Reddit mentions of From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima: The War in the Pacific 1941-1945

Thanks man,

I'm just an armchair enthusiast inspired by my dad; I was never in the Navy. I read books like Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (Ronald H. Spector, 1985) and From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima: The War in the Pacific 1941-1945 (Richard Overy, 2012).

Clearly it would be tons of mind-numbing work to chart the placement of ships across the whole Pacific versus time, under war conditions no less. I'm sure Naval Colleges can show you the movement of major task forces, but who can say just how many ships and people were involved, if you were to try to get down to every little craft like my dad's? Plus he served after WW2 - he was shipping out of Oakland CA when the first A-bomb dropped. (Of course, they still sent him, which let true vets could get home earlier... but I bet most WW2 naval histories gloss over everything after VJ day.)

Maybe some day, AIs will go through all the records and piece a lot of it back together. If that ever happens, thank heaven for the National Archives. Mike Constandy of WestmorelandResearch.org did a great job of digitizing dad's logs; seeing all his ship's movements is what got me wondering.

Here's to future AIs with more time than any of us. Assuming they're beneficial (laugh), they could piece together so much, at both the macro and micro scale.