7 ms·

They talk about it in the movie "Midway" (2019). It's definitely one of those things a lot of people thought was embellished to make the incoming battle of Midw

They talk about it in the movie "Midway" (2019). It's definitely one of those things a lot of people thought was embellished to make the incoming battle of Midway look more drastic. However it was absolutely true. Without the dive bombers and code breaking they were able to do in the lead up Midway would have been a disaster for the Americans.

DuskStar 7y ago
Ehhh. There's a lot of people that seem to think that Midway would have been a disaster for the US if they lost, but there's not much reason behind this. The only thing the US was really risking that had a significant strategic impact were the carriers - if the island of Midway fell it would have been essentially unsupportable by Japanese forces (being far past Japan's supply lines, when Japan was already facing logistical issues, and within B-17 range of bases in Hawaii) and even the carriers weren't absolutely critical must-not-lose assets for the US like they were for Japan. (The US commissioned 8 carriers in the year following Midway - four Essex class fleet carriers and four Independence class light carriers) Incidentally, this is part of why Midway was such a huge strategic blunder for the Japanese forces - it risked 2/3rds of their carriers for minimal gain. If Midway fell, it would have extended the war another few months. But I'm not sure that that really qualifies as a disaster.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
  > The only thing the US was really risking that had a significant strategic impact were the carriers Yeah, that thing Japan bombed Pearl Harbor over....
  - Evil_Saint 7y ago
    They bombed Pearl Harbor knowing that no carriers were docked there at the time. American carriers were not the main objective of the attack. You have to realize carriers were relatively new and not a known commodity like they are today.
    - DuskStar 7y ago
      And at the same time, carriers were counted as powerful enough to make the opening moves of the war. I don't think Japan was happy to discover that they'd missed all of the US's carriers. I think I've read that Yamato was furious, in fact.
      - jcranmer 7y ago
        The strike Pearl Harbor did achieve all of Japan's objectives: it prevented the US Navy from rushing to the Philippines' defense or otherwise thwarting their 1941-1942 conquests in Australasia. The IJN was still planning on having their decisive battle strategy, in which the US Navy would be decisively defeated in a pitched battleship battle, where carriers would not matter because carriers are not effective ships of the line, instead being good for scouting missions or harassing of incoming forces. Ironically, they still held to this strategy in 1944, and attacked the US Navy in the Battle of Leyte Gulf to force their missing decisive battle, using their carrier fleet entirely as a decoy force. Even after there had been only one battleship action in the entirety of the Pacific war to this point, with all other major naval battles involving only the carriers on one or both sides.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  6-12 months of Japanese free reign in the Pacific might've led to conditions in which the US would've pursued a negotiated peace, though.
  - mynameishere 7y ago
    6-12 years of Japanese total domination in the Pacific would have led to their eventual defeat. Their probability of victory was zero from day one of the war.
    - DuskStar 7y ago
      I'd say it was zero as soon as they gave the US such a large piece of internal propaganda (the attack on Pearl Harbor). Without that, and without a declaration of war, Japan might have been able to ignore US forces in the Pacific. Getting the US to attack Japan in response to attacks on countries full of lesser peoples would have been a difficult proposition, and the willingness to fight on through the slog that the South Pacific became might not have been there. But after Pearl Harbor...
- Spooky23 7y ago
  The Japanese wouldn’t be able to sustain a US invasion, but they would have conquered Australia and would probably have forced the US out of the Pacific war. That was the gamble. Success in 1942 meant Japanese domination of the entire Pacific, including areas of the Soviet Union.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    Ironically, if Japan had committed all 6 fleet carriers to the South Pacific in early 1942, they might have been able to conquer Australia. Instead they split them - two to the South Pacific, to be damaged in the Battle of the Coral Sea, and then the four remaining operational carriers to Midway. Had all 6 shown up at Midway... Things probably would have gone differently. The things that show up in hindsight, of course.
    - AlexCoventry 7y ago
      I don't know that conquering Australia would have done them much good, though. It would have been hard for them to hang on to it. They might have stood a better chance of they'd concentrated on their original plan to grab oil in the Dutch Easy Indies.
  - jcranmer 7y ago
    > Success in 1942 meant Japanese domination of the entire Pacific, including areas of the Soviet Union. Japan and the Soviet Union did not go to war with each other until August 1945.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      Sure, because "Success in 1942" didn't happen. It might've happened if Midway had gone differently.
      - jcranmer 7y ago
        I'm still dubious. Adding a new theater to the war when your other theaters are already stalling without a decisive victory is generally not a winning measure. The naval victory is only at best a temporary reprieve: the US is going to replace all its lost carriers within a year, and is similarly going to replace all the capital units [1] it lost at Pearl Harbor by that time. The Japanese didn't think themselves capable of mounting an invasion of the USSR before about mid-1943, by which point it was beginning to feel pressure on other fronts, and the IJA would start raiding the Manchurian army groups for manpower to keep from losing on the fronts they were already engaged in. [1] Again, recall that to Japanese strategic thinking at this time, it's the battleship strength that matters. Carriers are just a sideshow.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Strategically crucial in a Pacific that had seen most everything the Japan side of Midway fall. If Midway had fallen, New Guinea, Coral Sea and Fiji were next in line, putting Australia and New Zealand at risk. What you call minimal gain would, had Yamamoto's plan come off, have put over 60% of the Pacific under Imperial Japanese control. US would have been fighting their way across the Pacific, island to island at a range that no longer permitted bombing the mainland of Japan. Which, as seen at the end of the war, was subject to colossal losses.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    You're assuming that Japan could have kept Midway resupplied, let alone defended it. From what I understand, that's very questionable. Midway wasn't keeping Japan contained in the South Pacific - the two were as militarily separated as Midway and the Aleutians. Japan probably could have taken the South Pacific in early 1942, in fact - but instead divided her fleet carriers up piecemeal, available to be defeated in detail.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      No it wasn't keeping them contained, but it was an attempt to draw out the US carriers. Had the US lost Midway and Japan not got bogged down in the endless, unwinnable campaign in the Solomons that absorbed endless Japanese resources, Yamamoto's plan may have worked as his stepping stone to Hawaii. Only Midway and they probably couldn't have kept it... Had they got to Hawaii, I'm not sure Japan would have cared much about the atoll. As it was, with help in the Solomons, Midway turned the war in the Pacific. Least that's how I understand it, though I've certainly read more of the war in Europe. :)
      - DuskStar 7y ago
        My understanding is that while the US losing her carriers at Midway would have allowed Japan free reign in the South Pacific for a few months, that was already the case for anywhere that all 6 fleet carriers showed up. Nothing the US had - combined, worldwide - could match those 6. Killing the US carriers at Midway was just to turn it from a 6v3 to a 6v0 - instead it ended up 2v2, but so goes war. Japan invading Hawaii would have caused a famine if they succeeded - it'd be even harder to keep supplied than Midway, but with dozens of times the population. In my opinion Midway marked the turning point of the war in the Pacific, but that turning point was inevitable as long as the US could credibly say "we're going to commission 6 fleet carriers with a full suite of aircraft over a 12 month period". There's a great video here [0] that illustrates the differences in production over the course of the war. For instance, the US commissioned 17 fleet carriers and 9 light carriers from 1941 on - Japan commissioned 7 and 1, respectively. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ag2x3CS9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ag2x3CS9M
- leftyted 7y ago
  > There's a lot of people that seem to think that Midway would have been a disaster for the US if they lost, but there's not much reason behind this. The only thing the US was really risking that had a significant strategic impact were the carriers - if the island of Midway fell it would have been essentially unsupportable by Japanese forces (being far past Japan's supply lines, when Japan was already facing logistical issues, and within B-17 range of bases in Hawaii) and even the carriers weren't absolutely critical must-not-lose assets for the US like they were for Japan. The Japanese were well aware of this. The Battle of Midway was not an attempt by the Japanese to capture Midway but rather to lure the American Pacific Fleet into a trap and to destroy its carriers. Ironically the direct reverse of that happened.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    Oh, of course - that's why the Pacific fleet not taking the battle would have left Midway as a minor loss for Japan.
- csours 7y ago
  I agree about the material (and materiel, heh) impact, but I wonder about the psychological impact. The US could absolutely outproduce and eventually outfight the Japanese, but how would the populace react to the loss of 3 carriers?
  - AlexCoventry 7y ago
    Yeah, it's easy to forget now how demoralized the US was for the first six months or so. Japan was really kicking ass at first.
InTheArena 7y ago
Midway was surprisingly accurate.

DuskStar 7y ago

Ehhh. There's a lot of people that seem to think that Midway would have been a disaster for the US if they lost, but there's not much reason behind this. The only thing the US was really risking that had a significant strategic impact were the carriers - if the island of Midway fell it would have been essentially unsupportable by Japanese forces (being far past Japan's supply lines, when Japan was already facing logistical issues, and within B-17 range of bases in Hawaii) and even the carriers weren't absolutely critical must-not-lose assets for the US like they were for Japan. (The US commissioned 8 carriers in the year following Midway - four Essex class fleet carriers and four Independence class light carriers) Incidentally, this is part of why Midway was such a huge strategic blunder for the Japanese forces - it risked 2/3rds of their carriers for minimal gain. If Midway fell, it would have extended the war another few months. But I'm not sure that that really qualifies as a disaster.

WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
> The only thing the US was really risking that had a significant strategic impact were the carriers Yeah, that thing Japan bombed Pearl Harbor over....
- Evil_Saint 7y ago
  They bombed Pearl Harbor knowing that no carriers were docked there at the time. American carriers were not the main objective of the attack. You have to realize carriers were relatively new and not a known commodity like they are today.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    And at the same time, carriers were counted as powerful enough to make the opening moves of the war. I don't think Japan was happy to discover that they'd missed all of the US's carriers. I think I've read that Yamato was furious, in fact.
    - jcranmer 7y ago
      The strike Pearl Harbor did achieve all of Japan's objectives: it prevented the US Navy from rushing to the Philippines' defense or otherwise thwarting their 1941-1942 conquests in Australasia. The IJN was still planning on having their decisive battle strategy, in which the US Navy would be decisively defeated in a pitched battleship battle, where carriers would not matter because carriers are not effective ships of the line, instead being good for scouting missions or harassing of incoming forces. Ironically, they still held to this strategy in 1944, and attacked the US Navy in the Battle of Leyte Gulf to force their missing decisive battle, using their carrier fleet entirely as a decoy force. Even after there had been only one battleship action in the entirety of the Pacific war to this point, with all other major naval battles involving only the carriers on one or both sides.
ceejayoz 7y ago
6-12 months of Japanese free reign in the Pacific might've led to conditions in which the US would've pursued a negotiated peace, though.
- mynameishere 7y ago
  6-12 years of Japanese total domination in the Pacific would have led to their eventual defeat. Their probability of victory was zero from day one of the war.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    I'd say it was zero as soon as they gave the US such a large piece of internal propaganda (the attack on Pearl Harbor). Without that, and without a declaration of war, Japan might have been able to ignore US forces in the Pacific. Getting the US to attack Japan in response to attacks on countries full of lesser peoples would have been a difficult proposition, and the willingness to fight on through the slog that the South Pacific became might not have been there. But after Pearl Harbor...
Spooky23 7y ago
The Japanese wouldn’t be able to sustain a US invasion, but they would have conquered Australia and would probably have forced the US out of the Pacific war. That was the gamble. Success in 1942 meant Japanese domination of the entire Pacific, including areas of the Soviet Union.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  Ironically, if Japan had committed all 6 fleet carriers to the South Pacific in early 1942, they might have been able to conquer Australia. Instead they split them - two to the South Pacific, to be damaged in the Battle of the Coral Sea, and then the four remaining operational carriers to Midway. Had all 6 shown up at Midway... Things probably would have gone differently. The things that show up in hindsight, of course.
  - AlexCoventry 7y ago
    I don't know that conquering Australia would have done them much good, though. It would have been hard for them to hang on to it. They might have stood a better chance of they'd concentrated on their original plan to grab oil in the Dutch Easy Indies.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  > Success in 1942 meant Japanese domination of the entire Pacific, including areas of the Soviet Union. Japan and the Soviet Union did not go to war with each other until August 1945.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    Sure, because "Success in 1942" didn't happen. It might've happened if Midway had gone differently.
    - jcranmer 7y ago
      I'm still dubious. Adding a new theater to the war when your other theaters are already stalling without a decisive victory is generally not a winning measure. The naval victory is only at best a temporary reprieve: the US is going to replace all its lost carriers within a year, and is similarly going to replace all the capital units [1] it lost at Pearl Harbor by that time. The Japanese didn't think themselves capable of mounting an invasion of the USSR before about mid-1943, by which point it was beginning to feel pressure on other fronts, and the IJA would start raiding the Manchurian army groups for manpower to keep from losing on the fronts they were already engaged in. [1] Again, recall that to Japanese strategic thinking at this time, it's the battleship strength that matters. Carriers are just a sideshow.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Strategically crucial in a Pacific that had seen most everything the Japan side of Midway fall. If Midway had fallen, New Guinea, Coral Sea and Fiji were next in line, putting Australia and New Zealand at risk. What you call minimal gain would, had Yamamoto's plan come off, have put over 60% of the Pacific under Imperial Japanese control. US would have been fighting their way across the Pacific, island to island at a range that no longer permitted bombing the mainland of Japan. Which, as seen at the end of the war, was subject to colossal losses.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  You're assuming that Japan could have kept Midway resupplied, let alone defended it. From what I understand, that's very questionable. Midway wasn't keeping Japan contained in the South Pacific - the two were as militarily separated as Midway and the Aleutians. Japan probably could have taken the South Pacific in early 1942, in fact - but instead divided her fleet carriers up piecemeal, available to be defeated in detail.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    No it wasn't keeping them contained, but it was an attempt to draw out the US carriers. Had the US lost Midway and Japan not got bogged down in the endless, unwinnable campaign in the Solomons that absorbed endless Japanese resources, Yamamoto's plan may have worked as his stepping stone to Hawaii. Only Midway and they probably couldn't have kept it... Had they got to Hawaii, I'm not sure Japan would have cared much about the atoll. As it was, with help in the Solomons, Midway turned the war in the Pacific. Least that's how I understand it, though I've certainly read more of the war in Europe. :)
    - DuskStar 7y ago
      My understanding is that while the US losing her carriers at Midway would have allowed Japan free reign in the South Pacific for a few months, that was already the case for anywhere that all 6 fleet carriers showed up. Nothing the US had - combined, worldwide - could match those 6. Killing the US carriers at Midway was just to turn it from a 6v3 to a 6v0 - instead it ended up 2v2, but so goes war. Japan invading Hawaii would have caused a famine if they succeeded - it'd be even harder to keep supplied than Midway, but with dozens of times the population. In my opinion Midway marked the turning point of the war in the Pacific, but that turning point was inevitable as long as the US could credibly say "we're going to commission 6 fleet carriers with a full suite of aircraft over a 12 month period". There's a great video here [0] that illustrates the differences in production over the course of the war. For instance, the US commissioned 17 fleet carriers and 9 light carriers from 1941 on - Japan commissioned 7 and 1, respectively. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ag2x3CS9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ag2x3CS9M
leftyted 7y ago
> There's a lot of people that seem to think that Midway would have been a disaster for the US if they lost, but there's not much reason behind this. The only thing the US was really risking that had a significant strategic impact were the carriers - if the island of Midway fell it would have been essentially unsupportable by Japanese forces (being far past Japan's supply lines, when Japan was already facing logistical issues, and within B-17 range of bases in Hawaii) and even the carriers weren't absolutely critical must-not-lose assets for the US like they were for Japan. The Japanese were well aware of this. The Battle of Midway was not an attempt by the Japanese to capture Midway but rather to lure the American Pacific Fleet into a trap and to destroy its carriers. Ironically the direct reverse of that happened.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  Oh, of course - that's why the Pacific fleet not taking the battle would have left Midway as a minor loss for Japan.
csours 7y ago
I agree about the material (and materiel, heh) impact, but I wonder about the psychological impact. The US could absolutely outproduce and eventually outfight the Japanese, but how would the populace react to the loss of 3 carriers?
- AlexCoventry 7y ago
  Yeah, it's easy to forget now how demoralized the US was for the first six months or so. Japan was really kicking ass at first.

InTheArena 7y ago

Midway was surprisingly accurate.