GOING TO WAR

Their fateful decision to attack the United States and the Allies in December 1941 had been founded upon a catalog of faulty assumptions. They had assumed that the war could be won quickly, averting a prolonged war of attrition in which American economic power would become decisive. They had assumed that Nazi Germany was unbeatable in Europe, and would break Britain and Russia to its yoke; that sea routes linking Japan to its oil supply in the East Indies could be secured against submarine and air attacks; and that the main U.S. naval fleet would charge into the western Pacific to be met and annihilated in a single decisive sea battle, reprising the Imperial Navy’s triumph at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905.

From childhood, the Japanese had been taught that they were a unique race, guided by a divine emperor, watched over by their ancient gods, with a sacred destiny to rule Asia. Indulging shallow stereotypes about American culture and democracy, the Japanese miscalculated the temper and character of their enemy. They assumed that Americans lacked the stomach to fight a long, bloody war on the opposite side of the world. They assumed that their enemies had grown soft and decadent by easy living, and were hopelessly infatuated by popular entertainment.

The Americans were a mongrel people, a nation of immigrants, without unity or higher purpose, enfeebled by racial, ethnic, class, and ideological infighting. Women had the vote, and therefore wielded influence in politics—and they would resist sending their sons and husbands to fight on distant foreign shores. The size and strength of the U.S. economy would count for nothing if it could not be mobilized for war, and the capitalist oligarchs would not consent to retool their lucrative industries. The strike on Pearl Harbor was intended to shock and demoralize the American public, so that they would react to the disaster by pressuring Washington to make peace. 

 “We thought that we could easily tackle them,” a leading Japanese officer later admitted, “a race so steeped in material comfort and absorbed in the pursuit of pleasure was spiritually degenerate.”

If all of these premises had been right, Japan would have won the Pacific War, and might even be the dominant power in the region today. If even some had been right, Japan might have escaped the conflict with its sovereignty intact, and perhaps some remnant of its overseas empire. But as it turned out, all of these assumptions, in some degree, were wrong. In a sense, as Admiral Yonai and others grasped, the outcome of the Pacific War had been foreordained from the start, and Japan’s defeat was plainly foreseeable even in December 1941. Worse, defeat was actually foreseen and even predicted by some of the men who had acquiesced in the fateful decision to launch the unwinnable war in the first place. Above all, the Pacific War was the product of a political failure in Tokyo—a failure of catastrophic proportions, one of the worst in the annals of any government or any nation.

Ian W. Toll, Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (Vol. 3) (The Pacific War Trilogy) (768-769). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.