The airplane that did the most to turn the tide of the war.

GrauGeist said:

Considering that the Imperial Japanese Navy lost 4 of their Fleet Carriers at Midway out of 6 that were present - the two other carriers were light carriers, held in reserve. This was 4 of the 6 fleet carriers that the IJN possessed at the time - add to that the experienced pilots and aircraft that the IJN were hard-pressed to replace.

The two remaining fleet carriers, Shokaku and Zuikaku both would be sunk 2 years later during the Battle of Philippine Sea without any real contribution during that battle.

So in the end, the loss at Midway was a tremendous setback for their force projection and they hobbled along with light carriers from that point onward.

Now when I say "turning point" of the Pacific War, I am not tossing that out there on my own accord, I am simply going by the word of historians, both civil and military, who have made that determination long before I was even born.

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parsifal said:

The problems facing the Japanese at that time was not deckspace, it was trained aircrew. It was not the loss of 4 out of 6 carriers, either, it was 4 out of 8. The loss of 250 aircraft at Midway was a serious blow, but the numbers of aircrew that survived was substantial. It was unrealistic to expect that the big fleet carriers of the USN could be engaged with few or no losses....what was needed was that the US carriers be engaged and written off whatever the cost to the Japanese. this the IJN failed to do at Midway. ,The IJN expended some of its precious elite aircrews but did not achieve the victory it was looking for. In reality even this was unrealistic as an objective by June.

Aircrew losses for the IJN were within the normal or expected range. The numbers of carriers lost were much higher than expected, Even with the normal or expected losses Japan was unable to bring the CAGs of the carriers up to full strength. After Santa Cruz, the last of the Pearl Harbor veterans had been expended with no decisive result inflicted on the USN. The Japanese Carrier fleets did not know it yet, but after Santa Cruz their bolt was shot.


So, Midway was an important attritional battle, but far from a pivotal battle. It was part of a larger strategy, brilliantly delivered by the USN leadership. Midway was part of that wider strategy, and a massive propaganda and morale coup, but not decisive for the reasons relating to carrier losses. It was more a missed opportunity for the Japanese, and a pattern of survival for the US aircrews and carriers. They had not been subjected to a one sided crushing defeat. They had suffered some losses, and this would continue until the end of the year, but the losses sufferd by both sides were closer than is often portrayed. The "victory" at Midway was firstly that the US carriers had survived, and secondly the diminishing asset of Japanese airpower had failed to achieve the decisive victory that they desperately needed

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drgondog said:

FWIIW - I agree Parsifal. The "turning point" was a series of actions that in the whole, comprised the "turning Period". Coral Sea put a temporary hold on invading New Guinea and taking it easily, followed by rapid development of Port Moresby. Midway stripped IJN of a lot of airpower to support and defend New Guinea and Guadalcanal. The Aussies blunted the Japanese thrust to Port Moresby from the North - Had they penetrated it would have made Port Moresby untenable, making the assault on Guadalcanal even more difficult.

It makes my head hurt to try to define the 'aircraft that turned the tide of WWII' - It is hard enough to nominate five 'most important aircraft' . It is easy to define a series of 'influencers'.

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michael rauls said:

Absolutely agree that no one aircraft or any type of equipment alone turned the tide of the war. That's why the thread titled is frased as a comparative" the airplane that did the MOST to turn the tide of the war".

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drgondog said:

Well, My vote would be the HurriFire in 1940. It isn't certain what the outcome of losing air supremacy over Great Britain would have been to knocking the Brits into suing for peace, but to me they were the Most important at any time during the war. Far more than SBD at Midway.

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parsifal said:

I will have to go to shattered Sword and tally up the list given for Japanese aircrew losses. But more than half the aircrews were saved from midway and these were used to rebuild the shattered CAGs and put balnced CAGs on the Hiyo, Zuiho, Junyo and Zuikaku. None of these carriers ever had anything like a full complement in the latter half of 1942.
Having an extra carrier or two would have been handy, but the fundamental issue eating away at IJN force projection was its pilot availability, and more specifically, trained and experienced pilot availability that determined the levels of Japanese success. They were never seriously constrained by the lift capacity of their carrier fleet. they just didn't have enough pilots and that's the end of it.

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parsifal said:

They had no answer however to the merchant shipping losses being inflicted on them month after month.

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michael rauls said:

The SDBs did not have a fighter escort at Midway( at least not with them when it counted) and not only got near the Japanese carriers but seem to have annihilated them. They were also successful on other ocassions with minimal or no fighter escort in a way other bombers didn't seem to be able to pull off.
As a matter of fact they were somewhat successful acting in the fighter role themselves( CAP) on several occasions.

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motogp said:

its the engine not the plane the merlin ruled ww2

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Navalwarrior said:

(Two of the US carriers were within sight of each other). Instead, the initial aircraft launched had to burn fuel while the other launched! This used up precious fuel. It escapes all logic.

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Navalwarrior said:

Resp:
? ? There were plenty of fighters using the Merlin. So why couldn't they provide long range escort? Because it required a better platform that housed the Merlin! Merlin engine fighters had been around before 1940, so why couldn't any of them fly long distance at high altitude and take on the enemy over Germany?

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Shortround6 said:

You are assuming the various groups from the different carriers had practised working together. Losing your shipmates in clouds/bad weather is one thing, losing a bunch of strangers from another ship is another. It also means altering the deck spotting of the aircraft, something that needs to planned out ahead of time. The US planned (not always achieved in practice) to fly off large groups of planes in quick succession.
View attachment 530322
You can't launch any Dauntlesses until the all the planes forward of them are launched or they are taken below by elevator, at least one of which is either under or in the middle of the Dauntlesses. To land a plane ALL of the planes would have to moved forward.
A lot depended on when the first location reports of the enemy fleet are received. DO you go with what's line up on the deck or do you take 20-30 minutes to reshuffle things. ?

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Shortround6 said:

You are assuming the various groups from the different carriers had practised working together. Losing your shipmates in clouds/bad weather is one thing, losing a bunch of strangers from another ship is another. It also means altering the deck spotting of the aircraft, something that needs to planned out ahead of time. The US planned (not always achieved in practice) to fly off large groups of planes in quick succession.
View attachment 530322
You can't launch any Dauntlesses until the all the planes forward of them are launched or they are taken below by elevator, at least one of which is either under or in the middle of the Dauntlesses. To land a plane ALL of the planes would have to moved forward.
A lot depended on when the first location reports of the enemy fleet are received. DO you go with what's line up on the deck or do you take 20-30 minutes to reshuffle things. ?

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michael rauls said:

The SDBs did not have a fighter escort at Midway( at least not with them when it counted) and not only got near the Japanese carriers but seem to have annihilated them. They were also successful on other ocassions with minimal or no fighter escort in a way other bombers didn't seem to be able to pull off.
As a matter of fact they were somewhat successful acting in the fighter role themselves( CAP) on several occasions.

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parsifal said:

It is a myth that the IJN lost crushing losses to its aircrews at Midway. A comparison between midway, where four carriers were lost and Santa Cruz where no carriers were lost is very revealing actually.

Barrett Tillman's article "The Seeds of Victory Are Sown" (August 2017) is typical of the post war fiction that has come to pass as accurate in most post war accounts. . He states, "the Imperial Japanese Navy suffered a crushing defeat at Midway, losing... four precious carriers and most of their aircrews." The problem with this statement is that the Japanese did not lose most of their aircrews at the Battle of Midway. Parshall and Tully, in Shattered Sword examine this issue in detail. The book documents that the Kaga suffered 21 aircrew deaths, Soryu lost 10, and the Akagi 7. Only the Hiryu's air group suffered casualties in excess of 50 percent, losing 72. This is a total of 110—compared to a Japanese loss of aircrew at the battle of Santa Cruz of 145, where the Japanese did not lose any of their four carriers that participated in the battle.

The myth of Midway is that the Japanese carriers' flight decks were covered with armed and fueled aircraft ready to launch to destroy the U.S. carriers when the U.S. SBDs hit. The resulting image is that a majority of the flight crews were killed in explosions from dropping bombs while sitting in their fully fueled and armed aircraft. The reality is that the strike aircraft were actually in the hangar decks being rearmed, and only a few CAP Zeros were on the flight decks when the SBDs from the Enterprise and Yorktown hit. As the ships went down it may be that priority was given to saving the aircrew, in particular the pilots, because the proportion of pilots lost compared to the overall percentage of losses aboard the ships was very low.

This is why so many Japanese flight crews survived the battle: They were not in their aircraft.

Note that the big loss in irreplaceable personnel was maintenance crews at the Battle of Midway, Parshall and Tully make a lot of this, but I just don't see it. I cannot find much loss of efficiency amongst the ersatz carriers that fought the remaining battles of 1942. There was however a visible and measurable loss of efficiciency amongst maintenance crews at Phil Sea. Perhaps there were some long term effects arising.

One of the reasons that we have the belief that the Japanese decks were covered with strike aircraft ready to take off and annihilate the American fleet comes from Mitsuo Fuchida's commentary about the battle. Japanese historians have commented that this misinformation may be a result of his desire to uphold the Bushido code. It makes a more heroic image that the killing blow from the SBDs hit an instant before the Japanese were to unleash the blow that would have led to their victory. It just doesn't sound as good that you got wiped out when you were down in the hangar deck getting your aircraft rearmed. That almost gets to the level that you got wiped out answering the call of nature, and no true warrior would ever admit that.

We don't know the exact proportions of aircrew losses that occurred on the carrier decks, but it cannot have been high. Perhaps 5-10% of the total. If that guess is anywhere near correct, aircrew losses that can be attributed to the ship losses might amount to 5-10 pilots and gunners combined

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DerAdlerIstGelandet said:

And no where does it actually require a college education to be a great pilot.

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Dan Fahey said:

Engineering, designing and machining parts. Reading blueprints understanding assembly processes.

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