Pearl Harbor

"Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the naval and air forces of the empire of Japan......"

This marked the beginning of the speech given by F. Roosevelt to a joint session of Congress asking Congress to declare war on Japan after the Pearl Harbor attack on December 8.

I may have missed something, but nothing in my newspaper yesterday mentioned the Pearl Harbor attack.  I don't think I saw anything as part of the online news blurbs.  There might have been an article or more, but I didn't see anything.  Maybe I just missed it.

I guess the question remains why the Japanese attacked the US.  On face value, it seems pretty stupid.  The US had more people, more resources, more money......  Of course, we know the Japanese are not stupid people.  In effect, they were gambling.  The gamble was we couldn't stomach a war, that we'd fight for a short while and then ask for peace with the Japanese being able to hold on to what they'd conquered.

Throughout the '30s, the US had shown it really lacked a will to fight.  The isolationists were, if not dominant, at least a powerful force in US foreign policy.  Our response to the invasion of Manchuria (northeast China), with its vast resources to feed the Japanese war industries, was laughable.  It was almost as if the US said, "We're going to put a nasty letter in your file!"  Later, the invasion of the rest of China and the rape of Nanking brought similar nonresponse.  Even when the Japanese attacked one of our naval vessels (USS Panay), resulting in injuries and deaths to US sailors, the American response indicated we really didn't want to risk any fighting.  The Japanese determined our will to fight, to enter a war, was minimal.

Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, knew Japan had to win quickly, that a long, protracted war would result in an American win.  (He had spent several years in the US, even attending college here--Harvard, I think.)

The Japanese were seeking to build an empire, one that could supply the resources to their resource-starved nation.  The US (and to a lesser extent, Britain) potentially stood in the way and had to be removed.

Finally, the USed some ordered sanctions on Japan.  (Earlier attempts by the League were largely ineffective; they were sabotaged.)  This led to the Japanese attacks in December 1941.

After the war, from prison, Hideki Tojo (War Minister and later Prime Minister) before his execution, wrote that the Japanese were only "defending ourselves."  He said that the economic sanctions imposed by the US were "inhuman" and,  "For Japan to do nothing would have meant the destruction of our nation."  No mention was made of why the US slapped those sanctions on Japan--the invasion and colonization of Manchuria, the attack on mainland China, the rape of Nanking, the creation of what would be called The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (the Japanese Empire in the Pacific and East Asia).

Yamamoto was right, about losing a lengthy war, but wrong in his gamble. 

The First World War saw a similar gamble by the Germans.  In January 1917, German Chief of Staff von Falkenhayn convinced the Kaiser than Germany could end the war with a resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare.  (It began almost two years earlier, but was quickly abandoned when the US voiced vociferous protests.)  Wilhelm II had concerns about US entry, but he was convinced that the war would be over, that in effect Britain would be starved into suing for peace, before the Americans could make a difference.  The Germans gambled--and lost.