Quote:
Originally Posted by Sniper297
Reading a book about USS WARD (4 piper destroyer that sunk the midget sub a couple hours before the air raid on Dec 7) and it mentioned two items that seem significant;
1. A full size Japanese I boat sub patrolling 4 miles outside the harbor was lucky to avoid detection - "several times" in two days she lost trim and broached. Either something wrong with the sub or something wrong with the crew, a disaster waiting to happen.
2. On Dec 10th, a US dive bomber from ENTERPRISE sighted another Japanese I boat on the surface in the daytime near Hawaii, sank it with the loss of the entire 127 man crew.
Off to a bad start, my theory on Japanese sub losses and mediocre success (despite having superior torpedoes) is that they apparently weren't very good at submarine warfare.
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I believe they COULD have been great a it, especially early on, but the flaw was they did not utilize their sub force properly, stuck to their established doctrine of enemy warships being their primary targets.
Imagine the chaos and damage they would have caused if attacked west coast merchant shipping in 1942, while Germans were attacking east coast shipping during "Drumbeat", when our(US) commanders refused to listen to British and run convoys regularly (as Japanese did for most part until mid 1943 and early 1944, when it was too late). Imagine if they ran an unrestricted submarine warfare campaign against allied supply lines to Australia in manner we did on their supply lines?
Most of their boats lacked capabilities of US and German subs from what I understand, relatively shallow operating depths, slower dive times etc but they had excellent torpedoes and range, as well as brave crews.