Flight and Combat Training
At an early stage in the Pacific War, the IJNAF had made a decision about the conduct of the war which was to have far reaching consequences. Training of new pilots was cut back. This put all of its aerial strength "up front" and enabled it to compete with the Americans and their allies on more even basis. The U.S. embargo on petroleum had been the most immediate cause of the war for the Japanese and they remained short of it for the rest of the war--even after the capture of Dutch oilfields in Indonesia. (The gasoline was not where it was needed. American submarine captains understood this situation and deliberately sought out oil tankers as high-priority targets.)
The Americans, by contrast, chose exactly the opposite strategy after the war was just a few months old. After a short period of trying to put their own stength "up front", they deliberately retained their best pilots as flight instructors for future waves of candidate pilots. They invested large quantities of gasoline in the training of new pilots. They built large numbers of training aircraft and retained increasing numbers of less capable combat planes in the continental U.S. for training purposes as more advanced types became available. To be sure, this meant that during the first year or so of the war, that the U.S. Navy and USAAF would have fewer men and fewer planes "up front".
On the other hand, once this much larger system began to deliver newly trained pilots and new aircraft to the theaters of war, the IJNAF would have no hope of fighting them off. From being sworn in, put through boot camp, put into primary flight training and then into advanced flight training, it took about one year for the U.S. Navy or USAAF to train a pilot and assign him to an operational unit. Significantly, a little over a year after the start of the Pacific War, the pilots of the Imperial Navy began to find themselves outnumbered. It seemed to the front line pilots as if the Americans had inexhaustible sources of warplanes and pilots. And this was somewhat before the Americans were able to introduce newer aircraft types.
Alleged American racial superiority was dangerous nonsense in the life and death situations of aerial combat, but there was an area in which the USA did have a human or manpower advantage. The USA, at that time, had a population of about 150 million, versus Japan's population of about 90 million. However, the age composition of the American population favored young men, so the actual pool of them was substantially larger than the comparable Japanese pool. Of course, the output of American pilots would have to be divided between the Pacific War (South Pacific Theater, South West Pacific Theater), the CBI Theater and the European Theater of Operations (the ETO).
Bad as this situation might have seemed to be from the Japanese side, it was actually worse.
To be sure, this didn't quite make them qualified aviation mechanics or pilots, but most young American men of that generation had driven or maintained an automobile and many of them had also handled guns. In pre-war Japan, individually owned automobiles were a rarity and so were private firearms. In training aviation mechanics and pilots, American instructors could take many things for granted.
In the pre-war years, the IJNAF had chosen to train a very small number of pilots to a very high degree. The modern air force which most closely follows this path is the Israeli Air Force. Note how seriously the Israelis were affected by the loss of about 100 aircraft and pilots in the Yom Kippur war of 1973. The Japanese were at least equally vulnerable to attrition prior to the Pacific War. How could the Japanese have compensated for the loss of 300 pilots at Midway by pre-war standards? If they had had no further losses at all, it would have taken them two or three years to train that many pilots at pre-war rates.
By the middle of 1943, the IJNAF was frantically attempting to overcome all of these disadvantages with tools wholly inadequate to the purpose. The training of pilots was pushed as high as it could be, but there were serious problems. Instructor pilots were still scarce and many potential flight instructors had died at the Battle of Midway, in the Solomon Islands or elsewhere. In the United States, comparable experienced pilots were alive and instructing other pilots. Shortening the amount of training was tried and, by the last year of the war, Japanese pilots were being pushed into combat missions with as little as 100 hours of flight time. (By contrast, American pilots at that stage of the war[1944] would have had more than 300 hours of flight time.) When these pilots entered combat they were terrified novices, easy marks for American pilots. Even rookie American pilots were better off than this. As for experienced Japanese pilots, those who were still alive were also gradually being killed off in combat. Nor did a Japanese student pilot have to die in combat--many of them died in flying accidents, particularly when they were pushed into the cockpits of fast, unforgiving fighters. Flying accidents and training fatalities were common enough in the continental United States, but anecdotes give the impression that they were much more common in Japan.
PLEASE GO READ THE REST http://www.combinedfleet.com/ijnaf.htmMY NOTE ***ALLIED EXAMPLE:
VMF-124 and VMF-213 were ordered aboard the USS Essex on December 28, 1944 at Ulithi Lagoon. The Marines replaced our Dive-Bomber Squadron (VB-4). This change meant that the Essex now had a compliment of 55 F6F-5s, 36 F4U-1Ds, and 15 TBM-3Cs.
"At the time of reporting to USS Essex, each pilot had had an average of 12 carrier landings (qualifications in San Diego and Hawaiian area aboard the USS Macassar Straits, USS Saratoga, and USS Bataan). Each pilot had an average total of about 400 hours flight time in the Corsair type fighter." Now compare that to an IJAAF pilot flying a J2M3, Ki-84, or a Ki-100 with only 100-200 hours of TOTAL flight time which probably only a few hours high performance type.
http://www.airgroup4.com/marines.htmStream14
