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WraithMagus -> RE: Why Japan lost? (1/26/2021 2:47:27 PM)
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One more thing, responding to the "mistakes the Japanese made" part - it's not just the notorious failure to have their experienced pilots train a new generation of pilots leading to a decline in air experience, this was a problem top-to-bottom in the Japanese military. Japan started the war with forces with far more operational experience thanks to fighting wars with China for years before the US and UK entered the war against them, but they had no real ability to replace losses with troops of the same capability. It just didn't show as much with the Navy because Japan was incapable of replacing lost ships and needing to staff them with new crews at the same rate as they were replacing aircraft and needing new pilots.
One major place that the lack of standardized training showed was in the damage control on Imperial Japanese Navy ships. American ships (and British, as well) used standardized damage control systems and looked over data of what went wrong in ships that took damage, improving their damage control systems over the war and training their crews in their use. American doctrine also had any hand that wasn't necessary for other duty go to performing damage control when the ship was facing flooding or fire, as well.
This sounds like obvious stuff any navy would do, but the Japanese did not follow this doctrine. Instead, the IJN was mostly composed of a lot of one-off ships, conversions, and often had a lot of bespoke damage control systems that were unique to a particular ship. Damage control officers were expected to learn their own section of a ship on their own without any real standardization. Note the word section - they didn't communicate well with each other, although an officer with damage control duties at least had authority to start ordering men on other sections around. The regular enlisted sailors, for their part, were strictly forbidden from taking independent action via strict regimens of corporal punishment. They literally beat the urge for sailors to help stop a fire on their ship out of them unless they were following direct orders from an officer in charge of damage control. The problem, of course, is that this meant that if the damage control officer was ever wounded, killed, or simply isolated on a part of the ship cut off from contact to the rest by any of the damage, basically nobody had the authority to send any messages up the chain of command saying so, and sailors would basically just sit around waiting either for orders to come from a dead officer or until the fire overtook their ship. On top of this, any crew member who wasn't specifically assigned to damage control parties often didn't even know how to operate a fire extinguisher, being as many sailors at this time were basically farm boys who had never seen one before coming into the navy, and the IJN didn't bother to give them even basic damage control training if that wasn't their specific role on the ship.
This problem of every ship being unique and therefore never training anyone but new people to handle each new ship had major knock-on effects in the war. For instance, the Battle of Coral Sea should by all rights have been a minor Japanese victory - they sank an American fleet carrier and crippled another, in return for losing a light carrier, moderate damage to a fleet carrier, and depleting the air group of another. However, right before Midway, the Japanese decided to take Shoukaku back for full repairs, and made Zuikaku wait for a replacement of completely fresh pilots and aircraft because the Japanese high command refused to move aircraft squadrons from the damaged ship in dock to the functional ship that would be useful in their upcoming major operation. Therefore, the Japanese needlessly handicapped themselves by removing their only two good carriers from the fight before Midway even started. Meanwhile, they kept all their most experienced elite air groups on the rickety multiple-times-converted Akagi and Kaga, which were sunk by 3 bomb hits and one bomb hit, respectively due in no small part to the massive compromises to the damage control system that left the whole water pump system offline after a single bomb. The purpose-built carrier Souryuu was also sunk with three bombs, although this had more to do with another failure of damage control design, being that the ship was bombed during refueling, and there was no practice of sealing the tanks and flushing the hoses at that time, leading to the wooden-decked ship rapidly going up in flames.
The US Navy, for its part, recognized that transferring air squadrons between carriers would lead to a loss of effectiveness that would take a month or so to rectify, but also recognized that planes at three quarters effectiveness in the air were better than no planes in the air. Yorktown, after being nearly sunk, was given a plywood and duck tape repair job before being shoved back out into the fray because they needed every hull in the water. While Akagi, Kaga, and Souryuu were permanently disabled by 3, 1, and 3 bomb hits each, the slapdash-repaired Yorktown was hit with three bombs which managed to knock out all but one of her boilers. The Japanese radioed back that they sunk an American carrier. (Why wouldn't they? Three bombs was enough to sink THEIR carriers, after all!) Despite this, damage control parties managed to repair the ship enough that it was back in action in time for the next wave of Japanese carrier aircraft, who presumed it must be a new carrier, and Yorktown suffered two torpedo hits, giving it a serious list. The Japanese again reported this as a sinking. The Yorktown was nevertheless able to start to get its damage controlled and was being towed back when it was finally sunk by a Japanese submarine that used the sheer amount of debris from all the hits to the Yorktown as cover to sneak in and launch torpedoes. The Yorktown survived nearly as much ordnance as what sank the whole attacking Japanese carrier fleet.
This is far from the worst showing by damage control methods on Japanese carriers, however. The Taihou and Shinano were sunk by what can only be described as the raw incompetence of their officers and (basically untrained) crew and failure to adhere to what would be the most basic of damage control doctrines in any navy that had a standardized damage control doctrine. These were ships hit by a single torpedo before ever even seeing combat, basically giving the USN total freebies at a time when Japan was desperately short on carriers. (And giving the USS Albacore the highest sinking tonnage record of any US submarine.)
This isn't to say that there weren't major failures on the USN's part (especially by the Bureau of Ordnance), often due to simply underestimating their opponent because of pure racial bias (refusing to believe reports by their own men on the capabilities of Japanese equipment because they refused to believe anything the Japanese could make wouldn't be vastly inferior to their own equipment), which is in no small part why the Japanese had their initial wave of astonishing success. However, the United States was far more willing to learn from its mistakes, and it had the manpower and production capacity to rebound from those mistakes in the first place.
Other major failures of the Japanese include ever fighting with such a complex, multi-step plan as Coral Sea's in the first place. Their expansion plans were recklessly aggressive and success would have been guaranteed if the Japanese simply committed all their forces to a single thrust instead of spreading their forces too thinly. The Japanese attacked Midway (defended by 3 fleet carriers and one land airfield) with four carriers when they could have attacked with six fleet carriers and five light carriers if they had scaled back their invasion plans. (Granted, two light carriers were sent to Alaska explicitly as a diversion to draw away American defenses from Midway, so this would be forgivable.) Coral Sea's battle plan involved multiple independent naval task forces relying upon the timing of complex operations being perfectly coordinated, with any delay to any part of the operation resulting in operational chaos.
This massive over-complexity and assumption that they would have near-clairvoyant capacity to foresee factors well beyond the IJN's own control would frequently blow up in their face. The most spectacular example of which (besides maybe Midway) was the Battle of Leyte Gulf. The IJN was at the point where it knew it couldn't win a direct battle against the USN any longer, so it decided to send the Zuikaku on a suicide mission as a decoy for the Americans, presuming that the Americans would be so undisciplined that they would chase after a carrier if one appeared like a puppy chasing a car. They lucked out on this one, because William "Bull" Halsey was in charge of one of the fleets at this point, and that's exactly what he would do. The only problem was that their plans could and would be foiled because they couldn't predict the weather even before the plan met the enemy, and that they underestimated the effectiveness of the USN's submarine net. The two main forces that were supposed to approach Leyte undetected were detected long before reaching their target, while the decoy force went completely undetected because it was lost in a massive oceanic storm. The whole plan was blown before even reaching the operational area, and only Bull Halsey's refusal to communicate or coordinate with command while leaving his post when he did receive reports of the Zuikaku even gave the Japanese the option of humiliating themselves by failing to sink Taffy-3 on the way to the landing zones they were trying to attack. The southern force in particular was absolutely butchered for effectively no gain by torpedo boat attacks and a firing squad of battleships that could pick up the advancing Japanese on radar even while the Japanese radar was not advanced enough to pick out American ships amidst the islands, making for a truly one-sided battle.
A related problem was a refusal to give ground. When Japan suffered major losses, such as after Midway, the sane thing to do would be to abandon their furthest-flung operations and refocus upon forming a fighting force that could counter major American operations. Instead, Japan kept trying to overextend itself. Japan didn't even see Midway as a major setback, and continued trying to invade new territory. When the USN set up Henderson Field in the Solomons, right next to the naval base they wanted to set up during that whole Coral Sea mess, Japan became obsessed with it to a Stalingrad degree. Midway isn't what defeated Japan. The Guadalcanal Campaign fought to exterminate one single American airfield was, and over six months, enough ships on both sides were sent to the bottom of the passage between the Solomon Islands that it gained the name "Ironbottom Sound". (This was also when destroyers had to take up transport duty in "Tokyo Express" missions, or "Rat Runs" in the Japanese nickname, because Japanese transports were too slow to make the trip without being sunk by American airpower, forcing destroyer runs during the night. This exposed plenty of destroyers to sinking and also stretched their destroyers beyond the breaking point, leaving much of the navy lacking in submarine defenses.)
Another major mistake the Japanese made was massively underestimating submarines. The Japanese actually had the most diverse and interesting submarine fleet in the war, and had submarines large enough to be used as submersible seaplane carriers for reconnaissance missions, as well as one-man midget submarines. The IJN never understood or respected unrestricted submarine warfare, however, and would often let their merchant marine go with pitiful escorts, leading to the horrific casualties that they suffered. Japanese anti-submarine efforts were woefully deficient, and while they had effective tools to use against American submarines, such as escort destroyers and naval aviation bombers, the Japanese refused to make nearly enough of these cheaper countermeasures, preferring much more expensive full-sized destroyers (which were never numerous enough to cover the many duties given to them) and wouldn't spare any of their naval aviation bombers for mere escort duty. Japanese submarines, meanwhile, were often operationally restricted to operating near the fleet, which severely limited their effectiveness. (Something every other navy had learned by now.) The Japanese refused to send their submarines out to hunt Allied logistical support units and merchant marine, instead only sending them after the much harder targets. The USN could actually send transport ships out alone through the Pacific unmolested since Japanese submarines just didn't bother venturing out and fighting them, even as Japan's own troop and supply transports were being decimated.
A final major mistake the Japanese made was the fanaticism of their troops causing atrocities everywhere they went. Constant reports of the genocides in China ensured that the Chinese people were never going to work with the Japanese when they took over. The Japanese had no respect for other religions, especially Islam, and when they demanded that conquered peoples worship the Emperor as a god, this enraged the populace and ensured guerilla sabotage of their holdings, even though the colonial occupiers of the region were so hated at the start of the war that Japan was initially "greeted as liberators" when they came kicking the Dutch out of many islands. The response to uprisings was even more brutal treatment (not helped by the fact that Japan wasn't going to let its own people starve before stripping every single thing of value from occupied islands, which didn't go over well with anyone), ensuring more uprisings, and making sure Japan had to split its focus on trying to secure what territory it controlled over preparing for the coming invasion by the US.
Anyway, several of these (like poor damage control resulting in increased damage and/or drastically reduced experience for newly recruited units) could be covered by game mechanics, but several of these problems (like plan overcomplication, ignoring submarines, or stretching of one's lines too thin) are strategic decisions the player could simply rectify themselves and give Japan at least more longevity in the war. Other problems like technology could help, as well, as developing and installing fire control radar earlier would have massively benefited Japanese surface actions at night or poor weather, and Japan notably delayed in developing the replacements for their famous "Zero" fighter until they were too late to matter.
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