How should the United States have responded to Pearl Harbor?

[Crane]

Nemo,

That’s the point. The Japanese had no need or plan for the use of a strategic bomber.

We are discussing a point on the time line of history - 8 Dec 1941. The Japanese had the technology (some under license), the trained personnel, the support facilities, the command strategies and tactics to pursue their goals. They had no targets that justified the cost of strategic bombers.

The US had a few B17-Es, little or no ground support, very few personnel and no command strategy at all.

Two years later it would be a different story.

Crane

[Crane]

DrDeth,

The JU87 is a neat airplane for study and modeling. It was effective in Spain and later in Poland and France, but by the end of 1941 it was obsolete.

Crane

[Voyager]

@Donald_Rump

Mueller’s point is that what you describe is essentially the approach we took toward the USSR in Eastern Europe, and that policy was preferable to hot war/trying to occupy the USSR and force and unconditional surrender to our terms. Describing it as surrender is irrelevant to the question of whether that policy best served our national interests, which given the outcome of the Cold War I would say, in fact, it did.

You can’t ignore the existence of nuclear weapons. That a direct confrontation between the US and USSR could easily descend into a nuclear war prevented the possibility of total war - thus leaving containment to wars between proxies. So you can’t really compare the situations. If we had a nuclear weapon targeted on Tokyo Pearl Harbor probably wouldn’t have happened.

[Voyager]

I’ve got a few questions which I don’t think have been covered.
First, how would you propose keeping the containment (not that it would have worked) from turning into a hot war in any case? Would Prof. Mueller propose that our naval forces would be purely defensive? Without the Japanese having to worry about attacks on their newly captured territory, what would keep them from invading Hawaii and possible shelling Pacific cities, if not an actual invasion. How many civilian casualties in LA and San Francisco would be acceptable to him?
At some point the casualties of a delayed full war would have been greater than what we had, since we would started in a bigger hole, if we succeeded at all.

I just read a book by Philip Wylie written in the first half of 1942. Many were much less confident than you might think they would be looking back from today. Perhaps Mueller is confused by our current superpower status.

[Guinastasia]

@Donald_Rump

Do I think SOMEONE should fight and die to prevent the Holocaust? Of course. But my litmus test in these matters is, “Would I be willing to die horribly or send my son to die horribly for this cause?” And there, the honest answer is, probably not unless it threatened to directly affect me and my family. The same reason the US has generally not committed soldiers to preventing genocide (eg Cambodia, Rwanda, Iraq today).

And as pointed out upthread, stopping the Holocaust was a side effect (a most wonderful one to be sure) of our involvement in the war, not the motivating factor.

Considering the Nazis were determined to take over Europe and probably expand the Holocaust into the rest of the continent…it probably should have been. That motherfucker didn’t just want to get rid of the Jews in Germany. He wanted to wipe out the Jews completely. (Along with other groups that were considered “inferior”) I just wish he had still been alive when we dropped the bombs, so he could’ve shit his pants in fear.

BTW, the Imperial Japanese were just as bad as the Nazis. Unit 731? Bataan Death March? Rape of Nanking? Don’t kid yourselves.

[XT]

[QUOTE=Voyager]
First, how would you propose keeping the containment (not that it would have worked) from turning into a hot war in any case? Would Prof. Mueller propose that our naval forces would be purely defensive? Without the Japanese having to worry about attacks on their newly captured territory, what would keep them from invading Hawaii and possible shelling Pacific cities, if not an actual invasion. How many civilian casualties in LA and San Francisco would be acceptable to him?
[/QUOTE]

Yeah, I asked a similar question up-thread. Basically, containment wasn’t an option for the US until probably the middle or late '44…and that was after we had basically whittled away at the Japanese Navy and taken several key islands back from them that allowed us to interdict Japanese air and naval (and naval logistics) forces. Without us doing all of that, and building a huge Navy to challenge them it wouldn’t have happened, and there was nothing we could have done to contain them. This prof. Mueller doesn’t seem to actually understand the history he’s commenting on from the looks of things.

At some point the casualties of a delayed full war would have been greater than what we had, since we would started in a bigger hole, if we succeeded at all.

We would also have been in a much weakened position, and Japan in a much stronger one economically as well as militarily.

I just read a book by Philip Wylie written in the first half of 1942. Many were much less confident than you might think they would be looking back from today. Perhaps Mueller is confused by our current superpower status.

I think he was basically trying to be provocative and think ‘outside the box’ of conventional thinking, but the problem is I don’t think he actually has much of a clue as to history or the dynamics of the situation in the lead up to the war. It’s easy to challenge conventional wisdom and spout theories if you don’t actually understand WHY ‘conventional wisdom’ is, well, conventional, or why it’s the main stream view. Sometimes challenging it does lead to radical shifts, but it’s good to actually know something about the subject before you start challenging it…it makes you look less stupid when people start to pick holes in your shinny radical new theories.

[Donald_Rump]

@XT

Without us doing all of that, and building a huge Navy to challenge them it wouldn’t have happened, and there was nothing we could have done to contain them.

The first part of Prof. Mueller’s paper is devoted to arguing that on Dec. 6, 1941, the US did not have adequate naval resources to contain Japan. Hence, the title of the paper, “Pearl Harbor: Military Inconvenience, Political Disaster” (italics mine). (It certainly sounds callous to characterize Pearl Harbor as a mere “inconvenience,” but his larger point is that the 3,000 deaths that day pale in comparison to the cost of the whole war, and that the fleet itself was obsolete and inadequate even prior to the Pearl Harbor attack.)

So, implicitly he would agree that containment would require building up a formidable navy capable of defending Hawaii, the West Coast, Panama Canal, etc. No argument there. I don’t know what his view is with respect to the Philippines and how committed the US should have been to defending our interests there at all costs. He doesn’t say.

I think he was basically trying to be provocative and think ‘outside the box’ of conventional thinking, but the problem is I don’t think he actually has much of a clue as to history or the dynamics of the situation in the lead up to the war.

You’re welcome to your judgment of Mueller’s grasp of history, but I think it’s a little uncharitable to make any such judgment based on my transmission of his argument alone. His paper is at least as well cited as any post in this thread, although I give kudos to you and others who clearly have a great deal of WWII knowledge (hey, that’s why I came to the Dope).

I think the bigger issue is that it’s unclear from Mueller’s article (or my second-hand transmission thereof) exactly what policy he’s advocating. Broadly, he’s saying that in hindsight and viewed with a rather unrealistic degree of dispassion, we probably could have avoided going to war with Japan, let them collapse under their own weight over time as they got bogged down in their imperial project, and done things through diplomacy, sanctions, and peripheral skirmishes and harassment to speed that process along. (In any event, he’s saying that the American interests at stake didn’t justify the costs incurred in the war, so my guess is that he was ok with the idea that this could take 70 years, as it did the Soviet Union.) But it’s unclear to me where Mueller’s policy ends and the actual policy undertaken by the US begins, so I don’t even know what the argument is anymore.

Perhaps this isn’t exactly germane to debunking Mueller’s argument, but I would be interested in knowing how you/others think things would have turned out if we had, in fact, not gone to war with Japan and forced their unconditional surrender. What would the Pacific look like today? Would Japan be a military dictatorship enslaving all of its neighbors and committing vivisections in the name of science? How would China’s history have turned out differently?

[Little_Nemo]

@Crane

That’s the point. The Japanese had no need or plan for the use of a strategic bomber.

We are discussing a point on the time line of history - 8 Dec 1941. The Japanese had the technology (some under license), the trained personnel, the support facilities, the command strategies and tactics to pursue their goals. They had no targets that justified the cost of strategic bombers.

It appears we’re going to disagree. I think Japan did have a need for strategic bombers. Their lack was one of the reasons Japan lost the war.

I also disagree that the United States had no command strategy in 1941. They had developed war plans throughout the thirties on how they would fight a war against Japan, against Germany, or against Japan and Germany.

[XT]

[QUOTE=Donald Rump]
So, implicitly he would agree that containment would require building up a formidable navy capable of defending Hawaii, the West Coast, Panama Canal, etc. No argument there. I don’t know what his view is with respect to the Philippines and how committed the US should have been to defending our interests there at all costs. He doesn’t say.
[/QUOTE]

Except that without us in a ‘hot war’ with Japan we wouldn’t be able to cut back their own military, leaving it free to continue to expand, take new territories, expand their military and economic empire through the region all while we played catch up. And it ignores the fact that, if the US decided to go with his strategy I don’t see how or why the American people would make the same level of sacrifice they did in the real world to rebuild and build up sufficient to ‘contain’ Japan. I don’t think it’s possible for the US to contain Japan in any meaningful way without destroying their Navy and removing their island outposts and eventually blockading the home islands, and the only way to do that is how we did it.

Perhaps this isn’t exactly germane to debunking Mueller’s argument, but I would be interested in knowing how you/others think things would have turned out if we had, in fact, not gone to war with Japan and forced their unconditional surrender. What would the Pacific look like today? Would Japan be a military dictatorship enslaving all of its neighbors and committing vivisections in the name of science? How would China’s history have turned out differently?

Well, in the end we didn’t actually force an unconditional surrender…we actually allowed the Emperor to live and continue in his ceremonial role. I don’t think that leaving Japan’s then government in power was ever going to happen, but if we speculate that it’s 1945 and we have the home islands blockaded and decided for some odd reason not to invade OR use atomic bombs to bring down the government then I’d guess there would have been mass starvation in Japan as the resources they needed to continue on would have been completely cut off. Eventually, perhaps, there would have been some sort of peace that the then Japanese government could have lived with (how we and the Russians would have is another matter). Japan would have lost all of it’s overseas empire (China, Korea, etc), under some sort of interdict/blockade and probably economic sanctions, but still in power essentially. My thought is this would be very similar to what happened at the end of WWI with Germany. Without a clear cut victory I’m sure that the US and allies would have demanded concessions and probably some sort of reparations, and Japan would have been forced to sign treaties limiting their future military. The Japanese would have been just as resentful of this as the Germans were, and with the then current Japanese government still in power I could see the seeds of future wars being sown with such a policy.

I just don’t see any upside for anyone in this, to be honest. There would have been more deaths, it would have cost more and it would have just dragged on and festered. I suppose the cold war period might have been different, but perhaps it wouldn’t have been a cold war but a hot one instead, with a Japan jockeying with the super powers to see which side would give them the best advantage and to re-arm and start the cycle again.

[Dissonance]

@DrDeth

No, the USSR was gonna get whupped by Nazi Germany. The Soviets desperately needed lend-lease goods and Allied supplies. Also if GB had bowed out, Germany would have no issues with supplies and could easily blockade the USSR- at least in the Atlantic side. Stalin himself said that Lend lease was *absolutely necessary *to Soviet success.

Which, of course, explains why the USSR was able to bring the German advance to a dead halt and then threw them into retreat before any lend-lease aid even began arriving by the time Pearl Harbor was bombed. I fail to see how in the extremely unlikely event the UK bowed out of the war this would make it any easier for the Germans to ‘blockade’ the USSR. Very little of the lend-lease aid sent to the USSR went via the Arctic Route, which was the only one Germany could do anything about, and 92% of the supplies end that way arrived successfully. Germany could do nothing to stop supplies from flowing through the Persian Corridor or the Pacific Route, which historically moved more than 3/4 of lend-lease aid and could easily have taken up the slack had the Arctic Route somehow been closed.

@DrDeth

Not to mention, Stalin was unstable and obsessed with getting Allied aid and intervention. If the USSR had no allies or friends, he would have gone even more bonkers, causing the collapse of the USSR.

That is a rather bizarre assessment of Stalin, a man who is pretty much universally regarded as having been extremely paranoid and distrusting. You’re seriously claiming if he had no friends, it would have resulted in his going “bonkers” and causing the collapse of the Soviet Union?

[DrDeth]

@Dissonance

Which, of course, explains why the USSR was able to bring the German advance to a dead halt and then threw them into retreat before any lend-lease aid even began arriving by the time Pearl Harbor was bombed.

That is a rather bizarre assessment of Stalin, a man who is pretty much universally regarded as having been extremely paranoid and distrusting. You’re seriously claiming if he had no friends, it would have resulted in his going “bonkers” and causing the collapse of the Soviet Union?

Yes, yes, we’ve had this argument before. General Winter did a rather good job of stopping the German offensive… it couldnt last.
“Accounts by Nikita Khrushchev and Anastas Mikoyan claim that, after the invasion, Stalin retreated to his dacha in despair for several days and did not participate in leadership decisions.”
Joseph Stalin, during the Tehran Conference in 1943, acknowledged publicly the importance of American efforts during a dinner at the conference: “Without American production the United Nations [the Allies] could never have won the war.”[21][22]

Stalin also claimed over and over that a second Front was needed or else the USSR was in danger of collapse and thus Nazi victory.

So, your opinion is just your opinion. No historians share it and Stalin himself disagreed. American Lend-lease was absolutely necessary for a Allied Victory.

[Bridget_Burke]

I’ve enjoyed reading all the answers–I’m a bit of a history buff but this war isn’t my specialty. (Any more than it is for any other Boomer.)

But I’m wondering about one thing. Since Japan declared war in the USA after the attack, what were our real options? Could we have repliced “No, we’d rather not. Let’s explore less violent options”?

Actually, two things. Germany declared war against us on December 11th. Could our government have answered “This is not a good time for us. Perhaps later”?

[Little_Nemo]

@DrDeth

Stalin also claimed over and over that a second Front was needed or else the USSR was in danger of collapse and thus Nazi victory.

So, your opinion is just your opinion. No historians share it and Stalin himself disagreed. American Lend-lease was absolutely necessary for a Allied Victory.

A more likely explanation was that Stalin was lying. It was certainly better for the Soviet Union if somebody else was producing supplies for them and giving them to the Soviets for free. But the United States was fighting its own war and also needed the supplies it was making. Stalin needed to convince the United States that it was critical to keep sending supplies to the Soviet Union. Saying “We’ll lose the war without those supplies” is a lot more effective than saying “We’d be inconvenienced if we had to produce those supplies ourselves.”

[Little_Nemo]

@Bridget_Burke

But I’m wondering about one thing. Since Japan declared war in the USA after the attack, what were our real options? Could we have repliced “No, we’d rather not. Let’s explore less violent options”?

Actually, two things. Germany declared war against us on December 11th. Could our government have answered “This is not a good time for us. Perhaps later”?

There’s the old cliche that it takes two sides to make a peace but only one side to make a war. Once a country declares war on you, you can’t refuse. Your only alternatives are to fight or to surrender.

[DrDeth]

@Little_Nemo

A more likely explanation was that Stalin was lying. It was certainly better for the Soviet Union if somebody else was producing supplies for them and giving them to the Soviets for free. But the United States was fighting its own war and also needed the supplies it was making. Stalin needed to convince the United States that it was critical to keep sending supplies to the Soviet Union. Saying “We’ll lose the war without those supplies” is a lot more effective than saying “We’d be inconvenienced if we had to produce those supplies ourselves.”

Well, since every well known Historian agrees- maybe Stalin was telling the truth for once, eh?

Even those who claim the USSR basically won WWII singlehandedly* agree that Stalin would have been able to do it without the massive aid the USSR got. Note that the USSR depended on rail transport but was unable to make any significant new rolling stock to replace that the Germans destroyed.

• and certainly they took the brunt of the casualties.

[XT]

@Little_Nemo

A more likely explanation was that Stalin was lying. It was certainly better for the Soviet Union if somebody else was producing supplies for them and giving them to the Soviets for free. But the United States was fighting its own war and also needed the supplies it was making. Stalin needed to convince the United States that it was critical to keep sending supplies to the Soviet Union. Saying “We’ll lose the war without those supplies” is a lot more effective than saying “We’d be inconvenienced if we had to produce those supplies ourselves.”

No, I think this is revisionist. Stalin absolutely DID think the US/UK had to open a second front, and the USSR couldn’t have done what they did without US/allied aid. Looking back on events through the lens of hindsight…well, no, I still think Stalin et al needed the allies to open a second front in Western Europe or Germany could have concentrated much more on Russia and wouldn’t have folded quite as fast in '44-45 on the Eastern Front without it. And that the Russians wouldn’t have been able to do what they did without the massive amounts of food, materials, trucks, tanks, planes, parts and mountains of supplies given to them by the other allies.

[DrDeth]

Russia's Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World War II (Book...

Did Russia Really Go It Alone? How Lend-Lease Helped the Soviets Defeat the...

What is interesting is that during the War the Soviets were clear that lend-lease was crucial. However during the Cold war they started downplaying the parts the UK, USA and other Allies did, basically claiming they won WWII by themselves. This was pure propaganda.

[XT]

Found this link on Did Russia Really Go It Alone:

That the Soviet victories of late 1941 were won with Soviet blood and largely with Soviet weapons is beyond dispute. But for decades the official Soviet line went much further. Soviet authorities recognized that the “Great Patriotic War” gave the Communist Party a claim to legitimacy that went far beyond Marxism-Leninism or the 1917 Revolution, and took pains to portray their nation’s victories in World War II as single-handed. Any mention of the role that Western assistance played in the Soviet war effort was strictly off-limits.

During Nikita Khrushchev’s rule in the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was a window of greater frankness and openness about the extent of aid supplied from the West under the Lend-Lease Act—but it was still clearly forbidden for Soviet authors to suggest that such aid ever made any real difference on the battlefield. Mentions of Lend-Lease in memoirs were always accompanied by disparagement of the quality of the weapons supplied, with American and British tanks and planes invariably portrayed as vastly inferior to comparable Soviet models.

An oft-quoted statement by First Vice-Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars Nikolai Voznesensky summed up the standard line that Allied aid represented “only 4 percent” of Soviet production for the entire war. Lacking any detailed information to the contrary, Western authors generally agreed that even if Lend-Lease was important from 1943 on, as quantities of aid dramatically increased, the aid was far too little and late to make a difference in the decisive battles of 1941–1942.

But since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a trickle of information has emerged from archives in Moscow, shedding new light on the subject. While much of the documentary evidence remains classified “secret” in the Central Archives of the Ministry of Defense and the Russian State Archive of the Economy, Western and Russian researchers have been able to gain access to important, previously unavailable firsthand documents. I was recently able to examine Russian-language materials of the State Defense Committee—the Soviet equivalent of the British War Cabinet—held in the former Central Party Archive. Together with other recently published sources, including the wartime diaries of N. I. Biriukov, a Red Army officer responsible from August 1941 on for the distribution of recently acquired tanks to the front lines, this newly available evidence paints a very different picture from the received wisdom. In particular, it shows that British Lend-Lease assistance to the Soviet Union in late 1941 and early 1942 played a far more significant part in the defense of Moscow and the revival of Soviet fortunes in late 1941 than has been acknowledged.

Particularly important for the Soviets in late 1941 were British-supplied tanks and aircraft. American contributions of the time were far fewer. In fact, for a brief period during December 1941, the relative importance of British aid increased well beyond levels planned by the Allies as a result of American reaction to the outbreak of war with Japan; some American equipment destined for the Soviet Union was actually unloaded from merchant vessels and provided to American forces instead.

Even aid that might seem like a drop in the bucket in the larger context of Soviet production for the war played a crucial role in filling gaps at important moments during this period. At a time when Soviet industry was in disarray—many of their industrial plants were destroyed or captured by the advancing Nazi troops or in the process of evacuation east—battlefield losses of specific equipment approached or even exceeded the rate at which Soviet domestic production could replace them during this crucial period. Under these circumstances even small quantities of aid took on far greater significance.

According to research by a team of Soviet historians, the Soviet Union lost a staggering 20,500 tanks from June 22 to December 31, 1941. At the end of November 1941, only 670 Soviet tanks were available to defend Moscow—that is, in the recently formed Kalinin, Western, and Southwestern Fronts. Only 205 of these tanks were heavy or medium types, and most of their strength was concentrated in the Western Front, with the Kalinin Front having only two tank battalions (67 tanks) and the Southwestern Front two tank brigades (30 tanks).

Given the disruption to Soviet production and Red Army losses, the Soviet Union was understandably eager to put British armor into action as soon as possible. According to Biriukov’s service diary, the first 20 British tanks arrived at the Soviet tank training school in Kazan on October 28, 1941, at which point a further 120 tanks were unloaded at the port of Archangel in northern Russia. Courses on the British tanks for Soviet crews started during November as the first tanks, with British assistance, were being assembled from their in-transit states and undergoing testing by Soviet specialists.

The tanks reached the front lines with extraordinary speed. Extrapolating from available statistics, researchers estimate that British-supplied tanks made up 30 to 40 percent of the entire heavy and medium tank strength of Soviet forces before Moscow at the beginning of December 1941, and certainly made up a significant proportion of tanks available as reinforcements at this critical point in the fighting. By the end of 1941 Britain had delivered 466 tanks out of the 750 promised.

A steady stream of British-made tanks continued to flow into the Red Army through the spring and summer of 1942. Canada would eventually produce 1,420 Valentines, almost exclusively for delivery to the Soviet Union. By July 1942 the Red Army had 13,500 tanks in service, with more than 16 percent of those imported, and more than half of those British.

Lend-Lease aircraft deliveries were also of significance during the Battle of Moscow. While Soviet pilots praised the maneuverability of the homegrown I-153 Chaika and I-16 Ishak fighters—still in use in significant numbers in late 1941—both types were certainly obsolete and inferior in almost all regards to the British-supplied Hurricane. The Hurricane was rugged and tried and tested, and as useful at that point as many potentially superior Soviet designs such as the LaGG-3 and MiG-3. There were apparently only 263 LaGG-3s in the Soviet inventory by the time of the Moscow counteroffensive, and it was an aircraft with numerous defects. At the end of 1941 there were greater numbers of the MiG-3, but the plane was considered difficult to fly. The Yak-1, arguably the best of the batch, and superior in most regards to the Hurricane, suffered from airframe and engine defects in early war production aircraft.

A total of 699 Lend-Lease aircraft had been delivered to Archangel by the time the Arctic convoys switched to Murmansk in December 1941. Of these, 99 Hurricanes and 39 Tomahawks were in service with the Soviet air defense forces on January 1, 1942, out of a total of 1,470 fighters. About 15 percent of the aircraft of the 6th Fighter Air Corps defending Moscow were Tomahawks or Hurricanes.

Once again, raw figures do not tell the whole story. Although British shipments amounted to only a few percent of Soviet domestic production of machine tools, the Soviet Union could request specific items which it may not have been able to produce for itself. Additionally, many of the British tools arrived in early 1942, when Soviet tool production was still very low, resulting in a disproportionate impact. The handing over of forty imported machine tools to Aviation Factory No. 150 in July 1942, for example, was the critical factor in enabling the factory to reach projected capacity within two months.

And this doesn’t address all the other things the allies were giving the Soviets, including designs, food, medicine, clothing and tons of other miscellaneous supplies that were the fuel to make the Soviet Juggernaut run.

[DrDeth]

Great cites!

[XT]

@DrDeth

Great cites!

Was just going to say you ninja’d me.