Quote:

There's a mitigating factor to the sub situation: the Japanese Navy, being extremely rigid in all things, had shit for an anti-submarine service. From what I've read, there were two reasons:

1. Navy officers looked at it as extremely distasteful to escort civilian vessels--they all wanted to be Admiral Togo sailing into Tsushima in an epic, heroic battle to win the war. In any other country, they'd be told tough shit but senior officers had simultaneously cultivated and feared their underlings and relied on them for decision making far more than was healthy, and

2. Having been modeled after the British Navy circa 1910s, the Japanese Navy looked at submarine warfare as a purely military tool and thus didn't adapt until it was way too late.

From what I read, the escorts they organized had a couple of aging destoryers and cruisers mostly with overaged draftees on board, and weren't even put into service until 1943ish, at which point it was way too late. The strangulation by American subs would have happened anyway, because there's no way they could have matched the sheer number of steel ships the Americans could throw out there, but they probably could have held out much longer had they bothered with the above in 1941.




Now *this* is pretty close to the truth.

Submarines from their inception have been a bit on the nose to regular navy types, not just japs. Many navy men over the years poo-pooed them and tried to get their development stopped.

I mean submarines are to the navy what trannies are to porn producers. Necassary, but not all that liked.

Even today, with subs being the ultimate killing machine, they're still not seen in particuarly glowing terms by surface types.


So all navies, even the US and Britain, were a bit standoffish with subs. Which is partly why submen are a different breed.

Curiously the German wolf-packs of the early WW2 years were afforded hero status. And for the most part they spent their time descimating civilian US-Britain rust bucket cargo ships. Not a lot of glory there now is there?


So yeah, in WW2 you still had on all sides old style navy men who yes in fact hated subs.

Where's the Jap style honour in sitting in wait for days in a stinky sub then sneakily sinking a few civilian vessels from 2 000 yards away, still unseen? Very un-bonzai! Bonzai!

And where's the honour in wet-nursing cargo ships? And where's the honour in chasing ghosts around for thousands of miles on end?


So yeah, Arab IMHO is dead-on. And I'm not fawning. The Japs had a distate for all things submarine. Whether it be employing them or hunting them.

Even the midget subs, like the one's that made it into Sydney Harbour, on suicide missions, I've read that was pretty shameful.


You know, just as an aside, the Japs used to behead prisoners for fun, it was seen as quite an honourable act, and ppl used to queue up to have a go, and I don't need to say anything but the word "kamikaze" for y'all to get the currency and implications of that word.
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