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

Schweik said:

Midway was the stepping stone to Hawaii.



I'm sorry but I really don't think it is that complicated. Midway was a very 'close run thing' - as it was it really could have gone either way, certainly it would have if the US had inferior planes (like a Swordfish) instead of the SBDs they used to sink the carriers.

If the US had lost Midway, despite your confident predictions that victory was inevitable, the US would have put a lot more effort into the Pacific War and therefore less of what they had to support England and Russia - and both El Alamein and Stalingrad were also close run things. The tipping point of the war could have been delayed a year or more.

And that definitely could have been trouble.

However this does not mean I think the SBD was the one and only MVP of WW2 aircraft, it does however contribute to my assertion that the Swordfish wasn't in the running.

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I think its a good point that things could have EASILY gone against the US at Midway. Say the US losses 3 carriers.
Alot of aditional rescources are going to have to be shifted to the Pacific.
In hind sight we kind of assume the outcome was a given when it was not.

ClayO said:

I'd have to go with the Martin NBS-1, used by Billy Mitchell to demonstrate that airplanes could sink ships.

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You can add the Handley Page O/400 to that list then; not only did it drop the biggest air dropped bomb during the Great War, but a single US built example also took part in Billy Mitchell's sinking of the Ostfriesland, dropping the last bomb to hit the ship. In September 1921 an example carried a single 4,000lb bomb and dropped it at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.

Reluctant Poster said:

Actually the majority of the follow on battles did go against the United States. People over look the fact that the USN lost as many fleet carriers in 1942 as the IJN. 4 each. With the damage to Enterprise the USN had one fleet carrier left in the Pacific in December 1942. They had to borrow HMS Victorious and modify it a fair bit to match American procedures. It served in the Pacific alongside Saratoga for the first half of of 1943. The Japanese also gave several kickings to the USN surface fleet. The naval battles off Guadalcanal were brutal affairs. Fully half of the US heavy cruisers were sunk or knocked out for months (6 sunk and 3 very heavily damaged). Most of 1943 was a period of recovery for the US.
While Midway was obviously very important Guadalcanal was the true turning point where the Japanese offensive was finally stopped at great cost to the USN and the USM. On the other hand without Midway Guadalcanal likely falls to the Japanese.

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Resp:
Well stated. US operations in a nutshell. None of it was easy. You aviators should study Guadalcanal. The US Navy lost more men than the Marines in securing the island. Two admirals were killed in less than 24 hrs attempting to hold back surface forces. The Marines fought during the day and watched the Naval fireworks between the two Navies at night. When the carrier Enterprise arrived to assist by launching aircraft to supress Japanese naval forces, their pilots knew full well that they could not return to land on their carrier . . . due to elevator damage (could not lower returning aircraft to clear the deck) the Enterprise received in a prior engagement. All pilots were briefed that they would have to land at Henderson Field when they finished their attack against the Japanese. At one point there were so few aircraft operational on Henderson that naval personnel worked under tarps at night, removing a wing from one plane and fitting it to another . . . just so they could attack the Japs the next day. A LCDR the flew the 'parts' plane out to attack shipping. If my memory serves me, he and his ground crew repaired various aircraft, doing this for nearly 5 days (nights, actually) just so they could take the fight to the Japanese. The LCDR was eventually killed when he flew the last aircraft to attack the enemy ships.

Another thought pertaining to the importance of theaters and there priorities.
If things had gone really badly for the US at Midway and perhaps Guadalcanal also, I think you can kiss the Germany first priority good buy. The U.S. is not going to let Japan take the whole Pacific up to and maybe including Hawaii. At that point the priority is going to have to shift I think by necessity, for the U.S. anyway, to some substantial degree to the Pacific theater.

Shortround6 said:

The Izumo and her sister ship were both sunk at Kure by carrier aircraft in July of 1945 for example.

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That's a very nice picture, taken in Shanghai on the Huangpu River.

Schweik said:

that the SBD far exceeded the value of the Swordfish.

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To whom exactly, is the question to be asked here. To those engaged in the Pacific where the SBD's successes were high, but to those whom benefitted from the presense of the Stringbag, that is easily debated. It's worth mentioning that the Swordfish was primarily used as an anti-submarine aircraft from 1942 onwards, being armed with rockets, rather than torpedoes and carrying search radar. As an anti-sub aircraft, it was operated from 18 MACs (Merchant Aircraft Carriers) and 14 escort carriers and sank some 22 U-boats. By comparison, out of interest, the Grumman Avenger sank 35 U-boats, three less than the PBY Catalina. The highest number of U-boats confirmed as sunk by a single type was the B-24 Liberator, with 72 sunk. Info according to U-boat.net.

Anyway, back to the Swordfish, it is worth quoting at this time the words of Eric Brown, whose appreciation for it is often misconstrued;

"Its survival throughout WWII despite obsolescence places the Stringbag in somewhat the same category as the Junkers Ju 87, although the former was not subjected to the same progressive development as the latter. Both were operated primarily in an environment in which enemy fighters were conspicuous by their absense or where air superiority could be guaranteed. In the case of the Swordfish, this environment was out in the ocean beyond the range of enemy fighters or under cover of darkness before night fighting became an art.

"When fighters were around the Swordfish still had a measure of protection in its remarkable manoeuvrability, but when the chips were down as in the aiming run of a torpedo attack it was totally vulnerable. I would not detract from the great actions in which the Swordfish participated, nor especially from the gallant aircrew who fought these actions, but the hard fact is that these aircrew should never have been exposed to such danger in equipment so ancient in concept and I cannot believe that a more technologically advanced aircraft could not have done as well or even better."

A fair and measured assesment of the type.

Here's what Brown had to say about the Dauntless;

"It had established an enviable record for reliability and toughness and its career in the Pacific had certainly been illustrious. Yet from a performance standpoint it had been a very mediocre aeroplane and having operated for much of the time in a non-air superiority environment, one is left with a deep respect for its crews. I personally did not find the hidden quality in the Dauntless that I had sought on the strength of its remarkable operational reputation. I could only conclude that it was to be numbered among the handful of aeroplanes that have achieved outstanding success against all odds."

By contrast an aircraft Brown was very fond of was the Grumman Avenger, in fact, all of Grumman's frontline carrier types he had a fondness for - in the Martlet/Wildcat he had shot down 3 Fw 200 Condors in combat and reckoned that; "this Grumman fighter was, for my money, one of the finest shipboard aeroplanes ever created."

High praise indeed.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and make the not unreasonable suggestion in support of Brown's, that both the Dauntless and Swordfish were successful despite themselves. Both went into the combat arena because you go to war with what you've got and if the units operating them were equipped with more modern or better performing types would have achieved the same measure of success that these two types bathed in. There's no reason the US Navy would not have been able to do what it did with the SBD if it were equipped with a different dive bomber, maybe the Aichi D3A or perhaps even the Blackburn Skua - both types were competent dive bombers and easily demonstrated that they could do the job effectively, regardless of any comparison of numbers of ships sunk. The Swordfish was the same; its load carrying capability was offset by its lack of crew comfort and below par performance, but that did come with good manoeuvrability, something that perhaps a modern type might not have possessed. Regardless, the successes the Swordfish achieved at Taranto, Matapan and against the Bismarck could have been done with, say a Grumman Avenger or a Nakajima B5N.

This is again, not to denigrate either type, but to assess them both evenly, taking into account their weaknesses and their sterling combat careers alike. They both shone because they were thrust into the limelight.

Navalwarrior said:

Resp:
Well stated. US operations in a nutshell. None of it was easy. You aviators should study Guadalcanal. The US Navy lost more men than the Marines in securing the island. Two admirals were killed in less than 24 hrs attempting to hold back surface forces. The Marines fought during the day and watched the Naval fireworks between the two Navies at night. When the carrier Enterprise arrived to assist by launching aircraft to supress Japanese naval forces, their pilots knew full well that they could not return to land on their carrier . . . due to elevator damage (could not lower returning aircraft to clear the deck) the Enterprise received in a prior engagement. All pilots were briefed that they would have to land at Henderson Field when they finished their attack against the Japanese. At one point there were so few aircraft operational on Henderson that naval personnel worked under tarps at night, removing a wing from one plane and fitting it to another . . . just so they could attack the Japs the next day. A LCDR the flew the 'parts' plane out to attack shipping. If my memory serves me, he and his ground crew repaired various aircraft, doing this for nearly 5 days (nights, actually) just so they could take the fight to the Japanese. The LCDR was eventually killed when he flew the last aircraft to attack the enemy ships.

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The Cactus Air force was actually comprised of USN, USMC, USAAF and Commonwealth pilots.

Kevin J said:

Let's add Hellcat and Superfortress in the Pacific, Liberator and Swordfish in the Atlantic. The P-40 in North Africa. The Yak / Sturmovik combo on the Eastern Front.

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If Midway was the turning point, then the Hellcat and B-29 are late to the party; same goes if Guadalcanal was the turning point. You could make a case for the Superfortress as the 'finisher'.

If the 2nd Battle of Alamein is the turning point in North Africa (I agree it was) then the P-40 was certainly apart of the air battle, but it was hardly alone; quite a few other types were also involved.

Yaks and Sturmoviks in the Battle of Stalingrad? Could well be, it's a good bid anyway.

nuuumannn said:

I'm going to go out on a limb here and make the not unreasonable suggestion in support of Brown's, that both the Dauntless and Swordfish were successful despite themselves. Both went into the combat arena because you go to war with what you've got and if the units operating them were equipped with more modern or better performing types would have achieved the same measure of success that these two types bathed in. There's no reason the US Navy would not have been able to do what it did with the SBD if it were equipped with a different dive bomber, maybe the Aichi D3A or perhaps even the Blackburn Skua - both types were competent dive bombers and easily demonstrated that they could do the job effectively, regardless of any comparison of numbers of ships sunk. The Swordfish was the same; its load carrying capability was offset by its lack of crew comfort and below par performance, but that did come with good manoeuvrability, something that perhaps a modern type might not have possessed. Regardless, the successes the Swordfish achieved at Taranto, Matapan and against the Bismarck could have been done with, say a Grumman Avenger or a Nakajima B5N.

This is again, not to denigrate either type, but to assess them both evenly, taking into account their weaknesses and their sterling combat careers alike. They both shone because they were thrust into the limelight.

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I think that's well thought out and there certainly is some merit to that view of both planes. There certainly was some good fortune or just plain luck if you like that both types seemed to consistently benefit from but I'm also gona have to disagree just a bit also. Some planes posses valuable characteristics that don't nescesarily show up in performance stats.
A good example of this is the F6F in my view. Doesn't look that impressive by the performance stats but very successful in practice. I'm not a pilot but I'm thinking there is a lot of value in a plane that does what you tell it and doesn't talk back so to speak. Seems that kind of plane would breed confidence whereas the opposite might breed skitishnes and tentativity and confidence would seem valuable in combat. Imho, from what ive read in pilots evaluations of the SBD and F6F, Eric Brown not withstanding, ( not sure about the Swordfish)that would seem to have at least some substantial part in their success that wouldn't be evident just looking at performance stats.
Also, if a string of luck goes on long enough eventually you have to start thinking there's something behind it even if it isn't imediatly appearant at first glance.

Stig1207 said:

If Midway was the turning point, then the Hellcat and B-29 are late to the party; same goes if Guadalcanal was the turning point. You could make a case for the Superfortress as the 'finisher'.

If the 2nd Battle of Alamein is the turning point in North Africa (I agree it was) then the P-40 was certainly apart of the air battle, but it was hardly alone; quite a few other types were also involved.

Yaks and Sturmoviks in the Battle of Stalingrad? Could well be, it's a good bid anyway.

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Agree to all except significance of P-40 at El Alamein. If it was just P-40's then air superiority would still have been achieved, along with close air support. In the case of Hurricanes and / or Spitfires, you can't have one without the other.

Undoubtedly Michael, I agree with you. Aircraft like the F6F were a cut above their adversaries and achieved fame because they possessed characteristics that branded them not just good at what they did as their job, in the F6F's case as a fighter, but also that it possessed excellent performance and undeniable strength and robustness, as well as handling characteristics that made it a good fighter. The point Brown is making is that the Swordfish and the Dauntless, while possessing strengths, the former's load carrying abilities and manoeuvrability and the latter its robustness and excellent diving characteristics, could have been carried out by others of their type and the results would have been the same. The F6F however stood apart for the reasons I've explained and on its debut was a demonstrably superior fighter compared to its contemporaries in the A6M, Sea Hurricane, and F4F from the same company.

Likewise the likes of the Lancaster compared to the Halifax. The Hali was known for its extensive career in Bomber Command and its ability to survive a crash landing owing to its strength of construction, and also the diversity of roles it took on, but it was successful despite itself. It was in fact a dog of an aeroplane, certainly the early Merlin engied variants more so than the Hercules engined ones, but even then, they had their issues and were not completely satisfactory. The early Halifaxes did not meet their performance figures, were too heavy and draggy, which resulted in continual modification to lighten and streamline the airframes, with so many different series of each mark built that incorporated yet another change on the production line. This is of course not mentioning the severe rudder overbalance, which if the condition arose, had the aircraft turn into an unrecoverable dive, which continued to claim aircrews' lives after it had entered service. The larger 'D' shaped fins countered this nasty tendency.

The Lancaster by contrast was an excellent performer from the outset and although there were stability and drag issues, notably round the tail feathers and around the top turret mounting, these were overcome by increasing the chord of the elevators and the size of the fins and deleting the third one of the prototype and placing a ring around the mid upper turret. It is fair to say, however that without the Manchester suffering the issues it did and efforts made to rectify these, the Lancaster might not have had the reputation it did. Compared to the Halifax I and II however, the Lancaster I was faster, could carry a bigger bomb load over a similar distance and had a better chance of returning.

nuuumannn said:

Undoubtedly Michael, I agree with you. Aircraft like the F6F were a cut above their adversaries and achieved fame because they possessed characteristics that branded them not just good at what they did as their job, in the F6F's case as a fighter, but also that it possessed excellent performance and undeniable strength and robustness, as well as handling characteristics that made it a good fighter. The point Brown is making is that the Swordfish and the Dauntless, while possessing strengths, the former's load carrying abilities and manoeuvrability and the latter its robustness and excellent diving characteristics, could have been carried out by others of their type and the results would have been the same. The F6F however stood apart for the reasons I've explained and on its debut was a demonstrably superior fighter compared to its contemporaries in the A6M, Sea Hurricane, and F4F from the same company.

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I think the point Michael was making is that the F6F does not look particularly impressive on paper, by the normal stats we measure for a fighter - top speed, rate of climb, wing loading, and so on. But it turned out to be (by at least some measures, such as total victory claims) the most lethal fighter ever produced by the US. It's top speed on paper doesn't look much faster than the A6M5 for example. (Boscombe down analysis here gives a top speed of 371 mph, later marks were a bit faster but nowhere near say, an F4U). Clearly the F6F had some traits, which were in part due to the powerful engine, in part due to handling, takeoff and landing suitability... perhaps the elusive concept of 'power of maneuver', and other hard to measure characteristics which made it not just good but one of the wars great fighters.

While I think Eric Brown is a good source of insight into aircraft performance, I don't think he is the last word - several of his analysis of various aircraft have been more or less debunked on this forum by various people. I do take it into consideration, but I suspect he missed something with the SBD and may have had a different assessment of it in a different context. Next to a Spitfire or a Fw 190 sure it's a dud. But how many carriers did a Spitfire sink? If Eric had ever tried to drop a bomb on a Japanese ship or had to maneuver against an A6M he may have seen the light and grasped the meaning behind the nickname "Slow But Deadly".

I don't think the SBD was remotely comparable to the Swordfish or even the Skua. The SBD was known to have very good handling and maneuverability as well as excellent dive performance. It was also fairly heavily armed for it's day and class with two 12.7mm mg in the nose. The Skua was simply a generation behind it, it didn't have the range, speed, bomb carrying capability or the air-to-air combat ability to pull off the feats that the SBD did, (particularly at Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal). Skuas proved to be particularly vulnerable to fighters and had to be removed from combat in 1941. The SBD by contrast was able to shoot down enemy fighters on more than one occasion (with more than 120 air to air claims), could usually, though not always, make it through to the target even without an escort. It had a surprisingly high survival rate (allegedly the lowest loss rate of any USN carrier aircaft, which is fantastic for a bomber, apparently only 80 were shot down by Japanese aircraft in the whole war) and continued in use to the end of the war.

The SBD seemed to have two really crucial traits: 1) It was capable of surviving to reach the target and get the crew back to the vicinity of the carrier or airfield it launched from, and 2) most importantly it seemed to have a knack for scoring damaging hits with it's bombs. The combination of those two traits makes a very dangerous weapon for carrier warfare. It probably would have remained the main Navy dive bomber (with bigger / more powerful engines) except the wing design made it problematic to come up with any way to fold them. Thus limiting the number which could be kept on a carrier, and that was a major problem. That is really why the essentially inferior SB2C replaced it.

The D3A is a closer competitor to the SBD and in many ways comparable - in some aspects superior. But I would argue that it's vulnerability due to a lack of armor and self-sealing fuel tanks meant that it would have suffered seriously from attrition given the type of missions the SBD had to fly, in fact the D3A did suffer badly from attrition in those same battles, if not quite as badly as the B5N. In other words it may have been able to win Midway yes, but there may not have been any left (not to mention trained air crews) to also win at Guadalcanal afterwards.

Overall, as I mentioned upthread, I don't think anyone was able to produce a truly stellar dive bomber during the early to mid-war. From a design point of view, it was a hard nut to crack. Dive bombing was a very sought-after trait for military planners because it enhanced bombing accuracy by an order of magnitude. This makes it particularly compelling for naval aircraft. But adding dive brakes and stressing an aircraft for that high-G pullout knocks out too many other traits that you need in a wartime aircraft, much like carrying a torpedo does, especially for early war engines of ~800-1,200 hp. So when we say the SBD is "mediocre", what are we comparing it to? It was actually one of the best in it's class, possibly the very best (at least for the mid-war) though there were two other serious contenders.

The best dive bombers operational on any kind of large scale were all a distinct design compromise. I would say the SBD, D3A and Ju 87 (the only true vertical dive bomber) were the only three really good ones in terms of their operational history. The Skua, the Albacore and the Su-2, the Vought Vindicator and the Vultee Vengeance did not quite work out though they did show the deadly bombing traits to some extent. The A-36 could have been an outstanding dive bomber, and did some lethally accurate bombing in a very dangerous Tactical environment (in Italy, often unescorted). In fact it's importance in that role is probably underestimated. But it ultimately proved to not be quite strong enough for those high G pullouts. You also had twin engined dive bombers (notably Ju 88 and Pe-2) but their airframes and engines were heavily stressed by true steep angle dive bombing strikes and they had to be relegated to shallow angle 'dive bombing' of the type used by fighter bombers. Still much more accurate than level bombing, which along with speed and overall performance made them two of the best bomber designs of the war, but nowhere near as reliable for destroying targets as a real dive bomber.

A bit later in the war when bigger engines were available the SB2C could do the dive bombing job but it wasn't a great plane - closer to your analogy probably it ended up doing some real damage but kind of in spite of it's flaws rather than due to it's design merits. The multi-role Barracuda didn't seem to quite gel as a design. The impressive Aichi B7A and the Yokosuka D4Y were also good but flawed, the D4Y by vulnerability more than anything else, the B7A only by appearing in any numbers too late and being too big for existing carriers (apparently the B7A had armor and self-sealing tanks, which along with a 350 mph speed, two 20mm cannons and maneuverability compared favorably to an A6M, make it probably the best wartime aircraft in the class). None of these came early enough to help tip the balance of the war though.

So the best dive bombers through the mid-war had the best possible package of traits given the limitations of engine power and the features required by their role. The "Slow but Deadly" nickname of the SBD implies this, it doesn't seem that capable on the surface but it's actually quite lethal and therefore deceptively effective. Just like the Ju 87 and D3A.

Finally I should add - the SBD among it's many roles was also used pretty extensively for ASW. If you read Neptune's Inferno (arguably the single best overview of the naval war at Guadalcanal) it's surprising how many had to be constantly diverted, even in the hour of the most pressing need, to ASW patrols because of the immense danger posed by the Japanese submarines. Later it was the

TL : DR I definitely don't think they could have won Midway armed with Skuas or Swordfish instead of SBDs. The former would have been slaughtered by Japanese fighters.

The D3A is a closer match and a better point, but I think that was another one of the greatest aircraft of WW2, per the thread OP.

Stig1207 said:

If Midway was the turning point, then the Hellcat and B-29 are late to the party; same goes if Guadalcanal was the turning point. You could make a case for the Superfortress as the 'finisher'.

If the 2nd Battle of Alamein is the turning point in North Africa (I agree it was) then the P-40 was certainly apart of the air battle, but it was hardly alone; quite a few other types were also involved.

Yaks and Sturmoviks in the Battle of Stalingrad? Could well be, it's a good bid anyway.

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I agree with all that - given the crucial nature of Stalingrad to the defeat of the Germans and also the successful defense of Leningrad and Moscow, we have to look East, and when we do we will see that the Soviets were just starting to catch up in terms of fighter and ground attack capabilities at that time, they still had a way to go. The P-40 was important there too (during the siege of Leningrad in particular) but P-39 was really one of the stand-outs for the Soviets hard-won and gradual reclamation of Air Superiority in 1943.

However the Il2 (especially once they started putting the rear-gunner on it), Yak series and La 5 (etc.) fighters were all crucial to the defeat of the Germans. Once the Soviets worked out their production and build-quality issues they caught up enough to challenge German air supremacy and things really started shifting, though it was a hard job getting there.

I think the early war saw the crucial value of the Stuka, the Bf 109, the A6M, the D3A and G4M on the Axis side, and the Spitfire / Hurricane combo on the Allied side particularly for the critical moment that was the Battle of Britain. We shouldn't discount the astonishing successes of the Axis in the early war, that was the first turning point - with the BoB representing the first and earliest hard stop to the explosive Axis expansion. I don't think anyone was expecting the crushing victories the Axis powers won early on. Historically, if you go back into the longer memories of earlier times which extend centuries into the past, France, Poland, and the Royal Navy (including in places like the Far East) were formidable military powers which were not prone to easy defeats. Nor the Dutch East India Company.

Their sudden and decisive demise put all the Allied nations severely back on their heels and while some may feel victory was inevitable for economic reasons etc., I think most people at the time didn't see it that way (I know my family didn't). The Hurricane played an important role in those early days in blunting Axis momentum in places like the Pacific, North Africa and Russia.

The three mid-war turning points (back to neutral if you will) are Midway (or you could say Coral Sea / Midway / Milne Bay) and El Alamein (El Alamein / Tebaga Gap / Wadi Akarit) and Stalingrad (with Moscow and Leningrad). Then the momentum shifts right after that against the Axis with Guadalcanal, the invasions of Sicily and Italy (and the first capitulation of Italy) and Kursk. From that point onward the Axis were on the defensive and (IMO) there are no more tipping points, though there were of course titanic battles and some serious flare ups (Philippines, Anzio, D-Day, Ardennes, Kharkov, Korsun pocket)

All three of those Theaters - Pacific, MTO and Soviet-German war tend to get somewhat ignored in Anglophone discussions of WW2. British tend to focus on the BoB, Spitfire, Mosquito* and Lancaster while the Americans talk about Pearl Harbor**, D-Day, 8th Air Force P-51s and B-29s. We tend to forget in particular how big the scale of El Alamein and subsequent battles in North Africa were, those were almost comparable in scope to the titanic showdowns on the Russian front.

And the naval battles in the Pacific were beyond the scale of any ever before or since in history.

* Mosquito was one of the stellar aircraft of the war, I'm not sure if it was decisive to victory but in terms of giving an asset to the Allies that could reach out and seriously hurt German targets with precision, day or night, it was unparalleled.
**and a little bit Midway, probably more when this new film comes out.

When this thread started, there was discussion of defining the point the tide was turned. I think Nov '42 was the high water mark of the Axis. Guadalcanal, Stalingrad, Torch/El Alamein represented a global Waterloo for the Axis. After Nov 42 none of the Axis powers realized a strategic victory through the end of the War.

I think that is about when it started, but it took a while. Stalingrad went on until February of 43, same for Guadalcanal, serious heavy fighting in North Africa continued until March of 43 (Kasserine Pass, a substantial Axis victory, was in Feb of 43).

Second El Alamein was also set up by the first El Alamein in July 42 (a draw, technically but a rare example of stopping a major push by the Afrika Korps) and during the battle of Alam el Halfa, which was really the first important British victory by their new commander Bernard Montgomery, in August of 42. Simultaneously in the MTO was the series of engagements some call collectively "the siege of Malta" - Malta holding out, kind of by the skin of their teeth, amounted to another major Allied victory. That campaign went on through the year (and well before) but ended around your tipping point of Nov 42. Having Malta as an air base meant Axis logistics were choked off - definitely contributing to victory in the Med. Here you can give credit to the Hurricane and the Spit (and before that, the Gladiator).

Coral Sea (May 42) and Midway (June 42) were earlier, but in combination amounted to a serious punch in the face that knocked out some of the IJN's teeth. The real effects of it weren't entirely apparent really until Guadalcanal heated up, with those four or five carriers the Japanese would probably have won there.

So while you could reasonably say Nov 42 was the fulcrum, it was kind of more of a range from mid 1942- spring 1943, IMO.

I would also say in defense of the Swordfish, it clearly was one of those remarkable designs with something 'extra' that gave it the versatility it displayed and the long career it had - and contributed, along with pilot training, to the successes achieved with it. I just think it was a much earlier (mid-30s) design which didn't remain truly viable for as long.

Navalwarrior said:

Resp:
The notion that they US would 'let' Japan do/have anything after Pearl Harbor is a 'false notion.' Logic was out the window! Roosevelt wanted 'satisfaction.' ADM King flew out to California to see Nimitz. Their conversation went something like this; King to Nimitz: 'we (US Navy) aren't defending anything (meaning the craze in California), I want you to attack (Japanese Naval Forces), attack . . . attack!! Do you understand? Nimitz: Yes air! A USN Submariner assigned to Norfolk, VA was reporting to duty one cold day when he spotted a 'painted outline of an aircraft carrier' on the Tarmac. For some reason, a B-25 (PBJ) Mitchell was parked nearby. He forwarded his idea of the possible launching of Mitchells from an aircraft carrier. Two launches were done off the coast of New England. However, each time there was only one Mitchell onboard. Training and problem solving soon began at Elgin Field, Florida. The rest is history.

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I never said the US would let Japan do anything. My statement was that nothing in the Pacific Theater came close to constituting an existential threat to US survival. As such, it didn't matter from a strategic perspective whether the Japanese won at Midway or Guadalcanal because, in the long run, the war was simply unwinnable from a Japanese perspective. Yes, America would seek to disrupt Japanese intentions but any tactical or operational losses were simply setbacks because, ultimately the Allies would win the materiel capacity fight.

I'm sure that is true, but I think the sentiment at the time wouldn't necessarily reflect that with such equanimity. Any major setback (i.e. on the scale of Midway) in the Pacific would have had to be corrected before proper focus was shifted across the Atlantic. Many books I have read such as Neptune's Inferno (mentioned recently), pointed out that "Europe First" was more of a symbolic position and not necessarily the reality.

The loss of Hawaii, or even the plausible threat of Aircraft carriers launching strikes against San Fransisco or Los Angles may not have affected the ultimate outcome of the war, but they would have been a politically intolerable situation to American leadership. Far more so than anything happening in Europe.

buffnut453 said:

I never said the US would let Japan do anything. My statement was that nothing in the Pacific Theater came close to constituting an existential threat to US survival. As such, it didn't matter from a strategic perspective whether the Japanese won at Midway or Guadalcanal because, in the long run, the war was simply unwinnable from a Japanese perspective. Yes, America would seek to disrupt Japanese intentions but any tactical or operational losses were simply setbacks because, ultimately the Allies would win the materiel capacity fight.

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Reap:
Roger. There were too many unknowns in the beginning. Even today we debate, as we are now . . . the ins and outs of WWII. Information traveled slower and was harder to confirm. Good Intel likes to have several different sources to support and confirm information. The US will always be criticized for not helping (fighting forces) to combat Germany before 1942. So I will not attempt to do so. Logistics in the PTO was far greater than Europe. The USN quickly found that pre-WWII doctrine would not suffice against Japan (subs used as Intel gathering over destruction of enemy vessels and the Carrier became more important than the Battleship). Major changes occurred reapidly. Japan may have known the war was unwinnable, but in 1941-1943 it was questionable. Keep in mind that when Hitler declared war on the US in January 1942, the US was looking at how to fight/supply two wars.