The Ship Model Forum

I am reading a lot on the Pacific battles of WWII and I am struck by how often the scouts get the composition/position of enemy forces wrong. It happened on both sides so I wonder how much training went into the role? For instance at the battle of Midway the Japanese scout who located one of the US task forces simply said that there were ten enemy surface units.

This information is of almost no use to Admiral Nagumo as it has no details of the composition of the force and of course does not include the vital info that enemy carriers are around.

I understand that weather and enemy air activity (and inferior Japanese radios) made scouting a perilous and arduous mission but I wonder if aircrew did not value it as highly as it needed to be and if their training reflected a similar view of it by their superiors?

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In 1757 Admiral John Byng was shot "pour encourager les autres". Voltaire

The IJN placed great stock in long range air reconnaissance as part of their outranging the enemy tactical approach.I think that it was, and is, far more difficult to obtain accuracy, particularly in the heat of the moment. IIRC, the book "Kaigun" covers this aspect to some degree.

I am sure they were highly trained, but I also think the task at hand was more difficult than we can fathom from the comfort of our armchairs. Also, Shattered Sword is quite damning of IJN scouting practices, not so much of the training of individual crews, but of lack of resources allocated. In particular, when carriers were involved they didn't send out bomber squadrons to scout (as the US did with SBDs), preferring to maximise their strike potential while leaving their admittedly capable but numerically limited cruiser floatplanes to do all the scouting work. This proved rather short-sighted at Midway in particular. On the other hand, several of the Guadalcanal battles showed excellent scouting, lighting and spotting practices by IJN cruiser floatplanes at night. I guess it's just the fickle nature of the beast.

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Vlad

Vlad, I am sure you are right that it was a very difficult task as it seems that, at best, the reports are roughly correct about 50% of the time but it is the lack of standardization in the messages sent by the scouts that surprises me. Not all give a position, they do not always even identify themselves to their intended recipient and sometimes (as in Shattered Sword) it is a mystery what flightpath they are actually following.

I think I will get Kaigun as Dan has mentioned that it has some info on this.

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In 1757 Admiral John Byng was shot "pour encourager les autres". Voltaire

Having been a Navy pilot, and having done a bit of recon, I can tell you it isn't all that easy to ID ships from a distance. Over the open ocean, there is a lot of haze that distorts the target. But what and when do you report? If you wait for some positive IDs before reporting, you run the risk of being shot down with no warning given. If you report immediately, the reports are vague and almost useless - except as an initial alert. Even when procedures are "standardized", there is a lot of leeway given for the judgement factor. From our armchair perspective, it seems a lot easier than it actually is.

I am not saying scouting is easy! I was looking at a photo the other day and I had difficulty in recognizing a Mogami class cruiser. I thought it was a light carrier! If I can do that "in the comfort of my armchair" then I am sure it is very hard to correctly identify ships when you are flying around at several thousand feet and trying to be inconspicuous.

My point is that the reports were haphazard and sometimes useless or even misleading. The respective navies would have known the problems faced by the scouts so they would surely do everything in their power to reduce the inaccuracies of the reporting?

And yet at the most crucial moments in a battle the scouts would supply information that was completely wrong and led to commanders sending other aircrew to their deaths.

I am trying to make sense of this as the information supplied by the scout had to reach the person for whom it was intended and along the way it had to be relayed from other ships, decoded and someone had to work out who needed to see it. Knowing the way military organisations work, there must have been some sort of system in place to try to rectify the problems.

This reporting chain was part of the problem it seems to me and in 1942 the US had difficulties with deploying their CAP because the officer in charge of fighter control was not always informed of radar contacts by other ships in the task force.

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In 1757 Admiral John Byng was shot "pour encourager les autres". Voltaire

I followed up on my sources; it is "Sunburst" rather than "Kaigun" that discusses Japanese air reconnaissance in some detail. Only a few pages, though.

Thanks Dan.

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In 1757 Admiral John Byng was shot "pour encourager les autres". Voltaire

One way to simulate the difficulties of id'ing ship from the air - If you have a second story (US) balcony, at 1/700, one's view of the ground is equivalent to 9,000-10,000 ft altitude. Have a friend place 1/700 ships on the ground and try to id them.

For 1/1200-1250, the view would be equivalent to 15,000-17.000 ft altitude.

Do your own measurements to get exact altitude.

I think what Dick is saying makes a lot of sense. Whatever procedures they had could have been detrimental if made too rigid. At some point you have to trust the people you've trained so hard to do their job. A lot of the reports understandably elicit a "how could they get that so wrong?" response from us with our hindsight, but these people were doing what they thought was best according to their training. I don't think inaccurate reports can be used as evidence of lack of due process. These are situations where there is no right answer that any training or preparation could possibly prescribe.

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Vlad

Agreed. I am simply wondering what the training and procedures were? From the evidence it seems that neither side was well served by their scouts. I am not blaming the aircrew, I wonder if the training and expectations of the commanders was not matched in wartime. This would not be unusual as many weapons and systems did not perform as well in war as they had under peacetime conditions.

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In 1757 Admiral John Byng was shot "pour encourager les autres". Voltaire