I recently watched a Japanese animated series called Zipang. It was created in the 80’s and was about a hi-tech (in the 80’s) heavy cruiser being transported to the start of the battle of Midway. The story mainly focuses on what it means to be Japanese, and where the loyalty of the crew should lie- with the Americans whom they identify with more, or the Japanese who they are supposed to protect.
But annoyingly the series doesn’t have a proper ending! At the end an Imperial Japanese Lieutenant whom had joined the ship betrays them (kind of)- after having access to the ships library he discovers then unknown oil deposits in Manchuria - which he thinks will change the whole Japanese war plan.
Now the series disgustingly completely glosses over the war crimes that are going on right then which is interesting in its own right but that’s another discussion.
I want to know what people think the impact of one such ship and its knowledge would have on the war if it had whole heartedly taken the Japanese side, it seems to use missiles to easily destroy an American aircraft carrier (with a nice note saying this particular ship was destroyed anyway) which would have made a big difference.
But more interestingly what if just the knowledge about the oil slipped out, it was a major factor in Japanese war planning - could they have held on to Manchuria and used its oil deposits for greater success? Or would the war machine have crumbled even with the additional resources?
The Zipang ship was an AEGIS cruiser. Its radar dish alone would tip the Pacific War, with the ability to spot and identify ships hundreds of miles away, even if it never directly engages in battle. Picture how Midway would have gone if the Japanese knew hours in advance the position and direction of the American fleet.
Radar was known -it would have helped but wouldn’t have been seen as voodoo.
It could have changed the early stages, but ultimately the US had a massive advantage in manufacturing capacity and technology. I could see it lengthening the war, but not changing it, other than through a successful bluff.
Zipang isn’t that old. It aired from 2004-2005. I read the first 20 volumes or so of the manga a few years back but quit as the plot became more and more farfetched. I agree that the series’ glossing over of the moral issues involved with the modern-day Japanese helping the contemporary Japanese in the war is a bit jarring, but I’m okay with it. It would have completely derailed the story.
I agree with Bryan Ekers about the impact of an AEGIS cruiser in the war, so I’ll skip ahead to your second question.
I don’t think the discovery of oil in Manchukuo in 1942 would have made a major difference in the war. Just knowing the oil was there wouldn’t have helped them much; they would need time to properly exploit it. And even then they’d be faced with significant distribution problems. By this point Japan already held the oil fields of the East Indies; their real problem as the war progressed was getting that oil back to the home islands without getting their tankers sunk by US submarines.
The knowledge would be of much more value than the one ship. I don’t know how quickly or successfully Japan could be using previously unknown oil sources, but that’s the tip of the iceberg knowledge wise; Japan could be building nuclear reactors and weapons with the knowledge of the crew. Add to that enormous advances in computers, rocketry, electronics, aviation, you name it.
The ship itself would be a very powerful combat asset, but with one huge problem: no resupply. Once the missiles are fired, they’re gone for good; they won’t be tying up to a dock in Japan to reload the magazines for a few years at least. An aegis cruiser would be carrying oh, 8 or a dozen Harpoons which could sink a few ships and 100 or so Standard missiles which could wipe the skies clean of 100 or so aircraft. After those are gone, the cruiser is a reconnaissance asset, albeit an extremely powerful one. The last place modern cruiser would want to be is in a WW2 surface action, where it would be outgunned and heavily out armored. Navies no longer differentiate between light and heavy cruisers; the difference was (generally) whether a cruiser was armed with 6" or 8" guns as its main battery. Modern cruisers have neither, and compared to WW2 ships are essentially unarmored. Assuming for some reason none of the knowledge could be used, just the ship itself, Japan could win a battle or two, but would still lose the war. The problem is sinking a few ships and shooting down 100 planes won’t change anything, Japan is still going to be massively out produced by the US. There’s a handy site here that shows the results of a reverse Battle of Midway, where the entire American carrier fleet is wiped out and Japan loses none of its own carriers. The result?
Nevertheless, what the Mirai has is 60 years ahead of the most advanced radar systems that then existed.
Well, picture American morale when every fleet they send out gets trashed. Midway becomes a total rout. The American submarines can be spotted whenever they surface (which is a lot). There’s no inspiring Iwo Jima photograph… With the Mirai as flagship, directing the Japanese fleet to surprise attacks and to avoid counter-attacks, Japan avoids the crippling rate of losses that spelled its doom at and after Midway. Sure the Americans might prevail economically, but when the Pacific War sneaks into 1947… 1948… 1949… Maybe the Americans, having never gotten within bombing range of Japan, start using their nukes directly against Japanese ships. Suspecting this, and knowing when the Americans will get nukes, the commander of the Mirai saves its anti-aircraft weapons until mid 1945, shooting down any plane large enough to carry an early nuke.
The bigger threat to Japan might be from a land war with the USSR, after the defeat of Germany (assuming that goes off more-or-less as normal). Of course, a lot depends on how eager the crew of the Mirai are to share their tech with 1940s Japan, giving full access to technical manuals and such and allowing large-scale reverse engineering of its equipment. Heck, just alerting the wartime Japanese that their codes were all compromised would be a big help.
Postwar Japanese media has traditionally skated very far away from discussing or alluding to such atrocities, so while it isn’t surprising in a meta-sense, it should have given any modern naval commander pause at the very least.
Well isn’t the heart of the series about what the correct moral action for the crew to take is? How can you be moral in a immoral world? And they decide that it’s the course that leads to the least people dying? If you’re making that calculation then leaving out the suffering of subject people is something I find disgusting - as if their experiences aren’t important.
If it was all about bangs and funny time travel stuff then it would be less important, but the focus is very much on ideas and conceptions of what is right. It’s especially noticeable when they’re actually in Malaysia.
As for the impact of the ship- if they can fight off the first few fleets maybe that would give Japan the time to bring fuel on tap- Manchuria - Japan is a lot safer route when it comes to sea travel. So if they can access that fuel within the time period the ship allows it gives them much shorter supply and defence lines.
And maybe that would allow them to increase production as well!
Radar is still pretty much limited to line of sight though. Wiki quotes about 50 nautical miles for AEGIS surface search radar range, which compared to the size of the Pacific isnt that great, and 100+ nautical miles for aerial targets. You’d still have to be using other options to find fleets at greater ranges.
And it was known what limited radar, eg chaff, land, etc. Really the biggest thing as stated is info, eg change your naval codes numbskulls, they’re broken.
I think this would be relatively useless as a research project. I don’t imagine that there is much of interest that could be replicated in the time frame of the war. The first integrated circuits were still about 20 years in the future. Even if this shaved 10 years of their development, they still come after the war. And the more time spent studying the ship, means the less it is available for active duty.
I also question how well this would work as an active warship. The Kongōs are driven by gas turbine engines. I’m not sure that the Japanese have enough of the proper fuel to regularly field the thing. Nor am I certain that it can operate in wartime conditions for an extended period without proper replacement parts. After a couple of battles it would not only be out of ammo, it would have also placed extensive stress on just about every system on board. Without appropriate parts this thing is going to become a franken-ship pretty quick as they have to replace 90s tech with 40s tech. Sure it can dominate the air for a battle or two. But eventually the Americans are going to be fielding 1000 plane air-fleets. At that point whatever remains of the 90 SAMs and 1550 CWIS rounds become a drop in the bucket. Same for the rest of its weapons. It can sink a surface task force (as long as it stays outside of gunnery range), it will sink the first half dozen subs it sees, etc. But every time it uses a weapon it is gone forever. It could extend the war for a year or two, but American industrialization will tell in the end.
Code breaking knowledge would probably be the most useful thing. But that probably isn’t a war winner by itself. And knowledge of Manchurian oil, won’t get any of it drilled before the Soviets over run Manchuria. It is just too hard to build all the infrastructure for drilling, transporting, refining etc. in any short time frame, especially with an active war on.
One ship can only be in one place at a time. The entire rest of the war will proceed as it did. Wherein superior US production capability guaranteed the eventual result, if not the exact timing.
And modern guided missile cruisers carry very few missiles. While it could certainly defeat any other single ship of the time, after a dozen or so engagements it’s out of missiles. Then it’s simply a target. And the enemy ships it destroys can be replaced. By the terms of the scenario, once the magic future weapon is depleted, damaged, or destroyed there’s no regenerating it.
One of anything, except maybe a nuke delivered to the opposing capital early on, isn’t going to change the outcome. Change some details, sure. But not the big picture.
Probably the biggest help such a ship could make to Japan would be to sail immediately to Japan, advise exactly how it ends, and persuade the emperor it’s in his best interests to broker some form of reduced surrender and switch of sides. Then hide the ship, and use it as a research asset to get a massive headstart on the rest of the world.
It’s hard to tell if the leadership would believe that they couldn’t do better, now that they have some hindsight info. The further the timelines diverge, the less the future-crew can give advice about.
An interesting novelization of similar situation can be found in John Birmingham’s Axis of Time trilogy. His scenario involves an entire 21st century battlegroup sent back in time to WWII, but the conclusions are the same: A few overwhelming early victories, followed by mostly recon duties as the smart weapons run out.
Birmingham does an interesting job of contrasting the different sensibilities of the two times in collision. The moderns are appalled by the racism and sexism of the world of the 1940’s. And the people from the 1940’s are appalled by the cynicism and ruthlessness of the moderns.
I don’t think Zipang completely ignores the moral issues. The captain decides that he and his crew are not loyal to the Showa Emperor, but rather to early 21st-century Japan, with its pacifist constitution. Thus he will not help the Imperial Japanese Navy, and will not regard the U.S. Navy as an enemy. That seems to me to be a moral decision, and you don’t need to go into the details of Japanese atrocities: you just need to regard Japan’s war as unjustified, and know from hindsight that Japan was better off losing the war.
I think it is less the future knowledge that matters, and more the techniques and technology the ship and crew bring that would make the biggest impact.
I think it will have an impact, but not as much as some are proposing.
You could hand a tech manual (these come with circuit board schematics and troubleshooting steps) to the industrialists, and after explaining to them what the various unfamiliar symbols mean, but that doesn’t give them the knowledge of how to stamp an integrated circuit chip overnight, nor even how to produce the materials that are needed to make one. The computers of the day were vacuum tube and cleverly arranged gears… ( TDC, Gunnery computer)
All technology, both theoretical and practical, requires a base from which to rest upon. A leads to B leads to C etc.
You handing your digital watch to Oppenheimer might give him a clue towards techniques that obviously work, but most of us can’t explain all the intermediate steps that was required. (You’re showing him “step Z”, and he needs to figure out all the steps to get there from step “A” on his own, without knowing how many intermediate steps there may be.) That knowledge is crucial.
The result clearly wouldn’t be integrated circuits being cranked out tomorrow, or next year, and likely not in the decade. It’s not just the technical manuals and trying to reverse engineer equipment, however. The technical know how of the crew would all be shaving off years of research if the crew with technical knowledge work with the industrialists as they know things which would otherwise only be gleaned by lengthy and expensive trial and error. For example, understanding the basics of how a nuclear reactor works is something that would otherwise take decades to even figure out. For a more immediate example, Japanese radar was much more primitive than American radar throughout the war. The radar operators of the crew and those who maintain them have far more understanding of the fundamentals of radars than anyone else in Japan did. While they certainly wouldn’t be cranking out SPY-1s any time in the visible future, they could greatly improve upon the historically crappy Japanese radar of the day, though it would take some time to set things up. The length of that some time might be a couple or a few months or a couple or a few years, but it could be done.
