Editing The World Wars (section)

===The War in the East===
As Japan continued to push deeper into China and signed the Tripartite pact with Italy and Germany, the US threatened to embargo the oil, steel, and aircraft parts Japan needed to keep their massive war machine running, and the overconfident Army managed to push the Imperial Japanese Navy into launching an attack on the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor (timed to hit approximately 30 minutes after delivering the declaration of war, thus [[Rules lawyer|effectively being a surprise attack without technically being a surprise attack]], except they fucked up the timing and the declaration wasn't delivered until Pearl Harbor had already been bombed to shit).

The idea was that if everything went right, the fickle American public would be dismayed by the prospect of a hard fight over a bunch of distant islands that didn't even belong to them (especially while contemplating joining the war in Europe), the IJN could seize control of the Pacific while the crippled US fleet was out of action, and the US would be left with no choice but negotiation. However, while the Pearl Harbor attack did work pretty well and they did overrun a lot of Allied holdings around Asia, they missed all but one of the US carriers which only suffered minor damage, enraged an American public that was previously tepid on war (especially since mistakes delayed even the planned token warning), and the fact was that the US had more than 10 times the industrial capacity that Japan did as well as plenty of fuel and resources. <small>''To be fair, nobody* in the years leading up to World War II '''expected''' carriers to be important.''</small> Another big failure of the attack on Pearl Harbor was the fact that the Japanese attack didn't touch the dockyards, dry docks, fuel depots, command centers, and the rest of the infrastructure that you need to target to prevent a navy from functioning or recovering after its ships take a ton of damage.

To top it all off they also aligned themselves with the Nazis, based on shared enemies and ultra-imperialist/nationalist ideologies, but this only reinforced the narrative of them being a part of the barbaric Forces of Evil who needed to be completely defeated for the sake of the civilized world. 

Despite America's obvious industrial advantage, the US Navy was seriously lacking in experience and numbers compared to the IJN at the start of the war; with the Japanese carriers outnumbering the Americans (who had to split their fleets across two oceans to protect against German U-boat attacks), there was a very real threat that the IJN would return to finish the job and start raiding the US mainland before replacement ships could be built. The early stages of the war in the Pacific were very much touch-and-go, but that all changed after the Battle of Midway, when [[Tactical genius|Admiral Chester Nimitz]] intercepted the IJN's plans to attack Midway Island and lured them into a trap, destroying four veteran aircraft carriers, about half of the IJN's total carrier capacity at the time. This blunted the Japanese advance and threw them onto the defensive, buying the American war machine valuable time to rearm and retrain. It also didn't hurt that [[Spy|American and British Naval Intelligence]] partially deciphered most Japanese naval codes in 1942.

As time went on, and with some shaky starts, the Allies quickly learned how to rely on carriers instead of traditional battleship tactics. The Battle of Midway and the Solomon Islands campaign combined to put the IJN on the back foot; Midway cost them four carriers and a bunch of their best carrier aviators, and the prolonged attritional fighting in the Solomons cost them many more of their pilots, along with dozens of valuable ships that they couldn't afford to replace. The Japanese now found themselves as the proverbial one-legged man in the ass-kicking contest. Ferocious naval engagements gave way as the star of the show to even more brutal amphibious warfare as the Marines began their island-hopping campaign across the Pacific, painfully prying each strategically important Japanese-occupied island from their well dug in defenders &mdash; and crucially, skipping the islands that weren't important, leaving lots of Japanese units deployed in spots where they could do fuck-all except die slowly from starvation and disease. The jungle, cave and amphibious warfare of this stage of the campaign was especially horrific even by World War II standards, not helped by racism against the Japanese on the part of Americans and the racism against everyone crossed with the suicidal fanaticism of the Japanese further exacerbating this. The IJN also set up various military units for holding prisoners and scientific experiments - best exemplified by Unit 731 - which gave Auschwitz a run for their money on crimes against humanity, the only difference being the lack of a genocidal goal. [[RAGE|Well, that and the fact that the perpetrators were given immunity to prosecution in exchange for giving their data to the US government for it to use in its bioweapon program. Typical, really.]] 

One often overlooked (at least in popular history from the western perspective) event in the war in China was the last big Japanese offensive of 1944, named Operation Ichi-Go, where the Japanese threw their last reserves together to break through Republican Chinese lines under Chiang Kai-shek with astounding success. Although the Japanese were beaten back very quickly, as they were in no position to hold their gains against the Allied counter-offensive, the Republican Chinese failure to stop it led to the US taking control over the Nationalist forces after an ultimatum that greatly damaged the previously good relations between Kai-shek and the US government. It also led to the disillusionment of a lot of Nationalist Chinese officers and soldiers with their cause, prompting them to switch sides to the Communists under Mao Zedong. Mao on the other hand quickly utilized this momentum and influx of experienced soldiers (along with Soviet aid) to seize control of China from the Nationalists in the second phase of the Chinese Civil War (the Warlord Era got put on a semi-pause fighting against Japan, it was tenuous with constant skirmishing and the moment the Japanese forces got pulled out at the end of the World War it reignited), push them off the mainland and out to Taiwan, and found the Chinese People's Republic in 1949. 

One major note from a wargaming perspective in this theater is Operation Ten-Go, the last sortie of the IJN against the US military forces invading Okinawa. The largest battleship made by human hands, the ''Yamato'', and her support fleet, sortied to support the Japanese Army on Okinawa ... and were promptly destroyed by massed American airpower before they got 100 miles from Japan. This cemented the change in the IRL meta of naval warfare from battleship fleets to carrier dominance, which has endured to this day.