@barnee said in Wrecks of WWII Carriers Kaga and Akagi Located:
When i read the article I had forgotten that the carriers and a light cruiser on the last day of the battle were the only Japanese ships sunk. Seems odd, even with only planes vs ships
Actually, the outcome reflects good tactical judgement by Admirals Spruance and Fletcher, who were the commanders on the spot. (Fletcher was technically in overall command, since he was senior, but in practice the two American groups – the Hornet/Enterprise group commanded by Raymond Spruance and the Yorktown group commanded by Jack Fletcher – operated fairly independently. Once Yorktown was sunk, and Fletcher had transferred his flag to a cruiser, Spruance was the only carrier commander left in the game.) The Americans were vastly outnumbered at Midway, and not just in carriers; Yamamoto committed about half the Imperial fleet to the operation, if you count all the groups of forces he deployed. The Americans, following Mahan’s principle of going all-out for the enemy’s capital ships (defined in Mahan’s time as his battleships, but by 1942 being redefined as his carriers), concentrated all their attention (and their limited bomber resources) on Kaga, Akagi, Hiryu and Soryu and sent them to the bottom. Also important, but less well-known, is the fact that Spruance, once evening came, steamed eastward (meaning away from the Japanese forces) in order to avoid risking his precious two remaining carriers in potential night-time surface combat (at which the IJN excelled) against the still impressively large Japanese armada. He and Fletcher had eliminated Yamamoto’s key pieces, the carriers, for the loss of just one US carrier (the patched-together Yorktown, which had taken a beating at the Coral Sea shortly beforehand), and that in itself was enough to make Midway a US victory of enormous strategic importance. Even the Japanese recognized this; they briefly considered taking another crack at capturing Midway by sending in their battleships (including Yamamoto’s flagship, the 18-inch gunned Yamato) to bombard the island prior to staging an amphibious landing, but soon gave up on the idea and turned west to head for home.
