How could the Japanese navy fail this bad in WW2 ? Obviously, they never had a serious chance against the US, but why did they only inflict so few causalities ? Their navy was pretty good, the Zero was ok and they had decent pilots. Why none of their plan worked ? Even at Samar, against escort carriers, they failed. That's pretty bad.
How could the Japanese navy fail this bad in WW2 ? Obviously, they never had a serious chance against the US...
Angel Powell
Jason Long
Because they had no realistic means of forcing a decisive conflict while they still had the upper hand in forces on the water.
Mason Reed
>their pilots were decent
Up until they killed them all off half way through the war.
Joshua Russell
While they had "good" leaders, they just couldn't replace their losses like America could. They had to spread out their forces a lot more than America
Andrew Cox
>They had to spread out their forces a lot more than America
What? You ever hear of things like the ETO or the MTO?
Mason Wood
Japan was fighting upstream the entire time, even against themselves.
The first major problem was that Japan doesn't have much ability to replace its naval losses with next to no natural resources to keep secure at home. Japan was receiving scrap iron from the West and built its fleet on both that and buying British ships, they had little means to build their own with what little iron they had on the home islands. This was the core reason for their expansion into china/SE Asia, but trying to reliably secure iron and other resources while being harassed by enemy armies and guerrilla fighters didn't make such resource collection reliable enough. So any losses afflicted on them were almost always permanent.
Second was no coordination between the Japanese Army and Navy, these two operate more like independent factions more than they were a united military under the command of the Emperor. The Army and Navy actively competed against each other for funding and prestige, so they were not willing to coordinate or cooperate during battles with the enemy.
If the army was more willing to garrison the pacific islands instead of Japan's naval infantry, they might have stood a better chance with the resources and logistics the army possessed, but Japan's military akin to entering a fight as a split brain patient, with neither side able to coordinate with the other.
Last is a fundamental difference in Naval doctrine and tactics, before world war 2, not many nations saw Aircraft Carriers as the mainstay of naval warfare, so Japan focused mostly on main battleships and destroyers, only starting to invest in aircraft carriers when it was far too late. The US adopted Naval Aircraft warfare pretty much from the get-go, and had the advantage in air power form start to finish.
Jaxson Lee
There was a decisive battle while the nips had the upper hand. It's called Midway. It went badly for the nips.
Christopher Martin
>so Japan focused mostly on main battleships and destroyers, only starting to invest in aircraft carriers when it was far too late.
Japan had the largest carrier fleet in the world at the start of Pacific War.
Gavin Harris
Victory disease, shitty doctrine, bad leadership that was in love with overly complex plans, inability to replace their carrier pilots, questionably designed ships, bad damage control practices, shitty logistics&lack of escort vessels (mostly because of nip military felt that such things were beneath them and thus payed no attention to them before it was too late), pushed too far early in the war which make their bad supply situation even worse, weak AA, bad radar, bad communication practices, having their communications compromised thanks to the fact that yanks spent 90% of the Pacific war with having cracked Japanese encryption, navy & army spending almost as much effort in fighting against each other than they did fighting against allies, etc. the list goes on and on.
Add in the fact that they just had to go and piss off the nation that built aircraft carriers like other nations built destroyers and it is a small miracle that nips lasted as long as they did.
Grayson Nguyen
Having more carriers numerically doesn't mean you know how to use them.
Japanese carriers were often cheaply built, or just normal ships hastily converted with an airstrip platform to carry on the task of aircraft carrier in the later stages of the war. While the bulk of Japanese funding went towards showroom battleships like the Yamato.
Japan's recklessness with aircraft carriers showed how flawed their application of naval aviation was, with Japan putting carriers easily in the line of danger and losing 3-5 carriers in a single battle.
Jason Clark
>Japanese carriers were often cheaply built, or just normal ships hastily converted with an airstrip platform to carry on the task of aircraft carrier in the later stages of the war.
Japan had the most purpose-built fleet carriers in the world when WW2 began, and Shokaku-class was literally state of the art. Honestly just cut your losses and just admit you didn't know jack shit when you made your post.
David Reed
So, were those carriers poorly used then ?
Angel King
You didn't really address his argument though.
Henry Ward
Akagi&Kaga were extremely shitty conversions
Souryu and Hiryu were decent (well Hiryu had shitty island placement that but other than that they're decent)
Ryujou was basically a Nip Ranger expect worse in every regard
Shoukakus were decent-ish and about equal to the American Yorktown-class (but inferior to Essexes that were under construction)
Lucas Powell
Midway was not a decisive battle in any sense of the word, and couldn't have been even if the Japanese had crushed the American fleet.
Wyatt Rogers
Because the USN and USAAF were very very good., and their American counterparts utterly outgeneraled them. Also they couldn't do ASW for shit.
They did much better against the RN. IIRC the Brits only sunk one major Japanese warship, a heavy cruiser in the last year of the war.
James Hall
Shokaku-class were far better than the Yorktown-class, which was still hampered by treaty restrictions.
Ryujo was better than the Ranger, which was unusable in the Pacific.
Akagi and Kaga were on par with Lexington/Saratoga and better than the Courageous class.
Soryu and Hiryu were better than Wasp and Hornet.
The Essex were better than anything and there were like 40 of them, but in 1941, Japs were not behind in aircraft carrier design.
Ryan Bennett
>Midway was not a decisive battle in any sense of the word, and couldn't have been even if the Japanese had crushed the American fleet.
It was a battle which effectively destroyed Japan's carrier fleet. It was decisive in every sense of the word.
Blake Morgan
>It was a battle which effectively destroyed Japan's carrier fleet.
So? Japan doesn't need a carrier fleet the way that the U.S. does; carriers allow one to strike away from your own airbases. If you're on strategic defense, which Japan was, they're very useful, but hardly critical. There's a reason it was almost a year and a half between Midway and the first time the U.S. tried to assault a Japanese held island using carrier planes to oppose any land based garrison at Tarawa.
> It was decisive in every sense of the word.
No, it quite literally wasn't. The war didn't end.
Oliver Morales
40 essex class carriers
when exactly did You lose your mind?
Samuel Walker
>war must end at the very moment for an event to be decisive
Go sit in a corner and think about how dumb you are.
Thomas Scott
>No, it quite literally wasn't. The war didn't end.
not him
So you think a war ends after a decisive battle?
Where exactly do you get your ideas about war and history from?
Lucas Flores
Say what you want about the war. What pains me is the way the US treated the captured IJN ships and their old battleships.
>Poor Nagato was used as nuke target practice
>No cool pagoda mast battleships survived to become museum ships
Joseph Nelson
>zero
>decent
It was decent early war, and absolutely shit against later fighters. Turn fighters get shit on by energy fighters.
Jose Brown
en.oxforddictionaries.com
>Decisive
>Adjective
Settling an issue; producing a definite result.
Midway did not "settle the issue", nor did it produce a definitive result to the Pacific war. You had literal years of fighting afterwards, and the change in momentum had a hell of a lot less to do with the outcome of the battle as it did with all the new carriers and airplanes the U.S. was putting into play.
From dictionaries and history books.
A war usually either ends or the end becomes inevitable after a decisive battle that was not the case before said decisive battle.
Before Midway, you had an overwhelming U.S. long term advantage that the Japanese were hoping to not have to face by means of a negotiated settlement. Afterwards, you had the exact same thing, except a bunch of Japanese carriers were now at the bottom of the ocean; but their strategy, based around being hard to dislodge and being hopefully too expensive to be worth the trouble of destroying, was still present and still viable by defending with the rather large amount of land based airplanes they stuffed on their islands.
Carson Kelly
I don't think you know very much about the Pacific War if you think island bases built on tiny atolls by Korean conscript labor without any heavy equipment effectively replaced the ability to sortie 200 aircraft in the air anywhere you want to.
Juan Fisher
>A war usually either ends or the end becomes inevitable after a decisive battle that was not the case before said decisive battle.
How can it be the case before the decisive battle?
The battle can not have any impact before it happens.
Are you actually high?
Andrew Stewart
Pic related. Is your bizarre argument based on an inability to read, or is it that you're so ideologically committed to the notion that MIDWAY WON THE ENTIRE PACIFIC WAR that you're incapable of understanding anything different?
Carter Rodriguez
>le cumbinedfleet dot cum
When will this meme end?
Xavier Cook
>How can it be the case before the decisive battle?
>The battle can not have any impact before it happens.
No, because the decisive factor could be something completely unrelated to the field of battle, be it a new country or other power entering the war, production impacts making themselves felt, internal collapse from one or more participants, or something like just overwhelming power making itself felt.
What, pray tell, was the decisive battle in the 1940 invasion of the Netherlands? The Anglo-Zanzibar war? Was Kursk a decisive battle or just an illustration as to how Soviet material advantages were mounting higher and higher and could no longer be caught up with? When you have a UN imposed ceasefire halting the Israeli advance into Syria in the Yom Kippur war, what was the "decisive battle"?
I wrote what I did to attempt to narrow down the phrase "decisive battle" into cases where a battle somewhere was the decisive factor. War is more than just a series of battles.
Adam Walker
And what, pray tell, are your objections to its analysis?
Liam Fisher
eww read clausewitz you do not understand war at all
Nathaniel Gomez
Its "analysis" is the same as arguing that being shot was not decisive for JFK because he was going to die anyway.
Cooper King
>I have no idea what proximate cause means.
>I have no idea what the Japanese strategy of WW2 in the PTO entailed
>I have no idea how to make short to mid term predictions
>I will therefore criticize someone for coming to a different conclusion than myself using some pretty basic facts and logic.
I can't tell if you're a troll or just retarded. But good job, I suppose; I'm going to assume the former. Good day.