The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [222]
The individual decisions of four admirals dramatically hurt Japan’s cause. History illustrates that often a few people control the hinge point of events. Different decisions by these four men, while not winning the war, would hand their leaders a better chance at controlling later events. The strategic decision for or against war is the most critical because it is foundational; however, numerous poorly made decisions at the decisive point of battle can doom any nation. The Allies made good decisions throughout the war at the strategic level,[302] and the Allied fighting men made good decisions at the tactical level. Given the totality of decisions made by the Allies and the Axis, the Allies did far better.
Submarine Efforts—Axis and the Allies
Any discussion of the Pacific and Atlantic wars must refer to the US Submarine efforts against Japan and German efforts in the Atlantic against Britain. At the start of the war, US Navy torpedoes were defective. Reports of their defectiveness reached ranking admirals in the navy, but they were ignored. Only after the admiral of the submarine forces threatened to resign were tests run on the torpedoes, and they were defective. The problem was the magnetic detectors on the warhead that were supposed to recognize when the torpedo was directly under a ship failed. In WWI the torpedoes had mechanical detonators. The torpedo hit the side of a ship, the mechanical detonator fired, and a hole was blown in the ships’ side. Between WWI and II, torpedoes were improved and a magnetic detonator was invented which detected when the torpedo was beneath the keel of the ship causing the torpedo to explode. This difference was critical because when the torpedo exploded under the keel of a ship it broke the ship’s back (so to speak), the ship would sink faster, and it would take fewer torpedoes to sink a ship—usually only one (for a merchant ship).
The Germans encountered the same problems with their torpedoes; thus, they switched to WWI mechanical detonators and the German submarines had to fire more torpedoes to sink a ship when one should have sufficed. German Type VII subs only carried twelve torpedoes. A German investigation discovered the officers in charge of testing the torpedoes in the Kregsmarine were the same people that investigated any later-alleged flaws. The quality control testers covered up the fact that the detonators were malfunctioning. In Germany, these men were quickly put to death (after a trial, of course). In the US, Navy investigators determined the men originally in charge of testing the torpedoes were the same men looking for later problems with those torpedoes. If these men disclosed the flaws in their original testing they could get into trouble, so they kept quite. Do the facts ring a bell? Only here, the US Navy failed to outwardly punish the men. They just fixed the problem and moved on.
The US Submarine service was terribly hampered by these malfunctioning torpedoes. Submariners risked their lives in the Philippines, for example, to get shots at Japanese ships landing troops on Luzon only to have the torpedoes breakdown. At Guadalcanal, US Coastal submarines operating in The Slot recorded several kills. This got the US Navy wondering why the coastal submarines were having so much more luck than the fleet submarines. No one thought to look at the torpedoes, although suspicions were growing. The small coastal subs were using World War I torpedoes because they were second class fighting machines, so they got the old stuff. The old stuff worked and gave the Japanese a lot of headaches. The new stuff did not work and gave the United States a lot of headaches. Fixing the torpedoes led to spectacular kill rates for US Submarines after 1943. The Japanese failed to concentrate on protecting their merchant shipping, and US Submarines began slaughtering their transports. By the end of the war,