Good analysis.
The Japanese in all branches were known for overly intricate, overly coordinated and optimistically timed campaigns...to their detriment.
I have always thought that the Japanese did very well in light of their odd weakness in military doctrine. I have always attributed any of their later successes (after their initial ones) to their unbelievable toughness, stubbornness, and industriousness.
Yeah, they had the ongoing fantasy of getting that one big battle that was going to be the knockout punch of all knockout punches. A 'mother-of-all-battles' if you will. They even built their strategy around depending on such an event. The reality was that they weren’t much in the position to give any after Midway and we worked to try and avoid being on the receiving end of one. Even so, I can think of several instances where they got the drop on us bad – but then got cold feet, chickened and ran instead of following through and finishing the job. They came so close a time or two and never even knew it.
One of the wackier – to me the wackiest – strategic views by their high command, to their collective detriment, was the expectation that in our drive towards Japan we were going to attack each and every island in their defense perimeter, in the order we encountered them. Yes, believe it or not, that was an official strategic doctrine. They expected us to slam into island after island one at a time chock full of dug-in and prepared troops waiting to deal out a nasty drubbing at each stop. They concluded that would simplify their allocation of resources, only having to build up and concentrate troops and assets at locations and on a timetable that they could anticipate and control. When we split our approaches and commenced the “island hop” strategy, it threw Imperial Headquarters into disarray – they had no long-range planning to cope with such a scenario.
Headquarters then fell into a pattern of waffling around on what to do, which drove their field commanders bonkers - waffling that typically led to total destruction of their garrisons. There had been no real effort to harden up positions further inside their perimeter since there was no expectation that they would have to be defended. Consequently we achieved complete strategic surprise at a number of locations and caught the Japs utterly flat-footed. This is where the Japanese “toughness, stubbornness, and industriousness” came into play. There may have been plans for the defense of some locales, but no actual work done, no infrastructure in place. Some commanders managed to organize a defense in a pinch and give a good account of themselves in using what they had at hand, though typically at our arrivals they dropped what they were doing and headed for the hills, surrendered outright or launched a first and only Banzai charge with small arms because it was all the combat capability they had.