Just how good or bad was the IJN during WW2?

[Isolder74]

My best guess is that Japan tried to repeat the 1905 success against Russia. In 1905, Russia was also economically superiour, but after losing at Tsushima stopped fighting. So Japan probably thought that the USA would react similarily after Pearl Harbor.

This is an insane strategy, but at least would have some basis in reality. Everything else I can think of is just plain madness on Japan's part.

Trying to set up a Tsushima was the whole idea(they kept flying the battle flag from the battle as a luck charm). It lead to the entire idea for the Japanese of the decisive battle that they caught for all during the entire war. They hoped to make it Midway, when that didn't work they tried to do it at Guadalcanal, Marinas then Leyte. It was only after the Battle of Leyte Gulf that the Japanese finally seemed to realize that their holy grail of a back breaking battle just wasn't going to happen so they moved their efforts into the suicide weapons hoping to sink enough stuff to scare the American into calling it quits. All they did was make the Americans deploy their ships even more defensively making their Kamikaze attacks start to show their own diminishing returns.

RADAR, Proximity Fuses, and ever increasing sophistication in gun director tech was just going to overwhelm the Japanese.

[Isolder74]

Look at how nearly all Japanese twin engine bombers could only carry an 800kg bomb load. I don't think any single engine plane they had could do over 800kg at all except perhaps certain suicide plane conversions

The Japanese's best bomber aircraft from their carriers the 'Kate' torpedo and high level bomber have a max capacity of 1000 kg, and their two older models the 'Mabel' and the 'Jill' had a max capacity off 800 kg. However on all of those platforms the aircraft could not carry more then either one 1000 kg bomb or 2 500 kg bomb on the Kate or a single 800 kg or 2 250 kg(the dive bombers tended to max out at 3 hard points) bombs in the other two. If you look at the heaviest of the Japanese 2 engine bombers, the 'Betty' had a max carrying capacity of only 2 1000 kg bombs or 4 500 kg bombs. While the planes were quite capable of carrying higher payloads, the Japanese never installed into them efficient bomb deployment machinery giving them any possibility of actually making use of their carrying weight load. It's just not possible to carry 8 100 kg fragmentation bombs needed to crater airfields if you only have enough attachment points to actually release 2 bombs at a time.

Of course the Japanese philosophy was more with less. In their minds 2 big holes was just as good as 6 or 8 smaller ones(of course the Americans proved them wrong on that more then once).

Even the American's obsolete Devastator Torpedo bomber was more then capable of carrying 10 100 pound bombs(the SBD Dauntless had 6 hard points and 2250 lbs of capacity) and wrecking Japanese airstrips very quickly. Throw a squadron of B-17's at the base and it's going to get very messy very fast.