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A few field guns, cleverly sited in ruins & behind hedges, had knocked out at least a dozen tanks. The infantry, bereft of tanks, had been unable to advance. It had been a stubborn & skillful defence. (Both from the west and the east) Flesquieres was surrounded with derelict tanks, like a boar at bay with dead hounds.

Few people have ever seen the spectacle of a full admiral and a full general squirming like sheepish schoolboys. Add to them an angry Emperor of Japan and you have a truly memorable scene.

So it went on 5 September, when Hirohito turned his unfanthomable dark eyes upon them about "placing war preparations first and diplomatic negations second".

"With that confidence do you say 3 months?" [About a Pacific conquest]

"Als we Indië kwijtraken is Nederland failliet!"

de opbrengsten van de koloniale export heropstarten was belangrijk voor het naoorlogs herstel. Manu militari de productiefste gebieden omvormen tot deelstaatjes van een Indonesische federatie die een meer practische economische unie met het moederland aanhielden was een idee.

De inzet van de "7 December" divisie in het laatste kwartaal van '46 leidde tot grote verdeeldheid onder de gewone Nederlandse bevolking; de Vereniging Nederland-Indonesië waarschuwde dat dit het wantrouwen aan Indonesische kant juist zou vergroten, maar ook dat er geen enkele waarborg was dat de troepen enkel voor het officieel aangegeven doel [burgerbescherming] zouden optreden [& niet als Heroveraars]

De Aziatische specerijen die de Portugezen in Lissabon aanvoerden werden al jarenlang door Nederlandse kooplieden verder verhandeld.

De combinatie na 1580 van de hegemonie van Spanje over Portugal en de Opstand ontzegde hun de toegang tot de Portugese havens & gaf impuls aan een rechtstreekse handelsroute met de specerijeneilanden.

"War is never romantic because emergencies which might be adventures come only when the soldier is stale and tired"

The Suez canal was not the ONLY means of transportation for troops & supplies from the Raj or the Antipodes, but any attack would slow the flow. If Djemals 4th Army could achieve surprise & take even a portion of the canal's length for a mere two or three days, he could sink a number of blockships.

With Habsburg power restored, Francis Joseph now ruled as advised, disregarding traditional centres of power, abolishing the provincial noble estates & relying solely on the power of his bureaucracy and army to impose his imperial will. This was to be radical absolutism without Baroque niceties, but also to be a modern form with a modernizing imperative, NEO absolutism.

The single track made by the Tanks was obliterated by a squadron of cavalry following at once, these being followed by several agricultural harrows drawn by artillery horses. Such precautions were always taken as the wood [near Neuve Église] was within easy enemy shell fire. Within the wood the Tanks under their camouflage.

The year 1848 attested not to the weakness of the Habsburg monarchy, but to its surprising tenacity. Its nationalist diversity made any coherent ideology almost impossible for the INSURGENTS, leading to vast conflicts of interests & opinions that beset relations within the monarchy,. Once the Habsburg authorities regained their equilibrium, it proved relatively easy to exploit these divisions.

DIVIDE ET IMPERA

The Counter Reformation was introduced in 1620 in its most brutal form; Czech culture disappeared. Bohemia became the main engine of Austrian Habsburg power. Federinand II urged on by his Sanish & Bavarian allies, expanded the war to the Empire. His ruthless campaign against the Palatinate rallied the Protestant forces & turned a DOMESTIC crisis into an Empire-wide war.

All things considered, with the closing of Japanese consulats in the balmy month of May, without confirmation on the in-or-out position of the Pacific Fleet on X-Day the whole idea of striking at Pearl Harbor could have passed from the realm of reality back into the shades of fantasy whence Yamamoto had recently managed to lift it.

In dispatches between Tokyo & other adresses than Washington the Japanese came out from behind their fans & showed the real face of agression.
Japan wanted the resources of SE Asia so badly it would fight any combination of powers to secure them: the bear, the lion and the eagle while still entwined in the dragon's tail.
Because the State Department had access through Magic, it had a good idea of Japans intentions.

"Any marked advance by the US Navy would be more likely to deter Japan from going to war than the maintenance of the present very large fleet at Hawaii"
A remarkable British opinion: the Japanese navy danced to no tune of Hitler's & its government was infinitely less concerned about serving German interests than the United States was about bolstering Britain.

"The net effect was to reduce Naval Intelligence to a collecting and distributing clearinghouse. Even more serious, Stark's decision placed the responsibility for evaluating Japanese intentions in the hands of officers who did not know Japan, its language or its armed forces as did those in ONI"

The Pacific fleet had only 11 tankers, 4 capable of fueling at sea. To get an idea of the needs: "a single destroyer at full speed went dry in 30-40h"
[ how many carrier group hours can a tanker ship?].

Every teaspoon of oil had to be shipped across 2.000 miles, stored in plain sight above ground. The possibility of a tank catching fire accidentally or by enemy action was a recurring Navy nightmare.

Here was the bedrock of American naval policy at the time. No illusions about the Japanese tiger, but let's not poke him into action while Hitlers killer sharks infest the Atlantic. Keep Britain above water -that was the prime objective.

On the other hand, all things considered, the view from a mountain was much more important than the establishment of an efficient radar screen for the detection of an approach.

The fixation with sabotage was understandable. The Islands population included some 160.000 Japanese of which about 37.000 were foreign-born. The US had seen to what good use Hitler had put the discontent & aspirations of minorities. Below the surface the Japanese on Hawaii presented an entirely different picture from the European minorities, but Marshall & [garisson commander] Short were soldiers, not sociologists.

20.02.42 - With Bali & its Denpesar airfield lost, Japanese air superiority over Java was ironclad, the Allied fleet among the Dutch Indies as vulnerable as any reinforcements which Britain might conjure up in the Indian ocean, if such a possibility was even worth contemplating after the fall of their Singapore.

Foward-facing eyes with depth perception or big brains & a high IQ were not necessary to launch primates into the trees shortly after the Dinosaur Apocalypse, nor to start eating fruits, but a arboreal habitat & fruit-rich diets may have been prequisites for building a larger brain, by providing high-calorie meals inaccessible to most other mammals.

Japan advance into the Southern Resources Area has on morecthan one occasion been likened to an octopus, grabbing so many targets at once. But octopi are rarely so vicious, so malevolent, so vicious [the fish in the bottle would disagree] Japan it seemed could be everywhere at once while the Allies were seemingly nowhere.

Thus the Americans took 38 months to undo what it had taken the Japanese only 180 days to do by way of conquest.

An Allied advance through New Guinea, the Philippines & Formosa, the Navy argued in 1943, would be exposed to constant attack on its right flank [from various island chains within range of long distance bombers].

Both services couldn't agree on 1 line of attack, but they could afford two. Methodically.

"The Northern newspapers with characteristic and persistent falsehood, pretended that the Leesburg affair was nothing, a mere reconnaissance in which the Federals accomplished their object, a skirmish in which they severely punished the rebels, an affair of outposts in which they lost a few men ..[But] in the Federal Congress it was named "most humiliating", "a great national calamity"

Sources? Newspapers, notes?

Japanese air defence against dive bombers relied primarily on the manoeuvrability of the carrier and its own AA. Like the USN, the escorting cruisers believed that torpedoes presented the bigger threats; the instinct was to disperse formation & concentrate on low-angle targets such as torpedo bombers.

"But the strongest argument against detaching Crace's squadron of 6 cruisers & destroyers to watch the "entrance" to the Coral Sea (Jomard Passage, near the eastern tip of New Guinea) was the side effect of weakening the carriers YORKTOWN and LEXINGTON escorts' AA volume by a third."

Having approached to within 60/70 nautical miles of eachother the night of 6-7 May, the two carrier forces had been steaming away from eachother on nearly perpendicular courses since then; WNW vs due north... within the eye of the band of storms, whose edges reduced scouting planes' visibility.

Nimitz had just 4 carriers to combat what was believed to be more than twice that number of flattops. In reality, the Japanese had only 6 full size fleet carriers, 3 light carriers & an escort carrier (the controversial Shoho) which deployed fewer aircraft per flight deck & handled them less efficiently than the US. This went part way towards evening the balance ... but this closer examination contains hindsight.

But... 20th century fleets had less interchangeable components, while radio and airplanes took away the element of surprise.

By Postponing the new codebook until late May, IJN gave US codebreaking a crucial window for the duration of the Coral Sea campaign.

Port Moresby, New Guinea, was clearly next somewhere in April as "operation MO".

The roots of the Japanese penchant for complex plans with split forces can be found in samurai battles, fought on land between horsemen with swords. A strategy based on sending out small groups with instructions to reassemble at a distant point in time & space had power to enhance the chances of succes, while the loss of one or even several of these small & interchangeable groups would be unlikely to doom the plan.

AGREE CURRENT PRACTICE OF USING A SINGLE CARRIER IN AN IMPORTANT OFFENSIVE TASK WITHOUT SUITABLE COVERAGE BY SHORE BASED AIRCRAFT SHOULD BE AVOIDED

Here we see the difference with IJN practice of deploying battle groups centered on two carriers ...