Japan badly bungled the submarine war. Their doctrine was that the main purpose of submarines was to escort their own battle fleet and strike at the enemy battle fleet. The United States realized that submarines were a lot more effective if they were used independently to strike at the enemy logistic lines - especially in a war fought in the Pacific where both sides had dozens of island bases that were dependent on this shipping.
Not only did the Japanese refuse to seriously commit their own submarines to attacking American shipping, they also refused to acknowlege how badly their own shipping was being affected by American submarine attacks and dedicate their forces to effective anti-submarine countermeasures. In this regard, the American forces in the Pacific had it easy compared to the simultaneous war in the Atlantic - their supply ships never faced the equivalent of the German U-boat campaign and their own submarines never had to face the ruinous attacks the U-boats received in turn.
My understanding of the balloon-bomb campaign was that one of the objectives was to set the forests of western North America on fire and tie up Allied manpower in firefighting activities. Didn’t work very well, because the time when they were launched was from late 1944 to spring 1945 and the forests are least flamable in winter and spring.
However, one of them did land on a power line in Washington state and caused a power outage on the Hanford Reservation. Backup power prevented the reactor cooling pumps from losing power, so the reactor did not melt down. That plus the picnickers are the only significant effects of the balloon-bombs. There may have been a fire or two set by them, but they weren’t significant. It’s not like every forest fire has to be fought; they will burn out on their own if ignored.
But there was an aerial bombing of the forest near Brookings OR that happened in September of 1942. It was made by a submarine-launched seaplane which dropped two incendiary bombs. While they did start a small fire, it was quickly suppressed, since the weather conditions were not conducive to fires at that time.
It’s interesting that when a key Japanese leader promoting attack on the U.S. claimed that victory would be achieved in a matter of months, he was reminded by the Emperor that he had also promised victory over the Chinese in three months (the war in China by that time had been going on over four years).
The Japanese underestimation of the U.S. was based on more than lack of appreciation of U.S. industrial capacity. Key leaders were convinced that the U.S., unlike Japan, lacked a warrior spirit and was a nation of “merchants” who’d recognize that war with Japan was not worth pursuing after Pearl Harbor and would want to cut their losses.
False optimism about quickly achieving military victories and racial pride/arrogance are repeating themes in history that help explain how war proponents get in over their heads.
Actually, the overall plan for “Operation AF” included a scouting line across the route from Pearl Harbor (not San Diego) to Midway. I don’t recall the schedule off the top of my head, but I believe it was to be in place about the time of the initial (surprise) attack on Midway — the idea being that it would be able to spot (and possibly attack) the US carriers as they sortied to the island’s defense. Of course, the fact that the carriers were on station at Point Luck before the scouting line could form made it a moot point.
(There was also a provision for aerial reconnaissance of Pearl using a long-range floatplane, which was to refuel from a submarine at French Frigate Shoals. But there was a US ship there the first night, and a couple of US floatplanes there the second night, and the operation was called off after that. No great loss, since the assumption was that the US was still blissfully unaware of the Japanese presence.)
So there was a plan to use the IJN’s submarine and aerial resources to scout ahead of the fleet and ascertain what they could expect. But it was based on the miscalculation — which doomed so many parts of the operation — that the US was not expecting the attack on Midway and would only respond after the fact.
This is very wrong. Are you aware of how big Australia actually is? Even considering just the eastern economic heartland its about 1000km from Brisbane to Sydney and roughly another 1000km south again from Sydney to Melbourne. The idea of invading Australia was promoted by the Japanese Navy but it was never a realistic possibility given the multitude of Japanese commitments elsewhere, the massive land area involved and the extremely long and vulnerable supply lines that would have resulted. The concept was rejected out of hand by the Japanese Army High Command who would have been responsible for carrying it out. The Army High Command estimated they would need a minimum of twelve divisions to carry out such an invasion, and they did not have the forces available even if there was shipping available to move and supply them, which there wasn’t.
This is something of a myth. Both the F6F and the F4U were already in the late stages of development when a pretty-much intact A6M2 was found in the Aleutians, but neither saw significant changes. One of the primary reasons for that was simply that there wasn’t much to learn about the Zero by having one that could not be had by simply observing one in combat – which observations DID lead to some modifications, such as a larger engine.
I’m going to plug a book here that’s a must-read on Midway: Shattered Sword, by Parshall & Tully. It really puts to rest most of the issues raised above. To wit: the Aleutians operation was not a diversion, but an honest invasion operation of its own, with follow-ups post-Midway to seize larger parts yet of the Aleutians. And their tactical operations and strategy were not all that bad, seeing as how the carriers were operating together and everything else depended on them anyhow – it really didn’t matter much whether the battleships were five or five-hundred miles away. I’ll go into detail about this if you wish, but generally speaking, neither tactically nor strategically did the Japanese perform as poorly or as ineptly as has been claimed.
The commander of the Combined Fleet, as sizeable part of but not the entire IJN. This is an important distinction to keep in mind when thinking about the lead-up to war and the eventual prosecution of it. The Japanese high command was highly decentralized in a fashion, with the Imperial Army and Navy General Staffs and the respective formations under them, the Combined Fleet and the Armies (such as the infamous Kwantung Army) hardly ever agreeing, rarely cooperating, and occasionally simply ignoring each other. Thus:
…this is somewhat misleading. Yamamoto did not direct Japanese naval strategy, though he had considerable influence. Admiral Nagano, Chief of the Naval General Staff, “directed” Japanese naval strategy, and was frequently at loggerheads with Yamamoto, about Pearl Harbor among other things. It was Yamamoto’s prestige that often got him his way, but he had to compromise, and often did so badly. He let Zuikaku and Shokaku go to the Coral Sea to get his way with the Midway plan, a fatal error if there ever was one. The fatal flaw of the Japanese system was that essentially, no-one but the Emperor was in charge of both Navy & Army, leading to a laughable level of coordination.
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The Japanese War Plan**
I’ll add another tidbit to that: the Japanese war plan followed in general lines a plan that had been decades in the making. The Japanese would secure the resources they needed, and meanwhile establish a defensive perimeter to the East that would allow them to whittle down an approaching U.S. fleet as it made its way to liberate the Philippines, finally bringing that fleet to battle (a decisive battle, it was believed) somewhere around the Marianas). This was in fact how the war turned out to go – up until the Fall of Saipan in June, 1944, a lot of Japanese leaders had little reason to doubt that their strategy was working. They were trading space for time and American losses, but to their chagrin, the U.S. losses were too small. U.S. forces actually increased in power between Tarawa in November 1943 and Saipan in June 1944; and their decisive battle, what we know as Philippine Sea, was an unmitigated desaster. It was Saipan that caused the fall of the Tojo administration in Japan, probably as good an indicator of the impact that this failure of the decisive battle had as any.
Seen in its most pitiable form when it came to coordinating merchant shipping. Army ships
would leave Japan on a supply run to (say) Java, but return empty because moving raw goods
(such as oil) was not an Army responsibility. Their merchant fleet was barely up to the task
to begin with: this just further crippled their ability to move stuff around, made worse once
the Americans started to sink Marus in earnest (esp. tankers a high-priority vessel).
Indeed. During the thirties when the stage was set for the ‘Great East Asia War’, Japanese policy was the outcome of what amounted to gang warfare between various factions, with ministers being assassinated when they tried to rein in the more extreme militarists. The Kwantung Army was totally out of control (and irredeemably bogged down, IMO) in China, the established order in colonial Asia had been turned upside down by events in Europe, the US had imposed an embargo on metal and crude oil to try to force the government to rein in the army (which they were essentially powerless to do), central policymaking was a farce, and so forth and so on. I think it’s misleading to think there was any ‘Grand Plan’ in Japan any more than there was in Nazi Germany - they just sort of blundered their way into the apocalypse.
I don’t think the US would have done nearly so well if they had been saddled with a political structure where it would be possible for e.g. the Secretary of Defence to be assassinated by rogue colonels of the “Pacific” faction for suggesting that fighting Germany should take priority over the war against Japan, or for Eisenhower to ignore Washington and invade Spain on his own initiative without repercussions.