Posted on 12/13/2021 5:45:09 PM PST by poconopundit
I don’t doubt it. I think Yamamoto was under duress to make the decision, and wrote disparagingly about it. But he did as he was ordered. The army leaders were calling the shots. I read (somewhere, can’t find a peep about it right now) that a military plan to assassinate him was narrowly averted by a promotion. Oh, there is almost a reference to this on the wiki-wacky page. The assassination worry was in 1939, IOW a couple years before Pearl Harbor.
Glad our fliers killed his ass when they did. I don’t think it had much of an impact on the outcome, because the Japanese high command understood that they didn’t have sufficient fuel available to keep their fleet in action as much as necessary, thanks to our fighting men.
If the Midway plan had gone according to, Pearl Harbor would have been in range and would have become useless to the USN. Would have been a lot harder war, and longer, because we needed to get close enough for the Enola Gay and the Bochscar to hit their targets.
Twist? Was it like last summer? ;^)
Subtitles? I’ve found I’m much less able to put up with subtitles or furrin accents anymore. That’s my main complaint about some of the YT documentaries I might otherwise enjoy.
Hmm, I have a book on the building of the sister ship Musashi. The most amazing thing to me was the amount of trouble they had to go through to drill the wooden pads on which the hull sat in the dry dock.
Looping in the movie ping list.
I had not heard of this film, but it sounds like it’s right in the zone for a lot of us. Adding it to my watchlist.
The Yamato and her sister ship were indeed brutes but poorly constructed as the Armor was made using a inferior process which left it brittle due to contamination as post war tests proved it would shatter if hit even by 12in rounds and a 16 in round would go right though it. But the biggest and most telling weakness was Damage Control on both Battleships and overall for the entire Japanese Navy. The lack of Damage Control procedures and practices doomed both ships years before they ever sailed.
bfl
There was a debate underway among the Japanese leadership as to whether it would be smarter to let the US extend itself across the Pacific and have the fight in the vicinity of Japan or to throw the dice as Yamamoto proposed. (Interestingly, it was Yamamoto himself who foresaw the firebombing of his country by the Americans if they ever reached striking distance, and he foresaw this as early as 1940.)
The number of planes must be doubled also. If such a large fleet is organized, I will not be content to withdraw to the Inland Sea and such places and wait for an opportunity to strike out. This is even in the event that war should break out and Tokyo should be in flames by the action of the United States Air Forces. If huge fires break out in Tokyo and Tokyo is completely destroyed by fire three or four times; and if I must witness it while waiting for a strategically opportune time, I cannot remain still.
Yeah, it blew up real good.
“They mostly modernized themselves!!!”
Yes they did, but they sent thousands of young Japanese around the world to study at some of the world’s best universities.
Admiral Togo, the hero of the Battle of Tsushima in the Russo-Japanese war study nautical science and naval science in Great Britian for about six years along with eleven other naval cadets (Wikipedia: Admiral Togo).
Two reasons why we didn’t build huge battleships like our enemies did. An American built ship had to be low enough to clear the Brooklyn Bridge and thin enough to fit through the Panama Canal.
StarBalzers!
An epic anime space-battle/comedy!
Vice versa -- the Japanese were warned about the consequences of various things they were obviously planning to do, and over time the grades of useful scrap metals available from the US kept vanishing, and grades of fuel oil got cut off, from the top down. By 1942 they had the oil in the Dutch East Indies, but our subs were blowing holes in their shipping. By the end of the war, the US had built 28 aircraft carriers, 71 escort carriers, over 200 subs, and I'm doing this from memory, so, I probably screwed that up.
Parshall stated that the US economy was 5 times larger than that of Japan in December 1941, and was 8 times larger by August of 1945. In addition to their four big decks, they lost irreplaceable combat pilots (best in the world at the time) and skilled ground crews, not to mention loads of aircraft (those not shot down ditched, rather than surrender at Midway, as that was considered dishonorable). By the end of the war, the US had built a staggering 300,000 aircraft of all kinds, including (it sez here, I had to do it) nearly 100K fighters, nearly 100K bombers.
It is my understanding that Yamamoto told the Imperial Staff that attacking the United States would be a disastrous blunder because he had studied and traveled throughout the US as a junior naval officer and saw what we were capable of industrially. But they told him to plan for attack anyway and he dutifully did so.
I’m sure you know there was to be a third sister: the Shinano. Once their carrier force was wrecked and the older sisters unable to find deal opportunities to engage, the IJN decided to convert her to a fleet carrier. But one of our subs sank her before she could really work up her crew and air wings.
Any giant lizards crushing cities or puking up fire?
I don’t doubt it. I think Yamamoto was under duress to make the decision, and wrote disparagingly about it. But he did as he was ordered. The army leaders were calling the shots. I read (somewhere, can’t find a peep about it right now) that a military plan to assassinate him was narrowly averted by a promotion. Oh, there is almost a reference to this on the wiki-wacky page. The assassination worry was in 1939, IOW a couple years before Pearl Harbor.
12/06/2021 - "Misremembering Pearl Harbor" by VIctor Daavis Haonson
The Yamamoto Myth
Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbor, is often romantically portrayed as a mythical almost reluctant warrior who supposedly all along knew that he would awaken a sleeping giant by the attack. Thus, he accepted the reality that he could only run wild for six months before he was overwhelmed by American industry, technology, and righteous furor. In this historically incomplete view, the taciturn Yamamoto was a tragic hero ordered to find some impossible strategy of defeating a much larger and stronger United States.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Yamamoto himself agitated for the surprise Pearl Harbor attack. And he even threatened to resign if a skeptical General Tojo and Emperor Hirohito did not grant him a blank check to bomb the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Hawaii, a diversion of resources many in the Japanese military felt was unjustified, especially with the ongoing and increasingly expensive quagmire in China.
Thanks! Sounds great.
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