Getting P-40 into the air quickly

[michael rauls]

That's not how it worked in real life. Even with cap the IJN lost 4 carriers at Midway and the US lost Lexington at Coral Sea, Yorktown at Midway and Hornet at Santa Cruz.
70 years later everything seems easy.

At the risk of stating the obvious I think it's kind of a case of how well the CAP is performed. If performed well it has a good chance of being successful if in sufficient numbers. If not maybe not so much.

 

[The Basket]

The Zero CAP at Midway was effective considering and they took attack after attack. Yes it failed eventually but that was not the fault of the CAP.

The Pearl Harbour attacks.... I spell harbour with a U... Heehee... Was not to destroy but to send a message. As far as the Japanese were concerned, the attack met the Japanese goals perfectly.

 

[Navalwarrior]

The Zero CAP at Midway was effective considering and they took attack after attack. Yes it failed eventually but that was not the fault of the CAP.

The Pearl Harbour attacks.... I spell harbour with a U... Heehee... Was not to destroy but to send a message. As far as the Japanese were concerned, the attack met the Japanese goals perfectly.

Resp:
Not sure why you would drop bombs if not to destroy. If I remember correctly, aircraft carriers were targets on their list. The message the Americans got at Pearl Harbour was 'come fight,' and come they did!

 

[GrauGeist]

The idea was both to incapacitate the Pacific fleet as much as possible to buy time for their other operations and capitalize on the American public's growing anti-war sentiment.

The failure to deliver the deceleration of war in a timely fashion was perhaps one of Japan's greatest blunders of the Pacific war.

 

[XBe02Drvr]

The failure to deliver the deceleration of war in a timely fashion was perhaps one of Japan's greatest blunders of the Pacific war

Deceleration?? Has auto-correct claimed another victim (and misspelled itself)? What a declaration!

 

[GrauGeist]

Deceleration?? Has auto-correct claimed another victim (and misspelled itself)? What a declaration!

Yeah, this damned phone has an autocorrect that drives me insane.
Constantly having to redo my text only to have it change again as I post - then I have to go back and edit the post and hope it stays when I hit "save".

I'll be glad when I can use my computer again...

 

[Greg Boeser]

There is no big red button to push. This is the era of telephone exchanges and switchboard operators. If you've ever used a party line telephone system you'll understand how slow it is. There are no hot lines to the navy in fact they wouldn't want it. The navy never told the army when they would be flying in from carriers and vice versa. Foreign enemies may change with time but the army and navy will always have each other. The US radios all through 1942 were absolute crap so they were no help.
There simply isn't any system in place to communicate.
As for interception the sky is a very big place and if you aren't in the right position the interception doesn't happen. Shooting the enemy down after the bombs have fallen isn't all that useful. In fact one of the problems both the USN and the INJ had was the tendency of fighter pilots to chase after the empty bombers rather than waiting for the next wave of attackers
Just getting aircraft into the sky isn't enough. I suggest you read Friedman's Fighter Over the Fleet and you realize that interception was not easy.

Wake Island had plenty of warning and had a CAP of four planes in the air when they were attacked at noon. The Japanese attacked out of a low cloud bank and destroyed every plane on the ground without the CAP ever seeing them.

 

[The Basket]

Japaness goals at Pearl Harbour was
Sink battleship and freedom of action for 6 months.
Done and done and without a single loss of a ship.

Even if Japan utterly turned Pearl Harbour into a glass carpark it wouldn't matter because time wise American would win any war. Only a short sharp shock followed by capitulation would be a victory. Plus the Japanese would follow up the copy Port Authur by doing a copy Tsushima on any American fleet foolish to meet the Kido Butai. Destroying the fuel depots would ruin the chances of the Mahanesque decisive battle.

Without radar interception or fighter control then its mk 1 human eyeball time and a bit of cloud is all it takes.

Low altitude CAP and high altitude CAP. If you got no form of early warning then CAP all you got. So while not perfect it's better than waiting for bombs to fall.

 

[Navalwarrior]

Japaness goals at Pearl Harbour was
Sink battleship and freedom of action for 6 months.
Done and done and without a single loss of a ship.

Even if Japan utterly turned Pearl Harbour into a glass carpark it wouldn't matter because time wise American would win any war. Only a short sharp shock followed by capitulation would be a victory. Plus the Japanese would follow up the copy Port Authur by doing a copy Tsushima on any American fleet foolish to meet the Kido Butai. Destroying the fuel depots would ruin the chances of the Mahanesque decisive battle.

Without radar interception or fighter control then its mk 1 human eyeball time and a bit of cloud is all it takes.

Low altitude CAP and high altitude CAP. If you got no form of early warning then CAP all you got. So while not perfect it's better than waiting for bombs to fall.

Resp:
I seem to remember something about 'where are their carriers?' in their planned attack.

 

[GrauGeist]

At 1:20 a.m. on 7 December, Admiral Nagumo received a message sent to him by Takeo Yoshikawa, an IJN officer working undercover at the Japanese Consulate in Honolulu.

The message read:
"Vessels moored in harbor: 9 battleships; 3 class B cruisers; 3 seaplane tenders, 17 destroyers. Entering harbor are 4 class B cruisers; 3 destroyers. All aircraft carriers and heavy cruisers have departed harbor….No indication of any changes in U.S. Fleet or anything unusual."

So Nagumo knew the carriers weren't there - which is why he made the decision to cancel the third strike, because he knew the carriers were out there somewhere. And rightly so, the Enterprise, which was approaching Oahu, was perhaps the closest and could have been easily moved into striking range.had the USN known the location of the Japanese fleet.

 

[XBe02Drvr]

could have been easily moved into striking range.had the USN known the location of the Japanese fleet

And if anybody had had the presence of mind to interrogate those two lowly privates who'd been on the radar that morning, history might have been different. (That is if the Army and the Navy could unbend enough to talk to each other.)
Cheers,
Wes

 

[GrauGeist]

The radar pattern would have confirmed the direction of ingress and egress of the attack waves, but the IJN's task Force would have been well out of the radar's range.

1941 was a time where scouting aircraft still ruled the day.

 

[The Basket]

One of the biggest errors when we consider the Pearl Attack is that it was a military attack. It wasn't. It was a political message or statement saying basically stay out of our business.

The goal was not the destruction of this and that but to keep America out of the war.

One aspect of the Pearl Harbour attack especially the 2nd wave is how haphazard and uncoordinated the attacks were. So Olklahoma and West Virginia took half of the torpedoes fired in the first wave. And USS Shaw which was a destroyer was targeted by 15 Vals!

The Utah was attacked and it was believed to been attacked because that's where a carrier normally would have been. So even if they had Intel of no carriers then why attack the Utah? Again the Utah was poor target selection.

One aspect is that all IJN aircrew shot down were all killed. Not a single survivor.
The only PoW was from a midget sub.

 

[XBe02Drvr]

1941 was a time where scouting aircraft still ruled the day.

And if those scouting aircraft had gone out along the axis of the incoming attack they would have found Kido Butai. Catalinas have longer legs than carrier planes.
Cheers,
Wes

 

[GrauGeist]

One aspect is that all IJN aircrew shot down were all killed. Not a single survivor.
The only PoW was from a midget sub.

Technically speaking, there was one aircrew that survived, for a short while.

A1C Nishikaichi landed his shot up A6M2 on Ni'ihau. The events that followed were certainly most interesting.

 

[michael rauls]

Technically speaking, there was one aircrew that survived, for a short while.

A1C Nishikaichi landed his shot up A6M2 on Ni'ihau. The events that followed were certainly most interesting.

Well I for one am interested. This a new one for me. What happened to him?

 

[fubar57]

Remembering Pearl Harbor: the Ni'ihau Incident

 

[Ivan1GFP]

The Zero CAP at Midway was effective considering and they took attack after attack. Yes it failed eventually but that was not the fault of the CAP.

The Pearl Harbour attacks.... I spell harbour with a U... Heehee... Was not to destroy but to send a message. As far as the Japanese were concerned, the attack met the Japanese goals perfectly.

Hello The Basket, et al.

I contend that the Japanese CAP at Midway was NOT effective.
Here is why:
Although they were able to meet attack after attack and had the fuel to remain flying for an extended time, they did not have the ability to sustain combat for an extended time. The A6M2 only carries 60 rounds for each 20 mm wing cannon and about 650 rounds for each 7.7 mm MG. The problem is that the 20 mm is gone after 7 seconds of sustained fire. After that, it is a matter of trying to knock down attackers with a pair of rifle caliber MGs.

- Ivan.

 

[michael rauls]

Remembering Pearl Harbor: the Ni'ihau Incident

Wow. Quite the chain of events. Can't believe I've never seen anything about that before.

 

[Ivan1GFP]

Wow. Quite the chain of events. Can't believe I've never seen anything about that before.

I have always thought that THIS action was the basis for the internment of Japanese-Americans during the war.

- Ivan.