Quote:
Originally Posted by dragoon500ly
But Midway was not the Incredible Victory that many western authors paint it to be. It was a notable victory for the USN and certainly hurt the IJN, badly. But was it a decisive victory? Was it the turning point of the war?
The IJN still enjoyed numerical superiority over the USN. They were still protected by a ring of island bases that allowed them to control the seas around their islands and still were capable of offensive actions. While they had lost all of the carrier aircraft, a large number of their veteran pilots were rescued and were available for latter operations.
IMHO, the decisive battle of the Pacific War was the Battle for Guadalcanal. Here the cream of Japanese Naval Avation died fighting. Here the US took its first major offensive step forward on the long road that would end off an little known island called Okinawa.
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In a sense Midway was not the victory it has been made out to be because even if the Japanese hadn't lost four aircraft carriers they still would have been beaten, it just would have taken a while longer. However in another sense it was a sensational vistory as the IJN got a hammering, in fact it was the greatest naval defeat that Japan had ever suffered up to that date, and it totaly exploded the short lived myth that they were invincible.
Guadacanal had a similar senationalism to Midway, but it was on land. It was the first time that the Japanese Army was stopped and thoroughly defeated, although the Soviet would argue that they did the same in the lesser known battles of Lake Khasan and Khalkhin Gol in 1938 and 1939, and its impact was just a great to Allied soldiers and Marines fighting the Japanese in the Pacific and Asia as Midway was to the navy.