The Revisionist Attitude Towards The Pacific Theater

[tater]

Originally Posted by Moeceefus

"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." - Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto

One of the few things Yamamoto (perhaps the world's most overrated admiral) ever said or did. That said, his view was not a lone voice in the IJN, or the IGHQ. In fact, it was pretty widely held. The IGHQ themselves, when getting ready for the war to start gave themselves a 10% chance of victory, with a 90% chance of (their own words): "national death."

Bottom line is that they knew that the USN building program (started before the war, and it being the US, the exact count of ships etc was simply published in the newspapers) would render the IJN impotent after 1943. They felt they had to act, since they had convinced themselves that the USN was their primary foe.