Yamamoto modern thinker or old fashioned

Even though Yamamoto helped develop Japanese naval aviation, he launched the attack on Pearl in order to eliminate the BB threat from the US. He was willing to lose 2 or 3 carriers for 4 old BB's. He also insisted on giving his BB's a role in the Midway battle, which had an effect on the results.
I am puzzled by his obsession with older US BB's when he should have realized their limited value in the aviation age.

 

He was not willing to lose 2 or 3 carriers for 4 BBs, he was willing to lose 2 or 3 carriers for a possible 4 BBs and, up to, 4 aircraft carriers. If you recall, Kido Butai sailed from Hittokapu Bay on November 26th. The USS Enterprise sailed from Pearl Harbor on the November 28th(and was expected to return on December 5th), and the USS Lexington sailed from Pearl on December 5th. Finally, the USS Saratoga had recently completed an overhaul at Bremerton, Washington, and was approaching San Diego when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor to take on her air group, VMF-221, and some other aircraft that were to be ferried to Hawaii. So it was only by luck that none of the American carriers were at Pearl that fateful morning - unless you put any faith in the conspiracy theories.

Still, the battleships had target precedence and then came the carriers, IMHO, this was because the battleships were harder to sink than the carriers. Further, the Japanese tended to project their own ideals as to the Americans, thus, the more powerful psychological blow would come with the loss of their battleships.

That being said, I somewhat doubt that anyone really knows what Yamamoto was thinking in planning Midway. The plan is such an incredible Charlie Foxtrot, one has to wonder how Yamamoto has become so idolized in Japan. At Midway, the Japanese battleships are trailing the carriers by some, IIRC, 300 miles - roughly a half to a full day's hard steaming, thus they are way out in left field should any action take place between the Japanese carriers and the Americans. A more logical position would be to have them either with the carriers or steaming slightly ahead of the Japanese carriers, which would put them in a far better position to support the carriers or to absorb some of the American air attacks.

Was Midway a colossal blunder or was Yamamoto trying to engineer a battle that would prove, once and for all, to the Japanese " big gun club" that carriers were now the main arbiter of naval battles?

 

I don't think there's really much question that Midway was a colossal blunder. Making a deep penetration strike against an unprepared enemy and then running like the dickens is one thing. Making a deep penetration assault and sticking around waiting for the response is quite another. The fact that we ambushed the Japanese is almost immaterial. I tend to think that even had the plan gone flawlessly Japan has, at best, a distant base that is difficult to support at the cost of considerable men and material. They could possibly have sunk a few U.S. carriers, but doing so at no cost is a bit unlikely and we could afford to lose two carriers better than Japan to lose one.

But asking for it to be Yamamoto's proof of carrier over battleship requires some . . . . very convoluted thinking. Honestly, it's a battle plan that makes no sense and I've been asking the Yamamoto question of myself, at least, for quite a while now. Why oh why would his hair be enshrined at Eta Jima when his war plans were such a dismal failure and he lost more battles than he won? He got a few things right, but he made some pretty colossal boo-boos too. Horatio Nelson he was not. Of course I suppose it's quite possible Nelson won as much due to luck and general British competency as to his own brilliance, but at least I can't think of any major actions he lost.

 

In hindsight the Japanese attack at Pearl harbour was a disaster. They sank lots of irrelevant battlefields but failed to sink any of the carriers that were the real sources of naval power in the pacific. I don'l think any of the sailors in any country really appreciated the importance of aircraft carriers over battlefields.

The Royal Navy certainly did not. Otherwise whey would have not have considered force Z as a credible deterrent (or neglected the development of adequate naval aircraft.) At the start of WW2,battleships were the capital ships by which the strenght of navies was measured. Nothing in the European theatre had happened to illustrate the insignificance of battleships. Aircraft had played a role in hunting the Bismark, but she was caught and sunk after a shp v ship action. The Italian fleet had been caught in harbour by the Fleet air arm, but that was the Italians.... The RN's thinking still seems to have been based on battleships. They TN seemed more worried by the commando attacks on Valiant and Queen Elizabeth than the sinking of Eagle and Ark Royal.

It is easy after the event to see how naval aviation would dominate the Pacific war. The Pacifc is very big and it took time to build the based from which land based aircraft could operate. Few land based aircraft had the capability to do much damage to warships. The B17, and other level bombers turned out to be hopeless at hitting ships and fvew land aircrtaft were optimised as anti shipping dive bombers or torpedo bombers.

But I am not sure that was known as a fact before the event. The B17 had been bought originally to hit fleets that might threaten the USA. .In many navies there was an assumption that carrier based aircraft would inevitably be inferior to their land based counterparts. The Naval aviation champions might argue, that naval aviation changed the rules in fleet actions. . But submariners had made the same argument about how submarine changed the nature of fleet actions. In both World wars the German and Japanese navies had tried to use submarines as part of a fleet action -and failed. It wasntl unreasonable to be sceptical about either new weapon until their value was proven..


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Halsey was one commander on the US side who appreciated that BB's were a liability. Remember Yamamato was willing to sacrifice ships even if surprise was lost and he had orders for the strike to hit even if the carriers were not in Pearl, Takao. He wanted to hit the carriers, but the BB's were his over riding priority. In fact Midway came about because he realized his mistake in not ensuring that the carriers were hit at the start.

 

It wasn't evident to either side that the battleship was not the dominant type anymore. Had the US battleline not been sunk or damaged at Pearl Harbor, it is quite likely that US naval strategy would have remained centered on the battleship and not the carrier. The fact that the battleline was gone forced them to develop, what later turned out to be the correct strategy. Had things been different the first couple of years of the Pacific War might have revolved trying to bring on or intercept strong surface fleets where battleships and cruisers were slugging it out in surface actions with carriers in support. It would have looked alot like what happened in the Solomons after all the carriers were sunk or damaged, just on a bigger scale.

 

i tend to agree with USMCPrice, that if the BB batlleline had not been temp.removed from the board so to speak, that they would indeed have been the center of the battlefleets. i think that if that senario had occured, then the war in the pacific would have been alot longer war, with an increased cost in men and ships on both sides.

 

I'm not so sure. At least some in the USN saw the carriers as very important before the war. Note that the Essex class were ordered (in part) prior to the start of the war. Furrhermore battleships could still be quite useful. Indeed they turned out to be in a number of roles during the war. Battleships weren't exactly helpless agianst aircraft either. A late war US battleship, especially with escorts, was quite capable of defending itself from the strike launched by a single carrier and probably one launched by two. One of the interesting things I read in Neptune's Inferno is that the old BBs were sent back to the west coast not only for repairs but because there wasn't the fleet train to support them in the immediate aftermath of PH. The reason the two new battleships were near Guadalcanal rather than any of the older ones is that they were much more fuel efficient. So how active could the old battleships have been if they hadn't been sunk at PH?

 

Granted there were flaws in Yamamoto's plan for Midway and in Japanese doctrine generally, but the fundamental problem was having their codes broken by the Americans. Without that, what are the chances that every available American aircraft carrier would be at exactly the right spot to launch an attack while the Japanese were striking Midway?

Without codebreaking, we would have been in the same position the Japanese were when we attacked Guadalcanal, the Marianas, or Leyte Gulf - starting our response after their initial attack. Midway's airpower would be gone, and the Japanese carriers could concentrate on scouting for our approaching fleet, aided by float planes and submarines (side note, it's quite likely the Japanese landing attempt on Midway would be a debacle). If a full-scale action did develop, all of Yamamoto's forces would be in place.

I suspect the timing may have been a matter of fuel conservation. We often see comments like "the Midway operation used as much fuel as the Japanese Navy normally burned in a year", and the plan called for the battle fleet to arrive in the vicinity of Midway about the same time as the Americans might if they sortied from Pearl Harbor in response to the carrier attack.

 

Lacking the code breaking the USN would probably not have been able to sortie in time to prevent the attempted Japanese invasion. There's a very good chance the invasion would have failed which still ends up with an IJN defeat and while they've kept their carriers for a bit longer the odds aren't going to be with them for long. The overly complex plans and flawed damage control doctrine combined with the fact that they couldn't afford to loose or even win costly battles doomed them.

 

I'm not so sure I agree. It depends on the results of the naval engagement that resulted when the US Fleet sortied to protect Midway. I don't think the success or failure of the actual landing would have had a big effect either way. Midway was too exposed and Japan could not have successfully occupied it for any length of time, even if it had been taken. If the US lost a couple of carriers and the Japanese losses had been comparable, it would have forced a delay in launching the Guadalcanal campaign. Any delay makes the Solomons, Gilberts and Marianas only that much more fortified and prepared for the allies when they were eventually attacked. No long battle of attrition (Solomons) and the Japanese retain the ability to better resist and inflict higher casualties on US forces when they do attack. Japan didn't really get their economy up to full mobilization until 1943. If the war had drawn on longer, who knows. In the historical timeline the US public was very tired of the costs by the time of Iwo Jima, if because of the delay they reached that point when we were just getting around to taking the Marianas, would they have had the will to push the fight to the end? We'lll never know.

I remember reading the same thing in the same book and being surprised, because I hadn't read it before, and had always wondered why the older battleships had not been committed.

 

Without codebreaking would we have reinforced the Midway garrison with the 1st Marine Raider Battalion? Not immediately certain what the defense looked like before reinforcement, but that's an awfully big Japanese invasion fleet with a lot of air support and a very long line of ships for bombardment duties. Japan will have air and sea control very quickly without the USN response. I fail to see how infantry without air support, even well dug in Marines, can turn back that much hurt. My gut instinct is to think Midway ends up like Wake Island writ somewhat larger and with a much higher and less pleasant logistical cost to the Empire after the fact.

 

without the code breakers i really can't see how midway could have been reinforced, because we have to remember the us navy was still on the ropes from PH, they would have been unsure what the next IJN move was going to be.to be sure they would have some ideas of what areas would be likely targets, but they would not have known for sure where to send the troops. but this is just moho.

 

Without the codebreaking does the battle of the Coral Sea even happen? If it does the US carriers are likely to get there a bit later than they did historically so it's likely to be closer to Port Mosby possibly even after the landings occur. In any case given the attacks on Midway prior to June and the fact that it wasn't clear that Midway was the target until late April or May that Midway was to be the target that most of the build up there would have taken place anyway.

As for the invasion the fleet may have been huge but the number of troops was pretty small considering the number of defenders and their landing plan was pretty marginal. There's a good chance the first wave would have gotten hung up on the reefs. Furthermore the Japanese didn't have a very strong shore bombardment doctrine. Indeed it was up to a few cruisers and destroyers from what I've read and they lacked a plan for coordinating with ground forces.

If the US sends it's carriers to help at Port Mosby then they aren't going to be back in time to do anything at Midway at least until after the invasion and then only if the Japanese hang around. The results of the Coral Sea will likely be worse for the Japanese if the US carriers get there in time though. The land based air is going to inflict some losses on the IJN and between them and hitting targets in and around Port Mosby they will likely be somewhat distracted when the US carriers show up and they should have a decent idea where the IJN carriers are for similar reasons.

 

IIRC, Coral Sea was more traffic analysis than actual code breaking, but I will have to check.

If Coral Sea takes place a little later, than it is three American carriers involved in the fight, since the USS Enterprise arrived one day after the battle. Would the assition of the Enterprise be enough to prevent the Lexington's loss and some of the damage to Yorktown? And what of Shokaku and Zuikaku, how would the addition of the Enterprise affect the cranes' futures? Would the loss of the cranes and a decisive Japanese defeat be enough to turn Japanese attention away from Midway and focus it onto Port Moresby?

Would be an interesting "What If?

 

Besides a lack of oilers, the main reason for keeping the old BB's out of action was their slow speed, maybe 20 knots. This is why they were in Pearl and not with Halsey on the 7th

 

Getting back to the question originally posted, it appears Adm Yamamoto was neither visionary nor incompetent, but rather about average in ability and innovation for an officer of his rank. It would be erroneous to call him a "great" admiral... there's really nothing that ever happened to support such an assertion. His name lives on prominently for being the man who orchestrated the Pearl Harbor attack, rather than for exceptional abilities, such abilities rarely if ever having shown themselves subsequent to that day.

 

If you haven't read Shattered Sword I encourage you to do so. The first few chapters concentrated on the personas and politics at the top of the IJN. Yamamoto was certainly daring but doesn't appear to have been able to shake off some of the chains that tradition, culture, and doctrine impose. As I recall one of the things that the above work critisises him and for that matter the IJN in general for is overly complex plans. The Japanese in general seem not to have embrased the KISS principle.