Everything you said about the sub warfare at that time is absolutely correct. Getting a totally accurate assessment in a given situation would have been nothing short of miraculous. The fog of war, squared.
As to the Japanese would you want to be a pilot that returned to your carrier and reported failure?
The thing that always struck me as curious is that their commanders would not deeply quiz them. Fliers would return with ridiculous, even conflicting stories and their superiors would go "okey dokey!" and document them. That hurt their war effort because it is important to know the truth of what is going on, what is working or not, and make adjustments accordingly. Their military culture also did not tolerate input from lower ranks. Their chain of command only rolled one way, from the top down. Orders issued were expect to be obeyed - end of story. A number of competent officers got sidelined due to their insistence at sharing alarming concerns that nobody wanted to hear or follow up on.
The Japanese were even worse than the Germans about believing in their own superiority and the weakness of their enemies.
The Japs had a fakenews problem themselves at the time, on steroids - besides officially sanctioned propaganda, you had people like the aforementioned fliers talking to other personnel about their "great victories", writing letters home, visiting friends & relatives if they were fortunate enough to get to home port, and talking to the local news rags, all of which contributed to spreading exaggerations like wildfire. That also had a negative effect on their war effort, making civilian and military personnel alike complacent. There is an account of a POW working in a shipyard who noticed how slow and disinterested the workers appeared. He asked one about that, saying there is a war on, where is the sense of urgency at. The worker told him why bother, it's in the bag, they have it won, why exert themselves unnecessarily. What I can't get my head around is that Imperial Headquarters knew the truth of how bad things really were but near as I can tell never took steps to constructively correct it, so the self destructive psyops continued until events outstripped the ability to hide or lie about them.
Crews were constantly raided after each patrol to send seasoned sailors as leavening to boats with green crews.
That was a point of contention, especially after the sub fleet began to finally find its footing, shaking off the feckless peacetime culture and tactics. There were guys who wanted transfer to be with "winning" boats, others who were snatched up because they were competent standouts, by skippers who were trying to build a tight & aggressive crew. And even a good crew didn't stay together indefinitely. Standout senior officers would be tapped to get their own command so they could build their own crews, spreading new and workable tactics out to other boats in the fleet. We had to build up from scratch and do it fast - though we had been into subs since the first world war we had never developed the sort of culture to use them to their full potential, so it was on-the-job training at a frantic pace. I think that's what got Mush Morton killed, when Dick O'Kane left the Wahoo for his own command. I can see the logic for O'Kane leaving since good skippers were needed and needed badly, there was nothing new for him to do or learn aboard the Wahoo - Morton & O'Kane functioned well and deadly as a team, revolutionizing American submarine warfare as they went. O'Kane was a steady hand and a check on Morton's level of aggression which at times bordered on recklessness - consequently I think the absence of O'Kane had a bearing on the loss of Wahoo.
“The thing that always struck me as curious is that their commanders would not deeply quiz them.”
As you said, orders were expected to be followed and failure was not allowed for. This showed up in the navy as a lack of damage control training for ships crews. While US forces constantly emphasized training and new techniques the Japanese treated damage control as an afterthought.
Add in the fact that higher officers had little regard for midgrade officers and no regard for the average soldier or pilot and it was a recipe for mediocrity at best, disaster at worst.
Even worse was the lack of communication between the services in Japan. The army and navy operated completely separate of each other. From intelligence to weapons to research and development they were two separate trees in the same forest.
One of the things that hampered their radar development was the fact that both services ran their own R&D and strictly forbid sharing of information between the scientists and technicians, even if they were working in the same building.
Japan could never have run something like the Manhattan Project with it’s many different departments and specialties.
“The Japs had a fakenews problem themselves at the time, on steroids”
Of course they did.
Their easy victory in the 1904-1905 war with the much larger Tsarist Russia fed into their beliefs that the Japanese were invincible.
Then there were the senior officers who didn’t want what they perceived as temporary setbacks to jeopardize their cushy positions. Then the Junior officers who didn’t want to rock the boat.
All that was enabled by an introverted Emporer Hirohito who was much more comfortable with a book than with his cabinet and military leaders.
A complete clusterscrew from top to bottom.
One of the problems was the Japanese believed that if they could make the war costly enough in men killed and wounded then the soft Americans would sue for peace. They didn’t have a clue.
I remember reading about the Wahoo a lifetime ago. :(
Ironic that O’Kanes boat was sunk by a circular run.
All told our submarine forces went from 0 to 100 in record time. Even with defective weapons and no tradition in the silent service.
Oh, a quick and non definitive check shows most of our wartime sub skippers got their starts on destroyers. Maybe they were hardwired for aggressiveness from the get go.