Posted on 03/12/2017 11:45:09 AM PDT by DFG
Japan withdrew from the London Naval Treaty in 1936. The chief Japanese negotiator, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, feared that concessions on the part of his negotiating team would lead directly to his assassination upon return to Japan. Japanese nationalists believed that the Washington Naval Treaty system was holding Japan back and preventing it from becoming a first-rate power. Freed from the constraints of international treaties, they believed that Japan could build a world-beating fleet that would push the Western powers out of Asia and help usher in a new era of Japanese dominance.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalinterest.org ...
Submarines sunk the most large ships. B25s with hardnoses with 8 50cal mgs sunk the most ships total I believe. MostnJapanese ships were small freighters. Those B25 raised holy hell with machinegun fire and skip bombing. Took out a lot of destroyers too.
The ON SCENE commander for the Pearl Harbor attack was not Yamamoto, a huge carrier advocate.
It was NOMURA, an older Battleship guy who regarded carriers as Greasy Kid Stuff by pesky, no-nothing upstarts.
When the ecstatic flyers came back describing what they’d done and how much more was STILL possible with relentless follow-up attacks...
HE SIMPLY WITHDREW.
Nomura was resentful of it all from the very beginning, “Carriers are stupid”. He wasn’t the daring gambler that Yamamoto was.
NOTHING could sway Nomura, “Anyone with a lick of common Navy sense knows Battleships are EVERYTHING...”
Had Yamamoto instead been ON SCENE the outcome of the war almost certainly would have been MUCH further off; there could have been three or four waves. As things turned out maybe all but three or four ships sunk at Pearl were back fighting within 18 months or so.
The very widespread thinking of the high staff of the IJN was that they would probably lose as much as 50% of the strike fleet.
Their success was surprising, sure, but what really stunned the Japanese was that not a single of their attacking ships had been even damaged and that they managed a clean get-away.
Yamamoto had been in charge of all the planning but he should also have been on-scene or failing that, another big carrier guy.
The battle of Tsushima went to their heads. But the western powers also regarded battleships as foremost weapons of war for a long time, and tried to keep Japan from building them.
I have heard that Bill O’Reilly’s book, “Killing the Rising Sun” .. is a really great book about WWII Japan.
I have the book, but I haven’t read it yet. I want to read it because I remember my dad being an Air Raid Warden during that time, and how we had to put black curtains on our windows in CA - in order to turn on any lights. We were concerned because there was a Lockheed plant just down the street from our home.
Shortly after the war started, my dad moved us to Southern CA, and he went to work in a huge factory helping to build aircraft. He tried to enlist, but his heart issues kept him out .. so he did the next best thing. I think I get my conservative roots from him.
The owner of the Nihon Kaigun website (combinedfleet.com) wrote a very interesting treatise that the reason Yamato and Musashi saw so little use (besides being held in reserve for the Great Decisive Battle) was that, in terms of the fuel required, the Japanese Navy literally couldn’t afford to use them.
http://www.combinedfleet.com/guadoil1.htm
Their craving for global prestige to be won by conquest, led to a war that ended with them preparing to defend the homeland with schoolchildren armed with wooden sticks.
Military technology & tactics were in a major state of flux between the World Wars. Countries that made big best on the evolution of certain weapons systems (Battleship) got their heads handed to them by other countries that made shrewd bets on others (Carrier Aviation). If your thinking was even 10 years behind the curve you made a losing bet.
It took Pearl Harbor for the USN to realize the same lesson.
Vice Adm Chuichi Nagumo?
WHoops..!
THANK YOU.
And now that battleships can carry drones to supply their own air/submarine cover the same backward thinking will doom navies again.
A battleship group will cost a tenth of a carrier group for the same capability.
The US Carriers were unaccounted for, and in fact, USS Enterprise was shortly due back at Pearl. Had Enterprise been able to intervene during the launching of the 3rd Wave attack, you could have had a disaster as happened 6 months later at Midway.
Personally, I agree with you. Press the attack. Hit the fuel tanks & dry-docks. It would be worth risking the loss of even 2 carriers at that point in the war.
Imagine your drone air wing launched from VLS cells from a baby flattop, perhaps an LHA/LHD? You recover the more expensive recon drones and expend the cheaper strike drones. Heck, now a Marine Expeditionary Unit doesn’t even need a covering force. They are suddenly the baddest unit on the high seas.
Because apparently we didn’t pay attention when the Royal Navy blasted the Italian fleet at their main naval base Taranto in 1940.
The Japanese did !
Everything you ever wanted to know about the history of Battleships Yamato and Musashi - along with virtually every single surviving archival photo of the two ships, including dozens of in action shots of these two ships taken during the battles of Leyte Gulf and Okinawa - can be seen on my history website dedicated to these two ships:
http://www.battleshipyamato.com
Here it is, Kaigun, by Peattie and Evans. 700 pages.
https://www.amazon.com/Kaigun-Strategy-Technology-Imperial-1887-1941/dp/159114244X
Four books I recommend on the subject:
*”Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan” by Ronald Spector...he also wrote an equally good book about the postwar aftermath in Asia, called “In the Ruins of Empire”.
*”Soldier of the Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army”...my copy’s buried so I can’t see the author. Some very interesting consideration of how an army that had managed to sweep aside the best Western armies with astonishing speed was soon fighting underequipped on distant islands, out of reach of air cover and literally starving to death.
*”Japan at War: An Oral History” by Haruko and Theodore Cook.
*”Bridge to the Sun” (I think) by Gwen Terasaki. Written by an American woman who had married a Japanese diplomat years before the war and lived out the war in Japan.
And then, of course, there’s always the excellent “The Rising Sun” by John Toland.
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