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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   766 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 6, 2026

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My friend Dylan and I are embarking on a quest to read as many quality books as we can about US history this year. Although I've been having a very hard time with Indigenous continent (I think it's an awful book), I really enjoyed Ian Toll's The Pacific Crucible both from an entertainment standpoint and from a scholastic one.

Pacific Crucible starts dramatically at Pearl Harbor, backtracks a little bit to explain the US naval doctrine from the Spanish American War onwards and the reasons for Japanese militarism, and then proceeds chronologically until the Battle of Midway, alternating between the American and Japanese perspective. Although there were aspects of these first few months of the war that I feel like Toll covered too quickly (the battle for the East Indies), or even missed entirely (the submarine war on shipping for example), I learned a ton from this book.

  1. Fascist elements in the Japanese military began to take over the country in the early 1930s as a result of the Great Depression and perceived slights by Western Powers against the Japanese Empire. These elements were allowed to eventually overthrow the Diet because Hirohito was extremely weak-willed. The invasion of Manchuria and the rest of China was a direct result of this military coup, and the Pacific war was a direct result of this because the US eventually refused to sell oil to Japan anymore.

  2. Teddy Roosevelt and FDR were both big believers in naval power, although this naval bias played into a long US naval tradition of excellence at sea because of a need to protect global shipping. FDR actually started a massive carrier buildup in 1938, which made it such that new US carriers were ready as early as the end of 1942, which was incredibly important for faster victory in the Pacific.

  3. Lots of racism from both sides which caused incredible lapses of judgement at Pearl Harbor and the Malaya campaign, and at Midway/Coral Sea.

  4. At this stage in the war, Japanese pilots seemed to be far superior than the American ones. What prevented more Japanese victories at this stage in the war, as well as the collapse in capabilities from 1943 onward was poor command at a higher level (rivalry between the army and navy, lack of strategic vision or sober analysis of Japanese strength), and poor husbanding of human and material resources (veteran pilots got no break and were not used effectively to train new pilots, but were rather ground down completely by campaigns of attrition.

  5. This naval battles seem incredibly confusing and unsettling. All your ships are miles away from each other, and you don't see the enemy basically at all, unless you are a bomber pilot. I suppose this has gotten even worse with the advent of drones or ballistic missiles, which have made carriers obsolete in the same way that carriers made battleships obsolete.

  6. It's interesting how propaganda has completely changed our perception of WW2. In this book Toll notes that most Americans weren't super happy to be going to war, but were resigned to get the job done. Very different from how WW2 is portrayed now, as the "good war".

My friend Dylan and I are embarking on a quest to read as many quality books as we can about US history this year.

May I recommend Albion's Seed? Fascinating book for anyone interested in the history of America or the Anglo diaspora.

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