They talk about it in the movie "Midway" (2019). It's definitely one of those things a lot of people thought was embellished to make the incoming battle of Midway look more drastic. However it was absolutely true. Without the dive bombers and code breaking they were able to do in the lead up Midway would have been a disaster for the Americans.
Ehhh. There's a lot of people that seem to think that Midway would have been a disaster for the US if they lost, but there's not much reason behind this. The only thing the US was really risking that had a significant strategic impact were the carriers - if the island of Midway fell it would have been essentially unsupportable by Japanese forces (being far past Japan's supply lines, when Japan was already facing logistical issues, and within B-17 range of bases in Hawaii) and even the carriers weren't absolutely critical must-not-lose assets for the US like they were for Japan. (The US commissioned 8 carriers in the year following Midway - four Essex class fleet carriers and four Independence class light carriers) Incidentally, this is part of why Midway was such a huge strategic blunder for the Japanese forces - it risked 2/3rds of their carriers for minimal gain.
If Midway fell, it would have extended the war another few months. But I'm not sure that that really qualifies as a disaster.
> There's a lot of people that seem to think that Midway would have been a disaster for the US if they lost, but there's not much reason behind this. The only thing the US was really risking that had a significant strategic impact were the carriers - if the island of Midway fell it would have been essentially unsupportable by Japanese forces (being far past Japan's supply lines, when Japan was already facing logistical issues, and within B-17 range of bases in Hawaii) and even the carriers weren't absolutely critical must-not-lose assets for the US like they were for Japan.
The Japanese were well aware of this.
The Battle of Midway was not an attempt by the Japanese to capture Midway but rather to lure the American Pacific Fleet into a trap and to destroy its carriers. Ironically the direct reverse of that happened.
Strategically crucial in a Pacific that had seen most everything the Japan side of Midway fall. If Midway had fallen, New Guinea, Coral Sea and Fiji were next in line, putting Australia and New Zealand at risk. What you call minimal gain would, had Yamamoto's plan come off, have put over 60% of the Pacific under Imperial Japanese control.
US would have been fighting their way across the Pacific, island to island at a range that no longer permitted bombing the mainland of Japan. Which, as seen at the end of the war, was subject to colossal losses.
You're assuming that Japan could have kept Midway resupplied, let alone defended it. From what I understand, that's very questionable.
Midway wasn't keeping Japan contained in the South Pacific - the two were as militarily separated as Midway and the Aleutians. Japan probably could have taken the South Pacific in early 1942, in fact - but instead divided her fleet carriers up piecemeal, available to be defeated in detail.
No it wasn't keeping them contained, but it was an attempt to draw out the US carriers. Had the US lost Midway and Japan not got bogged down in the endless, unwinnable campaign in the Solomons that absorbed endless Japanese resources, Yamamoto's plan may have worked as his stepping stone to Hawaii. Only Midway and they probably couldn't have kept it... Had they got to Hawaii, I'm not sure Japan would have cared much about the atoll.
As it was, with help in the Solomons, Midway turned the war in the Pacific. Least that's how I understand it, though I've certainly read more of the war in Europe. :)
My understanding is that while the US losing her carriers at Midway would have allowed Japan free reign in the South Pacific for a few months, that was already the case for anywhere that all 6 fleet carriers showed up. Nothing the US had - combined, worldwide - could match those 6. Killing the US carriers at Midway was just to turn it from a 6v3 to a 6v0 - instead it ended up 2v2, but so goes war.
Japan invading Hawaii would have caused a famine if they succeeded - it'd be even harder to keep supplied than Midway, but with dozens of times the population.
In my opinion Midway marked the turning point of the war in the Pacific, but that turning point was inevitable as long as the US could credibly say "we're going to commission 6 fleet carriers with a full suite of aircraft over a 12 month period". There's a great video here [0] that illustrates the differences in production over the course of the war. For instance, the US commissioned 17 fleet carriers and 9 light carriers from 1941 on - Japan commissioned 7 and 1, respectively.
You are right of the unarguability of US manufacturing against Imperial Japan's, but that inevitability still doesn't eliminate the time recapturing territory that had Japanese presence. Their no surrender policy made island recaptures slow, brutal and ugly. Even with carrier provided air superiority.
Had they got to Hawaii, I imagine the experience would have been similar to all Japanese occupied territories -- famine, brutality, extensive forced labour and systemic murder. So long as the troops are fed, and enough comfort women can be found, nothing much else mattered...
The Japanese probably never had the logistical capacity to actually capture Hawaii. Hawaii is a supply chain 4000 miles away, and is not exactly rich in natural or industrial resources that can sustain itself. Getting a major fleet to Hawaii would eat up most of the IJN's support ships, and if someone at Pearl Harbor had the presence of mind to destroy the fuel tanks there before retreating, the IJN would have its fleet stuck there without any means of resupply, which would be easy pickings for the USN to recapture.
Granted, Yamamoto himself had no illusions re: a protracted struggle between Japanese industry, vs. American industry of the '30's/'40's era.
Assuming no loss of political will, I suspect even in a worse case scenario where the US lost all its 3 carriers, it would still have eventually produced enough to win the war. Just maybe it would have taken several years longer...
In 1943, the US was commissioning an Essex-class carrier more or less every month, so the extra time would have been closer to "several months longer" instead.
That's roughly my interpretation too -- there's no way Japan could out-manufacture US industry, and the difference in materiel, ship building and aircraft production wins out, even if Midway had been a catastrophic US loss.
I suspect a couple of years longer is much nearer the mark than a few months as the Japanese dug to never surrender, but second guessing history is a no cost game... Who knows what other dominoes would have fallen, and where, in the extra time.
Yeah, the US GDP was 4x Japans at the start of the war and 7x bigger at the end. Japans fate was sealed on Dec 7th, 1941.
But would a Midway disaster have extended the war 2 years? The US would become the worlds only nuclear power in 1945 and start cranking out atomic bombs no matter what happened at Midway.
I think you're ignoring the Soviet Unions contribution to the war. Even if America lost all 3 carriers you'd still have Manchuria and Korea failing to the soviets and the imminent threat of an invasion to the home islands, which even in our time line forced the surrender of Japan. Japan might have had more resources and industry to combat this but they'd still at least lose at roughly the same time on continental Asia.
I agree about the material (and materiel, heh) impact, but I wonder about the psychological impact. The US could absolutely outproduce and eventually outfight the Japanese, but how would the populace react to the loss of 3 carriers?
6-12 years of Japanese total domination in the Pacific would have led to their eventual defeat. Their probability of victory was zero from day one of the war.
I'd say it was zero as soon as they gave the US such a large piece of internal propaganda (the attack on Pearl Harbor). Without that, and without a declaration of war, Japan might have been able to ignore US forces in the Pacific. Getting the US to attack Japan in response to attacks on countries full of lesser peoples would have been a difficult proposition, and the willingness to fight on through the slog that the South Pacific became might not have been there.
The Japanese wouldn’t be able to sustain a US invasion, but they would have conquered Australia and would probably have forced the US out of the Pacific war.
That was the gamble. Success in 1942 meant Japanese domination of the entire Pacific, including areas of the Soviet Union.
Ironically, if Japan had committed all 6 fleet carriers to the South Pacific in early 1942, they might have been able to conquer Australia. Instead they split them - two to the South Pacific, to be damaged in the Battle of the Coral Sea, and then the four remaining operational carriers to Midway. Had all 6 shown up at Midway... Things probably would have gone differently.
I don't know that conquering Australia would have done them much good, though. It would have been hard for them to hang on to it. They might have stood a better chance of they'd concentrated on their original plan to grab oil in the Dutch Easy Indies.
They'd had some border skirmishes before WWII even started, with tens of thousands of casualties on each side. The 1941 neutrality pact was a result of a combined Soviet/Mongolian force defeating and removing the Japanese from Mongolia.
I'm still dubious. Adding a new theater to the war when your other theaters are already stalling without a decisive victory is generally not a winning measure. The naval victory is only at best a temporary reprieve: the US is going to replace all its lost carriers within a year, and is similarly going to replace all the capital units [1] it lost at Pearl Harbor by that time. The Japanese didn't think themselves capable of mounting an invasion of the USSR before about mid-1943, by which point it was beginning to feel pressure on other fronts, and the IJA would start raiding the Manchurian army groups for manpower to keep from losing on the fronts they were already engaged in.
[1] Again, recall that to Japanese strategic thinking at this time, it's the battleship strength that matters. Carriers are just a sideshow.
They bombed Pearl Harbor knowing that no carriers were docked there at the time. American carriers were not the main objective of the attack. You have to realize carriers were relatively new and not a known commodity like they are today.
The strike Pearl Harbor did achieve all of Japan's objectives: it prevented the US Navy from rushing to the Philippines' defense or otherwise thwarting their 1941-1942 conquests in Australasia. The IJN was still planning on having their decisive battle strategy, in which the US Navy would be decisively defeated in a pitched battleship battle, where carriers would not matter because carriers are not effective ships of the line, instead being good for scouting missions or harassing of incoming forces.
Ironically, they still held to this strategy in 1944, and attacked the US Navy in the Battle of Leyte Gulf to force their missing decisive battle, using their carrier fleet entirely as a decoy force. Even after there had been only one battleship action in the entirety of the Pacific war to this point, with all other major naval battles involving only the carriers on one or both sides.
