Kates BY SHATTERED SWORD

[EUBanana]

ORIGINAL: stuman

ORIGINAL: EUBanana

Shattered Sword is an extremely good read and I found it very illuminating, but its a bit... pop history?  I wouldn't take it as absolute gospel.

By the way EU I thought you woud get a kick out of the following. I was reading this thread when my youngest daughter walked by, glanced over my shoulder, and happened to see your picture of that puppy. She has asked me about getting a puppy now at least 5 times [:)]

[:D][:D][:D][:D]

[timtom]

ORIGINAL: Local Yokel

I think you do P and T a slight disservice. The last paragraph on page 89 of Shattered Sword refers quite specifically to production of 56 carrier attack aircraft in 1942. They may well have understated the true figure for B5N production, but I didn't understand them to have conflated production of both carrier attack and carrier bomber a/c into this figure, given their clear understanding of the distinction between these aircraft types.

Quite. The IJN distinguished between a "Kogekiki" (attack aircraft), and a "Bakugekiki" (bomber aircraft). The definition of an attack aircraft was that it was torpedo-capable. Hence a B5N was an attack aircraft while a D3A was a bomber aircraft. I believe P&T are refering to the former.

ORIGINAL: tigercub

I have all the production numbers pre war and during for aircraft,Source :Japanese Aircraft of the pacific by R.j.Francillon 1970

Total aircraft production 1941-45 including gliders 69,888,just combat aircraft 52,242

The book source: United states strategic bombing survey

This Book has easily been the best source of Japanese aircraft information i have ever seen.
It has every type of Japanese built, numbers built,armament layouts and so on and on
but did not tell me all i wanted about Kates and Vals but it seems Shattered Sword claim that only 56 carrier attack aircraft were built in all 1942 is just Rubbish and the fact i can find this out in 24 hours chatting to people here says a lot to this forum and a lack of effort in this reguard by the Shattered Sword Writers.

Tiger!

A word of caution about Francillon. "Japanese Aircraft of the Pacific War" is an excellent reference by any standard but it's also 40 years old and historiography hasn't stood still since then, or rather Japanese historiography hasn't - English language ditto on the subject almost has. The fact that an 40-year old reference is still considered premier on Japanese WWII aircraft says as much about the state of Western scholarship as it does about the quality of "Japanese Aircraft of the Pacific War". Lots and lots of stuff in Japanese though...

Francillon's "bible" as it's sometimes refered to is based on the first edition of the multi-volume, Japanese-language "Encyclopedia of Japanese Aircraft 1900-1945". A second, much revised, edition was published in the 1980's. All of the errors of the first edition was copied over into Francillon's work but obviously none of the corrections of the second edition. I don't think one should be afraid of questioning this particular "bible"

In fact I think non-Japanese speakers ought to be a bit hesitant about making too firm statements about the history of wartime Japan. I suspect our knowledge is but a veneer. There really isn't all that much written on the subject in language that I for one can read, much less based on Japanese sources.

[Przemcio231]

I remember i played a CG once in stock WITP as Japs... the campaign starting before Coral sea so DEI/Malaya and Burma were already occupied. I did not capture any more resources or HI as china was stelmate and i did not push to India. But i was able to outproduce the Allies fighter numbers with ease. I do not know the correct numbers now becouse that save fried itself with my old PC[:@] but it was nothing to it. I didn't bother to make calculations for nr of HI points when they fell i just switched off some Merchant shipyards. I only keept track of number of engines avaliable.

[m10bob]

A tale was told in these forums maybe 3 years ago, so forgive me if I miss certain details, but as I recall, it went something like this.

Even the venerable Zero was produced in mom and pop shops and moved from one sight to another by horse or ox pulled wagon, and at one point, the plane had to be pulled down a narrow road, one at a time.
A crucial element was enjoined to the plane at the end of that road, and back onto the wagon it went, and back down that same narrow road, singly, to its' next destination.

That the plane itself was handled in such a slow manner reveals something of the level of industrial capacity at the time in Japan.

Assembly line production was an invention of Henry Ford, and it was taken to Japan AFTER the war.
Till then, assembly in Japan was often a matter of more than one physical location, rarely having a finished product come out anywhere near the same place it began.

When Doolittles raiders hit some of those wooden shacks in Tokyo, etc, who knows how many of them were little family owned machine shops, etc?

[tigercub]

69,888 air frames is a lot of family work shops.But all so true in some cases.....Move that bloody ox of the road woman...[:D] 

[EUBanana]

ORIGINAL: Przemcio231

I remember i played a CG once in stock WITP as Japs... the campaign starting before Coral sea so DEI/Malaya and Burma were already occupied. I did not capture any more resources or HI as china was stelmate and i did not push to India. But i was able to outproduce the Allies fighter numbers with ease. I do not know the correct numbers now becouse that save fried itself with my old PC[:@] but it was nothing to it. I didn't bother to make calculations for nr of HI points when they fell i just switched off some Merchant shipyards. I only keept track of number of engines avaliable.

All I know is that whenever I play as Allies, my (fighter) plane pools seem to largely bump along at or near 0, and that airframe shortages are absolutely critical all throughout 1942. The only saving grace is that as time goes on, more aircraft types open up (Spitfires, P38s in various marks) so your production goes up. Certainly this is a major constraint on any operations because getting into fighter attrition seems to be suicide. Hurricanes, for example, seem to need to be husbanded as a precious resource. Getting into aerial combat with them over Burma soon runs the pool dry - and this despite Hurricanes being one of the most plentiful Allied fighters available, and probably the second or third best in the inventory.

These problems don't seem to matter to Japan, who make Zeroes in comparatively vast numbers in 1942. (and train vast numbers of pilots at their leisure in China but thats a different gripe).

I would have thought - indeed, isn't that the point? - that the Allies could accept attrition with Japan even at a disadvantage and eventually wear them down. After all, a P40E with a 60 xp pilot - the best the Allies have during most of 1942 - will be slaughtered by Zero pilots in my experience, at 3 to 1 or even higher sometimes kill ratios in Japans favour. Allied production simply isn't up to that challenge, but Japans most definitely is, and that is crazy. With about 80 reasonable quality Allied fighters per month (and a some more not reasonable quality fighters) the Japanese can simply steamroller this with their 'historical' industrial might, especially after a surprise round involve squashing most of the Allied front line aircraft at Clarke Field. It's pretty easy to work out really, even a 1:1 ratio of Hurricanes and P40s to Zeroes is grossly insufficient, all you do is empty your plane pools for no real return. No wonder a Sir Robin is popular faced with such stark choices.

If not for B17s blowing away vulnerable airfields Japan would have no worries at all, its about the only weapon in the Allied arsenal capable of destroying airframes at anything like the ratio the production numbers demand.

I think this is perhaps a problem due to Japan being able to tweak production and the Allies being unable to. It's pretty frustrating to see the Mitchell pool reaching stratospheric heights while there are no spare fighter aircraft whatsoever in the entire Pacific theatre, and you're down to downgrading West Coast fighter squadrons to release airframes to other theatres. That really doesn't seem all that historic to me - Japan the mighty industrial power bleeding the US white?

And as I mentioned before I really dont much like the eventual Allied counter to this - when P47s and Corsairs show up and wipe the floor with hundreds of elite quality Japanese fighters, turning the tables. This provokes so much crying and rage from JFBs when it happens, as it eventually does in almost every AAR. But the numbers game of the production side of things kinda dictates that it has to happen, or the Allies would be bled white for the entire war.

I think this situation is ultimately unsatisfying for both sides.

[Charles2222]

ORIGINAL: tigercub

69,888 air frames is a lot of family work shops.But all so true in some cases.....Move that bloody ox of the road woman...[:D] 

Yes, in terms of frames airplanes built, the USA must have had 3.5X the number of huts[:D]. Yes, I know, before anybody says it, the USA was building heavier frames, but there comes a time when nations on the defensive start building with a higher overall fighter ratio to bombers than nations on the offensive do, and therefore the numbers built for the defensive nations take on seemingly more significance than they're capable of. Very simply, they shifted their priorities. I personally don't think you could have this legend about IJ plane building, such as this pathetic example here, and come up with over 1,100 planes a month for the entirity of the war (even if they were to a very large degree fighters). It seems the more logical conclusion that while IJ lagged behind in some manufacturing capabilities, that this fits more into the racist sort of legends such as japanese being unable to fly airplanes because they had been carried on their mother's backs for so long (not that anybody has been lame enough to claim that here). We have heard the stories of the family ran manufacturing aspect, but it must had been either awfully well ran, or else wasn't that great a part of the overall scheme, to have produced such numbers of aircraft. Heck, Germany, something of the more industrial powers, didn't even double IJ's numbers. According to the same source I used for the 76,000 IJ planes built, they listed Germany as having built 120,000. So wouldn't the majority of you say that Germany was more than double IJ's manufacturing capability? And yet the planes produced, just in sheer numbers, don't reflect that.

[anarchyintheuk]

Producing armor is even more resource intensive than aircraft production. Would be interesting to see the manpower and resources that German industry devoted to it.

[herwin]

ORIGINAL: spence

Say what you want about the figures in the book (SS). The fact remains that the IJN was scrounging airframes to fill out it carrier airgroups at the time of Midway and even thereafter. Zuikaku sat out the game for lack of airframes as well as aircrew. Ryujo and Junyo borrowed airframes from the 6th Kokutai for their bit part in Aleutians. It speaks no good things at all about the IJN leadership that they went into the big fight with only a half a load of ammo by choice rather than by necessity.

The USN was scrounging by mid-1942, too.

[herwin]

ORIGINAL: anarchyintheuk

Producing armor is even more resource intensive than aircraft production. Would be interesting to see the manpower and resources that German industry devoted to it.

The metal that went into a German BB could have been used to build 25 Panzer IV tank battalions.

[Subchaser]

ORIGINAL: Charles_22

subchaser: Oh, okay, that was the '44 average. In terms of WITP, 600 Tonies a month could not be produced, unless you had 600 of the corresponding engines (or, you might say, what's a frame without an engine?), so obviously any player who literally does that, has boosted the kawasaki engine output to make it possible. Historic IJ didn't produce 600 Tonies a month, and it's almost as unlikely it was producing that many kawasaki engines, but then the supreme player emporer can change a lot of things to hopefully make a better match for the allies than the historic IJ did.

Actually, I think that july '45 figure for IJ is dramatically wrong. According to one source I have, and I have seen much higher, IJ had 10,700 planes ready for Operation Olympic, half of which were kamikaze. All of them may not had qualified as 'front-line' aircraft, especially since half of them were one shot kamikazes, but even the conventional air available exceeded the july figure alone. For Olympic, the USA was considered to have 9,000 planes. OTOH, Operation Olympic wasn't scheduled until 11/1/45, so maybe the figures I have seen was an estimate of IJ production of aircraft keeping apace until then. Notice also how the july USA figure fell from over 21,000 to 9,000. IJ could bring a great deal of front line aircraft to the battle, whereas the USA could not. The source does not go into any IJ planes elsewhere, as it focuses only on that proposed invasion.

It’s hard to find two sources on this subject providing the same data. It’s clear though that 10000+ figures are total number of all IJA/IJN aircraft, the info I’ve provided before covers only true combat aircraft. The following is lifted from Clayton’s “Japan 1945” ULTRA decrypted messages in may ‘45 indicated that the Japanese had a large inventory of 3335 combat and 3530 training aircraft, albeit obsolete, they could be used for kamikaze attacks. Allied photographic intelligence supported the ULTRA-derived claims. Nimitz’s intelligence staff estimated that 10290 aircraft were available on 13 august for Japanese homeland defense.

And this is from Richard Frank's "Downfall” “U.S. military intelligence initially estimated the number of Japanese aircraft to be around 2,500. An Army estimate in May was 3,391 planes; in June, 4,862; in August, 5,911. A Navy estimate, abandoning any distinction between training and combat aircraft, in July was 8,750; in August, 10,290.”

It’s obvious that by august US intelligence thought about entire Japanese aircraft park as a combat capable force, since it was unclear how many and what kind of aircraft will be used conventionally and as kamikaze. Nevertheless I would not go so far as to claim that Ki-17 trainer biplane was a first-line combat aircraft only because it was capable to take off with 60kg bomb and crash into something 20 minutes later, as a combat unit it simply did not exist. As for 9000 allied figure, this is probably the number of aircraft ready to take part in Olympic, carrier-borne USN, RN, Marines and long-range USAAF planes, the larger part of allied air power was simply out of the range. Japan had 3500-4000 true combat aircraft and something like 4000-4500 “other units”, total number of a/c available at home bases could be well over 10000, no doubt. But how many of these could have been really used against US invasion?

As an indication of the deteriorating quality of workmanship and materials, particularly in engine and power plant accessories, it was stated that at the beginning of the war the Japanese Navy was able to maintain operational availability of 80 percent. The percentage progressively became 50 (1944) and in some cases 20 (1945). These losses were due to a combination of poor factory workmanship, inferior materials and poor maintenance. By 1945 in many cases only one out of three airplanes ever reached the front lines due to engine failure…

…at the Kawasaki’s Akashi factory, 857 engines were received from the Army for overhauling over the period November 1944 - April 1945, 457 were found to have failed because of defective material, largely bearings and crankshaft. An index of the failure of landing gears is the increase from 40 percent ordered for spares in 1942-43 to 70 percent ordered in late 1944-45. A Japanese pilot's diary indicated that of 80 Ki-84 (Franks) which set out from Japan for Lingayen Bay in November 1944, only 14 arrived. The others developed trouble with engines, fuel system, landing gears, etc. The ATIG reported: “at the beginning of the war engine tests covered seven hours running time for the Army and nine hours for the Navy. By the end of the war only one out of ten engines was being tested and time had been reduced to two hours. Alcohol, low-grade gasoline with methanol and water injection systems were used for test runs. The combination of poor engines and poor fuel caused difficulty and losses.”

Because of the sheer shortages of magnesium and t.f.s alloys essential for engine production Japanese were simply unable to produce quality aircraft engines in 45, at least not in required numbers. US subs defeated Japanese a/c industry long before B-29s came. Japanese engines produced in late 44-45 had extremely short operational life of around 100-180 hours before a major overhaul was required. If it was a fighter aircraft (that was often operating at full throttle and at high G) then engine is almost always was beyond the repair (pine fuel, ersatz oil, poor manufacturing and maintaining). 200 hours of overhaul life means that aircraft remains operational only for 3-4 months before it grounded for weeks. With a/c industry, supply system and air force itself all in deep coma, I doubt that Japanese, facing Olympic, were capable to get more than 500 a/c airborne on any given day.

As a devoted Japanese fanboy, I’m already happy that there is only one “Japanese player” in the game, actually there must be two different players, IJN and IJA, both setting up different goals, unwilling to cooperate and even trying to steal resources from each other. In witp world you’re already in a better position, you can enforce standardization of your industries, so you can produce more combat-ready a/c and maintain that force, you have only one supreme HQ and only one strategic goal, if you’re planning an operation you don’t have to wait months to get approval from various committees, ministries and genro people, you don’t have to advocate ASW and convoy system for 2 years, you’re armed with a deadly weapon - hindsight. Japanese player is really not in position to complain, game perfectly balanced for me )))

[Subchaser]

ORIGINAL: Local Yokel


Subchaser, thank you for your informative posts in this thread. You may well be right in what you say above about B5N production in 1942. Just to stir the pot a bit, I expect you will also have noticed the graph on p.19 of USSBS Corporation Report XIX (Army Air Arsenal/Naval Air Depot production), which compares G2 intelligence with actual production figures and suggests an actual production figure for 1942 of 150 B5N against G2's estimate of about 165. If that should happen to be correct, it could imply production of an extra 25 or so machines beyond those accounted for by Aichi and 11th NAD production.

However, it's difficult to know what to make of that graph, not least because it seems to relate to production at 11th NAD alone. In that case I can't see a way of reconciling the graph plot with the figures you cite as to actual monthly B5N production at 11th NAD (or, for that matter, the figures for 1943). I rather discounted the graph because of the greater detail in the monthly production figures.

It’s nice to hear that somebody actually read them, thank you. I’ve missed that graph, thanks for pointing that out. I have to agree, I think that actual figure for Kates is 125 +/- 1or2. The problem with that graph is that it is there just to give an idea of how accurate intelligence was, you cannot be sure that parameter in this graph really indicates 150 Kates produced by December ’42, it’s just a reference mark IMHO. Besides, Munitions ministry document gives almost the same figure – 126.

[Nikademus]

so its maybe possible that as of May 42, going into the first week of June.....only around 50ish of those B5N's had been fully completed and delivered to the Navy?

[m10bob]

Subchaser, just because we do not respond to your posts, do not feel we do not read and very much appreciate that which you bring to the table, because we do..

[Charles2222]

ORIGINAL: anarchyintheuk

Producing armor is even more resource intensive than aircraft production. Would be interesting to see the manpower and resources that German industry devoted to it.

Oh yeah, it's no secret that IJ fell on it's face in that department.

[Charles2222]

subchaser:

As for 9000 allied figure, this is probably the number of aircraft ready to take part in Olympic, carrier-borne USN, RN, Marines and long-range USAAF planes, the larger part of allied air power was simply out of the range.

Whether the figures I saw included long range bombers I do not know, but part of the air fleet for USA was largely derived from the CV's of course. 9,000 planes sounds like too many if it were just the CV's alone included in there.

[stuman]

ORIGINAL: herwin

ORIGINAL: anarchyintheuk

Producing armor is even more resource intensive than aircraft production. Would be interesting to see the manpower and resources that German industry devoted to it.

The metal that went into a German BB could have been used to build 25 Panzer IV tank battalions.

No shit ? I have often wondered what a " conversion " ratio would be. Geez, bet they could have put those ( or related ) vehicles to better use than one of their capital ships.

[Nikademus]

well a panzer is more than armor plate. Remember that Hitler has to autograph each one too.

[;)]

[Przemcio231]

Well good for all of us that instead of Panzers Hitler stuck to his shiny worthless BB's[:)]

[Nikademus]

wouldn't call em worthless.