http://www.onwar.com/chrono/1943/jun1943/f14jun43.htm
Italians give up on Lampione
Monday, June 14, 1943 www.onwar.com
Italian soldiers surrender to the Allies [photo at link].
In the Mediterranean... The Italian-held island of Lampione surrenders to the Allies.
Interesting to see the news of the aerial combat over the Solomons. While the numbers are always inflated, it appears the Americans are gaining the upper hand on the Japanese. A couple of things are happening here.
The Japanese entered the war with an elite corps of army pilots and naval aviators...but they assumed they would live forever. Or that it would be a short war. Their pilot training program was not designed to churn out large numbers of qualified pilots. The Japanese seriously underestimated the rate of combat attrition of pilots. In addition, the Japanese philosophy was “fly till you die” and they did not rotate pilots out of the front lines on a routine basis. Combat fatigue set in and the pilots eventually burned out and assumed a fatalistic attitude, one which was almost guaranteed to become self-fulfilling.
So as the elite corps of pilots was burned out or killed, the Japanese had to scramble to replace them, and got themselves caught in a vicious cycle in order try to keep the force levels up. Rushed into a crash training program, they created flight schools. However, as the pilots at the front were killed, they rushed new pilots out of the training schools before their training was complete. Those pilots did not fare well in combat against well-trained American pilots, and their casualty rate was high. To replace the losses, they dipped into the training schools even earlier...and so on....
In addition, in order to keep the force levels up in the Solomons, the air wings of their carriers have been posted from time to time to land duty at Rabaul. They are getting mauled. Naval aviators have that special skill set needed to put planes down on moving flight decks. They are being wasted in the Solomons. They are also going through the same attritional vicious cycle. In fact, the Japanese are taking a huge risk by doing this. Their carrier force is an empty shell; the hanger decks are empty. When the United States Navy gathers its strength and finally moves in the Central Pacific, the IJN will be powerless to oppose it.