The Hikōkitai or air groups of Japanese carriers were permanently assigned to that ship. So close was the association that they literally took the name of the carrier on which they were based, i.e. Akagi Hikōkitai. While it's true that by 1943 the Japanese were forced by the exhaustion of the Imperial Army Air forces to operate their Navy carrier groups from land for the I-Go air offensive in the Solomons it was something they would have been very loathe to do in 1941. Even switching and mixing air groups and pilots between carriers was deemed too unorthodox. It could been done with the Shokakau and Zuikaku air groups prior to Midway to give Japan one more carrier in the battle but wasn't as the Japanese placed more value on established air institutions than they did on flexibility. Japanese air doctrine and organization changed only stubbornly under the stresses and losses of war. Especially after the debacle at Midway when they realized that they needed to burn the book they had been going by.warspite1 wrote: Wed Dec 07, 2022 5:15 am A question for Afficionados of the Japanese navy. This plan keeps changing to beat off challenges put up. But I believe the plan,at least at one point, envisaged Zeros from one of the carriers flying to the airfield on Maui to support the Bettys.
I understand that just before Midway (just six months into the war - a war that had largely seen only success for the Japanese) the front line carriers were slightly understrength and the second line carriers had major problems getting enough aircrew/airplanes to actually bring the air component up to strength. That being the case, how easily could Japan have replaced the Zero pilots and brought the carrier back up to strength in December 1941?
I also believe that the Zeros originally earmarked for the Luzon operation were to replace the Zeros sent to Maui, but that assumes these land based pilots had carrier training. Again I am not certain, but I don’t believe they all necesarily were.
Japan had a major problem with training sufficient carrier based aircrew to meet war losses once the war started. Losing these carrier based fighters from one of the main Japanese carriers, may potentially have put that carrier out of action for a while, no? Unless they denuded the second line carriers further.
The active fighter squadrons on each of the Japanese carriers at Pearl Harbor in 1941 was composed of 18 A6M Zeros, although some spares were onboard. Some accounts state the groups as larger but that was based on the older and smaller A5M Claude which the Kido Butai had recently relegated to second-line status. After the PH raid, the carrier with the largest number of operational fighters would likely have been the Shokaku which still had 16 Zeros in flyable condition. If you use that air group to fly to Maui that means Maui will have actually less fighter planes on hand than Oahu does accounting for historical losses.
The remaining strength of land-based Zero squadrons in Asia would have been about 90 with the Tainan and 3rd Kōkūtais in Formosa and 25 with the Yamada Detachment in Soc Trang, Vietnam. However, these weren't carrier-trained. In an effort to make sure that the Kido Butai had the full air strength it needed, the Japanese stripped the Zeros and most of the carrier-trained pilots off the light carriers Ryujo and Zuiho, leaving them with the older A5M Claudes and second stringer pilots. The light carrier Zuiho actually ended being left in home waters on December 7th to train up, as its fighter air group was not considered up to standards anymore after all this ransacking.
The Imperial Army Air forces were active in SE Asia as well, but were mostly concentrated over Malaya, Hong Kong and Burma and weren't too keen on assisting the Navy. Plus, the IJA Ki-43 Oscar wasn't quite the long-distance performer that the A6M was.
(Just a reminder....it's December 7th. Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day!)
; Julia Child
