No Damned Computer Is Going to Tell Me What to Do – Story of Naval Data System

Japan simply was not that big a country and even if you assume they had a disproportionate amount of intellectuals or amount of advancement per individual, they're a tiny tiny fraction of the size of the US, the US simply could be working on a lot more projects at once, and even long-shot ones that might not bear fruit, and they were working on the shorter-term ones at the same time. And that size factor also translates into much poorer availability of the strategic materials that are necessary for a lot of advanced research.

After Midway the Japanese military really shifted into field-expedient mode, you can see it even in things like the quality of their small arms production, they started cutting every corner that it was possible to safely cut and then some. At that point I imagine that a lot of the advanced research was cut hard unless it was really really important (iirc they still had, for example, a nuclear program) or seemed likely to bear immediate fruit.

The pacific front was really over when Japan didn't get the US carrier fleet at Pearl Harbor and it was definitely over after Midway, everything after that was just stubbornness. Same as the European front - there was really no chance of victory once the US shifted off a market-economy to a command-economy focused around war production and you had an industrial nation 2-3x the size of everyone else sitting 2000 miles away (which, realistically, might as well have been on the moon as far as Axis force projection) pumping war materiel into the battle. The US could build tanks faster than the Germans could blow them up, they could re-tool the Russian industry to modern standards, and they could build ships faster than the Japanese (or German u-boats) could sink them, all at the same time.

In that sense even if they had gotten the pacific fleet, the US probably still could have won in the long term, it would just have taken years longer. It's a "what if the germans had actually taken moscow" counterfactual... it probably still wouldn't have changed anything given the biggest factor, which is an untouchable foe sitting on the other side of the planet pumping out war materiel while you run out of your own resources.

But yeah in general the role of the military in Imperial Japan is very interesting... the army and the navy both had their own armies and navies and air forces, and they basically were in competition for the favor of the emperor. It wasn't quite what we think of as a modern professional military where everyone is at least theoretically "on the same side", the armed forces VERY MUCH did not like each other and would go out of their way to screw the other over. I could definitely see some disdain for eggheads, or refusing to adopt a technology because it came from the wrong branch too.

However, Imperial Japan certainly had much more experience than the US at the start of the war: they'd been fighting in China for years, had carrier operations down to a science, and had dominated southeast Asia for even longer. But they ultimately failed to adapt as the war went on. In a way, America starting as the underdog actually helped long term: while the US kept improving equipment, incorporating what doctrine and training worked, and refining production processes, the Japanese military essentially continued to use what had worked for the relatively low intensity war they had been fighting before.

The most famous example is probably that Axis (Japanese and German) pilots often had dozens of air to air victories, while the US sent their pilots home to train new pilots regularly. While the Japanese aces were formidable, the rest of their pilots weren't so great, and after so many pilots were lost there was nobody to create new good pilots. Over China, where the Zero was technically better than anything it went up against, it was fine to throw new pilots on missions with little experience, since the plane would compensate for inexperience. Against the US Navy though, even the most green pilot had trained from an experienced pilot and knew all the tricks and tactics that would otherwise take several combat sorties to discover. In short, the US pilots had lower peaks than the Japanese, but the baseline level was much higher.

Another example is the Bofors 40mm antiaircraft gun. Reportedly the original Swedish blueprints had so many sections marked "machine to fit" that an engineer said that "the Bofors gun had been designed so as to eliminate the unemployment problems of the Great Depression"[0]. By the end of the war, production time of the gun had been cut in half, enabling every ship in the fleet to be loaded with ever increasing numbers of guns. Meanwhile, the Zero's factory didn't even have an airstrip, and it had to be carried disassembled on animal-drawn carriage to the nearest airport, up to the end of the war.

TL;DR the Japanese didn't have better equipment at the start of the war, but they did have more experience. However, they relied on their tried-and-true methods of production and training, which were geared towards a lower intensity war against an inferior opponent in China. The US knew they started from the underdog position and worked from the start to improve everything everywhere, and continued to do so up until the end of the war.

[0] http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_4cm-56_mk12.php#Use_by_...

But, at best, they had parity with the USN in every other category. So, for instance, the USN was much better at receiving air attacks- they were about two years ahead on radar technology (which, given the pace of technological development in 1940 is the difference between your first experimental set and wide-scale operational deployment). They were much better at radios and communication (literally the Zero's radio was so useless that the standard way that surface ships communicated with friendly Zero's on CAP was to fire their main guns into the water, kicking up big spouts of water, summoning the Zeros to attack enemy planes near the ship). They were much much better at medium range AA fire (the USN developed the Mk. 37 Fire Control System, an analog gyrostabilized computer hooked up to the range finder which automatically slewed the gun turrets to the correct spot, adjusting for the wave motion of the ship. By 1944 it was so sophisticated that when an operator tracked the target in the range-finder it could even automatically set the timer on the shell for the correct time of flight for that distance). A lot of these advantages compound: for example, the RN never developed as sophisticated a fire control system as the Mk 37 because the USN had also developed more expensive and better (small-tube high pressure) boilers at about the same time. These more sophisticated boilers allowed USN destroyers to adopt unitized machinery- going boiler-turbine-boiler-turbine, so that one hit that took out two rooms wouldn't knock out power to the whole ship. The RN, with less sophisticated engineering plants (boiler-boiler-turbine-turbine), were much more focused on continuing to fight a ship after power was lost and so didn't try to develop that sort of analog computer system, and instead insisted that their turrets be workable against airplanes using purely manual controls. And this sort of superiority shows up again and again when you look at other areas: submarine warfare and anti-submarine warfare, UNREP, amphibious assault, etc. all of these other categories the USN was somewhere between slightly and extremely superior.

The Japanese, by carefully wielding those three areas of advantage, fought the larger USN to mutual exhaustion over the course of 1942, where both sides lost most of their carriers and other ships. But then by Operation Hailstone, the February 1944 raid on Truk, a totally different USN existed, which had been built during the course of 1942 and 1943, and that navy stomped through the remains of the IJN and has been the dominant naval force afloat for the past 80 years. ("There are three different navies that need to be understood to understand the Pacific War: the USN of Jan 1 1942, the IJN of Jan 1, 1942, and the USN of Jan 1 1944" as a historian once told me.)

And that other navy was built because, as smart and clever as the Japanese were, the US had twice the population and three times the per-capita income. In a war of national wealth like a naval-air war, that difference just couldn't be answered.

There are many good reasons why one would want a manual over-ride. The imagination of popular script writers is not one of them.

Did I wander into a convention of TREKKIES? :)

Though, after a quick google, it seems that the US took until April 2022 (a fortnight ago) to get their first female Captain. I'm slightly agog it's taken so long.

https://www.forces.net/services/navy/royal-navy-history-firs...

Sure. On the other hand, an admiral is technically allowed to micromanage the ships under his command. They seldom do because it can lean to needless conflicts, hurt egos, etc. Which tend to make the fleet less effective.

On the other hand, this would be a situation where SECNAV would be putting pressure on the admiralty to get this system into operation.

I don't think back in the day a captain going "I'm not going to have my men use these new-fangled anti-aircraft weapons" would have gone over very well. Well this is not technically all that different.

I do agree that sentence is probably overstating things a fair bit. In practice the captains would likely get pressured into using it by the admiralty, rather than actually removed. And to get court martialed for not using it would realistically require ignoring an order to use the system.