Posted on 08/04/2013 10:54:44 AM PDT by cutty
Depends on what you mean by superior. The P-38 was faster than the Zero and could outclimb the Me-262. Plus, the P-38 with it's guns all clustered in the nose had devastating firepower.
The Asiatic Fleet was depending on the submarines as its main striking force. This was probably unrealistic, but is everything had gone as well as possible they may have made it expensive for the IJN. They failed badly, mainly due to poor training and the scandalous state of the torpedoes.
Both problems were the fruit of a dysfunctional bureaucracy in that branch.
Had the been at sea around Luzon on 12/8, who knows what several of them might have been able to tag.
They failed badly, mainly due to poor training and the scandalous state of the torpedoes.
One has to add poor naval leadership.
The Asiatic fleet submarines sortied immediately and for the most part were in useful patrols to intercept Japanese shipping in December 1941. They even had a large number of contacts,many even in Lingayen, among the invasion fleet, or off Taiwan and elsewhere in the South China Sea.
The problem is that they were unable to turn most contacts into attacks, which they should have, which was a failure in training and leadership, and when they did attack their tactics or torpedoes mostly proved defective.
Quite fair I think.
Other parts of the US Navy were much better run than the submarine branch, and navies with much fewer resources, like the Dutch, managed to operate their submarines, boat for boat, far more effectively than the US did at least until 1943. The torpedo dept had been very badly run, mainly out of political and bureaucratic reasons, for a couple of decades. They NEVER properly tested their torpedoes until forced to by the submarine force in late 1942/early 1943.
This is from the Wiki on the Mark 14, but it matches everything I have read on the subject. There is a LOT of material on this out there, they were even printing articles in the Naval Institute “Proceedings” back when I was reading that religiously in the 1970’s-80’s.
“In 1923, Congress made NTS Newport the sole designer, developer, builder and tester of torpedoes in the United States. No independent or competing group was assigned to verify the results of Mark 14 tests. NTS produced only 1½ torpedoes a day in 1937, despite having three shifts of three thousand workers[17] working around the clock.[18] Production facilities were at capacity and there was no room for expansion.[17] Only two thousand submarine torpedoes were built by all three[19] Navy factories in 1942.[18] This exacerbated torpedo shortages; the Pacific Fleet Submarine Force had fired 1,442 torpedoes since war began.”
The simple answer to this - the failure to even produce defective torpedoes with such a huge establishment - is simple. Corruption and gross incompetence.
And the submarine branch likewise failed to test them - their principal weapon system - even after a year of reports of defective torpedoes from returning patrols, until the local squadron commander in Western Australia took it upon himself to run unauthorized tests.
Interestingly the Germans similarly found defects in their magnetic torpedoes in 1939, and heard of it from their U-boat commanders. They fixed their problems within weeks.
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