Insufficient Training = Predictable Results
Barrett Tillman
A big BZ with oak-leaf cluster (OK, the Navy uses stars) to Lieutenant Colonel Peter F. Owen’s excellent article (“Marine Air’s Dark Day at Midway”), extremely well sourced with academic-quality analysis.
Midway, of course, was the only significant U.S. use of the Brewster F2A Buffalo in combat (there had been one intercept of a Japanese patrol plane earlier that year). Consequently, the Buffalo has been judged by that extremely limited standard ever since. Fact is, Marine Fighting Squadron (VMF) 221 was committed piecemeal, caught at an altitude disadvantage by superior numbers of better fighters flown by more experienced pilots. That fight was only going to end one way.
The author’s comments about the state of training (or lack thereof) in VMF-221 concur with Marion Carl’s descriptions. I coauthored his memoir, Pushing the Envelope (Naval Institute Press, 1994). On 4 June 1942 Marion was a tactically mature, 1,000-hour aviator widely recognized as one of the two finest pilots in the Marine Corps. (The other was his former rival and flying mate, Harold W. “Joe” Bauer, a posthumous Medal of Honor recipient at Guadalcanal.) But Marion said the squadron got no useful training leading up to the Battle of Midway. He was so disenchanted that on one occasion he slow-rolled around the circumference of the atoll during a pointless patrol.
After the disastrous morning mission, VMF-221 fell apart. The senior surviving officer said, “Carry on, Sergeant,” and the noncommissioned officer took over. With two remaining airworthy fighters, there was not much for other pilots to do, so many of them got drunk and stayed that way. Marion’s Nordic resilience showed in his diary entry two days later: “Feeling better, ready for another fight. Jap fighters too fast for us.”
I knew or interviewed half a dozen Buffalo pilots, and none were critical of the airframe. The type’s main drawback was poor carrier suitability, and John B. Lundstrom’s superb The First Team: Pacific Naval Air Combat from Pearl Harbor to Midway (Naval Institute Press, 1984) noted that Fighter Squadron 3 withheld some aircraft from operations to have a few available for contingencies.
In 1983, I interviewed Geoffrey Fisken, New Zealand’s leading ace against Japan. He liked the Buffalo for its dive and .50-caliber armament but preferred the later Curtiss P-40’s all-around performance.
Regarding Midway as a lesson for today: I do not have current data, but according to emails and online sources, over the past few years both Navy and Marine Corps Hornet pilots average only 10 to 12 hours per month between deployments. As a Top Gun founder says, “That’s hardly enough to be safe to taxi,” let alone remain current in a multimission jet.
Let us hope that what was past does not remain prologue.
Battleships at Saipan, Battleships at Normandy
Nolan Nelson
Chris K. Hemler’s article on D-Day at Saipan (“Seizing Saipan”) and Ed Offley’s article on D-Day at Normandy (“The Invasion Fleet that Liberated Europe”) inspired thoughts about some contrasts between the two campaigns.
The United States assembled a huge array of combat ships for the Saipan invasion with three divisions, including seven fast and seven older battleships. I compare this to Stephen Ambrose’s account of the invasion of Normandy by six divisions using six old battleships (three British) in the bombardment fleet.
I can understand why the United States kept so many battleships in the Pacific, but why were not the British invited to participate in the Normandy bombardment? They had 17 battleships available in 1944. Surviving German ships were in port. Italy had capitulated. Japan was no longer a threat in the Indian Ocean.
Of the 17, surely six or more could have taken station at extreme range and emptied their magazines to subject the fortifications to plunging fire at a range of about 20 miles. Each shell would have been four to five times larger than a bomb delivered by one of the heavy bombers and could be guaranteed to be much more accurate. The heavies did in fact bomb several miles inland of the beach defenses, but I am not sure all would remember the poor performance of the heavy bombers on D-Day.
There Were Giants in Those Days . . .
Theodore Kuhlmeier
To complement Eric Mills’ excellent article “Showdown Off Camperdown,” I would like to quote two references about the towering British Admiral Adam Duncan from a former longtime U.S. Naval Academy textbook, E. B. Potter’s Sea Power: A Naval History (Naval Institute Press, 1981).
During the Royal Navy mutinies of 1797, Admiral Duncan, “a huge man, still powerful at 66, . . . quelled mutiny in the Adamant by dangling the leader over the side by one arm.”
After the Battle of Camperdown, where the fighting had been at close range and the casualties severe (the British lost 10 percent of their complement and the Dutch even more), the defeated Dutch Admiral Jan Willem de Winter, a huge man like Duncan, expressed his feelings thusly: “It is a matter of marvel . . . that two such gigantic objects as Admiral Duncan and myself should have escaped the general carnage of this day.”
Correction: In the caption on page 17 of the June issue, “USS North Carolina” should read “USS New Mexico.”
