Japan's Fatally Flawed Air Forces In WWII

[MaskRider]

Kind of an interesting article appearing in the July 28th edition of Historynet.

Stumbled across it while looking for info about Japanese airfields on Halmahera Island.

Japan's Fatally Flawed Air Forces In WWII

MR

 

[Worthless]

Fascinating!

A great read. Thanks MR.

 

[Ivan]

Hello MaskRider,

That is a very interesting article. I still have not finished reading it yet.
There is no doubt in my mind that this fellow knows much more than I do about history.

There are a few problems with it though which I would like to point out:
This was written mostly as hindsight and from the point of view of a Westerner. One might wonder why this is important.
I believe this is important because although the decisions that were made were ultimately fatal to the Empire of Japan, they were made based on the opinions and methods of fighting of the Japanese of the time and not Americans of today.
Starting a war was ultimately a stupid move. There is no question that the Japanese had no ability to fight a prolonged war. We know that today.

Consider that their belief at the time was that Americans were morally weak. They did not think Americans were willing to fight a war for China no matter what President Roosevelt may have wanted. What they didn't realise was that an attack on US territory would give the US a much better reason to fight.

War was not intended as a fight to the destruction of one side or another. It was to teach Americans to stay out of their business in Asia.
The Japanese had actually fought two wars of this type before against much larger and possibly stronger opponents: China in 1900 and Russia in 1905. They won both wars. In each case the other country had more to worry about from internal conflict than external aggression. The US did not have that problem regardless of internal political arguments for or against helping China.
It was to be a short, victorious war and it was.... for a while.
Industry and production capacity was not a part of the consideration.

The Japanese had seen what the British had done at Taranto to disable the Italian Fleet and thought they could do the same at Pearl Harbor. After all, they had much more modern aircraft and more of them than were used at Taranto. What they didn't realise was that the targets were a bit different and that their intelligence was not so accurate, but they DID manage to disable the American Fleet anyway.
Their view of the Type Zero Fighter was that it was so superior to its opposition that it was worth about three times what other nations' fighters were worth. Against the Chinese, they were correct. Against the Russians in Manchuria, they were much less correct but seem to have missed the lesson to be learned there.

If you count every A6M Type Zero as worth three or more enemy fighters, the fact that the Japanese Carrier Fleet was nearly the equal of the American Carrier Fleet and the losses to be suffered by the American Battle Fleet and Carriers at Pearl Harbor, then the Japanese would have a temporary superiority in numbers and of course the expected superiority in QUALITY. The Americans would be forced to do as the Chinese and Russians before them had done.

Quick construction of island air bases was not expected. That is why the Japanese spent so much effort on their Floatplane Fighters such as the A6M2-N and N1K.

Regarding quality of aircraft at the beginning of the war, the Japanese types were at least equal to American types.
The A6M was at least the equal of the F4F very early on. The B5N was easily superior to the TBD Devastator and the D3A was fairly comparable to the SBD Dauntless. The Ki-43 Hayabusa was different from the P-40 Hawk 81s but not necessarily inferior.
As for later in the war, the main failure of Japanese naval aircraft (in my opinion) was that there was no successor to the A6M fighter. The Japanese never had a 4 engine bomber to compare to American types, but in other areas such as Twins, Dive Bombers, and Torpedo Bombers, their late war types were arguably superior to American types.

In land based fighters, their main failing (again in my opinion) was that the Nakajima Homare was used in many of their designs and although it was a nice compact and powerful engine it if worked, it seldom worked as well as it was supposed to. This can be seen in the post-war testing of the Ki-84 Hayate fighter in the United States. The result was not necessarily superior to American fighters but it was certainly comparable.
So, the Japanese had similar quality aircraft designs but much lesser numbers, no infrastructure to support them and no training program to replace aircrew and could not win.

Am open to alternative arguments and opinions....

- Ivan.

 

[bub]

Excellent article. Thank you for posting the link.

 

[miamieagle]

Great article, thank you!

I would like point out that we are looking are it in wrong way. It was not the Japanese where so deficient but that we where so efficient.

 

[Captain Kurt]

Ivan makes some good points from the Japanese perspective. One detail though, I don't think the A6M was used against the Russians in Manchuria. As far as I have read that was strictly the Army's operation.

 

[SPman]

Great summation Ivan.
It is pointless trying to write a history of something, from a purely modern outsiders perspective, without trying to take account of the thinking, mores and conditions pertaining at the time, by the participants. While it might make sense to us in the here and now, a lot of our ways and thinking would be totally alien to the participants.
Japanese thinking about their opponents was flawed - as was the British opinion of the Japanese before the war - which led to the catastrophe in Hong Kong and Malaya/Singapore....

 

[Ivan]

Thanks Captain Kurt,

We are actually both correct. The Operational testing of the A6M did start in Manchuria in July 1940 but it was the Army (probably flying Ki-27s that actually fought the Russians.
The point was that against the Chinese, the Japanese (Army or Navy) were basically target shooting with very few losses. There was only a single A6M lost in the entire year of operations in China while achieving about 100 kills. Against the Russians in a short little war, the Japanese (Army) were pretty much even for losses and kills while flying against the SAME type of aircraft as the Chinese were using but no one seems to have noticed the difference that pilot quality made.


Thanks SPman,

As I tell my son, often tactics and the military's thinking do not evolve with the evolution of technology and weaponry until it becomes PAINFULLY obvious that things are not working. The introduction of he Rifle-Musket before the American Civil War about tripled the effective range of small arms, but neither side understood the implications. The Boer War taught the British that their Red Coats belonged back on the parade ground....
Wearing a bright coloured uniform and marching out in the open toward the enemy who is shooting at you is unthinkable today but that is how war was fought at the time.

By the way, the Middletown test of the Ki-84 Hayate was really about correcting the malfunctioning accessories and letting the engine operate as it was designed to operate. People often make the assumption that 100 Octane US fuel made the difference but although the US fuel may have been better quality, it was still only 92 Octane which was the same as the Japanese Army standard.

- Ivan.

 

[SSI01]

Ivan this is a fascinating thread, a great deal of fun to read.

You mentioned the Japanese training establishment and its failure to keep up with the US equivalent in pilot graduate quantity and quality. Saburo Sakai mentioned in "Samurai" the IJN set an almost impossibly high standard, pre-war, to gain admission to pilot training for that branch of service. The belief you stated about the A6M being possibly worth the equivalent of 3 comparable Western fighters could no doubt be bolstered by the implied information in Sakai's description of Japanese fighter pilot training pre-WWII. There seemed to be a lot of attention paid by the IJN to instill or improve in their trainess the intangible qualities that go into a superior fighter pilot, what they would call "spiritual strength," and that had nothing to do, strictly speaking, with flying a fighter airplane. No doubt their knowledge their trainees were getting training in kendo, sumo-style wrestling, and other martial-arts techniques, in addition to their flight training, probably increased their idea of the worth of the A6M once they mated it to the supposed superior qualities of its pilots. Taken together this combination came close to being a "world-beater," at least at the beginning of the war. Their training establishment failed to accept a slightly lower quality of graduate, particularly after Midway, in return for increased number of "good" as opposed to "outstanding" pilots. They suffered essentially from the same problem the Germans did - they could never relieve their outstanding fighter leaders to make them competent instructors for the fledglings, as we and the Commonwealth did in that war. They fought until they were dead, hopelessly disabled, or the war ended.

EDIT: Something else in the article, re: the increasingly desperate POL situation for the Japanese air services, rang a bell. The US Navy's submarine service did not begin a concerted effort to sink Japanese tanker traffic until well into the war. Even the belated start of this campaign, which is roughly dated in the article when describing the onset of fuel shortages, caused significant disruption in the Japanese air arms' efforts. What might have happened had COMSUBPAC/COMSUBSOWESPAC made tankers a priority target for US fleet submarines earlier in the war?