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To: poconopundit; dpetty121263; SunkenCiv; Captain Walker

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.


58 posted on 12/14/2021 7:53:38 AM PST by rlmorel (If the Biden Administration was only stupid or incompetent, some actions would benefit the USA.)
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To: rlmorel

Thanks! I’ve enjoyed three different iterations of J.P.’s lecture on Midway (there are probably five or six ones, plus some lockdown vlogger interviews with him) and should put that book on my Xmas list, or maybe see if there’s a Kindle edition.


67 posted on 12/14/2021 11:29:58 AM PST by SunkenCiv (Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie.)
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To: rlmorel
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)
Part of their problem in that area had to do with staffing. Everyone wanted to serve, but (as here) not everyone is really cut out for it. So, the jobs that weren't glorious were filled with the bottom of the barrel. I recall that one of those geniuses thought it was a good idea to get all the smoke and fumes out, had everything that would open opened, and it set everything else on fire, and the ship was lost. Whoops.

70 posted on 12/14/2021 12:12:47 PM PST by SunkenCiv (Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie.)
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To: rlmorel

Interesting story on how the Yorktown Flight Deck officer before Midway experimented with filling the fuel lines before battle with C02 thus preventing any major AV Fuel fires..It worked and that is why the Yorktown was able to absorb the attacks on her till her end..That practice become fleet wide after the battle.


72 posted on 12/14/2021 12:40:33 PM PST by dpetty121263
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