The many errors of Mitsuo Fuchida’s Midway

[Alan_Newport]

@c.captain

The only way Midway could have tipped any scales in favor of the Japanese would have been for them to have found the US carriers first and gotten in a blow like we got on them. Three US carriers caught on their heels and sent to the bottom would have left no serviceable carriers in the US fleet and the Japs would have owned the Western Pacific all of 1943 and well into 1944 before new US carriers would have arrived plus we would have had to overcome being the loser and feeling defensive about the employment of carriers. Midway put the US in the position of being the victor so the Japanese were always being defensive about employing their carriers. Guadalcanal likely would never have happened since we would have had zero carriers to support the Marines!

USS Saratoga (CV 3), USS Ranger (CV 4), and USS Wasp (CV 7) disagree with your assessment of carrier availability in the event of a Midway catastrophe.

Midway may have marked the end of Japanese offensives, but that was bound to happen anyways - Yamamoto always intended to consolidate lines of defense and grind down our resolve to fight, leading to a negotiated peace*. As to the tenaciousness of the US Navy, there were still hard lessons to be learned in the night battles during the Solomons campaign, but the fleet emerged stronger for them. War is a brutal teacher.

*Which I’ve personally never understood. From the founding of the country, to the Civil War, to WWII, and today, every enemy assumes that we’ll get sick of fighting and sue for peace (on their terms). We never have; this October will mark 17 years in Afghanistan. We’re about the most fightingest people on the face of the earth, it’d be nice if we got treated like it.