Quote:
Originally Posted by WernherVonTrapp
During the battle of Midway, as ineffective as they were in actually causing any physical damage to the IJN, the land based planes are nevertheless credited with disrupting/dispersing the IJN carrier TF and preventing the carriers from spotting their deck with torpedo planes and dive bombers. They kept the fighters on deck, landing, refueling and launching again and again. So they did contribute in an ironic but significant way.
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The key is
everybody contributed.
I quote from
Clear for Action page 205:
On word of the incoming attack every plane that could fly was sent into the air from Midway. These were twenty-seven dive bombers, six new Grumman Avenger torpedo planes, four B-26 medium bombers armed with torpedoes, sixteen B-17 Army bombers and twenty-seven Navy fighters, most of them outmoded Brewster Buffaloes. Because the fighter planes were needed for the defence of the island, the American attack groups had to carry out there mission without fighter protection. In that first attack, five of the torpedo planes and two of the B-26's failed to come back. They heavily damaged and set afire the carrier Kaga and an unidentified cruiser. It was during this attack that Major Lofton Henderson of the Marines dived his disabled plane into Kaga, proving that American's too, knew how to die.
This is not wartime propaganda, it's from a serious American naval history book published 22-years after the battle and conforms almost perfectly to the "official" Air Force version of events. That said, it's almost but not quite fictional.