Five out of eight U.S. battleships were quickly either sunk or sinking, with the rest seriously damaged (of those sunk two were total losses). The Japanese thus neutralized the U.S. battleship force in the Pacific by an air attack and showed the vulnerability to air attack of warships lying at anchor, as at Taranto. The loss of the battleships led the US Navy to rely on aircraft carriers as capital ships to make counterattacks against the Japanese such as the Doolittle raid April 1942 and to engage Japanese naval forces at the Battle of the Coral Sea May 1942 and the Battle of Midway June 1942.