The Battle of Midway offers an object lesson in the value of rapid innovation in warfare.
Despite several shocks to the system that should have induced the Imperial Japanese Navy to change many of its priors about warfare, the officers of the Mobile Force (
Kidō Butai) did not effectively translate the information into "lessons-learned" and iterate upon performance. A Royal Navy attack on the Japanese carriers in the Indian Ocean in April penetrated the Japanese combat air patrol (CAP), and if the British strikers had been better-trained, -armed, -prepared, and/or -supported, the Japanese may very well have taken casualties from the incident. However, the fleet did not change its CAP procedures whatsoever.
Two months later, on the morning of 4 June during the Battle of Midway,
Kidō Butai came under near-constant attack from American strikers and bombers for several hours. The attacks were relatively ineffective, since the early strikes were launched by poorly trained personnel, inadequately supported units, torpedo-bomber squadrons (which flew the obsolete TBD Devastator and dropped malfunctioning torpedoes), and inaccurate high-altitude heavy bombers. However, the attacks stretched the Japanese CAP laterally and temporally.
Kidō Butai's decks were forced to spend the entire morning launching CAP missions instead of preparing a strike against the American carriers. The CAP itself was pulled in every which way because of inadequate Japanese situational awareness and air control techniques. The first Americans to come into view were immediately swarmed by the
entire CAP, as though they were white blood cells attacking an infection, when the Japanese should have devoted more limited numbers to tackling each threat in order to keep Zeros in reserve. These were many of the same problems highlighted in the Indian Ocean, but to a much greater degree given the wave after wave of attacks coming from the Americans.
This left the CAP totally unprepared to deal with the massive American attack at 1020, which approached from several points of the compass and at both high and low altitudes.
Kidō Butai's Zeros immediately pounced on the first enemies to arrive, a squadron of Devastators at low level. This would have been bad enough, but the Americans had finally arrived with fighter support, provided by several Grumman F4F Wildcats. The Wildcat was less maneuverable and had poorer climbing characteristics than the Zero, but the Americans were led by LCDR John "Jimmy" Thach, who had developed a new tactic for engaging large numbers of maneuverable enemies. The so-called "Thach weave" improved the Americans' odds, but what was much worse was that the Zero pilots seemed incapable of thinking that they should do anything other than
line up to take on Thach and the Wildcats. Intellectually, the pilots must have known that the Americans had more strikes incoming, especially since the American dive bombers, the SBD Dauntlesses, had not yet arrived. Instead, Thach found himself swamped with a third of
Kidō Butai's entire CAP, inflicted high casualties, distracted the Zeros, and was able to flee when his job was done.
With all of the Japanese Zeros pulled toward the torpedomen and Wildcats, the Dauntlesses coming in from northeast and southwest, from USS
Enterprise and
Yorktown, were effectively unopposed when they made their attack runs. Within six minutes, they set three out of the four Japanese carriers ablaze and turned the tide of the war in the Pacific. Japanese failure to improve CAP management had dire consequences for
Kidō Butai's carriers and played a huge role in losing the battle.
Compare this to an American innovation that happened
at the same time.
During the Battle of the Coral Sea (4-8 May 1942), the American carrier USS
Lexington was heavily damaged and eventually destroyed by a Japanese attack that ignited fuel inside the many aviation fuel lines crisscrossing the ship. American damage control was generally better than Japanese damage control, even this early in the war, but the fires from the fuel lines made
Lexington impossible to save, although the Americans managed to evacuate her with minimal casualties. Machinist Oscar W. Myers on USS
Yorktown suggested the procedure of draining the fuel lines after use and filling them instead with inert carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide effectively worked as a flame retardant
...hey.
It really does work. Would you look at that.
(Yes, I know that "flame retardant" has a specific definition and that carbon dioxide doesn't technically qualify. Shut up. Common usage and all that.)
.
