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Did USS Lexington's loss at Coral sea provide the US Navy valuable lessons in damage control?

Discussion in 'Naval Warfare in the Pacific' started by USS Washington, May 6, 2015.

  1. Carronade

    Carronade Ace

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    Tulagi is kind of a toss-up. On the one hand, Yorktown's strike didn't prevent the Japanese establishing a base there, but we had conducted several carrier strikes in the area in the previous few months, so it was not unknown to the Japanese that we had carriers in theater. Except for the Doolittle raid, our carriers had not been active anywhere else since early February.

    Letting the Japanese take Port Moresby would leave us in the same position as Lae/Salamaua or Tulagi; we could beat them up a little but not impact their control of a strategic point - more critical than the others I might add. If the MO operation was completed without interference, Shokaku, Zuikaku and their full air groups would head home to join Kido Butai for Midway, making the balance 6:4. Usual caveat, anything could happen, but the odds are a bit worse for the US.
     
  2. F8F

    F8F New Member

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    Mahan stressed, drive the strongest warships of your enemy fleet from the sea, and then his weaker ships, bases, and isolated land troops are at your mercy. He recommended, even on a strategic level much less a tactical one, always focus first and foremost on the most crucial vessels of the enemy's fleet.

    American codebreakers knew when and where Shokaku and Zuikaku would be, and they also knew that CarDiv1 and CarDiv2 would be in home island port at the time. Meanwhile, in late April 42, I believe that the Japanese generally did not know where American carriers were, except that some of them had just been pleasure cruising off Tokyo.

    Again, I think the wisest course of action would have been to have set a trap for the S&Z with as much overwhelming power as possible. I think of this as similar to how Tirpitz and Scheer kept trying to rectify their inferiority in numbers by catching a division or two of the Grand Fleet on an isolated convoy escort mission, and then bring the whole High Seas fleet to ambush and destroy it, before the larger mass of British fleet could sail out and respond.

    I can't find concrete info as to what sort of land-based defenses Port Moresby had in May 1942. But I can see that MacCarthur had B-17s and B-26s on the York Peninsula and a few P-40s at PM. The SNLF was thrown back into the sea four months later, trying to invade remote Milne Bay.

    My guess is if Fletcher had waited five days for Halsey to arrive before tipping his hand as to US carrier presence, and if he had then sprung a trap and successfully sank or mission-killed Shokaku and Zuikaku, the post-victory Allied carriers and cruisers could have intimidated any remaining IJN vessels into a retreat North, and then leisurely sailed to gulf of Puapa, and then presumably set half-unloaded IJA transports on fire, smashed artillery pieces, vehicles, and piles of ammo and food sitting on the beach, and then strafed columns of IJA troop columns heading towards the Australian trenches and bulwarks. In this scenario, there was not much danger of PM actually falling.

    I imagine waiting a week to hit Tulagi would similarly have not left the Japanese in an impossibly more entrenched position, and could have produced roughly the same results as the impulsively-chosen May 4 raid.

    The records that I am seeing indicate the last time Yorktown or Lexington had had contact with Japanese Forces in the Coral Sea/New Guinea/Solomons area had been three months before the Coral Sea battle, during the March 10 Lae-Salamaua raid. In the following months, Lexington had been in the Hawaii area, and Yorktown had either been in the South Coral Sea, out of range of Japanese search planes, or in harbor in Tonga.

    I imagine that Fletcher and Fitch could have stayed to the South of Rabaul's Mavis search patterns, and Halsey remained North and East, until the S&Z had been located and were ready to be ambushed.

    [SIZE=11pt]Again, the scenario I present is not one of non-interference.[/SIZE]
     
  3. KiMaSa

    KiMaSa Member

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  4. USS Washington

    USS Washington Active Member

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    I don't think the additional Japanese troops would have made much of a difference for them at Guadalcanal, infact it might made their situation worse due to Japans logistical limitations and having those extra troops to supply, Guadalcanal wasn't nicknamed "starvation island" for nothing. ;)
     
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  5. F8F

    F8F New Member

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    Yah, did my dates wrong - noticed and edited that before I saw that anyone else had responded.

    I also saw something on line to the effect that PM was only provided with a garrison after Coral Sea.

    So - looks like the South Seas Detachment could indeed have simply landed and taken over the town, with Fletcher being the only force able to stop the landing. So, that pretty much torpedoes much of my thinking on the subject.

    That said, if I had a choice between [losing PM while sinking S&Z and not losing any of American carriers - which seems to me to have been a definite possibility if four USN CVs had been present and had had the element of surprise] vs what historically happened, I pretty sure that I'd chose the former. I feel confident that the allies could have kept the Japanese out of Australia using air power and then inserted themselves back into NG in late 42/early 43.

    (Or, better still, man up and send MacCarthur to command a training base somewhere and then skipped the relatively pointless New Guinea campaign altogether. I've long had the thought that the Allies faced two formidable enemies in the Pacific War - the Japanese, and Douglas MacCarthur.)
     
  6. Carronade

    Carronade Ace

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    Very true. I recall reading that at one point the Japanese commander on Guadalcanal asked his superiors not to send him any more troops until they could provide him food for the ones he had.

    According to Toland, 'ga' in Japanese means hunger, so it was easy to nickname Guadalcanal 'starvation island'.
     
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  7. KiMaSa

    KiMaSa Member

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    On the other hand, according to Potter's biography on Nimitz, MacArthur was opposed to the Guadalcanal Invasion in the first place. If Port Moresby falls, I can see MacArthur rail how the Navy botched things,How he (Once again) should command ALL US forces in the Pacific. And how ALL available troops need to be sent to reinforce Australia.
     

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