1 Considering the cost of a full battleship, were battlecruisers better than the cost-equivalent number of other, lesser warships, if that's all you could afford?

2 No.  In fact, the Dreadnought cost £1.67million, Invincible £1.7million.  The increased size of their powerplants (engine rooms, boilers, etc etc etc) outweighed the savings in price of armor by a far sight.  At the time, the RN didn't include the cost of the guns in a ship's final price, but the two ships were basically armed the same in any case.

3  It sounds like the battlecruiser captains (or their superiors) didn't heed  the "outrun anything it couldn't outfight" part.

4

Kayle, it's not that straightforward. The critical part of the Battle of Jutland was fought in fog, and there was no radar at that time. By the time the battlecruisers were aware that they were within gunnery range of enemy battleships, it was too late to escape.

In the case of HMS Hood, it was hunting Bismarck. But Bismarck's guns ranged Hood's guns. (Hood's guns had a maximum range of 32,500 yards. Bismarck's max range was almost 39,000 yards.)

Also, it was a do-or-die situation; the Bismarck had to be destroyed no matter the cost. If it successfully escaped and reached the coast of France, it would have been a mortal threat to the UK's supply lines across the Atlantic. In addition to losing Hood, the British took substantial damage to HMS Prince of Wales.

5 IMHO the UK Battlecruisers get a bit of a bum rap.

The big problem was chemistry. The UKs cordite was not particularly stable. The Battleships HMS Bulwark and HMSVanguard and the Armored Cruiser HMS Natal were all lost to spontaneous magazine explosions at the pier, a rather more benign environment than battle. The Japanese navy, which used UK pattern cordite, also lost 2 BBs and a cruiser to spontaneous pier-side detonation, and had a third ( the Mikasa) gravely damaged.

The 3 BC losses at Jutland were all a result of turret hits causing fires, explosions and general mayhem in the ammunition system. All might well have survived if not for the cordite issue.

Invincible herself gave a very good performance during the war clobbering Scharnhorst and is generally credited with sinking Lutzow (Lutzow received hits from other ships but they all caused minor damage. She never recovered from the pasting Invincible gave her in the moments before the British ship blew up).

While they were lightly armored in comparison with Battleships, the Invincible Class was actually better armored than the preceding armored cruisers.

The problem was that above about 20 kts the power increase required for an increase in speed  starts to go up and gets exponential eventuslly, so to maintain a 5 kt speed advantage over the BBs the costs got excessive.

..so you ended up with a ship that was a bit faster, but less well armed and armored and cost more and so was really too expensive to use on normal cruiser duties. This doesn't compute.

6 Another problem the BC had was that the "run from anything bigger" concept assumes that said bigger ship won't manage to hit you before you got out of range.  As demonstrated, one good volley from a BB was all it took.  And the gunnery of front line ships at the time was getting much better, very quickly.  Also of course, a BC can chase down cruisers, run from battleships, but it hosed if it runs up against another BC, especially if it encounters one with superior gunnery.

7 How do you classify the Kirov class?  NATO classified it as a battlecruiser, but apparently the USSR called it a heavy cruiser.  I've also heard good arguments that despite the fact that we call them guided missile destroyers, an Arleigh Burke could better be described as a battlecruiser.

8 Muppet, the Minotaur-class, the last RN armored cruiser and contemporary of the Invincibles,  was armored almost exactly the same as the battlecruisers.

Main armor belt: 3"-6" for Minotaur, 4"-6" for Invincible.  Deck armor: 1.5"-2" for Minotaur, 1.5"-2.5" for Invincible.  Both had 7" of armor for the barbettes, and while the Invincible had 7" of armor for her turrets, the Minotaur had 8" on her heaviest guns.  The armored cruiser's citadel was actually better armored. 

While the cordite was a problem, the bigger problem was that the battlecruiser's turret armor was made out of wet toilet paper, therefore making it MUCH easier for said cordite to go kablammo.

Kayle, the British battlecruisers at Jutland ran up against something they could neither outrun or outfight: the GERMAN battlecruisers.  Just as fast, nearly as heavily armed, and better armored... exactly NOT what Admiral Fisher wanted them to butt up against.  That the situation really didn't allow them to run away is a moot point.

David, I knew someone would bring up the Kirov.  The correct terminology for the Kirovs would be "Heavy Nuclear-powered Missile Cruiser."  It was called a battlecruiser because... well... it wasn't a battleship, and it was far more potent than a cruiser.  Heck, other than carriers, it probably the most powerful warship ever put to sea... and yes, that includes the modernized Iowas, too. 

As far as how the US Navy currently designates their surface combatants, it's totally screwed up in relation to the WWII system.  The Arleigh Burkes, using WWII designation systems, would probably be termed a CLAA (Light Cruiser, Anti-Aircraft), as that's its main mission.  The now-retired Spruance-class DD would be a CA, and the Ticonderogas... well, they don't fit, as there was no CAAA. 

9 The Minotaurs were good ships but ISTR  reading the I's armor was actually more extensive. That is those thicknesses were carried over a larger area.

10 Sanity check: "It was to be able to outfight anything it could outrun, and outrun anything it couldn't outfight."

11 "They could outrun anything they couldn't outfight" is something that was said of the American super-frigates in the first half of the 19th century.

12 No, technically Brickmuppet Logic break is correct.  Pedantic, but correct.  But I don't care, the sentence is fine, the reader (as opposed to the nitpicker) understands it.

13

Pardon the pedantry, but that's "His Majesty King Edward VII."

 

Incidentally, my grandfather served in Minotaur at Jutland, in Tiger (improved half-sister of Lion) in the 20s and in Courageous in the mid-30s, after her conversion to an aircraft carrier.

 

14

Tiger, when launched, was the fastest capital ship in the world, capable of thirty knots, and also one of the last to use coal-fired engines rather than oil. When my grandfather was in her, just before she was decommissioned pursuant to Washington, she was being used to trial experimental gunnery equipment. Her captain was a member of the Dewar distilling family, but was himself a teetotaller; he pronounced his surname "de War".

15

Another lovely excursion into nautical history, Mr Duck.  Thanks.

 

BTW - was the Mutsu also a cordite victim?  I had read somewhere that it was the victim of a peculiar AA shell fashioned for her main guns....

16 Would you believe that the Mutsu was probably destroyed by a suicidal crewman?

17

A bit late to the party, but I should mention that a big problem with British BCs blowing up to shell hits was the fact that since the Battle Cruiser Force made a high rate of fire king, the British BCs tended to leave everything else secondary, including ammunition safety.  This reached the logical conclusion where they removed even the rudimentary flash-protection they had because it interfered with their ammo feeds - which might have saved 2 BCs at Jutland.

Of course, a high rate of fire would have been nice if the BCF actually shot accurately in the process - which apparently only QUEEN MARY (The 1st BC sunk.) did so consistently....

And if you think the US Navy's current ship designation system is bizarre, how about the system the USN had between WW2 and the mid-1970s?

C.T.

1 Arrgh!  Why did you post this so late on a weeknight?  I have work tomorrow! 

Other than what appears to be a workshop or offices built on top of a pre-Dreadnaught battleship or cruiser, I've got naught so far...

2 The best I can come up with the USS Kearsage or Kentucky after conversion to a barracks or receiving ship.  I can't find any photos or write-ups for this, but several bow details seem to match.

And now, a few hours sleep before I need to go to work....

3

The bow looks like WWI.

I assume that the part at the rear that sticks out on the side is a latrine, right?

4 USS Prairie State (IX-15), better known as USS Illinois (BB-7).

5 flatdarkmars does it again.  Name your post, sir, or should I just do another one as usual?

6 Why did they feel the need to leave all that steel buried underneath an office building for thirty years?  Couldn't they have used all that armor-quality steel in some more productive fashion?

7

Mitch, that's simple: it's not an office building.  After the USS Illinois was changed to the Prairie State, she was also converted to become an armory ship.

That armor is, presumably, containing cordite, shell and shot by the thousands of tons.  It probably wouldn't do much good if it all went up, but it's likely better than nothing.

8 Hmmm your topic is... something to do with German surface commerce raiders in either the 1st or 2nd World War... I'll leave it fairly non-specific so you have some latitude to pick something interesting.

1

I'll try again.

"...that does not mean that Midway didn't matter, any more than it means that Guadalcanal/the Solomon Islands, Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, Tarawa, or even Attu and Kiska, didn't matter...."  Of course it mattered.  But I believe the people in the steel mills in the upper mid west, the Manhattan project folks in TN & NM, the bomber assembly workers in KS & GA, etc also mattered and that the collective efforts of the home front meant more to the wars outcome than the clearly heroic efforts of the military at the 'tip of the sword'.

What would have happened if the USA lost at Midway?  Lost the Hawaiian Islands?  Lost Australia?  

There might have even been fewer front line military deaths!  I don't know.  But I do believe that any rational analysis would show a defeated Japan before 1950.  Maybe even before 1946.

There is no likely case for getting Japan past Hawaii.  Existing submarine forces and the long supply line would have stopped the Japanese for years at Hawaii.  With Japanese actions on so many fronts, they didn't have the ability to project to our west coast.  In the absolute worst case, the America of 1944 would have looked about the same.  More carrier fleets than Japan, more submarines and so many long range bombers that the sky would still go dark when they were overhead.  Can you imagine a carrier fleet being attacked by B-29's (who were protected by P51's)?  And in the worst case, how many nukes would it take to eliminate the Japanese Navy in 1946/7?  Would our 700 (worst case) nuke inventory in 1950 been enough?  The method and path of winning was not known, that we would win was.

It is NOT any lack of scholarship OR disrespect for the efforts of the those on the front line in the Pacific.  Both of my parents are buried in Arlington and my father-in-law spent WWII on a destroyer in the Pacific (a high risk place to be).  It is a simple statement of fact that was known THEN as well as now.  The troops in the Pacific got the best gear last and the old stuff first.  Most of the military and most of the equipment went to Europe.  So did a lot of the Navy.  Our government knew then that Japan was going to lose.  That's why we 'starved' the Pacific war.  Germany was felt to be a much closer case.  It wasn't 'hindsight' or 'academic', it was the thinking of the 1941 American government/industrial complex.

The only real issue is the one that says the Japanese had to do this and made a reasonable gamble that an aggressive push against the US early would get the US out of the war.  A long war against a determined, violent Japan would discourage the US and cause them to sue for peace.  History has made it very and unambiguously clear that by 1941 the American government/industrial complex was already gearing up for the long war and was looking full time for a way to get into a war with Germany.  The only questions that are relevant are [1] Did Japan really have to go to war with the USA and [2] if they did, would bold, aggressive early actions get the USA to sue for peace?

So I'm left with my same three conclusions:

[1]  Really bad staff work by the Japanese military planners combined with a toxic command structure 'forced' Japan to conclusions that were not based on an understanding of the American people or readily available information about the war 'capacity' of the USA..

[2]  A Japanese 'peace at any price' policy might have worked but a war with the USA would never have a Japan favorable outcome.

[3]  "These discussions are interesting but so narrow as to be misleading.  The entire Midway exercise didn't matter, regardless of outcome."

Wonderduck: "... I won't apologize for being "too narrow" for someone's taste..."  I came to the Pond via a thread I noticed on Steven Den Beste's site.  I noticed the 'narrowness' because there were several different entries on Midway.  I decided to comment because I thought the conclusion was wrong and that a discussion would be interesting.  Nothing wrong with being narrow.  No reason to take the geopolitical big view.  Midway was an interesting battle for so many reasons.  Midway was an excellent example of the best of our military and people.  Midway was tactically significant and strategically significant to the military progression across the Pacific.

But it was NOT strategically important to the actual outcome of the war.  I thought the discussion on this site went a little too far on the importance of the Midway battle.  I note you have not been dissuaded from your view and I haven't changed mine either.  No change was expected.  The goal was an exchange of views and that has been achieved.  For me, very enjoyable.

Regards to all.

2 You can't really come to that conclusion, however.

War weariness did exist. It's easy to say "there were no circumstances under which the US would have accepted anything less than total victory and unconditional surrender", but that's plainly not true from contemporaneous records. This is one of the reasons we resorted to the atomic bomb; we anticipated a tremendous number of casualties in the invasion and we were worried that the public wouldn't support the war to a final conclusion.

Midway was extraordinarily costly for Japan. They lost the majority of their carrier fleet and carrier air arm in a single operation. Change the outcome to a Japanese victory, or even an inconclusive stalemate (say, the US carriers spot the battle fleet and work them over well instead of the Japanese carrier group), and the entire course of the war could have changed.

Does that mean the Japanese could have conquered Hawaii or Australia? Probably not. But having an experienced carrier group to contest several of the initial US invasions would absolutely have raised the casualty count and slowed down the US advance.

Sure, eventually we develop nuclear weapons. But we developed and deployed them at a time where we had virtually uncontested freedom to bomb the Japanese as we liked. But what if we hadn't gotten that far yet? If we were still working our way through the Philippines, if we hadn't taken the Marinaras? Even with nukes, our strategic outlook is quite different under those circumstances.

Would we have used nukes on otherwise-valueless islands to crush the Japanese resistance? You can make the case that we'd have done better turning Iwo Jima into a pile of radioactive glass, for example. You could even see the logic in nuking places like Rabaul or Truk, bases we didn't want to take on directly but didn't really need to occupy either. We might have ended up using as many as a few dozen nuclear weapons in the end, especially if you consider the chance of interception of the bomber, etc. That's a very different post-war Pacific.

Or would we resort to a Doolittle raid, with nukes? Surely we wouldn't have had the luxury to hit only one target, and it's not likely we'd have spared Tokyo under those circumstances.

3

To back what Avatar mentioned - as Richard Frank wrote in Downfall, there were people in the Administration whose job it was to monitor American sentiment and war weariness, among them Dean Acheson.  And they were detecting signs that the US public was becoming war weary by 1945.  It is a tribute to the Japanese's attack on Pearl Harbor it took that long to produce the effect, but the Administration was concerned that the Japanese strategy of 'outlasting' the US and the Allies in the Pacific War might actually had a chance of working.  Or perhaps just as bad, the Japanese would conclude it was working and thus stiffen their resistence.

Furthermore, as David Evans and Mark Peattie had pointed out in Kaigun, it was primarily because of the Japanese 'sneak attack' on Pearl Harbor that produced the psychological and motivational attitude among the American public for a total war to the finish, with the unconditional surrender of the enemy as the objective.  Had the war opened in a different fashion, perhaps by an attack on the Philippines following a formal declaration of war, it is highly unlikely that the US public would have been willing to fight for unconditional surrender - and more than likely that a large part of the American public would have called for immediate talks with the Japanese since the 'Philippines are not worth American blood!'

As for the assertion that the US government 'knew' the Japanese were going to lose - not quite.  The US government felt Germany was a more dangerous opponent than Japan and hence needed to be defeated first, but no one ever assumed either of them were eventually going to 'lose'.  We have the hindsight that says it is true - but nothing in the deliberation of both the US high command, or the debates among the Allied command suggest that until the end was in sight in either theater.

4 Bob, you're always welcome back, but next time?  PLEASE don't compose your comments in Word. 

Now then... "I noticed the narrowness because there were several different entries on Midway."  Yes, because that's what I'm interested in.  You wouldn't criticize a NASCAR blog for not writing about French cuisine, would you?  Of course not.

As far as the strategic importance of Midway goes, well, I've said ON THIS VERY BLOG that it wasn't the most important battle of the Pacific War, Guadalcanal was.  But saying that it wasn't strategically important to the outcome of the war is just silly.  If the results had been reversed, with the US losing three carriers and the IJN zero, (as opposed to 1 and 4 in reality), there's plenty of reason to believe the war would have taken much longer to prosecute.  Japan would still have lost, but not until 1946 or 1947, and it would have taken quite a few more nukes in the process.

That's important.

5 And fortunately I neglected to mention the fallacy that the US "knew Japan was going to lose."  CXT covered it nicely, didn't need my duplicate input at all.

There is a school of thought that a loss at Midway would have led to a postponement or outright cancellation of D-Day.  That's somewhat important... don'tcha think? 

6

There is a school of thought, both during the war and after it, that says D-Day and Normandy was an 'unnecessary' invasion - heck, the British kept pushing that idea until FDR let Stalin essentially shamed them into dropping it.  Make that what you will.

And regarding Avatar's point - B-36 bombardment groups, from Hawaii.

7 I'm not familiar with the B-36, I'm afraid.

I'd like to endorse Downfall as well. It's the best work I've ever read on the end of the Pacific war by a long way.

8 To feed off of cxt217's comment, I've been reading a lot of histories of the Eastern Front, and saying the outcome there was pre-determined is also a bit of a mistake.  A lot of the newer histories are drawing on previously-classified Soviet archives which indicate that through mid-1943 the situation was a lot more desperate than they were willing to let on, either at the time or in official Soviet post-war histories.  By the time of the battle of Berlin, the Soviets were also reaching their limits, and their operations changed from the carefully planned Bagration-style offensives to more of a frenzied 'lets just get this over with and throw everything in' final assault.

Of course Stalin wanted the Western allies engaged against Germany to draw German forces away from the front, and was disappointed in the level of support he felt he was receiving.  Even relatively minor distractions like Sicily had noticable cascading effects on German strength in the East.

9 The B-36 Peacemaker was the first true intercontinental bomber, designed in 1941 when it was looking grim for Britain.  It didn't fly until early August 1945, however.  Roughly twice the size of a B-29, as designed it used six radial pusher engines.  Eventually it also mounted four jets along with the radials.  Good article about it here.

I'll third the support for Downfall, though there's a new book by DM Giangreco that I've heard good things about, entitled Hell To Pay.  Same topic as Frank's book, I've been wanting a copy for the past year or so...

1 Helluva note, amigo.  Thanks for the explaination.

1 Thanks for the response!  I also read that the natural resources in the captured territories were insufficient to make up for the embargo from the US - and the Japanese knew it before they started the war.  If true, that meant not only did the Japaneses need for America to give up militarily within a year or two, but they also needed the US to "forgive and forget" and lift the trade embargo...

2

I don't know that this was really correct. It's true that they never did get the Indonesian oil fields up to the kind of production they really needed, but that wasn't foreseen before the war.

Their biggest problem was shipping, and not just because of the American submarine blockade. They handled their cargo ships suboptimally, because the Navy insisted on owning some of them and the Army did the same, and they didn't really coordinate their usage. So when the Army sent out ships full of troops and supplies to some region, they came back empty instead of bringing back raw materials. When ships were sent out to get raw materials, they went out empty. They could have substantially increased the efficiency of their cargo shipping if only the Army and Navy were more willing to cooperate.

3

It was not simply a misallocation of shipping.  Japan, despite having the third largest merchant fleet in the world in size, and the most modern and efficient in quality, did not have enough shipping under the Japanese flag to handle the traffic needed in peacetime, let alone the higher shipping requirements in war.  And this does not include the shipping needed for various campaigns (During the later days of the Guadalcanal campaign, the Imperial Army was pressing for major diversion of merchant shipping to support the campaign, despite being told to their face that such diversions were going cripple the overall war effort.) or the requisition of merchant ships for other purposes (Like conversions to escort carriers, minelayers, auxilary cruisers, etc.).

In fact, at the outbreak of the Pacific War, 60-75% of the Japanese merchant fleet had been requisitioned for direct use by the service or in the opening campaigns, leaving very little support the war effort as a whole.  For the tanker fleet, it was >80%.  No Allied planner would have dared being stupid enough do something anywhere like that.

4 These discussions are interesting but so narrow as to be misleading.  
The entire Midway exercise didn't matter...regardless of outcome.  The overall outcome was foreordained by the differential in GDP and the resulting delta in war production.  While I have some issue with specific entries, this web site is directionally correct ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II  . The war was decided on the size of the prewar industrial base and the ability to ramp.  The military efforts were heroic and certainly helpful, but the outcome was decided in the dull, boring (pick your term) factories of domestic USA.  The Japanese didn't have even two years...if not for the forced entry into the European conflict, Japan would have been finished years earlier.  
Japan could not have been certain of simultaneous entry of the US into the European conflict.  Any Japanese planning for a short war absent US involvement in Europe was idiocy even if only public source information was available.  Note the 1938-1941 difference in GDP between Japan and the USA.  The GDP impact is cumulative. 
Even if the US had been pushed back to continental US the outcome would have only been worse for the Japanese.  In this case, the wars human impact on the US population would have been quite modest and the resurgent economy (due to war production) would have made it 'easy' to stay the course.  Imagine a Japan in 1946 that owned the Pacific but was facing a US with long range bombers, scores of carriers and hundreds of nuclear weapons.  The post war period saw the development of 700 nuclear bombs by the end of 1950.  Imagine a wartime scale up of the nuclear production!  Forget Japanese cities....think of Japanese fleet or forward airbase survival in the face of a single bomb that only had to be somewhat close.
After 60 years we should be able to take a step back and understand what really happened.  And what was really important.

5

Bob, none of those things matter if the people of the rich country, or its leaders, don't have the guts to see the thing through.

The Japanese thought that was the case about the Americans. Even if you outproduce your enemy five to one, it still costs blood to win a war, and the Japanese thought that the Americans wouldn't be willing to shed enough blood to win.

That was their plan: after Pearl Harbor, to take and hold so much territory that the butcher's price of taking it back would be so high that the Americans would give up and make terms.

They weren't the first to make that mistake about America, and they weren't the last.

6

Everyone on the Japanese side thought the US would outproduce and outmass them if and when the Pacific War broke out.  Everyone.  You can argue they underestimated the production imbalance between the themselves and the US, but that is a different matter.

And barring the more extreme delusionists (Gerhard Weinberg in A World At War make for interesting reading on some of the more grandoise schemes of the Axis.), no Japanese thought it was possible to subjugate the US militarily - though quite a few Japanese recognize the US could do so to Japan.

Those were not the points.  The Japanese thought they could wear down the Americans' will to continue fighting, that the Americans, confronted with an invincible Germany on the other side of the world (And YES, the Japanese WERE assuming the Germans would play a role against the US - by knocking Britain and the Soviet Union without Japan having to do anything, if nothing else.) would come to terms with Japan that would leave the Japanese in control of a vastly larger empire.

7 I understand the assumption of foreign states of a lack of resolve by American citizens and an expectation of a US citizen desire to end any conflict early and at any cost.  I understand this because I see this assumption being made repeatedly over the centuries.  But, I also believe the foundation for these assumptions is not scholarship but simply wishful thinking.  Any review of American open source history should have warned them otherwise.
American history from the French & Indian War to modern day is a history of substantial citizen minorities acting with incredible violence over protracted time spans.  The American Revolution was a long war that was violent and resulted in a significant number of Americans being exiled from their homeland.  Modern warfare (WWI & WW2 style) was created by the American Civil War...violent, industrial, encompassing the whole of society, and with little quarter given.  If the Civil War was an example of American brother on brother violence, why would any foreign entity expect that the American reaction to foreign assault would be less violent and with less resolve.  It was a very indifferent citizenry that was dragged into WW1.  But still a speed and size of mobilization that was shocking even to the 'experienced' European warriors.  WW1 was a war without real passion on the part of the American citizen, but American history and politics clearly showed that an aroused citizen minority could hold a grudge for a very long time.  
While the Japanese right of passage on to the world stage was the war with Russia, could they not have not noticed the American crushing of a similarly waning power, Spain, with even less effort.  Could the Japanese not notice that the Depression crushed America, indifferent to foreign affairs, had the blue water navy that they were most concerned about?  In 1931 (Depression well underway), the Navy had 3 Carriers, 12 Battleships, 107 Cruisers/Destroyers, and 56 Submarines.  On December 7, 1941: 8 Carriers, 17 Battleships, 222 Cruisers/Destroyers and 112 Submarines.  ( http://goo.gl/9KAMi )  A Navy of this scope does not happen overnight, it is an activity that takes generations.  And the Navy of late 1941 was a product of an economically distressed country under a great measure of political upheaval.  It is worth noting that by late 1943 (only 2 years after Pearl Harbor), the US Navy size was greater than the combined fleets of all other countries on the planet.  Was their not a single Japanese analyst in the prewar period who could extrapolate existing shipbuilding capacity (1941) to a war time condition and determine that annual ship production was quickly going to be greater than the total Japanese 1941 fleet size.
In an open society there can be significant minorities that will protest for peace visibly and even irrationally.  American history shows that the 'war like' minority always holds sway and, while there can be noise, the ability of the American government to mobilize huge armed forces and the supporting industrial society for long periods and across varying economic conditions is always the case.  Perhaps our enemies are distracted by our discordant environment, something that doesn't exist in closed monolithic societies.  But it doesn't matter.  In matters of life and death, our enemies are under a societal obligation to develop the analytical resources that can see past the noise to the true conditions.  They never do and are doomed to make unfounded assumptions that cause their societies to collapse.  The information to make a correct assessment about American capacity and 'will' were in the open and available to the Japanese (Yamamoto knew).  The "Two Oceans Navy Bill" (July 1940) authorized 1.3MM tons of new warships, the 1939 Industrial Mobilization Plan gave the world notice of massive mobilization, in May 1940 the Office for Emergency Management and National Defense Advisory Commission were created to accelerate war planning, and in January 1941 things really started rolling with the new Office of Production management ---  years before open hostilities, the American society was years into a long term commitment to war.  All in the open.  For anyone to see.
It was over before it started.  Midway didn't matter.  The Japanese had many better options and would have likely pursued them had they had a rigorous analysis of the American reality, economic and strength of will.

8

You make a lot of good points, Bob, and we can agree to the preposition that any war started by Germany and Japan against the Allies was ultimately doomed to defeat (Though it was not apparent to all the participants at the time.).

But in many ways, it did not matter.  Both the Japanese and the Germans knew that once America entered the war, they would be outproduced - heck, the British outproduced Germany in ships, aircraft, and tanks by themselves.  And the Japanese were under no illusions about the possible size of the US Navy after the Two Ocean Navy bill/Stark Plan.

But it was the Japanese' consideration about whether the US had the will to fight them - especially with a victorious and apparently invincible Germany waging war against them at the same time - that represented their thinking.  That actually has some validity to it, since as Richard Franks pointed out in Guadalcanal, the Japanese had gotten a pretty sense of the domestic mood within the US in 1930s and 40s, including how the Selective Service was renewed by a margin of a single vote in the House.  Any doubts about both American and Western will to fight was shared, in private, by none other than Winston Churchill, following the fall of Singapore and Tobruk.  And the willingness of the Japanese to fight and die to literally the last man, and how that would impact American preceptions - that was what the Japanese expected before the war which did cause American concern during the war.

The huge productive advantage the US had is what caused the Japanese to plan on a short, decisive war of conquest before coming to terms with US - similar to how the mighty hosts of her surrounding enemies had caused two generations of the German General Staff to plan for a short, decisive war to knock out their opponents in sequence before they could be fully mobilized and act in concert.  Given the Japanese' apprisal of American opinion and the massive increase in US naval strength that was coming, that seemed a workable strategy to them.  The fact it was myopic is correct but in many ways, irrelevent. 

9 So the japanese believed they would win. What if Japan would never have attacked Pearl Harbor, what if they had left US alone and concentrated on carving a huge empire from China, Soviets and european colonial possessions? Would US have done anything? What could have been the triggering point?

10 The problem is that Japan wasn't completely independent of the US. They required significant shipments of raw materials, including a lot of scrap steel, in order to keep their economy going.

One of the triggers that prompted Pearl was the suspension of oil and steel exports to Japan in mid- to late 1941, in response to their continued invasion of China. Once they were in that position, they couldn't just coast along as they were; access to oil was absolutely required in order to continue with the military obligations they had and the civilian economy. So they had to get access to oil, and that either meant moving against SE Asia or backing down in China.

It's extremely questionable whether backing down in China was actually an option. Any civilian government that tried it without the military would have immediately been turfed out - the Japanese system required the army and the navy to provide a minister each, and they could undo a government by refusing to do so. On top of that, anyone who advocated such a policy would have been highly likely to be assassinated.

Could Japan JUST have attacked SE Asia without the US? Eh. It's not impossible. But if the US decided to make a point of it, it would have been easy to base the fleet at Manila, and there wasn't any way to run oil tanker convoys past a hostile Philippines. So they ran the risk of being pulled into war under circumstances that would have been much more favorable to the US, while still being at risk of getting fuel-choked at any time.

11 I intend to post a response to Bob tonight.  It will come as no surprise that I strongly disagree with his initial statements.

12

Avatar: I would argue that a Japan that avoided war with the US and only attacked British and Dutch interest would have gotten away with it, at least for a little while.  They had two domestic US factors going for them - the strongly isolationist mood of the US population at the time, and intention of FDR to go to war with Germany first while trying to maintain peace as long as possible with Japan.  A US public that saw the Japanese avoid attacking American interests (In the Philippines and elsewhere.) and avoid attacking Pearl Harbor, would not have been in a mood to declare war on a Japan that was overrunning Malaya and the Dutch East Indies.

Furthermore, the Philippines were not logistically prepared for a large American force to be based on - primarily because of its vulnerability to being attacked by the Japanese.  The ability of a December 1941 Pacific Fleet to do so was also questionable, given the priorities and allocations of forces to the Atlantic and against Germany - something that frustrated Husband Kimmel and his staff to no end.

13 cxt217 in #12 get's it exactly right.  By late 1941, the US had clearly decided that Germany was the opponent of choice.  A relatively small island nation that knew it's limitations would have seen a path to real victory as anything other than an attack on the US.  A treaty that limited China area conquests to Korea, Manchuria and northern China would have taken 'China' off the table and the American population would have lost total interest.  Since France and the Netherlands had been conquered by Germany, Japanese protection in force of these and also German assets in the pacific would have likely been welcomed.  Think of Japan assuming the role of a limited regional power that allowed the US and Britain to focus on the European/Mideast/Africa theaters.  Japan could have easily positioned itself as an ally.  An ally that would have been welcomed and whose activities to 'keep the neighborhood safe' would have been overlooked (think about treatment of Russia).  It would have taken generations to integrate the arc from Indonesia to Manchuria into a real East Asia co-prosperity sphere, by 1941 japan had conquered almost all it really needed to be strong for the next 100 years.  And it would have had some very appealing post war geopolitical considerations...a strong ally aligned against a weak China (likely communist) and a resurgent Russia.  A very different Pacific and maybe a very different world picture with Russia having a heavily militarized Japan on the ground in Asia just below the empty Siberia.

Avatar in #10's point about a base in Manila is a stretch.  A fleet would be hard to supply and Manila would be vulnerable to submarine blockage and air attack from Formosa.  Plus what cxt217 said in #12.  A smart Japan could publicize American attacks on still 'friendly' Japanese shipping and it would be extremely difficult for an America at war with Germany to get popular support for an attack on the Japanese fleet.  Again, the only thing Japan had to do was to go out of the way to NEVER declare war on the US and to never engage in a first strike.  Germany was at war with Britain for 2 years without the US stepping in as a declared partner of Britain.  Yes we defended convoys, took some aggressive actions in the Atlantic and beefed up western hemisphere defense but we did not engage Germany despite provocation.  Based on this example, why did Japan think the US would actively engage Japan in defense of Britain in the face of Japanese aggression against British conquests.  Just another case of bad analysis and bad thinking.

Again on Avatar #10, I think the issue of US oil and scrap steel export to Japan (or rather lack of export) was not really important.  Any war with the US would be the same as the export ban....nothing would come from the US to Japan with a state of war in place.  

But Avatar in #10 makes my case exactly when he states the very true statement that NO Japanese government would have survived a China retrenchment or likely any military stand down / stabilization.  The combination of an insular society, emperor worship and the blind desire for territorial conquest created the perfect storm to assure that all problems had the same answer of military expansion.  Post war documents clearly showed that Japan had no realistic plan to stop and that there was no real post war plan, plan to end hostilities or even to 'integrate' the conquests into a rational economic system.  True analysis and realistic selection of realistic options was not possible in the religious and political structure that was Japan.  The choices made were to recover from ethnic/societal slights and feed the military desire to acquire territory.  What other possible explanation could there be for so many bad strategic decisions.  It wasn't random bad luck.  Ari's point in #9 is so obvious, how could the smartest people in Japan 1941 missed that train of thought.


The linchpin of the discussion rests on two apparent thoughts about the American people by the Japanese leadership:  the Americans didn't have a stomach for a long war and they were too 'soft' to fight a determined enemy.  We know that these statements are not true but it is my contention that the Japanese could have determined this in 1941 from a careful reading of public source information and American history.  Their (the analysts) desire to support ethnic supremacy, their feeling that other societies were structurally inferior, and that they must provide analysis that supports the predetermined conclusions of the emperor and military caused the Japanese disaster known as WWII.  I won't repeat all of the prior points but I want to address some of the examples in #10.  A close vote on Selective Service was nothing compared to the draft riots of the civil war (which did not affect the conduct of that war).  Again, the American revolution and civil war showed conclusively that Americans would fight each other to the last man!  If Andersonville showed how Americans would treat their own, what lesson should Japan have taken away?  The American propensity for violence was in every newspaper every day....machine gun toting bank robbers, gangland wars in New York, Chicago and Detroit, UAW and other union organizing activity, veteran pension marches (and the government response), California efforts to restrict 'immigrants' from the mid west, ethnic violence on every group that ever migrated to the US in size (Irish, German, Italian, Jews, Chinese, etc.), and of course White on Black actions.  As all of this is compared to the relatively peaceful, very structured, very stable Japanese society, I can only ask: Exactly what information were the Japanese analysts missing?  A violent people that could hold grudges across many decades.

I do understand that casual viewing of dissent in American political life (and in America in general) could lead those with limited information and understanding to a conclusion that the American society could not be mobilized for war (despite what happened in the Spanish American War and the BUND rallies in the 30's).  I do understand that isolationist marches and vocal 'peace at any price' fringe groups could make an impression of weakness on the ill informed.  All white people look and act alike so yes, America should collapse like the French, Poles, Austrians, etc did in the face of German intensity (forgetting that Germans were also 'white').  And Roosevelt and his team didn't know about war and were only interested in the domestic economy.  And so on. BUT, the analysts and war planners are not supposed to be casual viewers of limited information.  These analysts were expected to be 'the best and brightest'!  They should have made the effort to learn and understand.  They had 2 decades and no externally imposed resource constraints...one less battleship in a 20 year period would have provided the funds to send hundreds of soon to be senior staffers to the US for a decade to learn about us.  Of course, the 'visitors' would be so contaminated by the US that they could never assume a senior analysis position in the Japanese hierarchy!

America is a noisy society with many components wanting isolation and peace at any price.  My belief is that America always has a range of opinion and it is a specific vocal minority that carries the day.  The guy's with the guns.  About 1/3 (an unsupportable guess) of America is deeply 'conservative' and they tend to run the important government agencies (Senate, State, Defense, local governments), banks, industry, religion, and the actual military.  While other minorities can have impacts on the edge and minorities overlap, there is a core to the US that has acted in a very predicable way (not necessarily right) since our founding.  We see it and others can as well (or should).

It wasn't Midway, just really bad staff work.  All the answers were available.  There were good choices to be made (from their view).  The only impediment was a closed mind.  Turns out to have been a pretty big impediment.

14

Bob, sorry but as much as you have some valid and good points - you are not going to win this argument.  Your argument about the Japanese' lack of looking at American history ignores that fact that it was very much the Present America and World of 1940-1941 that was the determining factor in Japan's (And Germany's, to a lesser extent.) decision to go to war, in so far it as the apparent lack of will in Americans to fight a war.  The Draft Riots of the Civil War are interesting for a Japanese examining American history - it is also largely irrelevent to determining whether Japan was going to war in 1941.  Much, if not most, of the American history you cite as being 'missed' by the Japanese were completely irrelevent to the deliberations at hand.

Also, if we are going to look at American history - how about the fact that Americans previously have seldom enjoy unanimus support in going to war?  There are been a large segment in almost every war (Barring WW2 - and that still did not prevent one congresswoman from voting against a declaration of war on Japan.) that believed their fellow Americans were making a grave mistake in going to war against whomever.  Sometimes this has led to more active anti-war efforts during the conflict.  That would seem to argue that the Japanese assessment of Americans might be correct?  Likewise, determining how European countries would react to Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, by the using the European history regarding the mood in August 1914 might a tad off.

It is important to read the other guy's history but you have to be careful reading significance into it.  Japan's defeat at Midway and in the Pacific War was the outcome of a whole host of factors, some of which no one could anticipate and some which could and should have been anticipated by the people of the time - but your overall position really is not one of them and, in my view, not supportable.

15 Sorry to hear that cxt217 in #14 thinks we are having an arguement....I really do think it is a discussion ;>)

I'm also a poor communicator...most of the comments in #14 I agree with and feel support my point of view!

The Civil War draft riots were brought up as a counterpoint to the comment about the Selective Service Act being passed by a single vote margin and how this shows a reluctant America...that by implication would 'freeze' aggressive action by the government.  The riots didn't and a single vote wouldn't.  I also think that other countries should look at the long history of a people.  Clearly much of France, to pick one example, has been and continues to be influenced by the French revolution, Napoleon, 1870, 1914 and of course WWII.  The distant past is important.  I believe this is true for most countries European, Asian, etc..and of course the USA.  

I'd ask (cxt217) why you think American history in general and my specific references to the violent nature of Americans in the 1930's doesn't serve as an indicator that Americans can be violent (and self organize for violence) and hold grudges for a long period.  As well as a multi year defense ramp up being well underway by 1941.  cxt217 says "...how about the fact that Americans previously have seldom enjoy unanimus support in going to war?..."  My point exactly!  With the possible exception of the Spanish American War (made unanimous by a 'sneak attack'!), the US had a long history of going to War with significant (perhaps majority) dissension.  How could the Japanese have missed this?

I'll respond to the third paragraph of #14 in a post on the next thread but my line of discussion is NOT about the Japanese defeat at Midway being "...the outcome of a whole host of factors...".  Of course it was.  My point was and is that the Battle of Midway, while heroic, was not really important in the outcome of the War.  And that with the perspective of 60 years after the fact, we should start to acknowledge this.

(Not having to do with this discussion, the cxt217 comment "... Likewise, determining how European countries would react to Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, by the using the European history regarding the mood in August 1914 might a tad off..." seems inappropriate on its face.  In 1914 Europe went to war on the basis of an assasination of a single person who wasn't really all that important.  So if Europe could go to war over a single death, why not a possibility over a single country?  Most historians weren't surprised...the exhaustion of WWI created the anomily of Austria and Czechoslovakia, not the other way around.)

16

First, I was error when referring to this as an 'argument' the way I did.  We are having a discussion - all parties are advancing their arguments (i.e. position.) in the discussion.

The point is that trying to read history as an example what a nation or a people will do later, can be dangerous if you put more significance than the part of history is worth.  Yes, America has gone to almost all its wars with large segments of the population dissenting (I would argue even the Spanish-American War qualifies, since there were a number of people, up and including William McKinley, who thought it was very bad idea.) and it has impair but not froze its action.  I suppose the Japanese could have read that as warning - but they could also read that any war in 1941 that involved the US would not be whole-heartedly supported by the people, and would have a major segment of the American population seek negotiations and peace as soon as possible, and that the peace movement who not freeze the effort - but it would impair so much that the US government would not able to concentrate its whole attention on the war and would spur the US (Especially faced with an invincible Germany too.) to seek peace with the Japanese.

Note that historically, the US has ended every war prior to 1941 except the Civil War with...a negotiated settlement.  And had the stalemate that persisted outside Richmond/Petersburg and Atlanta lasted longer in 1864, we might not have the exception either.  That would suggest to a Japanese studying American history that the US would eventually come to the negotiating table with Japan as equals to end the war - after all, Americans always become war weary and want it to end, one or another.

And the build-up of American military power prior to 1941 would have argued for Japan to wage a short, decisive war so everything could be settled before the US could bring its greater production to bear.  Actually, that is was brought up by the Japanese in the deliberations on the road to war - and before that as well, because they ALWAYS assumed the US would have the numerical advantage in the correlation of forces and productive capability.  And it is strikingly similar to a German General Staff that, understanding their neighbors had the ability to steamroller them when they finished mobilizing and acted in concert, planned to knock them out in sequence before that occurred.

Now, we know the Japanese were concentrating on the Present America and Present World of 1941 when considering going to war with the US.  Except for the US military build-up, very little else from American history was relevent to their decision making, though the war weariness/isolationism of the 1920s-1930s was certainly a factor.  But even if they did study American history more, it would not have supported your position.  No one, least of all me, will argue that past has no effect on the present, behavior or otherwise.  But you have to read it with the correct appreciation of its significance.

Finally, my comment about trying to predict the European reaction to the invasion of Poland in 1939 through the lens of a 1914 Europe was actually a callback to an observation by Barbara Tuchman in The Guns of August, where she mentioned that 1914 Europe seemed 'bored of peace' which led them to eagerly marched off to war.  You certainly can not say Europe was eager to go to war in 1939 - not even Germany - and thus you can not use that past to explain the present.  Those are hardly all the reasons for either war, but it does show that care needs to be taken when examining the events of the present through the filter of the past.

And yes, Midway was important - the Japanese defeat meant the initiative was knocked out of their hands and into the air for anyone to try to grab it.  That the Allies only grabbed it when they started the Guadalcanal Campagin does not reduces the importance of Midway.

All other commets will go in Wonderduck's post on the subject.

 

1

The other big problem with the Buffalo seems to be Brewster's inability to produce enough of them fast enough.  That meant a lot of the incremental improvements that occurred with other aircraft models produced during WW2 (Which often saw considerable improvements in performance in total.) never happened, because the production run never lasted long enough to do so, even after all the changes insisted by the services using them.

The other big problem which was not exclusive to the Buffalo was that you could not fight the A6M in the kind of low speed, low altitude turning fight it was designed for and which the IJN pilots were trained in.  As other pilots learned, you had to fight outside the Zero's performance envelope to engage it on equal footing.  The US Navy had started to learn to do so by Midway, the Marine Corps pilots had not.  That was true of aircraft with superior handling and performances - the first fighter wing of Spitfires that fought the Zero found this out the hard way, even though the Spitfire was a high performance fighter and the pilots who flew them were very experienced (Most of them were Battle of Britain veterans.).

2 Surprisingly, the F2A as originally designed probably could have fought in the horizontal, low-speed dogfight the Zero excelled in.  True, it was slower by about 20mph, but it would have been nearly as nimble.  It would have been outclassed in climb, but it exchange it would have had a better rate of dive.  It would have been about even with the Ki-43 (perhaps better known as the "Oscar", or the Imperial Japanese Army's main fighter plane).

But without armor or self-sealing fuel tanks, it would have been nearly as fragile as the Zero itself... and outgunned and outranged to boot.  I doubt the American pilots would have stood for it.

3 Now that the discussion has started, it makes me what to get out my copy of The First Team and re-read it to see if John Lundstrom had anything about the F2A.

1 Assuming that the Japanese had succeeded in taking Midway, did they have any plans to actually use it, such as for land-based bombing of Pearl harbor?  Or was it intended solely as bait to lure the US carriers out and sink them?

2

I was ready to respond to that question, but I should wait for Wonderduck's own post.

So I will.

3

From everything that I have read, which includes Tony Tully and John Parshall's Broken Sword, the Japanese did not have any plans for using Midway as a base to launch air attacks on Hawaii.  In point of fact, they did not have much idea on what to do with Midway after they had captured it.

Also, it is questionable just how many aircraft could have been based from Midway, especially larger ones.  IIRC, what the Americans actually had on Midway was essentially everything they could squeeze onto the island.

4 Well, I just posted my answer at my own blog.

5 Is there actually any plausible way for the japanese to win the war in Pacific?

6

"Is there actually any plausible way for the japanese to win the war in Pacific?"

Only if U.S. leadership folded which wasn't ever going to happen given the sneak attack on Pearl.  To emphasize how foolish the Japanese were was that only 1/3 of America's production was used against the Japanese.  Two thirds was for the Germans which were rightly perceived as the greater threat.

The Japanese war plan can be summerized as:

1. Attack Pearl Harbor.
2. ??
3. World domination.