Dirtnap
Kanmusu Affecionado
Uh...the D did have 6 guns, with something like 200 rpg for the pair near the root and 150 for the outboard pairs.
Changing Destiny (Kancolle)
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Selonianth
Writer of Words
When you're reporting sinking the same ship four times... it's a problem, and this is something the IJN claimed for multiple ships, not just E.
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Checked my sources and you're right, in fact the rpg you listed is about half of what it actually was. 380 rpg for the inner pair, 270 rpg for the outboard pairs.
That's seriously overgunning it. Maybe the stories of removing one of the outboard pairs were to reduce load, or to prevent/mitigate ammo shortages?
Selonianth
Writer of Words
Most likely a case by case basis.
Dirtnap
Kanmusu Affecionado
German planes were a good bit more armored than their Japanese counterparts. The only P-51 i can remember off the top of my head with 4 guns is the A/Mk 1. And those are 20mm Hispanos.
SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
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Nope. It's one of the great myths about Midway that are not actually true--I would highly recommend reading Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway. It basically gives the first clear-cut, thoroughly-detailed account of the battle from both sides (and at all levels, including the lead-up to the battle and the grand context of it all) that actually dispels the myths and outright lies surrounding the battle (particularly from long-since discredited sources).
To call it the operational, strategic, and procedural problems with the Midway operation as being caused by "victory disease" is like saying that the United States' complete dominance of the Pacific War after 1944 was due to numerical superiority: only partially true, and even then, only on a technical basis; in reality, that numerical superiority was not the primary cause (as seen by the USN completely outfighting the IJN in 1942, despite a massive numerical inferiority in capital ships, massive inferiority in key weapon systems [torpedoes, and by extension, submarines], and having to catch up to a war footing when compared to Japan being at one for years), and even then, the numerical superiority was due to the massive industrial output advantage that the US had had for decades (and did a lot to bolster even more in a remarkably short time), among other things.
Japan's problems with the Midway operation were fractal in nature. Just about everywhere you looked (beyond the tactical level), problems just begat more problems, most of which dated back a decade or more and were rigidly imbued into the Japanese military and political leadership (which were often one and the same, but not always) due to the culture it had fostered for several decades.
This is evidenced by (among MANY other things) the badly-mauled Kido Butai sailing towards the American battlegroups--including with its sole remaining fleet carrier, despite the massive range it had allowing it to launch attacks while sailing away from the battle (and thus expected counterattacks)--with the intention of engaging them in a nighttime surface action, despite there clearly being no logical reason for the Americans to oblige them, and every reason to believe the American battlegroups would resume the attack with its large carrier advantage against the Japanese fleet--now without any carriers, since Hiryu had been fatally bombed the evening before--still within range of said carriers because of that action. Why commit even more to what was clearly a lost battle, and thus risk even greater losses for relatively little gain? Because of many reasons, including that it would mean admitting a major defeat had been suffered. Note that the IJN, IIRC, never publicly admitted that it had ever suffered a defeat (I can't remember if it was like that for the entire war, or just until well after the Japanese fleet had long since been destroyed as a fighting force at Leyte Gulf).
I could go on.
SaltyWaffles
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No, it's because the bombers are literally diving into the enemy ships at high speed, then pulling out at high-Gs and low altitudes right after release. They're in arguably one of the worst positions to actually see who hit what.
EDIT: The USN was generally far, far better about figuring out the actual, accurate estimates of the damage inflicted and ships sunk, when questioning pilots, skippers/gunners, and going over AARs. And, well, it goes without saying that the USN was infinitely better than the IJN about accurately reporting its own losses.
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I would say that is a little of both. Most pilots see a hit and they will hope that hit is the good one until they see evidence against it. Also attack planes rarely get to stay on the combat area after releasing their payload, while fighters do have to keep there a little longer to fight off the local CAP in either preparation for the second wave or to help the slower bombers disengage.
And finally we need to take into consideration the fog of war and the relative resistance of ships. The Taiho for example was hit by a single torpedo shot from the USS Albacore, which was reported as minor damage. But hours later the fires started by it sunk the carrier, and the americans knew about it by radio interception long after the skipper of the submarine bitterly wrote in his log about a missed opportunity. By the same token the Yorktown received enough damage at Coral Sea that any neutral observer (and the japanese were anything but neutral about it) would think that it would never stay afloat or at the very least would need months of drydock, but some of the best DC specialists and naval engineers on the business performed miracle after miracle to keep her fighting until it eventually sank in Midway after being bombed, saved again and then torpedoed by a sub.
SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
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Well, kind of, yes, but it's important to remember that dive bombers are rarely in a position to see how their payloads fare; they're pulling hard Gs as soon as they drop their payload, and they're doing so at low altitude, pulling out at very low altitude, by which point the target and payload are well behind them. When you consider that dive bomber squadrons attack in something like 30-45 second intervals, one plane after the other, it gets confusing to see who hit what. The guy who goes fourth might see a part of the ship on fire after pulling out sufficiently, and think that the hit was his--when it might have been the guy who went after him; thus, two hits are reported when only one was scored. It's only afterwards that it gets sorted out.
It's also very hard to differentiate between a near-miss and a not-so-near-miss from the dive-bomber's perspective.
But yes: ultimately, loitering fighters are in far better positions to see who hit what.
Not exactly. USN carriers were better designed and built than anyone else's by far. They were capable of taking a lot more damage and surviving; the only real exceptions were Wasp (which was a specifically unarmored and TDS-less design due to Treaty tonnage limitations) and Lexington (which was the first instance of uncontrollable avgas fires spawning from leaking-due-to-damage avgas lines spreading their fumes throughout the ship--the USN quickly learned from this lesson and purged its avgas lines with inert gas before any incoming attack in all subsequent carrier operations).
Ultimately, British DC and Japanese DC were typically pretty bad, especially when it came to carriers (plus, the British carriers had all of the flaws of the inferior armored flight deck and enclosed-box-hangar design, while the Japanese carriers had the flaws of both the enclosed-box-hangar designs and unarmored flight deck designs). The British armored flight decks helped to reduce the need for good DC somewhat, but even the hits survived (and even mere accidents!) caused permanent structural damage that was impractical to fix, and armored flight decks (and thus, enclosed, hard-box hangars) were extremely vulnerable to any ordinance that did penetrate the armor.
Thus, it was not just exceptional DC that made USN carriers so much more survivable and durable: it was also substantially superior design.
Chloe Sullivan
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i've been trying to get a copy of that but my local libraries don't have and i'm too cheap to buy one.
I did read craig symond's book, which pointed out a number of those issues, but Symond was a bit too deterministic for me. he insisted that luck didn't play a role, but what do you call Nautilus and Arashi's duel ending with the perfect timing to make arashi the beacon to lead the Ent SBD's right to their targets if not luck?
I think symond's argument that the Japanese learned all the wrong lessons from Tsushima Straights is pretty good, which is an argument that they were basically infected with the "the battle will go as we make it go" syndrome for over a generation, and that's basically the mindset that made their midway op a farce from the very start.
use superior speed to dictate engagement range and employ your range advatage to crush the enemy with ALL THE FIREPOWER is something that works only until your enemy realizes you pulled that and adjusts. Yet all of the specs that japanese navy equipment were designed to were basically geared towards that as a philosophy of warfighting, rather than a single campaign gimmick. Japan won their fight with russia too Quickly for the downsides of their naval philosophy to show themselves.
So basically, Japanese warplanes were made of fragilium because the strategic mindset behind the benchmarks they were designed to were "max speed, all the range!" the original military specifications for what would be the Mitsubishi 00 made multiple companies throw up their hands in despair and tell the navy it could be done without a bigger (and more expensive) engine than the navy wanted to use. then Mitsubishi manged to pull it off by basically manically saving weight on everything- in many ways the Zero was closer to a U-2 spyplane than to a F4F in design philsophy
In the IJN's defense, you have to realize that unlike the USN or RN, they had no institutional experience of power projection or long term/long distance deployement of assets at all. their war with russia was basically a surpise raid and an ambush, the later of which was basically the decisive battle of Mahan's doctrine, without a lot of need for fussy stuff between. When they did raids and ambushes, they tended to do pretty well with them in WWII. When they had to maintain control of a wide sea area or support a groundside operation on an ongoing basis, they unsuprisingly had a lot of mistakes, because they basically were new to it. I mean, they did terribky even for rookies, but I am judging them a little less harshly than I would the RN frakking up like that.
A really big failure is that they just seemed to have this huge blindspot about "hey the enemy can ambush us or engineer circumstances to dictate engagements to us too," which the USN was all too happy to exploit, especially with the excellent radio intelligence assets Nimitz had access to. Radar also tended to be a huge boon for the USN when they turned around after being jumped and went back to ambush the IJN right back.
Skywalker_T-65
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The Yorktowns were especially tough. Enterprise speaks for herself, of course.
But York and Hornet? Yorktown by all rights should have sunk before she did. But she was in a pretty salvageable condition. Until Imuya got lucky, and she had a destroyer load of depth charges go off underneath her in addition to more torp hits.
Hornet took an obscenely large amount of fire to sink as well.
Yorktown though...man, if Imuya hadn't been where she was, that ship would have a reputation like Big E's for just not sinking. I mean, that amount of damage would have sunk damn near any other ship, but she could have survived and been repaired, even if it would take a lot of time. That's some tough design work right there, and great DamCon.
Hm. Damn it, now I've got ideas for my AU Sisters snips.
But York and Hornet? Yorktown by all rights should have sunk before she did. But she was in a pretty salvageable condition. Until Imuya got lucky, and she had a destroyer load of depth charges go off underneath her in addition to more torp hits.
Hornet took an obscenely large amount of fire to sink as well.
Yorktown though...man, if Imuya hadn't been where she was, that ship would have a reputation like Big E's for just not sinking. I mean, that amount of damage would have sunk damn near any other ship, but she could have survived and been repaired, even if it would take a lot of time. That's some tough design work right there, and great DamCon.
Hm. Damn it, now I've got ideas for my AU Sisters snips.
SaltyWaffles
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Not really; Japan had been engaging in naval and ground operations on distant shores for quite some time before December 7th, 1941. Hell, they'd fought one war with China, occupied Korea, and then occupied huge chunks of China in a second war with them for years before 1941.
They had plenty of experience with power projection. What they lacked experience in was prolonged naval warfare against a naval opponent who had anything approaching parity with them. However, this is not an excuse for completely neglecting the blatantly obvious logistics challenges of a massive naval war against a world power like the United States--the math was all there and clear-cut, and it was all presented to the Japanese leadership ahead of time. They were simply ignored or rebuked. That's the culture they had. That's why their strategy was to have a short, decisive war of conquest followed by a single, decisive battle against the US fleet, followed by the assumption that the US would cave and just let Japan keep everything it had taken by force instead of, you know, keep fighting and let its massive industrial advantage ensure (assuming their skills, doctrine, ingenuity, technology, bravery, etc/whatever didn't already do so) victory in the long term.
Japan launched a war of conquest against four(+) allied nations in order to take strategic resources...so that it could wage war against said nations...except that it never had the logistical capacity (as in, the merchant shipping and the processing facilities) to actually make effective use of said resource sources, and they knew this.
So, rather than rapidly use big chunks of its precious, limited oil reserves to actually leverage all of its top-heavy (as in, too many warships and especially capital ships, too few logistical ships and merchant ships to support their operation for very long) navy to overwhelm the US fleet with numerical superiority in a short period of time, they did things like sending in two battleships at a time to a decisive naval campaign, when they had at least four available at the time and the United States only had two, allowing themselves to be defeated in detail. They took every island they could get their hands on in the Pacific, fortified it, thus seriously expanding their logistical needs even while their merchant shipping was getting increasingly whittled down (and it was inadequate to begin with), all in the expectation that the enemy would attack and try to recapture every single one, rather than only attack strategically significant ones and simply starve out the rest.
The IJN knew that establishing such a huge umbrella of territory in wartime would be logistically intensive (and they knew HOW intensive, too; it was simple math). But they just assumed the enemy would oblige them by attacking everywhere they were strong, rather than attacking everywhere they were weak. Yeah, it's common fucking sense, but that kind of rationality, self-honesty, and willingness to consider that the enemy might think differently from you had long since been beaten out of the Japanese culture by WW2. And as WW2 went on, they just got even worse. They could be excused for being newbies to something, but they did the opposite of learning from their mistakes--they doubled-down on them.
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And their culture punished those who tried to make the best with the limits they had. Consider for example "Tenacious" Tanaka, the destroyer expert who managed to make the Tokio Express work for a while and defeated a much larger force at Tassafaronga or General Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya who conquered Singapour against a larger garrison but both were relegated to secondary commands out of political infighting within their services.
Chloe Sullivan
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@SaltyWaffles what i was noting was that what you described as the failed japanese war plans for ww2 is pretty much how the war with russia actually went. Japan was able to dictate the engagements thanks to having surpise, geography and Russia's desire to save face in european politics on their side. They forced the russians into a mahan-esque "decisive battle" on Japanese terms and basically won the war right there, no need for protracted struggle. they subsequently latched onto that as their institutional mythos, and all the baggage that went with. It should be noted that a significant number of frak ups by the Continental Army came from a similar fixation on the mythos of Bunker Hill. institutional culture screwed japanese strategic thinking long before the US and Japan came to blows, but "preparing to fight the last war" syndrome was hardly a unique failing. the japanese nave had less "last war" to go by than most, so their hilariously biased thinking is a little bit more understandable than it would be for a sevice with a longer history.
I agree that most of the IJN seemed to be utterly oblivious to the idea that maybe the USN wouldn't go for the "decisive battle", which was no doubt a big failing. The even bigger one was not taking into account that even if Japan won the decisive battle they wanted, the US, unlike Russia, was not basically removed as a power in the pacific once it lost it's fleet-in-being. The USN had, IIRC, *already* begun the process of adding a new generation of bigger badder more numerous carriers (and a chunk of new battleships) to it's roster by the time the pearl harbor attack went down. the other stuff might be bad doctrine, but this is a foundational level error that even Mahan would have chided them for missing without knowing a darned thing about how submarines and carriers changed things.
I agree that most of the IJN seemed to be utterly oblivious to the idea that maybe the USN wouldn't go for the "decisive battle", which was no doubt a big failing. The even bigger one was not taking into account that even if Japan won the decisive battle they wanted, the US, unlike Russia, was not basically removed as a power in the pacific once it lost it's fleet-in-being. The USN had, IIRC, *already* begun the process of adding a new generation of bigger badder more numerous carriers (and a chunk of new battleships) to it's roster by the time the pearl harbor attack went down. the other stuff might be bad doctrine, but this is a foundational level error that even Mahan would have chided them for missing without knowing a darned thing about how submarines and carriers changed things.
SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
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If they had been preparing to fight the last war, then they would have known that charging dug-in positions with machine guns, mortars, bolt-action rifles (let alone semi-auto rifles), and grenades using nothing but bolt-action rifles, bayonets, and human wave tactics was just a recipe for getting your troops slaughtered.
They would have known that modern naval fleet actions between lines of battleships were no longer decisive on their own.
They would have known just how deadly submarines could be in the merchant raider role.
They would have known that fighting against a world power very much risked a long, costly war of attrition where industrial might, natural resources, trade denial, population, intelligence, and logistics were key.
But they didn't prepare to fight the last war. They prepared to fight the Russo-Japanese War (1904) all over again, despite the blatantly obvious differences in the times, massive differences in the circumstances, and all of the clear, bloody lessons that WW1 had taught the world decades before WW2. They thought they could recreate the Russo-Japanese War, except with the United States, Australia, the Dutch, and Britain, thinking only on the tactical level, and only giving lipservice to the operational and strategic levels of considerations.
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Thinking about it, this explains a bit of the bitter backwards-looking evident in the narrative of the Universal Century setting of Mobile Suit Gundam, and to an extent the spin-off series as well. Each successive iteration of Gundam further drives home the understanding that there is no "final war", only "this war", "the war that came before it", and "the war that will happen as a consequence of this war." It never really occurred to me that the series was prodding scornfully at the decisive-battle doctrine until now.
Chloe Sullivan
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Did japan actually fight a war with anyone who had a signififant naval force to contest then between 1904 and 1940?
If there was an actual war in between that the IJN should have learned from, I'd revise my charitable stance, but my impression is that Japan's conquets during that period were of peoples who lacked actualy blue-water navies.
If there was an actual war in between that the IJN should have learned from, I'd revise my charitable stance, but my impression is that Japan's conquets during that period were of peoples who lacked actualy blue-water navies.
Japan did fight in WW1.
But...
Let's say the US did more then them, and we did what? Bum rush an already tired enemy?
And they didn't fight an actual naval battle until, what was the first major USN vs IJN battle again during WW2? Anyways in 1942.
But...
Let's say the US did more then them, and we did what? Bum rush an already tired enemy?
And they didn't fight an actual naval battle until, what was the first major USN vs IJN battle again during WW2? Anyways in 1942.
Selonianth
Writer of Words
First major one would have been... Coral Sea? I know E only missed 2 major battles... Coral Sea and one later when she was damaged in the previous one.
Skywalker_T-65
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Chloe Sullivan
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Coral sea was the first pure carrier battle. there were earlier battles where the IJN sank some british ships, IIRC, which actually involved land based bombers as well as seaborne assets.
Selonianth
Writer of Words
Well yes, and technically that was a large battle, and apparently the largest since Jutland according to wiki, only 5 USN ships were involved, four of them Clemson-class Destroyers. That's not so much a USN vs IJN conflict, which is what was asked.
CV12Hornet
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Okay, you seem to be laboring under some misconceptions here. First of all, citation needed on the Germans knowing about the KGV's turret problems. Second, those 14" guns? Were just as powerful as British 15" due to the newer design. King George V did just as well shooting up Bismarck as Rodney and her 16" guns did. That Bismarck was still afloat after that pounding had more to do with trajectories and good design than any deficiencies in the British guns.
That said, Bismarck worrying more about Hood is entirely logical. Bigger, faster, and has quite the reputation. But the King George Vs were superior ships in just about every way.