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

Many questions have been asked about the Japanese

doctrine

of

decisive

battle

or

kantai

kesen as it is called in Japanese apparently although I have almost certainly butchered that pronunciation horribly, however the central idea of ​​this was to win a war at sea by a single massive naval confrontation.

decisive

battle

after which Japan would theoretically 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, but to answer that we really have to look at How does this

doctrine

work? developed, it must be remembered that, surprising as it may seem, even as relatively late as the 1850s, Japan was not really on the radar of the world powers;

However, in the second half of the 19th century, Japan underwent an enormous transformation that included radical industrialization, and of course, in trying to place itself on the world stage, there were a number of competing theories about how it could do so. this, but at the end of the day, Japan is an island nation and therefore its main attacking power will always have to be a navy because, well, you can't invade anywhere from Japan unless you transport your men by sea and transports by sea, you need ships to protect them, equally speaking, if someone wants to come after Japan, they have to do it by sea, so to prevent your enemy from coming and attacking you, you must have a fleet to stop them.

This wasn't exactly a radical novelty. concept, the Japanese understood this in general terms, even if their success in invasion and defense against invasion by sea was somewhat uneven in the last few hundred years, but as the second half of the 19th century progressed and new technologies appeared in the form of iron and steel steam torpedoes. Shooting weapons, etc. began to come into play. There were two main competing schools of thought on how an island nation or even a nation with some sort of significant maritime interests should be run. One was the traditional approach that was adopted by nations such as the United States. kingdom at this point the British Empire and this was going to have a large fleet of battleships and then some cruisers to enforce their overall global domination plus some gunboats for local colonial work, however battleships were very cheap and a large fleet of them even more.

On the other hand, there was a school of thought that came from France called Journey Col and they argued that with the new advances in torpedoes and fast cruisers it was not necessary to have a large traditional battle fleet, in fact you could get away with it. with disrupting the power of an enemy fleet or perhaps even sinking a more conventional battleship-based fleet with much smaller and less expensive torpedo fleets that you would use on battlecruisers to attack enemy commerce and perhaps one or two other ships large to support the shortstops. during an exchange of fire, while as an island nation its geographical and strategic situation was much closer to that of the United Kingdom than to that of France, its financial and industrial situation was not brilliant and certainly much closer to that of France than to that of France. that of the United Kingdom and, therefore, initially to the Japanese.

The navy adopted the Jean Ecole style; However, with the advent of rapid-fire guns installed as secondary tertiary and occasionally quanta batteries on larger capital ships, especially pre-dreadnought battleships, as well as various other technological advances, the Zhernikov's power in European naval thought was beginning. To increase. Then, in the 1880s and 1890s, the publication of two books slowed somewhat: The Influence of Sea Power on History: The First Volume 1660 to 1783 and the Second Volume on the French Revolution and Empire, both published by the American naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan and he practically rejected the magazine thinking, although not directly, in its review of how power had influenced world history and although the two volumes, as we said, began in 1660 and between them they reached as far as which at the time was the current century, the first volume actually contained several expensive pages of naval history up to that point, talking about things like the Roman campaigns against the Greeks and Carthaginians and moving forward in time through the medieval era to its main starting point in the 17th century.

Mahan therefore argued for a more traditional Battlefleet story: 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 it with, Roughly speaking, a fleet based on the ideas of the Zhernikovs from which they arose. that with some rather important lessons that seemed to indicate that the Mahanian thinking of a large battle fleet was perhaps the most correct way of doing things because although the Japanese fleet had generally been the more modern of the two fleets and had contained a number considerable number of torpedo boats and cruisers, as well as better organization and leadership, some of the key naval victories of the war had been hard-fought, while the Chinese battleships, among various other things, were slightly obsolete by the time the battle actually began.

They fought, they had proven to be almost impossible to kill the torpedo boats, as they were nowhere near as effective as Zhernikov thought they would be and the other cruisers, despite having a considerable amount of firepower for their size, they still had when they had been hit occasionally. suffered a substantial amount of damage, it seemed quite obvious to the Japanese that if they had had one or two modern battleships they would have easily defeated the Chinese and thus in the 1890s the combination of the lessons of the Chinese war- Japanese and Mahan's influence on everyone's thinking began to reshape Japanese doctrine toward a 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 numbers and taking into account in this point that the three largest navies in the world were great britain, france and russia, all of which had different colonial interests on the western pacific coast and among the islands of the western pacific and, in the case of russia, also had a land border With the Western Pacific region assessing them as potential threats along with the Chinese, the Japanese could be relatively confident that the Chinese were not going to be a naval threat any time soon given the aftermath of the First Sino-Japanese War.

In the war, the French, while they had a large navy, had the fewest overall territorial concerns in the Western Pacific of the three major European powers and what they did control was largely outside Japan's immediate sphere of concern. . The largest French possession was French Indochina, which later became Vietnam and the Japanese were not particularly worried about that, the Russians, although they had the fewest individual colonies, had, as we said, a land border and Lots of territorial ambitions and the British of course had quite a few individual colonies and a very, very large navy in the 1890s the US wasn't really a big concern for Japan;

After all, they were on the other side of the world's largest ocean and had no particular holdings in the Western Pacific. Of course, at the beginning of the century, the Spanish-American War and a sudden increase in American naval expansion began to worry a bit to the Japanese, especially since the war ended with the Americans in control of the Philippines and a number of other small formerly Spanish colonies in the area which now gave them a direct geographical concern in what Japan was beginning to see as its sphere. of influence. Each of the three nations that were now the main threat to Japan.

Russia, the United States and the British Empire could use significantly larger fleets than Japan had or could actually afford and so at this stage and into the future for virtually the rest of the history of the Imperial Japanese Navy. , the idea of ​​having ships that were individually superior to enemy ships to compensate for the greater number of enemy ships began to emerge. At this point, Japanese shipyards were generally not capable of producing their own battleships, so their new capital ships were largely purchased abroad, especially from British shipyards, but when you looked at the ships the Japanese were purchasing , were taking the latest Royal Navy designs and making adjustments and improvements to them, so that Mikasa, the Japanese flagship at the upcoming Battle of Tsushima, for example, was derived from British designs, but from the design of which was derived in particular, it was very easy to argue that Mikasa was individually superior, the next stage of the Japanese plan was to eliminate a major power as a threat.

After looking around and concluding that, among other things, the British were the biggest threat, they decided to make an alliance with them, the Anglo-Saxons. The Japanese alliance that came into force in 1902 meant that Japan had reduced its list of possible enemies in the Pacific region at a stroke from three to two and eliminated the largest at a stroke, and even in theory, under certain circumstances , The war would have the largest navy in the world, the Royal Navy, backing them, which was even better as a couple of years later came the war with Russia and this would see the debut of another Japanese battle piece, thinking that while it was all good to discuss. that their ships were individually superior to the Russian ships and should therefore be able to defeat a larger Russian fleet, no one in their right mind was going to argue that this meant that you should simply wait for the Russians to come to you with numbers. superiors and expect that particular paradigm Instead, it remained true that 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 and a blockade using mines, despite some losses from their own mines, the Japanese were quite happy with the overall progress of the war, a series of naval engagements were fought with the Russian Pacific Squadron and, although These were not the overwhelming victories that the Japanese would have liked, the Imperial Japanese Navy was certainly winning, then of course the 2nd Pacific Squadron arrived and here at the Battle of Tsushima Japan mustered virtually all the ships of the Imperial Navy. Japanese, faced a numerically very large Russian fleet and defeated it incredibly well, not only coming away with a large number of Russian ships sunk but also with a large number captured and a fairly decisive end to large-scale naval operations in that conflict. in particular, with the main concern being that there were a few Russian stragglers who were directing him for internment in various other ports, while in general they had the majority of the war on land, as well as at sea, he had the sword of the sea of back and forth until after Tsushima, when the Japanese could command the oceans, secure supply lines, and have strategic mobility in their back pocket and the Russians couldn't, it was pretty much an open and shut case.

However, knowing who was going to win was taxing on the Japanese economy and many could point to the Battle of Tsushima and say this is where the war really started to move towards us, this is the kind of battle we need to ensure that the rest is simply being mopped up and therefore our wars can be carried out quickly and relatively cheaply, this fueled the idea of ​​a decisive Mahanian battle to win a war and thus two decades in which Japan he had been involved in two major wars and catapulted. went from being a relatively interesting but strategically unimportant nation somewhere in the middle of the Pacific to having one foot on the ladder of world powers, concluded with what seemed to be a blueprint for dealing with future enemies, a decisive battle on a large scale at sea in favor of Japan fought on Japan's terms that would end in a victory for Japan and thus decide the overall outcome of the war.

Attention now turned to the last major remaining threat to Japanese interests in the Western Pacific. USA. The fact that the United States went so far from Japan worked both for and against Japanese strategy and tactics, while a small squadron could be based in the Philippines, the Philippines was 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 that time was definitely not a major base; in fact, it would not become a major base until well into the 1930s, so inIn peacetime the majority of the US Pacific Fleet would be based in San Diego, 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 carry out in this particular scenario because the Japanese simply did not have that many ships with the had a range to cross the entire Pacific and return, and their torpedo boats definitely did not, and if two crossed that amount of ocean, someone would surely detect them and report it, which would put a damper on the whole surprise part of The surprise attack that played in their favor was the fact that the US Navy was divided between the fleets of the Pacific and the Atlantic and at that time, in the 20th century, that meant that for a considerable period of time they would have to deal only with the Pacific fleet in terms of the Atlantic.

Fleet ships to come and reinforce them would require a prolonged buildup of hostilities or several months of delay as the Atlantic Fleet sailed across the Atlantic around the tip of South America and back the other way, of course, in the 1910s. , this particular aspect would be nullified by the construction of the Panama Canal, but for the moment it was a tactical decision. Consideration in favor of the Japanese navy and, to be honest, even once the Panama Canal was completed, everything What this did was shorten the transit time for the Atlantic Fleet, not eliminate it entirely, this in theory would give Japan a certain window of operational freedom to implement its own interests in the Western Pacific before having to worry about ships.

Americans that appeared on the horizon, it also played in Japan's favor the fact that any battle would take place in the Western Pacific, therefore, much closer to the Japanese shipyards and much further from the American shipyards, so in In the event of a close battle or even possibly one in which Japan could lose marginally, their ships could return home and the damaged ships in the case of a victory, a defeat or a victory, in theory, with luck, everyone could return home for repairs and refits, while American ships, regardless of whether they had won, lost or drawn in a fight, would have a considerably longer voyage home and heavily damaged ships might not survive unless, of course, , that they wanted to run towards the internment, which, even if it did not sink them, would at least take them.

Outside of the rest of the war, as they planned to fight a defensive war, the Japanese maintained the relatively common theory at the time that an attacking naval force needed a numerical superiority of 50%, assuming all other things were equal or greater to ensure themselves of victory, so, for example, if Japan had 10 battleships, the United States would have to attack them with 15. In turn, this meant that if the Japanese navy were two-thirds the size of the United States navy , I would still lose, but in theory. if it was a little bigger it could win, 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 US navy at least in the Western Pacific at this time.

However, it was a very narrow margin, since when you looked at, say, the numbers of battleships, a Japanese fleet 70, the strength of the American navy could have that difference between less than 66 and 70 made up of a single hull of battleship and an unfortunate hit from a mine or a The simple fact that a ship was being refitted or a single well aimed or very unfortunately aimed, depending on which side the projectile was on, could change that balance of power completely in just a single moment since a massive attack to disable or destroy a significant portion of the American fleet and bring the numbers much closer to parity were not possible due to the aforementioned basing of American ships in the continental United States the Japanese began to look for other ways of reducing a theoretical battle line of maximum American strength before the decisive Japanese battle in this regard.

The destroyers were designed primarily for torpedo-based work and their cruisers were designed to be heavily armed, especially with torpedoes, as well as that these were the main anti-capital ship weapon very quickly to keep up and command the destroyers and there was a strong emphasis on gentlemanly fights among the Japanese navy, the idea was to inflict so-called attrition losses, as the thinking Japanese strategic maintained that if they went to war in the Western Pacific and ended up attacking American possessions like the Philippines, the American navy would set sail. They attempted to relieve the Philippines and counter the Japanese in a decisive battle of their own.

As they advanced across the Pacific, fast forces composed of cruisers and destroyers, perhaps supported by the Congo-class battlecruisers, would attack the American fleet. at night. The Navy was widely known to be relatively deficient in cruiser power, and while the construction wave of World War I had resulted in the construction of large numbers of Clemson- and Wix-class destroyers, Japanese theory held that a force of destroyers escorted by a cruiser should be able to break through a primarily destroyer-based fleet screen, especially considering that at the time the only modern cruisers the US Navy was building or possessing, the period now being between the wars, were the Omaha-class cruisers, which in some ways were actually oversized destroyers with all the protection of an ambitious sheet of paper, and the Pensacola-class cruisers Northampton and Portland that were built during the 1920s and most Of them had similar levels of almost non-existent protection when it came to fighting other cruisers with heavy 8-inch guns like this thought. had developed during the period of the First World War in the 1910s and had continued into the 1920s, it became increasingly necessary for this attrition phase to be carried out quite successfully, as the naval treaty The Washington Act of 1922 had restricted Japanese plans to build battleships and battlecruiser construction.

The tonnage ratios now fixed between the great powers meant that Japan was left with a fleet that, in terms of capital ships, would be two-thirds of the force. of an enemy fleet, either the United States or possibly the United States. United Kingdom, since the Anglo-Japanese treaty 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 is not believed that the Japanese battle line could defeat the American battle line, and thus the war of attrition throughout the Pacific had gone from being a nice way to increase the margin of safety in victory to absolutely vital to victory. , while the reduction of its battle fleet could be seen as a significant disadvantage.

For Japanese plans, the advancement of time, technology, and treaties had brought Japan new benefits that seemed like they could more than make up for it, not including its force of heavy torpedo cruisers and destroyers during World War I. , the submarine had truly come of age. And so, Japanese naval thinking quickly began to adopt the submarine inn as another weapon of the attritional warfare portion of the naval campaign, since there were not as many massive commercial trade routes departing from Japan or anywhere near the area of Japan's interest in the United States. using its submarine arm for commercial attacks was not particularly considered a massive priority;

Instead, the submarines were generally configured as fleet submarines for relatively fast units that were designed to outrun even the cruiser and destroyer squadrons waiting for the US fleet to arrive. run over the submarines and then fire torpedoes to further reduce the strength of the American fleet. The other aspect was that the aircraft also came of age in the First World War, but more specifically now the aircraft carrier, since the Pacific is a very large aircraft of the time. relatively short range and therefore, while some land attack aircraft could be taken into account, if the American fleet was to be attacked, it was highly unlikely to politely sail near every island the Japanese could occupy and place ground attack aircraft, it had to be done. go for an aircraft carrier or more than one again, an honest example of aircraft capabilities at the time meant that aircraft carriers couldn't really be expected to do that much to the enemy fleet, but they could certainly cause damage, perhaps destroy a few.

Smaller ships, if they were very lucky, could sink one or two larger ships, but they were not seen as a decisive element of the overall Japanese strategy, simply as another element alongside the submarines, cruisers and destroyers, all which would serve to gradually reduce the American fleet to a size that could be confronted by the Japanese battle line. In this regard, the Japanese also invested heavily in torpedoes, as torpedoes would be the main attack element of the four aspects of their attrition forces and thus eventually the development and deployment of the Type 93 Long Lance. range, its smaller Type 95 submarine derivative, and a series of improvements made to Japanese air-launched torpedoes, the Japanese naval high command estimated that between submarines and aircraft they could perhaps wear down about 20 percent of the battle line.

American force, that doesn't mean 20 sunk, but 20 sunk or damaged enough to have to get out of formation, this reduced the American superiority if they start with 100 and the Japanese remember with 66 percent down to about 80 percent and 80 to 66 that's a margin the Japanese thought they could probably play with, since that would equate to one or two hulls, but and that was before, of course, the cruisers and destroyers now came into exact figures of how many ships would be sunk or severely damaged by the cruiser. and destroyer attack varied 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 American fleet to parity or possibly even give it the Japanese a slight superiority in the final decision. battle and of course with their onboard reloads it was quite possible that the Japanese cruisers and destroyers could get stuck during the decisive daylight battle engagement, plus the wonderful thing about aircraft carriers is that they could also join in if they really they wanted to do it and so the Japanese were quite happy that a big decisive battle could be fought and that they could win and of course the idea was that if they won the decisive battle then they would surely have won the war now that the 1930s came around in aircraft carrier.

It became more and more of a consideration, however, before we talk about aircraft carriers, their striking power, and of course the development of the Yamato class battleships, let's review the Japanese plan and strategy so far. One of the first things with any battle strategy is the enemy. are you 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 an orange war plan and the orange war plane consisted of exactly what the Japanese thought it would. was going to consist, that is, of a major advance by the US Navy across the Pacific to reinforce the Philippine base outside there and crush the Japanese fleet in a decisive battle, so the US Navy seemed to be playing directly into the hands of the US Navy.

Japanese forces and whether the Philippines fell too soon for the American fleet. To help with what was considered in various evolutions of the orange fighter jet, there was a plan for an island-hopping campaign that may sound quite familiar because, broadly speaking, it was what the Americans adopted as a strategy in World War II. World War, but we were actually taking over a base afterwards. another and march across the Pacific that way, this was also not a big problem for the Japanese because ultimately the Americans would sail a long way from home to an area of ​​the central or western Pacific which was where the Japanese would like travel. engage them, wear them down and then engage them in a decisive battle and within Japanese thought, the area where this decisive battle would take place and gradually moved further and further east as time went on, however,even at this stage, in the early 1930s, before America changed.

In their war plans, which they would make in the late 1930s, there was a huge flaw in the Kantai Kessin strategy: it was an excellent strategy for carrying out a large decisive battle and, while the effectiveness or otherwise of submarine attacks , airstrikes and cruiser and destroyer attacks could have actually varied compared to how they were planned to come out on paper, it's relatively likely that with a bit of scouting and a few strokes of luck, and given the number of attacks that were going to throw at them, they would eventually have At least one or two strokes of luck, the Japanese probably could have won such a decisive battle assuming the U.S.

Navy continued advancing almost regardless of losses, but a strategy for winning a decisive battle is not a strategy to win a war at some point. and in fact, when you look at various documents and resources on Japanese naval thought, probably quite early in the line, Japanese thought had become a bit confusing, you see, while Mahanian doctrine is generally considered the doctrine of decisive battle, that's not actually the case mahan. he advocated a decisive battle yes he advocated 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 mastery of the sea what the doctrine of decisive battle at least as As for the way Mahan defended it was to give you command of the sea and the war between Russia and Japan in a microcosm was a very good example of this.

You had several smaller engagements between elements of the Russian and Japanese fleets, but this was not resolved. In general, who had command of the sea and therefore, although many of the campaigns were land-based, everything kept changing because if Japan lost command of the sea, it could no longer coordinate and move its troops and therefore , would lose if Japan could win. the sea command then had absolute mobility and easy resupply without much risk to their troops and as long as the money held out in theory they would win assuming the Russians didn't just flood everything in large quantities but since 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 had now sunk under the sea, they were able to exert it and they won the war, but when you look back at what Mahan had written about previous naval battles, both in ancient history as when he looked more closely and precisely at the latter part of the second millennium, his point could be seen to be repeated over and over again.

Trafalgar was the decisive battle, but the Napoleonic Wars did not end for another 10 years. years there was a small interruption in the early 1810s, what trafalgar did was give the royal navy command of the sea and with command of the sea the royal navy was able to enact a much stricter and harsher blockade of enemy ports, as well as attacking enemy merchant ships and, of course, securing their own merchant ship, thus boosting their economy at the expense of their enemies, in this case Napoleonic France, it must be noted that, although 1805 was the year of trafalgar, some of Napoleon's greatest victories, such as Austerlitz after Trafalgar and also the Spanish-American War, much closer to the period in which the Japanese are developing their battle strategy, did not end with the defeat of the Spanish fleets in several places in Cuba and the Philippines. but what those defeats meant in those smaller decisive battles was that the US Navy had command of the sea and with command of the sea they could begin the invasions of those areas and they could control those areas and they could supply those areas and one of the largest What was feared was that the Spanish would send their only pre-dreadnought battleship to the Philippines and regain command of the sea, thus frustrating all American efforts in that area.

Mahan's central point, if you can summarize two entire books and a lot of analysis for In a couple of minutes, mastery of the sea was what gave you victory because it meant you could keep your own economic lifelines open. , you could strangle enemies and had the superiority of strategic mobility, effectively, you could gradually suffocate the life of your enemy. You wouldn't even necessarily have to land a major army and if you had to land a major army, well, you could do it safely, you could support it while it remained on the coast with sea transport, you could keep it supplied while it marched overland and of course, you could afford to pay for it. , hopefully even with the gold you had captured from the enemy because they couldn't defend their own gold shipments.

The point was to reach that state of mastery of the sea and you had to eliminate the enemy navy. and the sooner you could do that, the sooner you would continue with the strangulation and this is where the decisive battle came with your large fleet concentrated in one place, you could go and find the enemy large fleet which would also be concentrated in one place. because if they weren't, your big flea could wipe out all their smaller fleets in pretty short order, you'll have your big decisive battle as soon as possible, you'll win and now you'll have command of the sea and you'll eventually win the war that was.

This last part of what to do once you have command of the sea, which Japanese thinking had never fully addressed when it came to Russia, was relatively clear, because Russia was there, you could have a land campaign like the one you had. It was made in Russia. Japanese war when you were trying to deal with someone like the British empire, well they had skipped that war for much of the 1910s and 1900s by having the Anglo-Japanese naval treaty and then again the British possessions at least the Those who wanted were fairly close to Japan and with so many overseas possessions around the world, the Royal Navy could probably commit slightly fewer ships as a proportion of its total force to confront Japan compared to the US Navy, gaining thus the command of the Navy.

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 to a new status quo since after all it may not be a fantastic part of their empire that was threatened overall , since while taking a place like India or Australia could be a good idea. India had a lot of people there, 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 too much about it, but the Japanese. They were mainly thinking about fighting the United States for most of the 20th century and the big problem they had there was that the United States was too far away, which as we said had actually confirmed another series of advantages over the Japanese, but also It meant that traditional ways of exploiting sea dominance didn't actually get the United States out of the war because the Japanese were able to take the Philippines, yes, well, they were able to take some of the small island colonies that the Americans had inherited from the Spanish. , but what then, taking those colonies was not going to massively impact the United States economy, was not going to massively impact the United States military, was not going to cause an economic crisis or a particular desire for peace within the United States. , there weren't any. any major trade route in the vicinity that it could attack, the largest transpacific trade route it could follow would be the line from australia to america, but if it did that, it would involve the british, which You have now doubled the number of enemies with the that you are fighting, which is not good, so what else did you have left with the command of the sea?

You could blockade the enemy coast, but this is where the United States being far away is a problem because it would take a long time for the Americans to reach the western Pacific and they would have a lot of trouble keeping their forces there if the Japanese took the Philippines, but equally the It would take a very long time for the Japanese to reach the United States and there was nothing off the western coast of the United States that the Japanese could settle on to keep their fleet supplied and ready, plus of course it was the continental United States. which represent an enormous amount of coastline to even begin to attempt to blockade with their smaller navy. and of course the United States has more than one coast, so the traditional idea of ​​blocking your opponent would be impractical to begin with, and even if you try and somehow magically succeed, you've only blocked half of the coast. coast, which doesn't really help you when we're talking about an industrial power as big as the United States that could simply build another fleet of the same size or larger on the other side of the continent, sail it through the Panama Canal, and hit you very severely, so the overall weakness of the Kantai Kesin doctrine was what do you do after you have won the decisive battle on which it was based?

The American fleet sets sail wounded. Fight against the American fleet. The American fleet wins the battle. We won the war. I hope the Americans recognize that we are superior and give up because if the Americans didn't. They didn't recognize Japanese superiority and gave up, there wasn't much the Japanese could do to hurt the continental United States, so if the Americans wanted to come back for the second, third, or fourth round, there was very little they could do. they could do about it. The only thing the Japanese really had going for them on the other side of a successful decisive battle was that for a good part of the early 20th century, the United States was in a fairly isolationist phase and therefore potentially if not done nothing major in the continental United States. threatened and it was going to take years and millions and millions of dollars to rebuild a fleet and American pride hadn't been insulted too much, there would be a small chance that the Americans could negotiate a deal that they could return to a few years later, but in theory, in At that time, the Japanese fleet, now superior in numbers, could maintain an advantage in both, hopefully, but at least in quality, this, of course, assumed that you did not do something like, for example, launch a sneak attack that It cost thousands of American lives. which was very unlikely that they would ever forgive with anything more than an unconditional surrender, but well, as we said, there wasn't much that could be done to enforce that because the US fleet was in san diego, so it all seemed very unlikely despite obvious weakness. but going 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 dedicated aircraft carriers, this time I mean they had built hosho but their main attack power up to that point had been Akagi and Kaga, but with the construction of Sorayu Heryu and the plans for Zuikaku and Shokaku, the transport arm was expanding quite rapidly.

I mean, they had built Ruko too, but well, most people tried to forget that Ruko actually existed, but as with all major navies. At this point there was quite a heated discussion about whether the aircraft carrier was the way of the future or whether the battleship would remain king of the seas. Aircraft carriers were certainly useful and that's why they were building more of them and the more lethal strikes. In theory, the power of the carrier would increase the percentage of the US fleet that could be damaged or destroyed by attritional air strikes, which was a good thing, and of course, with that strike power theoretically increasing on the other side there would also be needed aircraft carrier to defend itself. fleet against incoming American air attacks and, of course, ideally also to sink American aircraft carriers, the other arm of Japanese thinking held that the grand battle line remained ultimately the overall decisive factor and therefore While the investment in aircraft carriers was deserved to some extent the main investment should, of course, be in gigantic super battleships, this was partly due to the fact that the Japanese would never be able to compete in numbers, but also to the fact that, at At least for the time being, actual numbers were relatively limited and This made the super battleship concept quite attractive because, compared to World War I, where you might have had fleets at the top end of dozens of capital ships, even the The world's largest navies at the time only had a little over a dozen, so having a super battleship that could take on two or even three enemy battleships at once could be a huge force multiplier that, in theory, it would raise the strength of the Japanese battle line to approximate parity with the American battle line, even if the submarine's cruisers and destroyers failed to do all that. for the navyAmerican this would of course result in the Yamato class battleships during much of the 1930s, the discussion over whether the super battleship or the aircraft carrier would be the main weapon of the Japanese navy went back and forth and as a result I ended up building both the yamatos and the aircraft carriers, but Japan had financial and resource limitations that had not gone away relative to something like the US Navy, and therefore by building both weapons of the capital's strike power, it meant that Other aspects of the fleet such as a large number of small vessels for the escort and defense of its own merchant navy were somewhat neglected because there was simply no money or resources to build them and, of course, under the

kantai

kesen doctrine they were probably not necessary at all. anyway because after all, you only needed to escort and protect your merchant ship and hunt down enemy submarines if the enemy submarines and surface raiders came after your shipment and surely if you have a massive decisive battle and destroy the enemy fleet then they don't have the ships. come for you first and even if they have some survivors they will surely sue for peace so it doesn't matter anyway just towards the end of the 1930s however three things changed two the Japanese knew one they didn't Then this would ultimately mean that the Kantai Kesen was never fulfilled.

The aspect they did not know was the advancement of US tactical and strategic thinking. The end of the 1930s also saw the end of an orange war plan and its replacement. With the Rainbow Five fighter jet, although it maintained much of the island-hopping strategy of later versions of the Orange fighter jet, it discarded the idea of ​​sending the US fleet en masse to assist the Philippines and therefore , in one fell swoop eliminated the main strategic pillar of the kantai kesen, which was that the Americans would come to them, the other two factors that the Japanese definitely knew about was the rise of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto to command the combined fleet and the movement of the navy American from its anchorages in San Diego to its new anchorage at Pearl Harbor without knowing about the change in the Rainbow Five war plan, the Japanese initially did not see the move to Pearl Harbor as a huge problem, it did mean that we would be operating in a logistical supply train much shorter than the one the Japanese had.

I anticipated this, which was somewhat annoying, but on the other hand it allowed a concentration of Japanese attrition assets in a space slightly smaller than the entire Pacific Ocean, so overall it was fine, however, the arrival of Admiral Yamamoto changed things considerably more because, while the entire Kantai Kesen doctrine was a relatively passive defensive, while as much as it may seem, it actually depended on the Americans coming to the Japanese before a major part of it was implemented. Admiral Yamamoto was, let's say, a little more aggressive and now with pearls. port almost within reach of the imperial

japanese

navy and as admiral yamamoto was sort of a defender of the aircraft carriers he started looking at the

japanese

carrier fleet and it is a highly capable aircraft and the pilots look at pearl harbor where the american fleet now It was tantalizingly within reach of attack.

Then, from a distance, we remembered his own 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 began to put things in order and so Japanese strategy began to change a bit. The war of attrition between submarine cruisers and destroyers was still there, but Yad and Yamamoto's thinking was: if you could guarantee that the enemy fleet would be in one place at the same time, you could attack it like, for example, Pearl Harbor, why not attack him in the port before? after all, if it sails it will be alert and active and could go in all sorts of directions and you might miss it and therefore you might attack it a little late or if you are really unlucky you might miss it completely and Of course, a moving ship can evade a stationary ship that is not expecting an assault and can be hit quite easily and that means that when your other attrition units, your submarines, your cruisers and destroyers go after the US fleet, the US fleet is less, so they are You won't have as many escorts, which means you will suffer fewer losses to your own submarines and fewer losses to your own destroyer and cruiser units, and you will achieve even more proportionately because one battleship sunk in 15 is a Overall loss much less than a sunk battleship or aircraft carrier of, say, eight or nine remaining.

Now, this is not to say that Admiral Yamamoto was enormously enthusiastic about going to war with the United States. as he recognized a lot of the points that we've highlighted before about the fact that, well, if the United States really wants to continue the war, they can do it and there's not much 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 sought a quick and decisive victory by hitting the Americans as hard as possible as soon as possible, even if they could choose to continue the war, in theory this Japan would allow Japan to give it maximum time to take what it needed in terms of resources and territory and continue to strengthen its, hopefully relatively intact, navy so that it could at least try to maintain an advantage for as long as possible over an American navy that would be rebuilding and then, if absolutely necessary, force the new US Navy to come to them, deal a pretty strong blow to them, and then hopefully negotiate a peace.

Unfortunately, when things finally came to an end, the Kantai Kesen doctrine was found somewhat lacking due to the continued obsession with the great decisive battle. It meant that a fairly significant number of Japanese capital ships were held back for a considerable period of the start of the war, when they would probably have been less vulnerable and more useful; It also meant that the attacks on Pearl Harbor had failed to destroy any American ships, despite the shift of emphasis from battleship to aircraft carrier in certain parts of the Japanese navy, especially at the upper levels of the high command, meant that the The Japanese were constantly trying to draw the American aircraft carriers into the battle and the American fleet in general, but when the battle coalesced despite an initial tactical success in the Battle of the Coral Sea as well as an overall tactical success in the Battle of the santa cruz islands, other battles such as midway seriously undermined the strength of the japanese navy and neither battle was the decisive battle they were looking for. because, in fact, one of the factors that contributed to the way the halfway point occurred was the fact that because the Japanese navy had been operating a series of campaigns and engagements, the overall strength of its air groups had shrunk a little bit and so they didn't have as many planes available on the various flight decks as they might have had at the beginning of the war, and of course the big elephant in the room was that attack on Pearl Harbor, while they had managed to destroy or damage a significant number of the former US 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 heart and the frontline center of a modern navy.

Fast battleships would for a time remain critical. element of a fleet, but the aircraft carrier would also quickly rise to prominence and no fast battleships or any aircraft carriers were sunk, plus of course it was a sneak attack and the Americans did not react very well to a sneak attack which could also be argued that the The attack on Pearl Harbor was actually too successful despite the lack of carrier deaths because with so many American battleships at the bottom of the sea needing salvage repair or just cleanup, that meant that during the early part of the war, even if The American admirals had wanted to send the battle fleet and thus invoke the kantai kesen doctrine without knowing it, they could not because they did not have a battle fleet, this in turn forced them to use their aircraft carriers and later their fast battleships, as well as their cruisers and destroyers in a completely different way, of course, they were loosely following the rainbow five war plan which, as we said, the Japanese didn't actually know about, but the Japanese had unknowingly eliminated any ability for the Americans to follow the orange warplane, like we said, even if they had. wanted 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 be gradually reduced during 1942 and 1943 until it became a shadow of As it was before, several Japanese capital ships would be lost in a series of separate engagements until the number of available capital ships had decreased so much that any type of battleship engagement against the American fleet would not even be a Pyrrhic victory, it would simply be a glorious last stand and therefore the kantai kessin doctrine.

Although the Japanese still clung to the hope that it would simply fade, it had ultimately been based not only on the changes in operational reality surrounding the actual outbreak of the war, as we just explained, but also simply, as we mentioned above. , in the fact that they had never considered what they were going to do after the decisive battle in many ways, as the old illustration says: Kantai Kessin was a bit like a dog chasing a car: he had a very clear idea of ​​what he wanted . do, but if he ever succeeded, he had no real idea what he was going to do next and that was ultimately going to be his downfall, regardless of when it came into play.

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