Lessons From Another War

As some of you know, in addition to being obnoxious, I am a student of WWII and that is what I want to talk about today. At the outset of the war, Germany and Japan seemed unbeatable. They had supposedly better technology and "blooded" soldiers and pilots. Yet we soon had the upper hand. One wonders why....

I think they weren't as tough as we thought. We soon applied our will and our best brains on defeating them. In the Pacific theater, the Japanese supposedly had better planes and better pilots (because they were "battle-tested") but we soon learned how to beat them in planes that weren't as fast and weren't as maneuverable. Ours were designed to take a hit and still keep flying while theirs weren't. That made a difference. The Japanese also kept their best pilots in the field while ours rotated back to be instructors. That mattered because,eventually, we killed their pilots and that made a big difference.

Our pilots wanted to live, too, and that gave them incentive to develop successful strategies.

In the end we overwhelmed the enemy on two fronts and defeated them, mostly by waging something called "total war." What this meant was striking at the enemy at every opportunity and not caring what happened to the enemy population.

That might be the only way to defeat our current enemy.