How Did Wargaming Shape the War in the Pacific? (US vs Japan)

Hey everyone, I'm here with Rob Doan and he's the museum curator at the U.S. Naval War College Museum, and we're going to be talking about wargaming in the Second World War. We have some of the props out in front of us, but we're going to be talking more about the history behind it. So let's get started from like an overall perspective. What can you tell me about how the overall strategy of the Second World War in the Pacific was conducted? Sure, so the planning that goes into the war in the Pacific is something that is a very you might say almost chaotic affair in that there are many different bodies, many different offices within the U.S. military structure that contribute to the plan that's ultimately used to fight that war. You might think it's something that's very clearly spelled out in a law or regulation that says this department of the Pentagon or the military and the Navy before that is responsible for that. It wasn't that way. And it's also the case that they had plans before the war, but then no plan survives first contact. You have... True. Exactly. Causes you to rethink some. But in very broad terms, the Army and the Navy are both cooperating towards contributing toward this plan. Each of them have their own internal war planning mechanisms that are kind of formulating the plans for their service alone. But then they develop ultimately something called the Army-Navy Joint Board that takes on the task of coordinating the plans that are being generated by both services. Early in its years, the War College was looked at to provide the planning for the Navy side of it. And all of these color-coded war plans that are kind of well-known that come out of planning in the interwar period, plan orange, the one with Japan, red for Great Britain, black for Germany, all of those are plans that are kind of experimented with here at the college. The college is sometimes mistakenly identified as the body that actually makes those plans for the US Navy. And that's actually not the case in this period. The officers here are definitely being trained to carry out the plans and they're being encouraged to experiment with different plans for fighting that war. But they're not necessarily then writing down the plan and handing it over to the Chief of Naval Operations saying, here's what we do. It was more of an experimental and a training tool for them. But the payback is that when these war planning bodies like the Army-Navy Joint Board come into play, most of the officers being appointed to them are war college graduates. And so they all have had this kind of common background of just playing these games and kind of knowing the geography of the Pacific, knowing the logistical challenges of trying to organize and get a fleet from one side of the Pacific to the other. They've all had that common experience and they all know some of the pitfalls of where it can go wrong. So that absolutely benefits them in going through these plans. Plan Orange, which is the one that's sort of the seed of this, is an Army and a Navy plan. The Army contributes to it as well. And then ultimately it goes through different forms. It's still just focused on just Japan though. And in the years right before World War II, the Joint Board takes these and expands them into the Rainbow colored series of plans. Rainbow Five is the one that actually becomes the template that the U.S. uses in the war. It's born out of, again, all the many different phases that went through of war gaming here, of war gaming at the Army War College, and the two services trying to eventually bring their best people together to figure out what works. I understood. Yeah, thanks for that context. So one of the things we're interested in here is basically what's on the table in front of us, which is supposed to represent war gaming. This isn't particularly World War II, it's a little bit afterwards. But with the planning for World War II, what role specifically did war gaming play? Sure. So, well, again, the biggest benefit, I think, is just kind of getting the people who rose to the senior command position in World War II, getting them used to thinking in terms of the big strategic problems that come into play in the Pacific, the vast distances these fleets have to cover. In the beginning, the popular idea was that the U.S. Navy was going to basically steam all the way across, or sail all the way across the Pacific in one cruise, meet the Japanese fleet in some big climactic battle. They thought it would probably occur somewhere around the Philippines at first, and in the Central Pacific later on. But somewhere they would meet for this climactic battle, and in one battle decide the whole war. And it was what they called various times the through-ticket strategy. But the through-ticket strategy was kind of the initial thinking about this. And over time, it evolved to the point where they realized that trying to supply a fleet over the vast distances of the Pacific is just too hard to do. And there are too many ways that an opposing fleet can stop you from even getting to the point where you fight that decisive battle. And so, they eventually, kind of through a lot of trial and error, through hundreds and hundreds of games over the years, figure out that this island hopping strategy is much better. Because you can take an intermediate series of bases, and you can secure them, and you can use those to refuel, resupply, rearm, repair ships, and kind of go in hops and fits, and not one fell swoop. It's so hard to actually keep your fleet intact that way. And just to interject here, so when you're thinking about the war, there's like the strategic and the tactical level. The strategic level lends itself more to these sort of chart level analyses that aren't necessarily what's on the board here. What's on the board would be more the tactical level. Sure, right. For both, I could say. But so, you're telling me that the strategic one, there was some wargaming that went into the general island hopping plan. So, what about the sort of the tactical level? Yeah, so there's a couple, you know, level or a couple ways that the lower level gaming like that kind of produced tangible results for the U.S. Navy. There's a couple officers, one guy named Commander Roscoe McFall, who is looking at things about formations that the Navy uses when it's, you know, like a cruising formation versus a battle formation. And he's going through the college right after World War I in 1924, and he's looking at the types of formations they used in World War I, which tended to be very linear and were all about battleships and kind of maximizing their firepower. But right after World War I was over, the U.S. Navy was already starting to realize that aircraft were going to play a much more important role and that aircraft carriers would be a more essential component of the fleet. And up to this point, there had never been a big carrier battle yet. Correct. So, that's one of the things that they have to figure out what's the best way to protect it, utilize it. Yeah, exactly. And one of the problems with carriers is that when they are launching aircraft, they have to turn into the wind and that forces them to make some very sudden turns. And so, McFall was looking at what formation, you know, if a carrier is in the back of the formation and suddenly makes a 180 degree turn, that leaves all the rest of the fleet totally out of position. And so, he was trying to figure out how can you solve that. And he came up, he worked with a couple other people and ultimately pushes the idea of the circular formation, where you have the high value ship like the carrier in the middle and there's like rings of ships around it that provide protection against submarines, against incoming aircraft. And that's still pretty much doctrine today. And as far as I know, I'm not out there on the fleet today to say for sure, but certainly in World War II, that bore out very well. And so, that gives you 360 degree protection against anything that might be coming to attack you and it facilitates those turns he was talking about. So, the U.S. Navy uses those very successfully. So, that's one example. Another great example is a captain named Joseph Reeves, who is known as one of the founding fathers of carrier aviation in the U.S. Navy. And through playing these games, he realized that aircraft, no matter what kind they were, no matter how good the pilots were, aircraft are very fragile things. And in battle, you're going to lose a significant number, even if you're using them very well and being flown by expert pilots. And so, the key was carrying more aircraft, carrying as many as you possibly could on each carrier to maximize the numbers that you could bring into a battle. When he went out to the fleet and actually took over command of the Langley, the U.S. Navy's first carrier, he experimented with different ways to do that. And the key change he made was at that time when aircraft were landing on a carrier, they were being taken down in the elevators below decks and each one went down into the aircraft bays to be worked on before the next plane would land. He realized that that took too long and that he could speed things up if he stored all of the aircraft, not didn't take the time to put them under, take them down on the elevators, but to actually park them on the bow of the ship and have a barrier in front of them that would stop the landing aircraft in case they missed one of the wires to prevent them from running into all the aircraft parked at the bow. And so, basically, all that means is that he was able to recover aircraft quicker, turn them around quicker, and then store and be able to carry more aircraft on each ship. And that has a direct tangible benefit at the Battle of Midway, for example, where four Japanese carriers, the main carriers, would carry as many aircraft as three American aircraft carriers. The three American aircraft carriers carried as many as four of their enemy counterparts. So, that has everything to do with having the right numbers of aircraft in the right place at the right time, as certainly happened in the Battle of Midway. Okay. So, thanks. Yeah. So, we've covered wargaming strategic and tactical level. On the tactical level, we're talking about kind of developing formulas and doctrine that can almost be used generically against any opponent. But specifically, I have some questions about US versus Japan. So, how did the US model its interactions with the Japanese? Because in wargaming, you have players that represent both sides. In this case, it can be a little tricky. How do you model someone on the other side who's from a different army, different equipment, doctrine, training, and all that? So, maybe you can shed a little light on those differences. Yeah, that was a very difficult part for them. They certainly had the technical aspects of the enemy's forces down pretty well. They certainly knew the size of their ships, you know, their capacity for fuel, for ammunition, their cruising ranges, all of that, you know, those variables were pretty well known. So, they can model in terms of what they were technically capable of doing pretty well. But it certainly was much more guesswork involved in terms of, you know, from strategic thinking, what were they going to try to do? Were they going to basically stay on the defensive? Were they going to try to expand? Would they think about attacking the west coast of the US? Those questions were harder to answer. And so, you had to look at more intelligence, kind of like peacetime intelligence gathering through, you know, if you have people in Japan, they did have naval attachés in Japan in the 1930s, that certainly, you know, part of their role was to try and figure out to the best they could kind of what the Japanese were planning in general terms. But a lot of that was guesswork. After the war, you know, Admiral Chester Nimitz, who had retired, but he came back to the Naval War College in 1960, and he gives this speech where he has a very famous quote that's repeated often about the value of wargaming, where he talks about the fact that the war in the Pacific basically progressed just as they thought it would, and nothing took them by surprise, except for the kamikaze attacks, and that they had never anticipated those in any war game they played at the War College. So, that quote I kind of always like, because it does show the limits of what wargaming can do too, and it was just very difficult for them, short of having members of the Japanese Navy on site to tell them, here's what we would do. If you don't have that, it is tough to figure out what the other side wants to do versus just what they're capable of doing. And for that quote, I know it's often trotted out. I have heard while I've been here that it is sometimes a little bit overstated. They didn't know everything that would happen because of wargaming, but it's definitely influential in the mindset of the people, and it does speak to its depth of importance. So, some more questions that I have about like modeling the Japanese. We've talked about they know the equipment. The mentality is maybe not quite there. It's hard to model, but they're trying to get that. And then maybe the other piece of the puzzle for me is like a lot of stuff in the Pacific is who has what intelligence that plays a big role, obviously with the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and obviously asymmetry and information at Midway. So, did they try and model those sorts of like asymmetrical situations? Well, they certainly had games where they postulated that they would start with, say, a surprise attack. Believe it or not, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor had been anticipated in some level to some degree by some of the games in the 1930s. There was a one Naval War College graduate, an officer named Harry Arnell, who very had this famous... He was part of an exercise in Hawaii in 1932, where he was in charge of the aircraft component of the opposing force. And this was a real world drills. This wasn't a war game. They were doing a fleet exercise. And he staged a dawn, Sunday morning dawn raid on Pearl Harbor with his 152 aircraft, it was. And the umpires ruled that he had caused significant damage to the army's aircraft at the army airfields in Hawaii and to several of the battleships that were there. And the Navy did tend to somewhat discount that as seeming like it was an unlikely scenario. To their credit, I mean, the capabilities of the American aircraft certainly were not what the Japanese aircraft were that actually did that raid in 1941. So it's true that maybe they discounted the potential damage a little bit more. But yeah, they had games like that that they anticipated starting out with one side surprising the other. In a lot of their war games, the surprise attacks were not necessarily in Hawaii. They were much more often at Guam or the Philippines where the main naval bases were at that point. So they were thinking in terms of a sudden start to the war. They didn't get the exact location correct all the time. But they did model sort of the unknown, the fog of war that way by just having it start with a sudden or a set of unknown circumstances that govern kind of the start of the scenario. Great. So we've explored kind of the U.S. side of the war gaming. I have heard that the Japanese were pretty meticulous war gamers and they were performing it on their own side. Can you talk a bit about what we know, at least generally, about Japanese war gaming? Sure, yeah. They certainly were big believers in war gamers themselves and their navy practiced a lot of war games before the war. They very famously rehearsed the attack on Pearl Harbor many, many times over and used war gaming as a way to sort of model, you know, predictability and uncertainties in terms of what would happen. And sorry to interject, but I assume there are lines with the Germans who had history with the Prussians and sort of Crigsfield and kind of maybe inherited some of that expertise and maybe even had officials. I don't know if there's any records of that, but you'd assume there's maybe some training and support in that sense. Sure, I mean by the 30s most of the major navies, the militaries around the world, were aware of war gaming and it was pretty common knowledge that, you know, that was a tool you could use. So they had found out about it certainly from those sources and from the U.S. as well, having, you know, contacts over here in peacetime as well. But yes, they did use it to plan out their most significant operations. I would say the main difference between their war gaming and the United States was that the U.S. war gaming included it at many different levels, tactical, operational, and strategic. And as we kind of talked already, those strategic level games were really what provided the benefit to U.S. officers. The Japanese did not do much in the way of strategic level war gaming. They were much more focused on individual battles or operations that they planned. So they did that well and did, you know, spent a lot of time doing that. But in terms of a long-range plan for fighting the war, that was not something that they modeled in a war game very much. That was much more just a product of, you know, the whims of the people in charge and the discussions and whoever was influential and crafting policy at that time. So the, you know, example we talk about sometimes with the Battle of Midway, they had this kind of famous war game exercise right before Midway where their own war game resulted in having two Japanese carriers sunk right away at the start of the battle. And a couple Japanese officers said, no, that's not realistic, you know, and the umpire of this game actually ended up overruling that and saying, re-floating those two carriers and saying, keep fighting the battle and let's figure out what happens from here, and kind of discounted that result. I would say in their defense that it was not a totally unreasonable decision they made. In that particular case, what had caused those two Japanese carriers to sink in that game was a very lucky die roll, which anybody who plays war games knows how dice go. But they had rolled a very unlikely result on their dice that basically resulted in an American bomber, a level bomber, not a dive bomber, but like a B-17 scoring a hit on a Japanese carrier that was like a critical hit that sank it. And it has to be said, I mean, I think they were right to discount that in the actual battle. The American B-17s that did take part in it performed abysmally. They scored no hits at all. And so they were, they were not, it was not out of line for them to think that level bombing wasn't much of a threat to shipping because it wasn't. So you can say in their defense that was not an unreasonable decision to make. But at the end of the day, they did, you know, discount all of that and figured that they were, they were still going to have the edge in that battle when they turned out that they didn't through a variety of reasons. And to me, that's one of the main takeaways of war gaming. Like when you look at how the Battle of Midway played out, you think of if that were a scenario that played out, how many of those lucky die rolls did they have? If that had been a game that you played, are you really going to take that seriously and learn those lessons? That's the complete loop. So war is chaos. And so a lot of times war gaming does have its limitations when it comes to modeling the chaos of war. You have the people with experience who say, let's discount that for all the reasonable reasons. So that's kind of where the war gaming and reality start to burn. But war gaming still does have its value. Oh, yeah. And I think it shows the limits too. In war, when you're actually fighting the war and trying to game it out at the same time, you don't have time to game it out very much. A way that you could get past that is by playing that particular rehearsal they were doing with Midway. If you played that game 10 times or 20 times, then you'll see, you know, that one unlucky die result probably not going to happen in the other games. And if you play it many times over, then you start to get a better feel for what reasonable, accurate results were. But if you only play it once, because you don't have time, because you're actually going to do this operation next week, then you don't have time to figure out that maybe that one unlucky die roll was something that was not likely to be repeated. Or getting kind of what a more reasonable set of results would be. So that's part of what played into that scenario too. Well, great. I think that's a great place to end it. So thank you so much. You're welcome.