The American-Japanese naval war of 1941-1945 was the most vicious and savagely sustained naval and amphibious campaign in the whole history of the world. American college students, who seek safe-spaces because words do hurt, can’t comprehend what 18-19 year old boys and girls experienced in that war just a few years ago. There was no mercy. There were very few prisoners taken. Those that were taken were often routinely mutilated and killed. There were mass-murders and mass-suicides of whole populations.
Yamamoto didn’t live to see the awful end. He was notoriously punctual and with the Japanese naval codes broken again, an American squadron of P-38s ambushed him on a flight into Rabaul in 1943.
For the Americans, they went directly onto the offensive just two months after Midway. They drove inexorably ever westward towards the Japanese home islands. It took two more years before Yamamoto’s grand fleet was destroyed in its entirety.
How could it have been any other way? The Japanese built 17 aircraft carriers during the war but only one from the keel up. The rest were hybrids and conversions. The Americans built 142 carriers. They constructed over 800 destroyers and used 304 against Japan. Japan was able to build only 63. The USA built 34 million tons of merchant shipping to Japan’s 4 million tons. Japan was simply overwhelmed.
When the USA took the Mariana Islands in late 1944 their new heavy bomber, the B-29, was within range of Tokyo. The USA spent more money building the B-29 than they did on the Manhattan atomic bomb project. The pressurized and heavily armored bomber, the most advanced weapon system ever constructed, laid waste to Japanese cities with fire-bombs.
You can still see this seared into the Japanese consciousness in their post-war films. Fire-breathing monsters like Godzilla, or gigantic winged creatures like Rodan and Mothra, all born from nuclear bomb tests, awakened Japanese memories of death from above. The fire-bombs were but a prelude to the atomic attacks in August 1945. But still, Japan wouldn’t surrender. They had a few aces they might play, were it not too late.