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Example: At Midway, as presented in this video... the USA was losing EVERYWHERE until very near the end of the battle when a scant few dive bombers took the Japanese Carriers out.... why were these dive bombers deployed so late in the battle? What was the purpose of the previous sorties that lost every single plane and achieved nothing at all... not a single hit on any Japanese vessel?
There were two reasons for everything you describe.
First is, in fact, the torpedo planes and dive bombers from the carriers were supposed to arrive at the same time. Several things upset that plan. First is that the japanese fleet had moved from where they were last sighted before the americans launched, so even finding the japanese was a difficult business. Different units (torpedo planes, dive bombers) followed the leads of their commanders, all of whom made slightly different decisions.
One dive bomber unit, for example, saw a speeding japanese destroyer by itself, and just followed it back to the fleet.
One result of all that was that the torpedo planes arrived first. They flew into heavy air cover and basically got shot to pieces by zeros. I don't think a single one of them got close enough to launch an effective attack. I also don't think a single plane survived.
BUT as a result of that, when the dive bombers finally did arrive, all the japanese air cover had been drawn down by the torpedo planes to surface level, and so the dive bombers were both unseen and completely unopposed. They had the time and space to just divvy up the attack between the 3 carriers they saw (a 4th one was hidden by a squall) and attack. They just came screaming down literally out of the blue.
On top of it, the japanese had been caught in a tactical quandry. They were in the process of arming planes to launch a 2nd attack on Midway island when a scout plane reported seeing an amercian carrier. That means they had to switch several planes from bombs to torpedoes, and do it quickly, so there were armanents lying all over the deck of all 3 carriers when suddenly the american dive bombers appeared. They were not even spotted by people on the carriers UNTIL they were diving. So the japanese planes were all on deck, with all their crews inside the planes, and with heavy munitions lying all over their decks when the american dive bombers began their attacks.
It was over in a matter of minutes.
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Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/28/2019 11:27AM by zn.
