"Rare World War II maps reveal Japan's Pearl ..." Topic

… Harbor strategy

"WHEN GERMANY INVADED Russia in late June 1941, Japanese leaders debated whether to join their Axis ally and attack the Soviets—who had defeated Japanese troops along the northern border of Manchukuo in 1939—or proceed with plans to target European colonies in the Far East. They did not rule out invading Russia if the German advance on Moscow succeeded, but they saw more to be gained by seizing those Asian colonies and their resources, which they hoped to use to subdue China and sustain a vast empire they called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies were fairly easy targets, but the British would not yield Malaya and Burma without a fight, and their American allies would have to be dealt with as well. On July 2, Tokyo authorized "preparations for war with Great Britain and the United States."

After Japan took all of Indochina in late July and was subjected to an American oil embargo, Emperor Hirohito asked Prime Minister Hideki Tojo—a general committed to imperial expansion—to make one last effort to avert war. Talks in Washington faltered after deciphered cables from Tokyo indicated that Japan would attack if a deal was not reached by November 30. President Franklin Roosevelt declined to make concessions under the gun. On December 1, Admiral Yamamoto gave aircraft carriers the go-ahead to bomb Pearl Harbor—one of several blows delivered simultaneously in a vast Japanese offensive that expanded World War II enormously…"
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Amicalement
Armand

I'm always amused at people referring to information content as "rare" now that we have the internet. A map, book, or record could be rare back in the day, but once it's been digitized everyone can have a copy.

These maps may have been hitherto undiscovered, they may be infrequently seen, many history books may have been written without knowledge of them, they may be suppressed, they may be questionable, there are all kinds of reasons their absence might be notable, but not because they are "rare".

There's only one

Otherwise, interesting article.

At CelestiCon Frank Chadwick talked about a series of WW2 games he was designing for Victory Point Games. He had done a lot of research on the lead up to WW2 and a lot of informed speculation about how WW2 might have come about different ways. He said "In a lot of ways the WW2 we got was the least interesting of all the WW2s that could have happened."

CelestiCon had some very, very interesting seminars that are thankfully not lost to time:

celesticon.com/seminars.php

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand

Thanks for the link- great reminder of why I bought so many of Chadwick's games. Very few professional historians have his grasp of strategy and the interrelation of logistics and politics.