edgarblythe wrote:Actually, if you can go back and change history you would be dumb to start with Pearl Harbor when you could go back to the origins of our relationship with Japan and build a relationship based on trust and justice.
I won't call this pseudo-history, because you're not willfully lying. But you do display ignorance, something from which all of us suffer, and which can be cured.
In 1895, Japan went to war with China in the First Sino-Japanese War. They took the island of Formosa, now called Taiwan. In 1904-05, Japan fought the Russian empire over their territorial ambitions in Manchuria. In 1911, Japan invaded and overran Korea, something they had been trying to do for centuries. In 1931, using a manufactured incident, Japan invaded Manchuria. In 1937, they invaded the rest of China in the Second Sino-Japanese War. Early in that brutal war, they committed one of their most brutal acts, the rape of Nanking. There was an American gunboat in the river there, U.S.S.
Panay. The vessel's crew had painted huge American flag on the fantail, but in their arrogance and hubris, the Imperial Navy bombed
Panay. Two American seamen were killed, and 43 sailors and civilians on other ships were wounded. The Japanese issued a public apology (very humiliating for them), and paid reparations.
Japan announced their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in 1940. It was a cover for their imperialist ambitions in Asia. On the night of November 11-12, 1940, aircraft from a Royal Navy carrier attacked the main Italian naval base at Taranto in southern Italy. It was more or less a spur of the moment attack, with no long term planning, but it nevertheless sank one Italian battleship, and damaged several cruisers and destroyers. The event sent shock waves through naval staffs around the world. In mid-November 1940, Admiral Yamamoto, the senior naval officer afloat and the most highly respected military figure in Japan, told his chief of staff to begin planning an attack on Hawaii. In January, 1941, he appointed Lt. Commander Genda as planning officer for the operation. Genda asked that his military patron, Lt. Command Fuchida, be appointed to the operation. Yamamoto promoted Fuchida to Commander, so that he outranked the air wing commanders on the other carriers and appointed him training officer.
Why was Yamamoto doing this? By 1939, the Imperial General Staff had realized that even with American scrap metal and petroleum (something they could not count on), they would need more resources to conquer China. They began planning dozens of operations which were informally known as the Southern Operation. The eventual purpose was to take over the Netherlands East Indies, which was rich in metal ore and petroleum. Along the way, they would need to take out the Philippines, Hong Kong, British Borneo and Malaysia. Yamamoto understood that attacking the United States was tantamount to suicide, but he was a loyal officer who intended to do his best. That meant destroying or at least crippling the American Pacifi Fleet. Over the objections of the Imperial General Staff, he allocated all six of Japan's heavy carriers to the Hawaii operation. We were lucky. By seniority, a battleship admiral, Nagumo, was appointed to command the First Air Fleet. Having pulled off the attack with negligible losses, he decided to get out while the getting was good. Genda and Fuchida pleaded with him to make at least one more attack, but he wouldn't listen.
There would have been no building of a relationship based on trust and justice.