Description
In this issue:
– Knights Templar – Stormtroops of the Crusades. Modern fiction has immortalised the Order of the Temple as a force for good. But how much of that portrayal is true? MHM casts a critical eye over the romanticised image of the famous order of 12th-century warrior-monks.
– History of the British Army – Minden, 1 August 1759. After the victories at Plassey and Quebec, the British Army had one more crucial battle to fight on the field of Minden before British imperial supremacy was secured.
– The SAS War Diary – 1941 – 1945. To celebrate the 70th anniversary of the formation of the SAS, Gordon Stevens tells the story of the long-lost SAS War Diary and the secrets it reveals.
– Pearl Harbor – The flawed gamble. Regular MHM contributor Keith Robinson argues that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 January 1941 was a desperate and hopeless gamble on the part of Japan’s militarist elite.
– Bulgaria’s Verdun – The Forgotten Front. History often overlooks the fighting on the Macedonian Front during WWI. Here, MHM sheds light on the British attack of the Bulgarian trench-fortress of Doiran in spring 1917.
Plus: news, reviews, museums, opinion columns, and much more!
From the Editor:
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 was masterpiece of surprise and daring. The Americans knew that war was coming. They were on alert in the Philippines. But they did not anticipate an attack on their main Pacific naval base. The commanders on Oahu island had given their men the weekend off.
It was not all one-sided. The US carriers, the most valuable targets, were at sea. The Japanese attack became chaotic, with strike waves criss-crossing in the sky, partly due to poor signalling and radio communications. Billowing smoke and US ack-ack fire added to the confusion and further reduced the effectiveness of the Japanese strikes.
But these failings, as Keith Robinson explains in his 70th anniversary piece on the battle this issue, were relatively insignificant beside a far greater geopolitical and strategic miscalculation.
US opinion was anti-war. Churchill was desperate for the Americans to come in, and so was US President Franklin D Roosevelt. But the American people wanted nothing to do with a European war over territory and empire.
Pearl Harbor served the political purposes of President Roosevelt as surely as 9/11 served those of President Bush. The surprise attack, without declaration of war, swept the bulk of US opinion into the war camp.
As Japanese Admiral Yamamoto put it: ‘We have awakened a sleeping giant and have instilled in him a terrible resolve’. And such was the enormous industrial power of the US giant that, once awakened, the destruction of the Japanese Empire could only be a matter of time.
Cover Date: Jan-2012, Volume 2 Issue 4