Alternatives to a remarkably poor decision on 7 December 1941.

GarethC

Donor
The trigger is the Fall of France in June 1940. Japan sees an opportunity to hamper the flow of supplies to Nationalist China by taking advantage of the French defeat to launch an incursion into French Indochina and close off the LOC from the port at Haiphong.
Concern at France's collapse is fed by wariness of Japan's ambition in China, pushing the US to not just sanctions but also a vast military buildup.
If France does not fall, or if Japan is more measured in its actions towards FIC, then the US may be more lenient.
 
Surely the trigger goes back way beyond no just "diplomatic blunders" in Aug-Nov 41, but also 1940 and all the way back to Japanese strategic decisions in the 20s/30s.

The chain of reasoning that led up to Pearl Harbour went something like this:

Japan must conquer China.
To conquer China, Japan must be self-sufficient (there's an argument to swap the first two around, but it's immaterial as both meant the same and led to the same place).
To be self sufficient, Japan must have oil.
To have oil, Japan must conquer the Dutch EI.
To have the Dutch EI, Japan must remove the US from the Philippines (which could interfere with the supply routes).
To remove the US from the Philippines, Japan must defeat the US in war.
To defeat the US in war, Japan must destroy the numerically superior US fleet.
To destroy the numerically superior US fleet, Japan must rely on a defensive "perimeter" of ground-based aircraft to support a single decisive naval battle.
To construct a defensive "perimeter" of ground-based aircraft, Japan needs time.
To buy time, Japan needs to swiftly destroy, or at least put out of immediate action, the US Pacific Fleet.
To put the US Pacific Fleet out of action, Japan must bomb Pearl Harbor.

I'm sure I missed something but this covers the basics.

If you want to avoid Pearl Harbor, you need to give Japan an alternative course of action that meets it's strategic goals, and there just weren't any. They could attack the Philippines directly, but that would only invoke the immediate wrath of the untouched Pacific Fleet before their "perimeter" is in place. A northern push into Russia is off the table because the Soviets defeated the Japanese previously, and also because there isn't any immediately exploitable oil (that anyone knows about at this time). You could remove the need for a Chinese war, as Japan only "needs" oil to maintain that conflict, but that's intrinsically linked with Japanese prestige/survival in the minds of senior Japanese military leaders at the time (who are also disposed towards assassinating any civilian leaders that carelessly suggest otherwise).
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Can it be possible for the United States and Japan to avoid the diplomatic blunders between August and November 1941 that led to that "date which will live in infamy"?

Or does one have to go back as far as the "21 Demands"?

You can definitely have a POD after the 21 demands. There is just so much history here. The USA really wanted to own Yap Island after WW1, so Japan could have sold it to the USA. Japan could have stayed out of China or withdrawn out of China, i.e to the Great Wall. Or Japan could have limited itself to the Yellow River Basin and sold/traded it Yangtze river interest to the USA. Japan could have not invaded Indochina. There are many, many PODs.

Now to the last month. Both sides would have accepted peace on a "fair compromise". The question becomes one of "Does USA's maximum concession overlap Japan's Maximum concessions"? For the USA, it clearly means leaving Indochina. For the UK and the USA, this has to mean withdrawing from the Pearl river area. I can maybe see FDR being ok with these terms since it lets him focus on the Nazi. But much more likely, it also means the Yangtze and Yellow River. So I have pretty good confidence FDR would accept Japan keeping Taiwan and China north of the Great Wall. I can't see Japan accepting the Great Wall as a border. It would mean a coup.

So, what does Japan have to have. No aid for its enemies including Chiang Kai Shek. Hard to see USA and UK agreeing to this one. Easy to see Japan leaving the Indochina and Pearl River area if there is no aid to its enemies. I just can't see any solution where Japan leaves the Yangtze river basin. And the mountains/forests to the south make a natural border. And I think Japans has less political room to maneuver than FDR since you often die if you are patriotic enough.

So I guess the real question is. "Can you see FDR abandoning Chiang Kai Shek and the Yangtze river basin in exchange for oil so the USA can deal with the Japan issue after the Nazi?". Maybe with some fig leaf to make the Yangtze nominally free and open to USA trade. Maybe only the lower Yangtze too.

I just don't know. It would take FDR believing war is a 100% certainty without the compromise, which is possible given US intelligence efforts.
 
Actually there is a precedent with the Spanish Civil War, where the British and the French enforced an arms embargo against the loyalist or republican forces while letting Germany and Italy aid Franco as much as they wanted. This really helped Franco. It also meant that World War II didn't break out over something that happened in Spain.

So the USA and UK agreeing to something similar with the Chinese nationalists might actually have prompted the Japanese to make enough concessions on their own to satisfy the USA, especially as in theory they were not trying to annex all of China -some things were too insane even for them- but were supporting several puppet Chinese and Manchurian regimes. They could have maybe agreed to a deal of an international embargo against Chiang Kaishek, economic exploitation of China by the big Japanese firms to their heats consent, lots of weapons to their puppets but actual Japanese troops strictly restricted to certain areas. One feature of this is that unlike with Spain, China is really too big for Japanese backed puppets to really win. And it means the USSR becomes the main or only foreign backer of Chiang.
 

Archibald

Banned
To have oil, Japan must conquer the Dutch EI.
To have the Dutch EI, Japan must remove the US from the Philippines (which could interfere with the supply routes).
To remove the US from the Philippines, Japan must defeat the US in war.

And there the Japanese military goes off the rails...

Yamamoto
" we can't win a war against the United States. Within one year we will be toast."
Everyone else in the Japanese military
"oh, it's not a matter of winning or losing, but to strike the United States by surprise and hard enough, their morale will collapse, they will retreat to their Pacific coast and leave us alone."

And indeed, with such a plan, what could possibly go wrong ?

So much Monty Python thinking there. "Albatross !"
 
And there the Japanese military goes off the rails...

Yamamoto
" we can't win a war against the United States. Within one year we will be toast."
Everyone else in the Japanese military
"oh, it's not a matter of winning or losing, but to strike the United States by surprise and hard enough, their morale will collapse, they will retreat to their Pacific coast and leave us alone."

And indeed, with such a plan, what could possibly go wrong ?

So much Monty Python thinking there. "Albatross !"

To be more precise, Yamamoto suggested that he could run wild for six months, but after that, he could not predict the outcome.

December 7, 1941 to his bitter retreat from Midway on June 7, 1942; he was wrong by one month.
 
And there the Japanese military goes off the rails...

Yamamoto
" we can't win a war against the United States. Within one year we will be toast."
Everyone else in the Japanese military
"oh, it's not a matter of winning or losing, but to strike the United States by surprise and hard enough, their morale will collapse, they will retreat to their Pacific coast and leave us alone."

And indeed, with such a plan, what could possibly go wrong ?

So much Monty Python thinking there. "Albatross !"


Or like this.
Missed_Pivotal_Turning_Points_In_History_No_1.jpg
 

Archibald

Banned
Fair enough. Still (from my readings, including this board and elsewhere) I think Yamamoto had been a student in the United States, acknowledged the might of the american industry, and knew Japan couldn't win any war against America.
Am I wrong ?

Rephrasing my post "oh, it's not a matter of winning or losing, but to strike the United States by surprise and hard enough, their morale will collapse, they will retreat to their Pacific coast and leave us alone. then oil."
Nobody ever saw the obvious gapping hole in the plan
"Well, whatif the american morale does not collapse ? whatif we just piss-off a colossus, and then the very angered colossus picks the fight we started to win it at any cost ?"

Reminds of Pirate of the Caribbean when they fight the kraken, after they dropped all the rhum and gunpowder and make it exploded into the kraken face, and one (hopeful) sailor of the Black Pearl asks
"did we killed it ?" and Captain Gibs says "No. We just pissed him off."
 
Last edited:

Archibald

Banned
Or like this.

Excellent, really. WWII Japanese military flawed logic summarized in a single picture. Where did you found that ?

Somebody should remake this with the Japanese military
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_(South_Park)

Gnomes_plan.png


phase 1 we need to find a plan to defeat America so we can get through the Philippines to get access to DEI oil to achieve the conquest of China

phase 2 ?

phase 3 Japan gets the DEI oil and conquest China. Mission accomplished.
 
The trigger is the Fall of France in June 1940. Japan sees an opportunity to hamper the flow of supplies to Nationalist China by taking advantage of the French defeat to launch an incursion into French Indochina and close off the LOC from the port at Haiphong.
Concern at France's collapse is fed by wariness of Japan's ambition in China, pushing the US to not just sanctions but also a vast military buildup.
If France does not fall, or if Japan is more measured in its actions towards FIC, then the US may be more lenient.

I largely agree in that it lend to US Navy expansion. But the clincher for the US was Japan signing the Tripartite Pact in September 1940. This action to the US government, that Japan are aligning themselves with Military expansionist dictators. And will not take actions of 'reasonable' people. It therefore made the US take a tougher line.
The US had to know that the Pact was aimed at them. If they joined Britain in the war against Germany, they'd also have Japan to contend with to their west. If, Japan made aggressive moves in the South-West Pacific and the US reacted guns blazing to defend its vulnerability - German would DoW in response - the US has Germany to contend with to their East.
As per OTL with a Japanese attack Germany weren't obliged to DoW but did anyway. Yet, Japan could have taken the view that the US weren't interfere because the US didn't have the means to fight two wars at once.
 
It might help if the Japanese had better understood US demands in exchange for ending sanctions. One of them was that Japan withdraw from China. The Japanese understood it to mean that the US wanted a Japanese withdrawal from all of China, included Manchuria, while the US actually meant only all Japanese territories taken after Manchuria. If the Japanese government had actually understood that it might have helped diplomacy.

Another possibility is that France doesn't fall. I'm sure most of us are familiar with the fact that French forces were in many ways superior to German ones and the outcome was not predetermined at all. Also, suppose France falls but has sufficient local forces stationed in Indochina, and the Japanese get their asses handed to them when they try to invade.
 
It might help if the Japanese had better understood US demands in exchange for ending sanctions. One of them was that Japan withdraw from China. The Japanese understood it to mean that the US wanted a Japanese withdrawal from all of China, included Manchuria, while the US actually meant only all Japanese territories taken after Manchuria. If the Japanese government had actually understood that it might have helped diplomacy.

Unfortunately Manchuria was included in the Chinese expectations. While the KMT government might be arm twisted into agreeing Manchuria is off the table the Japanese leaders understood the Chinese would simply be lying & remain hostile over it. Any US leaders who thought otherwise, & there were some, was either ignorant or naive.

Another possibility is that France doesn't fall. I'm sure most of us are familiar with the fact that French forces were in many ways superior to German ones and the outcome was not predetermined at all. Also, suppose France falls but has sufficient local forces stationed in Indochina, and the Japanese get their asses handed to them when they try to invade.

Or Germany does not agree to Japans occupation of FIC & allows the French to follow the terms of the Armistices, requiring France to defend its colonies and prevent their control by other nations. That leaves the door closed to the IJA & they have to make a fight of it if they want into FIC.
 
And there the Japanese military goes off the rails...

Yamamoto
" we can't win a war against the United States. Within one year we will be toast."
Everyone else in the Japanese military
"oh, it's not a matter of winning or losing, but to strike the United States by surprise and hard enough, their morale will collapse, they will retreat to their Pacific coast and leave us alone."

Well, it’s worth remembering that Yamato was right along side with the “everyone else” there. When Admiral Nagano (his boss) proposed a plan for attacking the Dutch but not the Americans, Yamamoto threatened to resign, along with all the other senior officers of Combined Fleet, unless Nagano agreed to his plan for an attack on Pearl Harbor. Nagano capitulated and Yamamoto got his suicidal war.

Yamamoto incorrectly believed that if he did not destroy the American fleet at Pearl it would come west and interfere with the Japanese conquests. In fact the USN had no such intentions. Their own plans called for the abandonment of the western Pacific to the Japanese, while America conducted a massive military build up and then returned a year later andstarted taking it all back.

USN planners had actually considered the possibility of an attack on Pearl. They discounted it for two reasons. The first, because they (incorrectly) assumed it would have to be done with battleships, and they calculated such a raid would be far too dangerous for the Japanese. The second, because they (correctly) assumed that an attack on Hawaii would rile the American populace and ensure a long war that Japan would know she could never win. USN planners continually worried about their ability to sustain the will of the American people in the long war they were planning. They assumed the Japanese would not be stupid enough to solve this, their plan's greatest weakness, for them.

To be more precise, Yamamoto suggested that he could run wild for six months, but after that, he could not predict the outcome.

December 7, 1941 to his bitter retreat from Midway on June 7, 1942; he was wrong by one month.

He actually gave a variety of estimates according to Tameichi Hara. Sometimes it was 6 months, sometimes it was a year, other times it was 18 months, usually depending on who he was talking to. Clearly a case of hedging.
 
Yamamoto incorrectly believed that if he did not destroy the American fleet at Pearl it would come west and interfere with the Japanese conquests. In fact the USN had no such intentions. Their own plans called for the abandonment of the western Pacific to the Japanese, while America conducted a massive military build up and then returned a year later andstarted taking it all back.

Maybe if this had actually happened, the Japanese would have stood a chance at cutting a deal after wearing down the US through a war of attrition, especially if the US wants to occupy Japan. Their strategy of wearing down the Americans through inflicting huge casualties was never going to work after things like Pearl Harbor and the Bataan death march, but suppose the US is the one to strike first and there is no capture of large numbers of US soldiers in the Philippines that results in widely publicized atrocities. The sheer determination of Americans to see Japan crushed would not be nearly as strong.

Of course, does this mean there's also a chance that no unconditional surrender will be demanded of Japan? That the US will be content to push the Japanese out of their conquered territories instead of going all the way for an unconditional surrender/invasion of Japan?
 
Maybe if this had actually happened, the Japanese would have stood a chance winning through a war of attrition.

Not a war of attrition. A war of decisive battle like they wanted. The ideal scenario is they invade the British and Dutch colonies in SEA, wait for the US to spend political capital declaring war in response, and then swoop in and invade the Philippines anyways. Ideally, this would then compel Washington to override the Navies own warplan and order the fleet to sail to relieve the embattled army. Which would probably play out as a second Tsushima. Having inflicted a humiliating defeat on the US for a wargoal that the American public isn't very much behind ("defend Anglo-Dutch colonialism!" doesn't have as good a ring as "Remember Pearl Harbor!") the Japanese then might indeed get the negotiated peace they desired.

Of course the plan is hardly fail proof and still rests on a few assumptions that could be proven false. The most glaring flaw is-

Their strategy of wearing down the Americans through inflicting huge casualties was never going to work after things like Pearl Harbor and the Bataan death march, but suppose the US is the one to strike first and there is no capture of large numbers of US soldiers in the Philippines that results in widely publicized atrocities.

(Emphasis added)

Erm... yeah, that. And frankly I don't know how the Japanese are going to be able to avoid it. The Bataan death march was very much a function of the same institutional attitudes that compelled Japan to seek war in the first place. It runs into the similar issue as the "Notzis" trope. Even as it is, getting the Japanese to adopt the above strategy is asking them to jettison some problematic attitudes, like the heebie-jeebies they got at the prospect of fighting close to home.
 
Last edited:
Top