Asking more than telling here. Didn’t Yamamoto essentially believe the war was lost before it even began, but he simply felt he had to fall into line? Iirc , he thought the ONLY possible chance was getting a six-month head start in the Phillipines by destroying the Pacific fleet and even then it would still be a long shot. He was the “I fear we’ve awoken the sleeping giant” guy, as I’m sure you all know.
It’s not clear that Yamamato actually said those words - but they seem to represent his basic attitude Isoroku Yamamoto's sleeping giant quote - Wikipedia
I’ve always been amazed that the US was able to turn the tide of war in the Pacific a mere 6 months after Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. But I think a lot of the upper echelon Japanese military and government people knew it right away. They knew they couldn’t really win; I think they hoped a long war of attrition would cause the US to quit.
The Japanese got a taste of their own medicine when the US did a sneak attack on THEM–the atomic bombs.
But even that wasn’t as much of a sneak attack as what the Japanese did–American fliers dropped a lot of leaflets over Japan to warn them about was would happen if they didn’t surrender. (And I’ve often pondered the fact that it took TWO, not one, bombs to get them to quit.)
They didn’t surrender and we all know what happened after that.
Interesting, one producer said he read it in Yamamoto’s diary and another said he read it in a 1943 letter but no actual evidence has been found. The article says that he apparently “sank into depression” after the attack.
In fact the sneak attack was 4 months after Pearl Harbor when Doolittle bombed Tokyo. Didn’t do much damage but shook the hell out of the Japanese High Command.
And it might have been a bad idea. The Doolittle raid meant that the Hornet and the Enterprise weren’t at the Battle of Coral Sea. If they had been there, Coral Sea might have been a major allied victory.
Of course, you can argue that a victory at Coral Sea might have caused Japan to cancel the Midway operation and thereby avoid a larger defeat.
If not for the Doolittle raid the assault on Midway may not have taken place regardless of Coral Sea. Elements of the Japanese military high command (including the Naval General Staff) were opposed to Yamamoto’s Midway plan, primarily due to its enormous matériel requirements and the difficulty of resupplying the atoll once taken. It was only after Doolittle that everyone came on board.
It was worse than that. Some members of the Japanese military launched a coup to prevent the surrender.
Actually, it’s the reverse. The assumption was they could win a quick war and they didn’t want to get into a long war of attrition as they knew that they would lose that.
The USSR declared war against the Japanese right after Hiroshima. (The timing was coincidental. Stalin had agreed to the US request for them enter the war against Japan within three months after the defeat of Germany.) It took not only the atomic bombs but also the entry of the Soviets for the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War to finally get to the point where a decision was made. I’ve posted extensively on it previously, but even then it was a three-three split on surrendering or not and it took the Emperor intervening.
IIRC the Japanese thought was that Pearl Harbor would be such a crushing destruction of the US Navy that the US would be completely powerless to even stop the Japanese and immediately sue for peace. Their actual plan involved the destruction of ALL 3 American carriers in the area as well as most of the US battleships. After the battleships destruction the Japanese would have waited for the American carriers to appear and then sink them in battle, and they assumed they would lose at least 2 of their 6 carriers in the battle but the destruction of ALL American capital ships in the Pacific was deemed worth it. The fact the Pearl Harbor raid went off without a hitch for the Japanese made them overconfident that that alone was going to cause the Americans to look for a ceasefire and allowed them to withdraw without waiting for the American carrier response.
TokyoBayer, good point about the Soviet invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria being an important other reason for Japan’s surrender. I agree it was a “coincidence” that the invasion (the date agreed to three months prior) coincided with the atom bombs bring ready for deployment, but it’s also true that one reason Truman and Byrnes didn’t delay their deployment at all (e.g., giving more than three days between the two bombs for a Japanese decision), nor deploy (say) via a demonstration explosion in Tokyo Harbor (which may have made the surrender decision take a bit longer), was because the US didn’t want the Soviet occupation of Manchuria to proceed too far (certainly, Soviet occupation of Japan itself was to be avoided at all costs).