Reading the manual, I concluded that each HI center spends 3 oil/day (2 to generate 1 HI and 1 to generate supply/fuel). Andrew Brown and Nik seem to disagree from me, they say that only 1 oil is necessary. It´s seems that el cid again makes his calculations based on 3 oil/HI. What view is correct?
First, Cid agrees with Andrew and Nik - and I wonder where you read that? I seem to read 1 in my manual. [The manual sometimes contradicts itself though - and since I hope for a new one I like to document such points].
Second, Cid DID triple the oil - but ONLY because there is not enough oil to run the HI - either Allied or Japanese - and also because there is not enough oil in terms of what is really produced.
Now this latter is in spades: someone cited data from Palembang and compared it to the (increased) values used by RHS. I don't think he considered the data for fuel as well as oil - but he is right. RHS actually UNDERSTATES oil production - also deliveries from the United States and the Mideast - for a variety of reasons. It appears we are modeling only part of the economy - Joe coined the phrase "military economy" in a review he and Andrew and I did early in 2006. It also appears that allowing all the production might make it to easy for both sides. RHS is being conservative - and increasing slowly (or in the case of AKs decreasing slowly: AKs are half their CHS number - but we estimate they may need to be 1/4 - we just don't want to kill the economy by going too far- we are demonstrating 1/2 is not too big a cut). IF we find (say from HI construction) that added production is needed - we have the option of still further increases.
There is a wonderful book US Army Ships and Watercraft of the Second World War (or World War II). It lists the 12,000 named ships - and describes the 80,000 watercraft - of the US Army in that conflict - numbers which dwarfed the USN (but which are also given in the introduction). Just FYI - the US Army didn't exactly operate submarines and aircraft carriers - but it did operate minesweepers. And IJA instigated something similar to the LSD (if it is an LSD without a dock - their system was to roll down ramps into the stern gate) and the LSM (again if it is an LSM - it isn't exactly our concept). It is not particularly clear that Army funded, Navy designed and crewed ships were a bad idea - and it may imply considerable cooperation.
Nor to I disagree that the divide was vast. My favorite destroyer captain (Takishi Hara) never counts losses of Army ships when he is a witness - he only tells us about Navy losses! But see The War Between the Generals for almost horrifying stories on our side of the same sort. Study the Alaska campaign - or the personal relations between Adm Hart and Gen MacArthur - before you say we got it right. We never did reconcile Nimitz and Mac into a unified command. The truth is not that we got it right and Japan got it wrong. We both got it wrong - to a degree - and got it right - to a degree. It depends where you look - and it depends when you look. By the end both of us were doing a lot more cooperation than we started with. And even at the start there were instances of effective cooperation - including those ships mentioned above.
Retired: You seem to think there was no need for a PTO commander similar to Supreme Allied Commander Europe. You are the very first person I have ever heard suggest this was a reasonable way to organize. And your stated reason - the need to balance between theaters - should imply you agree with a unified command - so I do not follow your thinking. If you get into the details, Mac and Nimitz had very different ideas about what to do - and we seem to have tried to do both at once -
which was probably inefficient and surely led to furious allocation issues.
First, Cid agrees with Andrew and Nik - and I wonder where you read that? I seem to read 1 in my manual. [The manual sometimes contradicts itself though - and since I hope for a new one I like to document such points].
ebook manual, page 182
Second, Cid DID triple the oil - but ONLY because there is not enough oil to run the HI - either Allied or Japanese - and also because there is not enough oil in terms of what is really produced.
-But if oil is spent at one point/day for each HI, then Japan has enough oil to run 16000 HI points, if she captures all historical oil resources, in the stock scenario. Some upward adjustment is necessary, but if you triple oil, then Japan is already self sufficient from start (750x3-2250, which is enough to feed 13500 HI points). On the other hand, it´s possible that oil production for allies should be increased.
RETIRED: We agree that Japan could ill afford institutional rivalry - divided command - and so on. Not sure how you manage to "debate" a point on which we are in total agreement - but it is inspiring!
Apparently you have a problem with the concept that Japan could have done better than it did. In which case I think the assumption behind RHSEOS is not for you. EOS is intended to examine what might have been the case if they did cooperate better? It is an attempt, if you will, to show that you are right - doing what they did hurt them relative to being more sensible.
Actually, oil production is a complicated subject - and it is entirely possible the "quick and dirty" RHS experiment will have to adjust. This happened in a major way once already in fact - when it was found there is indeed not enough oil on the map to run Japanese HI - even if every last oil center were captured and undamaged. Similarly, the Allies could not make their on map economies work without more oil - and oil from the US Gulf Coast, Iran, Iraq, Russia and Canada were made to appear at various map edge points to deal with that. Note that the actually
available is GREATER than RHS says it is - for a variety of reasons.
We must not too greatly overstate the oil in 1942 - or things won't work right. We must not forget the oil associated with resources not in the model either. And as Joe pointed out it is not clear what oil is?
We have oil and fuel and supply points all with some oil in them!
So I don't want to put it all as crude oil. Anyway, I wish to see how it goes in a longer term sense before doing more analysis - comparing games with history.
Retired: You seem to think there was no need for a PTO commander similar to Supreme Allied Commander Europe. You are the very first person I have ever heard suggest this was a reasonable way to organize. And your stated reason - the need to balance between theaters - should imply you agree with a unified command - so I do not follow your thinking. If you get into the details, Mac and Nimitz had very different ideas about what to do - and we seem to have tried to do both at once -
which was probably inefficient and surely led to furious allocation issues.
There were TWO theatres in Europe, and both were smaller than those in the Pacific. Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Northwestern Europe. But when he rec ieved that posting, he gave up Command of the Mediteranean Theatre to a Brit. The "supreme" part of his title gave him command control over all the air, sea, and land forces in NW Europe---but he had no command over the 5th Army or the 15th Air Force in the Med.
"There are always three courses of action open to your enemy. And from them, he invariably chooses the fourth." Helmuth von Molke (the elder)
RETIRED: We agree that Japan could ill afford institutional rivalry - divided command - and so on. Not sure how you manage to "debate" a point on which we are in total agreement - but it is inspiring!
Apparently you have a problem with the concept that Japan could have done better than it did. In which case I think the assumption behind RHSEOS is not for you. EOS is intended to examine what might have been the case if they did cooperate better? It is an attempt, if you will, to show that you are right - doing what they did hurt them relative to being more sensible.
Actually my discussion on this subject was brought on by the comment "One might compare the USN and US Army to the Japanese services". Only in the vary broadest sense that there was interservice rivalry over football and budgets. The Allies had the "Combined" and "Joint" Chiefs of Staff to keep the "friction" to a minimum when dissagreements arose. And civilian control of the Production Boards to tell both services what weapons were going to be available, and that as many of the componants of their equipment that could be identical were going to be. In Japan, we have the IJN and IJA acting like totally seperate entities, each having it's own economic "fief" and research programs which competed against each other. Can you imagine the US Navy blatently lying to the Joint Chiefs about the results of Savo Island? Given Japan's already "shoestring" economy such wasteful practices WERE a major factor in her demise (the demise was virtually certain, but the process was speeded up considerably by the Japanese shooting themselves in the foot...., repeatedly)
When I hear someone comparing the relation between the IJN and the IJA with those between the US Army and Navy as though they were by any means "equal", I see red. It's lake saying two farmers have an equal "bug" problem when one has a couple of annoying crickets in the closet. and the other a plague of Locusts! There is no real comparison....
"There are always three courses of action open to your enemy. And from them, he invariably chooses the fourth." Helmuth von Molke (the elder)
Ok well in my current game as Japan I'm paying particular attention to the economic/logistics issues as it seems to me that with the massive reduction in shipping capabilities Japan will not only have problems shipping those resources and oil it captures but will be unable to move more than half of SAA at any one time without calling on all the currently extant AKs. IOW you can have massive invasions and a complete loss of resource and oil deliveries during those invasions or you can have moderate-sized invasions and keep your economy running long-term. Gamble on the moderate-sized invasion winning big or gamble that the loss of 2 or 3 months worth of oil and resource deliveries will be compensated for by your wins...
Anyways the main question I have is that after counting up all of the oil in the DEI/Malaysia/Burma area it looks like there's a good 7,000 oil points to be captured. Admittedly none of them are likely to be at more than 33% capacity given the steps RHS has taken to ensure masses of engineers at each of the critical oil centres but even then we're talking about 2,300 oil being added to Japan's starting total of 1900 oil for a total of 4,200 oil, or enough to run a war economy of 25,200. Admittedly the main problem is going to be shipping that oil but if you are willing to expand the HI in Singapore, Bangkok, Soerabaja, Manilla etc massively then you can make up for a shortage of hulls by consumin much more of that oil at or right beside the centres of production cutting both journey times and total amount of oil to be transported (thus allowing your current shipping to "stretch" much farther.
So,are you sure the number of oil centres is correct? I know you've done a lot of research on this but I figure I should ask before Allied players start going apes**t about Japanese production figures...
John Dillworth: "I had GreyJoy check my spelling and he said it was fine."
Well, that's that settled then.
I didn't know that Retired - my father served in the USAAF in the Med and was under Ike's command. But if you are correct, there was a change in that situation later. My father was one of 80 USAAF NCOs hastily transferred to CONUS after writing to the JAG of the Army - about the fate of German POWs from Yugoslavia (who were flown out by US bombers after being snatched by a "trapeeze" and cranked into the bomb bay). Seems every one ended up in the graveyard - a violation of US law - and the enlisted men (but interestingly not the officers) had problems with that. The most memorable line in the complaint was "We are willing to fight the Nazies. We are not willing to behave like them."
Retired, we simply do not agree about interservice rivalries on both sides. I see the existence of three different shipping allocation boards on BOTH sides as symptomatic of the same inability to coordinate properly (army, navy and civil). I do not see the IJN lieing to the Imperial High Command about the outcome of Midway either. It was IHC that decided not to admit the truth in public. And the US did the something similar in the Aleutians. [US soliders returning home were not believed when the reported fighting the Japanese on US soil - "its not in the papers nor on the news" people said.] If you look at the things said to staff (at least MacArthur's staff - where I have a personal window) - and the attitudes of people like Adm Hart and Gen Mac about each other (they could NEVER dine because each regarded himself as senior to the other - and had to sit at the "head" of the table) - I see almost mirror images of bad additudes on the other side.
And the thesis that everything on the Japanese side was done wrong makes me see red: it is plain false. See Tsuji (an Army officer regarded as a fanatic and hothead - on the IJN captain assigned to Yamashita for Malaya - or on Adm Yamamoto when he went to visit him re Guadalcanal). Clearly even the radical hotheads could get along across the lines, and effective cooperation resulted IRL. The bag was very mixed - and mixed on both sides. It was not in the least limited to football on our side.
Ok well in my current game as Japan I'm paying particular attention to the economic/logistics issues as it seems to me that with the massive reduction in shipping capabilities Japan will not only have problems shipping those resources and oil it captures but will be unable to move more than half of SAA at any one time without calling on all the currently extant AKs. IOW you can have massive invasions and a complete loss of resource and oil deliveries during those invasions or you can have moderate-sized invasions and keep your economy running long-term. Gamble on the moderate-sized invasion winning big or gamble that the loss of 2 or 3 months worth of oil and resource deliveries will be compensated for by your wins...
Anyways the main question I have is that after counting up all of the oil in the DEI/Malaysia/Burma area it looks like there's a good 7,000 oil points to be captured. Admittedly none of them are likely to be at more than 33% capacity given the steps RHS has taken to ensure masses of engineers at each of the critical oil centres but even then we're talking about 2,300 oil being added to Japan's starting total of 1900 oil for a total of 4,200 oil, or enough to run a war economy of 25,200. Admittedly the main problem is going to be shipping that oil but if you are willing to expand the HI in Singapore, Bangkok, Soerabaja, Manilla etc massively then you can make up for a shortage of hulls by consumin much more of that oil at or right beside the centres of production cutting both journey times and total amount of oil to be transported (thus allowing your current shipping to "stretch" much farther.
So,are you sure the number of oil centres is correct? I know you've done a lot of research on this but I figure I should ask before Allied players start going apes**t about Japanese production figures...
The historical situation was that there was "more than enough oil to meet the needs of the empire." In fact, only a fraction will be produced, and only a fraction of that will be moved. It seems to me we need to insure that there is sufficient oil and resources that the original situation is duplicated: the Japanese have choices about what to capture and what to ship? Actually, the number of oil centers is wrong! As one poster observed for Palembang, it is too low. But I calculate in the fuel production as well as the oil production (oil centers make both) - and am being conservative about production because I think some of it is not associated with the modeled "war economy."
Ok El Cid,
That's pretty much what I had expected... For the first time ever in WiTP I'm actually bothered about and expanding my merchant fleet production in order to get more AKs .
John Dillworth: "I had GreyJoy check my spelling and he said it was fine."
Well, that's that settled then.
I didn't know that Retired - my father served in the USAAF in the Med and was under Ike's command. But if you are correct, there was a change in that situation later. My father was one of 80 USAAF NCOs hastily transferred to CONUS after writing to the JAG of the Army - about the fate of German POWs from Yugoslavia (who were flown out by US bombers after being snatched by a "trapeeze" and cranked into the bomb bay). Seems every one ended up in the graveyard - a violation of US law - and the enlisted men (but interestingly not the officers) had problems with that. The most memorable line in the complaint was "We are willing to fight the Nazies. We are not willing to behave like them."
Ike left the Med approximately January 1st, 1944 to take command of "Overlord" and the "ETO". The "MTO" which he had commanded, then went to a Brit (I think it was Harold Alexander). Interesting...., My Dad was an NCO with the 8th Air Force in England throughout the War.
"There are always three courses of action open to your enemy. And from them, he invariably chooses the fourth." Helmuth von Molke (the elder)
ORIGINAL: el cid again
And the thesis that everything on the Japanese side was done wrong makes me see red: it is plain false. See Tsuji (an Army officer regarded as a fanatic and hothead - on the IJN captain assigned to Yamashita for Malaya - or on Adm Yamamoto when he went to visit him re Guadalcanal). Clearly even the radical hotheads could get along across the lines, and effective cooperation resulted IRL. The bag was very mixed - and mixed on both sides. It was not in the least limited to football on our side.
CID. Just where did I say that "everything on the Japanese side was done wrong"? I said that the Japanese, with a far greater need to do everything right, shot themselves in the foot repeatedly. From simple things like the failure to "standardize" as many A/C parts as was possible, to the IJA and IJN refusing to carry each other's cargos in their merchant ships. Sure I'll grant you that MacArthur was a first-class prick who's staff was more of a "court" than a military entity. But he still had to seek permission and approval from the Joint Chiefs for his Campaigns, as did Nimitz.
"There are always three courses of action open to your enemy. And from them, he invariably chooses the fourth." Helmuth von Molke (the elder)
I think you are both actually operating at pretty much the same conclusion but are talking a bit past eachother.
I'm sure you could both agree that Japan, having a smaller industrial base to begin with and a very tight cargo capacity situation needed to do everything possible to maximise efficiency in both its delivery of resources to Japan and delivery of supplies, men and materiel to the front lines. It manifestly failed to do so and so operated its armed forces at less than maximal efficiency for a very substantial period of the war. When it began to make the requisite changes it was too late.
The allies who had many of the same problems with inter-service rivalries were able, for the most part, to overcome them by sheer weight of men and materiel. When you need 200 bombers to raid a given enemy base to achieve decisive results and the army has 300 bombers available and the navy has 300 available you can afford to co-ordinate poorly and still be effective. When you can muster only 210 bombers with maximal co-operation any lack of co-operation is disastrous.
So the Japanese didn't do everything wrong they just had less "largesse" to waste with inefficiencies and rivalries before this waste fatally impacted their operations. As such given the same relative rivalries and inefficiencies the Japanese were effected much more than the Allies and so many are more aware of these issues in Japanese services than in Allied services ( even though they may have been present to the exact same extent... but not had the same impact).
Reading what you've both said I'm sure you could both sign up to the above, no?
John Dillworth: "I had GreyJoy check my spelling and he said it was fine."
Well, that's that settled then.
Retired, I guess my problem is that you say the Japanese failed to standardize - period. That is technically false. Any exception makes a statement false. And Japan did standardize - just too late to be decisive. Similarly in other matters, you say something negative and stop talking - and that is misleading and actually false. The bag was mixed. On oour side sometimes you say we got it right - and stop. Other times you admit problems - in fact this is your normal case - and we agree. I note that you still dispute the divided command thing for PTO though - and even if Ike lost unified command after a certain point - it does not change the fact SACEUR was once unified - and was once the proper way to do a theater. We never came close in PTO - and ran separate offensives right up until Okinawa - offensives based on very different stratetic concepts of how to prosecute the war. Similarly, we may have had an effective submarine and mine blockade - particularly when heavy bombers were used - but ultimately the heavy bomers were forced to stop laying mines - not because they were not working - but because it was not politicaly correct in the USAAF. USSBS concluded that no invasion was required t odefeat Japan by 1 Nov 1945 - nor an atom bombing - and yet this was not in the sitreps given the JCS in spring 1945. We did know the impact of the shipping losses - and both Gen Marshall and FDR feared the human cost of an invasion - yet the idea of not invading and not using atom bombs was not on the table. A unified strategy that was also realistic in terms of our own concepts never was really achieved. [I used to have a neighbor who worked on USSBS as a USN Captain - he retired an admiral - and so this was something of a joint stucy. One historian I know says it came to the right conclusions, though one may dispute how it reached them as less than the best methodology.]
I regard this exchange as academic: I think we both agree that the US did somewhat better than Japan did in respect to joint staffing, joint planning, standardization, etc. But I do find many things Japan did quite mirror images of what we did - and often in direct contriadictoin of what you can read in quite reputable books. [Japan "never converted its auto industry to aircraft production" when, in fact, it did that too much! Stuff like that. Japan DID come up with standarized and interchangeable engines, weapons, etc - although many say it didn't. it even had standardized merchant ships and escorts IN PRODUCTION BEFORE the war began.
"Retired, I guess my problem is that you say the Japanese failed to standardize - period."
Actually, I didn't say that either. And you and Nemo are both right in that it is an arguement of scale and institutionalization, not that one side had problems and the other didn't. The IJN and IJA had instatutionalized and politicized their differences during the 1920's and 30's to the point where when it came time to actually go to war there were many elements in the planning that were more on the order of negotiations between to distrustful "allies" than joint military planning. Where both groups could see an immediate advantage to the goals, they cooperated reasonably well - though even in the push to occupy the SRA the IJA put pretty strict limits on what it was willing to commit. Outside of that, the IJN got the "South Seas Detachment" (1 regiment - taken from the forces earmarked for the SRA) to help occupy the remainder of the Pacific. And you're right, eventually standardization was forced on the two services by the stress of the war - but not until the situation was already going from serious to hopeless. On the US side it was more a matter of "personalities and politics". The Navy saw the Pacific as "their" theatre (as Europe was the Army's) - but both needed considerable resources from the other and had to endure many "compromises" by the Joint Chiefs. The Army Air Corps, struggling to become the US Air Force, saw bombing Japan as the last chance to "prove" that it's doctrine of "strategic bombardment" could be decisive.
Now Ernie King disliked cooperating with the Army almost as much as he detested working with the British; Curtis LeMay didn't want anything to get in the way of his campaign to burn Japan to the ground; and Doug MacArthur thought he was God. All of which created "friction" between the services, and lots of excitement in the newspapers. But the US Army, Navy, and Air Corps COULDN'T just "go thieir own ways" because at the top the doctrine of "Civilian Control" remained intact and formidible. Compromise had to be achieved, standardization was the "order of the day", and "cooperation" was going to be shoved down your successor's throat if you got too far out of line. This was what Japan lacked. The military was for all practical purposes the Government of the nation from the mid-1930's on, and civilian oversight a joke (approve our program or some young officers might decapitate you). The "degree" of instatutionalized non-cooperation between the IJA and the IJN was much higher than among the Allies, and there was no power that could nay-say them (even the Emperor feared for his life).
So the side that could afford it the least suffered from it the most, and until the war turned decisively against them, didn't even see a reason to change. And by then it was too late. They could "force" greater fighter and trainer production out of the system at the cost of production of heavier aircraft and some loss of quality control - and they could force greater pilot production from the system by cutting qualifications and training hours and quality. What they couldn't do, even with the advantage of interior lines of communication, is make up for the fact that they had finally taken these steps 2-3 years after their opponants. They were already on the "slippery slope" of defeat when they finally made them.
Without the short-sighted and introverted policies of the Japanese Militarists controlling the Govenrment, Japan would probably have never gone to war. And because of it, they had little chance of winning the war. The US military may have had a lot to learn, and a number of misconceptions to get rid of...., but nowhere on the Axis Side do you find anything like the US Army's Industrial College. America invented "mass production", and the military had seen how it could be mis-used during the First World War. And the under-budgeted Services of the 20's and 30's took steps to insure that if the need ever arose again, and the budgets grew, the US Military and American Industry were going to move "hand in hand" towards winning it. The American Government, Military, and Industry THOUGHT BIG from the very beginning in terms that no other power could think (though the USSR came close due to it's peculiar necessities). The Axis Powers all though "small and limited" at war's outbreak. That was the system they were used to dealing with. By the time they realized what was happening and tried to expand, it was too little and too late.
I've always wanted to do a scenario where the Japanese Civilian Government, Military, and Industrialists made a conscious decision in 1936 that war was going to be inevitable. And began a sensable, realistic, and believable program to prepare for it. There is still only so much that could be done given the Japanese Industrial base, but A/C rationalization and a more sensible pilot training program are certainly among things that could have been instituted. Reasonable ASW and Convoy preparations (who knew US torpedoes were defective?) would certainly have occured to anyone examining Japan's need to import virtually everything. Maybe the IJA could even adopt and supply a reliable MG to it's troops. Overall the result would be a Japan that could "stay in the running" over a longer period in a war..., which might give the stratagy of "wearing down Allied resolve" a chance to work in spite of a "Pearl Harbor" to incite it. Of course, my scenario wouldn't include the Japanese aquisition of anyone else's fleet, or building all the BB's scrapped by Washington "in secret", or anything much of the "wild and wooley" so beloved to some of our modders. And Japan's industrial base would still be limited in relation to her opponants. She would simply make better and more rational use of it longer. Probably no one would even play it.
"There are always three courses of action open to your enemy. And from them, he invariably chooses the fourth." Helmuth von Molke (the elder)
You write well Retired. I particularly like your descriptions of the commander's personalities. I also have to revise upward substantially the degree to which we agree on things.
Your scenario proposal is very similar to RHSEOS - but goes one step farther:
EOS assumes that only the decision for war (July 1941) forces a planning regime on the Japanese. It is modeled on a real organization, led by Col Tsuji, which did the planning for Malaya - using some information from civil and naval sources. The EOS scenario thus forces Japan to start with considerable inefficiencies - particularly in terms of aircraft - and only STARTS to rationalize these about the time the war begins. Your scenario would allow much better integration in that regard: JAAF could be using the Zero as an escort fighter for example - and Ki-27 production could be curtailed considerably.
Now there WERE plans for escort production - also for a mass produced medium submarine (only two prototypes were built). RHS elects to produce the modified version - with oxygen torpedoes - but your scenario would allow production of the earlier version in numbers - without them. These were fine, maneuverable boats, and might matter - and be a better buy than numbers of big ones.
I personally like the idea of not using all the "ships that never were" - or of using the truly obscure ones that might have mattered (like second class escorts). This would have to be something like a "super Japan enhansed scenario" because Japan would be even more powerful - since being efficient early might matter a good deal.
The problem - of course - is how to end the war? Once begun war's take on a life of their own - and the US alone should usually defeat Japan. But Japan must face not only the Allies we think of (UK, Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand and Canada) but also devote major forces to China and the USSR. It remains one of the greatest military problems of all time - to take on such a full plate - and it is not likely a wise thing to bet on winning most of the time!
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