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Was the Doolittle Raid a Mistake?
Recent events have me thinking about military strategy, and the importance of morale. I found myself mulling over the famous Doolittle raid during World War II.
For those who might not recall the details, this was an air raid on Tokyo in April 1942 by a handful of American bombers, B-25 Mitchells, which were land-based bombers but were, in this instance, launched off the carrier Hornet. The damage to Tokyo was minimal, but the propaganda victory was significant, after a series of catastrophic American and allied losses in the first months of the war.
I’ll present a case that the Doolittle raid diverted critical naval resources from important operations, with real military and naval significance, in the south Pacific region. You all can then critique my evaluation, and also decide for yourselves whether the morale boost from the Doolittle raid was worth the cost in other locations.
I’ll provide a few links at the end, for anyone wishing to double-check my account or read more, mostly from the official Navy historical site (the Naval Historical and Heritage Command, history.navy.mil).
I. Background
As I’m sure you all know, the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, devastated the US Pacific Fleet. The Japanese had 6 fleet carriers at the time, all used in the Pearl Harbor attack — Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, Soryu, Shokaku, and Zuikaku.
The silver lining for the US Navy was that none of our carriers were at Pearl. At the time, we had either 5 or 7 fleet carriers, depending on how you count them. Saratoga, Lexington, Yorktown, Enterprise, and Hornet were solid fleet carriers, though Hornet was brand new and still working up. We also had Ranger and Wasp, often counted as fleet carriers, though they were smaller and poorly protected, and we tried to avoid using them in the Pacific (they did perform good service in the Atlantic).
So at the start of 1942, the Japanese had a 6-5 advantage in fleet carriers in the Pacific. This increased to a 6-4 advantage when Saratoga was torpedoed in January 1942 and knocked out of action until shortly after the Battle of Midway in early June.
This was the naval situation in the Pacific at the start of the Doolittle raid.
II. The Doolittle Raid
On April 1, 1942, Hornet took aboard 16 stripped-down B-25 Mitchells in San Francisco Bay. The B-25 was a medium bomber, with two engines, a maximum bomb load of 3,200 pounds, and a crew of five. Hornet could not carry its normal air complement along with the B-25s, so she rendezvoused with Enterprise en route, on April 13, and both carriers proceeded toward Japan.
Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle, commanding the B-25 squadron, took off for the Tokyo raid on April 18, 1942. The attack was launched earlier than planned, from a distance of 650 miles rather than 500, because the task force might have been spotted by a Japanese ship. During the launch, an unfortunate sailor slipped on the windswept and wet flight deck, losing an arm to the propeller blades of the last of Doolittle’s planes to take off.
The 16 B-25s successfully bombed targets in Tokyo and the surrounding area, and one damaged the Japanese light carrier Ryujo. The official naval history concedes that “the material damage inflicted by Doolittle’s raiders proved small.”
All 16 of Doolittle’s planes were lost, with 15 crashing in occupied China or off its coast, and one making it to Soviet territory, where the crew was interned. Ultimately, 69 of the 80 airmen safely returned to the US fairly promptly, including Doolittle, who received the Medal of Honor. Three Americans died in the raid itself, four died in Japanese captivity, four survived being held as POWs by the Japanese. Of the 69 who returned, the 5 who landed in the Soviet Union were technically required, under international law, to be interned by the Soviets until the end of the war, but were allowed to “escape” within a year. (Remember that the Japanese and the Soviets had a non-aggression pact until the very end of the war.)
As a bean-counting accountant, in terms of material damage, the Doolittle raid was probably a failure. The damages were minimal, and we lost 11 highly trained, heroic airmen — 7 killed and 4 captured by the Japanese — plus 16 valuable bombers. But war is not just about dollars and cents.
Evaluated in itself, I think that the Doolittle raid was a great success. No one thought that a mere 16 medium bombers were going to cause significant damage to a nation of 80 million. But it showed that we could strike back, and the message to the Japanese was quite ferocious. It was something like: How do you like this? This is just the first tiny drop from the bitter cup that you are going to drink, to the dregs. We’re going to send your Navy to the depths, slaughter your soldiers, burn your cities to the ground.
It is a good historical lesson. Thus far, in all of human history, it seems to me that the single most foolish thing that the leaders of any country can do is to get the Americans really, really mad. Bad idea, Tojo.
III. The Problem in the Coral Sea
My critique of the Doolittle raid relates to naval events elsewhere. Remember that, at the time, we had only 4 fleet carriers in the Pacific. Hornet and Enterprise were carrying out the Doolittle raid. That left Lexington and Yorktown to hold off Japan’s 6 fleet carriers elsewhere. Saratoga was still being repaired in Puget Sound.
The stage was set for the Battle of the Coral Sea, the first carrier-against-carrier battle in history.
Admiral Nimitz, commanding the US Pacific Fleet, had intelligence that the Japanese intended to make a seaborne attack on Port Moresby, on the southern coast of New Guinea. He dispatched Lexington and Yorktown to counter this threat, and the two carriers rendezvoused on May 1, 1942, in the vicinity of the Coral Sea. The intelligence was accurate. The two newest and best carriers in the Japanese fleet, Shokaku and Zuikaku, were there to cover the invasion, along with the (smaller) light carrier Shoho.
But as a result of the Doolittle raid, Enterprise and Hornet couldn’t get there in time.
Enterprise and Hornet returned to Pearl Harbor on April 25, and departed for the South Pacific five days later, on April 30. However, they could not reach the Coral Sea until the battle, fought between May 4 and May 7, was over.
The Battle of the Coral Sea is generally considered a tactical draw, or perhaps a narrow tactical victory for the Japanese, but a strategic victory for the US. In the event, we lost Lexington and Yorktown was significantly damaged (though she would be repaired with extraordinary speed at Pearl). The Japanese lost the light carrier Shoho, but more importantly, their best two fleet carriers were put out of action. Shokaku was seriously damaged and had to return to Japan, while the undamaged Zuikaku lost so much of her air wing that she, too, was out of action for a while.
Less than a month later, on June 4, our 3 surviving Pacific fleet carriers — Yorktown, Enterprise, and Hornet — would meet the other 4 Japanese fleet carriers — Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, and Soryu — near a tiny island called Midway. We would lose Yorktown. The Japanese would lose all four.
My critique of the Doolittle raid involves the answer to this question: What would have happened if Enterprise and Hornet had been at the Coral Sea?
IV. Hypothetical Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway
So what would have happened, but for the Doolittle raid? We can never know. We can only make an educated guess. Here is my educated guess.
In this hypothetical, we would have had a 4-2 advantage in fleet carriers at the Coral Sea. A month later, at a 4-3 disadvantage, we would sink all 4 Japanese carriers, losing only 1. So my educated guess is that we would have sunk both Shokaku and Zuikaku at the Coral Sea, with either zero or 1 carriers lost on our side.
The Japanese probably would have launched the Midway attack anyway, as they did so without their two carriers that were at the Coral Sea. The outcome of Midway would have been the same for us, or perhaps better, if all 4 American carriers had survived the hypothetical battle of the Coral Sea. We lost 1 carrier at Midway (Yorktown), and I think that we would have lose either zero or 1 in my hypothetical.
I think that the most likely outcome is that, but for the Doolittle raid, we would have lost a total of 1 fleet carrier in the combined, hypothetical battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. In the aftermath of Midway, we would have had 3 fleet carriers remaining in the Pacific — plus Saratoga, which had completed repairs before the battle and was en route, but didn’t arrive in time to fight at Midway. The Japanese would have lost all 6 of their fleet carriers.
Heading into the battles off Guadalcanal, we had a fleet carrier advantage, in the real world, of 3:2 — Saratoga, Enterprise, and Hornet vs. Shokaku and Zuikaku. In my hypothetical, we would have had an advantage of 4:0.
Note that this does not count one borderline carrier on our side, Wasp, and two borderline carriers on the Japanese side that were completed in mid-1942, Hiyo and Junyo. The latter two were converted passenger liners, on the weak side and with a limited air arm, though sometimes classified as fleet carriers.
Shokaku and Zuikaku were back in action within about 2 months, in a series of naval battles around Guadalcanal, which our Marines invaded on August 7.
V. Playing Out the Hypothetical
Enterprise was heavily damaged by Shokaku and Zuikaku at the Battle of the Eastern Solomons on August 24, 1942, being knocked out of action until October. We did sink the Japanese light carrier Ryujo in this battle — the same one that was damaged in the Doolittle raid. Hornet had not arrived for this battle, though Saratoga was there along with the borderline Wasp (meaning borderline between a light carrier and a fleet carrier).
Saratoga was badly damaged by a submarine attack a week later, on August 31, and knocked out of action until November. Wasp was sunk by a Japanese submarine attack on September 15, 1942. For the next month or so, Hornet was our only active carrier in the Pacific. Enterprise returned to action on October 24, just in time.
Well, just in time to watch Hornet go down, and to be badly damaged again. In the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands on October 25-27, 1942, Enterprise and Hornet faced heavy odds: fleet carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku, again, plus the borderline Junyo and another light carrier, Zuiho. Fortunately, Hiyo had turned back due to an engine room fire.
The Santa Cruz Islands was a victory for the Japanese, as Hornet was sunk and Enterprise damaged. Shokaku and Zuiho were heavily damaged on the Japanese side.
At this point, the damaged Enterprise was our sole carrier in the Pacific. Arguably because of the unintended consequence of the Doolittle raid, we had lost Lexington, and Yorktown, and Wasp, and Hornet — and Saratoga, while not sunk, was damaged and out of action. The Japanese still had Zuikaku, and the borderline Hiyo, with Shokaku and Junyo under repair.
It’s not clear whether any of this would have happened in my hypothetical. Would have the Japanese have risked the Guadalcanal operation, with no fleet carriers at all? They would have had the borderline, converted liners Hiyo and Junyo, plus the light carriers Ryujo and Zuiho, to take on (probably) 4 American fleet carriers plus the borderline Wasp. They were desperate, but perhaps not that desperate.
In the event, the present looked bleak at the end of 1942, though the future was bright. In December, the mighty Essex was commissioned, namesake of a new class of over two dozen American fleet carriers, the best carriers of the war by a wide margin, none of which would be lost. But at the time, we had only the damaged Enterprise in operation for a brief period, and the Saratoga returning from repairs in November.
We were so desperate, in mid-1943, that we went into action with the so-called “USS Robin,” an apparently new fleet carrier. It’s a great story. The Robin was actually the HMS Victorious, borrowed from the British and modified to handle American aircraft. It operated with the Saratoga briefly, covering a couple of amphibious invasions. You can read more about it here.
In the long run, of course, any negative consequences of the Doolittle raid would have made little difference. By mid-1944, American naval and air power were overwhelming in the Pacific, and the Japanese were doomed.
VI. Sources
If you’re interested in reading more, you can check out the following from the official US naval history website.
Battles: Doolittle Raid, Coral Sea, Midway.
Carrier service histories: Lexington (CV-2), Saratoga, Yorktown (CV-5), Enterprise, Wasp (CV-7), Hornet (CV-8).
Saratoga and Enterprise survived through the war. I’ve included the ship numbers for Lexington, Yorktown, Wasp, and Hornet, because all of these names were used again for Essex-class carriers.
Published in History
If you’re positioning this as another defense of Joe Biden’s “morale-boosting” lies to Ghani and the American people, I’ll start by pointing out that the “propaganda victory” in Biden’s most recent efforts goes only to the Taliban. I’m not sure that was the intended effect, but that sure is the outcome. I don’t know of a single American who feels “better” because Biden did what he did, other than perhaps a very few on the fringes of the lunatic left. And Ann Coulter. But I repeat myself, at least WRT the “lunatic” part.
And I’ll finish up by pointing out that, in the present situation, we were not desperate at all. If you think Biden’s mendaciousness was justified in his multiple lies and disgusting behavior, because he somehow borrowed “desperation” on behalf of the Afghan people when he was speaking to Ghani and to us, then I think that’s just another misreading of Biden’s motives.
Joe Biden is a bad man. I don’t excuse him, and I will not exculpate him. Particularly not by comparing him to Winston Churchill, or any other giant of World War II.
Interesting analysis! It’s impossible to know if you’re right, as unpredictable as those battles can be, and how much can turn on chance. But it’s fun to think about.
Either way, we were going to win that war, as our industrial advantage would have overwhelmed any problems bad luck gave us here and there.
I really enjoyed the book Shattered Sword,‘which analyzes Midway from the Japanese perspective – the mistakes they made. Those authors (names escape me at the moment) argued that the Doolittle raid had the unintended benefit of inducing the Japanese Army to go along with the Navy’s Midway plan. In Japan’s disastrous inter-branch rivalry, the Doolittle raid gave the Navy a leg up, because it shifted the focus on the need to destroy the American carriers, which was Yammamoto’s main goal at Midway.
Those authors also point that Midway island, itself, helped even the odds for the Americans at Midway, as it basically functioned as a static unsinkable carrier. None of the Midway planes scored any hits on the Japanese carriers but they did keep them distracted.
She, this one has nothing to do with Biden’s actions. The recent discussion of morale did bring the Doolittle raid to my mind, but I am not intending for this to have any application to current events. I found it to be an interesting story, and hoped some of you would find it entertaining and informative.
Thanks. Noted.
We have no idea how the counterfactuals of a Coral Sea battle with Hornet and Enterprise would have gone.
Maybe the IJN catches us with our pants down and sink all 4 of our flat tops.
We do know that the Doolittle raid so humiliated the IJN by allowing Tokyo to be bombed putting the emperor at risk, that they developed the Midway plan to get rid our our navy in a Mahan style decisive engagement. Unfortunately for Yamamoto we had broken their naval codes and were able to lay a trap for them this time. Even then, it was a very near run thing. A handful of dive bombers at the right place and time made all the difference.
I am going to have to ask some friends about wargamming it out.
Cool. Let us (me) know what they think.
Kozak, I don’t think that the timing works for the claim that the Japanese developed the Midway plan because of the Doolittle raid, nor that it affected the decision. According to the US Navy history cited at the end of the OP: “On 16 April, after several months of discussion, Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, convinced the Imperial General Staff to agree to his risky Midway and Aleutians strategy.” The Doolittle raid was two days later. This source does say that the Doolittle raid caused the Japanese to accelerate the plan, without stating how much it was accelerated.
A delay might have made Shokaku and Zuikaku available for the Japanese, but it would also have added Saratoga to our side, and perhaps Wasp.
‘
I highly recommend Shattered Sword for anyone interested in World War 2 in the Pacific. It is a thoughtful and overall, to me, convincing argument about Midway and its after effects. It is also a very good discussion of naval operations aboard an aircraft carrier. It also gives a graphic account of what it was like to be on a badly damaged or destroyed ship during battle. Parshall and Tully, the authors, state that the Kido Batai, the Japanese 6 carrier fleet was so important to the Japanese that it was foolish of them to risk the fleet by dividing it into smaller sections. The three sections of two carriers each were mutually stronger then any fleet afloat at that time including the U.S. carriers. When divided into smaller sections as they were at the Coral Sea and, because of the losses there, also at Midway they were vulnerable. The U.S. Navy was not going to be as powerful as the full six or as able to work together as a group until late 1943. Good book and I highly recommend it.
I haven’t read the book, but I’ve watched and heard a few YouTube discussions by Parshall. He’s very knowledgeable, and entertaining.
He consulted on the recent Midway movie. His account of it is funny. He asked if they wanted him to look at the script, and they said no. So the script is silly in many ways, especially in its portrayal of Richard Best as what Parshall called (if I remember correctly) a “gum-chewing New Jersey cowboy.” He said that the real Best was a no-nonsense, by-the-book guy.
Parshall suggested that he does deserve credit for the movie’s exceptional accuracy regarding the wall colors and furniture in the various rooms on the carriers. :)
For anyone interested, here’s a discussion between John Parshall and a YouTuber named Drachinifel about Midway:
This Drachinifel fellow sounds like a Brit, and has a great YouTube channel on naval matters, with dozens (if not hundreds) of videos.
More re Parshall. I hope that I’m remembering correctly in thinking that his lectures and interviews were the source of this. Dale, please correct me if I’m wrong.
(1) There’s a legend about the torpedo squadrons, from all three American carriers, that opened the attack. They were devastated, with the Hornet squadron losing all but 1 guy (the famous George Gay from the movie). It was a heroic attack, but it was claimed — and still appears at Wikipedia — that this attack drew the Japanese combat air patrol (CAP) out of position, leaving the skies free for the later dive-bomber attack. Parshall said that this is not true, as the timing doesn’t work. The Japanese CAP had time to get back to normal altitude.
(2) About that Hornet torpedo squadron, there’s a bit of a scandal that was swept under the rug. According to Parshall, the commander of this squadron (Waldron) was openly insubordinate to his commander, who was leading the entire Hornet strike force in what turned out to be the wrong direction. Waldron found the Japanese fleet, though his entire squadron was lost in the battle without inflicting any damage.
(3) I think that it was Parshall and his colleagues who dispelled the myth that the Japanese carriers had their flight decks covered with planes when the American dive bombers arrived. This was the story of the Japanese air commander Fuchida, who had led the attack at Pearl Harbor and was present at Midway, though he was sick and didn’t fly. Parshall discovered that the Japanese flight records showed that the carrier decks were still being used for CAP operations at the time of the attack. If I recall correctly, when he checked this with a Japanese historian, it turned out that they had discovered the same thing some years earlier.
(4) The story of Richard Best, while not exactly as portrayed in the movie, is just awesome. Doctrine called for his commander’s squadron to attack the farther carrier, Akagi, while Best’s squadron was to attack Kaga. But his commander, McClusky, went after Kaga — and got her. Best peeled off, with just two wingmen, to go after Akagi — and got her. Later in the day, Best was in the attack that took out Hiryu, possibly dropping one of the 4 bombs that hit.
I second the recommendation of Shattered Sword.
If I recall the book correctly, I think they say that the CAP did have time to climb back up to the dive bomber’s altitude, but they were poorly positioned, due to chasing the various torpedo bomber attacks, to see the dive bombers coming and respond effectively.
Yes, I think all those points are made, though I do think they say the lower decks of the Japanese carriers did have ammunition and fuel all over the place due to delays and confusion caused by the constant need to respond to what were really totally uncoordinated attacks from the planes at Midway and the American carriers.
You are totally and utterly wrong.
The raid had a deep psychological effect on Yamamoto. No one had threatened the Emperor like that before.
The raid did very much. It cemented their attack to Midway.
Jerry, you seem oblivious to the psychology of war and politics. It seems you don’t care to take into account feelings and emotions. Human beings care about symbols. They are critically important.
You sound, increasingly, like a libertarian who thinks that emotions don’t matter. That is crap.
I am always reminded of Salvor Hardin in Foundation when told to “Save it for the Mob”
His response is great
“Who do you think I am saving it for?”
Not to mention a handful of suicidal torpedo bombers.
As @bryangstephens notes, the Doolittle Raid shocked the Japanese. They had no idea they could be attacked.
As you note, Coral Sea had a wider effect. One Japanese carrier, I forget which, took a bomb on its flight deck and was unavailable for Midway; the other’s airmen were decimated, so it couldn’t participate either.
After Coral Sea, the Japanese didn’t try to get to Australia by sea, they bogged themselves down in New Guinea.
Finally, the key to the wargaming was which side found the other’s carriers first.
I don’t think so. The raid accomplished two things: 1) it told the Japanese we can reach out and strike their nation’s capital in a surprise attack as they attacked our remote base, and 2) it boosted morale back at home, that we stuck it to them in their nation’s capital.
World War II has been the source of many “what if” discussions, and always will be . . .
Interesting. Very much so. Some of the criticisms came up when Doolittle was trying to sell the brass on the project, as I recall.
If you want to add the perspective of one of the pilots, who lost his leg but made it out of the country thanks to a lot of self-sacrificing Chinese, there is “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.” I still have free copies of my Audible narration of this book, so if you would like to listen to it, send me a message here.
The Japanese wargamed the Midway operation. In the initial run through, the “Blue Force” (US) surprised the Japanese from a position nearly identical to the actual event. The result was a loss of 3 carriers. Nagumo was incensed, stating it was impossible for them to be in that position at that time. Yamamoto intervened and ordered them to restart with the US forces proceeding from Pearl.
I think the morale victory for the US is an important aspect. Also it was a daring accomplishment. I think you discount that perhaps too much. In the Civil War, McClellan often had opportunities to finish off Lee, but he played it too safe. It would have been easy for America to do the same against the Japanese in World War II. Instead we took the war to their home Islands, which they couldn’t have believed possible. It had to cause them to reconsider their situation and probably put them off balance. That has an enormous advantage.
Additionally as has been pointed out we aren’t sure that Coral Sea would have turned out better for the Americans. Most World War II Carrier battles depended on who spotted who first. It may be with more carriers the US would have been more on the defensive in Coral Sea and would not have had the ability to turn it around. In fact it could have been a reverse Midway. Especially since at the time the US did not have a good set of tools for Carrier warfare, with an unreliable torpedo bomber, as of yet unproven dive bombers, and an inferior fighter. We hadn’t developed the tactics at Coral Sea that we would need yet to defeat the Japanese Carriers.
Finally as pointed out a lot of Midway came down to great luck. It is possible that would have been replicated with more carriers; however, it is equally possible that could have gone the other way.
I don’t know how big of a deal it was, but I know they diverted resources to homeland defense after that.
Arm chair fleet admiraling nearly 80 years after the battle can be fun, but I agree with Bryan’s statement that the emotional impact of the Doolittle raid was important.
I also think that our fleet was still quite badly prepared to fight a carrier war. At Midway their tactics were pretty awful and it was mostly sheer luck that any Japanese carriers were sunk at all. If we had more ships we also would had more targets for the Japanese, and way the US was operating at that time it would have been quite likely to have accidentally left some unguarded.
I wouldn’t have ordered the Doolittle raid were I the commander in chief because the reward was small on the military side and risky on the morale side. Had the B-25’s been intercepted and shot down, or if the Japanese carriers got wind of the operation and attacked it would have been a waste of bombers and possibly a waste of two carriers. There was little reason to think that the Japanese weren’t able to break our codes or have spies to warn them. I wouldn’t have ordered the raid, and I would have been wrong, but there wasn’t any way to know that at the time.
But it did happen and it was a success. I think in the long run it did little for the war, but in the short term it certainly gave hope to our navy and our nation.
True. The original story (which I believed until watching a speech given by Parshall maybe ten years) was a typically Japanese just-so story, in which the valiant doomed heroes actually did everything right but got screwed by fate. I have Fuchida’s book on my shelf.
Was the raid a mistake?
It seemed to work, we won the war, and the rest is angels on the heads of pins.
One of my favorite lessons of military affairs was a mostly deterministic simulation wherein two sides are allowed to whittle each other down, but will call upon reserves at a certain trigger point.
Without calling the reserves, you get a pretty smooth transition from larger forces typically defeating slightly smaller ones in a number of turns, to much larger forces typically dispatching much smaller forces in far fewer turns.
If you give each side the option to call in reserves at some set point, the whole thing gets chaotic throughout most of the range out to the very extremes of utter domination by side A or side B. That is, even sizeably outnumbered forces can expect victory about 50% of the time, with victory or loss dependent solely upon whether they happened to call in reserves at an UNKNOWNABLE right time. A huge zone opens up in which neither victory nor defeat is “typical” even for a surprisingly large initial advantage.
Counterfactuals are excellent tools for teaching the principles, but not for assessing in hindsight (except for very recent events) whether a proper decision was made.
As mentioned by I think Kozak, what if having fewer forces exposed at Coral Sea was a benefit?
These are all found in Shattered Sword as you state. The Japanese had known about the fallacy of carrier decks filled with planes but no one had asked them. The stories of what it was like on the Japanese ships as they were sinking is very moving and gruesome. It was repeated on every ship sunk or damaged on both sides. As Sherman may have said, “War is hell”.
One only need look to the battle of Midway to learn that these things turn on the merest of chance and can be impossible to predict.
What if our codebreakers were not so clever? What if the two carriers slated to join the other 4 to attack Midway had not been damaged at Coral Sea? What if the dive bombers showed up at the same time as the torpedo bombers in the penultimate June 4th attack on the Japanese fleet at Midway? What if McClusky and his dive bomber squadron had not continued to search for the Japanese fleet after failing to find it initially on June 4? Three waves of American aircraft failed on the morning of June 4th but each failure contributed to the final incredible home run by setting up a situation in which the Japanese carriers were vulnerable and could not counterattack.
That stuff can’t be gamed or planned for.
There is no guarantee that another carrier would have increased Japanese losses or not led to greater American ones. Moreover, the Japanese believed that they had sunk the Yorktown at Coral Sea, or at least that she was damaged extensively enough to require extensive repairs. Even the Americans believed that it would take ninety days. Nimitz gave them three. When the Yorktown actually was lost at Midway, the Japanese estimate of total American strength was out of whack and would remain that way for quite some time. One month later, the Essex, first of its class, was launched, with two more in 1942, five in ’43, nine in ’44. Well before that time the IJN was doomed because we had carriers everywhere we wanted them, and more importantly, everywhere the Japanese didn’t.
@kozak Actually it was the referee Admiral Ugaki who rejected the wargame iteration that had the American carriers to the northwest of the Japanese, where the Japanese didn’t expect them. The wargame results were devastating to the Japanese, so Ugaki raised at least one carrier.
Parshall & Tully describe this incident, and Craig Symonds picks it up in his book on the Battle of Midway. One great feature of Symonds’ book is his appreciation of contingency. The USS Nautilus, a submarine, put its periscope up in the middle of the Japanese fleet, which went nuts. They depth charged the Nautilus but it kept bothering them. So, the Japanese left the destroyer Arashio to sit on top of the Nautilus while they rest of the fleet moved on. The Arashio hustled to catch up, creating a bow wave that one group of dive bombers spotted and followed to the carriers.
Symonds also notes that the Americans were more proficient in damage control and preparation. They drained gas lines and filled them with CO2 when they could.
I don’t mean to pooh-pooh the value of wargaming, after-actions, alternatives, planning, and educated guesswork.
I just mean to say that problems have different degrees of tractibility. Most things which actually matter can be “known” only approximately, and only in a statistical sense, except for the actual attempt that is recorded as definitive.
I would say that Doolittle did acheive its limited purposes and may have caused a price to be paid elsewhere. However, we have seen through our single full-scale experiemnt, that it did not cost us the war.
It is a good question to *consider*, but not a valuable one to *answer*.
Awe rats! I couldn’t resist thinking of the Battle of Thermopylae [spelling error corrected].
Right, the results at Midway were unlikely to get any better than they already were.
But my opinion is that Midway was mostly a side show. Except for the damage to the IJN carrier fleet (which was substantial) the main part of the war was still Guadalcanal. Had we lost Guadalcanal, it would have taken far longer to end the war, though there was never any chance that we would eventually lose the entire war, though it might have ended without being unconditional.