Was Allied bombing of Germany Jan - April 1945 a war crime?

An argument has often been advanced to the effect that American actions in the 1920s and -30s "made" Japan attack us. In fact, this argument was advanced as a defense by the attorneys representing Japanese officers in war crimes trials. Once, in a thread in which one of our members alleged that the United States "caused" the Pacific War by our actions, the individual concerned quoted a passage, and when i found it on-line, it was a part of the transcript of the defense offered for a Japanese officer charge with war crimes.

This, however, suggests that nations should be hostages to the ambitions of the militarists or the totalitarians of other nations. Japan limped along with a superficially parliamentary government from 1853 until 1923. In 1923, there was a terrible earthquake which levelled deal of Tokyo, and fires resulting from which burned a good deal more of that city, with Yokohama suffering in particular from fires. Rumor spread, even in otherwise respectable and reliable newspapers, to the effect that ethnic Koreans had taken advantage of the event to loot and kill, and even that Koreans had started some or most of the fires, and had increased the destruction with bombs. Vigilante mobs murdered undetermined numbers of ethnic Koreans, with estimates running form the hundreds to the thousands. One immediate consequence of the event was a declaration of martial law.

Officers within the Imperial Army and Navy had already been pushing for more control of the government, and that event gave them leverage which they needed, as the Army was the only organization in Japan at the time capable of responding in any significant way to the calamity. The Army and Navy, since the 1870s, had been building "patriotic" societies, which in effect became militarist political parties. First the Army, and then the Navy, created General Staff offices, which were independent of the Army and Navy ministers of the cabinet, and therefore independent of the Prime Minister. The Army and Navy General Staff Offices reported directly to the Emperor, and used a species of parliamentary manoeuver to dominate the cabinet. the Army and Navy ministers of the cabinet had to be serving, active duty officers. Initially, the Army and Navy used this requirement to control the appointment of the cabinet ministers--if an officer unacceptable to the Army or the Navy were appointed, they could simply retire the officer, or temporarily retire him on half-pay, and the Prime Minister would be obliged to nominate someone else, and, of course, would soon nominate only the candidate acceptable to the services.

But the Japanese constitution also required that the Prime Minister fill all cabinet posts within a certain period of time, and it finally dawned on the Army and Navy what kind of leverage that gave them. In the wake of the 1923 disaster, the services held the government hostage to their ability to overthrow any ministry through the forced retirement of the serving Army and Navy ministers. They soon engineered a bill which required the Army and Navy minister to be nominated by the respective General Staff Offices. Within a few years, they forced the passage of bills which required that any policy measure of the cabinet or bill of the Diet could not be implemented without the consent of both the ministers of the Army and the Navy, and therefore, effectively of the General Staff Offices of the Army and the Navy.

Japan had already begun to intervene in Korean affairs in the late 1800s, and in 1910, invaded and annexed Korea. This gave them a source of agricultural resources, and to a limited extent, access to some mineral resources (Korea's considerable mineral resources would not, however, be fully exploited until after the Second World War). In 1920, in response to raids by Korean independence agitators from "sanctuary" in Manchuria, the Japanese had crossed the Yalu River and occupied eastern Manchuria. The first Sino-Japanese War had been fought over control of Korean in the 1890s, and the invasion of Manchuria helped to keep the pot on the boil. In 1931, a section of the Japanese Southern Manchurian Railway was dynamited, and the Japanese in Manchuria responded with major force. In addition, a special brigade was formed in Korea and rushed into Manchuria. This was done in direct opposition to orders from Tokyo, which had carefully circumscribed acceptable behavior in response to the incident. The General Staff Offices knew that they could not publicly defy the cabinet, which had cannily secured the consent of the Emperor, because that would constitute a public defiance of the Emperor, never an acceptable act. The Army was to blame the invasion of Manchuria on "young officers," and carefully selected set of junior grade officers were reprimanded (subsequent appointments of these officers show that their careers were not impaired by the "punishments" inflicted on them). The large scale invasion of Manchuria was sufficient provocation to local Chinese patriots to spark incidents which the Army would use to justify the rapid occupation of the entire province, and the General Staff Offices had already moved to put control of the armies in Korea and Manchuria beyond the control of the cabinet. The eventual result of these machinations was the Second Sino-Japanese war in 1937, which many historians see as the opening salvo of the Second World War.

The United States was not resp0nsible for the Japanese decision to invade and occupy Korea, nor to subsequently invade and occupy Manchuria--moves which the Japanese made in order to secure the resources which she did not possess in the home islands. The United States was not obliged to abet the militarism of Japan in order to avoid a tacit threat, and the United States was justified in reacting to the invasion of China (Manchuria was, after all, still then in international law a part of China), a nation with which we had diplomatic relations and the trade with which was important to American business interests, by placing an embargo on scrap metal and petroleum to Japan. To suggest that this constituted a case of forcing Japan to go to war with us is to suggest that victims are responsible for the assaults they suffer at the hands of bullies.

Every step which Japan and her militarists took from the 1880s until 1941, in which she took steps to conquer her neighbors territory in order to secure resources were steps taken to support and expanding military--all that Japan needed from her neighbors which she could not supply for non-military uses could have been purchased, just as most nations in the world then and now purchase from other nations their needs which they cannot supply domestically. The great demand for iron ore, for scrap metal, for strategic metals and for petroleum in Japan in the 1920s and -30s was fuelled almost exclusively by the demands of the military. By the late 1930s, with the Second Sino-Japanese War raging, that military increasingly needed iron ore, strategic minerals and petroleum which it could not produce at home, and which it was unable to obtain in Korean and Manchuria in the quantities needed. The American embargo was in large measure a response of the Congress to the howls of American businessmen at the Japanese interference in the affairs of an important trading partner, China. England and Holland (among several others) followed suit, and encouraged by the American example, placed embargoes on the shipment of strategic materials to Japan. To be clear, Japanese domestic societies need for these materials were very modest, and could easily have been supplied by ordinary foreign exchange.

With a view to securing control the very significant mineral and petroleum resources of the British and Dutch east Indies, the Japanese General Staff Offices had begun planning military operations to take over Borneo (important mineral resources and even more important petroleum resources) which was controlled by the British and the Dutch, mostly by England; and to invade and occupy the Dutch East Indies. Doing so meant that Singapore would have to be taken and held by the Japanese, and therefore Malaysia would have to be occupied. To carry out such an operation (which was to be called the Southern Operation) meant that the threat of the American naval bases and airfields in the Philippines would have to be neutralized. As it was already clear that diplomacy could not accomplish this, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku began planning the attack on Pearl Harbor, at least as early as November, 1940.

To take out the Philippines would necessarily involve war with the United States, and the threat of the United States Pacific Fleet. If the Philippines were a threat on the left flank of the Southern Operation, the fleet in Hawaii was an even bigger threat. Admiral Yamamoto occupied a place in Japan, and not just the military circles, nearly equivalent to a god--second only to the Emperor in veneration. His plan badly frightened the Imperial Navy General Staff Office, and it was necessary for him to bully and cajole them into cooperation. It frightened the Imperial Army General Staff Office even more--it is common that officers by land are as completely incapable of assessing the risks of naval operations as it that naval officer generally underestimate the difficulties of protracted military operations by land. Only Yamamoto's personal influence and prestige were sufficient to overcome the objections of staff officers of the Army and Navy, and when the operation was on the verge of being put into execution, the Emperor very nearly gave staff officers heart attacks by doing something he never did--he objected to the operation at the monthly conference during which he was expected to silently approve Army and Navy planning. But the approval was finally secured, and on November 26, 1941, the First Air Fleet sailed from Hitokappu Bay--ironically, the same day that Roosevelt, Marshall (Army Chief of Staff) and King (Commander, Atlantic Fleet) sent the war warning message to Husband Kimmel (Commander, Pacific Fleet) and Walter Short (Commander of the Army's Hawaii Military District, and therefore commander of the U.S. Army Air Force on Hawaii). I've told in detail the incredibly incompetent response of Short and the casual indifference of Kimmel in other threads here. All the conspiracy theories about Roosevelt willfully ignoring the signs and precipitating the United States into war are so much BS, and the war warning message and the Martin-Bellinger report are evidence of that. Claims that the war warning message was not worded well enough to put Kimmel and Short (and MacArthur in the Philippines) on the alert are beggared by the responses of other officers, particularly that of William Halsey. As Admiral Nagumo and the First Air Fleet weighed anchor and began steaming for Hawaii, Halsey was in command of a carrier task force steaming for Wake Island. Halsey's response to the war warning message was to put his task force on full, wartime alert, with all watches going to general quarters, after which wartime watches were implemented throughout the rest of his cruise.

The Martin-Bellinger report was a report in March, 1941, by the two staff officers of the Army and the Navy on the probable consequences of an air attack on Hawaii, and recommendations to deal with them. The report's recommendations were ignored. The incredible stupidity of Walter Short could fill a thread by itself--suffice it to say that he was obsessed with fifth columnists, and clustered his planes in the center of the airfields (as far as possible from the fences and the imagined saboteurs) and put the ammunition bunkers under lock and key, so saboteurs could not use it to attack the planes. Fuchida, who, along with Genda had planned the attack, lead the fighters who straffed Hickam field, and he was astonished to see the planes clustered in the middle of the field, and couldn't understand why there was no anti-aircraft fire. Despite the Martin-Bellinger report, neither Navy nor Marine aviators were prepared to respond, and few of them got in the air. Despite the Martin-Bellinger report, there was no 24 hour radar coverage, and when the overnight mobile radar unit reported hundreds of aircraft approaching from the north, they were ignored, and told they had picked up B-17s coming from Los Angeles. Los Angeles is, of course, east of Hawaii, not north, and there six B-17s coming, not hundreds--the entire response to the attack was crippled at the outset by the inertia of peace-time complacency. The destroyer U.S.S. Blue reported submarine activity at the entrance to Pearl Harbor on the night of December 6th, and again on the morning of December 7th, and launched a depth charge attack on the morning of December 7th on the authority of standing orders. The report was not forwarded to Admiral Kimmel, nor to any member of his staff.

There is no reasonable basis to blame the United States for the Japanese attack. Furthermore, the very success of the Japanese attack can be said to be responsible for the savage attitude of the Americans in the Pacific War. The Japanese had long been viewed as almost sub-human, and laws had been passed in the states of the West Coast of the United States to limit their immigration--California passed a law to prohibit Japanese children from being educated in the same schools as "white" children. (The then President, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., had described the state officials as unruly children and bullies.) The American stereotype of the Japanese was of short, scrawny, bandy-legged, simian looking men with buck-teeth and "coke-bottle" glasses. Genda and Fuchida had overcome incredible difficulties in planning the raid, and their security measures were so good that as the fleet left Hitokappu Bay, Admiral Nagumo, Genda and Fuchida were the only people on board who knew the destination and the target--despite the fact that Fuchida had been training the air crews in very realistic exercises for more than six months by then. The fleet observed perfect radio silence, and arrived at the launch area undetected. The attack on Pearl Harbor deserves to be seen as the most spectacular naval operation of all time, accomplished against a daunting list of difficulties in planning, training and execution. A good deal of what fuelled American hatred of the Japanese was that this people whom we had so casually despised and belittled for more than half a century had humiliated the greatest fleet in the world in so spectacular a fashion.

To return to the topic--the United States showed no particular virtue, nor served any great moral principle. We were attacked, the idiots Hitler and Mussolini declared war on us, we went to war. It was as simple as that.

thanks for posting that by Vonnegut Endy

but all that destruction appeared to be by American aircraft. Therefore, according to Oralloy, it could not be criminal.

By the way, the United States was already "waging neutrality" as U.S. Navy and Coast Guard officers termed it, and U.S.C.G. aircraft, based in England, helped track down Bismarck after she sank Hood, while the USN and USCG patrolled convoy routes from North America to Iceland. Even with the Japanese attack, if Hitler had not been so stupid, Roosevelt could not have justified a European war, especially with a Pacific war on his hands --and there can be no doubt that Roosevelt was anxious to fight in Europe, if he could just find an excuse--and Hitler handed it to him on a silver salver.

Typically interesting and informative analysis, Setanta. A few supplementary points;

Japan was a dutiful (and self-aggrandizing) member of the Allied effort in WWI; supporting naval campaigns to clear Asian and even Indian Ocean waters of German commerce raiders and occupying some German colonial island possessions in the Pacific. During the 1919 negotiations they put forward some proposals for expressions of racial equality in the Versailles Treaty - proposals that the European powers, notably Britain, France and Holland, saw as a potential threat to their colonial interests. In any event Clemenceau and Lloyd George rejected them out of hand. This and the subsequent quotas (which they perceived as unfair) in the Washington Naval Treaty were fuel for the arguments of militarists in Japan that continued alliances with the victorious European powers were not in their interests, and, indeed, that conflict over their colonial posessions in South Asia was both inevitable and desirable. I also suspect the Japanese found Western indignation over their often terrible actions in northern China a bit hypocritical after the many 19th century interventions of these powers in China and their extensive colonial conquests in the region.

I suspect Roosevelt was well aware of all of these considerations. Moreover, discussions of an eventual war with Japan had been a staple of our military and government planning in this country for almost a decade by 1940. Just a glance at the network of Navy & Military bases - all constructed between 1933 and 1940 - on the west coast from San Diego to Puget Sound is a vivid reminder of that. My bet is that Roosevelt was looking hard for a pretext for war (as you indicated) and that he thought it as likely to come in the Pacific as in Europe. Beyond that things get a bit unknowable - in that we can never be certain about the inner motives of people, even political leaders.

Admiral Kimmel and General Short were duly tried and punished for their errors and laxity in command of Naval and Army forces in Hawaii. Interestingly the sainted General Douglas MacArthur got a free pass for his far worse laxity and ineptitude in the Philippines. Because of dense fog at their airbases in Formosa, the Japanese were not able to launch their planned near simultaneous air attacks on U.S. bases in the Philippines for about 10 hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The state of training and readiness of U.S. air forces there was not high though they had substantial forces at their disposal. Worse, MacArthur appears to have been in a seriously disordered mental state in the critical hours after he was notified of the attack on Pearl Harbor and before the Japanese air attacks on Clark airbase and the Cavite naval base in the Phillipoines. During those critical hours he refused to meet with his subordinate commanders and failed to order either a preemptive strike on the Japanese air bases in Formosa or even order elementary defensive precautions in his command.

I don't know if you are aware, O'George, but the Japanese also provided a cruiser and a destroyer flotilla to convoy supply ships in the Med during the Great War (based on Malta). They learned a great deal about ASW and subs during that time, and immediately began to take a close interest in submarine and destroyer design, tactics and operations.



I had thought about mentioning this in my post, but it was rather peripheral to the subject of the causes of war with Japan. The sentence above which i have highlighted is the second most damning indictment of MacArthur's failure in that time of crisis--but the most damning indictment is that being aware of the attack on Hawaii, he did nothing to protect his air assets from attack, as you put it, he did not even order elementary defensive precautions. Ironically, the B-17s which were headed for Hickam Field in Hawaii on the morning of the attack were on the way to the Philippines. It would be profitless, but nonetheless interesting to speculate how much use might have been made of the USAAF in the Philippines if MacArthur had quickly taken vigorous measures to attack Formosa and to protect his air assets. I suspect that the difference between Kimmel and Short, and MacArthur, was that the former were easily replaced, and the latter was going to be left to twist slowly in the wind. I rather think that him being ordered out of the Philippines five months after the invasion was a bit of realpolitik about the political cost of sacrificing someone whom the press had by then raised to the level of national hero. All that being said, i continue to hold the position that MacArthur worked wonders with the assets he had, after he got out of the Philippines. And, despite his stumbling response to the Japanese attack, he did organize the defense of the Philippines well, and despite footdragging and vacuous incompetence by Filipino authorities (for example, government stores of rice in the path of the Japanese troops would not be issued to the American-Filipino troops, because they didn't have paperwork from the civilian authorities--so Wainwright had it burned without consulting higher authority, so that at least the Japanese would not get it.

The Navy kept (or tried to keep) MacArthur on a short leash after he got to Australia, and in particular, Richmond Turner hated MacArthur and did as little as he could to cooperate with him. But MacArthur rose to the occasion, and his campaigns after he finally settled down in New Guinea were brilliant, and accomplished a hell of a lot when you consider how little naval resources he had to work with. His record on the ground is far superior to the meat grinders into which the Navy repeatedly threw the Marines, as though all that were needed for their purpose was enough warm bodies so as not to run out before the Japanese surrendered. MacArthur's Manus Island operation, in which he cut off more than 100,000 Japanese troops at Rabaul was particularly brilliant, and one which the Navy might have taken a lesson from, had they not despised him so much. Of course, the sentiment was cordially returned by Mac. The operation could not have been accomplished without support from Nimitz, and yet, after having helped MacArthur to "quarantine" the Japanese on New Britain, they returned to hitting the islands of the central Pacific head-on, no matter how many Marines and GIs were killed in the process. In the landing operations for which the Navy was solely responsible, i consider their record to be little short of murderous.

So, i would say that for MacArthur, he was lucky to have been where he was at the time the war broke out. The fact that he was neither reinforced nor removed from the islands until the Philippines were ready to fall suggests to me that Roosevelt (and probably Marshall) would not have been unhappy to have lost him. Interestingly, at the time Husband Kimmel was relieved, he was planning operations to relieve and resupply Army and Navy forces in the Philippines.

I don't fully agree with you concerning either the significance or the brilliance of MacArthur's usually overhyped "island hopping" campaign in south Asia. In the first place he didn't get far; and in the second, none of it was particularly significant to the outcome of the war.

The Japanese threat to Australia was blunted at the Battle of the Coral Sea. The decisive Battle of Midway -- which occurred just weeks later in early June 1942, wiped out the Japanese carrier striking force (4 carriers lost), and very significantly, nearly all of their experienced aviators -- ended it forever. (Unlike the U.S. which systematically rotated fleet pilots back to the states to train others, the Japanese kept theirs deployed and active in a dazzling string of victories which continued to Midway, about six months after Pearl Harbor.) After Midway Japan's ability to launch any successful attack on Australia or the USA was gone, and they had no ability to restore or replace it. It is noteworthy that after Midway the kill ratio in air combat with the Japanese naval air forces was about 20:1 - earlier it had been about 1:1. In the Battle of the Marianas a few months after Midway the Japanese lost over 420 aircraft in just a couple of days, compared to a handful of ours.

By the end of 1942 our submarines had in addition cut off most of the deliveries of petroleum to Japan from Indonesia. They still had powerful surface naval forces and well entrenched positions on islands throughout the region, however were no longer capable of seriuous offensive operations -- the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt. MacArthur's campaign had very little to do with it.

You miss the significance of the southwest theater. MacArthur's campaigns were intended to protect Australia, of that there is no doubt. But they were also intended to cut off large forces of the Japanese, and to provide bases from which to interdict the flow of supplies from the Dutch East Indies and Borneo, and they accomplished that, as well.

You're like so many navy men, totally focused on naval operations and their effect. Slamming head on into the island bases of the Imperial Navy certainly served a crucially useful purpose--but the United States Navy was focused on destroying the Imperial Navy and its bases. Accomplishing that would not end the war, either. The operations in the southwest theater were just as crucial to the outcome of the war. Once New Guinea was secure, and especially after Hollandia had been taken, the Army Air Force was able not simply to attack the Japanese bases in the Dutch East Indies, but to interdict Japanese shipping which would otherwise have delivered crucial strategic materials, not the least of which was petroleum, to the home islands. George Kenney and the Fifth USAAF did yoeman's service in interdicting Japanese shipping, and were at least as important as the submarine service in that mission. By the end of the war, Kenney commanded 5th USAAF, 7th USAAF, 13th USAAF and the Royal Australian Air Force. Not only did these air forces support MacArthur's operations and interdict Japanese shipping, but once a base was established in the Philippines, they supported the invasion of Okinawa as well. USAAF forces operated from Saipan to support the attack on Okinawa, and to interdict Japanese shipping.

It certainly would be a mistake to overrate MacArthur's contribution. It would equally be a mistake to attempt to portray the Pacific War as the Navy and Marines marching from one triumph to another.

Alright, Steve?

Vonnegut was a witness, an American there on the ground.
I believe he should be heard.
If nothing else - he earned that.. Not just because of what he witnessed - but because he took that terrible, soul destroying experience and instead of letting it destroy him, he created something profound and even beautiful out of it.
That's a kind of 'alchemy' and takes lot of guts
Good on him, i say

Well it's true there was little admiration for MacArthur in Navy circles then (Nimitz was particularly contemptuous of him). Moreover the Navy historical analyses of the very theatrical and self-infatuated general are not particularly kind.

Interestingly in leadership as in medicine the histories of the various pathologies that infest it are generally more interesting and written about than anything else. MacArthur is an excellent example of the authoritarian charismatic figures who inevitably lead their followers to catastrophe as a result of their inability to take the counsel of others when they need it most. No one could tell him not to lead the UN armies to the Yalu river in North Korea - or even ask him what he would do if the Chinese invaded, as they said they would.

We were fortunate that MacArthur was sidelined in the war with Japan as he was and that the important elements of our strategy and operations were in the hands of a truly capable leader like Nimitz. It is true - as you say - that MacArthur's campaign in New Guinea was intended to protect Australia. However it occurred after Japan had completely lost any meaningful capability to threaten the subcontinent.

It is true that the South Asian air forces played an important role in the interdiction of shipping from the Java Sea. However it was at best a supplement to what the submarine cordon around Japan had already done.

Eisenhower is said to have acknowledged that the experience of serving as his Chief of Staff was like "studying acting". MacArthur arranged for the (hardly justifiable) award of the Congressional Medal of Honor to the captain of the PT boat (James Bulkeley) who spirited him out of the Philippines - thereby implying something heroic about himself. He treated the Commander he left behind in the Philippines (Gen Stillwell) rather shabbily and saw to it that the Japanese General who defeated him in the Philippines was hanged for "war crimes". All this providing a rather substantial picture of the workings of a powerful and rather strange ego.

His apparent success through all of this had more to do with his theatrics than his accomplishments. It served the countrie's interest to portray his failures as heroic, and he exploited it all very well - and for far too long.

Petty nonsense, because we are saying the same thing.

No, we weren't. You spoke of punishing a few of the bad guys, and of our virtues. I try not to entertain any delusions about what uniform the "bad guys" may have been wearing. And more importantly, i have no delusions about "virtue" or "morality" in a war which we fought for the good and sufficient reason that we were attacked.

Thats a most lucid detailed and concise post Set thanks. Your ability to bash out the facts never ceases to amaze!

Just one more question...

Was it not unusual that the carriers should be out of Pearl Harbor at the time of the attack? Was the composition of the exercise group not strange in consisting mainly of carriers? Sorry thats two, well one and a half q's.

It was not necessarily unusual, as landings and take-offs from carriers at sea are considerably different from landings and take-offs on land, and for obvious reasons. Therefore, even in peace time, carriers were likely to spend a lot of time at sea, especially as compared to battleships, which required huge amounts of resources and labor hours just to put to sea, never mind cruise.

Halsey's group was steaming toward Wake Island, and i believe the dual-purpose was training and the delivery of aircraft to Wake Island. Wake was a way-station on the trans-Pacific airline route, and it was the most exposed position as a United States base in the event of war.

I believe that Halsey's group had a single carrier--at one time, i could have told you which one. Just at the moment, i don't recall which carriers were in which ports. At the beginning of November, 1941, i believe i am correct in stating that one carrier was at Pearl (the one about which Halsey built the carrier group with which he steamed toward Wake Island), one was at either Los Angeles (Long Beach) or San Diego (San Diego has been our main Pacific base until a few years earlier, when that base was transferred to Pearl Harbor--and the Japanese saw that as an implicit threat). Once carrier was in the Caribbean (based on New Orleans, i think) and one was in New York. That accounts for four of them. There were, though, five assigned to CincPac (Commander in Chief, Pacific), and i can't account for them all.

So, in November, 1941, it would have been strange if all four had been at Pearl, although certainly the Japanese hoped to find them there. (That was a rather foolish hope, given that even with the intensive training program for the Hawaii Operation, the six carriers of First Air Fleet were never in the same port until they assembled at Hitokappu Bay in mid-November, 1941. It was just not done to put all of one's aviation eggs in a single basket without a good operational reason.)

As i've said, i believe Halsey only had a single carrier in his group, which, given the stringencies of the pre-war period, was not unusual. His group would have been the carrier, one or more (but likely only one) heavy cruiser, one or more (and likely two) light cruisers, and a half-dozen or more of destroyers.

The scale of things on both sides was pretty damned modest in comparison to what the United States would build by the end of the war. Japan had seven large carriers, and even one of those was doubtful. She had perhaps three, maybe four light carriers--what the Americans were calling "Jeep" carriers by the time we had lots and lots of carriers (the word Jeep comes from GP, or general purpose vehicle). In the First Air Fleet, she had her six largest carriers--Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, Soryu, Shokaku and Zuikaku (the last named was making her maiden voyage).

The United States had fewer carriers assigned to the Pacific, but the five i've referred to had a carrying capacity in air craft, exclusive of scout planes, which was greater than the entire carrying capacity of the six carriers in Nagumo's First Air Fleet. The discrepancy would get much worse for the Japanese. Zuikaku was the last large carrier they would build. All the Japanese carriers which came off the ways after that were escort carriers (carriers intended to provide air cover for surface fleets), what the Americans called "Jeep" carriers, because the Japanese continued to think in terms of battleships as the Queen of Battle at sea.

By contrast, U.S.S. Essex was laid down in the Spring of 1941, and completed 15 months later in 1942. She was the first of the class named for her, and those which followed her would be built with even more expedition. She could carry 90-100 aircraft, exclusive of scouts, compared to the 60-80 of the Japanese carriers which formed First Air Fleet, and as compared to slightly more than 80 which was the maximum capacity of the pre-war American heavies.

The battleships we lost at Pearl were most of them pre-World War One battleships, which had been refitted and upgraded at least once each--but we did not lose the "cream of the crop," and even if the American officers were as ignorant of the fact that carriers made battleships dinosaurs as were the Japanese officers, we were building newer, bigger and better battleships. By contrast, the Japanese lost four of their "heavies" at the battle of Midway in the summer of 1942--Kaga, Akagi, Hiryu and Soryu--and was never able to replace them. The Japanese hadn't a snowballs hope in Hell from the day one, but after Midway, it was all rapidly downhill for the Imperial Navy, and all other operations of the American Navy, Marines, Army and Army Air Forces just became that much easier and more effective.

Sorry, Boss, but the Royal Navy just wasn't in it, and all fans of the RN should relish the destruction of Bismarck and discretely ignore the rest of the war. Bismarck didn't suffer that much damage from RN carrier-borne aircraft, but a very lucky shot disabled her rudder, and that was how the RN caught up to her. The principle RN attack aircraft at that time was the Fairey Swordfish, a dual open cockpit bi-plane which strapped on a torpedo or a rack of small bombs, wrote a will, kissed a photo of Mum and hoped for the best.

However, in November, 1940, the RN carried out a raid against the Italian naval base at Taranto, which may well have inspired Yamamoto's Hawaii plan. Using the silly little flying coffins, the RN nevertheless inflicted a stunning defeat on the Italian navy. There were a half dozen battleships there, five ready for sea and all relatively modern and well-built. HMS Illustrious launched just over 20 Swordfish in two waves (the typical RN carrier of the day had a carrying capacity of around 40 aircraft), and sank three battleships, damaged two others, and damaged a few cruisers. It was a ridiculously successful mission, the more so as the Italians had really rather good aircraft at that time--they simply had done nothing to protect their naval bases. Any decently protected base would have splashed all the Swordfish before they got in visual range of their targets. Certainly the boys in those Swordfish (fewer than a half-dozen were killed or captured) were incredibly brave--or perhaps simply so infused with that typical British hubris that they hadn't the sense to realize just what sort of military cheek they were displaying.

The RN made up for it all after the war, however, when they introduced three crucial refinements in carriers--the diagonal flight deck which dramatically increased the length of the flight deck, the steam powered catapult for launching air craft (naval vessels at sea have more steam than they know what to do with), and lighted displays for guiding returning pilots to their landing.

I'm no more a fan of the Royal Navy than I am of the US Navy or for that matter the Kreigsmarine. Except that its an interesting fact that the Navy reigned supreme from Trafalgar to Jutland and secured the largest empire in the world. (Also fascinating is the development of capital ships from Nelson to WW1...just over 100 years. From wooden sailing ships not that different from Elizabethan times to steam turbine oil fired 50k tonne steel armored battle ships with 16" turret guns. Not forgetting the Royal Navy was the first to have accurate charts and maps because a Yorkshireman called Harrison cracked the Longitude problem. Its helps in defeating your enemy if you know where you are especially if he doesn't )

The Fairey Swordfish was affectionately known as the Flying Stringbag on account of the mass of wires holding the structure together. It was so slow that radar controlled anti aircraft guns on a modern ship like the Bismark could not be calibrated for it...or so legend has it.

Probably true about the Swordfish . . . i don't believe Bismarck splashed any of them.

Accurate navigation was made possible by accurate clocks . . . and certainly men like James Cook went to a great deal of trouble to accurately map a good deal of the globe. But the English weren't alone in getting accurate navigational information. There was some joker at the USNA (Naval Academy) who was clever enough to put notes in bottles (yes, the classic stereotype of a note in a bottle) with instructions on how to contact him to tell where and when the bottle had been found, and asking that the bottle be put back into the water with a similar note. By this method, the currents of the North Atlantic were fairly accurately described within less than 50 years.

Having accurate clocks was crucial to navigation. For thousands of years, people have been able to determine latitude with a great deal of accuracy. The Old Norse did it with a notched stick. But finding longitude was only accomplished with accurate clocks. (By the way, the clock-making industry in England benefited greatly from the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. French Protestants had already been arriving in England--and Holland and Germany--for years, but after 1685, it became a flood. The Huguenots were mostly middle class, skilled tradesmen--and among them were some of the world's finest watch and clock makers.) With accurate clocks, one could now determine how far west one was by a comparison of "local noon" to noon as recorded on a chronometer set to Greenwich time. But arriving on a lee shore in the night was still unsafe, and accurate charts of currents and tides made it a much safer proposition.

The accumulation of cartographic and hydrological information, although initially jealously guard secrets for reasons of trade, was an international enterprise. I'll see if i can find a name for that joker at the USNA.

Harrison? Is that the anglisised name of Amerigo Vespucci?

A certain George Harrison, from Liverpool though, wrote "Long, long, long" but not "Longitude is all you need" or such.

Oh, , yes, John Harrison from West Yorckshire "invented" the ship chronometer. (I was even able to see it in Greenwich.)

U.S. Aircraft carrier presence in Pearl harbor was severely limited by the limited capacity of the airbase there at Ford island. Carriers generally fly off their air wings before entering port so that air combat training can continue while they are in port. The buildup at Pearl Harbor had been rapid and there wasn't yet adequate infrastructure there to base either the carriers or to support operations of their airwings. At the same time the Navy had an extensive network of large new bases at North Island in San Diego and the Moffet & Alameda bases near San Francisco, each designed expressedly for the support of carriers & their airwings. The result was that the carriers remained based on the west coast and only operated out of Pearl on a temporary & rotational basis.

It is true as Setanta noted that the total aircraft carrying capacity of US carriers in 1941 was probably as great (I doubt that it was greater) than that of the Japanese carrier force. Most of this capacity was concentrated in two large ships, Lexington & Saratoga, both conversions from planned battle cruisers resulting from the Washington Naval Treaty, built in the late 1920s. They were large & fast, but owing to their early design hangar and ammo handling systems not able to effectively operate as many aircraft as they could carry. Two others, Langley & Ranger were cheap conversions, suitable only for training pilots, but not combat operations. The main element of our Carrier force in 1941 consisted of Lexington, Saratoga and the three ships of the Yorktown class (Yorktown, Enterprise, and Hornet). These and one other small carrier, Wasp, comprised our carrier force for both Atlantic and Pacific Fleets. The Essex Class ships did not come on line until well after the desisive battle of Midway in mid 1942.

Someone at some level of our government and Navy was planning a long war with Japan well before Pearl Harbor. Ship; and base construction plus an enormous increase in pilot training, all started in the mid 1930s, confirms this. However, in 1941 Japan had a larger carrier force with better aircraft and arguably better trained pilots than we. They (perhaps of necessity) planned (or bet on) a short war (and not a war of attrition). Accordingly, they kept their best trained aviators on operational duty continuously, sacrificing a larger investment in the training of replacements. We did the opposite, and in the end that proved decisive. After Japan's loss of four carriers at Midway (June 1942) they no longer had the naval striking power to extend (or hold on to)their empire; threaten Australia; or stop our advance.

Interestingly most technical innovations in carrier design then and until the 1950s came from the U.K. This includes details of ship construction and the design of flight decks and their aircraft launch & recovery systems.

This is something which i have studied in particular, O'George:

Aircraft complement of Akagi, December, 1941: 18 fighters, 18 bombers, 27 torpedo bombers, for a total of four squadrons, launching 63 aircraft.

Aircraft complement of Kaga, December, 1941: 18 fighters, 27 bombers, 27 torpedo bombers, for a total of six squadrons, launching 72 aircraft.

Aircraft complement of Hiryu, December, 1941: 18 fighers, 18 bombers, 18 torpedo bombers, for a total of three squadrons, launching 54 aircraft.

The carrier Soryu, as with Hiryu, above.

The carrier Shokaku, as with Kaga, above.

The carrier Zuikaku, as with Kaga, above.

The carriers Lexington and Saratoga had a carrying capacity of up to 91 aircraft, exclusive of scout planes, and usually shipped five squadrons of 18 aircraft each. Enterprise had a carrying capacity of 90 aircraft, and ditto the assignment of Lexi and Sara. Hornet and Ranger were the first purpose built aircraft carriers (Langley was a converted ship, and Lexi and Sara were carriers built on the keels laid down for cruisers, but re-ordered as carriers afte the Washington Naval Treaty), and Ranger had a carrying capacity of 86 aircraft, while Hornet had a carrying capacity of 90 aircraft. Yorktown had a carrying capacity of 90 aircraft.

As of December, 1941, First Air Fleet could launch 387 combat aircraft. Any four of the American carriers, exclusive of Ranger, could launch 360. Any six of them (a match for the three carrier divisions of two carriers each which comprised First Air Fleet), exclusive of Ranger, could launch 540 aircraft.

I see in re-reading that O'George took not of the provenance of Lexington and Saratoga. I have an error: Kaga, Shokaku and Zuikaku all carried five squadrons, not six.

The six carriers of First Air Fleet were the six largest carriers in the Imperial Navy. Only one other "large" carrier was then in commission in the Imperial Navy, Hosho, which had a capacity of 30 aircraft--she was a purpose-built carrier, although as was the case with all Japanese carriers, she was built on a cruiser keel. The remaining Japanese carriers in 1941 were all what the United States Navy would have referred to as escort carriers, and that was the purpose they served in the Southern Operation. Major air attacks in support of the Southern Operations were launched from either Formosa or French Indochina. (The naval aircraft which sank Prince of Wales and Repulse were based at Saigon.)

The reason for Imperial Navy carrier superiority in 1941 was that the United States Navy divided its carrier resources between the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets. In fact, the total carrying capacity of carriers assigned to CincPac was only slightly less than the entire carrying capacity of the Imperial Navy.

It is certainly true that the Imperial Navy's carrier force was gutted at Midway. That was largely, however, the result of dumb luck. Spruance and Fletcher had decided that it was important to get attacks in as soon as possible to keep the Japanese off balance--it succeeded, at the cost of nearly every Devastator torpedo bomber which attack (a truly awful plane, the Devastators' contribution to the battle was to keep the Japanese off-balance, and to set up Nagumo's fleet for the incredible disaster which ensued--they did not damage a single Japanese ship). The first two torpedo attacks might have done some damage, if the Navy had not had such worthless torpedoes, something which BuOrd was then still refusing to acknowledge--but the served an important purpose. Nagumo's Zero's busily splashed the Devastators, and then headed back to their mother ships to re-fuel and re-arm. Wade McClusky, although is aircraft were dangerously low on fuel, had followed a destroyer to Nagumo fleet with his Dauntless dive bombers, and he decided to attack despite their critical fuel situation. By the time the three squadrons of Dauntless bombers arrived over the Japanese fleet, the carrier decks were crowded with Zeros landing and launching, and fueling and arming, and the hanger decks were crowded with Vals and Kates being fueled and armed for an attack on the American carriers. Because they were in the middle of arming the Vals and Kates, the hanger decks were covered with stacks of torpedoes and bombs. They went up like Fourth of July fireworks when McClusky and Company launched their attack.

That is not to say that Nagumo could have taken Midway, or that the Dauntless bombers would not have done some damage even if they had been obliged to attack under "normal" circumstances, with Nagumo's CAP in place. But certainly the spectacular nature of Nagumo's debacle was a result of just dumb luck--no one planned the sequence of events which doomed Kaga, Akagi, and Soryu. The final American attack badly damaged Hiryu several hours later, and she sank shortly thereafter.

One of those historical what-ifs centers around Nagumo. Nagumo was a battleship commander, and a damned good one, but he knew nothing about naval aviation, and had been known to deride naval aviators as being peripheral to the true mission of the Imperial Navy, to find the Americans and slug it out with their (then) superior battleships. When Hiryu sank at the end of the battle of Midway, Admiral Yamaguchi decided to go down with his ship. Yamaguchi was the best carrier commander Japan had.

So, one wonders: had Yamaguchi commanded First Air Fleet in December, 1941, rather than Nagumo, would he have launched a second and possibly a third attack on Pearl? The "tanker farms" at Pearl escaped in the attack, but would that have been true if there had been a second and third attack? Hiryu was the only carrier which still had its own CAP in place when McClusky and the Dauntless bombers arrived over the First Air Fleet--would Yamaguchi have managed his CAP and his fighter assignments more effectively than Nagumo?

Of course, that's just historical wool-gathering. But it cannot be denied that the great victory of Midway partakes more of luck than of superior naval aviation--something the USN could hardly have reasonably claimed in 1942.

Setanta is incorrect in ascribing our victory at Midway to “dumb luck”. While luck, good and bad certainly played a part in this decisive conflict, it is very clear that the Japanese defeat and the U.S. victory in this battle resulted primarily from readily detectable elements in the approaches of the two sides in this conflict that both preceded the Midway Battle and persisted throughout the war.

Perhaps as a result of their decisive victory at Tushima in the 1905 war with Russia, Japan was excessively focused on exquisitely planned and rehearsed major set piece battles that could singly and decisively alter the trajectory of history. This is what drove their attack on Pearl Harbor and the remarkable string of victories in the Philippines, Malaya, Singapore, the Java Sea, the Indian Ocean and the islands of the South Pacific that followed in the six months after Pearl Harbor. It also contributed to their somewhat incomprehensible (from our perspective) failure to follow through after the initial Pearl Harbor attack. Japan did not contemplate a long war of attrition with the U.S. and hoped that through decisive, dramatic action they could force us into a political accommodation. Conversely, the U.S. planned on a war of attrition right from the start.

The Japanese strategic goal at Midway was to force a decisive fleet engagement with the remaining U.S. carrier forces through an attack on Midway Island (half way between Hawaii & Guam), before our construction potential could give us superiority, and thereby force us to a political accommodation in which we would accept the gains they had made. We couldn’t afford to lose Midway Island without a fight so that aspect of their strategy was sound.

The forces available to Japan at Midway were vastly superior to our own " particularly among surface ships (battleships & cruisers), but also including aircraft, weapons especially torpedoes) and even aircraft carriers. We lost one of our biggest carriers (Lexington) at the Battle of Coral Sea a few weeks earlier and nearly lost another (Enterprise) which was badly damaged there and which put to sea for Midway after only a three day repair period, still with several hundred shipyard workers aboard busily welding the ship back together even during the subsequent battle. The Japanese lost a small carrier at Coral Sea.

At Midway the Japanese pursued an exceedingly complex plan in pursuit of their objectives. This included a nearly useless “diversionary” attack on the Aleutian Islands that displaced two small aircraft carriers that could have been far better used in the central engagement. In addition their force disposition at Midway was excessively complex, and this contributed to the tactical errors that later proved disastrous for them.

The U.S. had the benefit of superior intelligence " through code breaking Adm. Nimitz had knowledge of the Japanese attack on Midway and its approximate timing. We didn’t have details of their force disposition or of other elements including the attack on the Aleutians.

The decisive difference at Midway was that despite inferior forces, a number of serious errors in execution, and the inevitable confusion attendant to the engagement, the U.S. forces remained focused on their central objective " the destruction of the Japanese carriers (defending Midway was an important, but secondary objective). While, the Japanese executed a complex plan, losing sight of their central objectives in the process.
After the first Japanese air attack on Midway Island, in which they encountered tougher than expected resistance from the Marines there, the Japanese Air Wing Commander radioed back the need for a second strike on the island " something that was a planned contingency in their plan. However at that moment the only critical issue before them was the location and proximity of the American carriers " they had pulled the tiger’s tail and now needed to deal with the beast itself. Instead of staying focused on this, the central objective of the enterprise, the Japanese plan was “in automatic” and they dutifully armed their remaining aircraft for a second attack on the island using the appropriate contact-fused weapons. By contrast, the U.S. forces consistently stayed focused on their central objective, the Japanese carriers, avoiding all distractions. The attack on Midway itself gave Admiral Spruance a general knowledge of the location of the Japanese carriers, and as soon as a confirmatory sighting was achieved he launched the American attack.

U.S. Torpedoes and the aircraft that launched them were inferior to those of the Japanese, and our planned coordinated simultaneous attack by torpedo planes at sea level and high altitude dive bombers was botched by a navigation error on the part of the dive bombers, which arrived 18 minutes late. All our torpedo planes were shot down without scoring a single hit. However the dive bombers pressed on, arriving overhead as the Japanese fighters were finishing off the torpedo planes at low altitude and while the decks of the Japanese carriers were locked with fuelled, armed aircraft as they desperately scrambled to reconfigure them from the second strike on Midway to an anti ship strike, following the sudden discovery of the presence of the U.S. carriers. The dive bombers focused only on the Japanese carriers, and in the ensuing 8 minutes Japan lost three large carriers and suffered serious damage to a fourth which sank a few hours later. Equally importantly, they lost all of their trained, experienced carrier pilots, then arguably the best in the world. Japan never recovered from this loss " before Midway the kill ratio in air combat with the Japanese was about 1:1 (or less): after Midway it was about 20:1.

Japan lost at Midway despite a significant superiority in forces and weapons because they lost sight of their central objectives in the execution of an overly complex plan. The U.S. won at Midway because, despite a significant inferiority in available forces and errors in execution, they remained focused on their central objectives " and achieved them in the process.