Posted on 12/13/2021 5:45:09 PM PST by poconopundit
Nah.
I’ve never seen it stated anywhere, but the aperture of the wave-motion gun always reminds me of a shark’s wide-open maw.
[ “They mostly modernized themselves!!!”
Yes they did, but they sent thousands of young Japanese around the world to study at some of the world’s best universities.
Admiral Togo, the hero of the Battle of Tsushima in the Russo-Japanese war study nautical science and naval science in Great Britian for about six years along with eleven other naval cadets (Wikipedia: Admiral Togo). ]
Indeed, they valued knowledge and KNEW they needed to play catchup by sending out “reverse missionaries” to sponge up the knowledge and bring it back and apply it!
But the biggest and most telling weakness was Damage Control on both Battleships and overall for the entire Japanese Navy. The lack of Damage Control procedures and practices doomed both ships years before they ever sailed.
* * *
Very interesting analysis, dpetty. Is there a book or website you’d recommend on the subjects you discussed?
This kind of parallels a lack of Japanese resoures/practices I noticed looking at the Air Forces of the US and Japan during WW2:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II#Air_forces
The ratio of training planes manufacturing is 20% of American military planes overall. Japan’s training planes account for less than 5% of planes built overall.
This shows a lack of preparation — and maybe a lack of money (and fuel) to adequately prepare pilots for war. And yet it’s absolutely crucial that pilots get proper training.
If you look at that data, you also that the U.S. had almost as many training airplanes as ALL airplanes the Japanese built.
It was a huge blunder. Was it a bigger blunder than Operation Barbarossa?
If you consider that Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union ultimately led to Germany’s defeat, then a look at war casualties offers a comparison:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
The Japanese lost 3 million out of a population of 71 million (about 4%)
Germany lost 7 million out a 69 million population (about 10%)
The Soviet Union lost 24 million out of 188 million population (13%)
America lost 419,000 people out of 131 million ( about 0.2%)
Incidentally, Yamato was named for a Japanese province.
The US wasn’t in the war per se until Pearl Harbor, and after the Japanese attacked, people were lined up around the block to enlist.
Lend-Lease helped both the UK and the USSR, but actually fighting the Germans (even through Churchill’s “soft underbelly”) helped tip the scale. Hitler went to direct Zitadelle (Kursk) in person, and shifted three divisions out of the preparations for the battle line to shore up Italian defenses. Boneheaded.
The terrain of Italy was the defense. And after those dozen or so airfields in southern Italy were in allied hands, the US finally put its foot down with the British and said, we’re done trying to fight our way up this BS, we have our objectives in hand.
Not to mention, the full industrial mobilization happened, and would not have otherwise, leading to overwhelming firepower from us and our allies.
Compared to the Germans, the Japanese were midget rodeo clowns (no ethnic slur intended, but I stand by the midget thing), and we had to do most of that on our own, while still making Germany-first our priority.
Hitler’s mistake vs the USSR was just one of a series of errors, the largest one. Obviously he should have cut loose and bagged the British army at Dunkirk. Failing that, should not have started Barbarossa until putting adequate resources to finish off the British in North Africa, there’s no doubt they could have prevailed if he had. Imagine that, the Med a German lake, control of the Suez Canal, plenty of oil from Arabia, and still no new front to worry about.
Instead, he fought the war like it was a bus schedule, and fretted that they couldn’t possibly keep the timetable if he had to stop to pick up passengers. Didn’t grasp strategy or tactics.
Compared with Pearl Harbor, well, nothing compares to it.
And a Christian war movie: To End All Wars. Based on real events during WWII, this is the story of four Allied POWs who are forced to build a railroad through the Burmese jungle. https://tubitv.com/movies/530097/to-end-all-wars?start=true
Amazon.com
A Japanese P.O.W. camp during World War II becomes the battleground for the souls as well as the lives of its Scottish and British prisoners. Based on a true story, To End All Wars centers around Ernest Gordon (Ciaran McMenamin), a young soldier who wants to teach philosophy. When Gordon recovers from seeming death by illness, the other prisoners agree to become Grodon’s pupils, studying Plato, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Gordon’s superior officer, Ian Campbell (Robert Carlyle, Trainspotting, The Full Monty), scoffs at the increasingly pacificist bent of Gordon’s teachings. Jim Reardon (Kiefer Sutherland, 24, Freeway), a lone American running a black market, is equally skeptical. But under the relentless brutality of the camp, the only way for the soldiers to survive is to find what gives their lives meaning. The strong performances of To End All Wars makes this moral conflict as vivid as any gun battle. —Bret Fetzer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Gordon:
Captain Ernest Gordon was a company commander with the 2nd Battalion, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. He fought in several battles in the Malayan Campaign and the Battle of Singapore. He was one of the last Allied soldiers to cross the causeway from Johore before it was blown up. After the capture of Singapore, he escaped to Java, and attempted to sail several thousand miles from Padang to Sri Lanka with a group of other British officers in a native fishing boat. His boat was captured by some Japanese warships, and he was returned to Singapore as a prisoner of war.
Gordon found his sense of self and spirituality while a prisoner and one of the participant soldiers who helped build The Bridge on the River Kwai. As history shows, the Japanese were especially cruel to their prisoners. The death rate was quite high. He underwent very torturous events, that led to his being placed in the “Death Ward” designated for those who were not expected to survive. (These conditions included malnutrition, beriberi, malaria, tropical ulcer, and an appendectomy.[1])
He was treated there by two special soldiers in their late twenties, a Methodist named “Dusty Miller”, a simple gardener from Newcastle upon Tyne; and “Dinty” Moore a devout Roman Catholic. The two gave 24-hour care to Gordon. They would boil rags and clean and massage Gordon’s diseased legs every day. To the great surprise of everyone, Gordon survived, and as a consequence many of the POWs experienced a revival of faith and hope for life. Gordon, an agnostic, was impressed by Dusty’s simplicity and firm Christian faith in the face of the severe treatment the prisoners received at the hands of their captors. Dusty was one who did not lose faith and never met the cruel treatment he received with anger.
In a surprising turn of events, Gordon survived the war. Upon liberation as he sought news of his friends he found that two weeks before the war’s end Dusty had been crucified by a Japanese guard who was frustrated with Dusty’s sense of calm in the face of hardship. Dinty, whom Gordon cared for and admired profoundly, died when the Allies sank his unmarked prisoner transport ship.
But how much of that was due to Stalin's egoism in slaying so many commanders, and not preparing soon enough for war?
"America lost 419,000 people out of 131 million ( about 0.2%)"
By the grace of God, part of which is the "ocean effect."
But today we could not fight WW2 on its terms, as China could. How ridiculous was American production in World War 2? [images at link]
Nope. He’s more dangerous than Abrams.
He proved it already.
Sorry but all republicans need to lose if they do not acknowledge the steal.
Something else I forgot to mention was the Shinano the forgotten sister of the Yamato which was converted to a Carrier after the loss at Midway...and sinking by USS Archerfish...That incident is the best example as to why the Japanese mega battleships were mere Halloween costumes. I pulled what I said from a number of sources but this is one is a good one... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC6LN3U5ELk
Operation Barbarossa was technically, tactically and strategically perfect.
The problem afterward was twofold.
Firstly, Hitler wanted Ukraine and Lebensraum, splitting the forces which should have went straight to Moscow.
The secondary problem was the immediate implementation of the SS in those countries Germany took over. At the beginning, those countries looked at German troops as saviors from the USSR and would have gladly supported the Germans and fought against Stalin. The SS soured this massively and put a huge partisan movement over their supply lines.
Very true...
Interesting post *bump*
Interesting, Fiji. More detail on Yamato is here:
https://www.google.com/search?radiosearch=&q=what+is+the+meaning+of+yamato+in+japanese
Very interesting to hear this. It goes to show the Japanese at that time were building expendable ships either for lack of resources or some other reason.
One of the most fascinating and informative books I have read on the Imperial Japanese Navy was “Shattered Sword”.
Like many Westerners, I only knew much about the IJN battle doctrine, ship construction, damage control doctrine, and the battle of Midway from what I had read from US sources.
The book was written largely from the Japanese perspective, and explained MANY things that had made no sense to me.
I was unaware of the dramatic inferiority of ship design and construction, damage control infrastructure training and execution, and even the way flight operations were carried out right down to the way spotting of aircraft had to take place in the IJN.
Like most Americans, I believed that they had carriers, we had carriers. They had planes, we had planes. We flew them and used them using certain doctrine, and they flew and used them using similar doctrine.
It couldn’t be further from the truth.
Squadrons did not attach the personnel to the squadrons. They were ships company.
They had no concept of Combat Air Control similar to ours (which was still in its real infancy in the US Navy at the time of Midway, still being developed and refined...which we were doing and they were not even attempting. We were using radar guidance and direct radio communication to vector our CAP. The IJN was using antiaircraft fire (and even major caliber naval gunfire) as a vectoring tool for their planes who were expected to see the exploding ordinance fired by their screening vessels to go to where the incoming planes were! They didn’t have ANY effective shipboard radar, and we were already developing our third generation (I think) by then with the newer Sugar George, but they were still primitive. But the biggest surprise to me was the fact that the IJN aircraft radios were so unreliable, unwieldy, and difficult to use that many IJN pilots not only refused to use them, some had them removed completely from the aircraft!
Just wow.
The design and construction of their ships to withstand battle damage and execute effective damage control was hideously bad. We had our own damage control issues, but we learned fast. In Samuel Eliot Morison’s “Two Ocean War”, he talks about how, after the Battle of Savo Island where years of thick coats of paint on ships and overstuffed furniture like chairs and couches contributed to the loss of many of the ships, for the rest of 1942, the sound of paint chipping resounded through the fleet, and the comfortable furniture which burned and smoked was tossed overboard. We still made mistakes in design, like the Essex class carriers, brilliantly good in so many respects, had a major design flaw in the ventilation intakes which were located beyond the ends of the armored hangar deck in order to minimize openings in the armor. The resulting single long ventilation trunk became a conduit for smoke and burning gasoline, which proved disastrous on Franklin when she was hit by a kamikaze. (After the war, that was redone on the entire class to eliminate the flaw.)
But the IJN ships had poorly executed damage control systems where the redundancy either didn’t exist, or when it did, could be disabled by a single hit as happened in the Battle of Midway when the firefighting system redundancy was taken out with a single bomb (can’t remember which ship)
In our Navy, our damage control systems were reasonably well designed with redundancy at the beginning (which got better as the war went along) and training was superior. We had the advantage of trying to learn from our mistakes, and fostering initiative in the lower ranks on techniques to improve damage control. Additionally, the specific training and labeling to optimize the various damage control systems on a SPECIFIC ship were set in manuals and trained to rigorously and across wide populations of the crew, not just a few. The Japanese sailors had a lot of guts, but their specific DC functions were not trained to as rigorously or as widespread through the crew, and was easier to decapitate via casualties or isolation due to damage, smoke, or fire.
Great book.
Thanks, dpetty. Halloween costumes — great analogy! This issue made its way into the movie. The film has a wonderful plot and it deals with the purpose of building of these ships on multiple levels.
I’m going to watch that youtube.
And the Shinano is an interesting story itself! Found a link to that:
https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Japanese_aircraft_carrier_Shinano
I recommend “Shattered Sword” for excellent insight. Different perspective, and it makes all the world’s difference in explaining some very puzzling things in battles.
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