Quote:There is no such thing as already beaten before the war.
In this case there is. In 1939 and 1940 massive expansions of the US Navy were voted in Congress which allowed for the R & D on Essex-class carriers, Iowa-class battleships, Baltimore-class Heavy Cruisers, Cleveland-class light cruisers and so on. When war broke out they raised the order from 2 Essex-class to 32.
The Japanese could have sunk every ship in the Pacific on Dec. 7, 1941 and by the summer of 1943 they would have still been outweighed in every class by bigger, more modern ships with radar as well as superior aircraft.
In John Toland's "The Rising Sun" there is a discussion about Japanese thoughts to invade Australia with 10 divisions in 1942. The Army could not scrape them up and the Navy could not transport them if they had. The notion that the Japanese could ever have mounted an invasion of the continental US was simply war hysteria. The entire Japanese war plan was to strike a big blow, occupy the colonial possessions of the European powers which were involved in the war and then wait for the US to sue for peace. It was an absurd hope. No less a figure than Admiral Yamamoto told them that. He said the Navy could keep the US at bay for a year. He knew that Japan could not replace their battle losses. What he perhaps did not realize was that replacing lost ships was less of a problem than replacing lost air crews. The Japanese singularly failed to replace the pilots lost either in combat or operationally. The elite air crews from the pre-war days were lost at an amazing pace. Shokaku and Zuikaku were kept out of Midway because their air groups were shot to hell at Coral Sea. On top of all that, Japanese plans to deal with the submarine threat were a joke. They essentially told themselves that the war would be over before the submarines could be effectively deployed against them.
D'uh!
By 1944 the difference between a kamikaze and a regular pilot was one of intent. Japanese pilots who wanted to fly their mission and return were doing so as poorly-trained replacements in obsolete aircraft against Hellcats and Corsairs which were radar directed. If they did survive contact and made it back they still had to land their plane.
