But the biggest and most telling weakness was Damage Control on both Battleships and overall for the entire Japanese Navy. The lack of Damage Control procedures and practices doomed both ships years before they ever sailed.
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Very interesting analysis, dpetty. Is there a book or website you’d recommend on the subjects you discussed?
This kind of parallels a lack of Japanese resoures/practices I noticed looking at the Air Forces of the US and Japan during WW2:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II#Air_forces
The ratio of training planes manufacturing is 20% of American military planes overall. Japan’s training planes account for less than 5% of planes built overall.
This shows a lack of preparation — and maybe a lack of money (and fuel) to adequately prepare pilots for war. And yet it’s absolutely crucial that pilots get proper training.
If you look at that data, you also that the U.S. had almost as many training airplanes as ALL airplanes the Japanese built.
Something else I forgot to mention was the Shinano the forgotten sister of the Yamato which was converted to a Carrier after the loss at Midway...and sinking by USS Archerfish...That incident is the best example as to why the Japanese mega battleships were mere Halloween costumes. I pulled what I said from a number of sources but this is one is a good one... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC6LN3U5ELk
One of the most fascinating and informative books I have read on the Imperial Japanese Navy was “Shattered Sword”.
Like many Westerners, I only knew much about the IJN battle doctrine, ship construction, damage control doctrine, and the battle of Midway from what I had read from US sources.
The book was written largely from the Japanese perspective, and explained MANY things that had made no sense to me.
I was unaware of the dramatic inferiority of ship design and construction, damage control infrastructure training and execution, and even the way flight operations were carried out right down to the way spotting of aircraft had to take place in the IJN.
Like most Americans, I believed that they had carriers, we had carriers. They had planes, we had planes. We flew them and used them using certain doctrine, and they flew and used them using similar doctrine.
It couldn’t be further from the truth.
Squadrons did not attach the personnel to the squadrons. They were ships company.
They had no concept of Combat Air Control similar to ours (which was still in its real infancy in the US Navy at the time of Midway, still being developed and refined...which we were doing and they were not even attempting. We were using radar guidance and direct radio communication to vector our CAP. The IJN was using antiaircraft fire (and even major caliber naval gunfire) as a vectoring tool for their planes who were expected to see the exploding ordinance fired by their screening vessels to go to where the incoming planes were! They didn’t have ANY effective shipboard radar, and we were already developing our third generation (I think) by then with the newer Sugar George, but they were still primitive. But the biggest surprise to me was the fact that the IJN aircraft radios were so unreliable, unwieldy, and difficult to use that many IJN pilots not only refused to use them, some had them removed completely from the aircraft!
Just wow.
The design and construction of their ships to withstand battle damage and execute effective damage control was hideously bad. We had our own damage control issues, but we learned fast. In Samuel Eliot Morison’s “Two Ocean War”, he talks about how, after the Battle of Savo Island where years of thick coats of paint on ships and overstuffed furniture like chairs and couches contributed to the loss of many of the ships, for the rest of 1942, the sound of paint chipping resounded through the fleet, and the comfortable furniture which burned and smoked was tossed overboard. We still made mistakes in design, like the Essex class carriers, brilliantly good in so many respects, had a major design flaw in the ventilation intakes which were located beyond the ends of the armored hangar deck in order to minimize openings in the armor. The resulting single long ventilation trunk became a conduit for smoke and burning gasoline, which proved disastrous on Franklin when she was hit by a kamikaze. (After the war, that was redone on the entire class to eliminate the flaw.)
But the IJN ships had poorly executed damage control systems where the redundancy either didn’t exist, or when it did, could be disabled by a single hit as happened in the Battle of Midway when the firefighting system redundancy was taken out with a single bomb (can’t remember which ship)
In our Navy, our damage control systems were reasonably well designed with redundancy at the beginning (which got better as the war went along) and training was superior. We had the advantage of trying to learn from our mistakes, and fostering initiative in the lower ranks on techniques to improve damage control. Additionally, the specific training and labeling to optimize the various damage control systems on a SPECIFIC ship were set in manuals and trained to rigorously and across wide populations of the crew, not just a few. The Japanese sailors had a lot of guts, but their specific DC functions were not trained to as rigorously or as widespread through the crew, and was easier to decapitate via casualties or isolation due to damage, smoke, or fire.
Great book.
I recommend “Shattered Sword” for excellent insight. Different perspective, and it makes all the world’s difference in explaining some very puzzling things in battles.