Comments by "Gregory Wright" (@gregorywright4918) on "Drachinifel" channel.

  1. After he lost his Army Air Force on the first day, MacArthur tried to shift the blame to the Navy by giving his adoring journalist entourage some demeaning quotes about lack of Navy support. King was so incensed he blew up when Marshall suggested appointing MacArthur as Supreme Commander in the Pacific, and Leahy backed him. For some unknown reason, MacArthur had some respect for Halsey and vice versa, so Halsey got the tap for escorting him to the Philippines. FDR was a Navy man, but respected the political pull MacArthur could bring if he threw his hat in the ring for the Republicans. Getting to command the recapture of the Philippines kept him out of the race in 1944.
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  2. Aside from the S-boats that used the Mk 10, the Mk 14 had a success rate of around 20%. If it was lower maybe they would have investigated earlier.
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  3. She's off the coast, but in about 13,000 feet of water. And Paul Allen's Petrel has been tied up since his death. She was around 60 miles offshore, so outside territorial waters but within the EEZ.
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  4. That was the core of their plan, because they knew they could not outlast the US or the UK. Hitting first, hardest, and fastest at the longest range was their only chance.
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  5.  @Right-Is-Right  That's the Chinese who are scraping up the environmentally-fragile reefs and building islands on them - the Japanese made steel reefs by losing freighters and tankers all over the place.
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  6. Technically an angled deck can launch and recover at the same time, but you often see them using the foredeck as a parking area during recovery operations. Large strikes often need to land around the same time, so they park them forward or to the side to rearm and refuel, only putting planes that need maintenance down below in the hangar. One tactic the Japanese mastered before the US was the deck-load launch, spotting about half their planes at the rear of the deck and launching them quickly in conjunction with a similarly-spotted twin carrier, then melding the two partial-groups into one strike on the way to the target. That is why Pearl Harbor was "two strikes" but not of the same planes, and when the second strike was launched there were no planes left to form a third strike (aside from a few fighters held back for CAP).
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  7. (in a John Wayne voice): "Not hardly..."
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  8.  @JosipRadnik1  I think what he meant by "uncontested" was "no enemy fighters around"...
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  9. Putting a previously-retired RAF Air Marshal whose preceding job had been Governor of Kenya in as CinC was not a well-thought-out move either. It implies that London thought the Far East would be best defended by air forces, but then they did not send any. The needs of Home and the Med were much greater. The RN force they sent was most deficient in - air power. Phillips seems to have spent most of his WW1 time in destroyers, rising to command a cruiser. He also spent a lot of time in Whitehall on staff duties, where he gained the confidence of Churchill. When he read the conclusions of the first Board of Inquiry into the loss of the Hood, his criticism to Churchill was part of getting a second, more thorough Board of Inquiry convened. Small world.
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  10. One of the things they track about officers is the re-up rate of those under them. You and others not accepting gives him a black mark. Good job.
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  11.  @djinn666  No it can't, if it can't get to the fight. Small ships are fine for coast defense, but if they cannot handle a serious ocean storm or need to hop from port to port because they don't carry enough fuel or supplies they are not much of a threat. As far as "sink dozens of the largest warships", it will take dozens of missiles to overwhelm a CVBG screen. Size does matter if you need to go on the offense, or defend your shipping in other parts of the world. China is learning that right now. Her ships cannot project much beyond the East and South China Seas, hence the illegal fortification of those "shoals" and the "Belt & Road Initiative".
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  12. (43:30) The bypassed islands and bases were essentially POW camps, the seas around them acting as wire and some left-behind units as distant guards. As Drach mentions they were used as live-fire training opportunities for new or transiting units, and they were patrolled to prevent resupply attempts. Food was the biggest problem they had, a number of them developed extensive gardens to try to feed the remaining garrisons. Unfortunately tropical islands do not grow rice (or many other crops) very well.
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  13. One of my favorite movies, They Were Expendable, featured PT boats in the Philippines in early 1942. Robert Montgomery spent time in PT boats during the war, and he directed some uncredited scenes in the movie when John Ford broke his leg. You get a sense of the desperation and hopelessness of the campaign. Southern Florida stands in for Bataan and the central Philippines. MTB 3 had 6 Elcos, but they used 2 newer Elcos and 4 Huckins.
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  14.  @Trebuchet48  Most of his photos come from public sources, often national archives, which do not have the best labeling to being with and are sometimes labeled wrongly.
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  15. They worked better with wood-and-canvas biplanes, at least for takeoff. As mentioned, hangar deck space was sacrificed.
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  16. I think she could take on two at night with her radar, presuming the IJN floatplanes are not up to their night-time tricks like in the Solomons. I also think Drach is right that Nagumo would keep at least two of them back to backstop the rest of the KB.
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  17. A good list, Drach, with a couple omissions (probably ones out on loan?): Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy (1941-1945), by Paul Dull Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power (1909-1941) by Mark Peattie The Japanese Submarine Force and WW2 by Boyd and Yoshida The Japanese Merchant Marine in WW2 by Mark Parillo If your interest is in shipbuilding, there is a good chapter on Japan in: Naval Shipbuilders of the World by Robert Winklareth For individual ship focuses, aside from the cheap Osprey series, there is the Legends of Warfare: Naval series, which has Ahlberg & Lengerer doing the Soryus, Kongos, and Fubuki classes and their derivatives, the ShipCraft books, and the Anatomy of the Ship series. For "what were Japanese thinking", I would add: The Pacific War 1931-1945 by Saburo Ienaga Japan 1941 by Eri Hotta Japan Prepares For Total War by Michael Barnhart Fading Victory - the Diary of Admiral Motome Ugaki I did appreciate Japanese Destroyer Captain by Tameichi Hara, but I thought it needed to be taken with a bit of scepticism, not quite as much as Mitsuo Fuchidas books. Saburo Sakai's memoir was good as well, but he was part of the land-based naval air forces (flying a Zero), not the ship-based ones. Finally, there are some great battle studies, of which the best recently are: Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway by J Parshall and A Tully The First Team (2 books) by John Lundstrom Pacific Crucible (and 2 more) by Ian Toll Fortress Rabaul by Bruce Gamble Rising Sun, Falling Skies (and 2 more) by Jeffrey Cox Islands of Destiny by John Prados Empires in the Balance (and 2 more) by HP Wilmott Some of the latter ones focus more on US/Allied actions, but they mix more Japanese perspectives in than books from earlier. Final question - how do we get a library card for the Drach Collection?
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  18. You just outscored all the cadets of the pre-WW2 Japanese Naval Academy.
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  19.  @jimwind7589  IJN aircraft supported IJA land operations and land-based IJN bombers.
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  20. The new sidebars highlight just how short her "active" career was - but leave out how long it took to build her. She spent more time on the ways than in the water!
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  21. Yes, but the Japanese "superior sensors" was specialized binoculars along with specially-chosen lookouts, while the US was radar and CIC...
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  22. Re: German use of Narvik, my understanding was that the northern Swedish ports were ice-blocked in the winter season, so Narvik was the main port for shipments then (the best-quality Swedish iron mines were in the north). It was one of the primary reasons Germany moved to secure Norway when she felt it was threatened by the UK. Norway has a very jagged but deep coastline, so ships can hug the coast when moving south from Narvik, and German air cover would keep raiders away from the coast (heck, it reached out to hit the Arctic convoys badly), so they could not loiter offshore.
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  23. Great in theory, nightmares to implement in practice... And then things got worse.
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  24. You could say this would preclude Midway happening at all...
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  25.  @colbeausabre8842  And then we go and put two 155mm guns on the stealthy Zumwalt class but cannot agree on what ammo to shoot from it...
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  26.  @rogerwilco2  It's a shame we are so quick to blame everything on "racism" today. Yes, there was underestimation, but it worked both ways - Japanese thought the Americans were "decadent, lazy gaijin" who would be quick to cut their losses and make a deal if they just bloodied their nose a bit - hence, Pearl Harbor. Tokyo's "racism" extended even to other Southeast Asian people groups, particularly the Chinese whom they raped and massacred because they dared to defy the "Children of the Sun". Regarding the torpedoes, we knew about the British experiments with oxygen-enriching that did not go well. Even so, we should have been able to tell they were using a 24" torpedo to our normal 21" - three extra inches in diameter is going to get you some extended range anyway, and a bigger warhead too. Reminds me of how surprised we were when we got a good look at the MiG 25 Foxbat - steel wings, vacuum-tube avionics, short range and lousy dog-fighting. It looked so much more impressive from a distance.
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  27. I kinda like Copeland's words at Samar: "This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can."
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  28. Makes you wonder if they ever used the depth charges, as they would probably do more serious damage to their own delicate hulls or trim...
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  29. You mean the "extremely complicated plan with lots of split-up forces that requires split-second timing and inhuman dedication"?
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  30. Actually, it was a "Kate" Nakajima B5N horizontal/torpedo bomber on the BB, at 10,000 feet dropping a modified 16" AP shell.
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  31. Kind of ironic - Frank Jack Fletcher was sidelined, but the Fletcher class went on and on...
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  32. You could make a case to say the the RN had been using Mahanian concepts since the 1600s...
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  33.  @QuizmasterLaw  Dive bombers were a solid threat to carriers, but less so to battleships - their bombs weren't big enough. Initially, carriers were supposed to focus on scouting for the enemy fleet and spotting for battleship gunfire during the big battle. Torpedoes were a serious threat to battleships, mostly from destroyers and subs but increasingly from aircraft as they grew in lift capacity. The irony is that all of the US carriers lost in 1942 were lost to torpedoes (and a few bombs), while all of the IJN carriers were lost to dive bombers (although Shoho got one or two torpedo hits too, but after the fatal damage was done).
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  34. Makes you suspect the Assignments section did not get the memo about the renumbering of the sub... bureaucrats.
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  35. When the "old man" has a sense of humor - now that's a happy ship...
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  36. Junior officers of both groups plotted to assassinate the Emperor in the 1930s...
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  37.  @d.olivergutierrez8690 IJN did build a non-treaty restricted design - the Yamatos.
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  38. The WNT was signed just a few years after the end of WW1, when many people blamed the naval arms race for the start of the war and civilian governments had reasserted themselves over their militaries and cut the forces for a "peace dividend". There was a difference in attitude in the armies and navies because they knew they would be the first to bleed when the other side started things again, and they looked for every advantage they could find. Nobody goes into military service thinking "if we all just disarm and sign treaties, we can all just live in peaceful kumbaya". In most cases the WNT was imposed on the navies by the civilians (read a book or two on the meetings and who proposed what), which worked a little better in the democracies but almost led to a revolt in the militaristic IJN. Designs were drafted by naval officers, but then had to be funded by governments, so there was often some pushing of the limits hidden in the designs that the governments may or may not have been aware of. Later on during the Depression, cost was an important factor in getting approvals, although some like the US pitched shipbuilding as a job assistance program.
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  39. The main deck museum has a display commemorating her sister ships Des Moines and Newport News. Worth a visit.
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  40. Radar MIGHT have made a big difference here, if the two commanders were not so mis-directed by lousy intel on what the other side had and where. The ASVs on the Swordfish could have picked up the IJN ships at night, and the surface sets on the Warspite and other RN ships could have also helped in finding Nagumo. The closeness of the actual fleet tracks just points up that in 1942 air search from land or ships was still a hit-or-miss thing, and both carrier fleets and land air bases could be surprised. Most air searches were focused in a particular direction, and missed things off of suspected axes. 360 degree air search was a myth.
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  41.  @michaelwaldmeier1601 Since they were doing steam in subs for the first time, they pioneered many cascading failures and "lessons learned"...
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  42. I liked the 3D, but I had to replay those sections because the audio did not correspond to what the 3D was illustrating. The bunk beds were amusing, but hard to figure out which compartments they were in because the bulkheads were absent.
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  43. Might even make the IJN rethink the utility of the Soryu/Hiryu/Unryu design lineage if the RN gets a few decent torpedoes into one or both (I'm betting they have a hard time dealing with one, and definitely sink with two or more). Aside from Taiho, that was the historical core of their carrier future when they did not continue building Shokakus. It would also punch a hole in their "victory disease" two months before it was deflated at Midway, causing a reassessment of what they were trying to achieve out there with Kido Butai and probably leading it to become a reserve force like the rest of the capital ships.
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  44. Wright did command CruDiv4 in 1944 before his tour in SF. The really sad part is that he later became Inspector General of PacFleet. And they gave him a Navy Cross.
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  45. US Navy of the 1810s: Please let us sail away from that RN squadron quickly... US Navy of the 1860s: Our cheeseboxes on rafts rule the waves! Well, within sight of shore...
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  46. Another factor would be chance of grounding, particularly a ship as large as Yamato. The Kaga grounded in the Indies early in '42, and had to go back to Japan for repairs. The South Dakota grounded outside Esprito Santo (or Noumea?), so even waters near ports were not well charted. I remember reading about the Missouri grounding - that was near Chesapeake Bay, which is fairly well charted, and it took them two weeks to free her.
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  47. A destroyer with a "very large helicopter flight deck"... very large.
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  48.  @Right-Is-Right  The standard fleet type sub design was nailed down pre-war: six tubes forward, four tubes aft.
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  49.  @fullmetalpoitato5190  About an hour south on I-95 (not rush-hour) you can get to Groton CT and see USS Nautilus, to round out your fleet visit.
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  50.  @Philistine47  Japan benefitted massively as you say, but Japan did not PERCEIVE that benefit, instead it felt insulted at being relegated to the 60% second place. THAT is what set them up for the the loss 20 years later, as they felt they had to make their push for parity with the world superpowers when the window of opportunity to grab land and oil was temporarily open due to UK distraction and Dutch and French losses in Europe.
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