JAPAN’S DECISION FOR WAR IN 1941:
SOME ENDURING LESSONS
February 2009
Source: The Strategic Studies Institute;
which is here.
"Dr. Jeffrey Record takes a fresh look at Japan’s decision
for war, and concludes that it was dictated by Japanese
pride and the threatened economic destruction of Japan by
the United States. He believes that Japanese aggression in
East Asia was the root cause of the Pacific War, but argues
that the road to war in 1941 was built on American as well
as Japanese miscalculations and that both sides suffered from
cultural ignorance and racial arrogance. Record finds that
the Americans underestimated the role of fear and honor in
Japanese calculations and overestimated the effectiveness
of economic sanctions as a deterrent to war, whereas the
Japanese underestimated the cohesion and resolve of an
aroused American society and overestimated their own martial
prowess as a means of defeating U.S. material superiority. He
believes that the failure of deterrence was mutual, and that
the descent of the United States and Japan into war contains
lessons of great and continuing relevance to American foreign
policy and defense decision makers.""
Basically, this person is saying that the war between Japan and the U.S. was the fault of both countries, although the root cause was Japan's aggression in East Asia. That the two countries did not understand each other as far as their cultural concepts went is beyond argument. The Japanese leaders had contempt for the ability of the Americans to fight a war, and the Americans severely underestimated the Japanese willingness to fight to get what they wanted.
The U.S. had virtually no understanding of the concept of Bushido and general rules of war, and that led to many problems, including the kamikaze and the the horrible treatment of many prisoners-of-war taken by the Japanese who expected the soldiers, at least, to die rather than surrender.
This is not just something that concerns World War II, either. There is just as much understanding today between the U.S. and various Islamic countries as there was between the U.S. and Japan in the past. Lack of understanding can very easily lead to major problems, including violence and war.
I'll be quoting aspects of the report, as I have done above in the center, and then make some comments on what is being said in the quote.
"Japan’s aggression in China, military alliance with
Hitler, and proclamation of a “Greater East Asian
Co-Prosperity Sphere” that included resource-rich
Southeast Asia were major milestones along the road to
war, but the proximate cause was Japan’s occupation of
southern French Indochina in July 1941, which placed
Japanese forces in a position to grab Malaya, Singapore,
and the Dutch East Indies. Japan’s threatened conquest
of Southeast Asia, which in turn would threaten
Great Britain’s ability to resist Nazi aggression in
Europe, prompted the administration of Franklin D.
Roosevelt to sanction Japan by imposing an embargo
on U.S. oil exports upon which the Japanese economy
was critically dependent. Yet the embargo, far from
deterring further Japanese aggression, prompted a
Tokyo decision to invade Southeast Asia. "
This is very interesting. As long as Japan was running rampant through China, killing tens of thousands of Chinese, the U.S. wasn't really very concerned. Let Japan potentially threaten things that the West wanted, though, and it was an entirely different matter.
Japan decided that the only way it stood any chance of getting what it needed for its war effort in China was to seize these other territories and, to do that, they had to keep the U.S. out of the way, at least until they had seized the areas and set up a strong defensive position. Thus, the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Which was a major, major mistake on their part, as the Japanese had no idea at all of just how severely the reaction of the American public would be to that attack. It instantly united the entire U.S. which, almost on a dime, turned its economic might from domestic goods production to military production.
This, itself, was another miscalculation on Japan's part. There were some people who knew what could happen. Yamamoto himself had toured the U.S. and knew just how strong a war machine the U. S. could make, but the leaders chose to ignore his warnings. Something else Japan overlooked - their situation had a major difference from Germany's.
Germany could bomb England and hope to stop its war production. Japan had no way at all to bomb factories in the U.S. in any kind of practical manner. The U.S. was going to continue to manufacture the war goods, and Japan could only hope to sink merchant ships hauling those goods. They also thought that Japan could not possibly be defeated, and that Japan itself would not be attacked. They had no concept of what the U.S. would later do in its firebombing campaign against multitudes of Japanese cities, businesses and industries.
The author says the Japanese had several justifications, in their eyes, for waging war.
1. They had to go to war with the U.S. quickly. The longer they waited, the the less chance they had for success.
2. They realized they would probably not win a long war with the U.S. but figured that, if they caused enough casualties in island fighting, the U.S. public would grow tired of the war and get the government to sue for peace.
3. The Japanese believed they were racially and spiritually superior to the Americans, and that this would be enough to overcome the American ability to out-produce Japan as far as war production goes.
The U.S. had its own muddied thinking.
1. The U.S. basically demanded that Japan stay out of Indochina, and get out of China, both. Japan had already been fighting China for a decade by that time, and just walking away from it all was an unrealistic assumption. (the author's idea)
2. The U.S. considered Japan and the Japanese to be inferior to the U.S. There was already a long history of anti-Oriental prejudice in the U.S., dating back to when the Chinese first immigrated, and on through the Japanese immigration. This was seen in the various propaganda cartoons and movies, featuring the stereotyped Japanese soldier. It also led to the internment of over 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry who were forced to move from the West Coast into relocation centers (also called internment camps or, in some books, concentration camps), with the idea of making them move from those camps out into other parts of the U.S. and forcing them to spread themselves all through the U.S. (Although there was a strong movement to keep them from ever coming back to California.) (my ideas)
The author then notes the lessons that should be learned from what happened:
1. Fear and honor, “rational” or not, can motivate
as much as interest.
2. There is no substitute for knowledge of a potential
adversary’s history and culture.
3. Deterrence lies in the mind of the deterree, not
the deterrer.
4. Strategy must always inform and guide operations.
5. Economic sanctioning can be tantamount to an
act of war.
6. The presumption of moral or spiritual superiority
can fatally discount the consequences of an enemy’s
material superiority.
7. “Inevitable” war easily becomes a self-fulfilling
prophesy.
The author says that 'war with the United States was probably inevitable by
the end of 1941 even though Japanese prospects for
winning a war with the United States were minimal.' Many publications of that time, and some even decades earlier, also expected an eventual war between the two countries.
He goes on: 'The disaster that awaited Japan in its war with the
United States was rooted in a fatal excess of ambition
over power.'
The old saying 'your eyes were bigger than your stomach' kind of actually fits this pretty well. Japan simply wanted to do to much over to widespread of an area with too little to back up its own ambition.
So, why did Japan go to war against the U.S.? Some people think they were just acting irrationally.
"The presumption of Japanese irrationality is natural
given Japan’s acute imperial overstretch in 1941 and
the huge disparity between Japan’s industrial base
and military power and America’s industrial base
and latent military power. "
The author then goes into a detailed discussion of the economic steps
that the U.S. took against Japan. He points out that FDR did not figure that Japan would go to war over what was being done, though. The results of the various economic actions was that Japan's foreign trade dropped by 50% to 75%.
The culmination of U.S. economic warfare against
Japan by late summer of 1941 confronted Tokyo with
essentially two choices: seizure of Southeast Asia, or
submission to the United States.
The U.S. was demanded a lot of things from Japan in exchange for lifting the various boycotts and embargoes.
"The United States was, in effect, demanding that
Japan renounce its status as an aspiring great power
and consign itself to permanent strategic dependency
on a hostile Washington. Such a choice would have
been unacceptable to any great power. Japan’s survival
as a major industrial and military power was a stake—
far more compelling reasons for war than the United
States later advanced for its disastrous wars of choice
in Vietnam and Iraq. Would the United States ever
have permitted a hostile power to wreck its foreign
commerce and strangle its domestic economy without
a resort to war? "
There did not seem to be any room for compromise in the U.S. position, either. Japan was looking at a situation where they would lose everything they had taken and not gain very much in response. When you could that with the Japanese cultural idea that they were superior to the U.S. in a variety of ways, then it's not surprising that they went to war against the U.S.
"[S]ince Japan is unavoidably facing
national ruin whether it decides to fight the United
States or submit to its demands, it must by all means
choose to fight,” declared Admiral Osami Nagano,
the Chief of Staff of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN),
at an Imperial Conference in September 1941. “Japan
would rather go down fighting than ignobly surrender
without a struggle, because surrender would spell
spiritual as well as physical ruin for the nation and its
destiny.War—even a lost war—was clearly preferable
to humiliation and starvation. "
From the Japanese view, the decision to go to war was not an irrational one at all. They also knew that a great deal of the world's attention, including the U.S., was focused on the war in Europe, and that war, if the U.S. became involved, would drain a lot of resources form the U.S. and just possibly make it easier on the Japanese.
The author then goes into the assumptions that Japan made about any war with the U.S.
"1. The first assumption was that time was
working against Japan—i.e., the longer Japan waited
to initiate war against the United States, the dimmer
its prospects for success. "
The embargo would continue to take a toll on Japan's resources, and the longer it went on, the less chance Japan would have of being able to prosecute a war effectively. There was also a major gap between the potential war production of Japan and the potential war production of the U.S., and the gap would probably just get bigger as the economic measures against Japan went on.
"2. A second and equally realistic assumption was that
Japan had little chance of winning a protracted war with
the United States.""
If a war went on for very long, the U.S. superiority in ability to produce war machines would eventually allow the U.S. to defeat Japan. Japan could only hope to strike quickly, neutralize what U.S. forces they could, and hope the U.S. would take a good while to rebuild its forces, allowing Japan time to set up an almost impenetrable line of defense.
"3. ...that by swiftly
seizing and fortifying the Central and Southwestern
Pacific, the Japanese could force the Americans
into a murderous, island-by-island slog that would
eventually exhaust their political will to fight on to
total victory. Japan would raise the blood and treasure
costs of the war beyond Washington’s willingness to
pay.70 “The Japanese theory of victory,” contends Colin
Gray, “amounted to the hope—one hesitates to say
calculation—that the United States would judge the cost
of defeating Japan to be too heavy, too disproportionate
to the worth of the interests at stake.""
Keep in mind that, at that time, Japan could figure that the U.S. might eventually fight Germany and thus would be forced to divert a lot of its military power that way. They probably figured that the U.S. public would not support a two-front war. This was seen later in the war when Japan knew full well that its forces would be unable to hold islands like Iwo Jima and Okinawa forever. They concentrated, instead of victory, on just making the U.S. pay heavily for every inch of land it took. They hoped this would eventually cause the U.S. to give them very good terms for a peace treaty.
The author points out what many others have, also, and that is, at the time, Japan had never been defeated in war. Between that and the concept of Emperor worship, they pretty much figured no one would ever defeat them.
He then goes into the Japanese belief that their spiritual strength could triumph over America's physical military superiority.
"Reaffirmation of faith in moral attributes and
psychological factors amounted to callous evasion of
the realities of modern firepower, mechanization, and
aviation. The rationale was that the quantity and quality
of the material possessed by Japan’s enemies—and
their sheer numbers—could only be offset by intangible
factors such as high morale, spirit, and fearlessness in
close fighting against men and armor. At Nomohan
and throughout the Pacific War, the price was paid in
lives squandered in desperate banzai charges with the
bayonet, though it was well known that frontal assaults
had rarely succeeded since the days of the Russo-
Japanese War. "
The banzai charges are one of the things that confuses me. I know the Japanese did not believe in surrender, but the main concept was to cause American soldiers as much harm as they could. You can't do that if you're dead, and lots and lots of Japanese soldiers died in these banzai charges, usually without much of anything military to show for them.
He then goes into the Pearl Harbor attack, and notes the following:
1. Two of the over-aged battleships were destroyed forever.
2. The other six were damaged but were repaired and re-entered service.
3. 3 light cruisers and four destroyers were damaged in the attack, but they also were repaired and fought again.
4. No heavy cruisers or subs of the U.S. were lost, and the carriers were not even in the area.
Thus, from a short-term view, the attack was a success in that it kept the U.S. Navy out of action for a while, but in the longer view, the attack was pretty much of little value.
In addition, Japan did not really destroy the base, itself. They failed to destroy the ability of the base to function as a base. So even though they did damage a lot of ships, the base was still there to do repairs and handle new incoming ships and planes.
"The destruction of Pearl Harbor or the
invasion and occupation of the Hawaiian Islands would
have compelled the Navy to operate from the American
West Coast, adding another 3,000 miles of distance to
be surmounted before grappling with the Japanese in
the Central and Southwestern Pacific. After the war,
Minoru Genda, the brilliant Japanese naval aviator
who planned the details of the attack on Pearl Harbor,
lamented the Japanese failure to invade Hawaii, which
he blamed on the IJA’s preoccupation with eventual
war against the Soviet Union and unwillingness to
release (from Manchuria) the divisions necessary to
take Hawaii. “After the attack on Pearl Harbor,” he
said, “we could have taken Honolulu pretty easily.
This would have deprived the American Navy of its
best island base in the Pacific [and] would have cut
the lifeline to Australia, and that country might have
fallen to us like a ripe plum.”102 Japanese possession
of Hawaii and Australia would have deprived the
United States of the indispensable base from which to
challenge Japanese control of Southeast Asia.""
The author then goes in to various ways that the U.S. tried to deter Japan from its expansionism, but, of course, none of the ways worked.
There was also, again, the matter of self-interest. The author points out that if Japan had attacked European-controlled areas only, then the U.S. would have been much more reluctant to go to war against Japan, but Hawaii was an American territory and an attack on that was a totally different matter.
"A Japanese attack on American territory somewhere
in the Pacific was the only event that could elicit a
congressional declaration of war, and Roosevelt,
unlike later presidents, respected the Congress’s
constitutional prerogative to declare war. It was also
necessary that the attack appear unprovoked to the
American people. Stimson testified in 1946 that such an
attack was necessary to unite the country behind any
war with Japan. Even though by late November 1941
the administration knew that a Japanese attack was
coming (a 'war warning' was issued on November
27 to all U.S. Army and Navy commanders), and
“[i]n spite of the risk involved . . . in letting the Japanese
fire the first shot,” said Stimson, 'we realized that in
order to have the full support of the American people
it was desirable to make sure that the Japanese be the
ones to do this so that there should remain no doubt in
anyone’s mind as to who were the aggressors.'"'
So the government was ready to let people be killed just as long as we weren't the ones doing the first killing.
The author then returns to the economic argument again.
"...by airily jerking its lethal economic leash
around Japan’s neck to punish Tokyo for aggression
that Washington was never prepared to resist by force,
or even threatened force, the Roosevelt administration
invited the very war in the Far East it sought to avoid.""
"Roland
Worth, Jr., contends that 'the U.S. decision to embargo
90 percent of Japan’s petroleum and two-thirds of
its trade led directly to the attack on Pearl Harbor.''
Although 'striking at the economic Achilles Heel of
Japan was naturally appealing in light of its economy’s
comparative weakness, it only made sense if one were
genuinely ready to negotiate a mutually acceptable
compromise (which meant leaving Japan a good
part of its empire) or if one were willing to risk the
military retaliation that Japan . . . was quite capable
of inflicting.'"'
The author then points out the lessons that should be learned from what happened.
1. First, fear and honor, “rational” or not, can motivate as much
as interest.
2. There is no substitute for knowledge of
a potential adversary’s history and culture.
3. Third, deterrence lies in the mind of the deterree, not
the deterrer. To be effective, threatened force has to be
credible to the enemy—i.e., the enemy has to believe
that you have both the capacity and the will to what
you threaten to do, and that what you threaten to
do is unacceptable.
4. Fourth, strategy must always inform and guide
operations.
5. Fifth, economic sanctioning can be tantamount to an
act of war.
6. Sixth, the presumption of moral or spiritual superiority
can fatally discount the consequences of an enemy’s material
superiority.
7. Seventh, “inevitable” war easily becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy.
Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page
|