The Score

Now that the returns from the Coral Sea and Midway are in, these facts seem clear:

> Japan has lost much of her Navy's striking power at sea. Without that power, Japan cannot bring the war to the U.S., or even to the remaining U.S. strongholds in the Pacific: Pearl Harbor, Midway, Australia, the endangered (but by no means conquered) Aleutians and Alaska.

> Japan has not lost her defensive power, her power to defend what she has already won in Malaya, the Indies, the Philippines, and to defend her home islands and cities. Japan's early conquests, the U.S.'s early losses and the barriers which they raised between Japan and the U.S. are as formidable today as they ever were.

> The U.S. has lost some naval striking power, but not nearly so much as Japan has lost.

> The naval war in the Pacific is now a race to replace and increase striking power. In that race the U.S. has the edge-in terms of the total losses to be replaced and of capacity to replace them speedily.

And Then there Were ...? In today's sea & air fleets, the most important ship is the aircraft carrier. Nobody knows exactly how many carriers Japan had when the war started. Best guess: nine regular carriers, plus ten or more converted merchantmen, which are not so effective as carriers built for the job. Of her regular carriers, Japan has certainly lost four, plus three laid up for repairs. She probably lost six, and she may have lost seven.

Japan's losses include her biggest and finest carriers: the 26,900-ton Kaga and Akagi, each bearing 50 to 60 planes, which were bombed and torpedoed off Midway; two, possibly three of her next biggest (in the Kaku class of 45-plane carriers). The truest measure of carrier strength is not size, but plane capacity. In these terms, Japan has lost at least half of her regular carrier fleet; she may have lost two-thirds or more.

After the Lexington. The U.S. entered the war with seven regular carriers, plus several more near the launching stage. Of these, only the Lexington has been permanently lost.* How many have been temporarily damaged, and how many of these have returned to service, the Navy does not care to tell the Japanese. Last week the Navy admitted only that one carrier was hit off Midway.

Furthermore, U.S. carriers are bigger, have more hitting power than their Japanese counterparts. Example: the Lexington had 90 planes, almost as many as the Kaga and Akagi combined. Thus, while the loss of a single carrier may hit the U.S. harder than a similar loss hits Japan, three or four U.S. carriers in the Pacific would outweigh the known remainder of the Japanese fleet in plane power.

At the moment, Japan's converted merchantmen may help to redress the balance of carrier power. But the U.S. is rapidly converting merchant ships into carriers; it is pushing a big program of regular carriers (eleven had been announced up to Dec. 7). And it is doing even more. Last fortnight, Rhode Island's Senator Peter Gerry put on the public record a hopeful and hitherto secret fact about U.S. carrier construction: "The Navy is converting to aircraft carriers a number of ships planned as cruisers. . . . You can imagine what will happen to the rest of the Japanese fleet when we get these new ships in commission."

*The ancient Langley, lost near Java, was a tender, not a carrier.

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