12/22/2023 0 Comments Victory at sea pacific end date![]() Kennedy divides his work into two elements: narrative and analysis. Kennedy therefore wants to use his work to understand the “deeper reasons” for the “amazing turnaround of fortune in the midst of this gigantic conflict” (xvi). By 1945, however, the United States Navy was not simply larger than the next largest, Great Britain, but was larger than all the rest combined (424). It was a multi-polar naval world in which a “half-dozen navies jostled, unevenly, for power” (19). Each were bound by the strictures of the Washington Naval Treaty, signed in 1922, which allowed the Royal and US Navy each 30 percent of the world’s battleships-the presumed true arbiter of naval supremacy well into the Second World War-while 20 percent went to the Japanese, and 10 percent to the French and Italian navies. In the 1930s, the world’s navies consisted of six powers: Great Britain, the United States, France, Italy, Germany, and Japan. The victory at sea represented by these craft, much like the black ships of Commodore Perry’s arrival in Edo Bay in 1853, represented a new world or, for Kennedy, a new international order. However, Kennedy’s work seeks to do more than chart the war in the Pacific. As the sun passed over the American and British ships moored in the harbor, eventually “going down over Mount Fuji” there was “no more appropriate symbol of the end of the Japanese Empire” (398). Near the end of Victory at Sea, Kennedy, one of America’s great historians of international history, writes of the Japanese surrender at Tokyo Bay on the deck of the USS Missouri, complete with a 400-plane flyover, signifying Allied victory. ![]() New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022. ![]() Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II, by Paul Kennedy, with paintings by Ian Marshall. ![]()
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