Awakening the Sleeping Giant: Difference between revisions

** While he did not explicitly say those words, Yamamoto did express similar sentiments to his superiors prior to the attack. Yamamoto was of no illusions that all the attack would accomplish in the end would be the destruction of Japan as a Great Power, and the only question he could raise was whether the attack would buy six months or a year of grace with which to act before the hammer fell. (''Midway'' was six months to the day after ''Pearl Harbor'', bizarrely).

** Pearl Harbor was rather inept as a First Strike - but in all fairness, it was supposed to ''deter'' US entry into the war.<ref>Why 'inept'? Well, it did just enough damage to shock, enrage, unify, and motivate America like nothing else could, while doing as little truly significant damage as possible. Most of the battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor were relatively easily raised, repaired, refitted, and sent back into the war. In the biggest naval battle in history (Battle of Leyte Gulf), these [[Back from the Dead]] battleships utterly annihilated a third of the remaining Japanese fleet. Hundreds of aircraft were destroyed, but they were all very outdated or obsolete anyway. The massive oil reserves, submarine pens, intelligence/cryptology buildings, and most of the cruisers and destroyers were untouched, and none of the three fleet carriers were even there. And, because the attack took place in the middle of a very shallow harbor in warm waters, surrounded by military bases and a city, relatively few people died. So the end results? America began relying on what it had left, which turned out to be the most effective possible means to fight Japan--submarines, intelligence, and carriers with destroyer/cruiser support. Further, it made Japan extremely overconfident, as they thought that battleships were the true capital ships of the day, and that by destroying America's battleships, they had essentially struck a fatal blow. This actually also applied to America, who thought that it had taken far more crippling damage than it actually had, galvanizing its population and military like never before. As a result, you'd see marines, crews, and pilots alike going [[Beyond the Impossible]] against Japan. The only truly major damage done was to morale--which was remedied by the Doolittle Raid, whereby large (but stripped down) bombers would be launched from aircraft carriers deep in Japanese waters to fly over Tokyo, bomb some targets of opportunity, and try to reach Free China (some didn't even have enough fuel to make as far as Korea). This turned out to be the opposite of Pearl Harbor--extremely cost effective, a huge morale boost for America, a major blow to Japanese confidence (which caused them to call back their entire carrier force that was wrecking Allied assets near India for a while), and caused a lot of confusion for Japan (as they wondered where these heavy bombers had come from, since even the idea of launching them from a carrier would never even occur to them).</ref> The whole thing would appear to be a case of the Empire's top echelons believing what they want to believe, rather than what their intelligence analysts tell them. What's more, this [[Second Sino-Japanese War|wasn't the first time]] they had so grossly misread another country's motivations; that they even went to war with Britain and the Netherlands - and the USA - is a testament to this inability.

* This is what happened on 9/11, only the giant had no visible enemy to lash out at.

** When Osama bin Laden was killed and his records seized, it turned out that he was completely [[Genre Blind]] to this trope. He was actively holding his forces back from several planned attacks until someone came up with a plan for a massive attack on a date of great symbolic importance to Americans, in the hope they would be intimidated into withdrawing. Christina H at Cracked.com compared this strategy to repeatedly kicking a bees' nest in the hope that all the bees would give up and go home.