June 6th, Very important days in History. The Invasion of Europe and the culmination of the Battle of Midway

 *This should have dropped at 0430 this morning, but somehow I had selected "PM" instead of AM and caught it when I woke up to do my morning blog-reading while I drank my coffee.

 Sorry Guys, No Monday Music this week....They will continue next week.

 What I am referring to are the D-Day invasion of Western Europe in 1944, it was the first direct attack on Western Europe and "Festung Europa", after the aborted attack on Dieppe in 1942.  Some believed that this was a practice run on the Germans to see how they reacted.  The British left a lot of material behind and a lot of casualties and prisoners from that raid.  The Canadians were not happy about the results.  But 2 years later the Allies tried again with much different results than the ill-fated raid.

 On June 6th, the allies struck in Normandy on 5 beaches, Gold, Sword,Juno,Utah and Omaha, after a major bombardment with aircraft, battleships, destroyers, cruisers and the French resistance and more aircraft attacking the rear areas including railroad marshaling yards, bridges and other gathering points, they kept the Germans from reinforcing the bridgehead.  Also a major factor was Adolph Hitler who refused to release the reserves because he believed that the main attack would come at Calais instead.  This belief was reinforced by a major misinformation campaign by the allies to keep the Germans pinned at Calais and not reinforcing the embattled Germans at Normandy.

    Some facts about D-day:
    

The D-Day Invasion at Normandy – June 6, 1944

Invasion Date     June 6, 1944 – The D in D-Day stands for “day” since the final invasion date was unknown and weather dependent Allied Forces 156,000 Allied troops  from The United States, The United Kingdom, Canada,Free France and Norway Invasion Location The Allied code names for the beaches along the 50-mile stretch of Normandy coast targeted for landing were Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword. Omaha was the costliest beach in terms of Allied casualties. The Armada 5,000 ships and landing craft 50,000 vehicles 11,000 planes The Commanders United States – Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley The United Kingdom – Bernard Law Montgomery, Trafford Leigh-Mallory, Arthur Tedder, Miles Dempsey, Bertram Ramsay Germany – Erwin Rommel, Gerd von Rundstedt, Friedrich Dollmann Casualties Numbers represent total killed, wounded, missing or captured United States – 6,603 (1,465 killed) United Kingdom – 2,700 Canada – 1,074 (359 fatal)Germany – Estimated between 4,000 – 9,000 Results By June 11, with the beachheads firmly secured, more than 326,000 troops had crossed with more than 100,000 tons of military equipment. Paris was liberated on August 25. Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945.

I am a student of history and what got me interested in history was the battle of midway,  it lasted from June the 4 1942 until June 6 1942.  I will not post any major details except when it was done, the power has shifted in the pacific war.  After Midway Japan never had a victory until the end of the war.  The biggest loss for the Japanese besides 4 first line carriers was the loss to her aviation arm, the level of experience that went down when those carriers sank, they never recovered.

The events that transpired on those fateful days swung the balance of power in the pacific to the end of the war.  Before June 4 1942, the Japanese ran rampant through the Pacific, from bombing Pearl Harbor to the capture of the Philippines to the capture of the Dutch East Indies and the capture of the British Fortress of Singapore.The capture of Guam and Wake Island.  The Japanese started suffering from "Victory Disease" as Admiral Yamamoto called it.  The Allies found themselves fighting a much superior force than they expected from prewar intelligence.  The only hiccup was the Doolittle raid...

   The Doolittle Raid so traumatized the Japanese that they started planning the Midway operation before their Port Moresby operation was complete.  The Japanese made a move toward Australia and Port Moresby and the battle of Coral Sea. Coral Sea was the first battle where the ships fought and they never saw each other.  The battle was fought by carrier airplanes.  The battle was inconclusive, but we lost the Lady Lex and a fleet oiler.  The Japanese lost the light carrier Shoho but their 2 fleet carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku suffered heavy losses and the Shokaku was damaged.  This was why the Japanese didn't have those 2 carriers for the Midway operation.  The U.S.S. Yorktown was heavily damaged but they preformed a 72 hour miracle at Pearl Harbor and Yorktown joined her 2 sisters, Hornet and Enterprise.

 

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (AP) — Six months after the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan sent four aircraft carriers to the tiny Pacific atoll of Midway to draw out and destroy what remained of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

But this time the U.S. knew about Japan's plans. U.S. cryptologists had cracked Japanese communications codes, giving Fleet Commander Adm. Chester Nimitz notice of where Japan would strike, the day and time of the attack, and what ships the enemy would bring to the fight.
The U.S. was badly outnumbered and its pilots less experienced than Japan's. Even so, it sank four Japanese aircraft carriers the first day of the three-day battle and put Japan on the defensive, greatly diminishing its ability to project air power as it had in the attack on Hawaii.
On Monday, current Pacific Fleet commander, Adm. Cecil Haney and other officials flew 1,300 miles northwest from Oahu to Midway to mark the 70th anniversary of the pivotal battle that changed the course of the Pacific war.
Midway is now a National Wildlife Refuge hosting more than one million seabirds. Navy photos of the ceremony show an honor guard standing at attention next to a field of ground-nesting Laysan albatross and other seabirds.
"After the battle of Midway we always maintained the initiative and for the remaining three years of the war, the Japanese reacted to us," Vice Adm. Michael Rogers, commander of the U.S. Fleet Cyber Command, told a crowd gathered outside Nimitz's old office at Pearl Harbor on Friday to commemorate the role naval intelligence played in the events of June 4-7, 1942.
"It all started really in May of 1942 with station Hypo (the Combat Intelligence Unit at Pearl Harbor) and the work of some great people working together to try to understand what were the Japanese thinking, what were they going to do," Rogers said Friday.
Intelligence wasn't the only reason for U.S. victory.
The brave heroics by dive bomber pilots, Japanese mistakes and luck all played a role. But Nimitz himself observed that the code-breaking was critical to the outcome, said retired Rear Adm. Mac Showers, the last surviving member of the intelligence team that deciphered Japanese messages.
"His statement a few days later was 'had it not been for the excellent intelligence that was provided, we would have read about the capture of Midway in the morning newspaper,'" said Showers said in an interview.
Japan's vessels outnumbered U.S. ships 4-to-1, Japan's aviators had more experience, and its Zero fighter planes could easily outmaneuver U.S. aircraft.
But Japan, unlike the U.S., had little knowledge of what its enemy was doing.
Japanese commanders believed a U.S. task force was far away in the Solomon Islands. Then, as June 4 neared and Nimitz prepared his troops, Japanese commanders failed to recognize signs of increased military activity around Hawaii as an indication the U.S. had uncovered their plans to attack Midway, the site of a small U.S. base.
The U.S. lost one carrier, 145 planes and 307 men. Japan lost four aircraft carriers, a heavy cruiser, 291 planes and 4,800 men, according to the U.S. Navy and to an account by former Japanese naval officers in "Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan, the Japanese Navy's Story."
The defeat was so overwhelming that the Japanese navy kept the details a closely guarded secret and most Japanese never heard of the battle until after the war.
Nimitz got his intelligence from Showers and a few dozen others relentlessly analyzing Japanese code in the basement of a Pearl Harbor administrative building.
Japanese messages were written using 45,000 five-digit numbers representing phrases and words.
The cryptographers had to figure out what the numbers said without the aid of computers.
"In order to read the messages, we had to recover the meaning of each one of those code groups. The main story of our work was recovering code group meanings one-by-painful-one," Showers said.
At the time of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, they understood a small fraction of the messages. By May 1942, they could make educated guesses.
A key breakthrough came when they determined Japan was using the letters "AF" to refer to Midway.
Showers said Cmdr. Joseph Rochefort, the team's leader, and Nimitz were confident the letters referred to the atoll. But Adm. Ernest King, the Navy's top commander, wanted to be sure before he allowed Nimitz to send the precious few U.S. aircraft carriers out to battle.
So Nimitz had the patrol base at Midway send a message to Oahu saying the island's distillation plant was down, and it urgently needed fresh water. Soon after, both an intelligence team in Australia and Rochefort's unit picked up a Japanese message saying "AF" had a water shortage.
Showers was an ensign in the office, having just joined the Navy. He analyzed code deciphered by cryptographers, plotted ships on maps of the Pacific, and filed information.
Now 92 and living in Arlington, Va., the Iowa City, Iowa, native went on to a career in intelligence. He served on Nimitz's staff on Guam toward the end of the war, and returned later to Pearl Harbor for stints leading the Pacific Fleet's intelligence effort. After the Navy, he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Showers said commanders weren't always as open to using intelligence to plan their course of attack the way Nimitz was. Some were suspicious of it.
But Midway changed that.
"It used to be a lot of people thought intelligence was something mysterious and they didn't believe in it and they didn't have to pay attention to it. Admiral Nimitz was fortunately what we call intelligence-

   My favorite movie was of Midway with Charlton Heston, it was a good story and they used a lot of WWII movie cuts for the movie.  In the end there was a clip showing Admiral Nimitz played by Henry Fonda "Were we better than the Japanese?...Or just Luckier".  This battle showed a lot of luck for the Americans, from the Intelligence and the location of the carriers.  From the experience and power of the ships, the Japanese should have prevailed but luck was on the side of the Americans