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October 1920—In 40 fascinating pages, Carleton H. Wright tells us more than we ever wanted to know about “High Explosives and Their Raw Materials’ ’ in World War I. No word-mincer, he opens by asserting that the untimely death of England’s most beloved soldier was “a most fortunate occurrence for Great Britain and her allies.’’ Had Secretary ol State tor War Lord Kitchener not gone down with HMS Hampshire in June 1916, Wright suggests, he’d have mucked up the war because frankly, he had no idea ot what makes bombs tick. Wright knows.
Germany knew, too. Any country that can lead the world in the production of steel and cuckoo clocks can combine such technologies to disturb the peace. England, who led the world in textiles, got her big bang out of fibers and dye pots. “Elementary, my dear Watson, Holmes might have said,
“all it takes is the right—or wrong—chemistry. Many of the things that hold us together (e.g., cotton, coal, soda, starch, alcohol) can blow us apart.” How to proportion these things so that one has enough to leed and clothe and shelter oneself and enough left over to blow one s neighbor to smithereens is the hard question that would become academic at Alamogordo in 1945.
Footnote: Rear Admiral Wright’s mercurial career was torpedoed off Guadalcanal in November 1942, by made-in-Japan high explosives.
October 1940—Unlike Sam Clemens, who is supposed to have said, “My life has been filled with terrible things—most of which never happened, many of the terrible things Commander Leland P. Lovette ponders in the summer of 1940 actually will come to pass. The dark and dangerous world he surveys had been foretold four years earlier, when Deutsche Volkskraft predicted: “The war of the future will . . . end in the utter destruction of the vanquished nation. . .” Equally ominous is the quote from Lieutenant General Kiokatsu Sato’s 1939 book: “Hawaii will be the most strategic point in a war between America and Japan . . . The struggle for Hawaii constitutes the first stage of a Japanese-American war.’ And, according to respected Briton Hector Bywater, the Royal Navy can no longer be counted on to help defend Britain’s “widespread and priceless interests in the Pacific.
The panacea, Lovette feels, is a two-ocean U.S. Navy terrible in its righteous wrath. And that, too, will come to pass. One can almost hear Lovette’s sigh of relief as he records that, less than a month before publication of this article, $3.8 billion worth of contracts are being let for the 200 combatants that will guarantee a soon-to-be-second-to-none Navy.
October 1960—Rear Admiral Toshiyuki Yokoi’s “Thoughts on Japan’s Naval Defeat,” published this month, could be considered a companion piece to Captain William Puleston’s “A Re-examination of Mahan’s Concept of Sea Power,” published in September 1940. To Puleston’s central question, “Did the rapid development of aviation demand a modification o! Mahan’s sea power theories?”, Yokoi seems to be saying "Yes, but most of my father’s generation didn’t think so.'
Put perhaps too simply, Japan’s naval strategy was to defeat an allied America, England, and Holland the same way Japan beat the Russians in 1904: strike first at one of their outposts, then annihilate their avenging fleet—after forcing it to come thousands of miles to engage. A specialist in naval aviation since the 1920s, and a kamikaze commander at Okinawa, the author wishes Mahan’s studies had included the second Shanghai Incident of 1937, where Type-96 bombers and Zero fighters changed everything but the Imperial Headquarters mindset.
And so, during the war, while America built 16 Ewe-r-class, 9 Independence-class, and 53 escort carriers, Japan constructed or converted a total of 15 carriers. Thus, the author says, the defeat of Japan’s navy is a monument to “obstinate, out-dated naval strategists.”
Clay Barrow
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