Would the Pacific war have happened without the European war

Non-naval discussions about the Second World War. Military leaders, campaigns, weapons, etc.
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RF
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Re: Would the Pacific war have happened without the European war

Post by RF »

Karl Heidenreich wrote: As a matter of fact in their war in the Pacific they were reluctant to colaborate in any way with Germany.

Best regards...
I think this is an oversimplification.

Your statement is largely true of the Army, whose interests predominated until 1944. But see my post regarding General Oshima, who certainly did want collaboration with the Nazis. The main concern the Army had with the Germans was that Matsouka was deceived on his visit to Berlin in 1941, when the Germans did not tell them about Barbarossa when they were specifically asked about Germay's intentions in that area. This was perceived as a western slight on the Japanese - so they returned that by not telling Germans they were going to attack the US - but Oshima made sure that Hitler gave a verbal commitment to declare war on the US if the Americans declared war on Japan - one promise Hitler kept.

But elements of the Japanese Navy certainly did want to collaborate with the Germans - they invited them to set up a U-Boat base in Malaya, they sent submarines to Europe (the Yanagi missions) and used German equipment.

Overall the Japanese gained far more from German help than the other way round.
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Re: Would the Pacific war have happened without the European war

Post by RF »

Karl Heidenreich wrote:
I´m not that overly optimistic about this notion of Japanese objective thinking. Let´s remember that these people disliked (and many still do) westerners.
best regards...
This is in need of heavy qualification and I will get back to this next week when I have a bit more time.....
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Re: Would the Pacific war have happened without the European war

Post by Karl Heidenreich »

From Jon Parshall and Anthony Tully´s "Shattered Sword":
" As war approached, Yamamoto laid the groundwork for what was in effect a coup against IGHQ over who was to set strategic direction for the fleet. In so doing, he sowed the seeds of future military defeat by destroying the checks and balances within the Navy´s policymaking processes.
Yamamoto had insisted in 1941 that if Japan chose to capture the resources of the south through war also had to include the United States. Futhermore, he believed that the US Navy hadd to be dealt with a crippling blow at the outset so as to buy time for Japan to carry out its operations in the southern campaign areas without oposition. In his view, he was opposed by several senior members of the Naval General Staff, including his head, Admiral Nagano Osami. Nagano was of the opinion that the US would find it very difficult to go to war if Japan refrained from an outright attack. He reasoned, correctly, that President Franklin D. Roosevelt would have a difficult time rallying for support for a cassus belli based only on Japanese attacks on British and Dutch colonial holdings, as American popular opinion was decidedly ambivalent about defending such interests..."
page 24, Chapter 2.

From this we can hardly believe that Yamamoto constrained himself with the need of attack the US. Nagano and the senior Combined Fleet staff were the ones that didn´t want a war with the US. Kido Butai´s CO was the one the pushed forward to attack the USN at Pearl, unnecessary we must say.

More about this:
" The tendency reflected fundamental differences between the Army and the Navy about how the war was to be brought to a close. The Navy was steeped in a tradition of seeking decisive battle with it´s foes. It believed that landing a single roundhouse blow, if sufficiently powerfull, would bring hostilities to a close. It was the Navy´s fervent hope, therefore, that the war culd be concluded by 1942. The Army, however, held such no illusions, particularly against an opponent as powerful as the United States. Instead, the Army was girding itself for a potracted struggle. It was deeply suspicious of any attempts to increase the size of Japan´s territorial holdings in the largely empty wastes of the Pacific, knowing it didn´t have the strengh to garrison every outpost..."
page 26, Chapter 2

This hardly speaks that the Army was pushing for a total naval war against the US. It was a Navy policy (after Yamamoto got his way) to attack the USN.


Best regards...
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Re: Would the Pacific war have happened without the European war

Post by Karl Heidenreich »

RF:
Karl Heidenreich wrote:

I´m not that overly optimistic about this notion of Japanese objective thinking. Let´s remember that these people disliked (and many still do) westerners.
best regards...


This is in need of heavy qualification and I will get back to this next week when I have a bit more time.....
Ok. About this particular theme:

"...From this moment (Tsuhima victory), the Japanese had a sense of having arrived on the world stage and believed (with some justification) that the white nations should accord them the same respect they accorded one another. That they did not, rankled Japan greatly...
... During the decades leading up to the war, this belief in Japanese racial unity, of being part of a divinely purposed people, had been reinforced by the rethoric of nationalism until it become the central pillar around which the tent of Japanese militarism was pitched. To this mix were added legitimate and reinforcing grievances against the racism and asymmetrical economic advantage that the Western colonialism had created throughout Asia."
page 73, Chapter 4

"Towards America the Japanese reserved a very particular animus, one based on la long history of Yankee mistreatment that was hardly imagined. From blatantly unfair inmigration quotas on the West Coast, second-class treatment of Japanese émigrés, and the economic and social repression of the very sizable Japanese population on Hawai, the Japanese could point to a long list of grievances against their powerful Pacific neighbor.
To this general list the Japanese Navy added a complaint of their own - a long resentment against what they felt unfair and insulting provisions in the naval treaties that governed all the world´s major navies during the 1920s and 1930s.... In each case, the Japanese recieved a lesser tonnage quota than either the Royal Navy or the US Navy. The treaties were a slap in the face of the Imperial Navy´s self-perception as a world-class force. Worse yet, they placed the Japanese quotas of warships at a level that conventional naval strategy of the time pegged as being insufficient for the defense of the Home Islands."
page 75, Chapter 4
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Re: Would the Pacific war have happened without the European war

Post by Bgile »

Karl,

I believe this is the key: "Yamamoto had insisted in 1941 that IF Japan chose to capture the resources of the south through war also had to include the United States."
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Re: Would the Pacific war have happened without the European war

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Hi Bgile:

Yeah, interesting indeed. IF Japan chooses the go to war THEN we have two antagonic positions:

1. Go to war with the US. Supported by Yamamoto.
2. Not to go to war with the US. Supported by Nagano.

I´m not a hindsight critic of Yamamoto´s thinking, though, but it became clear that he was the one acting in order to launch a preemptive strike. Why? He wasn´t considering what Nagano does: the US political climate and public opinion. No Pearl Harbor, at least no US intervention in WWII for what? 1942? Never? It´s unlikely but still this puts Yamamoto in another light.

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Re: Would the Pacific war have happened without the European war

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I also don't think this evidendence puts Yamammoto in another light.

Why would he argue that any southward movement into the East Indies and Malaya would have to include a strike against the US? Logically it would make sense if he anticipated that the US Fleet would interfere with or otherwise interpose with the invasion forces, possibly to get Japan to fire on those ships (the very policy Roosevelt was pursuing in the Atlantic with regards to convoy escort and trying to provoke U-boat attacks on US warships).
In such a scenario one blow to eliminate the US Pacific Fleet would make sense. But it would still be an enormous gamble - which proved to be the case.
But was it not the case that Yamammoto was arguing from a standpoint where it was no longer a case of avoiding war with the US, but facing up to the fact that Tojo's policies made war unaviodable?
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Re: Would the Pacific war have happened without the European war

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Karl Heidenreich wrote:I´m not that overly optimistic about this notion of Japanese objective thinking. Let´s remember that these people disliked (and many still do) westerners. Both, the US and GB, did a great deal exploiting asiatics and the only way Japan forbade this from happening to them was to arm themselves to their teeth. And after WWI the western powers put it hard to them with the Naval Treaties which gave the Japanese an inferior status to the US and GB. Yamamoto was a witness to this opposition from the japanese "fleet faction" that more than once threatened to kill him because his support to the treaties.
Anyway the political and military japanese view of western powers, specially the US, was not a good one and, with the treaties and the US position over China and, later, Indochina, would have triggered the war anyway. Again, no need of facist rulers in Europe. When the IJN fought Russia they didn´t seek, and didn´t need, the support of any other foreign regime. As a matter of fact in their war in the Pacific they were reluctant to colaborate in any way with Germany.

Best regards...
As I say this is in need of heavy qualification. For some 25 years, between 1920 (the Japanese occupation of parts of Siberia in the war between the White and Red Russians) and 1945 this is the prevailing Japanese military view. But consider the two periods outside this.

In 1854 Commodore Perry's expedition to Japan forced that country to start to open up to the outside world. For nearly 50 years the Japanese did open up, slowly at first but then with a vengeance, particulary after the 1881 Meiji Restoration. This opening up and rapid modernisation/industrialisation was done largely on Japanese terms, with the Army trained by the Germans and the Navy by the British. There was no colonial rule involved, Japan became a colonial empire in its own right.

It has been argued that the importing of German military ideas infleunced Japanese thinking which was taken on board in the years up to and including the First World War, ideas that would fall on fertile ground as they coincided with Japanese martial thinking. Until this happened Japan was not an enemy of the Occidental Powers.

Similary after 1945 Japanese militarism vanished. The American occupation had a huge influence on Japan culturally as well as politically. Japan again redeveloped economically and became an economic giant through using US production methods and thinking, and achieved living standards unattainable under military rule. There are residues of anti-Western sentiment, but no more significant than the communist movement in the US.
Since the 1950's I don't think it is the case that the majority of Japanese resent the West. On the contrary I think they have done very well out of them and they recognise that.
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Re: Would the Pacific war have happened without the European war

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Karl Heidenreich wrote:Hi Bgile:

Yeah, interesting indeed. IF Japan chooses the go to war THEN we have two antagonic positions:

1. Go to war with the US. Supported by Yamamoto.
2. Not to go to war with the US. Supported by Nagano.

I´m not a hindsight critic of Yamamoto´s thinking, though, but it became clear that he was the one acting in order to launch a preemptive strike. Why? He wasn´t considering what Nagano does: the US political climate and public opinion. No Pearl Harbor, at least no US intervention in WWII for what? 1942? Never? It´s unlikely but still this puts Yamamoto in another light...
I think he was considering the US political climate and public opinion. Attacking British and Dutch interest in the Pacific would have brought the US into the war. Furthermore the US entering the war when it chooses sometime in 42 is a much worse proposition for the Japanese. The Philopines for instance would have been a much tougher nut to crack by mid 42. PH would have been pretty much out of the question. Wake and Guam may have been difficult as well. My reading of things was that Yamamoto's postion was that war in the Pacific meant war with the US. Given that it was better for Japan to go to war on thier terms rather than let the US decide where and when to enter.
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Re: Would the Pacific war have happened without the European war

Post by Karl Heidenreich »

lwd:

I agree with you that an hypothetical entering of the US in late 42 or early 43 would have been apocaliptic for the Japanese. But I disagree about the entering of the US on behalf a Japanese invasion of British and Dutch colonies in the East. If the USA didn´t declared war on Nazi Germany for their behaivor of indiscriminate bombing of Rotterdam and the Blitz, both Dutch and British targets, full of civilians victims, in a overtly act of criminal conduct, why would the US declare war on Japan for the invasion of "colonies" and assets on the other side of the world?
It was the Pearl Harbor attack the triggering act of war in the US.
I admitt that the US, sooner or later, would have get itself tangled in the war, in a Gulf of Tonkin fashion, but the academic question here is Yamamoto pursuit of a war against the US. I admit, again, that it was Tojo and the Militarist Camera in the goverment the ones that made war the only instrument of Japan´s foreign policy but it seems that Yamamoto pushed to get his country fighting an unwinnable war. And it´s obvious: he, as a military professional, made his risk assesment and found that the US would be the main enemy to face, eventually. So, he decided to play rough and put it out of combat before falling victim to the US power.

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Re: Would the Pacific war have happened without the European war

Post by lwd »

Roosevelty could probably have gotten a declaration of war vs Germany as early as Novemeber of 41. It however would not have had the overwhelming support he wanted. The US also was not ready for war. I've seen documents that indicate that the US would have been "ready" by June of 42 and ready for full blown offensive operations by that winter. As for war with Japan the US, Britain, and Holland had a diplomatic agreement that an attack on one was an attack on all. This might not have had the force of a treaty but espeshially when combined with the rising tide of anti axis feeling in the US, the wide spread accounts of Japanese activities in China, and the fact that there was essentially no Japanese constituancy in any state but California. A declaration of war was pretty certain. The real question is whether the US declares war immediatly or waits until it is a stronger position.
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Re: Would the Pacific war have happened without the European war

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I think we are agreed on the point that a move into the Dutch and British colonies would provoke a sharp US reaction and sooner or later start a shooting war with Japan at disadvantage. So Yamammoto pushing for the PH attack can be understood in that context.

My original question was of whether the Pacific War would have happened without the European war and people responding to this have focussed on the position post say 1938.
What I was thinking in making my original post was along the lines of ''To what extent was Japanese aggression fuelled and encouraged by the emergence of fascism in Europe?'' which sounds rather like an exam question. In other words was the aggression in China post 1936 given the green light by the emergence of Hitler and Mussolini as leaders of aggressive powers in Europe, or in the absence of that emergence would the Japanese Army have not openly invaded China as it did in 1937? If the answer is no then the resultant steady breakdown in relations with the US would not have happened - no oil embargo, no need to make a pre-emtive strike or any other attack on the US?
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Re: Would the Pacific war have happened without the European war

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Without something distracting the European powers from China I suspect that Japan would have been less agressive and a Pacific war may not have occured or if it did it would have been significantly different. However even without facism there were a number of potential distractions in Europe and elsewhere. I'm not sure I can give a good answer without more knoweledge both historical and what's happening in this time line. I'm also not sure how good of answer I could give with it but ... :)
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Re: Would the Pacific war have happened without the European war

Post by Karl Heidenreich »

RF:

My original question was of whether the Pacific War would have happened without the European war...
Yes, it would have happened. It was a completely independent situation. Maybe it would have happened a bit different from what historical fact we already know but happened anyway.

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Re: Would the Pacific war have happened without the European war

Post by RF »

I think that saying it would have happened anyway is a strong statement without hard corroborative evidence. It may have happened, which I think is the most likely scenario, I am inclined to think that it probably would not. I say this on the basis that in around 1940 the Japanese, due to a lesser predominance of what Yammamoto called ''Army hotheads'', have not dug themselves into the hole that they did, and by not invading China all out in 1937 they avoid US sanctions. In other words the situation is sufficiently diffused that the Japanese do not have to confront the US.

Also with no war in the early 1940's then the Soviet Union becomes the threat it was to become after WW2, which would draw the US and Japan closer together anyway.

The Pacific War was an indepedent event - as independent as Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia was from the invasion of Manchuria - but being independent does not mean that one action won't have an infleunce (without forcing) on separate actions that follow.
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