*MUST WATCH* Disney Documentary on Air Power and more (1943)

@KurtGodel7:

On another matter, I read an article describing two schools of thought which had existed in the American military. One school felt that the U.S. should produce very large numbers of good weapons. The other felt that the U.S. should produce much smaller numbers of outstanding weapons.

Sounds a bit like the contrasting pilot-training philosophies that existed in Japan and the US in WWII.  Japan started the war with an elite but relatively small corps of elite fighter pilots.  They swept everything before them for the first six or so months of the war, but as their losses started to mount (Midway being, I think, the first big bite taken out of their numbers) the quality of their replacements dropped sharply.  The US, by contrast, aimed to produce large numbers of pilots who were reasonably good; some turned out to be excellent, and these top-notch pilots were certainly valued, but the US wasn’t aiming to produce an all-elite corps.  This US approach proved to be very effective.  And it fitted well with the fact that the US was producing planes in very large numbers (which wasn’t the case for Japan).

@CWO:

Sounds a bit like the contrasting pilot-training philosophies that existed in Japan and the US in WWII.  Japan started the war with an elite but relatively small corps of elite fighter pilots.  They swept everything before them for the first six or so months of the war, but as their losses started to mount (Midway being, I think, the first big bite taken out of their numbers) the quality of their replacements dropped sharply.  The US, by contrast, aimed to produce large numbers of pilots who were reasonably good; some turned out to be excellent, and these top-notch pilots were certainly valued, but the US wasn’t aiming to produce an all-elite corps.  This US approach proved to be very effective.  And it fitted well with the fact that the US was producing planes in very large numbers (which wasn’t the case for Japan).

Good points. Just to add to what you’ve written: as of December 1941, Japan had 10% of the industrial capacity of the United States. Japan industrialized as the war progressed. In 1944 it produced three times as many military aircraft as it had in 1942.

Back in '41, Japan had wanted a long range aircraft that was easy to produce, and which could fight at least as well as that of any other major power. They achieved that, but only by omitting armor, self-sealing fuel tanks, and other defenses from their aircraft. It was hard to hit a Zero. But if you did, it would die quite easily. American aircraft were slower and shorter-ranged, but better-protected. American pilots had far more protection from bullets than did their Japanese counterparts. Later in the war, improvements in American aircraft technology led U.S. planes to be faster, longer-ranged, and far better-armored than their Japanese counterpart.

I think that Japan’s lack of industrial capacity may have played a role in the decision to create armor-free aircraft. I think they may have also been a little behind the curve in aircraft engine technology; though that was not necessarily apparent in '41. The problem with armor-free aircraft is that if you have an elite group of pilots, very limited in number, you want to protect them. Not send them up in planes which may as well have been made of paper.

@KurtGodel7:

The problem with armor-free aircraft is that if you have an elite group of pilots, very limited in number, you want to protect them. Not send them up in planes which may as well have been made of paper.

Logically, this makes good sense – but the Japanese military at the time didn’t always operate by that kind of logic.  I’ve heard of cases in which Japanese fighter pilots in perfectly intact aircraft (not in planes that were battle-damaged and were about to crash) would sometimes ram enemy aircraft if they had run out of bullets, rather than letting the enemy plane get away.  This was in keeping with the aggressive Bushido spirit that was cultivated as part of the military training of that time in Japan (it placed a high value on defeating the enemy, with self-preservation at the bottom of the list of priorities), but it was awfully counter-productive in terms of being able to sustain a prolonged war.  The unarmoured Zero similarly reflected this philosophy, as did the Japanese Navy’s low level of interest in searching for pilots who’d been shot down (in marked contrast with the USN, which put a lot of effort into recovering downed flyers, and which reaped the benefit of putting those valuable trained pilots back into service after they had recuperated).

I can’t remember the details, but if I’m not mistaken Japan at one point of the war, when it was starved for good pilots, sent into combat large numbers of flight instructors.  This produced a temporary spike in Japanese pilot effectiveness on the front lines, but the long-term effects were disastrous because it wrecked Japan’s ability (which was already marginal) to train adequate numbers of new pilots.  Germany made a similar mistake when it put together the Panzer Lehr division, which included large numbers of instructors.  The resulting division (which also had first-rate equipment) was one of the best tank formations Germany ever deployed, but a side-effect of its establishment was to deprive the Wehrmacht’s tank-training programs of excellent instructors who would have been more profitably employed communicating their experience to new tank personnel.

@Gargantua:

Hey - Tie fighters don’t come with shields baby, and you just got to deal with it.

Very good analogy.

@Gargantua:

Hey - Tie fighters don’t come with shields baby, and you just got to deal with it.

Quantity over quality.

@LHoffman:

@Gargantua:

Hey - Tie fighters don’t come with shields baby, and you just got to deal with it.

Quantity over quality.

Stalin once supposedly said that quantity has a quality all of its own, but that was before Star Wars famously illustrated the Principle of Evil Marksmanship, also known as the Stormtrooper Effect (sometimes called the Inverse Ninja Rule for combat which does not involve firearms).  The principle, in a nutshell, states that the shooting accuracy of movie bad guys is inversely proportional to their numbers.

@CWO:

The principle, in a nutshell, states that the shooting accuracy of movie bad guys is inversely proportional to their numbers.

That is a very accurate statement in the world of cinema.

Except perhaps for right here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE43XYKZzH8#t=345

@LHoffman:

Except perhaps for right here

I’d say it’s one of those exceptions that proves the rule.  If it took 70,000 to 300,000 Persians (Herodotus claims a figure as high as two-and-a-half million) to kill 300 Spartans, that’s actually a pretty pathetic performance on the part of the Persians.

It’s a good thing the Principle of Evil Marksmanship isn’t built into the A&A rules.  If that were the case, increasing the size of your attacking force would decrease the chances of rolling a hit against an enemy force.  (Now that would be a bizarre concept for a house rule.)

@CWO:

I’d say it’s one of those exceptions that proves the rule.  If it took 70,000 to 300,000 Persians (Herodotus claims a figure as high as two-and-a-half million) to kill 300 Spartans, that’s actually a pretty pathetic performance on the part of the Persians.

True. However, speaking just about shots and arrows, the Persians did get them all.