Hi Pearly Button; Re: "I disagree. I am not a military person but I do view wars as unstable systems. If the USA had lost at Midway I think it also could have easily lost the war. Apart from the secret code being busted, there was also one ballzy call to send every aircraft after the Japanese Carriers when they were sighted. They nearly missed too. They didn't, and the rest is history. If the USA had lost at Midway, whole loads of dominos would have been knocked over, maybe USA would not have even developed the bomb."
Midway was fought, well, midway through 1942. It's unrealistic to suggest that production would have been much changed in any of the countries as a consequence of that battle, since it was so far from either combatant. Here's the production of aircraft for that year and the following years:
Country 1942 1943 1944 1945
------- ----- ----- -----
US 47836 85898 96318 46001
Japan 8861 16693 28180 8263
In other words, by 1942, the United States was already outproducing Japan in aircraft by more than 5 to 1. The war was over the moment the United States decided to fight it out.
Yeah, wars are nonlinear, to a certain extent. Anyone who has ever played "Risk" knows this. But anyone who has ever played Risk knows that in order to exhibit the nonlinearity you have to actually conquer territory and reduce your opponents production. Japan was never, ever, ever in any position to do any damage whatsoever to U.S. production. On the contrary, the United States was cutting into Japanese production within a year.
Japan could have sunk every US ship at Midway. It wouldn't have extended the war more than a few months. The American strategists were not stupid and they were not gamblers, as you are implying. They knew that U.S. production would cover their losses no matter what happened.
There were a total of 3 U.S. carriers at Midway: Yorktown, Enterprise and Hornet. By the end of the war the U.S. had built a total of 31 carriers and 68 escort or light carriers:
google.com
The Japanese had a total of 12 carriers and 30 escort or light carriers:
marshallnet.com
The loss of 3 carriers would have bummed the U.S. out, but it would hardly have made a dent in the fleet. All that would have happened is that some of our (wasted) bomber production would have been converted to replacement carriers.
U.S. carriers were built in locations well protected by U.S. airbases, there was no way that Japan could have halted that construction from that far away (any more than the United States was able to halt Japanese construction from the same distance the other way). The battleground was in the central Pacific, and so the battle was completely and totally linear, as far as effects against the U.S. went. (Of course the United States put a stranglehold on the Japanese economy by unrestricted submarine warfare which was a very non linear effect.)
-- Carl |
