Posted on 01/18/2024 8:08:54 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Dated May 25 and delivered by plane while the Yorktown was about a hundred miles from Oahu, the report that Nimitz read was sobering...
One day ahead of schedule, on May 27, the Yorktown limped into Pearl Harbor. The next morning, after Nimitz had cut orders voiding the safety rule of spending a day purging her tanks of stored aviation fuel, the Yorktown eased into Drydock Number One. The caissons closed behind her, and pumps began draining out the water. With at least a foot of water still remaining in the drydock, men in waders gathered to inspect the hull. One of them was Nimitz. After staring at the burst seams and other damage on the hull, Nimitz turned to the technicians and said, "We must have this ship back in three days." After a long silence, hull repair expert Lt. Cmdr. H. J. Pfingstag gulped and said, "Yes, sir."
Within minutes the first of 1,400 repairmen, who would work around the clock, swarmed into the drydock to begin repairing the Yorktown. To satisfy the enormous power needs of the repair crews the Navy contacted Leslie Hicks, president of the Hawaiian Electric Company, who arranged a series of rolling blackouts in Honolulu...
At 11:00 a.m. on May 28, Drydock Number One was flooded and the Yorktown was towed into the harbor with workmen still busy aboard. On the morning of May 30, more patched than repaired but fit enough to fight, Yorktown steamed out of Pearl Harbor. With an air group composed of aircraft from three carriers, Yorktown sped to a rendezvous with the Enterprise and Hornet at "Point Luck" to participate in one of the most decisive battles in naval history.
(Excerpt) Read more at defensemedianetwork.com ...
jeez that steel is peeled away like a tuna can
“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
Although a movie line from
Tora,Tora,Torah (1970),
and not confirmed as Yamamoto
having actually saying this,
the giant did wake up.
These men did an amazing job.
“Attacking the US was the greatest military blunder, not only of WWII, but of all military history, IMHO.”
The day the Axis lost the war.
Had the Japanese finished up in the Solomons and then occupied Australia, before their attack on the US, we’d have had a much more difficult job in the Pacific until after V-E day. Might have taken more years at the very least.
As it was, US subs, surface ships, and aircraft were not recognized for sinking Japanese vessels without verification from a disinterested source, so the US figure for sunk Japanese shipping was 8 million tons, per Jon Parshall.
The Japanese figure was 11 million tons.
During the conflict, I don’t think the US every put boots on the ground in Borneo, which had all the coal, iron ore, oil, and probably rubber Japan would need. But the Japanese couldn’t get it to the manufacturers on the home islands. As Parshall noted, most of that 11 million tons was sunk before the beginning of 1944, after that time it was difficult to find Japanese shipping to sink.
Glad to see this story posted and to read it.
A while back I found some illuminating statistics on the actual numbers of aircraft, ships and land forces by nation. You could spend many fruitful hours exploring this data on Wikipedia. Take a look at this section: Military production during_World_War -- Air_forces.
One big take away is the incredible amount of effort and money America put into manufacturing training aircraft and doing lots of pilot training.
The statistics show that out of about 296,000 aircraft American produced during WW2, 58,000 of them were TRAINING aircraft, accounting for 20% of all production.
By contrast, the Japanese produced 65,000 aircraft, but only had 3,500 training planes, a little over 5% of all aircraft made.
You begin to see the great wisdom the "Greatest Generation" of Americans applied to winning World War II. Lots of smarts, grit, and pucker-factor guts by America's highly trained fly-boys.
The Japs took it out three times — twice at Midway.
It must have dawned on them early on the only way to cause us serious damage would be to attack on our east coast, most of the population and industrial capacity was east of the Mississippi, while Japan’s cities were mostly coastal. Doolittle’s Raid was a big humiliation, and the realization that we could do that again and again probably had them reaching for the antacids every day from then until the end of the war.
From the article, what was in the sobering letter (it was more than just a hole in the hull):
A 551-pound armor-piercing bomb had plunged through the flight deck 15 feet inboard of her island and penetrated fifty feet into the ship before exploding above the forward engine room. Six compartments were destroyed, as were the lighting systems on three decks and across 24 frames. The gears controlling the No. 2 elevator were damaged. She had lost her radar and refrigeration system. Near misses by eight bombs had opened seams in her hull from frames 100 to 130 and ruptured the fuel-oil compartments. Rear Adm. Aubrey Fitch, aboard the damaged carrier, estimated that repairing the Yorktown would take ninety days.
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It isn’t recorded in history, but I wonder if Nimitz said anything like “Jesus Christ was resurrected in three days. This ship can damn well be too!”
In the article it said that while the ship sailed back to port (18 days) the crew repaired the flight deck so well as if it had never been damaged.
I recall some German guy saying something like “We would shoot one bomber down, and the USA would send 7 back in its place.”
Mass production played a big role, but of course, US ingenuity first developed the B-29, then built over 3,000 of them during the war and nearly 1,000 more after that. Beginning June 1944, as many as 1,000 at a time raided the Japanese home islands. The reason Iwo Jima was wanted was to have a much closer-in emergency landing area for planes that got shot up or malfunctioned, problems which had claimed over 100 of the planes and presumably their crews. The first time a B-29 used that capability was *during* the Battle of Iwo Jima. :^)
Today it would take 90 days to do the paperwork.
And then they would say “It isn’t worth it. Sell it for scrap for ten dollars.”
Never seen them before. Fascinating.
Indeed they did.
Was at first puzzled by this term, doubting that it could be a reference to actual caissons (which always include pressurized air in an air-tight space) - but then looked it up on Wikipedia, where it is explained that this is not the "core" meaning. Rather, it is listed under "Other meanings," and refers to a sort of lock.
Regards,
How true.
The rest of your comment is likewise excellent.
My personal perception (based on watching numerous Youtube documentaries on the subject) is that the nigh constant dilly-dallying and re-arming of the Japanese planes (switching from torpedoes to bombs) - plus the fact that, even though our torpedoes were largely defective, our attacks forced the Japanese carriers to constantly evade - gave us the decisive edge.
That and the fact that the Japanese carriers were fire-traps (no use of CO2 in fuel lines) made them very vulnerable.
Regards,
You could argue the Battle of Midway was decisive in terms of the eventual outcome of the Pacific war.
Getting the Yorktown out to sea in three days to join the Hornet and Enterprise gave us the edge we needed that made all the difference.
All FOUR Japanese carriers were sunk at Midway. More importantly, most of Japan’s war-tested carrier pilots were lost at Midway too. How do you recover from that? Well, they never recovered.
A huge percentage of that was by our submarine fleet, I’m seeing 55%. The Japanese didn’t figure out anti-submarine warfare like the Brits and US did.
The B-29 program was 50% more expensive than the Manhattan Project. It was an enormous undertaking that advance the state of the aviation arts considerably.
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