7 ms·

I'm kind of wondering - at the beginning of the war, the IJN seemed to be on the upper hand with technical innovations, at least at the tactical level, and trai

by caycep 4y ago

I'm kind of wondering - at the beginning of the war, the IJN seemed to be on the upper hand with technical innovations, at least at the tactical level, and training. Why did it not keep pace with the tech development vs. the allies? Surely there were no shortage of talented individual intellectuals (Jiro Horikoshi, etc). Is this primarily a case study in management styles? i.e. the IJN had too many of those "No Damned Computer is going to tell me what to do" officers that shot down ideas like fighter director officers or NTDS systems?

paulmd 4y ago
I'm not any kind of an academic on the subject, but I'd guess a combination of lack of resources, and general lack of scale. Japan simply was not that big a country and even if you assume they had a disproportionate amount of intellectuals or amount of advancement per individual, they're a tiny tiny fraction of the size of the US, the US simply could be working on a lot more projects at once, and even long-shot ones that might not bear fruit, and they were working on the shorter-term ones at the same time. And that size factor also translates into much poorer availability of the strategic materials that are necessary for a lot of advanced research. After Midway the Japanese military really shifted into field-expedient mode, you can see it even in things like the quality of their small arms production, they started cutting every corner that it was possible to safely cut and then some. At that point I imagine that a lot of the advanced research was cut hard unless it was really really important (iirc they still had, for example, a nuclear program) or seemed likely to bear immediate fruit. The pacific front was really over when Japan didn't get the US carrier fleet at Pearl Harbor and it was definitely over after Midway, everything after that was just stubbornness. Same as the European front - there was really no chance of victory once the US shifted off a market-economy to a command-economy focused around war production and you had an industrial nation 2-3x the size of everyone else sitting 2000 miles away (which, realistically, might as well have been on the moon as far as Axis force projection) pumping war materiel into the battle. The US could build tanks faster than the Germans could blow them up, they could re-tool the Russian industry to modern standards, and they could build ships faster than the Japanese (or German u-boats) could sink them, all at the same time. In that sense even if they had gotten the pacific fleet, the US probably still could have won in the long term, it would just have taken years longer. It's a "what if the germans had actually taken moscow" counterfactual... it probably still wouldn't have changed anything given the biggest factor, which is an untouchable foe sitting on the other side of the planet pumping out war materiel while you run out of your own resources. But yeah in general the role of the military in Imperial Japan is very interesting... the army and the navy both had their own armies and navies and air forces, and they basically were in competition for the favor of the emperor. It wasn't quite what we think of as a modern professional military where everyone is at least theoretically "on the same side", the armed forces VERY MUCH did not like each other and would go out of their way to screw the other over. I could definitely see some disdain for eggheads, or refusing to adopt a technology because it came from the wrong branch too.
- caycep 4y ago
  I'm familiar with the industrial advantages...I'd had assumed that intellectual/engineering man hours would be easier to come by, but perhaps that was also limited in scale as well...or maybe it's a cultural thing that needs to get developed in a hypothetical Japanese equivalent of MIT/Harvard business school that did not yet exist...
  - newsclues 4y ago
    Cultural issues would be the aspect other than industrial, that gave the Americans a huge advantage. Decentralized command and initiative of low level officers and soldiers was a big factor. Can't remember the episode but this has been discussed on the Jocko Podcast I think.
    - paulmd 4y ago
      that is actually still an advantage of the US (or at least western armies) today... one of the reasons that Russian tank column in Ukraine just sat there for weeks is that the russians have a very top-down command structure where you don't do ANYTHING unless you're ordered. They lost communications, so there they sat. And when they actually sent generals up to get things cleaned up, the Ukranians picked them off with drones and snipers. The number of generals in the Russian command structure is also completely wack by western standards. The US has a very very large military and we have about 200 generals per service. The Russian army has about 1,500 generals in their army. So the "you don't do anything unless the general tells you" makes sense in that context - they have a lot of generals to match, their command structure is just much more top-down. (tangent, but hopefully interesting!)
      - newsclues 4y ago
        I respect the Russian style of pushing leaders towards the front lines. Russia doesn’t have an NCO rank system so they lack low level leadership at the tactical level. So they have more high level of leadership and need them closer to combat. Centralized command with poor communications infrastructure in a war zone with advanced electronic warfare, gives you good reasons for why the Russian military is struggling.
dontcare007 4y ago
Think bell curve distribution and population size. That's a big difference, all other things being equal. The US just has quantitatively more individuals to the far right of the curve, just based on population size. Then cultural differences- US highly prizes individualism (or used to, at least). Japan prized homogeneity, conformance, and Zen style perfection.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  Population is essential, but so are other inputs, including education. Many countries with large populations are far behind on technology. Also, you need people who are capable using technology, especially in novel ways in novel situations.
ranger207 4y ago
I'm not so sure the Japanese had better equipment at the start of WWII. The Zero was about the only thing that was qualitatively better than American planes, but that was more due to them having optimized it perfectly for their doctrine. Once Americans developed tactics to counter the Zero, like the Thatch Weave, the Zero's relative performance went down significantly. However, Imperial Japan certainly had much more experience than the US at the start of the war: they'd been fighting in China for years, had carrier operations down to a science, and had dominated southeast Asia for even longer. But they ultimately failed to adapt as the war went on. In a way, America starting as the underdog actually helped long term: while the US kept improving equipment, incorporating what doctrine and training worked, and refining production processes, the Japanese military essentially continued to use what had worked for the relatively low intensity war they had been fighting before. The most famous example is probably that Axis (Japanese and German) pilots often had dozens of air to air victories, while the US sent their pilots home to train new pilots regularly. While the Japanese aces were formidable, the rest of their pilots weren't so great, and after so many pilots were lost there was nobody to create new good pilots. Over China, where the Zero was technically better than anything it went up against, it was fine to throw new pilots on missions with little experience, since the plane would compensate for inexperience. Against the US Navy though, even the most green pilot had trained from an experienced pilot and knew all the tricks and tactics that would otherwise take several combat sorties to discover. In short, the US pilots had lower peaks than the Japanese, but the baseline level was much higher. Another example is the Bofors 40mm antiaircraft gun. Reportedly the original Swedish blueprints had so many sections marked "machine to fit" that an engineer said that "the Bofors gun had been designed so as to eliminate the unemployment problems of the Great Depression"[0]. By the end of the war, production time of the gun had been cut in half, enabling every ship in the fleet to be loaded with ever increasing numbers of guns. Meanwhile, the Zero's factory didn't even have an airstrip, and it had to be carried disassembled on animal-drawn carriage to the nearest airport, up to the end of the war. TL;DR the Japanese didn't have better equipment at the start of the war, but they did have more experience. However, they relied on their tried-and-true methods of production and training, which were geared towards a lower intensity war against an inferior opponent in China. The US knew they started from the underdog position and worked from the start to improve everything everywhere, and continued to do so up until the end of the war. [0] http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_4cm-56_mk12.php#Use_by_USA http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_4cm-56_mk12.php#Use_by_...
iooi 4y ago
Tech only gets you so far. Japan had a gigantic oil problem, even if they had developed supersonic jets at the end of the war they wouldn't have had the fuel to use them. Nice thing about kamikazes is that they use half the the fuel, since they don't need to return.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  It takes some fuel to teach them how to fly. Maybe less because you don't have to teach them how to land?
mandevil 4y ago
The Imperial Japanese Navy was best in the world in three things on Jan 1st 1942- attacking ships from airplanes, launching night torpedo attacks from cruisers and destroyers, and having the biggest, meanest battleship with by far the biggest guns and the most armor. Now, the Japanese navy picked very wisely- these were clearly the most important things in 1941, which was why they were so effective at fighting. But, at best, they had parity with the USN in every other category. So, for instance, the USN was much better at receiving air attacks- they were about two years ahead on radar technology (which, given the pace of technological development in 1940 is the difference between your first experimental set and wide-scale operational deployment). They were much better at radios and communication (literally the Zero's radio was so useless that the standard way that surface ships communicated with friendly Zero's on CAP was to fire their main guns into the water, kicking up big spouts of water, summoning the Zeros to attack enemy planes near the ship). They were much much better at medium range AA fire (the USN developed the Mk. 37 Fire Control System, an analog gyrostabilized computer hooked up to the range finder which automatically slewed the gun turrets to the correct spot, adjusting for the wave motion of the ship. By 1944 it was so sophisticated that when an operator tracked the target in the range-finder it could even automatically set the timer on the shell for the correct time of flight for that distance). A lot of these advantages compound: for example, the RN never developed as sophisticated a fire control system as the Mk 37 because the USN had also developed more expensive and better (small-tube high pressure) boilers at about the same time. These more sophisticated boilers allowed USN destroyers to adopt unitized machinery- going boiler-turbine-boiler-turbine, so that one hit that took out two rooms wouldn't knock out power to the whole ship. The RN, with less sophisticated engineering plants (boiler-boiler-turbine-turbine), were much more focused on continuing to fight a ship after power was lost and so didn't try to develop that sort of analog computer system, and instead insisted that their turrets be workable against airplanes using purely manual controls. And this sort of superiority shows up again and again when you look at other areas: submarine warfare and anti-submarine warfare, UNREP, amphibious assault, etc. all of these other categories the USN was somewhere between slightly and extremely superior. The Japanese, by carefully wielding those three areas of advantage, fought the larger USN to mutual exhaustion over the course of 1942, where both sides lost most of their carriers and other ships. But then by Operation Hailstone, the February 1944 raid on Truk, a totally different USN existed, which had been built during the course of 1942 and 1943, and that navy stomped through the remains of the IJN and has been the dominant naval force afloat for the past 80 years. ("There are three different navies that need to be understood to understand the Pacific War: the USN of Jan 1 1942, the IJN of Jan 1, 1942, and the USN of Jan 1 1944" as a historian once told me.) And that other navy was built because, as smart and clever as the Japanese were, the US had twice the population and three times the per-capita income. In a war of national wealth like a naval-air war, that difference just couldn't be answered.

by caycep 4y ago

paulmd 4y ago

I'm not any kind of an academic on the subject, but I'd guess a combination of lack of resources, and general lack of scale. Japan simply was not that big a country and even if you assume they had a disproportionate amount of intellectuals or amount of advancement per individual, they're a tiny tiny fraction of the size of the US, the US simply could be working on a lot more projects at once, and even long-shot ones that might not bear fruit, and they were working on the shorter-term ones at the same time. And that size factor also translates into much poorer availability of the strategic materials that are necessary for a lot of advanced research. After Midway the Japanese military really shifted into field-expedient mode, you can see it even in things like the quality of their small arms production, they started cutting every corner that it was possible to safely cut and then some. At that point I imagine that a lot of the advanced research was cut hard unless it was really really important (iirc they still had, for example, a nuclear program) or seemed likely to bear immediate fruit. The pacific front was really over when Japan didn't get the US carrier fleet at Pearl Harbor and it was definitely over after Midway, everything after that was just stubbornness. Same as the European front - there was really no chance of victory once the US shifted off a market-economy to a command-economy focused around war production and you had an industrial nation 2-3x the size of everyone else sitting 2000 miles away (which, realistically, might as well have been on the moon as far as Axis force projection) pumping war materiel into the battle. The US could build tanks faster than the Germans could blow them up, they could re-tool the Russian industry to modern standards, and they could build ships faster than the Japanese (or German u-boats) could sink them, all at the same time. In that sense even if they had gotten the pacific fleet, the US probably still could have won in the long term, it would just have taken years longer. It's a "what if the germans had actually taken moscow" counterfactual... it probably still wouldn't have changed anything given the biggest factor, which is an untouchable foe sitting on the other side of the planet pumping out war materiel while you run out of your own resources. But yeah in general the role of the military in Imperial Japan is very interesting... the army and the navy both had their own armies and navies and air forces, and they basically were in competition for the favor of the emperor. It wasn't quite what we think of as a modern professional military where everyone is at least theoretically "on the same side", the armed forces VERY MUCH did not like each other and would go out of their way to screw the other over. I could definitely see some disdain for eggheads, or refusing to adopt a technology because it came from the wrong branch too.

caycep 4y ago
I'm familiar with the industrial advantages...I'd had assumed that intellectual/engineering man hours would be easier to come by, but perhaps that was also limited in scale as well...or maybe it's a cultural thing that needs to get developed in a hypothetical Japanese equivalent of MIT/Harvard business school that did not yet exist...
- newsclues 4y ago
  Cultural issues would be the aspect other than industrial, that gave the Americans a huge advantage. Decentralized command and initiative of low level officers and soldiers was a big factor. Can't remember the episode but this has been discussed on the Jocko Podcast I think.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    that is actually still an advantage of the US (or at least western armies) today... one of the reasons that Russian tank column in Ukraine just sat there for weeks is that the russians have a very top-down command structure where you don't do ANYTHING unless you're ordered. They lost communications, so there they sat. And when they actually sent generals up to get things cleaned up, the Ukranians picked them off with drones and snipers. The number of generals in the Russian command structure is also completely wack by western standards. The US has a very very large military and we have about 200 generals per service. The Russian army has about 1,500 generals in their army. So the "you don't do anything unless the general tells you" makes sense in that context - they have a lot of generals to match, their command structure is just much more top-down. (tangent, but hopefully interesting!)
    - newsclues 4y ago
      I respect the Russian style of pushing leaders towards the front lines. Russia doesn’t have an NCO rank system so they lack low level leadership at the tactical level. So they have more high level of leadership and need them closer to combat. Centralized command with poor communications infrastructure in a war zone with advanced electronic warfare, gives you good reasons for why the Russian military is struggling.

dontcare007 4y ago

Think bell curve distribution and population size. That's a big difference, all other things being equal. The US just has quantitatively more individuals to the far right of the curve, just based on population size. Then cultural differences- US highly prizes individualism (or used to, at least). Japan prized homogeneity, conformance, and Zen style perfection.

wolverine876 4y ago
Population is essential, but so are other inputs, including education. Many countries with large populations are far behind on technology. Also, you need people who are capable using technology, especially in novel ways in novel situations.

ranger207 4y ago

I'm not so sure the Japanese had better equipment at the start of WWII. The Zero was about the only thing that was qualitatively better than American planes, but that was more due to them having optimized it perfectly for their doctrine. Once Americans developed tactics to counter the Zero, like the Thatch Weave, the Zero's relative performance went down significantly. However, Imperial Japan certainly had much more experience than the US at the start of the war: they'd been fighting in China for years, had carrier operations down to a science, and had dominated southeast Asia for even longer. But they ultimately failed to adapt as the war went on. In a way, America starting as the underdog actually helped long term: while the US kept improving equipment, incorporating what doctrine and training worked, and refining production processes, the Japanese military essentially continued to use what had worked for the relatively low intensity war they had been fighting before. The most famous example is probably that Axis (Japanese and German) pilots often had dozens of air to air victories, while the US sent their pilots home to train new pilots regularly. While the Japanese aces were formidable, the rest of their pilots weren't so great, and after so many pilots were lost there was nobody to create new good pilots. Over China, where the Zero was technically better than anything it went up against, it was fine to throw new pilots on missions with little experience, since the plane would compensate for inexperience. Against the US Navy though, even the most green pilot had trained from an experienced pilot and knew all the tricks and tactics that would otherwise take several combat sorties to discover. In short, the US pilots had lower peaks than the Japanese, but the baseline level was much higher. Another example is the Bofors 40mm antiaircraft gun. Reportedly the original Swedish blueprints had so many sections marked "machine to fit" that an engineer said that "the Bofors gun had been designed so as to eliminate the unemployment problems of the Great Depression"[0]. By the end of the war, production time of the gun had been cut in half, enabling every ship in the fleet to be loaded with ever increasing numbers of guns. Meanwhile, the Zero's factory didn't even have an airstrip, and it had to be carried disassembled on animal-drawn carriage to the nearest airport, up to the end of the war. TL;DR the Japanese didn't have better equipment at the start of the war, but they did have more experience. However, they relied on their tried-and-true methods of production and training, which were geared towards a lower intensity war against an inferior opponent in China. The US knew they started from the underdog position and worked from the start to improve everything everywhere, and continued to do so up until the end of the war. [0] http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_4cm-56_mk12.php#Use_by_USA http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_4cm-56_mk12.php#Use_by_...

iooi 4y ago

Tech only gets you so far. Japan had a gigantic oil problem, even if they had developed supersonic jets at the end of the war they wouldn't have had the fuel to use them. Nice thing about kamikazes is that they use half the the fuel, since they don't need to return.

ncmncm 4y ago
It takes some fuel to teach them how to fly. Maybe less because you don't have to teach them how to land?

mandevil 4y ago

The Imperial Japanese Navy was best in the world in three things on Jan 1st 1942- attacking ships from airplanes, launching night torpedo attacks from cruisers and destroyers, and having the biggest, meanest battleship with by far the biggest guns and the most armor. Now, the Japanese navy picked very wisely- these were clearly the most important things in 1941, which was why they were so effective at fighting. But, at best, they had parity with the USN in every other category. So, for instance, the USN was much better at receiving air attacks- they were about two years ahead on radar technology (which, given the pace of technological development in 1940 is the difference between your first experimental set and wide-scale operational deployment). They were much better at radios and communication (literally the Zero's radio was so useless that the standard way that surface ships communicated with friendly Zero's on CAP was to fire their main guns into the water, kicking up big spouts of water, summoning the Zeros to attack enemy planes near the ship). They were much much better at medium range AA fire (the USN developed the Mk. 37 Fire Control System, an analog gyrostabilized computer hooked up to the range finder which automatically slewed the gun turrets to the correct spot, adjusting for the wave motion of the ship. By 1944 it was so sophisticated that when an operator tracked the target in the range-finder it could even automatically set the timer on the shell for the correct time of flight for that distance). A lot of these advantages compound: for example, the RN never developed as sophisticated a fire control system as the Mk 37 because the USN had also developed more expensive and better (small-tube high pressure) boilers at about the same time. These more sophisticated boilers allowed USN destroyers to adopt unitized machinery- going boiler-turbine-boiler-turbine, so that one hit that took out two rooms wouldn't knock out power to the whole ship. The RN, with less sophisticated engineering plants (boiler-boiler-turbine-turbine), were much more focused on continuing to fight a ship after power was lost and so didn't try to develop that sort of analog computer system, and instead insisted that their turrets be workable against airplanes using purely manual controls. And this sort of superiority shows up again and again when you look at other areas: submarine warfare and anti-submarine warfare, UNREP, amphibious assault, etc. all of these other categories the USN was somewhere between slightly and extremely superior. The Japanese, by carefully wielding those three areas of advantage, fought the larger USN to mutual exhaustion over the course of 1942, where both sides lost most of their carriers and other ships. But then by Operation Hailstone, the February 1944 raid on Truk, a totally different USN existed, which had been built during the course of 1942 and 1943, and that navy stomped through the remains of the IJN and has been the dominant naval force afloat for the past 80 years. ("There are three different navies that need to be understood to understand the Pacific War: the USN of Jan 1 1942, the IJN of Jan 1, 1942, and the USN of Jan 1 1944" as a historian once told me.) And that other navy was built because, as smart and clever as the Japanese were, the US had twice the population and three times the per-capita income. In a war of national wealth like a naval-air war, that difference just couldn't be answered.