese production and aircrew training would not have changed the ultimate outcome of the war, but it could have increased the cost of ataining that outcome out of all proportion to the investment of a few subs and aircrew.

Straying rather further afield, while he canal attack would only work once,  assuming that the I-400 program retains its priority, the I-400s would be coming online in late '43 and early '44. An attack on New York and possibly Washington using disease bombs could have caused considerable mayhem. They'd have a better than even chance of succeeding as the alied ASW effort depended on radio direction finding and broken codes to track German wolfpacks, none of which would help against these boats as they'd be not be using German codebooks and wouldn't need to transmit since the knew where their target was.

3

Actually, the planners of the construction of the Panama Canal had envisioned a situation where the Gatun Locks or any of the other locks would breached (In the unlikely event of a ship managing to be so out of control that they managed to smashed through all the other safeguards.).  They built an ultimate failsafe for it - portable dams for just that eventuality, to prevent the loss of too much water.  So draining Gatun Lake was never going to happen if they simply attacked the locks.  Hitting the dam would have been more worthwhile, but the dam might have been easier to fix.  Knocking the locks out of action would still be worth it.

Of course, by 1942, the US Navy was already planning to send to sea ships larger than the canal could handle, so ultimately, it would not have meant as much either. 

As for using the I-400 - you wonder if the Japanese would have been through enough not use their radio communications at any part...

 

 

4 @Muppet: I left the date undefined because I couldn't quite figure out the minimum construction time required for an I-400 class sub.  In my brain, the attack in the post took place in early-to-mid '44.

@cxt: I didn't know about the portable dams, and haven't seen any reference to them in my research... interesting stuff, that.  I will note that while the Navy had plans to put Panamax-plus ships to sea, ultimately they didn't in WWII.

5 The MONTANA class got cancelled but I believed MIDWAY herself went to sea before the end of war.  If the war had lasted any longer, MIDWAY would have been sent on the long way around to join the Pacific Fleet.

6 USS Midway: commissioned 9/10/1945.

"...ultimately they didn't in WWII."

7

There was a nontrivial amount of shipbuilding, including warships, on the US West Coast, which wouldn't have been affected by damage to the Canal.

Quite a lot of it was intended for the European theater, but if the Canal had been taken out, they could have shuffled things around.

Also, by mid 1944 the US Navy in the Pacific was already large enough to win the war. Additional forces made that easier, but Nimitz could have won it anyway.

 

8

 The West Coast did have a lot of shipbuilding - Henry Kaiser and Marinship comes to mind - but warship construction was pretty much dominated by the East Coast yards.  The largest warships built on the West Coast during WW2 were the four OAKLAND class CLs.  Every other cruiser, battleship, light and fleet carriers, were all built on the East Coast.  So were most of the destroyers.

Nimitz and PACFLT probably had enough warships to defeat the Japanese, but the operational strain would have been immense.

I do wonder how much of MIDWAY's completion was slowed down by the imminent end of the war.  The US Navy was already cancelling ships from March 1945 on.

9

There's one big shadow over the end of the war which renders most of these kinds of what-if's moot. For instance, when people talk about, "What if the Normandy Invasion had failed" or "What if the Battle of the Bulge had turned out to be a German victory", the answer to all those questions is the same: the first A-bomb would have been dropped on Berlin, and the war in Europe would have ended in early August 1945.

By the same token, these what-if's about the Pacific all have the same answer: The war ends in early August 1945 no matter what happens before that.

If, for instance, the Japanese somehow managed to preven the Americans from taking Guam and Saipan, then the B-29's carrying the bomb would have flown from western China. But they still would have flown, and the bombs still would have been dropped, and the war would still have ended.

10 Way back in my original "What If...?" post, in the beginning of 2008, you proposed (in a reaction post of your own) that the bombs would have been flown from China, Steven.  I'll repeat what I said back then here:
Not a chance.  The chance that the plane carrying the bomb would have a malfunction and crash-land someplace the Japanese could get their hands on it wouldn't be taken under ANY circumstances.  We barely let our friends know what was going on with the bomb, after all.  The flight from Tinian, on the other hand, was completely over water... perfect for jettisoning the bomb where nobody untoward could get their hands on it.

The logistical problems with flying B-29s from China are well-documented as well.  Throw in the added headaches of trying to get the various pieces of the bomb to the Chinese base, and it seems even less likely.

11

I think you underestimate the issues Truman was facing by that point. The American people were tired of war. They wanted it over with. The only alternative was the November invasion, which was estimated to be profoundly bloody and difficult.

I think Truman would have ordered them to do it anyway, irrespective of the objections you raise.

12 You forget the third alternative, blockade.  Much less costly than invasion, at least for the US, and they'd be able to discharge a rather large amount of men to boot.  The Navy backed the plan, and it's pretty clear it would have worked very well by that time.  Japan would have starved to death, but that would have been a minor consideration by then.

I don't doubt that the bombs would have been dropped; just not from China. 

13 When I suggest the war might have continued longer or been more costly, it only would have been so until bases in B-29 range could be secured. If the IJN and IJA had upgraded their air forces in the interim then there would have been a reduction operation until their air forces had been culled sufficiently to allow the atomic bombs to be delivered.

Unlikely that the war lasts past early to mid '46.  Even if something like Hatanaka's gambit had succeeded, we would see operation Downfall, which in its post trinity version involved the use of 14 nukes. I can't see it going on past mid '46.

Note too that if the war goes much past August '45 AT ALL, then MILLIONS of Japanese start starving. One of the things the Allies discovered when they landed was that Japan was essentially out of food, the US and Commonwealth navies spent the winter shipping food in.


I agree with Wonderduck that nukes from China is a non starter. The nationalists were actually backed and trained by the U.S.S.R. and the other force in China was the Maoists. We were NOT going to send our super secret weapon there to be handed over to Stalin (we had our own academics to take care of that).

14

American war-wariness was a major concern for Truman and officials within his administration - which is incidentally one of, though not the only, reasons for unconditional surrender - but nothing I have read about and from Harry Truman supports the proposition that he would launch the nuclear-equipped B-29s from China or any place where the bomb would not have absolute security because of domestic considerations.  FDR might have considered it (Though even he was not likely to approve it.), but not Truman.  There was a better chance of the USAAF perfecting in-flight refueling to allow a longer-range B-29 flight than a China base scenario.

That the Japanese was running out of food would have shorten the war, but since the Japanese military and government had made it clear they would let millions of Japanese civilians starve to insure the military remained fed, I doubt it would have shortened the war too much.  Lack of materials to fight the war would have done much more to shorten to war, but not that much sooner, even with a full scale blockade being launched.

One thing which becomes clear is that Japan was really fortunate they surrendered when they did.  Even a delay of a few more months would have seen XXI Bomber Command focus B-29 attacks on the Japanese rail system while maintaining their mining operations.  If the former had happened, it would have crippled the Japanese rail system, which meant millions of Japanese would have starved even AFTER surrender because the distribution system had been wrecked.

This is the irony when people base their arguments against the use of the atomic bomb on the USSBS, which assumed the USAAF kept pounding Japan with B-29 raids.  Dying of starvation is no less pleasant than dying from nuclear attack.

1 It has a stack like the Lexington CV-2 but the Lexington had a closed bow. There goes my guess.

2 I'm afraid you're going to suffer a blues explosion.  The Lexington is an incorrect guess.

3 Graff Zeppelin.
The casemates and the oddball catapults  are the giveaway.

4 Very good, Muppet.  A winner is you.

5

Time for a naval "what if?"  I've read that the Nazi long range plan was to start WW II in 1943, by which time they would have a "balanced fleet", including at least one aircraft carrier.  They had already built and were testing aircraft for it, including a carrier-based version of the Ju87 Stuka. 

My questions is, assuming that their plans worked out, and the second World War started in 1943 at a time and stiuation of their choosing, what would they use their aircract carrier for?  I don't think anyone would consider using a carrier to support an invasion across the narrow English channel, and they expected a quick war where interdicting convoys would not be a factor, so what did they plan on doing with it?

6

Remember the Bismarck? Think that would have gone the same if Bismarck had been accompanied by a carrier?

Germany's naval problem was that all their major ports were bottled up. They could build big ships, but they couldn't get them out into the open sea to fight with them.

A blue water fleet with carrier air support could have done something about Gibralter, for example. (Or at least tried.)

7

There were three strategic constrictions between the German ship-building ports on the Baltic and the open ocean. Denmark was the first, but that could be solved by land invasion.

The second was the section of sea between Scotland and Norway. The third was the line between Scotland and Greenland.

Bismarck actually made it past all three of them, but only by shedding all its escorts and proceeding alone.

...and it would have made it, had it not been spotted by a PBY, and then attacked at long range by English carrier-based biplanes. A German carrier would have made all the difference.

8

 No guarantees the fighters from a German carrier would have shot down the PBY before it made its report (Even the Kido Butai did not have that much success doing so.) and considering the weather conditions in the fatal torpedo attack, it would have been doubtful any fighters would have made it into the air.  Of course, Goering did all he could to insure German naval aviation was stillborn - flying an ME 109 in the North Atlantic sounds positively insane.

Germany could have completed the Graf Zeppelin and maybe the Z Plan as well, but what would they have given up to free the materials for it?  Germany faced major resource and industrial shortages even before the war, far more than most people realize, and the Kriegsmarine usually ended up at the back of the bus since its was less important than the Army or influential as the Luftwaffe.  Even the projected date of 1945 would not have been possible, given the competing demands -  it is implied that the first of the  H-class battleships would have not been completed until 1946, even if their construction had not been postponed/cancelled by the war.

Of course, that also ignores what the other nations would be doing.  Nothing would be unsettling to a German crew than to break out into the Atlantic during 1944, only to find Lion and Temeraire and maybe a sister or four waiting for them.

1 Yep, she's Dutch.  And yes, she could be a cruiser, and her armament is awfully light for that, because she's a light cruiser.  The Royal Dutch Navy light crusier Tromp.  She was repeatedly claimed sunk by the IJN, apparently. That puts her in good company.
 
http://www.navypedia.org/ships/netherlands/nl_cr_tromp.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HNLMS_Tromp_(1937)
http://www.netherlandsnavy.nl/Tromp.htm
http://www.netherlandsnavy.nl/Photo_tromp.htm

2 flatdarkmars is right.

For some time, I've been looking for a ship photo with the idea of stumping Wonderduck.  I figured the photo had to be from an off-line source - so I was pleased to find this photo, framed in an antiques store.  I initially thought it wasn't online anywhere, but was wrong about that.

Just six hours from posting to solving - the power of the hive mind.

"The ghost ship."  Now why wasn't there a counter for it in Victory in the Pacific, like the De Ruyter?.

3

Apparently I was the only person who didn't know that this was the Tromp.  I have an e-mail from Siergen who named it correctly, but admitted to imagesearching for it.  I received a textmessage from Brickmuppet two minutes before FDM posted his comment, naming the Tromp.

However, since FDM was the first to leave his guess in the comments, he gets the "prize."  Name your post... or should I assume you want another "Name This Mystery Ship"?

4

If you think the Tromp was lightly armed for a cruiser, you might want to take a look at HMS Delhi following her 1941 refit in the US, or the Capitani Romani class as built.  Heck, Tromp's sister might even qualify.

C.T.

5 CXT, I still owe you a post... you need to get me a topic, though.

6 Sorry about that.  The last couple months had been hectic, not to mention physically demanding that I had completely forgotten about it. 

7 Hehe I spent at least two minutes finding links!  Anyway I can't think of anything in particular, so another Mystery Ship it is!

8 what happen to old ship. please, anybody explain to me what happen to any old ship. it is not like an airplane where it's would be easy to sell to other country when it get old . 

9

A lot of them do get sold. An American WWII light cruiser was sold to Argentina, who renamed it "General Belgrano". It was sunk by a British submarine during the Falklands war.

But if they can't be sold, usually they're torn apart so the steel can be recycled. Thousands of tons of scrap steel is worth quite a lot.

Sometimes they are ditched in a ship's graveyard, left at anchor to rust away.

Some get taken out to sea and deliberately sunk with scuttling charges. Sometimes this is done to create attractions for scuba divers, in service of the tourist industry. Sometimes they do it in hopes of starting coral reefs.

A few are turned into floating museums.

10

Sadly, being recycled for razor blades will be the fate of USS ENTERPRISE (CVN-65).  As much anyone would like to preserver her as a museum ship, the cost and effort involved in removing 8(!) nuclear reactors will leave the ENTERPRISE suitable for nothing else when she decommissions after her current deployment.

I do like the idea of trying to save her island, since that is the most iconic and identifiable part of her.  It is a lot easier than saving the entire ship.

11 Tearing apart any CVN will be challenging. But lifting the reactors out will be a lot easier if all the decking above the reactor is removed first.

1 Hmm. I never thought about a local shipyard having contributed to the WWII Pacific fleet... to the Wikipedia!

2 The three Kaiser yards in the Columbia River area weren't the big ones in the company (the four SF yards held that honor), but they still could crank out the ships... at least "smaller" ones.

3 A family friend served on the Guadalcanal.  I've never had much of an opportunity to talk to him about it, but he let me look through his "cruise book", and asked me to restore the print of the carrier on the cover.

4

IIRC Kaiser also had shipyards at Swan Island in the Willamette in Portland. (Which is misnamed because it isn't really an island.)

5 Well, that was kind of the point of escort carriers. If we insisted on fleet-carrier quality, then we'd get fleet carriers... but only a handful of them, which would generally be elsewhere (and require a screen of their own, of course). Escort carriers were cheap enough that you could afford to park them with the transports while the invasion came along... or lose half a dozen and not significantly change the strategic outlook of the war.

So the question is, what would a modern CVE look like? Converted merchant ship with a drone payload? Build enough of those and things could get scary...

6 A modern CVE would be a helicopter carrier.

7 More along the lines of a modified Atlantic Conveyor, if we follow the original RN's original concept for escort carriers.

8 Considering the fate of the Atlantic Conveyor, that's not a happy thought.

9 The fate of the Atlantic Conveyor wasn't that dissimilar from that of the Ommaney Bay.  Maybe it's a better comparison than we think (and I think it's a pretty good one).

10 At least Ommaney Bay could attempt to defend herself - one of the reasons Atlantic Conveyor was sunk was because she lacked passive or active defenses (Due to time, priorities, and whether an auxilary could be armed - as well as the Harriers she carried being transferred, as planned, to Hermes and Invincible.).  Otherwise, as Wonderduck says, she fitted the escort carrier concept pretty well, especially as a mobilization design that can go into service very, very quickly (Which almost all modern warships can not.).

11 As it turned out, a container ship makes a wonderful auxiliary carrier.  Now, one might question the wisdom of putting the entire aerial component of your land forces on one incredibly juicy soft target, but nobody can question that the use of the Atlantic Conveyor in the AVG role worked brilliantly.

Until it took two Exocets into its merchy hull, that is.

12 To be fair, it's easy to question the wisdom of a lot of things that were done in the Falklands. They're really, really lucky not to have lost Canberra...

13 The Atlantic Conveyor was a very austere version of the A.R.A.P.A.H.O. concept developed jointly between the US and the Brits in the '70s. The concept called for a ski jump and 2-4 point defence systems. (seawolf in the UK version) The idea was to store dozens of kits so that container ships could quickly be converted to mini carriers. As far as I know the kits were never made and Atlantic Conveyor was put together pretty much on the fly.

I think the Atlantic Conveyor is actually closer to a MAC than a CVE.

14 My father, Joseph J. Grass was on the Ommaney Bay from commissioning until she was sunk.

15 I hope he continued his naval career afterwards!

1 I am going to do another wag, a CVE? There were so many CVE's built that I cannot even start to guess a name.  Some of the ones transferred to Great Britain muddy the guessing even further.

2 It is a CVE, yes.

3 White Plains?

4 I'm cheating (looking at Wikipedia), so if I'm right I don't win anything. It looks like it's a member of the Commencement Bay class.

5 There's nothing to win this time around, Steven, but it is indeed a member of the Commencement Bay class.

6 I would have suggested that it was Commencement Bay itself, except that Commencement Bay was given a "dazzle" paint job.

7

Odd.  IIRC, if she was never comissioned, she should not have gotten an 'USS' prefix.

 

8 I wondered about that as well.  She was named at her launching, it appears, and I suppose the USS was simply applied at that time.

9 So apparently what's distinctive about her is that she's the last CVE ever built.

10 Yes, and I meant to put that in the "Update" and completely whiffed on it.  Being on vacation is relaxing, but it dulls the brain.

1 I'd want to watch the planning for Operation Seelowe, to find out if it was a feint, or if Hitler really meant to go through with it. I've never found a straight answer to that, and it may be that no one knows.

2 I was to see why MacArthur's planes were caught on the ground, in the Philippines, even though he had plenty of warning after the attack on Pearl.

3 Steven took my first choice. I had also always wondered about that.

Second:

I would want to be on the Yamato during the action off Samar to find out why Kurita snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.  No offense intended to Taffy3 who fought well and hard to the last, but the way was clear after the Johnston went down....yet....

4 Hitler's bunker when he shot himself.  I mean, who wouldn't want to see that over and over again? :-)

Tokyo when the decision to attack the US was made, or the Japanese Embassy to find out if it really was accidental that the war declaration was simply late.

Maybe watch Audy Murphy in action to witness true heroism.

If we weren't confined to WWII, I'd want to find out what happened to Amelia Erhart.

5 Mauser, is this what you were wondering about? 

1 With the proving of oil in Falklands waters it'll be interesting to see if 1435 Flight will fight again. I'm sure that Argentina didn't learn the 1st time, maybe a second time will do the trick.

2 JUST the fuselage?  I hate seeing that kind of disrespect.  It should be complete.

3 Mauser, it looks like there isn't room for the wings.

4 Also remember, we're talking about a 70+ year old plane whose wings were fabric-covered.  As near as I can figure, there's only seven Gladiators that have survived this long, and only two or three are still flyable.  My guess is that the Malta War Museum just doesn't have the funds to even attempt to preserve the wings.

FWIW, Faith is the only surviving Sea Gladiator.  The others are all the regular type.

1 Clearly that is DD-.  I'm not sure what the designation of the missing front half is though....Ouch!

2 Is this the one that turned in front of the Australian carrier? I think that the DD that was hit had a helicopter hanger though.

3 I'm guessing its the Murphy (Murphie?)...or at this stage in her career the Murp.

The bow of the Murphy is, IIRC somewhere off Delmarva and is a well known site because divers for years were looking unsuccessfully  for the rest of the ship.

4 Brickmuppet for teh win!  The USS Murphy (DD-603) was on convoy escort duty, approximately 75 miles out from New Jersey when she encountered the SS Bulkoil at night.  The Bulkoil was heading back to port after experiencing an engine failure when she heard a "torpedo" to port on her sound rig.  Naturally, she turned into the "torpedo" so as to decrease her profile. 

Problem is, the "torpedo" she heard was the Murphy, tracking a sonar contact of her own out ahead of the convoy.  The Bulkoil hit the destroyer just behind the bridge and cut through, shortening her by about 70 feet.  The bow portion sank in just a couple of minutes, taking 36 souls with it.  The stern section stayed afloat, was towed back to New York Navy Yard, and seven months later emerged with a new forward section. 

She served at D-Day then was eventually assigned to the Pacific Fleet where she was, apparently, one of the first (if not THE first) American vessel to reach Nagasaki after the bomb.

5 Yay!
I request Faith, Hope and Charity.

6 To clarify my request: Only as it applies to one of your illustrations in this post.

7 David, you are thinking of HMAS Voyager that was cut in half by HMAS Melbourne. It also collided with USS Frank E Evans (obviously not at the same time).

8 Actually, I wasn't thinking of any ship in particular.  It was just obviously the rear "half" of a destroyer, and I felt like making some kind of comment.

I was also assuming that the damage was from a torpedo hit, not a collision, which explains why my search didn't lead me to an answer.

1

The biggest reason the P-40 did so well early in the war was because its pilots were very well trained and knew the plane. A squadron of P-40's fought out of Henderson Field for a while, and did very well against the Zero even though the Zero really was a much better plane.

I agree that the Zero was the best fighter of the early war.

2 SDB, I think the same argument can be made for the early success of the Zero as you made for the 40.  But in any discussion of this type, my tendency is to look at the characteristics of the bird versus the ideal list of my wants.  Then the preference for rugged and heavily-armed comes into play....

3 It looks like you have a picture of an F4F-3.  It clearly has "F-3" on the side, and I don't see any sign of the wing joints.  That minor nit aside, great article, and great pictures.  They all look like they were taken somewhat recently, I wonder how recent the BF109 and A6M pictures are, given that I don't believe flyable versions of either exist anymore.

I'd have to argue on throwing out the BF109 so early, just based on the results it achieved.  I'd put it into the top three with the Spitfire and Zero.

4

David, that would actually be the squadron markings, not the type number, though technically it's incomplete.  The correct number would be X-Y-Z, where X is the Air Group Number, Y the plane type (Fighter, Bomber, Scout, Torpedo), and Z the plane number in the squadron.  So in 1942, 6-F-12 would be the 12th plane of the fighter squadron of the USS Enterprise's air group.

5

There were no P-40s serving at Henderson Field during the Battle for Guadalcanal.  They had the P-400, which was a bastardized export version of the P-39.  Almost completely unsuitable for air combat (All the more so because they had no ground equipment to keep their oxygen system charged.), but its heavy armament and payload made it invaluable for ground support.  The pilots there learned the hard way to leave tackling the Japanese aircraft to the F4Fs.

The A6M was very maneuverable but at high speeds or high attitudes, that maneuverability almost completely disappeared to the point of the aircraft being uncontrollable.  That was why Japanese pilots were reluctant to go into steep dives in the Zero.

Finally, it is easy to overemphasize the importance of maneuverability in a fighter.  Pilot skill and tactics often were far more determinative of the fighter's performance - which aircraft had greater maneuverability was only critical for the few pilots pushing the edge of the performance envelope. 

6

The genius of the Thach Weave was that it pretty much eliminated the value of maneuverability, and instead emphasized weapons and armor, in which areas the F4F (and pretty much all later American fighters) vastly outrated the Zero.

Also, this is from Fire in the Sky:

In April 1943 No. 15 Squadron (RNZAF) arrived on Guadalcanal with P-40s. RNZAF fighter squadrons took part in many of the  fierce engagements triggered by each new U.S. Landing farther up the Solomons. These engagements did much more than the Guadalcanal campaign to damage the JNAF, and by the time the JNAF abandoned Rabaul in April, New Zealand fighters had claimed ninety-nine kills

7 Regarding the suitability of P-39 for air combat, there's a funny picture here:
 http://wio.ru/aces/rechkalov.htm
Every star on that cowling is a downed German aircraft (quite a few were 109s).

8 I had forgotten that the P-40 saw such wide use early in the war.

I do remember that the American Volunteer Group ('Flying Tigers') were taught to climb high and dive towards the Japanese planes they fought. At least, that was mentioned in the book I read, way back in high school.

Chennault (leader of the AVG) was big on using that advantage of the P-40.

About the Spitfire, Bf109, and A6M2: the mix of guns with different convergence zones is surprising. Did the pilots have the ability to select which set to fire? Or did they have to fire both at once, and hit with whichever one was aimed right?

9 The Spitfire did not; it either fired all guns or none at all.  The other two could select to fire one type or the other (or both). 

10 P-39 originally had the fire selectable, but in Russian service it was modified to all-or-nothing, as were domestic fighters (such as Yak). I am not sure exactly why it was done, perhaps it had to do with flying in heavy gloves.

Erich Hartmann said that he preferred minimum range shots.

11 Conventional wisdom is that the Spitfire had a better turning radius than the Me-109. In actual tests run between captured Spits and Me-109s, though, the Germans found that the 109 had a better turning radius at most altitudes and speeds. Because of the huge firepower advantage of the Emil, I would eliminate the Spit before the Emil.

As far as the Zeke, it had a really poor roll rate, especially before the reduction in wing size with the Model 32. It's a remarkable technological achievement, but I'd take the Emil every day of the week and twice on Sunday, so long as operational radius wasn't my primary consideration.

And the Emil is clearly better looking than that effete Spitfire.

8-)

12 The Brits disagree with you, Doug, as does every single reference book I have over here.  The Japanese tested the A6M2 against the Bf109 (I can't find out which version), and according to them the only place the German fighter had any edge was in top speed.

I'll point out again that any of these planes could shoot down any other in the contest.  We're talking tiny percentage points differences between the top three.

Some time ago, I mentioned that I had a "What If...?" post I had to let go because I didn't know enough of the history involved.  The basis of that post was "What If... the Germans had replaced their 109s with Zeros at the Battle of Britain?"  I suspected the difference would have been huge, but I couldn't (and still can't) track down all the various permutations that change would cause.

13 I want to say that the information came from a comment by Galland, but it was about 15 years ago when I read it (back when I was playing Mustangs and Messerschmitts seriously) and I have no idea how to find it now.  IIRC, it's related to the behavior exemplified in this (from your link*):

"I had survived this mission simply because the Spitfire could sustain a continuous rate of turn inside the BF 109E without stalling - the latter was known for flicking into a vicious stall spin without prior warning if pulled too tightly. The Spitfire would give a shudder to signal it was close to the edge, so as soon as you felt the shake you eased off the stick pressure."

A good pilot could fly the 109 right on that edge, while an average pilot had to fly a few percent below that performance. With a Spit, even a relatively average pilot could hang on the performance edge. When combined with the 109s flying at the end of their endurance over England and the Spits flying over their own fields, the result was the performance differential that's usually reported.

"I'll point out again that any of these planes could shoot down any other in the contest. We're talking tiny percentage points differences between the top three."

Oh, clearly. To a large extent, the aircraft of the major combatants were direct responses to the challenges they faced during the war. The Japanese and Americans prioritized operational radius, the Japanese by sacrificing defense and the Americans by sacrificing maneuverability. American aircraft started significantly behind those of the Japanese and the Europeans, largely because of political concerns. The Germans and British sacrificed range for maneuverability or firepower.

The primary reason I'd choose a 109 over a Zero is that with good tactics, P-38s, P-40s, and F4Fs eventually attained something like loss parity with the Zero. And US experience in North Africa indicates that none of those aircraft could match the 109.

I'm treating this comment section in much the way I would treat the grognard discussion you alluded to in the first post in this series. And it wouldn't be that kind of discussion without disagreements opaque to anyone not in the in-group.

FWIW, when this is done, I'm willing to put forward the case that the Sherman is the most under-rated tank in WWII, (and arguably the best tank in WWII) as well**. 8-)

* An excellent data source, BTW, that I've not seen before.

** Seriously, not facetiously, but not based on which tank would win a tank duel.

14 Let's not derail. Fighters, folks, not tanks!

15 Yes. the only tanks that could conceivably belong in this thread are the flying tanks from the 1930s and they were even worse dogfighters than they were tanks. So they wouldn't win anyway.

16 I thought brick was joking.  I was wrong.  That's insane!  I can very well appreciate why the Soviets ordered one of the designers to take a ride on one of those contraptions after a prototype disintegrated on landing...

I don't really know enough about fighters to have any strong opinions about them, except to follow the simple rule: the point of fighters isn't to dogfight, it's to assert and defend air supremacy over a theatre.  That can be highly dependent on local conditions - logistics considerations, range, fuel efficiency, anti-aircraft artillery deployment, etc.  What was the relative maintenance profiles of these aircraft, for instance?

17

Even within the IJN in the discussions which led to the development of the Zero, there were experienced pilots who believed the emphasis on maneuverability to the detriment of other traits in a fighter design was a bad idea, and that inadequate maneuverability in a fighter could always be compensated for by improved pilot skill.  Ultimately, those pilots were proven correct.

It is worth noting that most pilots did not push their aircraft to the limit.  In that sense, arguments over the whether one fighter was more maneuverable tend to lead into a blind alley.

And as Len Deighton once noted, a common trait of all the highest-scoring aces like Hartmann was a willingness to get really close before opening fire on their targets.  That fact led to one of the few peeves pilots had with the Spitfire - the mounts for the machine guns were simply too narrow to converge the fire of all the machine guns as close as the pilots wanted.

18 With the correction that it's the turn rate that's important, not turn radius, Spit still won. Another important advantage that it had was that it shed energy slower than the competition (Mustang was the absolute champion though: it even had a maneuvering flap setting).

19 I just got emailed this, and it seemed relevant to this post... just about every plane mentioned appears at some point in the video, I think.  Now excuse me, I'm going to go see if I can figure out how to get to England this summer..

http://player.vimeo.com/video/37599899

1

"Early" American is the F4F and the P-38.

"Late" American is the F4U and the P-51.

But I wish there were a place for the P-47. It's underrated.

"Early" Japan is obviously the A6M "Zeke". "Late" Japan would be Ki-61 "Tony".

2 Oh, and you need a separate article about night fighters.

3 That's a... twin-engine... tractor/pusher configuration... fighter?

*blink* Well, crap, now I've gotta go research that thing.

(Oh, and this may be relevant to your interests: http://twitpic.com/7lfwna)

4

That configuration wasn't unique. There were a couple like that.

5 GD, excellent solution!

Steven, what other plane used the Pfeil's layout?  There were, obviously, a lot of pusher configuration planes, but very few t/p military aircraft that I'm aware of.

6 Another dividing line (which I admit is outside your parameters) is by the mission performed by the aircraft.  A plane which is a great short-range interceptor might not be good if employed on offensive fighter sweep, bomber escort, or ground attack missions...

7 Piaggio P.50, sort of.

During the P-38 design, Kelly Johnson considered a push-pull configuration.

The Fokker D XXIII had a push-pull configuration, but only one prototype was built.

The Russian "Moskalev SAM-13" was another.

Now the configurations of those others are not exactly the same as the Do 335, but it shows that the idea of a pusher-puller configuration was in the air, though no one ever really made it work well.

8 Spitfire or Hurricane? (grin, duck, flee for life)

9

That's not controversial. The Spitfire was unquestionably better than the Hurricane, even early in the war. Later versions of the Spitfire were even better.

The main reason the Hurricane was important during the Battle of Britain is that the UK had twice as many Hurricanes as Spitfires. So the Spitfires tried to keep the 109's busy, so that the Hurricanes could attack the German bombers.

10 Any room for the Messerschmitt Bf-109 E or even the K?

How about the Focke-Wulf 190 D?

11 Not a fighter, but I've always been in love with the B-25 Mitchell.  I mean, with up to 18 forward-facing .50's (If you aim the turrets forward) it's the 1940's equivalent of a disintegrator beam.

And who else could field a 75mm Howitzer until the AC130 gunship?

12 Mine are very close to SDB's.

Can I add the P-40, as used in China by the American Volunteer Group?

It's an American plane flown by Americans in the Chinese theater of the war against Japanese. And it had the most amazing paint-job ever seen on a WWII aircraft.

But I don't know where it would fit. And I'm not sure it compares, in performance terms, to the other planes in the war.

13 @#8+#9: Avatar, Steven, remember the rules... "planes won't appear in both Early and Late contests."  I even specifically mention the Spitfire; we might be seeing the Hurricane anyway!

@#7 Steven: So, no planes with a pusher/tractor config that flew more than prototypes.

@#11: Maybe I'll do a "medium bomber" thing.  Not likely, but maybe.

14

Early period, FW-190 and the Spitfire.

Late period, P-51 and the Corsair.

Imo, the P-51 is the best fighter of WWII period.  It's range plus combat performance was unmatched.

I refuse to list any Japanese fighter as 'best' because they sacrifice pilot safety for performance.  They were deathtraps.

 

15 FW-190 took a long time to reach the front service. It's a late-war plane for all practical purposes.

A. Yakovlev wrote in his memoir that during the infamous visit of 1940, Kurt Tank got drunk and bragged how he developed an airplane that could reach 700 km/h. When asked about it next morning, he said that the arplane has just suffered an accident and cannot be demonstrated. Hur hur hur.

16 I, too, think that P-47 was underrated. However, being underrated it still wasn't the best. The biggest downside, IMHO, was how one had to be Robert S. Johnson to get results with it. P-39 was well-liked in Russia and produced a few aces. And Yak-3 of course was an amazing sports car of a fighter, too. Neither of those was as good as P-51.

17

Gotta take the Jug and P-38, followed by the Bearcat and the Corsair.  I'm a big believer in ruggedness married to firepower.  11/11 I talked to a guy who had flown both the Jug and the Pony.  Claimed the Jug was the toughest bird in the air and the 51 was a sweetheart to fly...

 

Besides, those 12 hour missions in a 51 would bloody MURDER my 'roids...

 

You know how to open those cans-o'-worms, doncha Duck?

18 I do, as a matter of fact.  Alas, the F8F Bearcat never made it into WWII, so it can't be considered.  Ditto the F7F Tigercat.

19

Early British is always the Spitfire - though as others have pointed out, the Spitfire may have been less cost effective than the Hurricane (For example, from production and servicing standpoints, you could build ~566 Hurricanes for 20,000 man-hours versus ~290 Spitfires for 24,000 man-hours.).  Late war British was the Tempest (Although the fighter/fighter-bomber versions of the Mosquito almost won out.).

 

20

Not a fighter, but I've always been in love with the B-25 Mitchell. I mean, with up to 18 forward-facing .50's (If you aim the turrets forward) it's the 1940's equivalent of a disintegrator beam.

The strafer version of the B-25 wasn't the original configuration. It was actually a hack developed in Australia. They'd been given B-25's, but they were useless for the kind of war being fought in New Guinea. So the general in charge of air resources there let one of his guys, one Pappy Gunn, and he decided to completely change the mission.

He's the one who got rid of the bombardier, loaded a pile of machine guns in the nose, and so on. The result was so successful that North American sent a group of engineers to Australia (no easy trip at the time) to see what he'd done.

Then they came back to the US and deliberately designed a strafer version of the B-25 to manufacture.

It's one of the cooler stories of the war. But the B-25 strafer isn't a fighter, so it isn't relevant to this thread. (Alas.)

21 I recall reading Saburo Sakai's autobiography where at the close of the war he was assigned to a squadron with one of the late-war Japanese fighters that wasn't a deathtrap (resealable tanks, etc.) and that he took down a B-29 with it.  I'd say Shinden, but that doesn't seem right somehow.

Mauser: For ground attack, though I love the Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik, nothing beats the Hs129 B3 as far as sheer audacity and coolness of potential - a purpose built single-seat twin-prop ground attack aircraft mounting a 75mm AT gun. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henschel_Hs_129)

22 Mauser, many years ago I saw a Canadian Warbird Heritage B-25 at the Oshkosh fly-in that was piloted by someone who know how to make the most of it.  He was flinging that thing around close to the ground like it was a fighter;  I was very impressed.  I just wish I'd had a movie camera handy - I doubt I'll ever see one flown like that again...

23 Early War:

USN - F4F, since there's really no other choice. That is to say, "None".
USAAF - P-47
RAF - Spitfire
Luftwaffe - FW-190A (Easily the best early war fighter, given that "early war" goes into 1943. If the 190 is chosen for late war, then Me-109E, since the Emil was arguably the best WWII fighter until the FW-190 entered service.)
Japan - Zero-sen

Late War:

USN - F4U
USAAF - P-51D
RAF - P-51 (First used in British service and the Merlin makes it British -- yes, it's a stretch. 8-) )
Luftwaffe - FW-190D
Japan - None
USSR - None

So, for the argue-off, do we consider the best available variant, regardless of date of entry (for those aircraft that spanned both periods) or only the best available by the end of the period. If the former, then aircraft with wide capability variance might arguably be better entered as separate aircraft in each period. (FW-190A and D and Spitfire Mk. whatever come to mind.)

24 Russians never thought much about the combat effectiveness of He.129. It was considered a paper tiger. It arrived late in the war, when Russian air cover was much better, fighters were heavily armed and flown better. The 129 did not do much against Russian tanks.

As far as B-25 with 75mm, Jack Ogilvie wrote this:

"Yes I remember those flights very well, I think I was on all of them.
They were not bomb runs,those were B-25's that were fitted with 75 mm
cannons and they were trying to knock out some flak boats that were in
the harbor at Leghorn. They had a gun emplacement on a point going in to
the harbor that had two 105's and several 88's. They were the most crack
shot's I ever saw. They had a gung ho full colonel that was in charge of
the Squadron and he had us come to the briefing. His plan was to go in
with three flights of four planes and to go in four at a time stacked
one behind the other on the deck,we were to be circling above them. I
tried to talk them out of it and he got mad as hell. When we started in
and were maybe a mile out those 105s shot four rounds and knocked down
four planes-the rest scattered and aborted the mission. The colonel had
another meeting and ranted and raved and threatened court-martials for
cowardice. He said he was going to do the same thing the next day and
would lead the flight. He did and the first round was a direct hit on
his plane. As far as I know they were never used again."

The story of cannon-armed B-25 stuck with me because it was such a disappointment. Americans were supposed to fight smart, not like this. Of course I did not know about the "Flight to Nowhere" back then.

25 There are idiots in every branch of every military in the world.

Keep the comments coming, folks!  You've already forced me to reconsider one of the planes for the "Early" fighters... which is forcing me to postpone the entry until tomorrow.

26

Civilis, the Shinden never saw combat. The first test flight was three days before Hiroshima. There were only three test flights altogether, totaling about 45 minutes of air time.

It was probably the Ki-61, which did have self-sealing fuel tanks.

27 SDB: IIRC, the Australian modified B-25's had the extra gun mounts in the wings, which was never an official configuration, and the engineers didn't think the structure could support it properly, so they came up with the nose mount, in both 4 and 8 gun flavors.  Plus there were nacelles around the fuselage for guns, which required steel reinforcement plates on the skin to protect from the muzzle blast.

They were also successful at "Skip Bombing", which is a trip to see film of.

There's a lot of stuff on YouTube.

28 Well, the book "Fire in the Sky" says that the original Australian B-25 strafers mounted the extra machine guns on the outside of the nose of the plane.

29

US: Late B-25, the triple threat: "We bombs em, we strafes em, and we falls on em."

USSR: Early P-39

30

Fighters, guys.  Fighters. 

31

Fighters, guys. Fighters.

Them's fight'n words...

32 I suppose the P-47 doesn't really rate "best". But what other fighter plane has an enemy destroyer to its credit?

Those two guys from the Tuskegee Airmen were flying P-47's when they sank a destroyer in the Adriatic. (The TV movie had them flying P-51's, but that squadron didn't get P-51's until later.)

This was after Italy surrendered, and the destroyer in question was originally Italian but was reflagged and recrewed by Germany.

I've watched that gun-camera film several times, and I've come to the conclusion that one of the machine gun rounds set off the warhead on a torpedo. Of course, that would then set off all the others in the rack, and the resulting explosion was more than sufficient to blow the ship in half.

I don't know of any other case like that in the war.

33 Come to think of it, late war fighters which were carrying rockets or bombs might well have bagged destroyers. But that P-47 was using its machine guns.

34 Hmmm, the P-38 Lightning qualifies for BOTH periods.

35 US Late war (1944-on):
The Seahawk without floats!

36 Hey! I just found another push-pull airplane. Even better, it's got a canard!

Rutan Model 40

1 I didn't even realize you had categories...

2 Ow.  My ego.

3

No, see, that was a compliment.

Categories are filters.

If someone is unaware that you have categories, then either they read everything you write, or they read nothing that you write.

Siergen replied to this article.

Thus, he reads everything you write.

4 Yeah, what Mikeski said. 

Also, if you can get the right balance between lack of sleep and cold medicine dosage, your blog articles flow together into one continuous stream of consciousness.  Seriously, the F1 racers were beating the crap out of the rubber ducks at Midway, but then Rio starting altering probability again...

1 HMS Hermes

2 WRONG!!!  *points, laughs*

3 I was going to guess the USS Sable or USS Wolverine, the training carriers that sailed mostly in Lake Michigan.  But the pictures don't quite match up. It was a wag anyway. 

4 I wrote about the Wolverine back in May of 2010 anyway!

5 There's a point of honor about not using Google image search, right?

6 Ed, I have no way of knowing if you're doing so.  I think it's cheating and that you're less of a human being if you do, but I can't stop someone from using it.

I can understand the temptation; after all, a post on a topic of your choice is an incredibly valuable thing *rolls eyes*.  I don't condone it, but I understand it.

7 Only carrier I can come up off the top of my head with an island configuration like that is HMS Eagle.  But some of the hull details do not match up.

8 On a couple of previous "name that ship" competitions, after I'd given up, I did an image search just to see, without any intention of using that as my answer.  Neither time did I get a result.

9

Oh....I just realized my mistake.  You got a GOOD one, Wonderduck!  Hats off to you!

I take back my guess - it is not HMS Eagle, and you ruled out HMS Hermes.  That means it is S.S. Mamari or Fleet Tender C.  A decoy ship used by the Royal Navy during Big Mistake #2 to fool the Luftwaffe.

Good one!

C.T.

 

10

CXT got it!  Name your prize, C... remember, no pr0n, politics or religion, but otherwise anything goes.

11 Also, what style/flavor of hat are you going to feast upon?

12 Dang.  I know I didn't win, but how about a post about the "fleet tenders"?

13

Sorry about the delay in getting back but I have been preoccupied with a few things over the weekend.  Some pleasant, some not so much.

Hmmm....Let me think about that, Wonderduck.  I have to go really deep to find something that I like covered (At least with regards to military history.) for a write-up.  Hmmmm....

1 Congrats! How does it feel to be a historian?

2

First, my congratulations.

Now, on to substance: there's been something about your post that's bothered me ever since. Your fundamental supposition is that when a military commander's mistakes can lead to the deaths of his subordinates, then he should be held responsible for them and relieved of command.

I understand the feeling that losing people should be a high burden and a huge black mark. But, well, everyone makes mistakes, and that's true during war just as much as in any other time. If we insist that our generals and admirals be perfect, we won't be able to come up with any admirals or generals.

There isn't a single major allied commander in WWII who didn't have at least one such blunder to his name. For instance, there was Halsey and Typhoon Cobra. Nimitz screwed up in not taking the reports of torpedo failures seriously enough early enough, defanging his submarine force for most of the first year of the war.

Spruance is often accused of not being sufficiently aggressive. MacArthur... well, the list of his mistakes is a long one.

And that was true in Europe, too.

It's been said that everyone makes mistakes in war, and the side that makes the fewest wins. But no one ever manages to get through with no mistakes at all.

If Nimitz had been as eager to can people for mistakes as you implied he should have been, then who would he have had as commanders by the end of the war?

Nimitz knew that mistakes were inevitable. But he also could tell that men like Marc Mitscher were valuable, and he  couldn't spare them even if they screwed up royally.

3 Where is, repeat, where is Task Force 34? The world wonders...

I don't know if that extends to whitewashing the record, though. It's one thing for high command to get accurate reports of a screw-up and then to decide that it doesn't merit disciplinary action. It's quite another if they just don't know what really happened because someone's CO covered their ass.

The Japanese had a bad case of that, especially when it came to cross-service information sharing. The Japanese army knew it was over-committed; the Japanese navy knew (after Midway, anyway) that it couldn't win in a standard fleet action. But each service thought the other was in much better condition than it was. Lots of "if only they had been honest with us!" in after-war comments. Of course, they lost the war...

4 Steven, Av's got the right of it... I AM more concerned about the "sweeping it under the rug" aspect and the blatant falsification of records than I am the "he made a mistake" aspect.

People make mistakes.  But it's fairly clear that Ring should never have been in the position of command that he had, it cost two squadrons of aircraft and many people their lives for no material gain against the enemy, and then for all intents and purposes he got rewarded and promoted for his failure.  That's what I have the biggest problem with.

5 Conga-rats!

1 Nice post! I didn't know about this.

2

Out-bloody-standing, my friend.  Now Ring is right down with "Swede" Larsen in the pantheon of screw-ups.

Nicely done and a smooth read.  Gotta love it.

3 I never thought of Swede Larsen as being a screw-up, oddly enough.  A martinet with delusions of godhood who couldn't command his way out of a wet paper bag yes, but not a screw-up.

4 I'd heard of references to this screw up once or twice, but I'd never seen a full detailed description like this.  I'm sure they're out there, but here you have a clean readable blog post with a good explanation of the facts and consequences.  Bravo!

5

It should be noted that Mitscher exerted a baneful influence on the planning of Hornet's air operations even before the battle was joined.  He had a major say in the poor coordination between the escort fighters and the bombers which would have led to major disaster had the Hornet's birds attacked the Japanese carriers.  And unlike Enterprise's George Murray, Mitscher did not redeem himself at all with his later actions through-out Midway for his earlier mistakes.

Even before Midway, the less than adequate performance of Air Group 8 had caused Bull Halsey to stand them down one day to conduct more training.

The performance of Hornet and Mitscher at Midway had ramfication for the latter during the war.  Raymond Spruance's style of command depended on giving wide latitude to trusted subordinates, which meant less well regarded officers like Mitscher (When Spruance was CO of 5th Fleet, and Mitscher ran the Fast Carrier Force.) were kept on a tight reign.  In Mitscher's case, that was probably a good move, since the man did not confine his mistakes to the decisions he made on Hornet.  That includes the mishandling of his crucial decision to turn on the lights at Philippine Sea.

Then we have William Halsey's performance as fleet and theater commander, but that is another story.

6 Great post - thanks!

7 Holy cow. I swear I've read and seen a lot of Midway stuff, and bitter stuff was mentioned about the coverup, but nobody ever explained what happened and who covered it up. Educational for sure.

Also, Bath and Body Works has pink sparkly light-up bath duckies. Goodness knows why, but they do. I will think of them as Twilight vampire ducks, in keeping with the Halloween items elsewhere in the store.

8

IIRC, Mitscher had already been tapped for a promotion to flag rank as well as a position in Washington by time Hornet sailed for Midway.  Since the US won the battle, the Powers That Be probably decided that there was little gain from sacking people (However deserving some were.).  And yes, his replacement as captain of the Hornet was aboard the carrier at Midway, but graciously delayed the change of command so not to create confusion and uncertainty on the eve of battle.

9 CXT, that's why I said he was Captain (Admiral select).  His next duty was as commander, Patrol Wing 2, not a Washington tour.  That didn't come until 1946.

10 My bad.  I realized that I somehow missed that piece.  And I had always thought that Mitscher had been scheduled for a post in the BuAer after Hornet.

11

Excellent job in tying all the threads together on something as complex as the Midway battle. I, too, had read Walter Lord's book as well as several other accounts, but had never read as nice a summary of Hornet's AG fubar as yours.  Bravo zulu, WD.

 

12 Excellent post, fun to read.  Really clarifies the mess. Parshall and Tully make the point in Shattered Sword that there was a real contribution to the battle by the VT-8 - it changed the course of the Kido Butai, which delayed search efforts for the American fleet.  Also, smoke laid by the cruisers and anti-aircraft fire may have helped Lindsey's squadron locate the Japanese ships a half-hour later.  Waldron's a real hero.

13 I enjoyed your article a lot, however, there are a few amplifying comments that are food for thought, if nothing else.  LCDR Waldron had the opportunity and did object to the course of attack selected by CMDR Ring at a meeting attended by the other three squadron commanders and CAPT Mitscher just prior to the launch of Air Group 8.  During that meeting, Waldron did strongly object to Ring's plan in favor of his own, but Mitscher himself ordered Waldron to follow Ring's plan.  I believe that it was Mitscher's and Ring's plan that the Hornet's planes were deliberately intended to fly practically due west to intercept the course of approach of the Kido Butai to Midway, well north of their reported location, and then to turn left as a group and parallel the course of the Kido Butai until they intersepted the Japanese carriers which would then be retiring from Midway.  Had this plan been followed by the entire air group, I think there is little doubt that the Japanese would have been sighted and attached by the entire air group.

Now, as far as the official report of the Hornet is concerned, it would have been very difficult if not impossible for Mitscher to have written that Waldron had not only disobeyed orders to maintain strict radio silence but also disregarded Mitscher's and Ring's specific orders to follow Ring's Plan of Attack, and not court martialed the dead hero, Waldron.  It would likewise have been difficult for Mitcher not to have court martialed at least two of the other three squadron commanders for also disregarding Ring's orders to continue with the original plan of attack.

14 Jim, that's quite correct.  Regarding your comments on the official report, however, I have two points.  First, I'm not at all sure you can court martial a dead man.  I can't find any record of it ever occurring in the US.  Second, while Mitscher may very well have had to charge Rodee, Johnson and Mitchell, at what point does simple self-preservation trump orders?  I find it hard to believe that the squadron leaders would be found guilty of disobeying orders when those orders were guaranteed to run their squadrons out of fuel.

Regarding your first point, VB-8 essentially followed that same flight profile.  They never sighted Kido Butai, and never really came near it.  Their nearest approach would have come around 1020 on the Weisheit map, approximately fifty miles.  VF-8 would be down to about 20 minutes of fuel, the Dauntless crews would have to assume they would be swimming home.  VT-8, carrying the torpedoes would, like as not, already be in the water.  If that really was Mitscher and Ring's flight plan, it probably would have cost the Hornet her entire Air Group for even less effect than what it actually managed, instead of half of it.

15

Thank you. I have been looking for a clear article on this and you have done a great job. I was hoping to do something on this for my website, but now I don't need to!.

My take is we needed heroes. we got them, but not necessarily the right ones.

 

Best,

Jay Hambleton

16 George J Walsh, next time just include a link instead of copying 1000 words from somewhere else.  Like this: Essay Here.

17 People, did you try to analyse or simply COUNT the data from that nice chart above?

For example, the distance between the point were VF-8 claimed turned about 0910 and point were they ditched at 1040 (1.5 hours) is not less than 266 nautical miles even along the straight line! It means not less than 177 knots speed during fighters' return leg! Almost 50 knots more than F4F-4 cruising speed! It was only one example, but the timings, distances and speeds of other "tracks" are even more fantastic than VF-8's ones.

So you can believe in that revisionist сonspiracy rubbish as much as you want, but I recommend you to read discussions on The Battle of Midway Roundtable website, were the Midway veterans of VS-8 and VB-8 disproved Weisheit's fantasies.

18 Oh, good grief. 

19 The Battle of Midway Roundtable?  I've heard of it... assuming you're talking about the same BOMRT that featured this very post in its "Now Hear This!" page in October 2011?  I appreciate that some of the veterans of the squadrons disagree with Weisheit; heck, in some instances I do, too.  But you're missing the point.

Arguing that the F4Fs of VF-8 didn't make it back to the Hornet, or weren't found to the northeast of Midway, or that the SBDs didn't leave Ring, or that Hornet's Air Group wasn't completely frittered away on a useless flight to nowhere, is ridiculous.  I grant that it's quite possible that the tracks on the map aren't exact... and that there's no way to prove the matter either way.  Given.

But Ring screwed up, from the beginning of the day to the end.  Mitscher screwed up, from the beginning of the day to the end.  What little after-action report was released from the Hornet was realized to be worthless, if not totally fictitious, by Nimitz. 

That's the point of this post, Midnike, not exactly where VF-8 came down, or when VS-8 turned back to the Hornet.  *shrug*  I apologize if you didn't get that from the post.  It'd be my fault if that wasn't clear enough.

1 Good post!  Of course, now I'm eagerly awaiting whatever you have to say about the Hornet's after action report.
One of the air museums up here has a Catalina on display.  Probably Tillamook, but it might be at Evergreen.  It's not as big in person as you'd expect, but then few of the World War II planes are.  I remember being amazed the first time I saw a B-17 static display sitting next to an F-15 or maybe an F-14 that was nearly the same size.
I'm now curious to learn how they handled certain inevitable events on a 20 hour mission on this plane and others that had similarly long missions in those days.

2 About how you'd expect, David.  I suspect the hatches on the dash-4 and before had more than one use.

3

A PBY had a galley and I'm pretty sure it had a toilet. Just a hole in the hull beneath the seat, of course.

But one of the things that the Dumbo missions used to do when they pulled a man out of the water was to serve him a hot meal.

4 By the way, thank you for this post. It's very good.

5 I found plenty of references to the galley... heck, TIME did an article on the "PBY Dumbo" back in 1945 that featured a lovely photo of a sailor  "making breakfast for his crew"... but I couldn't find a picture of the head arrangements to save my life.

Except in modern PBYs... there's one flying out of Durban that has a full bathroom (minus tub/shower) with a standard-looking commode.

I'm sure you're right, Steven, about the hole, except... well, flying boat.  Maybe they just went into the bilge.

6

Thanks, brother.  The Cat has always been near and dear to my heart (I just LOVE butt-ugly aircraft!) - and the thought of paintin' one black and hangin'  lousy-operating torps off it to hunt Nips at night freezes the marrow in my bones.  Do you know anywhere I could buy a ride?  Already have notched a Ford Trimotor, T-6, and B-17...

Now tell the story about Ring.  Swede Larsen already seems to have been a perfect rectum - and I'd like to see how Stanhope measures up to him.  Looking forward to your next posting.

7

Reading the post about the PBY (For those who do not know, 'Catalina' was the name the British gave the PBY when they started to receive them.  Unlike the Martlet, it stuck with the Americans.), I was reminded of one of the odder little tales to come out of the WW2, namely of the Dutch PBYs that spent time as part of Midway's aircraft complement following Pearl Harbor.  And it was a PBY of the Royal Canadian Air Force which located the Kido Butai when the Japanese started their first Indian Ocean Raid.

The Australian also used the PBY as airborne minelayer in the Solomons, New Guinea, and South-East Asia, as well as a covert transport for supply coastwatchers and other parties behind enemy lines.

C.T.

8

The British are responsible for a lot of the names we hold near and dear. They named the Mustang, for example. They were the ones that named most of our tanks e.g. Sherman, Sheridan, Grant, Lee.

That's because the US Army wasn't into those kinds of names early in the war. The US Navy was, though, and it was Americans that chose names like Hellcat and Corsair.

9 I didn't know that they had named the tanks too. And really, Lee? That's... possibly not 100% politic, no? It'd be like supplying a tank to Soviet Russia and calling it the Czar...

10

I do not believe the British ever used 'Sheridan' as the name of a tank.  They used 'Stuart' though, for the M3 light tanks.

As for whether it was politic - the US Army had already named some bases after Confederate officers (Fort Bragg comes to mind.), so why not name a tank after the one of the best? 

The US Navy was obviously different from the US Army in giving names, though it seemed to have adopted names a bit (Catalina, obviously, and IIRC, 'Helldiver' for the SB2C was suggested by the manufacturer.).

And related to what Wonderduck commented - as much as Stanhope Ring's performance left much to be desired at Midway, I would add Marc Mitscher as another officer who fell short.  The main difference between Mitscher and Ring was that Mitscher received a better reputation.

1

God BLESS it, I love the way your mind picks out subjects to write about.....  Now where's that article about Black Cats in the Pac Theatre?  (grin)

Keep up the good work - don't let the undergrad ducklings mess with your mojo...

2 Well done!

Alas, All I came here to give you was a link to a Music Video with a Cartoon Girl and a Rubber Duckie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1E_LgLaiRE

Which I found here in this article about an innovative 3-D display device in Japan.

http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2011/06/22/hatsune-miku-larger-than-life-5-centimeters-tall/

1 Nobody on our side. A not-insignificant portion of the Japanese high command committed suicide. One of them declared his intention to "live on in the noble spirit of the special attack" (think I'm quoting that right, anyway), hopped in a plane, and headed east, never to be heard from again. Certainly he didn't hit anyone.

The Japanese were pretty worried that some other hothead would decide to do something similar to MacArthur's fleet when it arrived. They went so far as to take all the propellers off the planes to prevent any last-minute stupidity.

2 Or Halsey's fleet, anyway. (MacArthur was Army...)

3 Not my phrase, was the one they used in Downfall. Granted that of course he was army and not in direct command of the naval vessels, but he was the one who'd been instructed to accept the surrender and to head up the occupation. And for all his many failings as a general, I don't know that we could have found a better man for that role.

4

Sadly, it was a fairly insignificant number of the Japanese high command who decided to die with honor - Dr. Edward Drea records that out of 1500 IJA generals, only 22 committed suicide. My read on the proportion of suicides in the IJN is fairly similar.  Too many of the rest were trying to destroy documents, or following the example of the Japanese foreign minister, trying to use the dropping of the atomic bombs to divert attention from Japanese atrocities and war crimes against Allied POWs and civilians (Allied and Asians.).

Some of them probably had second thoughts about not taking the honorably way out when it was their turn to face the hangman later on (Like the Japanese admiral commanding the Wake Island garrison, who found his attempt at covering up his war crimes to have failed utterly.).

5

Sorry, Avatar, but MacArthur is a sore spot for me.

MacArthur had the same virtues and flaws as Patton and Montgomery. All of them really were great battlefield commanders. All of them were charismatic, great leaders of men.

And all of them were deeply flawed because of their towering egos. You compare them to men who didn't have that kind of ego problems, like Nimitz and Bradley, and you can see that it wasn't an essential part of the makeup of great leaders.

MacArthur's ego made him do stupid things. It ultimately led to him being relieved in Korea by Truman, and if anything Truman was preternaturally patient with the man and put that off. (And Ridgway, who took over, actually fought a smarter and more effective war than MacArthur had.)

His campaign in New Guinea was by all accounts brilliant, considering his terrible logistics and the beastly conditions, and in fact the ground operations during the reconquest of Luzon etc were brilliant, too. But the man simply wouldn't keep his mouth shut.

And I have to give him credit for his performance during the post-war occupation of Japan. There were so many things he did well; but his flaws and his mistakes just stick in my craw.

Referring to it as "MacArthur's fleet" seems typical, because MacArthur was a glory hound and it would have been in character for him to take credit for that.

6 Don't get me wrong, I'm no more of a Mac lover than you are. I don't even really give him the credit for generalship. The histories I've read generally credit him for bungling the defense of the Philippines (not that they expected him to hold it, to be sure, but his defensive plans ensured that most of the troops ended up in Bataan with most of the supplies outside it, and were responsible for a good amount of the misery the soldiers suffered.) They weren't any kinder to him when it came to the crossing of the Owen Stanley range ("reminiscent of the worst generalship of the First World War", one wrote).

I'll grant that he knew how to use amphibious landings to his advantage. But his actual generalship wasn't any better than indifferent, at least not until later in the war, by which point he was facing isolated Japanese outposts that he could bypass when necessary. And his political interference simply had no place in the proper conduct of an officer. There's also the matter of all that Filipino money that he ended up with...

Shoot, now I wanna do a MacArthur post.

1

I love the pic of the Mitchell behind it.  Wonder if it was set up with all the .50s for strafing....

 

(To mis-quote the Joker) "Where do you get all the marvelous pictures??

2 T.O.M., a lot of the time finding the "marvelous pictures" are just luck.  For example, I first saw a pic of the Muroc Maru while doing research for my USS Wasp post, and said "that's cool, I'll remember that."  Over a year later, World War II magazine used the same photo (the color one) in one of their contests, which rekindled my interest in the topic.  So I went digging and found the others.

Usually there's a lot of googling involved.  I've already put in a solid three hours on the upcoming PBY post, looking for suitable pics.  Sometimes, they're only available in a book... at which point I break out my trusty camera.

So it goes.

3 I think the Starblazers are going to have trouble turning that into a starship.

4 Space Target Muroc Maru!

5

Seeing photos of the Muroc Maru reminds me of all the cool, weird, and just-plain-strike-your-fancy photos from WW2 I remembered over the years.  Other than the obvious one (The Flag of Suribachi.), the one that immediately comes to mind is the photos taken aboard the ZUIKAKU just before her crew started going over the side at Cape Engano.  I am sure other people have other photos that come to mind.

C.T.