I don’t have the text handy and can’t find a good online citation, but John Keegan addresses this in an understandable way in his book The Second World War. Certainly it helped that the US was poised to recover from the Great Depression, in fact overdue. But US industry was drastically underused…“utilization of plant” was low and could be increased dramatically. US industry was larger than Axis industry in the absolute sense, but also could expand faster, had more access to resources, a better transportation network, was already more efficient per worker hour and could increase that efficiency AND add more worker hours. The results were overwhelming at a technological level where production output would be decisive in war.
Tangentially, I recall hearing that before the Pearl Harbor attack, a significant number of Americans supported the Japanese in their war against China. (Possibly leftover racism from the fairly recent anti-Chinese sentiments?) Has anyone else heard that, and do you have a link?
Depends on what you mean by a ‘significant number’. I’m sure there was a non-zero number of Americans who thought what Japan was doing was fine, but the reason why we did the embargo was the general negative public reaction to the Japanese war on China, especially some of the well publicized atrocities that were shown in news reels before and after movies.
Not sure what the ‘anti-Chinese sentiments’ were either, to be honest. My WAG is most Americans didn’t know or care that much, but of those who did and were vocal about it China was considered an ally and Japan considered an aggressor and pretty brutal. Why would the general American public have ‘anti-Chinese sentiments’, recent or otherwise??
My impression is that, at the time, US public opinion was strongly pro-China - a sentiment that had a number of causes:
– wide publication of Japanese atrocities, such as the ‘Rape of Nanking’;
– incidents of clashes between the US and Japan, such as the “Panay incident”:
– widespread popularity of Pearl S. Buck’s accounts of life in China, particularly The Good Earth (winner of the Pulizer in 1932; Buck won the Nobel in 1938; it was a best-seller in the US):
There may have been some pro-Japanese sentiment, but if so, it was a pretty small minority; the majority of US public sentiment was strongly pro-Chinese.
Why did the US oppose Japan operations in China? Was the US prepared to eventually go to war over that?
Pearl Harbor is reminiscent of Operation Barbarossa in being a suckerpunch meant to cower/finish a larger opponent that turned badly for the attacker.
ETA: I see Malthus gave more details. Still seems unlikely the US at the time would have been ready to go to war for atrocities against non-white non-Europeans. The Japanese likely had their eye on US clients like the Philippines.
Partly it was US sympathy for the Chinese; the Japanese form of imperialism was particularly brutal.
More importantly, an expanded Japan looked like more of a threat to US interests in the region – including in China itself.
The US had championed the “open door” policy in the early 20th century (by which each imperial power was supposed to have equal privileges in China). This made they expressly opposed to imperialists physically carving China up–as doing so would interfere with the US’s own trading rights. A Japanese take-over of China would, clearly, undo that policy completely.
The US was willing to impose a blockade it knew would strangle Japan, knowing that war was a possible Japanese reaction …
There is this difference though: Barbarossa was intended to destroy the Soviets, invade their nation, and hopefully drag Stalin out of Moscow to be paraded around Berlin like a Roman triumph. Pearl Harbor could not do that to the Americans.
If an analogy can be made, Barbarossa was like a knife aimed at the guts; Pearl Harbor is more like stomping on a toe - painful, maybe destabilizing, infuriating, but can’t be fatal.
Agreed: while Japanese atrocities (and romanticism of the Chinese) certainly helped sway US opinion, US policy was more motivated by much more concrete concerns - see post above.
No, the isolationist America First movement was very strong. In fact Japan likely could have taken the Dutch East Indies and the British colonies without us actually declaring war.
My sharpest memory from reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is that Dec 7 was either the same day or very close to the day that Albert Speer informed Hitler that Russia was unwinnable with the resources Germany had at hand.
It’s entirely possible to argue that Dec 7, 1941 was the day the Axis truly lost the war. Germany was realizing their mistake in invading Russia, Japan had a big China problem, and then Japan, much to Hitler’s surprise (and likely dismay) forced the US into it.
The Japanese were never going to be able to destroy the fuel at PH. At least not with the force they had (single engine carrier-based bombers).
The tanks are tough. They can take just about everything shy of a direct hit from an armor piercing bomb, and that would just crack the casing, not start any fires (see below). Maybe, just maybe on its best day a 20mm AP shell might puncture the tanks. But I doubt it. Again, the AP shells wouldn’t start fires.
Furthermore, the oil system at PH was quite robust and was manned by trained people. If there was an issue with a tank they could easily pump the oil out of one location and into another. The system had many redundancies and wasn’t going to crack from a few AP bombs. In addition, the system had modern (for the time) fire-fighting equipment and systems.
Finally, the vast, vast majority of the petroleum was Heavy Fuel-Oil, which has a notoriously high ignition temperature. The stuff actually needs to be heated before it can be properly burned in engines. This stuff wasn’t going to ignite easily.
The Japanese had to know this, so that may have contributed to them not attacking the oil facilities. That, along with their tendency to only go after purely military targets over logistical ones.
I sense this prevailing opinion that the Japanese underestimated the US. The Japanese knew exactly what USA was capable of, teddy rubbed their nose in it Great White Fleet - Wikipedia. The USA industrial capabilities were absurd relative to the rest of the world. As many have stated, Japan knew it would lose a protracted affair.
I think it’s wrong to assume japan made a mistake. In a game of imperfect information, it is possible for both sides to make the right call given what they know at the time. The Japanese couldn’t have known the USA would make breakthroughs in radar technology that allow the USA to stage an ambush at midway.
As to wrongly predicting USA resolve, there is something no one has mentioned. It wasn’t Japan’s intent to just sink the fleet and sue for peace. Their intent was to legitimately threaten bombardment of the California coast, think Tokyo firebombing but replace Tokyo with la. If the fight was brought to American cities the already reticent USA could have signed a truce.
This is an excellent post. Supposedly Admiral Nimitz made a comment that this was one of the mistakes that the Japanese made. From an article in the Washington Post.
This was been the subject of many debates, but as you pointed out, it could not have happened. Among other reasons, the Japanese did not carry AP rounds for their aircraft mounted 7.7 mm machine guns (at least at the time of Pearl Harbor). Their 20 mm cannons simply weren’t that accurate.
There is debate on the reason for his comments. It’s possible that he was attempting to improve morale at the time. He would certainly have known that this claim wasn’t realistic, especially given that the Red Hill Underground Fuel Storage Facility was being secretly constructed at the time. It’s been suggested that these comments were made to help cover the secret. However, I don’t know how public the comments were.
At any rate, even if there the tanks were destroyed, their purpose could be fulfilled simply by using tankers.
As you pointed out, destroying things with carrier based single engine bombers wasn’t practical in 1941. On a WWII forum, someone calculated the number of bombs required to destroy the dry docks or other facilities, and the Japanese carriers simply couldn’t carry that many bombs. It really wasn’t until 1945 when the US had those huge task forces with massive numbers of planes that carrier based bombing could start to cause damage to facilities and not simply other planes or ships.
In a Japanese documentary on the war, one of the aids said that the reason they didn’t go after the oil was that they simply weren’t looking at logistics. They were counting on a short war, and had they been calculating such things then they wouldn’t have started the war in the first place.
I think there was a psychological factor too. The Japanese throughout the war demonstrated that they didn’t grasp the idea of logistic warfare. They understood that logistics were important as far as being necessary to keep forces in the field or at sea. But they didn’t seem to get the idea that you could neutralize a force by attacking its supply lines. Considering that the whole point of the war was to secure its oil supplies, it’s amazing how they missed this.
Especially when it was being used against them. The American submarine fleet began attacking Japanese transport ships in order to hurt the supply lines to Japanese island bases. And this was quite effective. But Japan barely tried to use the same strategy; Japanese submarines were told to give priority to attacking the most “important” American ships ie big surface military ships like carriers, battleships, and cruisers. But attacking these ships instead of weak transport ships meant Japanese submarines took heavy losses.
You saw the same mindset at Pearl Harbor. The Japanese pilots had been given lists of what targets they should attack and in what order. The big naval ships were first, then the smaller naval ships, then aircraft, then military barracks. But things like oil tanks, repair docks, and supply depots weren’t even on the list.
My bolding.
This is silly. Certainly, unless the Japanese were absolute idiots not paying attention to the States, then they would have know about the very public Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940:
There simply can’t be any reason to believe that the Japanese would expect the US to take until 1950 to achieve parity. That’s silly. There were enough Japanese who were familiar with the capability of the States.
Another possibility is that Nimitz, like many military leaders, knew things like strategy and logistics, but had no clue about petroleum engineering and design. Patton & Montgomery, for example, both knew how to use tanks in warfare but were total dunderheads when it came to tank design and development (especially Patton).
How did they heat it aboard ship?
They use steam from the previous burning of fuel.
So yeah, a HFO powered ship is really screwed if the engines go cold or it runs out of fuel. Takes a while to get things running again.
This gives some more details, but with modern ships so the process might have been different with WW2 capitol ships.
I wonder if that’s where they got the idea for the ‘cold start’ plot complication on Star Trek.
That’s why the USS Nevada was the only battleship to get moving at Pearl Harbor. Not only was she not docked alongside the others, but her Deck Officer had had the crew fire up a second boiler earlier that morning, intending to switch the power load from one to the other about 8am. So she was able to get underway while the others were still trying to sort things out.
I’m actually reading through a book right now that mentions an interesting tidbit:
After FDR approved the draft but before Pearl Harbor, a lot of polling was happening to gauge public sentiment about going to war. Apparently at least one poll on the West Coast showed that folks out there were pretty ambivalent about Germany but were much more open to the prospect of war with Japan.