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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Snowshoe who wrote (6863)	10/22/2001 7:51:18 PM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The US fought half the war with faulty torpedo detonators. It was a classic bureacratic FUBAR by the Burea of Naval Ordnance Ha ha ha. Now did anyone really want to fix the problem? I can assure you, not the guys playing golf everyday. Maybe some guys wanting to win the war had an effect? Just my suggestion. pearly.

To: Snowshoe who wrote (6863)	10/22/2001 8:18:29 PM
From: maceng2	Respond to of 281500

Honestly, Anyone with an ounce of real common sense, I mean jeezus just look at the title... Why The Battle of Midway May Not Have Mattered. LOL, yeah right. Like... No one ever needs any balls in this world. I am sorry, only Australian/NZ words can offer true insight on these views. Real down below type of view. God bless those a/h's (my favorite buddies -g-)

To: Snowshoe who wrote (6863)	10/23/2001 12:43:38 AM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

If the U.S. had had a total disaster at Pearl Harbor, and lost every ship there, as well as all the aircraft carriers, the U.S. would still have won the war handily<< Something that the writer you quoted may believe that the sheer industrial power of the US would have eventually overwhelmed the Japanese, but there are some very important "what if" scenarios that he failed to incorporate into his analysis. One only has to recount the Battle of Coral Sea, possibly an even more important battle than Midway, and one that would not have occurred had not the US possessed those aircraft carriers. The Battle of Coral Sea was fought to repel the Japanese push towards Port Moresby in New Guinea which, had they captured it, would have provided ready land based from which to attack and eventually conquer Australia. No Japanese defeat at the Coral Sea, and Australia would not have been available as a base of operations and logistics from which the US could launch its island hopping campaign. Yes... we could have "nuked" these islands, but that would have had to wait until 1945 and 1946 until we possessed sufficient fissionable material to make enough bombs. And then our bombers would have had to face incredibly hostile opposition from some of Japan's veteran pilots and probably not even sufficient range from which to launch such strikes from the mainland. Furthermore, had Australia fallen, India would have fallen as well. That would have resulted in the defeat of China and then a German/Japanese link up between the two Axis powers in the Middle East (they were already attempting to do this with their submarine war and trying to convince the Japanese to invade Madagascar). If the Mid-East had fallen, the Soviet Union would have fallen, since Japan would have been under extreme pressure to attack Siberia (which had been stripped of soldiers in November, 1941 as Stalin gained foreknowledge of Japan's plans to attack the US). If Russia had fallen, Britain would have fallen, lacking the resources to hold out against the total power of the German army being unleashed from the Russian campaign. (No oil for British ships or planes). No... I would say that the potential repercussions of having lost all of those Pacific fleet carriers at Pearl Harbor would have set forth a series of events that might have left the US and the Americas standing alone against the combined power of both Germany and Japan. They wouldn't have been able to defeat us, and we would not be able to defeat them. Lacking forward logistical support bases, the US would have been lacked the means of successfully invading islands across 4,000 miles of ocean (Guadalcanal was a "near thing" as it was). And by the time we were able to reach the point of taking the war to them, Germany would have reached the point of actually manufacturing many of their advanced weapons systems, including jets and nuclear weapons. Hawk