So suppose for one reason or another Hitler never rose to power and Germany never invaded Poland. Germany and France decide to let bygones be bygones and export Champagne and Bratwurst to each other. Would the US still have gotten into a war with Japan? Other than an alliance between Japan and Germany primarily directed against Russia, the war in Europe and the war in the Pacific seem pretty much independent. But I suppose it is also possible that the issues in Europe emboldened the Japanese to take a more aggressive stance in the Pacific.
Any thoughts from dopers more well versed in history than I?
Unknowable, but I think the Japanese would have been less aggressive against the western powers (Vichy controlled Indo-China, the Dutch East Indies and British Burma) - Hitler’s earlier successes against France, Britain, the Netherlands and later on against the USSR filled them with confidence. Without the successes of their ally in Europe they would probably have focused more on China than the Pacific, where they had been engaged since 1937.
Wiki has an interesting article on events leading to Pearl Harbor, to see how much in isolation (or not, as the case may be) the Pacific War was.
This should be in GD as there are no factual answers to hypotheticals such as this.
This needs a more detailed response, but the short answer is that IMHO, yes, Japan was on a course which would have gotten them into a war.
Because of the Meiji Constitution, the Japanese military nominally reported directly to the emperor, but in fact was almost completely independent. By the later 1930s, the leaders, especially the Imperial Japanese Army field generals had convinced themselves that they were superior to everyone else and could do what they wished, a view not shared by America, Britain or the USSR.
Japan adventures into China were happening regardless of the events in Europe, and the US sanctions were a response to that. Once the US cut off Japan’s oil, it was pretty much a guaranty that there would be a war.
As the post before mine says if Japan attacks Pearl Harbor then there is going to be war.
However if we change the question to would Japan have started the war if Germany is out of the picture than I think we can get a more useful answer.
Japan decision to enter WWII was a very close run thing. For all intents and purposes Japan was ruled by it’s military which was split into Navy and Army branches. The Navy and Army absolutely despised each other. They actively worked against each others best interests on multiple occasions.
Both sides framed their arguments around Japan’s war with China. The Navy thought that by capturing additional territories they could get more raw materials to support the war effort in China. (The additional side benefit that this would primary be lead by the Navy and thus improve their prestige is a obvious but never stated side benefit.) The Army thought that the additional resources need to attack and defend the new added territory would exceed the new resources. (Also it was anther opportunity to stick it to the Navy.)
In the end because the the war in Europe had pulled most of Frances, England, and the Netherlands defenses out of the area Japan decided to go to war. (In particular they considered how few fighter aircraft were present in all of South East Asia and the Pacific.) If those countries had reinforced their colonies in the pacific then I think it highly unlikely that Japan would go to war.
SOME kind of Pacific conflict seems very likely, if no inevitable, because the Japanese were intent on building an empire, and FDR wasn’t going to allow that.
My understanding of it (and this is far from my area of expertise) is that Japan viewed the U.S. as being the aggressor in the decades leading up to WWII. They viewed Pearl Harbor not as an attack, but as a retaliation for numerous things that had come before, where we in the U.S. tend to think of Pearl Harbor as the start of everything. It’s a very different viewpoint than what we Americans are used to.
I don’t know how much of that viewpoint is revisionist history, but if it is basically true then the implication is that war in the Pacific was pretty much inevitable.
The Japanese also had the idea that if they hit us hard enough, we would be so shocked that we would retreat and stay out of any further action in the Pacific. That type of thinking usually results in the exact opposite happening. They also saw us as weak, since then (much like now) we didn’t want to get involved in wars in foreign lands. Some of that may have been influenced by our reluctance to get involved in the European theater though, so perhaps that would have factored in quite differently if there hadn’t been a European conflict at the time.
The causes of the war were independent of events in Europe. Japan was an expansionist power at the time and that had nothing to do with the Nazis.
The only issue was situational. Most of the established powers supported the status quo (as established powers usually do). They didn’t favor the idea of Japanese expansion. Japan was able to get away with it because most of the major powers were more concerned about other events. If Europe had been peaceful, Japan might not have been willing to risk expansion. Or if it had risked it, it might have prompted a quick and effective response.
This is pretty much it in a nutshell. Japan went to war with China in 1937 entirely independent of events in Europe - in fact Nazi Germany was one of China’s best friends at the time, having provided China with a great deal of assistance in modernizing their military from 1933-37. US support for China and escalating tensions with Japan over China and Japan’s desires for empire in the Pacific were going to happen regardless of what went on in Europe, and once the US placed an embargo on oil to Japan war was inevitable. In 1941 the US was the world’s largest producer and exporter of oil. Japan only really had two options: cave to US demands and leave China to get the US to turn the oil tap back on or go to war to take a source of oil by force, and the only plausible source of oil they could seize was the Dutch East Indies. It’s hard to imagine any nation accepting the humiliating option of allowing its foreign policy to be dictated from abroad; it’s impossible to imagine Japan choosing this option when the ultranationalists were running the country.
Imperial Japan began it’s military expansion in 1931 when it invaded Manchuria. Armed conflicts between Imperial Japan and China began in 1932 and finally escalated into all out war in 1937. Years of European appeasement didn’t prevent Imperial Japan using force to claim territory. Stalin was busy purging the Russian military in 1937. The U.S.A. wasn’t interested in getting involved in Asia or another European war since it had just finishing fighting the war to end all wars only 18 years earlier.
Mussolini wanted to recreate the glory of the Roman Empire beginning with the Abyssinian invasion in 1935.
So - Minus the European war would WW2 still occurred in the Pacific? First, an Asia-only conflict would not have been considered a world war. Second, European countries would have responded with military force to Imperial Japanese attacks on their colonies/territories. Third, many nations objected to Imperial Japan’s aggression and resorted to sanctions against Imperial Japan.
Imperial Japan responded to the sanctions by attacking the U.S. and British Navy in order to delay any military support for Imperial Japan’s intended targets.
Not to mention being able to throw the entire industrial might to the pacific theatre without needing to support a war in Europe would have made life for the japanese military orders of magnitude more difficult. Our navy was already growing by leaps and bounds, mix in the air power that was being delivered to Europe and you would have seen Japan turned into a giant smoking crater from the air.
In one sense, the Japanese did have a point. The Western powers were objecting the Japan doing what they themselves had done for a couple of centuries.
However, they took and ran with it, imagining themselves the great victims of a giant conspiracy. That, combined with the constitution which basically allowed fanatical field generals to start wars on their own, and you have a recipe for disaster.
I have a hard time seeing any scenario which doesn’t lead to war.
The US had been increasing its military in response to growing threats aboard, including the Naval Acts of 1934 and 1936, both of which predated the biggie: the Two Ocean Act of 1940. Starting from the fall of 1941, (summer-ish?) the US was starting to make active measures to fortify its possessions in the Pacific. (One interesting aside is that the Japanese had agreed to a smaller number of warships in the London Naval Treaty partly because of the concession of the US to not fortify its possessions. Once Japan abandoned the London Treaty, the US was free to build up its forces.)
The Imperial Japanese Navy was aware of this and knew it had a timeline to act.
It’s difficult to imagine a war in Europe not occurring at some time in the 1940s. Either France and Great Britain would have attacked Germany when it became clear that its military build up had only offensive uses. Or that the USSR wouldn’t have perceived Germany as being a growing threat and launched its own preemptive strike to prevent an invasion by Germany of its eastern frontier.
Having said the above, Japan would have eventually come into conflict with either Britain or France (both) over their colonial holdings and Japan’s desire to expand its influence throughout Asia. In fact, even without a conflict in Europe its likely that Great Britain and France would have an almost impossible task of preventing a Japanese incursion into their colonies ( the Dutch military really wasn’t up to fighting a conflict overseas as the country had a tiny air force and a small navy).
As Pearl Harbor demonstrated, the Japanese had a potent navy with effective long distance strike capabilities. Even if the French and the British had moved significant portions of their respective fleets to East and Southeast Asia (and thus leaving their home waters unprotected) they still would have had to contend with what was one of the most powerful navies during the 20th century.
As long as Japan didn’t attack the Philippines (and thus bring the US into the war) or the Soviet Union, they could have easily won in a very similar manner that they almost did in their conflict with the United States.
While history shows that a smart man never bets against the Royal Navy, how would have the RN have done against the IJN, when the former had been gutted by years of neglect, especially of the Fleet Air Arm.
That was relatively late in Japanese expansion. Modern Japan’s first expansionist war was an expeditionary raid into Taiwan in 1874. Japan occupied the Ryukyu Islands in 1879, which was their first territorial gain. Japan claimed further territory during the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, and World War I.
As an aside to an aside, the London Naval Treaty with its 5-5-3 ratio of capital ships for the US-UK-Japan was considered a grave insult to Japan’s honor by some of the extreme hardliners. It was in fact advantageous to Japan, which could not hope to match the US at even a 5-3 ratio in a full blown naval arms race as the Two Ocean Navy Act demonstrated. Japan also went about violating the treaty with regards to heavy cruisers from day one, which was one of the reasons their heavy cruisers were so much more powerful than Western ones at the start of the war. While US and British Treaty cruisers were built with the limit of 10,000 tons displacement; the 4 Myoko class cruisers displaced just shy of 15,000 tons full load, the 4 Takao class heavy cruisers just shy of 15,500 tons full load though Japan lied and claimed they displaced within the treaty limits. Since they were already at the limit of heavy cruisers allowed under the treaty, they skirted it by building the 4 Mogami class cruisers with 5 triple 6.1" turrets and a declared displacement of 8,500 tons, making them light cruisers under the treaty. They of course displaced a great deal more than 8,500 tons, and they were built with the intention of replacing the 5 triple 6.1" turrets with 5 twin 8" turrets; displacement ultimately rose to over 13,000 tons and the triple 6.1" mounts were used on the Yamato class battleships.
Perhaps I’m misreading you, but Japan came nowhere remotely close to winning in the conflict with the United States. Japan’s war with China and general ambitions in Asia was already driving the US and Japan on a path towards war which neither side was willing to back down from; attacking European colonies in Asia while sidestepping the Philippines wasn’t exactly going to ease tensions and prevent the inevitable war. Japan’s leaders did not consider it possible to do this without it leading to war with the US, which is why they started the war by attacking the US fleet at anchor and invaded the Philippines. Even were it not to lead to the immediate outbreak of war with the US, when the war came the location of the Philippines astride the sea lanes from the Dutch East Indies to Japan meant Japan would be instantly cut off from the oil it had conquered when war with the US did come.
For the navies of the world at that time, the biggist shock of the early days of the war was not that Japan had the ability to launch an attack on Pearl Harbor and sink battleships (although that was shocking to those who naively believed Japan was 10 years behind its actual state) but that they were able to sink Prince of Wales and Repulse at sea. Many years of naval doctrine were sunk along with those capital ships.
However, Japan never had the resources to fight a total war for very long and once the US was involved it was game over, with the only question of when rather than if.
It could be an interesting exercise to see how Japan could have conducted itself without Indochina being under control of Vichy France, from which they had launched the attacks on Malay, Singapore and DEI.
What would they have done with an oil embargo and not having those bases to launch from? Or, without them having entered Indochina, would Roosevelt have not slapped on the crippling sanctions as quickly?
Without thinking too much about this, I’ll argue that without Europe, the US would begin its buildup a little slower, but would still have its Pacific possessions fortified by the summer of 1942, at which point thing would get really difficult for the Japanese.
Would Roosevelt have ordered the Pacific Fleet to be based in Hawaii or wait until more preparations were completed, as his admirals wanted?
Ultimately, I don’t think it matters much in that the IJA and IJN officers would have done the job of dragging the US into a war, sooner or later. I think Japan actually did the best they could have in real history and any other scenario has doing worse.
If there had been no war in europe it is possible that the US would not have embargoed oil from Japan. Japan needed oil to conduct its war in China. It could only get the oil from the US or the Dutch East Indies. If there is not an embargo there is no reason to launch a war in the pacific. If the embargo stays then Japan has to attack the Dutch and British Colonies and the Phillipines in order to secure the oil. Thus Japan has to choose between abandoning the war in China or fighting a war against four countries. Japan has very committed to the war in China but that would have been a huge step.