war in the pacific 1941 1945

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The United States embargoed Japan, refusing to sell petroleum, mineral ore and petroleum to them, because of the invasion of China. If anyone wishes to consider that "causing" the war in the Pacific, they are welcome to their historical hebetude. The rationale is absurd, however, as the American's weren't practicing "colonialism" in the Pacific to the same extent that the Japanese Empire was engaged in. Basically, the militaristic government of Japan wanted to spread it's empire to the entire Pacific rim, and the European colonies and the Americans in the Philippines, and in their trust territories stood in the way.

The Japanese "needed" the resources of the United States, and of the English and Dutch colonies of the East Indies because they were prosecuting a war in China, had occupied Korea, and after the 1940 debacle, were occupying what had been French Indo-China. It was their intention to occupy Borneo and the Dutch East Indies to secure the mineral ores and the petroluem available there in abundance. The United States had a large base in the form of the Philippine Islands. At some point in late 1940 (some people think as early as late October or early November 1940, but certainly by December, 1940), the brilliant Japanese strategists, Isoruku Yamamoto decided that the naval base at Pearl Harbor would have to be attacked.

The Japanese Imperial Staff had already decided to invade Borneo, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, and were assembling forces for the purpose. Yamamoto saw that the Philippines would be a threat on the flank of what was already in the final planning stages and known as "the Southern Operation." To secure the naval forces steaming south through the China Sea from attack, it would be necessary to attack the Philippines. Attacking the Philippines would bring war with the United States, so Yamamoto boldly proposed a pre-emptive attack on the main base of the Pacific fleet in Hawaii. The subsequent planning and the execution of that operation in late November and early December, 1941, was brilliant and an immemorial tribute to the resourcefulness and skill of the Japanese Imperial Fleet, and the vision and leadership of Yamamoto. Many American revisionists have hinted at dark conspiracies which resulted in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor--they would rather think that the government connived in the event, or knew of it and let it happen, than to admit that the Japanese accomplished one of the greatest military operations in history. After all, racist prejudice against the Japanese was strong in the United States, and relations with the Japanese Empire had been shakey to downright hostile ever since the United States had annexed the Hawaiian Islands in 1898. The Japanese in California were badly treated, and the California legislature had passed acts to prevent Japanese children from attending public schools, and to limit employment and land ownership for Japanese immigrants. There was no love lost between the two nations, although they sometimes got along and cooperated, such as during the Boxer Rebellion in China.

Americans with those racist attitudes just couldn't accept that people they had long considered inferior had pulled off such a brilliant operation. In fact, a good deal of the success the Japanese enjoyed at Pearl Harbor resulted from the incompetence of American authorities in Hawaii. In March of 1941, the staff officers of the Pacific Fleet and of the United States Army Air Force in Hawaii produced a document now known as the Martin-Bellinger report (named for those two officers). They warned of the possibility of such an attack by the Japanese, and recommded measures to combat such an aerial attack if it were made. But they were ignored. Lt. General Walter Short was the United States Army commander in Hawaii, and as there was no separate air force at the time, he was responsible for the United States Army Air Forces in the islands. He ignored the report, and was obsessed with the possibility of "fifth columnists" in the Hawaiian Japanese community. When the Japanese attacked, they couldn't believe their luck--the American fighters were clustered in the middle of the air fields, away from the perimeter, because Short feared saboteurs would attempt to blow them up. Soldiers who wanted to fire on the Japanese planes had to cut the locks off the ammunition lockers with bolt cutters, because Short had ordered them to be locked so that saboteurs couldn't get at the ammunition to use it to blow up the planes and facilities. Short had an obsessional paranoia which was not justified either by the events, or what was known of the Japanese in Hawaii before the attack. He also had the attitude that the Army was only safe while the fleet was in port--even though his mandate was to protect the fleet.

Admiral Husband Kimmel also took far too casual an attitude, and took no measures to protect the fleet from possible attack--even though the authorities in Washington had sent a War Warning message on November 26, 1941--more than ten days before the attack. Kimmel probably bears less responsibility than Short, whose response was inexcusable--nevertheless, neither of them were adequately prepared for the attack, and both of them had been warned more than once that there was a high probability of an attack. The Martin-Bellinger report from nine months earlier laid out the possibilities in very specific detail. More than month before the attack, the Japanese codes had been changed (a standard measure in military usage), and had not yet been broken--but almost every capital ship in the Imperial fleet had already been identified and located--except for the six largest carriers. When the War Warning message was sent to Hawaii, those six carriers, representing nearly all of the Japanese naval aviation striking force, were just leaving Japan to steam to Hawaii.

In the event, the commander of the First Air Fleet, Admiral Nagumo, did the United States a favor--he dedided not to attack a second time, and to get out while he was ahead. I can't really blame him for that--operational plans were based on the loss of one third of the aircraft, and the possible loss of one or two carriers, and one of the fast battleships escorting the fleet. The Japanese had pulled off a brilliant attack, and when the two waves returned to the carriers, their losses were negligible. Even though no American carriers had been sunk, the damage at Pearl Harbor appeared crippling (not quite true, but it was a serious setback), and the First Air Fleet had not been found by American naval forces. Although Genda and Fuchida, who had planned the operation, were angry and frustrated, it was Nagumo's decision to get out while the getting was good, and i don't fault him in his logic.

I've read more than a dozen well-researched books on the topic--unfortunarely, most of them were by revisionists. I have come to the conclusion that Gordon Prange's book, At Dawn We Slept is the best-researched, most reliable account. The revisionists hate it, because his work was so thorough, and it so thoroughly discounts all of their favorite conspiracy theories. Toland is not a bad historian, in the realm of popular historians--but he is often unreliable, and given to making extravagent statements, very likely because his principle object was to make good money selling books, a goal at which he did not fail. His account of the Pearl Harbor attack is badly flawed.

History is not simply an academic pursuit, it is also a political tool. It is made a whore by those with an agenda to rationalize, to justify or to excoriate. The claim that the United States forced Japan to go to war was, by the way, the principle defense of Japanese officers tried for war crimes after the war. It didn't work for them, and it shouldn't work for anyone interested in actually learning what history teaches about those events.

most of that informations are true, but. japanesse diplomcy and militery japnesse goverment, in talk with americans agree that jappenesse army will return to madzuku - madzuria and korea and stop invasion on china. but there come error betwen japnesse and usa. roossvelt say that :if japan stop invesion on china, usa wiil stop embargo.

jappanesse think that americans think that is madzuko part of china (it is part), and becaouse that jappanesse army wiil be forced to leave madzuko. if jappaneessy army will be forced to leave madzuko, that will rise revolt of citezen in japan, and ther will rise comunist. because that japnesse goverment with Koneje on the head, refuse usa offer of stop invasion and embargo. jappanesse militery and army will return china to chanise, but ther will not return madzuko. in that misteke, 2 world war begans.

To recognize and understand the origins of Japan's responsibility for and her involvement in the Pacific war of the 1940s, one must look to the final years of China's Manchu rule. Itself a long and fascinating story, but irrelevant to this discussion, China's decline and fragmentation through the latter 19th Century encouraged Japanese extraterritorial ambitions. China's traditional rival, resource-poor but rapidly developing Japan had designs on resource-rich (particularly coal and iron) traditional Chinese client-state Korea and, ever increasingly with Japan's astounding 19th Century modernization and industrialization, on similarly resource-rich Manchuria.


In the closing decades of the 19th Century, perceiving threat of Russian expansion into the region as China's stability and control waned, Japan moved. Provoking a series of incidents with Korea, Japan forced that nation's essentially impotent government into an 1875 treaty which effectively opened Korea to Japan while wresting the nation away from Chinese control and influence, setting the stage for the eventual Japanese annexation of Korea as a consequence of the early 20th Century Russo-Japanes war - but we get ahead of ourselves.


In 1884, a pro-Japanese coup attempt failed to topple Korea's government while hightening Sino-Japanse tensions, with outright war avoided only through China's acquiesence to a Japanese-structured treaty calling for both China and Japan to withdraw their respective troops from Korea and at least ostensibly to recognize Korean sovereignity. The treaty notwithstanding, Japan continued "under the table" to press her aims on Korea, fommenting pro-Japanese opposition to the Korean government, opposition which soon escalated into open revolt.


In late 1893, responding to a Korean request, China dispatched troops to help suppress particularly fractious rebels. Japan, claiming the Chinese action terminated the 1884 Sino-Japanese agreement concerning Korean sovereignity countered with what amounted to an invasion of Korea, seizing its capitol, Seoul, deposing the Korean government, establishing a pro-Japanese puppet government which then severed relations with China and "requested" Japan to eject all Chinese troops from its territory. China, of course, did not take those developments kindly, refusing to recognize the Japanese-installed puppet government's legitimacy. A series of Sino-Japanese incidents and clashes ensued, escalating by late summer into the 1st Sino-Japanese War.


Far better equipped, trained, and prepared than China, Japan in a few campaigns over a couple of months easily overwhelmed her unequal foe, destroying China's ineptly led, inadequately equipped, indifferently prepared navy and crippling her equally incompetent, impotent army - much to the surprise of the astonished European powers, including most notably Russia.


Signal among Japanese actions during the brief and lopsided war was her seige, then brutal taking, of Port Arthur, an event which came to be known as The Port Arthur Massacre. While the exact nature and scale of Japanese atrocity against the fallen city's civilian population remains open to debate (the incident is the source of the term "Yellow Journalism"), the template for future Japanese treatment of the civilians of vanquished foes was clearly demonstrated. That template was to be employed even more horrifically some 4 decades later, but again, we get ahead of ourselves - more on that later.


Utterly defeated and humiliated, China accepted the Japanese-dictated Treaty of Shimoseki in April of 1895, ceding in perpetuity to Japan Manchuria, Taiwan and other islands in the Taiwan Straights, and significant Chinese mainland territory, as well as agreeing to payment of huge reparations and to unrestricted Japanese trade and development along China's coast and along the Yangtze River, China's principal inland waterway. This development greatly alarmed a Europe which had been caught totally off guard by Japan's military prowess. Russia in particular took notice, entering with France and Germany into an alliance known as The Tripartite (or Triple) Intervention, aimed at containing Japan's expansion into mainland Asia. Under that agreement, Russia quickly occupied Southeast Manchuria and Northern Korea, among other initiatives taking control of Port Arthur from the Japanese, establishing a heavilly fortified naval base there and constructing a railroad to supply that base.


That of course did not sit at all well with the Japanese. Tensions between Japan and Russia mounted over the next decade, erupting into the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-'05. Japan's drubbing of the Russians in that conflict was if anything a greater surprise to Europe than had been China's earlier defeat at Japanese hands. The abortive Revolution of 1905 distracted Russia somewhat from her conflict with Japan, but though some hold otherwise, many scholars maintain it was far less a factor in Russia's decision to sue for peace than were the naval and land force humiliations inflicted on her by Japan. Under the terms of the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth, mediated by US president Theodore Roosevelt (who received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in the matter), Russia ceded not only her Manchurian and Korean acquisitions to Japan, but also Southern Sakhalin Island. This left Japan's Asian territorial aims essentially unconstrained, inevitably and quite naturally emboldening the Japanese government as regards furtherance of those aims.


In 1910, Japan openly annexed Korea, over the feckless objections of a West preoccupied by the spectre of a looming European war. Under a Japanese governor and Japanese-selected-and-approved government in Korea (with most major positions held not by native Koreans but by Japanese appointees), Korea became effectively a Japanese colony, a satrapy for the exploiting. Exploitation to her own and exclusive benefit precisely is what Japan set about, imposing industrial modernization on a helpless agrarian society (with focus all but entirely on production of goods for export to Japan), evicting tenant farmers in the interest of providing virtual slave labor for the infrastructure Japan was building in the country, expropriating much of Korea's rice crop, inflicting ruinous taxes and restrictive legislation on the Korean economy thereby all but destroying the once-thriving Korean mercantile class, establishing by force a Japanese-style education system, and exporting Koreans as forced labor to both the Japanese homeland and to Japanese-controlled territories elsewhere in Asia.


In the spring of 1919, mounting Korean unrest under Japanese rule brought about nationwide rallies and demonstrations against their Japanese overlords. The Japanese response was swift and mercillessly brutal; in a bare few weeks, Japanese military and police killed thousands of Koreans, including the elimination of whole villages and communities, the unfortunate residents of which the Japanese slaughtered through means such as mass crucifictions and wholesale burnings alive. The fate of many who survived Japan's fury was not much more fortunate, as tens of thousands were conscripted into Japan's ever-growing slave labor enterprise, working mines, construction projects, and railroad and highway building under horrific conditions all but indistinguishable from those Germany imposed on her slaves a couple decades further on. Meanwhile, as reward for her (mostly on paper) alignment with and support for the Allied Powers against Germany during the 1st World War, Japan received control of the considerable German/Austro Hungarian interests and assets in Asia and the Pacific Rim, further strengthening Japan's influence throughout the region.


Anti-Japanese demonstrations and riots continued throughout the 1920s into the 1930s, gaining for the Koreans and others under Japanese occupation or rule only more and more stringent Japanese military rule and growing Japanese troop presence, which by the early 1930s amounted to absolute martial law throughout Japan's Asian and Pacific holdings. The Western Powers, essentially Europe and The US, reacted to Japan's blatantly imperialist depradations, and her continual pecking away at China, with disaproval expressed chiefly through holding talks, issuing stern words, and trumpeting threats of economic, trade, and travel sanctions, the functional results of which actions were little more than Japan's withdrawal from or abrogation of numerous treaties and agreements, including arms control initiatives.


As all this was going on, China was already in the throes of civil war, a situation the Japanese capitalized on at every opportunity, manfacturing incident after incident in order to "justify" Japanese military action against Chinese troops and territory. In 1937, the Japanese initiated an escalating series of incidents capped by the Japanese assault on a strategic bridge located in a suburb of the city of Peking, China's capitol (now Beijing). Civil war aside, China's military was no match at all for Japan's modern, mechanized, airpower-supported forces, leaving the outcome a foregone conclusion. Building on the incident and its immediate aftermath, Japan invaded and occupied vast areas of Southeastern China.


Component to this invasion there came about the outrage known today as The Rape of Nanking, a roughly 2-month-long orgy of Japanese brutality in which by conservative estimates some 350,000 Chinese civilians died (other estimates place the toll of the carnage as high as above 500,000 dead), a major city was all but obliterated from the map, thousands of Chinese women were raped under what amounted to not just Japanese official disregard but actual active encouragement on the part of the Japanese military's higher command, and untold thousands of Chinese were conscripted by the Japanese as slave labor. One way or another, several million Chinese were directly, and decidedly negatively, affected by Japan's conduct throughout the many weeks over which the attrocities continued. The true magnitude of this atrocity never will be known, but whatever the actual numbers, the barbarity was well covered by the world's press, heartwrenching photos, newsreels, radio reports, and written articles practically daily product on news stands and airwaves and in theaters wherever such venues were to be found. By comparison, the earlier Port Arthur affair had been a mere blip.


Finally, if reluctantly, no longer able to tacitly ignore what had been happening in Asia for the past half century, the rest of the world came to grips with the impotent futility of the stern words and unexecuted threat approach, and in 1938 at last began imposing real sanctions on Japan, sanctions increasing in severity over the next few years into actual forced embargos and virtual naval blockades against the domestic-resource-poor island nation of Japan. Far from deterred, Japan responded by going to full war preparations, determined to sieze by force the Asian/Pacific Rim empire, and the resources within it, on which her sights long had been set. The attack on Pearl Harbor really was a flank protection action, intended not to draw the US into a protracted war but to prevent the US Pacific Fleet from hindering Japan's military annexation of Southeast Asia, the Phillipines, and the Western South Pacific.


The only sense in which any blame for the Pacific war may be laid anywhere but on the militarist, imperialistic government of Japan and its savage, brutally inhuman, knowingly and intentionally carried out practices is in the failure of the rest of the world to do anything but talk about Japan's imperialist ambitions untill it was far too late to prevent the war for which Japan clearly was preparing and plainly had been engineering for more than half a century.


Credit where its due, however; precisely the same policies of avoidance as those Japan exploited in her march to WWII permitted Germany to almost simultaneously take the same march half a world away while the world likewise preferred to look the other way, denying the unambiguously gathering threat untill the inevitable storm broke, overwhelming all the "good intentions" of accommodation, acquiesence, and appeasement.

temberlenko . The only sense in which any blame for the Pacific war may be laid anywhere but on the militarist, imperialistic government of Japan did america have imperialistic plans for pacific?

temberlenko . Credit where its due, however; precisely the same policies of avoidance as those Japan exploited in her march to WWII permitted Germany who was those policies?

i think that jou are from usa - when jou say of masucure in nanking, whay didnt say bombing of tokio 1945, or the best part hirosima and nagasaki.

ps i have visit jou page about 11 9 . we in yugoslavia have the same - masacar in srebrenica, skabrnja, and vukovar. if jou know - what shell will bild on the place of WTC?