Quote:
Originally Posted by Torplexed
One of the most succinct statements that came from the Japanese naval authorities after the war was that they lost by "battling " instead of "warring" --"We conceived the war with America on a far smaller scale, studied it as a battle. We never became aware of this mistake, much less outgrew it."
The misapplied and probably out of date doctrines of Alfred Thayer Mahan and the concept of the "Decisive Battle"certainly came back to haunt them. They kept chasing for that decisive battle until they had no fleet left.
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Yup! IJN's thinking, of course, was shaped in a lot of ways by their experience of the Russo-Japanese War and the quasi-Mahanian victory at Tsushima. The IJN certainly took to heart the reasons for their own triumph, but failed to grasp the real reasons for Russia's humiliating defeat. To them, it was an example of a European empire falling to tactical brilliance and superior morale, all under the command of a genius admiral and his ultra-disciplined subordinates. In that, they totally disregarded the fact that Tsushima had virtually no impact on the war's outcome, or that Russia's war effort collapsed from the inside, for systemic reasons unique to Russia.
So their myth of the decisive battle was born, and built on layer upon layer of flawed assumptions that were held up as doctrine for the next 40 years.