hirohito voice
My admiral told me Americans keep sinking his warships so lasked how many carriers he has and he said he just keeps seeking decisive battle to turn the tide so I said it sounds like he's just feeding warships to Americans and then his flag officer started crying.
You should have maybe realised something before you got into this war when every single wargame indicated American victory
Admiral Yamaamoto wrote:
Should hostilities once break out between Japan and the United States, it would not be enough that we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco. To make victory certain, we would have to march into Washington and dictate the terms of peace in the White House. I wonder if our politicians [who speak so lightly of a Japanese-American war] have confidence as to the final outcome and are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices.
In January 1941, Yamamoto went even further and proposed a radical revision of Japanese naval strategy. For two decades, in keeping with the doctrine of Captain Alfred T. Mahan, the Naval General Staff had planned in terms of Japanese light surface forces, submarines, and land-based air units whittling down the American fleet as it advanced across the Pacific until the Japanese Navy engaged it in a climactic Kantai Kessen ("decisive battle") in the northern Philippine Sea (between the Ryukyu Islands and the Marianas), with battleships fighting in traditional battle lines.
Correctly pointing out this plan had never worked even in Japanese war games, and painfully aware of American strategic advantages in military production capacity, Yamamoto proposed instead to seek parity with the Americans by first reducing their forces with a preventive strike, then following up with a "decisive battle" fought offensively, rather than defensively. Yamamoto hoped, but probably did not believe, that if the Americans could be dealt terrific blows early in the war, they might be willing to negotiate an end to the conflict. The Naval General Staff proved reluctant to go along, and Yamamoto was eventually driven to capitalize on his popularity in the fleet by threatening to resign to get his way. Admiral Osami Nagano and the Naval General Staff eventually caved in to this pressure, but only insofar as approving the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Nationalism is a hell of a drug to make you not listen to your own chief admiral
To be fair, the story of Imperial Japan is the story of assassinating everyone who might have had the introspection to maybe suggest you not Do That Stupid Strategic Thing for being insufficiently loyal and nationalist YEARS before it came to that
It's also fascinating reading into the background of it all, seeing how the pieces that would fit together and make that absolutely maniacal break from reality possible - even reasonable, from the right perspective.
However, it is also abjectly hilarious that the US split the Pacific Theater into Southwest Pacific, South Pacific, and Central Pacific in order that General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz would have roughly the same amount of responsibility under their belts because they were abject and total children who could not be trusted with even the slightest responsibility unless they were certain that the other wasn't getting marginally more than they were.
I'd call it: The Only Generals I Wouldn't Spit On Were Truscott, Stilwell, and Freyberg; Patton I'd Spit On Twice.