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Red Sun at War: Pearl Harbour and Japan's Pacific Gamble
Red Sun at War: Pearl Harbour and Japan's Pacific Gamble
Red Sun at War: Pearl Harbour and Japan's Pacific Gamble
Ebook54 pages37 minutes

Red Sun at War: Pearl Harbour and Japan's Pacific Gamble

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The devastating attack on Pearl Harbour, the tragic losses, extraordinary courage of the US sailors and airmen, and the fatal decisions of the Japanese are all examined through eye witness accounts and testimony. The terrible repercussions of the attack are explained in full and the story of how Pearl Harbour changed the war not just for America, but for Britain, Germany and the Soviet Union. Red Sun at War is the eagerly awaited sequel to Red Sun Rising, Japan, China and the West.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherAUK Academic
Release dateDec 7, 2015
ISBN9781781660416
Red Sun at War: Pearl Harbour and Japan's Pacific Gamble

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I don't know why the author wrote this "book"
    of some 50 pages. It might best be used on
    the senior high school level to explain the
    event and how the US became involved in
    WW 2.


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Red Sun at War - Nick Shepley

Army.

The Raid

Japan had been contemplating how it would best deal with a threat from the USA since 1920. In his memoirs, Jisaburo Ozawa, Admiral of the Japanese Combined Fleet during the war, said that the strategy had always been to control the sea lanes by occupying the Island of Guam, and to prepare for a decisive sea battle, somewhere near the Philippines, a battle that America would have to be lured into. By 1937, he wrote that the plan for Pacific domination entailed a speedy occupation of US owned Wake and Gilbert Islands in the Pacific, but he also revealed that as early as 1927, Japan’s focus had been on Pearl Harbour. Airborne attack was out of the question in the 1920s because of limitations in technology, but submarine attack was far more plausible. Ozawa wrote that the Imperial Japanese Navy intended to lie in wait of the coast of Oahu for the US fleet and launch a torpedo attack using submarines.

Planning for the attack had begun in early 1941, and the main driving force behind the entire Pacific strategy was Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who believed the US Pacific Fleet, now moved from its base in San Diego to Oahu, must be eliminated in a surprise attack.

Yamamoto left the actual execution of the plan in the hands of his subordinate Nagumo, while he stayed behind at Naval Head Quarters on the battleship Nagato, moored in Hiroshima Bay, anxiously awaiting news of the attack. Yamamoto was right to be nervous, the attack on Pearl Harbour was central to the entire Japanese South East Asian strategy, the US Pacific Fleet had to be destroyed in order to make the simultaneous invasion of Malaya, The Philippines and the Dutch East Indies possible, and the Japanese had never mounted an operation like this before. Resupply at sea, navigation with total radio silence and dive bombing and torpedo bombing of this kind had never been done before. The stakes for Japan were enormously high and unless the entire Pacific Fleet was destroyed, the consequences would be

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