Sarah Paine

He had believed in Bushido, the ability of material, of willpower to more than compensate for inferior resources, but the war's outcome had proved him incorrect.

And so as an honorable samurai, he paid with his life and he kept his diary to nothing to be ashamed of.

He'd done what he was going to do.

Here I have the last prime minister of Imperial Japan, Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko, talking about his take on the war.

He said, I think the basic cause of defeat was a loss of transport shipping.

Okay.

By the end of the war, Japan was down to one ninth of its transport shipping.

It meant the empire was paralyzed.

What's the point of taking all these territories if you can't get the resources back?

The Navy had always focused on the mission by Alfred Theramahan, who's from where I work back in the day.

It was all about fleet-on-fleet engagements and things.

But it turns out that the Japanese Navy hadn't focused on convoy duty.

Mahan had called that a promising secondary operation.

Actually, it turned out to be primary in the Pacific, that U.S.

submarine services paralyzed their sea lines of communication.

Go submarines.

So here's

Admiral Ugaki Matame, who is talking about, he eventually comes around to recommending a more defensive strategy of not having this fleet on fleet because they don't have, they've lost a lot of the fleet and then they don't have the fuel to run it.

But by the time he's recommending a more defensive strategy, they don't have the fuel or the assets to do that either.

earlier in the war, here's his take before all that bad stuff had happened, it's too bad for the officers and men of the submarine service that they have not yet sunk any important men of war, only merchant men.