It's difficult to summup the Imperial Japanese Navy at the eve of 1941, but it was unquestionably, fit to fill the bill of conquering in a few month a huge maritime Empire in Asia, covering more square miles combined than the Axis conquest, German and Italian armies at their peak on land. Likewise, by building a powerful naval aviation tradition, the IJN developed ad cultivated an aggressive approach, with effective combined tactics that greatly influenced the design of her later ships. Subsequently, all ships from the largest to the smallest were built locally. Their last ships still from Great Britain's arsenals were the Kongo class battlecruisers. From 1914, the Japanese no longer depended on British construction. With the arrival of a nationalist military junta and the conquest of North China from 1931, international tensions were exacerbated, especially with the United States, the only truly rival fleet of the Japanese navy then. Out of the great war grandiose naval plans, Japan's authorities bitterly resented the Washington treaty restrictions, as a racist empediment to their dreams of imperialist expansion, which relegated the IJN third behind the US and British navies, both having equal tonnage. In also, 1918 the Hosho became the world's first aircraft carrier. Not content to copy, Japanese engineers innovated, as with the Satsuma, the first "monocaliber battleship" preceding by one year the famous Dreadnought, but eventually completed in a more classic way due to lack of equipment, but still quite a poerful secondary battery. Japan continued to build up an ever-growing fleet during the Great War, where a relentless chase against German units took place. The academy and trainig course included mandatory trips in UK, and at least two generations of officers were trained with the Royal Navy and used RN tactics. Destroyers and later cruisers were produced locally, first on adapted foreign plans. Battleships, cruisers were British-built (with the exception of two French and one German). Thus the fleet that fought the Russians at Tsushima in 1905 was largely modeled on the British Royal Navy, almost an Asiatic clone. Global view of the IJN ( poster available) Subsequently, the French and especially the "young school" under the aegis of Emile Bertin were going to be more and more present in this area and provide Japan with many ships until 1895 and set up some institutions.īut after a few failures (including the mixed battle of Yalu in 1894) and the loss of a cruiser due to a bad design (Unebi), the Japanese turned definitively to Great Britain for the supply of their ships, guns, technicians and training through a new naval academy and tactics refined by learning directly in the Royal Navy as observers, while the army was modelled by the Prussians after the French loosing in 1870. Germans, French, Americans and British, proposed and obtained various contracts.
Thus are born the first sea going Japanese war vessels. The Meiji Era with the end of the civil war, consecrated the constitution of a homogeneous fleet in the service of the Shogun, with since 1855, the assistance of the Dutch. The technological gap was such that it took a transition period to industrialization of nearly thirty years. The Yamato would remain the largest battleship afloat Originsīy the 1860s there was no proper "navy" but a collection of private fleets of the warring clans, consisting mainly of junks and galleys, many equipped with bronze artillery pieces.
#Sebastiano virtual sailor pro#
Since then, Japan experienced a troubled transition and civil war between pro and anti-openness, all declared in the service of the emperor, but also an industrial transformation at a speed rarely matched in history. This was not the first, but was the only one to succesfully open Japan (by the pressure of a modern fleet). Indeed, the milestone in the history of Japan is the moment when Commodore Perry landed in 1853 in Edo to successfully submit a trade treaty between the US and the empire, benefiting by extension to other powers of the moment (including France and Great Britain).
The Japanese Navy (Nihhon Kaigun) is still a relatively new creation in 1941, she is only 60 years old. The Imperial Japanese Navy in WW2 At the service of the Emperor