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In the just over six months between the attack on Pearl Harbor and their defeat at Midway the Imperial Japanese Navy won an astonishing series of victories, helping Japan seize a vast area of south-east Asia, including the Philippines, Malaya and Singapore and the Dutch East Indies, and defeating just about any naval force that the Allies could throw at it. However this series of victories ended with defeat at the battle of the Coral Sea and disaster at Midway, with four of the six best carriers of the IJN lost in a single battle. This book looks at the ships and men of the IJN, its doctrines and training, and examines how it was able to win those victories, but also what weaknesses helped lead to those defeats.
We get a good idea of the strengths of the Japanese Navy. In general their warships were fast and heavily armed, but lacked range and were generally under-armoured compared to contemporary designs. The Japanese had realised that they couldn’t hope to equal American numbers, so had decided to focus on quality, and some of their ships did indeed outclass most of what their opponents had in 1941-42. Their carrier force was the most powerful in the world in 1941, with good aircraft, extremely well trained air crews, and an ability to concentrate the aircraft from several carriers into a single powerful strike force that no other fleet had. Their sailors were probably the best trained in the world, having spent the previous few years engaged in near constant, hard and realistic training. They undoubtable had the best torpedoes, with the famous Long Lance giving them a capability nobody else had – both in range and reliability it outclassed the British and American torpedoes. Indeed it took several years before the Allies actually discovered its true capabilities – in many of the battles around Guadalcanal the Americans would be hit by torpedoes when they believed themselves to be far out of range of any possible attack.
Although this is the period in which the Japanese achieved their impressive series of conquests, the flaws that would bring them down are already clearly visible. There was little or no interest in developing a competent Intelligence department, and any intelligence that didn’t agree with the Navy’s preconceived ideas was normally ignored. The cult of the offensive was so dominate that anything that didn’t directly contribute towards it was seen as of secondary importance, so the logistics system was poor. One of the reasons for the disaster at Midway was the belief in the use of wide dispersion of the fleet as a form of misdirection. This was already present earlier in the war, in particular in the Dutch East Indies, where the Japanese forces were often split into several widely separated fleets that couldn’t support each other. In this case their opponents were unable to take advantage, but at Midway it meant that the Japanese only had four of their carriers when they could have had more, and even the fleet that actually approached Midway was so widely spread that large parts of it were never involved in the battle – despite the Japanese fleet allocated to the Midway part of the operation massively outnumbering the US Navy forces available, during the key part of the battle the Japanese carrier force was actually outnumbered and destroyed before the rest of the Japanese fleet could intervene. The lengthy nature of pre-war training also worked against them, making it difficult to replace the losses that were suffered even in the early successes.
Ironically, given the strength of the carrier fleet, the IJN’s pre-war doctrive was built around the idea of the decisive surface battle, in which the carriers, submarines and other lighter ships would wear away at an American fleet trying to cross the Pacific to reach Japan, before the battleships used their long range firepower to batter the American battle line then closed in to finish them off. This massive surface battle never happened, mainly because the age of the battleship was over, but also because the Americans refused to play along with the Japanese plan, and instead of charging into the Japanese trap concentrated on taking the new Japanese Empire apart island by island. At Midway, Leyte Gulf and the Philippines Sea the Japanese had to come to the Americans, and in each case suffered a crushing defeat.
After looking at the nature of the IJN, we move on to an examination of its main operations during this period, looking at the reasons for the Japanese successes and victories. It soon becomes clear that there were two key factors in the Japanese victories. First was the high quality of their pre-war Navy, which was the third largest in the world and contained some of the best warships in the world, manned by well trained crews. Second was that most of the Allied ships in the western and south-western Pacific were older, second rate ships – most of the Royal Navy was needed in British or Mediterranean waters, the American Asiatic fleet was small and equipped with older ships, the Dutch fleet was small and cut off from its conquered homeland and of course the main US Pacific Fleet was licking its wounds after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Even when the Allies were able to gather reasonably sizable forces, as in the Dutch East Indies, they came from several different fleets, were unused to operating together, and lacked the excellent air cover often available to the Japanese.
This is an excellent study of the Imperial Japanese Navy at its peak, giving us a good idea of why it was able to achieve so many impressive victories, but also looking at the flaws that would help lead to its eventual defeat.
Chapters
The Fleet’s Purpose
Fleet Fighting Power
How the Fleet Operated
Combat and Analysis
Author: Mark Stille
Edition: Paperback
Pages: 80
Publisher: Osprey
Year: 2023