First they were willing to fight to the death while on the defensive, while the fighting with the Soviets was a border dispute with neither side prepared to launch an all out invasion.
Second, the Soviets would have been fighting from within their own border giving them a solid supply line for their forces and the ability to quickly reinforce any armies under threat.
By moving south instead and attacking the US and British territories they were gambling on the ability to quickly secure the area and then settle in for the counter attack that would take time to arrive. The British were busy fighting the Germans and the US was on the other side of the Pacific, their logistic problems were far greater than that of the Soviets.
I think this is overly simplistic. Before the Pearl Harbor attack, and Germany’s declaration of war on the United States, I believe that U.S. naval units had already been involved in anti-submarine activity in the Atlantic. While war hadn’t been declared, I find it unlikely that the U.S. would have sat the European war out in entirety.
The situation was more like: Country A has been an asshole for a generation, Country B finally realizes how much an asshole Country A has been and cuts off anything that Country A could use to continue to be an asshole. Country A then speeds up being an asshole anyway.
Japan has been invading, conquering and annexing territory regularly since the Russo-Japanese war. The US did basically nothing to discourage Japan for a long time and then switched gears and gave the biggest smack possible, short of declaring war. The time to have stopped Japan from its territorial expansion was when it annexed Korea. From that point on, it’s clear Japan was going to keep expanding. All the US embargo did was speed up Japan’s time line.
On review, our viewpoints aren’t that much different. I just wanted to emphasize how long Japan had been territorially aggressive. I don’t think war in the Pacific could be avoided, the questions were “when it would happen” and “will the US be involved”. The American embargo simply forced the answers to be “soon” and “yes”.
I’m not sure how much “chest-thumping” goes on regarding WWII. Many people in every country involved view their contribution as critical and others proportionately less so.
“Gratitude” for war efforts is one thing, recognition of essential help is another. A wee bit of recognition for the benefits of the Marshall Plan in rebuilding postwar Europe is always appropriate.
Besides, if the U.S. hadn’t captured the Enigma machine from U-571 you’d all be speaking German now.
While I agree on some points, I feel you have overlooked the fact the Japan was at that time a militaristic and totalitarian-run goverment, bent on expansion. They took Manchuria to the west, the philipines and indochina to the south, and they wanted more. Japan couldn’t go north very much, due to Russia, and they would have had to invade Austrailia to finish off any southern resistence. They wanted domination of the Pacific( A big part of this no doubt is the possiblities of trade that would come with it), and all that stood in their way to accomplish this was the American fleet at Pearl Harbour. Japan wasn’t counting on a war with the US. What they had wanted was a decimation of the US Navy to the point where the US would be forced to make a negotiated peace, and in doing so, allow Japan to carve out a bigger sphere of influence in the Pacific.
If the US at the time had been morally weaker, the politicians may have felt it reasonable to conclude that they were not going to be able to defeat Japan, of whom already had the upper hand. Japan would then be able to profit from a greater sphere of trade and influence, and perhaps take Russia(which was discussed by the Japanese) as well as Austraila. Ruling out the chance that Russia would be able to take on Japan and Germany at the same time, or Austrailia checking the Japanese and defeating them, I feel it is possible to reasonably argue that the US may very well have “saved” (while its perhaps a misleading term at face value, and not one I would use) Asia and company from totalitarian Japan.
Which is just as ridiculous as many Europeans who have a attitude that they owe the US nothing because the US did nothing in the war, and that it was all the Soviets (or, if you are in the UK, the Brits).
Anyway, the US trade embargo on Japan was only a factor in starting the war between Japan and the US (and eventually bringing the US into the conflict with Germany, much to the relief of Churchill and Stalin, who didn’t subscribe to the meme that the US would have no effect). Japan was already at war and expanding in China and the Pacific Rim. With or without the embargo, Japan would have clashed with the US eventually. And the embargo had zero effect on the war in Europe (well, until after Pearl Harbor).
As has already been pointed out to you, we WERE fighting the Germans before Pearl Harbor. We had already dispatched elements of our fleet for both escort and sub hunting roles, and we were in a covert war with the German Navy months before Pearl Harbor happened. Eventually the fact that the US was supplying huge amounts of arms and material to both the British and the Russians, coupled with this covert naval war would have brought the US into the war one way or the other, with or without Pearl Harbor. Attitudes in the US had already begun to shift from solidly neutral to pro-war before Pearl Harbor due to the news reel footage and news reports coming out of England during the Blitz.
Assuming I’m reading this convoluted analogy right, no, it’s not surprising if country A, already bent on conquest and expansion simply ignores the embargo and all the other things happening and goes ahead with it’s plans anyway, especially if it thinks it has the military might to carry through.
Depends on country B’s (a.k.a. the US) actions. If country B happens to make a major contribution to the war effort, and if their efforts were instrumental in the eventual victory, then I’d has to say that country B is entirely within it’s rights to claim some of the kudos for said victory. This isn’t to say that country C (a.k.a. the UK) or country D (a.k.a. the USSR) shouldn’t get the same kudos, nor that all the other little countries who also participated shouldn’t get their share of the glory. Taking out the two extremes (i.e. the US saved the world or the US did nothing and had no effect), there is a middle ground where reality resides. The truth is, without the US entering the war the UK would have lost, and the Russians BEST case would have probably been a stalemate with the boundaries in Eastern Europe or even in western Russia. By the same token, without the UK staying in the fight then the Russians would have almost surly lost, and the US’s best case would have been a few decades of peace while the Germans consolidated Europe, with an eventual confrontation between Germany and the US being almost inevitable. Same if the Russians had lost.
I’ve heard plenty of people who dispute that…at least as many as I’ve heard American’s claiming we won the whole thing and saved the world, and the world owes us something (this attitude was much more prevalent when I was a kid, whereas the converse attitude is something I’ve only been hearing in the last 20 or so years).
As for your second part, I don’t see where you are getting that from. The Japanese had already invaded China and had plans to invade the southern pacific rim region as well. Should the US have just moved out of their way and not done anything at all? They were obviously expansionist, and their expansions would have become a direct threat to the US. I’d say that our reaction was MILD, considering what the Japanese were doing to the Chinese. Had we brought the hammer down when they first started their expansion then we might have completely avoided war in the Pacific…but that wasn’t our thinking at the time. So, instead we just embargoed them, thinking that by putting political pressure on the Japanese they would eventually cave in and negotiate, then we could get back to normal.
Honestly, this is never an attitude I have seen in the UK. It might be more common about World War I, where the role of the French and also the Russians can get pushed aside in the British mind, but never for WW II.
My complaint isn’t about acknowledging the US role in WW II. It’s more the idea that I don’t as a 41 year old British person owe any debt of gratitude to a 30 year old drunken American ex-frat boy, who was highly unlikely to have been storming Omaha beach or Iwo Jima. I’ll buy any WW II vet a drink, but I am damned if I am going to show some degree of gratitude to a pathetic loser whose sole reason for wanting it is happening to be born in the same country as people who were actually heros.
Was China, Korea and the Phillipines embargoing them too? I mean according to you, these countries must have ahd the natural resources that Japan wanted. Why couldn’t they trade for these resources from their neighbors?
I think there is a bit of confusion about the timing. Japan started their imperialistic expansion at the turn of the century when they realized that their exposure to the west had given them guns while all their neighbors were still using Kung Fu and bad ass swordfighting. So they invaded and subjugated their neighbors (purportedly to bring them into the 20th century).
If America did not exist (and I was always under the impression that Pearl harbor was a pre-emptive strike to crippple America’s ability to interfere with the Japanese plans), Japan would have invaded all their neighbors, obliterated millenia old cultures and imposed its own culture. As far as I can tell, America totally saved the world from Nazis and Imperialists.
Martini is simply wrong. Japan had been invading its neighbors for decades by the time the US got involved. Japan was building an empire not scrounging for scarce resources.
I am always amused by the attitude that somehow the USA should have been involved from DAY 1 in YET ANOTHER OF A SERIES of endless European squabbles that had gone back for centuries. Squabbles that only ended when the threat of Communism made the US (and the USSR) sit on Europe into they decided to calm down for at least a few decades.
Yeah, that’s another mystifying European attitude I’ve heard a lot of in the past. Why they think we SHOULD have been involved from the onset is beyond me.
The resource rich areas of Malaya and the Dutch East Indies were a lot more lightly defended than the Soviet Far East District.
The Soviets would have been able to ship in supplies and reinforcements (to the fighting in Manchuria and Vladivostok) overland, while the British and Americans would have to come at Japan in ships. Japan thought it could prevent the oversea counter invasions more successfully with their own navy, and its fairly decent (for the time) land based Naval Air forces.
But that’s hindsight talking. We were still in a depression. A lot of American’s (especially US soldiers coming back from Europe after the first WW) felt betrayed and slighted. Isolationist sentiment was running rampant in the US, and there was no way that a US president or Congress could have made a case for direct US involvement in the 30’s, even if they could have foreseen that this wasn’t just another European squabble for power between nations.
Behind the scenes (and at a non-zero political risk by people like Roosevelt) the US DID offer help and aid, and after we started to get a notion what was going on we started to rebuild our decrepit army in the late 30’s and early 40’s. That aid basically kept both the UK and the Russians in the game, and gave us at least a limited amount of time to prepare ourselves to jump into Europe’s struggles.
Of course it is hindsight talking. As I said, I can understand not being involved. Not being involved made a lot of sense. So did not stopping Hitler in 1936. But, given that hindsight, the British & French were wrong in not taking strong action in the mid-30’s. And the US was wrong in sitting the war out until 1941.
With that hindsight, you see, it wasn’t “Europe’s struggles” it was humanity’s struggles.
Sure, but if we are going to go all hindsight-ish, then the REAL problem was the punitive reparations heaped on Germany after WWI…and those can be both laid squarely at the feet of our French and British allies. Much as I dislike Wilson, he TRIED to get both nations to see reason, and they essentially ignored him (which, btw, also was part of the bitterness American’s felt post-WWI, and why we became so isolationist).
Nah bollocks. If we are getting all hindsightish, the problem was that Versailles was too soft on the Germans, and that Germany should have been dismembered and prevented from reforming as a single nation state after the Great War. But that is a very different argument.
