I've been reading up on this battle alot and wanted to know what people thought of it?

It seems like the overall Japanese plan was very good, but they suffered from poor commanders at the actual battle. The US also had some really bad command mistakes during the battle, but it would look like the Japanese suffered far more from putting somebody like Kurita in command of the centre force. They might have had very different results if they switched him to the southern force, and put Nishamura in command of the centre.

Also it is still hard for me to understand how the Americans did so well/Japanese sucked so much at Samar. It is definately the kind of thing, that if people saw in a movie they would never think possible.






sry if pics are too big, but I have no idea how to resize them.

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Partly it was the fire control radar. American battleships had excellent fire control, so much so that this website on the Japaneses fleet actually says the Iowa was better than the Yamamoto overall. Apparently only we had radar with a wavelength small enough to find direction over the horizon and not just range.
http://www.combinedfleet.com/baddest.htm#categories
We also had air superiority and tons of carriers, which is how we slowed down a lot of their forces. The charge of the destroyers though was a huge amount of luck and bravery.

The quote system is foolproof TEXT

This documental is actualy pretty good

enjoy

Thats Bull****.

The Japanese had as good if not better radars than the US, Its called the Yagi radar because Yagi was Japanese, The US had better command and control of its forces plus agressive tactics, the Japanese however had a very poor command system, plus the responsibility of answering for every shot fired, plus the stupidity of separate commands such as naval air arms and army air arms being split several ways.






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Japanese plans were always way to complex and their commanders lacked initiative to make changes once the plan started to unravel. Also after Midway the Japanese had lost their stones for a major engagement-they were gun shy.



Would you trust this man"