Operation C - Nagumo and Somerville dance in the Indian Ocean

[Music] the [Music] at the start of their campaign in the Pacific the Japanese Navy had faced four major opponents the US Pacific Fleet which had been substantially crippled at Pearl Harbor the US Asiatic Fleet or Asiatic Squadron which had been effectively destroyed almost immediately thereafter and the survivors of the latter had combined with the next threat on their list the Dutch Navy as well as elements of the British and Australian fleets to form abda command which had been sarily crushed in a couple of months in early 1942 thus by the end of February and early March 1942 pending the US Pacific Fleet marshalling its remaining strength the only remaining potential Naval opposition to the Japanese Navy's efforts in the immediate term was the British Eastern Fleet scattered remnants of abda command did still exist and the bulk of the royal Australian Navy had survived but unless until the Japanese pressed significantly further south these were unlikely to be much of an issue and even the threat of a couple of heavy Cruisers and a handful of smaller vessels was not particularly massive compared to the overall strength of the Imperial Japanese Fleet at the time although the British had just lost their major Naval Base at Singapore the Royal Navy could still bring carriers battleships and all sorts of other assets to the party and with the Japanese Navy's eyes turned eastwards across the Pacific the last thing they needed was a potential British Force hitting them from behind although the Royal Navy had deployed and lost fores said already Yamamoto knew that they were unlikely to make the same mistake twice and more to the point even if the Eastern Fleet didn't try and interfere in the Pacific operations the Japanese Army was steadily making its way through southeast Asia and if there was one thing the Japanese Navy wanted to hear even less than the unexpected appearance of enemy warships in their supply echelons it was the Japanese Army whining about how oh my supply lines are being cut and the Japanese Navy you really should do something about this the other options that the Japanese had on the table were to make a go going straight after Australia or to try and force what was left of the Pacific Fleet to come out and fight but with a huge distances of the Pacific and Indian Ocean the main strength of the Japanese Fleet could only be brought to bear on one of these targets at a time going after Australia immediately was quickly dismissed as it was clear that any major effort made in this area would only really be worth it if it was accompanied by Landings which could occupy various Northern ports this in turn would need several Japanese Army divisions and the Japanese Army refused to provide them with any blockading Australia or its supply routes would take too long and due to the size of Australia fix too much of the Japanese Navy's assets in a broad sweep which within the out and so that was out of the picture as well confronting the US Pacific Fleet was seen as the primary objective but Admiral Yamamoto was already starting his preparations for what would eventually become the Midway campaign and this left something of a gap between the start of 1942 and the pl planned start date for that particular Adventure into which removing the potential thorn in the side that was the royal Navy seemed to slot in quite nicely as an interesting side note at this stage the Japanese Navy seemed to be contemplating that if they did manage to destroy the American Fleet at Midway or a large part of it maybe they should attempt Landings in Hawaii to further hamper any attempted American counter offensive but in more proximate matters the majority of the Japanese Navy's Frontline strength happened to be in the Southwest Pacific mopping up most of the Dutch East Indies anyway the Indian Ocean therefore happened to be quite nearby the British meanwhile had fallen back to salon now Sri Lanka basing themselves out of the port of Trin but everyone on both sides expected a rather major Japanese offensive to take this facility out as well and the Royal Navy in anticipation of this prepared a 250 page document outlining in precise detail every single possible Anchorage in the entirety of the Indian Ocean and related regions that could could be used as further fallback positions both Fleet sized anchorages and individual Harbors that could be used for dispersed operations such as supporting submarine floa tillers or a few destroyers top of the list were freem manle in Australia Mombasa in Kenya and South Africa generally with a split between Simon toown and Cape Town and the port of Durban but there were other ideas like Adu ATL which were also detailed although it was noted that all repairs at said ATL would have to be done by ship and so to form a base there base ships accommodation ships repair ships and floating dry docks would have to be brought in as it was any facility that might be required soon wouldn't have to be particularly large as the Royal Navy strength in the Far East had been massively diminished compared to pre-war both to feed the various theas of war in Europe and with the loss of fored and those ships play placed under abda command which had sapped the remaining strength that the Royal Navy still had in the area further still having major supply routes compromised by a Japanese base in the middle of the Indian Ocean and facing yet another major Retreat wasn't the preferred outcome for the Royal Navy and so preparations to retreat if necessary were also accompanied by a crash course in reinforcement to try and forall that possibility almost 150 anti-aircraft guns thousands of troops and a total of more than a 100 fighter aircraft were fed to Salon as fast as possible along with a couple of flat pack radar stations strike aircraft followed in various forms and whilst the Mediterranean was still a cauldron of War it was also going through a brief Karma period at the very start of 1942 so ships were pulled in from all over the world to assemble a coherent Force this was made somewhat easy I by the Japanese entry into the war having brought the USA into the war as well as Japan's axis allies had declared war on the USA shortly thereafter older US Navy ships as well as a number that were working up were helping out in the Atlantic and that freed up Royal Navy ships from that area and soon what was on paper an impressive force was made ready five battleships three aircraft carriers six Cruisers plus a Dutch ship which was along for the ride and 13 destroyers along with with another Dutch guest in this class A few other small ships were scattered around in the theater as well but the main force compared to the two aircraft carriers several Cruisers and 11 destroyers of the Japanese force that Allied intelligence reported it seemed like a fair matchup even if some of the more tentative Intel reports indicated a battle cruiser or two might be coming were accurate a naval transmission marked most secret reveals are the likely cause of the confusion between what the Allies thought the Japanese were deploying and what they were actually deploying which we'll come to in a minute signals Intel had read a good portion of Japanese Naval transmissions and put together a picture of what was actually going on but crucially of course you can only determine from such Intel stuff that the enemy actually transmits and what they seem to have picked up were the strike orders for the attack but they'd mistaken the Japanese term used to refer to their carrier Strike Force as translating to carrier unit knowing that the Japanese Navy had used the same kind of terminology to refer to an American Carrier attack group the previous month they assumed therefore that this carrier unit would be two carriers a cruiser Squadron and a destroyer Flo tiller of course what it actually meant in Japanese was was the carrier Fleet the Kido Bhai they also picked up signals which ordered kaga to return to Japan and then to attack Target DG now they'd figured out from other intercepted Japanese submarine signals that DG meant to Target on Salon since they' intercepted Communications from two subs operating in the DG area and from other references in those reports as well as sightings by Recon aircraft they determined that the subs were operating near Salon thus They concluded that kaga's carrier division must be the one that was assigned to the attack and that it was a heading for Salon when in fact everyone but kaga was actually heading there now interestingly whilst they misinterpreted the meaning of carrier units in the translation they did notice the specific use of the term attack as opposed to Invasion or advance and thus concluded that this would be a raid that they can also concluded was aimed at ships and not a full-scale offense of an invasion they also happened to get the date right anticipating a Japanese strike of around the 1st of April but coming back to the British Fleet what the on paper figures don't show is that four of the British Cruisers were smaller older ships there were no Town Leander or even arusa class-like Cruisers present four of the battleships were older and slower R class and one of the aircraft caras was the stately but again quite small and slow hmes Hermes placed in command Admiral Somerville recognized the problem and formed his forces into two groups force a a faster group with the recently repaired Battleship warspite leading the fast armored carriers indomitable and formidable along with the heavy Cruisers Cornwall and dorsetshire and the more capable of his light Cruisers the emerald and Enterprise along with six destroyers the older and smaller ships were collectively placed in force B which was ordered to follow and exploit any situations that force a might manage to open up but they would hang far enough back to be able to make a run for it if force a signal that they'd been forced to retreat but there was another complication to the estimates and that was that the Japanese weren't just coming with two carriers in actual fact they were planning on coming with six aagi kaga hiru sor zaku and shokaku the force that had wrecked Pearl Harbor but kaga then grounded herself and the force was reduced to five as ongoing complications from this meant that K was ordered off home for repairs but the five fleet carriers were still an overwhelming Force as long as they could get their aircraft up into the sky on the Japanese side of things a separate raiding Force centered around the small carrier ruio was being sent out on a raiding Mission also into the Indian Ocean but the main Force which we're going to cover was aiming to steam at speed into the Indian Ocean and repeat December 7th 1941 Again by catching the Eastern Fleet in Port and destroying it this was however only to be a very large raid as the Japanese Army had once again refused to supply any troops to the Japanese Navy this time obviously for an invasion of salon and so the mission goals were limited to destroying enemy Fleet assets and disrupting trade a Japanese Intelligence on the strength of the British Force forces in the area was patchy and they also underestimated the strength of overall opposition this resulted in both sides going into this action rather confident that they had a reasonable degree of superiority over the other the British forces were split between Columbo and trinom both ports in salon and Adu atal a bit to the South but they were monitoring a number of other significant indicators of enemy activity a review of the most secret Intel files at the time shows that the Royal Navy was aware that prior to Major operations the Japanese Navy usually went suspiciously radio silent in the area that they were gathering their forces in but as soon as the operation had been launched that area went back to transmitting and usually with an increased volume of traffic presumably clearing out a backlog of messages they hadn't been able to send before this actually gave a pretty good indication both that a major operation was being planned and where it was assembling and then when the radio Transmissions peaked again when it had left late February and most of March saw regular transmission blackouts from the central part of the Dutch East Indies it just so happened that the celes were where the Japanese Navy was assembling its raiding Force the initial Japanese plan was to launch the attack in the third week of March having departed in the second week but this was delayed as USS Enterprise launched an attack on the Japanese facilities on the Marcus Islands at the start of March followed just under a week later by a raid by Yorktown and Lexington on other bases this would caused delays because shakaku and Zu Kaku made attempts to intercept Enterprise and shortly thereafter the erroneous reports of American carriers heading for Tokyo caused still further concerns as a result the two most capable Japanese carriers ended up burning off a lot of fuel then having to head back to Japan to refuel and then head south again which delayed the start of operation c as the raid was now called to the end of March with a planned attack date on Salon which was now moved to the 5th of April this meant that the British were now slightly out of step with the Japanese Navy as the plans they deduced from signals Intel were for earlier versions which had called for the attack on Salon itself to begin on the 1st of April with previous operations in the third week of March as they'd advanced shortly before the fleet sailed the Japanese Navy was sent a final force estimate they reckoned that the Royal Navy had three R Class the carriers Hermes and indomitable and four Cruisers in the area although quite where they dug up the name HMS Susan for one of the carriers I'll never know they expected the arrival of two further carriers and the battleships warspite and King George V in the near future in actual fact warspite had just arrived and the carrier formidable was only days out at the time that the intel was sent to the Kido Bai King George V was of course nowhere near the area submarine reconnaissance elements were ordered to provide as much information as possible in the form of operational updates and the fleet duly sailed on the 26th of March 1942 British Intel in turn updated Somerville that the Japanese force may include some of the Congo class but they still thought that two carriers maybe three was the most that the Japanese were sending Somerville himself had only arrived two days earlier coming in aboard the formidable but he kept up with the news and anticipating Japanese attack on the first of April he considered a Moonlight night attack timed to allow a dawn Landing back on the carriers as the most tactically advantageous for the Japanese Navy despite the lack of any Japanese Navy carry born Knight attacks thus far he got his forces underway ahead of time with the first of his ships sailing on the 29th then the rest on the 30th and then when all of these ships had sorted into their assigned groups they would head to their start points on the 31st of March the idea was to position his ships to the southwest of the anticipated Japanese line of advance and wait for them to make their first move then when either radio emissions reconnaissance flights or or other intelligence gave away the position of the Japanese ships he would move in at speed and hit the Japanese forces with a surprise Knight attack from the air followed up if needed by a surface assault this is reflected in the makeup of the carrier's air groups although there were 37 Fighters available a mixture of seah hurrians Fulmer and martlets which is the Royal Navy's name for the F forf Wildcat there were almost four whole squadrons worth of torpedo bombers making up the majority of the carrier's air groups all trained relatively extensively for night action and equipped with a number of aircraft carrying air to surface search radar known as ASV the Japanese Navy on the other hand had no night fighter training very little in the way of night based anti-aircraft gun capability and they would be facing more Torpedoes in the water if the British launched all of their torpedo bombers than the Japanese Navy themselves had sent down range at Pearl Harbor given the resources that he had to hand it wasn't a bad plan there was an additional Squadron of swordfish available on Hermes which was completely stocked with them to the expense of all other aircraft but she was small and slow to the extent that even the Venable swordfish needed a pretty good headwind to get off of hermes's Flight Deck when it was fully loaded so this fifth Squadron of swordfish couldn't necessarily be counted on Somerville had taken his Fleet well to the Southwest to avoid any submarines or aircraft which he thought might be scouting ahead of the Japanese Fleet and he then sailed eastn Northeast overnight with Force B lagging about 20 mi behind force a aiming to be about 120 mi from what he anticipated to be the Japanese Navy's launch position by 6:00 in the evening radar equipped aircraft would then look for targets until about halfast 2 in the morning and if nothing was seen the fleet would have time to fall back to the West of course with the delays to the Japanese Navy's operations the keto Bai was actually about 1500 miles away and so the reconnaissance flights found nothing of course not knowing this Summerville spent the 1 of April searching for them then repeated the night approach on a slightly different course and further searching throughout the day on the second also brought nothing and so it seemed perhaps the Japanese weren't coming out to play after all some ofil reason that this was either because the enemy's schedule had been changed by some outside factor which we now know was actually the case or the Intel he'd been given was flat out wrong or possibly the Japanese had learned that the Royal Navy was out at Sea and was waiting for them to go back into Port this last option being the one that Somerville at the time thought was the most likely deciding to deny them the chance to hit his ship's in Port but also needing to top up Fresh Water Supplies on the RASS a number of which had boiler tube leaks and condenser problems he directed his ships to Adu atal which he was fairly confident the Japanese Navy didn't know about as a base and was in any case not their anticipated Target at almost the same time the Japanese were just beginning their Final Approach to Salon conducting numerous aerial Recon sweeps but finding nothing more exciting than the occasional merchant ship various attempts by the Recon aircraft both from carriers and flying boats to bomb them met with no success although the submarine i7 did manage to sink the approximately 9,400 ton SS Glen shield with Torpedoes and gunfire the first sign of an actual enemy came on the afternoon of the 4th when a Catalina on its way home after the second troll of the day spotted a ship on the horizon getting closer the crew realized they'd spotted the screen of the keto Bai and made for Home full power realizing they might be jumped by Fighters at any moment they made repeated calls that they had located the enemy Fleet as well as its position and course zuikaku quickly launched a number of zeros in Pursuit they caught up with a Catalina which was in a shallow dive at its maximum possible speed but that was still well short of 200 mph and when it was on its third transmission cycle that cycle was never completed as a 20mm Cannon shell destroyed the radio set on fire in numerous places the Catalina quickly began to break apart in midair but thanks to already being at low Al thanks to said shallow dive the pilot managed to crash land into the sea the Destroyer isokaze was sent to pick up survivors but for unknown reasons whilst isokaze was still maneuvering to come alongside several zeros from the now active combat Air Patrol dive down on the stranded and burning flying boat riddling it with gunfire sinking it and killing three of the nine men aboard es soaz rescued the half dozen survivors and rejoined the fleet the main part of the transmission which reported that three battleships and a carrier had been cited had made it to salon and when the Catalina failed to respond to repeated radio calls and then didn't return to base a few hours later the British concluded it had been shot down this information was related to Somerville who was now left to scramble his forces thinking the Japanese Navy wasn't coming the Royal Navy was in the process of reconfiguring its forces to go and take Madagascar or fishy France Somerville himself wasn't entirely convinced he'd Seen the Last of nagumo but had thought that a Japanese Navy return to the area wouldn't be for a while and so he'd sent the heavy Cruisers dors cucher and Cornwall back to Salon the former to refit and get new radar installed and the latter to escort a convoy Hermes with the Destroyer vampire had been sent to trinom to reconfigure for the Madagascar operation on the third and the fourth reconnaissance flights had been sent out but these were aimed at keeping up training and spotting for submarines although a 24 strong torpedo bomber practice strike on Force B had also been conducted to prepare for Mass strikes on enemy targets eventually since many ships in the fleet had only operated together in the past few weeks and they were still trying to gel as a unit the news that the enemy was now present left the issue that the British ship so recently arrived at Adu atal hadn't had a chance to refuel and in the case of the battleships rewater just yet and some of V didn't want to leave Force B behind entirely as if three or potentially more enemy battleships and who knew how many Cruisers were actually present it would be a tough challenge for warspite to take them all on alone if they counterattacked after he hit the Japanese carriers the main advantage was that he knew where the Japanese were going so he recalled Cornwell and dorsetshire and ordered force a to be ready to leave at midnight the earliest that the Cruisers emerald and Enterprise could be ready and Force B was to follow in the morning over in Salon all possible vessels still in the port of Columbo were ordered to clear the area and not come back until the late afternoon of the fifth or the earliest a few would remain in Port for various reasons mostly poor condition or being in the middle of repairs but more than half made it out to seea more reconnaissance reports filtered in reporting various mixes of Destroyers Cruisers and the odd Battleship but none of them reported any fur carrier sightings this reinforced the idea in the British mind of there being relatively few carriers with a Japanese formation happily unaware of both somerville's predicament or location nagumo forged ahead with his first aircraft strike group loaded up with bombs suitable for hitting land targets and soft Merchant ships even the torpedo bombers were to be loaded with bombs and not Torpedoes if they spotted warships then semi armor piercing 1600 bombs on the Kates would be able to do some damage and then the second strike group could be sent in with proper armor piercing bombs later emphasis was now placed on destroying base facilities first aircraft carriers were the top priority targets if warships were spotted but once they knew they'd been spotted by the flying boats this changed and a reserve of torpedo armed torpedo bombers was also created thus on the morning of the 5th of April the escorting battle Cruisers and cruisers sent out reconnaissance aircraft of their own to ensure the seas around them were safe Japanese Navy search patterns of the time consisted of the various aircraft flying out like the spokes on a wheel to a preset distance and then orbiting in a search Arc before then returning behind them 128 aircraft were launched heading for Salon followed by the keto Bai turning to port and heading Southwest to maintain distance from the island 53 Val d bombers were kept on hot standby just in case somerville's fleet was spotted theoretically whilst the mixed Fighters based in Salon were largely inferior to a zero there were a lot more of them present than the 36 zeros running escort and they'd be supported by anti-aircraft gunfire and the zeros needed to protect the vulnerable strike aircraft even if all else failed the newly arrived radar station would be able to give a scramble warning in enough time time for the fighters to get into position above the incoming attackers but although a patrolling flight of full Mars and the separate patroling Catalina managed to spot the incoming Japanese aircraft the recent influx of so many Allied types meant that both groups assumed that the aircraft they saw in the distance were another friendly group of Fighters possibly hurricans and so they didn't raise any alarm for reasons I haven't been able to fully determine in as it was operational the shore based radar station near Columbo also didn't spot the incoming strike and so at 0745 a Japanese aircraft appeared in the Skies over Columbo and began their attack their arrival wasn't entirely unexpected as we've already covered the British knew the Japanese were likely to attack that morning and so the anti-aircraft guns at least were ready but without the final confirmed warning of incoming aircraft the fighters when now forced to scramble even whilst zeros dove in to pick them off as they struggled to gain altitude or even get off the Airfield at all this left the harbor exposed as RAF and Fleet air on aircraft had to then turn and fight over their own airfields to be fair in those areas they did put up at least a creditable effort the rat Milana Airfield attack was contested well enough that the Japanese lost six aircraft shot down and another six badly damaged in exchange for 11 British aircraft shot down many of them during their initial takeoff climbs over the harbor though the Japanese had an almost unopposed run a single formation of hurricans managed to intercept and went after some of the vals but without any other support they were in turn jumped by zeros and quite a few of them were shot down as the Japanese withdrew as well as damage to the facilities they damaged or sunk several Merchant ships damaged the submarine Depot ship that was assigned to the area and sunk the old destroyer tenidos and the armed Merchant Cruiser Hector they'd also downed a total of 19 or 20 Fighters depending on your Source damaged several more and wiped out a flight of half a dozen swordfish which had been headed for the rat Milana Airbase a squadron of blenham which were sent out for a Counterattack failed to find any Targets in exchange six vals and a zero had been lost with nine vals two Kates and three Zer damaged and in need of repair back aboard the kobai a second attack wave was being prepared when one of Tona Scout aircraft reported spotting a pair of Cruisers heading roughly their way after a brief argument over whether the port facilities further destruction or attacking the warships were more important the 53 valves that were kept on ready stand by were launched and ordered to attack the Cruisers they headed off around about noon Japanese Recon aircraft kept in contact with the Cruisers updating them to specifically Kent type heavy Cruisers and more dive bombers as well as torpedo bombers were ordered to make themselves ready for a follow-up attack the ships they' spotted were of course Cornwell and dorsa on their way back to join Somerville the captains of the two Cruisers knew that they were being followed by spotter aircraft and they now had to make a choice they could turn and run West at high speed and Hope to get themselves a little bit out of position for the inevitable Japanese attack or they could try and press on towards force a eventually deciding that the presence of single engined reconnaissance float planes meant that the Japanese carriers and their Associated escorts were a lot closer than they'd originally anticipated they decided to press on reasoning that they wouldn't get out of range of the attack by heading Westward and they also decided to Break Radio silence and warn Somerville of what was going on the veteran Japanese dive bomber Pilots arrived and realized that there was no escort screen or fighter cover and so with only the two Cruisers anti-aircraft guns to trouble them they spent time working around to a textbook diving attack position coming out of the sun they then began their attack in a series of three aircraft strikes the first Trio to go after dors cucher managed to score hits with all three bombs knocking out the ship steering radio and the port side heavy anti-aircraft battery Cornwall only suffered Splinter damage from a near miss and the loss of its aircraft hanger from its first attack but this was just the start more and more trios came in and the hits began to add up and with them the defensive fire began to slacken as men were killed or wounded and guns were knocked out this of course made making further hits even easier and within a quarter of an hour doreta had been hit 10 times with a number of damaging near misses whilst Cornwell was hit eight times with six near misses counted despite their best evasive action the relatively Nimble Japanese dive bombers and their skilled Pilots either managed to anticipate and adjust for most of the turns or thanks to coming in from the Sun anti-aircraft fire which was still at this stage Guided by the human eye even if they were using sights and Fire Control Systems was understandably inacurate which allowed the valves to release their bombs at the last possible moment this also improved their own accuracy the radar aboard warspite had actually tracked the vals which had passed less than 90 mil from its position on their way towards the Cruisers but Somerville couldn't risk his Fleet by breaking radio silence in turn instead around about the time the two Cruisers were slipping beneath the waves he sent out four albors to find the Japanese Fleet which by inference had to be relatively nearby he couldn't save Cornwall and Dorset but he could at least try to avenge them a destroyer was also dispatched to try and pick up any survivors shortly after this time nagumo decided to turn Southeast for a bit after recovering aircraft but carrier division 2 hu and soru instead turned Northwest for a bit the opposite direction this left them alone and essentially unescorted by a trio of Destroyers and at around 1600 two of the for Alor would find them unfortunately hu was incredibly quick on the draw having apparently made this course change to launch a final combat Air Patrol for the day anyway so she had zeros warming up on deck and they managed to catch the ALU pretty quickly shooting down one and damaging the other before a report could be fully radioed through the damage to the second albore included destroying his transmitters even though the aircraft remained flyable This Bat at albore headed for home carrying its vital news namely that the enemy was only 125 mil away Somerville had managed to bypass nagumo's reconnaissance screens entirely and was now on a collision course which would reach its Terminus a few hours after Sunset which was exactly what he'd wanted in fact further Japanese Recon efforts at this time were so short range that even if he'd been only a 100 miles away Somerville wouldn't have been seen before Sunset but about an an hour after this encounter and obviously not knowing about it sumerville got two bits of information the partial message from one of the ALU cores had given the location of five enemy warships but course speed and composition were all part of the data that had been cut off in fact the five warships were soru hu and the three destroyers but he also got another message from Salon which said the all the way back at 2 in the afternoon about 3 hours earlier at the point he was reading the message a Catalina had seen enemy carriers heading at 24 knots Southwest on a course of 230° although the Catalina didn't know where exactly this was this information was hours old but if it was true and was combined with the known position but unknown course and speed from the albore report which was made a couple of hours hours after that it seemed to paint a picture of the Japanese heading for Adu ATL and at a speed that would mean the two forces were about to run into each other whilst there was still plenty of daylight around and so at 26 minutes past 5 force a altered course to a southwesterly heading of 210° to keep the distance open long enough to allow for him to close in and deliver his Knight attack but then just after 1800 the carriers sent a series of signals the damaged albore had returned and was able to update its report now including enemy composition two carriers and three unknown vessels and the course heading was Northwest their last sight of the enemy ships had been at 10 5 this changed everything replotting the distances some of realized that when he changed course the spotted enemy had only been 100 miles away indeed post Battle Analysis showed that had force a kept heading east carrier division 2 would have sailed merrily past warspite's guns at about 2100 still with less than an hour spent on the new and wrong course Somerville immediately ordered the fleet to change course and prepare for battle all fighters were cleared from the flight decks every single operational albor and swordfish was wheeled into a ready position Torpedoes were loaded and flares mounted on the wings of every single bomber soon thereafter a radar equipped version rumbled into the sky Somerville would keep launching radar equipped search aircraft all night with at intervals of about 2 hours the pilots of the torpedo bombers remained at their stations on the open decks until the early morning hours waiting for a signal that the enemy had been spotted but the course change had not only sent them in the wrong direction away from the Japanese Fleet it had of course also so prevented them from closing the distance which doubled the effective distance that was lost and so the search aircraft found themselves looking too short transposing their search patterns from where they would have launched without that 26 minutes past 5 course change they would almost certainly have found carrier division 2 but it wasn't to be and the disappointed strike Crews eventually had to stand down the next morning force a and force be merged and remained at Sea hoping for better information further ships were dispatched to the area where the two Cruisers had been sunk as one thing the night Recon flights had confirmed was the fate of Cornwell and Dorset and between them these vessels managed to rescue 1, 122 survivors which meant 424 men had either been killed in the attacks or succumbed to a day spent in the ocean still thinking the Japanese might be aware of and trying to attack his his Anchorage sumerville hovered nearby keeping up reconnaissance flights to try and find the Japanese Navy but to no avail in fact nagumo had headed east and was happily planning his next strike in comparative safety although he still had no idea of just how close enemy ships had gotten or even that Sommerville was actually out at Sea in the immediate area to give a reference to a better known battle the British had spent the better part of a day hovering at an average distance from the Japanese carriers without being seen which was about 60% closer than the US carriers had been at Midway when they' first been spotted by Japanese reconnaissance aircraft having hit Columbo nagumo now planned to hit trom this time he wanted two waves to go in the first concentrating on Portside facilities and the second to go after any shipping on the seventh Salon based aircraft swept the Seas looking for the keto Bai but failed to find anything whilst summerville's own Recon sweeps found a couple of Japanese submarines believing them to be the flank guards of a force that might still be going for his Anchorage Somerville took the Eastern Fleet to the West intending to try and set up another flanking attack when the location of the Japanese carriers became clearer he was also having to deal with the survivors of his two heavy Cruisers who were now distributed throughout the fleet with the worst cases being sent ashore for treatment aboard the Destroyer Paladin escorted by the cruiser em news of Rio's raiding Mission came through and strategic planners successfully divined that the Keo Bai was probably actually going to come after trinom next but since the Japanese Navy had slipped the bounds of British reconnaissance exactly how they would approach and when remained a mystery by the morning of the 8th of April it was also becoming increasingly apparent that there may well be more than two carriers in the Japanese main Force but Somerville kept looking anyway still finding nothing concluding that wherever they were his Anchorage was now safe the Eastern Fleet re-entered Adu atal again just before noon on the 8th to resupply again whilst there Somerville received concrete Intelligence on the true strength of the kobai in the region and also new orders he wasn't allowed anywhere near Salon until it was certain that the enemy had gone away he therefore assigned Force B to head for ports in Kenya to try and fix their freshw issues whilst force a would head for the west coast of India as even with the advantage of a radar guided night strike and surface action by his Flagship he would find it rather difficult to successfully damage five fast Fleet carriers to the extent that they couldn't strike back at him the next morning whilst also having war spite engage in a 4v1 dual with the entirity of the Congo class at Point Blank Range nagumo's approach to trinom was now spotted by another British Catalina whose citing allowed the British to once again predict the timing of nagumo's strike this time the morning of the 9th ironically now that the Eastern Fleet had withdrawn although of course he didn't know that nagumo now started to get nervous about the Royal Navy hitting him in his flank whilst he was attacking Salon once again the British ordered All Ships to scramble out of the harbor in this time trom based on the Japanese attack on Colombo they anticipated pretty much repeat action with Japanese aircraft remaining far out to sea to avoid coastwatch stations which could give advanced warning before turning in to make their attack runs which they would mainly concentrate on Port facilities the carrier Hermes along with the Destroyer hmas vampire were thus ordered to sail along the coast to the South which should therefore be in the Japanese Navy's blind spot ideally they wanted to go north but Rio's group was roughly in that direction also sent out in other groups were a mine a Corvette three tankers four ammunition ships and a hospital ship some vessels which couldn't work up steam in time or had good defenses were retained in particular the 15-in armed monitor HMS arabus with its massive bulges and relatively open deck space allowed for a good concentration of anti-aircraft guns and a relatively low likelihood that she could be sunk at 0600 on the 9th the keto bti launched 91 bomb armed KES and 38 zeros as escort with 85 vals and nine more zeros on hot standby this time the British radar station in the area worked and after an early morning false alarm which turned out to be them spotting a reconnaissance aircraft the incoming strike was spotted 91 miles out even as another Catalina radioed in the position of the Japanese Fleet which had found shortly before it was shot down the first encounter between the incoming Japanese strike aircraft and the Defenders came in the form of three hurricans these had gained an altitude advantage over the strike formation passing over them noting and Reporting their strength and then coming in from above and behind on one of the fighter escort groups shooting down zaku's fighter commander and another zero before pulling up again pursued by the surviving Japanese Fighters which managed to down one of the attackers in return the two surviving hurricans then went after some of the bombers but one of them was accidentally shot down by friendly anti-aircraft fire as the formation crossed the coastline and the other breaking away from the bursting anti-aircraft shells took out another zero instead but this relatively small Skirmish didn't materially affect the Japanese plans and their attack began at 0720 drinky had far fewer Fighters assigned to defend it compared to Columbo another dozen hurricans were on their way but the remaining zeros forewarned by this first encounter were on a sharp Lookout now interestingly despite a numerical superiority and an on paper significant advantage in aircraft the zeros were not able to rack up the kill counts or ratios against pre-warned hurricans than they had over the scrambling ones in Columbo a trio of hurrians were jumped by twice as many zeros but only lost one of their number another section of three were all shot down but in return claimed two zeros as well as damage to some of the Kates all told across all engagements eight hurricans would be shot down with some others damaged whilst 14 more aircraft mostly strike variants were destroyed on the ground by Japanese bombers some disruption to the Japanese attack had been accomplished and between this and the scattering of ships only one merchantman was actually sunk but extensive damage to various Port facilities was nonetheless inflicted the monitor arabus was targeted the Japanese Pilots variously thinking of her as a cruiser or battleship in their reports but the calculation of her presence turned out to be fairly well founded six near misses riddled her starboard bulges and caused casualties but she remained comfortably afloat in exchange the Japanese had lost at least three zeros and one Kate shot down and 17 other aircraft damaged some badly enough to have thought to have been shot down at the time when they'd been attacked but the qualified good news of a relatively decent stand in the air was about the best that the British were going to get that day although the Gambit of sending the port shipping South close in Shore had worked perfectly against the Japanese strike formation which had no idea they completely bypassed them a SE plane from harona was another matter at about 0800 it spotted Hermes and other small craft and radioed its findings back to nagumo the 85 vals and 9 zos of the next formation were thus rapidly warmed up and sent skywards also in the air were nine blenham out of a total of 11 that had initially taken off as two of them had had suffed engine problem shortly thereafter these nine light bombers managed to sneak in close to the kai unnoticed indeed although they were spotted at the very last minute the first that many in the Japanese Fleet knew about their presence was when a trio of bombs exploded just in front of akagi's boughs this would unfortunately prove to be about as close as they got and despite an almost uninterrupted approach the blenham proved the LIE of Billy nal's claims of sweeping the Seas with level bombers by completely failing to hit anything they then made for safety but the Japanese Navy's combat Air Patrol which was is now waking up fell on them and downed four of the aircraft although one of hu's best zero Pilots somehow contrived to lose a dog fight to the blenham of Sergeant mclenon and was shot down before other zeros brought down the offending bomber in return meanwhile over on the salon coast news that the air raid was over was being transmitted and the carrier Hermes was now heading back North when at 10:15 signals Intel reported she'd been spotted and a Japanese Strike Force was on its way there was precious little the carrier which was without any aircraft at all at the time could do rather than accelerate for to full speed and hope that it could get under the cover of trin's guns as fast as possible Fighters were ordered to be scrambled to give Hermes some air cover but for some reason there was a lag of almost 30 minutes from the scramble order to takeoff a delay which would prove to have fatal consequences 3 minutes before the first fulmar had even taken off of from its Airfield the vals had spotted Hermes and then at 1050 they commenced their attack as with the heavy Cruisers the Japanese dive bombers faced no opposition other than the anti-aircraft batteries of Hermes and vampire and could take their time to position themselves for textbook attacks with close-in releases predictably the hits started coming in thick and fast Lookouts reported vals sweeping past below them as they pulled out of their Dives however the old carrier proved a remarkably resilient beast and was still afloat with enough bomb holes in her to resemble a slightly on fire swiss cheese but still more hits sealed her fate and she sank shortly before 1100 taking 307 men including her Captain down with her in the last stages of the Japanese attack the full Mars finally arrived Downing four vals in exchange for the loss of two ful Mars but with the attack essentially over the majority of the valves could just hi tail it which left the zeros with a much simpler combat problem to solve a poor old vampire had been attacked by any Val that couldn't find an unoccupied attack Vector heading for Hermes and with at least five damaging near misses and two direct hits she too sank although with only eight men dead on the way back back the Japanese force ran into the remaining blenham which were also on their way home and the escorting zeros duly went after them although once more the thoroughly obsolete light bombers proved weirdly capable against the zeros with the total score of that final aerial encounter being one aircraft shot down on each side two dozen of the vals had been unable to get a drop on either Hermes or vampire before it was clear that both ships were doomed and so these split up and searched up and down the coast hoping to find something else they found two of the tankers a merchant ship and the Corvette and sank them all over the course of the early afternoon before they also headed home with that nagumo decided he'd done enough and the keto tide turned for home itself at the cost of 17 or possibly 18 aircraft destroyed and about twice as many damaged he'd sunk a small carrier two heavy Cruisers two older destroyers an armed Merchant Cruiser a Corvette a Sloop and a number of merchant ships whilst also damaging two important port facilities ities there was little else he could do with his available forces unless the elusive Eastern Fleet appeared and so the kobai left the Indian Ocean on the way back receiving news of the doitt raid launched by USS Hornet against their Homeland some of the carriers needed to refuel and rearm for their next mission the one that would lead to the battle of the Coral Sea whilst the others prepared for the one that would follow from that and would in turn lead to the Battle of Midway the operation as a whole even without looking at Rio's little raid was an undoubted Japanese Victory the Eastern Fleet would remain in the western portion of the Indian Ocean for quite some time and of course the British had suffered far larger losses but it was still a qualified Victory without any troops to follow up their success the Kido Bai could not challenge overall British control of the area on a permanent basis and the facilities in Salon were soon repaired and reinforced with more and better Fighters and strike aircraft squadrons additionally although of course every ship and life lost was painful in the long term of all the ships that were sunk only the loss of the two heavy Cruisers which could have been put to good work in the Mediterranean in the next few months had any significant effects on the overall ongoing British war effort the loss of the various Merchant ships was much more impactful in their area as it cailed the available tunnage for moving materials on the Eastern side of India for many months until they could be replaced when it comes to Somerville opinions are sharply divided amongst historians an argument that actually goes all the way back to the immediate aftermath of the raid was he too Reckless was he too timid what portion of the blame for the loss of the heavy Cruisers is his and what is the admiralties for ordering him to prepare for operation Ironclad the AFF forementioned attack on vishy Madagascar etc etc on the one hand his primary orders were to preserve the main fighting strength of the Eastern Fleet which could have been largely wiped out in his efforts to attack nagumo had the dice fallen in nagumo's way and he'd gotten word of the presence of so many British ships within easy close in Striking Distance during the day on the other hand passively sitting back and letting Salon get hit repeatedly would have strained inter service relations considerably tanked morale in the fleet and led to a myriad questions about whether or not the Royal Navy was actually an effective combat Force his aggression in trying to bring nagumo to battle on his terms was in the finest tradition of the royal Navy at the same time both sides spent much of the operation running on hopelessly wrong Intel about the size and scope of the other side's Fleet and hindsight makes it easy for us these days to get a warped idea about what he should have done based on the full size of The Fleets versus what he actually knew against the full force of the Keo Bai there's not a lot you could realistically have expected sumerville to do but against two carriers and a few escort SS which is what everyone thought he was facing Retreat would have been very difficult to explain in my personal opinion I think sumerville largely did the right thing but got very unlucky ironically much like Jellico decades earlier partial Intel from ashore perhaps made things a lot worse in this case if all he'd had to go on was the partial report from the albore he might well have held his course and then managed to ENC Carri a carer division 2 he got more Intel once the albore landed whereas the hours old report from a Shore that the kabai was proceeding at speed straight at him was what made him turn back if that report had NE never made it to Salon be forwarded to him or had never been forwarded to him even if Salon had received it what might have been well that's it for this video but if you tune in on Friday we'll go over some of the potential ways that fight might indeed have gone down including the rather hilarious if disturbingly plausible scenario that the first carrier versus carrier kill could have been a surface gunfight that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pined post for dry do questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 398,917

Keywords: wows, world of warships, HMS Warspite, WW2, IJN, Royal Navy, Kido Butai, Kongo class, HMS Formidable

Id: GeGtSS-gtkk

Length: 54min 16sec (3256 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 10 2024