Japans Decision For War In 1941 Some Enduring Lessons

Download or read book Japan’s Decision For War In 1941: Some Enduring Lessons written by Dr. Jeffrey Record and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-06 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan’s decision to attack the United States in 1941 is widely regarded as irrational to the point of suicidal. How could Japan hope to survive a war with, much less defeat, an enemy possessing an invulnerable homeland and an industrial base 10 times that of Japan? The Pacific War was one that Japan was always going to lose, so how does one explain Tokyo’s decision? Did the Japanese recognize the odds against them? Did they have a concept of victory, or at least of avoiding defeat? Or did the Japanese prefer a lost war to an unacceptable peace? 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.

Download or read book Japan's Decision for War in 1941 written by Jeffrey Record and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Japan's Decision for War in 1941 written by Jeffrey Record and published by . This book was released on 2009-02-27 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Japanese decision to initiate war against the United States in 1941 continues to perplex. Did the Japanese recognize the odds against them? How did they expect to defeat the United States? The presumption of irrationality is natural, given Japan's acute imperial overstretch in 1941 and America's overwhelming industrial might and latent military power. The Japanese decision for war, however, must be seen in the light of the available alternatives in the fall of 1941, which were either national economic suffocation or surrender of Tokyo's empire on the Asian mainland. Though Japanese aggression in East Asia was the root cause of the Pacific War, the road to Pearl Harbor was built on American as well as Japanese miscalculations, most of them mired in mutual cultural ignorance and racial arrogance. 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. By mid-1941 Japanese leaders believed that war with the United States was inevitable and that it was imperative to seize the Dutch East Indies, which offered a substitute for dependency on American oil. The attack on Pearl Harbor was essentially a flanking raid in support of the main event, which was the conquest of Malaya, Singapore, the Indies, and the Philippines, Japan's decision for war rested on several assumptions, some realistic, others not. The first was that time was working against Japan-i.e., the longer they took to initiate war with the United States, the dimmer its prospects for success. The Japanese also assumed they had little chance of winning a protracted war with the United States but hoped they could force the Americans into a murderous, island-by-island slog across the Central and Southwestern Pacific that would eventually exhaust American will to fight on to total victory. The Japanese believed they were racially and spiritually superior to the Americans, whom they regarded as an effete, creature-comforted people divided by political factionalism and racial and class strife. U.S. attempts to deter Japanese expansion into the Southwestern Pacific via the imposition of harsh economic sanctions, redeployment of the U.S. Fleet from southern California to Pearl Harbor, and the dispatch of B-17 long-range bombers to the Philippines all failed because the United States insisted that Japan evacuate both Indochina and China as the price for a restoration of U.S. trade. The United States demanded, in effect, that Japan abandon its empire, and by extension its aspiration to become a great power, and submit to the economic dominion of the United States-something no self-respecting Japanese leader could accept.

Download or read book A War It Was Always Going to Lose written by Jeffrey Record and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2010-11-30 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeffrey Record has specialized in investigating the causes of war. In The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (Potomac Books, Inc., 2006), he contended that Hitler could not have been deterred from going to war by any action the Allies could plausibly have taken. In Beating Goliath: Why Insurgencies Win (Potomac Books, Inc., 2007), Record reviewed eleven insurgencies and evaluated the reasons for their success or failure, including the insurgents' stronger will to prevail. Wanting War: Why the Bush Administration Invaded Iraq (Potomac Books, Inc., 2009) includes one of Record's most cogent explanations of why an often uncritical belief in one's own victory is frequently (but not always) a critical component of the decision to make war. Record incorporates the lessons of these earlier books in his latest, A War It Was Always Going to Lose: Why Japan Attacked America in 1941. The attack on Pearl Harbor is one of the most perplexing cases in living memory of a weaker power seeming to believe that it could vanquish a clearly superior force. On closer inspection, however, Record finds that Japan did not believe it could win; yet, the Japanese imperial command decided to attack the United States anyway. Conventional explanations that Japan's leaders were criminally stupid, wildly deluded, or just plumb crazy don't fully answer all our questions, Record finds. Instead, he argues, the Japanese were driven by an insatiable appetite for national glory and economic security via the conquest of East Asia. The scope of their ambitions and their fear of economic destruction overwhelmed their knowledge that the likelihood of winning was slim and propelled them into a war they were always going to lose.

Download or read book Japan's Decision for War written by Louis Morton and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Japan's Struggle to End the War written by United States Strategic Bombing Survey and published by . This book was released on 1946 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Survival: June - July 2023 written by The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-06-09 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Survival, the IISS’s bimonthly journal, challenges conventional wisdom and brings fresh, often controversial, perspectives on strategic issues of the moment. In this issue Hannah Aries, Bastian Giegerich and Tim Lawrenson assess that Europe’s defence industry will struggle to meet increased production needs In 2007, the late Ronald Steel judged that while the Iraq War had weakened the United States, it would not profoundly affect US foreign policy (from the archive) Dana H. Allin reflects on Ronald Steel’s legacy and prospects for the ‘extended American Century’ Liana Fix argues that the West should formulate security guarantees for Ukraine in parallel with its counter-offensive Daniel Sobelman assesses that the Yemen-based Houthi rebel movement is emulating Hizbullah And seven more thought-provoking pieces, as well as our regular Book Reviews and Noteworthy column. Editor: Dr Dana Allin Managing Editor: Jonathan Stevenson Associate Editor: Carolyn West Editorial Assistant: Charlie Zawadzki