Dec. 7th, 2014, 73 years later.

Gawdzilla said:
I have a thread here about his attitude toward the fact that the attack came before the declaration of war. It was a Japanese tradition, so he couldn't very well claim it was a mistake.
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He seemed to be the only Japanese commander who had a realistic view of Japanese capabilities (his "run wild for six months" comments, for example). Most of the rest seemed to feel that "one touch of the iron glove" would be enough to roll up the Americans.
 
jhunter1163 said:
He seemed to be the only Japanese commander who had a realistic view of Japanese capabilities (his "run wild for six months" comments, for example). Most of the rest seemed to feel that "one touch of the iron glove" would be enough to roll up the Americans.
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He was one of the most senior people to be aware of what the US could do. But then he made the amazing miscalculation that a drubbing at Pearl would make us not want to fight. He obviously didn't go to many Cubs games. :p
 
Gawdzilla said:
We doubled the production of consumer goods during WWII while still supporting our own military needs and Lend Lease. :jaw-dropp
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I doubt if the UK managed to double the production of consumer goods, or increase production of anything except the most immediate necessaries. But things never got intolerably bad, as far as my parents informed me.
 
MG1962 said:
No I didn't know that - Here are some great shots of the model work done for the film.
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Definitely. Not to mention taking real aircraft and turning them into reasonable-looking facsimiles of the actual Japanese aircraft. The rows and rows of P-40s on runways being smashed to bits is darned impressive as well. I recall reading something about that many years ago, how a large number of full-scale fiberglass replicas of P-40s were made for the airfield attack sequences.
 
Gawdzilla said:
We doubled the production of consumer goods during WWII while still supporting our own military needs and Lend Lease. :jaw-dropp
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Well, in fairness, it helped that U.S. industry had several thousands of miles of open ocean on each side to protect it from strategic air attack. Large air raids by fleets of heavy bombers can have something of a retarding effect on industrial production.
 
Corsair 115 said:
Definitely. Not to mention taking real aircraft and turning them into reasonable-looking facsimiles of the actual Japanese aircraft. The rows and rows of P-40s on runways being smashed to bits is darned impressive as well. I recall reading something about that many years ago, how a large number of full-scale fiberglass replicas of P-40s were made for the airfield attack sequences.
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I have heard a lot of different stories about the propeller stunt - some say it was planned, some say it just sort of happened
 
dudalb said:
Yeah, Isolationism always works so well........
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Works better than Imperialism, most of the time. Is the UK "isolationist" because it is no longer world hegemon, with an ocean-commanding fleet? And a mighty Empire?

Many people are worried here at the re-establishment of a permanent military base "East of Suez" just announced. We've had plenty of that stuff in the past, and we've just completed, without any fanfare of victory, our fourth Afghan War.

I remember the Suez affair, when the USA wisely told the UK and France to be "isolationist" and get out of Egypt. That was very sound advice. So we can ask the USA to apply the same principles to its own behaviour.
 
Gawdzilla said:
The perceptive viewer will notice that there's only one P-40 crash in that movie.
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Something else that comes to mind is the sequence with the B-17 doing a brief touchdown with only one main gear extended. Nice bit of flying, that! With a real B-17 too. (In the film it cuts immediately after that to what appears to be WWII footage of a B-17 doing a one-gear crash landing.)
 
Dr. Keith said:
Does the book lay out how advertisers built on those underlying prejudices, maybe even created rather than just sustained them?
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Not really - it has been some 30 years + since I read it, but the title is a joke ad campaign suggested by a person della Femina worked with when they were on a campaign to sell one of the Japanese car brands being intro'ed in the US. It does describe campaigns, how they were developed and how they worked out.
 
jhunter1163 said:
He seemed to be the only Japanese commander who had a realistic view of Japanese capabilities (his "run wild for six months" comments, for example). Most of the rest seemed to feel that "one touch of the iron glove" would be enough to roll up the Americans.
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I've asked this before: what in Heaven's name made them think anything so evidently absurd? Not merely think it, but wager their country's wellbeing on it!

Perhaps they were influenced by the only recent example available to them of such "one touch" deterrence -- their own behaviour following the defeat at the hands of the USSR in 1939, at Khalkhin Gol. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol
 
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