Japanese Versus American Victory Claims (2 Viewers)

[Frog]

Japanese bomber and attack plane losses were often pretty appalling even in the first year of the war, especially during attacks on warships.

The Japanese concluded they needed something like a 3:1 to 5:1 ratio of fighter cover to bombers in order to execute daylight strikes in contested airspace. Lots of Japanese strike packages over the Solomons and New Guinea in 1943 featured 10 or fewer bombers plus dozens of fighters split between close cover duty and enemy fighter-hunting. Even still the losses were sometimes unsustainably high.

I'd attribute a lot of the extremely high loss rate to allied anti-aircraft capabilities and not just air superiority. Attacking an American task force by the last year of the war meant flying into radar directed guns firing proximity fuze rounds and literally hundreds of 40mm Bofors and 20mm Oerlikon. It took a lot of training and skill to pull off accurate torpedo and dive bombing attacks even in more or less ideal conditions, let alone under that kind of fire. So not only did the losses become completely unsustainable, the results were fewer and fewer. By Formosa in October, 1944, you had some sizeable formations of Japanese attack planes and bombers achieving tactical surprise by approaching US carriers at low level below radar, and nevertheless incurring crippling and irreplaceable losses with only a handful of bomb and torpedo hits to show for it.

It figures kamikaze was an anti-ship tactic.

Not even the last year of the war :during the Santa Cruz Island battle (25–27 October 1942), even if tactically a japanese navy victory, they had to cope with an air defense they never saw before resulting with an appaling cost for the Kido Butai, in term of trained crewmen and pilots and above all of an invaluable veteran cadre loss (groups, squadrons and sections leaders).

 

[andrewgeorge]

Not even the last year of the war :during the Santa Cruz Island battle (25–27 October 1942), even if tactically a japanese navy victory, they had to cope with an air defense they never saw before resulting with an appaling cost for the Kido Butai, in term of trained crewmen and pilots and above all of an invaluable veteran cadre loss (groups, squadrons and sections leaders).

That's what I had in mind when I said losses were sometimes appalling even in the first year of the war. Actions like Santa Cruz or the attack on Lexington off Rabaul even earlier in the war. At least at Santa Cruz the attack and bomber pilots dished it out while getting mauled.

I'm not even sure I'd call Santa Cruz really a victory—I mean, I guess strictly speaking the American fleet lost more ships and retired from the engagement zone. But it was in support of an offensive on Guadalcanal that failed horribly, so the Japanese didn't end up really accomplishing any operational objective.

 

[Frog]

That's what I had in mind when I said losses were sometimes appalling even in the first year of the war. Actions like Santa Cruz or the attack on Lexington off Rabaul even earlier in the war. At least at Santa Cruz the attack and bomber pilots dished it out while getting mauled.

I'm not even sure I'd call Santa Cruz really a victory—I mean, I guess strictly speaking the American fleet lost more ships and retired from the engagement zone. But it was in support of an offensive on Guadalcanal that failed horribly, so the Japanese didn't end up really accomplishing any operational objective.

At least a tactical victory : the damaged Enterprise had to have been jury rigged and for a little span of time, the only flat top (temporarily) on stage was japanese.
But the dire outcome was to come later.
To sum up :
- the core of carriers were lost at Midway ;
- the core of pilots/crewmen was lost at Santa Cruz.

 

[andrewgeorge]

At least a tactical victory : the damaged Enterprise had to have been jury rigged and for a little span of time, the only flat top (temporarily) on stage was japanese.
But the dire outcome was to come later.
To sum up :
- the core of carriers were lost at Midway ;
- the core of pilots/crewmen was lost at Santa Cruz.

That's probably a fair shorthand. Attrition kept Japanese carrier air groups from ever really fully reconstituting their skilled aircrews over 1943-1944 as well. There weren't many shipboard combat deployments since the allies were largely on the offensive. And yet, every time additional air power was needed in the Southeast Area (every few months), a carrier division's air groups would deploy temporarily down to the South Pacific from Truk, where they would incur additional losses which prolonged the rebuilding.

By the time you got to Philippine Sea, most carrier aircrew simply didn't have the training and experience to be very combat effective, and so the US Navy (with all of its other material advantages—numbers of aircraft, numbers of ships, radar-directed intercept, radar fire control, etc) simply chewed them up.

 

[GregP]

So much about aviation is covered incorrectly in the media that AI tends to retrieve the incorrect stuff as gospel. I've spent a lifetime around aircraft / aviation. Hardly any media civerage about aviation is anywhere near true. Quite a few of the books used as references by AI are nothing more than collections of stories with the attendant embellishment that always creeps in when stories are told.

When I have used AI to get things about WWII aviation, it is about 40-60% accurate if I'm lucky. Many times I'm not so lucky. AI doesn't sift through text for accuracy; it sifts for published contant regardless of accuracy. It basically outputs what it finds written in text that is avaiable for perusal.

It's kind of like a self-driving car. The "goodness" of the AI driver is completely dependent upon the programmer or team that writes the software, and they're only as good as the things they anticipate might happen in traffic. If anything happens they have not anticipated, the result is a toss up as to whether or not the response is good. Witness the stupid things done by self-driving taxis fairly recently.

 

[Squish]

Deleted.

 

[Irregualr23]

So much about aviation is covered incorrectly in the media that AI tends to retrieve the incorrect stuff as gospel. I've spent a lifetime around aircraft / aviation. Hardly any media civerage about aviation is anywhere near true. Quite a few of the books used as references by AI are nothing more than collections of stories with the attendant embellishment that always creeps in when stories are told.

When I have used AI to get things about WWII aviation, it is about 40-60% accurate if I'm lucky. Many times I'm not so lucky. AI doesn't sift through text for accuracy; it sifts for published contant regardless of accuracy. It basically outputs what it finds written in text that is avaiable for perusal.

It's kind of like a self-driving car. The "goodness" of the AI driver is completely dependent upon the programmer or team that writes the software, and they're only as good as the things they anticipate might happen in traffic. If anything happens they have not anticipated, the result is a toss up as to whether or not the response is good. Witness the stupid things done by self-driving taxis fairly recently.

Free AI tools simply tend to make up stuff, using sota model and anything above gpt5.6 and fable5 mostly get rid off the hallucination you see in older models, and they are very useful for going over large quantities of images and ww2 orals in batches and always linking evidence with original source rather than make up any fact by their own.

AI is definitely doing better on reading and understanding context than those who doesn't understand what researcher's writing based on losses reported on each side rather than pure claims.

 

[Squish]

Deleted.

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

S Squish I Irregualr23

Please take your argument elsewhere. The bickering and personal attacks you are making toward each other has a negative impact on everyone's forum experience.

You can both debate this topic in a civil manner without the sideshow.

 

[SaparotRob]

Sure, everyone gives AI a break but I make a teensy little mistake and then there's angry villagers with torches and pitchforks in my parking spot.

 

[Greg Boeser]

Sure, everyone gives AI a break but I make a teensy little mistake and then there's angry villagers with torches and pitchforks in my parking spot.

Could it be your "Club the Baby Seals!" bumper sticker?