The Battle of Midway 76 years ago today

[Fadingpain]

Here is a nice 1/350 scale model of IJN Kaga, sunk at Midway.

 

Note the interesting design; it was originally intended to be a battleship and then modified to carrier use, as the Japanese did with many ships.  This is a favorite subject matter among model ship builders.

 

 

[DC Tom]

25 minutes ago, Foxx said:

right. because absolutely everything is as it seems. everything.

 

like i said, i wasn't there. you choose to believe in absolutes and that is fine. me, not so much. i love my country but i don't trust the GUS. it's not like they have never lied to us before is it.

 

i would be curious on your take of the book.

 

cheers.

 

I choose to believe that three - or your sources so-called twenty-two - intercept stations, with all those people involved, did not all decide that yes, they would sacrifice their careers and thousands of lives and the Navies and Armies they lived to build, because Roosevelt told them to.

 

MacArthur in particular - you really think that a General who had publicly dressed down Roosevelt and been sacked for it, who had no compunction about further insubordination throughout the war, who worked to strip other theaters of command of combat power to enhance his own position in the Philippines to the point of having the single biggest concentration of strategic bombers in the US Air Force located on Luzon, who still managed to be surprised by a Japanese attack twelve hours after Pearl Harbor was bombed, and who had direct access to the raw intel of PURPLE traffic intercepted by CAST...still agreed to never, ever, ever divulge that the US leadership and thousands of people below them who likewise knew allowed the attack to happen unimpeded?

 

That's not me believing in absolutes.  That's me not believing in the fantasy world you're living in.

[Gray Beard]

11 minutes ago, Fadingpain said:

Here is a nice 1/350 scale model of IJN Kaga, sunk at Midway.

 

Note the interesting design; it was originally intended to be a battleship and then modified to carrier use, as the Japanese did with many ships.  This is a favorite subject matter among model ship builders.

That’s a pretty interesting tidbit of history. Lexington and Saratoga were originally going to be battle cruisers, but their design changed early in their construction so they weren’t really converted or modified. Of course the Langley was converted from a coal ship, but I don’t think it ever saw combat. From pictures of the Langley it is obvious that a flight deck was built on top of a cargo ship. Kind of like these pictures of the Kaga. 

 

[DC Tom]

17 minutes ago, Fadingpain said:

Here is a nice 1/350 scale model of IJN Kaga, sunk at Midway.

 

Note the interesting design; it was originally intended to be a battleship and then modified to carrier use, as the Japanese did with many ships.  This is a favorite subject matter among model ship builders.

 

 

 

Kaga was well thought of by her crew...but a pig.  As a converted battleship, barely fast enough for carrier ops in '41.  

 

Interestingly, she was a replacement for Amagi, the sister of Akagi, both originally battlecruisers converted to carriers.  But Amagi was irrepairably damaged during conversion in Yokosuka by the Great Kanto earthquake in '23, and scrapped.

 

Which is probably the only time in history a warship was destroyed by an earthquake.

1 minute ago, Gray Beard said:

That’s a pretty interesting tidbit of history. Lexington and Saratoga were originally going to be battle cruisers, but their design changed early in their construction so they weren’t really converted or modified. Of course the Langley was converted from a coal ship, but I don’t think it ever saw combat. From pictures of the Langley it is obvious that a flight deck was built on top of a cargo ship. Kind of like these pictures of the Kaga. 

 

 

Langley was rebuilt before the war and officially declared an aircraft ferry ship.  She couldn't fly off planes by WWII.  

And Lex and Sara were actually pretty far along in their construction - enough that the turret barbettes were in place.  It's one of the things that made them relatively weak carriers - shoehorning a hangar for flight ops into that completed battlecruiser hull wasn't very efficient.  It also led to the creation of "deck parks" - storing planes on the flight deck as well as the hangar - to increase the size of the air group Lexington and Saratoga carried to a useful number.  

[RochesterRob]

15 minutes ago, DC Tom said:

 

Kaga was well thought of by her crew...but a pig.  As a converted battleship, barely fast enough for carrier ops in '41.  

 

Interestingly, she was a replacement for Amagi, the sister of Akagi, both originally battlecruisers converted to carriers.  But Amagi was irrepairably damaged during conversion in Yokosuka by the Great Kanto earthquake in '23, and scrapped.

 

Which is probably the only time in history a warship was destroyed by an earthquake.

 

Langley was rebuilt before the war and officially declared an aircraft ferry ship.  She couldn't fly off planes by WWII.  

And Lex and Sara were actually pretty far along in their construction - enough that the turret barbettes were in place.  It's one of the things that made them relatively weak carriers - shoehorning a hangar for flight ops into that completed battlecruiser hull wasn't very efficient.  It also led to the creation of "deck parks" - storing planes on the flight deck as well as the hangar - to increase the size of the air group Lexington and Saratoga carried to a useful number.  

  It should be noted that the conversion was not a "flip" decision by the navy but the result of complying with the Washington Limitation Treaty back in the early 1920's.  It was a matter of recovering money invested in a ship that the US Navy could not use if completed in the original design.  Same with Akagi for the Japanese.

Edited June 5, 2018 by RochesterRob

[Gray Beard]

8 minutes ago, DC Tom said:

 

Kaga was well thought of by her crew...but a pig.  As a converted battleship, barely fast enough for carrier ops in '41.  

 

Interestingly, she was a replacement for Amagi, the sister of Akagi, both originally battlecruisers converted to carriers.  But Amagi was irrepairably damaged during conversion in Yokosuka by the Great Kanto earthquake in '23, and scrapped.

 

Which is probably the only time in history a warship was destroyed by an earthquake.

 

Langley was rebuilt before the war and officially declared an aircraft ferry ship.  She couldn't fly off planes by WWII.  

And Lex and Sara were actually pretty far along in their construction - enough that the turret barbettes were in place.  It's one of the things that made them relatively weak carriers - shoehorning a hangar for flight ops into that completed battlecruiser hull wasn't very efficient.  It also led to the creation of "deck parks" - storing planes on the flight deck as well as the hangar - to increase the size of the air group Lexington and Saratoga carried to a useful number.  

I didn’t know that about Lexington and Saratoga. I’ll have to find some books to read on the topic. I wonder if there are books like Dreadnaught and Castles of Steel written by Robert K. Massie. Those books are really well done and thorough, but they cover the British navy up until the end of WW1. I would need something comparable for the US navy in WW2. 

[DC Tom]

47 minutes ago, Gray Beard said:

I didn’t know that about Lexington and Saratoga. I’ll have to find some books to read on the topic. I wonder if there are books like Dreadnaught and Castles of Steel written by Robert K. Massie. Those books are really well done and thorough, but they cover the British navy up until the end of WW1. I would need something comparable for the US navy in WW2. 

 

Not that I know of.  There is the one I've been working on - you can read it when I'm done (unlikely.)  

 

Norman Friedman's books are decent, but rather technical, and I think they fall short on the doctrinal discussions (in that, while he delves into technical details of what navies wanted, he doesn't discuss much of why they wanted what they wanted, and how it informed and was informed by fleet strategy, operations, aircraft design and operations, treaty and budgetary constraints, etc.)  A lot of Japanese ship design philosophy, for example, was based on putting as much firepower on as little displacement as they could...which led to some very good designs (Japanese prewar fleet destroyers were the best in the world), some seriously bad ones (Ryujo - an attempt to build a carrier under 10000 tons displacement with a usefully large air group - ended up so top-heavy she was dangerously unstable), and some unfortunate design tradeoffs (Japanese heavy cruisers had such a heavy torpedo armament that many were lost in combat when hits detonated their own stored torpedo warheads.)

 

Yeah...I know a lot about the subject.  Imagine if I did something useful with my time.  

[RochesterRob]

22 minutes ago, DC Tom said:

 

Not that I know of.  There is the one I've been working on - you can read it when I'm done (unlikely.)  

 

Norman Friedman's books are decent, but rather technical, and I think they fall short on the doctrinal discussions (in that, while he delves into technical details of what navies wanted, he doesn't discuss much of why they wanted what they wanted, and how it informed and was informed by fleet strategy, operations, aircraft design and operations, treaty and budgetary constraints, etc.)  A lot of Japanese ship design philosophy, for example, was based on putting as much firepower on as little displacement as they could...which led to some very good designs (Japanese prewar fleet destroyers were the best in the world), some seriously bad ones (Ryujo - an attempt to build a carrier under 10000 tons displacement with a usefully large air group - ended up so top-heavy she was dangerously unstable), and some unfortunate design tradeoffs (Japanese heavy cruisers had such a heavy torpedo armament that many were lost in combat when hits detonated their own stored torpedo warheads.)

 

Yeah...I know a lot about the subject.  Imagine if I did something useful with my time.  

  Not surprising as Japan was most deficient in iron and sourced rather far away from home versus oil or aluminum which was as big a reason to develop air power as was the obsolesence of battleship warfare.

[DC Tom]

47 minutes ago, RochesterRob said:

  Not surprising as Japan was most deficient in iron and sourced rather far away from home versus oil or aluminum which was as big a reason to develop air power as was the obsolesence of battleship warfare.

 

It was actually more treaty constraints.  10kT carriers didn't count against the restrictions of the Washington Naval Treaty, so if the IJN could have as many as thry wanted.  That loophole was closed by the London Treaty...and as it turned out, you couldn't build a viable fleet carrier under 20kT.  It's an argument that continues today: whether more smaller carriers is better than fewer large ones.

 

Battleship "obsolence" had nothing to do with it.  Carrier doctrine on both sides of the Pacific was to use them to support the battle line with spotting and reconnaissance, and deny the enemy the same by fighting other carriers.  It's actually the Battle of Midway that marks the start of that doctrinal change - the first time a surface fleet was repulsed by air power, and Mahanian doctrine failed.  And even after that, admirals were pursuing Mahanian-type " decisive battles (e.g. Halsey's run to Cape Engano with the fast battleships at Leyte).  Arguing battleship obsolescence drove carrier development is putting tbe cart before the horse.

[/dev/null]

5 hours ago, Foxx said:

ahh, but we couldn't let on that we had cracked the code so we had to let them attack Pearl Harbor....

doh!

I never bought the FDR knew about the raid on Pearl Harbor in advance conspiracy theory.  They knew an attack was coming but thought it was going to be much closer to the Japanese home islands

 

Now Churchill on the other hand, let British cities get bombed without evacuating the residents because he was afraid it would tip off the Germans that the Brits had cracked Enigma.  Actually it was Poles that really cracked Enigma, but that just kind of happened while changing a light bulb

[RochesterRob]

1 hour ago, DC Tom said:

 

It was actually more treaty constraints.  10kT carriers didn't count against the restrictions of the Washington Naval Treaty, so if the IJN could have as many as thry wanted.  That loophole was closed by the London Treaty...and as it turned out, you couldn't build a viable fleet carrier under 20kT.  It's an argument that continues today: whether more smaller carriers is better than fewer large ones.

 

Battleship "obsolence" had nothing to do with it.  Carrier doctrine on both sides of the Pacific was to use them to support the battle line with spotting and reconnaissance, and deny the enemy the same by fighting other carriers.  It's actually the Battle of Midway that marks the start of that doctrinal change - the first time a surface fleet was repulsed by air power, and Mahanian doctrine failed.  And even after that, admirals were pursuing Mahanian-type " decisive battles (e.g. Halsey's run to Cape Engano with the fast battleships at Leyte).  Arguing battleship obsolescence drove carrier development is putting tbe cart before the horse.

  This would be another situation where I would have to go find a book that I read decades ago to provide the details of what the author was trying to get across and his sources for which the opinion is based upon.  Anyways, IIRC there were officers in the Japanese military that favored building aircraft as aluminum and rubber could be found much more readily in Eastern and Southeastern Asia.  With the British and Dutch out of the way by the end of 1942 a string of airbases could be built in Indochina, Malaysia, and Indonesia with proximity close enough that a plane could leave Japan and receive service w/o a navy ship down to Singapore and points beyond such as New Guinea.  It also seems to me that there were Japanese officers who felt that surface warfare aka battleship warfare was obsolete prior to PH.  While 10KT carriers is definitely an extreme I think the US was well served by placing air resources over more ships especially when kamikaze attacks got to be prevalent.  I don't mind going back through some of the old books but it is not something I can do in a day for the sake of discussion.  Further, I want to say there was disagreement among the Japanese in terms of building the Yamato and her sister among larger battleships but Yamamoto's vision held sway.  Others preferred limited steel going into carriers and subs.