"Japanese Troop loss's by Sub" Topic

I don't know how accurate this is, but I was just reading about the loss of the Japanese Carrier Shinano ten days after launching and I came across a list of ships sunk by sub. One thing that caught my eye right away was the number of Japanese Troop transports sunk during ww2.

I roughly added them up and its over 75,000 men lost during transport ! Thats an entire army…

wow, that's terrible, but shortened the war I guess…

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American Submarines were one of the major factors in Japan ' s loss of the war. Their effectiveness dwarfed the German U – Boats in WW2.

Indeed the U.S. Submarine force 'held the line' in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, allowing the fleet to regroup.

While testing the new torpedos, that were to be the primary torpedo for the US in WWII, the test did not discover their defects. The magnetic detonators didn't work right(Germany and England had the same problem), they ran deeper then their settings(no excuse)and the contact detonators were defective (again no excuse).

The two officers who oversaw the torpedos development later were given command of SW Pacific (out of Australia) and Central Pacific (out of Pearl Harbor). The SW Pacific comander refused to admit to problems and would not allow any tests and removed sub commanders who complained. The Central Pacific commander ran tests and eventually the problems were corrected. How many Japanese lives were saved by dud hits by defective torpedos nobody knows.

What the Imperial Japanese Navy did well, it did very well. Anti-submarine warfare was not one of those things. I once read* that of all the U.S., British and Dutch submarines lost in the Pacific, more were due to accidents than Japanese action. Japanese ASW methods and equipment were straight from WW 1, much to the delight and longevity of Allied sub crews.

* I think it was in this book, I'll have to check at home:

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The US lost 52 subs so there was a price to the victory.

Also, the United States and Briton pooled our anti submerine efforts. They actually ran a school for the convoy escort officiers and wargamed attacks on a convoy and trained the officers.

It also helped that German U-boats had to report regularly by radio and in code. We had a radio detection network around the Atlantic and knew where the messages were comming from and through much of the war with ENIGMA were reading the messages to the U-boat commanders before the commander did.

The US lost 52 subs so there was a price to the victory.

Yes, but the US fielded 300 subs, essentially all in the Pacific. So casualties in the Sub Fleet were horrible. 16% never came home.

and 52? I thought that was 48 submarines lost during WW2.

But you should see the monster painted map of the Pacific in SubPac's office: It has a 3"x5" flag for every single ship sunk by a submarine. The western Pacific, especially around the Philippines, is red and white with flags. Not a single blue or green spot to be seen.

The big problem for the Japanese was that the army was running the show. The IJN submarine force could have been as effective as the USN fleet, but the army insisted that subs were used for transporting troops to island garrisons, and not hunting for US ships. IJN anti-sub warfare was stuck in WW1 mode because they simply didn't have the experience that Britain and the US had had with U-boats, and later on (after Guadalcanal) the army would insist on packing troops onto a ship and sending it to a location by itself and not wait to form a proper convoy.

Actually the Japanese submerine command was under a different mission then the the US submarines. They were an extention of (and in support of) the surface fleet. From torpedoing the CV Saratoga off the west cost at the begining of the war to the sinking of the CA Indianapolis it's primary mission was anti warship.

FWIW – Let's all recognize a moment of silence for the several thousand Allied POWs who died when the Japanese transports conveying them from Java to Japan in 1944 were sunk in US submarine attacks.

B