Now, as a Naval War College professor of strategy, I am required to mention our patron saint—our holiest of holies, the German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz—every time I give a talk like this one. Information about your device and internet connection, including your IP address, Browsing and search activity while using Verizon Media websites and apps. https://www.history.com/news/why-did-japan-attack-pearl-harbor. Let’s ask “what if?” as we look back seventy-five years to the Japanese aerial assault on this place. The Imperial Japanese Navy had eradicated Chinese sea power during a short, sharp war in 1895, then turned around and crushed the Russian Navy in naval battles in 1904 and 1905—putting an end to Russian sea power in the Far East for decades to come. • And after the sleeping giant had started awake, the Japanese leadership failed to walk back its ambitious political and strategic aims. An invasion would have required a supply line as long as the Americans had to build going the other way and take nearly as long.The Pearl Harbor attack was simply a flank clearing exercise intended to shock the US into giving Japan free run of the Pacific.The attack was a surprise because the Americans didnt grasp the outrage in Japan resulting from their oil and steel embargo.Japan … Yahoo is part of Verizon Media. Some people understood but there is a difference between potential and actually doing it. Think about what Japan was contemplating from a geographic and geometric perspective. Some of them nearly had a fit. He can mass forces at some point along the line and punch through. As we know from the history books, the war did spill into a second year, 1942–43, and then into a third, 1943–44, and into a fourth. Nor should he have been. Maybe we would make ourselves better play-callers than Belichick or Brady through this learning process—a process we at the Naval War College call “critical analysis.”. Point is, Japan was not entirely unreasonable in thinking it could smash the bulk of the US Pacific Fleet and essentially sit on an early lead. If I want to defend a line, I have to be stronger than my opponent at every point along the perimeter. In particular, let’s look at Pearl Harbor through the eyes of the enemy. Just to add on to what other people are saying Pearl Harbour came after the massive success of the British at Taranto where a single aircraft carrier managed to cripple the Italian battlefleet, thus it makes sense that several aircraft carriers worth of air complements with several waves in a surprise attack could potentially wipe out the US Pacific fleet for potentially a year or more, the US would only really gain naval superiority from 1943 onwards, all through 1942 even after the poor performance at Midway the Japanese had a numerical superiority in the Pacific that would have enabled a competent enough leadership to maintain control over the Pacific through to 1943, had Midway gone differently it is entirely possible that the Japanese would have maintained sufficient naval superiority to expand throughout the southern Pacific islands and establish their sought after cordon of control. ...but you know what they say about assumptions. is that true? That shows what Japan was up against. Doing nothing is a viable strategic option, and oftentimes a good one. Japan fundamentally misunderstood the nature of their opponent. Japan erred by attacking Pearl Harbor—then it erred in how its aviators attacked Pearl Harbor. That illustrates the dimensions of the ground war—a war comparable in scale to the maritime war. So Yamamoto was right: Japan had to win quickly or not at all. What did Japanese want in the Pacific?

Pearl Harbor was attacked after the US passed economic sanctions on Japan after hearing about their war crimes committed in China. Recommended: This Video Shows What Happens if Washington, D.C. Is Attacked with Nuclear Weapons, Recommended: 8 Million People Could Die in a War with North Korea, Recommended: Why North Korea Is Destined to Test More ICBMs and Nuclear Weapons. No one likes the armchair QB in New England, my adopted home, who takes Bill Belichick or Tom Brady to task for substandard play in a Patriots defeat. • Japan picked a fight with a foe boasting vastly greater economic and industrial power, and it fired that foe’s resolve to translate economic and industrial resources—potential military power, in other words—into deployable military might on a scale that Japan had little hope of matching. By late 1943, what amounted to a second complete U.S. Navy—the shiny, new, higher-tech fleet authorized by Congress under the Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940—was steaming into the combat theater to do battle. They made the mistake of assuming that as a democracy the United States would be easily cowed and could be bullied by a sufficiently aggressive first strike into conceding to Japanese gains in a negotiated settlement. The Japanese goal was to cripple the U.S. Pacific fleet, and they nearly succeeded.

Japan knew that American industrial centers could be converted into the production of war materiel. That’s a fallacy. All of this, it is worth noting, is well known among Japanese historical circles but is almost completely ignored in American retellings. So here’s a pearl of wisdom from the great Carl: no fair Monday-morning quarterbacking! The Japanese saw they had to invade SE Asia to secure oil and rubber. For a bit of perspective, in 1941 the entire Japanese Navy air fleet was a little over 1,200 combat aircraft, total, which was roughly the same number fielded by the US Army Air Corps (this is before there was an Air Force). The Imperial Japanese Navy’s reach exceeded its grasp by mid-1942—just as Yamamoto had foreseen. The circle got bigger and bigger, Japanese naval coverage thinner and thinner. But he was also wrong: by executing his plan to strike Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Navy guaranteed there would be no quick win. Even if the US was neutral, it didn't mean the US wouldn't enter the war. Yamamoto told his political superiors: “If you insist that we really do it, you may trust us for the perfect execution of a breath-taking show of naval victories for the first half-year or full year. The Western allies were limiting exports of goods such as rubber and oil to Japan which it needed to continue its war in China. This was a mammoth undertaking. You should ask British military players about that one. What they did not understand was the political will of US society. Forget Chicago, Japan didn't have the logistics for Hawaii. In hindsight of course, just attacking the SE asia colonies would have been the smarter move 10/10. And the repercussions were hardly unexpected. the leaders (rightly) decided that the only way to beat the US was to strike first and strike hard. You've got to remember, even as late as December 1941, the US Navy was nowhere close to the overwhelming force it was by the end of the war; they had just over 350 combatant ships at sea, and about as many under construction, but they had two oceans to cover, while Japan had arguably the most powerful navy on Earth, and really only the Americans to fight. Even six months after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Navy was essentially undefeated in the Pacific. Had … The military expansion by the military into China was straining Japan's economy to supply its needs. Agreed on just about everything. That verges on impossible. Japan knew that there was no reasonable possibility of bombing those industrial centers. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast, Press J to jump to the feed. That left the United States Navy as the next big thing for Japan’s navy. It's still up for argument whether the American strategy shifted this way because it was the best strategy, or because aircraft carriers was pretty much what they had available, but it was a revolution in naval warfare. Important note: if American aircraft carriers had been at Pearl Harbor, the Pacific War might have lasted much, much longer. To accomplish such an ambitious goal, the resource-poor island state desperately needed imports of raw materials—primarily from Southeast Asia. And it wasn’t like the attack on Pearl Harbor was the first stage in … And even if it did awaken the American giant, it would have avoided filling him with what Yamamoto called a “terrible resolve” to crush Japan. If you really really really get into it. Six months after Pearl Harbor, America was building that many combat aircraft every month.

We know they were foreseeable because perceptive Japanese military men foresaw them. The US lost nothing important at all from a ship perspective and gained a nice doctrinal advantage during the Pearl Harbor Attack. Think about it: • By attacking Oahu, Japan took on a second full-blown war in the Pacific Ocean while waging a massive land war on the continent of Asia. Admiral Yamamoto, to name one, caught sight of how the war would unfold.

First consider the failure of Japanese strategy as strategy.

The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, brought the United States officially into World War II. Why did Japan do it? Find out more about how we use your information in our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy. Weren't they intending to destroy aircraft carrier (which actually weren't there) too? Thus, in the minds of the Japanese, they had to either give up all their territory in China or attack the West. In effect, then, Tokyo envisioned enclosing its territorial conquests and sources of natural resources within a long, distended defense perimeter that coincided, more or less, with the second island chain. In this environment, it becomes very easy to conjure fantastical ideas about how America would react - ranging from somewhat possible (America agrees to a negotiated peace because it's busy with Germany), to the outlandish (America will simply fold and capitulate before their might).

© Copyright 2020 Center for the National Interest All Rights Reserved, This Video Shows What Happens if Washington, D.C. Is Attacked with Nuclear Weapons, 8 Million People Could Die in a War with North Korea, Why North Korea Is Destined to Test More ICBMs and Nuclear Weapons. if i were IJN,i would do whatever it took to do peaceful negotiations with the world's super power. This is a roundabout way of getting to the beginning. When the shooting stopped in 1945, some 1.8 million Japanese troops were left in China, Manchuria and Korea. Had Tokyo exercised some forbearance, it may have avoided rousing the “sleeping giant” that Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto reputedly said he feared so much. Imperial Japan would have been far better off had it forgone the attack on Pearl Harbor and confined its operations to the Western Pacific. There was instead a very fierce rivalry between the Army and the Navy, whose leaders were both in mortal fear of being assassinated by their subordinates who had largely bought into the nationalism hysteria / propaganda. In fairness, that was the first real example of America's political will when attacked.

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Imperial Japan would have been far better off had it forgone the attack on Pearl Harbor and confined its operations to the Western Pacific. but IJN dropped the bomb while negotiations were still happening. Not attacking the US would have left a very dangerous Sword of Damocles that would threaten to unwind their progress against the other Western powers. All the battleships gone forced the USA to rely on the sub and carrier which would become the defining ships of the 20th century. Pearl Harbor was attacked after the US passed economic sanctions on Japan after hearing about their war crimes committed in China. He compared fighting the United States to “fighting the whole world.” The mismatch in economic and military power would be that lopsided once American industry was in full gear, turning out war materiel in vast quantities.



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