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2016-12-07 23:46:25 UTC
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75 years ago, what if Japan never attacked Pearl Harbor?
By Ishaan Tharoor December 7
Few events in World War II were as defining as the Japanese assault on Pearl
Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The "date which shall live in infamy" - as President
Franklin D. Roosevelt famously put it - prompted the American entry into the
war, subdued an entrenched isolationist faction in the country's politics
and, in the long run, prefigured Washington's assumption of the role of
global superpower.
2,403 Americans died and 19 vessels were either sunk or badly damaged in the
attack, which involved more than 350 warplanes launched from Japanese
carriers that had secretly made their way to a remote expanse of the North
Pacific. It caught the brass in Hawaii by surprise and stunned the nation.
"With astounding success," Time magazine wrote, "the little man has clipped
the big fellow."
But the big fellow would hit back. Japan's bold strike is now largely seen
as an act of "strategic imbecility," a move born out of militarist,
ideological fervor that provoked a ruinous war Japan could never win and
ended in mushroom clouds and hideous death and destruction at home.
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese naval commander, hoped his plan to
attack on Pearl Harbor would deliver a fatal blow to American capabilities
in the Pacific and persuade Washington to push for a political settlement.
Otherwise, he knew that his country stood no chance against the United
States in a protracted war, according to Steve Twomey, author of a new book
on the tense build-up to Pearl Harbor.
Twomey documents Yamamoto's initial opposition to engaging the United
States: "In a drawn-out conflict, 'Japan's resources will be depleted,
battleships and weaponry will be damaged, replenishing materials will be
impossible,' Yamamoto wrote on September 29 to the chief of the Naval
General Staff. 'Japan will wind up 'impoverished,' and any war 'with so
little chance of success should not be fought.'"
But with war a fait accompli, Yamamoto conceived of a raid that would be so
stunning that American morale would go "down to such an extent that it
cannot be recovered," as he put it. Unfortunately for him, the United States
was galvanized by the assault - and had its fleet of aircraft carriers
largely unscathed. A plane carrying the Japanese admiral would be shot down
over the Solomon Islands by American forces in 1943 with the U.S.
counter-offensive already well underway.
Could it have gone differently? No modern conflict has spawned more
alternative histories than World War II. In the decades since, writers,
Hollywood execs and amateur historians have indulged in all sorts of
speculation: What the world would look like if the Axis powers triumphed, or
if the Nazis crushed the Soviets, or if the United States had not deployed
nuclear weapons, or if Roosevelt had chosen not to enter the war at all.
But even if Japan had not attacked Pearl Harbor, it's quite likely that the
two sides would have still clashed.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the USS Arizona on Dec. 7, 1941,
pushed the U.S. into World War II. But the battleship wasn't supposed to be
docked at the harbor on that date. The Post's Michael Ruane takes us back to
that fateful day in American history. (Claritza Jimenez, Michael Ruane/The
Washington Post)
Japan's will to power
For imperial Japan, the United States posed a fundamental obstacle to its
expanding position in the Pacific. Here was a resource-hungry island nation
eager to assert itself on the world stage in the same way European powers
had done in centuries prior. By the summer of 1941, it had seized a
considerable swath of East Asia, from Manchuria and Korea to the north to
the formerly French territories of Indochina further south, and was
embroiled in a bitter war in China.
American sanctions attempted to rein in Tokyo: Washington slapped on
embargoes on oil and other goods essential to Japan's war machine. The price
to have them lifted - a Japanese withdrawal from China, as well as the
abandonment of its "tripartite" alliance with Germany and Italy - proved too
steep and humiliating. So Japan calculated further expansion in order to
access the resources it needed.
"Our increasing economic pressure on Japan, plus the militaristic cast of
the government ... and their partial loss of face in China, spelled a
probable resumption of their policy of conquest," mused a lengthy essay in
the Atlantic, published in 1948. "In what direction would the Japanese
strike, and against whom?"
Japan opted not to venture into Soviet Siberia; in 1939, Japanese troops had
suffered a chastening defeat at the hands of a combined Soviet and Mongolian
army and its forces were already bogged down on various fronts in China.
The decision was made to target the vulnerable British and Dutch colonies in
Southeast Asia - what's now the independent nations of Burma, Singapore,
Malaysia and Indonesia. The Japanese knew this would likely spur a greater
response from the United States, which then controlled the Philippines and
other scattered island possessions in the Pacific.
"Unwilling to give up what it wanted - greater empire - in return for the
restoration of lost trade, unwilling to endure the humiliation of swift
withdrawal from China, as the Americans wanted, Japan was going to seize the
tin, nickel, rubber, and especially oil of the British and Dutch colonies,"
wrote Twomey.
The rest is history. Some observers, though, reckon that American policy
could have forced imperialist Japan's hand.
Abe to become first Japanese leader to visit Pearl Harbor
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will visit Pearl Harbor with President
Obama, becoming his country's first leader to travel to the site of the
Japanese attack 75 years ago that drew the United States into World War II.
(Reuters)
"Never inflict upon another major military power a policy which would cause
you yourself to go to war unless you are fully prepared to engage that power
militarily," wrote American historian Roland Worth Jr., in "No Choice But
War: The United States Embargo against Japan and the Eruption of War in the
Pacific." "And don't be surprised that if they do decide to retaliate, that
they seek out a time and a place that inflicts maximum harm and humiliation
upon your cause."
Roosevelt's battle with the isolationists
Meanwhile, in the United States, President Roosevelt faced widespread public
opposition to entering the war. The memory of World War I - a struggle many
Americans believed wasn't worth fighting - still loomed large in the
political imagination. Roosevelt faced off a 1940 election challenge by
pandering to anti-war voters.
"I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again," he
declared on the campaign trail in Boston in October 1940. "Your boys are not
going to be sent into any foreign wars."
But Roosevelt was steadily trying to engage in the conflicts abroad, no
matter his rhetoric. He was an avowed anti-fascist and was preoccupied more
by Nazi aggression in Europe than Japanese inroads in Asia.
His political opponents fretted that he would push toward a greater
confrontation. This included figures from the America First movement, a big
tent coalition of isolationists, nationalists, pacifists and, indeed, some
anti-Semites, who wanted the United States to cling to a policy of
neutrality and weren't that bothered by an ascendant fascism in Europe.
Charles Lindbergh, the legendary aviator, was one of the more prominent
champions of the America First cause.
"The pall of the war seems to hang over us today. More and more people are
simply giving in to it. Many say we are as good as in already. The attitude
of the country seems to waver back and forth," Lindbergh wrote in his diary
on Jan. 6, 1941. "Our greatest hope lies in the fact [that] eighty-five
percent of the people in the United States (according to the latest polls)
are against intervention."
In March 1941, Roosevelt persuaded Congress to pass the Lend-Lease Act,
which "loaned" arms and ships to the beleaguered Allies in Europe. U.S.
warships engaged Nazi submarines in the Atlantic and protected convoys
bearing relief supplies to the British. Months of secret diplomacy with
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill already bound Roosevelt's
administration to the Allied cause, but the United States was not yet
formally in war.
The attack on Pearl Harbor in December gave Roosevelt all the ammunition he
needed. Germany, in alliance with Japan, declared war on the United States
four days later, saving Roosevelt the trouble of having to do it himself.
FDR's 'Infamy' speech
The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt delivered a formal address to the joint Congressional
session on Dec. 8. Here's an excerpt of the now-famous speech. (Jenny
Starrs/The Washington Post)
The isolationists were defeated. "I can see nothing to do under these
circumstances except to fight. If I had been in Congress, I certainly would
have voted for a declaration of war," Lindbergh lamented. Other politicians
in Congress, mostly Republicans, would soon lose elections and become an
irrelevant wing of the party.
Without the American entry into World War II, it's possible Japan would have
consolidated its position of supremacy in East Asia and that the war in
Europe could have dragged on for far longer than it did. The U.S.'s role in
the war forced Nazi Germany to commit a sizeable troop presence in Western
Europe that it would have otherwise diverted to the withering invasion of
the Soviet Union. It helped turn the tide of battle.
For decades since, though, conspiracy theories have surrounded Roosevelt's
role in the build-up to Pearl Harbor, with a coterie of revisionist
historians alleging he deliberately bungled military coordination and
obscured intelligence in order to provoke the crisis that led to war. Most
mainstream historians dismiss these claims.
"He was totally caught off guard by it," Roosevelt biographer Jean Edward
Smith told NPR this week. "The record is clear. There was no evidence of the
Japanese moving toward Pearl Harbor that was picked up in Washington."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/12/07/75-years-ago-what-if-japan-never-attacked-pearl-harbor/?utm_term=.2b8621cc5a60
75 years ago, what if Japan never attacked Pearl Harbor?
By Ishaan Tharoor December 7
Few events in World War II were as defining as the Japanese assault on Pearl
Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The "date which shall live in infamy" - as President
Franklin D. Roosevelt famously put it - prompted the American entry into the
war, subdued an entrenched isolationist faction in the country's politics
and, in the long run, prefigured Washington's assumption of the role of
global superpower.
2,403 Americans died and 19 vessels were either sunk or badly damaged in the
attack, which involved more than 350 warplanes launched from Japanese
carriers that had secretly made their way to a remote expanse of the North
Pacific. It caught the brass in Hawaii by surprise and stunned the nation.
"With astounding success," Time magazine wrote, "the little man has clipped
the big fellow."
But the big fellow would hit back. Japan's bold strike is now largely seen
as an act of "strategic imbecility," a move born out of militarist,
ideological fervor that provoked a ruinous war Japan could never win and
ended in mushroom clouds and hideous death and destruction at home.
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese naval commander, hoped his plan to
attack on Pearl Harbor would deliver a fatal blow to American capabilities
in the Pacific and persuade Washington to push for a political settlement.
Otherwise, he knew that his country stood no chance against the United
States in a protracted war, according to Steve Twomey, author of a new book
on the tense build-up to Pearl Harbor.
Twomey documents Yamamoto's initial opposition to engaging the United
States: "In a drawn-out conflict, 'Japan's resources will be depleted,
battleships and weaponry will be damaged, replenishing materials will be
impossible,' Yamamoto wrote on September 29 to the chief of the Naval
General Staff. 'Japan will wind up 'impoverished,' and any war 'with so
little chance of success should not be fought.'"
But with war a fait accompli, Yamamoto conceived of a raid that would be so
stunning that American morale would go "down to such an extent that it
cannot be recovered," as he put it. Unfortunately for him, the United States
was galvanized by the assault - and had its fleet of aircraft carriers
largely unscathed. A plane carrying the Japanese admiral would be shot down
over the Solomon Islands by American forces in 1943 with the U.S.
counter-offensive already well underway.
Could it have gone differently? No modern conflict has spawned more
alternative histories than World War II. In the decades since, writers,
Hollywood execs and amateur historians have indulged in all sorts of
speculation: What the world would look like if the Axis powers triumphed, or
if the Nazis crushed the Soviets, or if the United States had not deployed
nuclear weapons, or if Roosevelt had chosen not to enter the war at all.
But even if Japan had not attacked Pearl Harbor, it's quite likely that the
two sides would have still clashed.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the USS Arizona on Dec. 7, 1941,
pushed the U.S. into World War II. But the battleship wasn't supposed to be
docked at the harbor on that date. The Post's Michael Ruane takes us back to
that fateful day in American history. (Claritza Jimenez, Michael Ruane/The
Washington Post)
Japan's will to power
For imperial Japan, the United States posed a fundamental obstacle to its
expanding position in the Pacific. Here was a resource-hungry island nation
eager to assert itself on the world stage in the same way European powers
had done in centuries prior. By the summer of 1941, it had seized a
considerable swath of East Asia, from Manchuria and Korea to the north to
the formerly French territories of Indochina further south, and was
embroiled in a bitter war in China.
American sanctions attempted to rein in Tokyo: Washington slapped on
embargoes on oil and other goods essential to Japan's war machine. The price
to have them lifted - a Japanese withdrawal from China, as well as the
abandonment of its "tripartite" alliance with Germany and Italy - proved too
steep and humiliating. So Japan calculated further expansion in order to
access the resources it needed.
"Our increasing economic pressure on Japan, plus the militaristic cast of
the government ... and their partial loss of face in China, spelled a
probable resumption of their policy of conquest," mused a lengthy essay in
the Atlantic, published in 1948. "In what direction would the Japanese
strike, and against whom?"
Japan opted not to venture into Soviet Siberia; in 1939, Japanese troops had
suffered a chastening defeat at the hands of a combined Soviet and Mongolian
army and its forces were already bogged down on various fronts in China.
The decision was made to target the vulnerable British and Dutch colonies in
Southeast Asia - what's now the independent nations of Burma, Singapore,
Malaysia and Indonesia. The Japanese knew this would likely spur a greater
response from the United States, which then controlled the Philippines and
other scattered island possessions in the Pacific.
"Unwilling to give up what it wanted - greater empire - in return for the
restoration of lost trade, unwilling to endure the humiliation of swift
withdrawal from China, as the Americans wanted, Japan was going to seize the
tin, nickel, rubber, and especially oil of the British and Dutch colonies,"
wrote Twomey.
The rest is history. Some observers, though, reckon that American policy
could have forced imperialist Japan's hand.
Abe to become first Japanese leader to visit Pearl Harbor
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will visit Pearl Harbor with President
Obama, becoming his country's first leader to travel to the site of the
Japanese attack 75 years ago that drew the United States into World War II.
(Reuters)
"Never inflict upon another major military power a policy which would cause
you yourself to go to war unless you are fully prepared to engage that power
militarily," wrote American historian Roland Worth Jr., in "No Choice But
War: The United States Embargo against Japan and the Eruption of War in the
Pacific." "And don't be surprised that if they do decide to retaliate, that
they seek out a time and a place that inflicts maximum harm and humiliation
upon your cause."
Roosevelt's battle with the isolationists
Meanwhile, in the United States, President Roosevelt faced widespread public
opposition to entering the war. The memory of World War I - a struggle many
Americans believed wasn't worth fighting - still loomed large in the
political imagination. Roosevelt faced off a 1940 election challenge by
pandering to anti-war voters.
"I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again," he
declared on the campaign trail in Boston in October 1940. "Your boys are not
going to be sent into any foreign wars."
But Roosevelt was steadily trying to engage in the conflicts abroad, no
matter his rhetoric. He was an avowed anti-fascist and was preoccupied more
by Nazi aggression in Europe than Japanese inroads in Asia.
His political opponents fretted that he would push toward a greater
confrontation. This included figures from the America First movement, a big
tent coalition of isolationists, nationalists, pacifists and, indeed, some
anti-Semites, who wanted the United States to cling to a policy of
neutrality and weren't that bothered by an ascendant fascism in Europe.
Charles Lindbergh, the legendary aviator, was one of the more prominent
champions of the America First cause.
"The pall of the war seems to hang over us today. More and more people are
simply giving in to it. Many say we are as good as in already. The attitude
of the country seems to waver back and forth," Lindbergh wrote in his diary
on Jan. 6, 1941. "Our greatest hope lies in the fact [that] eighty-five
percent of the people in the United States (according to the latest polls)
are against intervention."
In March 1941, Roosevelt persuaded Congress to pass the Lend-Lease Act,
which "loaned" arms and ships to the beleaguered Allies in Europe. U.S.
warships engaged Nazi submarines in the Atlantic and protected convoys
bearing relief supplies to the British. Months of secret diplomacy with
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill already bound Roosevelt's
administration to the Allied cause, but the United States was not yet
formally in war.
The attack on Pearl Harbor in December gave Roosevelt all the ammunition he
needed. Germany, in alliance with Japan, declared war on the United States
four days later, saving Roosevelt the trouble of having to do it himself.
FDR's 'Infamy' speech
The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt delivered a formal address to the joint Congressional
session on Dec. 8. Here's an excerpt of the now-famous speech. (Jenny
Starrs/The Washington Post)
The isolationists were defeated. "I can see nothing to do under these
circumstances except to fight. If I had been in Congress, I certainly would
have voted for a declaration of war," Lindbergh lamented. Other politicians
in Congress, mostly Republicans, would soon lose elections and become an
irrelevant wing of the party.
Without the American entry into World War II, it's possible Japan would have
consolidated its position of supremacy in East Asia and that the war in
Europe could have dragged on for far longer than it did. The U.S.'s role in
the war forced Nazi Germany to commit a sizeable troop presence in Western
Europe that it would have otherwise diverted to the withering invasion of
the Soviet Union. It helped turn the tide of battle.
For decades since, though, conspiracy theories have surrounded Roosevelt's
role in the build-up to Pearl Harbor, with a coterie of revisionist
historians alleging he deliberately bungled military coordination and
obscured intelligence in order to provoke the crisis that led to war. Most
mainstream historians dismiss these claims.
"He was totally caught off guard by it," Roosevelt biographer Jean Edward
Smith told NPR this week. "The record is clear. There was no evidence of the
Japanese moving toward Pearl Harbor that was picked up in Washington."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/12/07/75-years-ago-what-if-japan-never-attacked-pearl-harbor/?utm_term=.2b8621cc5a60