Japan wanted a secure source of oil in 1941 so they planned on invading Indonesia (at the time the Dutch East Indies) and Malaysia (at the time a British colony). The American colony of the Philippines was on the route between Japan and Southeast Asia so they planned on invading that as well to prevent any American interference. And so they made a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor to destroy the American fleet and make it possible to invade the Philippines.
But suppose Japan had decided to focus on their main objective and not get distracted. Suppose they had bypassed the Philippines and just attacked the European colonies (we’ll throw in the French colonies in Indochina as well). But no attack on American territory and no war with the United States. Would it have worked better?
France and the Netherlands had already been defeated by Germany and could do nothing to defend their Asian possessions. Britain was barely holding on and couldn’t do much more. In reality Japan was able to conquer all of Southeast Asia. There’s no reason to assume they wouldn’t have been equally if not more able to do so if they hadn’t been at war with the United States.
So assume it’s 1942 and Japan has control of Indochina and the East Indies. What’s America going to do? The American-controlled Philippines would have been a potential threat to Japan but never an actual one. I can’t see there being any public support for the idea of us declaring war to save the Asian colonies of some European empires (especially when we didn’t go to war to save the European countries themselves).
Japan would have had its secure oil supply, its navy could go back on the defensive, and its army could fight in China without being diverted by a larger war with America. The United States would have remained officially at peace while offering support to Britain and the Soviet Union in their war with Germany.
Just out of curiosity but does your “what if” scenario also have Japan attacking the USSR at Vladivostok and trying to seize eastern Siberia and all of its natural resources? Since the Russians were barely holding on in Europe against the Nazis, I would think that they were especially vulnerable in Asia at that time. There seemingly would be little left in that part of the USSR to hold back the Japanese.
I have nothing to contribute to the topic but for some reason I am bothered by this phrase:
I am just not sure what may be the difference between a “potential” threat and an “actual” threat.
I guess a “potential” threat has to have the capability of becoming an actual threat or it is not a potential threat at all. Just like an actual threat has to be capable of becoming reality or it is not a threat at all.
As evidenced in earlier threads, the Japanese got their asses handed to them by the Russians in the few engagements they did have. The Japanese simply had no capability to threaten the Soviet East.
Then you gotta consider the point at which careful strategy and decision making meets mindless issues of domination and spheres of control. Would the Japanese have tolerated an American colony (the Phillipines) in the middle of their sphere of influence? I’d say it’s highly unlikely. Having conquered all else, would they have left Australia and New Zealand alone? At what point would the US have just said “Fuck it, we simply can’t allow this” and started making moves of their own?
The problem with the “what if” is simply the Philippines. Look at a map, there is NO way the Japanese could feel secure holding the Dutch East Indies (DEI) with the US in control of Manilla and other ports.
You can’t run a war if your supplies aren’t secure. The USA was only going to get stronger, Japan was already starting to exhaust by Pearl Harbor. The Japanese were too vulnerable.
This is why the Japanese lost the war at Pearl Haror. This is why the Germans lost the war at Pearl Harbor.
The Japanese stragedy was to over extend then hold, till the Allies exhausted. But the miscalculated the USA.
If you look at why the Allies won WWII it was America’s lend-lease. The Germans couldn’t have beaten Britian because of their navy. They couldn’t have beaten the Soviet Union because of the population and depth of territory. The best the Germans could have done is a stalemate. This is why Germany hoped for a quick knock out of Britian and the Soviets (which they almost did in the case of the USSR)
To give you an example by the end of WWII the industrial production of the USA ALONE was GREATER than ALL other countries of the world combined. The USA hadn’t even begin to dent their resources. We’re talking no infrastructure damage and not even half a million people killed.
The Japanese HAD to attack America and deliver a knock out blow. They didn’t do this. It’s like being in a boxing ring with a better fighter. You know you can’t win on points so the only hope you have is to go in and knock him out.
To allow the US to remain in the Philippines ment all the effort the Japanese put into gaining new territory could be cut off by the US in a few days. All the oil which they desperately needed could be cut off in a few days.
I guess it’s a semantic issue. I was distinguishing between a country that had the potential to defeat another country if they attacked and a country that had the potential to defeat another country and was already making the attempt. Germany, for example, was a potential threat to the Soviet Union up until June 22, 1941. After that they were an actual threat.
It’s like this. American ICBMs are a “potential threat” to Britain; we could in theory launch them at the British. But no one worries about it, because that’s incredibly unlikely to happen. Now, imagine that somehow a political party attains dominance in the US that has a genocidal hatred for the British, and a President who talks about “cleansing the filthy Isles of the British Antichrist with holy nuclear fire”. THEN those ICBMs become an “actual threat.”
But military superiority doesn’t mean anything if it isn’t used. The fact that America would beat Japan in a war (which I agree is true) only matters if there’s a war. And that war would only start if Japan or the United States declared war on the other. I created a scenario in which Japan chose not to declare war on the United States. Are you arguing that the United States would have declared war against Japan? Under what circumstances? My feeling is that the United States would not have declared war for anything less than an attack on American territory.
My guess is that such a scenario would have meant war anyway, and (at least on the surface) a war on more favorable terms toward the US, at least initially. I think the US opinion was moving towards war even before Pearl Harbor, and fresh aggression by the Japanese would have finally pushed us over the limit into declaring war on Japan anyway. No way could we (strategically) allow Japan to take over all of the European territories uncontested…it would have made them too powerful and the implications to our own interests would have been clear to the most fervent anti-war advocate…even leaving aside the inevitable brutality that Japan would have used to GET those territories I think public opinion would have shifted enough to make Roosevelt confident enough to ask for a declaration of war. And without having our fleet blow to hell at Pearl Harbor we would have had parity with Japan from the get go, with forward bases astride their lines of communication.
The only thing Japan could have done in a ‘what if’ scenario that would have made a difference would have been to consolidate their gains and stop their aggression and eventually getting the US to back off of our embargo. Personally I don’t think given the mood and philosophy of those in charge of Japan at the time that such a thing was remotely possible, but it’s the only thing that might have changed the inevitable conflict and out come.
Well starting in '39 Gallup was conducting regular polls which touched on the question of whether the US should go to war with the Axis. By late '41 roughly 20-25% wanted to go to war immediately with Germany and/or Japan. Roughly 60-65% said it was more important to defeat the Axis than to avoid war. And only 20% opposed the idea of war entirely. Unfortunately for Japan the pro-war faction was apparently growing by about 5% every 6 months or so.
And Roosevelt was already in favor of war with Japan and Germany. By late '41 he was largely ignoring neutrality in the Atlantic. Remember the USN were by that time sinking (and being sunk by) German U-boats. It seems likely that a determined Roosevelt would be able to provide the Causus-Belli. All he would need to do is schedule regular and routine patrols into neutral waters. And sooner or later someone on one side or the other would get too nervous and shooting would break out. One quick propaganda blitz (and maybe a John Wayne flick) later and thh US could easily be at war.
My feeling is that if Japan made a grand land grab in the Indies, somehow the US would be at war with Japan by the end of '42. Interestingly this was also the opinion of the Tojo government, which is why they bombed Pearl in the first place
In Churchill’s Memoirs of World War Two he indicates that when America joined the war in December 1941, there was no question that the Axis would need to be defeated in both the Pacific and the Atlantic. The question was “in which order?” Churchill naturally preferred to tackle Germany and Italy in Europe first, and was gratified to see that Roosevelt agreed (although American military leaders were eager to offer help to China).
Had Japan not attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, then Britain surely would have been that much more desparate for help when Japan invaded Burma (then a British colony, I think) in January 1942, barely a month later. The U.S. could certainly not have kept out of the war much longer after that anyway; the attack on Pearl Harbor was meant to give Japan a free hand in the Pacific and Indian Oceans so they could attack Burma (and then attack India in 1944).
Assuming it was 1942 and Japan had control of Indochina and the East Indies without having attacked the U.S., there’s no way it would not have eventually tried to expand its empire by attacking British and American territory.
It’s about as likely Japan would have been content with its holdings as it was for Hitler to stop at absorbing Czechoslovakia. Being heavily into theories of racial superiority and empire-building led in both cases to fatal over-reaching.
The Roosevelt administration was as pro-Britain and anti-Axis as neutrality would allow. But before Dec. 7, the US was largely in a state of “armed neutrality”: wanting to deter having either Germany or Japan overtly move against the US. It would have been a huge leap for the US to be the one to declare war first if no attack against the US had been made.
If the US and Japan had not been in a declared state of war by the time Japan moved against British, French and Netherland possessions in the East, my guess is that Roosevelt would have negotiated a treaty with Britain giving the US some quasi-jurisdiction over the threatened territories, like the right to have US military bases and troops stationed there. These would have been intended as a tripwire, to force the Japanese to either back off or attack “American” soil.
The US wouldn’t have gone to war first, but at a minimum it would have insisted on a “peace” wholly incompatable with Japan’s ambitions. And of course the Japanese couldn’t be absolutely certain that the US would never attack first. So either way, a preemptive attack on the US fleet made sense if Japan’s only alternative was abandoning it’s imperial aims.
However, in '38 and '39 the Soviets rather handily defeated the Japanese in clashes on the borders of Japanese-controlled Manchuria, and thereafter the Japanese refrained from conflict with the USSR (until the Soviets declared war on Japan in '45, in compliance with Stalin’s commitment to the Western Allies at Yalta.)
Huh, I wasn’t aware of that. OTOH, from what I gather from Wikipedia on the incidents, I’m not sure if the outcomes would have appeared wholly unambiguous to Japanese decision makers. And I imagine the situation would have appeared considerably different two years later with Stalin all busy in the west.
There wasn’t much support for going to war with Japan before December 1941, but Japan hadn’t done anything as brazen as attacking Malaya and Indonesia. They had invaded China, but that was an intra-Asian dispute. They had occupied French Indochina, but that was a backwater of only minor strategic importance.
Had Japan invaded the Dutch and British colonies, but left the US alone, it’s difficult to predict how public opinion would have reacted. Churchill certainly worried about it: “My deepest fear was that the Japanese would attack us or the Dutch, and that constitutional difficulties would prevent the United States from declaring war”. By constitutional difficulties he means the annoying necessity of a vote in Congress.
The Nazis also urged Japan to attack the European colonies and leave the US alone.
I believe, however, that the US would have entered the war during 1942 anyway. It would have been easier to arouse racist animus against Japan, and Americans could not have lived with Japan taking over the European colonial empires (especially Singapore), gaining unlimited access to oil, and encircling the Philippines.
If the US did enter the war, in three months or six or twelve, without Pearl Harbor having been destroyed first, it would have been bad news for Japan. On the other hand, they might have suffered less by virtue of the war ending faster.
I just have a hard time seeing how the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies would have been seen as a greater outrage than the German occupation of the Netherlands had been. The United States may have been upset but they already shown they were willing to stand by while Europe was overrun. Why wouldn’t they have stood by while Asia was?
And if America did reach the point where it felt it had to declare war, Japan wouldn’t have been the primary opponent. American policy had already decided that Germany was the greater danger. Japan had already shown it didn’t feel obliged to declare war against a country just because Germany was at war with that country. So the United States might have gone to war in Germany without fighting a second war with Japan.
The whole rationale for Japan’s invasion of SE Asia was to enable it to keep up its war of occupation in China. China had a lot of popular sympathy in the US in a way that even Britain and France did not. That, plus the perceived threat to the Philippines, would have gone a long way to persuading the US leadership and populace that Japan must be dealt with.
And the other countries at war with Germany didn’t pose a threat to Japan the same way the US did. Indeed, the Tripartate Pact itself can be seen as primarily an anti-US alliance between Germany and Japan. So I could see Japan responding to an initial US-German war the same way Germany did to the initial US-Japan conflict.
