Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "The Drydock - Episode 058" video.

  1. Dang! I must have gone to bed about five minutes before the Drydock came out. Outstanding content as usual. As to the the Japanese naval defeat, I'd add a few additional reasons; 1. Lack of effective radar actually getting into service. The Japanese did develop reasonably effective radars between the Army and Navy. The problem was the Japanese military realized the pivotal role of radar for fire control, in particular, much too late. By the time they did, the homeland was being reduced to rubble by air attack, so newer radar was only being produced in small numbers, and the number of ships that could use them was being reduced to a smaller and smaller number, 2. Lack of understanding of centralized fighter control and combat air patrols. The IJN never developed an effective equivalent to the Combat Information Center, and the lack of effective radar and poor understanding of how to conduct a CAP caused Japanese ships to be constantly jumped by allied aircraft. 3. Never developing a decent light AA gun. The 25 mm gun was, by far, the worst light AA weapon of any navy in the Pacific, and it was never significantly improved over the course of the war. The IJN knew of and had samples of the Oerlikon and Bofors guns quite early on in the war. Japanese industry never had the machine tools capable of sufficient tolerances to develop the Bofors gun into a reliable weapon. The IJN believed, quite wrongly, that their 25 mm gun was equal to the Oerlikon gun, and they had the manufacturing of the 25 mm gun down pat. It was a classic example of fighting a war with what you have, not what you wished you have. The lack of radar gunfire control and off-mount directors just made things even worse. 4. Rapidly improving quality of allied air carrier aircraft. The development of the F6F gave the USN at least a comparable aircraft to the IJN and, once the Marines finally proved to the USN the F4U was a good carrier aircraft, had a plane far superior to anything available to the IJN. If the war had gone on for another six months, the IJN would have faced the F8F Bearcat, a truly fearsome aircraft compared ot anything the IJN had. Add in the Seafire once the British Pacific Fleet got involved and the IJN lost any chance of being able to overcome allied air attacks. 5. Never having an understanding of the problems if supplying all their many island outposts, and assuming the allies would attack every one of them. That caused large amounts of soldiers and sailors dedicated to maintain these non-strategic islands, combined with the US adoption of island hopping, maent large numbers of Japanese just slowly starved to death as their fortified islands were bypassed and eventually were left far behind enemy lines. 6. Never understanding why attacking merchant shipping was of prime importance, and never understanding convoy warfare. Right up until the end of the war, Japanese subs continued to allow merchant ships to pass so they could conserve torpedoes for warship attacks. Most Japanese shipping was still unescorted single ships until late in the war, and by the time the Japanese did start convoying merchant ships. most of their large merchant ships had been sunk. They were then stuck trying to use large numbers of coastal freighters as oceangoing vessels, making convoys that much more difficult. On top of that, the IJN never developed very good escort ships, and never had enough of them in any case. These are just the issues I could think of off the top of my head. I'm sure there are many more.
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  2. I don't remember the specific ship, and it may have been USS Washington, but at least one USN battleship, having to fire at a target directly astern, blew off one and, with the second salvo, the other of their floatplanes, along with the catapults and aircraft crane. There were multiple occurrences of 5"/25 guns and 20 mm guns, in the heat of battle, putting shells into adjacent gun mounts or the superstructure. Pipe rails around the guns to act a limit stops were added to prevent this, but battle damage to these still allowed some guns to fire into their own ships. The turrets of dual 5"/38 guns had limit stops built into their power laying systems, but there was at least one case on a ship, the name of which doesn't readily come to mind, where the stops failed, and the mount pumped four or five rounds into their own ship before frantic calls over the sound powered telephones to the gun captain finally got him to cease firing. From the accounts I've read of men manning the AA guns, when the ship was under fierce air attack, job one was destroying or driving off said aircraft, and anything else could be rectified once the ship was no longer in danger of sinking.
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