Talk:Winter 2016 Event/@comment-26325008-20160209163951/@comment-118.137.111.1-20160210043238

@MrDeaf That's a long-debunked myth. The idea that IJN had too many BBs is damn stupid when you consider how many the US had, and all of the treaty BBs could easily outperform any non-Yamato Japanese BB (a situation made worse by Mutsu blowing up). This is an extension of the BBs were useless myth that came about because very few BB to BB engagements happened inn WW2. But BBs were useful in the confined seas of the Phillippines and the Western Pacific Rim in general. US BBs did prove largely useless in WW2, but that was never the case with Japanese BBs. The real reason few US BBs ever engaged Japanese BBs was because other things got to them first. But that also meant that IJN BBs had a large role in engagements all over the place throughout the war fighting all sorts of other ships, especially when you consider how busy the Kongou class were.

At the start of the war Japan had more than enough DDs to guard all their supply lines, not to mention the most effective SS fleet in the world. ASW was NOT a pure DD job for most navies at the start of the war; instead CLs and CAs were tasked with locating subs by coordinating floatplanes and DDs and DDs were meant to maneuver to take them out. Cruisers were the primary ASW asset - the heroes - and DDs were there only as weapons delivery platforms - the heroes' swords. In fact, only the US developed this thought of dedicated ASW DDs so their cruisers could do other jobs. They had to do this precisely because the Axis had more effective sub fleets. Later in the war as US subs started becoming a problem the situation was reversed and Japan was forced to consider true ASW DDs because they lacked cruisers. But there was no way to predict this situation in 1941.

AA DDs were also an anomaly in WW2. In the USN fleet air defense was handled by CVLs and CAs. DDs were meant to defend themselves and form the outer perimeter of the defense, using their own bodies essentially as a wall/shield for the rest of the fleet. The large-bore HA guns needed to perform fleet air defense were a better match for CAs as secondaries rather than as DD primaries, and only CAs had the fire control resources to direct their long-range guns to provide air cover for the fleet, engaging planes not directly flying towards them. That's why the Akizuki class were considered revolutionary when they showed up. They were the first DDs that could truly defend other ships in the fleet without resorting to desperate shielding tactics. Yet the real reason for the Akizukis was simply that Japan was by then unable to produce proper FAD CAs, so they had to resort to the desperate alternative of equipping DDs and CLs for this use. MAYA was what a proper IJN FAD asset should have looked like had they possessed the resources to develop more.

As an aside, we now tend to think of DD's as fleet AA assets, but that's not how WW2 navies thought. The idea of DDs as primary AA ships in the fleet is modern, thanks to the US Aegis system. However, Aegis DDs are actually light cruisers. The DD designation was just a convenient excuse to allow budgets to pass Conggressional hearings. The infamous Zumwalts are even bigger than pre-dreadnaught BBs and equivalent in size to Takao-class CAs. That there is the zinger. Realistically you need cruiser hulls to mount FAD weaponry. The Russians actually still do this. They use Slava mods and the gigantic Kirov battlecruisers as primary FAD assets. They're still honest about what those ships are.

The gist here is that Japan didn't have a lack of DDs during the war; rather, they lacked CRUISERS. Looking at the functions that IJN could not perform properly in WW2, all of these were actually cruiser jobs, then and now. It's just that we now call those cruisers DDs thanks to political shenanigans (especially in Japan where poor Kaga is now a DDH).