The Great War of Archimedes Review: If you want peace, prepare for… corruption and deceit?
By: Arius Raposas
Tags: Japan, World War II, Film Reviews, Movie Review, Mathematics

The future of sea battle is up in the air?

Despite some reviews observing how the movie was bland with statistics and technical details an average viewer might not understand, there was a jewel in the dirt. The film’s attempt to show how both sides might have some merit, and demerit, was commendable. The battleship advocates stressed how Japan needed a symbol to wreck their insatiable thirst for victory, even if that meant overspending hard-earned taxpayer’s money and creating a devious deception plan to make the whole world believe a super battleship could be built for the cost of a cruiser. The film made it a point to stress that their idea was to contract the project in pieces, veiled as cruiser orders but really parts of the super battleship. Indeed, the real-life Yamato costed more than what the film portrayed. The Great War of Archimedes pegged the price at 176 million, while the actual cost of building Yamato went over 250 million yen. If Yamato was destroyed, the nation which never knew defeat since the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895 would have to face reality: they were not invincible. Meanwhile, the aircraft carrier supporters argued that the nation need not to suffer and bleed its coffers dry to learn their lesson. They viewed a decisive battle resulting to an early peace being the only path to preserving Japan’s sovereignty. Also, even at 100 million yen, two aircraft carriers could have been built for the price of one Yamato, with enough change for armaments and aircraft. Then again, the people would faint at the notion of suing for peace, especially if the military was winning anyway. This was the very atmosphere after the Pearl Harbor attack, even though it was a partial failure. Nonetheless, despite Yamamoto’s supposed noble intention (as similarly portrayed in the 2011 biopic Isoroku), it was also hinted by the film that the plan might have been a pro-war tactic at heart because victory with the decisive battle might only encourage the people to seek even more fighting, not less. The Navy particularly articulated the “southern advance doctrine” (nanshin-ron), which saw the territories south of Japan being within their sphere of influence. This was immediately seen at the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. In the six months leading to Coral Sea and Midway, Japan had conquered Southeast Asia in what appeared to be an unstoppable wave of successes. Thus, it might seem that both sides had faults to deal with.

One vital takeaway that the film did not seem to highlight was the rationale of Yamamoto’s doctrine in the strategic sense. Japan was the world’s first operator of the modern aircraft carrier with the completion of Hosho in 1921. But that was that. The Navy leaned towards creating more battleships and cruisers despite the limitations of the London Naval Treaty and the earlier Washington Naval Treaty. Meanwhile, with lighter weight, more aircraft carriers could have been built for the price and the tonnage of any one battleship. World War II eventually proved a point: the age of ship gunnery was over. Major sea battles in the Pacific did not even take warships being close enough with each other to exchange broadsides. Capital ships became more like vulnerable targets than valuable war assets. This also caused a paradigm shift from sea denial, as exemplified by Admiral Teikichi Hori (Yamamoto’s friend and mentor) in his “fleet in being” concept, to sea control. Yamamoto’s Pearl Harbor plan aimed to strike as hard as possible the United States Navy to prevent them from mounting any retaliatory offensive. While Yamamoto’s logic did not entirely fall into deaf ears, only one of the three Yamato-class ships (Shinano) became an aircraft carrier. It also arrived too late to influence the outcome of the war as America ramped up its industrial production upon entering the war. Shinano was sunk ten days after it was commissioned. Another issue for carrier-centered warfare was fitting the ships with sufficient aircraft and top-class pilots to fly them. The relative rigidity of Japan’s recruitment process, combined with its limited production capacity and America’s access to Japanese codes, helped the country fall behind in the war at sea. Then again, if this was displayed a little more in the film, the theoretical conundrum about the morality of either side would probably not have as much of an effect. Besides, the setting was the planning stage for the ships involved, not their actual use.