Many historians date this as the beginning of World War II. ![]() Japan at the time of its surrender in 1945 was approaching starvation. Nor could the resources of their empire be brought back to the factories on the Home Island. The Japanese found their army bogged down in unwinnable campaigns in China and Burma and morooned on isolated Pacific islands that they could no longer supply or even defend. Third, the Japanese were unprepared for the American submarine campaign, a campaign which by 1943 was beginning to deny Japanese industry the resources from their newly won empire. ![]() This industrial base allowed American to build a military force that Japan could not possibly match. Second, the Japanese strategy had no provision for attacking the industrial base of the United States, an industrial base far exceeding the industrial capacity of Japan. The attack turned a biterly divided America into a unified, mortal enemy. First, the attack on Pearl Harbor was a starteling military success, but a strategic blunder of incalcuable proportions. This strategic concept was fataly flawed. The Japanese with little knowledge of America were convinved that America would never make the sacrifices needed to retake the Japanese conquests. The resources from the empire which the Japanese called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere were to be used to support the Japanese military. The Japanese strategic concept was to smash the Pacific Fleet and seize a huge empire with the resources it needed and then fortify it so that it would be enormously costly for the Americans to retake. Their focus became the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Once the Japanese had decided on war with America. One of the not yet fully inderstood questions of World War II is why the Japanese did nor strike north at the Siviets after the Germans had destroyed much of the Red Army. But situated between the Home Island and those resources were the American Phillipine Islands and the implied threat threat of the Pacific Fleet which President Roosevelt had moved forward to Pearl Harbor. German successes in Europe opened up the prospects of seizing the resource rich British, Dutch, and French colonies in Southeast Asia. Japan would have to end the war in China or find alternative supplies of natural resources. To make matters worse, their primary source of resources to conduct the war in China as the United States. The war in China put substantial demands on the Japanese economy. They had achieved sucess after success in China, but still the war dragged on. ![]() The problm for the Japanese was not only tht the Americans would be willing to pay the price, but the Japanese themselves would pay a far greater price. And this became the principal Japanese strategy, to make the United States advance so bloody and costly that the American public would be unwilling to pay the price. Rarely did Japanese soldiers surrender, even recruits in impossible situatins. ![]() The military indocrination of boys like this was remarkably successful. Here boys from an Osaka seconday school drill. They convinced themselves that this could overcome the industrial superiority of the United States. World War II: Japanese Strategic Concepts (1939-45)įigure 1.-The Militarists that took Japan to war were convinced that the martial spirit instilled in the Japanese people would prevailed over the Americans who they saw as weak and decadent.
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