You should know better than to take an after action report as gospel when considering enemy losses.
You ought to know better than to claim that I took an AAR as "gospel about enemy losses" when right there, in my post, I noted that friendly AARs are spotty data vis a vis enemy losses.
At Roi, Enterprise's VS-6 lost 4 SBDs over Roi, 3 to fighters, 1 to flak. And there is no VS-6 AAR for this period.
That is not what Enterprise's AAR says. I will take that AAR as the best source of information about Enterprise's losses because it was compiled at the time using multiple sources and roll calls. Thus..
This is from the CV-6 Association website.
While admirable it is not as authoritative a source as Enterprise's AAR vis a vis Enterprise's losses and to what cause.
Lundstrom in "The First Team" states that Hopping and 2 SBDs were shot down by fighters. Another SBD was shot down by flak.
You are correct in noting that such is what Lundstrom says. It is also consistent with Enterprise's AAR.
And just who was it that made Yorktown incapable of flight ops? Was it not Hiryu's strike, the one by the 2nd Chutai (Hashimoto)?
Yorktown was rendered incapable of flight ops by dive bombers. I find keeping up with your "shift the frame of reference change the subject" form of reasoning to be challenging but not particularly convincing vis a vis your central point. That initial attack faced a Yorktown CAP that was, as I have noted, *small* and said attack was escorted.
There is a fundamental difference between quantity of CAP and command and control. The most perfectly controlled cap will allow enemies to slip through the defense if it is simply overwhelmed by sheer numbers or brings underwhelming strength to the defense.
I was primarily refuting your claims as to the invinciblilty of US fleet defense.
In that event you are refuting your own straw man argument. I have not ever here or anywhere else described USN fleet defense as "invincible." We (or at least I) have been talking about CAP c.a.c. I do not see how any rational being can claim that Japanese CAP c.a.c. was as good as or better than USN CAP c.a.c. when it is a documented, established fact that Japanese section leaders rarely communicated with anyone on the deck that launched them, and when the *PRIMARY FORM OF COMMUNICATION WITH JAPANESE CAP ON PATROL* was to have picket ships make smoke and fire their guns in the direction of the enemy. It is a form of communcation more appropos of the Age Of Sail. Yes the USN CAP was less than perfect, both in size (throughout 1942) and in scrambled communication (this was most evident at Santa Cruz). But it still had better observation/detection of enemy a.c., better vectoring, and better communication with CAP in the air.
What I did say was that had the Japanese been able to launch a full strike (meaning the majority of their aircraft) it is highly probably that the US would have had more carriers sunk or damaged.
And you are incorrect. At the time the Japanese could have launched a "full strike" they only had reports of ONE POSSIBLE USN CV. They did not have knowledge of the existence of, much less location, course, and speed, Enterprise and Hornet. That is why your claim cannot possibly be correct, vis a vis the battle of Midway. At no time in the battle did the Japanese ever sort out which USN carriers where where. By the time they had rumours of "possibly a second carrier" their fleet was far too busy cycling CAP and dodging bombs. There was no hypothetical opportunity to launch a "full strike" at anything at all. At best the Japanese might have pulled off a "quickie" strike of Vals and a limited number of Zeros as escorts, and at the time the only fix they had was on Yorktown.
Probably wouldn't have changed the outcome of the battle because of their faulty strategic planning but the US would have been a lot more hurt than it was.
Nope. They'd have hit Yorktown, again, and they'd have still lost three carriers. After that it would have been Hiryu, whose location was known, looking for Enterprise and Hornet, whose locations were not known to the Japanese. That is why they *thought* they'd sunk 2 US CVs. They hit Yorktown twice, thinking her to be two different ships.
And at Coral Sea, the Japanese did launch a fairly coordinated strike. Certainly as coordinated as anything the US had ever launched and that attack saw Yorktown moderately damaged
Yes that is true. No one has suggested otherwise.
Lexington so severely damaged that DC crews were unable to prevent the explosions that sank her.
That is incorrect. As Demosthenes noted, Lexington's subsequent explosion was entirely preventable, as all detailed analyses of the Coral Sea battle clearly state.
[blockquote]me:
They arrived at target well coordinated, which I take to be the point salient to your apparent assertion that the USN could not achieve a coordinated strike. As a study of the effectiveness of "Long Range CAP" this incident has some value for game design. [/blockquote]
Are you meaning at Midway?!?
Clearly not, since I was obviously replying to your remark about Brown's Bismarck sea trans-Owens-Stanley raid.
And your viewpoint concerning the game design is hardly relevant, considering that you only borrowed it from a friend for a short time.
Ah, but then, we are at the moment talking about history and what a game design might do were it interested in producing historically plausible results. For that conversation, everything I've said here is quite germane.
According to your count: 8 ships at anchor in Darwin, 8 ships sunk. The US struck at 29 ships at anchor at Lae and managed to sink 3.
As I noted, the US struck their target in the Bismarck Sea with roughly half the force used by the Japanese at Darwin. In the Bismarck Sea the USN sank roughly half as many ships (3) as the IJN sank at Darwin (8), although we may note that the Japanese ships were not at anchor and the Allied ships in Darwin were at anchor.
It's a quantitative thing. Use half the force, get half the results.
Please provide your source for that last statement. I don't know what history books you've been reading or what substance you are smoking but I think you are a bit confused here. First, I would hardly call 2 VT squadrons, 2 SBD squadrons plus fighters as a very small raid.
I smoke your intent (to offend with non-sequitur and ad hominem), as Jack Aubrey might say. You would not call them a small raid if they'd arrived all at once, I agree. But in the face of four CVs worth of CAP it was in fact a small raid. Facing a CAP roughly 2/3 their size. These are better defender/attacker odds than Yorktown's CAP enjoyed (as I have noted on numerous occasions, SMALL CAPS were a problem) at Midway, and better than Lexington enjoyed in the Rabaul raid.
The Japanese CAP command and control was simply awful. I am not the first to have noted this, and the best current statement on the matter is Shattered Sword.
There are plenty of independent ways to measure this. How many times at Coral Sea or Midway or at any time before that was any element of Japanese strike a.c. *not* detected well prior to executing their attack runs? None, by my count. Contra the IJN, where they were quite literally COMPLETELY surprised in one of the UK LBA strikes in the Indian Ocean, knowing only of the attack when the bombs went off in the water around them, and at Midway, where the USN SBDs were undetected until they were pushing over into their attacks.
To have even a chance at vectoring CAP to intercept an enemy strike you need to at least consistently detect enemy inbound. The Japanese were not capable of consistently doing so. The USN however had such capability.
You need to certainly learn a little more about the Hiryu's action against Yorktown.
Ee-chu-tah! (Star Wars fans might appreciate that).
The bottom line is that the US's fleet defense needed a lot of work and was incapable of stopping even small raids from scoring hits.
Which strange "bottom line" is factually contradicted by the Rabaul raid, and the Marshalls raid (no hits there either).
Obviously the Japanese fleet defense was equally porous... no has said it wasn't but it certainly was not "clearly inferior" during this period as you claim.
I said Japanese CAP command and control was clearly inferior and have stated the reasons why by pointing out that in doctrine and in practice Japanese CAP had no adequate central direction, no radar to direct it, and relied on visual signals from picket boats to direct CAP. Details are provided by Parshall and Tulley.
If it's fleet defense you want, the Japanese were in some ways even worse overall than you have stated. Their flak capabilty (at least for shipboard AAA) was nonexistent, with each CV sporting badly positioned AAA armament, and each CV basically reliant solely on its own AAA defenses and maneuver to escape damage. The least you can say for fleet defense is that the USN ring formatipn was superior, because anything that slipped past CAP had to face formidible AAA defenses from multiple ships, many of which were armed with the best heavy AAA piece mounted on any WW2 ship (the 5"L38 DP Gun).
Even the US advantage in radar in early 42 was barely so.
Which would give you a range and altitude and closing speed quite quickly. Better information than the Japanese had other than on, IIRC, Nagara, the only Japanese ship with a decent radar set that was with the Japanese carriers, and Nagara was not in the CAP command structure.
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