soc.history.war.world-war-ii

Dave Anderer wrote:
> In article ,
> Bill Shatzer wrote:

-snip-


>>Coupled with naval gunfire support and (presumably) complete air
>>superiority, that should have been sufficient to successfully invade and
>>capture the island - albeit at some cost.

> I'm not aware that the Japanese had any real doctrine for NGFS at this
> point.

You're correct on that - or at least not anything approaching the
directed naval gun fire that the US Navy developed in the second half of
the war.

Still, IIRC, the Japanese plan called for sending in the heavy cruiser
division (Kumano et al) ahead of the invasion force to pound the hell
out of Midway. Sand and Eastern Islands are not all that large and
directed naval gun fire is really not required. Just hitting the
islands would be likely to hit something. While an hour or so's worth of
bombardment by 8" guns is gonna mostly stir up a lot of sand, it's also
almost certain to mess things up considerably, bust up a lot of
communications wire, take out some emplacements, and inflict some
significant casualties.

Additional bombardment by the escorts to the landing forces (a light
cruiser and eight or ten destroyers) would only have added to the
general mayhem.

> The air superiority was limited, both in number (the carriers
> were under-strength to start with, and were taking losses) and staying
> power.

Well, I was thinking more along the lines that Japanese operations would
be unhindered by US aerial opposition - not so much that the Japanese
would be applying air power against the island's defenses as that the US
would be unable to apply any air power against the Japanese or their
supporting naval forces.

Although, G4Ms staging out of Wake Island would have had the range to
reach Midway - 'though I'm don't think the Japanese had that in their
contingency plans.

> There were sufficient US subs available that, had they simply
> concentrated at the atoll, something useful might have occurred.

I'd considered that - but at that stage of the war, US submarine
torpedoes were rather notoriously unreliable - and US submarine
commanders were notoriously unaggressive. The US subs might have raised
some havoc but there are reasons for thinking that they might have not
accomplished much at all. Nautilus, after all, was unable to get a hit
at essentially point blank range on Kaga which was then almost dead in
the water.

> The Japanese were also landing over an open reef, against significant,
> well-entrenched firepower. It seems to me to have been more like a mix
> of Tenaru and Tarawa.

Clearly a Japanese landing would have incurred some significant cost for
the invaders. I'm just not sure the cost would have been sufficient to
repel the landings. After all, the Tarawa invasion was at some
considerable cost to the US Marines but the landings were ultimately
successful and the island taken, none the less.

Cheers,