Posted on 12/01/2019 3:22:05 PM PST by Retain Mike
I once read some translated sections of the IJN logs.
They spent an inordinate amount of time worrying about the emperor’s portrait getting safely off Nagumo’s burning flagship, the Akagi.
I need to get out and see the new movie. My dad was a torpedo man on the Yorktown, his job was to arm and mount the torpedo to the plane. He spent the rest of the war on a highly decorated Destroyer which was sent to Guadalcanal several months after Midway.
The new movie is tripe.
Too bad Nimitz didn’t have working torpedoes. It would have been a cakewalk.
I do have a copy of that book. Thanks.
Thank you. I specially wanted to record the name of everyone I could find who played an important part in that piece of history.
The proper word is not "luck." Giving credit where credit is due, the correct attribution is "Providence," overwhelmingly so.
Chance is blind, God is not, especially when His Will is carried out by determined Christians. I think we can say that of the plurality of American men of that time.
"Dieu et mon droit!" (Motto of British royalty)
"The Sword of the Lord and Gideon!" (Battle of King's Mounrain, uttered by Rev. Samuel Doak (click here to the 900 righteous American defenders)
Now being bred out of the American youth by our misdirected schools, universities, and religious denominations. Farewell, Columbia!
I had a hard time believing it when I read it, but apparently it is true. What an odd thing. Hell, they had radios. I don’t get it.
From reading Shattered Sword, IIRC, it took a lot of time to get from low to high altitude. Pretty much had to choose one or the other early on their patrol?
.
Without a great God they would have been destroyed. That should be the preeminent thought. It was the grateful prevailing thought in the afterglow enshrining the outcome.
Never forget that, please.
I went to see it...twice. I was very skeptical of Hollywood putting out anything military related, but...many Freepers told me there was no PC horsecrap in it, and that it was generally pretty accurate.
You should go see it on the big screen. I have been waiting years for someone to do a WWII Pacific movie with CGI that really showed the ships and planes in a realistic light, and they finally did it.
There were a few things I nitpicked about (they showed Doolittle taxiing his plane for launch, and I don’t believe he moved it at all...he needed every inch, and I thought the conversation between Nimitz and Layton (Nimitz’s Intelligence Officer) about the identification of “AF” by Rochefort was Hollywoodized, but...I have to read Layton’s book he wrote in 1985 before he died. Maybe that is where they got it from.
Go see it in the theater. You won’t be disappointed.
Agreed
Hey, maybe I’ll drop by the AMC tomorrow and see this in the afternoon. I just assumed it was another CGI/SJW mess with Nimitz played by a woman and showing what great humanitarians the Japs were and other silliness.
Thanks.
I had a brother in law involved in the battle of Midway. He came home a alcoholic and died of it. I need to ask his daughters if they have any thing related to his service. My two brothers, a sister and two brothers in law saw battle in Europe...
Thanks for the recommendation.
In regard to the Japs and Japanese PC nonsense, when referring to the war in the Pacific we fought the Japs of Imperial Japan and it would be most appropriate to refer to them in that way. The men who fought them should always be able to refer to them as Japs in relating their experiences. If you go to the official site for the 41th Infantry, which was part of McArthur’s army you will note they took pride in being the division that took the fewest Japanese prisoners. In New Guinea a unit of the division overran a Japanese position and discovered they had slaughtered and eaten American soldiers and the Japs were not that hungry. When McArthur’s army got back to the Philippines they killed about every Jap they could find.
There is a light year of difference between them and the Japanese of later generations and even those of that generation who rebuilt Japan. I remember how thankful we were to return to Yokosuka and have the Japanese yard workers swarm over our ship. Many of those who helped build the Imperial Japanese Navy that attacked Pearl Harbor were in charge of the shops that did exquisite work repairing our ship before we headed to Vietnam again. The piers, cranes, drydocks, and shops were never bombed, because the U.S. Navy had determined to homeport the 7th Fleet there.
Actually, all of the Japanese carriers had reasonable firefighting systems or at least were designed that way. The Achilles heel of Japanese damage control was that they didn’t design their ships *around* damage control like the Americans did and their naval doctrine dictated that damage control was supposed to be handled by a core of highly trained damage control specialists, which turned out to be a problem when the specialists were killed or disabled and the rest of the crew didn’t know what to do. The American practice was to train all crew members in at least the bare rudiments of damage control (”This is a fire hose, this is where you find them, this is how you use it” and “This is a hatch, you keep it closed at all times when you are not transiting it.” if nothing else) and had noticed the surprising survivability of the technically inferior German WW1 fleet units at the battles of Dogger Bank and Jutland, which were attributed to superior damage control and ships designed around it. US naval architects and policy makers took this idea and ran with it to an extent that the Germans couldn’t and didn’t recognize it in WW2. American damage control and damage control oriented design were partially why the destroyers and destroyer escort of Taffy-3 were able to keep floating and fighting for so long with such horrific amounts of damage.
The fact that the Japanese damage control issues weren’t hardware centric was demonstrated by the carrier Shokaku at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Shokaku was hit in and through the deck by three American bombs dropped by dive bombers, equivalent hits to what sank some of the IJN carriers at Midway, but was easily able to put out the fires and sail away. It turns out the captain of the Shokaku had taken a look at what doctrine said he should do to configure his crew for damage control, said f**k that and had his DC specialists start training his entire crew in the rudiments of damage control. Shokaku would be hit hard at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands (six deck and through deck hits from Hornet’s dive bombers this time) and again sailed away due to the atypical-for-the-IJN DC training.
Correct - if you were at low altitude, you often couldn’t climb back to altitude in time to do anything significant, let alone intercept incoming enemy aircraft.
To give you some idea, the Zero’s time to altitude was a bit over seven minutes to go from near sea level to 19,685 feet. Their initial climb rate was about 3,340 feet per minute. Keep in mind that their climb rate slowed greatly as they gained altitude, like all prop planes. The Zero climbs like some early jets, but even that was not enough to get it from splashing torpedo bombers on the deck to intercepting a Dauntless at altitude before the latter could begin its dive in any amount of time to be useful. This was a fact of life of air combat until the second generation jets like the F-86 started showing up with their 7000+ fpm climb rates.
There were QC, control and availability issues with Japanese aerial radios throughout the war. They had radios, but they didn’t always work, they weren’t easy to use and they couldn’t trust them.
References here: http://www.j-aircraft.com/research/gregspringer/radios/radio_systems.htm
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