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Bk Jeong
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Comments by "Bk Jeong" (@bkjeong4302) on "Kantai Kessen (Japanese Decisive Battle Doctrine) - Method or Madness?" video.

That’s not even the biggest problem here. This doctrine actively contradicts its own assumptions.
157
Philippine Sea was the real decisive battle. Leyte was just cleanup-even at Samar the Americans were in a much better position than usually made out to be.
71
@DoddyIshamel Because Yamamoto badly misjudged US intentions.....
32
@thomasvandevelde8157 It's actually debatable whether Kurita truly outgunned the Taffies, bearing in mind there were actually three separate Taffy groups involved (two of which were never at risk of attack by Centre Force) and that their airpower was much more of a threat than usually assumed (due to having anti-ship weapons available, rather than the long-held narrative of being unable to actually do any damage). And there was the fact the landings had already happened and Kurita was too late anyways.
31
@jimmyseaver3647 The Japanese DID care about the American carriers (albeit for semi-wrong reasons). Which actually makes their doctrine self-contradictory.
28
@thomasvandevelde8157 Most of the Japanese shells that hit at Samar (not just those from Yamato) passed through the American vessels without detonating, because the Japanese mis-ID'd targets due to outdated intelligence and so used AP; partway through the battle some of the Japanese realized they were against softer targets than they expected and started switching to HE. I'm not sure what you meant by "overshooting", but if you're referring to the shells not detonating and just passing through, that's not to do with poor targeting (then they'd just miss). Pretty much every Japanese battleship other than Yamato didn't do all that much hitting (Tellingly, Yamato was the only Japanese capital ship present with decent radar....except it was search radar and useless for targeting purposes, I don't think any Japanese vessel had targeting radar). But it was the cruisers that did the majority of the damage, probably because of how close they got to Taffy 3 rather than anything to do with equipment. Note that the Japanese did have fire control computers and used them widely in WWII (fire control computers having been used since WWI, starting with the British), so contrary to what's often said the firing calculations were automated on IJN ships; the problem was the lack of decent radar input, plus the lack of an American-style CNC that could automatically direct the main armament without human intermediaries. Coloured paint was actually being used to aim projectiles by various navies up until WWII, even the USN (though they probably didn't need to). Aside from the lack of targeting radar, Yamato was actually a fairly good BB for her time compared to what everyone else had-she had her flaws, the radar being the most significant one but overall she was a significantly better capital ship than, say, Bismarck (which had far more design flaws, inefficiencies and obsolete elements). And even with radar, battleship main batteries weren't all that accurate at long ranges (the hit percentage for an Iowa shooting at an Iowa-sized target at 30,000 yards in test settings was less than 3%; see the NavWeaps page on the 16"/50 gun), so in practice the lack of targeting radar was less of a problem than often assumed. The biggest problem with Yamato was that she was doctrinally obsolete and pointless upon launch, which applies to literally all WWII-era battleships.
17
@enterprism5298 Do note that while Japan was stupid enough to think battleships had strategic value in WWII, so was everyone else, hence why everyone else also wasted resources on battleships around the same time. The Germans were actually significantly worse in this aspect; they were less able to afford battleship construction than Japan, and shouldn’t have bothered with large surface ships (or carriers), period, given their geography and strategic situation.
13
The Japanese didn't assume their carriers were expendable; they needed them to kill the American carriers. The actual problem re: planned Japanese use of carriers was that they didn't use them aggressively ENOUGH, and planned to use battleships to sink battleships in a pointless fleet engagement, when they themselves assumed that carriers could kill battleships a lot better. Just don't bother using battleships at all, and let the carriers handle everything. This is the paradoxical, self-contradictory part of the Kantai Kessen doctrine.
12
@craighagenbruch3800 "Weak" - has nearly as much airpower as the entire Battle of Midway (which actually was a legitimate threat because the Americans actually did have anti-ship aerial weapons at Samar). Remember that Taffy 1 and 2 were involved as well.
12
@craighagenbruch3800 Yeah the CVEs carried a lot less planes than the fleet carriers, but between the three Taffy groups there were a LOT of CVEs to launch planes.
11
GaldirEonai Well the Axis are fucked. They are massively outnumbered, and only the IJN (the only Axis navy that can field carriers) can even attack the Allied combined fleet if the Allies are smart enough to rely on their carriers and not get close. Would give the Allies a bloody nose, but the numerical disparity (both on paper, and especially in practical terms) is way too much.
9
Look at the French predreadnoughts then.....
9
@madwolf0966 Fuel shortages plus the fact they'd be bombed from Henderson Field on the way back....
8
Except that unlike the Second Pacific Squadron, everybody involved in Ten-Go knew it was going to fail. They were insane, not stupid.
7
This absolutely cannot be understated-it undermined the Japanese logic behind causing the enemy to extend their supply lines, rendering the whole doctrine invalid.
7
Carriers rendered battleships obsolete and were superior capital ships for one massive reason; range. Carriers attack their targets from hundreds of miles away. A battleship isn't even going to be able to find the carrier, and if it does, it's not going to catch up, especially since carriers are almost always as fast as or faster than battleships (unless the carrier is a CVE). So the carrier can't be attacked by the battleship at all, while it itself can attack the battleship.
7
Vince Cuevas The Italian 15” gun all the way (when it has non-defective shells). Reasonably accurate, and hits harder than every other battleship gun except the 16”/50 and the 18.1”.
7
Seriously what’s with the battleship hype? They were obsolete even by WWII, let alone today.
6
@thanakonpraepanich4284 The last of the prewar pilots died in the Solomons, Philippine Sea was when the Japanese carrier force was broken.
4
@deeznoots6241 How the hell would the battleships find and chase down the carriers?
4
@carthienesdevilsadvocatenr2806 Good luck obliterating the landings when they were already over. The timetable of the Philippine landings precluded any chance of Kurita actually getting to the beaches in time. Also, the Taffies were CVEs, not fleet carriers (which could just outrun Centre Force and attack from afar).
4
Vespelian Actually it wasn’t until a bit before WWI that Japan was building its own capital ships.
3
PH COULDN'T have been completely destroyed as a base-the logistical capabilities for the Japanese weren't great enough to allow that, nor were the port facilities as vulnerable as often assumed.
3
The single biggest problem with this doctrine I can find is that it contradicts ITSELF, and is unnecessarily complex as a result. It correctly assumes that enemy carriers have to be eliminated as priority targets because they pose a threat to the Japanese battle fleet, yet it seems to completely ignore that the Kido Butai, after dealing with the enemy carriers, would themselves be better than the Japanese battlefleet at killing enemy battleships. So why even bother sending in the Japanese battleships for the final phase? Why not just leave them at home and let the carriers handle everything (since the doctrine was already assuming carriers on both sides had the capability to handle everything, and could sink battleships)? This is about as bad as the Americans bothering to put the Iowas into service after they knew they were redundant and obsolete. They are literally doing something they know is dumb and pointless.
3
 That version of Plan Orange was thrown out in the 1930s, being replaced with an attritional war plan based on industrial capacity.
3
DoddyIshamel Yet battleships even as early as the late 1930s would lose all the time to fleet carriers, simply because the carrier would never come close enough to be shot (no, Glorious doesn’t disprove this, because that was caused entirely by human incompetence in a situation where aerial scouting was both possible and part of the doctrine).
3
@joshthomas-moore2656 I'd say light, mostly due to the AA role.
3
Vlad Fedonkin People had ALREADY figured out that carriers could just stay out of range (and how to make that happen) by the time Glorious happened. The officer in charge was just being an idiot. What he means by “effective carrier doctrine” are things like massed airstrikes, CAP doctrine or other ways of making a carrier strike force more powerful; but even before those things, carriers had already trumped battleships simply because battleships couldn’t hit them.
3
@DoddyIshamel Carriers can operate in surprisingly bad weather (take a look at just how awful the weather was when Ark Royal launched the strike that disabled Bismarck) as long as visibility holds up well enough, and if you're in range of enemy airpower your battleship's going to be in even more trouble than your carrier. And it doesn't matter whether the enemy is letting you pick fights or is bringing the fight to you, because in both cases, a carrier is going to have the advantage; it maintain distance AND launch aircraft to attack the enemy battlefleet at the same time, because a carrier vastly outranges a battleship (unless visibility is too awful to allow aircraft to be launched). A battlefleet that runs with carriers is going to have to let the carrier do 100% of the work anyway, since they cannot come anywhere near close enough to open fire (unless they want to expose the carrier to enemy gunfire). So why bother with the battlefleet?
2
@jasonreed1631 Carriers weren't vulnerable "without significant escort" compared to battleships-not when anything other than another carrier or a sub in ambush wouldn't be able to catch a carrier (while the carrier could easily catch everything else). A carrier does need AA and ASW escort, but so did battleships, and unlike battleships carriers didn't need an anti-surface escort.
2
@DoddyIshamel Bismarck could have been dealt with entirely with airpower had the British known that was possible and desirable. The fact the British didn't isn't due to lack of capability, but due to ignorance about the value of carriers. Battleships are in fact MORE vulnerable to land-based aircraft than carriers, as while they are more durable, they don't bring their own air cover with them. If you think you can't maintain range in the Med you're seriously overestimating the range of battleship guns. If you're further than 40,000 yards away from a battleship you're out of theoretical range. That's not that much in any sort of open water. The carrier doesn't have to be where its objective is to defend it. It can be hundreds of miles away (thus maintaining distance) and still play a major role by sending its planes to the objective. Why do you fail to realize that carriers can maintain distance AND fight at the same time when dealing with surface units? Those other surface combatants are still going to have to find the carrier and catch up to it from a distance of hundreds of miles away, and if they somehow do, you still don't need battleships to deal with them; just use your own cruisers and destroyers. The idea carriers ever needed battleship escorts was a flawed one.
2
@bluemarlin8138 Just because a carrier isn't in a position to launch aircraft doesn't mean it's actually vulnerable to enemy battleships without its own battleship escort; any enemy battleship is still going to have to find a carrier from hundreds of miles away and somehow get up to it without tipping off escorting DDs and cruisers, and that's assuming the carrier doesn't move at all. As for AA-you don't need battleship main guns (and thus don't need a battleship) for AA. Cruisers and destroyers are far more cost-effective in the AA department, especially CLAAs.
2
@Maverick-gg2do Nah, they couldn't;t have done anything the subcapitals or the Kido Butai couldn't;t have done better, especially in terms of cost-effectiveness (which really mattered for Japan given its logistical situation)
2
Francisco d’Anconia They got further than that
2
@Superuser009 He didn’t want to fight the US, but when it became clear that the government would force his hand he came up with the worst way possible for trying to end the war with the US quickly (and only ensured it would take much longer and be much worse for Japan)
2
@enterprism5298 The Scharnhorsts shouldn’t have been built either.
2
Against the Second Pacific Squadron....
2
@DoddyIshamel You're looking only at the tactical level; strategically a capital ship isn't worth it unless it does the job of a capital ship (which is to achieve sea control by killing peer opponents). Tactically, battleships trump cruisers, but strategically cruisers are a better investment for any sort of secondary role, including carrier escort.
2
@Tuning3434 Note that the Iowas were originally intended as a fast wing to the battle line and not to support carriers (they were forced into the role due to being obsolete on launch and even then their utility was questionable); so there are NO classes of battleships intended as carrier escorts or all that good in that role, which makes this line of support for battleships even less valid.
2
BlueMarlin81 You’re STILL making false assumptions here and misinterpreting events. Glorious being lost doesn’t prove anything, because she could actually have escaped pretty easily if the captain was competent. Spruance turned away at Midway, yes, but his job was done. He’d already won. The fact he left actually PROVES that you can’t catch carriers with surface ships. Battleships didn’t actually have that many AA guns on relative terms; an Atlanta, for example, had half as many AA guns as an Iowa despite being one-eighth the size. You could build two Atlanta’s for every Iowa and get the same level of AA at far less cost. And EVERYTHING in the USN had the latest up-to-date fire control, so battleships weren’t more accurate either.
2
@Maverick-gg2do There was no way the Japanese surface fleet could catch the American carriers and the Japanese knew it (the whole Kantai Kessen doctrine called for using Japanese carriers to catch enemy carriers). That's why they gave up on that.
2
DoddyIshamel The Iowas WEREN’T intended to be carrier escorts from the start. A capital ship projects power by killing peer opponents or at least being able to kill peer opponents. Battleships in WWII couldn’t do that as well as carriers.
2
Dio Brando Your entire point focuses on the fact battleships were historically hard to kill, which isn’t why they became obsolete. They became obsolete because they couldn’t do the job of killing peer opponents as well as carriers could. It was their OFFENSIVE shortcoming in their intended role, plus the fact they cost too much to build for any other role, that rendered them obsolete. It doesn’t matter how hard a battleship is to sink when that battleship isn’t going to be able to attack.
2
No just no. That would have never worked.
1
Which is why they didn’t bother.
1
@its1110 In that case, both sides continued to ignore that lesson and kept building new battleships that they no longer needed.
1
@richardcleveland8549 But the offence-focused strategy he chose actually contradicted with the plans for a quick victory. It basically allowed the Americans to play for time and go for a longer war according to WPO-3.
1
@richardcleveland8549 What do you mean by this? Yamamoto basically ensured that an altered (more carriers, etc) version of WPO-3 would have succeeded and given the Americans the win. In trying to avoid a long war, he accidentally ensured a long war.
1
@todiathink8864 Yamamoto was right about American industrial potential but wrong about how to get a quick win to avoid that problem. He played straight into updated American war plans that called for a retreat across the Pacific, letting Japan overextend, while the American wartime industry geared up for a counteroffensive a year or two later. He should have skipped the PH raid and even the Philippines (at the point the Philippines could not have supported a major American naval presence) and only focused on the British and Dutch holdings. That way, there would be political pressure on the Americans to break their own war plans and take the offensive before they're really prepared for it (which would benefit Japan). Wouldn't win the war, but probably extends it by a year or two.
1
@anthonyburnam3415 What he didn’t want was war against the US, not PH specifically. In fact he pushed for the PH attack BECAUSE he didn’t want to fight the US: once it became clear war was inevitable he was determined to go for what he thought was the least bad way to start the war to even stand a remote chance of bringing the US to the negotiation table. Unfortunately for him, he guessed wrong.
1
The really big one being that the US wasn't going to bring the fight to Japan quickly as the Japanese planned for.
1
Again with the singling out of the Yamatos as being uniquely useless when you can say that about any WWII-generation battleship, even those that actually spent time out at sea (since they still, for the most part, didn't actually do anything that would have justified their construction)
1
@Maverick-gg2do You could use them, but why bother when much better alternatives exist? This is a criticism I also have of the other Axis powers or the Allies BTW (especially in cases where they went on to launch more of these things after they became pointless and obsolete). And Japan really needed to conserve fuel, so battleships are right out unless absolutely necessary.
1
@Maverick-gg2do They weren't about to win at Leyte Gulf. This myth needs to die. Japan's defeat there was inevitable. The Americans were actually in a much better position at Samar than the traditional narrative holds (mostly due to airpower, which did pose a legitimate threat contrary to popular belief), and even if they had gotten past that there is the problem of dealing with the rest of Seventh Fleet (which was moving north by the end of the battle to intercept), and if they get past THAT there is the whole matter with the American landings already being over by that point, rendering the whole Japanese operation pointless.
1
Philippine Sea was the real decisive battle.
1
Hugh Fisher I do know of Sacred Vessels; I just don’t like using it as a source because while the main argument is correct, the book contains major errors when it comes to details about specific ship classes.
1
@Maverick-gg2do A carrier doesn't need battleship escort, it's not supposed to be within gun range of enemy battleships in the first place and won't be if competently handled. Even at night the carrier can just keep on the move and maintain a safe distance-and good luck trying to find a carrier with a battleship (which has far less search capability). So the Iowas had no reason to exist.
1
They were supposed to pull out, except MacArthur was an idiot.
1
@shawnofthedead8666 More fighters than strike aircraft: Fair point. Lack of anti-ship weapons: This isn't actually anywhere near as bad for the Americans as often assumed. For starters, only Taffy 1 and 3 were loaded for ground support-Taffy 2 was already loaded for anti-ship strikes as they were ordered to clean up after Surigao Strait. And the later air attacks by Taffy 1 and 3 were also armed with anti-ship weapons. They don't need to sink the battleships; they just need to do enough damage to get them to back off. And the landing beaches were never at risk of Japanese attack; Kurita would have been too late to attack the American landings even if he was entirely unopposed on that day, because the landings were over by that point. The Japanese couldn't have pulled off an operational victory at all.
1
@bluemarlin8138 A battleship catching a fleet carrier is such an unlikely scenario that it's not worth trying to prepare for, even if you can afford to; invest those resources in preparing for much more likely threats instead. Explain how a BB is going to sneak up on carriers that are a few hundred miles away, even if said carriers are unable to launch aircraft due to being night and only have basic radar; you kind of have to be where your target is to surprise it. An Atlanta still does have radar guidance and the same central fire control as an Iowa (contrary to the claims of some BB fanboys), and the small number of local fire control directors is less of an issue in American fire control (where the central fire control director can override local directors). And while an Atlanta is a lot easier to kill than a battleship, it's also much cheaper and requires far less resources, making it the better option strategically.
1
Nukclear If you want to do shore bombardment just use subcapital units-even destroyers had enough firepower to take out enemy fortifications, and shore bombardment was effectively mostly at closer ranges anyways. To say nothing of the strategic concerns.
1
@DoddyIshamel Defending them...from what? Enemy battleships are bad at catching carriers and a battleship is overkill for dealing with enemy cruisers or destroyers.
1
Scott Havens Japan can’t even land on Midway, let alone use it as a base.
1
Jim Smith The small fast battleships are going to be just as much of a waste as Yamato. Just don’t build ANY battleships at all. And even then you still only get two more carriers due to lack of building slips.
1
Charles Burnham InB4 “everyone else was smart enough to know battleships were obsolete” (first, the comment was about the general idea of a decisive battle, and second, nobody in WWII was smart enough to figure out battleships were obsolete)
1
@scottygdaman The American carriers can just stay away from the Japanese surface fleet and they'd have won the battle (since they already got the Japanese carriers).
1
@scottygdaman The defences on the island.....
1
Better yet; cover the rivalry between the Yorktown-class and the Shokaku-class, because holy hell did these two classes fight all the time (usually resulting in serious damage to one or both sides and the Japanese suffering irreplaceable pilot losses).
1