The truism surrounding the Pearl Harbor tragedy is that the US was provided with the destruction of the battleship fleet. Navy with a wake-up call putting it on the Pacific path to victory. Like all such popular beliefs, there is a grain of truth in it, but there is also considerable misunderstanding of the hard processes that the U.S. military, and especially the navy, had to go through before they were fully prepared to fight and prepared to deal with the Imperial Japanese Navy on a relatively equal basis. Pearl Harbor was, in fact, just the opening round of a series of crises that molded and influenced both American strategy and conflict itself. It is then the intention of this paper to investigate American naval and military strategy during the first ten months of the war and gain insight into what actually happened and how the services, particularly the navy, were transformed from a peacetime force with a peacetime bureaucratic culture into the amazing instrument they were to become by the summer of 1943. The crucial point on which this paper will focus will be the reciprocal strategic influence and operations on American strategic leadership at the sharp end of the fight against Japanese forces during the first 11 months of the Pacific War – a period that laid the foundation for the eventual American triumphs of 1943 and 1944.
Corn made substantial gains on cotton acreage during the Civil War. ... Improved strains, more scientific cultivation and fertilization, and expansion of irrigation increased yields of corn in Texas from 10 to 25 bushels an acre during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to 90 to 120 bushels in 1975–80.
