jlf1961
Posts: 14840
Joined: 6/10/2008
From: Somewhere Texas
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quote:
ORIGINAL: WhoreMods
And they lost, didn't they?
The Japanese did not lose due to ship design.
They lost for two reasons, and only two.
1) They did not destroy the American Aircraft carriers at Pearl Harbor, which were their primary targets
2) They did not destroy the American Carriers at Midway, and in the process lost four of their six fleet carriers.
Once they lost carrier superiority in the Pacific, they basically lost the war, everything after Midway was nothing more than prolonging the inevitable.
Yamamoto made it clear that IF the American Carriers were not destroyed, and the Japanese navy could not establish fleet superiority in the first months of the war, there was no way Japan could win.
Consider the logistic nightmare of the Japanese Empire.
1) No large amounts of resources on the home islands, which is the primary reason for invading Korea and Manchuria in the thirties.
2) No oil reserves anywhere near the home islands, making it necessary to invade Indonesia and Borneo.
The second was the worst of their problems, since it meant that all of their oil had to be transported by ship.
Now, the oil problem would have been easy to solve IF the Americans had lost their carriers, since it was the carrier forces that allowed the first strikes against the empire.
Those carriers stopped the invasion of Port Moresby, made the invasion of Guadalcanal possible, giving the US a foothold in the Solomons, which in turn gave a base of operations out of Guadalcanal and Tulagi for PT Boats, those plywood demons hated by the Japanese.
Add to that it gave the Allies a good base of operations for American Subs, allowing them to patrol out of relatively forward bases, needing to return to Australia or Pearl Harbor for major overhauls and refits.
If the Japanese had taken Port Moresby, New Guinea would have become impossible to hold, and it would have put Australia in range of Japanese land based bombers, and resupply of American forces in Australia would have been impossible.
And Australia was strategically important to support operations in the South West Pacific.
Consider this point, the first US carrier launched after Pearl Harbor was the USS Essex, which went operational in December 1942.
The only Navy ships taking the war to the Japanese in any big way were the submarines, and while effective, they were hampered by the fact the Japanese never really adopted a convoy system.
We might not have actually lost the war, but the war in the Pacific would have been a very different one.
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Boy, it sure would be nice if we had some grenades, don't you think?
You cannot control who comes into your life, but you can control which airlock you throw them out of.
Paranoid Paramilitary Gun Loving Conspiracy Theorist AND EQUAL OPPORTUNI
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