Pearl Harbour. Why?

[Felix_Nietzsche]

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Source?

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Two sources:
1. John Toland, in his book "The Rising Sun" stated this.
Mao was getting his ass kicked by Chiand Kai-shek. Mao needed relief to save his cause. The attack by the Japanese caused huge damage to the Nationalist Chinese. Without this war, Mao was a dead man....
The first attack on Japanese troops was excuse by the Japanese and a truce occurred. Japanese General Ishihara said, "The first soldier marching in China will only do so over my dead body". A second attack occurred on the Japanese troops and this led to war.
2. James B Crowley, Asst Prof of History Amherst College
He said the Japanese tried to avoid war but the Chinese who escalated the Marco Bridge incident into a major crisis.


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Japan had already defeated China in multiple wars in the last 40 years, and easilly would have done so again.

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EASILY? The took TWO million casualties!
And this is with the Nationalist Chinese and Communist Chinese with holding ther better units from fight. Both Chinese warlords were reluctant to commit their troops completely because they did not want to lose their best troops after the Japanese left. Chiang-Kai summed it up nicely when he said, 'The Japanese are a disease of the skin but the communist are a disease of the heart.'


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US still controlled Phillipines, had major economic interests in China and had several island bases in the Pacific (Guam being most important). Japan getting stronger = possible loss of Pacific interests.

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They could not lose these interests with out a war.
FDR wanted a war. And he got it.


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Yes, huge miscalculation, although FDR would have figured out a way to get us into the war no matter what, be it by some staged [censored] or through repeatedly sending passenger ships through warzones in order to get another Lusitania incident etc.

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Yep....FDR would be crucified by the modern Democrat party for his WAR-Mongering.

[Nonfiction]

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Source?

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Two sources:
1. John Toland, in his book "The Rising Sun" stated this.
Mao was getting his ass kicked by Chiand Kai-shek. Mao needed relief to save his cause. The attack by the Japanese caused huge damage to the Nationalist Chinese. Without this war, Mao was a dead man....
The first attack on Japanese troops was excuse by the Japanese and a truce occurred. Japanese General Ishihara said, "The first soldier marching in China will only do so over my dead body". A second attack occurred on the Japanese troops and this led to war.
2. James B Crowley, Asst Prof of History Amherst College
He said the Japanese tried to avoid war but the Chinese who escalated the Marco Bridge incident into a major crisis.

[/ QUOTE ] From everything I have read, it was the Japs not the Communists. Wiki (yea, wrong a lot, but still w/e):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Polo_Bridge_Incident

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EASILY? The took TWO million casualties!
And this is with the Nationalist Chinese and Communist Chinese with holding ther better units from fight. Both Chinese warlords were reluctant to commit their troops completely because they did not want to lose their best troops after the Japanese left. Chiang-Kai summed it up nicely when he said, 'The Japanese are a disease of the skin but the communist are a disease of the heart.'

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It was actually a bit more than 1 million. The Chinese lost over 3 million soldiers and 20-30mil total. For example, in the battle of Shanghai early in the war, in late 1937 I believe, Japs vs China, China outnumbered Japs 2-1 but lost taking 3-1 casualties including most of their elite and best equipped units. China's only hope vs Japan was to hold out long enough for the West to intervene, but that took 4+ years since everyone was busy watching Germany in Europe and figured China had no chance anyways. If Japs don't dec US, they win in China, as Chinese morale would have completely collapsed with no hope of outside help.

[AlexM]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOvnI...ed&search=

Not a rickroll.

[Nielsio]

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOvnI...ed&search=

Not a rickroll.

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lol

[The once and future king]

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The Japanese destroyed 5 battleships, 3 destroyers, and 200 aircraft at a cost of 30 planes. The Japanese percieved the operation to be a success, so I'm not sure how you could argue that it was an operational failure.

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Oh I see, the Japanese subjectively view their own attack as a success, thus immediately it becomes one objectively.

Objectively speaking it can not be considered a success, which is judged purely on objective strategic outcomes rather than merely meeting the criteria of those that planned it.

Many battles have been executed perfectly, but have been operational disasters by the virtue that the battle should never have been fought and by fighting the battle one sacrifices the opportunity to use ones forces in a more productive way.

As I have stated previously, the Japs didnt destroy a single carrier at PH. Thus after the Yanks used a carrier to bomb Tokyo and at the Coral sea, deystroying the Yank carriers became operational priority NO1 to the Jap navy. Who all along understood the primacy of the Carrier.

Thus to destroy the Yank carriers, the Japs launched the attack on Midway, to try and draw the Yank carriers into a trap. The yanks through superior intelligence got wind of this and turned Midway into a ambush.

At Midway, the Japs were pawned totally.(by a much smaller naval force).

So objectively, operationally speaking the failure at PH to sink any carriers led to the effective defeat of the Japanese Navy six months later. Some success.

[mjkidd]

It's not even clear what you're arguing here. I don't think that anyone would argue that it was in Japan's interests to attack Pearl. I certainly wouldn't. And I don't have any idea what you mean by "operational success/failure." The attack on Pearl was sucessful in that it significantly reduced the power of the USN; it was a disaster in that it led to the complete destruction of the Imperial Navy and hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives. But the Japanese met -- and even exceeded -- their goals for the attack, which is why I said it was an operational success. In any case, the Japanese did not expect to destroy all three carriers, even in the most optimistic scenarios.

Our force at Midway wasn't much smaller. We had 3 carriers plus our air base at midway, they had 4. We also completly compromised their naval ciphers, so that was a massive advantage for the US. Without this advantage, there wouln't have been a decisive battle at Midway -- the Japanese would have crushed any small force we had there.

[iron81]

Wouldn't Japan have won the Battles of Midway and Coral Sea if they had gotten our carriers at Pearl Harbor? How would this have affected the war.

[mjkidd]

Yes, in the unlikely event that all of our carriers had been sunk, we couldn't have fought those battles. But it's important to remember that those battles happened because we knew the Japanese plans and made the choice to fight (we were reading thier signals). Had the correlation of forces been unfavorable, we would have withdrawn.

Between the US compromising the Japanese naval codes and our industrial superiority, the outcome of individual battles was irrelevent.

[MrMon]

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Wouldn't Japan have won the Battles of Midway and Coral Sea if they had gotten our carriers at Pearl Harbor? How would this have affected the war.

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In theory, yes, but there's some question what the U.S. would have done if they lost the carriers at Pearl. Speculation is, the U.S. couldn't let the Japanese run through the Pacific, they would have shifted the Atlantic carriers to the Pacific. But that didn't happen, so we'll never know.

[The once and future king]

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But the Japanese met -- and even exceeded -- their goals for the attack, which is why I said it was an operational success.

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As I previously stated, the subjective opinion of the Japs has no bearing on deciding if it was an operational success. To do that we must objectively determine the strategic outcome of the battle at the operational level (as opposed to the tactical level).

The strategic outcome of the failure to sink any Carriers via the attack on PH was the defeat of the Japanese navy within 6 months, thus we can clearly see that the attack on PH was a failure at the operational (strategic) level.

To be clear, in military science, the operational level is pretty much just a way to say the strategic level. Any operation is judged by its objective strategic outcome, and not by whether it achieved its tactical objectives.

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Our force at Midway wasn't much smaller

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The Japanese fleet for the attack on Midway was the largest naval fleet ever assembled. They had numerous battle ships, cruisers destroyers plus troop transports etc. The Carriers only made up a small complement of their over all fleet. The yanks had pretty much just there carriers and few support vessels.