Maybe shipboard damage control was a subtle reflection of the how they perceived their troops, ie, so much fodder. I’m thinking of how they didn’t armor protect the seats on the Zero. Or the whole kamikaze thing, for that matter.
It weird because some of their(IJN) ships were heavily armored and some not.
Their mindset was that a warrior should always be on the offensive, always attacking and not worrying about their own lives. Supposedly following this philosophy would invariably lead to victory. No armor on planes, no parachutes for pilots, and little regard for shipboard damage control.
When I was only fifty yards away, the Wildcat broke out of his loop and astonished me by flying straight and level. At this distance I would not need the cannon; I pumped 200 rounds into the Grumman's cockpit, watching the bullets chewing up the thin metal skin and shattering the glass.
I could not believe what I saw; the Wildcat continued flying almost as if nothing had happened. A Zero which had taken that many bullets into its vital cockpit would have been a ball of fire by now. I could not understand it. I slammed the throttle forward and closed in to the American plane, just as the enemy fighter lost speed. In a moment I was ten yards ahead of the Wildcat, trying to slow down. I hunched my shoulders, prepared for the onslaught of his guns, I was trapped.
The Wildcat was a shambles. Bullet holes had cut the fuselage and wings up from one end to the other. The skin of the rudder was gone, and the metal ribs stuck out like a skeleton.
© Pacific Wrecks - Dogfight between Saburo Sakai and James Southerland August 7, 1942 Source: https://www.pacificwrecks.com/people/veterans/sakai/samurai/southerland.html © Pacific Wrecks - Dogfight between Saburo Sakai and James Southerland August 7, 1942
The design was astonishingly bad. IIRC, they had their fire mains set up so that a hit on one side of the ship in the right place could knock out the ENTIRE firefighting infrastructure on that side, stem to stern!
Our ships consistently were designed with ways to isolate and limit the damage to critical things like fire mains, we could drain avgas pipes and pump CO2 into them if the ship was under attack, things like that.
Even the passageways they had to go through, they had to bend double in many of them. Of course, we had some passageways like that too, but not to the extent they did.
I am sure those sailors had a lot of guts and moxy, but if your tools suck...they suck!
In reference to the Zeros’ lack of armament: One of our neighbor’s sons was a marine beach master in the Pacific. He told my brother that the Zeros would strafe the beach at about fifteen feet elevation, and we could bust their cylinders with a BAR. The planes would then crash in the ocean.