A Quora on WWII Japan Navy losing night advantage to US Navy

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Andrew Peacock
History Teacher at Scotland (2011–present)Updated 1y
When did the IJN start to lose its advantage in naval night battles
against the Allies?
Well, a part of the answer to this question concerns technological
developments which shifted the advantage decisively in the Allies’
favour. The IJN trained extensively for night fighting; it was
recognised that the Royal Navy’s failure to press home its advantage
during the night action at the Battle of Jutland, allowing the German
fleet to slip away, had been a lesson of critical importance from the
First World War.


HMS Black Prince is illuminated (and subsequently sunk) after blundering
into the escaping German High Seas Fleet at Jutland, 31 May 1916.

The IJN did not want to be similarly cheated out of a decisive outcome
by the onset of darkness, and so skills and drills for night encounters
were routinely practiced throughout the 20s and 30s. This gave them an
initial edge during the early stages of the war in the Pacific.
Technologically, though, the Japanese were reliant on methods that
preceded the development of radar and, critically, the deployment by the
US Navy and Royal Navy of radar directed gunnery systems. The Japanese
relied entirely on optical methods of direction and fire control (this,
by the way, was the reason why their battleships featured the unusually
high ‘pagoda’ conning towers; they sought to gain an advantage by
elevating their optical range finders as high up as possible). At night
time, optical direction of fire required illumination of the targets by
search lights or by star shells.* The IJN were extremely skilled in
using these methods, and also possessed in the Long Lance torpedo a
weapon that was capable of inflicting huge damage on opponents, and
which was perfect for night battles.

[*To answer a point raised in the comments below, there are is an
utterly ridiculous myth - and unfortunately myths can circulate
endlessly on Quora - about the reasons for the IJN’s night fighting
prowess. They did not have night vision goggles. They had extremely good
binoculars, capable of absorbing 980 times more light than the human
eye, which is where I think this myth originated (someone has
erroneously concluded that this would allow you to see in the dark), but
whilst these enabled their spotters to see other ships during the day at
distances exceeding 20 miles, binoculars don’t function as night vision
goggles. They’re also not capable of accurately measuring ranges, and
they weren’t in any way integrated into the fire control systems of the
ships. So no, the Japanese did not invent night vision goggles, nor did
they ever deploy such technology during the Second World War. First
generation infrared sights for small arms were deployed by the Germans
during the last few days of the war in Europe, but claiming that the
Japanese had effective night vision goggles from the outset of the war
is as absurd as suggesting that they used stealth bombers and cruise
missiles to carry out the Pearl Harbor attack.]

The Allies were unaware of the capabilities of the Long Lance; it had
twice the range of Allied torpedoes, was significantly faster, and also
had an unusually large warhead. Japanese squadrons would often launch
salvoes of these torpedoes at the start of encounters with Allied ships,
from ranges of in excess of 20,000 yards at which they would not be
expecting a torpedo threat. Of course at night not only were long range
torpedoes an unexpected threat, it was also virtually impossible to see
them coming, and columns of Allied warships - sailing close together and
manoeuvring slowly - were perfect targets. During the Guadalcanal
campaign, Long Lance torpedo strikes were critical in the series of
ferocious night battles that occurred, particularly the First Battle of
Savo Island (aka The Battle of the Five Sitting Ducks, August 9th 1942)
and the Fourth Battle of Savo Island (aka the Battle of Tassafaronga,
November 30th 1942). Torpedo hits during these battles were mistakenly
attributed to undetected Japanese submarines.

Torpedoes aside, in a confused encounter without the benefit of radar,
however, the IJN’s optical methods of sighting and engaging the enemy
were unlikely to be effective except at very close range (the
ineffectiveness of the IJN’s long range gunnery/fire control during WW2,
even in perfect daytime conditions, was actually quite remarkable), and
with poor situational awareness - they did not have surface scan/search
radars - there was a considerable risk of undetected opponents lurking
in the darkness and then sneaking up on you.


Searchlights and starshells in a painting of the action at Second
Guadalcanal

On the Allied side, radar ultimately led to a revolution in both
situational awareness/locating the enemy and in Fire Control, making
gunnery several times more accurate than optical methods could ever
possibly hope to achieve. Radar directed gunnery, once the data from the
radars was integrated into the Fire Control System so that it fed
directly into the plotting computer and then on to the guns, was also
every bit as effective at night and in zero visibility as it was during
the day, and considerably more effective against rapidly manoeuvring
targets, giving Allied ships a potentially overwhelming advantage if
they fully utilised it. At the very outset of the Pacific War the US
Navy and the Royal Navy already possessed first generation radar
directed gunnery systems of proven effectiveness (the US Navy’s Mk.3 SG
radar and the Royal Navy’s Type 284), but not every ship had been fitted
with the technology, and not all senior officers were fully conscious of
the new capabilities that it gave their ships, nor how to exploit them
through adjusting their tactics.


The conning tower of the USS Washington showing the Mk.3 SG radar
antennas mounted to the gunnery directors

The Royal Navy had started to deploy the Type 284 gunnery radar in 1941,
and had used it with considerable effect against the Bismarck, but
bringing ships back into port for the extensive work required to fit new
radars and to upgrade their fire control systems was a time consuming
process, and naturally difficult to arrange in the midst of a raging
conflict. After Pearl Harbor the US Navy was similarly hard pressed, and
it took time for the new technology to cascade down to every ship in the
fleet. At the outset of the war, however, the Japanese fleet didn’t
possess any radar systems at all, nor did they have an electronics
industry that would enable them to catch up. They were in fact several
years behind the Allied Powers (and also their German allies) in
starting to develop radar, and would never catch up; in 1942 they were
just starting to deploy extremely primitive air early warning systems,
and the capture of a small number of US land based radar systems (the
SCR-268) during the opening operations of the conflict helped them to
reverse engineer and copy the technology, but their fleet would never
achieve radar directed gunnery capabilities, and consequently naval
encounters, particularly those at night, became increasingly one sided
affairs.

This was perfectly illustrated by the events of the second major naval
battle at Guadalcanal on November 14/15th 1942. In the preceding First
Naval Battle of Guadalcanal (13th November) the IJN’s superiority in
night fighting techniques had enabled them to prevail over a US task
force which, whilst possessing the technological advantage of radar, was
inexperienced and badly led, resulting in a confused melee that well
suited the Japanese and was described by one US survivor as being like a
Wild West bar fight where the lights had been shot out. Despite gaining
the upper hand, the confused nature of the melee prompted the Japanese
to withdraw. A powerful IJN task force consisting of the battleship
Kirishima, two heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and nine destroyers,
returned on the night of Nov 14th. Their mission was to carry out a
bombardment of the critical Henderson Field base. Initially they gained
the upper hand, sinking two US destroyers outright (USS Walke and USS
Preston), inflicting fatal damage on a third (USS Benham), and crippling
a fourth (USS Gwin). They then encountered the USS South Dakota. The
South Dakota was one of the newest US Battleships and equipped with
sophisticated radar, but two things conspired to negate any possible
advantage. The first was a dodgy electrician who, immediately preceding
the encounter, managed to knock out all of the battleship’s electrical
systems including the radar and the lights, literally leaving the ship’s
command team completely in the dark as the Japanese Task Force
approached. It could scarcely have been worse if they’d invited Tojo
himself aboard to do a bit of rewiring work. Secondly, the South Dakota
both illuminated and silhouetted itself against the burning destroyers,
giving the Japanese the perfect target. The South Dakota took 26 hits
from the Japanese guns, but fortunately it proved capable of absorbing
this heavy punishment. At this stage it looked like the Second Battle of
Guadalcanal was destined to be a repeat of the First, but advancing
towards the Japanese, completely undetected, was a second new US
battleship, the USS Washington.


USS Washington

The USS Washington was the flagship of Admiral Lee, a gunnery expert
and, critically, an expert in the new radar systems that his ship
possessed. It is said he knew more about these than the operators
themselves. After some initial confusion, Lee brought the Washington to
within 8,500 yards of the Japanese force and, targeting the largest
return on the radar - the battleship Kirishima - once certain that it
was an enemy ship, they unleashed a barrage of radar directed 16” shells
which reduced the Kirishima to an impotent, flaming, and sinking wreck
within seconds (estimates of the number of hits achieved range between
9–20).


USS Washington photographed firing at the Kirishima during Second
Guadalcanal

It’s worth noting that the Mk.3 radar was a first generation surface
gunnery radar system which had significant limitations, and which was
also being used by an inexperienced crew, but if we accept the lower
figure of nine hits from the seventy five 16” shells that were fired,
that’s a 12% hit rate. The upper figure gives a 25% hit rate. For
comparison, the IJN - using optical methods - often struggled to achieve
2% hit rates in daylight encounters in the Pacific.

Following the Kirishima’s demolition, the remaining Japanese ships
hastily withdrew after an ineffective attempt to respond with Long Lance
torpedoes. That moment almost certainly marks the turning point, after
which the US Navy indisputably held the advantage in night fighting,
both technologically and - more importantly - psychologically.

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