Word: leas
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...Homer Lea was a hunchback who wanted to be a hero. Before he was 18 he had mastered every detail of every battle Napoleon ever fought. While studying law at Leland Stanford University he made the acquaintance of some San Francisco Chinese who set his imagination to sparking on the coming Chinese Revolution. Knowing that he would never be accepted by the U.S. Army, he went to China, offered his services to Premier Kong Yu Wei, who was secretly plotting against the Dowager Empress...
Kong's plot was discovered and the Empress put a price of $10,000 on Lea's head. He made his way to Hong Kong, there met the great Sun Yat Sen, who later made Lea his chief military adviser with the rank of general. Lea went with Dr. Sun into exile in Japan. Then he went back to San Francisco and, after years of travel and study, wrote The Valor of Ignorance...
...East Asia. "The Philippine Islands," wrote Lea, "bear the same strategic relationship to the Southern Asian coast as the Japanese islands do to the Northern. . . . Without the Philippines, Japan's dominion in Asian seas will be no more than tentative, and her eventual domination or destruction will depend upon who holds these islands." Considering U.S. unpreparedness in the Philippines as of the time he was writing, Homer Lea said the islands could be captured by Japanese as easily as the U.S. took Cuba from Spain. In 1941 U.S. preparedness had begun to be more formidable. But only...
...Central Pacific. "Hawaii . . . can be considered the most important position in the Pacific." Hawaii, Lea thought, would be assaulted from within by the 1909 version of a fifth column. He asserted that there were more Japanese "immigrants" in the Hawaiian Islands with army experience than there were soldiers in the entire field army...
...Victory. But Homer Lea thought that assaults on the Philippines and Hawaii would be only a beginning. He wrote in 1909 (in 1941 he would probably add air battles wherever he referred to naval battles): "The advocates of naval expansion have . . . given a wrong impression to the public, not as to the necessity of a navy, but as to the accomplishment of enterprises beyond its sphere. Neither now nor in the future will international conflicts be determined by naval engagements. In some instances naval victories may produce conditions that will tend to hasten the conclusion...