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Rincewinds posted:The only Clancy book I have read is The Bear and the Dragon 10 years ago, and it turned me off Clancy as a writer. I enjoy most of the movies that are inspired by him, and I may just had bad luck in what book I started with but I could not take him serious after reading an entire book about how american technology can beat anything and yet China lose badly against old russian tanks converted to fortified positions. It was like reading an american 80s war movie converted to book form. One of his non-fiction works was about Desert Storm / Desert Shield, and I came to understand that he probably figured every future war would turn out like that, especially as the US gets smarter and smarter bombs.
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Jan 22, 2015 16:59
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100 Years Ago This is going to take a moment. Here's a quick link to today's entry. It's a bit of a departure from the usual routine, so: The last 15 years or so have seen a growing contingent of historians who are trying to re-evaluate the First World War and its context. I've referred to the conclusions they often end up with, possibly slightly unfairly, as the Sheffield-Gove view, after its most prominent member, Dr Gary Sheffield, and the oiky politician who more recently brought revisionist thinking to a wide audience. I like a lot of what's been done by revisionists. There's a lot of extremely useful research been done by them, on all kinds of subjects. Addressing myths like "the blokes spent years in the firing line", "we shot thousands for cowardice", "the generals were all morons who learned nothing in four years", "the Somme was a complete disaster", the list of things is as long as your arm. Unquestionably, a lot of their work puts the war in a more nuanced and interesting light. (Sheffield's book Forgotten Victory is the quickest, cheapest, most widely-available revisionist text - all the major themes are in there.) And then they start talking about what it was all for. For some reason, revisionists have this urge to show that going to war was the morally right thing to do, and that Britain in particular faced the same kind of existential threat that had to be combated. Sheffield's Grauniad piece prefers to refer to "Britain", in rather the same way that "England" was widely used in 1915 to stand for either the UK or the Empire as a whole. It's extremely telling that his only reference to the Empire is as "Britain and its empire", as though the Empire were some gauche black-sheep distant Took cousin to Britain's respectable, reasonable Baggins family. Of course, he's happy to talk about the aggressive, militaristic, expansionist policies of the German Empire, without speculating how they might have come about in the first place... So this is why today's entry is about Malawian national hero John Chilembwe (he's on their money), who is just about to lead an uprising against the white settlers in (as-was) Nyasaland. It's also about some of the features of British Empire rule in Nyasaland that have brought him to this point. Spoilers: there isn't much liberal democracy to be found here.
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Jan 22, 2015 17:23
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gradenko_2000 posted:One of his non-fiction works was about Desert Storm / Desert Shield, and I came to understand that he probably figured every future war would turn out like that, especially as the US gets smarter and smarter bombs. I remember when his name on a vidja was mark of quality, at least in sense of gameplay and guns. Then HAWX, Las Vegas and GRAW (2?) happened and it got really silly. I watched the goon LP of the last Ghost Recon game and drat it's different/silly. EDIT: Of, and about Germans defending their fatherland in Fury: they need to defend it because they invaded everyone else and lost. So it's not a noble defense in war that was brought upon them without provocation. It's about this point where Hey Gal posts something about mercenary shenanigans and/or pants.
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Jan 22, 2015 18:07
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Raenir Salazar posted:He's not terrible, lets be objective here, he's a flawed writer that until the most recent books his characters essentially serve as walking camera's for his alternate timeline; which to be fair is essentially the reason for reading alternate history in the first place. We had a What If we wanted to read about, and he delivers. That's a fair assessment. But I'd say my biggest issue is not with his writing style itself - I wanted to read that kind of thing when I read The Guns of the South - but that it's so repetitive. He has nuclear physicists and Nazi officers and 19th century farmers who all speak in the same way and use the same idioms, and while it may not have been noticeable for the first book, it became obvious what was going on after I had read a few. I wouldn't recommend reading a pile of his books, but The Guns of the South and some of the short stories, particularly The Road Not Taken, are worth it.
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Jan 22, 2015 18:17
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Chamale posted:I wouldn't recommend reading a pile of his books, but The Guns of the South and some of the short stories, particularly The Road Not Taken, are worth it. The joy of reading is in the writing, so yeah, I'd avoid almost everything he ever did (and Clancy and Ludlum too). But his short story collection is pretty good, as the power of his concepts can salvage his writing over the short-term. He has some fun ideas in there, fun enough that you don't notice how kind of meh the writing is before it's over and you're on to the next interesting concept.
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Jan 22, 2015 18:33
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JcDent posted:I remember when his name on a vidja was mark of quality, at least in sense of gameplay and guns. Then HAWX, Las Vegas and GRAW (2?) happened and it got really silly.
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Jan 22, 2015 18:39
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I'd love to know more about why the Japanese navy seemed to do so badly against the USN in WW2. The only thing I know right now is that we could build way more things than they could, and our technology base (at least in terms of carrier fighters) seems to have gotten much better than theirs during the war. Feel free to point me back in the thread, but with multiple hundreds of pages it'll take me awhile to catch up.
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Jan 22, 2015 18:56
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Chamale posted:That's a fair assessment. But I'd say my biggest issue is not with his writing style itself - I wanted to read that kind of thing when I read The Guns of the South - but that it's so repetitive. He has nuclear physicists and Nazi officers and 19th century farmers who all speak in the same way and use the same idioms, and while it may not have been noticeable for the first book, it became obvious what was going on after I had read a few. I wouldn't recommend reading a pile of his books, but The Guns of the South and some of the short stories, particularly The Road Not Taken, are worth it. He does get better at this. Characters in his newer books like the War that Came Early series tend to have a more fully realized voice and narrative style to their passages that distinguishes them from each other. The best Turtledove book is The Misplaced Legion, his first book. He is a Byzantine historian so the details are better than his other works, and while this bogs down the later Videssos books pretty badly the central conceit of the first book, one of Caesar's legions warping to fantasy Byzantium, keeps it entertaining. It's just from the perspective of one dude so it even has room for narrative. The Guns of the South is pretty bad in my opinion even by Turtledove standards. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 19:04
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SquadronROE posted:I'd love to know more about why the Japanese navy seemed to do so badly against the USN in WW2. The only thing I know right now is that we could build way more things than they could, and our technology base (at least in terms of carrier fighters) seems to have gotten much better than theirs during the war. Feel free to point me back in the thread, but with multiple hundreds of pages it'll take me awhile to catch up. Radar was a big thing, doctrine and training was another. It's not much of an over exaggeration to say that a converted Great Lakes steamer was a significant contributor to the USN's victories. quote:Together, Wolverine and Sable trained 17,820 pilots in 116,000 carrier landings. Of these, 65,000 landings were on Wolverine alone
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Jan 22, 2015 19:08
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Chamale posted:That's a fair assessment. But I'd say my biggest issue is not with his writing style itself - I wanted to read that kind of thing when I read The Guns of the South - but that it's so repetitive. He has nuclear physicists and Nazi officers and 19th century farmers who all speak in the same way and use the same idioms, and while it may not have been noticeable for the first book, it became obvious what was going on after I had read a few. I wouldn't recommend reading a pile of his books, but The Guns of the South and some of the short stories, particularly The Road Not Taken, are worth it. He resolved some of that in the Featherstone series, but that doesn't make them good books. It is an interesting thought exercise to think of how Southern and Northern dialects/accents would diverge in that type of scenario, but he doesn't really go too deep into it, just a couple references here and there to how they sounded weird to each other and the Southerners said "shitfire" and "damnyankee" a lot and called tanks tanks, the North called them barrels but didn't say shitfire or damnyankee. I guess the most interesting part of those books is taking the incremental justifications for Nazi atrocities and applying that incrementalism to Southern slavery-focused social thought. That doesn't require the books though and that's an important difference.
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Jan 22, 2015 19:15
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SquadronROE posted:I'd love to know more about why the Japanese navy seemed to do so badly against the USN in WW2. The only thing I know right now is that we could build way more things than they could, and our technology base (at least in terms of carrier fighters) seems to have gotten much better than theirs during the war. Feel free to point me back in the thread, but with multiple hundreds of pages it'll take me awhile to catch up. Shattered Sword, though about Midway, does a good job of covering some of the institutional failures in the Japanese Navy, like miserable damage control and the like. Their terrible anti-sub doctrine is also notable, since it was responsible for their fuel and materials shortage later in the war which only exacerbated their weaknesses. But it's important to note that their navy, as separated from its air component, really didn't do that bad against the Americans. Sure, they lost overall, but in surface engagements they did very well. It's just that the war became an air-based war, so that once the Americans established carrier, aircraft, and pilot supremacy Japanese skills could rarely be felt, because surface ships would almost never get close enough to engage. That the Americans began to come out on top after a couple of years of attritional wafrare is only natural considering their superior resource base. Nor does the fact that the Americans eventually had better aircraft, and more carriers, and better pilots reflect poorly on Japanese naval skill. Savo Island is a good display of that skill. If you follow the Pacific Campaign through to late 1942 you see a lot of American losses (after Santa Cruz in October 1942 the Enterprise was the only American fleet carrier left in the Pacific, and damaged at that). Xotl fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 19:15
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The USN submarine fleet sinking 5+ million tons of Japanese shipping probably doesn't get enough credit for bringing Japanese industry (and thus Japanese ability to maintain a war footing) to a halt. If you want to have a sprawling empire spread across half the pacific you need a lot of merchant shipping to keep the wheels moving.
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Jan 22, 2015 19:47
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SquadronROE posted:I'd love to know more about why the Japanese navy seemed to do so badly against the USN in WW2. The only thing I know right now is that we could build way more things than they could, and our technology base (at least in terms of carrier fighters) seems to have gotten much better than theirs during the war. Feel free to point me back in the thread, but with multiple hundreds of pages it'll take me awhile to catch up. Certainly economics were the main factor. Even during the Depression era, America's national income was 17 times that of Japan's, while its warmaking potential was 7 times as great. During the war, that disparity only increased as US production ramped up, assisted by new mass production techniques. In 1942 alone, the US built more merchant ships than Japan built during the entire war; in 1943 alone, the US built more airplanes than Japan built during the entire war. It's important to note that Japan's merchant marine was inadequate from the very start of the war, as it relied on foreign vessels for a lot of its needs, which were obviously lost as soon as it declared war. The supply situation worsened for Japan as American submarines and mines whittled down Japanese shipping, practically starving out Japanese war industry by 1945. The US also outstripped Japan in human capital. The American population was about twice that of Japan, and the average American was more likely to be functionally literate and to have experience with guns and machines. These advantages were magnified by a training apparatus that simply put out more qualified people. The Japanese purposely washed out most aircraft cadets--resulting in an air corps that was highly elite, but very small, and not easily replaced. Accordingly, the losses at Midway and over the course of the Guadalcanal campaign left Japan sending complete greenhorns into the air. The USN had no such problem, because experienced pilots were rotated back home to train more pilots, rather than being kept in combat until they became casualties. A similar attitude, getting as many people qualified as possible, characterized the two forces' approach to damage control--firefighting, counterflooding, and other acts to save a damaged ship. While the IJN only trained a dedicated crew in damage control, the USN taught every sailor damage control measures. This allowed USN ships (e.g. the Franklin) to bounce back from damage that the Japanese would have considered a total loss (e.g. Akagi.) Another problem was in the IJN's command structure. The rivalry between the IJ Navy and Army was ferocious and deep-seated, and made it extremely difficult to plan effectively. The IJA could effectively veto any IJN amphibious operation by withholding landing forces--indeed, thread favorite Shattered Sword explains how the IJA concealed its actual strength from the IJN in order to retain some political leverage. The book also discusses how interservice rivalry contributed, among other things, to the IJN's failure at Midway: the IJN split up its powerful carrier force, Kidou Butai, sending two carriers to Port Moresby as a paean to the Army's aims. The resulting battle left the carriers unable to participate in Midway (Shoukaku was damaged and Zuikaku lost too many planes), so the IJN was seriously understrength going into the Midway invasion. Another result of the Army/Navy split was duplicative effort: the two services refused to share their technology with each other, going so far as developing their own radar systems independently. This wasted time, resources, etc. at a moment when Japan had none of these things to waste. The USN's advantage was not only in quantity, but increasingly in quality as well. While the Japanese led the US in things like traditional optics and torpedoes, the US had better anti-aircraft guns, better radar, and eventually better planes. With a combination of effective fire-control computers and radar-fused shells, US ships consistently took heavy tolls on Japanese planes--by war's end, the only way IJN aviators could realistically inflict damage on an American task force was through kamikaze tactics. American radar also negated Japan's advantage in night fighting--contrast Savo Island in 1942 with Surigao Strait in 1944. Another important advantage the USN enjoyed was in signals intelligence and traffic analysis. The Americans had broken the IJN's main code by 1942. Although they were not able to decipher every communication they intercepted, the Americans became adept at identifying the sender of a given message (traffic analysis), allowing them to place a particular ship at a given place at a given time. Those are just a few of the factors that caused the IJN's defeat. The quick and dirty of it is that the IJN was simply not prepared to fight a long war of attrition. They expected the Americans to break after a single decisive battle, like the Russians at Tsushima Straits. You can find some counterfactual speculation out there about whether Japan could have kept the US out of the war if it had left American holdings in the Philippines alone, or if Japan could have fought and won a limited war with the US if it had not attacked Pearl Harbor. I've probably missed a lot in this summary, so pick up Shattered Sword if you'd like to learn more! Bro Enlai fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 19:50
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Given all their disadvantages the Japanese didn't actually do that badly for the start of the war, I thought. It was just that once the US finally got a good knockout punch in, they weren't gonna get back up again.
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Jan 22, 2015 20:14
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On a side note for anyone doing googling about IJN ships, thanks to Kancolle it never stops being funny having your google images preview pop up with a black and white picture of the actual ship and then anime shipgirls filling out the rest of the spots.
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Jan 22, 2015 20:19
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Fangz posted:Given all their disadvantages the Japanese didn't actually do that badly for the start of the war, I thought. It was just that once the US finally got a good knockout punch in, they weren't gonna get back up again. That's a fair assessment. Japan had the Allies very much on the run during the first few months of the war--the Centrifugal Offensive conquered enormous swaths of territory (admittedly mostly ocean) very rapidly and with minimal losses, while Kidou Butai decisively defeated British carriers in the Indian Ocean Raid. The IJN was the first naval power to combine multiple flight decks in highly coordinated strikes, and nobody really knew how to deal with the strategic threat of ~400 planes who could appear and disappear as they pleased. It's no coincidence that up until Coral Sea--when the IJN split up Kidou Butai--the IJN never suffered a serious operational setback. The four fleet carriers lost at Midway were essentially irreplaceable--no new fleet carriers were scheduled to arrive until Taihou in 1944. (For comparison, the USN already had twelve Essex-class carriers underway, which began to arrive as early as mid-1943.) Midway was not the end for the IJN, but it permanently deprived them of the initiative. Without the combined striking power of Kidou Butai, the USN was no longer forced to plan around the threat of a massed carrier attack--and the IJN was no longer free to dictate the pace of combat in the Pacific Theater. The loss at Midway opened the door for the ruinous Guadalcanal campaign, as the Japanese were not willing or able to oppose the American landings in the absence of their own carrier-based air support. At Savo Island, for example, the IJN crushed the Allied cruisers, but didn't go for the transports because they feared that US planes would attack if they stayed to make good their victory. This allowed the Americans to land and establish a foothold on Guadalcanal. Bro Enlai fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 20:43
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So, Kantai Kessen doctrine is a valid doctrine then? Just that Midway was the decisive battle, not Pearl Harbor... e: Kantai Kessen was focused on battleships, not carriers so this isn't a serious post. e2: Reading up on it more the theory that originated Kantai Kessen: "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kantai_Kessen" posted:Mahan believed that control of seaborne commerce was critical to domination in war. If one combatant could manage to deny the use of the sea to the other, the others' economy would inevitably collapse, leading to victory. Mahan's theory relied on the use of a fleet of battleships to establish command of the sea. The Mahanian objective was to build a fleet capable of destroying the enemy's main force in a single decisive battle. After this victory was won, it would be easy to enforce a blockade against the enemy. Except that it seems Japan got too focused on the battleship part and not so much on the 'deny commerce' part. In 1890 when the book was written, yeah, you would have to use battleships but battleships weren't the actual point just a mechanism. AFAIK Japan never addressed the 'deny the use of the sea' part of the concept. Murgos fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 20:54
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Murgos posted:So, Kantai Kessen is a valid doctrine then? Just that Midway was the decisive battle, not Pearl Harbor... Shattered Sword has a much more in-depth treatment of this question, but yes, the IJN thought about it that way. Between Midway and the Aleutians, they committed pretty much all of their assets--albeit too far apart to support each other. The aim was to draw out and defeat the USN's carrier force, giving the IJN a free hand in the Pacific until the Essexes started to come online. However, Midway was not decisive in the sense that the IJN was wiped out--only five ships were lost, though four of those were extremely important ones. Nor was it decisive in the sense that it resolved the outcome of the war--the American victory was all but preordained from Pearl Harbor on.
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Jan 22, 2015 21:00
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Yeah. Essentially Japan had no way to win. Hitler winning was like a one in a million shot, Tojo winning was just a fat 0 zero % chance.
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Jan 22, 2015 21:05
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Disinterested posted:Yeah. Essentially Japan had no way to win. Hitler winning was like a one in a million shot, Tojo winning was just a fat 0 zero % chance. The more I read about the war the less I agree with this. Their position was a lot like that of the CSA during the Civil War: "winning" for Japan was just getting the Allies to leave them alone to do their thing in the Pacific. They didn't have to invade the continental US and plant a flag on the White House lawn, they just had to get their opponents decide it was too much trouble to win. Had they won a couple more substantial victories and effectively eliminated the Allied naval presence in the Pacific I feel like some serious thought would have been given to negotiating.
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Jan 22, 2015 21:23
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bewbies posted:The more I read about the war the less I agree with this. Their position was a lot like that of the CSA during the Civil War: "winning" for Japan was just getting the Allies to leave them alone to do their thing in the Pacific. They didn't have to invade the continental US and plant a flag on the White House lawn, they just had to get their opponents decide it was too much trouble to win. Had they won a couple more substantial victories and effectively eliminated the Allied naval presence in the Pacific I feel like some serious thought would have been given to negotiating. That's all well and good from a Japanese perspective, but once you poo poo on Hitler in Europe you have an enormous machine ready to turn on Hirohito. Maybe your argument would be more effective in a scenario where Hitler applies even more pressure as well.
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Jan 22, 2015 21:25
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bewbies posted:The more I read about the war the less I agree with this. Their position was a lot like that of the CSA during the Civil War: "winning" for Japan was just getting the Allies to leave them alone to do their thing in the Pacific. They didn't have to invade the continental US and plant a flag on the White House lawn, they just had to get their opponents decide it was too much trouble to win. Had they won a couple more substantial victories and effectively eliminated the Allied naval presence in the Pacific I feel like some serious thought would have been given to negotiating. Really, you could argue that Yamamoto's insistence on pursuing the Pearl Harbor raid was what doomed Japan, by wrecking their initial strategy, forcing them into a series of improvisations, and seriously bolstering American political will to fight.
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Jan 22, 2015 21:30
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Did the Allies know that they were heading towards a huge material advantage? Was there a sense of "we're going them in Essex carriers just you wait" in planning Allied strategy? That's something I've never really been able to determine from my readings EDIT: Thinking about it maybe not, because Halsey still thought that the Japanese carrier fleet was a credible threat all the way to the Battle of Cape Engano. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 21:30
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gradenko_2000 posted:Did the Allies know that they were heading towards a huge material advantage? Was there a sense of "we're going them in Essex carriers just you wait" in planning Allied strategy? That's something I've never really been able to determine from my readings I'm not sure about the Japanese, but the production capabilities of the Germans was massively overestimated, especially in terms of aircraft. The monstrously huge American aircraft production plans were inspired by the idea that the Germans were producing many more aircraft than they actually were, meaning the US had to build that many more to defeat them.
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Jan 22, 2015 21:34
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bewbies posted:The more I read about the war the less I agree with this. Their position was a lot like that of the CSA during the Civil War: "winning" for Japan was just getting the Allies to leave them alone to do their thing in the Pacific. They didn't have to invade the continental US and plant a flag on the White House lawn, they just had to get their opponents decide it was too much trouble to win. Had they won a couple more substantial victories and effectively eliminated the Allied naval presence in the Pacific I feel like some serious thought would have been given to negotiating. The problem for the Japanese is their dependence on trade, especially by sea. There's a pretty strong faction in the War Plan Orange story that was all in favor of a big national siege, and I'm kind of dubious the US would've lost the stomach for that. I'm pretty sure B-36s could reach Japan from Hawaii, would they be able to mine harbors at that kind of range? That was brutally effective and really added to the damage the subs were doing.
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Jan 22, 2015 22:19
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Speaking of submarine forces, how'd the Royal Navy submarines do in the 2nd World War? And be honest, don't sugar coat it.
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Jan 22, 2015 22:30
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SeanBeansShako posted:Speaking of submarine forces, how'd the Royal Navy submarines do in the 2nd World War? I think they were resoundingly decent. Also got the only sub vs sub kill where both were submerged of the war.
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Jan 22, 2015 22:33
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xthetenth posted:I think they were resoundingly decent. Also got the only sub vs sub kill where both were submerged of the war. Hurray, nice to hear my country did some cool things with submarines after all. Oddly enough, all you ever hear about Brit WW2 subs are a few nasty accidents that lead to them sinking.
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Jan 22, 2015 22:39
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Speaking of Mahan, I'm currently reading The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. It's fairly interesting so far, and it's pretty funny to see how every other paragraph basically goes "Gosh, America, maybe you should take a few lessons from history and build yourself a goddamn navy already, jeez, are you guys thick or what?" That said, I'm curious about how Mahan holds up today. Does anybody know how modern naval thinkers view Mahan's theories? Which of his thoughts have been discarded as being obsolete, and which are still considered valid today?
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Jan 22, 2015 22:42
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SeanBeansShako posted:Hurray, nice to hear my country did some cool things with submarines after all. Oddly enough, all you ever hear about Brit WW2 subs are a few nasty accidents that lead to them sinking. Oh, also look up the HMS seraph, I believe. I believe she's the one that did a bunch of cool stuff including getting a makeover to have high underwater speed to let ASW units train before the firs elektroboots came out.
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Jan 22, 2015 22:45
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gradenko_2000 posted:Did the Allies know that they were heading towards a huge material advantage? Was there a sense of "we're going them in Essex carriers just you wait" in planning Allied strategy? That's something I've never really been able to determine from my readings Didn't they start deliberately throttling back on production in '44 and '45? That would imply that the US thought it had things in the bag from a ship production point of view at least.
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Jan 22, 2015 23:09
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Disinterested posted:That's all well and good from a Japanese perspective, but once you poo poo on Hitler in Europe you have an enormous machine ready to turn on Hirohito. Maybe your argument would be more effective in a scenario where Hitler applies even more pressure as well. Well, the American will to war was untested at this point. Why should Americans fight and die for these far off places? If an isolationist had been in charge instead of FDR, maybe their calculation could have been correct.
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Jan 22, 2015 23:17
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Talking about WWII navies, did the Royal Dutch Navy do anything of note? I know it had a disastrous loss during the battle of the Java sea, but beyond not much.
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Jan 22, 2015 23:26
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Fangz posted:Well, the American will to war was untested at this point. Why should Americans fight and die for these far off places? If an isolationist had been in charge instead of FDR, maybe their calculation could have been correct. I too agree that if history had been different, history would have been different. If you change any wide set of perameters you can change the result. Why not say 'maybe if Japan had begun its process of industrialisation 10 years earlier because of xyz?'. In the end it gets you nowhere.
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Jan 22, 2015 23:27
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SeanBeansShako posted:Hurray, nice to hear my country did some cool things with submarines after all. Oddly enough, all you ever hear about Brit WW2 subs are a few nasty accidents that lead to them sinking. There wasn't really any maritime commerce for them to attack. re: Japan. The problem they have is that the US has a giant unsinkable staging point right in the middle of the Pacific from which it can launch attacks at-will anywhere in the Pacific perimeter, which means never being able to present their conquests as a fait accompli. The best they can hope for is to catch all 4 carriers at Pearl Harbour and sink them, at which point they get a full year to rampage the Pacific effectively uncontested. The Battle of the Solomons and Midway don't happen, so Australia gets put under a ton of pressure. Ultimately you end up with a longer, more bloody war as the US has to attack through a much more entrenched Japanese Empire.
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Jan 22, 2015 23:32
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All of this just forgets the fact that when Hitler's finished the Sovs and the Brits are going to turn up, and either way the A-bomb research is ongoing. Nothing can save Japan from the former, let alone the latter.
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Jan 22, 2015 23:35
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bewbies posted:The more I read about the war the less I agree with this. Their position was a lot like that of the CSA during the Civil War: "winning" for Japan was just getting the Allies to leave them alone to do their thing in the Pacific. They didn't have to invade the continental US and plant a flag on the White House lawn, they just had to get their opponents decide it was too much trouble to win. Had they won a couple more substantial victories and effectively eliminated the Allied naval presence in the Pacific I feel like some serious thought would have been given to negotiating. The US public would have never tolerated a detrimental peace with Japan. gradenko_2000 posted:Did the Allies know that they were heading towards a huge material advantage? Was there a sense of "we're going them in Essex carriers just you wait" in planning Allied strategy? That's something I've never really been able to determine from my readings The US knew they had a huge industrial advantage over the Japanese. Part of the reason why Midway played out the way it was was because the US Admirals wanted to force an engagement with the Japanese, not that they had to be drawn out as the Japanese thought. Taerkar fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 23:53
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Bro Enlai posted:Certainly economics were the main factor. Even during the Depression era, America's national income was 17 times that of Japan's, while its warmaking potential was 7 times as great. During the war, that disparity only increased as US production ramped up, assisted by new mass production techniques. In 1942 alone, the US built more merchant ships than Japan built during the entire war; in 1943 alone, the US built more airplanes than Japan built during the entire war. It's important to note that Japan's merchant marine was inadequate from the very start of the war, as it relied on foreign vessels for a lot of its needs, which were obviously lost as soon as it declared war. The supply situation worsened for Japan as American submarines and mines whittled down Japanese shipping, practically starving out Japanese war industry by 1945. Really good synopsis here, thanks. I think I might pick up that book too. The entire idea that things like damage control played so well into the overall war effort (and approaches to training) is something I had never considered. I suppose it's simply because I've always focused more on the Air Force side of things than the Navy, because now that I think about it dishing out and receiving damage are the two most basic things ships do. Well, and transport things across water obviously, but you could argue that a Battleship is just a really fancy gun carrier with some armor.
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Jan 23, 2015 00:38
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The Akagi took a bomb hit and a near miss and died of it, cutting the Japanese strike to one carrier. The Yorktown ate three bombs and the Japanese thought she was out of the fight. She was able to do 20 knots and launch planes by the time the next wave came. She took two torpedoes and after a night unattended was in shape that they were doing a good job of salvaging her. It took two more torpedoes and a destroyer load of depth charges in close proximity to sink her. Between the Yorktown, the Hornet and the Enterprise absorbing hits like champs, the US probably lost one less carrier than the Japanese would have at both Midway and Santa Cruz.
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Jan 23, 2015 01:00
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Effectronica posted:Really, you could argue that Yamamoto's insistence on pursuing the Pearl Harbor raid was what doomed Japan, by wrecking their initial strategy, forcing them into a series of improvisations, and seriously bolstering American political will to fight. Very true; it was a high risk strategy that seemed to pay off big but ultimately backfired badly. Had the Japanese had just taken Singapore/Philippines and then forced the USN to fight a decisive battle on their end of the Pacific I think that 1) the American public wouldn't have been nearly so enthusiastic to pursue a war with Japan and 2) they'd have had a much better chance of winning a major battle or two.
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Jan 23, 2015 01:00
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