Submarine Warfare
Mister G
to be imported. Given that, why were they so incredibly bad at
commerce protection. They even had the British experience in WW1 to
draw upon, not to mention pointers from their German allies, so what
went wrong. Conversely, their strategy was to set up rings of island
fortresses which the US would be "forced to fight through. So why were
they also bad at submarine warfare. The must have understood that the
US would have bring every scrap of material across the Pacific, so why
wasn't the west coast - and all ocean areas from there to Japan -
swarming with Japanese submarines? In many cases support vessels would
be sitting right off the island being invaded, shouldn't that have
drawn IJN subs like flies to honey?
Louis C
> Japan is an island nation. Almost all their strategic materials needed
> to be imported. Given that, why were they so incredibly bad at
> commerce protection.
There was a cultural element involved: fighting warships was a
warrior's job, fighting battleships was the most glorious job
available, playing shepherd to a bunch of merchantmen definitely was
not.
There was an economic side to the question: if Japanese planners had
seriously taken into account the shipping situation, as opposed to
considering it unworthy of their attention, they would have been
forced to the conclusion that their country lacked the bottoms to
sustain its economy, even if the war turned out exactly as planned (a
rare occurrence), and that the IJN could not afford to escort what
shipping the country did have.
But my favorite would probably be doctrine. A man named Mahan looked
at British history without taking too close a look, and he claimed to
have identified the way to world power, which was control of the sea.
Still according to Mahan, there was only way to become a true naval
power and master the seas: build a fleet of capital ships, destroy the
enemy fleets in a climactic battle, and everything else will fall into
place afterward. According to that creed, the IJN decided that if it
managed to defeat the US line of battle, it could deal with other
problems later.
Now, my opinion of Mahan has never been particularly high, but it is a
fact that he is still highly regarded today, and in the early 20th
century his book was practically considered Gospel within British and
American naval circles. Japan had built its navy along British lines,
so it is little wonder that the Japanese would ignore commerce
protection. Note that they were far from the only country to do so,
including among large naval powers that should have known better.
> They even had the British experience in WW1 to
> draw upon, not to mention pointers from their German allies, so what
> went wrong.
The WWI Royal Navy was most reluctant to abandon its Mahanian stance
of trying to defeat the Germans in battle and consider the protection
of its own shipping. It took forever for the British to eventually
adopt, oh so reluctantly, as simple a measure as convoying. Britain
was building large warships right to the end of the conflict. WWI
naval warfare was not couched in terms of commerce protection, but
instead with such actions as Coronel, Jutland and the other North Sea
encounters between German and British forces, various daring raids on
Central Power positions, etc. Significant submarine feats were
identified as e.g. the sinking of 4 British cruisers in the Channel by
a single submarine, further confirming the Japanese into their belief
that they were right to focus on warships.
My point here: without direct experience of their own merchant marine
coming under submarine attack, I strongly doubt that what general
information was made available after WWI would have indicated that
submarines were a serious threat. Nor were the Germans providing that
many "pointers". Submarines had not proved decisive before, they had
at best been a very long-term weapon, and the whole Japanese strategy
focused on making the Americans give up early anyway. So enemy
submarines were not deemed important. Given the information available,
and the chosen strategy, I'd say the Japanese were right. Of course,
their strategy made absolutely no sense whatsoever, but then, that's
WWII Japan for you...
> Conversely, their strategy was to set up rings of island
> fortresses which the US would be "forced to fight through. So why were
> they also bad at submarine warfare.
I don't know that they were. Look up the fate of USS Wasp, for
instance.
> The must have understood that the
> US would have bring every scrap of material across the Pacific, so why
> wasn't the west coast - and all ocean areas from there to Japan -
> swarming with Japanese submarines?
Because Japan didn't have enough submarines, let alone subs with
enough range, to maintain an effective blockade of the US western
seaboard. Oahu was a major naval base and as such was heavily guarded.
> In many cases support vessels would
> be sitting right off the island being invaded, shouldn't that have
> drawn IJN subs like flies to honey?
I assume you're referring to the late war island-hopping campaign.
Part of the answer would be that the support vessels weren't exactly
unescorted, and the other part is that by the time IJN subs could
reach the area, the place would usually be under new management.
LC
David H Thornley
> Mister G wrote:
> There was an economic side to the question: if Japanese planners had
> seriously taken into account the shipping situation, as opposed to
> considering it unworthy of their attention,
There was some sort of official report, whose assumptions varied from
the perhaps barely conceivable to the ludicrously optimistic, that
said Japan would have enough shipping. I wouldn't count this as
"seriously taken into account", but it shows it warranted some sort
of lip service.
> Still according to Mahan, there was only way to become a true naval
> power and master the seas: build a fleet of capital ships, destroy the
> enemy fleets in a climactic battle, and everything else will fall into
> place afterward.
This is a simplification, of course, but not really an
oversimplification. Commerce raiding was normally referred to
as "guerre de course", apparently thinking it a French thing
to do. Mahan doesn't seem to have thought much of the French
Navy.
According to that creed, the IJN decided that if it
> managed to defeat the US line of battle, it could deal with other
> problems later.
>
According to Nofi, in his book on US Fleet Problems, the USN
was tending towards the idea that the battleship clash would be rather
late in the war. Even if the USN had stuck to battleship
supremacy, the Japanese might have had to deal with problems
earlier rather than later.
> Now, my opinion of Mahan has never been particularly high, but it is a
> fact that he is still highly regarded today, and in the early 20th
> century his book was practically considered Gospel within British and
> American naval circles.
Seems simple enough to me.
Mahan studied the Royal Navy, and came up with scholarly reasons why
it had the best doctrine. Flattery will get you a long way in some
cases. Then, of course, the USN had a few good frigate stories
and some Civil War activity as the basis for self-image and
tradition, and having the premier naval theorist and writer be
American was something to be proud of.
>> They even had the British experience in WW1 to
>> draw upon, not to mention pointers from their German allies, so what
>> went wrong.
>
> The WWI Royal Navy was most reluctant to abandon its Mahanian stance
> of trying to defeat the Germans in battle and consider the protection
> of its own shipping.
What seems odd here is that the RN, in the periods Mahan wrote about,
did use convoys as appropriate.
It took forever for the British to eventually
> adopt, oh so reluctantly, as simple a measure as convoying. Britain
> was building large warships right to the end of the conflict.
To give the British credit, the Germans added two battleships and
one battlecruiser to the High Seas Fleet after Jutland, and they
were in worse shape to do so. The British needed a powerful battleship
fleet, and were generally safe from enemy armies. The Germans didn't,
and the only thing keeping enemy armies from their soil was their
armies.
> My point here: without direct experience of their own merchant marine
> coming under submarine attack, I strongly doubt that what general
> information was made available after WWI would have indicated that
> submarines were a serious threat.
Don't forget that WWI Germany had been the only naval power using
submarines for commerce warfare in any significant way, and such
warfare was banned (again) in the Washington Naval Treaty. The
Japanese might have thought that the US would avoid being in
obvious flagrant violation of that treaty.
Nor were the Germans providing that
> many "pointers". Submarines had not proved decisive before, they had
> at best been a very long-term weapon,
Another thing to consider is that this was the first case of
asymmetric warfare in commerce raiding. In previous wars,
commerce raiders had been above-the-water ships of some sort,
be they galleys or modified merchant steamers. That may have
made it more difficult to understand.
--
David H. Thornley | If you want my opinion, ask.
da...@thornley.net | If you don't, flee.
http://www.thornley.net/~thornley/david/ | O-
Don Phillipson
news:5dba1630-eb7b-4c11...@a11g2000yqm.googlegroups.com...
The long-term historical context of Japanese warfare was:
(1) Civil wars between daimyos (local lords), mostly on land,
in which boats were marginal auxiliaries.
(2) Territorial expansion on the Asian mainland (China and
Korea.) The Chinese needed boats to get there, but once
arrived could fight on land as in #1.
(3) Modernization in the Meiji period: modern arms meant
gunpowder (earlier banned by moratorium) and emulating the
German army and the British navy (structure, tactics, training.)
Short-term strategy in WW2 was roughly as in #2 above,
with the extra target of SE Asia (for strategic resources, viz. oil,
rubber and metals.) The main innovation was the Pearl Harbor
attack, aimed to keep the USA out of the war. This succeeded
tactically (sank ships) but failed strategically (did not keep the
USA out of the war.)
Strategic success in SE Asia required control of the sea
lanes and the air, which Japan established on first arrival.
Japanese commanders were prepared for a long campaign
on land but not in air and sea (cf. (a) failure to replace naval
aircrew battle casualties, (b) reluctance to organize merchant
marine convoys, (c) no operational research to optimize
deployment of Japanese air and sea forces against
rapidly-growing Allied forces.
A fourth element may have been the Japanese cultural
tradition of noble death in battle, cf. the last sortie of the
BB Yamato and the Kamikaze attacks of 1945.
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)
Alan Nordin
> Japan is an island nation. Almost all their strategic materials needed
> to be imported. Given that, why were they so incredibly bad at
> commerce protection.
I've never seen {or don't remember} any history that addresses this
specific question. I would guess that they simply didn't have the
resources to build the Capitolship centric navy they wanted and also a
large fleet of convoy escorts. Like many other navies before WWII,
they may also have been lured into a false belief that Sonar was far
more effective than it proved to be. Though by Pearl Harbor,
obviously they would no longer believe this was the case considering
the successes of the U-boat fleet.
> They even had the British experience in WW1 to
> draw upon, not to mention pointers from their German allies, so what
> went wrong. Conversely, their strategy was to set up rings of island
> fortresses which the US would be "forced to fight through. So why were
> they also bad at submarine warfare. The must have understood that the
> US would have bring every scrap of material across the Pacific, so why
> wasn't the west coast - and all ocean areas from there to Japan -
> swarming with Japanese submarines?
Japanese submarine doctrine specified that they scout for the battle
fleet. And this is how they were used to a great extent even when it
cost them dearly {see the exploits of the DE England.} Also, later in
the war, submarines were the only method left to the Japanese to
deliver even small amounts of freight to bypassed garrisons and many
were diverted to this type of duty {and many were lost this way as
well.}
> In many cases support vessels would
> be sitting right off the island being invaded, shouldn't that have
> drawn IJN subs like flies to honey?
This was attempted and during the invasion of the Gilbert Islands was
at least partially successful when I-175 sank the CVE Liscome Bay. I
say partially successful in that it didn't prevent the landing.
The standard formula for amphibious operations was for the shore
bombardment, air support, minesweeping and ASW groups to arrive
earlier than the main amphibious groups and make the area safe. In
this the ASW groups were largely successful. Off hand, I can't
remember any other successful submarine attacks during a landing.
{Maybe one off of Saipan.}
Alan
ken...@cix.compulink.co.uk
<3a905088-cb22-4d43...@p20g2000yqp.googlegroups.com>,
loui...@yahoo.com (Louis C) wrote:
> The WWI Royal Navy was most reluctant to abandon its Mahanian stance
> of trying to defeat the Germans in battle and consider the protection
> of its own shipping.
The RN was reluctant to introduce general convoying. However it did
introduce convoying for troops and the Scandinavian trade. The
reluctance to introduce general convoying was in part due to the lack of
escorts.
Even in 1939 when convoying was introduced at the start of the war a
large proportion of ships continued to sail independently until the fast
convoy system was put in.
Ken Young
Caillebotte
> to be imported. Given that, why were they so incredibly bad at
> commerce protection.
At the time of Pearl Harbor, Japan's economy was operating at full
capacity, and had been doing so for an extended period. Producing a
greater number of escorts would have meant NOT producing something
else. What, among the Japanese military machinery should have been
canceled to allow a greater production of escorts?
In principle, the Japanese could have canceled Yamato, Musashi, and
Shinano. However, Japanese strategy called for a short war (which was
the only type of war that Japan could win); the heavy battleships were
a significant part of their strategy for defeating any major naval
power they faced.
In principle, the Japanese could have canceled construction of
aircraft carriers. This would seem counterproductive, given that the
major naval actions of the war turned on the ability to project
airpower.
In principle, the Japanese could have decreased aircraft product. This
would also seem counterproductive, because most operations in the war
were heavily dependent on (at minimum) air parity.
The reality was that Japan was incapable of winning a long war with
the US unless the US gave up prior to the total defeat of Japan. The
outrage elicited by the attack on Pearl Harbor precluded much chance
of the US deciding that the war was no longer worth the cost. As a
result, any decision that the Japanese took would lead to people
asking: "why did the Japanese do THIS, instead of THAT?"
A place to start for looking at the overall disparity in forces is:
http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm
The short version: by 1945, the US Navy was larger than every other
navy in the world, combined. By 1945, US Navy was more powerful than
every navy that had every existed, combined; nothing that Japan did
could prevent this massive level of production by the US, which left
the Japanese with little in the way of useful choices to make. The
only, very small, chance that the Japanese had was to inflict such
defeats upon the US that the US would give up without exerting its
full might; the only way that this might be possible was to build
warships and aircraft intended for offensive operations. The Japanese
attempted to do this, and discovered that nothing that they could do
would discourage the US enough to stop the war before essentially the
entire Japanese navy and merchant marine were destroyed.
>In many cases support vessels would
>be sitting right off the island being invaded, shouldn't that have
>drawn IJN subs like flies to honey?
The US built about 850 destroyers and destroyer escorts and over 100
escort carriers during the war. The Japanese submarines, although
reasonably effective in some respects, were less damage resistant and
less numerous than the U-boats. By the time that the island invasions
were happening routinely, the US Navy had learned most of the
necessary lessons about anti-submarine warfare from the British and by
fighting the Germans. The US had plenty of escorts; typically many
more escorts than I-boats were available, which limited the likelihood
of significant Japanese successes.
The Japanese submarines had some successes (the sinking of Yorktown
(CV-5 ) and Wasp (CV-7), and twice putting Saratoga out of action, and
the sinking of the unescorted USS Indianapolis), but these tended to
be early in the war, when US anti-submarine warfare was less effective
or under special circumstances. Once the US Navy learned the anti-
submarine warfare lessons, and once the US building program began out-
producing the world, the Japanese submarines became essentially as
ineffective as the German U-boats were after 1943.
mtfe...@netmapsonscape.net
> At the time of Pearl Harbor, Japan's economy was operating at full
> capacity, and had been doing so for an extended period. Producing a
> greater number of escorts would have meant NOT producing something
> else. What, among the Japanese military machinery should have been
> canceled to allow a greater production of escorts?
It would have had to come from the civilian sector, though I doubt they
could have produced anywhere near the numbers they required. But Japan
never went to a full war-time economy. The zaibutsu retained enough
quiet influence to avoid being completely subsumed to the war effort.
Mike
mtfe...@netmapsonscape.net
> "Mister G" <mdg...@verizon.net> wrote in message
> news:5dba1630-eb7b-4c11...@a11g2000yqm.googlegroups.com...
Some nitpicks...
> The long-term historical context of Japanese warfare was:
> (2) Territorial expansion on the Asian mainland (China and
> Korea.) The Chinese needed boats to get there, but once
> arrived could fight on land as in #1.
At and shortly after this time, the Japanese had more guns afloat
in the Pacific than all other nations (notably Britain, Portugal, and
Spain) combined, courtesy of one William Adams.
They would again rapidly build a formidable navy post-Meiji.
> Short-term strategy in WW2 was roughly as in #2 above,
> with the extra target of SE Asia (for strategic resources, viz. oil,
Japan had been progessively putting more and more effort into building
a first class navy, and they had a good one. What they didn't have
was the ability to absorb losses.
> Strategic success in SE Asia required control of the sea
> lanes and the air, which Japan established on first arrival.
> Japanese commanders were prepared for a long campaign
> on land but not in air and sea (cf. (a) failure to replace naval
> aircrew battle casualties, (b) reluctance to organize merchant
> marine convoys,
There's a good account of the life of a Japanese merchant mariner in
Cook & Cook's book.
> (c) no operational research to optimize
> deployment of Japanese air and sea forces against
> rapidly-growing Allied forces.
Most important was simply imaging the problem away. The Japanese Army
was simply to "provision locally". Problem solved.
> A fourth element may have been the Japanese cultural
> tradition of noble death in battle, cf. the last sortie of the
> BB Yamato and the Kamikaze attacks of 1945.
That's overrated; only if you're going to die anyway.
Mike
Chris
This is strictly in addition to the many other excellent points
brought up by other posters.
> Japan is an island nation. Almost all their strategic materials needed
> to be imported. Given that, why were they so incredibly bad at
> commerce protection. They even had the British experience in WW1 to
> draw upon, not to mention pointers from their German allies, so what
> went wrong.
Note that the Japanese never had a central lifeline traversed by a
thousand ships a month like the NORLANT was for the British [1]. The
links between the oil in the DEI and the Home Islands were vitally
important, as were other key resource links to China and along the
Inland Sea, but Japan had neither the merchant bottoms necessary nor
the need for running massive convoys from A to B. Instead they ran
small convoys with a few escorts. British OR people calculated that
bigger convoys were better- more efficient in use of escorts and more
ships survived. Obviously the smaller convoys that the Japanese did
run (and don't fool yourself, most of their merchant ships were
escorted, but would be with 4-5 other merchant ships and 2-3 escorts)
were not as effective.
"Why didn't the Japanese build the Type D destroyer [known to
Americans as the Matsu class] earlier?" is probably the best way to
ask this question. The answer, of course, is what do you want to give
up to get more of them? (The correct answer- the Army in China- means
that there is no war at all.) As a thought experiment, let's replace
the three colossal wastes of steel with Type D's. I can't see how it
give you more than 50 or so extra escorts (yes, a single Yamato
displaces as much as 50 Type D's, but engines are the key limiting
factor, requiring a great deal of expertise and effort to build, and
that was merely a factor of 6 different: 12 boilers versus 2. 50 is
merely a SWAG and should not be trusted as a hard number, but I
believe it to be the correct order of magnitude). Would ~50 escorts be
enough to appreciably change the war effort? They would certainly have
been more useful to Japan than what they built historically, and
killed a lot more American sailors, but they could not have turned the
outcome of the convoy war. The USN advantages due to code breaking and
greater building capacity would be just as terrifying in the end.
And submarines were far from the only threat to Japan's merchant
shipping. My notes from _The Economics of World War Two_ (edited by
Harrison) says that the Operation Hailstone raid on Truk sank 10% of
Japan's available shipping in two days.
> Conversely, their strategy was to set up rings of island
> fortresses which the US would be "forced to fight through. So why were
> they also bad at submarine warfare. The must have understood that the
> US would have bring every scrap of material across the Pacific, so why
> wasn't the west coast - and all ocean areas from there to Japan -
> swarming with Japanese submarines?
The submarines were earmarked for attrition of the USN main battle
fleet. The USN battle fleet and it's nasty 5 to 3 superiority was the
singular focus of the Japanese Navy before the war. Everything that
the IJN built, trained, and taught was designed to even up those odds.
Fighting a defensive island hoping campaign was not really something
that the Japanese really prepared for, and it shows. Though if they
did envision how the war would turn out they might have been more
careful about starting it.
[1]: According to my calculations (based on the data from
http://www.convoyweb.org.uk/), between June 21st and December 31st
1941 3292 ships set sail in the SC and HX (slow and fast, eastbound
only) convoys. All ships capable of doing 14 knots sailed
independently during this period. That means that the main NORLANT
lifeline for the British ran to 500 convoyed ships a month, one way,
*before* the US entry into the war had serious effect (by building up
troops and strategic air forces in Britain, fighting land battles,
etc.) so we are really just focusing on meeting Britain's needs.
Chris Manteuffel
The Horny Goat
<da...@thornley.net> wrote:
>To give the British credit, the Germans added two battleships and
>one battlecruiser to the High Seas Fleet after Jutland, and they
>were in worse shape to do so. The British needed a powerful battleship
>fleet, and were generally safe from enemy armies. The Germans didn't,
>and the only thing keeping enemy armies from their soil was their
>armies.
Yup - and the British acknowledged early on that their army was not up
to European standards (at least in quantity). You no doubt know which
British war leader claimed to be the only person in uniform able to
lose the war in an afternoon and know it was an admiral not a general.
[I personally think the quotation rather specious since even had the
Grand Fleet been 100% destroyed at Jutland without German losses (ha!)
engineering a 1916 Sealion would have been rather doubtful to put it
mildly but everyone knew who said it and that it wasn't a general.]
The Horny Goat
<e9...@SPAMBLOCK.ncf.ca> wrote:
>A fourth element may have been the Japanese cultural
>tradition of noble death in battle, cf. the last sortie of the
>BB Yamato and the Kamikaze attacks of 1945.
Very true though clearly the Japanese in the summer and fall of 1941
never expected to be in that position in 1944-45!
Louis C
> There was some sort of official report, whose assumptions varied from
> the perhaps barely conceivable to the ludicrously optimistic, that
> said Japan would have enough shipping. I wouldn't count this as
> "seriously taken into account", but it shows it warranted some sort
> of lip service.
Ok, so I suppose it was, in fact, deemed "worthy of their attention"
in that way. Point taken, I stand corrected :-)
> This is a simplification, of course, but not really an
> oversimplification. Commerce raiding was normally referred to
> as "guerre de course", apparently thinking it a French thing
> to do. Mahan doesn't seem to have thought much of the French
> Navy.
Guerre de course was the term used by the first officially sponsored
corsairs. At the time Mahan wrote, a lot of people spoke French, or
pretended they did, so the French phrase was better than "commerce
raiding". It also was more specific: after all, there was a difference
between guerre de course, which was what people like Jean Bart had
done, or ships like Graf Spee would do, and plain piracy. There's a
grey area of course for e.g. 16th century English pirates plying the
Channel attacking everything in sight, in the knowledge it was their
patriotic duty to do so (because most of the ships they attacked were
Catholic, and because it made for an additional source of income). But
at the time Mahan wrote, the Royal Navy was generally opposed to
piracy so Drake was a patriotic admiral and that was that.
More seriously, guerre de course was what the French reverted to after
their bid to defeat the combined English and Dutch navies with
conventional ships of the line had failed. So it was a second-best
choice, a loser's choice, and indeed the French generally lost at sea.
So commerce raiding was considered somewhat like guerilla: something
that defeated forces indulged in to keep themselves going for a while,
and which didn't really alter the outcome.
For an American, it seems strange that Mahan ignored how important US
commerce raiding had been during the war of 1812.
> According to that creed, the IJN decided that if it> managed to defeat the US line of battle, it could deal with other
> > problems later.
>
> According to Nofi, in his book on US Fleet Problems, the USN
> was tending towards the idea that the battleship clash would be rather
> late in the war. Even if the USN had stuck to battleship
> supremacy, the Japanese might have had to deal with problems
> earlier rather than later.
I wasn't claiming Mahan was right, let alone that the Japanese's
understanding of Mahan was. Only that it made sense, from their point
of view, to ignore details like US submarine attack on their shipping
lanes and focus on the big issue. After naval supremacy had been
decided, there would always be time to sort things out. Or so the
reasoning went.
Note that most WWII navies focused on building warships, first, with
ASW escorts always coming in later as emergency programs. The RN
thought it had the submarine threat under control with the decision to
instore convoying from the beginning of the conflict and the use of
ASDIC, from which much was expected. It was still well short of having
enough escorts until the second half of the conflict. All the other
large European navies - Marine Nationale, Regia Marina, Kriegsmarine -
built their light ships for fleet action first, only relegating their
less powerful DDs to escort duties, for which they weren't always
suited. It took the Cold War for a major navy like the RN to
consciously design itself primarily as a convoy escort force in peace
time.
> > The WWI Royal Navy was most reluctant to abandon its Mahanian stance
> > of trying to defeat the Germans in battle and consider the protection
> > of its own shipping.
>
> What seems odd here is that the RN, in the periods Mahan wrote about,
> did use convoys as appropriate.
It seems British admirals should have read about what their country's
history actually had been, instead of Mahan's enthusiastic take on it.
I should add that Mahan, like Douhet later would, had plenty of
company so I should probably stop singling him out by that point.
> To give the British credit, the Germans added two battleships and
> one battlecruiser to the High Seas Fleet after Jutland, and they
> were in worse shape to do so.
Sure, but that was a case of completing ships that had already been
started well before then. I don't think the Germans were building any
large warships in 1918, whereas the RN definitely was.
> The British needed a powerful battleship
> fleet, and were generally safe from enemy armies.
By the end of the war, it seems clear the British had better use for
their resources than building additional large surface warships.
Escorts, or additional equipment for the large army they had deployed,
would have made more sense from my point of view.
> Don't forget that WWI Germany had been the only naval power using
> submarines for commerce warfare in any significant way, and such
> warfare was banned (again) in the Washington Naval Treaty. The
> Japanese might have thought that the US would avoid being in
> obvious flagrant violation of that treaty.
A good point.
Still, one that wouldn't explain why the Japanese refused to consider
submarine commerce warfare for themselves. In my opinion, the
explanation for that has to be that submarine warfare had been
defeated, just like the other forms of commerce raiding, thus
reinforcing Mahan's theory that only decisive clashes between main
battle fleets settled sea supremacy, with the rest falling into place
afterward. From that perspective, the decisive battle of WWI was
Jutland, not the victory over the U-boats. I have read a few old
history books and Jutland is certainly mentioned more often than
convoys.
And the Japanese had a point: if the Germans had won at Jutland (or
had won a decisive fleet engagement in the North Sea), the effects
would have been far more important than additional sinkings by their U-
boats.
> Another thing to consider is that this was the first case of
> asymmetric warfare in commerce raiding. In previous wars,
> commerce raiders had been above-the-water ships of some sort,
> be they galleys or modified merchant steamers. That may have
> made it more difficult to understand.
I don't think so. The Japanese seem to have been fairly savvy,
technically. No-one considers submarines to have been a revolutionary
development for commerce raiding, and Germany still tried to use
surface raiders. The reason it mostly used subs was that, well, they
were easier to sail from Germany to places that mattered.
But the Japanese never seem to have taken commerce raiding seriously,
be it by surface or submarine raiders.
LC
Geoffrey Sinclair
news:5dba1630-eb7b-4c11...@a11g2000yqm.googlegroups.com...
> to be imported. Given that, why were they so incredibly bad at
> commerce protection. They even had the British experience in WW1 to
> draw upon, not to mention pointers from their German allies, so what
> went wrong.
Even without the pointers the Japanese embassy staff in London could
note the general effects of the U-boat campaign.
> Conversely, their strategy was to set up rings of island
> fortresses which the US would be "forced to fight through.
Yes, the layered defence as the Japanese knew they would be outnumbered.
> So why were
> they also bad at submarine warfare.
They had the best torpedoes, but the doctrine was based on the need to
provide a layered defence against a bigger force, so the submarines were
fleet units, attacking enemy warships, not commerce.
> The must have understood that the
> US would have bring every scrap of material across the Pacific, so why
> wasn't the west coast - and all ocean areas from there to Japan -
> swarming with Japanese submarines?
Essentially doctrine, the IJN partially tried a blockade of Hawaii in early
1942 but largely the submarines were meant to be part of fleet actions.
Like the scouting lines set up before Midway.
Also Japan did not have that many submarines in the first place, about 64
in commission in November 1941 and the Pacific is a big place. Using
the 1/3 rule that leaves about 20 on patrol at any one time.
> In many cases support vessels would
> be sitting right off the island being invaded, shouldn't that have
> drawn IJN subs like flies to honey?
The invasion forces did draw IJN submarines and they had some
successes but the USN by that stage had plenty of anti submarine
assets.
No Navy was going to build large numbers of escorts in peace time, they
cost much more to run per ton in money and manpower terms than the
bigger ships, which also take much more time to build. In WWII this
was compounded by the type with the longest building times, the
battleships, being much older on average than other classes of warships.
Submarines are also expensive for their size.
So the great light ship construction programs were a wartime thing,
compounded for the RN by the loss of the French Fleet and the
sudden increase in places under U-boat threat.
The IJN had the advantage the USN torpedoes had enough problems
to seriously effect USN submarine performance, along with a USN
doctrine of caution. This made it seem the submarine threat was small
enough to be manageable, even so the Japanese merchant fleet size
declined in 1942.
Rather like the USN the IJN escort building programs did not really
produce numbers of ships before 1943 and 1944, in the IJN case
more 1944 than 1943, by then it was too late. Similar trend for
the IJN submarine construction program, it struggled to keep up
with losses, the nominal strength of the IJN submarine force hit a
wartime peak of 73 in October 1943 and then 74 in January 1944.
(Ignoring the cargo submarine force)
The IJN built 32 DE from April 1944 onwards, losing 13 of them, they
also built 170 escorts from November 1942 onwards, mainly the type
C and D, plus they salvaged 8 allied ships. They lost 81 escorts.
Geoffrey Sinclair
Remove the nb for email.
ken...@cix.compulink.co.uk
<34e9a7fb-21cd-412d...@d1g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>,
loui...@yahoo.com (Louis C) wrote:
> I don't think the Germans were building any
> large warships in 1918, whereas the RN definitely was.
The Germans continued to build capital ships to the end of the war with
new construction being laid down in 1915 and 1916.
Ken Young
Chris
> Note that most WWII navies focused on building warships, first, with
> ASW escorts always coming in later as emergency programs.
There is a very good reason for that: for a 1940's navy battleships
are by far the longest lead time item a navy can have. All that armor
and those guns take a long time to create and then assemble properly,
and that means that battleships in particular have to be the focus
during peacetime: for the USN they took 35 months from laying down to
commissioning. Carriers- without all that thick face hardened armor,
but about the same size and even larger engines- were much faster,
just 19 months. [1]
I haven't bothered to create a spreadsheet for USN destroyer escort
construction times, but some random spot checks show them generally
commissioned about 7-8 months after being laid down. Which is why you
can afford to enter a war without all the escorts you will need to
fight it, but you'd better be very far along on all the battleships
you will need to prosecute the war.
[1]: Both numbers are the mean for all USN ships completed during
wartime that were worked on continuously from keel-laying to
commissioning. Battleships represent the average of all Iowa's,
SoDak's, and NC's. Carriers represent the average of all Essex's.
Chris Manteuffel
David H Thornley
> small convoys with a few escorts. British OR people calculated that
> bigger convoys were better- more efficient in use of escorts and more
> ships survived. Obviously the smaller convoys that the Japanese did
> run (and don't fool yourself, most of their merchant ships were
> escorted, but would be with 4-5 other merchant ships and 2-3 escorts)
> were not as effective.
>
larger convoys.
With normal merchant shipping, ships steam when ready, at their most
efficient speeds, and port facilities are kept more or less constantly
busy.
With convoys, ships steam when the convoy is ready, keep to one
particular speed (no faster than the practical best of the slowest
ship in the convoy), and ports are either mostly empty or
overwhelmed with work. I've seen estimates that convoying
reduces the efficiency of shipping by 30-40%, and that's why
the Allies didn't introduce convoys where they didn't have to.
The effects of this will be worse with the bigger convoys, and much
less with smaller convoys. It's one of those tradeoffs. I'm not
saying the Japanese were doing much of anything right in their
shipping war, but the smaller convoys did have short-term
advantages to a power short on shipping.
> And submarines were far from the only threat to Japan's merchant
> shipping. My notes from _The Economics of World War Two_ (edited by
> Harrison) says that the Operation Hailstone raid on Truk sank 10% of
> Japan's available shipping in two days.
>
Correct, and to some extent we have to blame the Japanese Army and
Navy for this. Both services were contemptuous of the merchant
fleet, and had no qualms about diverting merchant ships and
risking them futilely. (Nor were they at all interested in
cooperating to improve efficiency. It's hard to imagine more
dysfunctional armed forces.)
> that the Japanese really prepared for, and it shows. Though if they
> did envision how the war would turn out they might have been more
> careful about starting it.
>
The Japanese could envision how the war would turn out. They simply
disregarded the almost certain outcome, either thinking they had to
carry it out regardless or that they would be saved by divine
intervention (centuries ago, an invasion from China had been
disrupted by a typhoon, referred to later as the "Divine Wind" -
"kamikaze" in Japanese).
I've observed similar behavior in people with mental illnesses,
and it's quite common among unsuccessful minor criminals.
Sigvaldi Eggertsson
> to European standards (at least in quantity). You no doubt know which
> British war leader claimed to be the only person in uniform able to
> lose the war in an afternoon and know it was an admiral not a general.
>
> [I personally think the quotation rather specious since even had the
> Grand Fleet been 100% destroyed at Jutland without German losses (ha!)
> engineering a 1916 Sealion would have been rather doubtful to put it
> mildly but everyone knew who said it and that it wasn't a general.]
It is not sure if a 1916 Sealion would have been necessary, the loss of a
substantial part of the fleet (to mines or submarines, if not the High seas
fleet) would have given the British serious doubts regarding their
participation in the war.
The admiral in question was well aware of the quote and belived in it
himself, as evident from the battle.
Haydn
> But the Japanese never seem to have taken commerce raiding seriously,
> be it by surface or submarine raiders.
They came to the point of permanently preventing from going into action
two Italian surface raiders that had escaped from collapsing Italian
East Africa and reached Kobe in full sailing and combat efficiency and
high spirits.
Really bizarre in the way of self-defeating attitudes.
Haydn
Haydn
> More seriously, guerre de course was what the French reverted to after
> their bid to defeat the combined English and Dutch navies with
> conventional ships of the line had failed. So it was a second-best
> choice, a loser's choice, and indeed the French generally lost at sea.
Also at Mahan's time the French Navy could not hope to defeat the
British in a Mahanian decisive cannon contest. And they also saw their
coastline in severe danger - exposed to devastating naval gunfire that
would turn ports and coastal towns into ashes, with terrible
repercussions on the country's economy and morale. A rather common scare
at that time (see the contemporary Italian worries about the French
fleet savaging their coastline, too long to be seriously defended).
Hence Aube's set of ideas, some unlikely and somewhat extravagant, some
interesting, of which la guerre de course only was a part.
> It seems British admirals should have read about what their country's
> history actually had been, instead of Mahan's enthusiastic take on it.
> I should add that Mahan, like Douhet later would, had plenty of
> company so I should probably stop singling him out by that point.
I guess any degree of Mahanianism left in the Royal Navy died one day in
July 1940, when a consistent and long cherished - although, in the
specific case, stemming from casual circumstances - attempt to
decisively crush an inferior battle fleet in a heavy gunfire duel
failed. Much was expected of an encounter like that, at strategic not
only operational level, and very little (nothing, actually) came out of
it in fact. There was to be no other Mahanian battle afterwards.
Haydn
Mark Sieving
>
> Yup - and the British acknowledged early on that their army was not up
> to European standards (at least in quantity). You no doubt know which
> British war leader claimed to be the only person in uniform able to
> lose the war in an afternoon and know it was an admiral not a general.
Nitpick alert. I wasn't said by an admiral, either. I was said
*about* Admiral Jellicoe, but the speaker was Winston Churchill.