Posted on 06/07/2014 8:04:39 PM PDT by princeofdarkness
It's no secret that Japan was, shall we say, 'economically disadvantaged' in her ability to wage war against the Allies. However, the sheer, stunning magnitude of this economic disparity has never ceased to amaze me. So, just go give you an idea of the magnitude of the mismatch here, I decided to compile a few statistics. Most of them are taken from Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" (which, among other things, contains an excellent analysis of the economic forces at work in World War II, and is an all-around great book) and John Ellis' "World War II: A Statistical Survey." In this comparison I will focus primarily on the two chief antagonists in the Pacific War: Japan and the United States. They say that economics is the 'Dismal Science'; you're about to see why....
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearhistory.com ...
The Japanese did pretty well by losing to us. They still have the 3rd largest economy in the world.
I heard officers asked the Japanese, after the war, why they attacked Pearl Harbor. They allegedly said, because they did not think we would fight.
I have a theory that shutting down the heavy manufacturing in America was a conscious, intentional decision. The idea was to shut down the old and then when the unions have collapsed, bring in a new hi tech robotic controlled system. Something along the lines of what Amazon is doing in their warehouses. Another ten years or so and there’ll be a mad rush to get it built.
By then I’ll be dead and gone so I’ll never know if my theory is correct.
The biggest mistake of Pearl Harbor was not destroying the shipyards that turned out 24 Essex Class aircraft carriers.
I don’t think any ships were built in Hawaii. Big repair facilities but no ship yards.
They picked the wrong generation to attack.
I met one of the Tigers, he credited the fact that many of our pilots grew up hunting birds and understood how to lead the shot.
Yamamoto said as much. He said Japan would run wild the first year. But he knew America’s industrial capability would eventually win out. I think Japan thought they could hold out and get help from Germany. Didn’t happen. The British army prevented a link up by stopping the Japanese in Burma. They might have prolonged the war if they had developed their jet aircraft earlier than later. Numerous what ifs. But in the end, there’s no substitute for industrial might and the will of a country determined to destroy an aggressor.
From the quotes I’ve read from Yamamoto, he probably thought Japan could never win a war against the U.S. He knew the U.S. industrial capability would eventually overwhelm Japan. That and millions of angry Yanks thirsting for revenge after Pearl Harbor.
Yamamoto had lived in and was educated in the US. He knew and feared the USA.
Has anybody else heard the US war effort “bad mouthed’ by Brits because we entered the war “late”? Aside from significant US combat contributions in Europe which are reluctantly acknowledged, the pivotal role US supplies and materiel played in winning the war against both Germany and Japan is often given short shrift by such critics. As I always say when hear such sentiments, nobody won the war by itself, the Allies won the war. As for the former USSR, it takes full credit for the defeat of Nazi Germany.
The Russians started the damn war with the Germans. And they lost so many because of Stalin purging his best Generals before the war, and not being prepared when Hitler invaded.
Fiction not history...but interesting thoughts...
from Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon quoted from http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?383485-Adm.-Yamamoto-s-last-thoughts
“My thinking about Admiral Yamamoto reminded me of one of my favorite novels, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, and of one of my favorite passages from that novel, a passage written in Admiral Yamamoto’s voice and set just before his death. I stress that this is not relevant to any substantive issues related to the killing of Yamamoto — it’s just what my cranial database always brings up when I see “Yamamoto.”
“...To those Army ****heads, [the decision not to deliver the declaration of war until after the Pearl Harbor attack] is nothing — just a typo, happens all the time. Isoroku Yamamoto has given up on trying to make them understand that the Americans are grudge-holders on a level that is inconceivable to the Nipponese, who learn to swallow their pride before they learn to swallow solid food. Even if he could get Tojo and his mob of shabby, ignorant thugs to comprehend how pissed off the Americans are, they’d laugh it off. What’re they going to do about it? Throw a pie in your face, like the Three Stooges? Ha, ha, ha! Pass the sake and bring me another comfort girl!
Isoroku Yamamoto spent a lot of time playing poker with Yanks during his years in the States, smoking like a chimney to deaden the scent of their appalling aftershave. The Yanks are laughably rude and uncultured, of course; this hardly constitutes a sharp observation. Yamamoto, by contrast, attained some genuine insight as a side-effect of being robbed blind by Yanks at the poker table, realizing that the big freckled louts could be dreadfully cunning.* Crude and stupid would be okay — perfectly understandable, in fact.*
*But crude and clever is intolerable; this is what makes those red headed ape men extra double super loathsome. Yamamoto is still trying to drill the notion into the heads of his [Army] partners in the big Nipponese scheme to conquer everything between Karachi and Denver.... Come on guys, Yamamoto keeps telling them, the world is not just a big Nanjing. But they don’t get it. If Yamamoto were running things, he’d make a rule: each Army officer would have to take some time out from bayoneting Neolithic savages in the jungle, go out on the wide Pacific in a ship, and swap 16-inch shells with an American task force for a while. Then maybe, they’d understand they’re in a real scrap here.
This is what Yamamoto thinks about, shortly before sunrise, as he clambers onto his Mitsubishi G4M bomber in Rabaul, the scabbard of his sword whacking against the frame of the narrow door. The Yanks call this type of plane “Betty,” an effeminatizing gesture that really irks him. Then again, the Yanks name even their own planes after women, and paint naked ladies on their sacred instruments of war! If they had samurai swords, Americans would probably decorate the blades with nail polish....
They are approaching the Imperial Navy airbase at Bougainville, right on schedule, at 9:35. A shadow passes overhead and Yamamoto glances up to see the silhouette of an escort, way out of position, dangerously close to them. Who is that idiot? Then the green island and the blue ocean rotate into view as his pilot puts the Betty into a power dive....
They enter the jungle in level flight, and Yamamoto is astonished how far they go before hitting anything big. Then the plane is bludgeoned wide open by mahogany trunks, like baseball bats striking a wounded sparrow, and he knows it’s over.... As his seat tears loose from the broken dome and launches into space, he grips his sword, unwilling to disgrace himself by dropping his sacred weapon, blessed by the emepror, even in this last instant of his life....
He realizes something: The Americans must have done the impossible:* broken all of their codes. That explains Midway, it explains the Bismarck Sea, Hollandia, everything. It especially explains why Yamamoto — who ought to be sipping green tea and practicing calligraphy in a misty garden — is, in point of fact, on fire and hurtling through the jungle at a hundred miles per hour in a chair, closely pursued by tons of flaming junk. He must get word out! The codes must all be changed! This is what he is thinking when he flies head-on into a hundred-foot-tall Octomelis sumatrana....”
(my opinion...each nation or Caliphate ( ; ) may have clever men/women...I just hope to live in a country that promotes such thinkers and doers.)
Japan lost the war as soon as we had our new wonder weapons, the B-29, and the atom bomb. They did not have any influence on that date. The rest of the Pacific war just saved the Australians a lot of grief.
bump
Very interesting!
Thanks for posting.
Well, their tactical strategies like mass banzai charges certainly didn’t help matters. They largely abandoned these wasteful tactics by late 1944 and early 1945 and improved their defensive tactics at Iwo Jima and Okinawa but it was by then all for naught.
The point is there was no way the Japanese could stop us from building those carriers. Therefore, there was no way they could win.
I enjoyed the article but was disappointed he didn’t recognize one important factor, at least in my opinion.
That factor was the unbelievable bravery of our kids in tens of thousands of clashes with the enemy. Just one example was the young early twenties pilots that attacked the Japanese carriers at midway and sunk them.
And, individual Marines and soldiers engaged the enemy hand to hand against impossible odds and just kept on coming, particularly on Iwo and Okinawa.
So, in my opinion, the out and out courage of our young guys from the farms and cities was arguably the Japs biggest mis calculation. In street parlance, our boys just kicked their ass!. And, 6 of my uncles helped along with my dad! Sorry, just want to give some credit where some credit is due.
That’s not what you said. You specifically said Pearl Harbor. But now I see your point and agree.
You’re very welcome.
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