Midget Submarines

 I was just watching this excellent documentary on youtube about the attack on Pearl Harbor where the Japanese used midget submarines, which didn’t work out too well. As least for the submarines. And they were pretty useless for the entire war. And then it hit me: how many wacky and useless weapons did Japan and Germany come up with during WWII that cost them a lot for no return?

Japan had the midget submarine, some worthless light tanks that got their butts kicked by the Shermans, and a couple of huge battleships that were effectively useless because they required too many logistics. The battleships were probably the worst lot, because they could have used those personnel on carriers instead.

Germany had the V1s and 2s, terror weapons to be sure, but worthless militarily. Their jets were effective but in such small numbers also worthless. And they had the elephant tank and even the Tigers were suspect because they were super-hard to maintain and had low reliability. If they had used that money and effort on evolving the Mark IV Panzer and maybe some Panthers it would have gone, well at least a little better. Probably just drag things out.

So why did Japan and Germany go down these weird development roads? Especially as they hit some home runs with the Mitsubishi A-6M (Zero) and the Mark IV Panzer. Don’t get me wrong, we went down a few of these too. From the floating (not) tanks of D-Day the horrible MK 14 torpedo which some people at the Naval Bureau of Ordinance should have gone to jail for (don’t get me started on those guys), the US had its share of head-slappers. But overall, the United States selection of weapons systems and directions to go in was pretty solid.

So the big question is, why? Systems development is always a tug-of-war between the concept guys and the engineers who actually have to build the thing and deal with the soldiers. Now if you let the concept guys win that argument, well you get midget submarines. Things with limited or no practicality. If you let the engineers win that argument, you get something like the Sherman, that never changes. Easy to maintain, easy to put back together, and oh shit, there’s a Mark V. So both guys need a seat at the table.

But in those Marxist-Nazi type disasters, the concept guys always win. They sell the Fuhrer on a weapons platform, then they go to the engineering team, and the engineers say, “F you, if you try to build that as is, the only thing it will kill, is our own soldiers.” Now normally that’s when the concept team says, “OK, what do we need to change?” But when Stalin tells the concept team to build it as is, then they can just tell the engineering team, “F you back, Comrade Stalin will have you on Kamchatka eating blubber and freezing your schlong off if you don’t build this as-is.”

So then we get things like V1s and midget submarines.