Word: navale
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...Yamamoto's key planners was Commander Minoru Genda, still only 36, still a hot pilot at heart, first in his class at the Etajima naval academy, combat ace over China, leader of a daredevil stunt team called Genda's Flying Circus. Genda contributed several key ideas: that every available Japanese carrier should be assigned to the attack, that it should combine dive-bombing, high-level bombing and torpedoes, that the attackers should strike at dawn...
...techniques of dive-bombing and torpedo bombing were still relatively new, and aerial torpedoes were almost impossible to use in water as shallow as Pearl Harbor. Filching an idea from a recent British torpedo raid against the Italian naval base of Taranto, Genda had technicians create auxiliary wooden tail fins that would keep torpedoes closer to the surface; others converted armor-piercing shells into bombs. But drilling was Fuchida's main task, and all summer his planes staged trial runs over Kagoshima Bay in Kyushu, chosen for its physical resemblance to Pearl. Only in September did Genda tell...
Hull's answer, just as forceful, said the U.S. oil embargo would continue, and demanded that Japan "withdraw all military, naval, air and police forces from China and from Indochina." He handed it to the envoys on Nov. 26, the day Nagumo's fleet left Hitokappu Bay for Pearl Harbor. Hull did not know that, since the fleet was under total radio silence, but he did know from intercepted messages that another Japanese war fleet had passed Formosa on its way toward Indochina or Malaya. "We must all prepare for real trouble, possibly soon," Roosevelt cabled Churchill...
Kimmel and Short were only too aware that Washington was concentrating on Hitler's victories in Russia and his submarines' ravages of Atlantic shipping. Though Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark acknowledged to Kimmel that his Pacific Fleet was weaker than the Japanese forces arrayed against it, he not only turned aside Kimmel's request for two new battleships but took away three he had, plus one of his four carriers, to help fight the Battle of the Atlantic...
...were higher. The raids on Clark and Iba fields outside Manila wrecked 18 out of MacArthur's fledgling force of 35 B-17 bombers, 56 of his 72 P-40 fighters and 25 other planes. In returning later to pound the airfields again, the Japanese also smashed the Cavite naval base. And while Pearl Harbor was a hit- and-run raid, the Japanese would seize and hold the Philippines for the next three years...