Battles with critical breakdown of communication

Thinking a little more about the premise of this thread.

It was very difficult to understand what was actually going on in a battle before the modern e-enabled soldiery. It is not easy to work out what is going on using a 1:50,000 map and fragmentary running commentary, partially in code, delivered over three radios broadcasting simultaneously against a set of orders that might or might not bear some relation to the real events.

Even when the commanders can .see the battle it can be confusing and easy to draw the wrong conclusions. There are numerous reports from OPs on 1st July 1916 reporting that the German front line trenches had been captured and that British troops were continuing the advance to the second line in places where the attacks totally failed. Every effort was made to hep to follow the progress of the British attack. In one formation soldiers wore tin triangles on their backs, carried flares and signal flags. If the Somme was a war game, gamers would argue that surely the advance would be reported accurately. But it wasn't. Why might this have been?

One reason is that it wasn't easy to tell the difference between success and failure. The observers might well have seen troops entering the German trenches and some leaving the other side. But the result of the combat in the enemy trenches itself might be unknown. An experienced observer might form a judgement about the proportion of troops that reached the enemy front line - what might now be called situational awareness. In WW2 a man who possessed good judgement about what was happening from the misleading and fragmentary information was considered to have a "fingertip feel" The Germans had a term for this Fingerspitzengefühl
Fingerspitzengefühl - Wikipedia

 

Yes, from what I’ve read Bull Halsey took great personal offense over the phrase to say the least.

 

Apparently the message form handed to Halsey read "Where is Task Force 34? The world wonders.", and yes, he had a fit.

The basic problem was the divided command. The Navy was reluctant to place the fast carrier force under MacArthur, so Halsey was reporting to Nimitz back at Pearl Harbor and just coordinating with Kincaid who reported to Mac there in Leyte Gulf. The fiasco and the desperate battle off Samar wouldn't have happened if either the entire operation or all the Navy forces involved had been under one commander.

Unity of command is a basic military principle. My favorite saying on the subject is from Napoleon, who said he would rather entrust command of an army to one bad general than two good ones.

 

In this case MacArthur would be the bad general, if I were to hazard a guess.

 

The basic problem was the creation of the South West Pacific Area as a theater command, which seems to have been done mainly to provide a suitable role for MacArthur. If the senior American officer in Australia had been someone less prestigious than the former Chief of Staff, what became SWPA would probably have been included in the South Pacific command, a simpler and more effective arrangement.

 

But they had to stick MacArthur somewhere so he didn't become a political thorn in FDR's side, so creating the SWPA was the least painful alternative.

 

Alaska might have been a better choice...

 

The desperate battle of Samar shouldn't have happened regardless. Kinkaid made his share of foul ups that brought the battle about.

 

Least painful for some, didn't do any good for our fighting men......

 

Thanks!

Interesting, I also heard that they actually saw the Japanese on radar before the attack, but thought it was friendly aircraft instead (Officer mistook radar warning of Pearl Harbor raid)

This is a perfect situation for my game! Being cut-off, and forced to locate enemy companies and call in repeated artillery strikes would make for a great scenario, and the radio playing an integral role.

Interesting, another example of these extra 'padding' words being misinterpreted. Perhaps if there had been a more automatic way of encrypting messages (like ENIGMA) for the Allies, errors like these would be fewer.

For sure, it would have been extremely chaotic and stressful, with conflicting reports and multiple parts of the battlefield to keep track of. The responsibility would have been terrifying. It also would have been difficult to even hear radio reports coming, due to the sound of battle at either end of the message. It's very cool that there's a term for that intuitive understanding.

Dang that's really unfortunate wording.

That Napoleon quote is quite good. I'll note that down for future use. Reminds me of having random people as teammates when playing online strategy games - it would be far more effective to control all your team's forces than have half of your team's forces doing different things that are at odds with each other.

 

You should get in some multiplayer minitature games at a con or two as well. Might give you some more insight. That is if you haven't done so already. I see you are in Saskatchewan so not sure how many con's there are up there. Might be a bit of a travel.

(As an aside my dad was born in Duval, Saskatchewan)

 

Kinkaid had ordered a nighttime reconnaissance of the San Bernadino Strait, however, for a variety of reasons, only 1 PBY flew it's assigned route. Maintenance and operational issues prevented the others from taking off or led to aborts. There was no follow-up or additional patrols requested to make up the losses. Further, the dawn reconnaissance patrol that was to be flown took off some two hours late. Here again, there was no follow-up, such as passing the duty to another CVE. Had either of these recon ops been carried out as something other than a perfunctory task, Kurita would have been spotted in plenty of time for the CVEs to "greet him properly" with their aircraft.

 

That was not the problem...The messages were encrypted and decrypted just fine(just as would have been done with ENIGMA). ENIGMA still would have given the operator the "TURKEY TROTS TO WATER GG" and "RR THE WORLD WONDERS" padding-as that it part of the coded message, and it still would have been passed along to Halsey as such.

 

Do they still do the Double-Blind games at Cons?