Well...the IJN lacked many of the opportunities for brutality that their Army colleagues had. Except for that "Let's chain up the captured Aircrew and drop them over the side" thing at Midway, though I think they might have dispatched the VT pilot with a blade first..
Uh, you are not incorrect! There are multiple reasons why Grandpa Scoobs never purchased Japanese manufactured products and referred to the culture in racist epithets - the the most brutal example was a strike he flew against Chichi Jima in the Bonins where one of his buddies was hit by AA and bailed out - the local gunners then shredded the pilot’s parachute.
Great piece as usual... For too long Congress and the administrations have paid lip service to naval construction and industrial capacity. Yours has been a lone voice in the wilderness. With threats from China here, I pray you get the nod for the naval construction position in the WH.
And the issue that is most crucial is that we blew up the bridge ahead of us that put so much infrastructure out of commission that is incredibly difficult and expensive to replace
Uh....Fullbore. As shared in another recent FBF post on Leyte Gulf, the Scoobs Family has a rather unique connection to Zuikaku - Grandfather Scoobs (the brown shoe) was one of Halsey's flyers who helped put her down off Cape Engano. There's an interesting connection here - Grandpa Scoobs was flying off Lexington (CV-16), and it was known from intelligence that Zuikaku was one of the Japanese carriers off Cape Engano and by that point the last surviving Pearl Harbor attacking carrier afloat. However, Zuikaku was also known to have helped sink Lexington's predecessor, CV-2, at Coral Sea - and during the pre-mission brief CAG got up and said that CV-16 was going to get her revenge. CAG led the first strike and being the senior (USNA Class of 1935) aviator airborne assumed target coordinator duties over Ozawa's fleet and started designating targets to individual flights - of course leaving Zuikaku for his boys. Multiple carriers contributed to her eventual sinking, but Lexington's flyers got in the first hits and helped extract a measure of revenge for their fallen shipmates aboard CV-2 - and Grandpa Scoobs got see this beautiful ship up close and personal through a Mark 8 reflector gunsight just before he put a 1000 pound Semi-Armor Piercing bomb into her.
Refencing Sal's other point: on December 7th 1941 when Zuikaku made her debut on the world stage, Grandpa Scoobs was a civilian junior college student, CV-16 was in the early stages of construction, and the Curtiss SB2C Helldiver was struggling through the early stages of problematic flight testing. Less than three years later on October 25th 1944, Grandpa Scoobs was a fully qualified and combat seasoned naval aviator, CV-16 was a commissioned ship of the line with nearly a year's worth of combat experience, and the SB2C design had matured into the reliable SB2C-3 series and was the backbone (along with TBM & F6F) of carrier based strike power. Are we capable today as a country of pulling off anything remotely similar in terms of defense mobilization?
Short answer? Not bloody likely. Still, IF we really do get to a "Golden Age" it MIGHT happen. Recruiting numbers are up, though I gotta say I'm still waiting for Hegseth to clean house.
"If you are going to go to war, especially a naval war, industrial capacity matters. Shipyards cannot be built overnight. Skilled shipyard personnel cannot be created out of whole cloth."
Sal, I'm sure this post had two purposes, both its FBF one, and the revitalization of ship building. however:
I think the stronger history lesson is the empty Japanese flight decks.
They ran out of pilots before planes and planes before flight decks. The pre-Pearl Japanese Pilot core was an elite group. Survivors of a long and thorough training regime. The Best of the Best. But the training pipeline could not keep up with wartime losses. Unlike the US pipeline. The USS Wolverine and Sable alone carrier qualified 17,000 aviators.
I assume we need to plan for both a short war and a long slugfest with the PLAN. Losses will be ugly. Do we have a plan for rounding up every carrier capable plane and beached, but available, aviator and putting them into a replacement pipeline?
The Drill SGT: I would think that "booting up" and updating prior-generation military aircraft would be like trying to boot up an old, un-used PC running an older, un-supported version of MS Windows. Same with the pilots.
How many F-18's, F-35's, A-6's are in either shoreside squadrons, training units or the boneyard?
How many aviators are in stateside billets rather than deployed carriers? It would not surprise me if two or three times the strength of deployed squadrons are in reserve or shore billets
Without those planes and people busy stateside training the next wave of aviators you are limited to what you then have with zero reinforcements coming.
If they don't win conclusively, then we surely lose eventually.
agree, which is why we need strategies for long and short war. Unlike the WW2 scenario, I don't see us building 60 carriers and 17000 aviators, do you?
I can't remember the book, but it was written by a Japanese author that served in the IJN. He produced a plan to produce 120,000 pilots, but the plan was shelved and ignored.
I spent the bulk of my career in the Navy, and afterwards, designing, building, and repairing ships - which explains a lot of my “self expression” on these subjects.
It has been 80 years since the armed forces of the west have been in a high end peer to peer war, one where losses are high and industrial capacity, national will and staying power are the key to victory. We, the west have become complacent, fighting wars of choice, not wars of national survival. There are only two western nations that have fought wars of national survival, Israel and Ukraine. And they have needed to mobilise their whole nation to survive. Are we and our political masters willing to do that and leave our short term and complacent lives, or will we fall onto our backs and submit to tyranny?
Insight as always. Hope the right people are paying attention and we are able to make substantial improvements in the sustainability of our war-fighting ability. But won't be easy, fast or cheap.
I am so hoping (hate to being reduced to hope as opposed to a plan) that China's military & leadership is less prepared and more corrupt than our nation....
Infrastructure? Who needs Infrastructure when we have this fine example of our future here. "The Emperor expects that every man will do his duty" (Apologies to Nelson.)
One of the "what ifs" I have often pondered is: What if the Japanese had, instead of building SHINANO, allocated the tonnage and ancillary resources to build two more ZUIKAKUs?
I don't think it changes the ultimate outcome, but it *might* have extended the war by anywhere from three months to a year, depending on how well employed/equipped the additional flight decks are.
A good illustration of why and how the Japanese lost.
What we need to recognize is that:
(a) We could meet the same fate if we follow some of the Japanese choices.
(b) We won because we started with the industrial base of "the arsenal of democracy" and brilliantly planned and executed ALL aspects of ensuring we had everything we needed to support sustained combat operations at sea in the Pacific.
Stan Fisher's "Sustaining the Carrier War: The Deployment of U.S. Naval Air Power to the Pacific" is a MUST READ. It covers the full picture- ship and aircraft building and deployment, and the unsexy stuff like all the maintenance personnel, and the "A" and "C" schools to train them, and the cycling of replacement aircraft to the front, and retrograde of tired warbirds stateside for use in training to free up new construction for the fleet. The successes were often the result of providential choices of odd ducks to run the various bits and pieces, able to understand and make things work, relatively free from interference by "experts" whose frames of reference were out of synch with current needs.
Sadly, we have eaten most of our seed corn, close down schools, depleted our spares, and wasted our limited funds on a few Cadillacs when we need a huge supply of F-150 pickups.
Purty. Now, picture that as a swarm of 10,000 drones, each carrying a payload such as a thermite grenade, pouring out of a PLAN Cruiser, splatting them all over a USN Carrier or land facility...
Could not agree more. They too were brave and died honorably.
Well...the IJN lacked many of the opportunities for brutality that their Army colleagues had. Except for that "Let's chain up the captured Aircrew and drop them over the side" thing at Midway, though I think they might have dispatched the VT pilot with a blade first..
Uh, you are not incorrect! There are multiple reasons why Grandpa Scoobs never purchased Japanese manufactured products and referred to the culture in racist epithets - the the most brutal example was a strike he flew against Chichi Jima in the Bonins where one of his buddies was hit by AA and bailed out - the local gunners then shredded the pilot’s parachute.
The Pacific (irony) war had a brutality component; no quarter asked or given in many instance.
Sal,
Great piece as usual... For too long Congress and the administrations have paid lip service to naval construction and industrial capacity. Yours has been a lone voice in the wilderness. With threats from China here, I pray you get the nod for the naval construction position in the WH.
J
And the issue that is most crucial is that we blew up the bridge ahead of us that put so much infrastructure out of commission that is incredibly difficult and expensive to replace
Powerful
Uh....Fullbore. As shared in another recent FBF post on Leyte Gulf, the Scoobs Family has a rather unique connection to Zuikaku - Grandfather Scoobs (the brown shoe) was one of Halsey's flyers who helped put her down off Cape Engano. There's an interesting connection here - Grandpa Scoobs was flying off Lexington (CV-16), and it was known from intelligence that Zuikaku was one of the Japanese carriers off Cape Engano and by that point the last surviving Pearl Harbor attacking carrier afloat. However, Zuikaku was also known to have helped sink Lexington's predecessor, CV-2, at Coral Sea - and during the pre-mission brief CAG got up and said that CV-16 was going to get her revenge. CAG led the first strike and being the senior (USNA Class of 1935) aviator airborne assumed target coordinator duties over Ozawa's fleet and started designating targets to individual flights - of course leaving Zuikaku for his boys. Multiple carriers contributed to her eventual sinking, but Lexington's flyers got in the first hits and helped extract a measure of revenge for their fallen shipmates aboard CV-2 - and Grandpa Scoobs got see this beautiful ship up close and personal through a Mark 8 reflector gunsight just before he put a 1000 pound Semi-Armor Piercing bomb into her.
Refencing Sal's other point: on December 7th 1941 when Zuikaku made her debut on the world stage, Grandpa Scoobs was a civilian junior college student, CV-16 was in the early stages of construction, and the Curtiss SB2C Helldiver was struggling through the early stages of problematic flight testing. Less than three years later on October 25th 1944, Grandpa Scoobs was a fully qualified and combat seasoned naval aviator, CV-16 was a commissioned ship of the line with nearly a year's worth of combat experience, and the SB2C design had matured into the reliable SB2C-3 series and was the backbone (along with TBM & F6F) of carrier based strike power. Are we capable today as a country of pulling off anything remotely similar in terms of defense mobilization?
Saluting Grandpa Scoobs!
Short answer? Not bloody likely. Still, IF we really do get to a "Golden Age" it MIGHT happen. Recruiting numbers are up, though I gotta say I'm still waiting for Hegseth to clean house.
Thanks for sharing that.A tip of the cap to yer grandpappy.
"If you are going to go to war, especially a naval war, industrial capacity matters. Shipyards cannot be built overnight. Skilled shipyard personnel cannot be created out of whole cloth."
Sal, I'm sure this post had two purposes, both its FBF one, and the revitalization of ship building. however:
I think the stronger history lesson is the empty Japanese flight decks.
They ran out of pilots before planes and planes before flight decks. The pre-Pearl Japanese Pilot core was an elite group. Survivors of a long and thorough training regime. The Best of the Best. But the training pipeline could not keep up with wartime losses. Unlike the US pipeline. The USS Wolverine and Sable alone carrier qualified 17,000 aviators.
I assume we need to plan for both a short war and a long slugfest with the PLAN. Losses will be ugly. Do we have a plan for rounding up every carrier capable plane and beached, but available, aviator and putting them into a replacement pipeline?
The Drill SGT: I would think that "booting up" and updating prior-generation military aircraft would be like trying to boot up an old, un-used PC running an older, un-supported version of MS Windows. Same with the pilots.
And current generation planes and aviators?
How many F-18's, F-35's, A-6's are in either shoreside squadrons, training units or the boneyard?
How many aviators are in stateside billets rather than deployed carriers? It would not surprise me if two or three times the strength of deployed squadrons are in reserve or shore billets
Without those planes and people busy stateside training the next wave of aviators you are limited to what you then have with zero reinforcements coming.
If they don't win conclusively, then we surely lose eventually.
agree, which is why we need strategies for long and short war. Unlike the WW2 scenario, I don't see us building 60 carriers and 17000 aviators, do you?
They will out produce us...
I can't remember the book, but it was written by a Japanese author that served in the IJN. He produced a plan to produce 120,000 pilots, but the plan was shelved and ignored.
BADGER PAW SALUTE!
Your lips to Mars' ears.
Some hard lessons there. Think we’ve learned anything from this?
The right question, as always, is whether the right people learned anything from this.
It hits close to home, as a retired US NAVY bubblehead I tend to pay attention to these issues so I can’t keep my mouth shut
I spent the bulk of my career in the Navy, and afterwards, designing, building, and repairing ships - which explains a lot of my “self expression” on these subjects.
"...lacked the industrial capacity to replace losses, or even effectively repair damaged ships." or even to maintain them?
Sound familiar?
It has been 80 years since the armed forces of the west have been in a high end peer to peer war, one where losses are high and industrial capacity, national will and staying power are the key to victory. We, the west have become complacent, fighting wars of choice, not wars of national survival. There are only two western nations that have fought wars of national survival, Israel and Ukraine. And they have needed to mobilise their whole nation to survive. Are we and our political masters willing to do that and leave our short term and complacent lives, or will we fall onto our backs and submit to tyranny?
Excelent article, thanks!
Insight as always. Hope the right people are paying attention and we are able to make substantial improvements in the sustainability of our war-fighting ability. But won't be easy, fast or cheap.
I am so hoping (hate to being reduced to hope as opposed to a plan) that China's military & leadership is less prepared and more corrupt than our nation....
Infrastructure? Who needs Infrastructure when we have this fine example of our future here. "The Emperor expects that every man will do his duty" (Apologies to Nelson.)
One of the "what ifs" I have often pondered is: What if the Japanese had, instead of building SHINANO, allocated the tonnage and ancillary resources to build two more ZUIKAKUs?
I don't think it changes the ultimate outcome, but it *might* have extended the war by anywhere from three months to a year, depending on how well employed/equipped the additional flight decks are.
A good illustration of why and how the Japanese lost.
What we need to recognize is that:
(a) We could meet the same fate if we follow some of the Japanese choices.
(b) We won because we started with the industrial base of "the arsenal of democracy" and brilliantly planned and executed ALL aspects of ensuring we had everything we needed to support sustained combat operations at sea in the Pacific.
Stan Fisher's "Sustaining the Carrier War: The Deployment of U.S. Naval Air Power to the Pacific" is a MUST READ. It covers the full picture- ship and aircraft building and deployment, and the unsexy stuff like all the maintenance personnel, and the "A" and "C" schools to train them, and the cycling of replacement aircraft to the front, and retrograde of tired warbirds stateside for use in training to free up new construction for the fleet. The successes were often the result of providential choices of odd ducks to run the various bits and pieces, able to understand and make things work, relatively free from interference by "experts" whose frames of reference were out of synch with current needs.
Sadly, we have eaten most of our seed corn, close down schools, depleted our spares, and wasted our limited funds on a few Cadillacs when we need a huge supply of F-150 pickups.
Read the book!
Great plug for great book!
10,000 Drones Controlled by 1 Computer
Purty. Now, picture that as a swarm of 10,000 drones, each carrying a payload such as a thermite grenade, pouring out of a PLAN Cruiser, splatting them all over a USN Carrier or land facility...
https://youtu.be/HJxM44npcJo