The Last Naval Battle of World War 2 (2018)
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I never cease to be amazed of the performance of the US Navy in WW2. How did these "highest traditions" come about? America did not really fight naval battles in WW1. Before that they won a quick naval war against the Spanish in 1898, but arguably the Spanish were well behind technologically, in an era when technology was evolving by leaps and bounds.
In WW2 though, the US sailors were simply incredible. And the absolute majority of them (maybe 99.9%) did not have any prior combat experience. How did the US Navy turn from an inexperienced Navy into the most fierce-some naval force ever assembled in history?
And it's not just the industrial might of the US. Sure, in many encounters the US Navy just had more and better warships. But at least until 1943, there were plenty of encounters where it didn't, Midway being obviously the most famous.
There was something about the fighting spirit of the US Navy, but how did that get nurtured, considering that the US was a nation at peace?
I genuinely have no idea.
The US military invested, and still does, a lot in damage control and survivability. Everything is designed to maximize the equipment and people that can survive to fight another day. This has a significant cost, but the US has always leaned into their prodigious production capacity in support of this objective. This is doctrinal and fundamental, the US really goes to great lengths to make sure every soldier comes home, preferably with minimal damage.
In a long war, experience compounds. You can build a core of savvy battle-hardened veterans in a matter of months if your soldiers can learn the necessary lessons of the conflict without dying in the process. Experienced savvy soldiers are effective and difficult to kill. In many military traditions, these lessons are learned immediately before dying. US doctrine is that they learn their lessons quickly, survive, and adapt. That may not always come off, but that is the approach and has worked well for the US. There is no substitute for contact with the adversary when it comes to learning; how quickly you can adapt to those learnings determines outcomes.
No country's military is ever prepared for real war. US doctrine has been that they will survive their hard lessons, unpleasant as they usually are, and leverage that experience behind their vast productive capabilities. With respect to the US Navy specifically, the US has always had a strong naval traditions, by virtue of their location in the world. Even when they aren't at their peak, they've always known what they are doing.
Apparently at some point somebody noticed that one that worked had hit at a shallow angle, and arranged for that until they got fixed torpedoes. My impression was that this was not communicated to other submariners. I don't know how long the trick was used.
"I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast; for I intend to go in harm's way." Letter to Le Ray de Chaumont (16 November 1778)
"The future naval officers, who live within these walls, will find in the career of the man whose life we this day celebrate, not merely a subject for admiration and respect, but an object lesson to be taken into their innermost hearts. . . . Every officer . . . should feel in each fiber of his being an eager desire to emulate the energy, the professional capacity, the indomitable determination and dauntless scorn of death which marked John Paul Jones above all his fellows."
U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, address to Naval Academy
But beyond that lots of reasons,
- Intelligence and damage control (mentioned elsewhere)
- The air war of attrition started early, with the Japanese sending flights 600 miles from Rabaul to the Coral Sea. They didn’t rotate their pilots out to recuperate as the Americans did. The average Japanese pilot was a novice compared to his more numerous American adversaries by 44, and flying a very inferior plane compared to the newer F6F’s. And he could expect to fly sorties until he was killed, which by the end of the war was not much longer than one flight.
- Despite starting the war with Pearl Harbor, Japanese doctrine at the top never really moved on beyond Mahan and their plans tended to obsess with engineering a repeat of Tsushima. Yamamoto’s Midway disaster was an attempt to do just this. Compare to the American carrier raid tactics from Doolittle onwards.
- The Japanese were successfully starved of fuel, and for that reason couldn’t even get their big ships out of port before Leyte, which was a doomed banzai charge at sea.
https://www.amazon.com/Kaigun-Strategy-Technology-Imperial-1...
It doesn’t answer the question on USN motivations but does a great job explaining why the Japanese were stuck in a rut and rapidly surpassed in terms of tactics, morale, and skill.
It's not unlike Germany: win the blitzkrieg for a few years but lose the war.
There was something deeply irrational about their decision to go to war. The same irrationality led to subsequent errors, including Midway.
At the start of the war it wasn't clear that carrier-based air power would be able to effectively suppress ground-based air power. The prevailing theory was that carriers were too fragile to do this. The US Army and elements of the Navy with surface warship backgrounds believed this, too.
That turned out to be super wrong, and the Americans won much faster than expected by cutting off and bypassing Japanese strongholds (Rabaul, Formosa) and keeping their airfields impotent with regular carrier raids.
If those hadn't been the case, the Japanese strategy of seizing "unsinkable aircraft carriers" would appear to make more sense in retrospect. The thinking was that an initial crippling blow to the fleet plus the cost of clawing these back would be too much for the US.
Wrong, and in fact many of the Japanese brass thought it was wrong. But irrational would imply that there wasn't a theory, and there was a theory.
Attacking Pearl Harbor, in particular, was a lethal mistake. The "sneak attack" guaranteed the US would be filled with a thirst for vengeance. Japan might have done better by simply bypassing US possessions (including the Philippines) and going after European colonial areas to the south.
The US only won much faster than expected if one didn't understand how quickly war production ramped up. All that really mattered was that the US was going to do that. And, having done that, the US would just swamp anything Japan could do.
However, it does illustrate the underlying irrational process by which Japan drifted into the wider war. The decision to go to war in China wasn't the product of deliberate reasoning at the top, but was the result of actions of lower ranked hotheads in the Army.
Understandably, the Japanese military was much better industrialized and equipped, but at some point bodies also count.
The USA had two huge long-term advantages that Japan could not match: intelligence and production. For most of the war we were reading most of the Japanese encrypted communications. It’s one reason that we won the battle of Midway, for instance.
In terms of production, the US moved its economy into a war-footing quickly and nearly completely. People were planting Victory Gardens so that food producers could use less petroleum for farming and fertilization; tires were rationed. Over the long term it’s impossible to see the relatively small island of Japan standing toe-to-toe with the USA.
E.g., I found a 50-year-old dissertation [2] on the subject which claims that in 1939 over 90% of Japanese imports of petroleum, copper, and several iron and steel products were from the USA. It’s one reason they kept expanding during the war, despite the risk of being unable to hold territory: they needed the resources.
Certainly there are other factors, but these have always stood out to me as incontrovertible advantages.
1. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/437549.The_Pacific_Wa... 2. https://shareok.org/bitstream/handle/11244/23634/Thesis-1972...
But yeah, the US Navy played the cards they had incredibly well. They got somewhat lucky with the promotion of Nimitz. The proboem so is, as it is with the Soviets in WW2 and every single WW2 general who managed to write a well selling book about hinself, to see past the individual hero stories at the bigger picture.
Personnaly, I think the biggest plunder of the Japanese was to not take out the harbour infrastructure at Pearl Habour. Not that it wouod have changed anything in the long run so. That, and that they failed abysmally at submarine and anti-submarine warfare.
Interesting story here that Nimitz had to make an extraordinary gamble the intercepted Japanese communications were talking about Midway island and not somewhere in the Aleutians (the other possible candidate). The gamble paid off and the Japanese navy was always on the defensive after that point.
They were rather more certain of that.
https://www.history.com/news/battle-midway-codebreakers-alli...
> Determined to dispel such doubts, Rochefort’s team famously devised a ruse. Via submarine, they sent a message to the base on Midway instructing personnel there to radio Pearl Harbor that the salt-water evaporators on the base had broken down. Two days later, a Japanese message was intercepted that reported “AF” was running out of fresh drinking water.
He started as a greener-than-green ensign shortly before the war began, but you can see from the book how he made the effort to think about every little thing, and just got better and better. I suspect that was the secret, but the book quotes no less than Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, who was also stumped as to how this group of average folks did what they ultimately did. Plus, I think they were aggressive as hell.
And so, a month after the war ended, the one-time green ensign was not only captain of his ship, but also a squadron commander ("commodore") -- "the old man" at age 25. Repeat this in a few thousand instances and you've really got a navy.
As for combat experience, of those three navies, the only one with serious battle experience was the RN- and Jutland was so unlike the aero-naval war that actually occurred 1939-1945 that it is actively misleading (e.g. for Jutland the RN apparently forgot to signal to HMS Campania, the only seaplane carrier in the Grand Fleet, to make steam, so she was left behind. Such a mistake would have been unthinkable during WW2).
What might be confusing you is that while the US spent a large amount of money on its navy, and quite a bit on its air force (at the time technically still a part of the US Army as the US Army Air Corps), it spent very very little on its ground forces- in 1937 the US Army ground forces were smaller than that Yugoslavia! That was the branch that came from nothing, with very little experience, and grew exceptionally fast. It did indeed lead to problems during the war, as a whole lot of people got a whole lot of promotions very fast- e.g. General Mark Clark made O5 July 1, 1940, and was made O10 March 10, 1945.
The 1937 UK army was larger than the 1937 US Army, and the US Army at its peak was about 3 and a half times larger than the UK Army at its peak, so this rapid expansion is much more notable in the US Army than in the UK. If you look at Army Group commanders during the war, all of the British ones except Leese had at least 1 star on Sep 1 1939; all of the Americans who would go on to command Army Groups were Majors/Lt. Col's except for Devers who was a full Colonel.
The US Navy really did have a long, strong history.
If you read the Patrick O'Brien historical novels set in the Napoleonic wars you can get a good feel for how the British Royal Navy saw the US Navy as a serious force, although mostly concentrated in US waters at that time.
The US Navy was smaller than the British Navy, but they built bigger frigates (eg, the British frigates were mostly armed with 36 18-pounder cannons, while the US frigates carried 44 24-pounders).
This caused significant problems for the British in the War of 1812.
Military "traditions" are a weird thing, but old battles definitely count, especially when you win some against a bigger opponent.
Also, as mentioned elsewhere the Washington Treaty gave the US and Britain the equal biggest navies in the world throughout the 1930s. For a while during the 1920s and 30s Britain and the US were serious naval rivals too, and the affected how the US Navy thought about itself.
Numbers[1], technology, practice in the interwar years[2], and a lot of trial and error.
Also, the war in the Pacific was largely an air war, where both of the two belligerents were more-or-less figuring both doctrine and how to implement it from scratch.
Also, it helped that Japan could not take advantage many of its victories early in the war, due to lack of numbers, supply shortages, and an absolutely rotten command culture (It had a habit of firing competent admirals because they didn't win hard enough.)
[1] By the end of the war, American shipyards were building an aircraft carrier, two escort carriers, two heavy cruisers, and ten destroyers every month.
[2] Being surrounded by two oceans, the US has always depended on its navy in its ability to wage war.
If Japan had prevailed in Midway, supposedly inflicting to the US an equally devastating tally: even if the USA would have eventually won the war out of sheer productive capabilities, the traditions would have probably be written much latter if at all.
Up until Midway both powers were equally fearsome. One could even argue that Japan had MORE experience given it had already won against a superior enemy in 1905 (Imperial Russia).
In hindsight, Tsushima was more instructive to other navies than to the IJN itself.
For an example of the opposite dynamic in action, look at the largely agrarian Russia's naval performance in the Russo-Japanese war, where the incompetence of the officers was almost matched by the incompetence of the sailors. If you've grown up working on a farm, you're unlikely to adjust smoothly to working in an engine room.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_W._Nimitz
Nimitz faced superior Japanese forces at the crucial defensive actions of the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway.
The US navy has so much respect for him, a construction project was haulted because it could cast a shadow on this mans house.
"In 1998, the house became a bizarre flashpoint in the construction of the new Bay Bridge when the Navy refused to let Caltrans engineers onto Yerba Buena Island. Why? Their design called for a span that would cast a shadow on the Nimitz House."
Somehow, almost magically, it looks to me, the US Navy had the right promotion criteria in the inter-war period. But how did that happen? Peacetime nations tend to promote people that don't turn out to be quite the best in wartime, Jellicoe being a prime example. The US Navy unlocked the secret. But what secret exactly?
You had lots of mid-grade officers who had to compete to be promoted, an influx of new blood, and plenty of places to stuff idiots with political juice.
The key thing was the timeline between 1918 and 1942. If you compare early WW2 to the Civil War, in the civil war you were only 13-15 years removed from the Mexican War. Lots of old Napoleonic ideas were still in the heads of the officer corps, and it took a lot of blood and guts for officers like Sherman and Grant to work their way up and adapt. (The Confederates never figured it out)
We glorify the feats of our fighting men and women, but the reality is that a modern military is perhaps the greatest bureaucracy devised. Bureaucracy rewards the embrace of inertia, and only talented leaders AND timing/luck can break it.
In the event of a victory at Jutland, the UK could have taken the Russian offer. Russia was quite serious about going on an offensive, they started the Brusilov campaign only days after Jutland. If the Germans were forced to move troops to protect Berlin, then either the Western or the Eastern front might have collapsed.
There seem to be a lot of hypotheticals here. The Russians were pretty incompetent, plus it's not clear the UK would have taken them up on it.
But could be.
One of the actually longstanding traditions on the US navy is irreverence to decorum or the chain of command when it matters, too, so that sort of operational agility probably was a big factor.
I think a big part of the "fighting spirit" the OOP mentioned came from the Pearl Harbor attack. It galvanized everyone into action and lessons were learnt and mistakes were fixed very quickly, at all level of the military. For example, after the lost of Lexington, fuel lines were drained and filled with inert gas and that lesson was propagated quickly through the fleet. The fast turnaround between mistakes and lessons learnt probably also came hand in hand with how individuals were empowered to make decisions and took responsibility.
On other side of the coin, I think the IJN incompetence got highlighted and not enough credits were given. Their carrier divisions were very very highly trained and operated at a much higher tempo than the US at the start of war. The IJN night battle tactics were also very deadly. Even after Midway, they still went toe to toe with the USN during the attritional Guadalcanal campaigns. Despite their doctrine and culture giving them plenty of weaknesses and blind spots, it also gave them many strengths. I dare say during the preparation for the war, the "fighting spirit" and the effectiveness of the IJN was just as high.
In my opinion, the myths surrounding the Pacific naval war obscure very interesting stories from both sides with plenty of lessons that are still applicable today.
But he led the successful raids against the Japanese in February and March '42, and then launched Doolittle's planes in April.
But most importantly, he replaced Admiral Ghormley as the theater commander for Guadalcanal, and changed the fortunes of that most crucial campaign. A loss at Guadalcanal would have undone the victory at Midway. Conversely, the victory at Guadalcanal, in pretty much every historian's mind, spelled the end of the IJN's dominance in the Pacific.
For that, Halsey should get the tribute. But I personally also applaud Nimitz who visited Guadalcanal, assessed the situation and decided Ghormley had to go. And who also figured out that Halsey, who until then was just a raider, would be able to switch to an administrator and be an excellent one at that.
Japanese: One junk with five Japanese officers and seventy-eight enlisted men. Armed with a 75mm pack howitzer, six machine guns, and over one hundred rifles.
Americans: Two junks with two bazookas, one .50 caliber heavy machine gun, one .30 caliber light machine gun, several rifles, and grenades.
It seems the .50 cal was the Americans' only advantage. That said, when I think about how this battle may have played out, a .50 could have been incredibly useful since it could outrange other weapons and shoot through basically all available cover, unlike the rifles and machine guns, but also fire much faster than the artillery.
_Why_ did the bazookas take out the howitzer, and not the other way around? Howitzer seems like a more powerful weapon for the situation.
The Americans were greatly outnumbered, so _how_ did they win?
So my guess would be light, slow, inaccurate gun against highly maneuverable bazookas. It seems to me like a bazooka vs tank situation. Tanks are more powerful but a well positioned bazooka will kill a tank.
Usually howitzers fire, observe where the shell lands and then adapt. Here this couldn't work as ships changed positions.
In other words, you are right. Having something that you can point and shoot is easier to do. This might not be true if they could aim their howitzer low but then you get the fact that howitzer cannot be steadied (it will roll with the ship) while a human holding a bazooka can do some stabilization and fire at an exact moment the target is in crosshairs.
Howitzer works as a mortar or if they are lucky and can aim low, as a non stabilized gun.
I've been a big WWII guy my entire life but never realized how much I'd been shortchanging myself with neglect of naval stuff until I started watching Drachinifel.
Or, maybe they just had a broken radio and didn't know what was going on. Shame the article doesn't say more about the enemy's motivations.