But look at the training they've been getting from their seniors until now. All useless
Akagi talk about steak while trying to sell meat tenderizer Kaga teach them to use guns Hiryuu just send them to endless training until they get it Souryuu... ufufufufu Ryuujou talk about the paint, which is mostly irrelevant Wakamiya... I think I want to cry
Stop face-palming Zuikaku, without them. You girls won't have a well-train pilots.
Well they kind of didn't.... at least not enough. The Japanese entire training system was actually pretty terrible and poorly thought out. Maybe she's face palming because said broken system had her sitting in port at Midway despite having no damage because there wasn't anyone to fly her planes.
Well they kind of didn't.... at least not enough. The Japanese entire training system was actually pretty terrible and poorly thought out. Maybe she's face palming because said broken system had her sitting in port at Midway despite having no damage because there wasn't anyone to fly her planes.
Well still before the battle of midway, the IJN posses a well experience pilots. The entire shit starts after midway.
T34/38 said: Well still before the battle of midway, the IJN posses a well experience pilots. The entire shit starts after midway.
That's because the IJN intentionally decided to focus on training a small number of very elite pilots, and had a policy of keeping their best pilots on the front lines. This system worked very well as long as IJN didn't suddenly lose a couple hundred pilots. After Midway, they didn't just lose all their best pilots, they also lost all their best trainers.
That's because the IJN intentionally decided to focus on training a small number of very elite pilots, and had a policy of keeping their best pilots on the front lines. This system worked very well as long as IJN didn't suddenly lose a couple hundred pilots. After Midway, they didn't just lose all their best pilots, they also lost all their best trainers.
They basically put all their eggs in one basket.
Worse still, it was an extremely combustable basket.
Akagi and Kaga were not originally designed to be carriers, and the conversions to carriers were riddled with design flaws, ultimately leading to their aviation fuel stores being extremely vulnerable to... well, pretty much a stray cigarette would light the whole ship up. (Kaga was basically taken out by a single 1000-pound bomb that went through her unarmored deck that simultaniously destroyed all her damage control systems, power systems, AND lit her aircraft armaments on fire. She was also hit by a trio of other 500-pound bombs, but the single 1000-pound bomb was enough to kill her.)
Akagi and Kaga in KanColle have HP and armor like a battleship, but the fact is, most of the light carriers would realistically have better armor and HP than those two. Shoukaku and Zuikaku were actually much better carriers - at least they had a chance of survival after taking a real hit. (It's no mistake that those two lived through Coral Sea while everyone else died at Midway.) They were the "second-tier" carriers, due to being built later. (Which meant "with the shipbuilding experience to overcome some of the earlier carrier's flaws".) This was thanks to their idiotic training doctrine holding that you never transfer planes from one ship to another, so that all the most experienced pilots got the oldest, least useful ships and planes. Meanwhile, the Yorktown-class carriers they were up against were notoriously difficult to sink, even if their wooden decks were easy to ruin. All the Yorktown-class carriers, especially Enterprise, took several times as much damage as it took to put Kaga in a giant fireball, and still limped back to port for repairs and came back to fight the shocked Japanese time and time again.
The entire Japanese carrier doctrine was based around the notion of "victory goes to he who takes the initiative", AKA, "hit fast, hit hard, and pray to all the gods you don't get hit back." Akagi and Kaga sacrificed every scrap of defense they could muster for speed and more planes.
Then, in Midway, they put the carriers out front, with most of the battleships and cruisers that had the AA that could protect them hiding a hundred miles behind, where they were out of action, because Japanese naval doctrine at that time held that you basically used carriers only for skirmishy battles to soften up the enemy for the "real ships", the battleships, to come in and do the "real fighting". Hence, no need to protect your totally unarmored tinderboxes carrying the most valuable weapons in your arsenal.
... and basically every trained, decent pilot and trainer on the Japanese side was put in those two ships...
(Plus, they technically could have just moved all of Shoukaku's planes and pilots onto Zuikaku, and Zuikaku would have been able to participate in Midway, which would have ALSO tipped the balance at Midway. However, their idiotic doctrine also held that you never transfer planes from carrier to carrier because you had to train the whole ship as a unit. Really, the Japanese might as well have just put their dicks on a platter and dared the Americans to chop it off.)
T34/38 said: Well still before the battle of midway, the IJN posses a well experience pilots. The entire shit starts after midway.
The choices that would lead to the catastrophic deterioration and failure to replace losses were in place long before Midway. An inadequate and poorly organized training system, no trained reserve of pilots, and the policy of simply leaving skilled flier in operational units until they died where all in place well before the war even began. It was merely the case that Coral Sea, Midway, and then most notably the Guadalcanal campaign would show the folly of those choices.
Much like the problems that lead to early disasters in night combat for the US navy can be traced back to choices made years before, so it's the case that the seeds of the catastrophic failure of the Japanese Naval Air Arm was sowed and set before the first shot was even fired. They were always going to lose in this area in the end as the US had far more people with flying experience and mechanical inclination to draw on and a virtually limitless and unassailable reserve of fuel to expend on training, but even with that considered they failed miserably to make the most of what they had and plan ahead.
This can be seen in other areas beyond straight up training programs too. The US for instance often lost about as many planes as Japan in allot of the early battles (itself telling and showing that the huge focus on quality was largely futile), but that doesn't tell the whole story cause a closer look shows that they often recovered many of the pilots. This was partly cause the US most often held the field, but it was also because the US focused harder on search and rescue and it built planes with survivability in mind. Even if a Wildcat was disabled and lost it was vastly, VASTLY more likely to have protected it's pilot and allowed him to evacuate the aircraft. This held with other carrier aircraft as well.
That "Iron Works" nickname for Grumman wasn't given for no reason.
Air Warfare is by it's very nature a highly attritional game and the system to support and design of the weapons to fight it must recognize and reflect this. As in so many other areas the Japanese utterly failed to recognize this reality and planned for an exceedingly short war where there horrid lack of depth in air crews and total neglect of survivability features and SAR would not become critical. The moment the war went past about six months the folly of these choices became glaringly evident: carriers sitting around uselessly for lack of pilots, what pilots there where coming along being butchered due to lack of skill, and the feeble aircraft they flew meaning that few survived the first mistake to learn from it.
(Plus, they technically could have just moved all of Shoukaku's planes and pilots onto Zuikaku, and Zuikaku would have been able to participate in Midway, which would have ALSO tipped the balance at Midway. However, their idiotic doctrine also held that you never transfer planes from carrier to carrier because you had to train the whole ship as a unit. Really, the Japanese might as well have just put their dicks on a platter and dared the Americans to chop it off.)
They would also send their skilled pilots behind while the green ones were sent to be butchered, just like what happened to "The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot".
Skribulous said:
Who?
Iwamoto Tetsuzo, a Japanese fighter ace with 202 kills.
Our navy has lost the war by "battling" instead of "warring".
Admiral Toyoda Soemu said:
I think there was a mistake at the top from the very beginning as to the nature of modern warfare.
The "Kantai Kessen" (Decisive Battle) doctrine was a tactical doctrine of battle not a strategic doctrine of war: the objective wasn't to invade, conquer and annihilate the U.S, instead it was a complex, inflexible trap at the time and place of the IJN choosing that expected the U.S Pacific Fleet to run straight into it (like the Russian Baltic Fleet did in the Battle of Tsushima).
Before the war, the IJN major experiences were against two decadent powers (Qing China and Imperial Russia) both of them pragmatically ceded territory after suffering heavy casualities. So the officer staff not only wasn't prepared for a large scale attrition war, but it also believed that the Americans would lose their will to fight after witnessing the destruction of their fleets (such as the Pearl Harbor raid).
Admiral Toyoda Soemu said:
…this was the war for our very national existence, whereas in your case it was merely a case of national honor or perhaps protection of your economic interests in the Far East; and, because to you the war under such conditions would be of relatively slight significance as compared with ours….[we believed] you would lose your will to fight.
A fact that it wasn't helped by the facts that the IJN officers often drew their plans based on the best hypotethical scenario, ignoring what the enemy could do.
Captain Fuchida Mitsuo said:
Midway planners seemed to work entirely on the basis of what the enemy would probably do, rather than of what it might possibly do, or what he was capable of doing…. We were blind to the possibility that the enemy might act differently than we expected.
They would also send their skilled pilots behind while the green ones were sent to be butchered, just like what happened to "The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot".
Iwamoto Tetsuzo, a Japanese fighter ace with 202 kills.
He did not have anywhere near that many.
All sides over-claimed, but the Japanese were among the worst and least thorough about it. Oddly enough the 202 kill claim in this instance wasn't even made by him personally it was derived from reading of his dairy after his death. A later study by Japanese scholars estimated maybe 80 kills, 85ish max about 15 or so of those against incompetent Chinese fliers. This is still effectively a guess though as from what I understand like so many other areas toward the end of the war his unit destroyed most of it's official records and reports. This is why the initial insane claims came out of his dairy after his death, not official reports.
Said dairy wasn't exactly as detailed as real reports, as you'd expect, and further still some of the claims were frankly preposterous. For instance in it he claimed right about 50 corsair kills, that would have been more then 25% of all F4U lost in air combat during the war. Many of these supposedly happened in one area, around Rabaul, during that extended air battle that wore down that base. Frankly speaking if there really was some dude flying around Rabaul destroying Corsairs left and right I think someone on the US side might have mentioned it somewhere!
So that particular claim is needless the say completely ludicrous and must make one question pretty much every other number he gave. Indeed even later Japanese sources vaguely estimated the reality was more like 60's-ish WWII, but even that seems to amount to a guess due to lack of proper records. 50 to 60 I can accept though as several much better documented US aces operating in many of the same regions managed to get into the high 30s or just cracked 40. Factoring in his advantage of a more "target rich environment" increasing that by a third or so isn't unreasonable IMO.
It's still not two hundred-and fucking-two though.
Note that this isn't a knock on him or anything actually counting shit in a dogfight is really hard. One way I think to gain appreciation for that is to play a large scale semi-realistic flight sim. One event some years ago that really drove this home for me in a way reading can't was in Aces High II me and two other aircraft took off and trolled toward an area reported under enemy (player) attack. We found a mix of fighter bombers a bit below us and having the advantage we engaged them in about ten minutes of dogfighting. At the time I was convinced we were outnumbered at least three or four to one and that I'd shot down at least two in the melee with the other guys with me probably getting two or three each as well.
I landed sometime later and blinked when I was credited with no kills and the two guys with me had one and two respectively. I reviewed an automatically saved reply and soon found that in fact there had been only six enemy planes total, only five had ever actually engaged us, and my two 'kills' had simply taken some pings, dove away and fled back to base at low altitude. I gained an entirely new respect for how easy it is to way over-claim and I wasn't even under real threat of death or fighting through Gs!
I'm just using the Wikipedia reference since I got lazy, I do have an alternative source stating that his kills were 66 with 14 in China (I've used this info on post #1683110). Also Nishizawa Hiroyoshi, Japanese leading Ace Fighter, had only 87 kills and Sakai Saburo had 62 kills with 2 in China.
Worse still, it was an extremely combustable basket.
Akagi and Kaga were not originally designed to be carriers, and the conversions to carriers were riddled with design flaws, ultimately leading to their aviation fuel stores being extremely vulnerable to... well, pretty much a stray cigarette would light the whole ship up. (Kaga was basically taken out by a single 1000-pound bomb that went through her unarmored deck that simultaniously destroyed all her damage control systems, power systems, AND lit her aircraft armaments on fire. She was also hit by a trio of other 500-pound bombs, but the single 1000-pound bomb was enough to kill her.)
Akagi and Kaga in KanColle have HP and armor like a battleship, but the fact is, most of the light carriers would realistically have better armor and HP than those two. Shoukaku and Zuikaku were actually much better carriers - at least they had a chance of survival after taking a real hit. (It's no mistake that those two lived through Coral Sea while everyone else died at Midway.) They were the "second-tier" carriers, due to being built later. (Which meant "with the shipbuilding experience to overcome some of the earlier carrier's flaws".) This was thanks to their idiotic training doctrine holding that you never transfer planes from one ship to another, so that all the most experienced pilots got the oldest, least useful ships and planes. Meanwhile, the Yorktown-class carriers they were up against were notoriously difficult to sink, even if their wooden decks were easy to ruin. All the Yorktown-class carriers, especially Enterprise, took several times as much damage as it took to put Kaga in a giant fireball, and still limped back to port for repairs and came back to fight the shocked Japanese time and time again. ...
Kaga... ugh... who the hell thought that stupid funnel design was a good idea?
Well, at least she got off easy from the IJN's retarded policies, unlike a certain CVB...
... especially Enterprise, took several times as much damage as it took to put Kaga in a giant fireball, and still limped back to port for repairs and came back to fight the shocked Japanese time and time again.
Kinda miss this one...
Enterprise survive miraculously unscathed after Midway (though she was declared as "sunk" so that it won't affect the Japanese morale in the war), it's Yorktown who took all the punishment from Hiryuu. Enterprise started absorbing damages was during the Solomons Campaign, but thanks to her amazing damage control crew which allows her to fight for another day without needing to further withdraw from the front lines (but she needs to return to Hawaii to refuel though), thus earning the title "The Grey Ghost". She only got a breather after the new Essex-class carriers and the Independence-class light carriers were commissioned.
Enterprise survive miraculously unscathed after Midway (though she was declared as "sunk" so that it won't affect the Japanese morale in the war), it's Yorktown who took all the punishment from Hiryuu. Enterprise started absorbing damages was during the Solomons Campaign, but thanks to her amazing damage control crew which allows her to fight for another day without needing to further withdraw from the front lines (but she needs to return to Hawaii to refuel though), thus earning the title "The Grey Ghost". She only got a breather after the new Essex-class carriers and the Independence-class light carriers were commissioned.
By the context he wasn't talking about a specific battle, but rather the class's performance in general with Enterprise being cited as the most obvious example due to surviving the war and being hit multiple times during it.
The point is well taken, but also somewhat moot, as, is so often the case, the reality of warfare has a tendency to nullify such technical advantages. Yorktown did have one escape due to good design and a rapid turn-around to be able to fight at Midway, so in that case the classes better durability perhaps did effect the outcome of a battle. Other then that though the improved durability, while apparent, didn't help much due to circumstances and a healthy pinch of bad luck as the next time both were damaged despite almost making it, they ultimately sank to a last minute attack at the tail end of the battle. Enterprise did absorb a fair bit of damage, but it must also be stated she really was lucky, most notably she never took a torpedo in the entire war.
There's a saying that varies a bit, but the version I like is "If you want to fill a ship with smoke, use bombs. If you want to fill it with water, use torpedoes."
Then again a number of the Japanese ships that were torpedoed decided to explode before or rather then flooding so... yeah, they were unusually combustible. Now that I stop to think about it actually they were really combustible, aircraft carriers generally are, but still I can only really think of two of them that didn't burn and/or explode rather then simply sink. Though in the case of Shinano one almost has to macabrely wonder if that was simply because there was nothing on board to explode yet. Zuikaku meanwhile would have really had to work for it to burn down with water rushing in from something round about half a dozen torpedo hits.
This is notable compared to the US where only the Lexington was lost to a similar thing, and that at least had the excuse of being the first fleet carrier ever lost by the US Navy, and it didn't happen again. The Yorktown's got hit repeatedly and while they burned they never exploded and both losses were ultimately due flooding from torpedoes not fire or explosion. Saratoga was torpedo twice by submarines and failed to explode in Japanese fashion. The Essex class also of course had several famous cases of serious fires caused by hits that failed to sink a single ship.
(And yes Wasp did burn, but she was borderline between a light and fleet carrier and even considering that I frankly think she often gets a bum rap for being "fragile"; three torpedo hits spaced along one side of the ship would be a mortal danger to anything afloat and acting like her going down to that damage indicates some inherent weakness of design has always seemed a bit of a stretch to me. Pretty much the exact same level and type of damage killed Shōkaku and you don't hear too many people talking about how fragile she was (quite the opposite actually). Actually Wasp performed better then the larger ship. She burned and sank, but she never catastrophically exploded which allowed the crew to get off with comparatively very few losses. Shōkaku meanwhile butchered much of her crew when a runaway vapor explosion sent her plunging downward rapidly in a literal ball of fire that incinerated scores of those attempting to get off)
Overall then the Yorktown class did demonstrate a higher damage tolerance then Japanese ships did, but it didn't really particularly help most of them due to circumstances. Although it did mean they got back into operation faster, but part of this also seems to have been better American logistics and a greater and prudent sense of urgency. Although part of that rapid turn around was also ironically because of the wooden decks.
The thing is that a wooden deck is easy to 'ruin', but it's also easy as shit to fix. It's not necessarily an 'armored deck is just better' question because while the armored deck might be slightly harder to damage, it's also massively harder to fix if it is damaged; particularly at sea or in a forward base area. It's also extra weight up high on the ship eating displacement which tends to drive a need for lower placement to at least try and maintain stability. British carriers did this by shrinking the hanger down resulting in a cramped space and constant clearance issues as aircraft grew in size.
That weight placed high up also meant that mounting any serious armor that high wasn't really feasible unless you made the ship huge. Due to this the armored decks in use by most 'armored carriers' were quite measly and in practice actually provided worse protection then a single thick plate at the hanger floor would have (in dealing with perpetrators at fairly standard non hyper velocities two plates spaced apart are worse then a single plate of the same thickness). In practice pretty much any naval bomb actually in use at the start of the war would go through it like it wasn't their so the deck then provide more or less zero extra protection to hanger against threat weapons and basically just assured that the fuse would be primed when the bomb entered the hanger. It was, effectively, a completely pointless sacrifice of air group and longevity for almost no tactical advantage.
Almost because The British can eternally thank the Japanese for resorting to the only weapon in the entire war that their flismly armored deck ever had any effect against to give them something to cling to when trying to argue that the armored deck as implemented on their pre-war ships wasn't a complete failure. Though it still was because when they carriers WERE damaged due to the flight deck being part of the ships structural strength any fire in the hanger was effectively a fire within the ship, not on top of it. The result of this being that pretty much every single one of the armored carriers was ruined after the war due to warping, while the 'fragile' Essex class would truck on for decades.
So yeah the armor deck only provides any notable increase in survivability if your enemy decides to hurl very lightly built suicide aircraft at your ships. Other wise the wooden deck tends to provide better damage tolerance by being easier to repair.
50 times the 1st Carrier Division (in name)!10 times the 5th Carrier Division (in name)!We are the 50th Carrier Division!Note: They are simply the training unit.Awesome, dechi!