Question: What if Japanese naval doctrine of conservation of forces was replaced by "we do not waste ships...

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34 Essex Class were planned. And the midway class was coming online.

Japan had zero chance once we didn't come to immediate terms. They could have invaded and took Hawaii, won the battle of midway, won in Guadalcanal, invaded Darwin and it wouldn't have mattered in the long run. They were never going to our produce the USA in terms of men and material. Especially quality of material.

Is it wrong that I kinda wish those things had happened?
Imagine it being the middle of 1946 and the USN is shitting out tens of Montanas and Midways.

All of this plus Japan's failure to consider that an island nation of limited natural resources should probably put ASW and convoy protection high on its list of priorities.

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Things looked very grim when their gambit at Pearl failed, after the battle of Midway they were utterly doomed. No amount of reshuffling tactics and strategies could have saved them.

Not sure if it would have been any different watching a hellcat off an essex rape an A6m vs a bearcat off a midway.

Worst comes to worst and the US has to actually pay attention to Japan before 1944 instead of leaving it as a sideshow to the European theater.

>held back

Nigga you fuckin stupid read a history book.

for the US europe was the sideshow, not the other way around.

Nigga you fuckin stupid read a history book.

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Yes, what anime are you referring to? The only ones I can think of that have to do with IJN warships in any way are Zipang, KanColle, and Arpeggio of Blue Steel. Not sure how any of them are about that topic though...

He's not entirely wrong. The average american was seething over the pacific, and took ownership of the fight against the japs. Americans generally saw the european war as 'go along to get along'. Going after germany first wasn't a very popular decision.

No he's not right in the slightest. Europe got the vast majority of troops, funding, and military equipment. The Pacific Theater was a sideshow fought with 35% of the US's military and 20% of its personnel.

>Going after germany first wasn't a very popular decision.
This is pure revisionism.

we should nuke the nips every 50 years just as a reminder

The USN and IJN during the first and most decisive period of the war were far more evenly matched than most believe.
At the beginning of 1943 the Japanese had 4 CVs, 3 CVEs, 10 battleships, 36 cruisers, and 99 destroyers. The Americans had 2 CVs, 4 CVEs, 9 battleships, 25 cruisers, and 146 destroyers. By this time Japan had already been forced onto the defensive.
America's productive capabilities were important, but it took time for that to translate to overwhelming superiority on the front lines. By then the outcome had clearly been decided already.

It's kinda hard to say we went after Germany first. We didn't really ramp up the campaigns against either nation until 44 when we were royally wrecking the japs thanks to finally having the tankers to support more of the fleet and made landfall in France. We were still fighting both in 42/43, but it was either in colonial territory or meat grinders while we got our acts together.

they do marginally better but eventually get smashed in the end like a bug once the usa gets fully going
it's not a winnable to fight for japan
their entire premise was that america would fold at the first sign of adversity which clearly wasn't going to happen

That would be because it took us 2 years to get a significant army built up, and 3 years to build it up to a degree the generals felt comfortable making landfall with.

A 1943 landing would have been possible, and by some accounts would have been better than D-Day in 1944. But at the time intelligence suggested that it would have been far too risky and could have resulted in the landing force being destroyed.

Japan had a couple real chances very early war to hold off the inevitable.

1. 3rd Wave at Pearl Harbor.
-The Third wave was targeting oil facilities and ships at Pearl. Without these, no American ship could operate for extended periods in the Pacific. These would've taken months to rebuild and restock and given Japan about a 6-8 Month lead time for consolidating gains.

2. Battle of Savo Island and subsequent Guadalcanal Naval Battles
-Essentially the IJN caved to fear instead of pressing their advantages and could've wiped out the Marines on the beachhead at the start. Other options would've enabled them to take out the transports that served as a "just in time" supply train for the majority of the battle of Guadalcanal. The First Battle was a very close call and mainly "won" due to Abe pulling out due to the damage sustained to the ships and anger from Yamamoto. If he had pressed or combined his force with the 8th Fleet Cruiser force, they would've been able to achieve victory instead of attacking piece meal as they did.

This puts a shut down on America's first real attack of the war and another massive defeat for the ABDA force which was already struggling. This again enables Japan to consolidate gains and enables more viable threat to Australia and/or cease fire with ABDA forces.

End Result - Japan loses regardless as soon as Germany is taken care of.

I bet the Montanas would have been cancelled. Battleships were useless for anything other than shore bombardment by that point in the war, and the US already had enough old battleships that would work fine for that.

They were cancelled. So were the Iowas but they were almost done building four already so they kept them.

Battleships (American battleships with VT fuzed 5" shells, anyway), somewhat ironically, were very useful for providing air defense to fleets.

Did ship tonnage really matter that much beside carriers? I mean a battleship usually has a lot of trouble against a swarm of torps

Japanese naval production was pathetic when compared to what it needed to do. Even compared to minor powers Japanese production fails to impress. They barely outproduced Italy, the joke economy, when Italy was still in the war. Canada, a nation that had started the war with a handful of small craft and some retired British officers, managed to produce only 12 fewer warships then Japan during the war. The Canadian built warships were almost all small ASW ships but they did a great job a defeating the u-boats and Japan certainly needed more ASW hulls once the US got working torpedoes.

Japanese industrial capacity was hopelessly incapable of supplying the material needed to win. Changes in doctrine and tactics would have only delayed the inevitable.

I wouldn't degrade Japanese shipbuilding that much. Relative to the size of its economy, it performed remarkably well.
>Japanese production of shipping during the war was impressive. Merchant and naval vessel construction received half of all the finished steel Japan produced between 1943 and 1945. Between 1942 and 1944, the Japanese finished the construction of one battleship (of the enormous 64,000 ton Yamato Class), 13 aircraft carriers, 5 cruisers, 55 destroyers and 99 submarines. As a point of comparison, the United Kingdom in these years completed 2 battleships (combined displacement of 70,000 tons), 6 aircraft carriers, 15 cruisers, 141 destroyers and 111 submarines.
>The balance in Japan’s favor in terms of merchant ship construction was even greater. During the war from 1942 to 1945, the Japanese produced 3,392,814 tons of merchant shipping, 986,159 tons of which were fuel tankers. Production in the United Kingdom during the same period, completed almost entirely without any real damage from strategic bombing which severely hindered Japanese production during the last year of the war, was only 14 percent higher. Between January 1, 1942 and June 30, 1945, 3,874,000 tons of merchant shipping was completed in the UK. Without bombing the Japanese might have actually out-produced the British in merchant shipbuilding.
books.google.com/books?id=42oaCAAAQBAJ&pg=PA63&lpg=PA63&dq="Japanese production of shipping during the war was"&source=bl&ots=60yt0kMT5E&sig=N8gQiUYW94l_7U0j7TQze03bBHQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiDjZDam7LfAhWErlQKHeRXA7wQ6AEwAHoECAAQAQ#v=onepage&q="Japanese production of shipping during the war was"&f=false

It didn't matter what they did. Had they committed everything they had at Pearl and invaded Hawaii, even if they succeeded the US would still go on a rampage of ship building in the states, we had more manpower, we had more fuel, we had more resources to fight them and win even if the war would have been longer.

Every loss of ship the Japanese suffered was a loss that realistically they couldn't replace as fast as the US could. The US could train far more men, replace far more ships, and more importantly, had a massive merchant fleet to deliver supplies and material of war anywhere they wanted, with a massive fleet of destroyers and destroyer escorts to protect them.

Then you have the technology advantage. The US was simply much more advanced in their shipbuilding, in their avionics, and in their radars and sonar systems. Many Japanese ships didn't even have radar, long into the war too. Radar meant that the US ships could target Japanese vessels in the dark without flares. It meant they could track Japanese ships long range and know their positions. Not to mention the fact that the US broke Japanese naval codes early in the war and the Japs didn't know it.

Japan was fucked no matter what or how successful they were. Maybe if they had nukes, which they would have never had in the first place, you could make this argument though.

The warship statistics, while not entirely inaccurate, are somewhat misleading as it ignores the 413 escort ships the UK launched and has a timeframe that favors Japanese production.

The merchant stats on the other hand are completely off from what I have, no idea why. The UK Japan outproduced by a good margin for except for when British numbers slowed as the war was winding down, with final numbers of 4.15 million tons from Japan and 6.38 million from the UK .

>World War II A Statistical Survey, John Ellis.

Probably different time periods. The British Statistical Digest shows 3.874 million tons of shipping completed in the UK from 1st quarter 1942 to 2nd quarter 1945.

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Would have only delayed the inevitable, the Japanese Imperial Military was never going be able to win, no one could have won against the US War Machine. Why? Because the US could out produce everyone else. The Japs never stood a chance, the rest of the Axis forces never stood a chance and in an alternative universe where right after the defeat of the Nazis the US went to war with the USSR they wouldn't have stood a fucking chance in hell. With Generals like Patton, Bradly, Eisenhower, and Marshall plus the greatest war production ability ever known to mankind, not even god himself could have defeated the US.

Also note the words of Admiral Yamamoto who predicted the outcome to a t;
"In the first 6 to 12 months of a war with the United States and Great Britain, I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success."

Japan's discipline worked against them. It took them years to train a carrier pilot. The US just put Jim Bob in a plane after a month and he either landed or he didn't

Literally no chance of a mythical third wave. The ships and planes were running on fumes, the carriers were returning and the base aircraft were flying, and the pilots were all dead tired. A third wave would see a total loss for the Japanese which would have gutted the Jap naval air arm and rendered them incapable of training new pilots as a lot of the pilots taking part in midway were instructors. The war gets shorter as a result.

What impact would the destruction of the panama canal have. Although can't see how such a thing would be accomplished.

Nothing as only merchant shipping traversed it. Our navy all went around SA as, iirc, the carriers couldn't fit through the locks.

To think Yamamoto was getting death threats before the war from other Japanese commanders who thought his words of "Don't go to war with the US and UK, we'll lose." were equal to cowardice.

Biggest ones I could think of would it would limit the amount of repair yards available to the US Navy and newer vessels may have longer to sail before joining the war if they were built on the coast opposite of their destination. The Pacific and Atlantic fleets were both had a huge amount of resources and it's not like ships were being transferred between the two constantly.

Most ships could fit through, carriers included. I think the only one that may not have been able to were a few of the standard type battleships that received extensive refits that included widening their beam.

Ahh. I guess I was thinking more of the modern navy. Thought it was like that back in WW2. Well my bad.

Its not quite that they hoped we would surrended at the first sign of adversity (that would have been pearl harbor).
The Japanese strategy was to cripple us at pearl harbor while they captured resources and bases they needed to supply the war machine they had and build enough strategic strongpoints they could bring a major American fleet to battle on the perimeter of their empire (something like winning midway or leyte gulf) [theres a battle im missing the name of where a smaller force ofamerican destoryers and cruisers fended off a superior japanese fleet from annihilating the landing craft and troop carriers at a major landing] and win decisively effectively crippling our pacific theater twice and get us to sue for peace. Unfortunately for the japanese 1) america didnt give a fuck and would likely have meatgrindered men and material into the fight like rome against hannibal IMO based on the NATO v USSR doctrine the same commanders had in the immediate postwar period and (a lot more historically based) 2) we just fucking ignored any strongly fortified island they made if we could since they didnt have the ships to resupply them or threaten us from them once we attacked somewhere else. The island hopping idea was great because they had to defend every island we could turn into an airfield or a refuling station and we just needed to conquer a chain leading to japan and skipped as many major concentrations as we could.
From what I understand the plan was to do something like capturing midway to force us to fight for it back 6 months later while using the captured resources of China and Indonesia and the Philippines to supply the products Japan needed.

This is, remember, Allied intelligence, which was very very good especially when compared to the Germans sorry excuse for OPSEC.

They got some ship to ship action in in a few occasions.

they should have done like Italy desu
>focus on conservation of force
>focus on escorting convoys going to Libya and stopping british convoys to Malta
>use light ships and special forces to strike enemy capital ships
Guess what fleet lasted longer

>theres a battle im missing the name of where a smaller force ofamerican destoryers and cruisers fended off a superior japanese fleet from annihilating the landing craft and troop carriers at a major landing
Taffy 3 at the Battle off Samar

Probably the most heroic thing in the history of the American armed forces.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Johnston_(DD-557)
>A survivor saw the Japanese captain salute her as she went down, considering her an honorable enemy. That was the end of Johnston.

>focus on escorting convoys going to Libya and stopping british convoys to Malta
Southern Italy to Libya is like bringing shit from your house to your own backyard when compared to mainland Japan and to the entirety of Southeast Asia. Same goes for Malta. The sheer difference in distances involved alone makes it an entirely different ordeal.