A question about worldwarII...in the Pacific?

Question

Is it correct to say that the Japanese were crippled after the battle of the midway?

Answer 1

The midway naval war just changed the tide of the war to America's favor. The Japanese were not yet defeated although the USA gained the upper hand in the pacific by winnning midway. So to answer your question, "crippled" is too strong of a word to accurately described what happened after midway. A better word would be "stunned."

Answer 2

Well the Japanese were behind at the start of the second quarter, to put it in football terms, but they wern't out of it yet.

What happened at Midway was they lost 4 carriers, (which was bad enough!) but more importantly they lost a lot of men.

The Americans had the resources to train a pilot, send him out, and then rotate him home after a set number of missions. When you think about it, that is INCREDIBLY expensive thing to do. It costs (today) something like a million dollars to train a pilot. To make that sort of investment just to have the guy fly 40, 50 missions for you... that's pretty expensive. Most other nations simply didn't have the $$$ or the manpower to do that. You flew till you were A) Shot down and killed. B) Shot down and so badly wounded you couldn't fly anymore C) Shot down and captured or D) The war ended. They simply did not have the resources to turn out pilots like the Americans did.

So the Japanese had a limited supply of pilots. Early in the war this wasn't a problem because the ones they had were GREAT pilots. By the time Midway happened they had fought at Pearl Harbor, Coral Sea, in the Indian Ocean, in the Java Sea, against the HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse, etc.

Problem was, when they lost most of those pilots at Midway, they couldn't replace them. They could get more kids, they could get more planes, but they couldn't give the new pilots the same sort of training, and certianly not the same sort of experience, that the ones who died a Midway had. They didn't have the resources or the time.

That meant that their Carrier's were weaker becuase their Carrier Air pilots and crews were weaker, and this weakness came at just about the same time the Americans were starting to make their industrial muscle felt with more ships and planes and Marines showing up. Combine these two facts and it becomes harder for the Japanese to achieve air superiority, and without air superiority you can't take the offensive.

You can't win a war on the defensive. All defense does is buy you time. The best the Japanese could hope for at that point was for someone in Congress to sand up and pass a resolution demanding that Roosevelt bring the troops home by the end of 1944.

Don't laugh, that was actually part of the Japanese War Plan. They felt that if they could just kill enough Americans and drag the war on long enough, we would come to the peace table and negotiate out a settlement. They may not have been far wrong, the plans for the invasion of Japan (Operation OLYMPIC and CORONET) assume that the war is going to drag on until 1947, and that is assuming that A) the landings didn NOT get driven back into the sea and B) we took several hundred thousand casualties. But for the Atomic Bomb, you might have seen Truman and Tojo signing an armistice sometime around Christmas of 46.

So they wern't crippled, but they were put on the strategic defensive, and that is never a good place to be.

Answer 3

Yes. However, in a more exact sense, it meant that the Japanese were no longer able to win the war. They fought on, and one could argue that they were not "crippled." MacArthur fought a chess game in which the Japanese players found themselves increasingly boxed into an end game.