What if the US carriers were all lost at PH/Coral Sea?

[Patroklos]

Then your problem is they could do the same thing to us. And it would be easier, as all they would have to do is hunt off Hawaii with their entire submarine force. Not only that, the entire Japanese fleet can be dedicated to ASW operations now that there is no serious US surface threat.

[Borgholio]

Our carriers might be gone but we'd still have plenty of destroyers. In the Pacific war, the submarine conflict was mostly one-sided. Our subs were more aggressive than theirs, and our anti-sub warfare was superior to theirs. Really it was quite a lopsided contest.

[Patroklos]

Sure, IRL. We are not talking about IRL though. Or is only the US allowed to adapt and/or take advantage of the altered circumstances of this scenario?

[Borgholio]

How would the Japanese adapt to this? They'd need to build more destroyers and design more advanced anti-submarine weapons...which they wouldn't suddenly be able to do if we lost all our carriers. It would take them time, but we already had the lead and it would only grow if we were forced into using more submarines than we did IRL.

[Tribble]

Besides which, the Allies would be actively crippling Japan's naval assets while it was trying to adapt. Even if Japan built more destroyers and designed more advanced anti-submarine weapons, if their destroyers are stuck in port due to a lack of fuel its a moot point.

The more damage the Allies did to Japan's shipping (particularly to its ability to ship oil) the less Japan would be able to effectively respond. The less Japan could effectively respond, the more damage the allies did to Japan's shipping. This is the same tactic that was used by Germany against the UK, and it would have worked if the USA and Canada hadn't been involved.

[Patroklos]

How would the Japanese adapt to this? They'd need to build more destroyers and design more advanced anti-submarine weapons...which they wouldn't suddenly be able to do if we lost all our carriers. It would take them time, but we already had the lead and it would only grow if we were forced into using more submarines than we did IRL.

Or they just need to use the destroyers they had for ASW defense instead of screening boondoggly SAGs like they were so fond of IRL. Which of course they would have no need to keep around if there is no USN fleet out there to fight. Same goes with their naval aviation assets that can be bent to ASW work rather than scouting for US carrier fleets. The issue I am having here is you seem to think that both the USN and the IJN are just going to twiddle their thumbs for years and refight the battles of 1941/43 in 1943/44.

And it should be pointed out to you that the IJN submarines were not second hand hulks, they were pretty good at what they did. As were their commanders. The main difference was that IJN doctrine was to use their subs to scout for their SAGs/CAGs and participate directly in anti warship operations in conjunction with them. Free of this requirement after the USN is at the bottom of the ocean, there is no telling what the IJN would have done, but its pretty clear they would have redeployed their forces to address this new situation.

So what are these ASW weapons the USN had in 1941 that the Imperial Japanese did not have an equivalent to? Why exactly could the an IJN almost entirely dedicated to ASW operations and its own interdiction missions not develop whatever the US came up with either IRL or this alternate history?

Besides which, the Allies would be actively crippling Japan's naval assets while it was trying to adapt. Even if Japan built more destroyers and designed more advanced anti-submarine weapons, if their destroyers are stuck in port due to a lack of fuel its a moot point.

Why? They were not stuck in port in 42/43 IRL and now we have a situation with the US in a worse position in general and the Japanese in a far better position to tackle ASW and escorts than then. The US certainly isn't going to cripple Japanese naval assets worse than IRL in this disadvantaged situation. Sorry, but this idea is hogwash.

The more damage the Allies did to Japan's shipping (particularly to its ability to ship oil) the less Japan would be able to effectively respond. The less Japan could effectively respond, the more damage the allies did to Japan's shipping. This is the same tactic that was used by Germany against the UK, and it would have worked if the USA and Canada hadn't been involved.

Except the less naval power the US has (as this scenario stipulates), the less it can damage Japan's shipping and the more effectively Japan can respond. The more effectively Japan responds, the less damage the allies do to Japan's shipping. There is zero parallel to the UK here, the UK's navy was never at the bottom of the sea and the UK's LOCs were longer and more vulnerable and the Germans didn't have to travel 10K miles to be effective against it.

[Borgholio]

So what are these ASW weapons the USN had in 1941 that the Imperial Japanese did not have an equivalent to?

Well in general we had superior radar and sonar units, which of course helped. We invested more time and effort into upgrading sensors than the Japanese did. Later in the war we developed the Hedgehog system which was more effective than depth charges, and I don't believe the Japanese ever developed that kind of weapon. Also, our destroyers were intended from beginning to be built in large numbers so we could escort our merchant ships AND our combat fleets. Japanese destroyers tended to be bigger and although they were more powerful, they couldn't build enough to protect their supply lines, which our sub commanders took advantage of.

So the Japanese would have to shift their focus from larger fleet destroyers to smaller escort ships, which they might not do because if their hubris was boosted by the destruction of the American carriers, they might continue to build their large and expensive battleships rather than stopping production and shifting to lots of small escorts until it's again too late. But this time instead of having 200+ submarines in the ocean we could have double that. So really either way, they're still screwed in the long run.

[Simon_Jester]

I am not missing any of these facts, and you will note that I said nothing to contradict any of them.

Yes, but the point is Churchill was still wrong to have kept Force Z in Singapore by December 8th. It was clearly mass suicide at this point, and they would have known it was already mass suicide well before this had they bothered to not allow hubris to allow them to grossly underestimate the capabilites of the IJN.[/qutoe]The Germans managed to keep lone capital ships parked in locations a good deal less fortified than Singapore without the Royal Navy managing to destroy them.

So I don't get how you say it should have been 'obvious' that Force Z would be instantly wiped out. Sure, if Japan committed enough effort it could be destroyed, but I have no evidence that CHurchill ever expected Force Z to stop the full strength of the whole IJN all by itself. The point was simply to put a reasonably tough task force into Singapore so it would at least have a limited ability to stop casual raiding and amphibious landings in the area around Singapore itself.

Those British carriers again would be little more than target practice had they been deployed. The IJN is a completely different beast from the Luftwaffe. You could have deployed every British carrier with Force Z and it would still have not been enough. To not play the carrier vs carrier or battleship vs battleship game was in fact the only way to "win".

It is true that the British did not have doctrine suitable for fighting carrier battles on the open ocean. I imagine this was for the very obvious and sensible reason that the only enemy in a position to threaten their national survival would never try to fight them in one.

The problem with this mode of thinking is that it ignores that Force Z was destroyed on December 10th, or days after the obliteration of battleship row at Pearl Harbor, which already demonstrated that the IJN in fact possessed far advanced carrier strike abilities than previously thought.

It was known that Japan had at least six large to medium carriers. At Taranto, one medium-sized aircraft carrier, operated by the British themselves sank a battleship and put two more in drydock for six months apiece. Multiply that by six, and...

Anyone could have predicted that Japan's carrier strike capabilities would allow them to launch a surprise attack on an anchored fleet that would sink or damage the battleships anchored there.

So no, the bare fact of the Pearl Harbor attack did not reveal anything about Japan that would be likely to make the British realize that they were outclassed in terms of carrier aviation doctrine. The Royal Navy could, in all likelihood, have planned and executed a similar attack given the right equipment to do it with (which they did not have).

Moreover, it is foolishness to withdraw the garrison from your most important fortress in an entire theater of war, three days after the war starts, purely because you are afraid that the garrison can be wiped out if the enemy puts forth their full strength. To do this is to cede any hope of even making the enemy notice that you are opposing them, and most likely to cede control of your fortress.

Yes, if the squadron you've placed in your fortress is kept there, it may be sunk. It may even be sunk under lopsided conditions with minimal loss to the enemy. But there is no point in building a warship in the first place if you are not willing to risk it being sunk in defense of a key strategic installation. And British planning viewed Singapore as such an installation.

Moreover, what you're forgetting is that Force Z was never premised to stand alone. Even if the British hubris made them blind to Japanese carrier advances (when Chennault and his Flying Tigers were already reporting that the Japanese were flying much more advanced aircraft types since the 30s to anyone who would listen), they were fully aware that the IJN possessed an actual battlefleet, including two ships of the Nagato class, four Kongos, and four WW1-era dreadnoughts; all of which could easily crush a task force consisting of only a KGV and a battlecruiser.

Force Z was in fact supposed to operate in concert with the American battle line, giving the combined British + American fleet something like 10 battleships to face the Japanese battle line.

Would you mind documenting the part where the British specifically planned that Force Z would join the American battleline for a specific naval action?

The problem by December 8 is that the American battle line was already gone and that you now had just these two British capital ships and four destroyers against ten IJN battleships plus their cruiser and destroyer escorts.

Assuming that the Japanese committed literally their whole fleet to hunting down Force Z, yes that would be the case.

Otherwise (based on what the British knew at the time) Force Z would find itself in a position similar to that of the German battleship Tirpitz, which survived for quite some time and tied down large enemy naval forces by the mere threat that it might go out on a sortie.

[Zinegata]

The Germans managed to keep lone capital ships parked in locations a good deal less fortified than Singapore without the Royal Navy managing to destroy them.

So I don't get how you say it should have been 'obvious' that Force Z would be instantly wiped out. Sure, if Japan committed enough effort it could be destroyed, but I have no evidence that CHurchill ever expected Force Z to stop the full strength of the whole IJN all by itself. The point was simply to put a reasonably tough task force into Singapore so it would at least have a limited ability to stop casual raiding and amphibious landings in the area around Singapore itself.

German warships were kept in Fjords that were difficult to attack by air because of the massive cliffsides. Singapore was a sea level anchorage similar to Pearl Harbor. And again the Japanese had just demonstrated that they were fully capable of annihilating a fleet at anchor.

This is simply not the same situation featuring two very different types of terrain and two opponents with very different capabilities; to compare them is to engage in the same sort of childish pettyfogging that Churchill kept foisting pointlessly on his staff.

Assuming that the British can ride out the storm in Singapore again smacks of willful ignorance and hubris if that had really been their assumption. Pearl Harbor had already demonstrated that the IJN was not the Luftwaffe. If the PoW and Repulse stayed at Singapore they would have been sunk eventually at anchor, because if the Japanese could sink multiple battleships at anchor they could certainly sink two. And in any case staying at Singapore was again stupid and useless - which was why Force Z went on its death ride against a suspected troop transport convoy in the first place; at least that way they could do some damage even though the job should have been left to lighter warships.

Would you mind documenting the part where the British specifically planned that Force Z would join the American battleline for a specific naval action?

It's the only course of action that makes any sense. Otherwise you're seriously advocating two British capital ships with only four destroyers as escorts as being capable of taking on ten Japanese battleships and all their cruisers and destroyers. With the US battle line the odds would have been even capital ship-wise; and is the only fallback for sending such a threadbare force in early December.

Deliberately courting battle with 5:1 odds disadvantage in capital ship strength is again "hubris" and no amount of Churchillian excuse-making changes that.

Assuming that the Japanese committed literally their whole fleet to hunting down Force Z, yes that would be the case.

Which was in fact already a very possible case by December 8th because the American battle line was gone, and the Japanese could in fact concentrate their fleet south. Even then Japan didn't even need to deploy all ten battleships - again the odds were so hilariously bad in Britain's favor to begin with.

In short, even if the Japanese magically decide to be nice and don't bomb PoW or Repulse to death (which was contrary to their doctrine of whittling down enemy fleet elements), it was merely delaying the inevitable. In fact it's not out of the question that PoW or Repulse would have been sunk by mere Japanese cruisers or even destroyers because of how threadbare the group's escort complement was - with only two destroyers apiece and half of which weren't even up-to-date ships. Force Z was in fact a grossly inadequate force even without the Japanese carrier strike capabilities, which is what happens when you move around capital ships around the map thinking they're the only thing that matters while ignoring how a real navy operates.

[Zinegata]

Then your problem is they could do the same thing to us. And it would be easier, as all they would have to do is hunt off Hawaii with their entire submarine force. Not only that, the entire Japanese fleet can be dedicated to ASW operations now that there is no serious US surface threat.

No, Japan never had the capability of sailing its submarines regularly to the American coast. By contrast US submarines by 1945 were regularly penetrating the Japanese inland sea in wolfpack strength. Japanese submarines frankly had mechanical issues that made them incapable of doing regular long-ranged patrols.

Moreover, everyone is not realizing that the US submarine campaign really increased in effectiveness thanks to radar. Radar allowed submarines to track enemy targets beyond visual range, remain on the surface and use the diesel engine's much higher speed to maneuver to an ambush position, before finally conducting the actual attack underwater. This was a capability that no submarine force in the world ever had, which was why American submarines were actively hunting even enemy destroyers by 1944 as opposed to U-boats who tended to sink enemy warships only by chance.

There is no real "answer" to this in ASW tactics using surface vessels - sonar was too short-ranged and the submarine would probably be in an attack position before detection could be made. The real answer was air patrols - which would spot submarines in the edges of a battlegroup/convoy and try to attack them. But this is an imperfect solution because American radar still worked at night while Japanese air patrols would have been blind since they didn't have airborne radar. And this assumes the Japanese have aircraft to spare and start developing CVEs to make up gaps in air coverage.

In short, while Japanese ASW was pretty damn bad, they were also up against a comprehensive and well thought-out system when the American submarine offensive began in a big way in 43/44.

[Simon_Jester]

German warships were kept in Fjords that were difficult to attack by air because of the massive cliffsides. Singapore was a sea level anchorage similar to Pearl Harbor. And again the Japanese had just demonstrated that they were fully capable of annihilating a fleet at anchor.

With, again, an attack force roughly equivalent to their whole fleet, and against an unprepared target (i.e. no torpedo nets).

It takes more than three days to draw the conclusions you describe; your entire post is so heavily saturated with hindsight that it's hard to even talk about the content without constantly having to call you out on "this was only obvious in hindsight, that was not known at the time."

This is simply not the same situation featuring two very different types of terrain and two opponents with very different capabilities; to compare them is to engage in the same sort of childish pettyfogging that Churchill kept foisting pointlessly on his staff.

It was a fairly well established principle of warfare that a fleet in a fortified anchorage was hard to attack if it had competent defenses. Pearl Harbor wasn't really a counterexample to this, because when they were attacked the defenses in place were for all practical purposes not even used- the AA guns had no ammunition, only two fighters even got off the ground.

You're not wrong to observe that even prepared and well equipped defenses at Singapore could not reliably have stopped the Kido Butai from sinking a handful of anchored warships (or alert warships at sea). However, as of December 8, this strategic reality had not yet caught up with anyone except the Japanese navy, and maybe Husband E. Kimmel if he had a few spare moments to reflect on the catastrophic defeat he had just personally suffered at IJN hands.

Now, if those two ships had still been parked at Singapore a month or two later, then we could reasonably argue that the British were being stupid.

This isn't the first time in an alternate history thread that you've berated people for failure to instantly draw the right conclusions from evidence presented to them, when those conclusions are complicated and the evidence is likewise complicated. And yet people should draw the right conclusions, and only the right conclusions, and only the right conclusions as informed by your personal weighting of what is 'right.'

Would you mind documenting the part where the British specifically planned that Force Z would join the American battleline for a specific naval action?

It's the only course of action that makes any sense.

So... no. No you are not going to do that. You have no evidence that the British did not seriously intend to operate their small squadron* by raiding against small-scale operations of the Japanese, and by posing a "fleet in being" threat against any lone capital ships Japan dispatched, while retreating or writing off the ships if they were attacked by the entire Japanese fleet.

*Force Z plus, hopefully, any more ships that would be along later, remembering that when Force Z was dispatched no war was going on and the British might fully have expected to reinforce it later with more ships before war broke out.

Otherwise you're seriously advocating two British capital ships with only four destroyers as escorts as being capable of taking on ten Japanese battleships and all their cruisers and destroyers. With the US battle line the odds would have been even capital ship-wise; and is the only fallback for sending such a threadbare force in early December.

Deliberately courting battle with 5:1 odds disadvantage in capital ship strength is again "hubris" and no amount of Churchillian excuse-making changes that.

By the same argument the Germans should have scuttled Tirpitz at her moorings- because she couldn't fight the entire Royal Navy alone.

Not even trying to make use of inferior forces to inhibit the operations of a superior force, for fear that the inferior force will be defeated, is an easy way to lose a war. Because in a large scale war (like World War II), it is literally never possible to concentrate the entirety of your force at a single point. You must be prepared to accept inferiority in some arms (say, having better ground forces but inferior aircraft), or in some places (say, because logistics makes it easy for the enemy to resupply but hard for you).

If you decide to never even try to oppose the enemy on unfavorable terms, you will lose a lot of very important real estate and political advantages. And it may come to pass that the favorable terms you desire never even materialize- because the loss of that first wave of uncontested 'battles' puts you at a disadvantage in the second wave.

Assuming that the Japanese committed literally their whole fleet to hunting down Force Z, yes that would be the case.

Which was in fact already a very possible case by December 8th because the American battle line was gone, and the Japanese could in fact concentrate their fleet south. Even then Japan didn't even need to deploy all ten battleships - again the odds were so hilariously bad in Britain's favor to begin with.

The US still had its carrier fleet and a considerable number of battleships that were not pressingly needed in the Atlantic to contain the Axis powers in Europe, so it is (again) not that simplistic.

In short, even if the Japanese magically decide to be nice and don't bomb PoW or Repulse to death (which was contrary to their doctrine of whittling down enemy fleet elements), it was merely delaying the inevitable. In fact it's not out of the question that PoW or Repulse would have been sunk by mere Japanese cruisers or even destroyers because of how threadbare the group's escort complement was - with only two destroyers apiece and half of which weren't even up-to-date ships. Force Z was in fact a grossly inadequate force even without the Japanese carrier strike capabilities, which is what happens when you move around capital ships around the map thinking they're the only thing that matters while ignoring how a real navy operates.

Again, Force Z was dispatched to Singapore at a time when Britain was at peace with Japan and probably expected to remain so for more than a few weeks. It would hardly be surprising if more escorts were sent at a later time.

However, I nonetheless agree that even under those conditions, failure to send out adequate escorts was a serious mistake by the British. Unlike some of the 'mistakes' you point out, this was something they could have realistically predicted would be a problem in light of what they already knew, rather than having to divine it in advance with their nonexistent psychic powers.

[Sea Skimmer]

German warships were kept in Fjords that were difficult to attack by air because of the massive cliffsides.

The Nazi smoke screening was far more relevant then the cliffs, and so massive as to consume strategically significant resources to implement for the German war machine. Similar to that needed to smoke screen a small city or major industrial target. Any smaller screen wouldn't work because pilots could reasonably blind bomb into the screen if it were, and the direction of the wind cannot be reliable upon. The Germans could never operate screens over more then a few major targets areas at a time.

The US Army was interestingly working on a plan to smoke screen Pearl harbor with something like a hundred fifty oil burning smoke generators but nothing was actually implemented on it. The Chemical corps had no modern screening equipment even designed upon the 1940 mobilization because it had almost zero money for R&D interwar..

The Germans used huge numbers of what would otherwise be more expensive smoke candles in the fjord hides, oil was too valuable via irreplaceable scarcity. Smoke candles are nice though because you can wire them all up to a detonator box and ignite a string of them over a wide area.

In any case such a screen needed at least 20 minutes warning to become effective and Tirpitz was surprised by air raids several times and heavily damaged for it. Her final destruction by Tallboy bombs was largely facilitated by the complete lack of smoke screen equipment where the Germans finally moored her. Any heavy attack would have worked.

Assuming that the British can ride out the storm in Singapore again smacks of willful ignorance and hubris if that had really been their assumption.

The assumption was actually that they would fall back to Ceylon as a base if Singapore was too hot to stand in daylight. They still could have refueled at the place by cover of night though, the Japanese had no night bomber units at all.

Pearl Harbor had already demonstrated that the IJN was not the Luftwaffe.

Hmm, recall Crete earlier that year? The British already had a very healthy respect for what air attacks could do to ships. Japan was never capable of sustained air raids like those sustained by the Luftwaffe against the entire British Mediterranean fleet. The British expected fast ships to be able to evade coordinated air attacks by the kind of air power Japan actually had in south Asia, about 90 major bombers and 200 total planes. Too bad for the British Japanese pilots were really good and the British escort was very weak because it had not had time to assemble. Still the British had no reason to think this an impossible level of air threat. The whole Japanese carrier force was twice as many planes, and ones better suited to attacking ships. Pointless comparison.

And in any case staying at Singapore was again stupid and useless - which was why Force Z went on its death ride against a suspected troop transport convoy in the first place; at least that way they could do some damage even though the job should have been left to lighter warships.

What is 'suspected' about a troop convoy tracked by the air on its approach prewar, and from which ground troops had been engaged on land, oh and air attacks had already hit several of the ships in? The British operation was really not a death ride in any sensible terms, it was an operation against a known major strategic threat and it got halfway home after forcing the dispersal of the Japanese transport ships.

It wasn't the best move in hindsight, but the reality was in 1941 the British had faced massive air attacks in several different operations and while suffering unsustainable losses in several of them among destroyers and cruisers big ships had generally held up well. They could absorb damage from air attacks as they could shellfire, and torpedo hits were rare and countered by constant high speed turning. Which BTW was EXACTLY Japanese doctrine too, and something they stuck with to the end of the war unlike the allies.

Repulse dodged a lot of torpedoes too while Prince of Wales had incredible bad luck on hit placement; it wasn't out of question that Force Z could have eaten that strike, and kept going home damaged. And Japan had no replacement torpedoes for those bombers in Indochina due to supply shortages affecting its entire war machine. Any follow up strike would have been with only 250kg bombs. The Japanese surface action group might have been able to run them down if slowed though. But it would be questionable they would try or manage as they had destroyer fuel limitations.

[quote
It's the only course of action that makes any sense. Otherwise you're seriously advocating two British capital ships with only four destroyers as escorts as being capable of taking on ten Japanese battleships and all their cruisers and destroyers. With the US battle line the odds would have been even capital ship-wise; and is the only fallback for sending such a threadbare force in early December.[/quote]

It was never the British plan to operate with the American battle fleet. That makes no sense given the speed disparity and shear distance. In fact the plan was to operate with other allied ships in the Dutch East Indies, and the US Asiatic Fleet commander Admiral Hart had dispatched four American destroyers from Balikpapan to join force Z. The war broke out before they could physically steam the distance!

The British had a number of cruisers and a few other destroyers in the far east as well, besides the Dutch fleet, but these ships had to be kept defending against German armed merchant raiders prior to the outbreak of war. Many reinforcement convoys were at sea, and a big one (being escorted by the USN in the Atlantic!) was expected and had to be met for a handover. Some of these ships like HMS Exeter were able to join later battles. The shear surprise with which Japan was able to attack such dispersed positions was just too much strategic shock.

Deliberately courting battle with 5:1 odds disadvantage in capital ship strength is again "hubris" and no amount of Churchillian excuse-making changes that.

The Japanese main fleet was not in South Asia though. It was known not to be. The British ships were both as fast or faster then any Japanese capital ship and superior to the Kongo class which other then Yamato were the only ones fast enough to force an action. This was the entire reason the decision was made to send two modern ships rather then the alternate proposal of stationing all remaining R class battleships at Ceylon.

Both of you guys really ought to take a look at what the actual deployed Japanese forces look like, and indeed rather formula like kept looking like in the follow up operations to Malay and the Philippines though Java. The actual task forces Japan deployed were individually not all that strong.

Which was in fact already a very possible case by December 8th because the American battle line was gone, and the Japanese could in fact concentrate their fleet south. Even then Japan didn't even need to deploy all ten battleships - again the odds were so hilariously bad in Britain's favor to begin with.

That ignores the reality of distance and time. Kido Butai couldn't redeploy to south asia for a full month after the outbreak of war, only departing Japan again on January 5th 1942.. The Japanese battleships were mostly too slow to engage the British ships and known not to be in south Asia. The British were not going to get physically overwhelmed by a large portion of the Japanese fleet because they could decline action with it. RN night fighting skill and equipment was very good too, and they had radar while Japan didn't.

In short, even if the Japanese magically decide to be nice and don't bomb PoW or Repulse to death (which was contrary to their doctrine of whittling down enemy fleet elements), it was merely delaying the inevitable.

Which is often the point of warfare, fighting for time. That was kind of all the British could do in most theaters in 1941. The Royal Navy expected to expend ships in wartime, it always had. Interestingly the RN also won in both world wars, while large numbers of Japanese and German ships were sunk at anchor in home ports being COMPLETELY USELESS.

In fact it's not out of the question that PoW or Repulse would have been sunk by mere Japanese cruisers or even destroyers because of how threadbare the group's escort complement was - with only two destroyers apiece and half of which weren't even up-to-date ships. Force Z was in fact a grossly inadequate force even without the Japanese carrier strike capabilities, which is what happens when you move around capital ships around the map thinking they're the only thing that matters while ignoring how a real navy operates.

Its also not out of the question that the two ships, which successfully evaded the Japanese SAG anyway, could have massacred the entire Japanese transport force if it hadn't fled the beaches. But the fact is the British had been loosing a lot in the war at this point, and knew they had political problems in the far east colonies, and to simply stand by and do nothing while Japan geared up to attack would have been a certain track to trouble. Churchill took a risk rather then simply let history unfold, which to that point had been serving British interests very badly anyway. The Japanese decision to attack at all remains stupider. In hindsight sure, PoW and Repulse should have been held at Ceylon until a carrier could also arrive which would have also brought additional escorts. But that means openly deciding that Malay will fall to Japan, which was hardly a reasonable conclusion at the time.

[Zinegata]

The Nazi smoke screening was far more relevant then the cliffs, and so massive as to consume strategically significant resources to implement for the German war machine. Similar to that needed to smoke screen a small city or major industrial target. Any smaller screen wouldn't work because pilots could reasonably blind bomb into the screen if it were, and the direction of the wind cannot be reliable upon. The Germans could never operate screens over more then a few major targets areas at a time.

The US Army was interestingly working on a plan to smoke screen Pearl harbor with something like a hundred fifty oil burning smoke generators but nothing was actually implemented on it. The Chemical corps had no modern screening equipment even designed upon the 1940 mobilization because it had almost zero money for R&D interwar..

The Germans used huge numbers of what would otherwise be more expensive smoke candles in the fjord hides, oil was too valuable via irreplaceable scarcity. Smoke candles are nice though because you can wire them all up to a detonator box and ignite a string of them over a wide area.

In any case such a screen needed at least 20 minutes warning to become effective and Tirpitz was surprised by air raids several times and heavily damaged for it. Her final destruction by Tallboy bombs was largely facilitated by the complete lack of smoke screen equipment where the Germans finally moored her. Any heavy attack would have worked.

So why didn't the Tirpitz get attacked heavily before then? Range?

There's the British midget attack that also rendered her immobilized but that was not exactly a permanent solution.

Hmm, recall Crete earlier that year? The British already had a very healthy respect for what air attacks could do to ships. Japan was never capable of sustained air raids like those sustained by the Luftwaffe against the entire British Mediterranean fleet. The British expected fast ships to be able to evade coordinated air attacks by the kind of air power Japan actually had in south Asia, about 90 major bombers and 200 total planes. Too bad for the British Japanese pilots were really good and the British escort was very weak because it had not had time to assemble. Still the British had no reason to think this an impossible level of air threat. The whole Japanese carrier force was twice as many planes, and ones better suited to attacking ships. Pointless comparison.

Yes, but the Luftwaffe didn't have as-good a naval strike capability as the Japanese in many regards. Not very good aerial torpedoes for one thing. Again, there was a very serious failure of intelligence that did not recognize that Japan had such capabilities; especially three days after Pearl. Sure, you can give a variety of explanations/excuses why Pearl ended up that way - it was attacked by surprise and the battleships were in the anchorage - but the fact that the Japanese had launched 100+ planes in the strike should give pause that they aren't dealing with an enemy that wasn't capable of some serious air strikes.

What is 'suspected' about a troop convoy tracked by the air on its approach prewar, and from which ground troops had been engaged on land, oh and air attacks had already hit several of the ships in? The British operation was really not a death ride in any sensible terms, it was an operation against a known major strategic threat and it got halfway home after forcing the dispersal of the Japanese transport ships.

The transports were already empty and Force Z in fact had spent some trying to investigate suspected contacts and landings as well. Okay, fine, you can't blame Philips not knowing the transports were already empty, but going out there with just four destroyers does not strike me as fighting with the odds anywhere near your favor.

The British had a number of cruisers and a few other destroyers in the far east as well, besides the Dutch fleet, but these ships had to be kept defending against German armed merchant raiders prior to the outbreak of war. Many reinforcement convoys were at sea, and a big one (being escorted by the USN in the Atlantic!) was expected and had to be met for a handover. Some of these ships like HMS Exeter were able to join later battles. The shear surprise with which Japan was able to attack such dispersed positions was just too much strategic shock.

Alright, fair enough on the strategic shock.

Both of you guys really ought to take a look at what the actual deployed Japanese forces look like, and indeed rather formula like kept looking like in the follow up operations to Malay and the Philippines though Java. The actual task forces Japan deployed were individually not all that strong.

Yes, they were mostly cruiser and destroyer formations doing the escorting and in very limited quantities. But again when you only have four destroyers escorting two capital ships it's not out of the question to see an earlier Java Sea where the PoW or Repulse gets torpedoed by a cruiser for want of a good screen either. My argument is not refusing to roll the dice, my argument is that the dice were rolled with such poor odds to begin with both from the perspective of hindsight and from what should have already been known by December 8th.

[Zinegata]

It takes more than three days to draw the conclusions you describe; your entire post is so heavily saturated with hindsight that it's hard to even talk about the content without constantly having to call you out on "this was only obvious in hindsight, that was not known at the time."

Yes, it may be fair to attribute shock for not digesting this information in three days. But basic outlines and conclusions could have already been drawn had cooler heads been at the head of each Navy. That Japan could launch an air strike of 100+ planes so far from home should in fact have caused folks to take the air threat much more seriously.

By the same argument the Germans should have scuttled Tirpitz at her moorings- because she couldn't fight the entire Royal Navy alone.

You should really stop assuming that I think Axis strategy was particularly competent. They never should have built Tirpitz to begin with because they didn't really have any clue how to use her.

Not even trying to make use of inferior forces to inhibit the operations of a superior force, for fear that the inferior force will be defeated, is an easy way to lose a war. Because in a large scale war (like World War II), it is literally never possible to concentrate the entirety of your force at a single point. You must be prepared to accept inferiority in some arms (say, having better ground forces but inferior aircraft), or in some places (say, because logistics makes it easy for the enemy to resupply but hard for you).

If you decide to never even try to oppose the enemy on unfavorable terms, you will lose a lot of very important real estate and political advantages. And it may come to pass that the favorable terms you desire never even materialize- because the loss of that first wave of uncontested 'battles' puts you at a disadvantage in the second wave.

And yet the point remains that you don't need really capital ships to destroy troop transports. ABDA's mismash collection of destroyers and cruisers were in fact able to sink several troop transports - some of them by the action of WW1 vintage US destroyers operating without any heavier support. It was again a force with bad odds off success that got sent out.

[Simon_Jester]

Yes, but the Luftwaffe didn't have as-good a naval strike capability as the Japanese in many regards. Not very good aerial torpedoes for one thing...

How, realistically, do you expect anyone to gauge the naval strike capability of a hostile nation's air force when they have not yet gone to war?

Again, there was a very serious failure of intelligence that did not recognize that Japan had such capabilities; especially three days after Pearl. Sure, you can give a variety of explanations/excuses why Pearl ended up that way - it was attacked by surprise and the battleships were in the anchorage - but the fact that the Japanese had launched 100+ planes in the strike should give pause that they aren't dealing with an enemy that wasn't capable of some serious air strikes.

Three days isn't even enough time to type up a coherent report on a situation as complicated as the attack on Pearl Harbor. Let alone enough time to totally rethink your naval tactics.

I mean, what, do you think Churchill and his advisors were supposed to watch the Youtube footage of the battle and jot their conclusions down on their tablets? And then decide, despite their own fleet's experience in the Mediterranean, that air attacks were an unstoppable God weapon?

Because the action outlined in the second sentence is almost as ridiculous and anachronistic for a WWII leader as the action in the first sentence.

What is 'suspected' about a troop convoy tracked by the air on its approach prewar, and from which ground troops had been engaged on land, oh and air attacks had already hit several of the ships in? The British operation was really not a death ride in any sensible terms, it was an operation against a known major strategic threat and it got halfway home after forcing the dispersal of the Japanese transport ships.

The transports were already empty and Force Z in fact had spent some trying to investigate suspected contacts and landings as well. Okay, fine, you can't blame Philips not knowing the transports were already empty, but going out there with just four destroyers does not strike me as fighting with the odds anywhere near your favor.

Sinking the transports is still desirable and important, because troop transports are a specific class of ship that cannot be instantly replaced. Sink the amphibious transports available to Japanese forces in the Southeast Pacific, and they cannot mount further amphibious operations for weeks or months until new ones come to them from home. Which, given that the Japanese were in the middle of a massive surprise attack that depended on speed and daring, would have badly interfered with their plans to conquer the region.

Both of you guys really ought to take a look at what the actual deployed Japanese forces look like, and indeed rather formula like kept looking like in the follow up operations to Malay and the Philippines though Java. The actual task forces Japan deployed were individually not all that strong.

Yes, they were mostly cruiser and destroyer formations doing the escorting and in very limited quantities. But again when you only have four destroyers escorting two capital ships it's not out of the question to see an earlier Java Sea where the PoW or Repulse gets torpedoed by a cruiser for want of a good screen either.

It's possible- but in a fight between Repulse and a cruiser I'd bet on Repulse. The most likely result, statistically speaking the average of all the things might happen, would be something like:

"Repulse takes a cruiser or two with her in the course of totally disrupting a major Japanese amphibious offensive, and is then lost."

Which is probably a worthwhile trade, given that we're talking about an elderly ship built shortly after Jutland. As Skimmer notes, it was Royal Navy policy to accept warship losses, including capital ships, if that was the price that had to be paid to prevent an enemy from gaining maritime superiority. As Cunningham had said roughly six months earlier, "It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition. The evacuation will continue," at the cost of British ships being damaged or sunk by air attack.

This policy, again as Skimmer notes, worked out very well for the British over a long string of wars stretching over centuries, including both World Wars.

Now obviously, a decision to risk ships has to be a calculated risk. One may gamble, and lose. One may lose hard if one has severely miscalculated, which the British did.

But the British could not easily have gotten the calculation much closer to correct than they did, with Force Z. Given the numbers they had, sending the ships was a sensible decision- a fast battlecruiser/destroyer force with the speed to evade enemy surface ships, in a theater where enemy air power was relatively limited, with a fleet that had so far had good luck with its heavy ships' ability to survive a limited air attack.

My argument is not refusing to roll the dice, my argument is that the dice were rolled with such poor odds to begin with both from the perspective of hindsight and from what should have already been known by December 8th.

I contend that you are probably right about the odds from the perspective of hindsight. Not from what COULD have been known by December 8th. Partly because you have unrealistic ideas about what "should" have been known, and do not make reasonable allowances for how long it takes to digest the results of a battle. And because you tend not to respect the fact that an action on day D may depend on decisions made weeks or months in advance, and not be something that can casually be changed on a whim because of a sudden emergency on day D-1.

It takes more than three days to draw the conclusions you describe; your entire post is so heavily saturated with hindsight that it's hard to even talk about the content without constantly having to call you out on "this was only obvious in hindsight, that was not known at the time."

Yes, it may be fair to attribute shock for not digesting this information in three days. But basic outlines and conclusions could have already been drawn had cooler heads been at the head of each Navy. That Japan could launch an air strike of 100+ planes so far from home should in fact have caused folks to take the air threat much more seriously.

It would also cause folks to realize Japan had just committed their entire carrier force to an operation roughly half a world away from Singapore, indicating that the Japanese carriers were unlikely to pose a major threat to Singapore for, oh, four to six weeks...

Assuming, of course, this nearly psychic ability to extract accurate information about a battle no one in Britain had seen, at a time when even sending a written report across the Atlantic required a courier to physically carry it across, or required it to be laboriously tapped out on a telegraph.

At most, the British would have been in a position to get "US fleet at Pearl Harbor hit by major surprise aerial attack, several battleships sunk or disabled." And from that you expect them to have moved to "Never mind our own experiences about ships under air attack at Dunkirk and Crete, planes are super-killers, pull the fleet out of Singapore NOW! Cede all naval operations in Southeast Asia to Japan, we can't hope to resist them!" and ordered this immediately acted upon.

I submit that any high command structure prone to such a swift, I would almost say "panicky" decision, in response to very limited information...

That high command will also commit a lot of very serious strategic mistakes, by overreacting to a surprise.

By the same argument the Germans should have scuttled Tirpitz at her moorings- because she couldn't fight the entire Royal Navy alone.

You should really stop assuming that I think Axis strategy was particularly competent. They never should have built Tirpitz to begin with because they didn't really have any clue how to use her.

Well, the point is, once they had her, what were they going to do with her? By your logic even having the ship was a waste of time, even when she was treated as a sunk cost.

I mean, clearly there's no point in even detaching a squadron if the enemy has a fleet. Not "has a fleet right there, ready to attack my squadron." But has a fleet anywhere. Because that fleet could defeat my squadron if it fought together, and that means the squadron might as well not be there!

In which case there's no point in even HAVING an inferior military force, you might as well order it to commit suicide rather than fight the enemy...

I will observe that the side whose philosophy of war came closest to this lost, whereas the Royal Navy on the whole won the naval part of the Second World War, against the forces arrayed against it. This may have been due to superior numbers... but superior numbers are useless if the commander is afraid to use them.

And yet the point remains that you don't need really capital ships to destroy troop transports. ABDA's mismash collection of destroyers and cruisers were in fact able to sink several troop transports - some of them by the action of WW1 vintage US destroyers operating without any heavier support. It was again a force with bad odds off success that got sent out.

If a "mismash [sic] of cruisers and destroyers" can sink troop transports, surely the same force would do better with the support of a battleship or two.

You seem to be mentally modeling the ABDA forces of the winter of 1941-42 as though they were an alternative to Force Z, when the opposite is true. Had it not been destroyed by a well-executed, surprisingly effective air attack, Force Z would have been integrated into the ABDA command, and I assure you that having that pair of capital ships would have been a very welcome change of pace for ABDA.

[Zinegata]

How, realistically, do you expect anyone to gauge the naval strike capability of a hostile nation's air force when they have not yet gone to war?

By looking up reports like those made by the Flying Tigers showing that Japan had much more advanced air capabilities than mere biplanes. Again, it's not as though there is totally zero data on Japan's air fleet.

I mean, what, do you think Churchill and his advisors were supposed to watch the Youtube footage of the battle and jot their conclusions down on their tablets? And then decide, despite their own fleet's experience in the Mediterranean, that air attacks were an unstoppable God weapon?

Because the action outlined in the second sentence is almost as ridiculous and anachronistic for a WWII leader as the action in the first sentence.

You can be snarky and claim Youtube videos but Grace Tully, secretary to Roosvelt, who was present when the White House received the news of the attack recalls that they knew within an hour of the first reports that the navy had in fact taken crippling losses. They didn't have an accurate count of the dead yet, and there was some unsupported reports of US warships torpedoed elsewhere that ended up in the day of infamy speech, but they knew that the strike had crippled the battle fleet.

And note that this requires no hysterical idiocy where the British need to delude themselves so far the other way that air attacks are an unstoppable God weapon. What it should have told the British, and what I have been telling you despite your attempts at hyperbole, is that the Japanese did in fact have much more advanced air strike capability than previously thought. Therefore a sortie of a force of two capital ships and four destroyers was again playing with fire.

Sinking the transports is still desirable and important, because troop transports are a specific class of ship that cannot be instantly replaced. Sink the amphibious transports available to Japanese forces in the Southeast Pacific, and they cannot mount further amphibious operations for weeks or months until new ones come to them from home. Which, given that the Japanese were in the middle of a massive surprise attack that depended on speed and daring, would have badly interfered with their plans to conquer the region.

Except of course the justification for going after the transports was to defend Malaya, and British intel was so bad that by the time PoW/Repulse sortied the transports were already empty, the troops already on the ground, and the British were already well on their way to losing the whole Malaya campaign. There was a whole series of intelligence failures on the part of the British (who had expected an attack on Malaya and had plans to pre-empty this by attacking Japanese forces pre-emptively as part of "Operaton Matador") and the only real excuse for them is that Japan's decision to go to war was so insane in the first place.

It's possible- but in a fight between Repulse and a cruiser I'd bet on Repulse. The most likely result, statistically speaking the average of all the things might happen, would be something like:

It is not a fight between Repulse and a cruiser. It is a fight between Repulse, Prince of Wales, and their four destroyers - one of them World War 1 vintage - against a cruiser/destroyer group. ABDA tried doing that at Java Sea despite having a more robust screen though without real capital ships, and what actually happened is that their flagship ended up blowing up to a Long Lance torpedo anyway.

Which is probably a worthwhile trade, given that we're talking about an elderly ship built shortly after Jutland. As Skimmer notes, it was Royal Navy policy to accept warship losses, including capital ships, if that was the price that had to be paid to prevent an enemy from gaining maritime superiority. As Cunningham had said roughly six months earlier, "It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition. The evacuation will continue," at the cost of British ships being damaged or sunk by air attack.

This policy, again as Skimmer notes, worked out very well for the British over a long string of wars stretching over centuries, including both World Wars.

There is a very, very large difference between accepting warship losses and carelessness in putting warships in a position where they are going to get sunk for no good reason; and using the former to justify the latter is how you get so many naval disasters in the first place.

At most, the British would have been in a position to get "US fleet at Pearl Harbor hit by major surprise aerial attack, several battleships sunk or disabled." And from that you expect them to have moved to "Never mind our own experiences about ships under air attack at Dunkirk and Crete, planes are super-killers, pull the fleet out of Singapore NOW! Cede all naval operations in Southeast Asia to Japan, we can't hope to resist them!" and ordered this immediately acted upon.

I submit that any high command structure prone to such a swift, I would almost say "panicky" decision, in response to very limited information...

That high command will also commit a lot of very serious strategic mistakes, by overreacting to a surprise.

Or they could be sane and realize that the Japanese have air strike capabilities much better than previously thought, and that the piddly escort of four destroyers and a bunch of biplanes was clearly inadequate. But no, apparently there's only "let's panic and pretend Japan has supermen".

Well, the point is, once they had her, what were they going to do with her? By your logic even having the ship was a waste of time, even when she was treated as a sunk cost.

You're asking me to find a role for a warship that had no clear role to begin with at the design phase (or rather it had a very retarded role that's worse than no role at all). The problem started when they started building her without knowing its purpose. Really why do you think they started considering putting some of the German battleship guns on shore batteries instead?

And do note that battleships, while capable of wrecking transports, actually make bad convoy raiders. German commerce raiding was largely a failure precisely because it's very inefficient to send a big, oil-hungry battleship to chase down merchantmen that could be sunk by smaller armament; and that you're much better served having multiple small raiders instead of one big battleship because each small raider can hunt down a different merchie when the convoy scatters.

The main job of the battleship is to engage the enemy warships. That's what the 14inch guns are meant to wreck. But again you can't have them doing this on their own - because otherwise you open them to getting damaged or sunk by torpedo attack and this was well known even in 1918. This is why the force needs escorts. Force Z didn't have these in any real numbers and still went after a troop convoy anyway. Maybe ABDA would in fact have had two capital ships to play with later on and therefore be more effective had these ships not gone out on their own in early December.

[Simon_Jester]

How, realistically, do you expect anyone to gauge the naval strike capability of a hostile nation's air force when they have not yet gone to war?

By looking up reports like those made by the Flying Tigers showing that Japan had much more advanced air capabilities than mere biplanes. Again, it's not as though there is totally zero data on Japan's air fleet.

1) I'm going to assume you didn't read the word "naval strike."
2) I'm going to assume you think the Luftwaffe was flying biplanes from now on, because that was the British metric for naval strike given that that was who had been striking them less than a year earlier.

And yes, you'll come up with all these elaborate and condescending explanations for why the British "should have known" that the Luftwaffe was a second-rate antiship force despite being so impressively competent in other areas and being on the rampage in much of Europe.

And I'll have to just smile and roll my eyes, because it's wacky Zinegata assuming everyone in the 1940s was psychic and calling them morons for not being psychic. Again.

I mean, what, do you think Churchill and his advisors were supposed to watch the Youtube footage of the battle and jot their conclusions down on their tablets? And then decide, despite their own fleet's experience in the Mediterranean, that air attacks were an unstoppable God weapon?

Because the action outlined in the second sentence is almost as ridiculous and anachronistic for a WWII leader as the action in the first sentence.

You can be snarky and claim Youtube videos but Grace Tully, secretary to Roosvelt, who was present when the White House received the news of the attack recalls that they knew within an hour of the first reports that the navy had in fact taken crippling losses. They didn't have an accurate count of the dead yet, and there was some unsupported reports of US warships torpedoed elsewhere that ended up in the day of infamy speech, but they knew that the strike had crippled the battle fleet.

As I noted later, what the British knew after Pearl Harbor was that six Japanese carriers could do to the US fleet what one British carrier had done to the Italian fleet.

Given that the Japanese carriers in question had just quite firmly proven that they were in the vicinity of Hawaii, this does not establish that they are an imminent "oh God pull the ships out NOW" threat to Singapore. Or that the naval bombers Japan did have in Southeast Asia were either. Yes, it proves there's a risk to the ships, but they already knew that there was SOME risk and were acting accordingly.

At this point you're just being willfully obtuse, and refusing to grasp the difference between "I know air attacks are a threat to warships tied up to a dock" and "a fifty or 100 aircraft sortie is highly likely to sink a pair of capital ships on the move and armed with modern AA defenses."

Except of course the justification for going after the transports was to defend Malaya, and British intel was so bad that by the time PoW/Repulse sortied the transports were already empty, the troops already on the ground, and the British were already well on their way to losing the whole Malaya campaign. There was a whole series of intelligence failures on the part of the British (who had expected an attack on Malaya and had plans to pre-empty this by attacking Japanese forces pre-emptively as part of "Operaton Matador") and the only real excuse for them is that Japan's decision to go to war was so insane in the first place.

By the way, is it a sign of British failure that various Japanese plans were kept secret from them and surprised them? Or is it a sign of Japanese success? I mean, one would expect that if Japan does things right, they will have a pretty good chance of concealing their intentions from a foreign power on the other side of the planet whose citizens cannot easily infiltrate their country.

It is not a fight between Repulse and a cruiser. It is a fight between Repulse, Prince of Wales, and their four destroyers - one of them World War 1 vintage - against a cruiser/destroyer group. ABDA tried doing that at Java Sea despite having a more robust screen though without real capital ships, and what actually happened is that their flagship ended up blowing up to a Long Lance torpedo anyway.

Torpedo hits are in large part a matter of luck- Repulse dodged many aerial torpedoes, Prince of Wales failed to dodge the first few and took a lucky hit. It is very much uncertain how much danger Repulse would be in.

The ships of Force Z might, if serving as the nucleus of an ABDA force, be effortlessly sunk by Japanese surface ships they were fighting. Or they might effortlessly sink multiple Japanese cruisers. Or there might be a pitched battle in which Allied gunfire does some damage and Japanese torpedoes do some damage. Or the Japanese might see British capital ships and decline to engage those capital ships with their own cruisers, so that the Japanese force scatters rather than fights.

None of this is predictable in advance. Some of the relevant parameters (Japanese torpedo performance, Japanese tactical doctrine for engaging capital ships with cruisers) were closely guarded secrets that were not evident even after Pearl Harbor, i.e. long after the decision to dispatch Force Z had been made and after Force Z had already arrived at Singapore. Things no one outside Japan knew until, historically, after Force Z had been sunk.

It is reasonable for a reasonable observer whose knowledge of military affairs had last been updated in November or early December of 1941 to suppose that Renown and Prince of Wales would at least pose a considerable threat to Japanese cruisers, especially when working in conjunction with other Allied warships that the British knew were in the immediate area.

There is a very, very large difference between accepting warship losses and carelessness in putting warships in a position where they are going to get sunk for no good reason; and using the former to justify the latter is how you get so many naval disasters in the first place.

The British managed to not have that many naval disasters during the Second World War. The loss of Force Z was a high-profile example... but it is also a case where the Japanese achieved near-total surprise, throwing their enemies off balance. Where the British were plagued by massive bad luck- accidents and combat losses putting almost their entire carrier force out of action in the month before the Japanese sneak attacks. Where weapons that had performed well in the Atlantic and Mediterranean performed considerably less well in the tropics. Where the commander on the spot had specific blind spots regarding air attack that may well not have been fully appreciated by the high command.

Almost everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. And many of the mistakes were the same sort of thing that literally every fighting service in history has done wrong on numerous occasions.

Shit happens, and frankly this was simply a case of it happening.

It is important for us to be able to distinguish, when studying history, between "this was a stupid plan" and "this was a plan that failed." It is very easy to look at a disaster, magnify all the things that made it happen, and then screech at people for not having foreseen it, while totally ignoring all the reasons why they DID make rational decisions that nonetheless led to disaster.

Or they could be sane and realize that the Japanese have air strike capabilities much better than previously thought, and that the piddly escort of four destroyers and a bunch of biplanes was clearly inadequate. But no, apparently there's only "let's panic and pretend Japan has supermen".

I now conclude that you believe that the British Hurricane fighter was a biplane.

I'm also concluding that you're evading my point that the decision to keep Force Z in Singapore and use them against the Japanese was, if not wise in hindsight, at least understandable given wartime emergency conditions and the existing experiences of the British with capital ships repeatedly coming under air attack and generally surviving in fairly good condition afterward.

[Irbis]

Well, they'll at least have the historical B-29 bases; if they can physically range on Japan when the atomic bomb comes out, we may see air-atomic bombing of Japan from China regardless of whether the Pacific War has advanced to recapture the Marianas.

Why China? Then, it was unstable backwater with zero infrastructure needed to support heavy bombers, firmly in Japanese/Warlord grip. What remained in control of the nationalists was in even worse shape than that.

I expect USA beg Soviets for second front, bombing campaign staged from Russian soil, and Russian offensive in 1945 taking not only all of Manchuria, but also Korea (historically contested by US landing), plus war in China against Japan being joined by Soviet and US troops.

Sea campaign should proceed more or less the same, except maybe more direct route and bypassing, instead of capturing, various strongholds. Japan is still going to run out of oil so even if every single US ship is sunk in 1942 by 1944 USA should proceed unopposed, IMHO.

The problem is that Renown and the Revenge-class are totally inadequate to fight a first class enemy battleship like Tirpitz. The Queen Elizabeths are at least manageable, being a very progressive World War One design. Nelson and Rodney have modern armament but are slow due to Washington Treaty limitations. Only the King George V-class is truly modern and effective against the Axis' best capital ships.

So from the point of view of British naval strategists, they had to keep most of the King George Vs and at least one large carrier in or near home waters before allocating ships to the Indian Ocean or the Pacific... which is exactly what they did historically. They can't send significantly more ships into the Indian Ocean without creating a situation where Tirpitz can go on a rampage in the Atlantic in relative safety, or where the Italians can seriously consider launching a naval counterattack in the Mediterranean.

Hmm. What if USA offered transferring 4-8 BBs to Britain in return for the carriers? Even older ships could match any Axis battleship and while slow, they could do convoy duty pretty well. I can see USA arguing that European theatre doesn't really need all these carriers as most of the duties can be done by land based planes too due to short ranges involved. Also, by 1943, Italian fleet would be interred on Malta, suddenly halving Axis naval force.

I mean, think about the Graf Spee's operations in 1939. Not so much the damage they did, as the fact that it took a coordinated manhunt by over twenty ships, seven of them capital-class, to chase Graf Spee down. Now imagine having to do the same thing, only this time you're hunting a real battleship instead of a "pocket battleship." With higher stakes because this time the commerce raider can hit whole convoys, not just isolated ships in the South Atlantic.

That is a threat that the British high command viewed with great alarm. And countering it required a disproportionate number of modern capital ships.

Uh... No. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau did exactly such raid, almost unopposed, in Operation Berlin. All it did was sinking 22 ships over 2 months, not very impressive amount given the amount the resources expended. In fact, this proved uselessness and expense of surface raids as opposed to U-boots, what's more, both ships could have attacked a convoy, but were scared off by a single pre-WW I archaic capital ship escorting it, three different times. Great alarm, you say?

Moreover, by 1943, even if Germans don't lose Italian fleet any attacks on convoys will be suicidal. Even at 1:1 ratio, British ships will have too big advantage - see battle of the North Cape for example. Even with speed deficiency, with sea Enigma broken and radars detecting German ship long before it can detect them in return and get it deep into gun range. All Scharnhorst did whole battle was slowly opening distance then slowing again due to damage. All 'alarm' appearance of Axis ship will cause will be the scramble who gets to collect medal for sinking it first.

Or they just need to use the destroyers they had for ASW defense instead of screening boondoggly SAGs like they were so fond of IRL. Which of course they would have no need to keep around if there is no USN fleet out there to fight. Same goes with their naval aviation assets that can be bent to ASW work rather than scouting for US carrier fleets.

It took Britain three years of Battle of Atlantic to produce really effective ASW means. And that was on top of WW I experience. USA only catched up because UK send them their newest toys in a box for free. By the time Japan replicates this, it's 1945 and its merchant marine is long sunk. By 1945, IRL, US subs ran out of targets worthy a torpedo for, so...

[Sea Skimmer]

So why didn't the Tirpitz get attacked heavily before then? Range?

The British began bombing her with twin engine bombers at Trondheim so she was moved out of range of all British bombers to the far north of Norway. Smoke screens thwarted several carrier launched attacks, but several also damaged her including one which scored fifteen hits and put her out of action for months on its own. The whole saga illustrates the limitation of air attack against battleships really. Planes win through attrition and striking range, not being all that effective plane for plane. It isn't for nothing that so few battleships were actually sunk by air attack when underway at sea in the war. Sure the battleships avoided bad situations, but more then enough attacks took place to demonstrate they had great resisting power even with early war anti aircraft batteries.

There's the British midget attack that also rendered her immobilized but that was not exactly a permanent solution.

Actually it basically was. She was never fully repaired, nor could be fully repaired in Norway. D turret was never operational again as only a major shipyard could lift and reset the turret, the bottom of the hull was only patched with concrete and damage to her shaft runs could only be partly repaired.

But the British couldn't be sure the Germans didn't repair her fully in Norway, as they only knew she'd been damaged enough not to be able to move, which could be from many different causes. So as soon as the repair ship tending her treatable wounds left they launched a mass carrier strike which landed fifteen bomb hits, and marked the start of a constant bombing campaign by carrier and then Lancaster, after the Germans moved her further south, that sank her.

That first carrier strike caught the Germans totally by surprise and would have sunk her had not most British planes been armed with only 500lb bombs. They only had a small supply of Americna sourced 1600lb AP bombs, several of which hit and one of which penetrated both her armor decks only to be a dud (common problem!). Even still damage was sever to the point of one main turbine being broken off its foundations.

The X-craft attack was in any case fully intended to sink the Tirpitz, almost did, and also the Sharnhorst and Lutzow though in neither of those cases was the assigned X-craft successful in planting a charge. The Lutzow assigned sub sank enroute, and Sharnhorst wasn't at anchor.

Yes, but the Luftwaffe didn't have as-good a naval strike capability as the Japanese in many regards. Not very good aerial torpedoes for one thing.

German aerial torpedoes were excellent, as they were all bought from Italy, and then copies made later in the war. Italy had the best models around in 1941. The British and French were buying Italian torpedoes right up to the Italian declaration of war. The Italian torpedoes had more or less the same warhead and speed as the Japanese Model 91 Mod 2 aerial torpedo, but superior range, though that advantage was not very relevant against moving warships. Japan though had to use a mix of the Model 91 Mod 1 and 2 against Prince of Wales and Repulse as they had not produced enough Mod 2s to do otherwise. Mod 1 had a lighter warhead. All torpedoes used at Pearl harbor were Mod 2s.

At Crete though no German torpedo bombers were actually deployed except some random naval seaplanes that never did anything of note. Italian torpedo planes were fairly active but generally targeted on merchant and transport targets.

The Germans though had very large numbers of land based dive bombers, including large numbers of twin engine models, something Japan didn't have at all in 1941, and which statistically in the war tended to produce more hits then torpedo planes. Like I said before, Japan never was able to bomb allied shipping in the concentrated manner the Germans did at Crete. Japan never even physically had enough operable planes anywhere to do that until 1944, and by then the US fast carrier groups were so powerful it bloody didn't matter, culminating in the FORMOSA AIR BATTLE . The Kamakazi followed that glorious imperial victory shortly after.

Again, there was a very serious failure of intelligence that did not recognize that Japan had such capabilities; especially three days after Pearl.

The British fully well recognized that they would face air attack and in fact had accurate information on the number of Japanese planes present in Indochina. The qaulity, and luck of Japanese pilots was not foreseeable, and indeed a complete fucking unreasonable disaster for Japan strategically, so certainly not something the British could be expected to assume! China had certainly not shown it, indeed Japan was still sometimes loosing planes to Chinese biplanes in 1940-41. Most Japanese Army planes were in fact obsolete by European standards too, while naval types were observed far less owing to the closed nature of Japan itself.

Sure, you can give a variety of explanations/excuses why Pearl ended up that way - it was attacked by surprise and the battleships were in the anchorage - but the fact that the Japanese had launched 100+ planes in the strike should give pause that they aren't dealing with an enemy that wasn't capable of some serious air strikes.

Your just a moron is what you are really saying. You obviously don't know a damn detail about the subject and are insisting on completely unreasonable conclusion contrary to actual fact. Duh the whole Japanese fleet can launch a large air attack. Gee it's also a huge formation that cannot operate in South Asia in peacetime without being detected first. And it can't attack the US and Malay at the same time. The known Japanese air threat meanwhile was about 1/4th that faced at Crete. The British force was likewise much smaller, but welcome to war.

The transports were already empty

The transports had unloaded the men, they actually still had considerable amounts of equipment and stores to land. Japan was generally slow at doing that, which later led to fatal miscalculations at Guadalcanal BTW. The Japanese didn't realize the US could do a better job at it even though it had no practical experience.

and Force Z in fact had spent some trying to investigate suspected contacts and landings as well.

Do you know any actual details? Seems like no. It took one diversion, while still steaming partly towards Singapore, towards a reported landing.

But you know what, it made that that actually meant the Japanese raid MISSED THEM when it flew south! The Japanese didn't know the British changed course in darkness because they had no radar and no shadowing aircraft. Had the British not changed course they would have been found sooner! In fact the Japanese formation was about a half hour from jettisoning weapons and returning to base for lack of fuel when it finally got a contact. This shouldn't have happened but the Japanese sucked at conducting air searches. Sound like a familiar problem? It was also linked to just how few planes Japan actually had in South Asia at the time.

Had this one air mission missed, Force Z would have been back in Singapore before another raid could have been mounted, and Japan had no replacement torpedoes to arm the planes with either. Equipping the planes with torpedoes at all had been a reaction to the public dispatch of the British capital ships in the first place and they'd only brought out one weapon per plane, carried by the aircraft themselves. The G4M bomber type hadn't even been in Indochina before that was announced, only older G3Ms far less capable of torpedo runs, though still able to be equipped. You want something to blame Churchill for, blame him for being public about it so early. But he had good reasons to do that anyway because this was about avoiding a major political collapse, and above all Turkey entering the war for the Axis. Since that didn't happen Churchill did not fail at what he was really concerned with.

Okay, fine, you can't blame Philips not knowing the transports were already empty, but going out there with just four destroyers does not strike me as fighting with the odds anywhere near your favor.

No major escort had been spotted, because it didn't exist, all the Japanese warships were grouped in one big SAG because they lacked the capital units to be certain of countering two RN fast ships. So the odds actually looked better then they probably should have had Japan used a less risky plan. Odds alone though don't matter.

Risk is balanced against the importance of the mission in wartime. You cannot consider one without the other and draw a conclusion with any validity what so ever. The importance of the mission was to limit a Japanese invasion of Malay and prevent the capture of Singapore which was the only modern fortified British base east of India. Its loss meant operating from Ceylon, none of the tiny Dutch bases could hold a capital ship, and from Ceylon or south Australia effective operations in the Dutch East Indies would be nearly impossible. As far as importance goes this was extremely high. Nobody thought the mission wasn't risky, the fact that they turned back when they did reflects it.

It was meanwhile the highly successful tradition of the Royal Navy to risk ships in harms way to carry out difficult operations, because if you don't try you always fail. And the British didn't just spout that stuff, they designed it into the ships they built, pretty much always favoring economy and thus numbers over quality. They managed to build five KGV battleships, only lost one, and that's more tonnage of modern battleship then Japan, Germany or Italy crapped out. British ships were meant to be expended to accomplish the nations goals, not hoarded for the end times. This strategy was in broad terms completely correct, and did not fail in the South China Sea. Hell you want hindsight, in hindsight we know PoW and Repulse would have never been super important ever again owing to the growing size of allied air power, and couldn't have saved Java alone, ergo nothing gained (except lives of crewmen) by saving them.

Yes, they were mostly cruiser and destroyer formations doing the escorting and in very limited quantities. But again when you only have four destroyers escorting two capital ships it's not out of the question to see an earlier Java Sea where the PoW or Repulse gets torpedoed by a cruiser for want of a good screen either.

Have you ever looked at the Java Sea? Japan fired at least 164 torpedoes, and scored 3 hits, a grand hit rate of 1.4%, all during the night phase. That's actually something totally work risking. Torpedo results were seldom much better in other daylight battles for anybody, the range are just too long for the speeds of the torpedoes, even the Long Lance. Japan later produced a heavier warhead shorter range version of the torpedo because of that.

At night the situation would be bad, but the British had radar while Japan did not, and a good record on night fighting, as well as simply being fast, particularly Repulse. They could certainly blunder into an ambush, but it would not very easy for Japanese ships to overtake them and torpedo them in a formal action.

My argument is not refusing to roll the dice, my argument is that the dice were rolled with such poor odds to begin with both from the perspective of hindsight and from what should have already been known by December 8th.

I'd say you know little about the subject past the ships sank, and what you think the British should have known is unreasonable and questionably factual. Pretty pointless anyway considering the Japanese decision to launch such a sweeping surprise attack in the first place could lead nowhere but disaster, and Japan actually 100% had the information in hand about the US fleet and industry and 1940 program to know this. Ergo in hindsight Churchill should have assumed Japan would not attack, because all the fact's said Japan would loose, and that it wouldn't matter if he made this assumption because basically Japan would loose the war no matter how inept the allies could ever reasonably be short of scuttling their own ships. See how pointless and useless this is?

[Beowulf]

three days after Pearl

I've seen this a couple times in this thread. It was two days after Pearl that Force Z was sunk. Pearl Harbor was attacked on Dec 8, local to Malaysia.

[Lonestar]

Possibly a later end to the war but still ultimately a crushing American victory


A bit down the page the author spins a scenario where all the carriers are lost at Midway. By late 1943 the US is ahead of the IJN in CVs, and triple the number of CVLs. This isn't counting the number of CVEs out there. At the end of the day, the Japanese are fundamentally outclassed by American industrial strength, and a American victory doesn't require a fleet of B-36s to blot out the sun to win.

[Captain Seafort]

A bit down the page the author spins a scenario where all the carriers are lost at Midway. By late 1943 the US is ahead of the IJN in CVs, and triple the number of CVLs. This isn't counting the number of CVEs out there. At the end of the day, the Japanese are fundamentally outclassed by American industrial strength, and a American victory doesn't require a fleet of B-36s to blot out the sun to win.

The basic statement that the US will eventually build up to a level that treats anything the Japanese can put up as a speed bump goes without saying. The intent of the OP was to try and establish how much more damage is likely to be done while the Japanese have free reign, how much further out the perimeter is likely to be, and how the US is likely to go about their counter offence, given the lack of forces in contact on New Guinea and the likely presence of Japanese garrisons much further to the south east than historically.

[Lonestar]

how much further out the perimeter is likely to be

About the same, the best they can hope for is taking all of New Guinea and Midway.

They simply don't have the lift to take HI or land in Australia.

[Captain Seafort]

They simply don't have the lift to take HI or land in Australia.

Agreed, but I'm not talking about Hawaii or Oz - I'm talking about the islands north of NZ to try and cut the lines of communication from the US west coast to Australia.

[Irbis]

With the loss of New Guinea and probable successful knocking out of Australia from the war its going to be a much longer and harder slog across the Pacific than it was in reality even if the end result would eventually be the same.

Out of curiosity, how they would knock Australia out of the war? Only northern Australian shore is really anywhere near Japan's operational range, while the industry and population centres are mostly in the south. USA would probably love invasion of Australia, perfect opportunity to use their armoured formations to crush big Japanese force with lots of advantages on US side, with none of disadvantags of storming small fortress island...

Agreed, but I'm not talking about Hawaii or Oz - I'm talking about the islands north of NZ to try and cut the lines of communication from the US west coast to Australia.

If you look at this map there is really no way for Japan to do this without eventually running of of forces/supply range/being cut off by flank US attack, IMO...