Kantai Kessen (Japanese Decisive Battle Doctrine) - Method or Madness?

[Music] many questions have been asked about the japanese decisive battle doctrine or kantai kesen as it's called in japanese apparently although i've almost certainly horribly butchered that pronunciation nevertheless the central idea of this was to win a war at sea by a single massive naval engagement the decisive battle following which in theory japan would win and therefore win the war as a whole most of these questions tend to be whether or not it had any chance of success at all but in order to answer that we really have to look at how this doctrine developed one has to remember as amazing as it might sound that even as relatively late as the 1850s japan was not really on the radar of world powers it was still a closed-off society that was technologically speaking quite considerably behind a number of more advanced technologically speaking societies such as most of the colonial powers however in the second half of the 19th century japan underwent a huge transformation including radical industrialization and of course looking to put itself on the world stage there were a number of competing theories as to how it could do this but at the end of the day japan is an island nation and so its primary striking power was always going to have to be a navy because well you can't invade anywhere from japan unless you transport your men by sea and to transport them by sea you need ships to guard them equally speaking if someone wants to come after japan they have to come by sea so in order to prevent your enemy coming and attacking you you have to have a fleet to stop them this wasn't exactly a radical new concept the japanese broadly understood this even if their success with invasion and defending against invasion by sea was somewhat mixed over the past few hundred years but as the latter half of the 19th century progressed and new technologies in the form of iron steel steam torpedoes long-range guns etc started to come into play there were two primary competing schools of thought as to how an island nation or indeed a nation with any kind of major seabourn interests should handle itself one was the traditional approach which was adopted by nations such as the united kingdom at this point the british empire and this was to have a large fleet of battleships and then some cruisers to enforce your overall global domination plus some gun boats for local colonial work however battleships were big inexpensive and a large fleet of them even more so on the other hand there was a school of thought that was coming out of france called the journey col and this held that with the newer advances in torpedoes and fast cruisers it wasn't necessary to have a large traditional battle fleet you could in fact get away with disrupting an enemy fleet's power or perhaps even sinking a more conventional battleship based fleet with much smaller much less expensive fleets of torpedo boats which you would use in battle cruisers to attack the enemy's trade and perhaps one or two larger vessels to backstop the torpedo boats during a gunfire exchange while as an island nation its geographical and strategic situation was much closer to the uk's than it was to france's its financial and industrial situation was well not brilliant and certainly a lot closer to france's than it the uk's and so initially the japanese navy adopted the jean ecole style however with the advent of quick firing guns installed as secondary tertiary and occasionally quantenary batteries in larger capital ships especially pre-dreadnought battleships as well as various other technological advances the power of the zhernikov in european naval thinking was beginning to wane somewhat then in the 1880s and 1890s came the publication of two books the influence of sea power upon history the first volume 1660 to 1783 and the second volume upon the french revolution and empire both published by american naval historian alfred thayer mahan and he pretty much rejected the journal thinking albeit not directly in his review of how c power had influenced world history and although the two volumes as we said started in 1660 and between them came all the way up to what at the time was the present century the first volume actually contained a multiple page pricey of naval history up until that point talking about things such as the roman campaigns against the greeks and the carthaginians and rolling forward through time through the medieval era up until his main kickoff point in the 1600s mahan therefore argued for a more traditional battle fleet the japanese were about to embark on the first sino-japanese war or at least the first sino-japanese war of this particular period and they went into that with broadly speaking a fleet based around the ideas of the zhernikov they came out of that with some rather important lessons which seemed to indicate that the mahanian thinking of a large battle fleet was perhaps the more correct way of going about things because although the japanese fleet had by and large been by far the most modern of the two fleets and had contained a considerable number of torpedo boats and cruisers as well as better organization and leadership some of the linchpin naval victories of the war had been very close run things as whilst the chinese ironclads amongst various other things were slightly obsolete by the time the battle was actually fought they'd proved almost impossible to actually kill the torpedo boats having had nowhere near the effectiveness that the zhernikov thinking had said they would and the other cruisers despite having a considerable amount of firepower for their size had still when they'd been occasionally hit taken a substantial amount of damage it seemed fairly obvious to the japanese that if they'd had a modern battleship or two they would have easily rolled over the chinese and so in the 1890s the combination of the lessons from the sino-japanese war and mahan's influence upon everybody's thinking began to reshape japanese doctrine towards the more traditional battleship-based battle fleet one of the first things that the imperial japanese naval officer khadra began to appreciate was that despite japan's rapid modernization and industrialization they did not have the resources to match the top tier naval powers in terms of sheer numbers and bearing in mind at this point that the world's three biggest navies were britain france and russia all of which had varying colonial interests on the western pacific coast and amongst the western pacific islands and in russia's case they also had a land border with the western pacific region when evaluating these as potential threats along with the chinese the japanese could be relatively sure that the chinese weren't going to be a naval threat any time soon given the aftermath of the first sino-japanese war the french whilst they had a large navy had the smallest amount of overall territorial concerns in the western pacific of the three major european powers and what they did control was largely outside of japan's immediate sphere of concern the largest french holding was french indochina later to become vietnam and the japanese weren't particularly concerned with it the russians whilst they had the smallest number of individual colonies did as we said have a land border and a lot of territorial ambitions and the british of course had a fair number of individual colonies and a very very large navy in the 1890s the united states was not really that much of a concern for japan they were after all on the other side of the world's largest ocean and they had no particular holdings in the western pacific of course at the turn of the century the spanish-american war and a sudden upswing in american naval expansion did start to concern the japanese somewhat especially since the war ended with the americans in control of the philippines and a number of other smaller formerly spanish colonies in the area which now gave them a direct geographic concern in what japan was beginning to see as its sphere of influence each of the three nations that were now the primary threat to japan russia the united states and the british empire could all bring to bear significantly larger fleets than japan had or indeed could afford and so at this stage and going forward for pretty much the rest of the history of the imperial japanese navy the idea of having ships that were individually superior to enemy vessels in order to make up for the greater quantity of enemy vessels began to take fruit at this point japanese shipyards weren't capable of producing their own battleships by and large and so their new capital ships were largely bought from overseas especially from british yards but when you looked at the ships that the japanese were buying they were taking the latest royal navy designs and making tweaks and improvements on them so mikasa the japanese flagship at the soon to come battle of tsushima for example was derived from british designs but from the design that she was in particular derived from it was very easy to argue that mikasa was individually superior the next stage of the japanese plan was to eliminate one of the major powers as a threat having taken a look around and concluded that amongst other things the british were the single largest threat they decided to make an alliance with them the anglo-japanese alliance taking effect in 1902 meant that at a stroke japan had cut down its list of possible enemies in the pacific region from three to two and eliminated the biggest one with a stroke of a pen added to that they even in theory in certain circumstances of war would have the world's largest navy the royal navy backing them up which was even better then a couple of years later came the war with russia and this would see the debut of another piece of japanese battle thinking whilst it was all well and good to argue that their ships were individually superior to russian ships and therefore should be able to defeat a larger russian fleet no one sane was going to argue that this meant you should just wait for the russians to come to you with superior numbers and hope that that particular paradigm held true instead the japanese opened the naval aspect of the war with a surprise attack on the russian port of port arthur using torpedo boats between the success of this as well as a blockade using mines despite some losses to mines of their own the japanese were fairly happy with the overall progress of the war a number of naval engagements were fought with the russian pacific squadron and although these weren't quite the crushing victories the japanese would have liked the imperial japanese navy was certainly coming out on top then of course came the second pacific squadron and here at the battle of tsushima japan marshalled practically every ship in the imperial japanese navy took on a numerically very large russian fleet and beat it incredibly soundly not only coming away with a large number of russian ships sunk but also a large number captured and a rather decisive end to large-scale naval operations in that particular conflict with the main concern left being a few russian stragglers that were running it for internment in various other ports whilst generally having the better part of the war on land as well as at sea it had sea sword back and forth a bit until after tsushima when the japanese could command the oceans guarantee supply lines as well as have strategic mobility in their back pocket and the russians couldn't it was pretty much an open and shut case as to who was going to win it was however somewhat draining on the japanese economy and many could point to the battle of tsushima and say here is where the war really began to go our way this is the kind of battle that we need in order to ensure that the rest is just mopping up and therefore our wars can be conducted swiftly and relatively speaking cheaply this fed into the idea of a mahanian decisive battle in order to win a war and thus two decades which had seen japan involved in two major wars and catapult itself from relatively interesting but somewhat strategically unimportant nation somewhere in the middle of the pacific to actually having a foot on the rung of the ladder of world powers concluded with what appeared to be a template for dealing with future enemies a large-scale decisive battle at sea in japan's favor fought on japan's terms that would end in victory for japan and thus decide the overall outcome of the war attention now focused to the last remaining major threat to japanese interests in the western pacific the united states the fact that the united states was so far away from japan worked both for and against japanese strategy and tactics whilst a small squadron could be based in the philippines the philippines were in no way suitable for the prolonged deployment of a large number of ships in the form of a large war fleet and pearl harbor at this point was definitely not a major base in fact it would not become a major base until well into the 1930s and so in peacetime the majority of the u.s pacific fleet would be based in san diego in california on the opposite side of the pacific ocean the main problem japan had was that a surprise attack to diminish the strength of an enemy fleet as had happened at port arthur was practically impossible to pull off in this particular scenario because one the japanese simply didn't have that many ships with the range to go all the way across the pacific and back again and their torpedo boats definitely didn't and two crossing that amount of ocean someone was bound to spot them and report it in which would put something of a crimp on the whole surprise part of surprise attack working in their favor was the fact that the u.s navy was split between the pacific and atlantic fleets and at the moment in the 1900s that meant that for a considerable period of time they would have to deal with only the pacific fleet as for atlantic fleet ships to come around and reinforce them would either take a prolonged buildup of hostilities or several months delay while the atlantic fleet sailed down the atlantic round the tip of south america and came back up the other side of course in the 1910s this particular aspect would be negated by the construction of the panama canal but for the minute it was a tactical consideration in the japanese navy's favor and to be honest even once the panama canal was completed all this did was shorten the transit time for the atlantic fleet not eliminated entirely this in theory would give japan a certain window of operational freedom to enact its own interests in the western pacific before it had to worry about u.s ships coming over the horizon also working in japan's favor was the fact that any battle therefore would take place in the western pacific thus much closer to japanese yards and much further away from american yards so in the event of a closely fought battle or even possibly one that japan might marginally lose its ships could run for home and damaged ships in the case of either a win loss or victory would all be able in theory hopefully to make it home for repairs and refits whereas us ships regardless of whether they'd won lost or drawn a fight would have a considerably longer voyage home which heavily damaged ships may well not survive unless of course they wanted to run for internment which whilst didn't sink them would at least take them out of the rest of the war since they were planning on fighting a defensive war the japanese held to the relatively common at the time theory that an attacking naval force needed a 50 superiority in numbers assuming all other things were equal or greater in order to assure themselves of victory so for example if japan had 10 battleships then the us would have to come at them with 15. in turn this meant that if the japanese navy was two-thirds the size of the united states navy it would still lose but in theory if it was slightly larger it would be able to win and so thoughts began to develop that a japanese fleet that had about 70 percent of the strength of the us navy was a japanese fleet that could beat the u.s navy at least in the western pacific this was however something of a razor thin margin as when you were looking at say battleship numbers a japanese fleet 70 the strength of the us navy might have that difference between under 66 and 70 made up of a single battleship hull and an unlucky mine strike or a ship simply being in refit or a single well aimed or very unluckily aimed depending on whose side you were on shell could change that balance of power completely in but a moment since a massive strike to disable or destroy a significant portion of the american fleet and bring the numbers much closer to parity was not possible due to the aforementioned basing of u.s ships over in the continental united states the japanese began to look at other ways to whittle down a theoretical maximum-strength us battle line before the decisive battle in this respect japanese destroyers were designed for primarily torpedo-based work and their cruisers were designed to be very heavily armed especially with torpedoes as well as these were the primary anti-capital ship weapon very fast in order to keep up with and command the destroyers and there was a strong emphasis on knight fighting amongst the japanese navy the idea was to inflict so-called attritional losses as japanese strategic thinking held that if they went to war in the western pacific and they ended up attacking u.s holdings such as the philippines the u.s navy would sail out to try and relieve the philippines and counter the japanese in a decisive battle of their own as they progressed across the pacific fast forces made up of cruisers and destroyers with perhaps support from the congo class battle cruisers would attack the american fleet at night the american navy was known widely as being relatively deficient in cruiser strength and whilst the world war one building spree had resulted in the construction of vast numbers of clemson and wix class destroyers the japanese theory held that a cruiser escorted force of destroyers should be able to blow through a mainly destroyer-based fleet screen especially when you consider that at that point the only modern cruisers that the us navy was building or possessing this now being the interwar period were either the omaha class cruisers which were really in some ways overgrown destroyers with all the protection of an ambitious sheet of paper and the pensacola northampton and portland class cruisers that were built during the 1920s and most of those had similar levels of near non-existent protection when it came to fighting other cruisers with heavy 8-inch guns as this thinking had developed during the world war 1 period in the 1910s and carried through into the 1920s it became ever more necessary for this attritional phase to be conducted with a fair degree of success as with the 1922 washington naval treaty having curtailed the japanese plans for battleship and battle cruiser construction the now fixed-in-place ratios of tonnage between the great powers meant that japan was left with a fleet that in capital ship terms would be two-thirds the strength of an enemy fleet whether that now be the us or possibly the uk since the anglo-japanese treaty had had to be abandoned with the signing of the washington naval treaty this of course was bad news because of course 66 percent is less than 70 and now on its own it was not believed that the japanese battle line could defeat the american battle line and thus attritional warfare across the pacific had gone from being a nice-to-have way of increasing the margin of safety on victory to absolutely vital for victory whilst the curtailment of its battle fleet could be seen as a significant disadvantage for japanese plans the onward progress of time technology and treaties had brought japan to new benefits which looked like they might more than make up for it not including their torpedo-heavy cruiser and destroyer force during the first world war the submarine had really come of age and so japanese naval thinking rapidly began to adopt the submarine inn as another arm of the attritional warfare part of the naval campaign since there weren't that many massive merchant trade routes running from japan or anywhere near japan's area of interest over to the united states the use of their submarine arm for commerce raiding was not particularly seen as a massive priority instead the submarines were generally configured as fleet submarines for relatively fast units that were designed to run out ahead of even the cruiser and destroyer squadrons wait for the american fleet to run over the submarines and then fire torpedoes to whittle down americans fleet strength even further the other aspect was the aeroplane likewise having come to maturity in the first world war but more specifically now the aircraft carrier since the pacific is very large aircraft of the time were relatively short range and so whilst some land-based attack aircraft could be taken into account if you wanted to attack the american fleet which was very unlikely to politely sail close to every single island the japanese might occupy and put land attack aircraft on you had to go for an aircraft carrier or more than one again an honest example of aircraft's capabilities at the time meant that it couldn't really be hoped that the aircraft carriers would do all that much to the enemy fleet but they could certainly do damage maybe destroy a few smaller ships if they were really lucky they might sink one or two larger vessels but they weren't seen as a decisive element of the overall japanese strategy merely another element alongside the submarines the cruisers and the destroyers all of which would serve to whittle down the american fleet to a size that it could be dealt with by the japanese battle line in this respect the japanese also heavily invested in torpedoes since torpedoes would be the primary striking element of all four aspects of their attritional forces and thus the eventually the development and deployment of the long range type 93 long lance it's type 95 smaller submarine derivative and a number of upgrades made to japanese aerial drop torpedoes the japanese navy's high command estimated that between submarines and aircraft they could perhaps attrition away about 20 percent of the american battle line strength that's not to say 20 sunk but 20 either sunk or badly damaged enough that they'd have to fall out of formation this reduced the american superiority if they start out 100 and the japanese remember at 66 percent down to about 80 percent and 80 versus 66 that's a margin the japanese thought they could probably play with since that would amount to a hull or two but and that was before of course the cruisers and destroyers went in now figures for exactly how many ships would be sunk or badly damaged by the cruiser and destroyer attack varied quite considerably during various japanese tactical evaluations throughout the 1910s 1920s and early 1930s but it was generally held that this should be able to bring the us fleet down to either parity or possibly even give the japanese a slight superiority for the final decisive battle and of course with their reloads aboard it was entirely possible that the japanese cruisers and destroyers might be able to get stuck in during the daylight decisive battle engagement as well the wonderful thing about aircraft carriers as well being that they could also join in if they really wanted to and so the japanese were fairly happy that a nice big decisive battle could be fought and they could win and of course the thinking went if they won the decisive battle then surely they have won the war now as the 1930s came in aircraft carriers became more and more of a consideration however before we talk about carriers their striking power and of course the development of the yamato class battleships let's review the japanese plan and strategy so far now one of the first things with any battle strategy is well is the enemy going to be nice and cooperate and do what you think they're going to do in this particular case the answer was actually yes the americans had war plan orange and warplane orange consisted of exactly what the japanese thought it was going to consist of namely a big thrust by the us navy across the pacific to reinforce the philippines base out of there and crush the japanese fleet in a decisive battle so the u.s navy appeared to be playing directly into the japanese hands and if the philippines fell too early for the us fleet to assist which was considered in various evolutions of warplane orange there was a plan for an island hopping campaign which might sound rather familiar because it was broadly what the americans actually adopted as a strategy in world war ii but we effectively consisted of seizing one base after another and marching their way across the pacific that way this wasn't a massive problem for the japanese either because ultimately the americans would be sailing a long way from home to an area of the central or western pacific which was where the japanese would like to meet them attrition them down and then engage them into decisive battle and within japanese thinking the area where this decisive battle would take place and did gradually progress further and further east as time went on however even at this stage in the early 1930s before the u.s changed its war plans which they would do in the late 1930s there was one massive flaw with the kantai kessin strategy it was an excellent strategy for holding a big decisive battle and whilst the effectiveness or not of the submarine attacks air attacks and cruiser and destroyer attacks might have varied in reality compared to how they were planned to come out on paper it's relatively likely that with the decent bit of scouting and a few strokes of luck and given the number of attacks they were going to throw at them they'd eventually have at least one or two strokes of luck the japanese probably could have won such a decisive battle assuming that the u.s navy continued to plow on almost regardless of losses but a strategy to win a decisive battle is not a strategy to win a war somewhere along the line and actually when you look at various documents and resources regarding japanese naval thinking probably actually fairly early down the line japanese thinking had become a little bit muddled you see whilst mahanian doctrine is generally held to be the doctrine of decisive battle that's not actually the case mahan advocated for decisive battle yes he advocated for large fleets of capital ships yes he didn't say that would win you the war what mohan said would win you the war was command of the sea what the decisive battle doctrine was supposed to do at least as far as the way mahan advocated for it was to give you command of the sea and the russia japanese war in microcosm was a pretty good example of this you had the various smaller clashes between elements of the russian and japanese fleets but this didn't resolve overall who had command of the sea and thus whilst a lot of the campaigns were based on land everything remained in flux because if japan lost command of the sea it could no longer supply coordinate and move its troops and thus it would lose if japan could gain command of the sea then they had absolute mobility and easy resupply without much risk for their troops and as long as the money held out in theory they would win assuming the russians didn't just swamp everything in mass numbers but given that was at the other end of the trans-siberian railway it was relatively unlikely and then when you had the battle of tsushima well japan now had come under the sea they were able to exercise it and they won the war but when you look back at what mahan had written about previous naval battles both back in ancient history and when he looked more carefully and precisely at the latter part of the second millennium you could see his point coming through again and again trafalgar was the decisive battle but the napoleonic wars didn't end for another 10 years there was a small interruption in the early 1810s what trafalgar did was it gave the royal navy command of the sea and with command of the sea the royal navy was then able to enact a much more stringent and harsh blockade of enemy ports as well as savaging enemy merchant shipping and of course securing their own merchant shipping thus boosting their economy at the expense of their enemies in this case napoleonic france it should be borne in mind that whilst 1805 was the year of trafalgar some of napoleon's greatest victories such as austerlitz post-date trafalgar and likewise the spanish-american war much more proximate to the time period when the japanese are developing their battle strategy did not end with the defeat of the spanish fleets in various places in cuba and the philippines but what those defeats meant those various smaller decisive battles was that the us navy had command of the sea and with command of the sea they could commence invasions of those areas and they could hold those areas and they could supply those areas and one of the biggest fears was that the spanish would send their one pre-dreadnought battleship over to the philippines and regain command of the sea thus upsetting all the american efforts in that area mahan's entire point if indeed you can boil down two entire books and a lot of analysis to a couple of minutes was that command of the sea was what gave you victory because it meant you could keep your own economic lifelines open you could strangle the enemies and you had the superiority of strategic mobility effectively you could gradually choke the life out of your enemy not necessarily even having to land a major army and if you did have to land a major army well you could do that safely you could support it as long as it stayed in the coast with shipping you could keep it supplied as it marched over land and of course you could afford to pay it hopefully even with gold that you'd captured from the enemy because they couldn't defend their own gold shipments the thing was to get to that state of command of the sea you had to eliminate the enemy navy and the sooner you could do that the sooner you get on with the strangling and so this is where the decisive battle came in with your big fleet concentrated in one place you could go and find the enemy big fleet which would also be concentrated in one place because if they weren't your big flea could mop up all of their smaller fleets in fairly short order you have your big decisive battle as soon as possible you win and now you have command of the sea and eventually you will win the war it was this latter part of what do you do once you have command of the sea that japanese thinking had never really quite addressed when it came to russia it was relatively clear because russia was right there you could have a land campaign like you did in the russo-japanese war when you were trying to deal with someone like the british empire well they'd kind of skipped out of that one for a good part of the 1910s and 1900s by having the anglo-japanese naval treaty and afterwards again british holdings at least the ones that they wanted were pretty close to japan and with so many overseas holdings all over the world the royal navy could probably commit slightly fewer ships as a proportion of its overall force to taking on japan as compared to the us navy so gaining command of the sea would allow the japanese to take what they wanted and the british would probably negotiate to get some of it back and agree a new status quo since after all it may not be a fantastic amount of their empire that was overall threatened since whilst taking somewhere like india or australia might be a nice idea india had a lot of people in it both indian and british troops and well if you're going to invade australia they had their emu defense system so yeah let's not think about that one too hard but the japanese were mostly thinking about fighting the united states for the majority of the early 20th century and the big problem they had there was that the united states was very far away which as we said had actually confirmed another number of advantages on the japanese but it also meant that the traditional ways of exploiting command of the sea didn't actually knock the us out of the war because the japanese could take the philippines yeah fine they could take a number of the small island colonies that the americans had inherited from the spanish fine but what then taking those colonies didn't massively impact the united states economy it wasn't going to massively impact the united states military it wasn't going to cause an economic crash or a particular desire for peace within the united states there weren't any major trade routes in the immediate vicinity that you could attack about the biggest international trans-pacific trade route that you might be able to go after would be the australia to america line but if you did that then you'd involve the british at which point you've now doubled the number of enemies you're fighting which is not a good thing so what else was left you with command of the sea you could blockade the enemy coast but this is where america being far away is a problem because the americans would take quite a while to get to the western pacific and they'd have a lot of problems maintaining their forces there if the japanese took the philippines but equally the japanese would take an awful long time to get to the united states and there was nothing off the western coast of the united states for the japanese to base themselves out of to keep their fleet supplied and ready plus of course well it's the continental united states that's a huge amount of coastline to even begin to try and blockade with your smaller navy and of course america has more than one coastline so the traditional idea of blockading your opponent would be impractical to start with and even if you tried and somehow magically succeeded you've only blockaded half of the coast which doesn't really help you when you're talking about an industrial power as big as america who could just build another equally size or larger fleet on the other side of the continent sail it through the panama canal and beat you up very severely and so the kantai kessin doctrine's overall weakness was what do you do after you've won the decisive battle it relied on american fleet sails out hurt american fleet fight american fleet win battle dot dot dot we win the war hopefully the americans recognize that we are superior and give up because if the americans didn't recognize japanese superiority and give up there wasn't a lot the japanese could do to actually hurt the continental united states and so if the americans wanted to come back for round two round three or round four there was precious little they could do about it the only thing the japanese really had going for them on the far side of a successful decisive battle was that for a fair amount of the early 20th century the us was in quite the isolationist phase and so potentially if nothing major in the continental united states was threatened and it was going to take years and millions upon millions of dollars to rebuild a fleet and american pride hadn't been too massively affronted there would be a small chance that the americans might negotiate a piece they might come back a few years later but in theory at that point the japanese fleet now being superior in numbers would be able to maintain a lead in both hopefully numbers but at least quality this of course assumed you didn't do something like say launch a sneak attack that cost thousands of american lives which they were very unlikely to ever forgive with anything other than unconditional surrender but well as we said there wasn't really a lot you could do to enforce that because the american fleet was in san diego so it all seemed very unlikely despite the glaring weakness but back to japanese planning in the 1930s as the idea evolved the japanese noticed that aircraft capabilities were evolving quite rapidly and so they started building more aircraft carriers dedicated ones this time i mean they had built hosho but their primary striking power up until this point had been akagi and kaga but with the construction of sorayu heryu and the plans for zuikaku and shokaku the carrier arm was expanding quite rapidly i mean they'd also built ruko but well most people pretended to forget that ruko actually existed but as with all major navies at this point there was quite the heated discussion as to whether the aircraft carrier was the way of the future or the battleship would remain king of the seas aircraft carriers were certainly useful and this is why they were building more of them and the more lethal striking power of the carrier would in theory ratchet up the percentage of the american fleet that could be damaged or destroyed by the attritional airstrikes which was good and of course with that striking power theoretically going up on the other side as well carriers would be needed to defend the fleet against incoming american air attacks and of course therefore ideally to also sink the american carriers the other arm of japanese thinking held that the big gun battle line was still ultimately the overall deciding factor and so whilst investment in carriers was merited to a certain degree the main investment should of course be in gigantic super battleships this was in part due to the fact that the japanese would never be able to compete in sheer numbers but also due to the fact that at least for the minute the actual numbers were relatively constrained and this made the super battleship concept fairly attractive because compared to world war one where you might have had fleets at the top end of dozens of capital ships even the biggest navies in the world at this point had only just over a dozen and so having a super battleship that could take on two maybe even three enemy battleships at once could be a huge force multiplier that would in theory bring the japanese battleline strength up to approximate parity with the u.s battle line even if the submarine's aircraft cruisers and destroyers failed to do all that much to the us navy this of course would result in the yamato class battleships for much of the 1930s the argument as to whether the super battleship or the aircraft carrier would be the primary arm of the japanese navy went back and forth and as a result they ended up building both the yamatos and the aircraft carriers but japan had financial and resource limitations that hadn't gone away relative to something like the united states navy and so by constructing both arms of the capital striking power it meant that other aspects of the fleet such as large numbers of small craft for the escort and defense of their own merchant navy were somewhat neglected because there simply wasn't the money or resources there to build them and of course under the kantai kesen doctrine they probably weren't needed anyway because after all you only needed to escort and protect your merchant shipping and hunt enemy submarines if enemy submarines and surface raiders were coming after your shipping and surely if you have a massive decisive battle and you destroy the enemy fleet then they don't have the ships to come after you in the first place and even if they have a few survivors surely they'll be suing for peace so it doesn't matter anyway right towards the end of the 1930s however three things changed two the japanese knew about one they didn't then these would ultimately mean that the kantai kesen never came to pass the aspect they didn't know about was the advancement of u.s tactical and strategic thinking the end of the 1930s had also seen the end of a war plan orange and its replacement with warplane rainbow five whilst it retained much of the island-hopping strategy of the later iterations of warplane orange it scrapped the idea of sending the us fleet on mass to assist the philippines and thus at a stroke it took away the major strategic pillar of the kantai kesen which was that the americans would come to them the other two factors which the japanese definitely did know about was the ascendancy of admiral isoroku yamamoto to command of the combined fleet and the movement of the us navy from its anchorages in san diego to its new anchorage at pearl harbor not knowing about the change to war plan rainbow five the japanese didn't initially see the move to pearl harbor as a massive problem it did mean that us would be operating on a rather shorter logistical supply train than the japanese had anticipated which was somewhat annoying but on the other hand it did allow for a concentration of the japanese attritional assets in a slightly smaller space than the entire pacific ocean so overall this was fine however admiral yamamoto coming in did change things quite considerably further because whilst the entire kantai kesen doctrine was a relatively passive defensive one whereas enough as it might sound it did actually rely on the americans coming to the japanese before any major part of it was implemented admiral yamamoto was shall we say just a tad more aggressive and now with pearl harbor just about in range of the imperial japanese navy and with admiral yamamoto being something of a carrier advocate he started to look at the japanese carrier fleet and it's a highly capable aircraft and pilots look at pearl harbor where the american fleet was now tantalizingly within striking distance then look back at his own wartime experience in the russo-japanese war and the relatively important effect of that sneak attack on port arthur at the beginning of the war and he started to put things together and so the japanese strategy began to change somewhat the submarine cruiser and destroyer attritional warfare was still there but the yad nor yamamoto's thinking went if you could guarantee that the enemy fleet would be in a single place at a single time that you could hit like say pearl harbor why not hit it in harbor before it sails after all if it sails it's going to be alert and active and it could go in all sorts of directions and you might miss it and you might therefore attack it a little bit late or if you're really unlucky you might miss it entirely and of course a moving ship can evade a stationary ship that's not expecting an assault can be hit fairly easily and it means that when your other attritional units your submarines and your cruisers and destroyers go after the american fleet the american fleet is lesser so they're not going to have as many escorts which means you're going to take fewer losses from your own submarines and fewer losses in your own destroyer and cruiser units and you're going to achieve even more proportionally because one sunk battleship out of 15 is a much smaller overall loss than one sunk battleship or carrier out of say eight or nine remaining now this isn't say that admiral yamamoto was massively enthused by the idea of going to war with the united states as he recognized a lot of the issues that we've highlighted earlier about the fact that well if the united states really wants to stick to the war they can do and there's not a lot that the japanese can do about it because of the vast expanse of the pacific separating the continental united states and japan however in the event of war yamamoto looked for a quick and decisive victory by hitting the americans as hard as possible as early as possible even if they could chose to continue the war it would in theory allow japan the maximum amount of time to take what it needed in terms of resources and territory further build up its hopefully relatively unscratched navy so that it could at least try to maintain a lead for as long as possible over a u.s navy that would be rebuilding and then if absolutely necessary force the new u.s navy to come to them give them a fairly hard knock and then hopefully negotiate a peace unfortunately when push eventually came to shove the kantai kesen doctrine was found somewhat wanting because of the continued obsession with the big decisive battle it meant that fairly significant numbers of japan's capital ships were kept back for a considerable period of the early war when they probably would have been at their least vulnerable and most useful it also meant that with the failure of the pearl harbor strikes to destroy any american aircraft carriers despite the shift in emphasis from battleship to carrier in certain parts of the japanese navy especially in the upper echelons of high command it meant that they japanese were constantly trying to lure the american carriers into battle and the american fleet in general but when battle was joined despite an initial tactical success at the battle of coral sea as well as an overall tactical success at the battle of santa cruz islands other battles such as midway severely sapped the japanese navy's strength and no single battle was the decisive battle that they were looking for indeed one of the contributory factors to the way that midway went down was the fact that because the japanese navy had been operating a series of running campaigns and engagements the overall strength of their air groups had been whittled down somewhat and so they didn't have quite as many aircraft available on the various flight decks as they might have had at the very start of the war and of course the big elephant in the room was that attack at pearl harbor whilst it had succeeded in destroying or damaging a significant amount of the older u.s standard battleship battle line the simple fact of the matter was that the battleship in general and the standard battleship in particular with its relatively slow speed was not the frontline heart and center of a modern navy fast battleships for a while would remain a critical element of a fleet but the aircraft carrier would very quickly rise to prominence as well and no fast battleships were sunk nor were any carriers sunk plus of course it was a sneak attack and the americans didn't react very well to a sneak attack it could also be argued that the pearl harbor attack was actually too successful despite the lack of carrier kills because with so many american battleships on the sea floor needing salvage repair or simply clearing it meant that for the early part of the war even if the american admirals had wanted to send the battle fleet out and thus invoke the kantai kesen doctrine unknowingly they couldn't because they didn't have a battle fleet this in turn forced them to use their carriers and later their fast battleships as well as their cruisers and destroyers in a completely different manner they were of course following loosely the war plan rainbow five which as we said the japanese didn't actually know about but the japanese had unwittingly removed any ability for the americans to follow warplane orange as we said even if they'd wanted to and so through a whole combination of circumstances the great decisive battle that the japanese navy was anticipating never happened instead the japanese carrier force would gradually be whittled away over 1942 and 1943 until it was a shadow of its former self various japanese capital ships would be lost in a number of separate engagements until the available capital ship numbers had dropped so far down the any kind of battleship engagement against the american fleet would be not even a pyrrhic victory it would just be a glorious last stand and so the kantai kessin doctrine although the japanese kept holding on to hopes for it just kind of petered out it had ultimately founded not just on the changes to operational reality surrounding the actual outbreak of war as we've just explained but also simply as we mentioned earlier on the fact that they'd never quite considered what they were going to do after the decisive battle in a lot of ways as the good old illustration goes kantai kessin was a little bit like a dog chasing a car it had a very clear idea about what it wanted to do but should it ever succeed it had no real idea what it was going to do afterwards and that in the end was going to be its downfall regardless of when it was ever put into play that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry dock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 408,721

Rating: 4.9162993 out of 5

Keywords: wows, world of warships, IJN, Pacific War, WW1, WW2, Russo-Japanese War, Sino-Japanese War, Pearl Harbour, Yamamoto, Yamato, Kido Butai, 8-8 Plan

Id: kss0X8oaeow

Length: 53min 46sec (3226 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 19 2020