The Futility of Pearl Harbor

First off I would like to state that this is not meant to insult anyone and there will definitely be people who say I am biased because I am an American, but I try to be as objective as possible.

On December 7^th 1941, the Japanese Navy launched a surprise attack against the United States Pacific fleet stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and inflicted heavy casualties and loss of equipment on the United States Navy, while suffering minimal casualties in the process. Afterwards the forces of the Empire of Japan launched strikes against all Allied territories, which included numerous Pacific islands, the US supported Philippines, the Dutch controlled Indonesian islands and British Burma. This attack on the United States and the Allied nations was motivated in part because of the United States Oil embargo of Japan due to their invasion of China which began in 1937. Japan had become increasingly expansionist and militarized since the turn of the century and had been expanding since the Russo-Japanese war in 1904, but their actions in 1937 onward were the largest expansion attempt by far. I do not want to get bogged down in the history of Japans imperialism, but it is important to understand that many in Japan viewed a war with the United States as another way for them to expand as they would be free to push their imperialism without the United States to stop them. The problem though is in that expansion itself, Japan had no endgame they could not conquer and occupy China because their population paled in comparison and yet they continued to expand in China and require more and more men and materials to do so. Throughout the war with the United States the vast majority of their ground troops were concentrated in China until the very end when many were withdrawn to Japan to defend against an American Invasion of the home islands, they never lost in China but it did not matter in the end. Japanese imperialism had gotten the nation over extended in China and the attack against the United States made this exponentially worse.  

When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union he had an objective and it was one that was attainable, now it was over ambitious due to the fact that he underestimated the Soviet Union and Stalin, but it was still an objective that Nazi Germany could accomplish until early 1943. For Japan however there never was any hope, even Isoroku Yamamoto the Japanese Admiral who organized the attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent offense against the United States and her Allies, knew that a prolonged war with the United States would lead to japans defeat. Yamamoto hoped that early success against American forces would force the United States to negotiate a peace. This is a huge gamble and one whose odds are astronomically against you and I do not believe that Yamamoto thought that he could really win, there is the famous quote that may or not have really been said by him “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” Now obviously we do not know if this quote is true, but the point remains that the United States response to this attack was far from unexpected.

The problem was that the Japanese high command had completely deluded itself into thinking that these ventures were going to work. People within the Japanese government and military believed that they were overextending themselves, but the high command ignored these ideas and became more and more stuck in China with no end in sight. When the Japanese decided to attack the United States it was because they believed that a war would allow them to capture oil rich territory and that the United States and the colonial European powers would be forced to give up, but while that idea works for Britain, France and the Netherlands it doesn’t work for the US. The United States isn’t tied down in Europe trying to defend its home against the Nazis or a declining colonial empire, no they were a fresh and young nation that flexed its military and industrial muscles on the world stage for the First World War, but had not truly used them yet. When Japan loses at Midway, Japan has lost they don’t believe it but they have and every action afterwards is basically trying to get a negotiated peace. This is really where the delusion hurts the Japanese people, the Japanese state is so repressive that few have any real knowledge as to how the war is going, but they start to figure out that it is not going well when the American bombing campaign has flattened every city and then fire bombed what was left. Author Thomas Zeailer in his book Unconditional Defeat: Japan, America, and the End of World War II, wrote about the delusions inside the Japanese government later in the war stating: ‘The military leaders of Japan began blaming one another for their misfortune and Prime Minister Tojo demanded a plan to halt the Americans and bring them to the negotiating table.’ Japan was playing to not lose ever since Midway and so they hoped that they could cause enough casualties to the Americans that they would not want to keep fighting and so their entire strategy basically becomes to not lose the war by making it too costly for the Americans. Tojo and the Japanese high command are also at the point where they cannot try and surrender because there are Superpatriot elements in the country who will assassinate him if he does, while that may seem hard to believe to some don’t forget that these same forces tried to kidnap Emperor Hirohito, to prevent the surrender, after the two atomic bomb attacks on Japan in what is called the Kyūjō Incident. The Japanese government had built up what they were doing as a type of Holy War to liberate Asia from the Europeans and establish an empire all for the glory of Japan and the Emperor. 

This is where the problem truly lay, Tojo and the rest of the Japanese government declared in all their propaganda that they could not possibly lose, but the problem with this is that they began to believe it themselves and so the attack doesn’t seem hopeless as it should to them. They basically hoped that they could somehow completely destroy the American Naval fleet and therefore sap the American Populaces will to resist. Some have made the claim that if the American aircraft carriers had been present the fleet would have been damaged beyond any measure of resistance, but the American Industrial capacity was such that they simply would have built more carriers, the United States deployed over 100 carriers by the end of the war and that’s something Japan never came even remotely close to matching. Losing at Midway would have been a setback for the United States, but they would not have simply abandoned Hawaii and short of that there is no way Japan could have possibly forced the United States into a vulnerable position. So the true problem was not the war with the United States, but rather Japanese expansion in general which was something Japan was not capable of sustaining as they simply did not have the industrial base or population to conquer China or take on the United States and definitely not both.  The idea that Japan could possibly win the war was one based on delusion and in the end the Japanese people paid for it when America’s wrath unleashed nuclear fire on Japan.