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

[XBe02Drvr]

First, I think we should again at least acknowledge that we have to consider the merits and significance of the Theaters and time periods which were and weren't significant.

Early war Japanese conquests in the Pacific were characterized by highly effective use of overwhelming force and surprise.

If the Japanese had been able to continue this kind of action a bit more, and if the Germans had won El Alamein which he have also been discussing, it might have gotten ... dicey for the Allies.

More than dicey; disastrous.
Consider that a crushing loss at Midway could have meant the loss of all three of our carriers to no Japanese losses. This makes the Guadalcanal operation untenable, resulting in interdiction of the supply lines to Australia, and potentially the loss of Hawaii. With supplies to Australia cut off, Japanese success in New Guinea is likely, putting the Aussies in a state of siege.
The still undamaged Kido Butai can now concentrate its affections on Ceylon and the Indian Ocean, eventually threatening a linkup with the German controlled middle east. This eliminates the Axis Achilles Heel of petroleum, and puts a whole different tilt to the strategic balance.
At this point, many "neutral" nations, or those philosophically sympathetic to the Allies, but physically removed from the fighting, are going to notice which way the winds are blowing and it's going to become harder for us to obtain the exotic resources needed to make our high tech war machine perform. Tropical wood, natural rubber, exotic minerals to make alloys of steel and aluminum, and myriad other resources from around the globe will no longer be at our beck and call.
So now the Essex class carriers are coming on line with their Hellcats, Helldivers, and Avengers, and it's time to start clawing our way back to Tokyo, Berlin, and Rome starting from our own shores, not some point halfway there.
How does your war of attrition look now?
Cheers,
Wes

 

[XBe02Drvr]

For the extra it could carry it still wasn't as cost effective as the C-47/DC-3. I've also read somewhere that Douglas had better product support and a better supply chain.

And it was stuck with tho$e Cur$ed Electric Prop$!

 

[XBe02Drvr]

What is it with you? Think I was born yesterday?..

You sound that way.

What the Hell is a THEORETICAL AVIATOR?

"Theoretical Aviator (noun): A person who has read all the literature, watched all the YouTube videos, and played all the flightsim games and is able to lecture endlessly on flying, but makes himself airsick whenever he touches the controls of an actual airplane. Hasn't been there, hasn't done it, and is clueless as to what it's really like and is unaware of his own cluelessness."

I have been there, I have done it, and that includes the "clueless and unaware of it" part too.
Cool off, chill out, and hang in there, you'll get over it in due course.
BTW, my draft number in that same lottery was 55, so I had to go play Uncle's game, which became a life changing experience and a highly educational one. Never learned so much so fast, not even in four years of college.
Cheers,
Wes

 

[michael rauls]

What is it with you? Think I was born yesterday?..
What the Hell is a THEORETICAL AVIATOR? …. Require Aptitude and Motivation to learn.
To advance in any thing requires Aptitude and Motivation.... No S(four letter word).
I have 45 years of Martial Arts and Soccer Referee Reffing advanced youth leagues.
At 68 can still chase down a Tournament level U19 team. I train everyday!
Coached and owned Soccer Teams and a League at one time.
Coached Kindergarten to High School and know about teaching and how to break bad habits.

In any military if you do not know how to write, figure out equation, and able to communicate you were not getting a skilled position. Public Education systems provide the foundation or you are not going to get to the next step...period !!
Just like learning a second, third or fourth Language you need education and Science has its own language. That is modern society.

My draft number in 1968 was 352 and did not have to join. Yet harassed by US Army and Navy to join because of my Engineering background and a few other attributes. Told I was not going to have to bear a weapon to fight.! HA HA !! I know more than you think and have friends absconded by the police in the south and were forced into the Army..!! Just about anyone with a good Skill or Technical Education was given a non Combat positions. Unless they chose to take field position. I documented about a dozen soldiers after Vietnam including my friends experience. WW2 and Korean War Veteran would not let them enter the front door of a VFW. I know because we were shown the door when we tried entering.

For the last 25 years own a Defense Contracting company, before that worked on Weapon Defense Systems as a Designer and Engineer. I know human resources and training programs. How applicants are evaluated. One of the tests administered for agile thinking was the Wolf Test.. Look it up!! There were a dozen other personality, visual, physical, mental acuity and other tests that improved likelihood of minimal fall out. Training the wrong person for a highly technical skill like flying Fighter plane ends in tragedy or a lot of "just" wrecked equipment. WW2 all the combatants lost about half of their planes to non combat issues. Vast majority to training. One not well documented story was the Germans placed a lot of their damaged planes on fields that would never fly. A whole bunch were Me 109's. The Allies racked up a lot of ground kills further wrecking the wrecks yet caught in AA traps. Which the Vietnamese improved on in Vietnam.

You need an education to operate equipment...you need a Body to wield a sword !!

???

 

[Kevin J]

Ok second, I'd like to drill down a bit more into the Pacific War and play with it a bit on the meta-level.

With regard to the Japanese, you'll notice a distinct contrast between their early, middle and late war

Early war Japanese conquests in the Pacific were characterized by highly effective use of overwhelming force and surprise. The catastrophes at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia showed their ability to dominate by leveraging their assets and advantages, planning well, achieving surprise, achieving and sustaining early momentum, and essentially fighting a type of 'Blitzkrieg*.

In other words not attrition warfare. If the Japanese were able to get enough of their better quality warships and flying machines in action, and had time to plan, they were able to dominate Allied forces. There was a certain degree of panic among Allied forces and legends of Japanese invincibility - such as tales about the Zero climbing at 5,000 ft per minute and so forth. Japanese bombers and torpedo planes seemed to sink ships right and left, and their destroyers were dominating night surface combat.

This started to peter out after they were met with both more comparable equipment and numbers, and far better planning and preparation. I.e. if they had lined up planes on Henderson Field the way they had at Clark Field Guadalcanal would have been quickly lost. That is why Coral Sea and Milne Bay were so important, and even the tiny battle at Wake Island - they were not really major victories, more like draws, but they represented a faltering of the Japanese juggernaught and punctured the veil of their invincibility. It represented a stabilization of the slide into catastrophe for the Allies and a shift of the war from Blitzkrieg* where the Japanese had some hope of victory, toward attrition warfare where the US in particular would ultimately and inevitably have a decisive advantage.

But of course it wasn't settled overnight. Even long after Midway the Japanese were still dealing brutal knockout blows to the Allies such as we saw in surface actions like Savo Island etc.

This is why I think Midway was indeed important however because if the Japanese had fought the campaign in the Solomons with 6 aircraft carriers and an extra 50 or 100 aircrews, they may have been close to that Blitzkrieg level again. It was not enough to have fighters and pilots that could take on their Japanese equivalents with some possibility of success, but they had to be managed well and you needed close enough to parity in numbers - quantity as well as quality - to fight in a more attrition like manner, i.e. not getting bodyslammed by a Japanese Blitzkrieg.

If the Japanese had won Midway they would have still had the Strategic initiative and the ability to concentrate their forces in a decisive manner and probably win some more stunning victories ala the Philippines. That is why I would not rule out Hawaii falling if Midway had been taken.


* I am using this term as shorthand, in the broad or popular sense of the word.

Winning at Midway wouldn't stop the Aussies beating the Japs on the Kokoda Trail or at Milne Bay.

 

[Kevin J]

So the Third question is then, the big what - if.

I know this gets us in trouble sometimes because some folks get too literal minded about it. We know the Japanese lost Midway and lost the war in 1945 etc. But this is just some speculation. What is the Japanese had won Midway and maybe one or two other battles after that, and the Americans had been forced to recoil into a defensive posture.

Well that means the Japanese would have been able to consolidate some of their gains closer to home, places with some Strategic resources and geographical value like Formosa, Indochina, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. It would have given them some time to build up their forces, maybe even improve training (the feasibility of this is an open question for me maybe someone else knows in detail) But what else could they have done?

One thing that seems likely to me is that they could have gone back into the Indian Ocean and done some real damage.

Reading about their short spring 1942 Indian Ocean / Ceylon raid, it looks like in a very short time they did some very serious 'Blitzkrieg' damage to the (mostly) British forces there, and if they hadn't had their hands so full dealing with the Yanks in the Pacific, I wonder how much Strategic damage they could have done in the Indian Ocean to British supply lines ?

From the way that raid went down, it looks like at that time in 1942 the Royal Navy was not ready to handle the IJN. The surface fleets were about equal, with a slight advantage for the British (5 battleships, 7 cruisers and 15 destroyers for the Royal Navy, plus about 30 frigates, armed merchantmen etc., with 4 battleships, 7 cruisers, and 19 destroyers for the IJN). But the Japanese had enough of an advantage in aircraft (both qualitatively and numerically at about 3-1 in planes) with 5 aircraft carriers vs. 3 for the British.

The results were very lopsided, and reminiscent of the opening Blitzkrieg assault of the IJN - the Royal Navy lost 1 carrier sunk, 2 heavy cruisers, 1 'armed merchant cruiser', 1 corvette, 1 sloop, 23 merchant ships and 40 aircraft. The Japanese lost ~20 aircraft. Certainly no devastating attrition of aircrew.

In the air, the Royal Navy's compliment of Fairey Fulmars, Swordfish, and Albacores, supported by land based Blenheim's and Hurricanes, proved incapable of withstanding the onslaught of Japanese air raids and unable to sink Japanese ships. Some examples -

A flight of Blenheim's makes a strike on the IJN fleet, they lose 5 planes and score zero hits. Would SBD's have been more useful there? I think so. For that matter A-20's might have gotten a couple of hits.

During the infamous Easter Sunday raid, according to the Wiki the RAF and FAA lost 27 aircraft, mostly Hurricanes, while the Japanese lost five. The wiki claims that 90% of the Japanese dive bombers hit their targets. That means they were relatively free of danger because they did not by comparison do quite that well at Midway or in the Solomons.

If the Japanese had been able to continue this kind of action a bit more, and if the Germans had won El Alamein which he have also been discussing, it might have gotten ... dicey for the Allies. Certainly Winston Churchill thought so:

"The most dangerous moment of the War, and the one which caused me the greatest alarm, was when the Japanese Fleet was heading for Ceylon and the naval base there. The capture of Ceylon, the consequent control of the Indian Ocean, and the possibility at the same time of a German conquest of Egypt would have closed the ring and the future would have been black. "



So IMO, the TL : DR is - if the Japanese had decisively won at Midway, they may very well have won in the Solomons, and bought themselves some time to do real damage to British forces in the Indian Ocean, perhaps capturing Ceylon, thereby causing serious Strategic Injury to the British War Effort. And perhaps affecting the outcome of the War.

A lot of big ifs there of course, and we know this did not actually happen. Just some food for thought.

At sea, the FAA had Sea Hurricanes and Martlets as well optimised for low altitude unlike the American Wildcats. The Sea Hurricane Ib being superior in performance to the A6M2, their torpedo bombing crews well trained in night attacks. Just because they didn't clash doesn't make the outcome a foregone conclusion.

 

[Schweik]

Winning at Midway wouldn't stop the Aussies beating the Japs on the Kokoda Trail or at Milne Bay.

Not the first time, but what if they tried again with aircraft carrier support?

 

[Schweik]

At sea, the FAA had Sea Hurricanes and Martlets as well optimised for low altitude unlike the American Wildcats. The Sea Hurricane Ib being superior in performance to the A6M2, their torpedo bombing crews well trained in night attacks. Just because they didn't clash doesn't make the outcome a foregone conclusion.

I am not confident a Sea Hurricane could handle a Zero. Martlet as we know is fairly comparable but I'm not sure how many they had in 1942, none seem to be involved in the Ceylon debacle.

 

[Kevin J]

More than dicey; disastrous.
Consider that a crushing loss at Midway could have meant the loss of all three of our carriers to no Japanese losses. This makes the Guadalcanal operation untenable, resulting in interdiction of the supply lines to Australia, and potentially the loss of Hawaii. With supplies to Australia cut off, Japanese success in New Guinea is likely, putting the Aussies in a state of siege.
The still undamaged Kido Butai can now concentrate its affections on Ceylon and the Indian Ocean, eventually threatening a linkup with the German controlled middle east. This eliminates the Axis Achilles Heel of petroleum, and puts a whole different tilt to the strategic balance.
At this point, many "neutral" nations, or those philosophically sympathetic to the Allies, but physically removed from the fighting, are going to notice which way the winds are blowing and it's going to become harder for us to obtain the exotic resources needed to make our high tech war machine perform. Tropical wood, natural rubber, exotic minerals to make alloys of steel and aluminum, and myriad other resources from around the globe will no longer be at our beck and call.
So now the Essex class carriers are coming on line with their Hellcats, Helldivers, and Avengers, and it's time to start clawing our way back to Tokyo, Berlin, and Rome starting from our own shores, not some point halfway there.
How does your war of attrition look now?
Cheers,
Wes

Admiral Canaris, an old pal of Franco advised him that the Germans would lose WW2 so Franco never went after Gibraltar. Losses in the Pacific still don't save the Axis in the Med. The Brits would simply have deployed their fleet to the Indian Ocean and the 'soft underbelly' of the Axis may not have been in attacked in 1943. The Aussies would still have beaten the Japs in New Guinea.

 

[Kevin J]

Not the first time, but what if they tried again with aircraft carrier support?

There was always the British Fleet in the Indian Ocean to contend with. The World doesn't revolve around America.

 

[Kevin J]

I am not confident a Sea Hurricane could handle a Zero. Martlet as we know is fairly comparable but I'm not sure how many they had in 1942, none seem to be involved in the Ceylon debacle.

The Wildcat was technically inferior to the A6M2, but the pilots were first class, the Sea Hurricane Ib was superior to the A6M2 at low altitude, and the pilots I'm sure just as good as the USN ones, if not better.

 

[Schweik]

There was always the British Fleet in the Indian Ocean to contend with. The World doesn't revolve around America.

Needless to say. But the point I was making was that the British Fleet in the Indian Ocean seemed to be melting away like snow under boiling water on contact with the IJN fleet - case in point being the Ceylon raid. Maybe they could have got some Martlets in place and some more modern ships etc. but I'm not so sure.

I also don't think the Aussies could have held on in New Guinea etc. if the Americans had been badly defeated and backed off from the area, allowing the IJN to concentrate their might.

Of course it's all speculation.

 

[Schweik]

The Wildcat was technically inferior to the A6M2, but the pilots were first class, the Sea Hurricane Ib was superior to the A6M2 at low altitude, and the pilots I'm sure just as good as the USN ones, if not better.

Like I said, I'd need some serious convincing that the Sea Hurricane could hold it's own with an A6M2, let alone that it was better. Maybe Sea Hurricanes didn't clash with Zeroes but plenty of land based Hurricanes clashed with both Zeroes and Ki 43s and they didn't do well. Hurricanes were also very short ranged, especially compared to an A6M, which would confer a major operational advantage to the Japanese. That and the fact that their bombers were inferior and dead meat if they were caught by fighters (night flying capability notwithstanding)

I would assume that the RN / FAA pilots would be well trained, the USN ones certainly seemed to be among the best available to the US - it was really training, Thach weave etc. which made the F4F a viable weapon against the A6M and Ki 43- that and it's generally better suitability for attrition warfare.

A lot of that hinged on the USN bomber being very effective, which again puts the emphasis back on the SBD for me.

 

[Kevin J]

Needless to say. But the point I was making was that the British Fleet in the Indian Ocean seemed to be melting away like snow under boiling water on contact with the IJN fleet - case in point being the Ceylon raid. Maybe they could have got some Martlets in place and some more modern ships etc. but I'm not so sure.

I also don't think the Aussies could have held on in New Guinea etc. if the Americans had been badly defeated and backed off from the area, allowing the IJN to concentrate their might.

Of course it's all speculation.

Our fleet didn't melt away in the snow. They simply weren't stupid enough to engage in a daytime combat where they were outnumbered. Don't underestimate the Aussies, they fought better than the first lot of Americans that arrived in New Guinea, and its not the AIF that I'm talking about, its their Militia.

 

[Schweik]

I'm not comparing manhood size, I agree the Aussies fought very well (in the sky and on the ground), and a lot of US Army units in the Pacific didn't especially early on (USMC seemed to better)

But Milne Bay etc. were a close run thing hinging largely on air superiority and excellent air support by the RAAF. You bring 3 or 4 IJN carriers to the fight air superiority goes away.

As for "melting away" - losing 31 ships and 40 aircraft and only taking out 20 aircraft in response is not a sustainable exchange rate.

 

[Schweik]

Admittedly though the IJN had 3-1 odds in aircraft so that made a big difference. If the odds were more even it may have been less of a catastrophe. But that is kind of the whole point of the Midway defeat scenario, if the USN was pulled back to San Fransisco and Long Beach, the Japanese would have been able to concentrate more forces for those kind of knockout blows.

 

[Dan Fahey]

You sound that way.


"Theoretical Aviator (noun): A person who has read all the literature, watched all the YouTube videos, and played all the flightsim games and is able to lecture endlessly on flying, but makes himself airsick whenever he touches the controls of an actual airplane. Hasn't been there, hasn't done it, and is clueless as to what it's really like and is unaware of his own cluelessness."

I have been there, I have done it, and that includes the "clueless and unaware of it" part too.
Cool off, chill out, and hang in there, you'll get over it in due course.
BTW, my draft number in that same lottery was 55, so I had to go play Uncle's game, which became a life changing experience and a highly educational one. Never learned so much so fast, not even in four years of college.
Cheers,
Wes

WOW.. Welcome Home !!
Hired a lot of Vietnam Vets .. and even a few former WW2 and KW Vets too that were all in technical and engineering fields.
Was interesting reading their resumes who worked on the early Curtis.

New guys from Iraq and Afghanistan I never say "thank you for your service. !"
To some that is Cringe Worthy and just want to walk away quietly.

Just better to just say welcome home !

Dan

 

[Schweik]

Welcome home is better.

The rest of that, I would delete, as it's too personal.

I'm sure you are a nice guy Dan, but if you have spent all that time in rough bar-rooms, studied martial arts etc, you know sometimes it's a good idea to take a couple of steps back. There are several guys on here who are pilots and some active duty or former military pilots. Many other mechanics, air controllers, all kinds of real world experience, aside from the historians amateur and otherwise. A lot to learn.

And amigo, don't over-expose yourself on the internet.

 

[XBe02Drvr]

The Brits would simply have deployed their fleet to the Indian Ocean

And brought their carriers (only ships that count) full of aircrews used to Atlantic/Med tactical situations to face the Japanese. More snow to melt away. While the Brit carrier fighters might ON PAPER appear superior to their Japanese counterparts, if they're flown the way they were in the west, they're going to be in for a nasty surprise, as Singapore and Ceylon attest. And their huge deficit in range would likely prove decisive.
Cheers,
Wes

 

[Kevin J]

And brought their carriers (only ships that count) full of aircrews used to Atlantic/Med tactical situations to face the Japanese. More snow to melt away. While the Brit carrier fighters might ON PAPER appear superior to their Japanese counterparts, if they're flown the way they were in the west, they're going to be in for a nasty surprise, as Singapore and Ceylon attest. And their huge deficit in range would likely prove decisive.
Cheers,
Wes

Navy fighter pilots are a superior breed, ha ha, like Eric Brown. Lets put it this way, if technical details had anything to do with it then the USN Wildcats should have been shot from the skies by the Jap Zero's. Singapore and Ceylon were an RAF fest.