? 
They took it down, those chain-licking cowards.
Posted on 09/23/2019 5:08:19 AM PDT by NorseViking
The only part of Tora, Tora, Tora that was technically inaccurate:
The first fighter wave is dramatically shown flying past an enormous hillside cross at Kolekole Pass.
That cross was erected to commemorate Pearl Harbor deaths, ergo it could not have existed prior to the attack.
Almost everything else in the film is accurate.
Oh, they took down that cross a couple years back, btw.
Isn’t that nice.
If only Japan had struck north against Stalin...?
That cross would still stand today.
?
They took it down, those chain-licking cowards.
And heeeeeeere we go...
More babble about (((Rothschild))) conspiracies, and how t3h j00000z are the source of all evil in the world. (rolls eyes)
“It all basically came to this, the Japanese were building an empire and the U.S. and other Western countries had reached a point where they didn’t think the status quo should be changed.”
There are cultural aspects that have to be understood to see the entirety of the formation of an “Asian” sense of things, in Asia, in the 1st half of the 20th century.
If you were ANY Asian, in Asia before WWII what did you see happening in Asia? You saw European empires in Asia all around you, European merchant ports extracted by gun point from weak Chinese emperors, and even that font of “democracy”, America, with its own imperial plot - the Philippine Islands. And through it all westerners of every class and stripe lambasting any sense of empire building by any Asian source, as though only they were entitled to raise empires.
Neither Russia nor China were concerned that Japan would deny Korea it’s independence, only that Japan would put Korea under it’s control before they could. Korea was a sore thumb sticking too close to both Russian and Chinese interests.
Neither the British, French, Dutch or Portugese gave any thought to “independence” of their imperial holdings in Asia. Their only goal was to not let Germany or Japan have a hold there.
To most westerners, the greatest offense of the Empire of Japan in Asia was that it had been achieved by an Asian power.
It was only post WWII that the western nations tried to cover their historical pre-WWII imperial tracks in Asia, and any role they had in leading things into WWII, by finally starting to give real independence to their Asian imperial holdings.
I do not say anything here to absolve the governments of Japan for anything they did either with respect to any lands they occupied, or to their military behavior.
My only point is there is a legitimate different Asian view of Asia pre-WWII than what is generally painted in the west.
Maybe if the world had not been filled with and dominated by empires pre-WWII, that different reality may have provided an industrializing Japan a different sense of continued Japanese industrialization in Asia, on a friendly basis with neighbors who were not themselves occupied by or compliant clients of western empires.
Yes it sent chills through all Western nations because the idea that some backwards Asian power could defeat a Western power was unheard of. I think though as traditionalist as Japan was, it was far more modern than the West gave it credit for.
One thing I don’t understand is the Japanese brutality. They were even worse to the Chinese than us.
I have the book, “Rape of Nanking” absolutely horrible.
We didn’t have a torpedo that would arm in shallow water like Pearl Harbor, and naturally couldn’t imagine that there was any threat.
We had a lousy torpedo for a lot of the war. The branch of the Navy responsible for the design refused to believe all the reports coming in about their failure to perform.
At Tsushima the Russians had an aging and obsolete fleet opposing a Japanese navy that was modern, faster and better armed.
No argument there.
The Japanese, using intelligence from the Italians and Germans, copied the British design for shallow depth torpedoes and adapted it for the torpedoes used at Pearl.
The early Mark 14 torpedo was a result of the Bureau of Ordnance not doing proper test because torpedoes were expensive.
They ran too deep, the magnetic exploder could cause premature explosions, the contact exploder tended to fail to fire and the torpedoes tended to run a circular pattern back to the firing ship.
The navy had the same problems with the Mark 15 torpedoes used on destroyers.
Sinkings were nigh impossible until the problems were fixed.
I picked up some good histories of the Pacific War which agree with what you’ve posted about our torpedoes. Hornfischer’s “The Fleet At Flood Tide”, and Toll’s “Pacific Crucible” and “The Conquering Tide”. Excellent books for those who saw “Victory at Sea” but never knew where all of those battles took place.
It was arguably criminal how that Ordnance Bureau delayed correcting the serious problems with those torpedoes.
By contrast the Japanese ‘Long Lance’ was apparently a lethal weapon that reliably worked.
The Japanese and German torpedoes were very effective. The Japanese Long Lance was a ship killer even though they used high explosive material and the US used the more powerful Torpex.
The Long Lance also had a longer range and higher top speed.
The Long Lance had it’s own problems during development.
The gyroscopes tended to malfunction leading to accuracy issues. The Japanese fixed their problems long before they went to war.
After the war the navy paired the Mark 14 and the hydrogen peroxide propulsion system of the German fish to create the Mark 16 torpedo.
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