Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "The Pacific War | Animated History" video.

  1.  @yo_tengo_una_boca6764  He did, but only at the beginning. I'm not sure you could really consider China to be the most important member - lots of Japanese troops were employed there, but the problem the Japanese had everywhere else in the Pacific War wasn't lack of manpower, it was lack of warships, planes, transport, and infrastructure. Having another half million soldiers stuck in the Japanese Islands because there was no way to transport them to the Marianas or Philippines and no way to feed them or supply them with ammo had they been there wouldn't have changed anything. And the Chinese military proved almost useless to the Allies because of the hopeless state of the government and the national economy at that time. Most of the country that wasn't held by Japan was in the hands of local warlords who paid little attention to directives from the central government and used troops and supplies mostly for jockeying for position against the other warlords and the communists rather than for any coordinated effort against the Japanese.
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  2.  @hayek218  Nonsense. The Chinese were not fighting for the preservation of white colonization, they were fighting to resist the genocide that Japan subjected them to wherever it gained control. And all of the other people unfortunate enough to be conscripted into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere quickly learned that however bad the Europeans were, the Japanese were infinitely worse. What Japan meant by "Asia for Asians" was really "Asia for *us*, and the rest of you ought to consider yourselves lucky if we allow you to survive as brutally treated slaves and prostitutes for our empire."
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  3. What Yamamoto failed to understand was that the very magnitude of success he achieved at Pearl Harbor would infuriate the American people so much that they would never settle for a negotiated peace with Japan. Port Moresby and Midway were turning points but even if the Japanese had won those they never had the capacity to occupy Hawaii and certainly not Australia, and between those bases and US industrial capacity an eventual US comeback was inevitable.
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  4.  @yo_tengo_una_boca6764  The vast majority of those weren't troops, they were civilians. The Japanese fascists murdered nearly as many people as the Nazis did.
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  5. @Paul G That was never more than a pipe dream. The US and UK were never going to allow Japan to take over SE Asia and Japan never had the means to beat them in a naval war. Even if not one other aspect of the Pacific War had taken place, once war with the US and UK commenced the Allied submarine campaign alone would have been enough to cripple the Japanese economy and bring any offensive operations by them to a halt. They simply lacked the resources to run their economy on their home islands and lacked the naval forces required to secure the vital resource-producing areas of SE Asia.
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  6. It wasn't a declaration of war, though - more like a list of excuses for the attack. It said nothing about commencing hostilities, it just left off with a statement that further negotiations were useless. Delivering it an hour earlier wouldn't have changed anything - which s exactly why the Japanese had originally intended to deliver it an hour earlier. One, the American commanders were already alert to the high probability that war was about to break out, two, the note didn't announce when or where Japan intended to attack, and three, and most important, American codebreakers had already decrypted the message the night before, but the prewar communications and command and control mechanisms made it difficult to send an effective alert to commanders in the Pacific.
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  7. More overall US casualties, though. The difference was that almost none of the Japanese wounded survived.
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  8. Only people who are completely ignorant about amphibious warfare could say something that foolish. A ferry ride? It takes a bit more than a ferry to mount an invasion with hundreds of thousands of troops! the only question about a Soviet occupation of any part of Japan was whether MacArthur would be nice enough to give them a ride over, and the answer to that had always been no.
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  9. 南京大虐殺 シンガポール大虐殺 マニラ虐殺 (Relying on Google Translate so hopefully those came out right.)
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  10.  @hayek218  Mostly a good summary but I would strongly dispute your second point - the Japanese were trying to negotiate a settled peace, not a surrender. They still hoped to end the war with their government intact, no occupation of the home islands, and preferably keeping Korea and some part of Manchuria. None of that would ever have been acceptable to the Allies. But what people lose sight of is everything that had happened up to that point. The decision to surrender then and there was caused by the events of August, 1945, but the war was irretrievably lost for Japan well before that. There never would have been any question of surrender if the Allies, which really means the Americans with a little help from the UK and Commonwealth, hadn't won control of the Pacific right up to Japan's doorstep, destroyed the entire combat strength of the Japanese Navy, devastated Japan with repeated conventional bombing raids which Japan had no effective means to oppose, and cut Japan off completely from its vital overseas resources. Those were the real reasons for the surrender. Everything after Okinawa was just a question of how long the killing would have to go on before Japan admitted the utter and complete defeat it had already suffered.
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  11. They were a lot more worried about Germany's bomb program than Japan's. Japan concluded very early on that it did not have the resources to seriously pursue atomic weapons. Really no one but the US did (the UK had the scientists - who became very important to the Manhattan Project - but not the industrial resources to actually make bombs). Ironically, the US and UK almost certainly wouldn't have been able to develop the A-bomb without the help of Jewish scientists who fled Europe because of the Nazis.
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  12. @Sal Widdi That's all true but the fact remains that the Chinese government was never able to mount much of a threat to Japan and the war there, despite the numbers of troops involved and the number of people killed, was largely irrelevant to the outcome of the Pacific War. Nothing that happened in China had any effect on the American ability to advance across the Pacific and bomb Japan into submission or cut off its resources with submarines, and that's what led to Japan's defeat.
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  13.  Billy  That is pure nonsense. The US came in very early in the campaign - there were as many US as Australian troops at Buna and Gona - and the campaign continued for almost two more years with far more US than Australian troops involved. The mopping up was left to the Australians not because the US troops refused to fight, but because they were going on to invade the Philippines. Maybe if you'd actually read a history book you would know something about this.
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  14. Largely irrelevant to the outcome, although they did affect the Japanese decision to surrender when they did. But the war was long since lost by that time, it was just a matter of convincing the Japanese leaders that there was no point in continuing to resist. Very significant to the postwar world, though.
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  15.  @Wayne.J  That's nonsense. The Soviets had no possible means of invading Japan and the Japanese knew this. There was no Soviet navy in the Pacific. The only possible Soviet occupation would have been if the Americans and British had invaded and conquered the home islands and then invited the Soviets to come in and occupy part of them (which, in the event, Truman, Churchill, and MacArthur refused to do). The bombers flattening Japanese cities every night were American, not Soviet; the ships and submarines cutting Japan off from vital resources were American and British, not Soviet. The Soviet contribution to the Allied victory over Japan was negligible. They jumped in after the fighting was almost over so they could get a share of the spoils, like Mussolini did with France in 1940. It was depressing news to the Japanese but it was only the last in a 3-year series of disasters.
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  16.  @kazudv1071  Japan's pretenses about liberating Asia were never anything but lies, they just wanted to replace European colonial rule with Japanese colonial rule. They considered themselves a separate and superior race from anyone else just like the Nazis did, and were every bit as racist as the Europeans and much more brutal.
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  17. True, but as the much greater destruction at Hiroshima showed, the damage and loss of life is not necessarily directly proportional to the yield of the warhead.
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  18.  @pbeccas  Those forces were irrelevant to the outcome. Japan had no means to ship them to distant islands in the Pacific or to feed and supply them once they were there. Once the Americans, with some help from the British, Australians, and New Zealanders, were able to bomb Japan at will and sever their sea link to the vital southern resource area, the war was effectively lost for Japan. The most they could have accomplished was to drag the killing out longer because there were too many to make an Allied amphibious invasion of Japan practical.
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  19. MacArthur didn't order anyone to surrender, he had left by then, ordered by Roosevelt to go to Australia. General Wainwright ordered the surrender. The major controversy was that the Japanese only agreed to accept the surrender (as opposed to just massacring everyone after overrunning the island) if he also ordered all the other forces in the Philippines to surrender, which he did even though he had no lawful authority to do so. Corregidor is a tiny island and it was crammed with wounded and noncombatants, so resistance would have been brief and fatal to a lot of people - of course most of them ended up dying from Japanese maltreatment anyway, but Wainwright had no way to know that at the time.
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  20. The Yamato was built for the wrong war - it was an immensely powerful battleship in a war where victory or defeat at sea was determined by aircraft, and to a lesser extent by cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. Of course every other naval power also built battleships that turned out to have little purpose in modern war.
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  21. They realized that if they attacked the Dutch and British colonies there was a good chance the US would go to war, so leaving the Philippines unaccounted for was a risk they couldn't take.
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  22.  @michalbenes1996  Bullshit. The reason they surrendered was that their navy was at the bottom of the ocean and the Americans had complete control of the sea and air around Japan and were able to bomb at will and cut them off completely from all their vital resources. Arguing about whether it was the bombs or the invasion of Manchuria that were the vital last straw is silly. Putin fanboys and America-haters just can't stand for the US to be given credit for anything. As for the Soviets being close to japan, Hitler got to within a few miles of Moscow and 20-odd miles from Dover, but those last few miles proved to be a bit of a problem - and the Soviets had far less capability to conduct an amphibious invasion of Japan than the Germans had of invading England.
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  23. Yes, of the battleships only the Arizona was left in the harbor floor. The West Virginia and California, along with the ones that were only damaged, were raised, repaired, and returned to fleet duty. They originally intended to return the Oklahoma to service but by the time she could be righted and re-floated they realized her limited value wasn't worth the cost of repairs so she was resigned to the scrapyard. There was a fifth old ex-battleship that was sunk, the USS Utah, but she had been converted into a target ship with no military value, and the efforts to raise her ran into difficulties, so she was left in the water as well and AFAIK the wreck is still there today.
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  24. True, but "just wounded" usually meant more than a band-aid and some mercurichrome could fix. In military terms, many those men were out of the war for good.
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  25. So did most people at the time. ;-)
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  26. They had arrived in China, but they didn't actually see combat until after Pearl Harbor.
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  27. Roosevelt was afraid that a war with Japan would distract the US from the war he wanted it to fight against Hitler. Hitler's being stupid enough to declare war on the US after Pearl Harbor was a huge relief to Roosevelt and Churchill.
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  28. Japan had no way to supply an invasion force that far across the Pacific, and the force required would be very large. There was never any serious possibility of invading Hawaii. Midway was not only closer, but MUCH smaller and more lightly defended, so an invasion there was much more practical. In the South Pacific they had nearby bases like Truk and Rabaul from which they could supply the fighting forces - but even then supply became an endless nightmare for Japan.
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  29.  @PhillyPhanVinny  Legitimate deal? By whom? The Czechoslovakian government wasn't even invited to the conference!
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  30. It was much too far away. Also, there were few long-range search planes on Midway at that time, and the Japanese task force was very careful to go far out of its way to the north and approach Oahu from due north rather than on a direct course from the northwest.
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  31. Yeah, but hitting us in our own backyard and embarrassing the Navy by sinking the pride of the Pacific Fleet had a lot to do with the public being as infuriated as it was. Most Americans didn't care all that much about Guam, the Philippines, or Malaya.
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  32.  @Idahoguy10157  The bulk of the IJA was irrelevant to the outcome. Japan had no way to transport them to distant Pacific islands or to feed and supply them if they had. Nothing that happened in China - or for that matter in Burma and India - had any chance of affecting the Americans' ability, with some help from UK, Australian, and NZ forces, to take the island bases in the Pacific from which Japan was bombed and starved into surrender. Even the New Guinea, Solomons, and Philippines campaigns were decisive mostly because of the naval and air losses they inflicted on Japan. The war in the Pacific, unlike that in Europe, was largely decided in the air and on (and under) the sea.
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  33. Depends on how you determine "largest". Leyte Gulf was the largest in terms of tonnage of ships involved and tonnage of ships lost. It was not the largest in terms of people killed, and it's hard to say whether it was the largest in terms of number of people involved because ancient sources are highly unreliable - sometimes by as much as a factor of 100 - when it comes to number of combatants.
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  34. Because none of the combatant powers regarded bombing enemy cities as a war crime, and every one of them did it to the extent they were able. There was no UN or ICC back then, what was or was not a war crime depended largely on the the normal customs and practices of warfare, and like it or not bombing enemy civilians from the air had become normal and customary. The US just got better at it than anyone else. The same went for unrestricted submarine warfare. In WW1 it was considered illegal, in WW2 it wasn't, largely because everyone who had submarines did it. Some American leaders wanted to prosecute Doenitz for ordering unrestricted submarine warfare until Admiral Nimitz pointed out that they'd have to put him in the dock next to Doenitz - at which point those particular charges were quietly dropped. Since that time the community of nations has decided that deliberate aerial bombing of civilians as a primary target is not a lawful or legitimate practice of warfare, and most nations have stopped doing it.
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  35. By tonnage of ships involved and tonnage sunk it was absolutely the largest. In terms of numbers of men it's hard to say because ancient sources are extremely unreliable in that regard - what was almost certainly a small professional army of 10-20k Persians becomes a horde of 1,000,000+ whose arrows blot out the sun in flight because that makes really impressive propaganda and a cool movie.
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  36. Depends on how you measure it - in terms of tonnage of ships involved it was the largest - and after all, one trireme is hardly equal to one battleship in size or power. Also, of course, ancient sources have a bad habit of exaggerating numbers a hundredfold or more because it makes better propaganda, so take any claims of hundreds of thousands or millions or people being involved in ancient battles with a very large grain of salt.
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  37. So don't bomb people who are a lot better at bombing than you are. The Taliban learned the same hard lesson.
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  38. It was a huge theater of war but after Malaya and Singapore how much did it really matter to the outcome?
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  39. Yes, one thing that always seems to get left out is that while there were significant numbers of American troops, the majority by far of MacArthur's army was made up of Filipino soldiers who fought with legendary courage and tenacity against tremendous material odds. And also that the guerrilla war in the Philippines kept going the whole time between the surrender of the conventional forces at Bataan and the invasion at Leyte 2 1/2 years later.
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  40.  @Wayne.J  "The war situation had not turned to our advantage". He might also have been considering the nightly fire bombings and the economic catastrophe inflicted by the submarine war, as well as the massive defeats at Saipan, the Philippines, and Okinawa that put pretty much the entire Japanese navy at the bottom of the ocean, in evaluating that situation. Losing your whole navy tends to be bad news for island nations.
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  41.  @Wayne.J  Do you have the remotest concept of the amount of infrastructure and fleet support that was necessary for the Normandy or Leyte invasions? The Soviets had none of that. Sakhalin was virtually undefended. Hokkaido would not have been.
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  42. Depends on how you count. Jutland is larger in terms of the tonnage of ships that actually fired their guns in anger, but Leyte Gulf was bigger in terms of tonnage of ships in the fleets that were directly involved. Ancient battles were probably larger in terms of numbers of ships, but do you really count a trireme with 200 rowers as the same as a battleship or aircraft carrier? And ancient sources are massively unreliable on numbers of men and ships.
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  43. Nonsense.
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  44. Why would Japan have surrendered to the Russians? They had zero means of mounting an invasion of Japan. Their entire Pacific Fleet was less than the escort for a single US or British carrier.
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  45. At was a brief overview. There were a hundred battles he didn't mention.
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  46. Probably, although there might not have been a Pearl Harbor attack. But the US had extensive economic ties to China and was strongly opposed to Japanese aggression there or in SE Asia, so war may have been inevitable.
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  47. Once Singapore was gone, the rest, although terrible in its human toll, became largely irrelevant. Nothing that could possibly happen in Burma was going to affect whether and when B-29s were going to start flattening Japanese cities or Allied submarines were going to cut off their vital resources.
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  48. Like many others, they were fooled by the Japanese lie that it was going to be a war against colonialism. As the Thais learned the hard way, it was really a war to replace European colonial masters with even worse Japanese ones. India would have been in the same boat if Japan had managed to conquer it.
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  49. Probably most naval aviation buffs do. Although it's a shame we never got to see how the F4U matched up against the Luftwaffe's finest.
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  50. It's something all too rarely talked about. Sadly the Japanese government today would prefer to pretend none of it ever happened - but the Chinese people are unlikely to forget it!
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  51. That was the second carrier named the Hornet, the original one, which fought at Midway, was sunk in 1942.
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  52. There was no negotiation between the two bombs - the Japanese made no attempt to respond until after the Nagasaki bombing.
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  53. None of them were soldiers, they were Marines or sailors.
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  54. They did use them. The problem was getting the oil back to Japan after American and British submarines had sunk all their tankers. Their main fleet was based at Singapore for much of 1944 for that reason: it was far from where the main naval fighting was taking place but close to the fuel supply.
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  55. In order to keep their war economy going they needed the resources from what were then Dutch and British colonies in SE Asia, and they knew that if they attacked those the US would certainly declare war on them. So their choices were either attack the US, see their whole economy collapse for lack of resources, or give in to US pressure and end their war against China. They were never going to accept either of the latter two.
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  56. Are you referring to Nanjing, Singapore, or Manila? Or somewhere else the Japanese murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians?
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  57. When it comes down to it, people often find themselves choosing the possibility of a long horrible death at a later date over the certainty of a quicker but equally final one in the immediate future.
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  58. The F4F was not completely outclassed by the Zero, and did very well against the Zero once the proper tactics had been developed. The Zero was a great design based on very questionable design priorities. It was fast and maneuverable but terribly vulnerable to enemy fire, and an F4F pilot who got a Zero on his tail could just dive away and leave the Zero behind - the Zero couldn't keep up in a dive and would likely rip its wings off if it tried - while his plane was sturdy enough that it could often survive being hit by the Zero's guns and its self-sealing gas tanks greatly limited the risk of fire. By comparison if an American pilot got his guns on a Zero it would usually either disintegrate or turn into a Roman candle. Sacrificing the ability to absorb damage in return for increased speed and maneuverability turned out to be a bad decision. Also, the production Wildcat's Pratt & Whitney R-1830 engines were fuel injected, you're probably thinking of the Rolls-Royce Merlin's carburetor which caused problems in the early Spitfires. (The earliest Wildcats used Wright Cyclone engines, I'm not sure whether they had carburetors or injectors, but few of those saw combat with the US).
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  59. Not historically accurate though - there had been an air raid alert earlier that day in Hiroshima, but there was no alert for the plane dropping the A-bomb because there were only three planes in the formation and everyone assumed it was a reconnaissance flight.
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  60.  @oddballsok  My uncle was one of the guys operating the planes flying supplies into China from India over "the Hump". He said nobody gave them any credit or attention during the war either. ;-) US submarines did VERY well after the early torpedo problems were sorted out. It was by far the most successful submarine war in history, and if nothing else in the entire war after Midway had taken place the US submarine offensive alone would have made it impossible for Japan to continue the war. It's the down side to being an island nation: you're very vulnerable to naval blockade (which is why the UK was so determined to have the biggest and best navy for so long.)
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  61. True, but it was a very brief overview. There were easily a hundred other battles left out.
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  62. In terms of numbers it just wasn't nearly as big a battle. Whether it was necessary is still controversial. The generals and admirals were very wary of trying to take an island that was out of range of land-based bombers, and while Tarawa was within range, the next target up the chain, Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, was out of range until Tarawa was taken. Also, as you noted, a lot of leaders also said in retrospect that while Tarawa was horrific, the main reason the Marshalls invasions went so well was because of the lessons learned at Tarawa - so if we'd skipped Tarawa, there just would have been an equally horrific battle at Kwajalein or one of the other later island assaults.
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  63.  @takemeout5687  You can't really compare a trireme to a battleship. Also, ancient sources are extremely unreliable when it comes to numbers, they frequently tended to exaggerate enormously.
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  64.  @arashrezaee1464  He was ORDERED to leave. He wanted to stay. Roosevelt decided that losing him would have been too big a blow to civilian morale in America.
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  65. They didn't really win at the Coral Sea - in the long run we could replace a lost carrier a lot more easily than they could, and in the short run it took two heavy and one light Japanese carriers out of action for the immediate future but only one American flattop. Likewise Savo Island - they won a spectacular naval victory and then completely failed to follow up on it. Losing a few cruisers was hardly significant to the long-term war effort, but losing the entire Guadalcanal invasion force would have been a calamity. But really the Japanese leaders deluded themselves about the possibility of avoiding a long war just because they knew they couldn't possibly win one.
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