Raj and Bernadette Bollywood Dance | The Big Bang Theory | Feb 18, 2021 | Sheldon's FC
Posted on 12/13/2021 5:45:09 PM PST by poconopundit
Nice, Sunkenciv. Appreciated your intelligent ramblings across the theaters of war. You make a good point about securing Middle East oil.
In that respect, both Germany and Japan were similarly handicapped from the start — relatively scarce sources for fuel.
I read a great book “Sink ‘Em All” by VADM Charles Lockwood who was in charge of US Submarines in the Pacific in WWII.
In it, he discussed how in the days following the Japanese surrender, the US forces took over the Yokosuka base where the IJN Shinano had been built in her giant drydocks (which I was fascinated by as a young kid because they were big enough to fit an aircraft carrier in, biggest in the Pacific at the time when I lived on the base there)
The USS Archerfish, which sunk the Shinano needed some work, and they put it in the very drydock the Shinano had been built in.
There were Japanese shipyard workers, who the US contracted immediately to work on US Navy ships, and the Commander of the Archerfish said those same Japanese shipyard workers were viewing the Archerfish with a degree of palpable hostility, knowing full well she had sunk the huge ship they had proudly built in that very drydock.
The Captain of the USS Archerfish decided to break the ice by opening the submarine for tours, and all the Japanese workers filed through the Archerfish...everything was fine after that!
What a great idea. I am sure he had to think of the risk, but...he accepted that and it paid off...:)
You might enjoy my post above at #62...and the book it came from was very good...:)
Thanks for the tip. I’m going to get my hands on that book.
“It is my understanding that Yamamoto told the Imperial Staff that attacking the United States would be a disastrous blunder because he had studied and traveled throughout the US as a junior naval officer and saw what we were capable of industrially.”
Both Yamamoto and the German general Eric von Manstein both counseled their governments on the American industrial ability to retool. The prevailing wisdom of industry in Germany and Japan was that expensive retooling to produce new products (in particular automobiles) every year was foolishness on the part of the Americans. American firms were ridiculed for producing ‘toys’ and frivolous products like washing machines by both the German and Japanese commands and their analysts. Yamamoto and Manstein understood the threat.
German and Japanese factories would produce a particular product or vehicle for ten to fifteen years before retooling. And then the retooling of a factory would shut the factory down for months at a time.
American firms understood that consumers desired new (and improved) products and retooling to produce new things became customary and so practiced that downtime between product runs was sometimes measured in hours. Auto plants could retool in a few days and had the process down to a science. The last vehicle of a model year would move down the line and the line was pulled up and replaced behind it.
Consequently when the war started auto plants retooled and started producing planes and tanks in as little as a week. The company that produced Erector Set toys rapidly switched to producing Thompson submachine guns. A Dodge plant took only a week to switch from producing cars to producing B-24 bombers.
And Maytag cleverly switched from producing washing machines to producing gun turrets for aircraft and armored vehicles. The initial runs of gun turrets actually used up supplies of washing machine tubs for gunner seating!
In short the US economy took less than six months to completely refocus on war production. It was an economic ability that the Germans and Japanese dreadfully underestimated.
for a good laugh put on an Indian movie in Hindi and select english auto-subtitles.
Thanks! I’ve enjoyed three different iterations of J.P.’s lecture on Midway (there are probably five or six ones, plus some lockdown vlogger interviews with him) and should put that book on my Xmas list, or maybe see if there’s a Kindle edition.
Thanks for the kind remarks. The Germans had an ambitious synfuels program that vanished into classified microfilm at the end off the war and was reexamined during the OPEC Energy Crisis of the 1970s. BTW, thanks go out to Jimmy Carter for making everything worse. Anyway...
Oil refining made a big leap, a big buildout, during the war, because the US was supplying itself and all its allies, keeping cargo, convoys, navies, home heating, and to some extent power plants operating, while asking the home front to “keep it under 40”.
It’s no surprise that the interstate hightway system was built after the war — moving wartime production from point to point turned out to be a real hardship during the war years, even with the already-robust rail system, so it was funded under the context of national defense. I remember something about how the Higgins Boats were built and loaded onto the open railcars, and the workers gave them their paint job as the trains rolled to Norfolk — completing the manufacturing aboard an open, moving train.
So, after the war, what do we do with a massively increased industrial capacity, and a massively increased refining capacity, plus a massive increase in domestic oil supply? Everyone buys cars and trucks, and the last of the livery places close down for good. Vacations to the national parks a thousand miles away? Pile in the station wagon and let’s go!
Americans moved out away from where the industrial jobs were and into vast new suburbs, the reverse of what had been going on between the wars, and even before WWI when agricultural jobs started to vanish as a consequence of mechanized agriculture.
Sidebar — He was a Jew-hating racist, but IMHO Henry Ford stands alone in the category of having transformed world society via mass-produced internal combustion vehicles (farming, transportion, and don’t forget the Wright Brothers, who I believe were first to use ICE to build a prototype) and manufacturing and retailing in all sectors. There were others who did this or that, such as electrification (Edison, Westinghouse, Tesla) or communication (Morse, Bell), but *no other one person* has had the impact that Ford has had. The only person I can think of who even has a shot at joining him is Elon Musk, and that’s a wait-and-see.
Geez, I’m still gabby. I must have had too much to drink at breakfast.
What I started to get at, before my little episode there, is, that the supply problem existed for everyone, but the US solved it most effectively. Stalin turned his population into cannon fodder, and relied on Lend-Lease, and blamed all the hardships of the war on the enemy. The Germans were actually innovative and efficient, making more with less than pretty much everyone. Hitler remarked (that recording made surreptitiously in Finland I think it was) about how “monstrous” the Soviet construction of (up to that time) 35,000 tanks was. I think the final tally for tank construction in the USSR was something like 80,000 — but the Germans in their efficiency destroyed something like, or north of, 70,000 of them.
I’m glad we don’t fight wars on that scale anymore.
The Japanese started out with a more capable navy (on paper), had the best naval aviators in the world, better range on their aircraft, better air-launched torpedoes, a much larger army (most of it was in China etc, I think they invaded Manchuria in 1932 or something), and much more experienced as well.
10 weeks after Pearl Harbor, they were humiliated before the world when Doolittle’s raiders dropped a load on Tokyo and took off.
About six months after Pearl, our three remaining, ailing carriers and fearless fliers, destroyed all four of their big decks, hundreds of planes and their best aviators...
Anyway, blah blah blah. ;^)
Raj and Bernadette Bollywood Dance | The Big Bang Theory | Feb 18, 2021 | Sheldon's FC
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)
Part of their problem in that area had to do with staffing. Everyone wanted to serve, but (as here) not everyone is really cut out for it. So, the jobs that weren't glorious were filled with the bottom of the barrel. I recall that one of those geniuses thought it was a good idea to get all the smoke and fumes out, had everything that would open opened, and it set everything else on fire, and the ship was lost. Whoops.
Thanks, we might watch it... soon. American (Hollywood) movies suck, for the most part.
Interesting story on how the Yorktown Flight Deck officer before Midway experimented with filling the fuel lines before battle with C02 thus preventing any major AV Fuel fires..It worked and that is why the Yorktown was able to absorb the attacks on her till her end..That practice become fleet wide after the battle.
Yep. They turned the carrier into a huge fuel-air bomb.
The Japanese Bushido culture gave short shrift to any areas behind the fighting core. The Japanese just weren’t interest in damage control. They relied on Heavenly Intervention an awful lot. Add to this the brutal treatment of enlisted men, the regular beatings, and you don’t end up with a crew that has initiative.
Just finished watching this. Excellent recommendation. Thank you.
Yep. The Germans were the victims of their own propaganda. They built a culture of extreme xenophobic arrogance and created resistance movements everywhere they went.
Fortunately for us the Japanese could have built and manned dozens more cruisers and destroyers, instead of these giant battlewagons, which would have given us a lot more problems in the South Pacific. We might not have been able to hold Guadalcanal in that case.
But the Japanese had a habit of sending in units piecemeal instead of real striking forces. They could easily have dislodged us from Guadalcanal if they’d sent their Fleet from Truk and Rabaul during the initial landings. Instead they “conserved” ships and fuel, only to have them later destroyed pointlessly by US Naval Air.
The Imperial Japanese Navy were worse blunderers than the US Navy. Hence we won.
I toured Ford’s River Rouge plant around 1980. Iron ore went in one end and finished cars rolled out the other. Very impressive.
Yes...that is very cool. That is (or was) one of the strengths of the US military in the past. Anyone can suggest something to improve a process, and personal initiative is not looked on as dimly as it in in Communist forces from what I understand.
This will give you some insight into the tests ran post WW2 and it was found that Japanese steel was inferior to US or even British due to the processes used. https://neveryetmelted.com/2020/03/26/japanese-battleship-armor-post-war-tested/
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