there are tremendous interservice rivalries between the Army and Navy and Japan and it goes back to the pre-war budget Wars where Japan's a resourced poor country and both Services have what they consider absolutely essential things to be funded Japan didn't have the money to fund both and then when you get in war and you start expending these things you need even more money and so the the disagreements were brutal uh but before I get there uh the ingroup outgroup uh differences that stove pipe things and cause problems aren't simply between Army and Navy they're within each service so I'm going to start there and be to be fair I'm going to provide one example for each service I'll start with the Army it was the guandong army or Japan's Army of Manchuria that decided to invade all of Manchuria back in 31 it was not the home office back in Tokyo but it's this branch that turns out kicks off a 15-year War so these folks think that they know what's best for Japan and how best to defend the Empire and they're just off and running meanwhile there are a series of coup attempts some of them where Navy is part of it a lot more of them with the Army that's dealing with it uh going back and forth and at the very end when Emperor hito 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 had succeeded so the point is if you got who's running on that 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 um air Ser the people who are 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 that Japanese couldn't have grafted people between groups it's just culturally it's not the natural thing that comes to mind moreover the and this apparently applies to the present that uh in the US 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 H 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 uh in-group outgroup things are causing problems within service says it gets toxic between the services and I've got four examples and I'm going to start with organizational issues so it's only in 1944 that the Army and Navy finally to get it together to have regularly a z meetings in Tokyo great just in time to uh you know figure out how how the capitulation is going to work and then the Army wanted to unify the the two high commands the Navy wanted nothing to do with that one because they knew they just become the Box launch delivery service for the Army didn't want to do that so by 1945 they did unify their information Department great they can spew the same propaganda and maybe share Tokyo Rose on good day who knows but there was no planning even under the imminent threat of invasion to how they're going to coordinate their assets to protect the home Island they aren't even coordinating their air assets disaster and This Disaster goes back way in time they had very uh far back in time they'd had a very successful war against Russia the ends in 1905 but afterwards in 1906 immediately afterwards the Army and Navy are allowed to have completely separate War plans the Army plan is all about fighting Russia for the big land grab in Eurasia the Navy plan has completely different set of enemies it' be the United States and Britain for the big gambut you're not going to use ships in Siberia the big Gambit for Empire in the Pacific and each of these plant a they're secret from the other service and be each plan assumes the other surface service is going to do all kinds of important things for them okay great so um I guess the idea of secrecy and surprise normally you apply that to your enemies not your sister service but that's how it works uh in this setup now the Army does come around to the Navy plan why because they get walloped by the Russians on the Mongolian border at the Battle of nanan the the the Russians just decimate them in 1939 so now the Army it says okay okay maybe that's Southern an advanced thing wasn't such a bad idea and um so the Navy thinks this is great and they do their uh Southern Advance they go zooming down the Japanese Mind Over Matter stuff seems to be going really well because in 1942 the army takes more land than or over a more dispersed theater than any country on the planet the Navy hasn't uh lost a single ship I mean it's looking really good uh except there are a few little details here that are a problem um what the Navy hadn't told the Army is that actually they weren't ready for this whole thing that they needed this Outer Perimeter reinforced by airfields in order to make the thing work and that wasn't complete and the Army learned about this on August 17th 1942 because one of these air fails was being built in this tropical nightmare called guada Canal that the United States knew about even though the Army didn't and all of a sudden the Navy is in deep dark trouble and needs the Army to help them out of guat canal so now than Samurai the Japanese 17th Army had been ordered to take Port moris be in New Guinea that's what they were up to but with gu Canal they are told uh you need to tack on guat Canal to that Port morby event okay Ander Logistics they're a thousand kilometers apart so now the Army uh is going to be lying to the Navy about how many people they got at guat Canal because they're scared the Navy won't provide enough rations and things the the Navy doesn't provide enough rations people starve anyway and then the Navy that got the Army into this mess wants to call it off and move out but the Army good Samurai want to fight on and uh they just expend all kinds of resources and this thing has enormous strategic effects prior to guat Canal the Japanese Army wanted to continue their strategy of chasing the the nationalists out of China back in 1937 the Japanese had conquered ning which is the original nationalist capital and the Nationalist had fled up the yanga river to Chongqing Beyond some gorges and some other things and Beyond the the rail network and in 1943 the Japanese were planning to attack Chongqing and then at at that point I think if you're a nationalist you're fing into Burma and if that had happened then you the Japanese could have probably pulled hundreds of thousands of people out of the China theater and put them elsewhere and that would have caused all kinds of problems also the Japanese had to call off their plans to uh invade Australia so guat Canal has enormous strategic implications so if you're focusing Samurai on one battle guat Canal well it has implications in places called China and Australia that are a long way off okay the United States also had interservice rivalries right between our Army and Navy and that's why you have two separate campaigns for Admiral nimtz and General MacArthur big ego is one campaign for each ego and apparently that wasn't even big enough for MacArthur okay uh but even so I don't believe the inner service rivalries in the the United States were remotely on the scale that they were in Japan I have one final example to prove that one so after Pearl Harbor uh that had been tremendously successful for admiral Yamoto he wanted to do the next thing was to attack Midway because us basing there and the Army said I don't want we're not going to do this and yamam mo goes I'm gon to resign and the Army we don't care I'll commit suicide go buy popcorn uh and here's what changes this so after Pearl Harbor Americans wanted to let the Japanese know that we were thinking about them and so this is where Lieutenant Colonel James dittle the do little raids named after him in April 1942 it was a one-way trip off an aircraft carrier because they had so much fuel in order to get to Japan that the idea was they're going to go bomb Japan and then ditch in China whoever survives very brave people who did this and are they going to cause massive damage in Japan well yeah if you're directly underneath you won't appreciate it but in general it causes minor damage but it has a major uniss anticipated Strategic Benefit think Samurai uh the Army all of a sudden is backing the Navy that they're going to now do Midway with them and it's right don't think retaliate avenge your honor the Army was appalled that anyone had been able to bomb Japanese Skies so now they're all over it okay so how does Midway work out really poorly for the Japanese they lose four aircraft carriers uh they've only got 12 they've lost lost a third oops and here we go in group outg group the Navy doesn't tell anyone for three or four months incredible in a war right so they're thinking about their little stove pipe and they're ignoring Japanese interests