Show 65 - Supernova in the East IV

What you're about to hear is part four of a multi part series on the war in Asia and the Pacific Area between about 1931 and 1945. If you like your stories in some sort of linear order and you haven't heard the earlier segments, you might wanna catch up by checking those out first. If you don't care or you heard those already, well, then this is Supernova in the East part four. It's history. It's hardcore history. There's a very wonderful and squishy question in play in both world wars, especially. I can hear some people in the back of my head saying it's always been in place since the the beginning of time, but certainly because of maybe the increase in the pace of change and whatnot. You see it in stark relief in both world wars. But it has to do with the difference between quantifiable war elements versus unquantifiable war elements. And and this is not to say that one is more important than the other, but one is much more subject to proof and testing than the other. We had said earlier that the early parts of this conflict are the acid test of combat, the rubber meets the road moment for a lot of the prewar promises about these ships and these aircraft and all these, land based systems and ideas, both tactics and strategy and equipment, where we get to see if all the hype before a conflict breaks out lives up to it once conflict does. The good news about something like that is that is quantifiable evidence. If that airplane sucks and doesn't live up to the potential and the promise, you'll know it quickly, and you'll be able to use what doesn't work to help make something that does later. But the other side to the conflict and its goals, much harder to measure. And if you can't measure it, how do you know if it's working or not? How do you know if you should keep doing it or not? If somebody really wants to keep doing it and really believes it, that might be a plus. Right? Not being able to prove it one way or the other. But it has to do with the question of morale. Morale, of course, is a psychological state, isn't it? So right now we're in the realm of, harder to pin down and harder to say that what applies to person a will apply to person b necessarily, But morale is one of those things that on a tactical level, on a battlefield level, is undeniably huge, and they've been writing about it, military strategists, since the bronze age. The idea is not to kill everybody on a battlefield. Traditionally, it's to kill enough people to break their will to continue fighting, right, to destroy their morale, killing as a means to an end. Nobody denies this. What is interesting, though, is to try to extrapolate what applies, and that …