How Allied Submarines Crippled Japan in WW2

The Pearl Harbor attack ignored the drydocks, the fuel tank farm, and the entire sub base.... Fatal errors.

Captain Tasuku Nakazawa, the Operations Department Chief of Navy General Staff, wrote the following about a war with American and Britain: “We have no chance to win the war. War games resulted in heavy losses in shipping and the loss of control of overseas lanes and lines of communication. If we wage a long, drawn-out war, we will not have any means to bring the US and the UK to terms . The Operations Department, the center of naval war planning, already recognized that they could not beat Allied fleets in war, and many regular Navy officers came to the same conclusion. It was ridiculous for the IJN to declare a war on the US.

Source: Tasuku Nakazawa, “Nakazawa Tasuku Kaisoroku” (Memoir of Nakazawa Tasuku) The National Institute for Defense Studies Military Archives (NIDSMA), Tokyo, Japan.

US submarines helped to fulfill the dire predictions of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) pre-war naval gaming exercises made before 7 December 1941.

How ironic and tragic!

Superb. Excellent video 👏

Excellent video!

Where were the US sub bases?

My uncle was a LT Commander on a sub and was depth charged by the Japanese numerous times.

The US submarines were aided by the US breaking of the Japanese Naval codes, not by Blechley Parks breaking of the German codes.

I'm wondering what a historian would calculate as the timeline and likelihood of success a blockade stranglehold would have had on Japan, assuming we decided to blockade and bomb, versus using nukes? It seems the supply chain was such a huge problem for them, more than most countries.

The IJN undervalued the submarine effectiveness, and never prepared weapons and tactics to beat them. This single fact limited their ability to ship oil, and placed most BBs at drydock as there wasn't enough oil to operate their fleets

In Novermber 1944 USS Archerfish sunk the 68000 ton Carrier Shinano in a lone wolf attack 10 days after the carrier was completed. She was sailing internal Japanese waters to finish being fitted out. It remains to this day the largest ship ever sunk by a submarine

How to win the Pacific War:Step 1: develop torpedoes that actually work. How to win the Pacific War:Step 1: develop torpedoes that actually work.

Well ..seeing this documentary I think the bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was totally unnecessary .with Japan almos on his knees It seemed like a revenge act ..

The arrogant Americans got what they deserved, incompetent and preglacial leaders. Example the Tuskegee airmen because they were black! That's like playing your fourth-rate team. These young men destroyed more planes than any other team. But hey stupid is stupid just look at Pearl harbor!

Our old neighbor Richard O'Kane was a Comander of the USS tang in WW2. The torpedos were so bad that the thing spun around and hit his own ship forcing them to abandon and subsequently become prisoners of war.

The mark14 torpedo is gonna rear it's ugly head

So...the American Magic decoding had nothing to do with it? Interesting, so how did Midway as a target get identified?

How were the Germans not the most successful in WW2 submarine warfare? German submarines sunk 14 million tons of allied shipping, US submarines only sunk 5 million tons.

WAR CRIME

The British supplied info from ULTRA? I thought the US had broken the Japanese naval code

What is the contribution to the sub war of the british and the netherland? Im curious to hear about them. A video about the japanese sub would be very interesting.

love these great videos on submarine warfare, during WWII--an excellent job, Historigraph!

The sub war in the Pacific was represented well in Operation Petticoat, and Operation Bikini.

great domcumentaries ! Good job

Japanese code decryption was happening at pearl harbor not bletchley park

I have visited both the U-505 (Chicago) and the USS Drum (Mobile, AL). The main difference between American and German submarines/u-boats of WW2 has to be crew consideration. German U-Boats almost seem to 'resent' the fact that men must live aboard, while the American subs seemed to be made as comfortable as possible for the crew.

Gato is a spanish word pronounced "gah-toe" ... Not gaydo like you're saying it.

Frustrating, in Europe and the Pacific, U.S. victory often seems like Dumb Luck or Even a Blind Squirrel will eventually find a nut,

I think the early war lack of success vs IJN warships had more to do with the pos torps the USN was saddled with over anything else...

Jarg torps crises! 🤣

The torpedoes back in the earliest days had these problems;
Run wide/ run deep
Premature magnetic detonation
Run cold (drive stall)
Dud upon a well aimed contact due to aluminium firing pin collapse on impact. If aimed bad, an explosion was possible. Of a complement of 21 fish, 8 successes was considered a God send y:-/

Only Nazis had U-boats, the West, Italians and Nipon had subs. U-Boot is specific to the Grey Wolves only (/°•°)\

That was a good captain to outrun them torpedos. nice ruddering man. saved a lot of good men

Subs are a life vehicle they can repopulate the realm. We just need more diesel doctors and must be protected at all cost this rubbish of climate change Needs a bang on the head with a hammer. Love thy diesel you can get into the frost with them and meet a frost Giant. Heheh

Excellent video.

This is a great historical narrative. Most historians argue whether Midway was the turning point in the war in the Pacific. They ignored what happened under neath the waves. I would say the turning point is when (in the beginning of 1944) when the submarines started taking out Japanese shipping.

Odd. You hear a lot about the allied effort to knock out the production of ball bearings. And the Luftwaffe effort to deplete the fighter force in the Battle of Britain. Both of which almost worked.

Not here’s a true crippling blow to the enemies fighting capacity that has largely gone unrecognized.

Those submariners need some Brand Champions like the Kardashians! Let’s get the word out!

😂

A couple of points. Most commentators think the MK 14 was terrible. Admittedly it had flaws early on, but still was functional enough to sink almost a million tons of Japanese shipping in 1942. After being fixed, the MK 14 and it cousin, the MK 15 were the most potent torpedoes of the war. Also, the authors of this video state that no Japanese warship was sunk by a submarine in 1942. This is patently wrong. Heavy cruiser Kako, a victor at Savo Island, was sunk by S-44 on its way back to Rabaul on August 10.

If the Navy had a more reliable torpedo at the start of WW II, it could of shortened the war by at least a year. Your data shows the poor performance of the submarines, but didn't show how many Japanese ships got away because the MK-14 would run erratically, warheads not operating, running too deep, etc.

And they should still be paying reparations today! They start a war and then come out of it better off!

Incredible, loved it.

One error, the US Submarine S-44 managed to sink the heavy cruiser Kako after the Battle of Savo Island in 1942. So there was at least one submarine victory in 1942, because the S class was not designed for the horrible Mark 14 torpedoes and used the older, reliable Mark 10 versions instead.

Read Thunder Below by RADM Eugene Lucky Fluckey (MOH) Incredible…and all true. Fluckey’s USS Barb killed a train! Epic.

Apparently a few boats had Nisei personal aboard. They would pick up the Japanese radio voice traffic and translate it. These people knew full well that if the crew ever had to abandon boat that they would have to go down with it to avoid capture. They are mentioned in only a few boats war diaries, how many there were serving on the boats may never be known. The U.S. boats were and have always been known as the Silent Service since the war due to their operations being constantly underwraps.

us submarines managed to sink a carrier later in the war. Warship sunk is at a low frequency. But the threat was real.

I seem to recall the heavy cruiser IJN Kako was sunk by USS S-44 in August 1942 off of Rabaul returning from the Japanese victory at Savo Island.

"Ultra de-crypts from Bletchly park." Doesn't Ultra typically refer to messages encrypted by Enigma? The U.S. breaking of Japanese codes was called Magic I think. In any case I'm not what the amount of contributions by either code breakers was but it doesn't seem quite right as stated.

The reason Admiral Donitz got off light at Nuremberg,. We did the same thing to Japa.