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Post by jeb94 on Dec 18, 2018 18:29:16 GMT -6
By the time they got into the battle area the Japanese would've likely established long range torpedo bomber squadrons within range Okay, so the Japanese are diverting their incredibly threadbare logistical abilities from invading the Dutch East Indies to building airfields in the Philippines. Remember, they can only support a single division in the dutch east indies at the start of the war because they have so little shipping after accounting for Singapore and the Philippines. So you've just slowed down the tempo of their expansion by about 3 months and the battleships haven't even left harbor. A delay during that crucial opening phase could very well mean that they never push the border back too far for US submarines to operate. So instead of becoming effective in 1943 they become effective in 1942 and Japan runs out of oil that much sooner. Remember, their cargo ship building was ramping up rapidly so making them start taking losses from submarines sooner would have an outsized impact. Fleet in being matters. It might not be the most important thing but it does matter. They wouldn't have to divert much resources to build airfields. Just capture the ones already there. Like Del Carmen Airfield and Iba Airfield which fell sometime around Dec 20. Sure there wasn't a great logistics situation for the Japanese but they could move a few groups of bombers around if they could capture the airfields already built.
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Post by aeson on Dec 18, 2018 19:55:19 GMT -6
There's also that as a flagship a battleship is not necessarily inferior to an aircraft carrier, and that using Yamato or Musashi, which were available and likely to be somewhat inactive due to high fuel consumption, as Combined Fleet flagship was probably a better use of resources than taking one of Japan's carriers - especially one of Japan's handful of fleet carriers - for the same purpose, all the more so considering that any ship which he chose as his flagship would in essence be rendered unavailable for service if Yamamoto himself was not going to personally accompany the operation and didn't transfer his flag somewhere else for the duration. With Yamamoto holding a position in the Japanese fleet more or less analogous to that held by Nimitz in the US Pacific Fleet, I cannot say that I feel that it would have been appropriate for him to personally accompany many more operations than he did historically, and there are some issues inherent to continually moving the command staff from one office to another or with the fleet's highest commander and his staff going incommunicado for the duration of an operation, as might have been required if Yamamoto had taken an aircraft carrier as his flagship and tried to interfere with its operational availability as little as possible.
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