Ken Bridges: Lt Col Robert Hite was famed veteran of Doolittle s Raid thedailycitizen.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thedailycitizen.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The B-25 continued to be the preferred medium bomber in the Pacific until the war’s end.
Here s What You Need To Remember: The B-25 was an all-around excellent aircraft; it lacked any serious vulnerabilities, and its configuration was varied during the war to best fit its requirements.
During the 1920s, U.S. Army Air Service commander Brig. Gen. William C. “Billy” Mitchell drove himself into an early grave while frantically trying to convince the ground-bound generals of the U.S. Army that the airplane was the weapon of the future.
Mitchell’s efforts reached the point of insubordination, for which he was court-martialed in the fall of 1925 and suspended from further service for five years. The verdict led Mitchell to resign from the Army, and he soon succumbed to the ill health his battle had earned for him. But his name would live on in the tactics he had advocated and in the bomber that was named in his honor.
Dreadnought and HMS
Invincible entered service. Prior to the construction of Dreadnought, the USN had built two different kinds of capital ship. Large, slow, well-armored battleships would engage enemy battleships in set-piece battles, while large, fast, poorly armored cruisers would raid and disrupt enemy commerce. Although the battleships were starting to trend larger, at the turn of the century cruisers and battleships were of roughly the same size.
The Dreadnought Revolution changed the equation. Britain, Germany, and Japan began to build all-big-gun battleships, but supplemented these battleships with battlecruisers. Faster but less heavily armed and armored than their cousins, battlecruisers would serve as the scouting wing of the battlefleet, but could also operate in traditional “cruising” roles, such as commerce raiding or protection.
1. Strengths of the USA
1.1. Japan launched a surprise attack on Southeast Asia in 1941 > hope that its quick and early successes would convince the Allies to negotiate for peace > Admiral Yamamoto warned the Japanese leaders that Japan could win early but not a long war > USA s industrial capacity was larger than Japan s & the USA would be able to rebuild its Pacific Fleet and strike back with even greater force > Japanese leaders took a gamble in 1941 that the USA would be unwilling to pay for the price of a long and total war > Japan underestimated USA s determination once it had been roused to action by the Pearl Harbour attack > Japanese were also relying on the continued success of Hitler s armies in Europe to distract the USA When the USA formally entered the war: Churchhill & Roosevelt agreed to defeat Germany first and once Germany was defeated, Japan s fate was sealed.
The shocking turnaround was something akin to a miracle.
Key point: The battle was only six months after Pearl Harbor and the outcome was far from certain. Here is how America managed to pull a rabbit out of a hat.
A devil’s advocate is a precious commodity. That has to be one of the takeaways from revisiting the Battle of Midway seventy-five years on, and it should be etched on the internal workings of any martial institution that wants to survive and thrive amid the rigors, danger, and sheer orneriness of combat. Despite Japanese mariners’ tactical brilliance and élan, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) leadership was prone to such ills as groupthink and strategic doublethink. Worse, the IJN fleet was cursed to be led by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto a leader of such stature and mystique that subordinates deferred to him out of habit. Never mind whether his ideas concerning operations and strategy made sense.