Friday, February 29, 2008
pacific theater
In the Pacific theater I thought that the most interesting aspect was the use of the Aleution Islands at the battle of Midway. I never knew that Alaska was so involved in key parts of the battle. Also I found it interesting that Japan never really did plan on invading the US and only planned to work their way down to cutting off supplies to Australia. Japan also it seems to have had a great ability in estimating US naval ship ammounts where as the US failed at this and underestimated poorly.
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I also thought that it was interesting to see how well they estimated the total of US ships. I was also surprised on how much Alaska played a vital role in their plans. But did they think that basically invading a US area that we would defend ourselves?
I thought the U.S. estimation of Japanese ships was interesting as well. I am curious how having the best navy in the world they did not predict Japanese ships correctly. It is amazing that without good intelligence we still won the Battle at Midway. Pure dumb luck is a great thing.
Indeed, I highly respect Yamamoto as one of the greater admirals in history. He was able to time and time again accurately estimate the enemy fleet composition, while when first presented with the possibility of war with the US, he used the term "sleeping giant" and was unafraid to tell the Japanese High Command that he would "run wild" for the first 6 months or so, but after that, when America's industrial might came into play, nothing was certain.
Yamamoto may have been the only highly placed Japanese officer who really understood how the US worked. Unfortunately for him, his political leadership was totally unable to understand America and Americans.
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