"Hagiography is for myth-making; history is for lesson-learning.[1] One is the commemorative DVD showing a team's heroic march to victory, the other is the coaches' film showing the strengths and weaknesses of the coaches' and players' actual performance. Seventy-five years after the Pearl Harbor attack plunged the United States into World War II, the national recollection of that war has begun to confuse hagiography for history. And as every sports fan knows, the final score of the last game is a poor predictor of outcome of the next one. As the Pacific continues to grow in strategic importance to the United States, it is time to take our eyes off the scoreboard and attempt to learn something from the raw footage of the United States and Imperial Japan locked in the desperate and uncertain conflict of what we now know to be the fourth quarter the central Pacific campaign of 1944–1945, when the U.S. spiraled into the madness of total war and learned the tyranny of distance across the world's largest ocean.
The central Pacific offensive saw the maturation of U.S. naval and amphibious operations, enabled by all the industrial might of the home front, where the shipbuilding industry ramped up to launch eight full-size and 37 escort carriers, 630 auxiliary ships, and 37,724 landing craft in 1944 alone. The Pearl Harbor attack was a devastating blow to the pre-war battleship navy, but the survival of the carriers allowed the Navy to fight another day By May 1942, the Battle of the Coral Sea had made clear that battleships themselves were no longer the sine qua non of sea power, and by August 1945, the full enormity of the U.S. Fifth Fleet extended like a lance all the way from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo, preparing to strike the final blow.
But Operation Downfall—the planned amphibious invasion of Japan—did not occur. Instead, Col. Paul W. Tibbets, USAAF, and the crew of the Enola Gay, the gleaming silver B-29 Superfortress Tibbets had named after his mother, delivered the Little Boy uranium bomb on the city of Hiroshima, ushering in the age of atomic warfare…"
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Amicalement
Armand
goes to sea with the Terrain Mat.
