NYT-1201: STATE OF THE ART A Thermostat That's Clever, Not ...

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