Both the U.S. and Great Britain had hypothesized attacks on Pearl Harbor as early as 1928, even noting the probability that the attack would come from the North to avoid detection in commercial traffic lanes.
As you say, deterring an attack in the first place is the best sort of victory. Aside from ones you’ve mentioned, the failed Anglo-French attempt to force the Dardanelles in WWI comes to mind.
I have to admit that I’m not terribly familiar with the Corregidor landings myself, but Japan had the advantage of Bataan being only two miles from Corregidor and were able to shell and bomb it for almost a month non-stop before landing. Browsing through the CMH’s volume The Fall of the Philippines it appears the Japanese landing force took severe casualties getting ashore, but primarily from 37mm batteries and a 2 gun 75mm battery, not the island’s heavy guns. The landings were conducted at night, many of the fixed coastal defense guns had been knocked out during the siege and
Nevertheless
As Gray Ghost notes a couple of posts up, land based artillery has a much easier time with fire control than ship based guns. More importantly, this firepower that you dismiss as being that of one obsolescent battleship, one battle cruiser, and a couple of heavy cruisers has one feature that those ships lack: it is unsinkable. Knocking it out requires placing direct hits with large caliber guns. Ships will usually be sunk or abandoned to uncontrollable fires long before every turret is knocked out of action. The amount of coastal artillery on Oahu would make invasion impossible until it was put out of operation; trying to close to the shore with unarmored troop transports would be suicidal. Also note that nobody ever seriously planned, much less attempted an amphibious invasion facing anything remotely comparable to the firepower of Oahu’s coastal defenses.
Perceptive question.
The modified AP shell bombs were dropped by level bombers and not dive bombers. The level bombers, Kates, could drop torpedoes (about 900 kg.) from a very low altitude because the torpedoes would then go on their own power to the ship. WWII bombers didn’t have the precision to hit ships from level bombers, which is the reason they went with the Val dive bombers, which carried a 250 kg bomb. The modified AP shell bomb was around 900 kg, IIRC.
I don’t think I’ve debated this particular issue with you, but I don’t see it. They were really hurting for oil at that point. DEA oil wasn’t coming on line as fast as they wanted and Midway burned up a lot of their reserves. The US was learning how to fight them in the Pacific. It would still be a while before the results started to swing more, but the US was very much learning how to fight. The US knew the math, and knew that Japan was burning up carriers, slowly in early '42, but the USN also knew they had tons of carriers coming on line.
The original plan had been for the US to lay low for a while, then once the USN had built up strength to take the fight to them. If the US got hit hard at Midway, I think they would have gone back to that, rather than give up. The USN was pissed at Japan after Pearl Harbor and I don’t see them walking away without revenge. I also don’t see the US population just giving up so easily. Remember that America itself was attacked.
Japan didn’t have the ability to knock out the US, so if the US stayed low, then Japan couldn’t win. Without getting into a hijack, this is the opposite problem that the US had in the Vietnam war, where the US had made a decision to not fight in North Vietnam. If the battle was going against them in the South, the NVA could pull back and regroup.
I left my copy of At Dawn several countries ago, so I don’t see where the context of the quote was made. The book is still one of the best on the subject. However, even a casual student of history knows that there was never a snowball’s chance in hell of an invasion of the US mainland, a fact Yamamoto would very well be aware of, so the admiral would not be making a literal statement.
Prior to Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto did not predict that the war would end in six months, but like the rest of the IJN, there are indications that he was also suffering from overconfidence from the headly days of the early war, where Japan could do no wrong and the allies could do no right. All of the objectives were taken, earlier and at less cost than even their reckless planning had anticipated. We look at Coral Sea as a draw, with a tactical win for them but giving us the strategic edge, but their navy would have been more positive, with – that they thought – was the loss of two of our carriers, (only one, actually. The US was able to save the Yorktown, but the Lexington was sunk) against the loss of the light carrier Shoho for them.
Their euphoria has been described as “Victory Disease”, and in Battle That Doomed Japan, 245. “… the spread of the virus was so great,” the Japanese authors write, “that its effect may be found on every level of the planning and execution of the Midway operation.”
There is no doubt that the Doolittle raid was one of the key reasons for the attack on Midway. However, as written above, scope of the attack and the battle plans were the direct result of the crushing defeats the imperial forces had been forcing on the Allies.
What should have given the IJA pause is the whopping they got at the hands of the Soviets at Khalking Gol. Battles of Khalkhin Gol - Wikipedia That defeat gave the upper hand to the Strike South faction with the plan to go after the colonial territories of Britain and the Netherlands. The Strike North still wanted to fight the Soviets, and even proposed attacking the USSR simultaneous to the march South. If you are going to go against two Western power, why not a third?
The question was not if recent setbacks had altered their thinking but rather where the ideas had come from. I don’t know of any serious historian who doesn’t credit the Russo-Japanese war for the Japanese acceptance of the Decisive Battle Doctrine. The admirals in WWII were young officers during that wildly successful campaign, with leaders such as Yamamoto serving on the front lines. The Russo-Japanese war, and to a lesser degree the First Sino-Japanese war, brought prestige to the then fledging Japanese navy.
The Imperial Army saw itself as the successors of the samurai class which had been disbanded in the Meiji Restoration and the abolishment of the feudal domains. The IJA came from the army raised by the key domains of Satsuma (now Kogoshima) in Kyushu and Choshu (now Yamaguchi) in western Honshu and fought under the banner of the Emperor, against the army of the Shogun.
(Many leaders of the army came from Western Japan, and even looking at the Big Six of the Supreme War Counsel which decided the fate of the war at time of the surrender, it’s telling that the three members of the Counsel who were diehard militants refusing to surrender were all from Oita Prefecture in Kyushu.)
There is a world of difference in being prepared to die fighting, to which the Japanese were completely committed, and being prepared to fight, which the Japanese were not. At least not logistically.
Land-based guns and ship-based guns are like apples and oranges. You can’t compare them one-to-one. Land-based artillery was usually in bunkers, which were harder to destroy than a ship’s armor. Guns on land were not moving and were therefore more accurate than guns on a ship. And a near miss on land would usually not put a gun out of service. A near miss against a ship’s gun might still hit the ship and sink it, along with the undamaged gun.
As Admiral Nelson once observed, “A ship’s a fool to fight a fort.”
I think that’s the most important feature. You don’t attack unless you have enough strength to do the job. In this case, there is simply no way for the Japanese to invade Hawaii, so bringing a large fleet over for just some shelling would be folly. This would unnecessarily expose the fleet to land-based bombers for a minimal psychological gain. Not worth it. Not to mention that the IJN didn’t have the oil reserves for the operation. Midway burned up a year’s worth of fuel by sending damn near everything the could float.
And note that he was a navy attache. I had forgotten about it, but the Nazi sleeper agent was caught by the US prior to being useful. They did not recruit any of the Japanese living in Hawaii.
And they had also theorized that the attack would be most effective on Sunday morning. So, what happened several days after Washington sent out a message to on war footing? There is a lot of weight given to the message which didn’t get through in time, but all overseas bases, including Pearl Harbor, the airbases and those in the Philippines had been told to be prepared for an immediate war.
Most of the Japanese landings had been unopposed and they were all under the benefit of air cover. An attempted invasion of Hawaii could have resulted in the loss of the irreplaceable experienced Japanese pilots.
(post #42):
I have my own copy of the book at hand and I promise the quote is not taken out of context. The sentence before the quote merely identifies it as taken from from a private letter (later made public) to a prominent Japanese ultranationalist. The second sentence after the quote states:
He was warning the far right bluntly that that the United States was not, as certain wishful thinkers believed, a hollow giant to fall and smash to pieces at the first blow.
And on the previous page Japanese Premier Konoye quotes Yamamoto as saying in a 9/40 meeting:
If I am told to fight regardless of the consequences I shall run wild for the first six months or a year, but I have utterly no confidence for the second or third year.
So there is no doubt that before Pearl Harbor Yamamoto expected a prolonged struggle with the US. Now, what would be most revealing is knowledge Yamamoto’s attitude after Pearl Harbor. That should be available in Miracle at Midaway (by Prange posthumously, Golstein and Dillon). That I also have a copy of (somewhere, I think). If I can find it I will post relevant information.
All this is quite true, and I would not have been moved to object if it had been posted instead of the insinuation that the US would just cave in after PH.
Victory disease even before any victories had been won!
Doctrine yes, but inference of short war with the US after PH success no.
All true from what I know, but does not address my objection.
Oh - oh my, it is a small world. From the fourth post in that thread:
I won’t name him, but “he who must not be named” does show up a few posts later; around 5 years or so ago he posted his wildly unrealistic plan for a Japanese invasion of Hawaii on Axis History Forum in the What If section and a number of other WW2 related forums. His imperviousness to logic or reason and dogged determination in the face of reality was quite amusing to watch, I think he may have also authored an even more wildly impossible alternate plan for Sealion.
I agree that prior to the beginning of the war Yamamoto was opposed to the war. However, by all accounts, he was a loyal warrior and single-handedly developed the attack which brought the US directly into the war.
However, he expected that the attack on the US battleships would affect the US morale, which is a major reason that I believe that he also started to think that the US would give give up at some point. If he were truly believing that it was going to be a long, drawn out, fight until the very bitter end, then would he have bothered with a move aimed at morale?
Please reread my post. I did not state that it was Yamamoto’s expectation just after PH. That euphoria seemed to have developed in time with the easy success of the first six months. Ironically, he seemed to have forgotten his own prewar statements.
I’m not sure what this comment is supposed to be. Your quotes are showing that the ultra nationalists were expecting a cakewalk.
Let’s look at your objections:
Simply no. No one within Japan was planning a total war with the US, with the same degree that Germany undertook in Europe. Your own quotes this time show that many were anticipating the very opposite.
Again, my argument is not that the military wasn’t prepared to die for Dainippon, it was that they were not thinking or planning logistics.
They did not have sufficient oil capacity, shipping, manufacturing capacity, or other elements required in total war, and not enough to last long enough to endure the several years of conflict. This was never really discussed across the services or at the highest levels of the government.
I have not said or implied otherewise.
I do not agree that morale deflation was the mission of the PH attack, except in that any defeat will lower morale.
Yamamoto did not want to commit to unlimited objectives in south Asia with his east flank open to an untouched fleet in being at PH. The mission of the PH attack to eliminate that threat, and open the way for seizing enough US bases in the east (i.e. the Philippines, Wake Is. and Guam) to present a defence in depth that the US would be unable to soon counterattack. Long-term, repeat: long-term, Yamamoto hoped that unfavorable attrition would lead the US to negotiate a peace favorable to Japan. PH was only the first of numerous actions by which it was assumed that end could be reached.
An immediate cave-in is the only reasonable interpretation for your repeated emphasis on morale deflation as Yamamoto’s ostensible primary objective in the PH operation.
Furthermore, here, again, is the exchange I originally responded to, emphasis added:
(reply #23):
The Midway operation took place only six months after PH, so any distinction you intend between “much earlier (than Midway)” and “just after PH” is not only unreasonable, but is also too ambiguous to be recognized by anyone not endowed with the ability to read your mind.
The comment was only supposed to express agreement with the tone of your own comments on Japanese over-optimism.
Yamamoto was certainly planning for a total war with the US, or else he would not have told Konoye he had no confidence for the 2nd and 3rd years. You don’t think he meant that the US could threaten to defeat Japan with less than an all-out effort, do you? Nor do you think Japan would oppose such a threat with less than an all-out effort of its own.
All this means is that the Japanese leadership was irrational. They were not the only ones of the era. However, they were not so irrational as to expect that the US would just cave right in, as you would have it.