Quote:
Originally Posted by mavfin
Some say the roots of the European war were laid in the shambles at the end of WWI, or even say that it goes back to Bismarck, and that the Pacific side goes all the way back to the Meiji days for the Japanese aggression.
I think the origins of the war came in 2 parts -- Pacific and European, and only merged when the US entered the war. Of course, at the same time the US was attacked, so were the British and the Dutch in the Pacific. At the time the US was already involved in supplying belligerents in Europe, and had been building to a confrontation with Japan for a while. However, until that time, the only linkage between Japan's war and Germany's war was that the US was giving some supply to opponents of both aggressors, meaning China and Britain.
(Yes, I'm aware that the Japanese and Russians had clashed at the Manchurian border a few times, but, the Japanese had decided that dog wasn't going to hunt, and had made a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union)
|
All quite true, except there was another linkage between the Pacific War and the European war and it existed in the calculations of the Japanese militarists. The Japanese looked upon the European war as a golden opportunity to expand their empire while the European powers were otherwise occupied. They had done the same thing in WW I by seizing the German territories in China and the Pacific while Germany was helpless to do anything about it.
While the United States was not yet part of the European war, the Japanese certainly expected it to become a belligerent and assumed (incorrectly) that the US would not be able, or have the will, to successfully fight on two fronts at once. This was factored into the equation that the Japanese developed to assess their chances in a war precipitated by their seizure of the Southern Resources Area. They knew that they would normally have scant chance of prevailing in a war against both Britain and the US, but felt that Britain would be sorely wounded, if not defeated, by Germany and the US, with the European war on it's hands, would be much more likely to negotiate with Japan than fight a costly and bloody war.
Of course, their stupid and unnecessary attack on Pearl Harbor upset all of their assumptions and rendered any hope of negotiation with the US dead on arrival.