Japan made the same mistake Germany did in WWII. They assumed that strong countries attacking weak countries was the natural order. From their perspective, if countries like America and Britain were stronger than Germany and Japan, they would already be attacking Germany and Japan. The fact that weren’t must mean they were weaker and therefore Germany and Japan could safely attack them.
Another huge mistake Japan made was something you alluded to - Japan failed to understand logistics. What did the Japanese make their primary target at Pearl Harbor? The battleships and cruisers. But as you pointed out, they ignored the repair facilities and fuel depots. Destroying those would have paralyzed the fleet just as much as sinking the ships would. But the Japanese could never see things like that.
They saw wars like they were jousting events - the two forces would attack each other face to face and the stronger fighter would win. It was not just an honor thing - they had no problem attacking an unprepared opponent as they did at Pearl Harbor. But they became too focused on their enemy’s offensive capabilities - they would attack those capabilities without ever considering whether it was possible to go around them instead.
Americans, on the other hand, understood how to fight indirectly. They would send submarines out to sink supply ships rather than hunt for battleships. They would cut off and bypass military bases rather than attack them. Their planes would bomb factories rather than fight other planes.
I’ve seen a History Channel wargame that claimed that, had the battleships been at sea, they would have engaged the Japanese fleet and many of them would have been sunk in deep water where they could not be retrieved. As it was, with the exception of USS Arizona, the Pearl harbor battleships were all raised and repaired and served again in the war, even getting some licks in at Surigao Strait.
My God. Did Theodore know FDR felt that way about him? Creepy.
I speculate that the US would have sent a task force to relieve the Phillipines,and if we hade, we would have been badly defeated.
The Japanese surface fleet was a match for ours on paper, but later experience showed that they were superior in fighting skill. More importantly, their air assets, carrier- and land-based, were more than powerful enough to maul any foray into the Western Pacifc by the US NAvy in 1941-42. And this was at a time when most admirals hadn’t come to appreciate the threat that aircraft can pose to capital ships.
I thought US ships had far superior fire control systems. Even prior to radar (lack of which which made the Japanese hopelessly behind the times in naval warfare after the US deployed it) we still had the Mk-8 Rangekeeper which automatically calculated proper gun settings for US battleships and cruisers.
As such I thought overall the US had the advantage in surface actions compared to the Japanese.
Why didn’t the Japanese launch a follow up attack? They knew that the carriers were out at sea-so why not hang around and finish the job?
Although, maybe the Japanese were running low on fuel-or did they fear submarine attack?
Our advantage was that if our cruiser or destroyer was sunk, we could replace it. The IJN could not. If our ships were seriously damaged, they’d be out of action a long time. If an IJN ship was seriously damaged, it was out of action forever while it sat in a dock not getting repaired.
The course of the Solomons campaign was such that the IJN dictated that almost all surface battles were at night, which was what the IJN had thoroughly trained for.
The Battle of Vella Gulf in August 1943 was the first time that the USN was really starting to get it’s act together in terms of surface engagements. From THIS SITE:
For the Americans Vella Gulf was also a watershed battle. It was the first time American destroyers had independently taken the offensive against Japanese surface shipping since Balikpapan, eighteen month previously. The destroyer men regarded their success as vindication of their weapons and proof of the principal that destroyers were best employed offensively unencumbered by screening or escort duties. However, there was more to the American victory. American destroyers fought Japanese destroyers five times more, (at Horaniu, three times off Kolombangara and at the Battle of Vella Lavella) before they achieved another victory at Cape St. George. The victory at Vella Gulf was surely assisted by having a plan and a doctrine. But other factors were equally important. First was experience. The Americans rotated men in and out and a weeding out process was gradually bringing the best men, like Burke, Simpson and Moosbrugger to positions of leadership. Officers like Russell had seen enough war to sense the flaws in their weapons and ways to offset these flaws. Second was improvement in weapons. Faulty torpedo detonator were out, flashless powder, flash hiders, and more powerful warheads were in. Third was opportunity. The Americans found the Japanese first and were in the perfect position against a dark shore with the torpedo division closest to the enemy when they did so. Fourth was complacency on the Japanese side: they did exactly what they were supposed to do. Fifth was luck. Japanese eyes outperformed American radar many times before Vella Gulf. If the lookouts had seen the Americans even one minute earlier, the results could have been far different. As events at Tassafaronga (or Samar) proved, it was possible to have a plan, the superior force, achieve surprise and to still suffer a stinging defeat. There are no guarantees in war, but Moosbrugger (and Simpson) did everything right, all the intangibles worked in their favor and they were rewarded with one of the great victories of the campaign. They finally taught the Japanese to respect American torpedoes.
Wasn’t that mainly because the U.S. had broken a Japanese code? Hence, it knew what the Japanese plans for the Battle of Midway were, while the Japanese had no idea about where or how strong the U.S. naval forces were.
Yes, but also because the attack and invasion forces were trying to take an objective that was beyond the reach of their own land based air, and within the US’s. That leaves those forces awfully exposed and vulnerable, even without the broken code. The occupation of the Phillippines, Malaya, and Dutch East Indies was supported by their land based air, and the Japanese benefited from that support.
The Japanese had changed their cipher a couple weeks before Midway. The planning and gathering for Midway was well detected by the US (and countered), but note that the Guadalcanal Campaign (where the new codes had not been broken yet) was a much more costly series of battles for both sides.
They were more concerned about air attacks. As mlees wrote, the carriers might have been preparing a strike. And the land-based aircraft on Hawaii definitely were. The Japanese second strike had taken a lot more casualties than the first strike had and a third strike might have been even costlier.
And this was an incredibly bad idea. The Japanese believed they had better night vision so they figured they had an advantage over the Americans in night battles. But in reality, the Americans relied on radar not visual searches to locate enemy ships and planes. So night operations had minimal effect on American capabilities while it greatly decreased Japanese capabilities.
I understood what you were saying, and realize it wasn’t your personal belief. I just think that few if any modern-day Japanese would think it through this far, and any that do would see through the notion of Roosevelt’s putative motivations as justification for a clearly aggressive attack.
I recently took a girlfriend from Japan, and her visiting mother, to see Fort Rosecrans in San Diego. (I have to say that I did this out of curiosity as to their reaction. The only thing I’d mentioned beforehand was that it’s a great view of San Diego Bay.) They both watched in quiet awe as we went through the cemetery, passing by thousands of rows of military headstones (many of them from the Pacific Campaign).
On the way to the old lighthouse I made sure we stopped by the WWII battlements there–which were designed with Japanese ships in mind. I said nothing as we watched a WWII training video in a bunker (seen in the fifth photo) that showed how to triangulate and aim a 16-inch gun at a hypothetical ship off-shore–a ship that could only have been from Japan.
Once outside, she translated something her mother was saying: “We were stupid. We couldn’t have won. The US had higher technology than us.” Then they both insisted upon posing for a photo on top of one of the bunkers–the one seen in the third photo of the website. (Here’s their photo.)
I’m curious to how the Japanese view Pearl Harbor compared to how Americans view Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sure, Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn’t a sneak attack or such, but in the decades that have passed, the image of the a-bomb has become a sort of symbol for the cruelty and terrifying nature of war.
A misconception held by a lot of people (Americans and Japanese both) is that the Japanese went to war with the US thinking that they would win. The truth is that they knew that their chances for victory were slim but felt that it was worth the risk. Their biggest mistake was not underestimating American capabilities, it was underestimating the consequences of losing the war.