What my daughter was taught at Annapolis is that Nimitz got lucky. Neither
fleet knew where the other was. Planes from the US fleet discovered Yamamoto’s
carriers before the Japanese discovered the US carriers. As a result, most of
Japanese air power was wiped out. Then it was a turkey shoot.
WARNING: This is my memory speaking. No sources to cite. (That said, it reminds
me of that old military maxim about the fog of war and how strategy rarely
survives the start of battle.)
John
Sent from my iPad
On Feb 20, 2020, at 0:22, david ritchie <profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Feb 19, 2020, at 6:49 AM, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
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.
Keegan’s version of Midway has a different emphasis. He thinks it’s caused
in part by the Doolittle raid. You might enjoy that part of his book, “The
Price of Admiralty.” I started “A World At Arms” last night. Not very
engaging and his opening statments about Japan seem to discount their
economic predicament. With limited access to oil, they were in a bind. I
imagine he returns to the issue later.
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
