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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1215 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 13, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Submarines were absolutely vital for the American effort in the Pacific, and were responsible for sinking something like 60% of the enemy tonnage throughout the course of the war. My favorite chapter in the book was one in which we followed the submarine crew of the Wahoo and its crazy Skipper "Mush" Morton throughout most of 1943. Unlike the Allies in the Atlantic, the Japanese didn't really give much of an effort in developing anti-submarine tactics, because of the "low prestige" of the job, nor did they really ramp up their own submarine attacks on American shipping. This seems like a huge oversight.

I sometimes want to write a cynical version of the American war in the Pacific. We often get the "heroic" view, of daring pilots and fearless marines raising flags. But the cynical view starts with Japan as basically a 3rd world economy, stretched to the breaking point on long-range shipping, completely dependent on resource imports. The US starts with the completely broken Mark 14 torpedo as a result of institutional incompetance, but once they finally get a working torpedo, they quickly sink the entirety of the Japanese transport fleet, which had no defense at all. The home islands are left starving and quickly surrender. The entire "island hopping" strategy was a wasted effort except for propaganda purposes.

The two worst examples of this were lack of pilot rotations, meaning almost all experienced pilots were killed in 1942-early 1943

I know this is conventional wisdom, but that one always rubbed me the wrong way. It was obvious (even at the time) that the Americans had vastly more material resources- if Japan was going to have any chance at all of winning, they needed to win quickly. Pulling back experienced pilots to train new ones seems like a very American-centric way of thinking, that they'd be able to sustain a very long war with heavy casualties. They needed to repeat something like Pearl Harbour or Tsushima rapidly, not keep up in a war of attrition.

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