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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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If the Japanese and German war efforts were so doomed, why were they stupid enough to throw themselves into a war they couldn't win?

Because it was a desperate, last-gasp gamble for both of them. Starting a war usually is (unless you're a neocon).

The Japanese knew they were engaging on a high-risk venture with little chance of success. But they had been forced into a corner by FDR's steel and oil embargos. It was either strike now, or be assassinated by the ultranationalists they had been egging on. We actually have the minutes from the last imperial council meeting where they made the final decision for war and they're quite clear on this.

Hitler considered that there were too many Germans and not enough food to feed them. The soil was giving out, and what would happen then? Germany must rely on imports, and hence become yet another slave of the western bankers. Hitler always felt himself racing against time, and needed to strike quickly. Imagine if he wasn't so hasty and had an army of Tiger tanks and V2 rockets to start with.

This just seems to kick it back up a layer. Why did they find themselves in such a position? Why did the Japanese egg on the ultranationalists? Why didn't Hitler dedicate himself to, I don't know, fertilizer research, or try literally any other solution than aggressive war against an unbeatable enemy? Or just mortgage himself to the gills to the bankers, who if memory serves didn't have much of a problem with him pre-war, use the money to finish climbing the tech tree, and THEN go all Mongol horde on his creditors?

And this presumes they thought the war was unwinnable, which is really not the impression I've gotten from what history I've read.

This requires a broader understanding of how both theatres were going, and more importantly, the political climates that led Germany and Japan to war in the first place. I will mainly talk about Japan here, as I think someone else can probably do a better job illustrating the particulars of Hitler’s views on lebensraum.

The Japanese knew they were engaging on a high-risk venture with little chance of success. But they had been forced into a corner by FDR's steel and oil embargos. It was either strike now, or be assassinated by the ultranationalists they had been egging on. We actually have the minutes from the last imperial council meeting where they made the final decision for war and they're quite clear on this.

In an attempt to be concise:

  • The Japanese civilian government has had been dominated by the IJA/IJN at that point, especially after the perceived failure of Taisho democracy in the early 1930s. This was not helped with the many assassinations (and many more attempted assassinations) of civilian officeholders by military staff; most notably, of PM Inukai in 1932 in the May 15th Incident. Further background to this: the Meiji restoration was led mainly by the daimyo and samurai military classes, and only were (relatively) discredited by the outcome of the Russo-Japanese war in the 1900s, which saw Japan winning but with the public broadly dissatisfied with its gains; as such, liberal-democratic norms in Japan were relatively superficial. This was exacerbated by (among many, many other things) that the Army and Navy had zero civilian oversight; the chain of command went straight to the Emperor, bypassing any civilian decision-making. The initial invasion of China was essentially a unilateral escalation by the IJA, with the civilian administration in Tokyo reluctantly being dragged along. (Conversely, the Army and Navy were also entirely separate from each other, and often at each others’ throats as well - each side would frequently assassinate officers and civilian supporters of the other side. Naturally, they also had different approaches to the war; the Army wanted to expand north into Siberia, while the Navy wanted to expand south.) In short, Japan’s militarists egged themselves on, no second party necessary.

  • Japan had been at war with China for more than 4 years at the point of the attack at Pearl Harbor; the principle reason for Japan to extend the war to Southeast Asian were to 1) block aid to China, and 2) procure resources for its war on the mainland. (They started by occupying French Indochina, which Vichy France under Nazi control ceded to Japan.) When the US retaliated by embargoing oil, the Japanese war machine (esp. navy) was stuck: they only had a very limited amount of oil left, and had to get it from somewhere (I believe the Manchurian deposits were not known at the time). One of the least bad ways they could think of out of the situation was to try to hamstring American force projection in the region, quickly occupy SEA, then hopefully try to sue for peace with the non-interventionist US; if that didn’t work out, at least it would have bought them time to dig in in the region. As far as desperate plans go it at least made sense for the IJN.

  • The Japanese war command, in its hubris (but also due to not really having suffered defeats at any point, and having already occupied Manchuria), really didn’t expect to be that bogged down in China. They expected the war to be over in a year with Chinese resistance collapsing quickly; instead they were stuck in a long, protracted war where they had trouble extending their control beyond the coast plus some supply lines into the interior.

  • The Japanese also thought that due to irreconcilable regional interests in Southeast Asia, the US, Britain, and Japan would have to come to blows at some point anyway, as Japan expanded its colonial empire.

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