This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Hillsdale.

For information on their new course, Winston Churchill and statesmanship,

go to Hillsdale. edu slash W.W.2 Podcast and sign up today.

Hello and welcome to another World War II podcast.

In this episode we'll be looking at the Java Sea campaign with Jeffrey Cox.

Jeffrey's book, Rising Sun, Falling Skies, the disastrous Java Sea Campaign of World War II

from Osprey examines the events following Pearl Harbor.

In their own lightning offensive, the Japanese attacked

Singapore, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies. The Allies reeled against the well-planned

assaults, struggling to hit back with any useful resistance in the first

major sea battles of the war in the Pacific.

Jeff, thanks for joining me.

I wonder if we should start with the Japanese Navy. How good were they at the start of the war

when we compare them to the Allied forces in the Pacific?

In terms of ships, I would say they have the better ships probably the best ships of all the navies in

World War II at that point.

Yamato was about to come online at the beginning of the war and behind Yamato wasusashi, they didn't have radar and they really wouldn't

get radar until very late in the war, but the radar for the Allies at the beginning

of the war, especially the Americans in terms of surface

search radar, was not very good. They're heavy cruisers, which are sort of the

tendons or the muscles of a Navy. They were like race cars. They were very sleek, they were very fast.

They had sort of an odd turret arrangement sometimes. They would have 10 8 inch guns in five turrets, three forward, two back, but it wasn't like the Rodney and the Nelson

...