IJA "Reinforced" Divisions in EOS (plan)

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: witpqs

What is a 'self fueling vehicle'?

Japan - by statute - long before WWII began - required ALL non-military vehicles be "self fueling." By the time the war began, 100% of the Japanese civil vehicle fleet - and a significant portion of the military vehicle fleet - was self fueling.
The term is almost self descriptive: it refers to any technology which permits a vehicle to generate its own fuel requirements. But it is slightly misleading: it really means any non-standard fueling technology. Thus - in cities - you sometimes see photographs of cars with floating "fuel tanks" over them: these are using coal gas and they do not actually make any fuel. On the other hand, the term fits better the most common technology used: wood burners which slowly "cook" wood (or other organic matter) to produce an alcohol fuel. These work adequately - but do not produce the equal of the octane of vehicle gasolines of the period. But because these were the standards to which vehicles sold were expected to be fueled, the official power ratings of the engines was lower than would have been the case if the engines were using petroleum distillate fuels. This was noted in some US Army intelligence materials in the form of statements indicating that the power ratings seemed low for the cubic capacity of the engines.

The strategic reasoning for this choice - which had moderate impacts on performance and significant impacts on vehicle costs - was to stretch the strategic petroleum stockpiles as long as possible - by rendering the need to supply motor vehicle fleets as nil. Military vehicles might or might not be self fueling - depending on where they served and the possibility of getting petroleum distillate fuels there - but all could be fitted with burners if required and many had them even though they didn't use them (making it hard to run em out of gas, as it were). One US Army officer I know thinks this is a very clever policy which we ought to consider in some contingencies.

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: JWE


[Your point is a crock. Moreover, you know it's a crock. Japanese production capabilities were pathetic in the 50s and 60s. Quality was deemed poor, to say the least, and efficiency was (productivity/man hour) was in the bottom third globally

Interestingly neither here nor any other place do I have the slightest grasp of what JWE thinks is "a crock?" But his language, heat and attitude imply a classical, racist, "home team is best" attitude. I run into this more often today with respect to the Chinese - who are considered as inept as we once considered the Japanese. JWE seems to have missed the "Japanese as industrial supermen" phase our culture went through not long ago.

Ironically, the problem I seem to have with JWE and Terminus (and possibly a couple of others) is not one I EVER have in person. I have what soldiers call "command presence" - and wether among people I know well or total strangers - regardless of rank - I never have the slightest problem being trusted, believed, or looked to for answers - the worse the situation - the more so. I speculate that the web cuts off so many of our senses that the things that make it obvious to one and all that I am one of those people who simply will not misrepresent something are not working. Even among the worst people - people who trust absolutely no one - my promise is worth more than cash money - because cash might be counterfeit - but my word will be honored. When police were unable to work inside a Spanish speaking ring of Dominican (black) drug runners, I did it - for five months - until all but one was in prision (that one was shot by one of his fellows, his uncle in fact) - and without compensation. Even though black, Hispanic, Dominican drug runners never trust any white man - they trusted me: everyone does. Their mistake is the opposite of JWE's: they had murder and other felonies in their hearts. Absent that, I won't say something I don't think is true, like it or lump it. I am way too egoistic to have the slightest problem admitting I am wrong - if indeed that is the case. But getting upset and saying I know I am wrong is to wholly misread who I am. I have no time to play games saying anything that isn't so - within the limits of my understanding. On any given matter, I might be incorrect, but I would never be disingenuous. People who charge otherwise are probably revealing a great deal more about themselves - and what is normal in their social circle - than about me. I must get along with children, with people from the third world who are not jaded like urban first worlders are,
across cultural lines, and in confrontational situations of all sorts: the very heart of my methodology is to ALWAYS tell the truth. Most people notice this - consciously or subconsciously - within minutes - because it is not normal, modern behavior. I will admit this or that, recommend this or that, regardless of how well or poorly it represents my interests:
it works very well and it is such an ingrained habit I sometimes get in trouble with supervisors who are embarassed that I don't conceal things they regard as embarassing. IF JWE, Big T, et al can be so wrong about reading my character, they are also likely not to have lived in Japan, learned the Japanese language, collected technical and historical Japanese documents in numbers, or participated in forinsic examination of historical Japanese machines and documents - all of which I have done. I am a technical consultant to authors who write about Japan, and one of these brought me into consultation with an intelligence contractor who was having problems (in spite of the highest of clearences) getting to the bottom of wartime Japanese technical research. Although the contractor had an eight man team, including two scientists from National Laboratories, he reacted by saying no one he had encountered had a similar handle on these matters.

It is perfectly true that Japanese industry was not as efficient or productive as US industry was in the period of interest. The biggest reason for that is something called "economy of scale." High quality dies are good to make two million stampings. If you don't need that many, you must still pay the same price for the dies, but you cannot divide the cost of them by such a huge number. In many dozens of different ways things become more and more efficient, at least until you reach the point of needing a million or two (after which you may have bottomed out and may not be able to become more efficient). The sheer quantity you need (can sell in your market) dictates what methods may be appropriate - so that you might not consider methods that would be appropriate if your needs were of a different order of magnitude. The fact your cost (in dollars, in labor, in any other measure) is more per unit does not mean that you are stupid or doing anything wrong or inappropriately. And note that in more than way Japan managed to produce technical machines that were the best of their kind in the world - or unique which by definition is also the best - far more often than those who view the Japanese as technically inferior would like to admit. The more complex the matter, the more this was the case: in one of the few well documented meetings of scientists in the Japanese atomic program (the one at Navy Park in the summer of 1942) the conclusion was reached "Japan has a better chance of successfully applying atomic science during the war than Germany has" - a position I at first assumed was national racist arrogance. Turns out that Japanese physicists were far better theoriticians - and also that the Japanese were willing to LISTEN to their theoriticians in a sense we never did - so that - in the months and years that followed - time after time they solved on a blackboard in hours problems we needed vast sums and long experiments to solve. We admit the concept of fusion was first clearly enunciated by a Japanese wartime physicist. I point this out to illustrate that things you probably never would guess were the case IRL. And I am familiar with them. We had to measure critical mass - and it was so dangerous one scientists was killed doing it. They figured it out more precisely without experiments.

When someone wrote that Japan "never" built any dedicated plant, the case of multiple shipyards - each automated for the production of a single class of standardized merchant ships - jumped into my mind. You can read about them in The Japanese Merchant Marine and World War Two. And you can see them listed in Warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy.
This is not a case where Japan built one or two such things - a mere technical exception either: they built several different size specialized types - and they usually built more than one for each type. Mid war you will see similar things being done for aircraft engines, airframes, and other industrial things. That some Western writer or academic - or even that some Japanese writer or academic - is not aware of these cases - does not make allegations they "never" did this true. I was indeed told such things as a child: but I went to Japan - I went to Mitsubishi and other sites - and I began to read the historical materials. It is impossible to proove a negative proposition, but a positive one requires only a single case to show it was done. While I don't have time to debate people who start in bad faith - Big T never would believe anything I said even if God Almighty certified it - and the fact I have never lied to him cuts not the slightest ice -
the fact is that I never say anything without cause and I actually live in a technical library of some size. I work tirelessly for academics, authors and intelligence officers who DO respect me - and almost always without compensation.
I can write and teach on these matters - and sometimes do so. ONLY if you start out "knowing" I "must be wrong" can you justify the language JWE and Big T use - here or in other threads. I think it would be far better if they ignore me - why not if I must be wrong? - than attempt to hijack threads with charges that are wholly hostile, false and actually forbidden by the terms of use of the Forum. I am not upset by such antics - I know in my heart I am always honorable: but I am upset Matrix does not police its Forum better - generating warnings against such space/time wasting behaviors. I will not be drawn into extended debate with people who already know the Japanese are always inferior and that anyone who represents differently must knowingly be lieing. They are as wrong about the one as the other.

And note that JWE does not read precisely: I never said I worked on a production line at an automobile plant. I worked in Engineering at the most elaborate field testing facility on the planet. We typically worked on products that were ten years in advance of production. Not just our products, but those of minor companies (which could not afford elaborate research and development facilities) and those of foreign countries someone wanted to understand. I also said I was not an expert - just a person exposed - but I didn't say I was an assembly line worker - and somehow he got that out of it.

[Mike Scholl]

"When someone wrote that Japan "never" built any dedicated plant, the case of multiple shipyards - each automated for the production of a single class of standardized merchant ships - jumped into my mind. You can read about them in The Japanese Merchant Marine and World War Two. And you can see them listed in Warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy. "

I wrote that Cid..., though not in the sense that you are choosing to interprate it. I'm quite sure the Japanese built some slipways dedicated to the production of a single type/size of vessel. I am also totally certain that the Japanese NEVER built anything like the Kaiser Yards for mass producing "Liberty Ships". Show me a single instance of Japan producing a 10,000 ton ship in a month (or even two months) during WW II and I'll shut up. These were "ship assembly lines" extending a mile back from the shore that produced dozens and dozens of ships in that time-frame (one in four days). That's "assembly line mass production in a purpose-built plant".

Or show me the Japanese equivelent of Willow Brook, that could turn out a complicated piece of equipment like a B-24D bomber once every 63 minutes. By airframe weight, that one plant produced well over 50% of Japan's entire aircraft production during 1944. Again, that's "assembly line mass production in a purpose-built plant"..., and something the Japanese didn't even know how to do until after the war. If you measure industrial output in some meaningful way, such as "Aircraft output in pounds per man-day of labour", you'll find that in their best year (1944) Japanese labor managed to produce .71 lbs per man-day of airframe...., while US workers were churning out 2.76 lbs per man day. That's almost 4 times as much production per worker. That's where the advantages of "purpose-built single-item factories/assembly lines" show up. And Japan didn't have such luxuries.

[el cid again]

Japan did indeed built shipyards for the efficient mass production of standardized ships - very similar in concept to the Liberty ship - but not apparently in imitation of it. Japan also did build large aircraft (and aircraft engine) plants during the war. On the other hand, Willow Run was the second biggest building on the planet - after Boeing Renton - and there were other truly gigantic aircraft plants built as well - one in LA and on in Kansas come to mind (although nothing ever approached Boeing Renton until Boeing Everette was built decades later). In a similar way, the Kaiser facility for building CVEs was done on a scale impossible to believe - even if you go there today. The Liberty ship was not in fact a US concept - but a British one: yet the US built so many of them, almost no one remembers that it was the concoction of a British shipyard based on a pre-war design. There was even a strange case - actually a stunt - where a Liberty ship was built at astounding speed (a very labor inefficient thing, but good for morale) - something like ten days if memory serves.
I did not say that Japan attempted to build facilities equal in size to the largest ever built. Your statement was they "never" attempted to build "decidated, specialized" plants - and that is plain false. There is nothing about saying they did that implies they built them on a supergigantic scale - it would not have made sense to put so many eggs in one basket in a Japan likely to be targeted by bombers. There is nothing about saying they did that implies their rate of construction was anything like ours either. Japanese shipbuilding was not as time efficient - for lots of reasons - including drafting of specialist workers, substitution of unskilled labor and even prisoners, the very nature of Japanese shipyards (which - outside the automated new ones - were of the classical sort - very flexable but not very efficient) and significant bottlenecks in delivering subassemblies (e.g. engines). Aircraft production was also not as efficient as in the UK or the US - no matter how you measure it - and again it was substantially structural - and related also to economy of scale.
When wartime demands led to reorganization and new plant, mass production and efficiency gains were indeed achieved - and on a scale not equaled by nominally more industrially advanced Germany - but the increases in efficiency in the US in particular always outpaced those in Japan - not least because of the sheer size of dedicated operations - because we would exempt specialists from the draft - and because we had only self imposed disruption of the supply of vital materials and virtually never any plant destruction. The USA adopted the astounding (and not planned) concept of building 100,000 aircraft - and did so to such an extent the US Army could not be built to the level it normally would have been - or indeed to the size of even Japan (never mind Germany, or Germany plus Japan). We believed that an "air war" would cost inherantly fewer casualties than a "ground war" would - and then proceeded almost to make that untrue by insisting on daylight bombing raids. [We almost certainly could have had better operational impacts by using bombers to hunt submarines and support mililitary operations and even deliver mines - but that is a different subject - the CONCEPT that air power was a better investment was probably correct] Japan (and Germany) never considered a campaign based mainly on aircraft - and it is not at all clear the investment would have been a viable option for our enemies? In the context of this strategy, building plants like Willow Run (where my grandmother worked and which for a long time was the main airport of Detroit) and Boeing Renton (where I worked as a contractor for some years) made sense in a way that could not apply to Japan: had Japan bombed Renton we might not have looked as smart either.

Words are slippery - and possibly you intended to say something slightly different than you did say? Japan did build specialized, decicated plant during the war. They didn't build it on the scale we did - and they should not have tried either. Products like the Ki-67 prooved to be so effective - even though not produced on anything like the scale we produced much bigger bombers - we kept it secret (in part to limit the extent to which they attempted their operations).
The sheer numbers we used combined with the limited space to service aircraft created a situation in which an attack just before take off (when our planes were immobile, loaded with avgas and bombs) was always a devistating thing. That they figured out DAYS AHEAD OF TIME just when that takeoff would be - it took two days just to fly to the target - and another day or more to set up the raid - was something we found mystifying. [We were too predictable in our methods, and they noticed patterns, like when weather planes appeared - exploiting that information] Operational success is not purely a function of numbers or the sheer size of the aircraft: in this case the limiting factor was not the capability of the Ki-67 nor the number made - but the number of crews up to flying such a mission at that stage of the war. Japan probably built too many planes - in terms of what it could fuel and crew effectively. More focus on delivery of fuel supplies and training - and less on airframe production - would have probably been more operationally effective. My point is that what is built should be a function of the NATIONAL situation and strategy - that the requirements of a different nation may legitimately be different. [Paraphrasing US Army Col Larry Frost there] Building dedicated plant is a good idea - and it was done. Doing so on the scale of Willow Run was not desireable, practable, feasible or germane to the situation Japan found itself in.

[Mike Scholl]

"I did not say that Japan attempted to build facilities equal in size to the largest ever built. Your statement was they "never" attempted to build "decidated, specialized" plants - and that is plain false. There is nothing about saying they did that implies they built them on a supergigantic scale - it would not have made sense to put so many eggs in one basket in a Japan likely to be targeted by bombers. There is nothing about saying they did that implies their rate of construction was anything like ours either. Japanese shipbuilding was not as time efficient - for lots of reasons - including drafting of specialist workers, substitution of unskilled labor and even prisoners, the very nature of Japanese shipyards (which - outside the automated new ones - were of the classical sort - very flexable but not very efficient) and significant bottlenecks in delivering subassemblies (e.g. engines). Aircraft production was also not as efficient as in the UK or the US - no matter how you measure it - and again it was substantially structural - and related also to economy of scale."


No Cid..., it's not just "economy of scale". You don't get 4 times the productivity per worker just through scale. And American labor was heavily diluted with unskilled new labor (women, blacks, and the rural poor)---one of the great advantages of US style assembly-line mass-production was that it worked very well with diluted labor supplies. Each worker performed one simplified activity repeatedly..., with tools specialized for that particular task. Your obfuscating the discussion with a lot of words. Yes, the Japanese built "specialized plants" to build aircraft or trucks or something. But they didn't build plants around a production-line specifically designed to build one particular Aircraft or Ship...., breaking the production of that specific item down to thousands of individual steps along that assembly line. The proof is in the pudding..., or in this case, in the production figures. Both the US and the USSR built over 50,000 tanks of a single design/model (the M4 and the T-34) using such assembly line production. The entire Axis (Germany, Italy, and Japan) couldn't produce that many tanks of all types and models together. The Japanese had a perfectly fine design for a DP gun in their 3.9"/100mm mounting. All together during the entire war they managed to build 150-60 of them. Compare that to the US production of 5"/38 DP guns and mountings for all it's BB's, CA's, CL's, DD's, CV's and many DE's The BB's alone used more than all Japanese 3.9" production..., the destroyers more than 2 dozen times as many. The discussion is about "apples", and dragging in oranges, dates, and grapes won't change the result.

[el cid again]

Ironically, you are perfectly incorrect. I don't know what the reason is you insist that a dedicated line was not built. We have clearly this very thing in a "E Type Shipyard" to build - and on a semi-automated basis - Type E standard merchant ships. [Same for A, B, C and D] It appears this was also done for specific types of aircraft.

If you wish to understand the issues involved with productivity read a nice little book called The Air War.

I think you are grossly underestimating the impact of economy of scale. If I set up a dedicated line, and then it is not able to produce most of the time due to lack of duraluminum components, engines, machine guns, whatever - the overall statistic (say for a year's production) does not look good at all. Add to that, later in the war, that the plant might need to be repaired - or stop producing so workers can take cover during an air raid - and it gets worse, not better. The Axis powers made a fundamentally bad choice to accept too many kinds of aircraft for production. That greatly exaserbated problems getting specialized subassemblies. More than a few times the airframe plant was ready - but the engines were not - so the plant had to remain idle - or do something else for which it was not as efficient as it was designed to be.
Now we were not free of such problems - and the story of the B-29 (and even more the B-32 competator) is full of technical problems of one sort or another. But relatively speaking - we did not have the same degree of problems getting plants up to speed keeping them there. A plant that is up to speed actually serves well as a training ground for workers.
We also adopted a pilot plant concept: a (say) automobile plant would imitate a primary aircraft plant - and not depend on its on manufacturing engineering staff to resolve problems - but would instead use the pilot plant staff. I grew up being told (by people in the auto industry) that Japan never did anything like that. Turns out - they did too much of it!
They believed planes win wars, but not tanks - and converted too many auto plants to make planes - using a similar system. Nevertheless, they didn't do it on the same scale, nor integrate pilot/slave plants to the same degree we did.
There also is a problem with statistics: Japan produced more kinds of seaplanes than any other country - and a lot of other specialized types; many small production models skew the efficiency capability of the industry - even in terms that it really achieved. The data for the industry as a whole must include these many small production runs and it does not properly indicate the efficiency of the larger ones - at least potentially (if they had the subassemblies required, the power, and so on so they really could run continuously). We would have much worse statistics if we had important disruptions due to enemy air raids (a la Nemoesk bomber raids) - if we had tried to produce three or four times as many models - etc.

I am not sure where you want to go with this discussion? It hardly seems to be related to the thread. Does it make you feel good to believe that the Japanese industrial effort was smaller and, in fundamental ways, less efficient? It was both.
That does not mean they were stupid, didn't have first rate technical advice from Germans (and sometimes American's before the war began) of great repuation, or able to adopt dedicated, assembly line production methods - because that is also clearly true. Why is that a problem?

[Mike Scholl]

"That does not mean they were stupid, didn't have first rate technical advice from Germans (and sometimes American's before the war began) of great repuation, or able to adopt dedicated, assembly line production methods - because that is also clearly true. Why is that a problem? "


Not once in this discussion have I said that the Japanese were stupid, or that the didn't beg, borrow or steal technology wherever they could. All I've ever maintained is that they were incapable (for reasons of finance, material, or design expertise) of adopting US-style assembly line mass production. As for Japanese shipbuilding, by 1943 one in every six Japanese Merchant ships was out of service due to defered maintainence, breakdowns and marine engine shortages. This for a nation that needed every hull in operation to reap the benefits of the SRA that had driven Japan's entry into the war. Hardly a glowing endorsement of Japanese shipbuilding.

It's only a problem in that your contentions are misleading. They might give players the idea that the Japanese could have achieved production with US effeciency. The truth is that General Motors produced as much war material (by value) as Japan did. The Japanese were stupid only in the sense that they didn't believe folks like Yamamoto who tried to tell them about the incredible potential of US industry. Sir Edward Grey said it best. "America is like a gigantic boiler. There is no limit to the power it can supply if only one can light a fire under it." The Japanese lit that fire with a vengence..... I'm pulling out of the discussion at this point..., it's definately gotten fairly far afield.

[el cid again]

Apparently "US style assembly line mass production" has some special meaning in your mind - one you didn't say up front. I do not know what it is supposed to mean either? Henry Ford invented the assembly line well before World War I - and any assembly line is at its heart a "US style assembly line" in the sense that the very concept was invented in the USA. There are vast numbers of variations on assembly line methods - and no one at all used the original one as such by WWII. [The very first "assembly line" had a worker pulling a car on a rope down past the work stations] Just what method is "US style" but not "Japanese style" I can only wonder? IF there is a significant difference beween major production operations in the US and Japan during the war, it was one of economy of scale. Yet in the very largest of these (for ships) "assembly line" isn't even the right term for what was done. I have agreed that there was a difference in industrial efficiency - for a host of reasons - but most significantly because of economy of scale - and you don't like that at all. Why not one wonders? Finally - at no time did I attempt to mislead anyone by saying Japan could achieve US levels of efficiency: not even the UK (which did second best in the world) could have done that. I am saying the Japanese could have achieved significantly better efficiencies if they had taken appropriate steps, including

a) Not having the Army draft workers from plants making things for the Navy

b) Not having the Navy draft workers from plants making things for the Army

c) Standardize on calibers, voltages, radios, and aircraft designs much sooner than they actually did

d) Reduce the number of designs produced to a minimum

e) Focus more resources on defending plants and lines of communications for raw materials/subassemblies - so more was available more of the time at the final assembly locations

f) Focus more on less militarily glamorous transport aircraft, vehicles and ships - things that are easier to produce and contribute directly to logistic efficiency which is needed to support industry as well as military operations

g) Produce in place designs earlier - even from before the war began - for everything from light tanks to escort vessels to certain aircrafts - rather than wait for months or years before producing them - so the numbers would be better and the time to apply them more significant.

Note the glaring absence from this list of gross changes in industrial methodogy. You could add increasing investment in industrial engineering - but Japan did that - and was able to apply lessons learned successfully better than any other Axis nation did - and probably second best only to the USA. I don't think much more could have been done than was done - except to have created a sort of Albert Speer Industrial Tzar sooner than was done (and it was done IRL).

[anarchyintheuk]

You might as well add "gross changes in industrial methodology". Japan would have "achieved significantly better efficiencies".

[Historiker]

It's really funny reading again and again german loan words in this forum here! [:D]

[el cid again]

ja virklich

[Dili]

BF 109 : 5000-7000 manhours. In 43 the Germans wanted to change from ME 109 that was at end of development and FW 190 that was only good at low level, to the Italian 5 Series mostly to Fiat G55/G56 Centauro that was a good fighter at all altitudes and had development potential. They stopped when they coudnt cut below 12000 manhours from the usual over 20000. 
 
Late Japanese fighters 20000 manhours. This might due to the late war dificulties.