Example Of Gunboat Diplomacy

The Aircraft carrier forever altered how wars were fought throughout the world. The battleship ruled the sea for almost one-hundred years and many thought it was the ultimate naval machine. Aircraft played a huge part in both World Wars but without a takeoff and landing runways they were rendered ineffective over open ocean. This was until a country could bring the takeoff and landing strip to the battle with them. With planes able to base so close to the battle, it made it easier to carry heavier weaponry. The aircraft carrier is still being developed today and a new Ford Class carrier is due to be released soon and will be more powerful and have more capabilities than any other sea vessel ever. Carriers are helpful not only as offensive weapons …show more content…
Gunboat diplomacy is defined as: diplomatic relations involving the use or threat of military force, especially by a powerful nation against a weaker one (Dictionary.com). The United States is one of the greatest military powers this world has ever seen. It is common knowledge that seventy-one percent of this planet’s surface is covered by water. This means essentially that controlling the seas means controlling most of the planet, and the United States has greatly taken advantage of that. All of the world’s greatest nation’s power in the past and present is directly related to the size of their navy. If you are to look at the British Empire, who at one point controlled a fifth of the world’s population, you would see how powerful they were because of their navy. The Royal Navy from 1815 to 1918 was the most feared military power in the world. Today there is a reason that the United States is the most feared and respected nation on this planet, our Navy. At the head of our Navy fleet is a vessel that is the most powerful this world has ever seen, the aircraft carrier. There are currently ten United States aircraft carriers in service around the world. With the aircraft carrier’s range being so immense, just ten of these ships could cover most of the planet’s seas. The United States’ Nimitz Class carriers carry out thousands of missions every single day. The Navy never sleeps and these ships are the leaders of that …show more content…
Nearly every event that occurred in the Pacific involved a carrier one way or another. The single event, Pearl Harbor, that rallied American approval to join the war was only possible because of the carrier. On December 7th, 1941, Japan used its aircraft carriers to launch a surprise attack on the United States early on a sunday morning. Due the great range of the aircraft carrier they were able to remain undetected to the moment that the first bomb was dropped on United States battleships. The men at Pearl Harbor on that eventful day never saw it coming and the attack would never have been possible without the use of the aircraft carrier. Luckily, we had not stationed our carriers in Pearl Harbor at the time of the Japanese attack or else we would have been very defenseless due to the fact that we would not have had enough power to win the Battle of Midway. Our answer to the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was to use our carriers to attack right back with. This was in the form of the famous Doolittle Raids. At this time America was about to change how people thought about carriers forever. The United States decided to use B-17 bombers to take out this mission of bombing Japan (Astore, William J., and Duane C. Young). This event was so revolutionary because the bombers were so large than could only take off from the carriers and could not land. They carried