Chapter 28 Chapter Twenty Seven

Midway Island (from Armin von Roon's "World Massacre") A pivotal battle in world history was now being waged on the other side of the world at sea, unnoticed in Germany, and even in our High Command.The failure of our Japanese allies to give us the truth about the Battle of Midway is tantamount to a breach of trust.However, Hitler did not like to hear bad news, and even if there was a report that reflected the real situation, he probably would not pay attention to it.Serious German readers must grasp what happened at Midway in June 1942 if they want to understand the whole course of the war.

Oddly enough, the democracies themselves made little publicity about the Battle of Midway.In the United States, the news about the battle was curt and inaccurate.To this day, few Americans know that their navy won a naval victory at Midway that will go down in military history as Salamis and Lipianto.For the third time in the history of this planet, Asia has launched a warship attack on the West in a desperate bid for world domination.At Salamis, the Greeks drove back the Persians; at Lipianto, the combined Venetian fleet kept the Islamists at bay; at Midway, the Americans, at least in our century, prevented the rise of the Asian colored race.Those subsequent Pacific campaigns were basically a futile attempt by Japan to regain the initiative lost at the Battle of Midway.Before the Battle of Midway, despite Adolf.Hitler and the Japanese leaders repeatedly missed opportunities and miscalculated, and the outcome of the battle remained uncertain.If the United States loses this battle, the Hawaiian Islands may not be able to hold on.With America's west coast suddenly exposed to Japanese force, Roosevelt might have to overhaul his notorious "Germany First" policy.The whole war may have a different turn.

So why is this pivotal event so underestimated?This anomaly was due to the nature of the campaign.The Battle of Midway was won in part by analyzing Japanese coded telegrams.This method cannot be disclosed during wartime.The U.S. naval authorities' reports of the Battle of Midway were vague and cautious, and were delayed for several days.It was a long time before it was fully appreciated that this defeat of Japan's war plans.So the truth about the Battle of Midway was covered up.The battle went on amidst the roar of the guns, and the battle was lost in sight, like a cloud of dust from a truck that obscures Mount Everest.Same.But as time went on, this turning point loomed larger and clearer in the military history of mankind.

The "Flat Boat" War German readers accustomed to warfare on land need a brief explanation of tactical issues at sea.On the sea, of course, there is no difference in topography.The entire battlefield is a smooth, boundless surface of water.As soldiers on land know, this simplifies combat but increases the importance of those fundamental factors.The development of the aircraft carrier has made a fundamental increase in the range of firepower. In ancient naval battles, warships rammed each other, destroying each other's rows of oars, and firing arrows, stones, iron bullets, or flaming objects across several feet of sea.Sometimes the warships grappled each other and leaned side by side, and the soldiers jumped onto the enemy ships and fought on the deck.Long after the cannons were installed on the warships, hand-to-hand combat on the water continued.john.Paul.Jones1 seized the English ship Serapis with a grapple, boarded her, and won America's first naval victory, just as a Roman captain did to a Carthaginian galley .

But those great scientific and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century produced the battleship, a steam-propelled steel colossus with rotating centerline cannons that could fire a one-ton shell nearly ten miles to port or starboard .All modern nations are scrambling to build or buy battleships.The race between our own and British shipyards to build bigger and bigger battleships, with both sides trying to get ahead, was a fundamental cause of World War I.Even before that, British capitalists had been happy to build for the Japanese a fleet of this formidable fleet, which they used to defeat Tsarist Russia in the Tsushima Strait in 1905.Only one other major battleship engagement took place.In 1916, at the Battle of Skagerrak, our ocean-going fleet defeated the fleet of the British Empire in an exemplary battle.Twenty-five years later, at Pearl Harbor, warships of this type were finally eclipsed by uselessness.

Battleships are the dinosaurs of naval warfare, neither born legally nor long-lived.Each ship, like the equipment of many army divisions, is a bottomless pit that consumes national resources.But it brought the firepower of long-range cannons into naval warfare.Since the Earth's surface is curved, the trajectory of its cannon balls needs to be corrected accordingly!Thus the industrial age compelled man to deal with the natural limitations of his little planet. After World War I, some far-sighted naval officers saw that airplanes could far exceed the range of the cannons of battleships.Airplanes can fly hundreds of miles.Airplane pilots can carry the bomb almost all the way over the target.They refuted those admirals who stubbornly advocated the battleship, and finally won the debate in favor of the construction of naval mobile airfields and aircraft carriers.Pearl Harbor settled a twenty-year dispute in one hour, and this contest in the Pacific became an aircraft carrier war.

Translator's Note: I've always been a battleship fan.Long ignores the battleship's role in maintaining the balance of power during a turbulent half-century, though no one could disagree with its crushing defeat at Pearl Harbor.His irresponsible description of the deadly battle near Jutland (the Battle of Skagerrak) as a German victory is ridiculous.After the battle of Jutland, the ocean-going fleet of the German Empire never went into battle.Most of the warships were scuttled at Scapaflo. After the "Bismarck" was sunk and the other battleships were grounded and immobilized by the Royal Air Force, Hitler finally demolished the rest. --dimension.Heng.

Aircraft Carrier Battle Tactics All aircraft carriers in the Pacific, American and Japanese, carry three types of aircraft. Fighters are defensive.It escorts attack aircraft to attack targets, shoots down enemy fighters that try to intercept, and protects the safety of attack aircraft.It also flies overhead and conducts air combat patrols to protect its own fleet from enemy aircraft. There are also two types of attack aircraft: dive bombers and torpedo bombers.Dive bombers drop bombs in the air.The torpedo bomber aimed deadly at targets below the waterline; it attacked in a more risky way, and it dropped heavier bombs.It had to fly low and straight to the surface for many minutes, then slow down and drop the torpedo.In the process of advancing on the enemy in this way, the driver of the torpedo bomber is very vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire or fighter jets, and his behavior is tantamount to suicide.So he needs the strong protection of fighter jets.

The principles of aircraft carrier warfare are the same for both navies.The three types of aircraft formed a squadron and took off to carry out the mission.Fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers join forces in the air and fly together towards the target.Fighters fought against the opposing defensive fighters, dive bombers attacked, and when the enemy's attention was most distracted, easy-to-hit torpedo bombers flew low and quietly to kill the enemy.This is called a coordinated attack, or dispatched in batches. There were variations in the plan; for example, a fighter could carry a light bomb; and the Japanese originally designed their torpedo bomber, the Type 97, as a dual-purpose aircraft.If it does not carry a torpedo, it can carry a large anti-bomb, which makes it also have a powerful destructive force against land targets.

As a result, this Japanese dual-purpose bomber decided the outcome of the entire campaign. Codebook C information also plays a decisive role.Thanks to the analysis of coded radio telegrams and the partial deciphering of codes, the Americans became aware of the enemy's battle plan.The Japanese should have foreseen this and prevented it.In modern warfare, codes and codenames should be changed frequently.This is a standard provision in the directives of our German army.One has to assume that the enemy is transcribing all the inexplicable words that we broadcast, and that the human mind can interpret whatever the human mind can conjure up.Japanese communications doctrine called for a change of codes, but her navy's work was disrupted by overconfidence and haste in preparing for the Battle of Midway.The haste of action was the result of an air raid led by Dolittle.

Codebook C has been used by the Japanese Navy since Pearl Harbor. American and British teams, originally using International Business Machines machines, pored over the messages for half a year.From April 1st, the Japanese should have switched to code book D. If the code had been changed, the code for Japan's attack on Midway would never have been revealed.But in the confusion following the Doolittle Raid, the change of codes was delayed until May 1st, and then until June 1st.From June 1st, codebook D was like an airtight curtain and finally covered everything, but at that time there were only three days left before the battle, and most of Japan's plans had already been known to the enemy. Wounded Aircraft Carrier Japan's overconfidence and haste of action was revealed after the Battle of the Coral Sea, a skirmish aircraft carrier battle when the Japanese attempted to capture Port Moresby, New Guinea, to pose an aerial threat to Australia .The expeditionary fleet clashed with two American aircraft carriers.Due to bad weather, the warships on both sides never saw each other, staged a comedy full of wrong decisions and hide-and-seek in the air; in two days of melee, the Japanese had the upper hand and sank the large aircraft carrier "Lexing". Dun" and an oil tanker, and damaged the "Yorktown".They lost a light aircraft carrier; in addition, the aircraft carriers "Xianghe" and "Zuihe" in the fleet were damaged by bombs, and the number of aircraft on board was reduced. The aircraft carriers of both sides returned to their bases crookedly from the Coral Sea.Fourteen hundred American workers worked non-stop twenty-four hours a day at Pearl Harbor to repair the battered Yorktown in three days; she took part in the Battle of Midway.But the two damaged Japanese aircraft carriers did not enter the battle.The Supreme Command refused to postpone the date of operation to train and replace the flight crew, and did not order emergency repairs.In order to guarantee the landing on the night of the full moon, or for some such flimsy reason, the combat power of the two aircraft carriers was indifferently abandoned. Plans and counter-plans Yamamoto's plan for the Midway Island operation was formulated by Colonel Kuroshima, who once conceived the great but aborted "Westward" strategy.His judgment seemed to have deteriorated.The Midway project was colossal in its size and dizzying in its complexity, but it lacked two military virtues: simplicity and concentration of power.It's a double mission, which is always a risky operation. 1. Occupy Midway Atoll. 2. Destroy the US Pacific Fleet. The plan started out as a complete repeat of Pearl Harbor, an aircraft carrier attack on the atoll.Under the command of Rear Admiral Nagumo, four aircraft carriers—instead of the originally required six—would sneak in from the northwest.They would wipe out the American air defenses in one fell swoop, and then the atoll would be captured by the landing force before Nimitz could send troops.They assumed (quite correctly) that Nimitz, though weak, would have to fight.Yamamoto himself planned to ambush his battleships behind Nagumo, separated by several hundred miles, out of range of the planes, in preparation to close in and destroy the remnants of the Nitz's fleet that had escaped from Nagumo's aerial onslaught. The plan included a feint attack on the Aleutian Islands not far from Alaska.Several other aircraft carriers would destroy the US naval base there, and then land an invasion force.This feint might lure Nimitz's thin force far to the north, thus giving Yamamoto a good opportunity to insert himself between the Pacific Fleet and the Hawaiian Islands; if Nimitz does not move, Japan can still seize peace Occupying the Aleutians thus removed the American stronghold at the northern end of the Pacific line. So Yamamoto, despite his overwhelming superiority in military power, decided to base his military operations on deceit and sneak attack; but there was no possibility of sneak attack.Nimitz made the audacious assumption that what the codebreakers were reporting to him was the truth, and that he might win by sneaking up on the raiders at a disadvantage, betting his entire bet on that assumption.In this way, he quickly solved the difficult problem in military theory: should the battle plan be based on what the enemy is likely to do, or on the most severe action the enemy can take.Chester.Feng.Nimitz ignored the nagging telegrams from Washington, five-star Admiral King, who repeatedly pointed out that the Japanese fleet might be sailing to Hawaii.If it turns out that Nimitz was wrong, he would suffer a greater disgrace than the deposed Commander-in-Chief at Pearl Harbor. But Chester.Feng.Nimitz is a good one.He is of pure German military descent and is well educated.His Texan lineage goes straight back to Ernst, a German major who was awarded the crown coat of arms in the eighteenth century.Freiher.Feng.Nimitz.This ancestor came from Feng, who had been a soldier for generations.The Nimitz family, all the way back to the Crusades.The recent generations of the Nimitz family could not afford to maintain an aristocratic lifestyle and gave up the title of "Von"; of course, in Texas, this title can only cause trouble. Nimitz made a simple but great decision: to ambush Yamamoto.He made a decision: when Nagumo's aircraft carrier came from the northwest, he placed all his aircraft carriers in the northeast of Midway Island.Midway is a vast, protruding land surrounded by sea water; around this land, there will be a life-and-death battle, and the battle will be won or lost largely by who sees the other first.Nimitz arranged his heavy warships in this way, kept a distance from the opponent, and concealed them, which took a lot of advantage. Because the planes from Midway (on land) can search an arc of seven hundred miles, while the planes on Yamamoto's aircraft carrier can only patrol up to three hundred miles.Nimitz could also receive patrol reports from the Midway submarine cable in Hawaii, so that there would be no additional radio communications on the atoll to alert Yamamoto that the Americans were on alert.Nimitz was able to relay the patrol report from Hawaii to his aircraft carrier in coded telegram on the spot, while Yamamoto's fleet slugged into range, bewildered and seeing nothing. This is the ambush laid by Nimitz.Yamamoto's fleet broke straight into the ambush circle. However, not all ambushes are guaranteed to be successful.Sneaking is a huge, but fleeting advantage.Yamamoto's valiant fleet quickly stabilized its position during Nimitz's sneak attack. In the initial stage, the situation of the Battle of Midway was that the Japanese won a huge victory. English translator's note: "Five-star Admiral Nimitz was a man of foresight, good sense of humour, and a calm and calm man. Not long before his death, he saw the original translation of my chapter. When he saw Long used "Feng.Nimitz" idiom, he laughed happily, but said the details about his family tree were correct. There is a naval motto that says, "If you can make it work, you're a hero; if you can't work it out, you're a coward." Much of the intelligence deciphering at Midway is indeed guesswork.Some signals that confuse the Japanese side must be sent to lure them into leaking clues.Admiral Nimitz's decision to act on such "insider information" was a bold one.He didn't know the plan of the Japanese.Rather, he had only a rough idea of ​​what might happen.He acted on a hunch that turned out to be perfectly correct. The measures taken by the German army to prevent the code from being broken were not very effective.I can't go into too much detail here, but the fact is that German telecommunications have been largely deciphered. --dimension.Heng.