Platoonist wrote: Sat Nov 19, 2022 8:25 pm
RangerJoe wrote: Sat Nov 19, 2022 8:02 pm
My understanding was that merchant ships were assigned to the army and navy separately, not combined nor coordinated with civilian needs. So frequently fully laden ships would pass empty ships, then return empty while other ships would load cargoes to go to the originating port of the loaded ships, then return empty.
One incident where this crippling division of effort really reared its ugly head was in the devastating US carrier raid on Truk in February 1944. IJN intelligence saw the raid coming and moved most of its warships well out of harm's way. However, it couldn't be arsed to inform the Imperial Japanese Army, resulting in a staggering number of Army freighters fully laden with cargo getting sunk in port. The way the Navy saw it was; That was the Army's look-out, not the Navy's.
An eminent Japanese scientist with firsthand experience of the bitter inter-service rivalry once remarked that; "A general and and admiral would rather lose the war than shake hands".
". . . That's just the failure of the Japanese leadership to match strategic plans to available resources, without going into how they further mismanaged those resources. At an operational and tactical level the Japanese merchant fleet was also grossly mismanaged.
There's a basic rule of transport efficiency where you send ships out full, and bring them back full. So a ship leaving the industrial centre would carry finished goods out to the resource areas, from which it would then return laden with raw resources. Because the Japanese tried to push a security perimeter out past the resource areas this basic efficiency was lost to them. Ships heading to the Southern Resource Area left Japan empty, and returned from Indonesia and Indochina full of raw resources, while ships heading to the frontline island fortresses left Japan full of weapons and ammunition, and returned from the Marianas, Marshals and Solomon islands empty. Had Japan drawn up her defensive perimeter at the resource areas she would have more than doubled the efficiency of her transport fleet; something she badly needed to do.
Even the military value of pushing a security perimeter out beyond the resource areas was questionable because once the Americans attacked Japan proved completely unable to sustain her forces at those far flung points. During the battle for Guadalcanal Japanese troops received 10% the tonnage in supplies that their American opponents did, and that was the best Japan would ever have it. From that point on growing American strength and mounting Japanese losses would make the logistical situation ever more lopsided.
Those losses are of particular note, because the Japanese completely failed to protect their vital merchant fleet from the enemy. Before the war the IJN put very little intellectual and material resources into the problem of protecting its maritime commerce. The best destroyers were instead designed for fleet service, and the various escort commands were reduced to begging for whatever leavings they could acquire that Combined Fleet was willing to part with. The ships the escort forces did receive were poorly equipped, and their crews poorly trained for the complex task of ASW and convoy duties. Before the war the merchant fleet also had paid little attention to convoy training, so when the practice was belatedly adopted in 1943 the Japanese convoys were badly handled, with ships failing to maintain station, colliding, getting lost, or panicking and scattering once under attack.
The Japanese gained a brief respite early in the war due to the failings of American submarines, but once these were fixed Japan's merchant fleet was slaughtered across the length and breadth of the Pacific. Protecting Japan's many sea routes would have posed a complex problem even for the most skilled and numerous escort forces, but for the naval dregs who Japan actually tasked with escort duty the problem was insoluble, and Japanese shipping paid the steepest of prices.
Basically, Japan chose to fight a war with a plan that required more shipping than she had, and then used that shipping highly inefficiently while failing to provide it the most basic protections. Japan's defeat was inevitable even had she done everything right, but - as far as logistics are concerned - Japan made a slew of egregious and unforced errors (of which I've only mentioned the most glaring - there were many others such as inefficiencies in cargo on and offloading, and the failure of ground transport to and from the ports) that further weakened her forces and hastened her collapse."
https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads ... 508/page-2
; Julia Child