On Feb 18, 2020, at 12:43 PM, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I’m about 10% through Weinberg’s A World At Arms. He discusses, as everyone
seems to, how leaders in Germany and Japan underestimated the military
potential of America.
David wrote:
Keegan is clear that Yamamoto, having spent time in the U.S. did not
underestimate that potential at all. I’ve now finished “The Price of
Admiralty,” which title apparently comes from Kipling, “the price of admiralty
[domination of the seas] is blood.”
Lawrence responded:
Yes, I had read that same thing, but that statement seems to apply to America’s
industrial capability. In a long war American industrial capability would
overwhelm that of the Japanese. But Yamamoto had a low opinion of American’s
actual fighting capabilities. Yamamoto made some bad, even fatal, decisions in
that regard. I read a couple of books recently on Midway that place the
Japanese failure in that battle directly on Yamamoto’s head. He thought the
Americans unwilling to fight and that they needed to be tricked in order to do
so. He chose what he considered a good place from which to pounce. The
Americans utterly surprised him by being there before him, in much better
position, very willing to fight, and able to do a much better job of it than
the Japanese. Yamamoto and the rest of the Japanese admiralty should have
committed suicide after that battle, but instead lied about what happened at
Midway, saying it was a great victory for them, in order to keep Japanese
fighting spirits as high as possible.
In the debate about which kind of ship is the future Keegan votes for
submarines, citing the manifest vulnerabilities of a carrier group. His
accounts of several conflicts are, in my view precise, but not as enlightening
as has been the case with his analyses of land warfare. Two passages stick in
my mind:
"In 1932 U.S. carriers Saratoga and Lexington, in a pre-dawn simulated raid on
Pearl Harbor with 152 aircraft, caught the Pcaific Fleet base totally by
surprise and overwhelmed its defences.” p162. Two things I don’t get about
this: the Pacific Fleet was not moved out to Hawaii until 1941 and how can you
overwhelm defences that aren’t firing at you? War gaming rules I assume.
In May of 1918 Admiral William Sims planned large-scale American naval
expansion, “no other navy in the world…has to cover so great an area…as the
American navy…it ought, in my judgement, to be incomparably the most adequate
navy in the world.” (p. 171) An older use of “adequate.”
There was also the story of some guy in an Atlantic convoy who was rescued by
one of the escort vessels. He was rescued by the same vessel months later when
another ship was sunk in the Mediterranean. Echoes of the Unsinkable Molly
Brown.
Since I live where the current occupant of the White House proposed putting
defensive missiles, I don’t take the North Korean threat lightly. But we also
live with the threat of a subduction quake or one of the Cascades blowing its
top.
I’ll open, “World At Arms” soon.
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
