Comment by mcfunley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcfunley | Hacker News Reader

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The war was over after the Marianas were taken, if not at Midway. It doesn’t seem right to discount the industrial might like you do when the US produced dozens and dozens of carriers and escort carriers while the Japanese produced four or five more.

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.

Incidentally I have been reading an excellent background on the subject.

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.

I'd recommend Morison's Two-Ocean War: https://www.amazon.com/Two-Ocean-War-History-United-States/d...

Yeah the Japanese for example conquered the oil fields in Indonesia but they never had the oil tankers to ship it to where they needed it.

It's not unlike Germany: win the blitzkrieg for a few years but lose the war.

Japan's bigger problem was that for all that area they conquered in the Pacific, they obtained no industrial capacity. It was just space they had to garrison and supply.

There was something deeply irrational about their decision to go to war. The same irrationality led to subsequent errors, including Midway.

I don't know if it was that deeply irrational, I mean beyond the decision to initiate a war with the United States in the first place.

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.

The big mistakes were: starting a war with your largest trading partner, allying with countries that could not make up the trade difference, and assuming the country attacked would just give up rather than exploit its factor of ~6 advantage in production capability.

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.

Invading China?

That was a mistake, but not such a spectacularly fatal one.

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.

I mean, that's quite a populous and geographically large nation to start a land war with.

Understandably, the Japanese military was much better industrialized and equipped, but at some point bodies also count.

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