Yamamoto modern thinker or old fashioned

His successors made even more complex plans.
What I will never understand: He was hoping for a "decisive battle" and after Pearl Harbour, he always splits up his forces - doesn't makes sense to me.

 

In mid 1942, it became apparent that aircraft carriers were the new backbone of a modern navy. And the american carrier force was still intact. I thought, Midway was attacked to lure the remaining carrier force into a battle with Kido Butai.

 

I'm not sure that was quite the case. They were the "backbone" of the USN because of the US lost so many battleships. They became the backbone of the IJN because they were holding their battleships for the "Decisive Battle", fuel issues, and the fact that the battleships had little hope of actually catching the US carriers and the USN battleships weren't coming out to play much. I suspect it was late 42 at the earliest and perhaps some time in 43 that the full ramifications of the early engagements in the war were realized.

 

But they only had a couple of the fast battleships in the Pacfic until 43 and as you say there wasn't the fuel in the right places to make much use of the old battleships. I submit is was the combined combat that took place in 42 that really demonstrated the full impact of carriers.

 

Indeed but it's what they had to fight with. If they hadn't had the carriers then all that was available were smaller ships and a couple of fast battleships through until you get into 43. It was in 42 that carriers really started showing what they could do but there was still some questions about how useful planes were against battleships for instance especially when they had decent AA and/or CAP. Carriers in the mean time proved themselves pretty fragile. Look at it another way. What had carriers proved they could do up through mid 42? They had proved they could sink just about anything if they caught it by surprise in harbor. They had proved they could sink each other and smaller ships. They had proved they could make surprise raids vs land instalations (but they couldn't hang around long at that point. Even later in the year look at how much effort they expended sink Hiei a lone heavily damaged battleship with no CAP and almost no escort that could hardly move. I simply don't think there was time for all the lessons to sink in during 42 and certainly not by mid 42.

Indeed now that I think of it perhaps the lesson learned up to that point was that the backbone of the fleet was fleet oilers.

 

Midway simply showed that carriers could take out carriers, as well as a cruiser or two. They proved that at the Coral Sea. In the process they pretty much depleted themselves of planes. If two fleets both equipped with carriers and battleships of aproximatly the same size met then the logical conclusions from Midway is that the carriers would take care of each other and surface ships would decide the outcome especially if one side didn't get extremely lucky.

 

Or not.

 

Wasn't the IJN carrier force escorted by a few? In any case that was pretty much the point. Indeed I can't think of a single battleship that was attacked and hit by a a carrier plane at that point in the war that had any sort of CAP. There simply wasn't the information available to ascertain that the carrier was now the "backbone of a modern navy". The fact that it wasn't until mid 43 (July actually) that work on the Montana's was suspended kind of points mid 42 being too early to make that call and even late 42 being questionable. The fact that the last two Iowa's were laid down in 42 one December kind of points that way as well.

 

I actually made a "what if?" regarding the Coral sea last May, only in that one there was never a Doolittle raid and we committed both Enterprise and Hornet in addition to Yorktown and Lexington from the get go.

http://www.ww2f.com/topic/52976-what-if-uss-enterprise-and-uss-hornet-had-been-committed-to-the-coral-sea-instead-of-being-sent-on-the-doolittle-raid/