NYT-1201: STATE OF THE ART A Thermostat That's Clever, Not ...
NYT-1201: STATE OF THE ART A Thermostat That's Clever, Not ...
NYT-1201: STATE OF THE ART A Thermostat That's Clever, Not ...
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ed in their eyes to the status of a demigod. Now h<br />
e could dictate his wishes to the Tokyo admirals,<br />
and would continue to do so until his death in Apr<br />
il 1943, when American fighters shot down his airc<br />
raft in the South Pacific.<br />
And yet, Pearl Harbor aside, Yamamoto was not a gr<br />
eat admiral. His strategic blunders were numerous<br />
and egregious, and were criticized even by his own<br />
subordinate officers.<br />
Indeed, from a strategic point of view, Pearl Harb<br />
or was one of the most spectacular miscalculations<br />
in history. It aroused the American people to wag<br />
e total, unrelenting war until Japan was conquered<br />
. Yamamoto was also directly responsible for Japan<br />
’s cataclysmic defeat at the Battle of Midway, and<br />
for the costly failure of his four-month campaign<br />
to recapture the island of Guadalcanal.<br />
But perhaps the most important part of Yamamoto’s<br />
legacy was not his naval career at all, but the pa<br />
rt he played in the boisterous politics of prewar<br />
Japan. He was one of the few Japanese leaders of h<br />
is generation who found the moral courage to tell<br />
the truth — that waging war against the United Sta<br />
tes would invite a national catastrophe. As Japan<br />
lay in ashes after 1945, his countrymen would reme<br />
mber his determined exertions to stop the slide to<br />
ward war. In a sense, Isoroku Yamamoto was vindica<br />
ted by Japan’s defeat.<br />
Ian W. Toll is the author of “Pacific Crucible: War<br />
at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942.”<br />
~~~~~~~~~~<br />
<strong>NYT</strong>-1208: OPINION: OPINIONATOR - <strong>THE</strong> STONE<br />
Intellectuals and Politics ... By GARY GUTTING<br />
Good politicians don't need to be intellectuals, b<br />
ut they should at least have intellectual lives.<br />
===== notyet