3 thoughts on “Teddy Roosevelt and Japan

  1. I’m about to start his book about TR and the Japanese.
    I just finished Rutherford’s “New York,” which is a great book. I highly ercommend it. Maha, you love the city, as I do (though I live upstate, now), and I think you’ll love the novel.

  2. It’s interesting, but leaves out the actual reason for the attack on Pearl Harbor.

    “Isoroku Yamamoto was specifically thinking of how, 37 years earlier, the Japanese had surprised the Russian Navy at Port Arthur…” When that occurred Japan and Russia were already at war and had been so for some years. The Port Arthur attack was not used as a means of starting a war between two nations.

    Yamomoto wrote extensively about not wanting to go to war aganist the US because he had visited and studied here and knew that our manufacturing might would defeat Japan. He wrote of the need to defeat us quickly if they did go to war with us, so that terms of peace could be established before our manufacturing “sleeping giant awakened,” and described the Pearl Harbor attack as a means of achieving that quick victory. When the attack failed to destroy our carriers he wrote in his dairy that the war was lost even as it began.

  3. Fascinating! I never knew that about TR. So, the shorter version is that he started the ball rolling towards the attack on Pearl Harbor. Sure gives a whole new perspective on the war in the Pacific. The mention of Korea is a reminder of how big powers play Monopoly with smaller, weaker countries. The Yalta Conference is another political event that carved up Europe. Great post! Love having new ideas that make me think.

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