How did Afrika Korp get to Africa?

Today or yesterday (depending on where you live) was the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Phillipine Sea.

When the US landed in Saipan, the Japanese responded with a massive carrier attack (supported by aircraft from land bases), the first major Japanese carrier operation in a year and a half. Numerically, at least, this was the largest Japanese carrier force ever committed to battle and was faced by the largest and most powerful fleet ever put together in the history of warfare up to that point, America’s Fast Carrier Task Force.

Due to the sharp decline of Japanese pilot quality and a massive technological and numerical advantage from the American side, the Japanese 1st Mobile Fleet was dealt a giant defeat, losing 3 carriers and irreverisble numbers of aircraft for essentially no results.

The battle saw the combat debut of Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, arguablly one of the best Japanese carrier commanders, in command of a major Japanese carrier force. Previously Ozawa commanded various fleets and formations containing carriers, but never the Kido Butai (or its successor, the 1st Mobile Fleet) in combat.

@Witt

Thank you so much! I appreciate your input.

@ABWorsham4

Curious. Would’ve been a complicated air operation, given that escorting aircraft may have had to come from carriers. Then again, the Western Allies ruled the skies.

The success would’ve depended on whether the Italian government collapsed (Mussolini and the facists overthrown) and the army would’ve defected as quickly and massive as they did following the invasion of Sicily. If a substantial number were at least disarmed, it’s quite possible enough Allied troops could’ve been ferried into Italian ports to hold against an expected German counterattack.

While I don’t think the Allies would’ve reached the Italian-Yugoslavian or Italian-German borders, they may have reached what would become the Gothic Line by early 1944. Just making probable estimates, I did not look this in detail.

For me, it would depend on if I was the pilot, or the air marshall…

Pilot - BF109. The later spits outperformed the later bf’s, but 1940, in a straight dogfight, the 109.

BUT…
If I was looking at it and commanding at the high level, the hurricane. Easy to fix, easy to produce, fast turn around for reload/refuel, easier to train on, fighting over your own territory with a full tank. Yep - the hurricane.

Other:

Libya would have been lost, BUT (and this is a MAJOR but) Russia would have faced more German heat, earlier. Enough to take one of Leningrad, Stalingrad, or Moscow?

Not sure.

Enough to make a difference?

Definitely.

Very interesting story.  Thanks for sharing.

So this was the vehicle:

Still pretty decisive. Imagine if it had lasted 10 days instead of 1. :-o

@ABWorsham:

Should the Italians and Germans occupied Tunisia in 1941? This would have given more airfields to attack Malta bound convoys, provided more ports for shipping, ports that were closer to the Apennine Peninsula. The addition of these ports would forced the British to hunt for shipping west of Malta, which could have helped ease the stress on Tripoli and Benghazi convoys.

Those might have proved to be advantages to the Axis, but they might have come at the cost of negative consequences that would have offset them.  Tunisia was a Vichy-controlled territory at the time.  If the Axis had invaded Tunisia, the Vichy regime would likely have regarded this as a breach of the 1940 armistice terms with Germany, and would probably have reacted in ways Germany would not have liked.  Remember that when the Allies invaded North Africa, Germany occupied the “unoccupied” Vichy-controlled southern part of France, to which France responded with the scuttle of its fleet at Toulon to keep it out of German hands.  France might have done the same thing if the Axis had walked into Tunisia in 1941, and might even have jumped to the Allied side entirely.  So the cost-benefit analysis of an Axis invasion of Tunisia involves some tricky might-have-beens.