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Comment by jlawson | Hacker News Reader

Question. How did the Americans win? The forces were:

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.

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I mean... the article explains it in detail. The bazookas took out the howitzer, the HMG was useful, and later they just got within range and spammed hand grenades to great effect before wrapping it up with a melee boarding party (I presume the enemy was basically defeated by this point).

The articles says what happened, not why it happened that way.

_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?

This got me curious and while a quick search didn't give me much info on what kind of "howitzer" these junks had, this similar naval gun had an optimistic fire rate of 5 rounds per minute and was less effective against agile targets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20_cm/12_short_naval_gun

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.

Outnumbered by manpower, but they had two ships. The howitzer was a heavier weapon but pretty limited all the same.

Howitzers are built to fire at an upward angle -- perhaps less accurate overall when going up against a target where both the gun platform and the enemy are moving? The bazooka, on the other hand, fired at a flat trajectory.

To fire a howitzer you need to calculate the angle at which you need to fire and amount of propellant. It seems like an incredibly hard thing to do on a ship and with the enemy maneuvering. It's likely you could only guess and hope for the best.

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.

Making a bazooka much more like a gun on a sailing ship, able to time their fire with the roll of the ship, while a howitzer would be more akin to a mortar on an 19th century bomb ketch, where precision of aiming, powder needed for the shot and timing of the fuse are arrived at by trial and error. (I am reading through the Hornblower books for the umpteenth time, so Napoleonic sea warfare is fresh in my mind.)

Bazooka would be more like a rifle on a ship. Much easier to aim with the roll and you get your arms to do the stabilization.

Howitzer works as a mortar or if they are lucky and can aim low, as a non stabilized gun.

I doubt the howitzer was that great. The battled opened with a hit on the foremast from the howitzer and it seems the ship still worked well enough to participate.

With encounters like this it's sometimes just the roll of the dice as well.

And the fact they had two boats over one.

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