The Midway carriers were killed -- destroyed -- by fire.  The burning hulks were eventually scuttled by torpedoes, but that's all they were by then -- hulks that had been warships, but had been damaged far beyond any possibility of repair.  Same with HORNET, PRINCETON etc.  This is rather like claiming that sinking a fishing boat is a naval battle.

That would still be you. Larry.

Sinking a radio picket guard boat during a battle. Get it straight nitpicker. You won't be permitted to try to slide a misstatement of historic fact into this discussion.

I'm going to tell you this one time, and I expect you to understand it, Larry. The mechanism each chose to scuttle their carriers is the TORPEDO. Get it? T.O.R.P.E.D.O. They didn't open sea cocks and flood the bilges. They broke a carriers keel and sank it with torpedoes so that it couldn't be captured reverse engineered, trophied, or used. Scuttle is when you sink yourself. I addressed the HOW. Now that I squared you away on this little factoid; let's deal with the rest of your nonsense.

LEXINGTON and TAIHO  were both lost to a series of events that started with torpedo hits (plus bomb hits in the case of LEX., but were destroyed by fires resulting from explosions of avgas fumes.  In each case the immediate damage caused by the torpedoes had been dealt with, flooding under control and the ships were prepared to operate a/c.  The proximate cause of the explosions was, in each case, an error in damage control efforts.  In LEXINGTON this was an error of omission -- failure to shut down an electric generating unit located near the avgas leak.  In TAIHO is was an error of commission -- the attempt to use power tools to free the jammed a/c elevator without purging the ship of avgas fumes first.

Sunk by torpedoes. Otherwise they would have been towed home by SOMEBODY as a war trophy.

WASP and SHINANO (due largely to incomplete compartmentalization) were certainly torpedo kills.  YORKTOWN was also finally killed by the I-boat attack, but only after surviving both bombs and torpedoes as the resulting fires, and all the other fleet carriers mentioned were destroyed by fire.

Hulks are not destroyed for use until they are SUNK. This little fact seems to escape you.

ARK ROYAL's loss to torpedo damage was largely due to the engine room arrangement, which was duplicated in the four ILLUSTRIOUS class ships, none of which was ever hit by a torpedo, so the question of their ability to survive such hits remains only a theory.  Again, you're ducking the real problem.  ARK ROYAL was the only RN carrier with adequate a/c capacity.  The  USN would cheerfully have traded either WASP or RANGER (especially RANGER) for ARK ROYAL.  The ILLUSTRIOUS class were basically huge, expensive, armored CVLs.  This was acceptable because all that was expected of them was scouting and CAP for a battleship force. 

Incorrect. You are forgetting the British PTF? What carriers were used? No American admiral would use the British carriers without British crews, nor could he. Different tech trees-totally different tech trees. Not even the ammunition was the same for the primary AAA guns.

The TBF was available by the time the Barracuda was.  What I said was that the Albacore wasn't enough improvement on the Swordfish (note that the Albacore was retired BEFORE the Swordfish it was supposed to replace) to be worth the cost of development and production interruption and the Barracuda wasn't worth doing at all.  Brown (DUELS IN THE SKY) considered the Skua an excellent dive bomber, but tricky to land on board (but no worse than a Sea Spitfire) and was also critical of its stall characteristics.  Still, the big problem was that RN carriers didn't have enough capacity for dive bombers as well a fighter and torpedo a/c.  If I recall correctly, the first serious German warship sunk by RN a/c was dive bombed by Skuas. 

The Barracuda is not available in 1939, neither is the Avenger. Got it? You have the Swordfish and the Fulmar . You have to make do with your tech tree. No miracles. The Albacore was sturdy enough to take a better engine but wasn't really going to be in the Avenger category. Short term in 1939, you should look at the Devastator and see if you can give it a better engine as well as some more range. That is an American problem, but if you are the British purchase mission. you investigate putting a Bristol Perseus or Hercules engine into the tweaked Devastator, or you use an P&W R-1830-86. 300 HP-400 HP added translates into about 20-35 more knots airspeed in that Heinenmann airframe.

While the British torpedo was cetainly more reliable than the US Mk13, it was certainly not any more sturdy, and the drop parameters were at least as strict.

Repeat after me; simplified Mark VI composite exploder-total failure. Fat stubby fish broaches, porpoises, breaks at the warhead afterbody join or blows up on hitting the waves................The British torpedo before the Mark 13 plug nose ring shock entry kits and the break off drag drop fins works as dropped. The Mark 13 doesn't.

The WW1 convoys were usually only lightly escorted with warships (troop convoys excepted) and often not escorted at all.  If a submarine was encountered, they tried to ram it.  It actually worked due to the limited capabilities of the subs of the period.  That was why the Germans started building the big 'cruiser' submarines which had sufficient deck gun armament to make that tactic impractical.

The WWI U-boat was SLOW on the surface, and there were no wolf packs. The cruiser sub was to increase sortie range. The small WW I U-boat could and DID carry a deck gun big enough to frighten a freighter.

Ironicaly in WW2 it was the USN that resisted going to a convoy system and the RN that pushed it.

We didn't have our escort ducks in a row. That wasn't because we had the wrong doctrine. It was because of King, and his Japan fixation, and our escort shortage. I said this. So don't let's try to rewrite history with another falsehood, shall we? 

So much for 1, 2 and 3. 

Yeah. You still got nothing.

Herald

4. Oh, you are so full of it your hair is floating.  The USN NEVER seriously examined the relative advantages of multi-carrier forces before P.H.  None of the Fleet Exercises involved two or more carriers operating together.  Unlike the Japanese, there was no realistic training in air group sized strikes and NONE AT ALL involving two or more groups together, which is why the Japanese were so much better at it during most of '42.   The Japanese doctrine made the air group the TOTAL a/c of BOTH carriers of a division, not that of a single ship.  It made possible coordinated wave attacks while the US air groups were fumbling with multi-deck load launche

A. You don't know what you are talking about as usual, Larry.

Fleet Problem X-XIII had Lexington and Saratoga go up against each other usually with the Langley aiding one of them. As soon as Ranger came onboard it was two on two or three on one, or all against landbased air. The Pearl Harbor attack was a FAVORITE. At the NWC they table-topped multi-carrier engagements [Spruance ran some of those problems]

B. What the NWC table-topped either became a Fleet Problem or the Fleet Problem was simmed, but the exercises were usually collaborated so that everybody commanding had a whack at it and understood what the fleet was trying to do.

On the other hand, the US AAA was far better than the Japanese, due to radar.  Without radar, the IJN air defense doctrine was to concentrate the carriers tightly and spread the escorts around them in a circle five to seven miles in radius to spot the incoming attack and direct the CAP Zeroes to intercept by firing the warships main guns at the attackers.  That meant that the CAP (who didn't carry radios) tended to mob the first attacking force encountered and were unable to react to any other strike groups, and that the attack force would be shot at by one or two escorts crossing the 'ring' and would then have to deal only with the AAA of the carriers themselves.

First of all the Japanese used the AAA Hotchkiss 25mm triple mount

Effective slant range on it was 4000 meters. It was fed clips of 15 rounds each jammed like crazy and was aimed by a guy pointing a sword at an aircraft while the gunner followed in train bearing and elevation used a segmented ring sight.

Second; The USN used the Chicago Piano as its standard AAA mount. That was the 28 mm/60 caliber auto-cannon that had an effective slant range of 4000 meters , was fed 7 round clips in a vertical feed, jammed like crazy and was aimed by a gunner using an unreliable mechanical track lead that the gunner laid by following where the gun captain pointed at plane until the gunner put the plane into a segmented ring sight.

Third: the Japanese used flash charges to point their fighters in the direction their fire control optical directors saw enemy aircraft come in to attack.

Fifth: US radar at Midway was ineffective beyond thirty nautical miles.

Sixth: Japanese picket ships occupied the compass points around the carriers. The rest of the escorts were in a C-shaped ASW formation. Standard drill was every ship for herself, when under air attack maneuvering to dodge bombs or torpedoes. Nobody covered a sky arc.

Seventh: US carrier separation was thirty miles. When the Hiryu attacked Yorktown, the ENTIRE US CAP swung around and went out to meet the raid-all twelve of them-which was the average American CAP size for Midway by the way. Concentration of carriers in the same location didn't matter. The CAP failed because there weren't fighters-not because there weren't enough carriers.

Eighth: The 5/38 didn't have a good V/T shell in June 1942. That would change in time for Santa Cruz, but at Midway? Forget it. USN AAA was a JOKE.

The USN directed CAP by radar and concentrated the cruisers and destroyers tightly around the carrier as AAA support.  At Coral Sea the shortage of fighters for CAP seriously hadicapped the defense, but even then, the few fighters available, and the AAA savaged the Japanese attack force.  At Midway, YORKTOWN was caught alone because King, in Washington had specifically forbidden combining the two TFs into a single formation.  Doing so, as Fletcher, and Ted Sherman both recommended, would have greatly improved the coordination of the CAP and more than doubled the concentration of AAA.  Instead of one carrier, three cruisers and 6-7 destroyers, they'd have been up against three carriers, nine cruisers and 18-20 destroyers.  The Navy eventually accepted that the dispersion policy was WRONG after studying the 1942 carrier duels, and made units of up to four carriers standard policy by mid-'43.

Not enough fighters and you are confusing the AAA of the late Solomons campaign with the reality that was Midway.

Example: at Midway the fighters were 1/3 of a carrier air-wing. By the Turkey Shoot it was more than half on the heavy carriers and the Princetons carried as many as 2/3rds of their air-wing as fighters.

Dispersal worked??  Name me one occasion on which it worked!  It protected nothing, while weakening the defense and making coordinated strikes much more difficult to manage by separating the ships.

MIDWAY.

The Hornet and Enterprise ESCAPED because they were not seen in time for the Hiryu to get them. Hiryu got two strikes off remember? All three US carriers together would have meant at least two and possibly three dead US carriers. By dispersal the USN sowed doubt. At one point Nagumo reported as many as FIVE US carriers in the area. He know there were more than one, he didn't know how many or where though. He had no idea. All carriers bunched together? Yamaguchi would have us dead to rights, all in the same target set.

Now then.....................

5.  In your dreams.  You bailed on the last thread when you couldn't answer my points.  You keep going back to those 1943 intel. briefings as 'proof' even though the Hyperwar site where you get them warns against using them as source material on the battles, rather than as a guide to what the Navy THOUGHT had happened at the time.  Try checking a creditable source written after 1960.  To recap Midway:

Naw I just was tired of trying to reason with a stubborn Larry who didn't know what the hell he was talking about.

Attend.

Morning strike:  After futile attacks by Midway based a/c (the B-17s claimed to have hit and set fire to a carrier, but the claim was totally in error) and the gallant attack by VT8 which accomplished nothing except to burn some fuel and ammo among the CAP Zeroes, the ENTERPRISE and YORKTOWN air strikes hit the Kido Butai around 1020-1030 hours.

They actually missed everything but later scared the hell out of Kondo forcing him to divert and screw up the rendezvous with the main body..

SORYU was attacked ONLY by YORKTOWN a/c flying from YORKTOWN, scoring 3 hits.  Ship destroyed by fire and ultimately scuttled.  Credit to YORKTOWN.  Credit to Fletcher as CTF17/ OTC

Since the Yorktown fliers were LOST and homed in on Wade McClusky's radio Fletcher gets NOTHING.

Shattered Sword . The claim is two to four bomb hits, and sunk by Japanese destroyer torpedoes. Japanese were unable to tell which VB squadrons scored the hits. At least some excess Enterprise planes ran in on Soryu. So who knows?

Nice to see you quoting wiki by the way.

KAGA hit 5 times, and AKAGI hit once by ENTERPRISE a/c flying from ENTERPRISE.  Ships destroyed by fire and ultimately scuttled.  Credit to ENTERPRISE (2),  Credit to Spruance (2) as CTF16 and concurrent credit to Fletcher (2) as OTC.

Akagi took TWO bombs. One exploded on the edge of the flight deck

Spruance gets two, since he did the work, Fletcher gets nothing.

HORNET dive bombers wandered around the ocean without locating the Japanese fleet, losing over a dozen a/c to fuel exhaustion.

Hornet muffs this round. You get this part right.

Afternoon strike, just after 1700 hours.

HIRYU hit 4 times by bombs from ENTERPRISE and YORKTOWN a/c flying from ENTERPRISE.  Ship destroyed by fire and eventually scuttled.  Credit to ENTERPRISE (with assist to YORKTOWN for her a/c).  Credit to Spruance as CT16 and concurrent credit to Fletcher as OTC.

Yorktown is a wreck and launches nothing against Hiryu. Enterprise launches a composite strike package. Credit Spruance with the third flattop. Fletcher dislocated and trying to shift his flag doesn't even know who is doing what to whom, so he gets nothing.

HORNET half strike (they botched up the launch) arrived after the strike from ENTERPRISE had finished its business.  HIRYU was already a wreck.  HORNET a/c attacked several escort ships, claimed hits on a battle ship and a cruiser.  Claims were in error.  No hits made.

Hornet aircraft ran in on Hiryu. After the fact, but they ran in. All Japanese carriers sunk by Japanese destroyer torpedoes to prevent capture by the United States Navy. Nagumo was not preparing for a night surface action. HE WAS RUNNING FOR HIS LIFE.

Just after 1800 Spruance reports to Fletcher (his OTC) attack on HIRYU and requests orders.  Fletcher relinquishes command to Spruance in reply.

Fletcher finally relocates his flag. He has no staff, no air wing and he's bat blind. With no choice, letcher lets the admiral who's done most of the fighting comtinue fighting.

Score for the day:

ENTERPRISE  3 (with one assist to YORKTOWN)

YORKTOWN 1 (an assist)

HORNET        0 or 1 depends on Japanese accounts which at this point are just downright confused since the logs were either destroyed or reconstructed after the war or the officers who knew the details were killed.

Spruance          3 as CTF16 concurrent with credit to Fletcher as the OTC.

Fletcher gets nothing. He just sat around and let Buckmaster and company do the work.

Fletcher           4  one as CTF17 and three more concurrent credit with Spruance as his OTC

 As I said if you sit in the chair and do nothing, you earn NOTHING.

I know that the 'reports' you read on Hyperwar say that SORYU was actually sunk by torpedoes for the USS NAUTILUS after being dive bombed, but that's another one of the errors in those old reports.  The sub actually attacked KAGA, nor SORYU.  It got one hit, on the armor belt, and the fish failed to explode, doing no damage at all.

Didn't read the footnote in Hyperwar that corrected the record did you? Why do I even bother if you don't pay attention to the data I give you?

I know you don't agree with Nimitz, but he knew who had won Midway.  That's why Spruance went on to the job of Chief of Staff for CinCPac that he'd been picked for BEFORE his temporary stint as CTF16.  At a time when the USN desperately needed an admiral who won battles, Spruance went to a very important STAFF job.  Meanwhile, Nimitz bumped Noyes (who was senior to Fletcher as a Rear Admiral) from command of the SARATOGA Task Force, which was on hand, sent him to the WASP TF which was still back in the US, and gave TF11 to Fletcher, keeping him the senior CTF afloat, and then went to a serious effort to expedite his promotion to Vice Admiral to ensure that he'd STILL be senior when Noyes came out with WASP.

Oh I agree with Nimitz. He brought Spruance ashore to do the staff work and to command the Central Pacific Drive-the heart of PLAN ORANGE and the heart of the USN Pacific War. Its YOUR crap interpretation with which I disagree.

Fletcher now had a ?staff? to help him, and Nimitz later sent Halsey to handle the details of the fighting.

6.   The importance of the de-crypt intel is not to be understated.  The fact remains that the Japanese (read here, Yamamoto) wasted their advantage of weight by first the Coral Sea fiasco that cost them three flight decks that were supposed to be at Midway, and the Northern operation, that drew off two more flight decks and several useful heavy cruisers.  With ZUIHO, two fast BBs and several more cruisers tied to the invasion force, and the most modern battleships well to the rear expecting the US ships to appear on schedual, not before, the battle was reduced to combat between a US force of 3 carriers plus 7 CA, 1 CLAA and DDs vs IJN force of 4 carriers, 2 BB, 2 CA 1 CL and DDs, with nearly equal numbers of a/c.  At that, the US victory was largely the result of the sheer luck that provided a coordinated attack by the YORKTOWN and ENTERPRISE strikes that was certainly NOT the result of either proper planning or organization.  They were very fortunate that the success of the intitial, morning attack insured that the Japanese reply would be piece-meal instead of coordinated.  If there had been six CVs backed up by four more, instead of only the four, the loss of three or four wouldn't have saved them.

And you are just full of it, Larry.

ATTEND as I give you a lesson in battle-space management.

I'll keep it simple so you can understand.

1. You use the curvature of the earth to mask the presence of your carrier force.

2. You win the reconnaissance battle at all costs.

3. You concentrate your forces at a decision point where you can inflict maximum damage.

4. You use your doctrine of dispersal to hide your numbers as well as your position. The uncertainty you introduce into the battle-space thus you exploit against enemy command morale, as Spruance did to force the Japanese [Yamamoto] to flee from his own exhausted and used up fleet. Remember half of the USNAF was GONE-150 planes and pilots.

5. The decrypts gave Nimitz a good idea how the Japanese would move, even gave him a good idea of what would be the Japanese plan of movement.

6. What the decrypts did not give him was the exact times on station.

7. So Nimitz prepared his battle-space reconnaissance, anticipated his enemy's reconnaissance plan and he sent at least one admiral who knew what projected rates of movement and possible positions would be based on extensive war-gaming experience.

8. That was PLANNING and not luck. The American side was plagued by bad technology and poor tactical drill. Luck if you call it that was the astute decision making of many pilots and a certain bold admiral. It wasn't Fletcher.

And that ain't BS. That's straight from the 'official records' available today, rather than the guesses and assumptions of 1943.

What I told you is what those records show me. That you misunderstand it is no surprise. You don't know the first thing about this topic do you aside from what you read in books, Larry, do you?

I've covered actual IJN defense doctrine above.  It was their weak point, but it was the best they could do with what they had (no radar).  The fact remains that they were far in advance of the USN in carrier operations for making concentrated, co-ordinated attacks.  That was still a closed book to the USN at Midway, largely because of the ill-advised insistence on dispersing the carriers.  It resulted in ships too far apart to properly support, or co-operate with each other, but not far enough apart to provide any meaningful protection for discovery by the same search, and there were several EXPERIENCED officers by mid-'42 who were telling them that, including Fletcher, Brown and Ted Sherman (who was, I believe, the most experienced CTG in Fifth Fleet by the end of the war).  Not until the dispersion concept was abandoned was it possible to make properly co-ordinated air strikes, and seriously improve AAA and CAP defenses.  It's just a pity that both Easten Solomons and Santa Cruz were fought under the dispersal doctrine.

Since I've covered in detail why you are wrong all down the line let me just hit one or two more points.

1. The Japanese had their carriers altogether where a SINGLE US carrier [Enterprise] could pick them off in detail without too much hunting. On the other hand, the Japanese never found Enterprise and Hornet in time to attack or evebn confirm that they were present before Hiryu was gone. This plus the uncertainty the Japanese suffered, once the Japanese lost their air cover completely, was the edge the PACFLT needed.

2. Your fantasy about what the US fleet could actually do in air defense in June 1942 is hilarious.

3. The Japanese knew no more about how to fight an aircraft carrier battle than we did. Their tactics didn't work, ours did. They were a little more experienced in getting off an air-strike. Nimitz called Spruance to Pearl to fix that problem and to prepare the Central Pacific Task Force. Frankly Fletcher was not capable. As for Noyes, well Noyes hadn't fought Japanese , and at least Fletcher had. I would guess Noyes would have done a better job. Spruance was too important to send to the Solomons SIDESHOW. HE was needed for the Central Pacific.

4, 5 and 6 covered, and no BS at all, at least from this end. 

Well that is your unsubstantiated opinion, Larry.

Unfortunately you can't snow me on this. I am a bit better informed than your average commentator.

T'is late. I'll finish you off tomorrow

Herald

Visual aid.