About Hunter Wallace 12394 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

12 Comments

  1. I’m not counting them, others wrote this info. That’s just a cursory look at the opposing forces. The US fleet was weaker, at best it only had parity.

    You are just arguing for argument’s sake. Why risk mere parity?

  2. Good news.

    NBC are floating the rigged voting machines story.

    This increases the chances of a chimpout in Ohio and elsewhere.

    Good hunting!

  5. Hunter wrote: “I decided after Paul Ryan got the VP nomination to morally support our Yankee friends in the final stretch of the race.” Thanks for calling some northerners friends, which some of us really and truly are, even if we would rather remain in our own land rather than migrating or “transplanting” into your states.

    I always think this stuff goes without saying, but Yankees and Irish always prove me wrong: of COURSE being a white advocate makes void the typical criticisms of Yankees and Irish, etc! Jeez, what are you guys, dense? 🙂

  6. “You are just arguing for argument’s sake. Why risk mere parity?”

    Because the rest of the Japanese fleet was an invasion force set to occupy Midway Island fer chrissakes!!!

    How fucking dense can you get????

  7. Rudel, wtf are you talking about?

    The Japanese Imperial fleet was a massive strategic force. They brought more carriers to the fight than the USN. They brought more support ships. They had enough of a fleet to have an invasion fleet. This is precisely the point. They had enough gear to knockout the entire USN in the Pacific. Why risk emboldening a rival fleet by not having absolute naval supremacy? The Japanese strategy in the Pacific was perhaps doomed from the start but the near parity of force DID encourage their hopes to have the YS sue for peace.

    Midway could have easily been a very bloody and catastrophic defeat for the USN. If you don’t have a deterring supremacy some likely-lad like Japan or today China will take a roll of the dice. Thats essentially what a war is if forces are near parity. A roll of the dice, Clausewitz classified battle as a contingent factor, something that you are well aware of. You are just being obtuse. Japan very nearly sank the entire USN Pacific carrier fleet.

  8. “The Japanese Imperial fleet was a massive strategic force. “

    The majority of the fleet was for the land invasion of Midway Island and played no part in the battle. Indeed, it’s two small slow carriers were sorely inadequate for any defense of the troop ships.

    The seaborne force of large carriers in the van of the fleet was the target of the American attack. It was necessary to attack and destroy this force in order to turn back the landing force which if successful would have established a base from which to attack the remaining Hawaiian Islands.

    As far as a sea battle goes the landing force and it’s slow and vulnerable mix of troop and support ships were actually a liability and not a sign of overwhelming superiority. That the Americans were not faced with an overwhelmingly superior force is testified to by Yamamoto’s rapid withdrawal of this fleet of troopships and its paltry two small carriers and vulnerable battleships after the loss of his four big fleet carriers during the battle.

    I find your lack of knowledge of history and especially the history of WWII, absolutely appalling. It was the Japanese who were recklessly emboldened to take on 3 aircraft carriers and the Midway land based planes with only 4 carriers who were BTW, lacking a sufficient number of search planes for the size of their force. Pretty even odds and ones that we were forced to take as Japanese landings on the Hawaiian Islands was strategically unacceptable.

    This was actually a huge gamble by the Japanese and one in which their faulty intelligence as to the actual strength of the American fleet (3 carriers), the all around poor co-ordination and execution of their attacks, and timidity to commit made them pay dearly. The back of the Imperial Japanese navy was broken during this battle and their only future successes were in a couple of successful cruiser skirmishes during their unsuccessful defense of the Solomon Islands. From the fall of 1942 onwards, the IJN only ran away whenever we appeared in force. Indeed their timidity at Leyte caused them to miss an opportunity to destroy our landings in the Philippines and can only be described as cowardice on their part.

    You seem to think that a 3 to 1 majority of attacking forces vs. defending forces is essential for victory in naval warfare as much as it is sometimes said to be for land battles. This is rarely the case at sea, which a simple review of your own country’s naval history would attest, had you the wit to engage upon one.

  9. You are going into the weeds now. I’ve designed naval warfare scenarios. One thing that keeps coming up in the sims of historical naval battles is their stochastic nature. A sim generally attempts to create rules that recreate the broad outcome that happened historically. So you are generally constrained by logistics, quantity and attrition. Generally the games are designed to prove a point about doctrine or impress an idea into a stafff officer. But naval warfare is strange as an aggressive commander can completely transform a battle. Sims for Trafalgar for example often use a deus ex machina “Nelson Touch” as the decisive nature of the battle cannot be accounted for in math. My point being that it is better not to rely on the genius of a commander and make sure you always have the bigger fleet or the bigger batallion. In the long run the bigger force or alliance wins.

    The Japs could have easily obliterated the USN Pacific fleet if they spotted the Fleet early enough. They wouldn’t have dared cross the US if the US had twice the numbers of carriers in 1941. Pearl Harbor would have never been contemplated.

  10. Rudel,

    Could we just agree on this? Obama was dangerously glib about naval matters and Romney sounded like a real statesman. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Military Balance 2012, the U.S. has 114 principal surface ships (aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and frigates) and 57 tactical submarines. Unfortunately, fewer than half will be deployed at the same time: some will be preparing to deploy, others recently returned and still others in maintenance. And of course few of  these ships operate independently — a Carrier Strike Group, for example, operates with a minimum of six ships — a carrier, a cruiser, two destroyers, an attack submarine, and a supply ship. So deployment of three carrier strike groups to any one part of the world will substantially deplete availability anywhere else.

  11. “My point being that it is better not to rely on the genius of a commander and make sure you always have the bigger fleet or the bigger batallion. In the long run the bigger force or alliance wins.”

    We had no choice as our backs were against the wall. And Spruance in particular was brilliant in his bold action of throwing every available plane at the Jap fleet at the first sign of contact and while still out of range. Nagumo foolishly took the time to re-arm his planes with anti-ship ordnance.

    And I will again re-iterate that the Japanese ships held far to the rear and intended for the landing operations on Midway do not count in tallying up the order of battle. Three aircraft carriers and one island with bombers equal 4 carriers.

    The Japs lost the war because they ignored Yamamoto’s advice against war with the U.S. in the first place. We had them trumped on industrial might and in our superior cultural traits of ingenuity and aggressiveness. We made effective war against Zeroes with only P-40’s and Wildcats. We outsmarted them strategically while they engaged in overly cautious tactics navally and insane and suicidal tactics on the ground. A U.S. Marine was a superior fighting man to a Japanese soldier. And a single destroyer captain, Ernest Evans, led such an aggressive charge of a couple of destroyers and destroyer escorts against an overwhelmingly huge task force surrounding no less a ship than the Yamato that the IJN turned tail and ran away at Leyte. Simulate that engagement and that result will never occur in a thousand runs, yet like Midway, it happened.

    We killed them everywhere we deemed it necessary and incinerated their cities. Put that in your simulation and smoke it.

    —

    As for running a carrier battle group with only six support ships I say phooey. It’s supposed to be twelve. And our carriers sit in port most of the time because we can’t afford to run them. They are obsolete anyway. What is a carrier battle group supposed to do when it has two or three hundred atomic warhead surface to surface missiles coming against it simultaneously at mach 3? Get vaporized, that’s what. And you’re young enough that you will probably actually see it happen in the Formosa Straight or the South China Sea if we keep electing war-mongering morons like Obongo or Romney.

  12. “Bayonet charges freak out fuzzy wuzzy ghazis.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/9571522/Soldier-who-led-Afghanistan-bayonet-charge-into-hail-of-bullets-honoured.html

    They don’t like cold steel. They don’t like it up em!”

    Hard to calculate this into a simulation:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cWz9MrHskk

    “When Britain fi-i-irst, at heaven’s command,
    Aro-o-o-o-ose from out the a-a-a-zure main,
    Arose, arose from out the azure main,
    This was the charter, the charter of the land,
    And guardian a-a-angels sang this strain:
    Rule Britannia!
    Britannia rule the waves
    Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.
    Rule Britannia!
    Britannia rule the waves.
    Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.
    Still more maje-e-estic shalt thou rise,
    More dre-e-e-e-eadful from each foreign stroke,
    More dreadful, dreadful from each foreign stroke,
    Loud blast above us, loud blast that tears the skies
    Serves but to ro-o-o-ot thy native oak.
    Rule Britannia!
    Britannia rule the waves.
    Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.
    Rule Britannia!
    Britannia rule the waves.
    Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.”

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