The below video is wartime propaganda so it should be cut a little slack. No country is going to tell a complete set of facts while it is still fighting a war. And in a lot of ways, the it does a pretty good job of conveying how hellish the battle was without getting too gruesome about it (in fact, it took the President of the United States to release this video during war time). But for all its educational value, it does present a skewed view of the battle to hide some critical errors that the US leadership made.

This article presents a fairly concise look at the major error made by US forces. And of course, there is always the Wikipedia overview (which also contains the history of the above video).

This is a a departure from our usual Educate Deb fair in that it is multiple smaller videos strung together in attempt to give a complete novice a better than average understanding of the Navel War between Japan and the US.

To start with, we need to understand what Japan hoped to accomplish by declaring war against the US. And there is no more concise way to do that that look at Japan’s successful Naval war against Tsarist Russia.

Battle of Tsushima

Just as with the war with Russia, Japan sought to open its war with the US with a surprise attack.

Pearl Harbor.

Japan knew that it could not win a long war with America. The war against Russia almost bankrupted Japan and that was relativity short war. So even though Japan had many early success in the war, the Japanese navy knew they had to bring the US fleet to battle and defeat it just as they defeated the two Russian fleets if they wanted to have a chance to win the war. For this reason, Japan sought to bring about the decisive defeat of the American fleet at the battle of Midway.

The Battle of Midway 1942: Told from the Japanese Perspective

After the battle of Midway, everyone with half a brain knew that America was going to win. But still, Japan fought on and on and on. The short little video below shows the changing tides of the war from the time of the pearl harbor attack until Japan surrendered.

World War II in the Pacific: Every Day

Almost everyone knows how America ended the war. But what was the alternative? The below video gives a good overview of one alternative way of doing things.

The Invasion of Japan – Operation Olympic / Downfall

If you still have patience, this last video is a good corrective to the view that “of course Japan would have surrendered even with out the dropping of the bomb.

Why the Japanese Military wanted to fight on after(!) the 2nd Nuke