Originally Posted by webjunkie

I'm for guns, and I've seen this bit on a lot of e-mails and it always gets my goat (mainly because this is the area of history that I study).

The quote from Yamamoto is: "You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass."

He was trying to make a point to Tojo, who was for war with the US, that the only way to win a war with the US would be to dictate terms to Washington after having defeated the US militarily and Japan would never successfully invade the mainland US. While they did invade the Aleutian Islands, Japan would never have been able to invade the mainland. Even if the attack at Pearl Harbor hadn't been a strategic failure the Japanese just didn't have the resources to maintain or defend the supply lines required to invade the mainland US. If they had, Yamamoto's point about American's being armed would have mattered very little to the Army's culture of the superiority of Japanese infantry.

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