How to increase Japanese shipping capacity pre-WW2

What's surprising, really, is it took so long for the Sub Force to crash Japan's economy. :eek::rolleyes:
Well it would of helped if the American Mark XIV torpedoes hadn't been so bad that as the official historian put it 'The only reliable feature of the torpedo was its unreliability' and the Bureau of Ordnance back home such a clusterfuck. It must have been supremely frustrating for the submarine captain. If they had been issued torpedoes that actually worked in the field then as you say the Japanese shipping fleet and economy could have been crushed much faster.
 
Simon said:
Well it would of helped if the American Mark XIV torpedoes hadn't been so bad that as the official historian put it 'The only reliable feature of the torpedo was its unreliability' and the Bureau of Ordnance back home such a clusterfuck. It must have been supremely frustrating for the submarine captain. If they had been issued torpedoes that actually worked in the field then as you say the Japanese shipping fleet and economy could have been crushed much faster.
Supremely frustrating? You have no idea.:eek: Skippers fulminated. (Morton, after a dry patrol, came back asking Lockwood for boathooks, if he wasn't going to get working torpedoes.:eek:) At least one set up as near a live fire trial, against a Japanese ship in the war zone,:eek: as you could manage, & had fourteen consecutive failures.:eek::eek: BuOrd specialists sent out to investigate, on at least one occasion, sabotaged the torpedoes so they could blame the crews.:eek: (All of this is recorded in Blair. Except maybe the boathooks remark...; it's been awhile since I've read it.;))

Faster, but not as much as you'd think, actually. The more important failure was a prewar fuckup in San Francisco. A Customs agent, whose name should be as infamous as Benedict Arnold's IMO,:mad: seized & copied a Japanese merchant marine codebook. It was so clumsy, the Japanese couldn't help notice, & they changed it. At the time, ONI was reading it.:eek: It didn't get broken again until about January 1943.:eek: That change increased sinkings about 75%; the Sept '43 fix to the Mk 6 only raised them about 20%.
 
From the early/mid-1930's as a result of both the depression and the US response to the Japanese war in China, Japan had significant and increasingly severe foreign currency (hard currency) problems. While there were shipyards with excess unused capacity that would have been glad to get the Japanese business, there was no way the Japanese could pay for any significant number of ships either with hard currency or barter. BTW at this point in time about the only thing Japan had to barter with was silk, most of the rest of what Japan sold on the international market like some fish products was low value. Had Japan increased the size of its merchant fleet, most of that capacity would have sat idle.

When the war came Japan needed a great deal more shipping than it had (especially tankers), but until then any significant increase in tonnage would have had no cargoes to carry to/from Japan, and there was no way that Japanese shipping would be carrying cargo to/from non-Japanese (or Imperial) ports - everybody else was providing preferences for their own merchant marine one way or another.

Japan did not have the money to buy more ships, they did not have the capacity to produce both useful merchant hulls and naval vessels, and most importantly they did not foresee a long war with the USA and the sort of shipping losses they took as the war went on. Better coordination of shipping between army & navy (sort of ASB) and better ASW tactics/convoys etc could have improved their situation but the reality was they did not have enough tonnage to do what needed to be done, and no matter what the deficit got worse every month pretty much throughout the war.

You would need to at least double merchant tonnage prior to 1941, much of which would be tankers, to make any real change in Japanese logistic issues. This is simply not doable by any realistic combination of local construction and foreign purchase for reasons enumerated above.
 
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