Quote:
Originally Posted by You Need a Thneed
I think it's clear that the Japanese thought Battleships would be the key elements in the war. They specifically targeted the American battleships at Pearl Harbour, and were fairly heavily investing in their own.
There's so many interesting battles in the war of the Pacific.
I picked up volume one of this book when we were at Pearl Harbour a year ago. A good read to understand the pacific war a little better. |
Actually, they were specifically targetting America's aircraft carriers, which were not in the harbour at the time.
That was Yamamoto's "Oh frak" moment.
If I'm not mistaken, Japan had the largest carrier fleet in the world at the time and were heavily influenced by the British carrier assault on the Italian fleet at Taranto.
It is true that Japan did have two of the largest battleships in the world as well.
Saw the first episode of Pacific last night and am still getting emotionally invested in the characters but the particular terrors of jungle warfare are already starting to come to the fore. They don't know it yet, but even those lovely streams they were floating in contain bugs that will kill or disable them.
Just walking down a jungle path, the greeness closing in on you, where anything, including a machine gun, could be hiding three feet from you and you wouldn't know it . . . . . must have been a permanent sphincter-tightening experience.
The most alarming statistics of these battles in the Pacific were the fact the Japanese, who might have numbered in the many tens of thousands on any of these islands, died virtually to the last man. America's first real experience with suicide fighters.
Cowperson