Americans Appear Unexpectedly Off Midway (Ep.4) 

Thank you for listing the ship. I respect all honorable Warriors. Respecting another helps ensure you don’t underestimate them.

@sgt.grinch3299 Sir thank you so much for your appreciation ,Kind Regards Sir

Glad you like them!

“Yet it must also be recalled that Japan was not alone in harboring ethnocentric outlooks, many of which were less poetic in nature [than the Japanese claim of mystical superiority].” Yes, foremost among them was the philosophy of Charles Darwin as expressed in his book _The Descent of Man;_ ”At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.” In an 1881 letter to W Graham, Darwin specifies the “upper civilized races” as being the Caucasians and specifically mentions as the “lower races” people of color, specifically the Turkish. If the Japanese chafed at White colonialism, so did the Americans; the Declaration of Independence states “we hold these truths to be self evidence, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unaliable rights,” Those words, stated that Kings and Queens are no more divinely entitled than the rest of us; that there is no mystical supernatural superiority inherent in anyone. And on the strength of those words America fought, and won a war for independence from the British empire, they fought an eternal war to free the black slaves and fought into world wars against the forces who denied the creator who gave these rights to all men. “Christianity makes no distinction of race or of colour: it seeks to break down all racial barriers. In this respect, the hand of Christianity is against that of Nature, for are not the races of mankind the evolutionary harvest which Nature has toiled through long ages to produce?" Arthur Keith, Evolution And Ethics, p. 72 Note that Sir Arthur Keith is critical here in his writing concerning Christianity; he felt the idea of disregarding race and skin color as “unscientific” because it ran contrary to the philosophy of evolution.

@davidsmith7372 So nice of you Sir

I was fascinated to learn about the war gaming fiasco. That was a fact that I have heard mentioned before on other channels. The more I learn, the more I think that Yamamoto was not the genius he was so often described as. What happened at Coral Sea and Midway can be blamed directly on him.

Yes, I think you are correct.

I see what you did there!

This may be too twilight zone, but I think Yamamoto was in a strange place within himself. His mind told him that doom rushed toward the combined fleet, day by day nearer as USN shook itself into dynamic expansion and bold probing. This recalls the fatalistic and resigned Admiral Villeneuve on the eve of Trafalgar, certain of his defeat. We must remember that these commanders were essentially correct in their foresight, and this is seen frequently through time.

Not true. The morale blow the IJN suffered was serious.

Likely so. Japanese anger led to a multitude of errors.

George W. Bush and millions of Americans swear they saw the first jet fly into world trade tower Ome Live on TV. They didn’t, but that’s the way they remember it. Fuchida remembers seeing a whole flight of aircraft on the deck, only minutes away from launching when the American dive bombers came down. The evidence shows that’s not what happened. But Fuchida was operated on for appendicitis the previous day, was hopped up on meds, and after the attack broke both his ankles trying to escape. Witnessing the death of four Japanese aircraft carriers, and many of his fellow pilots was certainly traumatic. I don’t know that he was lying so much as he remembered things not as they happened. He’s not so much a liar as he is an unreliable observer regarding his account.

"...a negotiated peace..." Unfortunately, nothing Japan would offer at this point in the war would be acceptable to the Allies, and nothing the Allies would demand would be stomached by the Japanese.

@@johnbox271 the Japanese destroyed Russian battleships at Port Arthur 37 years earlier in a surprise attack. The bombing of Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack; they simultaneously attacked the British and Dutch colonies/territories. A negotiated piece with a Japanese would only give them time to gather their strength in order to stage another surprise attack elsewhere. it wasn’t that the allies couldn’t trust the Japanese, but that they absolutely trusted the Japanese which strike again in similar fashion in anything other than unconditional surrender.

@@denvan3143 Pre-ww2, the US position revolved around... "the United States insisted that Japan immediately withdraw its troops from China and Indochina." Which was unacceptable to the Japanese. No mention of Korea, or Manchuria. The US after the war started would have demanded so much more. "...Japanese would only give them time to gather their strength..." Japan, inside their islands, were almost at max strength at the start of the war, it was the US that time favored.

They hoped the US would accept a pounding and then negotiate. Thers was never any chance of that but none of the junta would stick their neck out and say so. Doing so could get one assassinated.

⁠​⁠​⁠@@SeattlePioneer Japan didn’t throw everything they had into the war at the outset. When two aircraft carriers returned to Japan after the battle of the Coral Sea they were in no hurry to return them to battle; they could have put a new air crew on the one aircraft carrier and returned it to Service immediately. They were in no hurry to repair the damage on the other one, as compared to the US Navy, who repaired three months worth of damage to the USS Yorktown in three days and thus sent it to join in the battle at Midway. Beneath the veneer of civility, the Japanese government exercised medieval savagery. From 1909 to 1936, 11 of Japan's political and military leaders were assassinated: 8 Prime Ministers, 2 Generals, 1 Admiral. Anyone in Japan who spoke for peace, ended up with a bullet in their head. The ones who were left were all military or pro military; with hammer in hand, they saw everything around them as a nail. The militarized Japanese government saw a window of opportunity during the European conflict and saw the western Powers at their lowest. The problem for Japan was the western world at its lowest was still stronger than Japan at its highest. The Japanese sucker punch strategy worked until their intended victims got to their feet and punched back.

The wound received at Pearl Harbor was superficial, not severe; the USN achieved parity with the IJN in six months; all but two of the sunk battleships were raised and returned to sea in less than two years time, the number of aircraft destroyed by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor was at the height of the war less than the number of aircraft the United States would produce in one day. And the US had twice the population of Japan to draw on for combatants. The real of damage was to US military pride, and that humiliation was paid back a hundredfold in the course of the war. The lesson learned at Pearl Harbor was the price of peace is eternal vigilance, the cost of complacence is catastrophe. We forgot that lesson. On 911 I walked into a federal building for possible jury selection and shook my head at the lax security; I have been aware cutely for the previous 18 months that the US was perpetually in a state of December 6, 1941: yes, we had enemies around the world who hated us, but nothing bad Could really happen. When I was not selected as a juror and allowed return to work, two airliners had crashed into the world trade towers and two more were on their way to Washington DC. Our leaders had forgotten the lesson of Pearl Harbor.

Yes I've read this elsewhere, it's worth noting though that until war became a reality the Roosevelt administration was unable to go all out on recruiting and training pilots, building planes arms and ships at full capacity. Japan had been doing this for years by 1942.

Welcome sir

Thanks for this excellent channel.

pesky

You have a typo. The Japanese killing took place 1938 to the end of WWII.

Butt pirates like you agree.

The problem was some of those ships couldn’t move as fast as a carriers. A fleet can only travel as fast as the slowest ship in the group. But you bet they wished they’d had that extra an aircraft artillery when the American planes started coming in.

We have an excellent biography of Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy by Hiroyuki Agawa. Published by Kodansha International.

100% correct.

75% wrong. The war still had to be fought and won, not an easy task at all. 25 years later North Vietnam fought the United States to exhaustion, defeating the war aim of the United States to maintaining an independent South Vietnam. Afghanistan fought the Brits to an exhausted withdrawal, followed by doing the same thing to the USSR and the United States. The United States was not going to give up and go home, but there was a distinct element of war weariness in 1945 and the prospect of huge casualties from invading Japan was daunting to Truman. Fortunately for Truman, he had his choice of tactics, including starving the Japanese, burning down all their cities, and, the one that did the tric, use of atomic bombs. The Japanese plan of a negotiated peace with a war weary United States was wrong, but was at least plausible. Vietnam certainly proved that.

Iirc that was thoroughly thrashed in the previous episodes in the series.

I just love trashing the I adventure. Are you aware that Attu and Kiska along with Midway are now bird sanctuaries? There still is WW2 debris in the Aleutians. Here is a very short video showing Attu currently. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-bQcNSjJnuuM.htmlsi=i9fLm3Q2bueH8Mtu

It may not apply to this specific video, but many of the videos on 'WWII Tales' are narrations based on literal translations of memoirs from Japanese fighters and staff. This video is (as said in the publisher's notes)"an in-depth analysis and insights drawn from Japanese primary sources". Based on this, then it would be wrong for the narrator to add or modify the memoir to reduce thrashing Yamamato, or add more critique on the Aleutian campaign.

The commercials make the channel possible.

No, they are pure.

The “White Powers” stomped a mud hole into the Japanese nation. Arrogance ends like that too often.

Japan has a long history of barbarism in Korea, long before European or their kin arrived in the region.

And satanic Japanese war criminals

Smoke the magic, suck the smoke of the brain dead.