Hey everyone, Scott here. A quick note before we start this episode, which is actually a snippet for my good friend James

Early Show, Key Battles of American History. James and I did a massive multi-part series on World War Two in the Pacific theater.

We went into detail on every major battle. Pearl Harbor, the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Battle of Midway, Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and much more.

Now James was really the mastermind of the series and something that he has always excelled at is giving incredible context for battles. He's not just mentioning troop numbers and weapons and everything else, but he's explaining the why of what happened.

In this episode, you're going to hear him and I go into detail about the rise of Imperial Japan and explain why Japan had such far-reaching ambitions in the Pacific and beyond.

It'll help you understand why World War Two and the Pacific happened the way it did and overall Japanese strategy. If you'd like to hear this episode and many more, you can look for Key Battles of American History on the podcast player of your choice. We're going to part the non-podcast.com. Enjoy.

Hello and welcome to a brand new series of Key Battles of American History. I'm James Early your host as always. In this series, I will be discussing the Pacific theater of the Second World War.

Through the lens of the most important battles fought in the theater and I'm delighted to be joined by my long time podcast partner, author, historian, professor, and host of the great podcast, History Unplugged. Scott Rank, Dr. Scott Rank, it's so good to have you again. How you doing, Scott?

All right, ready to sink my teeth into the Pacific theater. If that analogy makes or similarly metaphor makes any sense. You said like a shark, Scott. All right, that is a great point right there, which we're going to see those later on some battles. So things are getting grizzly already as they should.

Yeah, we're starting starting right away or getting right into it. So before we really get rolling, I'd be interested to know, Scott, I know you've World War two has always kind of been one of your favorite topics and you've read quite a bit about it. Tell me how you became interested in World War two.

Naples, history. Well, yeah, it's kind of funny because I'm not a specialist in World War two at all. I'm a specialist in the late autumn and empire, which most people don't know about. So I try to get into it too much because it doesn't have a common dream of reference with people.

But most people who are interested in history are fast, soon by World War two. And this should be because it's one of the cataclysmic groundbreaking events that created our modern world order.

But I'm not too big of a fan of researching it for the podcast just because number one, I'm not a specialist. And there's many more people like you James who knew more than I do.

And number two, I think it just kind of distorts our view of war where there's a clear good guy and clear bad guy, especially Europe when you have Hitler, Grace Moore villain of all time.

I don't know if that cut and dry, but I am excited to get into this series with you because when I've looked at the naval theater in the Pacific, I mean, it really is fascinating where you're talking about the most tonnage in any war that ever happened where there's millions and millions and millions of tonnage.

There's dozens of aircraft carrier battleship and escort carriers and cruisers and what really struck me is about a year ago or about six months ago, I had a former Navy admiral in a podcast.

I was asking what was like to be an admiral where you're looking at your entire carrier fleets where you're in charge of you hold in your handle lives of thousands and thousands and thousands of men. It's like being a fair on top of a pyramid.

And he said that up there, I mean, the wind blows the harshest of the highest altitude, you feel the weight of duty.

And when I was asking about who his favorite admiral was in all of history, he said, Chester Nimitz, who was the leader of the, he was the fleet admiral, the US Navy and commanded allied air and land and sea forces.

I think we just made him stand in awe because there's probably no one man who control as much naval might as he did so. And people who are into naval history, they sort of talk in hushed homes about the Pacific theater, the way that people in America talk about the Civil War, where it wasn't men clashing it was God's just this larger than life event.

So yeah, I think this will be really cool to get into.

I have to admit or not admit, but I have to just bring up the fact that Chester Nimitz was a Texan.

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