![]() This "Southern Operation" would seal off China from outside help, thus underwriting victory in Japan's frustrating four-year war against Chiang Kai-shek's feckless but tenacious Chinese army. Now was the time to plunge into the paddies and rubber plantations of French Indochina and British Malaya, and the coveted oil fields of the Dutch East Indies. When Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, in June of 1941, distracted Japan's traditional rival for hegemony in East Asia, Japanese expansionists saw a historic opportunity. The Americans seemed more concerned with the disintegrating situation in Europe than with events in the Pacific, and appeared unlikely to muster either the resources or the will to fight a two-ocean war. Hitler's conquest of France and the Netherlands in the preceding year and the Battle of Britain had left the resource-rich European colonies in Southeast Asia and the Indonesian archipelago temptingly vulnerable. The potential gains seemed especially alluring in December of 1941. It was a carefully calculated risk that held out the prospect of huge rewards. ![]() Japan would in time pay a horrific price for its moment of victory at Pearl Harbor, but the attack was hardly a gesture of suicidal folly. Future sea battles would be fought over distances once unimaginable, and by sailors who never laid eyes on an enemy ship. In a few minutes of a Hawaiian Sunday morning a few hundred Japanese pilots enormously widened the arc of naval war, and transformed its very nature. Though it would take some time to become apparent, Pearl Harbor ended the era of the dreadnoughts. battleships anchored helplessly below them. Aircraft launched from half a dozen Japanese carriers, operating thousands of miles from home, made quick work of crippling the eight aging U.S. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, dramatically heralded the new age of naval combat. By war's end these vaulting leaps in military technology had swept all the combatants, including the United States, across older moral frontiers as well. The Second World War incubated revolutionary innovations in all spheres of warfare: tanks transformed land battle strategic bombers opened new fighting frontiers in the air submarines and aircraft carriers rendered obsolete centuries of doctrine about waging war at sea. MILITARY necessity is a profligate breeder of inventions. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |