The Japanese military carefully and
methodically followed military and technical developments in other countries
from the Meiji Restoration in 1868 on. Therefore, it isn't especially
surprising that the airplane was investigated as a potential weapon by the
Japanese military at a very early stage in its development. In 1910, a Japanese
national acquired a primitive airplane, a type similar to that designed and
flown by the French aviator Henri Farman. This machine was flown in Japan and
the design was put into limited production at the Tokugawa Balloon Factory in
1911, this being the first Japanese aircraft production of any type.
During the Great War, Japan joined the
conflict on the British side and also acquired examples of several wartime
allied aircraft types, including some French Nieuport fighters and Salmson 2A-2
bombers.
During the 1920s, as a consequence of its
military treaty with Great Britain, Japan received a naval aviation delegation
from the Royal Navy. The British delegates made recommendations for the
establishment of a well-organized Imperial Japanese Navy Air Force and even
helped to train some of its officers. The Imperial Japanese Navy Air Force was
very conservative and, consequently, many of their operating practices and
tactics in the Merdeka War were those which they had adopted from the Royal
Navy thirty years before. But while these had changed in Britain over that
period, they did not change in Japan.
A typical example was the widespread use
of floatplanes and flying boats. During the Great War and '20s, the Royal Navy
made extensive use of such aircraft and found them to be very useful. If no
water-based aircraft could then exceed 100 mph, then at that time, few
multi-engined, land-based aircraft could exceed 100 mph either. But this
situation radically changed over the next few years. The Short Sunderland not
withstanding, the British had found that, with the escalation of aircraft
speeds in the '30s, the floatplanes and flying boats became too slow to be
worthwhile. If the maximum speeds of water-based aircraft had reached 200 mph,
then those of the land-based types had soared to over 300 mph. Prototypes of
the British Spitfire were flown with floats but it is significant that they
were never operational. By contrast, the Japanese relied on a substantial
number of floatplanes and flying boats, including two floatplane fighter types
comparable to a Spitfire on floats--the Kawanishi N1K1 and the Nakajima A6M2-N.
The British had changed with the times, but the IJN hadn't.
With the debut of the first Japanese
aircraft carrier in the 1920s, the IJNAF was initially tied to the battleships
as some sort of reconnaissance and attack element, but like the U.S. Navy, the
IJN had real difficulty integrating them into their tactics. A person in either
country who alleged--back then--that future fleets would instead be built
around the aircraft carrier, with the battleships simply providing
anti-aircraft cover and mobile artillery against land targets, would have been
immediately dismissed as a crank in any country back then.
During the '20s, there was a second
foreign aviation delegation which arrived in Japan. This one came from Germany
and they trained the fledgling Imperial Japanese Army Air Force. Like the
German Air Force in the Great War, the IJAAF was closely tied to the Army and
its movements, performing those operations which would later be called
interdiction and close support. IJAAF reprised these tactics during the China
Incident, but in 1940 the Luftwaffe was beginning to find its own role
independent of the German Army and its immediate needs. For all practical
purposes, the IJAAF never did so.
At this time (the late '20s), it is
remarkable to note that at least two major elements of Japanese aviation as it
stood in the China Incident were not in place. There was no element capable of
conducting long range operations inside enemy airspace nor was there any
explicit arrangement for protecting air bases and air strips themselves from
aerial attack. In addition, the IJAAF and the IJNAF had different--and even
incompatible--sets of tactics and operating practices.
Up until the early 1930s, the two Japanese
air services, the IJAAF and the IJNAF, were mainly equipped with obsolescent
foreign aircraft types either imported or built in Japan under manufacturing
licenses. At about this time, Japanese aircraft designers began to produce
home-designed aircraft types that were better adapted to their own operational
requirements--and they were by no means primitive given world standards at the
time. Because of the distances involved and the general secretiveness of the
Japanese government and society, this important change was not recognized in
the U.S., and not fully appreciated by the Europeans, even at the start of the
Merdeka War in 1959.
In fact, when the Dutch Empire was on the
verge of war against Japan in 1957, it was assumed that the air services of
Japan would be, at most, a few hundred aircraft, mainly copies of older
British, German, Italian and U.S. designs. This was not simply an example of
racist thinking. The widely respected Jane's All the World's Aircraft for 1957
showed current Japanese types as being a flea market of older, foreign designs
with a few obsolescent indigenous designs on the side. There seemed no reason
to suppose that the Japanese would make particularly good pilots. Consequently,
it must have seemed to Dutch and German airmen and aviators--whether they were
in the Air Force or the Navy--as if the force facing them would be comparable
to the Polish Air Force in 1939. On the basis of numbers, equipment and pilot
quality, Dutch and German airmen and naval aviators expected that the result of
combat would be a series of one-sided Dutch massacres. And that expectation was
more or less reasonable in terms of the picture which they had. But that
picture was very wrong.
In 1937, Japan began a campaign to create
an acceptable Chinese government and, in fact, rather quickly overran its
then-capital city of Nanking, the coastal provinces and many of its larger inland
river valleys. When the war in China began, the IJNAF found itself with new
tasks. With long-ranging Type 66 Land-Based Attack Bombers (Mitsubishi H4Ns)
the IJNAF bombed targets in the Nanking area from bases on Taiwan, then a
Japanese possession. To support both Army and Navy operations in China, fighter
aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Navy were also assigned to land bases on the
Chinese mainland. The Type 66 followed a little later on. As the "senior
service", the IJN was able to have a remarkable spread of duties assigned
to it along with, hopefully, the "assets" (planes, factories,
personnel, etc.) necessary to perform them. Since they had long-ranging
twin-engined bombers and the best fighters, the IJNAF was assigned to bomb
targets on land with its own land-based bombers and to protect all Japanese air
bases--both those of the Army and its own--from enemy planes. In addition, the
Imperial Navy had primary responsibility for the defense of the Home Islands.
During the China Incident this imposing spread of duties--while it might have
created some problems--seemed to be a source of strength for the IJNAF.
From the middle of the Soviet-Japanese
War, on the other hand, this extraordinary spread of duties impacted the IJNAF
very severely. The central problem was that while the responsibilities had been
assigned to it years before, the needed assets simply were not available. It
shouldn't be assumed that the IJAAF was doing very well, either. It had fewer
responsibilities, but it also had fewer assets than the IJNAF. In addition, the
IJAAF had been assigned--without Navy support of any type--to face the enemy
air forces in China, Manchukuo and Korea. By contrast, the IJNAF had
responsibility for the defense of the Japanese Home Islands. A high level meeting
to resolve these discrepancies and to make the most of the assets which each
service really had would have been a reasonable response to the situation. But
this never happened. After the war, the IJAAF was disbanded, and its place was
taken for the Imperial Japanese Air Army, an entirely independent branch of the
military, who saw little action in the Merdeka War. In its place the IJNAF took
over the control of the air, that was a vitally important aspect of the
Imperial Japanese Navy's operations in the Merdeka War.
