Re: Japanese 'plan' - new math

On Mon, 18 Jun 2007 12:19:48 -0400, "a425couple"
<a425couple@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Pre-war, the UK thought Hong Kong and Singapore could
be defended. The Dutch thought NEI could be defended.
US felt the Philippines and Wake had decent defenses,
and that Pearl Harbor was a safe base.

At least from the USN point of view, Wake and the PI were not expected
to be held (and the bulk of the naval 1941 era thinking was that the
changes wrought by Rainbow 5 would not change the simple math
involved. Better the 40 years of war planning against Japan had
produced, over that span, two major groups who might be styled
"thrusters", who wanted to move the fleet to the western Pacific ASAP,
and "cautionaries" who wanted to have a phased advance across the
Pacific and a major base in the Western Pacific to support their fleet
before moving on to the PI. The design and construction of the
modular BB sized floating drydocks installed at Manus during the war
were a direct result of this planning. Plans for a permanent base in
the PI, with a sufficient garrison to hold it, had been mooted several
times between the end of WW I and 1940, but always the cost was out of
the question. In the end, the logistics of getting a western Pacific
base governed the pace of advance. Keeping either the PI or Wake was
pretty much out of the question without spend much more money then the
congress would authorize (and after the Naval treaties, without being
in violation of same).

All those assumptions had clearly been proved wrong.
Seems then, very understandable that both sides
reevaluated, and US became concerned about West Coast.

The US military was not concerned about an invasion of the West Coast
after 1941. The Navy, who understood Japanese logistics, never took
the idea seriously. Certainly the general public panicked, but that's
a different matter.

And Australia became concerned about their coast,
remember that "for every trained Australian soldier still
free on Australian soil there were two who were prisoners
of the Japanese."

Harsh, jarring, math figures that must alter the mind set.

Not so much to the logician. The IJN had driven their expansion to
just about the limits of their logistics. Six weeks after the PH
attack Nimitz was sending out carriers on offensive missions. With
that, the Japanese logistics became much worse, leading to a series of
ill-planned operations -- the MO op, the attack on Milne Bay, the
advance over the Owen Stanleys, and Midway. They had stretched
themselves way to thin for the Navy they had.

.

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