Word: hokkaido
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...squared off to subject Japan to an indignity without precedent. A great steel plant, only 275 miles from Tokyo, was hammered by the warships' guns. And that was only a be ginning; a day later the Americans struck again. Battleships sailed into the narrow waters between Honshu and Hokkaido -and smashed steel works and other military objectives to bits & pieces...
Sure enough, Halsey struck again. Four days later his carrier planes thundered up again out of the dawn. Some struck Hokkaido (pop. 3,300,000), which had never been bombed before. Some struck northern Honshu. Some struck in Tsugaru Strait, where the railroad and automobile ferries run between Aomori (on Honshu) and Hakodate (on Hokkaido), almost the only link between the two islands...
...foul Aleutian weather). That strip, when & if it can be used, places the Jap naval base at Paramoshiri, 750 miles to the west on the Northern tip of the Kurile Islands, within easy reach of U.S. bombers. Established there, U.S. fighting men would be only 650 miles from Hokkaido, topmost of the main Japanese islands...
...used. . . . Many harnesses have been broken, so much string will have to be used." The particular string with which Kiralfy would bend his bow is an Allied invasion of Japan from the half-Russian island of Sakhalin. Sakhalin is almost within firing distance of the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. Says Expert Kiralfy: "As the key to victory in the Pacific lies in the north, so does the key to the north lie in Sakhalin...
...poor communications should not be permitted to dim the value of this front. Retrospective foresight would recommend that the estimated losses of a year be concentrated and accepted in an offensive that would not only eject the Japanese from Karafuto [southern half of Sakhalin] but follow them into Hokkaido, with Honshu [the main Japanese island] and Tokyo as the objective. This is direct war in its simplest form. Because the successive fronts are narrow, Japan's advantage in numbers would not prove decisive. Because of the wild nature of the northern Nipponese islands, the resourcefulness of the anti-Japanese...