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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.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.
Resp: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.
Deceleration?? Has auto-correct claimed another victim (and misspelled itself)? What a declaration!The failure to deliver the deceleration of war in a timely fashion was perhaps one of Japan's greatest blunders of the Pacific war
Yeah, this damned phone has an autocorrect that drives me insane.Deceleration?? Has auto-correct claimed another victim (and misspelled itself)? What a declaration!
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.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.
Resp: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.
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.)could have been easily moved into striking range.had the USN known the location of the Japanese fleet
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.1941 was a time where scouting aircraft still ruled the day.
Technically speaking, there was one aircrew that survived, for a short while.One aspect is that all IJN aircrew shot down were all killed. Not a single survivor.
The only PoW was from a midget sub.
Well I for one am interested. This a new one for me. What happened to him?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.
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.
Wow. Quite the chain of events. Can't believe I've never seen anything about that before.
Wow. Quite the chain of events. Can't believe I've never seen anything about that before.