[ARC5] Ht-4 Query

[Kenneth G. Gordon]

On 24 Oct 2014 at 17:08, Dennis Monticelli wrote:

> 
> Another reason why the Japanese lost at Midway was their arrogance.  Two
> aircraft carriers were damaged in the Battle of Coral Sea.  One lost most of
> its senior air crew and the other had physical damage. They lost irreplaceable
> senior aircrew on other carriers as well. They could have patched up the damaged
> carrier in situ, transferred some flight crew among the ships and involved those
> two carriers at Midway to bring the total to nine vs the very small number of US
> carriers they expected to face.  But instead they brought only seven  thinking
> they had this thing in the bag while we massed all four of ours along with a
> goodly number of land based bombers.  That plus a little luck with the timing
> of our bomb hits ended up leveling the playing field after the last bubbles from
> the fourth lost Japanese carrier. 

Not to mention, the SBDs. :-)

Old Slow But Deadly, God Bless 'em.

It wasn't until I watched a youtube video about how Swede Vejtasa shot 
down three Japanese Zeros while piloting an SBD that I discovered that SBD 
had two .50 calibre machine-guns in the nose, in addition to those special 
high-speed M2 AN .30s in the rear. Those .30s, BTW, were capable of 
something like 1200 RPM each, and some models were capable of 1500 
RPM. Move over MG-42. :-)

Ken W7EKB