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larryjcr 5/17/2008 1:27:09 PM

If no bomb hit the KAGA's
island, what exactly, killed virtually all the ships senior officers??
Not the bomb that hit just forward. It went off in the hanger deck
below. When the attack by McClusky's force was over, the island was
smashed and the Captain and virtually his entire command staff were
dead. Magic??
You say that there are many fact wrong in SHATTERED SWORD. What is your proof. The interrogation reports??

The magazines forward EXPLODED and wrecked the island. The Interrogation reports will do as a start point on this as a contradictor, the erroneous claims made about the US submarine war, also.

As I said, Shattered Sword has a lot of problems.

Herald

Actually, Herald, YOU are the one with a lot of problems in this. You are engaging in REVISIONISM on the basis of one, single source that has been available to everyone else who has studied this, and they all disagree with you.

The original Japanese investigation of Midway concluded that there was a direct hit to the bridge by a 500 lb bomb, on the basis of comparison of witness statements taken from ALL surviving officers, ALL surviving aircrew and hundreds of enlisted sailors. Several witness described seeing the explosion of the forward island. Several dozen described the damage to the island immediately after the attack: the forward end, including the bridge, were totally destroyed. The steel plate 'skin' had been blown entirely off and the structural 'skeleton' was a broken, twisted ruin immediately atfer the SBD attack. Of the four bombs described by Amagi, none penetrated below the level of the upper hanger deck. None got anywhere near reaching a magazine, which are, of course, much deeper in the ship. Three bombs exploded in the hanger and one in adjacent crew quarters. The magazine explosion came MUCH later in the sequence of events -- a 'cook off' caused by the heat of the fires.

The USSBS interrogation took place more than three years later. Amagi has given severl statements of these events, first to the 1942 investigation, then to USSBS and later to various historical investigators, and his accounts differ considerably, depending on who he was talking to. The accounts by Commander Mitoya, the only other senior officer to survive the attack, and who was standing less than 20 ft. from Amagi, also differ considerably from Amagi's, and also come in several variations.

There is no special magic to a USSBS source. They had to asses what they got the same way any historian does: compare to other statements and available information on physical eveidence, and consider the motivations of the person interrogated.

Post war US historians have also interviewed witnesses to the hit to the island. Perhaps the most famous account is by Lord in INCREDIBLE VICTORY recounting his interview with civilian photographer Makishima Teiuchi who was in AKAGI (which was not yet under attack) as was taking pictures of KAGA being bombed at the time of the hit. He had seen bombs hitting the water around the ship, and the first two hits, which started fires, but were not obviously serious from AKAGI. Not so the hit to the island. According to Lord, Makishima stated: "I remember saying to myself 'they are beaten at last'."

You keep saying that there are errors in SHATTERED SWORD, but when asked to argue that point, you just repeat the statement. There is a very legnthy footnote on the problem of trying to reconcile the various statements of Amagi and Mitoya and their conflicts with each other, and with other witnesses. Perhaps you should read it. The information on submarine warfare came from Blair and Roscoe, as I stated.

You constantly whine about REVISIONISM when evidence refutes you positions, no matter how solidly based the evidence is. You are willing to revise the virtually unanimous conclusions of everyone who's studied the question on the basis of a single source document from a subject who had been inconsistant in his accounts at best.

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larryjcr 5/17/2008 1:33:16 PM

Above, I've already dealt with the problems of using primary source information without proper assesment. Such a documant (as the interrogation reports, or Leslie's report) are not, by themselves, conclusive proof. As I've shown, there are clear, demonstrable errors in them, as well as a tendancy to read into them what you want to see. There's an old saying in both military intelligence and police work: If you some hard enough for something, you'll always find it, even if it isn't there.

Since you don't understand what is happening in the battle-spaces we discuss, or can keep the chronologies straight or even WHY the admirals fought the way they did historically, I'd be interested to see how you can even make that claim, Larry?

The interrogations were made first hand as soon as possible and cross-indexed with the best information that the US had.

Subsequen evidence proved the interrogations were ACCURATE: Let's take the Kaga example again shall we?

Kaga wreck....

Aircraft Carrier - KAGA

Wreckage clearly belonging to a Japanese carrier was found
& photographed in the Midway battle-site in May and September 1999.
Subsequently, this chunk of wreckage was confirmed to be part of the
aircraft carrier KAGA in the spring of 2000 by a research analyst team
comprised of the author, Jon Parshall, and David Dickson.

Condition: The fragment is just that, transpiring to be the
starboard gun tub of the KAGA, its positive identification on 14
February 2000 was made possible by the landing array arrangement
attachment unique to her of the four unlocated Midway carriers. Since
it is a fragment, it is of course next to impossible to tell anything
of the condition of the main wreck, or even if it is immediately
adjacent. However, according to eyewitness testimony in the last hour
of KAGA afloat and as she sank, the carrier's hull remained intact, but
a good section of all but the aft and forward ends of the hangars and
flight deck and side completely blown out and missing. She went down
stern first at a very shallow angle, and presumably descended in such a
way to the ocean floor. However, as further exploration has been
repeatedly postponed due to changing conditions, any further details
are purely speculative.

Note: For further details on the 1999 discovery and the 2000 identification process, see:

Identifying (part of) KAGA's w...

Her magazines went off.

Herald

Yes, her magazines went off -- eventually -- but as a result of the fires, not the bomb hits, which didn't reach them. KAGA remained afloat for hours after the bombing attack. The entire forward overhand of her flight deck collapsed due to fire damage, before the magazines finally went off and sank her. If any of the bombs had gotten to a magazine, she'd have done a 'HOOD' on the spot.

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larryjcr 5/17/2008 1:35:31 PM

Yep! You said you had SILENT VICTORY. Re-read it. Also, at the end of the link you post, you'll find an ad for Roscoes' SUBMARINE OPERATIONS (in some editions its titled PIG BOATS). He covers it in considerable detail.

By the way, you seem to be upset about SHATTERED SWORD and complain it's inaccurate. The folks at the US Naval Institute's PROCEEDINGS seem to think pretty well of it, and of Lundstrom's books as well. That's were I got my copies.

I could care less. Proceedings also carries this book:

Admiral Halsey's Story....

Also referred to as Admiral Halsey's ALIBI.

Just because you bought it there makes it true, accurate, or RELEVANT.

Herald

I notice that your reaction "I could care less" isn't exactly a response to the facts that I've put forward.
Appearantly, something is only RELEVANT if it agrees with you.

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larryjcr 5/17/2008 1:46:11 PM

May
I suggest a mental exercise? The film Midway. Why don't each of you
list the first ten major errors of fact you notice or recall. I think
that could be taken as a baseline of Midway CW at the time of filming.
Both of you offer some surprises that I assume are a function of the
latest scholarship.

1. Wrong carriers shown for American standins.
2. Japanese ship models structurally inaccurate the girders were punched oval not truss girder box framed..
3. Wrong Japanese torpedo bombers shown taking off Hiryu.
4. Glen Ford played a horrible Spruance.
5. Submarine model was the wrong model- Not Gato: but Argonaut class was the Nautilus.
6. The Enterprise Bombing 6 sequence is BACKWARDS.
7. None of the American torpedo planes ran straight in on the Japanese. They had to make circle chase attacks as the Japanese carriers put over hard aport. Also they were Devastators: NOT Vindicators.
8. The "captain" was not shot up in an attack on a Japanese cruiser. The actual US historic loss was due to a Japanese DESTROYER. Also the USN didn't have Panther jets at Midway.
9. AFAIK there was no twin-engined US land-based aircraft that attacked the Japanese carriers at all-certainly not within the slant range of Japanese 25 mm guns.
10. US fleet flags as shown in Nimtz's office didn't exist at that time in WW II.

Larry, tankers' priority is a known (CW) issue. Naturally, if you are dominant in the sea - a wolfpack vs. a wolf in the folds
-
you would want to take out the escorts first, so you could take your
time on the rest. If you only had one torp, it would go to the tanker.

Herald,
in light of the notorious ineffectiveness of land-based bombing, to
what do you attribute the primacy of operating under land-based air
cover? In any case naval dive bombers seem to have somehow gotten the
job done more than torps at Midway. Though the Nips were apparently
respectful of our torp attacks, they merely dodged them (exploders
aside).

Fighter cover [P-38s] to begin with if you can get it . The Japanese were able to turn out of our launch vectors . We needed a torpedo plane that could circle chase in a bank and launch at 200 knots at 1500 feet at a range of at least 2000 yards. We got it in the AVENGER. Too bad the Mark 13 took forever to fix.

You said you'd have to draw off air cover to
skip-bomb the IJN. Just as VT8 drew off the air cover with its
sacrifice, the same could have happened to divert CAP from an incoming
wave of B-17s or B-25s. But what I meant was, with my earlier ask
about bringing-the-pain, why did you need such big a/c? Why couldn't
say a Corsair or other fighter-bomber skip-bomb? Why not extend range
with a slick hulled bomb casing and maybe a motor? Guidance - at sea
level only one axis of control...

The Zeke was just that good. You had to draw it off so that you could set up a low level bomb run. You needed the bigger aircraft because you are dropping a STICK, the bombs you use are 500 or 1000 pounders, the airframe Has to be STRONG and you want to release from an internal bomb bay at HIGH SPEED to obviate TUMBLE.

I'd have to watch the movie again to start. Been a long time. May try that next chance I get.

???????????????????????
I pointed out that ComSubPac on advice from ONI that the
Japanese were badly short of escort ships, encouraged US subs to attack
escort ships. The priority list placed escorts just BELOW tankers, so,
yes, if that was the choice, the tanker would get the fish. But the
priority on escorts placed them ABOVE cargo ships as preferred
t

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larryjcr Attack on SORYU 5/17/2008 2:07:56 PM

I will address, once again, the matter of the attack of and destruction of the SORYU by VB3 from YORKTOWN. You have posted the interrogation report by Ohara who was SORYU's XO at midway, which describes three flights of a/c totally about a dozen planes attacking simulataniously as is it somehow proves that someone besides VB3 was involved it the attack. Rubbish! Take note. Ohara reports about a dozen attackers. Leslie had 14 VB3 a/c in the attack. Ohara reports that there were three groups of attackers. All USN SBD squadrons were organized into three divisions. At full stength these were 6 a/c each, but VB3 started one a/c short, and three more turned back after they lost their bombs. That's IT. NOBODY ELSE HOME!

It is interesting in one respect. It illustrates the need to consider motivation when reading original source statements.

In the report by Leslie, which you have also posted, there is no mention of dividing the squadron. Why? Consider!

At Midway, the dive bomber squadrons were still operating under a doctrine laid out in peacetime. This called for any attack to be made on a single axis with the a/c spaced 6-7 seconds apart, to allow each time to get out from under the bomb dropped by the next behind. Attacks from multiple directions were specifically forbidden as the navy was unwilling to accept the small, but real chance of a collision between two a/c or an a/c and a bomb with two or three flights attacking from different directions at the same time.

It was understood that there were some advantages to a mult-axis attack. For one thing, it got you thru the AAA faster. A single line attack by 14 a/c required a minimum of just under 80 seconds to initiate, plus the actual diving time. Divided into three flights of 4-5 a/c each, and initiating the attack at the same time, the maximum time needed to initiate the attack was under 30 seconds. About fifty seconds less exposure to AAA.

The standard defensive tactic for a ship attacked by dive bombers was to turn towards the attack. The VBs didn't dive straight down. The usual diving angle was about seventy degrees. Turning towards the attack forced the pilots to steepen their dives. If they could be forced to steeped the dive beyond the vertical, the chances of getting a hit went sharply downward. A multi-axis attack negated that defense. Any attempt to make the attack of one flight harder, just gave the others an easier attack.

If Leslie and his SBD pilots had decided to ignore doctrine and make a multi-axis attack, as Ohara (and several other Japanese witnesses seem to describe) he probably WOULDN'T want to put it in his report, in order to protect himself and his pilots from citicism. And that's just ONE of the motivations that lead to omissions and sometimes outright lies in primary source statements.

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larryjcr battle space management 5/17/2008 4:53:32 PM

You spend a lot of time talking about this, but I'm not sure that you've grasped the most basic concept. There isn't anything NEW in this. The basic principles have been around since the Egyptians, they've just been tricked out in some new jargon.

Battles are NOT fought in a tactical vacuum. They are part of a campaign, which is part of a war. It is self-defeating to

sacrifice the objective of the campaign in order to achieve a tactical victory.

Great generals and admirals were great NOT because they followed a set of rules, but because they knew when to

BREAK the rules in order to achieve the objective. Robert Lee broke the rules in every battle he ever fought except

one. He followed all the rules at Gettysburg.

The one, most basic principle of battle is to find and focus on the one, key element. This may be a location, a military unit,

either yours or your opponant's, or some tactical concept. But there will be ONE, critical element, and the

commander who identifies it and focuses on it is the one who "controls the battle space."

At the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the Japanese were totally outclassed in every way, except the striking range of their aircraft. In order to have ANY CHANCE AT ALL of doing meaningful damage, Ozawa had to attack from beyond the range at which TF38 could strike back. That is exactly what he did. Ozawa controlled the battle space west of Saipan. He did everything he had to do to have any chance at all of winning. He just didn't have enough to hit with.

As I've said before, Philippine Sea was a painfully simple battle. The ONLY element that mattered was to control the engagement range. By placing TF38 on the defensive, Spruance handed the initiative to Ozawa and permitted him to dictact engagement range. That is not being the 'master of the battle', or 'controlling the battle space." That is letting the enemy do it. If the difference in balance of forces had not been so great, Spruance might have been author of a real disaster. As it was, TF38s CAP and RCI won the battle, in spite of the disadvantages placed on them.

If you want to see battle space management, and mastery of the battle, check out George Thomas at Nashville. He not only picked the critical element, he chose it and imposed it on his enemy, then pinned him in place and destroyed him. And, of course, he'd never heard the term 'battle space management'.

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Herald12345 You've just stepped omto your Johnson, Larry. 5/17/2008 8:08:53 PM

Battle-space management, something about which you evidently know nothing, is something, I'm about to take you to school in.

Tomorrow. Same Bat time same Bat channel.

Herald

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Nichevo 5/19/2008 4:14:14 AM

I just want to reiterate my admiration for the both of you and commend all flame addicts to this thread. More work is getting done here than on any, say, Rafale or EU war scenario thread I have seen. Keep up the good work!

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larryjcr 5/19/2008 4:55:05 PM

Battle-space management, something about which you evidently know nothing, is something, I'm about to take you to school in.

Tomorrow. Same Bat time same Bat channel.

Herald

Maybe I can same us both some time. First, the difference between battle-space management and Battle-space Management.

Battle-space Management is the current attempt to systamatize the use of three elements into military planning and operations.

First: The use of business management methods. This was introduced by Robert McNamara, and became chic during the late 1970s and 1980s. It threw out the leadership model of military command in favor of a 'management' model. It did work -- largely due to the fact that we weren't actually in a war at the time.

Second: The concept of Joint Operations. This was imposed on the military by members of congress following the Jimmy Carter, Iran fiasco. This was actually a result of mis-management at the top depriving the forces involved of adequate preparation and training time, but gave certain political figures a chance to show off their supposed brilliance. It was an attempt to reduce the cost of the military by regularizing the use of elements of different services on the same missions.

Third: The concept of Network-centric Warfare. The collection of data from a maximum number of sources, then to be processed by extensive data-management resources and finally disseminated as intelligence and orders to all elements involved.

Battle-space management is not pertient to our current discussion of events in the 1941-5 historical period. As a minimum, it requires both an extremely robust, very secure, very reliable and very high capacity communications system, and an ability to handle and corrilate massive amounts of information. During the 1941-5 period, neither of these requirements could be met. Communications were very limited in capacity, often unreliable, rarely secure and always vulnerable to failure, and data management was limited to what the staff could write down, and compare. A non-starter.

Battle-space management, on the other hand, COULD be taken to be a label (jargon) for the command requirement that an admiral or general have the ability to grasp the space-time relationships of the battle field, which is a concept about as old as war. I assumed that you were using the term in the latter sense, as the former meaning it, as I've pointed out, completely invalid to this discussion. In this, latter sense, it is, as I've said, simply a new term for a set of very old principles.

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larryjcr To Nichevo 5/19/2008 4:59:30 PM

Thank you for your encouragement. I do apologize for the way that this had gotten off the original subject. I just can't resist the temptation of a debate. If it's providing you with some entertainment, all the better.

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