In this instance, my frame of interest stops just before Pearl Harbor, and is almost exclusively directed at the Japanese side of the equation beforehand; so Infamy is only there to provide another angle on the Japanese lurch toward war. It may ultimately prove to contain nothing directly useful, in which case it's only in the bibliography as background (much like I expect Weinberg and Wilson to be). Right now, it looks like Hotta and Rising Sun are going to provide the bulk of the secondary-source citations (the heavy lifting will be done by the one English-language primary source I was able to find, the Liaison Conference transcripts published as Japan's Decision for War).

Amusingly, that little John Keegan book—which is essentially a pocket historiography of what Keegan, not yet Sir John, considered the Current Scholarship on the entire war as of 1995—contains a sublimely backhanded dismissal, not just of Infamy but of the entirety of Pearl Harbor history written to that date, to wit:

Keegan or his editor could perhaps have troubled to spell the late Gordon W. Prange's name right, but that aside, I love it when historians beef with each other. They go at it like rappers sometimes. If you really want a (deeply nerdy historiographical) laugh, dig up the Spring 1979 issue of the journal History Workshop and read Tony Judt's "A Clown in Regal Purple", which opens with a sententious passage asserting that Something Is Wrong With Social History, even though (he acknowledged) it was the New Hotness in historianing at the time—then asks rhetorically, "What, then, is wrong?" and proceeds to lay down the following immortal dis in reply:

The rest continues in similar vein for the better part of 30 pages. He doesn't mention it in so many words, but I bet he thought they had weak rhymes, too.

--G.
¹John Keegan, The Battle for History: Re-Fighting World War II (New York: Vintage Books, 1995): 80.
²Tony Judt, "A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians," History Workshop, no. 7 (Spring 1979): 66.
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If you're already reading Rising Sun and don't actually care about Pearl itself, Infamy isn't going to have a lot new. That said, it's been awhile since I've read my Toland; I went through a big Toland phase about twelve years ago, but he isn't one of those historians I feel a need to re-read just for pleasure, unlike say, McPherson, or Halberstam.

(I goddamn love Halberstam. In fact, I should dig out my copy of War in a Time of Peace. It seems like it might be relevant to the times again, and even if it isn't it's been like five years and I really like just reading it.)

>Keegan or his editor could perhaps have troubled to spell the late
>Gordon W. Prange's name right, but that aside, I love it when
>historians beef with each other. They go at it like rappers
>sometimes.

Sayre's Law has given us all some good laughs, hasn't it?

If you really want a (deeply nerdy historiographical)
>laugh, dig up the Spring 1979 issue of the journal History
>Workshop and read Tony Judt's "A Clown in Regal Purple", which
>opens with a sententious passage asserting that Something Is Wrong
>With Social History, even though (he acknowledged) it was the New
>Hotness in historianing at the time

The "is social history real history?" fights of the sixties, seventies, and eighties produced some white-hot blood feuds that are still being reckoned with today, didn't they?

-Merc
Keep Rat

(And then crashed into a barge).

The Kancolle portrayal of Destroyers as adorably murderous school children starts to make more sense the more you read about what specific classes of ship in general got themselves into.

Killed by kicking a chest (wide keyhole).

--G.
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Well, that's the great irony of Operation Z, isn't it? Even the mission goal the Japanese thought they had accomplished, irrelevant as it turned out to be to the war overall, was largely an illusion: even two of the battleships they sank returned to service within three years (and could've been repaired faster, except that they weren't given the highest priority), and the others that were only damaged were back in harness within a few months. Even poor old Oklahoma could be raised, even if it turned out once that was accomplished that she was beyond economically salvaging. It turns out that if you don't blow it completely up in the process, sinking a ship in water that isn't as deep as the ship is tall is not necessarily that definitive an outcome.

Now, if anyone in the attack force had noticed those gigantic oil tanks just off to one side and thought to lob some ordnance that way, they could have genuinely crippled the Pacific Fleet for months or even years. But no. No, it was all battleships battleships battleships with those guys. Not that I'm complaining, mind you, but still. For an organization so toweringly preoccupied with fuel supplies in its everyday life, the IJN was peculiarly oblivious to the enemy's.

(The diligence of some Japanese airmen's attacks on USS Utah—a disarmed target ship*—also deserves an honorable mention.)

--G.
* Well, all right, she had ONE anti-aircraft gun, I guess because there was nowhere else to train people to use them? Not sure what the rationale was there.
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Damage Control doctrine/salvage/metallurgy/etc.

The bit about fuel makes me wonder, though. This is NOT the last time the Japanese would make a mistake concerning fuel during WWII that led to a disaster. (Check out the story of the Taihou sinking if you haven't already.)

Possibly. It's also true that it can be hard to tell how badly damaged a ship really is in cases where it doesn't either explode outright or completely disappear into impossibly deep water. Later in the war, the Japanese would have their own first-hand experiences with ships "sunk" in water barely deep enough to float them in the first place, but before that point they had never experienced a port attack themselves; their prior losses had taken place in high seas engagements, where any ship that sank was gone forever.

>The bit about fuel makes me wonder, though. This is NOT the last time
>the Japanese would make a mistake concerning fuel during WWII that led
>to a disaster. (Check out the story of the Taihou sinking if you
>haven't already.)

Avgas is a harsh mistress. Not for nothing was the common wisdom in the USN that the fleet carrier hull code, CV, stood for Combustible Vulnerable. (Escort carriers had it even worse, since theirs stood for Combustible Vulnerable Expendable.)

--G.
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did you mean: hangars

I think you'll find that all carriers have open flight decks. Otherwise the airplanes couldn't take off and land. :)

Snark aside, that's true, although in fairness most Japanese carriers had open hangars as well, and it didn't particularly help Kidō Butai at Midway, thanks to another quirk of Japanese carrier doctrine. Turns out it's really better to be fueling and arming the aircraft topside, not down in the hangars; not only is it easier to get rid of stuff that isn't working out, you don't have to run the elevators as much (which was a particular problem in Taihō's case).

I'm not sure why the IJN kept that procedure for as long as they did. Maybe it was a hold-over from the days when the aircraft would actually be launched from the lower deck, and the top one was only for recovery—which was kind of a cool idea, until aircraft technology left it behind. I don't think the US ever played around with that multi-level carrier idea, although the British did, briefly.

Anyway, yeah, Mistakes Were Made, both in design and operation; this is at least in part a reflection of how desperate the situation was in the IJN's carrier arm by then. (Look, for instance, at poor Shinano—converted for the least glamorous of tasks, and then not even able to do that.)

(As an aside, it's hella weird studying the Pacific War now. It's like reading about bad things happening to people you know, and it's difficult to reconcile that sentiment in re the Imperial Navy with the conduct of the Army whenever they appear. On the other hand, counterbalancing the natural tendency to regard the Japanese as the Universal Bad Guys is probably a good thing overall, scholarship-wise.)

--G.
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I wonder if the enclosed hangar idea was a holdover from British designs, since that was BASICALLY where the Japanese got the core of their naval tech from. The IJN hangars were unarmored, though, maybe because of straight up material shortfalls.

When it comes to the seminal event of the 20th century, GenX and the millenials are going to get to live through what is always an important scholarship swing; the scholarship being done by the people who lived through the events in question, and thus have both first-hand knowledge and enormous and obvious built-in biases due to same, and then everybody who had first-hand knowledge being dead and in the ground (and, thus, conveniently unable to argue with you anymore) and the scholarship being done by people who can maybe be more detached and objective, but who also are operating through the veil of decades with all the imprecision that that implies.

That's always a fun time. I'm young enough that I might live long enough to see that swing happen for the sixties as well, and won't that be interesting.

-Merc
Keep Rat

In the armed forces of Imperial Japan, as a general rule, it seems that no deed of any kind went unpunished. It was a very... uh... punishment-oriented society.

>Also, this is a terribly immature observation, but; it's sure nice of
>the publishers of A Battle History of The Imperial Japanese
>Navy to put a warning about the quality of the content of the book
>right at the top of the spine.

Indeed, and what a joy it must have been to go through school with a name like Paul S. Dull.

--G.
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Surprisingly, Takeichi Hara seemed to get off pretty lightly for the few disciplinary mistakes he mentions in the book. I was referring more to something like a karmic burden; I don't know if there can really be a spoiler warning on nonfiction material from 70+ years ago, but if you haven't read it yet then this is jumping fairly deep into the book.

During the 3rd naval battle of Guadalcanal (the same one that made the Yuudachi famous-ish) Captain Hara tested out a theory he developed on torpedo aiming, resulting in 2 US destroyers and a light cruiser killed or crippled by the salvo. His reward for this performance is to be promoted to squadron commander . . . of the worst destroyer squadron in the entire fleet. And even that is in name only, as all of the ships in the squadron have been poached to replace losses in other squadrons, save one- the Shigure, which is best described as a maintenance problem filled with discipline problems.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

In fairness to the admiralty, the entire IJN could reasonably be described as a maintenance problem by that point in the war.

--G.
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-Merc
Keep Rat

I've found this site to be an INCREDIBLE resource for getting images of maps for roleplaying game handouts

--
-Pasha
"Don't change the subject"
"Too slow, already did."

Much has been and will be written about the intense belief the IJN and its sister services had in... I've seen a lot of translations for the concept, which isn't unique to Japan, but basically in "spiritual power." A belief that goes above and beyond "the men should have good morale because it will make them more effective at their jobs" and into the realm of "all you have to do to win is want it badly enough. We want it more than the Americans do, so of course we'll win. The pure warrior spirit of a single Japanese soldier is worth entire American armies."

This of course is not true. Willpower can drive men to do remarkable things. It does not, however, grant wishes.

This is a pernicious belief in all walks of life in many cultures, often reinforced through social conditioning and cultural narratives. Tengan Toppa Gurren Laggan is a great example, as it posits a world where your fighting spirit will literally transform itself into actual real power in the real world and that's all you need to win. Intellect and analytical reasoning are not to be trusted; the only thing that matters is what you feel in your guts.

In politics, it's become known in recent years as Green Lanternism. ("The reason is Iraq was such a clusterfuck is because we just didn't try hard enough!" "The 111th Congress could have ushered in glorious socialism but it didn't. even. try.") Demonstrate willpower and you'll triumph! If you didn't triumph, that is prima facie evidence you didn't want to because if you did you would have won. QED.

-Merc
Keep Rat

That kind of thing is very dramatic; it's a great storytelling device, one with which I'm (obviously) very comfortable. However, I hope I would hesitate to base a foreign policy on it.

>In politics, it's become known in recent years as Green Lanternism.
>("The reason is Iraq was such a clusterfuck is because we just didn't
>try hard enough!"

My mother still believes this about Vietnam. But then, I think we've covered before that my mother is basically Vichy French.

--G.
which is to say a fascist, but not particularly good at it
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This searing insight puts you one step above an enormous number of previous Secretary's of both Defense and State. Probably one step above the current incoming pair as well.

>>In politics, it's become known in recent years as Green Lanternism.
>>("The reason is Iraq was such a clusterfuck is because we just didn't
>>try hard enough!"
>
>My mother still believes this about Vietnam. But then, I think we've
>covered before that my mother is basically Vichy French.

Your mother is at least not alone in that belief; the combination "we lacked will/dolchstoss" belief with regard to Vietnam has had quite a lot of currency among a whole lot of people who should really know better since before either of us were anything more than genetic potential inside our parents reproductive organs.

Generally speaking, at best those folks are simply ignorant of the context and specifics of Vietnam but have an unshakeable faith in America's ability to do anything it really sets its mind to.

At worst, they are very, very knowledgeable about Vietnam but have an action plan that essentially boils down to making a desert and calling it peace.

... you know every time you start a history thread I end up wanting to go back and read my most depressing history books again. A Bright Shining Lie is practically whispering to me from the box it is in. Thanks? I think?

(Maybe the movie version is on Netflix.)

-Merc
Keep Rat

"I did bring balance to the Force, you asshole. There's two of you and two of us now."

>... you know every time you start a history thread I end up wanting to
>go back and read my most depressing history books again. A Bright
>Shining Lie is practically whispering to me from the box it is in.
>Thanks? I think?

I was at the supermarket earlier, and in the charity book bin was a well-thumbed copy of Ghost Wars, Steve Coll's Pulitzer-winning book, which should be but is not subtitled How the CIA Fucked Everything Up—Surprise!—in Afghanistan Long Before You Had Ever Heard of the Fucking Place, and Oh Yeah, Basically Created Osama bin Laden. I... didn't buy it.

--G.
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Interestingly, to me at any rate, that metaphor actually extends itself and is still useful after said extension; not only are there Vader/Palpatine and Kenobi/Yoda, but there's a single ex-Sith and a single ex-Jedi. I don't think that's on purpose, mind you, but happy accident for these purposes.

>I was at the supermarket earlier, and in the charity book bin was a
>well-thumbed copy of Ghost Wars, Steve Coll's Pulitzer-winning
>book, which should be but is not subtitled How the CIA Fucked
>Everything Up—Surprise!—in Afghanistan Long Before You Had Ever
>Heard of the Fucking Place, and Oh Yeah, Basically Created Osama bin
>Laden. I... didn't buy it.

I've read Coll's opus, but I think of him the same way I think of Rick Perlstein. Immensely valuable writer, does important work, everyone with even a vague interest in the topic should read him and pay close attention... but the thought of reading the entire thing ever again as opposed to selected bits makes me reach for a drink.

I think this is because its stuff I'm way to close to, having lived it. In which case this is a problem that's only gonna get worse.

When I want to read a chronicle of the CIA fucking up Afghanistan that isn't so dreary (if there is such a thing) I grab Charlie Wilson's War. Great book, also a great movie. People think its a story about how the CIA successfully drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

They are wrong. What it actually is is a story about how the CIA is so fucking incompetent that a semi-corrupt Blue Dog Democrat, a shadowy array of proto-neoconservative foreign policy hawks, well-heeled religious types, and a disgruntled guy who couldn't climb the ladder because the Ivy-league assholes running the joint found him too coarse and too ethnic managed to completely subvert the CIA from within and run its Afghanistan desk as their own private fiefdom in service of their own private war.

And they ran that war better than the CIA had ever run their own private wars.

Shit was fucked up, yo.

-Merc
Keep Rat

SEE ALSO: Schindler's List; The Rape of Nanking (the latter of which was so horrible it arguably killed its author).

--G.
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Poor communications security doomed the Japanese at Midway and Yamamoto himself --- The Americans sent an entire squadron of P-38's after him when they discovered he was going to be at Bougainville Island.

He knew that Pearl Harbor was going to piss off the Americans, and Japan had a limited time to win the war. He carried out his orders anyway, even though he knew the odds were in Japan's favor.

Craig

He also thought they'd bag at least one American carrier at Pearl. The rest of the original strategy started to fall apart at exactly the point where there weren't any there. Most of his superiors didn't recognize that, though, because they were battleship men, and they knocked seven hells out of the American battleships! It's just a shame (from their perspective) that battleships were already all but strategically irrelevant by that point.

One of my chief sources for this paper is a book entitled Japan's Decision for War, which is a translated compilation of the minutes of Liaison and Imperial Conferences in late 1940 through 1941. (Liaison Conferences were meetings of key "civilian" ministers (sarcasm quotes because they were virtually all ostensibly-retired generals and admirals) and top active military personnel, which was how the Japanese government made most decisions at the time; an Imperial Conference was basically a Liaison Conference that the Emperor also attended.) I was very lucky to find this book, because it's not easy to find primary source documents concerning the Japanese side of the war that are not in Japanese.

Anyway, the point is, in these transcripts—again and again—you can see grown-up professional men believing in Santa Claus. Queried about the country's oil reserves, Prime Minister Tojo literally uses phrases like "we can get more somehow," and the others act as if that was some sort of answer.

--G.
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I just checked for that book on Amazon. It's not available on Kindle, and the only copy of it they have left is $67.50. I'd love to read it, but I just can't justify spending that kind of money on it.

Yamaguchi was... interesting. I understand that his proposed solution to the shorter ranges of Hiryu and Soryu during the Pearl Harbor attack was to abandon them once the mission was complete! Parshall and Tully have a lot to say in Shattered Sword about Yamaguchi's questionable decision making at Midway.

Someone on another group once submitted that Yamaguchi would have made a good replacement for Yamamoto had he survived Midway. The rejoinder was that the only place Yamaguchi would have made a suitable replacement for Yamamoto was in the passenger seat of a certain G4M. :)

Sounds a bit like the hawks in the Politburo from Red Storm Rising. "We only have enough oil to last 60 days of combat operations, but if we double the intensity we'll have enough to defeat the West and go capture the Middle Easy oil fields!" (or something like that)...

Knowing Clancy's penchent for research, I wouldn't be surprised if he came up with the idea from those transcripts...

Offsides

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>

Midway is a fascinating battle in which it was a two forces playing the most dangerous game of tag, and the number of things that went right for the US Navy cannot be understated.

Craig

I was just rounding up the (many, many) books used for this project to untabify them and get them ready for shelving, and I was reminded of my favorite little bit I discovered in this one. There are sections of transcript available for some of the conferences, and a moment occurred during one of them that perfectly encapsulated the reaction that even other people in the government had to Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro's fulminative foreign minister, Matsuoka Yosuke (a career diplomat so spectacularly undiplomatic that some historians have given him a large portion of the blame for the war).

Matsuoka was a man famously in love with the sound of his own voice, and occasionally argued both sides of a controversy in the same conversation just for the pleasure of demonstrating how intellectually agile he was. He never said one word when 100 would do, and often spoke so elliptically and/or tangentially that very few people could reliably understand what he was even on about.

At the May 22, 1941 Liaison Conference, while most of the people present were discussing the problem of the Dutch East Indies (the "problem" basically being that the Dutch government-in-exile in London wouldn't give them to Japan), Matsuoka not-really-responded to a question about British and American support for the Dutch position in the matter with a long tangent speculating that Britain, the US, Germany, and the USSR were about to form an alliance and turn on Japan.

(Note: The Germans were one month away from invading the Soviet Union at that point—a delayed invasion that should, as planned, have started by the time of this conference—and Matsuoka, who had just come back from a European junket that included briefings from Ribbentrop, almost certainly knew it. And at that point in time, the idea of Britain and Germany concluding an alliance to do anything was patently ludicrous to even the most casual observer, let alone the foreign minister of a major power.)

The Army Chief of Staff, General Sugiyama, pressed Matsuoka to get back on the beam, asking why diplomatic preparations for the planned operation in French Indochina hadn't been completed yet, and the following ensued:

Now, there are a couple of different ways of interpreting that, depending on the tack the translator chose to take. Taken literally, it reads like the most fantastic offhanded collective dis—Oikawa inquiring rhetorically of the room at large whether Matsuoka, who was sitting right there, was sane, and the rest of those gathered evidently having no answer for him. Alternately, since I seem to recall that Japanese doesn't involve pronouns in the English sense, the question might have been directed at Matsuoka himself (in the way that an English speaker would ask, "Are you out of your frickin' mind?"). I like the former interpretation better on a strictly cinematic level, but either way, it's pretty good—the Navy minister, having kept silent throughout the discussion, suddenly dropping the are-you-nuts-boy on the foreign minister.

(Also, by "no conclusion was reached" I assume the editor meant "about the East Indies matter," not "to Navy Minister Oikawa's question," but I prefer to imagine that it does refer to the latter. :)

As an aside, I've been listening to the Audible version of Toland's The Rising Sun (it's now past the point where it was relevant to the paper, but I kept going because it's good to pass the time in the car), and I've noticed something odd and slightly amusing about the performance. The narrator does not customarily do "voices" for the dialogue... except for General Tojo, whose lines are all rendered in a grating, nasal, vaguely prissy voice that is not as extreme as, but puts one in mind of, the vocal style of comedian Gilbert Gottfried. I don't know if the real Tojo sounded like that, or if it's just a bit of oblique editorializing on the voice actor's part, but it's weird and a bit funny just because it's so incongruous.

--G.
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--G.><-
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When I was in undergrad my teachers were just grateful if we handed in an MS Word document that was properly formatted. A lovingly laid-out PDF would have been far too much to hope for. But maybe grad school is different.

-Merc
Keep Rat

This particular seminar was something of a special case: the general theme was "Digital and Spatial History", which was fairly flexible in application to the final project, and in my particular project's case involved a) the introductory hook about the relative sizes of the aggressive powers' territorial ambitions in World War II and b) trying to include as many (relevant) maps as possible. The nature of the maps, in turn, made landscape presentation the obvious way to go, and making it a PDF at the end was just a way of cutting down on Word's redonkulous overhead for documents with graphics in them and making the whole thing a bit more stable cross-platform. At heart, it's still basically a Word document, though I did want to make it look nice.

If I had had more time, I would probably have tried dressing this one up further with InDesign, like I did for the "special edition" of my senior thesis, An Instinct for the Regrettable; but that would have been unnecessary by the standards of the seminar itself, and anyway, Instinct's conversion was something I had several weeks to fool with, since it was itself the final project for a graphic design class.

--G.
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