Talk:Attack on Pearl Harbor

Semi-protected edit request on 15 February 2018

change 4 battleships sank to 5 battleships sunk and change 4 battleships damaged to 3 battleships damaged. Cam023 (talk) 01:04, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

Not done. I count four; Arizona, Oklahoma, West Virginia, California. Perhaps that book is counting the Nevada, which was beached, but not sunk? Tarl N. (discuss) 03:38, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

References

Minor revert war between Riventree and Beyond My Ken

First, Beyond my ken, I want to start by saying I completely respect your knowledge of this battle. Indeed, I see your name over and over again in the history of this article, including frequent reversions. That said, I know almost nothing about it. I was making grammatical/prose changes.

You reverted my revert of your revert of my change, but then put most of my changes back. What is the point in reverting someone's change if you're going to make (essentially) the same changes? Spite? I want to AGF, but I feel that you may be pushing etiquette here. If you don't like the "flavor" of someone else's changes, just make your own. Reverts cause hard feelings almost universally amongst editors. Also, there was no explanation on any of the talk pages for your first or second revert.

My difficulties with the original section were three:

1. Imbued is NOT an appropriate term. Perhaps you are thinking of "suffused"? Rocks, wood, soups can be 'imbued' with another chemical substance. People are committed, enamored, attached, etc. To beat this point completely to death, if IJN had actually been "imbued" with someone's writings, they'd die from paper pulp in their bloodstream and internal organs. I'm only making this point because in your revert you said it was the right term. It wasn't a ridiculous metaphor, but it was a bad metaphor, and i fixed it.
2. The conjunction "that" was inappropriate. It was, and after you reverted my change, you put it back.
3. The entire deviation into IJN Command's opinion is a red herring - a path that goes nowhere and is not referred to in the rest of the article. It COULD arguably be deleted altogether.

I fixed each of these things in my first edit, then you reverted it. I fixed them again. Then you reverted it, and fixed them differently, except you re-added the bit on IJN.

Lastly, What IS your case for including the (eventually completely ignored) writings of some unrelated third party? Is it just wiki-SPAM to bolster his status? The big ships weren't there; Yamamoto attacked anyway. Paring the whole lot of it seems reasonable to me.

Perhaps I have taken these reverts too personally. Did you, too?

Riventree (talk) 14:47, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

You may both have noticed I came in late. IMO, you may both be wrong. I can appreciate the desire for a particular sense in the reader; I don't see "enamored" as wrong in tone (tho I can appreciate how it might be seen to be), & I agree, "imbued" isn't right. "Suffused" comes close, but given IJN's conscious adoption of Mahan's theory, & a wholesale, almost blind adherence to it, to the exclusion of good sense & evidence (as appears to be the case), I'm not sure "suffused" is quite right, either... Is it a dead end? IMO, no: it helps explain why battleships were the prime target. That may need clarification or elucidation elsewhere on the page...but that risks getting into OT areas; maybe a link to an IJN doctrine page? TREKphiler ^{any time you're ready, Uhura} 17:09, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for putting your oar in, Trekphiler... it is my experience that the "uninvolved third party" usually has the clearest head. Please continue, if you like!

Riventree (talk) 17:38, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

Rest assured, you'll have my two cents. Just don't ask me to hold you apart. ;p TREKphiler ^{any time you're ready, Uhura} 21:08, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

"Enamored" means to like or love something (hence the root "amor" = "love"), and is generally used in a personal, or even sexual, sense, hence not in any way appropriate for this circumstance. The idea is that the IJN was so under the spell of Mahan's theories that they basically couldn't think outside of that limited box. "Suffused" ("gradually spread through or over, (as in) 'her cheeks were suffused with color'") isn't right either.

So, if I give up on "imbued", what's wrong with my latest suggestion "attached to"? Or the sentence could be re-written to say that they were "blinkered" or "blinded" by Mahan's theories.

I agree with Trekphiler that it's fundamental to understanding many of the errors made by the IJN during the war, and needs to stay in the article. Beyond My Ken (talk) 23:43, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

I think trying to wordsmith a specific word in an awkward sentence is the wrong approach. Try re-arranging the sentence; something like Mahan's doctrine had become critical to IJN's strategy... or The strategies advocated by Mahan had become entrenched in the IJN's planning, ,... Tarl N. (discuss) 04:47, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Agreed. Riventree (talk) 12:48, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Certainly we must tell the reader that the Japanese were firmly attached to Mahan's doctrine of decisive battle. Specifically, the Japanese were entrenched in their own version of the doctrine. They called it kantai kessen, and it was a critical factor in how they approached every aspect of the Pacific War. A modern historian, Rotem Kowner, talks about it on pages 122–23 of his book Historical Dictionary of the Russo-Japanese War. Writer John A. Adams also talks about it in his book If Mahan Ran the Great Pacific War: An Analysis of World War II Naval Strategy, which describes how the Japanese adopted the Mahan strategy but then made critically bad decisions which Mahan himself would not have endorsed, such as the paltry "concentration" of force that Japan sent to attack Pearl Harbor. Professor Sadao Asada writes in Culture Shock and Japanese-American Relations that the Japanese navy mirrored the Mahan strategy of the US as soon as its translation was published in Japan in 1896. The Mahan strategy served as a textbook in the IJN Academy through the 1940s, studied by every IJN officer who served in WWII. Asada describes how political arguments in the 1890s about which larger country would annex the old Kingdom of Hawaii was the first sparring between Japan and the US in what would much later become the Pacific War. Asada concludes on 81, "It is possible to argue that precisely because the Japanese and American navies shared the same Mahanian strategic doctrine—fixation with the battleship and obsession with the main fleet engagement—they pursued a collision course leading to Pearl Harbor."

We have already cited Wilmott in the article. I think we can cite others, and expand the text to summarize their thoughts. Binksternet (talk) 03:15, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

resolved

I just want to say that the current wording:

IJN top command was attached to Admiral Mahan's "decisive battle" doctrine, especially that of destroying the maximum number of battleships. Despite these concerns, Yamamoto decided to press ahead.

suits me fine from a language perspective. Given the broad (informed, polite, and studied) support for keeping the Mahan reference in, I (as someone who knows little about the actual battle) definitely yield the point. Talk-pages discussions like this yield better articles. Unexplained reversions, quite the opposite.

I propose that this matter is now resolved. BMK: If you agree, please remove the question mark in the header. Riventree (talk) 13:08, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

I have done so. Thanks. Beyond My Ken (talk) 22:01, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Can I propose a minor change: from "attached" to "overly attached", or "fixated on"? There is a sense of being blindered at play here, too. TREKphiler ^{any time you're ready, Uhura} 22:30 & 22:31, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

I like "fixated on" better, but "overly attached" works for me as well. Beyond My Ken (talk) 22:32, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Infobox edits

I changed the result parameter in the infobox. What do you guys think? I'm still questioning whether Nazi Germany should be listed as an Empire.. makes it more clean that way, though. KevinNinja (talk) 20:01, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

   Will it help you at all if someone translates "Deutsches Reich"?
--Jerzy•t 10:55, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Characterization of the unannounced attack

   My father was in midshipman school in Chicago that morning, and his preceding confidence that he was already on his way to war further belies any notion that (regardless of anyone's expectation of the niceties of formal declarations) eventual belligerant status for US was at all in doubt. And i've reworded another of the former expressions that suggested naivety abt the future was widespread. (By the way, the number of battleships at "Pearl" should be a reminder that "non-belligerent" is a legal status rather than a state of mind.) And i think i replaced a one-word profession of US innocence with that in mind; see the edit history, which is easier for most of you to do than for me.
--Jerzy•t 10:45, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

We were all expecting an attack after the economic embargo and the Hull note. (2A00:23C4:6391:A500:1012:3C04:395:FBC0 (talk) 01:17, 26 April 2018 (UTC))