Posted on 06/03/2012 3:50:59 PM PDT by smokingfrog
Spanning hundreds of leagues and four days, June 4-7, 1942, the Battle of Midway pitted an overmatched American fleet against a Japanese armada in a desperate struggle for command of the Pacific. What unfolded more than 1,000 miles northwest of Hawaii was, British historian John Keegan maintains, “the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare.”
Saturday in San Diego, the U.S. Navy celebrated this triumph’s 70th anniversary. Aboard the retired aircraft carrier named for the battle, 1,000 guests were to hear videotaped comments from a handful of survivors.
They included aviators, Marines and one plucky steward.
“The Japanese had the most ships,” that steward, 97-year-old Andy Mills, said during an earlier interview in his San Diego home. “But we knew they were coming — we had cracked their codes. We had the upper hand.”
The U.S. Navy may have had another advantage — it was stocked with flexible, creative officers and sailors. Mills, a black man in the then-segregated Navy, began the Battle of Midway as a steward aboard the carrier Yorktown, making meals and cleaning rooms. Before the battle’s end, he would crack a safe, struggle to save a doomed vessel and abandon ship — twice.
Midway turned the tide of World War II in the Pacific, snapping a string of Japanese victories that had begun six months earlier at Pearl Harbor.
(Excerpt) Read more at utsandiego.com ...
I agree and I came to realize my parents didn’t really talk much about it, nor toss it back at me when I complained about something. Their generation and the one before it just went out and got it done. Then went on about their business working and raising a family.
Yeah...the deck eventually became stacked against them.
Funny thing is, you talk to people today, and they talk as if the outcome of WWII was a foregone conclusion.
Early on, when we met the Japanese around the Solomons, they were a tough, evenly matched foe with us, and superior in some facets.
We learned from our mistakes. They did not. A great book that explains how we embraced technology and tactics, and how they stubbornly refused to change is “Neptune’s Inferno”, about the naval battles around the Solomon Islands. Of course, it also highlights how some of our leadership refused to learn as well, particularly with respect to torpedoes...we were stuck on gunnery. Even as late as November 1942, there were commanders in the fleet who did not understand either the deficiencies with our torpedoes, or the clear superiority and performance specifications of theirs (Long Lance).
Well before my time, yet tears streaming. Unfortunately the Greatest Generation didn’t teach their young well. They are the long grey haired freaks pretending to teach their Grand Children about right and wrong.
Another thing these early battles proved was just how vulnerable aircraft carriers were to dive bombers. A single 500lb bomb could destroy one.
The Navy had broken the Japanese Naval Code(JN25), that helped. The Japs didn’t have radar, that helped too. Personally, I think just six months after Pearl Harbor the US Navy was just Hell-bent for revenge. God Bless the US Navy and Naval Aviation..
Six months after Pearl Harbor the war was lost for all intents and purposes in this one battle. There were a lot of battles to be fought yet, but the Japs weren’t going to win the war
Midway, El Alamein and Stalingrad, 1942 a bad year for the Axis forces
Wow. I’m impressed Reb.(Don’t forget LT. Cmdr. Wade McCluskey.)
I think the problem is these hardened WWII and depression era veterans and their equally hard working wives wanted to make things easy for their children. They did not realize the hard times they went through is what made them tough and in some sense, good.
Also the end of WWII coincided with Marxists taking control of the country just as McCarthy said. they did it without the average American even knowing it.
“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve’’. Admiral Yamamoto’s answer on the success of the Pearl Harbor attack.
Lt. Joseph Rochefort, along with his OP-20-G cryptanalyst colleagues in Hawaii, made a major contribution to the success at Midway.
I read that same book years ago. Sakai’s near-death flight back to his base at Lae, wounded as he was and though an enemy combatant was amazing.
Actually the Japanese had superior aircraft at this point in the war. Midway Island had only a handful(maybe two or three)wildcat fighters with mostly Brewster Buffalos as there mainstay fighter, a plane that was highly out classed by the Zero. Even the Wildcat was slightly inferior to the Zero except in certain aspects. The carriers were full of the obsolete torpedo plane, most of which were shot down along with there crews in their attacks, in some instances 19 out of 19 planes in a squadron were killed before they could drop their torpedoes and the torpedoes that were launched didn't hit anything.
The plane that won it for us was the Douglas Dauntless dive bomber and then only because the torpedo planes had pulled the Zeros down to sea level in an effort to stop them so with no Zeros to oppose them the dive bombers were able to launch their attacks successfully, they had to come back the second day to get the 4th carrier, by that time the Japanese planes were all but gone.
The Japanese had the advantage except for one thing, our intelligence had broken the Japanese codes(not all of them but many)and the Japanese were so arrogant they thought no one could break their codes and they refused to change them. This lost them the war. Magic was kept secret for the entire war, a great achievement in it's own right.
Breaking the code only helped in that we could do a little more to fortify Midway. As it turned out the long range high flying Army bombers had no effect on the Japanese fleet. In fact high flying precision bombers never did do much against ships for the entire war.
The American carriers still had to beat them in battle. In a way it was just what the Japanese wanted, to lure the remaining American carriers into a battle where they could sink them all. It turned out we had one more carrier than they thought but I would bet they would have chosen to fight us at Midway even so since they still had 4 and had shown they could beat us.
History would have been very different if the Army fire eaters in Japan took Roosevelt's deal to end the stalemated war in China proper, keep their oil supplies, and looked north to Siberia to deal a death blow to the Soviet Union in the fall of '41 preventing Stalin his reinforcements that blocked the Germans at the gate of Moscow.
Yes he was shot through the eye by the tail gunner on a Dauntless. A .30 cal. bullet through the eye would stop most people but Sakai made it back home even tho he was passing in and out of consciousness.
He was based at Lai and I remember him saying at one time that a fellow pilot told him American Marines had landed on New Guinea and were fighting like demons.
Don't forget intelligence. According to the movie, and I believe it is correct in outline, this was crucial. It enabled what amounted to an ambush of the Japanese by the Americans.
I loved the scene in the movie where Charlton Heston was talking to Hal Holbrook, who was explaining their theories about the interecepted radio communications. Heston exclaimed in exasperation, "You're guessing!" Unperturbed, Holbrook replied, "We like to call it analysis."
But, again, worse for the Japanese they had committed two cardinal sins of dividing their superior forces and failure to focus on a single objective.
The American fighting man of WWII had no equal.
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