The force a fluid exerts on a wall is 1/2(roGh). As the height h increases, they might need a thicker wall. Those are rather tall.
Oh, I don’t doubt its authenticity. It looks like it was earlier oil storage tanks located elsewhere that might have either held some other fuel or were was all that was needed for PH when a large portion of the fleet still ran on coal.
Sounds like the guys borders a bit on what we call Tojoboo. 
Fair enough, and without having access to Zimm’s discussions with his experts I cannot comment any further, especially since I was poorly recalling a lot of Zimm’s position (I read it not long after it came out) in any case. I wasn’t flat wrong, its just Zimm’s point was not about steel thickness but rather than the tanks weren’t as vulnerable as folks make it out to me, nor was the oil irreplaceable.
BTW, do you have a source on that API ammo in the downed Zero? I was under the impression that the IJN pilots didn’t really bother with thinking the machine guns on their planes for much more than soft targets, given what was written about their usefulness against US planes in Shattered Sword.
Separate Ball (ie copper jacketed aluminum/lead cored), AP (ie steel cored) and incendiary rounds, put into the ammo belts in threes. The source for that being the load out on the Akutan Zero is “Koga’s Zero: The Fighter that Changed WWII” by Jim Rearden. Background on the types of ammo used by the Type 97 aircraft machine gun can be found on the Japanese language Wiki page on .303 ammo. All three of those types definitely existed.
The typically ~3/8" seat armor on US fighters of that time could stop the 7.7mm AP round. Besides being armor plate not mild steel*, such a round had to penetrate the plane’s aluminum skin at a generally very acute angle then probably cut through some internal aluminum structure after that before hitting the seat armor.
Note that while US .50 API has been mentioned, that type of round wasn’t actually used at the time of PH either. At that time similarly US fighters used mixes of AP and incendiary in their ammo belts. The API round became common from ca. 1943. Still, even non AP .50 rounds would easily go through 1/2" of mild steel, so if the person’s off the cuff reference was US capabilities, and not considering that Japanese a/c mg’s were smaller caliber (then, later model Zeroes used a copy of the .50 Browning besides longer barreled 20mm) they might view 1/2" of mild steel as quite vulnerable to ‘a/c machine guns’.
*in a few cases in the early months of the war USN F4F-3 fighters were fitted ad hoc with mild steel ie ‘boiler plate’ behind the pilot’s seat. There’s not enough data AFAIK to know if that actually would have stopped 7.7mm AP. Later on, kits with real armor were issued, then F4F-4’s were fitted with armor at the factory. Likewise F4F-3’s didn’t have self sealing fuel tanks at the beginning, crude liners retrofitted in some not all early actions, but the USN fighters at Midway were F4F-4’s with tank liners as well as seat armor fitted at the factory.
Interestingly, some have noted that the re-arming of the US was drastically cutting into the US exports of oil as it was needed domestically for all the new military gear. So much so that the embargo was almost an empty gesture.
Mind you, had production increased or re-arming died down that would mean some of the oil was exportable again and the embargo would matter.
Good summation- one thing I need to stress is that only Japan sees it as America forcing them to go to war. Everyone sees it as Japan not stopping it’s military absorption of other nations and areas.
One thing I read, which may or may not be true, is that the USA demanded Japan withdraw from China, but we didn’t consider Manchuria part of China.
Still basically the USA demanded that Japan withdraw from conquered areas or they wouldnt sell Oil, etc to Japan.
Outside of Manchuria , the Japanese army was having a real hard time of it anyway.
Please see my recent post. The time was indeed running out, but more specifically because of oil. The Japanese navy had a two-year supply of peacetime oil reserves. They needed to obtain more (either by war or agreeing to what they felt was unacceptable terms).
While some Japanese leaders believed that they could defeat everyone and all, others were not so sure.
Tojo Hideki was one of the those would was worried about the Western powers. He was worried about the growing ABCD (American, British, Chinese and Dutch) powers becoming stronger and strangling Japan. However, when informed exactly how strong the US was becoming, he disregarded that with the Japanese fighting spirit argument.
The US and Japan had agreed that the Pacific mandates for both countries would not be fortified. Japan had withdrawn from the League of Nations but didn’t return the mandates (gosh, wonder why) and had fortified them. The US was beginning to in 1941. The US believed that a war was coming, but thought that they had until spring of 1942.
According to Zimm’s book, the US had already made that change in strategy to wait until they had built up further forces. IIRC, the Orange War plan called for waiting for a six months(?) to move aggressively. In the meanwhile, the US was building up forces and fortifications in the Pacific.
Interestingly, while the US rethought the idea of battleship supremacy after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese really didn’t get it.
I don’t know if that would be a valid assumption for future growth, which Japan would be very well aware that the US would not need as large of a navy in the Atlantic.
Also a factor was just how messed up Japan’s governmental system was at the time – with assassination of government ministers seen as being insufficiently militant being a fact of life for years leading up to the war, the army and navy acting like independent governments (and not at all friendly towards each other), etc.
It is entirely possible that making a rational decision on a risk/benefit basis was simply not an option for them; how possible was it for any in the Japanese leadership to tell the army to stop attacking China, if that was the price of avoiding a crippling embargo?
I have not been able to google anything to support this argument. At the time of the embargo, the US was supplying 60 to 80% of Japanese needs (depending on the sources). I haven’t found anything which said that the exports had already dwindled down to zero.
I did find this
The Dutch and British had joined with the US in the embargo, so Japan was cut off from the other sources. They had been importing a significant amount from the DEI, although talks concerning importing more had broken down.
Cordell Hull, Secretary of State and Frank Knotts, Secretary of the Navy (a cabinet position) were opposed to the sanctions as they believed it was tantamount to declaring war. Several sources claim that Roosevelt had not intended the oil embargo to be 100% and that the Japanese could apply for special permits for importing a certain amount of oil, but that the American leaders who were in charge of oil dispersement refused to allow the Japanese to obtain any.
In addition, the embargo also included other raw material required for Japanese industrial purposes as well and their war efforts.
As an aside, in her book, Eri Hotta discusses growing problems which were caused by reduced supplies to civilians, such as the disposal of night soil from Tokyo. Prior to civilian rationing because of the war in China, this had been done by truck.
I assumed
that all or almost all the readers here would be familiar with that. I’m also assuming the people will not presume my familiarity with the Japanese side involves any sympathy for their actions.
It was not that simple. Japanese negotiators were handicapped by the position of their government which was in chaos, with no clear overall leadership. They wanted an unacceptable amount of time to withdraw from China, even if there could obtain a consensus to agree to a withdraw. Again, without a clear leader opposed to the war, things just muddled along. It could also very well have been that even had the US agreed to resume oil shipments, there were enough voices calling for war that the negotiations would have failed by the November 1st deadline which the Japanese had secretly set as the make or bread date.
Now back to other things.
Both sides made a number of critical mistakes in their assumptions about the other side. Japan’s most obvious one was assuming that the US could quickly settle. Many leaders in the US were assuming that Japan would never attempt a war against the US, and consequently thought the measure such as oil embargo would not lead to war.
Japan assumed that their fighting spirit would prevail, and far too many Americans assumed that the Japanese could not fight effectively.
The same cite claims this. I have no way to vouch for its accuracy, but it’s an interesting tidbit.
I’m not going to get involved in that debate, but an interesting point is that it illustrates the difference in the mindsets of the two sides.
As I posted earlier, one Japanese officer said that they didn’t attack the oil tanks because they weren’t thinking of US logistics. Had they been thinking of US logistics, they they would have thought more about their own logistics.
The Japanese leadership was the Army. The Diet was pretty irrelevant by then.
In “Bankrupting the Enemy” Miller shows graphs of Japanese oil imports from the US by year. The annualized rate in the months of 1941 pre-embargo dropped around 30% from the 1939 volume (1940 was in between) to around the level prevailing in the mid 1930’s. So it did decline just before the embargo but not enough to make the embargo nearly an empty gesture, even temporarily. And it was attributed in part to soft sanctions. The US didn’t say it was refusing to export all oil to Japan till mid 1941 (except >=87 octane gasoline exports banned in mid 1940), but export licenses had to be granted and they were increasingly slow walked especially for crude particularly suitable for gasoline production, and for gasoline near the octane limit of the 1940 ban.
Although in the total picture sure, a faster growing US economy cushioned the blow for CA oil producers from creeping restrictions then outright Japan export ban by boosting oil demand elsewhere in the US. US real GDP grew 17.7% in 1941, final general recovery from the Depression in part from rearmament. As Pac War encyclopedia points out there were no oil pipelines to the US West Coast then (one Canadian pipeline has a terminal in Anacortes WA now, otherwise there still aren’t). But shipping oil to rest of US via the Panama Canal wasn’t prohibitive. It happened then and it’s not unheard of even now (other direction usually).
The Trans Mountain pipeline, built in the early 50s, terminates on the BC coast, doesn’t it?
What do you call it when you make a statement which is obviously wrong, then when challenged you retreat because you don’t like “arguing?”
Where did you get that idea that the Japanese believed that the US would not achieve parity until 1950?
Here is yet another cite (from the US Army War College) which says your statement is completely rubbish:
You seem to believe that a debate is simply repeating yourself again and again, even in the face of authoritarian cites. This is the Dope. You can’t get away with that.
My statement for review: “As Pac War encyclopedia points out there were no oil pipelines to the US West Coast then (one Canadian pipeline has a terminal in Anacortes WA now, otherwise there still aren’t).”
I believe it’s correct. The Trans Mountain has one terminal in Anacortes, WA and another in Burnaby, BC after going across western Canada from Edmonton. But other than that one Canadian pipeline with a US terminal, there are no oil pipelines to the US West Coast.
Here’s the 1941 Gallup polls concerning war, including this:
Polls much earlier in the year showed that opinion was split on risking war with Japan to save the DEI and Singapore.
There does seem to be much more support for a possible war against Japan than against Germany. There could be racial reasons for this, but also I suspect most people did not believe a war with Japan would be as costly – in terms of lives as well as material – as what it turned out to be.
I suspect it may two parts to the answer
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oh boy…getting involved in another Continental European war…hooray…
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Japan did actually threaten our positions in The Pacific, unlike Germany which could do little more that use U-boats against us.
But yeah, I’d say there was an element of thinking Japan would be a pushover compared to Germany was a factor as well.
One thing that barely gets mentioned in discussions on why Japan attacked Pearl Harbour in 1941, is that 90 years earlier, the United States Navy showed up with gunships in the port of Edo, Japan making various demands to the Japanese around trade, port access for American ships, etc. When the Japanese side stalled the negotiations, the American fleet commander (Captain Perry) threatened the Japanese with war.
History records that the Japanese agreed to the demands only under duress, when they realised they wouldn’t be able to defend themselves against an American attack.
I think this incident is very relevant when trying to understand the Japanese psyche in 1941.
(Wikipedia has an excellent article about the Perry Expedition).