Sarah Paine

Meanwhile, there are a series of coup attempts, some of them where Navy is part of it, more of them with the army that's dealing with it.

going back and forth.

And at the very end, when Emperor Hirohito is capitulating, there was one last coup attempt, which, amen, it failed because the war might have terminated quite the way it did if it had succeeded.

So the point is, if you've got coups running on, that is not called unified command.

It's a mess.

And the Navy wasn't any better.

I have a different sort of example here.

During the war, the US air service, people who were flying planes, they would alternate combat and training missions so that you would bring back someone who had survived and learned something from combat to tell new people the things to avoid, how not to get yourself killed and some other things.

Well, in Japan,

In groups, out groups.

You sign up together, you train together, you fight together, and you die together.

It doesn't mean the Japanese couldn't have grafted people between groups.

It's just culturally, it's not the natural thing that comes to mind.

Moreover, and this apparently applies to the present, that in the U.S.

military, they have what are called hot washes after different operations where you come back and you're very self-critical about all the things that went wrong to figure out how to do it better the next time.

Well, there are cultural reasons why you would not want to do that in Japan.

Just, it's different.

So if these in-group, out-group things are causing problems within services, it gets toxic between the services.

And I've got four examples, and I'm gonna start with organizational issues.

So it's only in 1944 that the Army and Navy finally get it together to have regular liaison meetings in Tokyo.