And it really throws a slightly different light on the Pearl Harbor attack. Don't know just exactly how accurate this is or might be, but it does make one remember that the; "plans dissolve upon first contact". Goto: The Pearl Harbor Myth
I don't know...The article seems to make a lot of supposition and present it as fact. But this bit really confuzzled me. The article states implying that 4 torpedoes per battleship is sufficient to achieve a sinking. It further says that the wasted torpedoes would have been put to better use against the Nevada which received only one torpedo hit. But later the article states about the bombs dropped Now, how can the Nevada be insufficiently targeted with torpedoes, in the first part, and yet, have been "sufficiently" targeted by torpedoes in the second??? Boy, I should have been an article writer for a military magazine. You can have the IQ of a brick and still get published and paid...
This article is proof that one researching an event seventy-years later has both the benefits of hindsight and not having been shot at during that particular event. tom
Actually, Zimm is correct, although he should have left out some words that confuse. The bombers were not there to drop against those ships accessible to torpedoes (those berthed with an unobstructed side) but only those batttleships inside of a double berth. So hitting an outside battleship would be considered a wasted (or hopefully redundant) use of bombs. I've read his book, The Pearl harbor Attack, and Zimm certainly does lay to rest the idea that the Japanese air attack was superbly planned and executed. It was neither. The torpedo planes, for example, should have attacked first and in unison, and operation that should have taken no more than a few minutes. None of the planes would likely have been downed, given the average time required from sound general quarters to the first anti-aircraft shots. As it was it took almost 15 minutes and 5 of the last 7 torpedo attacks resulted in the plane being shot down. It was anything but a disciplined attack - fighters downed several civilian aircraft an strafed targets of no military value. Zinn then calculates the AA fire effects and defensive fighter effects against the Japanese had Pearl been provided 30 minutes or so of warning, and the probable result would have been near destruction of the attacking forces. The Japanese were lucky the US had such incompetent Army (Short) and Navy (Kimmel,Bloch,Pye) commanders running things.
The reason the attack proceeded as it did was because the signal that total suprise had been achieved was mistaken for the opposite.
Given the height they were dropping from isn't that rather unrealistic? Actually at least from reviews I've read it has not been particularly well recieved. Was their sufficient air space to do this? Note that it also doesn't allow one to launch torps at targets missed by earlier planes. There's no way that operation could have been acomplished in "a few minutes". They had to plan on surpressing the US fighter fields for example and that combined with the attack on the naval vessels is going to take some time. Then there's the fact that unless they were supremely over confident they would still want the second wave and that had to follow the first by a siginifcant interval. Since the second wave faced a force that had significantly more warning and didn't suffer such a fate his conclusions are rather brought to question.
The bombers were not there to drop against those ships accessible to torpedoes (those berthed with an unobstructed side) but only those batttleships inside of a double berth. Given the height they were dropping from isn't that rather unrealistic? I saw an article years ago, I think in the Naval Institute Proceedings, which included a diagram of the bombs dropped on Arizona and Vestal. The high-level bombers flew in flights of five and dropped as a group, which I found a bit surprising, so their bombs landed in a wide V pattern spread across both ships. They were flying along the axis of Battleship Row, i.e. along the length of their targets, so I guess this was intended to cover left-to-right spread. Arizona and Vestal were attacked by two five-plane flights, from Hiryu IIRC, each of which scored one hit on each ship, one forward, one aft; the forward hit on Arizona was the fatal one.