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Lopsided Military Defeats and Humiliating Battlefield Setbacks

Khalid Elhassan September 17, 2024 35 min

Lopsided - Egyptian prisoners captured during the Six Day War — Egyptian prisoners captured during the Six Day War. Pinterest

21. Wrong Premise, Right Conclusion

The Battle of Midway’s air strikes. On War

The first American planes to reach the Japanese fleet were Devastator torpedo bombers – slow planes that had to fly low, steady, and straight, to launch their torpedoes. 41 Devastators in three separate waves, one from each American carrier, attacked the Japanese carriers without fighter escort. 35 were shot down, without scoring a hit. After successfully dodging American torpedoes, the Japanese carriers resumed refueling and rearming. While the American torpedo bombers were getting slaughtered, the Enterprise’s SBD Dauntless dive bombers, led by Wade McClusky, reached the designated point where he had been told the enemy fleet would be. There was no Japanese fleet in sight. At that point, McClusky had to guess whether the enemy fleet had steamed faster than expected, and was thus to his south, in the direction of Midway, or was behind schedule, and thus to his north.

Heading south would have been the safer bet. Even if he did not find the Japanese, McClusky and his by-now-dangerously-low-on-fuel pilots would be able to continue on to land safely in Midway. However, McClusky had great intuition and an instinctive sixth sense feel that is often the hallmark of great leaders. He guessed that the Japanese, who had been attacked by planes from Midway earlier that morning, must have been delayed trying to evade the onslaught, and were thus still to his north. He also reasoned that if the Japanese had been to his south, and thus closer to Midway, he would have heard about it because they would have been detected by Midway’s patrol planes.

Lopsided - A Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bomber — A Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bomber. Wikimedia

McClusky was correct in his conclusion, and was spot on re the first premise. He was, however, woefully mistaken about the second assumption. Midway’s patrol planes communicated on a different radio channel that McClusky would not have heard if they had spotted and reported the position of the enemy fleet. Even if their report had made it back to McClusky’s carrier task force, it would not have relayed that information to him because it was operating under strict radio silence lest it give away its position to the enemy.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.