Impact of USAAC strike on Formosa, Dec 1941

Ad: This forum contains affiliate links to products on Amazon and eBay. More information in Terms and rules

Come on you'd have to suspect they're lined up so perfect for a inspection by some high ranking officer.
You can see some of the revetments they're probably normally parked in in the background.
 
While the Army played a big role, given the significant jar head involvement in the Pacific campaign, perhaps a USMC General with amphibious warfare expertise would have been the better pick.
 
According to IJNAF aircrew and aviation officers, the departure for the Clark Field raid was delayed for several hours by WOXOF conditions all over Formosa. (Sky obscured, Indefinite ceiling, visibility zero in fog) NOBODY was going to takeoff, land, bomb, or fight under such conditions. CAT III takeoffs and landings didn't exist back then, despite Jimmy Doolittle, nor did radar bombsights.
If MacArthur had launched a B17 strike against Formosa ASAP, it probably would have arrived, unescorted, just as the first CAPs were being launched from the IJNAF fighter fields, and the surviving B17s would have led the Japanese strike force back to Clark.
But for all this to happen, MacArthur would have to have first perceived an imminent threat from Formosa ("Rickety Jap bombers don't have the range to do it; let's face it, they aren't B17s! And no fighter in the world could fly such a mission.") And second, for it to succeed timing-wise, he would need accurate and up to date weather info from Formosa. An attack there would likely draw the unwelcome attention of a carrier task force. Better to keep airborne patrols with the limited fuel available and wait for Intel info.
 
You said it better than I, especially the political angle. Thanks.
Not unlike the IJA and IJN sending "political hot potato" officers off to the Kwantung Army or Combined Fleet to put distance between them and Tokyo.
 
According to David Roll, Marshall had very mixed feelings about MacArthur.

Eisenhower's feelings appear to have been along the lines of "Die, die, die." He wanted MacArthur court-martialed for disobeying orders during the Bonus Army massacre.

 
rednev said:
Vision down thru fog is often not to bad . lots of landing accidents caused by pilots
thinking vision was good enough to land only to find once they where in it forward vision
was bad
So maybe the bombers can be effective maybe not
Click to expand...
I've flown in near WOXOF conditions, and you can't see down through it at all. On still mornings between Labor Day and Halloween our field was often blanketed with five hundred to a thousand feet of pea soup fog until about 10 AM.. Coming over the hills on the way to work I could verify the thickness of the layer and that it was clear above. By 8 AM it was usually thinned enough at the surface to see three stripes down the runway, so if I had a commercial or instrument student, we'd get an IFR to VFR on top clearance and my student would get a little IMC time and a practice instrument departure procedure. If it was really thick, we would make a fast taxi up and down the runway to stir up the air a little and check for deer.
Beats the hell out of some of the new hire FOs we got later at the airline from the "pilot factories" who had practically no "actual" IFR and never made an instrument takeoff.
 
That's why I like to fly on Air Canada or Westjet, as these pilots have probably flown in pretty much every condition. I remember as a passenger in an AC Beech 1900 flying from Fredericton, NB to Halifax, NS and it being total fog. In those days there was no cockpit door, not even a curtain IIRC as I could see straight out, same view as our apparent teenaged pilot's. IDK if those little planes have all the computer pilot assists that the larger ones have, but I was impressed by the seemingly uneventful landing.
 
For about a year and a half in the mid '80's the company I worked for sent me on what you might call the golden triangle, TPA - DTW - DFW and back to TPA or any combination thereof. I was in or out of one of those airports every two weeks or so.

In and out of Tampa = Sunshine and rainbows

In and out of Detroit = Well, depends, there was many a takeoff where you could barely see the wing tips through the snow storm it seemed. And as I'm sure Wes can tell you, landings where the ice has supposed to have been cleared from the runway...

DALLAS = Biggest scare of my life on an airliner. Had been riding a DC-9 from Tampa to Dallas/Ft. Worth sitting next to a pilot friend who was also on the trip. Turning on final I believe we hit a microburst and felt the plane stalling/falling to the right, we both looked out the opposite (low side) window and could see the ground coming straight for us, my buddy's only comment was "Oh shit". The pilot was a pro I can tell you that, apparently had enough altitude and power on to recover. Scared the living shit out of me, probably the flight crew as well.

Two or three months later Delta Flight 191 hit a microburst and crashed. Delta Air Lines Flight 191 - Wikipedia

I quit that company at the end of the year and I've pretty much driven anywhere now, after quitting them I've stepped foot on an airliner only once and that was in 1996 because I had to for a funeral in Michigan and it would have taken too long to drive (short notice).
 
My condolences. Riding in the back of a 1900 is no fun, but they sure are fun to fly. Nearly half of my 13,000 hours is in 1900s, all of it in the northcountry. I started my instrument training in Florida, but did most of it in Vermont in the wintertime, and am I ever glad I did!
Last of the simple automation-free commuter airliners, none of our 1900s even had an autopilot, except UB1, N6667L, the original Beech prototype for the airliner version of the plane. It had gobs of power for its weight and really responsive flight controls, almost a "Walter Mitty fighter plane". At anything less than max landing weight we could land on Rwy 33R at Logan (KBOS), which is only 2 1/2 carrier decks long, and no, we didn't have a tailhook. When ATC asked, we could shed 5,000 feet of altitude and 50 Kts airspeed muy pronto, a tall order for most airliners, but easy for us, and without upsetting the folks in back. Very useful when operating in a busy terminal environment. We could also accelerate and climb quickly, which controllers found useful to fill gaps in traffic and keep the airport's arrival/departure rate up. It was also highly stable in approach configuration, and easy to fly on non-precision approaches as well as the ILS.
The only fly in the ointment was that impressive "greaser" landings were difficult to achieve, as the props would dump to ground idle the instant the right main touched down, causing a sudden increase in drag and a thumping settle onto the oleo struts. You got real good at touching down one or two degrees left wing low and keeping the right off until most of the weight had settled on the left strut, then EASE the right one down. Takes practice, which we got plenty of, averaging 8-12 legs a day, and sometimes 14 or 15. Those were the days!
 
Admiral Beez said:
X XBe02Drvr nice. Thanks for sharing. Here's pretty much the view I had, not my vid.

Click to expand...
That's the D model. Lap of luxury compared to the Cs we flew. A "stand up" (ha, ha!) cabin, winglets, and more comfortable seating, as well as not having that annoying prop pitch change on touchdown.
Our C models had a cabin height four inches less than the length of my legs, so I had to walk down the aisle folded over in a knees-bent crouch, and crewmembers deadheading out to relieve a crew at an outstation were expected to sit in the three-across bench seat at the aft cabin bulkhead. Three full size adults strapped into a 60 inch wide bench seat had better be pretty good friends! On one memorable trip across the adirondacks on a bumpy summer day I had to share the bench seat with the chief pilot of our big airplane division (who I had originally taught to fly years before) and her husband (a USAIR pilot). He and I are both big guys, and the plane's yaw damper was MEL'd inop, so the plane was waddling violently in the turbulence, she was being slammed from both sides, and people were tossing their cookies right and left. When my FO and I climbed into our plane to take over, the off-going crew took one sniff and said "Whew, where the hell have you guys been, a vomitorium?"
Ayup.
 
Last edited:
The 27 B-17Cs and Ds were a large collection for the time, maybe the largest in the world at the time. The C and D model Fortresses were faster and better high altitude performance than the "E"models that were coming off the line at that time. Only through a mixture of exceptional luck and airmanship could an A6M21 pilot shoot down a B-17C or D at altitude with warning. At 30,000 feet, the B-17 outperformed any fighter the Japanese had. (It is also questionable what targets the B-17 could hit from 30,000 feet, but that's another issue entirely.)

Most of the B-17s weren't destroyed on the ground in the Philippines. Fourteen of them were withdrawn to Australia. The oft-told story of the B-17C flown by Colin Kelly being destroyed by zeros of the Tainan Air Group, lead by Saburo Sakai needs to have an asterisk. On December 10, this plane took off on an emergency basis and attacked a group of ships before coming under attack by Sakai's fighters. This was not a case of a B-17 at 30,000 feet attacking Formosa, this was a B-17 at 22,000 or below being attacked from above by Japanese fighters well within their performance envelope. This was not an easy kill even against an early model B-17 at medium altitude for multiple zeros flown by the best pilots. If the B-17s would have been kept up near 30,000 feet, even unescorted, they would be reasonably safe in a bombing mission to Formosa. If the airfields were socked in by clouds, they probably could have found some coastal shipping to drop on.

Politics definitely had some role in the (lack of) early response. It has been written that Philippine President Quezon personally appealed to McArthur both before and after the Pearl Harbor attack not to engage in offensive actions from the Philippines prior to Japanese attack on that country in order to preserve Philippine neutrality. That is not absurd as far as it goes, except McArthur was a general in the United States Army, and presumably, his most important function was to know what he was supposed to do in the case the United States was at war. This was not an unforeseen event. If the marching orders were not to attack from the Philippines unless the US was attacked there, not only should that policy have been made crystal clear to McArthur, it should have been crystal clear to every officer under his command as well. It wasn't, and it likely was totally against the orders coming from Washington.
 
Were there actually any explicit orders from Washington, after they were aware of the Pearl Harbor attack, to strike at Formosa? And was there any awareness that a strike from Formosa was possible with the aircraft the Japanese were believed to have available?
 

Why would MacArthur need explicit orders from Washington? Surely once Pearl Harbor has happened, American forces would consider themselves under threat, even if war hadn't officially been declared. While the 5,000-mile screwdriver may have been in evidence in 1941, I suspect it was nowhere near as prevalent as it was in later conflicts. Ergo, why would MacArthur need to wait before acting?

As to your second question, I think the performance characteristics of Japanese aircraft were actually pretty well known. Certainly, the Brits in Malaya had access to performance metrics on the Zero and all the Japanese bomber aircraft. I see no reason why the US would be any different.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Users who are viewing this thread

Total: 1 (members: 0, guests: 1)

Similar threads

A
Where could Universal Carriers make an impact?
Replies
4
Views
359
Warspite63
M
If German have access to high ocatane fuel, how does that impact the performance of their fighters?
2 3
Replies
51
Views
4K
Engineman
E
A
Japan decides upon the IJA “strike north” plan instead of IJN’s “strike south”
2
Replies
28
Views
3K
Geoffrey Sinclair
G
FW-190 and The Battle of Britain
2 3
Replies
40
Views
2K
Admiral Beez
A
C
Advice on wooden aircraft
Replies
3
Views
932
Howard Gibson
Menu
Log in
Register