Posted on 10/30/2014 4:11:30 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
And how many innocents did Mao slaughter “for the greater good?”
Yes. Chiang had had the “China Lobby” behind him, but Stalin, FDR, Teddy White, and the whole liberal establishment were behind Mao.
But in the end don’t sell Chaing’s incompetence short; his regime was corrupt and rotten. It didn’t take much for Mao’s much better organized and disciplined communists to run him out of China. After all that “aid” we gave him. No fan of Mao, but Chaing wasn’t going to win that fight anyway.
I think the correct number is "a s***load."
4 carriers
that is a crippling blow
True. Not that they had planes or pilots for them at that point, though.
Still, it’s better that they went to the bottom. It’s a lot harder to build carriers than to build more planes.
Nah. Ike and Bradley are getting all wee wee'd up about the "national redoubt." Besides, what could possibly go wrong?
I think I stayed at that joint. Once. The poo was served for breakfast, and it was not so refreshing.
Those carriers pretty much had empty hangar decks when they sortied. It was a sad end for proud veteran Zuikaku. But Ozawa knew he was a decoy.
The IJN has three more carriers of the Unryu class that are basically completed, but they will never sortie on a combat mission. Nor will Shinano, a converted Yamato class battleship.
It still baffles me that the Japanese had a decent carrier concept with Shokaku and Zuikaku, but didn’t bother to build more of them. They were never going to match our production of Essex class carriers, but it looks like they didn’t even try.
Wiki had some interesting comments:
By this time, Kurita had news that the Japanese "Southern Force", which was to attack Leyte Gulf from the south, had already been destroyed by Kinkaid's battleships, which were too far south to attack Kurita's forces. Admiral Kurita's "Central Force" had fewer than half its ships. With Musashi gone, Kurita had four battleships but only three cruisers remaining, and all of his ships were damaged and low on fuel. Kurita was intercepting messages that indicated Admiral Halsey had sunk the four carriers of the "Northern Force" and was racing back to Leyte with his battleships to confront the Japanese fleet and that powerful elements of 7th Fleet were approaching from out Leyte Gulf.
In December, Kurita was removed from command. In order to protect him against assassination, he was reassigned as commandant of the Imperial Japanese Navy Academy.
a brief interview with a journalist, Ito Masanori, in 1954 when he stated that he had made a mistake at Leyte by turning away and not continuing with the battle, a statement he later retracted
It was not until he was in his 80s that Kurita began to again speak of his actions at Leyte. He claimed privately to a former Naval Academy student (and biographer), Ooka Jiro, that he withdrew the fleet from the battle because he did not believe in wasting the lives of his men in a futile effort, having long since believed that the war was lost.
Take off your 20/20 glasses. Everyone (since Sept) thinks the AXIS will collapse any day.
Yea, there are those waking up to the realization that it MAY be a tough winter.
Reality won't hit the Allies until early to mid Dec that this will not be.
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