Japan’s Fatally Flawed Air Forces in World War II

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Food at Japanese airfields was bad. Barracks were jungle slums. There were no laundry facilities, and men washed themselves in rivers, or under water-filled cans. Disease felled pilots and left serviceable aircraft grounded. Physical exhaustion lowered pilot performance, so that lesser-skilled opponents sometimes shot down veteran but feverish Japanese pilots.

Manpower became critical with no tractors, and ground crews wore themselves out pushing aircraft around fields. They worked at night to avoid Allied air attacks, only to fall victim to the malaria mosquito, which was most active at night. Men worked seven days a week in wretched weather at exhausting and mind-numbing tasks. Ground crews became nervous and irritable from lack of sleep. It took longer and longer to accomplish a given assignment. Minor as well as major accidents increased.

Raw human muscle wrestled bombs, cannon shells and machine gun rounds onto aircraft. Mechanics pulled maintenance on baking hot fields in direct tropical sunlight, for there were no hangars. When flooded airstrips dried after rains, dust billowed up in the wake of each aircraft, choking cockpit interiors and eroding engines.

‘The maintenance crews are exhausted, but they drag their weary bodies about the field, heaving and tugging to move the planes back into the jungle,’ a navy pilot at Buin wrote in July 1943. ‘They pray for tractors such as the Americans have in abundance, but they know their dream of such ‘luxuries’ will not be fulfilled.’

Commanders and planners lacked any understanding of the vast numbers of technicians required to support a modern army. Although there had always been shortages of trained mechanics, commanders showed little interest in sending their men to the ordnance school in Japan. The service schools themselves paid little attention to logistics and engineering support of combat forces. Nor did commanders establish schools or training programs at tactical units or in geographic army areas.

Japan’s absence of standardization in weapons and equipment ranged from aircraft types to different engines, down to instruments and the smallest accessories. The army used a 24-volt electrical system, whereas the navy used a different voltage. Mounts to hold guns, cannons and rocket launchers varied between the two services. By the end of the war, Japan produced at least 90 basic aircraft types (53 navy and 37 army) and 164 variations on basic types (112 navy and 52 army), making the logisticians’ jobs that much harder.

Japanese technicians and repairmen, already too few in number to handle even a well-managed maintenance system, were scattered in weak groups so as to cover the wide variety of equipment. Identifying, segregating and issuing the multitude of parts on a timely basis to the correct user was beyond their ability. The Japanese were hard-pressed to manage normal maintenance, let alone spare men and equipment for unauthorized field expedient modifications.

Mechanics at forward airfields were not trained well enough to correct many of the factory faults that were discovered when new aircraft arrived on station. The Japanese military also failed to master the supply, maintenance and medical problems that arose once their aerial units reached tropical zones far from their main depots.

Communications were a problem as well. The navy had great difficulty in controlling its combat air patrols because of bad radios. ‘It seemed to us,’ recalled Rear Adm. Raizo Tanaka, ‘…that every time a battle situation became critical our radio communications would hit a snag, causing delay in important dispatches…but it seemed to hold no lesson for us since communication failures continued to plague us throughout the war.’ Maintenance of aircraft radios was so difficult, spare parts so few and reliability so bad that many frustrated pilots actually removed them from their planes to save weight.

Another limitation was that Home Island flight instructors were faced with too many students to train them effectively. The urgency of training pilots overwhelmed the curriculum. ‘We couldn’t watch for individual errors and take the long hours necessary to weed the faults out of a trainee,’ Sakai recalled in 1943. ‘Hardly a day passed when fire engines and ambulances did not race down the runways, sirens shrieking, to dig one or more pilots out of the plane they had wrecked on a clumsy takeoff or landing.’ The decision to press for quantity over quality meant that poorly trained fliers graduated to combat units. ‘We were told to rush men through,’ Sakai said, ‘to forget the fine points, just teach them how to fly and shoot.’

By the end of 1943, the army and navy had lost about 10,000 pilots. As American Lt. Gen. George C. Kenney reported to Washington, ‘Japan’s originally highly trained crews were superb but they are dead.’ When matched to pilot production of 5,400 army and 5,000 navy in the same period, and when one considers the expansion in units, missions, tempo and geographical separation, it is clear that Japan’s pilot strength had not increased at all. Worse, the vast majority of prewar and even 1942-43 veterans were dead or wounded, and their replacements had none of the veterans’ experience.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Airborne Operations, Aviation History, World War II

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