The Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor, for one.
This absolutely has to be in the top ten.
It was effectively an act of national suicide the moment the first bomb dropped on the battle line.
The Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor, for one.
This absolutely has to be in the top ten.
It was effectively an act of national suicide the moment the first bomb dropped on the battle line.
I don’t think it was inevitable (for example, didn’t the Achaemenids frown upon slavery?)...
I don't think so? Maybe they didn't have slaves working their fields, but I'm pretty sure the rich Persians used slaves to work in their households.
Persian slaves were mostly prisoners of war, nonetheless, no ancient society ever frowned upon slavery itself. The Achemenenids and Tolemaic Egypt, to pick two ancient civilizations, only had a small portion of slaves because most of their free commoners already lived as slaves, just not nominally so.
[Pearl Harbor] absolutely has to be in the top ten.
It was effectively an act of national suicide the moment the first bomb dropped on the battle line.
Yeah, the only chance for Japan to win in that scenario was not to strike Pearl Harbor. Even if they had gotten the carriers in port, once the US got the Essex carriers available, the Japanese were screwed.
I mean, if that’s not really a decision, I guess I could knock that off the list and bump all the others up one (it still sucks though).
Hindsight bias. Nobody knew that carriers would have the significance that they eventually had. By all the conventional wisdom of the time, Japan should have neutered the Pacific fleet with the attack, having destroyed or damaged almost every battleship.
Furthermore, it wasn't even a stupid decision. If Japan hadn't attacked Pearl Harbor, then they would have simply run out of petroleum supplies after the US embargo entered full force without a means of fighting back, effectively conceding their empire for nothing. By attempting to decapitate the Pacific fleet, they at least gave themselves a fighting chance, and there's a possibility that they may have never been occupied if it were not for the atomic bombings, which they couldn't have known about
there's a possibility that they may have never been occupied if it were not for the atomic bombings, which they couldn't have known about
But any possible, plausible deal it could have reached with FDR would have been vastly preferable to going to war with him.
Japan had zero chance to win a war with the United States - let alone a war with the United States, the British Empire, and China all at once.
Zero chance. Zero.
Even fighting to a draw was not in the cards.
The United States had ten times the industrial capacity, twice the population, full self sufficiency in all critical natural resources even at full war mobilization, and superior technology in key fields. Launching a surprise attack on the U.S. guaranteed the final missing piece of the puzzle: the political willpower to see the war through to the bitter end. Atomic weapons don't even need to be in the equation: Japan was utterly broken as a great power before the Trinity test even happened.
How Japan initiated such a war mattered far less than the decision to launch it in the first place.
The petroleum and steel embargoes were grave blows to the Japanese economy. But any possible, plausible deal it could have reached with FDR would have been vastly preferable to going to war with him.
Rarely has human history seen a state pick such a lopsided fight it was on the short end of.
Nope, they get partitioned between America and Russia with hundreds of thousands of more lives lost thanks to Operation Downfall if the Japanese don’t concede when the Russians invade. America was never going to accept anything less than total surrender.
I agree with you 100% that Japan had no chance, but keep in mind that Roosevelt didn't want a "deal". He actively tried to get the USA into the war, and everything he did was geared towards purposely trying to get Japan to declare war. So there wasn't going to be any deal at all, short of "Japan gives up its Pacific empire, breaks its ties with Germany, and agrees to trade dictates set by the USA". That still would've been much better for Japan than OTL (after all, they would've had to give up a lot, but could probably have retained Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan and most holdings in China), but one can understand why they wouldn't go for anything like that. Hence: war. Just as Roosevelt wanted.
I'm not arguing that Japan could have won such a war, obviously that was out of the question. Japan simply miscalculated the US public's wherewithal to joining the war fully. But I don't think it was inevitable that Japan would end up occupied. The real force disposition of the Japanese army on the home islands was roughly equal (and in some places, superior) in number to the planned US invasion (since it wasn't really possible to misdirect Japan's defenses like was done on D-Day since there was only one realistic location to land). Given a few more years, the US could muster a much larger force to eventually overwhelm the Japanese, but it could take up to three more years, depending on how the Soviets react and how many of Japan's forces can be withdrawn from China, and the political will from the American public may have evaporated. By that time, it may be preferable to reach an accommodation with Japan to prevent them from falling to the Soviets (as the Cold War may be in full swing by this point, given the partition of Europe).
Well, let's just freeze the war on August 5, 1945.
Is there anything about that state of affairs that is anything but grand mal disaster? What would any Japanese policymaker in 1941 - even an Army fire-eater - have thought if given a crystal ball dialed to that date?
* You've suffered over 2 million war dead, and almost another million civilian dead in bombing. Millions more have been made homeless.
* Nearly all of your overseas empire has been overrun, or is dying on the branch.
* The Japanese Imperial Navy - pride of the nation, third largest in the world - is hors d'combat. You don't even have fuel to send out the few hulks that aren't coral reefs, beyond a few submarines.
* Nearly all of your merchant marine - over 10 million tons! - has been sunk.
* Operation Starvation has smashed your food transportation infrastructure, even within the Home Islands; Mass starvation is already known to be imminent by the end of the autumn, regardless of whether the Americans invade or not.
* Over 60 of your largest cities have literally been reduced to cinders. Mass formations of American bombers fly over the Home Islands with impunity almost daily.
And on top of all that, the Soviets will be declaring war on you in three days. There's literally nothing you can do to stop them from overrunning Manchuria, most of North China, Korea, Sakhalin, the Kurils, or even Hokkaido(!) within 8-12 weeks.
And all that is without any splitting of atoms over Japan. Or Operation Downfall.
It's hard to see how Japan can sustain anything beyond the spring of 1946, even if the U.S. decides not to invade.
I think The Red's timeline, Decisive Darkness, is a pretty fair look at what the war would have looked like for Japan, had it gone on for another year. End result: No more Japan. "Death of a Nation."
10. The Jin not recognizing the danger of the Wu Hu. I heard that the Wei actually didn’t do too bad in settling barbarians in their empire, but the Jin were not so careful. Caused 2-3 centuries of additional strife after a terrible conflict that had already ravaged China.
11. Honorable mention: the last western Zhou king being... less than intelligent by alienating his vassals to the point where they ignored his summons.