Has Putin Met His Marianas Moment?
When Propaganda Narratives Die, They Die Hard
Hello All,
I spent the last few days at the Lennart Meri Conference in Estonia. It was a brilliant affair (btw the Old Town of Talinn is wonderful, you should go if you can).
I spoke at the last session, which was entitled: The Master Plan: Europe’s Grand Strategy and had written out an article length piece on the ideas shared. My plan was to release that today. However, what has happened in Moscow over the last few days seems a more immediate priority, so that other piece will have to wait a few days. If you want to watch the conference session, here is a link.
Hope that is ok.
Has Putin Met His Marianas Moment?
In June 1944, the Japanese came face to face with a strategic and propaganda catastrophe. US forces isolated and then seized the Marianas Island in the Central Pacific theater, in particular Saipan, Guam and Tinian. The Japanese had known for a while that the Americans might go for the islands, and had built up the largest forces that they could to try and hold them. When the Americans appeared, the Japanese sent everything they could spare into the fight, including almost all of their surviving aircraft carriers (see picture above),
It did not matter. The US has such total air-sea dominance around the Marianas, that there was nothing the Japanese could do. The Americans first isolated the Marianas from any Japanese support and then landed Marines and Army soldiers who ruthlessly worked their way through the island until they were in US hands.
I go into this campaign in detail in How The War Was Won: Air-Sea Power In World War II (Cambridge University Press 2015) if you want to read more.
The catastrophe for the Japanese was not just strategic. As the Japanese leadership very well knew, the fall of the Marianas destroyed the entire fantasy that they had been selling repeatedly to the Japanese people. Since Pearl Harbor they had described the Pacific War to the Japanese public as a series of smashing victories against the Americans, claiming to have inflicted so many losses on US forces that the Japanese home islands were safe and secure.
In this way even disastrous losses were reimagined to the Japanese people as great victories. For instance, the Japanese defeat at Midway, which saw the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) lose four large aircraft carriers to one for the USA, was actually presented to the Japanese public as a clear Japanese victory. The official report of the battle said that the Japanese had sunk two US aircraft carriers and only lost one themselves.
The loss of the Marianas, however, could not be bluffed away.
