Just some thoughts i have.....

C

Cowboy1968

Charter Member
I have been working on a series of lectures during this Christmas Vacation and well in the process of doing the research i have come to some questions that need to be thought about.

1. At the beginning of the Pacific War, many Americans were surprised to find out just how good the Japanese were. They seemed to be invincible. For six months they ran wild in the Pacific. A lot of this can be attributed to the unpreparedness of the allies. Manly the Americans. The Japanese had hit the US with a sledge hammer at Pearl Harbor, but they failed to get the carriers. The US wound up trading real estate and ships for time. But once the American and Australian forces were able to be ready to engage the Japanese on terms of there choosing and not being out numbered, the Japanese failed to win a single victory. So how much of this invincibility was just a hollow shell...perpetuated by allied strategy to buy time? And was this policy justified because of the effect on moral it had?

2. There was a myth that Japanese aircraft were better, but is this true? If you look at the kill ratios you have to wonder. Even the plane that everyone loves to denigrate had a 2 and 3:1 Kill ratio. that Being the Brewster F2A Buffalo. 13 Buffaloes and 6 Wildcats were lost from VMF-221 at Midway but in the final analysis of the battle VMF-221 had 32 confirmed kills. And this was done by inexperienced marine pilots flying up against some of the most experienced combat pilots in the world. The Wildcat was able to achive a 3.1 Kill ratio as well. Over on the Army side the P-40 and even the P-39 were gaining 3 and 4 to one kill ratios. Once new equipment hit the field of battle these numbers even went higher The Hellcat was 7.1 the Corsair achieved 11:1 ratios. The P-51 had an 8.1 and so on. How much of this superior equipment did the Japs really have? Was it more to the skill and experiance of their pilots?
 
Cowboy

As to your first paragraph, I would look into the vunerable part of ALL armies on the march. The role of logistics, and its lack of, that can bring mighty machines to a grinding halt. Not only the Japanese but The German army in the Battle of the Bulge and even Pattons Third Army. The longer the logistics the more vunerable they are. This coupled with the submarines, the need to garrison the many islands, and the training of the Japanese army to be reliant on conquered lands for supplies caused a veritable logistic nightmare for the Japanese.

"Was it more to the skill and experiance of their pilots?" Again cultural tendencies come into play. The Japanese pilots early on were extremely competent, trained and motivated. However the code of Bushido and Samauri did not allow them to accept defeat. Hence their tendency to waste their pilots if a arieal battle was lost. At sea, they sometimes didn't even bother to look for the downed pilot and over land some didn't bail out because it would accept defeat and dishonor the emperor. Their tactics also came into play. I believe it was Foss, or Thatch, who wrote that the pilots would stay in a set formation while under attack and not do evasive manuvers thus making them fairly easy to shoot. They carried "train like you fight" to the opposite measure.
When you are losing experienced pilots the enemies kill ratio climbs and attrition is a deciding factor. Example, the ratios were fairly constant until Midway and then at the Mariannas, with almost all experienced pilots gone, the fledglings were literally sitting ducks for plucking.

To sum up; question #1 logistics, question #2 ; Tactics and training.

There will be those who will vermently disagree with me but this is what I have gleamed from volumes of history books and conversations with people I was in the military with (and were still around when I was in!) , and relatives, who fought in the Pacific.
 
Part of the answer to the first question is that the Japanese were not considered a serious threat by the Great Western powers, even the Russians who'd experienced the Japanese fighting first hand.

This was particularly prevalent in the British and Commonwealth Armed Forces from the highest levels down and principally due to ignorance and the xenophobic tendencies of the Japanese themselves.

So it came as a bit of a shock when they basically handed us our arses in late '41/ early '42 despite the fact they'd been fighting through China since 1937.
 
I think starting on the 20th of December 1941, the AVG (Flying Tigers) along with the British flying in China, showed the world that the Japanese were not invincible.

Equipment and training being equal, tactics made the big difference.

Also agree with Fibber, fighting to the death in a losing situation, is not a winning option.

Curt:kilroy:

I might be alittle biased toward the AVG..lol
 
That "hollow shell" of invincibility was fabricated by the Japanese, just as much as it was a misconception on our side from the quick series of Japanese victories in 1942. For example, Japanese aircraft carriers. They were badly lacking in damage control systems because those systems were considered "defensive" in nature. It wasn't in their game plan for those ships to be swarmed by SBD's as happened at Midway. Their pilot training continued into the war with high wash-out rates. They should have streamlined the training pipeline and lowered the academic bars early on, after the Midway disaster at the latest. Then those pre-war elite aviators like Sakai and Nishizawa could have been augmented by thousands of young guys with average flying skills but enough stick time and tactical knowledge to survive in combat. Those excellent late-war aircraft designs didn't count for much when all they had left to fly them were high school kids with barely enough training for Kamikaze missions.
 
I have to agree with what has been said.At the battle of Midway CIN:pAC strongly suggested that the fighters from Midway cover the attacking force flown out of Midway.The CO. decided to have the fighters defend Midway.This in itself caused a great loss to the Midway attack force. The second reason we lost so many fighters at Midway was the fact that we split our forces holding a good part in reserve.Eventhough we used the high side attack and it was effective we didn`t leave thefight and eather attacked the fighters or were attacked by the enemy fighters causing a great loss to our fighters.

At Guadalcanal things changed. Maj. Smith was lucky enough to come across the reamning pilots that had fought at Midway and exchanged his less experanced pilots out for them.Once they reached Henderson Field they came up with some very basic rules of combat.One never engage any zeros unless you have no other choice.Fight as a team if possible, if you get seperated from your lead head for a cloud and work your way back to the base.If you see another friendly aircraft join up on his wing and fly as a group. Make one highside pass at the bombers if escorted then find a cloud and head back to base.If not then try to climb back up and make a second pass and head home.
 
Cowboy, my assessment is based on something I taught: Guerrilla and counter guerrilla war, something our nation has not yet grasped in it's paradox of intricate tactics and simplicity in destroying. The Japanese being steeped in Sun Tzu didn't hurt either. Simply put, they used the sucker punch.

The Japanese had some brilliant tacticians and strategists, they simply did not have the industrial capacity to keep the Allies from piercing the Co-Properity Sphere's border. A small man defeats a large man by taking the fight to the larger man's vulneable points while defending his own. We did what Hitler could not: We fought a two-front war and won it. The Japanese fired a few rounds from a sub off the west coast, a floatplane dropped a few bombs, and they launched some rice paper fire ballons at us, we were able to take the war to their vitals. Same with Germany. Germany had no strategic bombing of Russia's industry, they were too obsessed with tactical bombing until they grasped the strategic concept too late.

I was once a bouncer in a biker bar. I saw an 8th degree karate master put too much faith in his craft. He took on a larger man and his blows were absorbed, his attacks got through a few times, the bigger guy gave him some of his own medicine with a blow to the Adam's Apple that ended the fight. That bigger guy was me. The Germans and Japanese were able to use the first principle of guerrilla war: The guerrilla strikes when and where he wishes. They bit off more than they could chew, they refused to draw back, consolidate their holdings, and negotiate a settlement maybe would have preserved their countries, they were unable to attack their enemy's vitals and defend their own, like that little guy in the bar. He met someone trained in akido yet simply put, was bigger than he was but just as cunning.

Rudolph Hess and Isuroku Yammamoto realized this: They sucker punched someone much bigger than they were. The greatest tank battle of all time was Kursk. Yet the Russians defeated it by counter punching 5 times as hard. They destroyed the Germans with wooden airplanes but wooden planes that outnumbered the Germans 23 to one. They had the best tank in the world too, the T-34. There were 5000 Tigers built, there were 83,000 T-34s. The Sherman was a death trap but a deathtrap that outnumbered German armor 17 to 1.

The Japanese grasped the concept of the Corsair and Hellcat, of course, with the Ni1K2 George, the Reppu on the horizon, the Ki-84 Hayate but like the Germans were too emeshed in the Viking Funeral concept. To be blunt, the Japanese were too bipolar in their view of victory and defeat. They rejoiced over largely non-existent victories their press fed them, and were too quick to commit seppuku at the smallest defeat. Both Axis powers put too much faith in defense. George Patton said battles are won by 3 methods: 1. Attack. 2. Attack. 3. Attack. We didn;t win the Battle Of The Bulge defending every foxhole. We defended every foxhole as a delaying tactic till the big guy came in and cleaned their clocks.

We've been at war with Russia and Red China for 60 years now, by proxy. We are at war now with their proxies, the Islamic extremists. The Iranians are smuggling uranium in from our friend and former enemy and ally in the war in Afganistan, Kazakstan. Who has the greatest staying power? Them or us?

Japan and Germany had their staying power destroyed because we were too far away to have our vitals hurt. You don't win a fistfight attacking your opponents fists, but his vitals. We had the reach on them, as pugilists are fond of saying.

Will we survive the next Pearl Harbor?

Staying power is the key to all war. The Chinese didnt have it in the 30s, the Japanese didn't have it in the 40s.

Bones
 
About the kills ratio, we have to be very cautious. Historians tell us that there is often a gap between the claims and the actual losses of ennemy aicrafts. Even considering the confirmed kills, a significative over estimation could exist.
I believe it has been the case for every nation in every theatre.
Even if, for a particular fight, the confirmed kills may match exactly the losses in the other side ... it may not be the common case.
 
Tonybones summed it up pretty good. You must have been around during WWII. It was a concise explanation of what went on.
To it I would add there was a fear of war and the "peaceniks" held sway, hence our stupid isolationist policy. We were warned by the Japanese scorched earth policies in China. But we chose to ignore them.
Also, the vaunted Zero was not a good an airplane as thought. It was light because they just didn't have the materials to put them together properly. We had one at Jacksonville and had a chance to go all over it. It had a wicker seat for the pilot. Very rudimentary panel. Some of the inspection panels were wood. Through out the aircraft, it definely had a "Made In Japan" look to it.
For those that remember, the Japs put out some cheesy toys before the war with stampings that would hack your fingers.
 
vidal said:
About the kills ratio, we have to be very cautious. Historians tell us that there is often a gap between the claims and the actual losses of ennemy aicrafts. Even considering the confirmed kills, a significative over estimation could exist.
I believe it has been the case for every nation in every theatre.
Even if, for a particular fight, the confirmed kills may match exactly the losses in the other side ... it may not be the common case.
Click to expand...

No truer words were ever spoken, look at Saburo Sakai over the Solomons and his encounter with the Avengers. I'm sure several ball turret gunners claimed him as a kill when they saw his canopy burst into flinders, he took two TBFs down with him and then flew, what was it, 700 miles to base with two .50 calibre bullets in his head? Then with sight in only one eye claimed another 4 kills later in the war?

Many of the German kills on the Eastern Front and in general would be what we call "probables" due to witnessing the kill by another person or gun camera confirmation. German pilots set a B-17 wing on fire, it drops from formation, Jawohl, he ist kaput, then the plane flies home. Maybe never to fly again but it brought it's crew home to fight again.

Bones
 
Helldiver said:
Tonybones summed it up pretty good. You must have been around during WWII. It was a concise explanation of what went on.
To it I would add there was a fear of war and the "peaceniks" held sway, hence our stupid isolationist policy. We were warned by the Japanese scorched earth policies in China. But we chose to ignore them.
Also, the vaunted Zero was not a good an airplane as thought. It was light because they just didn't have the materials to put them together properly. We had one at Jacksonville and had a chance to go all over it. It had a wicker seat for the pilot. Very rudimentary panel. Some of the inspection panels were wood. Through out the aircraft, it definely had a "Made In Japan" look to it.
For those that remember, the Japs put out some cheesy toys before the war with stampings that would hack your fingers.
Click to expand...


Hell, actually I'm a post Baby Boomer. I learned the art of war on school playgrounds. Being a little guy with a southern accent in a northern state with few friends thereof, I was picked on and beaten constantly by other kids. what warped my brain was visiting Fort Knox Ky when my brothers graduated basic and holding an M1-Garand and hearing a Pershing tank fire up 20 feet away. I didn;t fire my first gun till I was 5(Mom's .45 1911A1). I rarely could play in my own front yard without someone jumping the hedge and beating the stuffing out of the hillbilly kid. Of course, these people rode past the same hedge on bikes and got broomsticks in the spokes and they flew 20 feet into Mom's rose bushes. I knew the terrain. First principle of guerrilla war is the terrorist will strike when and where he chooses.

I'm what you may politely call a military historian. My heros are not James Cameron, Janeanne Garofilo, or Harvey Milk, my heros are Julia Child(Julia parachuted into France as one half of a Jedberg recon team in Occupied France), George Kenny, and Saburo Sakai. Saburo was once The Enemy, I have to admire him for his accomplishments. Yeah, many Jap pilots strafed survivors in the water, they were trained to HATE what wasn't Japanese, but many Americans strafed Japanese survivors. War is hell. Having to fight 4 other boys at once at school recess taught me that.

George Kinney did the most damage with what he had, the B-25 and a surplus of Browning M2s, thus the Destroyer was born. Jiro Hirikoshi saw what Willy Messerschmidt failed to: A plane is a gun platform, not a sports car. Like the Russians and the Mig-25, he did the most with what Japan gave him. Foil or broadsword? There is a story that Richard The Lionhearted attended a dinner with Saladin. He took his sword and split an iron bar in two. Saladin laid his Damscus steel scimitar on a silk pillow, gave it a slight pull acorss it and split the pillow in twain without a feather moving from it's place. Think about that one. Brute force or finesse'?

We defeated Germany and Japan with both. The Japanese were faced with limited resources and produced a Zero with just enough performance to get two 7.7s and two 20mms into the air while the P-36s had two .30 Brownings. The Zero had finesse' and it had brute force. Till the Hellcat came along with more of both.They came out with the George. I've shot down so many Hellcats in the stock CFS2 George I got bored with it. Then we would hve thrown in the Bearcat. Japan ran out of punches.

We win a lot of wars for the simple reason we are sort of isolated geographically from the people we kill. I guess we felt lonely in the 1860s so we were glad to fight among ourselves in a bloody but politely fought War, I guess that's why it was called the Civil War. I mean, does Chavez think he an take the US on because we are close to heem? We win wars because we outlast our enemy's will to fight. Did the British defeat the Zulus at the Battle Of Roarkes Drift? No, The Zulus gave up. All 4000 of them. The British had nowhere to go and nothing to do but fight. Did we "lose" the Vietnam War? No, we won it 3 times: 1965, 1968, 1972. We let Grace Slick and The grateful Dead decide our foreign policy and we walked away, like those Zulus. We win wars because out industrial capacity is largely untouched in time of war.

Weapons design: Read Victor Suvorov's INSIDE THE SOVIET ARMY and you'll see why I ain't impressed with the F-22 or F-35. Why do all our weapons have to be built like Swiss watches? Read his chapter on the simplest and best weapon ever invented for infantry warfare: The mortar.

Russian mortars, in 2009, are unrifled. One rifled mortar has twice the effectiveness of one unrifled one. One rifled mortar costs ten times the amount of one unrifled one. I'll take two unrifeld ones, and here's why:

Two unrifled ones equal one rifled one in effectiveness. Cool. They throw twice the projectiles, and are 4 times as hard to destroy as one mortar of any kind. They churn up twice the dust, explosion, and fragments as one rifled one. I got 50 rubles that buys one rifled mortar, or ten unrifled ones? Do the math, imagine the damage 10 mortars of any kind does?

A lot of people boo at me for this statement: We didn't beat Hitler, the Russians did. The whole battle for Europe and the Pacific war were spitball fights compared to the Russian Front.

Barack Obama and Sean Penn thinks it's better to be a live coward than a dead hero. Too bad many dead heros who washed off Omaha Beach into the English Channel and rest there, too many Russians threw themselves bodily on German tanks and made it possible for them to flit around the world and make fools of themselves.

Wars are won by numbers, weapons and will. We will always have the first two but I wonder about the third in these times.

Bonesimoto
 
A very brilliant Japanese tactician once said that he feared that they had awakened a sleeping giant.

In my research of the war in Papau New Guinea, I have found that allied planes had better armour and BIGGER bullets, whether in the PTO or ETO.
The IJNAF, IJAAF, and Luftwaffe had basically .30 cal rocks and a few cannon shell boulders, as did our British allies. Outnumbered did not matter. We had better equipment.

US forces in all theaters had .50 cal BIG ROCKS and some BIGGER cannon boulders to throw at our enemies. A short burst of .50 cals took wings right off of lightly armoured aircraft, literally. If by chance a tracer happened to hit a non-self-sealing wing tank, the entire wing exploded.

If all the enemies' cannon shells were used up and our planes were still flying, our pilots hunched down behind their cockpit's armour plating and just absorbed the pea-gravel .30 cal rocks being thrown at them until the enemy ran out of those too. We also had self-sealing fuel tanks which would take on massive amounts of damage and still hold together and not leak all of our fuel out to ignite from tracers.

Then, there is the American work ethic and esprit de corps coupled with our will to keep the republic and liberty alive and well.

That is all I will say on this, because it is getting me too close to coming into the 21st century USA and world, which will get into present day politics. TABOO SUBJECT ON HERE!
 
"We didn't beat Hitler, the Russians did." A very astute comment,Hitler made the mistake of trying to conquer a country so vast that it literally swallowed his army.


Never underestimate your enemy.......
 
Devildog73 said:
A very brilliant Japanese tactician once said that he feared that they had awakened a sleeping giant.

In my research of the war in Papau New Guinea, I have found that allied planes had better armour and BIGGER bullets, whether in the PTO or ETO.
The IJNAF, IJAAF, and Luftwaffe had basically .30 cal rocks and a few cannon shell boulders, as did our British allies. Outnumbered did not matter. We had better equipment.

US forces in all theaters had .50 cal BIG ROCKS and some BIGGER cannon boulders to throw at our enemies. A short burst of .50 cals took wings right off of lightly armoured aircraft, literally. If by chance a tracer happened to hit a non-self-sealing wing tank, the entire wing exploded.

If all the enemies' cannon shells were used up and our planes were still flying, our pilots hunched down behind their cockpit's armour plating and just absorbed the pea-gravel .30 cal rocks being thrown at them until the enemy ran out of those too. We also had self-sealing fuel tanks which would take on massive amounts of damage and still hold together and not leak all of our fuel out to ignite from tracers.

Then, there is the American work ethic and esprit de corps coupled with our will to keep the republic and liberty alive and well.

That is all I will say on this, because it is getting me too close to coming into the 21st century USA and world, which will get into present day politics. TABOO SUBJECT ON HERE!
Click to expand...

Historians like to whack the Buffalo and P-36s in the Pacific war and are strangely silent about the Finn's successes with them. The Russians were not boobs either that lined up to be shot down.

The British did a pre-WW2 study that in modern day war the maximum amount of time a plane would be in a pilot's gunsight was 2 seconds, they determined the armament needed to destroy a bomber was 8 .303 machine guns. Hence the Battle of Britain amament of Spits and Hurricanes. I don't dismiss cannon as a weapon, it's a matter of brute force PLUS finesse'. It's a matter of how much metal you can throw. Fortunately we had the resources for both. With the Me-109 F and it's two 7.9 and one 15mm, it took finesse'. The most ancient Soviet BMP had a 73mm gun, a 14.5 monster for infantry and aircraft, and anti tank missles. Makes you wonder about that little 25 mm on the Bradleys. Weapons should be designed by the people who use them.

Well that it is tabboo my friend, you're speaking to a Ted Nugent Republican who thinks firearms ownership and bearing should BE the law in some locations and situations.

Bones
 
Simple fact is the Buffalo in the Pacific were in the hands of inexperienced pilots. Technically the Buffalo was an airplane that performed near or equal to a F4F-3\4 Wildcat. The Buffalo could in proper hands turn with the Zero. The Buffalo had a good heavy armumant of four .50 machine guns in USN service, and it had good Armour and self-sealing fuel tanks. You hear of VMF-221's fight at Midway and the fact the plane was painted in bad light. But, you don't hear about VF-2's operations in the Coral Sea. VF-2 were still flying the Buffalo in this battle and these experienced Navy pilots held there own. they downed five enemy planes with no loss of their own.

Fact is if you use the tactics developed for use with the F4F, the F2A can be deadly. This airplane was a victem of bad circumstance, inexperienced pilots, pure maintenance on the RAF machines, being out numbered, and simply not having replacement supplies in the pipeline. The F2A was already out of full production due to the fact that the landing gear just couldn't hold up to carrier landings, so the USN was switching from the Buffalo to the Wildcat. This switch wasn't because of performance, it was because the plane had problems with landing gear failure.

Now for those who will give me the dirty eye for blaming RAAF and RAF maintenance for their lack to meet expectations, well even the British admit they didn't recieve proper ground maintenance.

Now given all those things listed above, the Buffalo still took down more enemy planes then the number of Buffaloes lost.
 
Hey guys,

You all are having quite a discussion in here. The information in this thread is very good, but please make sure that it does not get political. I don't want to have to call in the attack dogs, okay?
 
No fears, Rami.

My favorite planes in an out and out dogfight are still Hurricanes and Spitfires. Just wish our cousins in England had put some M2s in their wings with a few thousand rounds. I enjoy the flight dynamics of both, performance of the Spits, and durability of the JUG.

By jove, I think I've got it! We could have a HurriSpitnJug!

:monkies:
 
I'm partial to the P-47 as well. I love the diving ability and the survivability factor. The R-2800 was a legendary engine. There are many pilots flying Hellcats, Corsairs, and Jugs that can testify to that engine's ability to get ya back home with a couple of cylinders blown off.
 
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