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"The [Russian] Revolution began not as a seizure of power but as a desintegration of authority, creating a void into which others gingerly stepped."

- Thank you mr. Stevenson ! This is a core phrase that will remain with me during all books on the subject.

Visibility at 20 miles for a ship was less alarming as the accumulated impact of technological advances permitted the existing escort craft to get an edge on the U-boats. Improved hydrophones & catapults to launch aimed depth charges which were carried in ever greater numbers ...were much more effective than passive countermeasures such as nets and mines, which either the tides or the enemy often cut loose.

But if the submarine campaign now seems a desperate gamble at the time, adopting the convoy system posed greater risk than it does in retrospect. Nocturnal navigation in formation & a zig-zag pattern was demanding for the average merchant pilot. Adequate protection was a matter of stretching resources: various smaller ships were nibbled away from the Grand Fleet & graciously augmented with American destroyers.

While the convoy system is rightly termed essential in the long term for shipping U.S. troops & goods, its slow piecemeal implementation insufficiently explains British survival. It succeeded only in conjunction with wider measures that the Asquith cabinet initiated & Lloyd George's followed through. ex. improved direction in congested harbours & a focus on the shortest but most dangerous North-Atlantic route.

While MacArthur envisioned himself from the start as C-in-C Pacific thrusting to liberate his beloved Philippines, his improvised defense plan for the concrete bunker island of Corridor had left much to be desired: His beach defenses were outflanked by 3 Japanese prongs while a frontal infantry attack only came after two weeks' artillery duel, scoring another victory on a shoestring for Japan.

The morning after Pearl a surprise raid also wiped out Clark Field near Manila. This left the only naval base of the U.S. Navy in the Orient, the Cavite Yard, at the mercy of aerial destruction. The pre-war defensive strategy anchored on MacArthur's precious Philippines lay officially in ruins.

Sparta's launched a surprise on Piraeus that got as close as the famous bay of Salamis, but superior Athenian naval tactics parried it like all other maritime attacks - for now. On land the plague had killed as many citizen-soldiers as a decent hoplite battle would have.
Perikles died in 428, but nobody who wanted his increasingly unpopular strategy entombed with him could formulate a workable alternative.

The U-boat crisis was largely invisible to a British public already accustoming to volatile rationing, but the naked numbers are there: food imports between January-May '17 dropped to 2.9 million ton compared to 4.9 million pre-war. It also starved the French arms industry of coal.Same for the efficiency of the convoy system: by Oktober, the round trip loss rate stood at 1.23% compared to 25% during "Black April".

In the wake of Pearl, the blame spread quickly to C-in-C Admiral H.E. Kimmel and conspiracy theories mushroomed : the former has been reinstated & the latter debunked. The raid may have been the perfect pretext to raise popular support and a Congress majority vote for a declaration of war, but F.D.R. was no Illuminatus.

Long-range submarines grew into submersible cousins of the aircraft carrier, the weapon that Yamamoto rightly identied as the future. It was stocked with lighty armed, wooden-framed but incredibly nimble Zero fighters, Val dive-bombes and Kate bombers, both of which could carry modified torpedoes to bubble forward between the surface and submerged torpedo nets.

Japan's devastatingly demonstrated fighting edge lay in 4 technologies to extend the fighting range of any encounter, just like they had done at Tsushima a generation earlier. Superbattleships with 18-inch guns hurled 1.5 ton shells over 40km. Oxygen-powered T93 torpedoes found their mark at this same distance from every cruiser and destroyer of the IJN.

In 428 the war was two years old & Perikles' cautious long-term strategy was already draining the resources of the Athenian treasure by talents per day. It couldn't even affort to support an invasion by proxy of Thebes into Macedonia (geographically linked to the Corinthian front). Much less could it react in time to stop an allied colony of her own on Sicily from defecting to Sparta, with all her naval resources.

In the face of HQ's want for a victor's peace and a hardened civilian attitude during the turnip winter weakened the Chacellor's political veto against unrestricted U-boat warfare. Ironically, cruiser rules submarine warfare could've won the war by exhaustion in combination with Russia's collapse and failed land offensives (?!)

One of the most famous shots of the movie "Pearl Harbor" is the POV descent of a fin-converted torpedo plunging into the USS Arizona's magazine, instantly killing 1,102 men out of a 1.177 crew. It does not QUITE put the explosion into perspective: all that remained of cpt. Franklin Van Valkenburgh was his Annapolis ring.
A NY organisation of Nisei immediately declared their patriotic support to FDR.

"When you see all these people in bed sheets laying out stacked up like corkwood, it takes all the glamour out of war" (Seaman William Fomby, USS Oklahoma)"
The meticulous deception of the Pear Harbor attack was a tactical failure: only 2 captal ships were irretrievably sunk. But the tragedy was tangible enough. 66 people in an airtight room of the battleship West Virginia left us chalk marks: they lasted 16 days...

Tojo replaced Konoe as Prime Minister in October '41 as the political situation seemed doomed to escalate into war, so it was on hìs desk that the Hull Note landed on 26 November: a 10-point ultimatum on the complete withdrawal from China. It was unusually frank, but so were the MAGIC interception about troop movements for a surprise attack on South-East Asia.

Hastily a two-front strategy (DOG) on a "Germany First"principle was built upon the pre-war strategy to hold the Pacific centered at the Philippines (ORANGE) with a diminished naval presence: this way the US Navy could take over for the Royal Navy in the Atlantic while it protected Singapore. The plan underestimated the offensive qualities of the Japanese as much as the shortcomings of the American defence.

The military success of the Imperial armed forces, like their German counterparts, was based on the premise of a short war. A war of attrition was simply guaranteed defeat in terms of economic resilience. Simulations made their high command painfully aware. Against China, the window had shrunk to little more than 5 years. Against America, the situation would approach Armageddon by 1944. Eerily accurate.

Japan was a Sparta in the making, its ecomony already in full war mode by late 41. Living standards were dropping failing along with shipping construction tonnage. Ironically a country so dependent on foreign shipping for its import of strategic raw materials (bauxite, copper, iron, lead, rubber) would go to war with the world's 2 largest merchant fleets. Every objective protection showed a long war to be unwinnable.

Ugliness is not just in the eye of the beholder; his fascination with the Other, with the Exotic, with Evil, must first draw the eye upon Ugliness...
When the Devil found out, he left us monsters who sit on our chest to cause nightmares, the craniosynostosic criminal on Anti-Semetic posters and the psychosomatic deformity of Hyde. While he became a soft-spoken & impeccably tailored elderly gentleman.

An honour sabre-ratling between Corinth and a sister city escalates into a war by proxy between Sparta's Peloponesian Bund & the Anthenian Empire. Perikles focused on the disparity between Sparta's joint hoplite strength and his own maritime power to opt a defensive strategy anathema to the offensive martial tradition of Greece, but knew the treasury could only pay for 3 years.

the New Deal made the foundation for improved logistics. Expanded highways worked better than the railways under Pershing. Massive construction projects had also created a skilled manpower reservoir. The automobile's high-tech infrastructure could easily be tuned to munitions and turned to assorted machines of war

Quantitively speaking, the AEF was present in 1918 in sufficient numbers to tilt the balance of attrition against the Germans, thanks in part to a premium on combat troops shipping after the Spring offensives. But the Stateside organisational framework to direct the fusion of civilian industry with military logistics did not fully find its feet until the end of the war.

the most significant difference in the draft of 17-18 & that of the earlier war was that local civilians rather than army officers administered it. Despite (un)justified criticism, the War Department accomplished much in'17: it inducted, fed, clothed, housed, armed, equipped, armed & trained a huge number of men. Almost 5 times the strength of the peacetime regular army, it managed to get some to France.

Islamabad-sponsored insurgencies of Islamist irregulars always get the upper hand on superpowers' conventional forces, especially in a tribally shattered country like Afghanistan, where every road and city is interdicted by mountains and nobody ever seems to think in the long term.

the U.S. was even less prepared for war than in 1917, with little idea how to gear up the economy to the level of an enemy coalition whose armies had been mobilizing for 7 and 4 years, respectively.
The threat of war with Japan helped push the Lend-Lease Act in March '41, which substantially assisted the British Empire (ships, aircraft), USSR (tank, trucks and aircraft) and China (truck, aircraft, arms and fuel)

As the result of two succesful campaigns, of the employment of an enormous force & the expenditures of large sums, all that has yet been accomplished has been the disintegration of the state, the assumption of fresh & unwelcome liabilities in its provinces & a condition of anarchy throughout the remainder of the country. (Lord Hartington, Secretary of State for India, 1880)

The Philippines were not just the 'crown jewel' in America's unofficial empire, they were the cornerstone of its pre-war bomber offensive strategy. From Manilla a B-17 could reach Formosa and the Home Islands.

Reading about the "turnip winter" makes my fresh spinach with lamb taste extra delicious...

The oil embargo had deficient clauses: a ban on 87-octane airplane fuel based upon the standard U.S. distillate didn't affect the Zero, which ran on 86-octane. Also, it was never meant to be in long-term effect! Autarkic empires were incompatible with America's economic dependency on free global trade, including Asia. The Japanese view, that the West actively sabotaged its imperial ambitions, was insofar justified.