Posted on 06/07/2014 8:04:39 PM PDT by princeofdarkness
It's no secret that Japan was, shall we say, 'economically disadvantaged' in her ability to wage war against the Allies. However, the sheer, stunning magnitude of this economic disparity has never ceased to amaze me. So, just go give you an idea of the magnitude of the mismatch here, I decided to compile a few statistics. Most of them are taken from Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" (which, among other things, contains an excellent analysis of the economic forces at work in World War II, and is an all-around great book) and John Ellis' "World War II: A Statistical Survey." In this comparison I will focus primarily on the two chief antagonists in the Pacific War: Japan and the United States. They say that economics is the 'Dismal Science'; you're about to see why....
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearhistory.com ...
Upon hearing that no carriers were destroyed in his Pearl Harbor attack, Yamamoto said that Japan had just lost the war.
First of all, even if they had gotten all our carriers, out production advantage -- highlighted in the article -- would have still carried us to victory. Maybe an extra year would have been tacked on to the length of the war, but probably not. After all, the loss of our carriers would not have changed the release-date of the atomic bomb.
But secondly, if our carriers had been in port on December 7, wouldn't our planes have been able to defend against the Pearl Harbor attack?
“No flaming here——I agree.”
We have our own peacenik surrender monkeys and they take power potentially every four to eight years. They get us into wars, like Wilson and FDR. But they have evolved into balding hippies who start stuff, like Libya, or bomb aspirin factories for political cover. The party no longer has intentions of doing the hard, unpopular work of actually winning. Instead they fight feel-good pseudo wars like the war on poverty or the war on drugs. They lose those too, as winning would entail unpopular things like punishing the users instead of spending lots and lots of money with their cronies to buy equipment and arm their own private (federal agency) armies.
Awesome! Got into Yamamoto’s head but notice how Y.’s grudging admiration for America does not override his Nipponese contempt for the western `gaijin’ (if that’s what the real Y. believed).
And...the war declaration was to have been delivered just before, not after, the attack on Pearl. Seems their embassy lacked a competent typist. Fortunes of war.
My first landlord and long time friend in Japan was training to be a kamikaze pilot when the war ended. He told me that 'We Japanese could never have done this well if we had won.'
Even if all three had been dockside, the water was shallow and barring a magazine explosion like the Arizona, the sunk carriers could have been quickly refloated and repaired.
That would have been virtually impossible. All 24 Essex class carriers were built in East Coast shipyards.
Only because Hitler foolishly declared war on the US in the mistaken belief that his "ally" Japan would reciprocate by declaring war on Russia, since by December 1941 the parallels to Napoleon's Russian debacle were already becoming clear in Berlin. But Japan did not reciprocate and this sealed Germany's fate.
Had Hitler not declared war on the US it is not at all clear if or when the US would have joined the European conflict. If the US had directed all of its effort against Japan while ignoring Germany in 1942-43 it is unlikely that Britain would have been able to carry on alone. With a pacified Europe behind him, by the time the US had finished with Japan a global stalemate between the US, Germany, and the USSR might well have been the outcome.
Right, but I meant the ones quoted in the post I responded to, who said they didn’t think the US would fight.
They believed their own propaganda about Americans- that we had no honor and were cowards. Turns out, the American soldier, sailor, and Marine had more courage and honor than the Japanese. True, we had industrial capacity and might, but it didn't mean diddly squat when the Americans were fighting the Japanese at Guadalcanal (where the Japanese had more men, materiel, and better supply lines).
Unfortunately, we believed our propaganda about the Japanese- that they were pidgeon-toed midgets with bad eyesight...however, after Pearl Harbor, we adjusted.
“wouldn’t our planes have been able to defend against the Pearl Harbor attack? “
It was SURPRISE attack. The idea was to bomb the carriers before any planes could take off, not to mention we had no way to find the Japanese carriers. Besides, there were airfields full of hundreds of planes at Pearl then that never got off of the ground either and got bombed and strafed on the ground. Only a hand full of our planes ever made it off the ground.
There’s some interesting theories on why no carriers were there.
I understand all that I was just wondering if it wouldn’t have been beyond the capability of the Jap attackers to keep all the planes from taking off if those carriers had been in port. I’m not trying to argue the point, just wondering if our ability to defend against the surprise attack would have been different if we had had those carriers with their planes available to respond.
Everyone always assumes that it was bad for the Japs that they missed the carriers. I’m just wondering if it would have also been bad for them if the carriers had been there to fight back against the attack.
I’m not saying... just wondering.
Alex, I’ll take, ‘Because we bombed the crap out of them’ for 500 please.
” just wondering if our ability to defend against the surprise attack would have been different if we had had those carriers with their planes available to respond.”
Sadly enough, I don’t think it would have helped. Pearl was 100% unprepared for war or attack even though there was a large amount of intelligence to suggest that such an attack was highly likely. It is still not clear whether that intelligence was withheld from Pearl or the Pearl commanders simply ignored it. Either way the Pearl commanders were relieved of duty.
And the Japs attacked on a Sunday when most men were on leave and at a base in which everyone apparently believed they were on an extended Hawaii holiday given their inability to fight back and given the extent of damage. Both the ships and the planes on the fields were all lined up in neat rows ready to be taken out in mass, rather than scattered about in protective positions. There was even advance radar detection of the incoming Jap planes from several minutes out, but there was confusion about whether the planes MIGHT be a squad of our airplanes out on some UNKNOWN exercise and no one could sort it out until the Jap planes started dropping bombs.
I couldn't agree more-in fact most military historians agree that the Soviet Union was preparing to invade Germany in 1942 and a few even surmise that the Russians easily could have invaded by Aug 1941.
The Germans were actually shocked by the huge accumulation of Russian troops and aircraft sitting within 150 miles of the German border.
It's hard to argue with that.
Funny thing is that the Soviets invading eastern Poland in 1939 (and the Baltic states in 1940) probably helped save them since it pushed the demarcation line quite a large distance to the west.
Without that extra buffer it's a pretty fair guess Moscow would probably have been taken in Oct of 1941.
Thanks.
Yes I have read that book and it is very interesting.
I did read later that people who have searched records of both the Japanese and Americans, British, Dutch etc. Do not believe he shot down over 60 planes.
They do agree he was Japans greatest fighter pilot. They don’t think he was cheating just that often several people claim the same victory.
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