H.P. Wilmott thread

[grumbler]

I mentioned before that I have recently re-read all my H.P. Wilmott books, because you just can't stop! 

As i mentioned in another thread, Wilmott is a pretty "dense" writer, in that he generally assumes (though not in the case of The Barrier and the Javelin and Empires in the Balance, his best two books and my most highly recommended) that you know the history, so he can stick to analysis, but he has a number of interesting conclusions.  I thought I would do a thread just talking about some interesting observations he makes about World war Two, with maybe, at the end and assuming people are still interested, some stuff from his The Last century of Sea Power.

I am going to start with his Leyte Gulf book, 2005's The Battle Of Leyte Gulf: The Last Fleet Action.  In it, he lays out 3 controversies that, he says, have never been well-understood, despite all the ink spilled on the battle:
(1) What was it that the Japanese thought that they could accomplish, and how realistic was that thought?

(2) What caused Halsey to make so many blunders in this battle?

(3) Why did Kurita turn back, on the very verge of (some kind of) victory?

His conclusion on the first issue is that the Imperial Japanese Navy had tied all of its thinking to the concept of the "Decisive battle," to the point that the requirements for that battle had driven procurement and training, and then operational thinking and decision-making, and eventually strategic decision-making.  Japan continued to increase the percentage of her merchant fleet devoted to supporting operations in the Central and Southwest Pacific, even as merchant numbers declined and her needs for shipping to support the economy grew.  This was because the IJN had promised, time after time, that this battle would be the decisive one, and so support for it couldn't be skimped.  The IJN had thus built up a huge reservoir of guilt over failing, time and again, at great cost, to bring about the decisive battle (except, as Wilmott notes in another book, to creating the precise conditions for the Decisive Battle and seeing it come to fruition, only for the Americans - the US did at Guadalcanal exactly what the IJN wanted to do).

The IJN knew that the Battle of Leyte Gulf couldn't be won.  Even if everything worked out for them, they couldn't possibly get their ships into position to deter the invasion, and that was the only hope they had.  Nevertheless, they had to fight.  The loss of the Philippines would mean the end of their policy of keeping their ships in Singapore, close to fuel (but far from ammo and spare parts), and sending the fleet to japan would mean it couldn't sail again.  In essence, the IJN was engaging in a hopeless battle in which they couldn't influence the war, but which honor dictated they fight, anyway.  It wasn't accidental that the IJN's air arm engaged in kamikaze missions in this battle for the first time.

Halsey presnted Wilmott with the a problem:  if he took Halsey at his word in Halsey's postwar rationalizations, Halsey comes across as one of the most heartless bastards of all time (since Halsey's justification for his actions was that Halsey felt that any Japanese success against Seventh Fleet could be reversed by Third Fleet when Halsey got around to it, so the unnecessary deaths of thousands of Americans was not consequential compared to Halsey's need to preserve "unity of effort").  OTOH, just looking at what Halsey knew and when he knew it, Halsey comes across as a stumblebum, unable to work out simple time-distance equations.

Wilmott's conclusion is essentially that Halsey was obsessed with sinking Japanese carriers (spurred in part by his competition with Spruance, who had destroyed the Japanese air groups but had been mostly concerned with his mission of supporting the landings, and so had let the carriers themselves get away).  His particular contribution of new information is an analysis of how Halsey used his staff; unlike the commanders who got promoted to flag rank during the war, and unlike Spruance who grew to understand the new staff organizations, Halsey treated his staff as a collection of individual experts who could advise him on specialized topics like logistics or reconnaissance, but preferred to treat his staff as a set of individual assistants, not as an advisory board.   Halsey wanted facts from his staff, and not opinions.  Every member of his staff, and every subordinate commander (and every senior commander, and every peer commander), was astonished when he left no forces to cover San Bernadino Strait, desite the fact that everyone knew Kurita was coming through it that night.  Halsey himself, Wilmott argues, didn't think that way, and there was no one willing to tell him he was wrong.

Kurita presents Wilmott with a similar, but worse, dilemma.  Kurita's after-action justifications changed each time he made them.  To the facts of the case have to be added the fact that Kurita had spent time in the water when his flagship was sunk, and that he had almost none of his staff with him on the Yamato.  Japanese ships were flooding the flagship with absurd reports about the numbers of "Enterprise class" carriers they were sinking, along with "battleships" (like the destroyers Hoel and Johnston) and "Baltimore-class cruisers."  Further, if Kurita thought that the forces he was facing were fleet carriers and fast exceots, they must have been pulling away.

But none of that explains why Kurita pulled away.  If he thought he had routed the American carriers, then he should have sailed into Leyte Gulf and continued the mission.  Sure, he was short of fuel to return to base, but what good did a return to base do when he was supposed to lead his force to glorious death anyway?  Wilmott concludes he was either suffering from some sort of battle fatigue, or was a coward, or both (and his career to date didn't preclude his being a coward).

Wilmott makes another couple of observations I found interesting:
(1) The US Navy's accomplishments in quadrupling the size of their navy and Naval Air Forces while simultaneously increasing individual and group proficiencies was remarkable. He considers this the most impressive accomplishment of any of the warring nations during WW2 (though he pretty much argues the same about the Red Army's development of a true strategic warfare capability while rebuilding their strength during the war with Germany, so this has to be taken with a grain of salt). 

(2) The USN's torpedo tactics in this battle (especially during the Battle of Surigao Strait, when the US had an enormous advantage) were woefully inadequate - ships didn't seem to coordinate at all, even though this was to years after they had seen the advantages the Japanese got from such coordination.  My own observation is that the US never appreciated the value of having dedicated destroyer "leaders" like the British "leaders" and the Japanese CL's, which could have experts assigned to coordinate precisely this function.

Another observation I had was that Japanese ships seemed very easy to sink in this battle, especially when compared to sister ships in the Guadalcanal campaign.  Examples of the very same ship classes that took brutal beatings in the naval battles around Guadalcanal were sunk here by single torpedo hits (even the battleship Fuso which, while old, still should never have succumbed to a single torpedo hit).  I can only conclude that Japanese crews by this point in the war simply didn't understand their ships, nor damage control.  But where did the ace crews of these ships from the earlier war periods go?

So, anyway:  thoughts?

[The Brain]

Well he's not the only dense writer.

[jimmy olsen]

(3) Why did Kurita turn back, on the very verge of (some kind of) victory?
...

Kurita presents Wilmott with a similar, but worse, dilemma.  Kurita's after-action justifications changed each time he made them.  To the facts of the case have to be added the fact that Kurita had spent time in the water when his flagship was sunk, and that he had almost none of his staff with him on the Yamato.  Japanese ships were flooding the flagship with absurd reports about the numbers of "Enterprise class" carriers they were sinking, along with "battleships" (like the destroyers Hoel and Johnston) and "Baltimore-class cruisers."  Further, if Kurita thought that the forces he was facing were fleet carriers and fast exceots, they must have been pulling away.

But none of that explains why Kurita pulled away.  If he thought he had routed the American carriers, then he should have sailed into Leyte Gulf and continued the mission.  Sure, he was short of fuel to return to base, but what good did a return to base do when he was supposed to lead his force to glorious death anyway?  Wilmott concludes he was either suffering from some sort of battle fatigue, or was a coward, or both (and his career to date didn't preclude his being a coward).

Interesting. What do you think the result would have been if Kurita had continued on?

[Jaron]

Well he's not the only dense writer.