Panoply of Panay Possibilities

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Eisenhower was still the head of the U.S. military in the Philippines in this period. MacArthur would only take his place by 1939.

Not sure about how well Ike was in terms of not screwing up the command.

From what I see in Wikipedia:

What could Japan do?

It is a matter of shipping and logistics. What we do know is that the entirety of the IJA was smaller in 1937 than 1941, so building up forces/mobilisation takes time.

Others have spoken on their carrier situation, but Hiei and Fuso are out (being reconstructed), Ise is just coming out of recon, leaving Nagato, Mutsu, Fuso, Yamashiro, Hyuga, Kongo, Haruna and Kirishima. 8 battleships, of which three are reclassified battlecruisers, are going to have issues going against the USN battle line. The Japs also are down on cruisers, having 4 Mogami CLs, 4 Takaos, 4 Myokos, 2 Aobas and 2 Furutakas. Their older light cruisers (2 Tenryu, 5 Kuma, 6 Nagara, 3 Sendai and Yubari) are suitable for second line service at best.

Put simply, they struggle to field a fleet that can do China and a Kantai Kessen at the same time. Expansion operations to the south and wider Pacific are out.

From what we know of IJN construction in @, they won’t have the capacity for any big wartime programmes. For Tokyo, any war is effectively come as you are. Even on standing forces, they lose.

It is more than that.

a. Technology and methodology: at least with sea-power,
--the naval Japanese aviation does not have the tools in aircraft aviation, yet, in pilots or type aircraft, air administration or ship handling. They need that three years of the China war to bring in the coastal air support operations that enable them to figure out how to mass their aircraft carriers and develop air traffic control methods for what are essentially floating airports. Getting planes to take off and land-on to one aircraft carrier in a serial manner is difficult enough. But when you have to handle three or more together, it becomes almost impossible. The Japanese developed the starboard and port orbit circuits and what we now know as stacking, to manage the problem. Why did they have to learn how? Because they discovered the Chinese were very good at this thing called air defense. For a Japanese raid to get through the Chinese Republic of China Air Force, the Japanese bombers (primitive things in 1937, worse than the American Keystones of the 1920s) had to have fighter escort. The raid had to be large, at least two sentai or larger or about thirty plus bombers plus escorts.

--it becomes something of a long process but in three years the Japanese navy learns how to handle planes on flight decks, launch aircraft off pairs of aircraft carriers together and manage to stack up to 200 aircraft up and land down inside an hour of flying time. Get the point? It took them an hour to do with four aircraft carriers TOGETHER what it would take the British or Americans at least as long to do with one aircraft carrier to put up just fifty planes, never mind land them in the same evolution. The Americans would not figure this process out until 1944!

--Japanese army and navy aircraft (divided effort, service rivalries) do not become "excellent" until about mid 1941. For example; we do not see the Val until 1940. The Kate is about the same time. The Betty or G4M Flying Cigar often referred as a Rikko (short for Ichishiki rikujō kōgeki ki, Isshikirikukō or more often "hamaki" for "lighted tobacco roll".), enter service just in time for the Japanese navy to think they can do the Southern Road operation they have been planning for a decade.

--Then there is the aircraft carrier pilot program and deck crew program. To handle this very complicated work up and work out these procedures in a country that is not "mechanically minded" in 1927 when the Japanese begin this long process, is not readily or easily understood. To get the aviation mechanics (about 6,000) and pilots (about 3,000) the IJN had in 1941 takes fifteen years and costs almost 5,000 lives. That incidentally is about what it cost the United States Navy proportionally (2,500 dead) in peacetime operations over the same time to get HALF those numbers in 1941. I do not know the numbers for the Royal Navy, but if fifty percent of the American and sixty percent of the Japanese pilots are dying just in training, and a lot of deck crew are dying in aircraft carrier operations then the Royal Navy operating in the North Atlantic must have taken equally appalling, if proportionate in totals losses. At a guess over a decade and a half, as many as 1,500 dead?

--then there is the fleet trains. The Japanese had about 200 warships in 1941. This was supported by a specialized refuel at sea oil tanker force of 60 fast tankers out of a total national inventory of 100 oil tankers overall. Just to give a comparison, the Royal Navy around the same period in wartime had a fleet of 35-40 dedicated at sea refuel capable tankers out of a national inventory of perhaps 500 bulk oil carriers. The Americans had about the same number out of 1,000. Note numerically that the British fleet was twice as large and the Americans almost twice as large numerically as the IJN?

--For all three navies it took one tanker to support two battleships or one tanker per aircraft carrier. The rule of thumb was one tanker per two cruisers, one tanker per four destroyers, or one tanker for four freighter equivalents. The Japanese had fuel dumps in the Mandates and in the Marianas, so they could project forward from fuel bases. But their tactical radius unrefueled was about 2,000 nautical miles. Note that. Of the three navies in 1941, they could refuel at sea ROUTINELY and had to do so. They practiced it as standard procedure. The Americans and British knew how, but rarely practiced it, except for occasional fleet problems.

-- when one adds up these factors and others I have not mentioned, such as one theater war versus global commitments and multiple fronts, a Japanese naval war starts with them at numerical parity to all the allies in theater, four times the air power, twice the trained personal and a full half decade technical lead in the operational art (Thanks to the China War.). Add better trained admirals, officers, and sailors at the start and one begins to understand why the Fleet Faction IJN thought the Treaty Faction admirals, such as Yamamoto, were pessimists.

-- and one begins to understand just how steep a hill the British and Americans... especially the Americans had to climb to just achieve equality of outcome by 1943.

-- the war in China was a tremendous drag in manpower and land-based resources, but it can be essentially read as two huge light infantry armies tussling with each other. It was not mechanized air land war to the same extent as the European theater was. If anything, the China war was more like the Russo Japanese War with a few scattered airplanes. And even at that, the Japanese Army were pretty much able to go where they wanted and do what they wanted as long as their minimalist logistics held up. They were frighteningly efficient as the Americans discovered on Luzon and the British on the Kra peninsula found out.

To quote Douglas MacArthur:

"The Japanese army is the most efficient user of [half-trained] infantry in the world, bar none."^1

Some sources suggest the word, "incompetent", but he wrote "half-trained". 

-- which brings up the main Japanese bottleneck. Sealift or amphibious assault capacity. MacArthur was right and the American navy was wrong about that one. IF, and it was a big "if" the defenders could sink as few as two dozen transports *(24 x 5,000 tons of specialized shipping or 120,000 tons), the Japanese ability to invade more than one objective with more than one division was impossible. The Malay settlements were invaded from Thailand because the Japanese landed their troops from the sea away from British territory and opposition. The British REALLY should have invaded Thailand first as Brook Popham suggested. The Japanese went in a serial sequence of invasions, using the same transports (and sometimes same troops as Yamashita and his Malay veterans had to bail Homma our in the Bataan campaign when he bungled it.) over and over and were not stopped until those transports were sunk at Guadalcanal, a point most historians overlook. (See Map).



It just seemed simultaneous because the Japanese were so fast and the allies kept losing, but it was a full year of Japanese offensive operations only hiccupped at Coral Sea and Midway. The stopper was finally Guadalcanal.


If you know anything about the Pearl Harbor Salvage Reports and the ship's bills that were compiled with all of the technical and physical deficiencies noted after action. (See videos)





then one will be shocked at the decrepit material state of the American battleline as they became a bomb-ex. This nearly full decade of neglect can be attributed to two admirals, the utter criminals Leahy and Stark, especially the despicably incompetent Harold Stark. Weapons, equipment, the ships, and the crews were not kept up to scratch. It was a paint it over Potemkin navy that looked good in a Hollywood news reel. In 1937, when the rumblings of reform were just bubbling up from the General Board and the junior admirals voices were being heard, the Japanese were in MUCH better shape than the Americans, if their equipment was still a bit dated compared to the British. Four more years of rundown and the result was ... well Pearl Harbor and Clark Field and the British have their own problems.

That is more a question of tanker support and amphibious lift. The Japanese could do raids as far as Sri Lanka in second stage operations and they got as far as Coral Sea and might have made a stab at New Caledonia and Fiji if they had won at Coral Sea, the Jutland of WWII, and the most important naval battle of the war as Kokoda Track was possibly the most important land battle. See Operation FS for details. The Japanese were after bird guano of all things. 

This is mostly true. Time hampered them as well as manpower. They could ship-build if they had the time and given two years, they would have, but they did not get those two years. That is where the American submarine campaign came in. Just think of what could have happened if the American submariners had their 1944 in 1942? About 7 million Chinese and around 3 to 4 million Filipinos, Malays, and Indonesians<, Laotians, Burmese, Indians, Cambodians and Vietnamese and 100,000+ allied prisoners would not have been murdered later.

But this is 1937. It would take a miracle (It did.) for the Japanese to get as far as they did or for the allies to stop them. 1937 still favors the Japanese massively in what looks like a replay of Jutland with airplanes. For what that would look like...

Homer Lea, The Valor of Ignorance. and The Day of the Saxon.

So a Yorktown batch III then, first batch would be Yorktown CV-5 and Enterprise CV-6, second batch would be Hornet CV-8 and the third batch would be the once following them.

Well they will learn the problems of the Mark 14 torpedo not denoting against their targets soon enough.