I’m somewhat familiar with the historocity of the war between the US and Japan in the Pacific, although I’ve never seen this question answered:
Why did Japan attack the US, in the first place? I realize they had a superior navy at the outset, but for them to have thought that they could somehow defeat the US would be foolish. What was the goal? Did they want to devastate the US military ASAP and then sue for peace? What was the motive here and logic behind this? Thanks in advance.
Hoo boy! Entire books have been written about this. Let me try a bite size answer and then let’s have all the gang join in.
Japan is a resource-poor nation, heavily dependent on imports of petroleum, steel, etc. After the Japanese aggression in eastern Asia, the U.S. had cut off exports of “strategic materials.”
The Japanese hoped a quick attack on the U.S. fleet would A) force a quick peace treaty with the U.S. that would lift the embargo and B) neutralize the U.S. from moving against Japan in any further expansion.
Japan was trying to establish a large Pacific empire. The U.S. Pacific Fleet was a major obstacle to this goal. So, they attacked it. Admiral Yamamoto, a brilliant U.S. educated tactician, cooked up the plan. He warned the leaders of Japan, however, that Japan could only beat the U.S. for about six months before things turned. He was almost exactly right.
May I recommend the excellent movie Tora, Tora, Tora? I wouldn’t call it an exhaustive treatment of the subject, but I think it’s a decent introduction to those not well-versed in the history of the time.
For $11.90 (+S&H) you can get:
The Reluctant Admiral: Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy
by Hiroyuki Agawa, John Bester (Translator)
From Amazon & it will give you the details on what has already been said which recount the main story.
The only “sound bite” thing I would add is that the Japanese expected Pearl Harbor to be far more devastating than it turned out to be. There were three aircraft carriers that were stationed at Pearl Harbor: the USS Lexington, the USS Saratoga and the USS Enterprise. Even the most optimistic Japanese plans did not expect all three to be there but had hoped 1 or even two might have been in port 12/7/41 – and so sunk.
There was also the hope (read wishful thinking) among the Japanese planners that enough ships would be sunk in the channel to make Pearl unusable, possibly for up to 18 months.
My understanding is that is was less that the Japanese thought the U.S. would lift the embargo, and more that they planned to seize an empire to provide them with their resources after “neutralizing” the U.S. fleet. Then we could embargo them all we wanted, and they wouldn’t care. I don’t think they were counting on a post-war resumption of trade with the U.S. in their economic and strategic plans.
Pearl Harbor was only the beginning of a comprehensive attack against the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), (British) Malaya and Singapore, and the U.S.-held Philippines. The idea was that once they seized those areas and their assorted natural resources such as oil (Indonesia went on to become a member of OPEC) and rubber, they could establish the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” as an autarky, an economically self-sufficient region which wouldn’t need imports. As far as I know, they never intended any direct territorial expansion at the expense of the U.S., except for the Philippines (at the outbreak of the war a U.S. commonwealth headed towards full independence) and maybe some smaller insular possessions like Guam–I don’t think they even really contemplated annexing the territory of Hawaii, let alone invading California. The idea was, by the time the U.S. recovered from the initial blow, the Japanese would already have consolidated their empire in East and Southeast Asia, and they were counting on us to not find it worthwhile to wage a war against strongly defended territories in order to liberate assorted Malays and Filipinos so on. (Britain they were probably counting on Hitler to deal with, and France and the Netherlands–both colonial powers in the region Japan coveted–were already under Nazi occupation.)
Of course, it was all a huge miscalculation by the Japanese, but that seems to have been the logic of the attack.
I read a story in a newspaper many years ago that the scenario played out with Pearl Harbor was developed at the British War College in the 30s, where Tojo or Yamamoto was studying at the time. To wit: U.S. embargos Japan, Japan strikes Pearl Harbor to neutralize the fleet, secures its Pacific empire, and strives for resource sufficiency.
The kicker is that, in that scenario, Japan ultimately lost because they couldn’t stop the U.S. from rebuilding it’s fleet and taking the Pacific back, even if Japan was able to secure its own resource base. Kicking the U.S. out of the Pacific had little impact on U.S. resources, which eventually overwhelmed the “superior fighting spirit of the Japanese soldier”. Tojo/Yamamoto knew this going into the attack on Pearl, but it was the only available plan, and their attempts to reason with their superiors failed.
I do know that in Axis & Allies, Japan can wipe out the U.S. navy in the first two turns, and then invades Russia. With a sufficiently aggressive German player, the Axis takes Moscow and London and wins.
Add to this the submariners’ view that one of the great pieces of luck was that our sub fleet was not in port. Since submarines eventually had a major role in sinking the Japanese fleet, this is fairly important. Of course, at the time the Japanese had no idea submarines would be so effective.
This has more or less been said, but the Japanese simply didn’t have any other competition for the whole Pacific! They’d sunk a huge Russian fleet in WWI, they were on the way to utterly defeating China. When the Japanese “looked for an enemy”, as military planners do, the obvious choice was the US.
The reverse was only true in part for the United States. Yes, we were putting economic screws on the Japanese. But the majority of Americans in the 1930s were isolationist, so we weren’t ramping up for a full-scale war.
Here’s an amazing notion, which only came home to me reading and watching about Pan Am’s Flying Clippers. If the Japanese could sink most of our military fleet, and the long-distance fleet submarines were not available – there was no way for an American to cross the Pacific in under, say, a couple weeks from the West Coast! If the Japanese controlled the Pacific, they controlled access to all of the orient! When the Flying Clippers “broke” this monopoly in fast travel, they became a target. There weren’t that many of them, and they were very expensive, so knocking out, say, six, could have changed the nature of travel across the Pacific! There’s a great topic for a book on military history: “How the Flying Clippers Kept the US in the Pacific War”. (I don’t know whether the thesis is defensible, but it would be interesting to write.)
Another shortfall was not making the on-shore oil stores and the drydocks a priority target. As it is, when Naguno decided to NOT stick around for a 3rd and 4th wave attack (influenced by not knowing where the heck the US carriers were), he left the remnant of the Pacific Fleet with the capacity to repair, rearm and refuel relatively close to the front.
MEBruckner pretty much has the overall gist of what they were thinking. Since right up to 1941 American public opinion was very isolationist, “don’t-get-our-boys-involved”, towards foreign wars, it was a reasonable, if extreme-high-risk, gamble that we would not find it worth the blood to push them all the way back – maybe get a couple of licks in, to save face, but we’d then grow weary – and the war would end with them in control of what they needed.
Many of the career officers knew that the US had the advantage in material and human resources, available technology and industrial capacity, if it became a long-duration slugfest. Thus the comment attributed to Yamamoto that he could go berserk for six months, but if by then the US was still standing and fighting, Japan was in trouble.
One aspect not mentioned is that the Japanese nationalists were incredibly racist. They were of pure blood while Americans were mongrels. Obviously we would be no match for them. They completely misunderstood the psychology of the the US which also backfired when Pearl Harbor turned out to be the best way to flip the US war machine “On switch” in the short possible time.
(I thought Yamamoto’s time estimate before the tide turned was 1 year, not 6 months.)
This site gives the Yamamoto quote as “In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.”
The Battle of Midway, generally considered to be the turning point of the war in the Pacific, was in June 1942, so Yamamoto’s low-end figure turned out to be closer to the truth.
Thinking that they could defeat the US was foolish, but no one said that Japan in WW2 wasn’t. In a broad sense, Japan was going to go to war with the US and UK over southeast Asia; Japan wanted a colonial empire (the 'Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere), and would need to get the consent of the US and UK for that to happen. Their basic idea was that the US wouldn’t fight hard to stop this, that they could inflict a few defeats on the US and secure a peace aknowledging their new place in the sun.
The timing of the actual attack on the United States comes down to oil; the US oil embargo against Japan had led them to nearly deplete their reserves, so if they had waited much longer than they did they wouldn’t have been able to operate ships. The primary oil producer in the area was the Netherlands East Indes, which they planned to seize to be self-sufficient in oil. The problem is that the Phillipines (a US territory) lays right on any route tankers could take between the NEI and Japan proper, which would make it a good base for subs, aircraft, and raiding ships to disrupt Japan’s new oil. So they decided that they needed to capture PI as part of their big offensive against the westerners (at the same time they’d be attacking British possessions).
Since an attack on US forces in the Phillipines would obviously start a war with the US, they decided to attempt to destroy the US’s ability to fight, and included an attack on Pearl Harbor. The idea was that by capturing PI and mauling the US fleet at PH, US morale would be too low for a real war and Japan could successfully sue for peace. This plan, of course, didn’t work (it would be hard to design a better attack than the one on Pearl Harbor to get the US behind a war), and the rest is history.
Although the attack on Pearl Harbour was certainly the most complicated and dramatic, in fact the Japanese attacked the British first on December 7th (or December 8th Tokyo time); some 2 hours before the raid began at Pearl, Japanese troops were landing in British Malaya, at Kota Baru.
Interesting to speculate on what maight have happened if the news of this attack (landing near a fairly remote airfield) had been spread faster…
Probably nothing would have happened. An attack by Japan on the British in Malaya wouldn’t have occasioned a lot of alarm in the US. After all, weren’t our forces in the Philippines taken by surprise, for example at Clark Field, several hours after the Pearl Harbor attack?
It is difficult at this remote point in time to appreciate the mind set of most of the US that we were were entirely protected by distance from any war unless we decided to get into it. We really thought, most of us, that it was entirely our choice.
Granted that this speculative history of the sort that nearly everybody has reservations about, but were the Japanese really that foolish? Their only real mistake was not knuckling under to the Americans. What if they had stopped around 1940 with the holdings they’d won? Then spent years dithering after rejoining the League of Nations, making little compromises, watching while the world exhausted itself in WWII? They could have consolidated their position, built an extraordinary surface fleet of the kind they almost managed to do, and get their submarines behaving properly. The United States would have put all its effort into defeating Germany, true, but that still probably would have left the Japanese until 1944 before anyone even considered attacking them. Seems like a pretty strong position…
In 1940, the Japanese holdings included chunks of China, and the Japanese war with China was the primary reason the US was hostile to Japan. The Japanese army could not leave China without losing face (and thus their power in the government), and there’s no way the US was going to let Japan stay in China proper (Manchuria, probably, but not the other holdings). Their holdings didn’t include any oil-producing lands, so without withdrawing from China (which the army wouldn’t do) they couldn’t fuel their fleets (since the US would embargo them for not leaving China).
Even if we presume that the Japanese manage to somehow get the army to withdraw from China and so avoid an embargo, their ‘exceptional’ surface fleet just wasn’t going to measure up to what the US could sail. The US would end up with over 50 fleet carriers (including ones completed after the historical end of WW2 and ones not completed), and that doesn’t include the over 120 escort carriers (which were only suited for convoy duty). They’d also have to deal with Soviet forces siezing Manchuria and China, and the Commonwealth fleets, as well as stronger forces in the western allies colonial holdings. IMO, there was simply no way for Imperial Japan to achieve her goals in WW2.
If discussion continues on this hypothetical, I’ll continue it in GD since it’s getting out of GQ territory.
The OP’s question has been pretty well answered, but there are paradoxes to the Pearl Harbor episode that have always puzzled me.
At the time, naval strategists in both the U.S. and Japan placed primary reliance on the firepower of the battleship to win battles. Hence, Japan’s main target at Pearl was “Battleship Row,” where sat no fewer than eight battleships, lined up like ducks in a shooting gallery. And for the remainder of the war, Japanese strategists repeatedly attempted to maneuver the American Pacific Fleet into the “one great battle” with the battleships of the Japanese Combined Fleet, which the Japanese were confident they could win.
Yet, by executing Yamamoto’s plan at Pearl Harbor, weren’t the Japanese demonstrating – rather painfully, to us – that *the real key to controlling the vast Pacific was not battleships at all, but aircraft carriers? *
This question leads to another – Why did the Japanese do what they did, the way they did, when they knew beforehand with absolute certainty that not one of the American carriers were at Pearl?
As it turned out, we adopted the notion of the primacy of naval airpower rather more quickly than did the Japanese, and the eyeball-to-eyeball battleship slugfest the Japs sought never took place. By the later stages of the war, U.S. battleships had been relegated to support roles, while our carrier fleets projected power over 50,000-square-mile chunks of ocean.
I think there is a factual answer to this question, but it’s not a very satisfying one. Both the Americans and Japanese were heavily wedded to the concept of the line-of-capital-ship confrontation, but both sides were also cognizant of the emerging power of naval aviation and used it out of pragmatism.
If you look at this page, you will see that the first Essex-class fleet carrier was laid down in April, 1941, and it looks like the money for it was appropriated for FY1941 as well, meaning that the concept was approved by Congress in 1940. The next two members of the class were laid down in December, 1941, which I think implies some prior preparation.
The Essex was the prototypical modern carrier–big, fast, purpose-built (unlike the Lexington and Saratoga, which were originally planned as battle-cruisers). It, its sister-ships, and its close cousins of the Ticonderoga class proved to be one of if not the most important strategic hammers which won the war in the Pacific.
Furthermore, American naval aviation had grown by leaps and bounds throughout the 1930s. Believe it or not, the Douglas Devastator, which proved so tragically vulnerable come 1942, was state of the art when it first flew operationally in 1937.
This implies to me that some people in the Navy were forward-thinking enough to see the potential of the aircraft carrier well before Pearl Harbor (but I’ll bet fewer were aware of that potential before Taranto) .
On the other hand, neither side seemed to be able to slip the legacy of Jutland. After losing four carriers at Midway, Yammamoto still entertained the thought of slipping his fast battleships into the midst of the American carriers. “Bull” Halsey, an Admiral legendary for his volatility, was supposedly at his very angriest when a coding screw-up blew his chance to duke it out mano a mano with his battleships at Leyte Gulf in 1944. In that same overall battle, the Japanese, probably driven more by pragmatism than anything else, pressed surface operations on multiple fronts, and the engagement at Surigao Straight was much celebrated at the time for the Adm. Jesse Oldendorf’s classic “capping of the T.”
In hindsight it is easy to dissect the results of Pearl and conclude that it was the American aircraft carrier which turned the tables in the Pacific war (and barely at that–for a brief period in 1943 the Americans had one fleet carrier, the Enterprise, operational in the Pacific). But there was always a large contingent of Naval thinkers who still felt that the battleship, properly used, would prove to be the strategic key–as it always had from time immemorial.
I don’t understand battleships well (80% of what I know about navies is submarine-related), but recently I’ve been trying to get a handle on why battleships such as the Yamato and the Bismarck were so feared. Apparently, having a battleship with bigger guns, that was also faster and better armored was a death sentence for the most modern enemy battleship from 15 years before. Even while fighting ships were wooden there was a race to have more firepower, but once ships went metal the differences between one generation and the next became magnified. If I have this right, a couple ships like the Bismarck could have sunk a good part of the British surface fleet in 1940.
The other somewhat bewildering fact is that in its entire life, a modern battleship could expect to be engaged at most for only a few hours with another battleship. Admirals got ships in position, and played to the finish, right then and there. That’s why Admiral Yamamoto was hoping for a knock-out blow against the aircraft carriers.
When I was hypothesizing that the Japanese could have built a “super fleet”, Riboflavin, if they’d managed to stay out of the fight with America for an extra few years, is based partly on the assumption that 5 battleships of the Yamamoto class would be virtually unstoppable in 1944. Particularly if the United States hadn’t invested heavily in developing submarines. And, of course, if the United States hadn’t build dozens of aircraft carriers–but they wouldn’t have if the main enemy was Germany.
A question dear to me, the OP and the related one about aircraft carriers. Up front, I’ll offer a few books that will probably answer most of the questions well enough, AND are an enjoyable read.
Start off with
Willmott, H.P., Empires in the Balance. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1982
Bix, Herbert P., Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. New York: Random House, 2001
LaFeber, Walter. The Clash: A History of U.S.-Japanese Relations. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998
For the carriers vs. battleships thing, see:
Peattie, Mark. Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power.. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2002
Evans, David C., and Mark Peattie. Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1998 [AFAIK]
Campbell, Mark. The Influence of Air Power Upon the Evolution of Battle Doctrine in the U.S. Navy. M.A. Thesis, University of Massachusetts, 1992
TBone2 wrote:
In reverse order, they did not know with certainty that no carriers were in Pearl until the evening of December 6th, Hawaiian time, the latest time they got ground-based intelligence. They could have expected a return of the carriers on Sunday, December 7th, on the grounds that usually at least half the Pacific Fleet (thus, one or two carriers) was in port on Sundays. But for out-of-the ordinary missions and events (aviation transport tasks given to LEXINGTON and ENTERPRISE, and a delay in ENTERPRISE’s return to Pearl, scheduled for shortly before 8a.m. on the 7th), they would have caught at least one carrier in port.
The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor because the battleships in port in fact WERE the main strength of the U.S. Navy, the part which would have been used to hinder Japanese operations in South-East Asia. The American plan for battle was similar to the Japanese, would have seen the sortie of the battleships for an engagement north of the Marshall Islands, and would have required a MASSIVE Japanese commitment of forces to engage. Therefore, the battleships were still a valuable target.
In both the Japanese and American navies, there were adherents of battleship-centered strategy, and carrier-centered strategy. The Japanese had more combat experience and a better doctrinal concept for carrier handling, even if their carrier tactics were rather too advanced for their technology (it was, for example, not a good idea to mass six carriers in one formation in general, if you did not have radar for sufficient early warning against airborne threats). Their Carrier Striking Force certainly showed what it was worth in the Pearl Harbor raid; yet it is somewhat clear that the Americans would not have relied much on battleships after a certain point even if Pearl Harbor had not happened. They, too, had very reasonable concepts for the employment of their carriers in war, as evidenced by, for example, SARATOGA’s Wake relief mission, which saw the standard carrier group of 1942 already fully deployed and developed.
Rodd Hill wrote:
Probably nothing would have happened that would have altered the Pearl Harbor results. Two hours are a ridiculous small amount of time for anything to show results in a peacetime, even an alarmed peacetime, military establishment. Witness, for example, that it took some two hours for the first combat action at Pearl Harbor (WARD’s sinking of a midget submarine) to the air attack, with barely any headway being made towards an alerted base.
Riboflavin wrote:
This is probably closest to the truth, with one problem: it doesn’t adequately explain why the Japanese saw the need to attack the U.S. It is true that the U.S. demand was for the Japanese to quit China, which for the U.S. did NOT include Manchuria (according to Cordell Hull, SecState). Basically, the Japanese thought it meant Manchuria also, and refused to discuss the matter. With oil embargoed from the U.S. and talks with the Dutch getting no-where, the Japanese decided they needed to take the oil fields. The problem was, as in so many things, that the Japanese did not realize the political realities in the U.S. They believed the Philippines to be a threat to their operations in the south, as the U.S. would declare war even if the Japanese only attacked the British and Dutch. However, that was totally out of the question – that Congress would not have passed any declaration of war without a direct attack on American soil (even an attack on the Philippines did not seem adequate to some). Roosevelt, in fact, was quite desperate to get SOME reason for a declaration, posting Navy ships in the path of the Japanese invasion convoys.
In the end, the decision to fight the U.S., the way the Japanese fought it, and the hopes they attached to it, were founded on bad misreadings of American politics. Just as Congress would not have declared war without an attack, it would never ratify a peace treaty without victory after Pearl Harbor.