> Swentzel was later awarded the Navy Cross for relentlessly pressing the attack against overwhelming odds. His actions were in accordance to the highest traditions of the United States Navy.
I never cease to be amazed of the performance of the US Navy in WW2. How did these "highest traditions" come about? America did not really fight naval battles in WW1. Before that they won a quick naval war against the Spanish in 1898, but arguably the Spanish were well behind technologically, in an era when technology was evolving by leaps and bounds.
In WW2 though, the US sailors were simply incredible. And the absolute majority of them (maybe 99.9%) did not have any prior combat experience. How did the US Navy turn from an inexperienced Navy into the most fierce-some naval force ever assembled in history?
And it's not just the industrial might of the US. Sure, in many encounters the US Navy just had more and better warships. But at least until 1943, there were plenty of encounters where it didn't, Midway being obviously the most famous.
There was something about the fighting spirit of the US Navy, but how did that get nurtured, considering that the US was a nation at peace?
My own view, and with multiple ancestors that were in the Pacific Naval theater and survived.
The US military invested, and still does, a lot in damage control and survivability. Everything is designed to maximize the equipment and people that can survive to fight another day. This has a significant cost, but the US has always leaned into their prodigious production capacity in support of this objective. This is doctrinal and fundamental, the US really goes to great lengths to make sure every soldier comes home, preferably with minimal damage.
In a long war, experience compounds. You can build a core of savvy battle-hardened veterans in a matter of months if your soldiers can learn the necessary lessons of the conflict without dying in the process. Experienced savvy soldiers are effective and difficult to kill. In many military traditions, these lessons are learned immediately before dying. US doctrine is that they learn their lessons quickly, survive, and adapt. That may not always come off, but that is the approach and has worked well for the US. There is no substitute for contact with the adversary when it comes to learning; how quickly you can adapt to those learnings determines outcomes.
No country's military is ever prepared for real war. US doctrine has been that they will survive their hard lessons, unpleasant as they usually are, and leverage that experience behind their vast productive capabilities. With respect to the US Navy specifically, the US has always had a strong naval traditions, by virtue of their location in the world. Even when they aren't at their peak, they've always known what they are doing.
And US torpedoes didn't work for the first two years. Meaning, they bounced and sank. Almost always. Two years.
Apparently at some point somebody noticed that one that worked had hit at a shallow angle, and arranged for that until they got fixed torpedoes. My impression was that this was not communicated to other submariners. I don't know how long the trick was used.
Culturally the U.S. inherited a strong and aggressive maritime tradition from the pre-eminent naval civilization, the English. American colonists were famously pirates, some of whom operated as far away as the Indian Ocean. The spiritual father of the U.S. Navy is John Paul Jones, a brawling pirate and revolutionary war figure who responded "I have not yet begun to fight!" when asked to surrender.
"I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast; for I intend to go in harm's way."
Letter to Le Ray de Chaumont (16 November 1778)
"The future naval officers, who live within these walls, will find in the career of the man whose life we this day celebrate, not merely a subject for admiration and respect, but an object lesson to be taken into their innermost hearts. . . . Every officer . . . should feel in each fiber of his being an eager desire to emulate the energy, the professional capacity, the indomitable determination and dauntless scorn of death which marked John Paul Jones above all his fellows."
U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, address to Naval Academy
Another important aspect of suitability is the building time for new ships, in most cases you will only be able to fight the current war with the ships that you already have or are currently under construction. So having ships survive is important, and it is why so many of the WW1/2 navies were so afraid of using them.
The war was over after the Marianas were taken, if not at Midway. It doesn’t seem right to discount the industrial might like you do when the US produced dozens and dozens of carriers and escort carriers while the Japanese produced four or five more.
But beyond that lots of reasons,
- Intelligence and damage control (mentioned elsewhere)
- The air war of attrition started early, with the Japanese sending flights 600 miles from Rabaul to the Coral Sea. They didn’t rotate their pilots out to recuperate as the Americans did. The average Japanese pilot was a novice compared to his more numerous American adversaries by 44, and flying a very inferior plane compared to the newer F6F’s. And he could expect to fly sorties until he was killed, which by the end of the war was not much longer than one flight.
- Despite starting the war with Pearl Harbor, Japanese doctrine at the top never really moved on beyond Mahan and their plans tended to obsess with engineering a repeat of Tsushima. Yamamoto’s Midway disaster was an attempt to do just this. Compare to the American carrier raid tactics from Doolittle onwards.
- The Japanese were successfully starved of fuel, and for that reason couldn’t even get their big ships out of port before Leyte, which was a doomed banzai charge at sea.
It doesn’t answer the question on USN motivations but does a great job explaining why the Japanese were stuck in a rut and rapidly surpassed in terms of tactics, morale, and skill.
Japan's bigger problem was that for all that area they conquered in the Pacific, they obtained no industrial capacity. It was just space they had to garrison and supply.
There was something deeply irrational about their decision to go to war. The same irrationality led to subsequent errors, including Midway.
I don't know if it was that deeply irrational, I mean beyond the decision to initiate a war with the United States in the first place.
At the start of the war it wasn't clear that carrier-based air power would be able to effectively suppress ground-based air power. The prevailing theory was that carriers were too fragile to do this. The US Army and elements of the Navy with surface warship backgrounds believed this, too.
That turned out to be super wrong, and the Americans won much faster than expected by cutting off and bypassing Japanese strongholds (Rabaul, Formosa) and keeping their airfields impotent with regular carrier raids.
If those hadn't been the case, the Japanese strategy of seizing "unsinkable aircraft carriers" would appear to make more sense in retrospect. The thinking was that an initial crippling blow to the fleet plus the cost of clawing these back would be too much for the US.
Wrong, and in fact many of the Japanese brass thought it was wrong. But irrational would imply that there wasn't a theory, and there was a theory.
The big mistakes were: starting a war with your largest trading partner, allying with countries that could not make up the trade difference, and assuming the country attacked would just give up rather than exploit its factor of ~6 advantage in production capability.
Attacking Pearl Harbor, in particular, was a lethal mistake. The "sneak attack" guaranteed the US would be filled with a thirst for vengeance. Japan might have done better by simply bypassing US possessions (including the Philippines) and going after European colonial areas to the south.
The US only won much faster than expected if one didn't understand how quickly war production ramped up. All that really mattered was that the US was going to do that.
And, having done that, the US would just swamp anything Japan could do.
That was a mistake, but not such a spectacularly fatal one.
However, it does illustrate the underlying irrational process by which Japan drifted into the wider war. The decision to go to war in China wasn't the product of deliberate reasoning at the top, but was the result of actions of lower ranked hotheads in the Army.
I have a few ideas, and I’ve read about this for years, fascinated and frustrated that my dad was in WW2 but never talked about it. Most recently I’ve read The Pacific War[1], a comprehensive classic.
The USA had two huge long-term advantages that Japan could not match: intelligence and production. For most of the war we were reading most of the Japanese encrypted communications. It’s one reason that we won the battle of Midway, for instance.
In terms of production, the US moved its economy into a war-footing quickly and nearly completely. People were planting Victory Gardens so that food producers could use less petroleum for farming and fertilization; tires were rationed. Over the long term it’s impossible to see the relatively small island of Japan standing toe-to-toe with the USA.
E.g., I found a 50-year-old dissertation [2] on the subject which claims that in 1939 over 90% of Japanese imports of petroleum, copper, and several iron and steel products were from the USA. It’s one reason they kept expanding during the war, despite the risk of being unable to hold territory: they needed the resources.
Certainly there are other factors, but these have always stood out to me as incontrovertible advantages.
And Midway still ended up with a number of cards falling the US way to be the decisive victory that it was. Might not have made a difference at the end of the day--but it turned the US to a much more offensive position earlier than it might otherwise have had. And greatly weakened Japanese options for a negotiated peace.
Not to forget, Yamamoto predicted a six months time window for Japan after Pearl Habour. After these six months, he knew Japan has lost. And the Japanese carried on for qyite a bot longer than that.
But yeah, the US Navy played the cards they had incredibly well. They got somewhat lucky with the promotion of Nimitz. The proboem so is, as it is with the Soviets in WW2 and every single WW2 general who managed to write a well selling book about hinself, to see past the individual hero stories at the bigger picture.
Personnaly, I think the biggest plunder of the Japanese was to not take out the harbour infrastructure at Pearl Habour. Not that it wouod have changed anything in the long run so. That, and that they failed abysmally at submarine and anti-submarine warfare.
> It’s one reason that we won the battle of Midway
Interesting story here that Nimitz had to make an extraordinary gamble the intercepted Japanese communications were talking about Midway island and not somewhere in the Aleutians (the other possible candidate). The gamble paid off and the Japanese navy was always on the defensive after that point.
> Interesting story here that Nimitz had to make an extraordinary gamble the intercepted Japanese communications were talking about Midway island and not somewhere in the Aleutians (the other possible candidate).
> Determined to dispel such doubts, Rochefort’s team famously devised a ruse. Via submarine, they sent a message to the base on Midway instructing personnel there to radio Pearl Harbor that the salt-water evaporators on the base had broken down. Two days later, a Japanese message was intercepted that reported “AF” was running out of fresh drinking water.
[Blatant advertisement] If you're interested in knowing how the Navy's dominating performance in WW2 came to be, read my 102-year-old father's memoir of the war, completed a couple years ago [0].
He started as a greener-than-green ensign shortly before the war began, but you can see from the book how he made the effort to think about every little thing, and just got better and better. I suspect that was the secret, but the book quotes no less than Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, who was also stumped as to how this group of average folks did what they ultimately did. Plus, I think they were aggressive as hell.
And so, a month after the war ended, the one-time green ensign was not only captain of his ship, but also a squadron commander ("commodore") -- "the old man" at age 25. Repeat this in a few thousand instances and you've really got a navy.
The USN was the largest navy in the world (technically tied for it with the RN) for the entirety of the Washington Naval Treaty system. When the naval arms limitation treaties broke down, circa 1936, their spending ramped up at about the same pace as the other two nations that matter (IJN and RN), e.g. the first battleship commissioned by any of those 3 navies after the breakdown was HMS KGV (Oct 1, 1940), the second was HMS PoW (Jan 19, 41) but the third was USS North Carolina (April 41). They had actually spent an awful lot on naval technology during the 1930's- e.g. they had the best engineering plants in the world thanks to their small tube high pressure boilers that enabled unitized machinery.
As for combat experience, of those three navies, the only one with serious battle experience was the RN- and Jutland was so unlike the aero-naval war that actually occurred 1939-1945 that it is actively misleading (e.g. for Jutland the RN apparently forgot to signal to HMS Campania, the only seaplane carrier in the Grand Fleet, to make steam, so she was left behind. Such a mistake would have been unthinkable during WW2).
What might be confusing you is that while the US spent a large amount of money on its navy, and quite a bit on its air force (at the time technically still a part of the US Army as the US Army Air Corps), it spent very very little on its ground forces- in 1937 the US Army ground forces were smaller than that Yugoslavia! That was the branch that came from nothing, with very little experience, and grew exceptionally fast. It did indeed lead to problems during the war, as a whole lot of people got a whole lot of promotions very fast- e.g. General Mark Clark made O5 July 1, 1940, and was made O10 March 10, 1945.
The 1937 UK army was larger than the 1937 US Army, and the US Army at its peak was about 3 and a half times larger than the UK Army at its peak, so this rapid expansion is much more notable in the US Army than in the UK. If you look at Army Group commanders during the war, all of the British ones except Leese had at least 1 star on Sep 1 1939; all of the Americans who would go on to command Army Groups were Majors/Lt. Col's except for Devers who was a full Colonel.
The US Navy really did have a long, strong history.
If you read the Patrick O'Brien historical novels set in the Napoleonic wars you can get a good feel for how the British Royal Navy saw the US Navy as a serious force, although mostly concentrated in US waters at that time.
The US Navy was smaller than the British Navy, but they built bigger frigates (eg, the British frigates were mostly armed with 36 18-pounder cannons, while the US frigates carried 44 24-pounders).
This caused significant problems for the British in the War of 1812.
Military "traditions" are a weird thing, but old battles definitely count, especially when you win some against a bigger opponent.
Also, as mentioned elsewhere the Washington Treaty gave the US and Britain the equal biggest navies in the world throughout the 1930s. For a while during the 1920s and 30s Britain and the US were serious naval rivals too, and the affected how the US Navy thought about itself.
> How did the US Navy turn from an inexperienced Navy into the most fierce-some naval force ever assembled in history?
Numbers[1], technology, practice in the interwar years[2], and a lot of trial and error.
Also, the war in the Pacific was largely an air war, where both of the two belligerents were more-or-less figuring both doctrine and how to implement it from scratch.
Also, it helped that Japan could not take advantage many of its victories early in the war, due to lack of numbers, supply shortages, and an absolutely rotten command culture (It had a habit of firing competent admirals because they didn't win hard enough.)
[1] By the end of the war, American shipyards were building an aircraft carrier, two escort carriers, two heavy cruisers, and ten destroyers every month.
[2] Being surrounded by two oceans, the US has always depended on its navy in its ability to wage war.
Could it be that Midway was simply that lucky spell that started the whole tradition? I don't mean to be provocative or anything, it's a genuine question of mine. I've read many times about the Battle of Midway and how it could have easily gone the other way (there are even several YouTube videos that show the whole thing nicely animated from both sides with fog of war).
If Japan had prevailed in Midway, supposedly inflicting to the US an equally devastating tally: even if the USA would have eventually won the war out of sheer productive capabilities, the traditions would have probably be written much latter if at all.
Up until Midway both powers were equally fearsome. One could even argue that Japan had MORE experience given it had already won against a superior enemy in 1905 (Imperial Russia).
One factor could be that industrial might quite likely correlates with crew performance. The job of a sailor is essentially to maintain and operate a large floating industrial complex. Engineering skills are not always necessary, but experience working on a factory floor would directly translate to the psychological conditions and technical problems a sailor would encounter within a warship.
For an example of the opposite dynamic in action, look at the largely agrarian Russia's naval performance in the Russo-Japanese war, where the incompetence of the officers was almost matched by the incompetence of the sailors. If you've grown up working on a farm, you're unlikely to adjust smoothly to working in an engine room.
Nimitz faced superior Japanese forces at the crucial defensive actions of the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway.
The US navy has so much respect for him, a construction project was haulted because it could cast a shadow on this mans house.
"In 1998, the house became a bizarre flashpoint in the construction of the new Bay Bridge when the Navy refused to let Caltrans engineers onto Yerba Buena Island. Why? Their design called for a span that would cast a shadow on the Nimitz House."
I do consider Nimitz to be the greatest American warrior ever, but the question is, how come a man like him got in the position where he could add so much value? In WW1, the British, who had hundreds of years of actual naval tradition, managed to find themselves with John Jellicoe in operational command. With all the chips on his side, Jellicoe managed to botch the battle of Jutland. A victory there would have shortened WW1 by 2 years.
Somehow, almost magically, it looks to me, the US Navy had the right promotion criteria in the inter-war period. But how did that happen? Peacetime nations tend to promote people that don't turn out to be quite the best in wartime, Jellicoe being a prime example. The US Navy unlocked the secret. But what secret exactly?
I think the secret was that the rapid growth of the Navy ensured lots of promotional opportunities to replace the WW1 people who had ossified in place.
You had lots of mid-grade officers who had to compete to be promoted, an influx of new blood, and plenty of places to stuff idiots with political juice.
The key thing was the timeline between 1918 and 1942. If you compare early WW2 to the Civil War, in the civil war you were only 13-15 years removed from the Mexican War. Lots of old Napoleonic ideas were still in the heads of the officer corps, and it took a lot of blood and guts for officers like Sherman and Grant to work their way up and adapt. (The Confederates never figured it out)
We glorify the feats of our fighting men and women, but the reality is that a modern military is perhaps the greatest bureaucracy devised. Bureaucracy rewards the embrace of inertia, and only talented leaders AND timing/luck can break it.
Really? I'd consider ching lee to be much much better than Nimitz. Won marksmanship awards with defective eyes, helped defend a squad of Marines from snipers, translated his gun marksmanship philosophy to battleship gunnery, corrected the naval armament calibrations for gunpowder and issued corrections himself, wasn't too proud of a surface officer and admitted early on that carriers would take the day, personally elevated the role of the radar operators (and sometimes operated them himself) and pummelled Japanese ships from behind squalls because he could see them when they couldn't see him...
No argument about how the Brits botched Jutland. But since the German Navy was a non-factor after that anyway, how would a victory have shortened the war by 2 years?
The Russians had offered to the British to land on the Baltic shore of Germany and march towards Berlin, if only the Brits could take them there. With the High Seas Fleet still in being, the Royal Navy had its Grand Fleet tied in patrol duties in the North Sea.
In the event of a victory at Jutland, the UK could have taken the Russian offer. Russia was quite serious about going on an offensive, they started the Brusilov campaign only days after Jutland. If the Germans were forced to move troops to protect Berlin, then either the Western or the Eastern front might have collapsed.
Roosevelt personally ordered him out to Pearl Harbor to take the role of CINCPAC. King appears to have been ambivalent about him, at least up to Midway.
Maybe my headcanon is wrong but my understanding is that the us navy utterly sucked at the beginning of WWII (e.g. torpedoes that didn't work, Halsey) - and it was very likely through a combination of "figure your shit out", natural selection, and at the top promoting a handful of amazing no bullshit admirals (king, ching lee) that got the US out of it. There was still incompetence in the later years (cough cough Halsey)
One of the actually longstanding traditions on the US navy is irreverence to decorum or the chain of command when it matters, too, so that sort of operational agility probably was a big factor.
Yeah I feel like the overwhelming naval victory at Midway and in the overall war kind of masked the flaws and mistakes of the WWII US navy in the public perception. The WWII US navy made many operational and tactical mistakes. For example, even with the major intelligence advantage, the Battle of Midway was pretty dicey and a lot of luck was required to achieve the unthinkable result of sinking 4 carriers. Don't get me wrong, the US probably would have won the naval war regardless due to the materiel advantage.
I think a big part of the "fighting spirit" the OOP mentioned came from the Pearl Harbor attack. It galvanized everyone into action and lessons were learnt and mistakes were fixed very quickly, at all level of the military. For example, after the lost of Lexington, fuel lines were drained and filled with inert gas and that lesson was propagated quickly through the fleet. The fast turnaround between mistakes and lessons learnt probably also came hand in hand with how individuals were empowered to make decisions and took responsibility.
On other side of the coin, I think the IJN incompetence got highlighted and not enough credits were given. Their carrier divisions were very very highly trained and operated at a much higher tempo than the US at the start of war. The IJN night battle tactics were also very deadly. Even after Midway, they still went toe to toe with the USN during the attritional Guadalcanal campaigns. Despite their doctrine and culture giving them plenty of weaknesses and blind spots, it also gave them many strengths. I dare say during the preparation for the war, the "fighting spirit" and the effectiveness of the IJN was just as high.
In my opinion, the myths surrounding the Pacific naval war obscure very interesting stories from both sides with plenty of lessons that are still applicable today.
He did. Two typhoons actually. He also fell for the Japanese faint at Leyte Gulf.
But he led the successful raids against the Japanese in February and March '42, and then launched Doolittle's planes in April.
But most importantly, he replaced Admiral Ghormley as the theater commander for Guadalcanal, and changed the fortunes of that most crucial campaign. A loss at Guadalcanal would have undone the victory at Midway. Conversely, the victory at Guadalcanal, in pretty much every historian's mind, spelled the end of the IJN's dominance in the Pacific.
For that, Halsey should get the tribute. But I personally also applaud Nimitz who visited Guadalcanal, assessed the situation and decided Ghormley had to go. And who also figured out that Halsey, who until then was just a raider, would be able to switch to an administrator and be an excellent one at that.
Clearly the USN was highly effective at inculcating its institutional memory. Look at Commander Ernest Evans, a Native American with no family tradition of naval service, who earned a posthumous Medal of Honor at the incredible battle of Samar (the “Last Stand of the Tin-can Sailors”):
Question. How did the Americans win? The forces were:
Japanese: One junk with five Japanese officers and seventy-eight enlisted men. Armed with a 75mm pack howitzer, six machine guns, and over one hundred rifles.
Americans: Two junks with two bazookas, one .50 caliber heavy machine gun, one .30 caliber light machine gun, several rifles, and grenades.
It seems the .50 cal was the Americans' only advantage. That said, when I think about how this battle may have played out, a .50 could have been incredibly useful since it could outrange other weapons and shoot through basically all available cover, unlike the rifles and machine guns, but also fire much faster than the artillery.
I mean... the article explains it in detail. The bazookas took out the howitzer, the HMG was useful, and later they just got within range and spammed hand grenades to great effect before wrapping it up with a melee boarding party (I presume the enemy was basically defeated by this point).
This got me curious and while a quick search didn't give me much info on what kind of "howitzer" these junks had, this similar naval gun had an optimistic fire rate of 5 rounds per minute and was less effective against agile targets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20_cm/12_short_naval_gun
So my guess would be light, slow, inaccurate gun against highly maneuverable bazookas. It seems to me like a bazooka vs tank situation. Tanks are more powerful but a well positioned bazooka will kill a tank.
Howitzers are built to fire at an upward angle -- perhaps less accurate overall when going up against a target where both the gun platform and the enemy are moving? The bazooka, on the other hand, fired at a flat trajectory.
To fire a howitzer you need to calculate the angle at which you need to fire and amount of propellant. It seems like an incredibly hard thing to do on a ship and with the enemy maneuvering. It's likely you could only guess and hope for the best.
Usually howitzers fire, observe where the shell lands and then adapt. Here this couldn't work as ships changed positions.
In other words, you are right. Having something that you can point and shoot is easier to do. This might not be true if they could aim their howitzer low but then you get the fact that howitzer cannot be steadied (it will roll with the ship) while a human holding a bazooka can do some stabilization and fire at an exact moment the target is in crosshairs.
Making a bazooka much more like a gun on a sailing ship, able to time their fire with the roll of the ship, while a howitzer would be more akin to a mortar on an 19th century bomb ketch, where precision of aiming, powder needed for the shot and timing of the fuse are arrived at by trial and error. (I am reading through the Hornblower books for the umpteenth time, so Napoleonic sea warfare is fresh in my mind.)
I doubt the howitzer was that great. The battled opened with a hit on the foremast from the howitzer and it seems the ship still worked well enough to participate.
I've been a big WWII guy my entire life but never realized how much I'd been shortchanging myself with neglect of naval stuff until I started watching Drachinifel.
It's no wonder the US didn't mint another Purple Heart until 1976. They were prepared for more casualties in the Japanese home islands than the nation saw in all conflicts since, combined.
Probably the same reason why there will always be a debate about the net lives saved/taken with the atomic bombings. The Japanese were indoctrinated to keep fighting regardless of the odds. Plenty of them wanted to fight on even after the bombs were dropped. The fact that it was a hopeless cause was beside the point.
Or, maybe they just had a broken radio and didn't know what was going on. Shame the article doesn't say more about the enemy's motivations.
Great shame there wasn't two Japanese Junks, so they could do the Thomas Cochrane/Nelson thing of attacking boat #2 across from the deck of boat #1 having stormed it.
I never cease to be amazed of the performance of the US Navy in WW2. How did these "highest traditions" come about? America did not really fight naval battles in WW1. Before that they won a quick naval war against the Spanish in 1898, but arguably the Spanish were well behind technologically, in an era when technology was evolving by leaps and bounds.
In WW2 though, the US sailors were simply incredible. And the absolute majority of them (maybe 99.9%) did not have any prior combat experience. How did the US Navy turn from an inexperienced Navy into the most fierce-some naval force ever assembled in history?
And it's not just the industrial might of the US. Sure, in many encounters the US Navy just had more and better warships. But at least until 1943, there were plenty of encounters where it didn't, Midway being obviously the most famous.
There was something about the fighting spirit of the US Navy, but how did that get nurtured, considering that the US was a nation at peace?
I genuinely have no idea.