Posted on 01/01/2022 10:11:01 AM PST by dmam2011
The honor and dignity of Japanese culture carefully hides dubious aspects of their WW2 military operations. Why would a culture place such a high priority of respect onto legacies of kamikaze pilots, suicide submarine missiles, and underwater suicide mine bombers? In short, families of these soldiers knew the personal realities behind the warrior myths.
(Excerpt) Read more at clarksvillian.com ...
The Battle of Midway 1942: Told from the Japanese Perspective (1/3)
The air war in WW2 is really hard to follow.
I’m sure there is more info that is still hidden.
I always wondered why the Nazis didn’t bomb the British aircraft factories.
Turns out, they did.
The British were assembling Spitfires in auto dealer garages.
I’ve read books from the Japanese, British and Americans about the air war in the Pacific.
I think the Japanese simply didn’t have enough trained pilots and didn’t have enough young men in the pilot pipeline.
Midway didn’t just cost the Japanese four carriers, it also bled them dry of trained and experienced pilots.
The Spitfire was dependent on one refinery in the Caribbean. The Nazis didn’t know or they would have shelled it from a submarine
A Japanese movie called “The Eternal Zero” goes into depth on this as a young modern boy tries to understand how his grandfather became a kamikaze.
Part rational, part brutality, and much desperation.
For a Jap pilot it was not at all obvious they would survive the war anyway. They all knew death was a few weeks or months away.
Many was heavily coerced, and others facing reality thought at least maybe they could take out a huge US asset like a carrier.
Coral Sea hurt the Imperial Navy even earlier...the US lost a fleet carrier, but the Japanese lost so many veteran aircrews in the battle that two entire fleet carriers (Zuikaku and Shokaku) missed Midway as a result.
The Japanese were counting on a quick, decisive war without a lot of losses...their economy’s productive capacity was already maxed out even before Pearl Harbor. When “the Hundred Days” of conquest became a drawn-out war of attrition, not only did they have little to no room for increased production to replace war losses, they also had little room for development of new equipment they desperately needed, like heavier artillery, antitank weapons, or better antiaircraft guns.
Likewise, their emphasis on the offense (that largely drew on experience from the land masses of China and Manchuria) meant little thought was given to holding, defending, or even supporting what gains they made...which is how they wound up with garrisons on Guadalcanal and New Guinea starving to death, because they couldn’t project air cover for proper supply convoys, and trying to use destroyers to bring in supplies was as inefficient as delivering groceries with a Ferrari.
Three books I recommend, if you haven’t read them already:
“Japan at War: An Oral History”, Cook & Cook
“Soldiers of the Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army”
“Eagle Against the Sun”, Ronald Spector
They didn’t have enough oil to give their trainee pilots enough flight hours to train them properly. As the world’s largest oil producer, the US had plenty of oil....so much so in fact that US pilots had hundreds of flight hours more by the time they were deployed than Japanese pilots had. Once Japan’s excellent corps of trained and experienced pilots was gone, they went down hill fast.
I think it’s easy to overlook how little the Japanese populace really understood of what was going on in the war. The government controlled all the news reporting, and in many cases openly lied about the war’s progress, to the level of turning catastrophic losses such as Midway and Saipan into completely fabricated victories for the Japanese.
Hence, when “B-san” (the B-29s) began raining wholesale destruction on Japanese cities in 1944, it was a complete psychological shock to the civilian population, probably on the level of an invasion by space aliens.
70,000-100,000 deaths per raid, deadlier than the atomic blasts.
Lemay knew how to start a fire.
I think it’s easy to overlook how little the American populace really understands what is going on now...
Honorable mention to Portland
My father was a WW2 fighter pilot in the CBI. He had many friends who were pilots in the Pacific. So I read as much WW2 history as I could get my hands on, but was always left with pretty much a confusing picture of the Japanese. Then I read Eric Beregrud’s book, Fire in the Sky, about ten years ago.
He clears up a lot of the confusion for me. The Japanese had a better fighter to start the war, but few trained pilots and no way to replace losses. They also had few spare parts and fewer shop manuals. Even worse, they had fewer military draftees who had ever worked on a machine or could even read a shop manual. When a new aircraft version made it out to an island base, it was unrepairable due to lack of parts, shop manuals and mechanics.
He contrasted that with American GIs who had worked on tractors and other farm machinery and on someone’s Model T or other vehicle, as well as having the ability to read a manual. Plus, the US had on site machinists who could make some spare parts.
It looks like the book is on Kindle. I highly recommend it.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1498194.Fire_In_The_Sky
The Coral Sea Battle cost the Japanese two of their front-line carriers, one to battle damage and the other to aviation losses.
The Japanese Navy permanently assigned air groups to carriers…when an air group was decimated, the carrier was deemed out of action.
The guy who’d that put together did a fantastic job. I was checking each week waiting for the last segment to be released.
LeMay also knew you had to keep kicking them, even when they are down, so they don’t even think about getting up.
At the Surrender in Tokyo Harbor, he put over 450 B-29’s in the air over the Missouri and they each made 3 passes before flying back to their bases.
We had told the Japanese Hiroshima and Nakasaki were “One Plane, One Bomb” and let them make their own assumptions about what the B-20’s overhead were carrying.
In late 1943, they started dialing back pilot training. We weren’t losing veteran pilots as quickly as we thought. Meanwhile, the Japanese were losing them very quickly. The Japanese got too comfortable shooting up Chinese pilots and Brewster Buffaloes.
Samurai, published a few decades ago. He describes the pilot training as selective and rigorous to an unwise degree. The pilots they graduated were great, but the training process took too long, the required performance standards were pointlessly high, and they ejected too many young men who would have made fine pilots for irrelevant reasons.
His view was that Japan's government culture, which he compares to the Nazi one, was dishonest and insane.
He and other surviving Japanese aces became close friends with Allied aces after the war, especially the Americans. The aces would travel across the globe to make their reunions. He was very fond of America and Americans, and I believe his daughter married an American.
(Amazing) Thanks, I didn't know that.
At the end of WW2, the US had 109 carriers in the Pacific....albeit, many were Escort Carriers
I remember as a kid seeing all the things that the sailors made out of the spent shells, most were brass ash trays and lamps.
That is an excellent video on Midway
I read a book written by a British pilot in the Pacific.
I was amazed at how many pilots and planes were lost in training and everyday flying.
If that kind of loss occurred with the Japanese, it would have been disasterous.
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