Enterprise
I liked your analysis of Yamato. Good perspective I never really thought about.
It’s a hijack but as this thread is slow moving and I think answered.
Can you provide the same analysis to Lee?
What to you feel about Patton, who I think was overall are best battlefield general?
If needed maybe a new thread could be started.
Thank You
Sorry: this should read:
What do you feel about Patton, who I think was overall our best battlefield general?
The thing was that Yamamoto and all of the other Japanese military leaders seemed to lack a real understanding of logistics. They were all too combat oriented and couldn’t understand that wars are as often determined by supply as by battle.
Japan would send troops and ships into areas where they would be unable to keep them in supply. They would do next to nothing to defend their own supply lines or to attack the American ones. They never attempted to rationalize their economy for the war.
The Americans, on the other hand, made their plans according to sound economics. They didn’t send their submarines to attack the Japanese fleet; they used them to sink supply ships so the Japanese fleet had no oil. They didn’t attack Japanese strongholds; they cut them off from their supplies and left them to starve. And the comparison in military production is mind boggling; the Americans probably could have lost every battle and still won the war based on their superiority in production.
Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
How long do you think the US entry into WWII would have been delayed by the lack of a Pearl Harbor attack?
I’ve heard this before, but if not island hopping, what would have been the strategy? Heading straight for Japan?
Opinion only: Virtually anything that occured involving American citizens or armed forces could’ve been fanned into a fire in the general populace allowing easy and popularly supported US entry into the War. We were going to be in it eventually against Germany.
Shrinking the circle of influence.
Instead, targets were… targeted… based on what strategic advantage they gave to the aggressor (in this case, the US) and not simply on erradicating any overall military presence of the enemy. The US left significant areas of the PTO relatively untouched, depending on the amazing performance of the submarine forces and the evolution of the fast carrier task force to make sure those troops and equipment had no impact on the actual targetd areas.
This calls into question, though, the wisdom of liberating the Phillipines at that stage in the war. Except that the virtually one sided outcome of the events surrounding that campaign pretty much answer our armchair second guessing.
I rather doubt that this was the case, as FDR’s speech can be easily verified.
US being the aggressor relates to the role they took on in regards to the PTO. The original aggressor, of course, was Japan. The US going on the offensive switches the roles for the sake of the previous post. Not a moral judgement, simply a choice of semantics.
just fyi, ftr, whatever…
Cool. Is the entire address to Congress?
The passage I’m remembering came from one of Edward Jablonski’s World War II books. As I said, I never found a cite to confirm, which is why I presented it as I did. Besides, it’s easy to see, even in a casual reading, that Jablonsky has an axe to grind about certain subjects.
If anyone can completely eliminate this from world of veracity, I would be obliged.
Yes, that was the whole thing. Transcription here. FDR may have slipped at a later date, but it would have been moot by then as Germany declared war on the US a few days later.
Beautiful!
Thank you very much.
The thing here, is that there’s a curious disconnect in US stategic thinking towards the end of the Pacific war. All the planners knew how badly the Japanese merchant marine was strained to keep what outposts they could supplied, and they knew that the war had been about securing resources for Japan. They even knew, that by April or May of 1945, there was almost no Japanese merchant marine left.
I cannot understand how so many people who were seeing how effective cutting off an island nation’s trade was at crippling it’s ability to project force, or even maintain a self-sufficient economy, could remain convinced that a full-scale invasion of Japan was going to be necessary.
I know that the Japanese military and, to a lesser extent the civilian population, were not precisely reacting in a sane manner. Certainly the actions at Iwo Jima and Saipan were horrifying by any standard. But by the summer of 1945 Japan was starving. There were serious shortages of food, let alone anything more advanced. (There is at least one naval planner at the Pentagon who tried to make the point that an invasion was pointless, and was told to stop telling fairy tales.)
It just seems very odd, in a theatre that was dominated by various concerted attacks on economic targets, that at the end the logical conclusion of that kind of stategy wasn’t immediately obvious.
You do realize that I didn’t mean starving as a metaphor? I meant that there were literally people dying because there was no food. And the Japanese military, which was still unable to see the big picture, insisted that it was important to maintain the nation’s fighting ability so whatever food there was went to soldiers. So the alternatives were to use the atom bomb and kill 100,000 Japanese; invade and kill 1,000,000 Japanese and Americans; or do neither and wait until martial law, starvation, food riots, mass executions, plague, civil war, and cannibalism killed off tens of millions of Japanese and the entire society collapsed.
I know that starving wasn’t a metaphor. I wasn’t sure whether you knew it or not.
I didn’t mean to imply that I felt the use of the A-Bomb was in any way unjustified. Unnecessary, perhaps; but that is a far cry from saying it is unjustified.
To give Hirohito is due, he recognized that the surrender was needed to save his nation and people. And there were enough high military types who’d agreed with that reasoning. IIRC the Chief of Staff of the Imperial Army committed seppukku AFTER the surrender announcement went out - he could have stopped it, but he let it happen.
Of course, the interesting thing is that, AIUI, the sticking block for the week after Nagasaki (and for some time thereafter) had been the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender. most of the military knew the situation was hopeless and just wanted to preserve the Emporer.
I’m sure the Japanese generals and admirals were concerned for the Emperor. But in their atual negotiations, one of the main points they kept bringing up was that Japan would not be occupied and nobody would be turned over to international tribunals. There was clearly personal self-interest involved.
Not that the military staff was the only ones who were looking out for Number One. It’s worth noting the Hirohito only decided to defy the military and end the war after the Allies announced he would not personally be punished. And that Hirohito, who would later be protrayed as an almost powerless symbol who didn’t support the war, was able to end the war by giving the command. Not that there wasn’t some resistance - some of the same officers who were claiming they were fighting only for the Emperor’s prestige attempted to kidnap Hirohito and remove him from the throne after he stopped the fighting.
The fall of the Japanese Empire was actually a common story. The rulers were proclaiming that everything they were doing was for the nation. But when things turned against them, they were prepared to sacrifice their nation rather than surrender themselves. And when things got tough, everybody was willing to sell out anyone else to save themselves.
You’re quite welcome 
I’d hesistate to comment on Lee, because I still haven’t decided yet. Certainly he wasn’t the flawless genius that, for example, Douglas Freeman makes him out to be. But unlike Yamamoto, Lee showed true genius quite frequently. There’s a number of things one can fault Lee with, I think. To fight at Antietam was a horribly bad idea, and I just don’t buy the apologists claim that Lee, “knowing” McClellan, “knew” he would not fight tooth and nail. Antietam was the best chance the Army of the Potomac had to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia until well into 1864, and it was Lee who delivered it to McClellan on a golden platter. But on the other hand, then, Antietam followed right up on Seven Days/2nd Manassas, which by all standards were brillant campaigns largely thanks to Lee’s guidance and offensive spirit.
In the same way, Lee’s clear errors at Gettysburg (not following Longstreet’s counsel, making Pickett’s Charge, never utilizing his Army to the full extend that would have been required) were preceeded by what is probably still the most daring and dazzling campaign in U.S. history, Chancellorsville. Anybody not impressed by Lee’s risk-taking and his great rapport with Jackson really needs to find me a better example of great tactics making use of every opportunity granted to defeat an enemy.
I think it goes on like that into 1864, with Lee’s tactically ingenuous position taking at the North Anna following on the heels of a terribly dangerous and large self-caused march down the front of the Army of the Potomac. And above all stands his ultimate failure as a strategist. He never developed a sense for the totality of the conflict (seeing Virginia as the primary theater to the sacrifice of others), and his costly offensive thrusts, especially again in the Antietam campaign, stood to gain little and lose much for the Confederacy.
I really have no opinion on Patton, never having studied his campaigns, so I’m loath to comment.
While I agree in theory, I think in practice, there is a real difficulty here. Take World War I: by the summer of 1917, shortages in Germany were acute. The war lasted another year and a half, almost. And none in the Allied camp were capable of giving accurate forecasts of the time it would take for Germany to collapse internally.
The same holds true with regard to Japan. While Japanese shipping had been destroyed to such an extent that by the summer of 1945, U.S. submarines frequently lacked targets but for wooden junks or fishing boats, to get an accurate idea of the time that a blockade would need to bring Japan down required a level of information on the internal Japanese situation that just wasn’t really available. It’s instructive to read the State Department’s deliberations on these points in the summer of 1945. Blockade was a sure way of defeating Japan, but it was uncertain how long it would take, and the U.S. was war-tired by the middle of 1945. A quick way to bring Japan down was needed, with invasion being the only feasible way but for the Atom Bomb.
And Japanese sources actually agree with the idea that invasion would be necessary to bring about unconditional surrender.
Thanks all for informative and interesting answers.