Why did Japan perform so poorly in WW2?

[That NOS Guy]

To rotate veteran pilots, your nation needs a large population- not to mention training facilities and other logistical resources- to provide replacements for those you pull from the frontline. This lack of resources was a reason the Luftwaffe failed to do so during WW2 (source: How to Lose WWII).

Did Great Britain rotate it's pilots?

[Mr Bean]

Did Great Britain rotate it's pilots?

When possible, unlike the Japanese the British only had to fly alone for two and a half years and they large numbers of both Polish and French airmen to bolster the RAF's numbers, they also got American volunteers in smaller numbers.

[CaptHawkeye]

British pilots could also train in the safety of Canada. Many German pilot trainees were lost by roving Allied squadrons late in the war. These guys were new and usually flying training aircraft so they were in no position for a fight if they encountered enemies. I remember somewhere that German cadets were instructed to get their plane on ground as quickly as possible, even if it meant landing it somewhere it couldn't takeoff from again or wrecking it. Pilots were too valuable late in the war to be lost.

Then again, training standards for German pilots late war were almost non existent. Your average fighter pilot barely had more than 10 hours before he hoped into a 109 and was expected to shoot down bombers. Today you can't even legally get your Private Pilot's license on less than 40 hours.

[Irbis]

When possible, unlike the Japanese the British only had to fly alone for two and a half years and they large numbers of both Polish and French airmen to bolster the RAF's numbers, they also got American volunteers in smaller numbers.

Also: Czechoslovakia, Greece, Jewish volunteers, Benelux countries, Canada, India, Australian and NZ pilots, etc, etc. During Battle of Britain there were moments UK had 3-4 pilots per airworthy plane (granted, not all of them had training on newest type of modern aircraft), rotating pilots in such circumstances is easier. That, and radars largely eliminated need for reconnaissance patrols, allowing pilots to rest more effectively, and unlike on Pacific ocean, pilots shot down landed on friendly farm and were recovered next day.

The 'Pacific' bit is actually very important - once US or Japanese plane was even slightly damaged, the pilot landed in water more often than not and was as good as dead. USA thrown a lot of resources at creating methods of recovering these pilots, and eventually succeeded, Japan simply had its best cadre drown/be captured.

[Sea Skimmer]

below was meant for this thread and placed in Spanish one by mistake

---It’s a pretty interesting thing to look at, but Japan never managed to get over 500 planes into the Solomon’s and New Guinea at one time, effectively no more numerical strength then they had when striking at Pearl Harbor. Saburo Sakai made this point in his book Zero. Japan’s effective air strength didn’t increase until 1944, what they had before was the maximum effort. The 1944 forces deployed for the Philippines Sea and later the Leyte Campaign were larger, but had such awful pilot quality and generally dated aircraft they could be effective with convetional tactics.

These charts from the strategic bombing survey show how things slowly built up, and then just collapsed under US pressure.

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/33 ... hinng.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/44 ... ra.jpg/---

[Zinegata]

Wasn't I think the problem with the air crews was that they didn't rotate veteran pilots back to train the next batch so the quality of the air crews went down? Along with not having proper plans to expand the training of air crews to keep up with the attrition, you had out of 3000 pilot cadets only 20 or so graduate back in the 1930's which lent itself to excellent air crews but not good in terms of quantity?

It's one of the reasons; I've never seen much to indicate that the Japanese did a lot to spread hard-won frontline experience to its newly trained units.

But it wasn't the only reason. People have already mentioned the lack of manpower (which is further compounded by the fact that Japan had a puny civilian air service prior to the war, whereas the United States had a pool of civilian pilots available), but the much bigger problem later on was the lack of fuel.

Fuel-wise, Japan started the war with a massive deficit, and capturing the oil fields in SE Asia was never enough to pick up the slack. A lot of fuel produced in SE Asia was simply delivered to the fleet units stationed around the area, whereas the pilot training facilities were all in Japan. This was further compounded when the US submarines began destroying the Japanese tankers and reduced this fuel supply to a tiny trickle.

By the end of the war, a US pilot would probably have about 2 years worth of training and several hundred hours of actual flight time. The Japanese training period was not only shorter, but actual flight training would be limited to only a few hours. Japanese training methods had in fact degraded to the point that they tried to replace flight time by making pilots watch movies shot from the "cockpit-view"... but that's not gonna help very much at all.

[Sea Skimmer]

I think by the end of 1944 they were down to three months total training time, and then one month by the end of the war. IIRC the max length of prewar training was 64 months, though only 36 months was really full on military training as the early phase was a variable amount of middle-high school education being finished in a military academy. Unlike the Nazis the Japanese don't seem to have even been able to make lots of gliders to try to supplement a lack of early flight training late war either. The Germans were actually doing it all the way from prewar years with the Hitler youth, which was a pretty clever idea for mass mobilization to weed out the worst of the crop.

[CaptHawkeye]

Wasn't wood one of the things the Japanese had in plenty of supply? You'd think training gliders would be right up there on bang-for-buck systems the Japanese were desperately in need of late war.

[Mr Bean]

Wasn't wood one of the things the Japanese had in plenty of supply? You'd think training gliders would be right up there on bang-for-buck systems the Japanese were desperately in need of late war.

Gliders don't fly by magic, they need a tug plane and the Japanese never had a good one. They were using Betty bombers as transports due to lack of anything but civilian airliners as planes. Again it was the engines numbers game. They needed the same engines for tug planes as for bombers. There was never enough to go around for heavy bombers, they had few medium bombers and were only able to get decent numbers of light bombers during the war which were being replaced as fast as they were made.

[Sea Skimmer]

You didn't use tugs for this, you launched them off steep hills with a group of kids pulling them. This was actually a pretty common way of flying gliders in the interwar period.
http://ww2db.com/images/other_hitleryouth107.jpg

I'd assume lack of gliders came down to lack of labor and above all lack of skilled labor, even wooden ones need some skill to make as well as metal hardware or glue. They after all had 12 year old school children working in aircraft factories and even radio factories by 1945. Some factories were so badly staffed they had to give up production shifts, because workers on the less skilled shifts ruined more then they produced. Japan's extremely low levels of technical education were a factor in this, most of the population just had no conception of how mechanical things should work. In rural areas they had fairly young children digging out tree stumps to make into Methanol for aircraft fuel. Actual classroom instruction while at school was often under two hours a day.

One thing I know they did use gliders for, with tow aircraft, were the trainers for the Oka rocket bombs since it was unreasonable to actually fly one for training. In that case the same bombers that would fly the operational mission could have served as tugs.

[thejester]

Did Great Britain rotate it's pilots?

When possible, unlike the Japanese the British only had to fly alone for two and a half years and they large numbers of both Polish and French airmen to bolster the RAF's numbers, they also got American volunteers in smaller numbers.

Don't think they had anything to do with it - my understanding was that it was a conscious decision by the RAF to rotate pilots back to OTUs upon completion of tours, and likewise a conscious decision by the Luftwaffe to keep pilots on operations indefinitely. Keep in mind even during the Battle of Britain RAF pilot strength increased, although many were of a lesser quality, and that was before the EATS spigot was turned on. IIRC there was also an effort from October 1940 onwards to start rotating Battle veterans and what was left of pre-war Fighter Command back to OTUs.

[Sea Skimmer]

The Luftwaffe didn't exactly keep fighter pilots on operations indefinitely; they had an even dumber system. Once you got 100 kills you became a general and served in purely a command role with no more flying at all except for liaison purposes. This lasted into 1942 as far as I can tell, then they began letting those commanders fly in combat again. Not sure what they did with bomber crews.

The British did adapt a policy of rotating pilots to the training units, and placing them in new squadrons later in the Battle of Britain, because early on they would put active squadrons on rest, and replace them with squadrons of entirely green pilots which would then get rapidly cut up.

[thejester]

Downing did rotate squadrons but the replacements weren't necessarily 'green'; Bungay suggests the only inexperienced squadrons who went into 11 Group were Leigh Mallory's rejects and even then the problem wasn't that they were straight from OTUs, it was that they were prewar flyers who hadn't gained experienced over Dunkirk or the Channel and so hadn't abandoned obsolete tactics like the vic yet. Tuck got a crack at fixing 257 but that seems to have been unique before the ABC system formalised rebuilding squadrons using the survivors as an ad hoc cadre.

Something that's always really interested me in general, how military organisations manage the corporate memory (for want of a better term) that veterans represent. At a complete right angle to the thread but went to a lecture the other day that talked about the decline in the tactical skill of Napoleon's armies and how he used increasingly crude methods like the grand battery to compensate. Which leads you to ask - why did tactical skill decline? Obviously men die in battle but it's not like the campaigns prior to 1805 were bloodless. Even before 1812 there's a decline in tactical skill; why didn't the veteran core retrain the bulk of the army and allow them to assume that veteran mantle from 1807 onwards?

[Alkaloid]

God,not this shit again. Justify your comments.

Perciveal didnt have the relevant staff training sure,but his lower level organisation skill against the IRA and pre war is recognised.

I swear that everytime I see this pop up,I see a revisionist intent on brushing away British strategic weakness in the East and ignoring the Japs tactical performance. I'm too biased by previous experience,so please excuse my discourtesy if I wish you to elaborate,even though the burden of proof is on me.

I don't mean the British should ever have won, they were pretty thoroughly boned from the get go, but the manner in which they lost was so unprofessional and disjointed that it is a pretty stark contrast from much of the war. Even the initial European campaign didn't devolve into the sort of shambles that Singapore did, in no small part because no two members of the general staff agreed with each other on how they should proceed and seemed more interested in blaming each other after the fact than they did in actually preventing the fall from occurring or minimising the damage it did, and that seriously tainted the way the Japanese Army expected Allied land forces to behave when they started to encounter actual competent officers commanding the troops.

[phongn]

Something that's always really interested me in general, how military organisations manage the corporate memory (for want of a better term) that veterans represent. At a complete right angle to the thread but went to a lecture the other day that talked about the decline in the tactical skill of Napoleon's armies and how he used increasingly crude methods like the grand battery to compensate. Which leads you to ask - why did tactical skill decline? Obviously men die in battle but it's not like the campaigns prior to 1805 were bloodless. Even before 1812 there's a decline in tactical skill; why didn't the veteran core retrain the bulk of the army and allow them to assume that veteran mantle from 1807 onwards?

I think the term you're looking for is "institutional memory".

As for the loss of tactical skill and the veterans: do we know the cross-section of fatalities, casualties and veteran survivors? There might not have been enough leaders surviving as time wore on to bring up the rest of the fresh troops to quality.

[Blayne]

Out of curiosity does anyone know the Russian system for rotating pilots during WWII?

[Sea Skimmer]

Far as I've gathered, the Russians did reassign some skilled pilots to training units, but this seems to have been more of a staff job then hands on training , and it doesn't seem to have been a large scale policy. Russian aces typically seem to fight the whole war or until death.

But what they did do on a large scale was take the best pilots and group them into guards fighter regiments. These regiments would only be committed to major offensive and defensive actions, sparing them from constant attrition losses day to day. They did the same thing with ground attack and bomber pilots. This fit in neatly with overall Russian doctrine which called for as many high quality/high firepower assets as possible to be held back from day to day battle and massed at the highest levels to overwhelm the Hitlerite invaders at decisive moments.

[ChaserGrey]

that they took Singapore because Britain essentially abandoned it as soon as things got hairy, a problem compounded by the British habit of sideways promoting officers that proved incompetent to Singapore rather than stripping them of command.

The other problem was that most of the "British" troops fighting in the Singapore campaign were actually Indian troops with British officers. For some odd reason it turns out people from Colony A aren't terribly motivated to help their colonial overlords hold onto Colony B, where B is in fact not anywhere near A. I find it hard to blame them for not jumping right up to die for King and Empire.

[ChaserGrey]

I'd assume lack of gliders came down to lack of labor and above all lack of skilled labor, even wooden ones need some skill to make as well as metal hardware or glue.

Designing a decent glider is also relatively hard, as engineering tasks go, mostly because there's no tolerance for weight gain anywhere in the design or construction process. Japan was also very short on engineering talent- to the point where the fighter that was supposed to replace the Zero (A7M Reppu) never got into service because Mitsubishi, one of the largest aircraft companies in Japan, had enough engineers available to work on either the Reppu or improved Zero models, but not both. (And since the improved Zeros could be available sooner, guess which won?) I'm not sure the Japanese aircraft industry could have handled another project that demanding, tbh.

[Sea Skimmer]

I doubt that was the problem, given that numerous glider designs existed military and civilian that could have been easily adapted, and work on Army gliders for transport of combat troops, as well as for a glider tank (as in tank with glider wings...) was kept up through 1944. In 1945 they actually did have an active project for a suicide glider to be fired by rocket assist off a ramp to defend beaches, and a training glider specifically for the J8M rocket interceptor but neither was going to make a good simulator for a normal aircraft.

As it was pilot training and indeed almost all flying was suspended just before the end of the war, owing to the collapse of aircraft production and the fuel shortage becoming final, as the US began bombing all the oil refineries in Japan with the new, and very effective APQ-13 radar. This meant whatever little crude was left couldn’t even be made into gasoline. But this would not have been known in 1944, or even 1943 when serious fuel shortages were already becoming a problem. Plus like I was saying, Germany was doing this even before WW2 began. Its not for nothing that at times US commanders called Japan a fifth rate air power.

[Captain Seafort]

The other problem was that most of the "British" troops fighting in the Singapore campaign were actually Indian troops with British officers. For some odd reason it turns out people from Colony A aren't terribly motivated to help their colonial overlords hold onto Colony B, where B is in fact not anywhere near A. I find it hard to blame them for not jumping right up to die for King and Empire.

I consider that statement to be highly offensive. The Indian army, far from not being motivated, fought hard for the King (or King-Emperor) throughout the war, from the western desert to Malaya.

[Sea Skimmer]

Tens of thousands of Indian troops agreed to fight for the Germans and Japanese after surrendering, motivation levels varied.

[Captain Seafort]

Tens of thousands of Indian troops agreed to fight for the Germans and Japanese after surrendering, motivation levels varied.

And hundreds of thousands played a vital role in giving them a kicking. Without Indian troops how well would O'Connor's offensive have done? How could Italian East Africa, or Iraq, or Syria been taken? Above all else, where did the troops who fought at Imphal, Mandalay and Meiktila come from? Sure, some of them binned it very quickly, and some fought for the Axis, but the same could be said of any of the allies. It's the implication in CG's statement that all Indian troops were inherently unreliable that I find offensive.

[That NOS Guy]

And hundreds of thousands played a vital role in giving them a kicking. Without Indian troops how well would O'Connor's offensive have done? How could Italian East Africa, or Iraq, or Syria been taken? Above all else, where did the troops who fought at Imphal, Mandalay and Meiktila come from? Sure, some of them binned it very quickly, and some fought for the Axis, but the same could be said of any of the allies. It's the implication in CG's statement that all Indian troops were inherently unreliable that I find offensive.

How silly, you'd have to reach pretty far for that one. He prefaced the statement immediately with 'in the Singapore campaign'. I don't know how you got that far reaching critique of the Indian Army from that, but oh well.

[Irbis]

Out of curiosity does anyone know the Russian system for rotating pilots during WWII?

Russian relied on enormous reserve of pre-war trained glider pilots, including women, which made replacing losses somewhat easier. There is a reason both female air aces were Soviet veterans.

Tens of thousands of Indian troops agreed to fight for the Germans and Japanese after surrendering, motivation levels varied.

And? By that standard, one can point to French, British, American, Norwegian, Benelux, etc. volunteers serving in SS Divisions. Especially to that French SS unit destroyed defending Hitler's bunker. On the flip side, many colonial units are considered to be best British units of the war, heck, colonial white troops from Canada and Anzac were considered to be better motivated and harder fighting than most British mainland units.