Axis Escorts

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The anti-warship role they settled on made sense in the perceived strategy - lure the US fleet out, damage and reduce it by air and submarine attacks, then sink it with battleships. Of course, they didn't seem to bother with why the USN should so obligingly fall into this trap, but the earlier US war plans did have them doing this - they weren't changed into something more sensible till quite close to the war.

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Arguablly the IJN submarines did more damage to the USN aircraft carriers in 1942, than the IJN carriers. Most folks are unaware or forget the Saratoga was twice taken out of action for months by two submarine attacks. Another was sunk outright, and the savagable Yorktown sunk by submarines.

The Pacific isn't as big as all that when you consider it ratioinally. You're making the same mistake Nimitz (or Withers & English) made: you're looking to scatter boats all over the ocean. Look at the trade routes. Look at the ports. There are a small number of "ideal" places, & there's everywhere else.

Still the IJN did not have enough submarines to operate this either. With the number of submarines they can have on interdiction stations & if they have a average number of hit comparable to the Germans at their peak, the potiential tonnage of cargo ships sunk or damaged is still 'small'.

Interdicting Hawaii is the same, & an especially vulnerable target...:eek:

Nearly 20 IJN submarines operated near Hawaii in December 41 - January 42 with the express purpose of interdicting ships coming and going. they managed to get one significant hit, on the Saratoga. concentrating closer in, and altering doctrine for targets could have nailed 3-4 cargo ships, but...

The problem with concentration of raiders is the defender can concentrate as well. The Germans ran into this problem when Allied ASW resolved its problems through 1942. In 1940 a effort to concentrate on the near approaches to the British ports of the UK ran up unacceptable losses (re: Huges & Costello 'Battle of the Atlantic') They forced the relocation of the submarine Patrols to a more dispersed pattern furhter out in the Altantic. A similar thing ended the massacre in US coastal waters in 1942. byt the autum of 1942 neither the east coast or Carribean were safe for the Germans. Again they had to relocate into the mid Atlantic.
 

CalBear

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The Japanese sub doctrine wasn't quite as daft as people suppose, but it was a problem due to the geographical limitations.

The Pacific is BIG. Trying to interdict traffic to Australia (its a CONTINENT, remember) is pretty much impossible, especially with no air recon. The U-boats did poorly when they couldn't find the convoys.

The only places there would have been suitably small areas to search would have been SE Asia/DEI. Tactics for using subs to isolate these while the Army attacked would have been useful, but in OTL this scenario finished in favour of Japan so fast it wasn't really needed.

The only other options are to sit off the main Australian ports, Hawaii or the US west coasts. All of these require big, very long range subs, and the ratio of subs on station would have been terrible. One of the things that made the late-war US sub offensive so effective was that they were closer by this point.

The anti-warship role they settled on made sense in the perceived strategy - lure the US fleet out, damage and reduce it by air and submarine attacks, then sink it with battleships. Of course, they didn't seem to bother with why the USN should so obligingly fall into this trap, but the earlier US war plans did have them doing this - they weren't changed into something more sensible till quite close to the war.

If you want an effective anti-merchant ship strategy, you really have to go back some time, design bigger, longer range boats, think on resupply, and so on. But in that time period, Japan was fixed on China, not on a long war with the USA.

The IJN's problem was its remarkable inflexibility. It continued to play the same hand, voluntarily, long after it was demonstrated to be a loser. The Pacifoc is, indeed, vast, it is also immaterial to the escort question. The Japanese needed to provide escorts across very specific sea lanes, most of which were well within land based air, much of it being in relatively limited, narrow waterways. The entire South China Sea can be covered by air patrol out of Cam Ranh Bay, the East China Sea and the Philippine Sea out of Formosa. Escorts do not need even the range necessary to cover the Atlantic, relays of shorter range vessels (which could be build in mass numbers, including using yard that did not generally produce warships) could serve very nicely. The Japanese simply failed to take the action necessary.

Even when the danger became obvious, the Japanese made escort a minimal priority. They would rarely use convoys, when they did the escorts were as often as not a minesweeper or a single light patrol ship, often without proper sensors. It would be illogical to expect the IJN to be able to produce the schools of DDE and CVE that came out of American and Commonwealth yards, but some reasonable refocusing especially once the Mandates had been lost, would seem to be screamingly obvious.
 
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