This is interesting. A marine did it two decades before Pearl Harbor.
4 thoughts on “Predicting The War In The Pacific”
Yeah, and Yamamoto predicted it would bee suicidal, right?
There’s a reason there’s fighting in Ukraine /again/. It’s one of history’s battlegrounds.
Japan expansionism plus where the resources are shows you the likely course of where they want to do their expanding. The excuse for not noticing is that you look backward at what worked and you look at e.g. coal (or wood!) instead of oil and rubber as your resources.
Reading about British ships in WWI. I’m not sure I believe it, but the author suggests there was an actual school of thought among the high command that “broadsides and boarding” would work – with ships capable of accurate fire at 5000 yards! The reasoning was supposedly that it was good enough for Nelson…
There is another historical figure who presaged a good deal of what happened in the Pacific during WWII. Homer Lea was (by his own and others’ promotions) a semi-mythical figure closely associated with Sun Yat Sen in the 1911 revolution in China. He was a Social Darwinist who feared that Anglo Saxon culture was in danger from expansionist aims of Germanic, Russian, and Japanese (Asian) cultures. His 1909 book “The Valor of Ignorance” later became required reading among MacArthur’s staff in the Philippines (I have a copy), also at the Japanese War Colleges before the start of the war. Critics have cited the “well, that’s the only real decision they could have made” argument to dismiss Lea’s originality in describing how Japan could/would invade Luzon, but…he did write it over 3 decades before it happened, and it happened pretty much exactly as he described.
Lea died young in 1912 from a stroke. His semi-racist attitudes notwithstanding, the book is worth a read.
The Ukrainian war strikes me as being something like the US Civil War, a sneak peek at future war technologies in an immature stage. Then trench warfare, now drone warfare. What really surprised me, aside from the weakness of Russia’s military, was that Turkey and Iran were significant military contributors because of their cheap, sufficiently useful drone tech.
That might also indicate potential future conflict in the Middle East between those two, possibly by proxy. I doubt they independently thought drones were a good idea.
And it doesn’t bode well for the US which has had decades of a head start on military drones.
Yeah, and Yamamoto predicted it would bee suicidal, right?
There’s a reason there’s fighting in Ukraine /again/. It’s one of history’s battlegrounds.
Japan expansionism plus where the resources are shows you the likely course of where they want to do their expanding. The excuse for not noticing is that you look backward at what worked and you look at e.g. coal (or wood!) instead of oil and rubber as your resources.
Reading about British ships in WWI. I’m not sure I believe it, but the author suggests there was an actual school of thought among the high command that “broadsides and boarding” would work – with ships capable of accurate fire at 5000 yards! The reasoning was supposedly that it was good enough for Nelson…
There is another historical figure who presaged a good deal of what happened in the Pacific during WWII. Homer Lea was (by his own and others’ promotions) a semi-mythical figure closely associated with Sun Yat Sen in the 1911 revolution in China. He was a Social Darwinist who feared that Anglo Saxon culture was in danger from expansionist aims of Germanic, Russian, and Japanese (Asian) cultures. His 1909 book “The Valor of Ignorance” later became required reading among MacArthur’s staff in the Philippines (I have a copy), also at the Japanese War Colleges before the start of the war. Critics have cited the “well, that’s the only real decision they could have made” argument to dismiss Lea’s originality in describing how Japan could/would invade Luzon, but…he did write it over 3 decades before it happened, and it happened pretty much exactly as he described.
Lea died young in 1912 from a stroke. His semi-racist attitudes notwithstanding, the book is worth a read.
The Ukrainian war strikes me as being something like the US Civil War, a sneak peek at future war technologies in an immature stage. Then trench warfare, now drone warfare. What really surprised me, aside from the weakness of Russia’s military, was that Turkey and Iran were significant military contributors because of their cheap, sufficiently useful drone tech.
That might also indicate potential future conflict in the Middle East between those two, possibly by proxy. I doubt they independently thought drones were a good idea.
And it doesn’t bode well for the US which has had decades of a head start on military drones.