On the attack on Pearl Habor they called of the second attack and missed the fuel and the workshops, On Guadalcanal they missed the transports the first night, at Leyte Gulf a tiny excort carrier and a few destroyers fought off Yamato and they missed the transports. What in the Japanese mindset caused these blunders?
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An extremely complex question about the whole Japanese mindset to war. I’m sure it would be a good doctoral thesis.
Strategically bold but tactically timid. I think you could see that in some of their land operations as well.
An oddity is that they were willing to rush in and die with little thought as if death or victory was a tactic to wage war by.
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I don’t think there is a common thread in the three examples.
At Pearl Harbour Nagumo was a traditionalist and he had eliminated the US battle fleet. In his perspective the US was crippled, without a battle fleet they could not oppose the IJN.
Also the US carriers were out there, so why risk it. The fuel could sit in the tanks as there were no battleships to use it.
The Americans fought a sea war that the Japanese hadn’t anticipated.
At Savo Island the power of American carriers, this just 8 weeks after the Kido Butai had been massacred at Midway, would be in Mikawa’s mind. If the American carriers caught him in daylight it would be the second massacre in as many months.
At Samar in the previous 48 hours Kurita had had his flagship sunk under him by submarines and ended up in the water. In the same action he had lost another cruiser sunk and a third so damaged it had to return to port.
Then US air attacks sent another cruiser back port and sank the superbattleship Musashi.
Then the ferocity and effectiveness of the American forces at Samar drained him, his cruiser squadron was being savaged, he was under constant air attack, and I think he just lost hope that his force could achieve anything meaningful. He’d had enough and pulled back from a pointless sacrifice.
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