rantAK posted:

How is he doing vs. historical performance in pilot pools/experience?
Is he on "track" to lose 10k pilots by then end of year?

quote:

Should hostilities once break out between Japan and the United States, it would not be enough that we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco. To make victory certain, we would have to march into Washington and dictate the terms of peace in the White House.

Ikasuhito posted:

Yeah, a really short one where they give the Allies a few lumps that bring them to the negotiating table.

RZApublican posted:

Hilariously this was also Italy's plan, and depending on how you look at it, Germany's as well.

Leperflesh posted:

We laugh now, but at the time that was sort of how a lot of wars had been going, though. You fought for a while, traded colony holdings and maybe some other more important territory, and then came to the table and negotiated. WWI had also happened, but the same things kind of happened there, too. The Japanese were not totally off-base in thinking the principle could apply to the US and its allies with regards to the southeast-asian colonies and holdings, too. I mean obviously they were wrong, but it wasn't just this wildly unfounded idea they'd cooked up out of nowhere.

quote:

On 5 June, Mussolini told Badoglio, "I only need a few thousand dead so that I can sit at the peace conference as a man who has fought.

Jobbo_Fett posted:

vyelkin posted:

That's funny because it was exactly that kind of thinking (in part) that made Italians so mad after WWI that they supported Mussolini in the first place

frankenfreak posted:

The other part of their thinking was of course thinking they needed a victory at the Isonzo.

vyelkin posted:

That's funny because it was exactly that kind of thinking (in part) that made Italians so mad after WWI that they supported Mussolini in the first place

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

The Italians got pretty much everything reasonable people could have wanted out of WWI. I don't think Italy trying to hold on to Dalmatia was long run going to work out.

Mikl posted:

And the world in general, in that time period. Let's make Germany take the whole fault for the war and severely punished her regarding territory! And force her to pay unsustainable war reparations! Surely this won't cause any problems or revanchist sentiment in the long run!

(Spoiler: it did )

aphid_licker posted:

Reasonable people were in short supply across Europe.

Lord Koth posted:

Basically, the Japanese finally realized that their production rate of pilots was far, far too low but, given this didn't happen until '43, it was far too late by then to make a difference, especially as they were already experiencing many other shortages.

Here's a brief article on the subject: http://www.historynet.com/japans-fatally-flawed-air-forces-in-world-war-ii-2.htm

If you don't feel like reading the entire thing, here are two paragraphs from it that pretty well sum up the situation at this point.

quote:

The Japanese army had to use infantrymen to help build airfields. In December 1942, for example, the engineer regiment and three rifle battalions of the 5th Division were detailed to build airfields in the Solomons. “When we compare [our] clumsy result with what our enemy accomplished,” recalled Commander Chihaya, “building huge airfields in good numbers with inconceivable speed, we ceased to wonder why we were utterly beaten. Our enemy was superior in every respect.”

Food at Japanese airfields was bad. Barracks were jungle slums. There were no laundry facilities, and men washed themselves in rivers, or under water-filled cans. Disease felled pilots and left serviceable aircraft grounded. Physical exhaustion lowered pilot performance, so that lesser-skilled opponents sometimes shot down veteran but feverish Japanese pilots.

Manpower became critical with no tractors, and ground crews wore themselves out pushing aircraft around fields. They worked at night to avoid Allied air attacks, only to fall victim to the malaria mosquito, which was most active at night. Men worked seven days a week in wretched weather at exhausting and mind-numbing tasks. Ground crews became nervous and irritable from lack of sleep. It took longer and longer to accomplish a given assignment. Minor as well as major accidents increased.

Raw human muscle wrestled bombs, cannon shells and machine gun rounds onto aircraft. Mechanics pulled maintenance on baking hot fields in direct tropical sunlight, for there were no hangars. When flooded airstrips dried after rains, dust billowed up in the wake of each aircraft, choking cockpit interiors and eroding engines.

“The maintenance crews are exhausted, but they drag their weary bodies about the field, heaving and tugging to move the planes back into the jungle,” a navy pilot at Buin wrote in July 1943. “They pray for tractors such as the Americans have in abundance, but they know their dream of such “luxuries’ will not be fulfilled.”

Commanders and planners lacked any understanding of the vast numbers of technicians required to support a modern army. Although there had always been shortages of trained mechanics, commanders showed little interest in sending their men to the ordnance school in Japan. The service schools themselves paid little attention to logistics and engineering support of combat forces. Nor did commanders establish schools or training programs at tactical units or in geographic army areas.

Japan’s absence of standardization in weapons and equipment ranged from aircraft types to different engines, down to instruments and the smallest accessories. The army used a 24-volt electrical system, whereas the navy used a different voltage. Mounts to hold guns, cannons and rocket launchers varied between the two services. By the end of the war, Japan produced at least 90 basic aircraft types (53 navy and 37 army) and 164 variations on basic types (112 navy and 52 army), making the logisticians’ jobs that much harder.

sullat posted:

I bet the Japanese subs don't even have ice cream machines.

wedgekree posted:

Good luck taking out the CVE's. Think you can manage to take them? And.. How did your convoy run into them and not take any losses at all?

Skanky Burns posted:

To be fair, at least they went to war with working torpedoes.

Coucho Marx posted:

This sounds like a good time to ask people to find and read Shattered Sword (if everyone here hasn't already). It's a superb book that really gets into the myriad problems Japan had in planning and operating the war in the Pacific; from faulty campaign plans to personality clashes, problematic officer culture and damage control procedures; from risky ship design and function to difficult deck operations and distractable CAP pilots; from poor scouting and battle plans to command indecision; all the way down to intelligence failures and plain bad luck. The authors go out of their way to use mostly Japanese sources to get the most accurate view of the events as possible, and the minute-by-minute playback of events as they unfold is at the same time exhilarating, fascinating, and absolutely heart-wrenching, knowing that it resulted in the pointless and avoidable deaths of thousands

I don't read much, of anything, ever. I have only a passing interest in WW2, and no particular interest in the Pacific theatre.

I have read this book four times.

wedgekree posted:

Good luck taking out the CVE's. Think you can manage to take them? And.. How did your convoy run into them and not take any losses at all?

gradenko_2000 posted:

Both a transport TF and a carrier TF abhor surface combat. The DD escorts would only have engaged to run interference for the carriers to withdraw, but since the Japanese transports would also have withdrawn immediately on their end, everyone runs away and nothing happens, even if that's not what we think would have happened IRL.

CannonFodder posted:

Well IRL the carriers would have sent up some planes to hunt down the transport ships, but since WitP uses turns the carriers weren't able to attack that turn, and on the next turn set up a CAP because they were spotted and rightly expected an attack to arrive.

Danann posted:

I have a feeling that taking such losses against baby carriers is not sustainable for when we fight the real carriers.

Ron Jeremy posted:

I salute the forward thinking of an American carrier named for a battle they won’t fight until next year.