Case Studies in the Achievement of Air Superiority - Air Force ...

AIR SUPERIORITY
Allied air power. Their early successes lulled the Japanese into a false sense
of security. For much too long they tended to think in terms of the feeble,
outclassed Allied aviation originally encountered in Southeast Asia and
China. The Japanese doctrinal approach to air power was narrow and uncoordinated.
The IJAAF was typically subordinated to ground forces. Neither
the IJAAF nor the IJNAF (which had a somewhat broader conception)
could ever mount sustained and heavy strategic attacks at long range
against economic targets or rear zones. Both services underestimated the
Allies’ ability to conduct such operations against Japanese industry and
urban
The Japanese did not exploit the advantages of interior lines of communication.
When time was already working against them, they frittered
away their best air units in piecemeal fashion around their far-flung perimeter
of strategic defense-the consequence of envisaging a relatively short
and victorious war. Japanese tactical aviation was committed in driblets;
operations entailing more than a hundred aircraft were few. Toward the end
of the war, certainly, the low quality of Japanese planes and pilots would
have prevented the massing of disciplined formations, but it was also the
belief of the IJNAF that the Army Air Forces would only cooperate with it
if operations were conducted over land. Navy officer Minoru Genda, the
man who helped to plan the Pearl Harbor operation, later remarked that
each service sought to conduct operations on its own and lacked understanding
of the other branch. Not only did the IJAAF and the IJNAF fail to
cooperate effectively, but the Army and the Navy competed frantically for
allocations of Japan’s limited supplies of raw materials and production
facilities. Realistically speaking, unification of the separate military and
naval air forces was an impossibility.145
In sheer quantities of aircraft, the Japanese manufactured a formidable
number for both services during the Pacific war-65,000 of all types. But
they lost a similarly formidable number of planes, over 50,000 to all
causes-a catastrophic price to pay for negligible results. By war’s end, it
is no exaggeration to state, only hundreds of Japanese aircraft could be
maintained and only scores could be operated effectively by conventional
measures of military ~erviceability.~~~ By 1944-45, it was largely the weakness
of the Japanese in orthodox air operations against the newest AAF
bombers and fighters, as well as against USN and USMC aircraft, that
spawned two deliberate decisions on the part of the Japanese: to abandon
the contest for air superiority over the homeland, and to stake everything
on kamikaze defense of the main islands against Allied invasion. Though
the former decision may be arguable politically and militarily, there can be
no doubt that the kamikaze option was fearsome. Wrote the U.S. naval
historian. Samuel E. Morison:
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