Hitler compounded the problem by declaring war on the US! If he hadn’t done that, there may not have been one “world war”, but two, with the US focused entirely on Japan (instead of the Allies, including the US, deciding on a “Germany first” strategy).
In his mind, he somehow managed to spin December 7 into a good thing for his cause – that gaining Japan as a ally was worth gaining the US as an enemy.
Churchill, needless to say, held the opposite view (he says something in his memoirs of going to sleep happy that his cause had been saved), and of course, he was right.
Is the United States capable of paying off the national debt? Yes, certainly. Do you think it’s likely that the national debt will be paid off by 2028? No, almost certainly not. We lack the political will to do something we know we should be doing.
That’s the key point that the Japanese and Germans saw in 1941. The United States had a huge economy; but it wasn’t focused on military production. And that’s true even in 1941. The Roosevelt administration was constantly dealing with the problem of production delays in military contracts. 1941 was a boom year for car sales and manufacturers were pushing to build more cars rather than expanding their production of tanks and airplanes. Soldiers in the summer of 1941 were still drilling with broomsticks. Promised lend lease supplies to Britain and Russia couldn’t be delivered because the material hadn’t been produced.
Then there was the political situation. There was still a strong sense of isolationism in America. Congress had barely passed the draft extension in October (it passed by one vote); if they hadn’t, the United States army would have begun breaking up units as the draftees finished their enlistment.
The Axis powers were dictatorships. They looked at the democracies and told themselves, “This is why we’ll win. Sure, the United States has a lot of potential power. But they’ll never get organized. There’s nobody that can give orders and get things done like there is here.”
From what I understand, Japan has little if any natural oil resources on the home islands. The only way they saw victory was through taking out the Pacific US fleet, allowing for enough time to capture oil rich territory in Oceania. Pearl Harbor was to achieve this.
It looked promising, since there were only a handful of airstrips capable of allowing the Allies to project air power, so if Pearl Harbor was a success, they could more or less buy a year of time before they would have to faced Allied power, in earnest.
Obviously Pearl Harbor was a crushing blow, but not the mortal wound Japan needed. It bought time, but also a commitment to the destruction of the Japanese Empire. They could not have predicted the extent of American mobilization of industry.
These and even more factors contributed to Pearl Harbor being less of a choice, and more of a requirement to even dream of a Japanese victory.
Would have been easier for Japan to bypass China and America altogether and just focus on Siberia and taking the oil resources there. Russians would have had a hard time reinforcing.
Probably not. The Khalkin Gol battles demonstrated that Japan really could not face the Soviet army and its mechanization. They were soundly defeated even with the Soviets using their mediocre BT tanks and T-26 tanks.
Read what I wrote in the post TokyoBayer was replying to. Even a direct AP bomb hit was unlikely to do much to the oil tanks. Any breakage would likely be in the top of the tanks and wouldn’t make much spillage. The system also had plenty of pumps and redundancies to deal with issues like aerial bomb attacks.
Carrier bombers just couldn’t do the kind of damage to make much difference.
At the beginning of the battles they were not outnumbered, and their progress was, charitably, slow. Its not like the oil fields were right on the border, either.
Well, let’s just say that Admiral Nimitz disagrees.
And they certainly could have sank the Neosho.
I did read what you posted and you said “They can take just about everything shy of a direct hit from an armor piercing bomb,…” and then I proposed a direct hit from a bomb and now you say that wouldn’t work?
Here’s another cite that says the Oil tanks wer vulnerable:
Agreed. It was a bad idea. However, the Soviets were also helped greatly by having Zhukov there, who had miraculously survived Stalins purges of the officer corps.
We can also say that Nimitz is not a petroleum engineer.
I followed with “that would just crack the casing, not start any fires”. Cracking the casing wouldn’t do much, especially given that the most like hit would be on top.
An AP bomb could crack the roof. Big deal. Nothing would spill and Fuel-Oil certainly would not ignite. You’d get more loss from the exposure afterwards than any splash the bomb might make.
In a miracle shot they might, just might manage to hit the side with an AP bomb. (again, good luck with that). Now you have a poor angle for penetration after having made one hell of bombing run on a target vastly smaller than a BB.
This guy is not much of a source. He’s not familiar with the setup at PH. The fact that he triumphs with:
Shows he really, really does not know what he is talking about.
This doesn’t really say anything about the oil. It is mentioned as one facility among many that were untouched by Japanese attacks. Japan couldn’t attack everything you know.
Being a liquid, petroleum is not really compressible. Suppose a bomb penetrated the top of a tank and exploded inside? Wouldn’t the shock wave through the medium cause the structural failure of the vessel?
Keep in mind the Japanese army was already heavily committed to a war in China. Attacking Siberia would have been opening a second major land war with already limited military resources.
But an attack on the East Indies would be primarily a naval war. And the Japanese navy was available for use in 1941.
