I think Yamamoto is one of the most important figures of the War and he isn’t discussed much, so I opened this thread for him. I think his time at Harvard must have shaped his views dramatically.
First of all, he found himself commanding a navy with a military strategy completely different from the one he had initially advocated. He wanted to Japan to take on a series of smaller opponents and gradually build up the navy to improve Japan’s diplomatic position, and thereby muscle a fractured China and European colonial powers into making major political concessions. Instead, he found himself leading an invasion of China, and eventually leading major attacks on the US.