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In the 1920s and 1930s, three important visions of future naval war in the Pacific were extant: the American ORANGE war plans, the Japanese "Attrition/Interception" concept, and the British "Singapore strategy." This chapter by Evan Mawdsleyexamines what relevance these expectations had to the situation after the outbreak of full-scale war in China (1937) and Europe (1939), and especially after the fall of France in May-June 1940. It discusses how the war planning of the USA, Japan, and Britain dovetailed, and how it developed in the light of geopolitical and technological changes in the two years preceding the attacks on Malaya and Hawaii; June-July 1941 marked a second significant turning point. Finally, the chapter considers the relationship between the two actions of the Imperial Navy planned for December 1941, the "Southern Operation" and the "Hawaiian Operation," and the connection between those two Japanese strikes and the American-British "ABC-1" strategy of March 1941.

This chapter by David Kohnen examines the Allied response to the initial German submarine operations in the Indian Ocean during the Second World War. Roughly forty German submarines sailed for East Asian waters after 1942; U-188 was among the few to navigate the Allied gauntlet in the Atlantic to reach the Indian Ocean. Only three German submarines, including U-188, returned to Europe from operations in the Indian Ocean before the Allied victory in May of 1945. The discussions between key British and American commanders regarding the presence of German submarines in the Indian Ocean provide unique insight into the operations and intelligence organizations of the Admiralty and Navy Department and are examined in detail. The chapter also looks at the Allied submarine tracking rooms, which assisted the Special Operations Executive and Office of Strategic Services in the capture of the skipper of U-188 – thereby securing information on the Imperial Japanese during a critical period in the closing months of the Second World War.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 saw the introduction of game-changing naval strike technologies, among them the first Japanese introduction of aircraft voice radios, shallow-running torpedoes, armor-piercing bombs, advanced fuzes, and the use of dive bombers against fleet units in port. The attack was the first instance of a multi-carrier strike, with over 350 aircraft participating. Instead of amplifying success, these technologies contributed to a very poor performance: with sufficient firepower to sink all the accessible battleships and cruisers in the harbor, with overkill, they applied killing levels of ordnance to only three. The attack is an exemplar of what can go wrong when introducing new naval technologies and doctrine. This chapter by Alan D. Zimm examines the errors made by the Japanese, the impact of these errors on strike performance, and the ultimate source of the errors. Examined are bombsights, general-purpose and armor-piercing bombs, radios and command and control, and torpedoes and anti-torpedo defenses. Much of the Japanese performance shortfall can be attributed to improper assimilation of new technologies, along with poor testing, manufacturing, and installation of new technologies.