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Popular Thug Drink posted:america got mad because it got sucker punched. losing a massive decisive battle in a straight up war would probably diminish people's will to fight in the pacific. we generally cared less about what was going on in china/se asia than the eto The Shokaku and Zuikaku weren't fleet carriers? The Japanese misplayed their hand in the Solomons campaign but they had carrier superiority for most of it. The ETO didn't really demand the use of US naval assets, and the US was already committed about 75% to the ETO in many respects except for naval assets and sailors. The idea that one massive decisive battle would decide the war in the pacific, or any modern war for that matter was one of this delusions I thought we would be over by 2015.
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Jan 22, 2015 00:13
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Panzeh posted:The Japanese had four, actually, during that time. Their problem was their excessive airgroup casualties more than not having the ships. Historically, the Pearl Harbor raid, without hitting any carriers, put Nimitz in a deep despair according to his contemporaries. Of course, the civilian response was very different, but this is getting very counterfactual. More interestingly, it's worth wondering if carriers would have become as dominant in this history without the Pearl Harbor raid to bolster carrier types in the IJN and likely without a Coral Sea/Midway until much later in the war.
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Jan 22, 2015 00:14
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computer parts posted:IIRC FDR was actually expecting an attack on the Philippines and that's why Pearl Harbor was such a surprise. They thought there might be an attack on DEI or Malaya or Hong Kong or the Philippines if the negotiations over the embargo broke down. What they didn't expect was an "all of the above and Pearl" using the negotiations as cover.
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Jan 22, 2015 00:16
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im just saying that ironically japan might have gotten the decisive battle they actually wanted if they didn't hit pearl and cause the us to hulk out. blundering across the pacific and getting jumped by the KB would have been a plausible mistake in early 1942, but after pearl there was no way the US was going to get baited into that, as shown by the US flipping the tables at midway
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Jan 22, 2015 00:16
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Modern Day Hercules posted:What? Nobody is arguing that point. The discussion is our entrance into the war, and my point is that it happened as soon as we started the embargo. Right or Wrong is another thing entirely. We've sanctioned tons of countries we haven't gone to war with. I agree it was an "aggressive" act, but I don't see how that was a gateway into firebombing Tokyo. It could just as easily have been a step to avoid having to use military force.
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Jan 22, 2015 02:00
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How much awareness of Japan did Depression-era America even have? I was under the impression the focus was on the war in Europe, and any news of Japan or reports of Nanking were met with "welp, dumb heathen Orientals killing each other, what can you do?" I can't imagine anyone expected the sanctions to provoke such a dramatic response
icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 02:07
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There were some volunteer pilots fighting for the KMT in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War and before we formally entered WWII. I think they flew planes with tigers painted on them?
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Jan 22, 2015 02:10
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Volkerball posted:We've sanctioned tons of countries we haven't gone to war with. I agree it was an "aggressive" act, but I don't see how that was a gateway into firebombing Tokyo. It could just as easily have been a step to avoid having to use military force. Nobody's arguing that Pearl Harbor had no impact. It was certainly an escalation, but the point is that it wasn't completely out of nowhere in the way that usually gets talked about. That's the only point people are contending.
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Jan 22, 2015 02:25
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IJN damage control doctrine being what it was, the USN could have just waited for Japanese sailors to drop lit cigarettes in the wrong places and won the Pacific by attrition.
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Jan 22, 2015 02:42
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Jerry Manderbilt posted:There were some volunteer pilots fighting for the KMT in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War and before we formally entered WWII. I think they flew planes with tigers painted on them?  The Flying Tigers are another example of FDR skirting American laws in order to aid China. Chennault was one of the few Allied commanders who didn't want to see China hold out until victory day and then collapse. He was also a big advocate of using fighters as interceptors, in the 1930's the Army was focusing on high altitude bombers, and a number of his strategies were used to take back the skies over Chongqing.
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Jan 22, 2015 05:11
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Jerry Manderbilt posted:There were some volunteer pilots fighting for the KMT in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War and before we formally entered WWII. I think they flew planes with tigers painted on them? Yep, I knew a guy whose grandfather did that. In general it seems like the reaction was kind of similar to today - yes, the Japanese were "the baddies" but we don't really want to go to war but some of us are crazy enough to go out and volunteer.
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Jan 22, 2015 05:12
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I think a good deal of American anger towards Japan stemmed from Japan's continual skirting of the Open Door Policy in China and their aggressive expansion within Asia and the South Pacific. The recognition of Manchukuo was a big point of contention and American leaders were well aware of the Philippines lying within Japan's theoretical sphere of security. A big current in Japanese political thought was the need to secure growing room and defensive space for Japan. Most Japan watchers were well aware of this and there wasn't much doubt about these intentions after the Mukden Incident. In the 1930's. the Chinese were gradually morphed into a positive character as well within popular culture and works like The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck humanized the Chinese for many people. The Japanese also began to gradually morph into a buck toothed, glasses wearing barbarians in popular culture as Japan became more and more expansionist. Though this documentary was from 1945, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8EZoPqzpS4, most of the footage is from newsreels released around the time they occurred. It's kind of hard not to feel that the Japanese had to be stopped after their conduct during the Second Sino-Japanese War. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 06:20 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 05:39
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Chantilly Say posted:IJN damage control doctrine being what it was, the USN could have just waited for Japanese sailors to drop lit cigarettes in the wrong places and won the Pacific by attrition. Hey now, they only lost one battleship to a spontaneous case of the booms. And a lot of ships to damage similar US ships shrugged off. (compare the Yorktown getting hit by three bombs and two torpedoes, and then spending the night unattended, and being in good enough shape they probably would've saved her had she not eaten two more torpedoes and gotten badly hit by a destroyer's supply of depth charges going off nearby, taking another night before she sunk to the Akagi getting hit and missed by one bomb and dying of it.) In fairness though, the US ships started benefiting from lessons that cost them ships to learn real early in the war. That wouldn't necessarily help in the first battle, where the US would likely make mistakes like not voiding their fuel lines. Stuff like that is the difference between the Yorktown and Hornet taking a ton of punishment to kill and the Lexington taking two bomb hits to turn into a fuel-air bomb. The biggest question is how big the losses would be before the air wings were exhausted or one side pulled back. As far as American policy went, War Plan Orange dates to a bit after 1900 if I remember right because of anti-immigration sentiment and other problems as much as imperial policy, but it wasn't seriously pursued until after WWI when American and Japanese interests started to run into each other, and it's worth remembering that the US had war plans for Canada and any country they could come up with any reason a war might happen.
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Jan 22, 2015 06:16
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Yeah, the US was really pro-Chinese in the 1920s and 1930s.. The Good Earth did a lot for that, there was a lot of American christian missionary work being done in China, and Henry Luce was a big backer of China (and Chiang) and his magazines Time and Life had a ton of pro-China coverage (and lots of material about Japan's behavior in China). The big US plan for WWII in the Pacific was to expect an invasion of the Philippines and attacks/siezures of the barrier islands (Guam, Wake, etc.). McArthur would be expected to hold the Japanese at bay for several months until the US Pacific Fleet made it to the Philippines and destroyed the IJN in one great big battle. Well, McArthur's defense of the Philippines lasted weeks, not months, and most of the US Pacific Fleet was sitting on the floor of Pearl Harbor on 12/8/1941, so less than a day into the war the US was already reaching for Plan B. Japanese thinking seemed to be: 1) we need oil to continue our war with China, 2) our traditional supplier, the US, is refusing to sell us oil, 3) the only oil around is in the Dutch East Indies, 4) point 2 shows how important it is for us to control our own oil supply, 5) attacking the DEI will be tough because the Philippines is right between Japan and the DEI and the US could interdict oil shipments pretty easily, 6) ugh, it looks like we're going to end up going to war with the US sooner or later, 7) if war with the US is inevitable, then why not start it on our terms and try to gain the greatest initial advantage possible?
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Jan 22, 2015 06:43
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Volkerball posted:We've sanctioned tons of countries we haven't gone to war with. I agree it was an "aggressive" act, but I don't see how that was a gateway into firebombing Tokyo. It could just as easily have been a step to avoid having to use military force. We put Japan in the position where they had to attack us if they wanted to continue pursuing their foreign policy goals. Obviously, they did and very conveniently for them they were actually capable of waging war against us (for a limited time). If we ever put another nation in that spot, and they had the capability to wage war against us, the outcome would be the same 9 times out of 10. This is even worse when we look at Japan because even in an alternate universe where Japan has nothing to do at all with the rest of WWII, we were still going to have conflict with them. They wanted to be the big dick navy in the pacific and we were sort of already occupying the position. We were going to fight over something sooner or later, the embargo was an attempt to make sure we weren't fighting as many ships made out of Pittsburgh steel as we might have been otherwise. The embargo didn't cause the war anymore than a pre quake tremor causes the earthquake that follows, but it was directly connected to it, and as soon as it happened we were pretty unarguably involved in that conflict.
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Jan 22, 2015 07:25
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FMguru posted:Japanese thinking seemed to be: 1) we need oil to continue our war with China, 2) our traditional supplier, the US, is refusing to sell us oil, 3) the only oil around is in the Dutch East Indies, 4) point 2 shows how important it is for us to control our own oil supply, 5) attacking the DEI will be tough because the Philippines is right between Japan and the DEI and the US could interdict oil shipments pretty easily, 6) ugh, it looks like we're going to end up going to war with the US sooner or later, 7) if war with the US is inevitable, then why not start it on our terms and try to gain the greatest initial advantage possible? Most of Japan's thinking for starting the war with China and the United States was based on a sense of desperation and a belief that if a victory wasn't achieved at that point, victory would be impossible. Japan invaded China because if they waited longer, China would have built itself up to a point of parity with Japan and a victory would have been theoretically nearly impossible by early 1939. Japan attacked the US because it believed that if victory was not won during a period from December 7, 1941 to some point in 1942, a quick war was impossible. They were very wrong on both accounts because they terribly misjudged the dedication of the Chinese and American peoples and their will to continue fighting in the face of terrible brutality. Japan was in many ways driven by statistics and the anxieties of right wing extremists in the military. Hirohito was more willing to listen to military men than politicians like Konoe who felt attacking America was a big mistake. The Japanese military operated separately from the civilian government too so it's not like the Diet could even think of stopping them. The Diet usually just went along with things because they didn't want to admit how impotent they were after two weak emperors and military officers were murdering anyone who could have opposed them. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 08:03 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 07:54
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Most of Japan's thinking for starting the war with China and the United States was based on a sense of desperation and a belief that if a victory wasn't achieved at that point, victory would be impossible. Japan invaded China because if they waited longer, China would have built itself up to a point of parity with Japan and a victory would have been theoretically nearly impossible by early 1939. Japan attacked the US because it believed that if victory was not won during a period from December 7, 1941 to some point in 1942, a quick war was impossible. They were very wrong on both accounts because they terribly misjudged the dedication of the Chinese and American peoples and their will to continue fighting in the face of terrible brutality. Hirohito did not run Japan at any point during his reign. Basically every Japanese emperor in the history of the nation was only a figurehead, but Hirohito moreso than others before him. It literally did not matter one goddamn bit who Hirohito listened to because the military ran the nation during (and slightly before) WWII. They did what they wanted to do. Hell Hirohito had to broadcast the surrender of Japan direct to the Japanese people over the radio because the military was not going to stop fighting otherwise. You might expect that if he was actually the ruler of the nation he could have just ordered them to stop without going through all the trouble. This is part of the reason why we didn't execute Hirohito after the war. He couldn't have done poo poo, the military leadership would have assassinated him and put a damned baby on the Chrysanthemum Throne if they needed to. Not like they were averse to assassination.
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Jan 22, 2015 09:25
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Actually Japan's decision-making was seriously dysfunctional so it's hard to draw a clear line of causality at all. The civilian government collapsed repeatedly and the military's long term planning was plagued by a whole host of institutional and personal failures. Japan in the 20s and 30s jumped from one crazy moonshot plan to another. They basically fell into the 10 year occupation of china by accident as a side project to help them defeat the USSR and then went to war with the US to help them defeat China.
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Jan 22, 2015 09:51
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Modern Day Hercules posted:Hirohito did not run Japan at any point during his reign. Basically every Japanese emperor in the history of the nation was only a figurehead, but Hirohito moreso than others before him. It literally did not matter one goddamn bit who Hirohito listened to because the military ran the nation during (and slightly before) WWII. They did what they wanted to do. Hell Hirohito had to broadcast the surrender of Japan direct to the Japanese people over the radio because the military was not going to stop fighting otherwise. You might expect that if he was actually the ruler of the nation he could have just ordered them to stop without going through all the trouble. This is part of the reason why we didn't execute Hirohito after the war. He couldn't have done poo poo, the military leadership would have assassinated him and put a damned baby on the Chrysanthemum Throne if they needed to. Not like they were averse to assassination. This is pretty untrue and based upon the narrative created by the American occupation forces to redeem Hirohito after the end of the war. The entire government of Japan pre-war was a "gift" from the Emperor and he could remove it any time. Hirohito had as much power as Kaiser Wilhelm did during WWI and Hirohito's carved stone stamp was needed for everything. The problem was that Hirohito's father was mentally handicapped and there were no rules or precedence for what to do when that happened. Hirohito also had no idea as to what to do because his father had no idea and the military had been the strongest force in his life. Tojo and his faction never wanted to get rid of the Emperor as well because he was a symbol of the state and they bought into the emperor myth started by Meiji. There were factions that wanted to remove the current governmental system and create a Nazi-esque regime but only a very small minority wanted to exclude the Emperor from this. The Emperor was always willing to play ball because he was most likely an idiot man child and he believed the military's promises of a quick end to the conflict. This led many conservatives and reactionaries to believe that the Emperor was one of them and should always keep his post as living god ruler. Hirohito also ended the war by decree because the Japanese people wouldn't have stopped fighting because they were told a narrative that Japan was winning the war. It's akin to Germany in WWI and the belief they had that they were winning the war despite their homeland being in turmoil. People forget that there were about a million troops in China and Southeast Asia continuing to fight the Allies and who were always on the verge of victory. Everyone was raised from birth to worship the Emperor so if the Emperor tells you to stop fighting, you stop fighting. The US allowed Hirohito to escape punishment because MacArthur believed that if the Emperor was harmed it would cause an insurrection against the American Occupation. The occupation also kept the Emperor as a figurehead when they wrote the constitution because they believed the institution would be a bulwark against communism. MacArthur was also willing to turn over control of Japan to men like Nobusiki Kishi in the name of anti-communism as well.
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Jan 22, 2015 15:56
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You're right to say Hirohito had the same amount of power as Kaiser Wilhelm in WW1 - none. As soon as the war got going Wilhelm became a largely irrelevant figure in a country run by generals, with a parliament that was already planning a post-war Germany without the monarchy. Kaiser Bill was, however, an extremely active and powerful figure in German government before the war, unlike Hirohito. Hirohito was not powerful pre or post-war except in theory. In practice he was never expected to play an active role in government, just to rubber-stamp the policy of his advisors. That is why one of the principal historical questions about Hirohito has always been 'If the belief in the Emperor-as-deity by the leading junta figures was genuine, would they have followed an order by the emperor to stop if he had made it in 1938-1941?' and not 'why did Hirohito decide to go to war with America?'.
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Jan 22, 2015 16:14
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FMguru posted:Yeah, the US was really pro-Chinese in the 1920s and 1930s.. The Good Earth did a lot for that, there was a lot of American christian missionary work being done in China, and Henry Luce was a big backer of China (and Chiang) and his magazines Time and Life had a ton of pro-China coverage (and lots of material about Japan's behavior in China). Not exactly. Japan's main goal was to become a Great Power. Being a Great Power meant colonies/satellite nations, and colonies also allowed Japan to secure resources it didn't have indigenously. Japan came late enough to the colony game that people were starting to turn against it, though, especially in the USA, and a lot of Americans and Europeans were horrendously racist against the Japanese. So this inevitably meant conflict with other powers. The Army considered China and Russia/the USSR the main priorities, the Navy the USA and UK. In addition, by the 1930s, it was becoming obvious that the USA would dominate global politics and society sooner rather than later and avoiding American domination required even more resources than just to stay on par with France and the UK. Other alternatives were not considered because the ultranationalist factions had disproportionate power compared to liberals for several reasons, chief among them being the lack of civilian control of the military and the willingness of ultranationalists to use assassinations. The creation of Manchukuo and the Marco Polo Bridge incident were created by local army commanders and rubberstamped by the General Staff and civilian governments because liberal/semiliberal politicians and officers like Fumimaro and Higashikuni feared the consequences of going against the nationalists. Once the Japanese were engaged in China, withdrawing became politically impossible, especially with the grandiose lies told to the population of Japan. Ultimately, this desire to appease the right led directly to the breakdown of relations that left war with the USA inevitable. It should also be noted that Pearl Harbor was celebrated by large parts of the Japanese public because not only was it recalling their great victories in the Russo-Japanese War, but also the actions of the government were finally matching up with the anti-colonialist rhetoric about liberating Asia from European rule. It's probably most apt in terms of analogies to think of the Second Sino-Japanese War as Japan's Vietnam. Modern Day Hercules posted:Hirohito did not run Japan at any point during his reign. Basically every Japanese emperor in the history of the nation was only a figurehead, but Hirohito moreso than others before him. It literally did not matter one goddamn bit who Hirohito listened to because the military ran the nation during (and slightly before) WWII. They did what they wanted to do. Hell Hirohito had to broadcast the surrender of Japan direct to the Japanese people over the radio because the military was not going to stop fighting otherwise. You might expect that if he was actually the ruler of the nation he could have just ordered them to stop without going through all the trouble. This is part of the reason why we didn't execute Hirohito after the war. He couldn't have done poo poo, the military leadership would have assassinated him and put a damned baby on the Chrysanthemum Throne if they needed to. Not like they were averse to assassination. If that's the case, you have to wonder why the commanders on Saipan and Okinawa obeyed his direct orders to force the civilian populations to commit suicide, against their express desires, if he was only a figurehead.
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Jan 22, 2015 16:17
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Can we talk about how lovely a general Douglas MacArthur was? You don't even have to go after his political actions and war crimes. Even from a traditional military history evaluation, he was pretty crappy, yet the History Channel keeps stroking his dick, even as recently as "The World Wars". He ran his WWII campaign thinking he didn't need to know what the intelligence was saying. He constantly did things because of "his gut" and it usually backfired. He got many of his own men killed for the stupidest reasons. And that's not even going into Korea.
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Jan 22, 2015 17:08
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Echo Chamber posted:Can we talk about how lovely a general Douglas MacArthur was? You don't even have to go after his political actions and war crimes. Even from a traditional military history evaluation, he was pretty crappy, yet the History Channel keeps stroking his dick, even as recently as "The World Wars". He ran his WWII campaign thinking he didn't need to know what the intelligence was saying. He constantly did things because of "his gut" and it usually backfired. He got many of his own men killed for the stupidest reasons. And that's not even going into Korea. MacArthur usually had the following cycle of generalship: (a) asleep at the wheel (b) keeping calm in the ensuing crisis (c) getting overconfident because things turned around (a) asleep at the wheel... The thing that made MacArthur good was that he tended not to lose his head completely when things went bad, but things often went badly because of his own negligence. I don't think an entirely useless commander could have pulled of Inchon, but Korea only got that bad because of his idiocy, and it went bad again afterwards because of his supreme overconfidence.
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Jan 22, 2015 17:17
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Disinterested posted:The thing that made MacArthur good was that he tended not to lose his head completely when things went bad, but things often went badly because of his own negligence. This makes me think Joseph Joffre.
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Jan 22, 2015 17:23
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Disinterested posted:The thing that made MacArthur good was that he tended not to lose his head completely when things went bad, but things often went badly because of his own negligence. I don't think an entirely useless commander could have pulled of Inchon, but Korea only got that bad because of his idiocy, and it went bad again afterwards because of his supreme overconfidence. One of the very interesting things about leadership is that having a bad plan is better than having no plan. MacArthur may have made baffling decisions but if memory serves he had a good cult of personality around him and was good for morale. The things that win wars aren't good battle plans but rather good logistics and good troop morale. Which, of course, are linked; if your boys in the field get all the gear they need and enough food they're more likely to actually fight. Poorly equipped, miserable, hungry troops are more likely to desert or just hid in a foxhole and hope the enemy goes away.
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Jan 22, 2015 17:26
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ToxicSlurpee posted:One of the very interesting things about leadership is that having a bad plan is better than having no plan. MacArthur may have made baffling decisions but if memory serves he had a good cult of personality around him and was good for morale. The things that win wars aren't good battle plans but rather good logistics and good troop morale. Which, of course, are linked; if your boys in the field get all the gear they need and enough food they're more likely to actually fight. Poorly equipped, miserable, hungry troops are more likely to desert or just hid in a foxhole and hope the enemy goes away. That is one of the many things that happened in Korea, mind you. Matt Ridgway saved a lot of bacon.
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Jan 22, 2015 17:32
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Echo Chamber posted:Can we talk about how lovely a general Douglas MacArthur was? You don't even have to go after his political actions and war crimes. Even from a traditional military history evaluation, he was pretty crappy, yet the History Channel keeps stroking his dick, even as recently as "The World Wars". He ran his WWII campaign thinking he didn't need to know what the intelligence was saying. He constantly did things because of "his gut" and it usually backfired. He got many of his own men killed for the stupidest reasons. And that's not even going into Korea. MacArthur had all the bad qualities of Patton and none of the good qualities. I honestly believe that he got to the position he did because he had been there long enough and did not show his true colors until he felt he was in a position where he was untouchable. Most of his actions before the war show his own opportunism and his actions after show his obsession with his personal image and legacy. His handling of the suppression of the Bonus Army was incredibly heavy handed and brutal and showed how far he was willing to go to appease the establishment for his own benefit.
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Jan 22, 2015 17:42
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Patton had good qualities?
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Jan 22, 2015 17:46
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FAUXTON posted:Patton had good qualities? He had a few though he's another general people like to jerk off to because they saw a movie about him and think he was George C. Scott playing a philosopher general that never existed.
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Jan 22, 2015 17:52
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FAUXTON posted:Patton had good qualities? He was a useful general for the US military to have in a few regards and his forces usually performed well. He would've been less than useless in a military that didn't somewhat rein him in though.
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Jan 22, 2015 17:59
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FAUXTON posted:Patton had good qualities? His over-aggressiveness and recklessness were appropriate for the sheer supremacy the US had in France but if he done the same with any other nation's army he'd go down as one of history's greatest blunderers.
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Jan 22, 2015 18:00
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Echo Chamber posted:Can we talk about how lovely a general Douglas MacArthur was? You don't even have to go after his political actions and war crimes. Even from a traditional military history evaluation, he was pretty crappy, yet the History Channel keeps stroking his dick, even as recently as "The World Wars". He ran his WWII campaign thinking he didn't need to know what the intelligence was saying. He constantly did things because of "his gut" and it usually backfired. He got many of his own men killed for the stupidest reasons. And that's not even going into Korea. My grandfather served under MacArthur, and to this day he basically believes the man was the mortal avatar of the God of War, a larger-than-life superhuman ultimate general who could have reunified the Korean peninsula and brought capitalism back to China if the evil civilian government hadn't stabbed America in the back. He believes this despite the fact that he spent the majority of the Korean war as a POW as a direct result of MacArthur's idiocy.
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Jan 22, 2015 18:07
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Any recommendations out there for a good survey history of the Pacific theater and/or Japan in WWII?
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Jan 22, 2015 18:19
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MothraAttack posted:Any recommendations out there for a good survey history of the Pacific theater and/or Japan in WWII? You should take this to the Milhist A/T thread, a lot of people know it well. Their favourite book ever is Shattered Sword, an unbelievably detailed account of the Battle of Midway.
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Jan 22, 2015 18:20
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Effectronica posted:If that's the case, you have to wonder why the commanders on Saipan and Okinawa obeyed his direct orders to force the civilian populations to commit suicide, against their express desires, if he was only a figurehead. I think it's a little of column a, a little of column b. Partly because the Emperor, for the most part, was on board with rahrah ganbarre Nippon. So there really wasn't a whole lot of testing of the relationship as far as who would follow whose lead. At the very end you had cases like a junior officer attempting to destroy the recording of the Emperor's surrender speech before it could be broadcast, but whether that reflected, say Tojo's attitude... it's unclear. One thing to keep in mind is that Japan at the end of WWII was not in the same position as Germany at the end of WWII. The Allies hadn't really touched any 'real' Japanese territory. Okinawa, even today, is kind of in the grey zone. Japan wasn't fighting to win but they were fighting to basically make it costly for the Allies to continue to push them back, in hopes of being allowed to negotiate for keeping their holdings. It wasn't totally unreasonable, Italy nearly got to keep Libya, for instance.
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Jan 22, 2015 18:24
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Shattered Sword the best book. Very informative, very readable. Limited in scope but it really gives a good understanding of carrier fights and operation. Other great ones are Kaigun (and Sunburst), which are about the Imperial Japanese Navy at the start of WWII and its planning. Naturally it starts with the creation of the IJN and goes halfway into the war until things go really off the rails. Sunburst is the naval aviation chapters that got pulled because it was getting a bit long. Dull's Battle History of the IJN is apparently quite good. For a really good readable view of the war, Tameichi Hara's Japanese Destroyer Captain is top notch autobiography and a great perspective on the war.
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Jan 22, 2015 18:29
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Effectronica posted:Historically, the Pearl Harbor raid, without hitting any carriers, put Nimitz in a deep despair according to his contemporaries. Of course, the civilian response was very different, but this is getting very counterfactual. More interestingly, it's worth wondering if carriers would have become as dominant in this history without the Pearl Harbor raid to bolster carrier types in the IJN and likely without a Coral Sea/Midway until much later in the war. Honesty, Nimitz ought to have been happy that they were caught by surprise. If the USN had sortied out of harbor at the first detection of the IJN strike force's approach, there would have been 8 battleships sunk for good in deep water instead of 4 raised from the harbor, and probably 30-40k sailors dead instead of 3k.
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Jan 22, 2015 18:47
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:Honesty, Nimitz ought to have been happy that they were caught by surprise. If the USN had sortied out of harbor at the first detection of the IJN strike force's approach, there would have been 8 battleships sunk for good in deep water instead of 4 raised from the harbor, and probably 30-40k sailors dead instead of 3k. He was. Nimitz posted:It was God's mercy that our fleet was in Pearl Harbor on December 7. If Kimmel had "had advance notice that the Japanese were coming, he most probably would have tried to intercept them. With the difference in speed between Kimmel's battleships and the faster Japanese carriers, the former could not have come within rifle range of the enemy's flattops. As a result, we would have lost many ships in deep water and also thousands more in lives."
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Jan 22, 2015 19:02
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MothraAttack posted:Any recommendations out there for a good survey history of the Pacific theater and/or Japan in WWII?
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Jan 22, 2015 19:09
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meatbag posted:He was. Haha imagine that.
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Jan 22, 2015 19:11
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