Yamamoto was one of the few Japanese of that era who found the courage to oppose war with the United States. As a younger man, he had twice been posted to America (once as an English student at Harvard, once as naval attaché in Washington), and he had made a close study of the country’s vast economic resources and industrial base. “Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas,” he would later remark, “knows that Japan lacks the national power for a naval race with America.”9 He foresaw that the Pacific War was likely to become a long, drawn-out conflict in
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