World War Two
Published 6 May 2023A command crisis in the Chinese Nationalist Army benefits the Japanese invaders, in Italy, Mark Clark spends his birthday planning new offensives, the Japanese are pushing for Imphal, and the Soviets for Sevastopol — another busy week of the war!
(more…)
May 7, 2023
Total Chaos on the Chinese Front! – WW2 – Week 245 – May 6, 1944
Comments Off on Total Chaos on the Chinese Front! – WW2 – Week 245 – May 6, 1944
May 5, 2023
Alligator Creek: America Learns to Fight the Japanese
Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 Jan 2023The Battle of Alligator Creek (aka Battle of the Tenaru) was a formative moment in the American World War Two psyche. After making an unopposed landing on Guadalcanal and taking its mostly-completed airfield at minimal cost, the US Marines had to defend their permitter on the night of August 21st, 1942.
Colonel Kiyonoa Ichiki was sent from the Japanese base at Truk with about 900 tough veteran soldiers to push the Marines off the airfield. These men had originally been slated to assault Midway Island, but the Japanese naval defeat there forced a change in plans. Ichiki was overconfident, and more concerned about retaking the islands of Tulagi, Gavutu, and Tanambogo across the straights, where Japan’s main base in the area had also been captured by Marine Raiders. Marching up the coastline towards Henderson Field, Ichiki’s men hit the thin single strand of Marine barbed wire about about 1:30am on the morning of there 21st. An intense firefight erupted, with the well dug-in Marine positions opening up with .30 caliber and .50 caliber machine guns, small arms, and 37mm canister rounds.
The fighting continued after daybreak, with Ichiki’s men digging in on the east bank of Alligator Creek. The Marines launched a two prong counterattack, with one force crossing the Creek inland and advancing down the east bank while a second group, including several Stuart light tanks, advanced across the sandbar. These two groups linked up in the early afternoon of the 21st, almost completely annihilating the Ichiki Detachment.
This was the first real land combat between American and Japanese forces in which American soldiers were able to report back on their experience. It was here that the US military as an institution learned that the Japanese would die rather than surrender, and this engagement set the American expectations for the rest of the Pacific campaign.
(more…)
Comments Off on Alligator Creek: America Learns to Fight the Japanese
April 30, 2023
Germany’s Existential Crisis – WW2 – Week 244 – April 29, 1944
World War Two
Published 29 Apr 2023The fighting at Kohima is up close, personal, and vicious, as it is at Imphal. The Allies consolidate their gains at Hollandia, the Japanese are advancing in Central China, and it seems like the Chinese Nationalist Army has lost the support of the civilian population. This might not surprise you when we take a closer look.
(more…)
Comments Off on Germany’s Existential Crisis – WW2 – Week 244 – April 29, 1944
April 29, 2023
Okinawa 1945: Planning Operation ICEBERG
Army University Press
Published 7 Dec 2021On 1 April 1945, U.S. forces invaded the Japanese home island of Okinawa. It was the largest joint amphibious assault mounted during World War II in the Pacific Theater. The invasion of Okinawa was the culmination of three years of operations in the Pacific against Imperial Japan. The film explores the planning and preparation for Operation ICEBERG from September 1944 to 1 April 1945.
“Okinawa 1945: Planning Operation ICEBERG” examines the U.S. Army operations process as well as planning by echelon from field army, corps, and division with special emphasis on current Joint doctrine. This film is the first in a two-part series covering Operation ICEBERG and the U.S. Tenth Army’s securing of Okinawa.
(more…)
Comments Off on Okinawa 1945: Planning Operation ICEBERG
April 23, 2023
The Biggest Offensive in Japanese History – WW2 – Week 243 – April 22, 1944
World War Two
Published 22 Apr 2023Japan Launches Operation Ichigo in China, their largest offensive of the war … or ever, but over in India things are not going well for the Japanese at Imphal and Kohima. The Allies also launch attacks on the Japanese at Hollandia, while over in the Crimea, the German defenses at Sevastopol are cracking under Soviet pressure.
(more…)
Comments Off on The Biggest Offensive in Japanese History – WW2 – Week 243 – April 22, 1944
April 21, 2023
Type 94 Japanese 37mm Antitank Gun on Guadalcanal
Forgotten Weapons
Published 30 Dec 2022The Type 94 was the standard infantry antitank gun of the Japanese Army during World Ware Two. It was developed in the early 1930s as tensions with the Soviet Union rose; there had not been much need for Japanese antitank weapons in China. However, high explosive ammunition was also made for the gun, and it was used in an infantry support role with HE in China as well as in the Pacific.
The Type 94 was small and light, and could be disassembled for transportation without vehicles — a very useful capability on islands like Guadalcanal. Against US M3 Stuart light tanks, the Type 94 was a reasonably potent weapon.
Note that the Japanese also had a Type 94 tank gun, which was not the same as this — and did not use the same 37mm cartridge.
(more…)
Comments Off on Type 94 Japanese 37mm Antitank Gun on Guadalcanal
April 19, 2023
The USMC finds a new mission after WW1
Another excerpt from John Sayen’s Battalion: An Organizational Study of United States Infantry (unpublished, but serialized on Bruce Gudmundsson’s Tactical Notebook:
The 1919 demobilization was nearly as traumatic for the Marines as it was for the Army. Their numbers fell from a peak of 75,000 to about 1,000 officers and 16,000 enlisted in 1920. Authorized strength was 17,400. The 15 Marine regiments and at least three, probably four, machinegun battalions existing at the end of November 1918 had withered away to only five regiments and a couple of separate battalions (one artillery and one infantry) by the following August.
Marine commitments, however, remained heavy. The brigades in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic had their hands full suppressing new rebellions. Guard detachments were still needed for Navy bases and Navy ships. The number of men required for the latter duty had fallen by only 10% since 1918. The Marines also had to staff their own bases at Quantico, Parris Island, and San Diego and they had to find men to rebuild the advance base force as well. When these facts were brought to the attention of Congress in 1920 the latter increased the Marine Corps’ authorized strength to 1,093 officers and 27,400 enlisted but then approved funding for only 20,000.
[…]
The bulk of the Corps’ operating forces were still engaged in colonial police work in the Caribbean. However, the new Commandant, Major General John A. Lejeune, was prescient enough to realize that this would not last and that a much more permanent mission would be needed to secure his service’s future. Instead, Lejeune and his advisors concluded that the real mission of the Marine Corps was “readiness”. While this concept might seem trite, one should consider that the United States was and is primarily an insular power. Its standing army in 1920 served primarily as a garrison force and cadre for a much larger wartime citizen army. Little or none of it would be available for immediate use upon the outbreak of a major war beyond the troops already deployed to major US overseas possessions like the Philippines, Hawaii, or the Panama Canal.
Although the Army of 1920 seemed to have little idea about who its future adversaries were likely to be, the Navy had already fingered Japan as its most likely future opponent. Japan had the most powerful navy after the United States and Great Britain and Japanese-American animosity was growing. The Japanese resented the treatment of Japanese immigrants in California. Americans resented Japan’s high handed actions in China. The Japanese saw American criticism of Japan’s China policy as interference in Japan’s rightful sphere of influence. Any war fought against Japan would be primarily naval in character. However, post war disarmament treaties forbade improvements to any American fortresses west of Hawaii. The League of Nations had also mandated most of the central Pacific islands to Japanese control.
If it was to successfully engage the Japanese fleet, or to threaten Japan itself, the United States Navy would need bases in those central Pacific islands. Hawaii was too far away to be useful and the Philippines were too vulnerable to Japanese attack. Only an expeditionary force could seize and hold the central Pacific islands that the Navy needed and that expeditionary force would have to be ready to move whenever and wherever the Navy did. By staying “ready”, requiring only limited reserve augmentation and, being already under the Navy’s control, the Marine Corps would be much better positioned than the Army to provide this expeditionary force, at least during the critical early stages of the next war.*
* Heinl op cit pp. 253-254; Moskin op cit pp. 219-222; and Clifford op cit pp. 25-29 and 61-64.
Comments Off on The USMC finds a new mission after WW1
April 18, 2023
Guadalcanal’s Red Beach Landing: America’s First Offensive in WW2
Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Dec 2022After (formally) joining World War Two in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the United States endured a series of defeats at the hands of the Japanese. The Philippines garrison fell, Wake Island fell, Guam fell. British possessions in Southeast Asia teetered and fell as well — the campaign was not going well for the Allies.
The first American offensive of the war would come on August 7th, 1942 with the landing of the 1st and 5th Marines at Red Beach on Guadalcanal. Part of a multi-prong assault (the nearby Japanese bases on Tulagi and Gavutu/Tanambogo were also captured at the same time), the attack on Guadalcanal was made to secure the airstrip under Japanese construction there. If the island became an operational Japanese air base, Allied supply shipping to Australia would come under threat, and this could imperil the whole area of operations.
Fortunately for the Marines, US intelligence massively overestimated the Japanese force on Guadalcanal. It was in fact only a few hundred infantry, leading a work force of about 3,000 laborers (mostly Koreans). They thought the US landings were just a small raid, and dispersed into the jungle to wait for the US departure. Instead, the Marines were there to take the airfield and hold it. They were not, however, very well prepared. The Navy suffered a massive defeat in the waters off Guadalcanal the very next night, and would pull out of the area August 9th, leaving the Marines with dangerously low supplies of food, ammunition, and other essentials.
(more…)
Comments Off on Guadalcanal’s Red Beach Landing: America’s First Offensive in WW2
April 16, 2023
4,000 German teens trapped in Tarnopol – WW2 – Week 242 – April 15, 1944
World War Two
Published 15 Apr 2023Thousands of German soldiers, mostly new teenage recruits, are obeying Hitler’s “Fortress Directive” and are surrounded in Tarnopol; it does not go well for them. German forces in Ukraine manage to all pull back across the Dniester, but they are under serious pressure in the Crimea. Meanwhile, in India, the Japanese siege of Kohima continues, and in China they are poised to launch a gigantic offensive.
(more…)
Comments Off on 4,000 German teens trapped in Tarnopol – WW2 – Week 242 – April 15, 1944
April 14, 2023
QotD: The three great strategic sins
The first sin is the sin of of not having a strategy in the first place, what we might call “emotive” strategy. As Clausewitz notes, policy (again, note above how what we’re calling strategy is closest to policy in Clausewitz’ sense) is “subject to reason alone” whereas the “primordial violence, hatred and enmity” is provided for in another part of the trinity (“will” or “passion”). To replace policy with passion is to invert their proper relationship and court destruction.
The second sin is the elevation of operational concerns over strategic ones, the usurpation of strategy with operations, which we have discussed before. This is, by the by, also an error in managing the relationship of the trinity, allowing the general’s role in managing friction to usurp the state’s role in managing politics.
Perhaps the greatest example of this is the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; an operational consideration (the destruction of the US Pacific Fleet) and even the tactics necessary to achieve that operational objective, were elevated above the strategic consideration of “should Japan, in the midst of an endless, probably unwinnable war against a third-rate power (the Republic of China) also go to war with a first-rate power (the United States) in order to free up oil-supplies for the first war”. Hara Tadaichi’s pithy summary is always worth quoting, “We won a great tactical victory at Pearl Harbor and thereby lost the war.”
How does this error happen? It tends to come from two main sources. First, it usually occurs most dramatically in military systems where the military leadership – which has been trained for operations and tactics, not strategy, which you will recall is the province of kings, ministers and presidents – usurps the leadership of the state. Second, it tends to occur when those military leaders – influenced by their operational training – take the operational conditions of their planning as assumed constants. “What do we do if we go to war with the United States” becomes “What do we do when we go to war with the United States” which elides out the strategic question “should we go to war with the United States?” entirely – and catastrophically, as for Imperial Japan, the answer to that unasked question of should we do this was clearly Oh my, NO.
(Bibliography note: It would hardly be fitting for me to declare these errors common and not provide examples. Two of the best case-studies I have read in this kind of strategic-thinking-failure-as-organizational-culture-failure are I. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (2005) and Parshall and Tully, Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway (2005). Also worth checking out, Daddis, “Chasing the Austerlitz Ideal: The Enduring Quest for Decisive Battle” in Armed Forces Journal (2006): 38-41. The same themes naturally come up in Daddis, Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam (2017)).
The third and final sin is easy to understand: a failure to update the strategy as conditions change. Quite often this happens in conjunction with the second sin, as once those operational concerns take over the place of strategy, it becomes difficult for leaders to consider new strategy as opposed to simply new operations in the pursuit of strategic goals which are often already lost beyond all retrieval. But this can happen without a subordination failure, due to sunk-costs and the different incentives faced by the state and its leaders. The classic example being functionally every major power in the First World War: by 1915 or 1916, it ought to have been obvious that no gains made as a result of the war could possibly be worth its continuance. Yet it was continued, both because having lost so much it seemed wrong to give up without “victory” and also because, for the politicians who had initially supported the war, to admit it was a useless waste was political suicide.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part VIII: The Mind of Saruman”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-06-19.
Comments Off on QotD: The three great strategic sins
April 9, 2023
New Offensive in the Crimea – WW2 – Week 241 – April 8, 1944
World War Two
Published 8 Apr 2023The Soviets are finally going to try and push the Axis out of Sevastopol and the Crimea. They also continue to drive the Axis back in Transnistria. Over in Burma and Northeastern India, the Japanese have the Allies under siege at not one, but two towns, and are also attacking Imphal from several points, but the Japanese have way bigger future plans up their sleeves in China.
(more…)
Comments Off on New Offensive in the Crimea – WW2 – Week 241 – April 8, 1944
April 6, 2023
Japan is weird, example MCMLXIII
John Psmith reviews MITI and the Japanese Miracle by Chalmers Johnson:
I’ve been interested in East Asian economic planning bureaucracies ever since reading Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works (briefly glossed in my review of Flying Blind). But even among those elite organizations, Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) stands out. For starters, Japanese people watch soap operas about the lives of the bureaucrats, and they’re apparently really popular! Not just TV dramas; huge numbers of popular paperback novels are churned out about the men (almost entirely men) who decide what the optimal level of steel production for next year will be. As I understand it, these books are mostly not about economics, and not even about savage interoffice warfare and intraoffice politics, but rather focus on the bureaucrats themselves and their dashing conduct, quick wit, and passionate romances … How did this happen?
It all becomes clearer when you learn that when the Meiji period got rolling, Japan’s rulers had a problem: namely, a vast, unruly army of now-unemployed warrior aristocrats. Samurai demobilization was the hot political problem of the 1870s, and the solution was, well … in many cases it was to give the ex-samurai a sinecure as an economic planning bureaucrat. Since positions in the bureaucracy were often quasi-hereditary, what this means is that in some sense the samurai never really went away, they just hung up their swords — frequently literally hung them up on the walls of their offices — and started attacking the problem of optimal industrial allocation with all the focus and fury that they’d once unleashed on each other. According to Johnson, to this day the internal jargon of many Japanese government agencies is clearly and directly descended from the dialects and battle-codes of the samurai clans that seeded them.
This book is about one such organization, MITI, whose responsibilities originally were limited to wartime rationing and grew to encompass, depending who you ask, the entire functioning of the Japanese government. Because this is the buried lede and the true subject of this book: you thought you were here to read about development economics and a successful implementation of the ideas of Friedrich List, but you’re actually here to read about how the entire modern Japanese political system is a sham. This suggestion is less outrageous than it may sound at first blush. By this point most are familiar with the concept of “managed democracy,” wherein there are notionally competitive popular elections, culminating in the selection of a prime minister or president who’s notionally in charge, but in reality some other locus of power secretly runs things behind the scenes.
There are many flavors of managed democracy. The classic one is the “single-party democracy”, which arises when for whatever reason an electoral constituency becomes uncompetitive and returns the same party to power again and again. Traditional democratic theory holds that in this situation the party will split, or a new party will form which triangulates the electorate in just such a way that the elections are competitive again. But sometimes the dominant party is disciplined enough to prevent schisms and to crush potential rivals before they get started. The key insight is that there’s a natural tipping-point where anybody seeking political change will get a better return from working inside the party than from challenging it. This leads to an interesting situation where political competition remains, but moves up a level in abstraction. Now the only contests that matter are the ones between rival factions of party insiders, or powerful interest groups within the party. The system is still competitive, but it is no longer democratic. This story ought to be familiar to inhabitants of Russia, South Africa, or California.
The trouble with single-party democracies is that it’s pretty clear to everybody what’s going on. Yes, there are still elections happening, there may even be fair elections happening, and inevitably there are journalists who will point to those elections as evidence of the totally-democratic nature of the regime, but nobody is really fooled. The single-party state has a PR problem, and one solution to it is a more postmodern form of managed democracy, the “surface democracy”.
Surface democracies are wildly, raucously competitive. Two or more parties wage an all-out cinematic slugfest over hot-button issues with big, beautiful ratings. There may be a kaleidoscopic cast of quixotic minor parties with unusual obsessions filling the role of comic relief, usually only lasting for a season or two of the hit show Democracy. The spectacle is gripping, everybody is awed by how high the stakes are and agonizes over how to cast their precious vote. Meanwhile, in a bland gray building far away from the action, all of the real decisions are being made by some entirely separate organ of government that rolls onwards largely unaffected by the show.
Comments Off on Japan is weird, example MCMLXIII
April 3, 2023
Goodbye Manstein… Hello Model – WW2 – Week 240 – April 1, 1944
World War Two
Published 1 Apr 2023As the Allies prepare to close in on Germany from all fronts, a shake up of the German military leadership can only achieve so much…
(more…)
Comments Off on Goodbye Manstein… Hello Model – WW2 – Week 240 – April 1, 1944
March 26, 2023
Germany Invades Hungary – WW2 – Week 239 – March 25, 1944
World War Two
Published 25 Mar 2023Germany occupies Hungary this week to prevent any possible Hungarian defection from the war, the Soviets continue pushing back the Axis in Ukraine, pressing them ever more toward Romania, the Japanese advance on Imphal and Kohima continues, but Allied attacks in Italy and Japanese ones on Bougainville come to their ends.
(more…)
Comments Off on Germany Invades Hungary – WW2 – Week 239 – March 25, 1944
March 25, 2023
Beria’s Reward for Ethnic Cleansing – War Against Humanity 100
World War Two
Published 23 Mar 2023Authoritarian regimes on both sides, in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Imperialist Japan the terror is once again escalating. The bombing war from both sides see continued death of civilians, while Harris of the RAF, Spaatz of the USAAF, and Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower are getting into a fight about how the bombers should be used for the upcoming D-Day.
(more…)
Comments Off on Beria’s Reward for Ethnic Cleansing – War Against Humanity 100
