el cid again
Posts: 16922
Joined: 10/10/2005 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: el cid again On Dec 8, 1941 (US time) IJN Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto decided the historical hit and run raid was a MISTAKE. That the Kiddo Butai should have STAYED in Hawaiian waters, hunting carriers and damaged ships fleeing to the US West Coast - and cutting the line of supply for Hawaii. Once the carriers had been neutralized, and certain land facilities as well (air bases, and open to air observation major coast guns at Fort Ruger - which could prevent landing on any coast), a follow up force should have landed three divisions on Oahu. The Battle of Midway was an attempt to correct this "mistake" - just being phase one. In this sense - that the Japanese fleet commander THOUGHT they SHOULD have stayed - and also that MANY US naval officers AT THE TIME thought they SHOULD have done - it IS a reasonable option that players do so. CID. Can you supply a source document for this statement? It seems rather odd that after months of planning and gaming Yamamoto would have suddenly had this "brainstorm" the day after the attack. And as the IJA wasn't offering 3 divisions for any Hawaiian advanture (look at what they were willing to make available for Midway with six months of victories behind them..., basically a regiment), the "landing" is just a pipedream. This is not the way history is taught in the West - and you may imagine my surprise when I first read it. It was in a history of Hawaii called something wierd like "I Heard the Sea Call My Name". But it was a real history, and it cited the official Japanese history, an amazing (and almost impossibe to read) collection more than 100 volumes long which took decades to publish. Since then I have found a few more authors who have noted the basic story, including one actually naming the three divisions, in English. Probably the best brief way to become familiar with the massive materials without spending about a dozen years learning Japanese is to use University of Hawaii materials (they specialize in all Central Pacific history, as you might imagine), starting with The Pearl Harbor Papers and Hawaii Under the Rising Sun. These are scholarly - meaning you get good cites - and you then can follow up if you must in Japanese - or in archives (good luck there! we are not preserving the docs). [Commercial translation of Japanese costs $3000 a page, or $2000 if you order many pages. And it is almost never up to translating material of this age: no one understands the terms of art. The best path is to do it yourself and associate with scholars and linguists with an interest - that is everyone helps each other without charge - something you can only do if YOU bring something to the table. But such a process never ends - it only gets closer and closer to a sense of the material.] For practical purposes, we do not understand what the Battle of Midway was about - and so we completely put it in terms of its initial phase - which at least we saw attempted. The real operation was to continue for many months, with wave after wave of units, and, given what we know about the situation on Hawaii - it is only a question of which wave was defeated. While I believe in a Japanese invasion of Hawaii (planned since 1910) - and I even think it may have been better politics once upon a time (given 70% of the people were Japanese - we are supposed to be democrats - right? ) - I ONLY believe in it if they did it up front, in Dec 1941 - not in November 1942. It is very had to do it right - I once did it and won the battle BUT LOST THE WAR because I committed too much shipping! To do it right you have to be like Yamashita in Malaya - go in with less than offered - I find about half of three divisions works best - but ONLY in 1941. Not a year later.
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