How much of a difference did battle ships and destroyers make in the
Pacific battle?? Since the carriers were out to sea when Pearl was
attacked, and looking at the day by day reports of the battles, it seems
that most damage was done by the planes from the carriers. Torpedo
bombers and such. It doesn't seem like the damaged battleships were
missed. Also, how effective were the bigger bombers in the ocean
battles. Looking at a particular photo on the Navy's history web site,
B17's were a complete miss when going after a Japanese ship.

Sawfish wrote:

Merlin Dorfman writes:



Glenn Jacobs ) wrote:
: On 22 Dec 2003 17:13:30 -0800, cave fish wrote:





: Yes. Against the prospect of instantly annihilating entire populations
: indiscrimately, I would risk more American soldiers' lives. And,
: unless the invasion was attempted we wouldn't know whether it was a
: good or bad idea.





: Invasion is almost always a bad idea when other alternatives are available.
: You fight a war to win it and part of winning it is to conserve your lives,
: and to waste as many of the enemies lives as possible. As for military
: versus civilian, the only place that the Japanese respected this was at
: Pearl Harbor, in all other cases they treated the civilians equally as the
: military.





I think this isn't really true. I think the difference was
Army vs. Navy. The Imperial Japanese Army had really been driving
the militarization and expansion, and had few officers who had ever
spent any time outside of Japan. The Navy was reluctant to
participate in aggression, having seen the Western world and
understanding that the US in particular could out-produce Japan
many times over; and in modeling itself after Britain's navy seemed
to have a more Western sense of how a war should be fought.



I don't think that you understand the psyche of the pre-war Japanese
leadership. It was an arrogant crew of elitists with the peculiar Japanese
trait of being reluctant to make a commitment because the anture of
commitment carries infinitely more moral weight there than here.

So, the Army leadership could see that the likelihood of them mopping the
floor with the British/Dutch/Americans/what-have-you was very great;
success for them was very likely. Hence no problem commiting to war; their
part looked pretty safe.

But the naval leadership could see that they were going to have no great
strategic advantage if Pearl Harbor was not a rousing success (it was
not), and hence the tendency to equivocate.