Maneuverability vs Speed

Halsey put his four main assets in the Pacific as submarines, radar, aircraft, and bulldozers.

Shockingly, it would seem that forced laborers have both reduced capability and desire to help when compared to trained engineers

But seriously, people look so much at the pretty toys every side had (for good reason, mind you), that we tend to forget how stacked the deck was on every OTHER front in favor of the US, at least in terms of long term. A massive amount of untapped skilled labor, to say nothing of how the massive fuel reserves affected everything OUTSIDE of combat: instead of relying on horses or hand labor, you could have things sent by truck, fields cleared and flattened by machines, and all of this meant that the US men who did the fighting could do so from the best possible starting point. "The army marches on its stomach", and the United States was rolling around like a a deranged car tire while Japan was stuck army crawling

Spindash64 said:

Shockingly, it would seem that forced laborers have both reduced capability and desire to help when compared to trained engineers

But seriously, people look so much at the pretty toys every side had (for good reason, mind you), that we tend to forget how stacked the deck was on every OTHER front in favor of the US, at least in terms of long term. A massive amount of untapped skilled labor, to say nothing of how the massive fuel reserves affected everything OUTSIDE of combat: instead of relying on horses or hand labor, you could have things sent by truck, fields cleared and flattened by machines, and all of this meant that the US men who did the fighting could do so from the best possible starting point. "The army marches on its stomach", and the United States was rolling around like a a deranged car tire while Japan was stuck army crawling

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True. U.S. troops in the Pacific were said to be supported by four tons of supplies daily while Japanese troops
were backed up on average by two pounds.

GregP said:

No one can sustain 50% loses and stay operational. If you start with 100 aircraft and you suffer a 50% loss rate, you are out of airplanes in 8 missions.

Somebody's math is seriously screwed up because the Japanese lasted 3 1/2 years after attacking Pearl Harbor, and that was WAY more than 8 missions.

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I think it was the Midway thread, A6M's were 20% Vals and Judys were 40-50% losses.

PAT303 said:

I think it was the Midway thread, A6M's were 20% Vals and Judys were 40-50% losses.

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At Midway the carrier based aircraft were 100% write offs.

Greg Boeser said:

At Midway the carrier based aircraft were 100% write offs.

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Yep, the other two carriers were too far out to be of any help.

Any aircraft from the air groups of Soryu, Kaga, Hiryu or Akagi that weren't shot down or destroyed aboard, had to ditch.

That is a 100% loss rate.

This thread seems to keep wanting to veer into idiotic delusions, and then it gets wrestled back in the general direction of sanity.

The US did also push the limits of range quite often. That Yamamoto assassination flight is one example. But the most famous was during the Battle of the Philippine Sea in 1944. Admiral Mitscher was so determined to get the last Japanese aircraft carriers, which had just unsuccessfully attacked his ships (being in range for their aircraft) that he sacrificed a large number of his own aircrew to get them.

The US had the F6F by this point. The Japanese were short on skilled pilots and badly outnumbered (it was 15 US carriers vs 9 Japanese carriers). Their offensive raids got slaughtered, losing 243 out of 373 aircraft sent to strike the US carriers. The Americans had only lost 23 aircraft wreaking this havoc, but Mitscher sent an air strike consisting of 226 aircraft to attack the Japanese. Problem was, like a Spitfire VIII, these planes - SB2C, Hellcat, FM2, were basically medium range planes. Only the old SBD could be considered close to long range. None of them had the range of the A6M.

But Mitscher wanted to get the Japanese fleet so badly, he launched the strike anyway. Both he and the aircrews knew they were going to be out of range and that some planes would not make it back to the fleet on the return flight. He did, in fact take 50% losses. He launched 226 planes and only got 115 back. 80 ran out of fuel and had to ditch. Though they went to extraordinary measures to recover the crews, including turning lights on for planes landing after dark, risking submarine attack, they lost about 30 aircrew IIRC (I couldn't find the exact figure, maybe somebody knows).

Pretty hard core, almost a kamikaze type raid for some of these guys. Dying in a life jacket in the Pacific ocean is not a great way to go. Shows you how brave and disciplined the pilots were, and how ruthless the commanders. War is a brutal business. And Mitscher was no fool, he proved to be a very cunning and capable commander in several actions, notably at midway and later on with TF 58 when they took out the Japanese air armada at Truk.

That air battle showed clearly the limitations of the Japanese planes - the A6M was totally outclassed by the F6F by this point. But it did also show the importance of range, and the major problem the US was having with range of some of the newer Navy types.

Greg Boeser said:

At Midway the carrier based aircraft were 100% write offs.

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Not talking about losses when the carriers went down, I'm talking about losses in actual battle, as an example, the battle of the Taiwan Sea, the first Japanese strike on Intrepid and Bunker hill lost 34% of the attacking aircraft, 6 betty's attacking the Franklin lost all six, 100%, overall the Japanese naval group involved in that one battle lost 50% of it's aircraft.

If the British navy had tried to face the IJN in the open sea any time from 1941-1943, and with British planes flying off of British carriers, they would have faced an even more dire situation than the US did in the Philippine Sea. They were stuck with very short range types - Sea Gladiator (439 range miles), Sea Hurricane (505 miles), and Swordfish (522 miles), were all short range aircraft. Only the Fulmar (780 miles) and the Albacore (710 miles) had what you might call medium range, but both were still badly out-ranged by the Zero and the D3A.

No amount of patriotism, positive thoughts, or fantasies about 200 gallon ferry tanks can change that.

And what that means is the Japanese fleet could attack the RN one, sink ships, and while their strike aircraft would be at risk and would probably take some losses, their carriers and surface ships would be free and clear. From the results of encounters between A6M and Hurricanes and Swordfish it would have most likely been a quite one-sided slaughter.

We also know in fact that none of these aircraft could contend with the A6M, right into the end of 1943.

The Swordfish and Albacore have the ability to attack in bad weather and at night, which could confer some advantages in theory, but it's unlikely they would get close enough to deliver an attack before their carriers were sunk. If they did manage to get close at night, they would face the likelihood of a Japanese night surface attack. Which would probably not have gone very well.

Even with the newer British carrier planes - their best fighter, the Seafire (493 miles) was very short ranged. Really only suitable for fleet defense and couldn't even fly CAP for a long time, though with it's good rate of climb it could get where it needed quickly. The Barracuda was medium ranged (853 miles) but painfully slow, and for some reason performed extra poorly in the Pacific. The Firefly was the first legit long range naval aircraft for the British, with 1,300 mile range, but extended teething and development problems meant it was not in action until July of 1944.

Thanks to Lend Lease, the British, fortunately, did have Martlets, Tarpons and so on, and by the late war F4U and F6F too... which provided some capable medium range aircraft. But these too were outranged by the IJN planes, and this was sometimes a problem for the US.

Speed is good. Maneuverability is good. But in naval combat especially, range is very, very important.

Wild_Bill_Kelso said:

Only the old SBD could be considered close to long range.

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Without a bomb.

Wild_Bill_Kelso said:

The Firefly was the first legit long range naval aircraft for the British, with 1,300 mile range,

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That is with drop tanks.

Might want to check the range on the D3A too.

Wild_Bill_Kelso said:

Speed is good. Maneuverability is good. But in naval combat especially, range is very, very important.

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Range gives you choices.

Wild_Bill_Kelso said:

And Mitscher was no fool, he proved to be a very cunning and capable commander in several actions, notably at midway and later on with TF 58 when they took out the Japanese air armada at Truk.

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Mitscher's performance in Midway was dreadful. Not one Hornet bomb hit one Japanese carrier.

PAT303 said:

I think it was the Midway thread, A6M's were 20% Vals and Judys were 40-50% losses.

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Ther wer only 2 Judys at Midway. Do you mean Kates

Shortround6 said:

Without a bomb.

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Well from what I gather none of the SBDs were lost in the infamous Mitscher TF 58 raid. These were sent in strike configuration, with bombs. They had better range than the SB2C.

The SBDs sent on scout missions often carried a 500 lb bomb and in fact attacked and hit Japanese ships during several engagements in 1942, and also attacked submarines. On strike missions they usually carried a 1,000 lb bomb.

The TBF also had decent range, what you might call on the outside of 'medium' (915 miles).

Shortround6 said:

That is with drop tanks.

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So? It's fine for carrier fighters to fly with drop tanks IMO. Wildcats did later in their career, F4Us and Hellcats did routinely as well.

Shortround6 said:

Might want to check the range on the D3A too.

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The relevant point is that it is much longer than a Swordfish It is relevant though that the B5N did not have a very good range. The B6N did but it wasn't available until summer of 1943. Their range allowed them to participate in the strikes in the Philippine Sea battle but by then the Hellcat had a major advantage over the A6M, and the US navy had numerical superiority as well.

For really long range strikes the Japanese also had the option of sending their land based ship-sinkers like G3M and G4M, which they used effectively as late as Jan 1943

On that level, the British did also have the land-based Beaufighter which was probably their single strongest naval asset by the 1942-43 period. Beaufighters and Beuforts could have a credible chance to sink Japanese ships, though with heavy losses.

My overall point though is that contrary to the opinion of the OP, the Japanese navy was better, more advanced and more powerful in 1941-1943 than any European navy, including the British. Only the US could challenge them and it took basically the entire US navy to do it. It's debatable whether the IJN or USN was stronger at the beginning of the Pacific War, though the Americans eventually won out.

Factors like (mostly) breaking the Japanese code, the seabees, logistics (although the Americans did also have a serious fuel shortage for the first couple of years of the war), and better attrition warfare assets, including both the armored and protected planes, and the robust air-sea rescue system, are probably what made the difference. Radar helped a little bit toward the latter part. The USN was also very well trained and at times almost suicidally brave as seen in the Philippine Sea incident (and for example, the destroyer crews in Taffy 3).

Greg Boeser said:

At Midway the carrier based aircraft were 100% write offs.

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True, but what percent of the total Japanese aircraft and Naval aircraft were on those carriers?

Not very much.

It was more of a blow to lose the pilots, I'd think, just because they weren't getting very many through training as replacements. And the ones they got weren't getting much in the way of lead-in combat fighter/bomber training. They were thrown into the war fresh out of flight school.

I think most of the IJN pilots were recovered. The true loss to Japanese Navy that day was the loss of veteran aircraft mechanics. Of course the loss of 4 CVs didn't help.

Wild_Bill_Kelso said:

This thread seems to keep wanting to veer into idiotic delusions, and then it gets wrestled back in the general direction of sanity.

The US did also push the limits of range quite often. That Yamamoto assassination flight is one example. But the most famous was during the Battle of the Philippine Sea in 1944. Admiral Mitscher was so determined to get the last Japanese aircraft carriers, which had just unsuccessfully attacked his ships (being in range for their aircraft) that he sacrificed a large number of his own aircrew to get them.

The US had the F6F by this point. The Japanese were short on skilled pilots and badly outnumbered (it was 15 US carriers vs 9 Japanese carriers). Their offensive raids got slaughtered, losing 243 out of 373 aircraft sent to strike the US carriers. The Americans had only lost 23 aircraft wreaking this havoc, but Mitscher sent an air strike consisting of 226 aircraft to attack the Japanese. Problem was, like a Spitfire VIII, these planes - SB2C, Hellcat, FM2, were basically medium range planes. Only the old SBD could be considered close to long range. None of them had the range of the A6M.

But Mitscher wanted to get the Japanese fleet so badly, he launched the strike anyway. Both he and the aircrews knew they were going to be out of range and that some planes would not make it back to the fleet on the return flight. He did, in fact take 50% losses. He launched 226 planes and only got 115 back. 80 ran out of fuel and had to ditch. Though they went to extraordinary measures to recover the crews, including turning lights on for planes landing after dark, risking submarine attack, they lost about 30 aircrew IIRC (I couldn't find the exact figure, maybe somebody knows).

Pretty hard core, almost a kamikaze type raid for some of these guys. Dying in a life jacket in the Pacific ocean is not a great way to go. Shows you how brave and disciplined the pilots were, and how ruthless the commanders. War is a brutal business. And Mitscher was no fool, he proved to be a very cunning and capable commander in several actions, notably at midway and later on with TF 58 when they took out the Japanese air armada at Truk.

That air battle showed clearly the limitations of the Japanese planes - the A6M was totally outclassed by the F6F by this point. But it did also show the importance of range, and the major problem the US was having with range of some of the newer Navy types.

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You should stop calling other people in this forum idiotic, Bill. You're not the only person in here to have original ideas and the people who do aren't idiots. Because you don't agree with some ideas doesn't make them delusions or even incorrect, though some likely are incorrect. It's fine to say someone is incorrect, but personal attacks like saying they're idiots don't belong in here. It doesn't make you look good and you're not the only sane person in here.

One source with a paragraph or more about Mitscher doesn't mean that source is right. All it means is that the text was the author's opinion. That's the thing about history, the people who wrote it almost always weren't there and are just doing their best, most times colored by their own political views - fake news that sounds plausible because the story fits the facts. I'm pretty sure you know that.

You're a good contributor; don't stop. Maybe tone down the criticism so it doesn't read quite so personally hostile. It would be nice if this forum was friendlier than what is laughingly called "Social Media," but really isn't all that often very social.

Just so this doesn't come off wrong, I have been guilty of similar posts in the past. I didn't really intend for them to read quite so hostile but, upon re-reading them the next morning, they DID come off pretty hostile, and I've tried to make my criticisms more tactful since then. I doubt you really meant to call people idiots, either. So, please don't think this is a "bash Bill Kelso" post. It's more of a,"You probably didn't realize quite how that post sounded" thing.

Cheers.

Wild_Bill_Kelso said:

the Japanese navy was better, more advanced and more powerful in 1941-1943 than any European navy, including the British.

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Well, that rather depends on definition of "Navy" doesn't it?

For ships and carrier aircraft there is only one European contender and that is the British, there wasn't anybody else.

British problem was that they were fighting in several area at once and could not concentrate their forces.

If you meant "western navy" (non Japanese) then there are only two, the British and the Americans.

The French, Italians and Germans put together don't equal the British.

Wild_Bill_Kelso said:

It's debatable whether the IJN or USN was stronger at the beginning of the Pacific War, though the Americans eventually won out.

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It swung back and forth. But Remember the "Germany first" problem? The US could not concentrate it's fleet in the Pacific.
US naval forces involved in Operation Torch
3 battleships, The Massachusetts and two real oldies.
5 carriers, (Ranger and 4 escorts) which while not up to Pacific standards carried 108 F4F, 36 SBDs, 28 TBFs and 76 P-40Fs to be flown off for use on land.
7 cruisers,
38 destroyers,
8 fleet minesweepers,
five tankers commanded by Rear Admiral H. Kent Hewitt

This was while the US was contributing to the Battle of the Atlantic.

USN aircraft non-combat losses at Philippine Sea 20 June 1944.

The losses were mainly due to the need for excessive loiter during night recovery of aircraft and the lack of practise in night carrier landing. Very few aircraft (~10) ran out of fuel prior to reaching the vicinity of the USN carriers.:

Task Force 58's first try at a mass night landing had been a failure.
Even with plenty of fuel plane losses probably would have been in-
acceptably high because of the lack of night-landing training of most pilots.
By Admiral Mitscher's reckoning only 6 fighters, ten dive bombers, and
four torpedo planes, 20 aircraft altogether, had been lost in combat. But
17 fighters, 35 dive bombers, and 28 Avengers had been lost in deck
crashes and water landings. Exactly 100 planes of 216 reaching the target
area had been lost. Yet personnel losses had hardly been greater than in the
Turkey Shoot the day before. The final count came to 16 pilots, 22 air
crew, two deck officers, and four ships' enlisted crewmen killed or missing.
Probably TF 58's loss in air crew was less than that suffered by pilots of
Admiral Ozawa's First Mobile Fleet in defending their carriers.

In military terms Mitscher's decision to strike the enemy late in the
day had paid off, though not as handsomely as he had hoped. He might
have done better to have kept shadowing Ozawa and to have deferred
Iaunching until morning. But his further decision to "turn on the lights"
reduced what admittedly were heavy plane and pilot losses and proved to
be of lasting benefit to the morale of his hard-worked air crew.

During a landing process that had taken nearly four hours, Task Force
58 had steamed steadily into an easterly wind at 22 knots. (Titans of the Seas, p,297

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The relatively small Dauntless losses were due to several factors, but mainly from the fact that VB-10 was the last to leave their carrier and spent the least time airborne:

It was a close-run thing; VB-16's returning SBDs averaged just 24 gal-
lons remaining while Bombing Ten - the last group to depart the task
force-had 54 gallons, or enough for roughly one more hour. (SBD Dauntless units of WW2)

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3 of the 35 dive bombers lost due to non-combat reasons were SBDs (29 SBDs participated in the attack), two from fuel starvation and one from a landing accident.

GregP said:

You should stop calling other people in this forum idiotic, Bill. You're not the only person in here to have original ideas and the people who do aren't idiots. Because you don't agree with some ideas doesn't make them delusions or even incorrect, though some likely are incorrect. It's fine to say someone is incorrect, but personal attacks like saying they're idiots don't belong in here. It doesn't make you look good and you're not the only sane person in here.

One source with a paragraph or more about Mitscher doesn't mean that source is right. All it means is that the text was the author's opinion. That's the thing about history, the people who wrote it almost always weren't there and are just doing their best, most times colored by their own political views - fake news that sounds plausible because the story fits the facts. I'm pretty sure you know that.

You're a good contributor; don't stop. Maybe tone down the criticism so it doesn't read quite so personally hostile. It would be nice if this forum was friendlier than what is laughingly called "Social Media," but really isn't all that often very social.

Just so this doesn't come off wrong, I have been guilty of similar posts in the past. I didn't really intend for them to read quite so hostile but, upon re-reading them the next morning, they DID come off pretty hostile, and I've tried to make my criticisms more tactful since then. I doubt you really meant to call people idiots, either. So, please don't think this is a "bash Bill Kelso" post. It's more of a,"You probably didn't realize quite how that post sounded" thing.

Cheers.

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You and i disagree sometimes, but I don't think you are delusional or an idiot. Same with Sr6 and most others on here. I don't pretend to have a monopoly on truth, and I am very well aware I'm not the only perceptive person here, nor do I think I'm immune to mistakes. To be clear, many here are better informed than I am about many aspects of WW2 aviation, that is what makes these discussions fun. I think this forum can be a little bit cliquish and I push back against that sometimes, but most of the people here seem nice and quite well informed. We are all just a bit opinionated.

But I do have limited patience for blatant self delusion or ideologically driven distortions. That doesn't mean the person is, but sometimes their posts are, and if it goes unchallenged more people can start taking on that kind of role and the whole thing spirals into stupidity. The suggestion that the Japanese were somehow inferior on some 'meta' level is irritating to me, (because it's not factual), especially when it's been clarified but persists in the face of the evidence / data. As is the tendency by some, sometimes, to put their thumb on the scale, cherry pick data etc., is also irritating and when you detect someone with that fanatical bent, you can basically either ignore it or point out the fallacies. Usually I ignore it, but sometimes I decide to step in front of it.

I am myself an historical researcher and author (not on aviation) yes, people who write historical narratives often have an agenda and are often at least partly mistaken. But history isn't limited to personal narratives of one or two people, it also includes a lot of far more prosaic - even boring - literary data, but which is typically a little less biased. Things like invoices, bills of lading, requisitions, inventories, lawsuits, testimonials from multiple witnesses etc. This too can be distorted, in a different way, but the more data you have and from as wide a variety of sources as possible, you can start to see a clearer picture. I think it is a bit of a cliche to claim that history is inevitably distorted. We can't ever know everything with full clarity - (without a time machine). But we can actually know a lot. More than people tend to assume.