Best German Weapon for the Japanese

I don’t think any 1 technology from Germany would have helped at all.
Japan imho lost the war the day they Bombed Pearl.
Why?
Because with all their planning, practicing, hush hush, and training, they forgot the biggest weapon of all…. A amphibious landings on Hawaii.

Their surprise attack had Air and Sea but no land forces.
Just imagine the Technolgy, resources, and military hardware they would have captured had they brought a land invasion w them.

I don’t think anything the Germans could’ve given the Japanese would have helped. I voted for the MG42 though because they never seemed to have a very good machine gun which I believe would have helped them the most out of the choices listed.

The Japanese simply were just too over extended strategically.  Thier weapons while not horrible became outmoded quickly the faster the Allies got up to full production. The Japanese strategy failed when they were unable to stop the USN in a timely enough manner. Thier biggest failure was failing to protect thier precious convoys which further hindered an already stretched logistical process.

The best thing Japan could have done for herself was to not attack the US, bide her time and hope for a German victory. Had Germany won and captured precious oil and resources, she at some point could’ve supplied a rested and more technically advanced Japan against an uprepared and isolationist US. You could argue the US would enter the war in any case. However it may have bought a lot more time for Japan to sit tight and delay a full US entry into the war.

@Gargantua:

@variance:

@Gargantua:

MG34’s (LEGAL) are now for sale at my local gun store!!  It’s legal to hunt with LOL!  Though “plate restricted” to semi auto.  It has no magazine limit because it is belt fed.

For real?Â

Yes.

$5000,

Semi Auto MG34, with a 50 round Non disintegrating belt, + Bipod.  NON RESTRICTED, Legal to hunt with.

Nice Pic GAR

@ShadowHAwk:

@ABWorsham:

I agree that lack of a convoy system made the US tonnage war a turkey shoot. Another handicap the Japanese had was the lack of heavy construction equipment. The US brought bulldozer and trucks into war, the Japanese brought shovels, picks, and Korean Slaves.

Example of this is Pacific air bases, the only two Japanese air bases with concrete airfields and decent facilities were the bases at Clark Field in the Philippines and at Rabaul, both captured from the Allies.

Then again concrete runways are not required, in the UK most airfields where just grass which made them verry hard to destroy. Sure you bomb this part well we just land 50 yards to the left and call that the landing strip :D

In the Pacific, some American airfields were constructed by leveling the ground with bulldozers then laying down hundreds of large prefabricated square metal grids (a bit like installing tiles on a floor) until a landing strip of suficient length and width had been built up.  A quick and effective technique.  If the airstrip got hit by enemy bombs, all that was needed to repair it was to replace the damaged grids with new ones.  As ABWorsham noted, the Japanese – who used manual labour for their airfield construction – were shocked at the speed with which American units like the Seabees could carve an operational airstrip out of a jungle in just a few days, often while fighting off Japanese counter-attacks in the process.  Civilian construction projects in the U.S. routinely used heavy equipment such as bulldozers, so the use of such machinery in the Pacific would have seemed completely normal to the American troops, but it gave a nasty surprise to the Japanese.

The U.S. produced 48,000 military aircraft in 1942, as compared to 9,000 for Japan.* None of the weapons systems, tactics, or strategies discussed in this thread could have solved the problems that production disparity implied.

That said, if I had to pick something from the list; I’d choose radar. Radar might well have allowed the Japanese to win at Midway; thereby lengthening their temporary naval advantage over the U.S. A victory at Midway might, if they were lucky, have bought them an extra year.

In 1944, Japan produced 28,000 military aircraft; as compared to 96,000 for the U.S. Put another way: Japan had tripled its aircraft production; whereas America’s has merely doubled. Given enough time; Japan might have been able to close more of the production gap. But radar alone would have been insufficient to accomplish that.

• Corrected an earlier error. Thanks to Red Harvest for pointing it out.

@KurtGodel7:

The U.S. produced 48,000 military aircraft in WWII, as compared to 9,000 for Japan. None of the weapons systems, tactics, or strategies discussed in this thread could have solved the problems that production disparity implied.

That said, if I had to pick something from the list; I’d choose radar. Radar might well have allowed the Japanese to win at Midway; thereby lengthening their temporary naval advantage over the U.S. A victory at Mkdway might, if they were lucky, have bought them an extra year.

In 1944, Japan produced 28,000 military aircraft; as compared to 96,000 for the U.S. Put another way: Japan had tripled its aircraft production; whereas America’s has merely doubled. Given enough time; Japan might have been able to close more of the production gap. But radar alone would have been insufficient to accomplish that.

I believe your first figure above is for 1942 rather than WWII.

The ratio increase is probably misleading though, as it is difficult to see how Japan could have fielded an even greater number of aircraft even if it could have produced them (pilot training was a major problem.)  The Japanese aircraft industry was largely safe from attack until the last few weeks of 1944 so it might be that they were near maximum production anyway.

The mix had shifted upward to nearly 50% fighters for Japan whereas the US built about 40% fighters during 1944 (heavier multi-engine aircraft like heavy bombers, med. bombers, and transports.)  Japanese tank production peaked at 1200 in 1942 and shrank to only 295 in 1944.  Japanese warship production had been nearly flat since 1941 with a spike in 1944 (unneeded carriers it appears, without planes, and one of the converted Yamato class BB’s as a carrier.)  Together, this indicates that Japanese industry was already tapped out just building aircraft…that and merchant vessels.  Japan had gone from producing 260,000 tons of merchant vessels in 1942 to 1,699,000 in 1944…but lost 4,115,000 tons in 1944 alone.

You don’t even want to see how much the U.S. figures for all the above classes dwarf the Japanese ones.

Just to follow up on my earlier post about metal-grid runways, last evening I checked up on my source, which I was quoting from memory.  It was the wartime documentary Report from the Aleutians (narrated by John Huston).  It shows such a runway being built on Adak.  The grid segments were rectangular rather than square, but the basic runway-building technique was as I mentioned previously.  The engineers started by draining a shallow lake by cutting a channel into it with heavy equipment, then leveled the lake-bed with bulldozers, and finally laid down a million-and-a-half square feet of steel gridwork, each segment being secured into place with steel spikes hammered into the ground.

@ABWorsham:

I don’t believe anyone with even a elementary knowledge of WW2 would give the Japanese even a remote chance of defeating the West in WW2.
When the question came to my mind I was thinking what German weapon if I were leading the Japanese armed forces would I desire in my doomed adventure to fight the US, Britain and Australia.

Most definitely sir. My vote was for the MG. The Japanese from everything I’ve ever learned just never seemed to get thier stuff together when it came to firearms and even more so with the ammunition.

I voted for the radar as the Japanese deficiency in this area put them at a distinct disadvantage.  I don’t see that it would have saved them since U.S. radar would still exist.

I agree also about the MG’s.  The Japanese really needed some decent rapid fire weapons.

I did think of one other thing that might have made the list:  radios.  According to Saburo Sakai the radios in Japanese aircraft were useless.

@toblerone77:

The Japanese from everything I’ve ever learned just never seemed to get thier stuff together when it came to firearms and even more so with the ammunition.

They had trouble getting their act together in other areas too.  One example is that the IJN sometimes indulged in overly-complicated plans involving multiple task forces steaming independently from each other (too far away from each other to be able to povide support to each other) while trying to carry out a coordinated plan.  The Midway and Leyte Gulf operations are the two classic examples.  The Midway one was particularly disastrous, and not just because the IJN lost four fleet carriers.  Japan had launched a near-simultaneous attack against the Aleutians, supposedly as a diversion, thus wasting a couple of carriers which might have tipped the scales for Japan if they’d been present at Midway – all for the gain of just two useless Aleutian islands.  Even worse, the Aleutian operation resulted in the US capture of an almost-intact Zero fighter (the Akutan Zero), an event which helped change the course of WWII.  By repairing and test-flying the Zero, the Americans finally got a complete understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of this fabled aircraft, and were thus able to devise tactics to deal with it.

@ABWorsham:

The Japanese with 5,000 men on two worthless Islands were able force the US to commit 200,000 to 300,000 men to defend Alaska. And forced the US fleet to commit an entire fleet including battleships to the extreme North Pacific.

Interesting.  I had a quick look at (for whatever it’s worth) the Wikipedia article on the Aleutian Islands campaign.  It says that US military strength in Alaska in June 1942 was 45,000 men (not 200,000 to 300,000 men), and it doesn’t list any battleships in the composition of ComNorPac’s Task Force 8, whose surface combat units consisted of 5 cruisers, 13 destroyers and 6 submarines.

From what I vaguely recall of working at Adak NAS and visiting the little museum there back during the Cold War the peak number of men on just that island was at least 30,000 to support retaking the Aleutians.  The facility had been created during the war as the primary base.  I don’t know how many personnel were elsewhere specifically for that phase of the campaign.

One of Japan’s biggest blunders was not building escort ships or sufficient merchant ships/tankers for convoys until it was too late.  They had enough of the Pacific secured in the early going that they don’t seem to have considered it important.  Allied fighters/bombers had been overwhelmed and USN torpedoes didn’t function correctly in the early going, giving them a false sense of security.  Amazingly, an island nation dependent on a vast naval transportation system to run its industrial/war machine completely understimated the need for tankers and cargo vessels as well as the need for escort/ASW vessels.  They didn’t get any appreciable number of escorts commissioned until 1944!

@Red:

The ratio increase is probably misleading though, as it is difficult to see how Japan could have fielded an even greater number of aircraft even if it could have produced them (pilot training was a major problem.)  The Japanese aircraft industry was largely safe from attack until the last few weeks of 1944 so it might be that they were near maximum production anyway.

The mix had shifted upward to nearly 50% fighters for Japan whereas the US built about 40% fighters during 1944 (heavier multi-engine aircraft like heavy bombers, med. bombers, and transports.)  Japanese tank production peaked at 1200 in 1942 and shrank to only 295 in 1944.  Japanese warship production had been nearly flat since 1941 with a spike in 1944 (unneeded carriers it appears, without planes, and one of the converted Yamato class BB’s as a carrier.)  Together, this indicates that Japanese industry was already tapped out just building aircraft…that and merchant vessels.  Japan had gone from producing 260,000 tons of merchant vessels in 1942 to 1,699,000 in 1944…but lost 4,115,000 tons in 1944 alone.

You don’t even want to see how much the U.S. figures for all the above classes dwarf the Japanese ones.

Good points. I recall that about 10% of total American aircraft production during WWII consisted of four engine heavy bombers. These are much more expensive to produce than single engine aircraft such as fighters, dive bombers, or torpedo bombers. I don’t think the Japanese produced any four engine heavy bombers during WWII.

The U.S. produced 102,000 tanks during WWII; as compared to 2,500 for Japan. American tanks had better guns and better armor than their Japanese counterparts. (This is one reason why German ground weapon technology would not have made much strategic difference for Japan. Japan had to either defeat the U.S. at sea and in the air, or not at all.)

I’ve read that in December of '41, Japan had only 10% of the industrial capacity of the U.S. That percentage increased as the war went on; because Japan was in the process of industrializing.

The ratio increase is probably misleading though, as it is difficult to see how Japan could have
fielded an even greater number of aircraft even if it could have produced them (pilot training was a major problem).

Pilot training was an issue for three reasons:

1. Lack of oil = lack of training hours in the air.
2. Pilot training schools which were too exclusive. If you want a few schools for the elite pilots, fine. But there should also have been other schools intended to train large numbers of good but non-elite pilots. And there weren’t.
3. The Japanese didn’t pull back their best pilots to train the new ones. Their best pilots remained at the front, always.

While I acknowledge your point about pilot training, that’s not the reason why I brought up aircraft production rates in the first place. During WWII, the rate of military aircraft production was a good proxy for overall military production–a much better proxy than GDP. If Japan’s military aircraft production tripled between '42 and '44–which it did–then that’s a strong indication its overall military production had tripled.

whereas the US built about 40% fighters during 1944 (heavier multi-engine aircraft like heavy bombers, med. bombers, and transports.

A good deal of the 60% non-fighters undoubtedly consisted of single engine dive bombers and torpedo bombers. But the real question is whether America increased its percentage of multi-engine aircraft in '44 versus '42. If that percentage had stayed the same throughout the war, then a doubling of American military aircraft production from '42 - ‘44 would indicate a doubling of overall military production. (Albeit, American production of X number of aircraft would represent more production than Japanese production of X; because the Americans’ percentage of two and four engine aircraft would be higher.)