Comments by "Gregory Wright" (@gregorywright4918) on "The Drydock - Episode 168" video.

The Bigger Issue, though, was that in just about all cases, even when the US Navy suffered the worse losses, it still managed to divert or distract the IJ Navy from the Primary Objective - to stop the invasion (Savo Island - sink the TRANSPORTS, not the cruisers), land more troops, resupply cut-off troops, or bombard the airfield badly enough that it could not stop another attempt at landing more troops. Sometimes you have to deliberately sacrifice units in order to achieve a bigger objective. And sometimes you do that by accident...
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In Kaigun, by Evans and Peattie, they talk about the changes in battle plans in the early 1930s as the Kongos were rebuilt with more armor and newer engines. They were detached from the main battle force and added as reinforcements to the precursor night battle force due to their speed and heavy guns. They were not expected to face battleship guns, just cruisers and destroyers.
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Also shows why building a magazine next to an engine room is a Bad Idea...
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Guadalcanal? They thought the area was a "backwater", and they were intending to garrison it better once it was completed. They also thought the present floatplane search and air cover from Tulagi was good enough till the field was finished, and the distant cover from Rabaul would be enough of a threat to keep enemies away. At one point back in February or something a raid had approached Rabaul but the 2E bomber attack had driven them off, so they may have been overconfident as well.
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@NathanOkun I think part of that change may have been the destruction of their metaphysical myth - they had to face the real world, and find a new way to build a future on civil government, production, trade, and alliances.
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It played into the general Japanese attitude toward us versus them - we may have fewer ships, but they are individually superior.
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That might be a little extreme. They learned the battle side of things fairly well, and trained their men exhaustively. They believed more in the "metaphysical" side of conflict, the "spirit" over the "steel". That may stem from believing that they were an Empire descended directly from a god. They had pretty good advisors in the Germans and Brits, so they learned about staff work and planning as well as battle tactics. What was "broken" (or never worked right) was the necessary subordination of the military to the civil government, and the consequent objective analysis of whether it was "worth it" to pursue a military solution to insolvable problems. The Kwantung Army kept thrusting ahead in China, even despite Army higher-ups back in Tokyo telling them they could not afford it. Reading pre-war memoirs, it seems everyone knew that taking on the US and the UK was a bad idea due to the economic disparity, but no one could break out of the self-made whirlpool of events and national pride. Even on a "total war" footing (which they entered with rationing and restrictions on civilian production in 1937) they never had a realistic chance. As to their leadership, that may also have been influenced by their "spiritual" background. They believed in ancestor worship and group consensus, so there was less of a "meritocracy" that recognized and promoted those who performed better over those who were older and in the traditional line of seniority. Nagumo got to command the Kido Butai not because he was an outstanding aviator or air theorist, but because he was next in seniority to command. He did not like the Pearl Harbor plan, but got stuck with it. Several times lower-ranked officers showed initiative or criticized plans from higher ranks (like Tanaka and Hara), but they were then shunted into side jobs to quiet them. Yamamoto was the only one with the seniority and leverage to promote "out of the box" thinkers like Genda, but he also had to be careful not to push too much change, and once he was gone there was no one with the same leadership.
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Ones that are a bit shorter than the width of your bathtub...
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Logistics and attrition - neither of which Japan was prepared for or willing to spend enough to win.
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This one, or the earlier one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKPDSfcuBW4
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For #6, the big problem was speed of advance, only the Kongos had the speed to get in, bombard, and get back out again during darkness. The other old battleships were too slow, and the Yamatos were too deep a draft to risk the possibility of grounding in the poorly charted Solomons area. They were willing to burn the fuel for the Kongos to do it.
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When they were first built they were called battlecruisers, and their 8-8 Plan specifically called for eight battleships and eight battlecruisers, of which the Akagi and Amagi were planned as 16"-gunned battlecruisers but converted to aircraft carriers after the Washington Naval Treaty (but the Amagi was damaged in an earthquake, so one of the cancelled battleships took her place).
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The better question would be "were battleship main guns ever SUCCESSFUL in AA use?" - And the answer would be NO. There is a rumor that early in the war when IJN fighters did not have radios, the heavy ships would train their turrets toward an incoming air strike and fire them to attract the attention of the airborne CAP. Have not seen that substantiated, but that might be the closest to AA usefulness.
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@kemarisite I remembered seeing it, but not in any first-hand action reports. I don't think alerting the CAP was what he was getting at.
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@ricardokowalski1579 Perhaps, but the strategic picture forced them to take the Philippines as quickly as possible in order to move on to what they really needed, the oil in the Dutch East Indies. The IJ Army had only given them a few divisions to work with, so they needed to wrap up operations in order to move south. As it went, they spent longer there but the operation in Malaya went faster so it worked out. Kantai Kessen would not have worked anyway, both because the "cautious" faction in the US Navy was favored over the "thrusters" by the end of the 1930s, and because the war in Europe was prioritized over the war in the Pacific, so no quick thrust to the Philippines would have happened anyway.
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@fouraces9137 Read up on the Battle of Bismarck Sea in March of 1943.
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@johnshepherd8687 True, but not your first point. The Kongos were not sent as cruiser killers, they were sent as fast "battleships" to bombard the airfield. They needed speed because of the reach of Henderson's planes, to get in and out under cover of darkness. Most of their loadout was for bombardment. And their commanders expected the other ships to deal with enemy ships, not the "battleships".
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@giovannifontana1433 The UK had no need for a specialized amphibious assault ship at the time, and they would not consider a carrier until helicopters were well developed. A modified transport makes more sense.
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@champagnegascogne9755 US Army Air Corps bombers were a very different story from US Navy bombers. Though they had a large load, it was mostly HE bombs, and dropped from at least 20,000 feet was not very accurate. They made up for that by flying hundreds of bombers in tight formations. That said, I think only the B-29 could make it to Japan until the summer of 1945 when Okinawa became available. The standard USAAC bombs were 500 lb, 1,000 lb, and 2,000 lb. I've heard of a US 1,600 lb AP bomb, but that may have been a US Navy bomb. The B-29 required months of modification in the factory to be able to carry and drop the A-bombs which were about 10,000 lbs, and there was only two squadrons of those planes until 1946. The B-29s flew very high, such that their drops were affected by the jet streams and sometimes landed miles from their targets. This is why their tactics were changed to night attacks at low altitudes with incendiaries. The unique nature of Japanese cities (crowded into narrow areas, construction of paper and wood, less-mechanized fire-fighting equipment, etc) made them more vulnerable to these tactics. But neither tactic would be effective against a Yamato.
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@washingtonradio The Japanese loved complicated things like mazes and puzzles, and thought they could anticipate the US reactions, or force them into expected reactions. They also thought they could depend on their own forces following a plan to the letter, and trained their officers for obedience to orders first. In addition they thought that a complex plan would be harder for an enemy to understand and react to, particularly if the incoming forces did not seem very big and threatening until the last moment when they combined together. The creators of complex plans tended to be men who went to General Staff type schools but had less front-line command-of-men type experience. A number of Japanese memoirs of front-line men grumble at the plans that were forced on them from "headquarters-type" staff officers. Note that the IJ Army was advised by German officers from the 1880s into the early 1900s, while the IJ Navy was advised by British officers over a similar time period. I don't know if they taught von Moltke in their Naval Academy or War College.
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@scottgiles7546 Simply put, they have the armor to withstand battleship guns, which battlecruisers do not.
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Whereas a Hunter/Killer sub captain needs to be so bold he will sneak into the baffles of his prey and trail her for a week, or creep into shallow territorial waters and tap and undersea comms cable. Wonder if they "promoted" the latter or the former.
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Speed of reload?
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Both of the US guns you mentioned - weren't they using cartridge charges in an auto-loader system?
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The breech block slides horizontally - to the side, so it adds to the distance necessary between guns. Plus you want the guns centered in the turret, so whatever space you need for the slide on the side it opens, you have extra space on the opposite side. Compared to other navies with vertical or rearward opening breeches, your turret is going to have to be wider for the same number of guns, and if it is too wide it will be very heavy and the barbette will be much closer to the outer skin of your ship, which means you have no depth for torpedo defense. Plus sliding breech block guns require the powder to be in a brass cannister, so you have extra handling and extraction issues compared to normal powder bags.
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I read the 60-cm Karl-Gerat was made by Rheinmetall, not Krupp.
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