Strategy & Tactics

Field

The Pacific War

The 1941–1945 war between Japan and the Allies across the Pacific and East Asia — the war in which carrier air power replaced the battle line as the decisive arm.

1 casePeriod: 1942

In a carrier action the range of the guns decides nothing. The time it takes to launch and recover decides everything. Denying the other side an uninterrupted stretch in which to range a strike on deck is itself the attack. The case in this field shows time treated as a resource and designed for.

Patterns found in this field

  1. 03
    A design of time

    Take his turns away: chop up the uninterrupted time his procedure needs.

    The Battle of Midway (1942) →

A pattern is not a template to apply but a tool for checking conditions. The conditions under which each one fails are set out on the patterns page. The thirteen patterns

The Japanese carrier Hiryū adrift and burning, her flight deck wrecked, photographed from the air on 5 June 1942
The Battle of Midway (1942)

The battle in which an intelligence advantage was converted into a simple operational fact: the Japanese carriers never got the unbroken time they needed to launch. Why the torpedo squadrons that scored nothing mattered most.

Pattern: a design of time
Decisive American victory Read →

Other fields

Napoleonic Wars Second Punic War The Eastern Front The Hundred Years War The American Civil War Japan's Warring States period The Western Front, 1940–45 The Vietnam War The Western Front, 1914–18