How should the United States have responded to Pearl Harbor?

[mlees]

I don’t see how the U.S. could have “contained” the Japanese without engaging in hostile actions against their forces. My first reaction to reading the OP was “Even if the U.S. didn’t want to go to war, like it or not, war is exactly what they had!”.

@Donald Rump

Would such a policy have worked against Japan? Mueller thinks so:

• The Japanese were vastly overextended and bogged down by their intervention in China, which they could not possibly win.

Never-the-less, China couldn’t have defeated Japan either, and Japan had, by that point, occupied a lot of the areas in China that provide plenty of raw materials the Home Islands needed.

• By 1941, military spending had soared to 38% of Japanese economic output, the country couldn’t import needed raw materials to keep up with military production, and was running into labor shortages

Does he give details? Historically, Japan maintained their economy well into late '44, even with all the losses a “hot” war brought along with it. I’m no expert, but I am dubious about the above claim.

• Despite gains in Southeast Asia (including some important oil fields in the Dutch East Indies), the Japanese inspired such hatred among conquered peoples to guarantee enormous occupation costs

Historically (like with Britain in India), a more organized and “advanced” military force can occupy a large population for quite a while.

• Prewar studies showed that even with access to conquered oil fields, the Japanese would face a major oil crisis within a few years due to the inadequacy of those resources and Japan’s inability to effectively exploit them (lack of tanker fleet, not enough time to get fields into production)

Only if they are forced to expend that oil at wartime rates. A “cold war” would require much less, IMO.

• Japan had a grossly inadequate merchant fleet, making it especially vulnerable to economic containment

Incorrect. The Japanese merchant fleet (6 million tons) was large enough for Japan’s peacetime needs. cite Where it fell short is when the military requisitioned tonnage for military operations, and losses to enemy activity began to mount. The Japanese also built (or seized) another 2 million tons (totaling 33% of the size of the pre-war merchant fleet) over the next three years.

• In terms of domestic politics, there were elements among the senior leadership that weren’t totally on board with Japan’s militaristic direction (including the Emperor); quite possibly with time to let Japan’s ill-advised policies play out, moderate voices would have become ascendant.

Those senior “moderate” elements would have lost a lot of political clout had the pro-war faction been proven “right” with their strategic war goals. This “coup from within” would NOT have happened, IMO.

IMO, the Japanese, if left unchecked, could have built a self sufficient economy with what they had conquered by April/May of '42. No amount of economic sanctions (even including any assumed internal inefficiencies with their own “unbalanced” military spending) was going to cause their empire to collapse. I don’t know why the professor feels that Japan could not have occupied a colonial empire for long, even though many European nations have done just that in those very same regions.

Historically, even with a policy of total wartime blockade on Japan (which goes much further than economic sanctions and “cold war” style diplomatic relationships) , it still took three whole years of submarine warfare and island hopping invasions (to put the Home Islands within range of land based airpower) to achieve it. Without military force? Can’t be done.

Even if you accept that the U.S. “defeated” the U.S.S.R. by economic means, it still took nearly 50 years to do so. How much time does the professor think it would take for Japan to fall? Why is 50 years of “cold war” better than 4 years of “hot” war?

---

While the attitude of “war is never the [best] answer” sounds ideal, the reality is, in short, for diplomacy to work, both parties must want it to work. For war to happen, you only need one side to pursue that goal to achieve it.

[XT]

[QUOTE=Donald Rump]
His argument is that the Japanese empire–under sustained pressure from the US oil embargo, further sanctions and harassment by the US and other Western countries, and resistance by conquered peoples–was inherently unstable and would not have withstood a policy of containment.
[/QUOTE]

Then, again, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about if he’s making that statement. A Japan basically left unchecked wouldn’t have cared if ‘the US and other Western Countries’ put further sanctions on them, further embargoed their trade or called them bad names because Japan was already taking their territory and possessions and killing their military and civilian personnel in the region.

Again, Mueller is not arguing for doing nothing. He’s arguing for measures that fall short of the most maximally aggressive response imaginable, which is the route the US pursued.

And, again, he’s wrong. The US had very limited choices after Pearl Harbor. Our fleet had been destroyed and may of our troop concentrations scattered throughout the Pacific had been overrun and destroyed as well. Our ability to project force was seriously compromised. We basically fought the Japanese on a shoe string with what was left, harassing them at every chance we got and trying to bring them to battle when we could use what forces we had left to best advantage. The choice was to do this exactly as we did (and get lucky, as we did) or do essentially nothing while Japan overran the entire region and set up a defense in depth, capturing the high resource areas they were targeting and then making it so the US et al would not be willing to take the losses required to take them back. This was Japan’s stated war aim and was central to their strategy, and no amount of embargoes or sanctions or bad language was going to deter them from this.

Also, what do you mean by “existential threat?” I don’t believe the Japanese ever had the intention or the ability to pull off an amphibious invasion of the United States.

You misunderstand. The Japan in our universe, the one we all live in never had the chance to become that sort of threat, and never had the ability to invade the US. Neither did Germany. A Japan allowed to run rampant through the region and snap up the territories they were targeting, as well as one that, having those resources could expand further (also part of the Japanese overall and long term strategy) into, say, India and all of Asia, WOULD be such a threat to the US. You don’t need to invade the US to pose an existential threat btw…cutting off our trade would be a serious blow.

[Donald_Rump]

@RickJay

A policy of not engaging Japan in a war isn’t even a coherent train of thought as of December 8, 1941, because Japanese troops are actively engaging and fighting American troops in a number of places. Pearl Harbor was a fraction of what was going on.

But disengagement from those conflicts would have been among the available policies, at least in principle if not politically. (Sometimes described by opponents of such decisions as “cutting and running.”) The question is whether the US interests at stake (in the Philippines, for example) justified the massive escalation that the US pursued, ultimately successfully although at very great cost, and whether less costly alternatives might have likely achieved similar outcomes.

[Donald_Rump]

Public service announcement: appeals to the self-evident stupidity of X aren’t a very convincing argument against X. If you think his argument is too dumb to counter with substance, then by all means take a pass.

[Little_Nemo]

@Ravenman

I see that Professor Mueller has also written a book which appears to have as its thesis, “Nuclear weapons: what’s all the fuss about? They’re way overrated.”

For someone who claims to be one of the top international relations academics in the country, he has some pretty stupid ideas.

ETA: I should not have said stupid. His ideas belong in academia and nowhere else, especially not in government.

No, this is the job of academics. They’re supposed to ask questions like this. In some cases, questioning a basic premise that everyone takes for granted may reveal that a new approach to how things can be done. There’s no assumption that should go unquestioned.

But as a practical matter, in most cases the reason why everyone believes something is true is because it really is true. When you question the conventional wisdom, you just verify that the conventional wisdom is correct. And that’s the case here.

[XT]

@Donald_Rump

Public service announcement: appeals to the self-evident stupidity of X aren’t a very convincing argument against X. If you think his argument is too dumb to counter with substance, then by all means take a pass.

I’d say that is exactly what people are doing. If you are ignoring that and merely focusing on the chorus of folks saying he’s wrong (something that should be telling you something right there) then you are missing the point of most of the posts in this thread countering what he (or you) are saying.

[iiandyiiii]

@Donald_Rump

But disengagement from those conflicts would have been among the available policies, at least in principle if not politically. (Sometimes described by opponents of such decisions as “cutting and running.”) The question is whether the US interests at stake (in the Philippines, for example) justified the massive escalation that the US pursued, ultimately successfully although at very great cost, and whether less costly alternatives might have likely achieved similar outcomes.

The answer is a resounding “yes!” – in addition to regional and trade concerns, because it’s vitally important that America is seen as a nation that responds to aggression with overwhelming force. It’s vitally important that there be an enormous and as immediate-as-possible cost to attacking America.

[Lemur866]

As for the contention that we shouldn’t have conducted the “most maximally aggressive response imaginable”, here on Earth-prime the US didn’t actually do that either. We had a policy of “Germany First”. We fought Japan with our left hand while reserving our right hand to fight Germany. And our military actions of island hopping, picking off or bypassing isolated forces, destroying Japanese shipping, destroying Japan’s ability to transfer troops or material around the theater, sure sounds a lot like the containment that the professor seems to have wanted.

We didn’t load a bunch of boys on landing crafts and send them straight for the home islands. Instead we contained Japan–real containment, not harsh language. Then we started shipping everything we could spare to the Russkis, we kicked the Germans out of North Africa, we started grinding through Italy, and finally Normandy. Japan was always a sideshow. By the time Germany surrendered, Japan was isolated to the home islands and China, but there was no way for the Japanese to recall the Chinese expeditionary force for defense of the home islands.

So our plan then was to bomb the living hell out of the home islands until we built up a big enough invasion force, or Japan surrendered. Luckily we had the atomic bombs we had built in our spare time, intended for Germany but now waiting to be used on Japan.

If we want a counterfactual 1945 with no atomic bombing, it might have made sense to starve Japan–literally starve Japan–rather than carry out Operation Downfall. Millions of dead from starvation and daily conventional bombing might have been better than the cost of the invasion. Not that we were in any mood to care about the sufferings of the Japanese civilians in 1945.

[Ravenman]

@Little_Nemo

No, this is the job of academics. They’re supposed to ask questions like this. In some cases, questioning a basic premise that everyone takes for granted may reveal that a new approach to how things can be done. There’s no assumption that should go unquestioned.

But as a practical matter, in most cases the reason why everyone believes something is true is because it really is true. When you question the conventional wisdom, you just verify that the conventional wisdom is correct. And that’s the case here.

I think we’re saying the same thing. I’m just saying it with more attitude.

[Donald_Rump]

@XT

I’d say that is exactly what people are doing. If you are ignoring that and merely focusing on the chorus of folks saying he’s wrong (something that should be telling you something right there) then you are missing the point of most of the posts in this thread countering what he (or you) are saying.

I’m just trying to maintain the hygiene of the thread. I was not referring to your posts, XT, but to ones containing no substance other than to say that Mueller’s obviously an idiot.

[Little_Nemo]

@Donald_Rump

Public service announcement: appeals to the self-evident stupidity of X aren’t a very convincing argument against X. If you think his argument is too dumb to counter with substance, then by all means take a pass.

We are countering his (and apparently your) position with substance.

You can’t conduct an economic war against a country that is conducting a regular war against you. To give one example, you mentioned shipping. In a non-war, you can send ships from one place to another across the ocean. In a war, your enemy will try to sink your ships and you need to use your navy to defend your ship against their navy.

But in the plan that you and Pr Mueller described, the United States would have sent its merchant ships out and Japan would have sent its submarines to sink those ships. In a war, we’d send American warships to sink the submarines in order to protect our merchant ships. But if we didn’t do that, the submarines would sink every merchant ship with impunity.

The same thing would have happened throughout Asia and the Pacific. Japan would have using its armed forces to attack and occupy territory. The only thing that prevented this was us using our armed forces against theirs.

[XT]

@Donald_Rump

I’m just trying to maintain the hygiene of the thread. I was not referring to your posts, XT, but to ones containing no substance other than to say that Mueller’s obviously an idiot.

I won’t say he’s an idiot, just wrong. A lot of times these things are basically the academic version of trolling, though ‘trolling’ is to harsh a word. It’s to spark discussion and provoke thought and to challenge conventional wisdom and make people think outside of the box (as well as lots of other buzzword bingo :p). I think Little Nemo summed this up pretty well in post #45.

[Declan]

@Donald_Rump

Granting that hindsight is 20/20 and that the proposed containment policy may well have been politically unthinkable in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, what say you, O ye students of WWII and military history? Is the good doctor onto something here or is he full of shit?

He would have been right, up to the point of japanese carrier planes killing us servicemen and civillians, in great numbers. From that point, it was war to the knife.

Truth be told, if we include the Panay incident, his would have been the prevailing mindset. The sanctions ran out of time.

If that was todays headlines, he would have been one of the justice , not genocide crew.

Declan

[Scumpup]

Murderous regimes have to be beaten down hard into the dirt and the society rebuilt in a more acceptable form. This is what happened, with great success, in our dealings with Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. The Cold War collapsed the USSR, but there was no enforced restructuring, with the result that Russia is still an aggressive, authoritarian nation that is ready to get up to their old tricks the moment they feel strong. When have Japan or Germany invaded anybody since 1945?

[Tamerlane]

@Donald_Rump

But disengagement from those conflicts would have been among the available policies, at least in principle if not politically.

Actually, no. The Japanese invasion of the Philippines was timed to immediately follow the Pearl Harbor attack and did so ten hours later. There was no time to disengage short of immediate surrender, which frankly doesn’t sound much like containment.

As RickJay notes the entire premise is absurd because even beyond the overwhelming political imperative the Japanese attack wasn’t to a little-warning-tap-and-then-wait-for-diplomatic-contact. It was an all-out push and the U.S. had no choice in whether they were engaged in a war or not.

[Ambrosio_Spinola]

@Donald_Rump

But disengagement from those conflicts would have been among the available policies, at least in principle if not politically. (Sometimes described by opponents of such decisions as “cutting and running.”) The question is whether the US interests at stake (in the Philippines, for example) justified the massive escalation that the US pursued, ultimately successfully although at very great cost, and whether less costly alternatives might have likely achieved similar outcomes.

But how could we have disengaged with the Philippines conflict once the Japanese forces landed? The American forces there didn’t have any way to leave, and the Japanese would have been insane to simply let them go. I guess they could have simply surrendered straight off instead of doing what they historically did, which was fight as long as they reasonably could and then surrender, but I still don’t see how they end up coming back to the U.S. in this scenario.

I guess it’s not crazy to question assumptions, but in this case Japan had officially declared war against the U.S., which meant it was already asserting the right to use force against the U.S. At that point the U.S. had the practical choice to either try to end the war through negotiations or to respond with force of its own.

[XT]

@Tamerlane

Actually, no. The Japanese invasion of the Philippines was timed to immediately follow the Pearl Harbor attack and did so ten hours later. There was no time to disengage short of immediate surrender, which frankly doesn’t sound much like containment.

As RickJay notes the entire premise is absurd because even beyond the overwhelming political imperative the Japanese attack wasn’t to a little-warning-tap-and-then-wait-for-diplomatic-contact. It was an all-out push and the U.S. had no choice in whether they were engaged in a war or not.

And the destruction of the fleet and capturing of key territories really narrowed our possible response set to a binary solution…we could surrender or fight at that point. Containment was never an option after Pearl Harbor until maybe late '44 when we could essentially impose an overwhelming blockade on the home islands and bomb them pretty much at will. Getting to that point, however, did not involve nasty diplomatic notes or harsh language, and we had to go through all of that pain and death to get to that point first before we could even consider Mueller’s plan, such as it is.

[Donald_Rump]

@XT

Then, again, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about if he’s making that statement. A Japan basically left unchecked wouldn’t have cared if ‘the US and other Western Countries’ put further sanctions on them, further embargoed their trade or called them bad names because Japan was already taking their territory and possessions and killing their military and civilian personnel in the region.

The debate boils down to how much those territories and possessions were worth fighting for. I think a dispassionate analysis makes it clear that the answer isn’t, “Infinity.” I don’t have the answer myself, but I could be persuaded that the answer is, “Fewer than 350,000 cansualties.” I could be especially so persuaded if someone made a cogent argument that the Japanese empire was unlikely to prove sustainable for the same reason empires in general (including the Soviet one) prove unsustainable.

And, again, he’s wrong. The US had very limited choices after Pearl Harbor. Our fleet had been destroyed and may of our troop concentrations scattered throughout the Pacific had been overrun and destroyed as well. Our ability to project force was seriously compromised.

I don’t follow your logic that because our ability to project force was compromised (and maybe nonexistent to begin with–Mueller argues that the losses at Pearl Harbor were negligible vs the magnitude of assets required to succeed in the war) we therefore had no choice but total war. Whether the policy was to wage total war or to pursue Mueller’s idea of containment, the US was going to need to make very large investments in its naval capabilities. Once that capability was established, we would be able to choose between taking the war aggressively to Japan or engaging in containment.

You don’t need to invade the US to pose an existential threat btw…cutting off our trade would be a serious blow.

Can you expand on what “cutting off our trade” would mean in practical terms and why it would have posed an existential threat? We were obviously cut off from trade with the Soviet bloc countries, but as I see it the Soviets presented an existential threat not because of trade but because of their ability to destroy the United States.

The US suffered 350,000 casualties in the Pacific theater and, had it not been for the A-bomb, presumably would have been prepared to suffer hundreds of thousands more, perhaps millions. So I think the US interests at stake deserve to be spelled out with some precision.

[XT]

[QUOTE=Donald Rump]
The debate boils down to how much those territories and possessions were worth fighting for. I think a dispassionate analysis makes it clear that the answer isn’t, “Infinity.” I don’t have the answer myself, but I could be persuaded that the answer is, “Fewer than 350,000 cansualties.” I could be especially so persuaded if someone made a cogent argument that the Japanese empire was unlikely to prove sustainable for the same reason empires in general (including the Soviet one) prove unsustainable.
[/QUOTE]

Ok, but the Soviet Union lasted for over 70 years. If those are the time tables we are looking at then why do anything at all? I mean, eventually, every country will fall, so if you want to take the long view there is no point in ever doing anything…just sit back and wait for whichever country is threatening you or taking your stuff to fail then, um, something.

I don’t follow your logic that because our ability to project force was compromised (and maybe nonexistent to begin with–Mueller argues that the losses at Pearl Harbor were negligible vs the magnitude of assets required to succeed in the war) we therefore had no choice but total war. Whether the policy was to wage total war or to pursue Mueller’s idea of containment, the US was going to need to make very large investments in its naval capabilities. Once that capability was established, we would be able to choose between taking the war aggressively to Japan or engaging in containment.

Containment presupposes the ability to contain. We had no ability to contain the Japanese or their expansion until late in the war, after we’d done all that fighting and dying part that Mueller seems to be opposed too.

As for the rest, this was basically what Japan wanted/needed/was counting of for us to do. Their whole strategy hinged on hitting us with a series of hammer blows and putting us on the defensive and wiping out our ability to retaliate, capturing enough territory and fortifying it enough so that once we did rebuild we’d be in such a weak position and it would be so costly for us to do anything that we would then settle for peace on the Japanese terms, and allowing the Japanese to dominate the entire Pacific rim and pretty much all of Asia and giving them a stepping stone to further future expansion while securing their own lines of communications and trade. Had it worked out that future US trade, much of which relied on resources from that region would have been seriously curtailed.

Can you expand on what “cutting off our trade” would mean in practical terms and why it would have posed an existential threat? We were obviously cut off from trade with the Soviet bloc countries, but as I see it the Soviets presented an existential threat not because of trade but because of their ability to destroy the United States.

Much of the worlds trade flowed (and flows through today) that region. Cutting off our curtailing our access to that trade would have stifled and possibly crippled our economy…and at a time when we were just getting out of the Great Depression.

Trade with the Soviet Union and it’s block was never affected in the same way since the Soviet Union never controlled the trade routes that Japan would have controlled had the US and our other allies allowed the Japanese to achieve their war aims. It’s totally apples to orangutans in comparison. Seriously, just look at a trade map of the Pacific if you aren’t seeing what I’m saying. And this doesn’t even consider the products that the US wouldn’t have had access to if there was such a cut. Rubber was one of the things that the US had serious issues with during the war because most of the export to the US for rubber went right through that region and we didn’t have access to it. And that’s just one product.

The US suffered 350,000 casualties in the Pacific theater and, had it not been for the A-bomb, presumably would have been prepared to suffer hundreds of thousands more, perhaps millions. So I think the US interests at stake deserve to be spelled out with some precision.

I don’t really have access to the percentage of GDP the trade through the Pacific was for the US prior to WWII where I’m at now, but there was a reason the US had bases throughout the Pacific as well as a very large fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor. We didn’t just do that stuff because we didn’t have any better use for it. If no one else has this info at hand I’ll see what I can Google up, but I’d be surprised if we weren’t talking about 20-25% of our trade coming from that region, maybe more (both imports and exports), and world wide it was probably more considering we are talking about India in that mix.

[Ravenman]

The US interests at stake?

1. The US had extensive interests in the region, from the territory of Hawaii, to its position in the Philippines, to its friendly relationship with Nationalist China, to name but three. Each one of these three major interests with attacked with no reasonable justification by Japan. I’m thinking quite hard to think of another historical example of a country’s major interests being under either a sudden surprise attack, or under prolonged occupation with significant atrocities (see for example the Rape of Nanking, to say nothing of those learned about later) without resorting to an armed defense of those interests. Can you think of examples?

2. Japan was actually conducting a war of conquest across the region. In contrast, the Soviet Union during the Cold War wasn’t even that bold. It subverted governments, it installed puppets, it armed rebellions… it did a lot of stuff, but when they actually invaded countries, like Afghanistan, the heat got turned up a lot. Nothing the Japanese did during that time remotely resembled the Soviets incursions into Czechoslovakia, for example. The Japanese were waaaay more aggressive.

So what, you say? I think civilized countries have a reasonable duty to counter naked aggression.

3. The Roosevelt Administration had a compelling interest not to do something which, again to my immediate memory, is probably unprecedented: respond to a sneak attack that killed thousands of citizens with some more sanctions. What was this interest? Mainly, not looking like an incompetent boob after the hue and cry about appeasement of Hitler and the complete failure of that policy.

Personally, I think those are pretty compelling interests all around.

I would love to hear someone offer a better explanation for the Professor’s weakest argument: that the U.S. entry into the war somehow led to Mao taking over China. He strongly implies that if we had opted for containment, Mao wouldn’t have murdered all those people. Which, to me, sounds like arguing that if Teddy Roosevelt hadn’t built the Panama Canal, Castro wouldn’t have taken all that American property in Cuba.