All your posts here have been excellent. Including the snip I’ve just quoted.
Ref just this snip, that’s pretty much what actually happened in Viet Nam 30 years later. The NV government, and certainly the Viet Cong insurgency, could never hope to conquer the USA. But they could make it choose to go away. And eventually our nose for commerce would overcome our shame at being pushed out militarily and we’d be trading again as if nothing had happened.
Since 1945 the US’ military and commercial interests have been heavily oriented to the Pacific. Or at least our Atlantic and Pacific interests have been well-balanced. So it’s easy for contemporary commentators like us here to forget that that was not always so.
In the 1930s when all this IJN planning was done the US orientation of all aspects of the government, of commerce, and of the people at large, was vastly vastly Euro- and Atlantic- centric. The Pacific was, in a very real sense, like the Western Frontier of the 1830s: someplace we’ll control eventually, but mostly a sideshow right now; the real action is all in/to the east.
As such, the underlying idea behind Japan opening hostilities wasn’t totally barking mad. Riskier than appreciated at the time, but not crazy.
All of this of course demonstrates the very real dangers of believing your own propaganda, assuming your enemy is either a mirror of yourself or a dullard Cylon clone, and of silencing dissenting voices in your own senior ranks. A failure that has been plaguing governments, militaries, and would-be hegemons of all stripes for millennia and will continue to do so until human nature changes.
That’s what always struck me as weird about the Japanese decision to attack. Their only winning strategy is to hope the US gets too bored or pays too hefty a price and quit. There is no way for them to bring the war to a conclusion by taking Washington DC and dictating terms.
And the Japanese leadership knew that! Hence every plan was essentially some version of draw the Americans out to someplace they don’t want to defend and make them suffer so dearly the American public rejects the war.
This doctrine drove Yamamoto to demand that the opening steps of the war had to include the Pearl Harbor strike, knowing that if the US didn’t quit, Japan would be in trouble. There were arguments that forcing the Americans to defend European colonies was the better move, but Yamamoto threatened to resign unless his plan was used and hence got his way.
Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue had a better take on the situation than Yamamoto and the rest of the leadership.
His “A Thesis for Modern Military Planning,.” written in late 1940, describes the inadequacies of Japan’s plans as well as a prescient look at how the war eventually played.
Inoue noted that Japan could not invade the US nor blockade it, and the US had everything it needed to survive even if blockaded. Japan had none of those advantages. In effect, the war would be a chess game where the US could checkmate Japan, but there was no way for Japan to checkmate the US. In the end, that was the strategic problem Japan faced and never found an answer for.
I think some people look at the Vietnam War and see an example of a small country beating two larger countries, each of which had far more resources.
But the Vietnamese strategy was based on fighting the war at a sustainable level. They were fighting in a way that they could keep up for decades. They didn’t overextend themselves in an attempt at a quick victory. And eventually they wore the other sides down.
Japan didn’t do this in WWII. They grabbed more territory than they could hold. They were quickly burning through the reserves they had build up before the war. Their wartime production came nowhere close to replacing their losses. Japan wouldn’t have been able to keep fighting at the level it had fought at in the first few months of the war even if the United States had done nothing to damage the Japanese war effort.
So Japan’s only chance of winning the war was not only was based on the United States giving up; it also required that the United States give up quickly.
Could Japan have won the war if they never directly attacked the US? Would the US declare war when Japan attacked Hong Kong? Or Singapore? Or Australia?
I wonder if the response of a US which was never directly attacked by Japan would have been slow enough that Japan could have created a sustainable perimeter.
In addition and unlike the Japanese, the Vietnamese got a lot of outside assistance from larger powers. The Soviets in particular poured in resources, but China also contributed quite a bit. The trickle of tech that Germany sent Japan’s way was nothing in comparison. Also, the US was reluctant to outright invade North Vietnam, both because of our experience in Korea and how China could and probably would intervene again, but because such an invasion risked all out nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union. So, the North Vietnamese had several advantages that Japan lacked in such a conflict…and they used those advantages brilliantly.
Depends on where they pulled up. If they stuck to China, then they were already winning there and no one else was doing more than the US’s oil embargo. Had Japan attacked the British…well, it’s not a sure thing the US would have declared war. The British weren’t our formal allies, and we had no treaty with them for mutual defense. Same goes if the Japanese had attacked any other European colonial territories in the area…the US response was uncertain. A large part of the public in the US didn’t really want a war, and even when that started to change in the late 30’s and 1940 it was still a pretty close balance…and the thought was focused more on Germany than what Japan was doing. It’s possible that Japan could have gone after the British and French, say, territories and the US would have stayed out of it. But then again, it’s possible we would have not, too.
Hard to say how America would have reacted at that time to a Japanese attack on British colonial territory. The Japanese themselves didn’t know, but the thinking was eventually they would need or want something that would send the US over the brink and into declaring war. Also, there was the Philippines. The Japanese basically needed that, at least wrt to their overarching strategy, and that WOULD have been a declaration of war. Still, they Japanese could have left the US alone, for a time, and focused on China and on the British territories and it’s possible the US would have stayed out of it. There are a few issues though. First, the US would almost certainly have increased our military presence in the region. We’d have fortified the Philippines and our other Pacific territories, continued to build up the fleet, etc. And then there was that oil embargo, that was really hurting Japan, and nothing they could do about it while they maintained peace with the US.
I read somewhere that Japanese assessments of US production capacity was mistaken because they were using numbers based on what the US was then producing, and not the vastly larger amount that the US could produce (by hiring the unemployed and opening shuttered factories).
No, the US wouldnt have declared in any of those cases. However, bit by bit, inch by inch, Roosevelt’s policies would have drawn the USA into war vs Hitler. How long is the question. 1942 or 43 is the best guess.
Would the USA have then declared vs Japan? It depends on what the Imperial Japanese did, of course.
Well, a few things. First, the US was in sort of a covert war with Germany already by this time. The navy had been fighting Germany military units at sea. As you noted, we were getting closer and closer to open war as Roosevelt maneuvered the public into a war mind set. Secondly, the US was already fairly suspicious of Japan. We had, after all, imposed a full on oil embargo on Japan, and had told them that further expansionism would be met with more sever policies. What that entailed, of course, was unclear…as US policy often is, even today (think Taiwan). The Japanese certainly weren’t sure, and in fact they felt it was a good possibility.
Personally, I think you are correct…the US probably wouldn’t have declared war on Japan if they had attacked the British or another European colonial power. Not unless they attacked us directly (we were actually expecting them to do so, sometime…just not where they did. We though it would be the Philippines).
My Dad, who served directly with MacArthur, and has the Phillipines Defense, Liberation and Independence medals, swore that Mac had been ordered to be ‘surprised by the Japs’ so that their attack on him would seem more perfidious and thus more of a reason for going to war. It does explain Doug’s total lack of preparation, even given almost a days warning.
The Philippines werent really part of the USA, so would the US Public get into a war mood if they were attacked? However, the Japaneses did the worst thing they could do- attack part of the USA by surprise- that galvanized the US public into 100% support for the war.
Not a state, but it was a US territory until after the war and had been for several decades at that point. An attack there would have been as much an attack on the US as Pearl Harbor - Hawaii was also not a state at the time and wouldn’t be for nearly 20 years.
" Spanish rule ended in 1898 with Spain’s defeat in the Spanish–American War. The Philippines then became a territory of the United States. U.S forces suppressed a Philippine Revolution led by Emilio Aguinaldo. The United States established the Insular Government to rule the Philippines. In 1907, the elected Philippine Assembly was set up with popular elections. The U.S. promised independence in the Jones Act.[18] The Philippine Commonwealth was established in 1935, as a 10-year interim step prior to full independence. However, in 1942 during World War II, Japan occupied the Philippines. The U.S. military overpowered the Japanese in 1945. The Treaty of Manila in 1946 established the independent Philippine Republic." Nor was Alaska a state when the Japanese occupied the Aleutians.
In my opinion, nothing short of a Japanese attack on American territory would have caused a war between the United States and Japan.
Japan’s strategic goal was to conquer the British and Dutch colonies in South East Asia. They should have simply ignored the Philippines and other American territories that lay along the route.
It’s a myth that Roosevelt secretly provoked a Japanese attack. Roosevelt didn’t want a war with Japan. He saw Germany as the serious threat and was worried that a war with Japan might divert America into the wrong war in the wrong place.