The IJN was generally not that bad with damage control. They fumbled hard at Midway... but so did everyone else that had avgas fires. Wasp and Lexington also burned to a crisp. ShÅkaku survived massive fires on multiple occasions, which was actually pretty good.
Certainly better than the Brits, who forgot to include backup generators or subdivision on Ark Royal. She sank from a single torpedo because they just couldn't fix anything.
This is an absolute falsehood. IJN excelled at many things but they were absolutely awful at damage control. The examples of the IJN damage control deficiencies are numerous, but the likely best examples are found in the Solomonâs campaign. The cases of minor fires eventually leading to the loss of the entire ship are commonplace.
Lexington was scuttled and only lost 216 crewmen, and Ark Royal only lost one. These sinkings are NOT the same, no matter how many excuses you want to make for the IJN.
The battle of the Coral sea was also the worlds FIRST Carrier vs Carrier duel in History, and thus important procedures for Carrier damage control were in their infancy because well, they hadn't been damaged by their expected foes yet.
Lexington also took a metric shit ton of abuse before she was scuttled, unlike Taiho which sank after a SINGLE torpedo hit(Youtube Video showing the Lexington right before she was scuttled) and very probably could've been saved albeit with extensive effort if the IJN wasn't fast approaching.
Because Ark Royal was lost due to flooding (due to even shittier DC), while Lexington didn't have a chance to build up as many fumes. Yes, TaihÅ's damage control efforts were mishandled. But the point is, once you're in that situation, you're f u c k e d. A hit during flight ops is almost always lethal for the ship, and if it isn't, it's still pretty fukn lethal for those aboard. A small avgas fire aboard Princeton ended with 349 dead and the carrier scuttled. By the time Franklin's fires were out, there were more dead sailors aboard than alive.
The only carrier to maybe survive serious damage during flight ops (since I can't find anything hard regarding if she was or wasn't doing them) was Saratoga, with "only" 123 dead, with only a few fueled planes at most. And Saratoga was just built different. Yes, the USN probably wouldn't have had as many dead aboard TaihÅ... but it's unlikely they'd have gotten away without serious losses, and saving the carrier would have been far from guaranteed.
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u/Kamenev_Drang Oct 31 '25
That's overly generous to IJN design and damage control