So, I've been reading about the Japanese preparations for Pearl-Harbour and their strategical plans for the coming war and I've found out that they were planning to have two separate main line battles against the British and the Americans in order to secure the Pacific. Since I am not really familiar with the naval military history, this approach struck me as anachronistic and outdated by the experiences of the WWI and the technological developments in the Interbellum. And retrospectively we can say that this strategy indeed was wrong, since the Japanese were never able to secure the Pacific despite the initial advantage in line battleships and heavy aircraft carriers.
There were the following evidence suggesting the ineffectiveness of this approach that were available in the 1930-s:
Retrospectively we also know that the Americans were indeed able to avoid the main battle until they have constructed enough ships for themselves and wore down the Japanese to be superior to the IJN and then they've pressed this advantage and imposed the battle against the weaker Japanese in Leyte Gulf. Also, for someone who lives in 2021 and is familiar with the land side of the WWII history the line battleships as an entire class seem to be the gigantic resource sinks that were too precious to be readily committed by the navies and therefore were almost never effectively used by the navies.
So I have two questions:
Please keep in mind that I am relatively unfamiliar with the naval side of the military history, so if this question seems silly for someone who is well-versed in the topic, please be kind to the newbie:) Also, sorry for my English, I am not a native, I've proofread it, but there still might be some typos and mistakes here and there.
The Imperial Japanese Navy's strategic and tactical doctrine made sense given the naval geography they were facing. Unlike the British and Germans in the North Sea in WWI, any enemy the IJN was likely to face would have to fight a fleet action to achieve its objectives. However, they expected any war to be a quick affair, rather than a long, drawn out slog; in this, they were overly influenced by their victory in the Russo-Japanese War.
In the North Sea in WWI, it was hard for either side to force a fleet action. This was for the simple reason that the risks of losing your fleet represented an existential threat. For the British, without the Grand Fleet, the Germans could break the British blockade, and possibly even invade. For the Germans, the High Seas Fleet stopped the British opening up supply routes to Russia through the Baltic, as well as preventing an invasion of the North Sea coast. The status quo, meanwhile, was more acceptable to both sides. For the British, the blockade was an eventual war-winner, while for the Germans, it would not bite until restrictions on shipping to neutral powers were properly enforced in 1916-17; even then, it was still possible that they could win the war before the civilian population starved. As such, avoiding a battle that might have a catastrophic ending was the sensible choice. In the Pacific, though, it was much easier to force a battle. The American colony of the Philippines and the British colonies of Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong were isolated, far from the main fleet bases of their respective powers. The Japanese could easily capture or threaten them, forcing a fleet to be dispatched to relieve or recapture them. For the commanders of this force, the status quo was, (at least in theory) equivalent to the result of losing the fleet. The Japanese would still be in control of the captured colony. Fighting, and trying to recapture the colony, made sense. Both British and American planning for a war with Japan corresponded to Japanese expectations. Both navies intended to dispatch a fleet with the express goal of liberating or reinforcing their colonies in the Far East, before making offensive moves against Japan's trade.
Jutland, meanwhile, did not prove that a fleet that did not want to fight could not be forced to. In the interwar period, it was regularly reanalysed in naval academies around the world. It was wargamed again and again, to tease out the mistakes each commander made. It became clear that, for example, had Jellicoe turned towards Scheer instead of turning away to avoid torpedo attack, it would have been much harder for Scheer to escape. Had the commanders of Jellicoe's light forces kept him updated on their positions, Jellicoe would have been able to get into a position to ambush Scheer on the morning of the 1st June 1916. Had Beatty conserved his force better, he might have been able to cut off Scheer's retreat. The general conclusion drawn from these wargames was not that Jutland proved that a fleet could always avoid action, but that aggressive manoeuvring was required to force one.
Technological changes did not significantly affect this strategic thinking either. While there were technological changes that made it easier to carry out a commerce-raiding strategy, this did not really threaten Japan. Cruisers, submarines and aircraft could all attack trade, but they needed bases to refuel, rearm and resupply. Japan depended mainly on short-range trade, between Japan, Korea, Taiwan and its colonies in China. This was hard to interrupt without bases close to Japan. The British plan, War Memorandum (Eastern), required the British force to establish a forward base, likely in the Ryukyu Islands, from which cruisers, subs and aircraft could establish an effective blockade. Setting up this base would give further impetus to fight a fleet action. After all, the base could not be established and sustained if the Japanese fleet could attack the convoys it would rely on.
As far as the geopolitical sitution of Japan goes, you are right that they could not exert decisive power over the homelands of Britain or America. They could not invade either, or force either power to a crushing defeat as the Americans and British did to them. However, they were not intending or expecting to do so. They wanted to protect their interests in East Asia and the Western Pacific, to colonise these areas as the British and Americans had done. Capturing the Philippines or Malaysia would not represent an existential threat to America or Britain, you are right; but this meant that either power would be willing to give them up in a peace treaty. The Japanese expected to be able to capture these colonies, defeat the fleet that was coming to rescue them, and then present whoever they were fighting with a done deal. The Japanese controlled the colony, there was nothing that could be done to retake it, and so the only option that was available to accept it and sign a peace treaty in Japan's favour. This was the aspect where Japanese planning was most influenced by the Russo-Japanese War. Here, the Japanese had threatened or captured Russian colonies in the Far East, then crushed the fleet that was intended to relieve them. They did not try to invade further into Russia, to take more. The peace treaty confirmed Japanese control of many of these colonies - Port Arthur, the southern half of Sakhalin - as well as preventing the Russians interfering further with Japan's colony of Korea. The problem here was that the Japanese underestimated American resolve. They would not accept a peace treaty, see Japanese control of the Philippines as a fait accompli, but instead chose to fight on, to draw out the war and bring their industrial might to bear. This was not a problem of naval strategy, but more an issue of diplomatic and political misreading. Japan's naval strategy made perfect sense for the war it was expecting to fight. It was that expectation that was flawed.
I should also note that Japanese tactics were not purely the battleship-centred tactics of WWI. By WWII, they had shifted to a complex combined-arms approach, albeit one that would end with a battleship action. Aircraft carriers, submarines and night attacks by cruisers and destroyers would be use to whittle down an enemy force as it approached. The battlefleet would then fight a long-range action, in line, against the remaining enemy battlefleet. This compensated for the relative weakness of the IJN compared to the British and American navies. As far as the naval doctrines of the other two major powers went, I've discussed them here, in a tactical context. To summarize it, both the British and Americans planned for a fleet action. The Americans focused on fighting a long-range fleet action, with carriers scouting and helping to defend the fleet from enemy attacks. The British, meanwhile, adopted a combined-arms approach. Carriers were to find and fix the enemy fleet, slowing it down through their strikes, while also protecting the fleet against enemy air attack. The battleships would then fight using 'divisional tactics', splitting up into multiple groups rather than operating in a single line. This would allow them to manouvre such that the enemy line was always at a disadvantageous position relative to one of the groups. They wanted to fight a closer-ranged action, quite possibly at night. On a more strategic level, the British did not seek to fight a decisive action as the Japanese did. The fleet was seen as a tool to protect Britain's colonies and enable commerce raiding. This might require acting as a fleet in being, but might equally entail fighting a major fleet action. The Americans, meanwhile, were more interested in fighting a decisive battle. The main American plan for a war against Japan involved the fleet fighting across the Pacific to relieve the Philippines. It would then fight a decisive action to crush the Japanese fleet, allowing American commerce raiders to strangle Japan's trade.
/u/thefourthmaninaboat has provided a great answer already, but I will add in a bit on Japanese doctrine that I wrote in a previous answer. (What is doctrine? In a nutshell, it's how a military conceptualizes fighting and winning a war -- it operates a level above both tactics and strategy, and drives decisions such as fleet acquisition and composition.)
Japan was quite aware that a long war against the U.S. was not winnable. Their war aims were to secure the resources of Southeast Asia (in particular oil, but also rubber and other industrial supplies). They couldn't do that with a U.S. presence in the Philippines. So their overall war plan, which saw successive revisions throughout the decades before 1941, was to quickly defeat colonial powers in Southeast Asia, and to build a defensive perimeter that the U.S. fleet would be attrited by before a final annihilating battle, after which the U.S. would sue for peace. The idea was that the American fleet, steaming west, would have to face Japanese air power and submarine attacks before making it to the vicinity of the Philippines or the home islands, where it would be decisively beaten.
To that end, the Japanese fleet's composition emphasized quality over quantity; they trained very elite naval aviators, for example, but very few of them. They also emphasized night fighting, the use of torpedoes, and an offensive spirit that was reckless and dashing, all to overcome numerical weakness that was inevitable given the two countries' industrial bases. At the start of the war, the Japanese arguably had the finest air fleet in the world, absolutely had the largest battleships, and had unparalleled torpedo technology.
In the immediate run-up to WWII, the Japanese naval leadership conceived the plan of striking the Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor at the same time as planned strikes on US, Dutch and British possessions in the Philippines and elsewhere. The Pearl Harbor attack was inspired partly by the British raid on Taranto, and was designed to cripple the U.S. fleet in harbor to win the Japanese extra time to build that defensive perimeter. To say that the political leadership underestimated America's resolve for a long war is an understatement.
For some reading regarding Japanese prewar plans, Peattie and Evans, Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887-1941 is the gold standard. It covers both operational and strategic developments in the building of the navy, and how those influenced one another. It is weak on airpower, because the two realized they were writing a long book already, but Peattie used much of their research to write the companion volume Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909-1941 (Evans has passed away).
For some reading about Midway, the current best book out there is Parshall and Tully, Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway. It's The first history of Midway that draws heavily upon Japanese primary sources and dives into Japanese doctrine and tactics. Does an especially good job of telling the story from the Japanese perspective while rebutting or refuting many of the tropes about the battle and the "failings" that armchair admirals like to point out.
/u/thefourthmaninaboat has given an excellent post about the legacy of World War I naval combat, as well as the tactical and operational considerations faced by the Japanese, British, and Americans in the Far East and Pacific, and /u/jschooltiger has also provided excellent commentary on the doctrine of the IJN itself. I want to try and expand on their answers by focusing on the internal politics of Japan at the time, and why that generated domestic pressures for a large and powerful battlefleet.
In the early years of Imperial Japanese history, not long after the Meiji Restoration had concluded, when the new imperial government was attempting to identify what its defense priorities would be. In naval terms, this presented a question of how the navy would be developed. As a relatively minor power at the time, with a relatively limited economic base, the Japanese were initially highly interested in the French Jeune École concept, which held for a fleet of small commerce raiders and torpedo boats to provide a relatively cheap threat against a more dominant naval power. Given their standing in the late-19th century, the Japanese enthusiastically adopted this concept, and much of the IJN's early fleet consisted of relatively small cruiser sized vessels. The First Sino-Japanese War called this into question, as while the better trained and organised IJN was able to defeat the Qing Empire's Beiyang Fleet, the IJN struggled to deal appreciable damage to large Chinese battleships. The lessons learned in the First Sino-Japanese War would go on to play a major role in the build up to the Russo-Japanese War, as the IJN sought to acquire its own battleship force, which ultimately culminated in the Battle of Tsushima. While the tactical and strategic influence of Tsushima is significant (and the posts by the others have done much to expand on that point), the domestic political repercussions for Japan were also significant.
It is at this point that Japanese internal politics begin to exercises a very large influence on the course of IJN naval planning. With the defeat of China and Russia, the two most clear rivals to Japan in the Far East, the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy faced a crucial question: who would Japan's next rival be? This is where the infamous inter-service rivalry between the IJA and the IJN came to the forefront, as the Japanese were never able to properly answer that question. The IJA presumed that Japan's greatest concern should remain Russia (later the Soviet Union), where a revanchist movement could threaten Japan's holdings on continental mainland Asia. As a primarily continental threat, having Russia as the imagined future enemy would of course provide the the Army with primacy between the two branches, entitling it to a larger share of Japan's quite limited resources. The Navy, seeking to justify its own continued existence, as well as desiring a larger slice of the resource pie, would go on to begin defining itself against the US, and using US naval strength as a justification for its own expansion. It's important to note that at this point (the first decades of the 20th century), while there were undoubtedly a degree of tensions between the US and Japan, they were nothing like the tensions that would grow as a result of Japanese expansionism in the 1930s. The Navy's choice of the US as its primary imagined threat was almost entirely a position taken for greater advantage in the internal struggle against the Japanese Navy's true enemy: the Japanese Army. If the US was the primary threat, then, of course, the Navy would take primacy and the lion's share of Japan's resources. This kind of internal politicking to justify its own existence, and a larger share of Japan's total resources was a major cause for the oft cited ratios of strength related to American naval strength, as the USN provided a useful justification for the IJN to continue to argue for its own further expansion.
As we move into the 30s, and Japanese expansionism in Asia (especially in China) is further straining US-Japanese relations, this internal squabbling over resource allocations remained paramount. As the attention of both the Army and Navy turned to the south, the Navy found itself in a very awkward position. On the one hand, it had spent the past few decades demanding a large share of Japan's national resources for itself, using the strength of the US Navy as a justification for its own continued expansion. On the other hand, despite all of this buildup, the Navy was still rather unsure of its own ability to defeat the Americans, leaving the IJN in the uncomfortable position of using the threat of war with the West to demand more resources, while also pushing back on actually going to war, for fear that it would be incapable of defeating the USN. To admit to incapability would be to admit that all the resources invested in the Navy were worthless, which was a humiliation the IJN simply couldn't endure.
You are also quite right in identifying that the Japanese could not fight another kind of war. No one in Japanese government or either branch of the military envisioned that Japan could win a long, drawn out war with the West. The differences in industrial power were simply too vast. Japan's only real hope of victory was that they could win a series of early victories, defeat the initial naval counter attacks, and the negotiate peace from a position of strength. As such, the IJN invested very heavily in the kind of front loaded force that would enable it to have a chance at winning that kind of campaign, at the expense of almost everything it would need to support itself in a long, drawn out war. That the Japanese had no way of compelling the US or UK to negotiate such a treaty, and should have conducted diplomacy so as to avoid such a confrontation was a failing in Japanese politics that deserves in its own post.
On a slightly different note, I would like to address the issue of "obsolete" battleships. While, in hindsight, it does seem like battleships were wastes of resources (and indeed, the IJN did husband its core battleship strength awaiting the Decisive Battle that never came), from the perspective of a naval designer or war planner in the 1930s, this was far from clear. Given the role air power would play in World War II, and the continuing dominance of air power in later 20th and 21st century wars, we have a tendency to lionise those early air power advocates of the 1920s who declared that air power had completely overcome traditional armies and navies, and--in naval terms--to imagine stodgy old "battleship" admirals, stuck in their ways, and unable to grasp the prominence of aircraft and carriers. However, we do tend to forget that the world proposed by the most zealous of air power advocates never came to fruition. Strategic bombing was unable to decide the war on its own accord, and land based high level bombers proved startlingly incapable of defeating naval formations (the US Army for one, envisioned the B-17 as a devastating anti-shipping weapon, a task it failed miserably at). In the 1920s and 30s, the carrier and aircraft in general were still an unproven weapon, and--given the relatively weak performance characteristics of aircraft of this era--that the various navies of the world continued to build and place confidence in their battleships was entirely sensible. Remember that up until the end of 1941, when Japanese bombers sank HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse off Malaya, no capital ship underway on the high seas had been sunk by aircraft. While British aircraft had indeed played a major role in the sinking of the Bismarck, as well as inflicting serious damage on Italian capital ships in the Mediterranean, such actions were still ultimately either against ships in harbor (as at Taranto) or as an adjunct to surface naval action (as with the Bismarck and the damaging of Vittorio Veneto at the Battle of Cape Matapan). This is not to say that aircraft were ignored either. Navies spent a great deal of effort envisioning the role aircraft and carriers would play in any coming war, but they were not yet seen as decisive in their own right. The Japanese in particular envisioned quite a major role for both their carrier and land based naval aircraft. However, until the lessons of World War II had been learned, it would have been a huge gamble to abandon battleships in favor of a new and untested weapons system.
Just to add my two cents:
When trying to understand the IJN's mentality you can't disregard the heavy legacy of Tsushima. Why on earth are you going to change your proven and successful doctrine to pursuit some fancy novelty?
Japan WAS NOT ALONE in this regard. England, US, France, Italy, even Germany were building battleship practically up to the very beginning of WWII. All the big fleets were still going with the "Gun Club" line and therefore it made sense for a naval power to stick to what was apparently the common sense.
Last but not least.
A serious case can be made that actually Japan WAS RIGHT on keeping the fleet-to-fleet doctrine and the "big battle" strategy, because without Pearl Harbor a USN-IJN naval war would have very probably come to a massive "Fleet-to-Fleet" decisive action.
Pearl Harbor changed everything.
Without operational battleships in the Pacific Theater the USN had no other option than to rely on carriers and light units to fight the war. Doctrinal change came to the USN out of necessity not so much out of conviction.
Without Pearl Harbor, the USN battleships sail to help the Philippines, Singapore or the Dutch East Indies and we have a huge “Fleet-to-Fleet” action in the middle of the Pacific sometime during the first months of 1942.
So you could say that Japan actually lost the war in Pearl Harbor.
Why was this strategy chosen by the Japanese and enormous amounts of resources continued to be committed to the line battleships and heavy carriers?
The battleship program was, in hindsight, a really poor use of resources for a country that was dependent on imported oil and materials to make steel, and more importantly, had relatively little industry for refining oil or making steel.
It is important to keep in mind that, when these battleships were conceived in the mid-1930s, carriers were still unproven as the planes of the day weren't really capable of bringing a lot of firepower to bear on opposing ships. Even in 1941, the best carrier launched torpedo bombers the US had featured a 400 mile range when carrying the torpedo, were only capable of launching torpedos at speeds under 115 mph, which really wasn't an issue since the aircraft struggled to maintain a cruising speed much higher than that when carrying them. Long range bombers weren't really a threat as they also had limited range and payloads and high altitude bombing sucked.
Additionally, planners did not know that the Japanese did not know exactly what sort of oil crises they would face when the war finally broke out.
So, I've been reading about the Japanese preparations for Pearl-Harbour and their strategical plans for the coming war and I've found out that they were planning to have two separate main line battles against the British and the Americans in order to secure the Pacific. Since I am not really familiar with the naval military history, this approach struck me as anachronistic and outdated by the experiences of the WWI and the technological developments in the Interbellum. And retrospectively we can say that this strategy indeed was wrong, since the Japanese were never able to secure the Pacific despite the initial advantage in line battleships and heavy aircraft carriers.
As explained by /u/thefourthmaninaboat, an in-depth study of the Japanese government and Japanese politics prior to the war is needed to really understand the strategy which basically boiled down to:
Those are all pretty logical thoughts, except for #6. The irony with #6 is that the Brits and Dutch were collectively too weak to beat Japan in the early to mid-1940s.
The Japanese political structure in the 1930s and 1940s was, highly summarized, a huge mess. It basically gave the Japanese Army and Navy the ability to set foreign policy independent of the government, a feature the Army was really fond of. The Army got the Japanese into the great resource suck of war in China, without any authorization from the government. The government went along because it seemed better than saying "yo, sorry, we can't really control the Army."
If you like alternate history, I can see a fair number of scenarios where the Japanese simply capture the DEI and Singapore, avoid attacking the US, and are able to either avoid conflict with the US or are able to come to a quick treaty with the US after a few skirmishes. In those scenarios, the Japanese get 4-6 years to reinforce their holdings before the Brits and Dutch can get enough of a fleet and soldiers into staging areas in Australia to attempt to reconquer them. Japan would get even more time if the British rescue fleets defeated on their way to the theater. That entire time period would feature the Japanese building new fleets, planes, and defenses. If you think the Kido Butai was formidable - and it was the best carrier fleet in the world until 1943 - Japan might have been able to build 2 more of those combined fleets by 1945 if they'd had access to the materials necessary to do so and the time to train the crews and pilots.
So where did Japan go wrong?
IMO, the biggest problem was attacking the United States. Japan's only reasonable hope to win the war in the Pacific was to quickly push the British and Dutch aside, get those colonies producing resources, and get those resources back to Japan, without starting a full scale war with the United States. The US public at the time was very isolationist and, IMO, there was a better than even chance the US would only respond economically if not attacked. The decision to attack Japan was simply a miscalculation by Japan.
Sources:
Shattered Sword by Parshall
Japanese Destroyer Captain by Hara