Missing Pieces: - Royal Australian Navy

58 Missing Pieces
Why were the outcomes of such brilliant intelligence coups frequently dismissed as
being ‘unrealistic’ by sceptical leaders and their staffs? One reason is that information
collected by the British and the Americans was rarely shared wholeheartedly to
boost a common understanding of a mutual potential enemy. Sigint information was
inappropriately distributed within the USN and not passed to the US Army, and Western
conventional wisdom about the IJN was dangerously faulty. Despite the efforts of RN
Admirals Dreyer and Layton, both Commanders-in-Chief China, neither the British
nor the Americans held the Japanese capacity for war fighting in high regard. 158
IJN staffwork was considered poor, and its officers were believed unable to readily
conceive new plans if the originals went wrong — in the event, a reasonably accurate
observation, although unproven at the time. The following comment appeared in the
Admiralty’s Confidential Book (CB) 1752, Japan (with possessions) Intelligence Report
dated December 1936:
Their facility in cooperation is also remarkable, as opposed to the strong
individualism of the Anglo-Saxon. They possess an infinite capacity for
taking pains, great powers of organisation down to the most minute
detail, and a very definite gift of careful planning. Intensely suspicious
and naturally secretive, they are able to put their plans into action at
the chosen moment with suddenness, speed and efficiency, but, with
all their qualities, they have a definite lack of imagination. 159
However, quite derogatory racial bias also found its way into official assessments. A
1935 paper by Captain Vivian, RN, British Naval Attaché Tokyo, singled out perceived
Japanese racial weaknesses, including, ‘it requires time to readjust the mental outlook
from one subject to another with rapidity’. 160 Neither of the Allies was able to conceive
of a Japanese Navy capable of testing, let alone besting, their own fleets, while the
alleged shortness of stature of the Japanese race and its presumed myopia, among other
racial traits, furnished the Westerners with clear reasons why the Japanese could not
fight on an equal footing with whites:
How could officers brought up on Drake, Blake, Hawke, Howe,
St.Vincent and Nelson believe that little chaps in the Far East who
ate rice could ever hope to be a match at sea for honest, beef-eating
Englishmen who had had salt water running through their veins for
the past 400 years? 161
Overall, Allied unpreparedness to fight the Japanese was a case of ‘situating the
appreciation’, as there is ample evidence that most of the facts of Japanese warfighting
and technological capabilities were available in some form to Allied commanders. Most
seem to have been unmoved by it, apparently preferring not to contemplate the outcomes
if alarming accounts of Japanese technological superiority and tactical readiness might
be true. 162 The intelligence jigsaw on the Japanese armed forces was not complete, but