Because we cut off petroleum sales to them, that’s one of the reasons.
Thanks for more neat statistics, moonshot925.
The Japanese knew they would never win a war with the United States.
Why they attacked Pearl Harbor is complex.
BTW, FDR wanted to bomb Japan from China in 1940.
They went after Indonesia, which had plenty of oil.
The US didn’t have much of a military at the beginning of the war. It amazes me still how quickly and dramatically we created a fleet and an army from almost nothing to an armada big enough to fight two major wars simultaneously. And win.
That’s a very complex question, one with no simple answer, but a bare bones version is China. Japan invaded China in ‘37, and by 1941, the US government, which had a large and rather vocal Chinese lobby, had had enough. The US enacted trade embargoes on many materials declared to be related to the war in China, such as oil and steel. Trade would be reopened if certain goalposts on an American-backed plan for peace were met. Japan didn’t feel like it could back down, and the embargoes were hitting the import-reliant Japanese economy hard. Therefore, it was decided that Japan would attempt to seize the resource-rich European colonies in the Pacific. The Philippines were (erroneously in retrospect) seen as a dagger straight into the heart of the supply lines of a potential invasion of the Dutch East Indies, and the British holdings in the Pacific. Therefore, it was felt that the US must be quickly knocked out in order to achieve their ultimate goal of conquering China.
Japan underestimated the US military, overestimated their own forces, and completely misread the politics of the US. They were hoping that a swift series of military victories could bring the US to the negotiating table like Russia in 1906. They were very, very wrong.
They believed they were a superior race and invincible. Americans were not much more than apes to their way of thinking.
Logistics did not seem to be their strong point. Instead of field kitchens, they would issue cookable food to the individual soldiers before the campaign, enough for a week or so, even before long campaigns. Capture what you need when you finish this.
I wonder how much that had to do with the atrocities? Take a bunch of prisoners when you’ve been out of food for two weeks and what happens next...
In 1937 we probably produced 400 times more than the rest of the world.
Japan shot their wad at Pearl Harbor and by the end of the war they were parking their ships due to a lack of fuel. The same lack of oil caused Germany downfall.
In the Japanese extimation, the United States didn't have the moral strength or unity to fight a bloody war of attrition in the Pacific. They believed that one or two quick, decisive blows would eliminate our naval power and our advance bases in Asia and they would assert control and that we would accept the new reality.
They didn't know us.
I think we still would have prevailed (due to the atomic bomb which was going to be developed regardless) but short term, the situation in the Pacific would have been much grimmer.
Almost certainly, the Japanese would have gone on to occupy the Hawaiian island and our all-important Pearl Harbor base would be useless to us. Further, the Japanese would have had a free hand in the entire Pacific and would also have captured and occupied Australia as well as the Aleutian islands and quite possibly the oil-rich area of Alaska.
The U.S. Navy would have been forced to retreat to the West Coast of the U.S. until such time that additional battleships and carriers could be built for Pacific operations. Remember that at that time, the focus was on the European War and the priority was to establish a beachhead in northern Europe - which was still two full years away.
It was because of Midway that the Allies saw fit to continue to pour resources into the Pacific - in order to keep the Japanese on the defensive. If not for the turning point of Midway, in which U.S. naval forces were able to achieve parity with the Japanese virtually overnight, the island hopping campaign that brought us virtually to the shores of mainland Japan by the time of the German surrender would not have been possible.
Instead, we would have been forced to put the Pacific War in a holding pattern and focus our efforts there on defending the West Coast until such time the battle in Europe could be won. The Japanese empire would have become just as powerful as Nazi Germany and it would likely taken us into 1946 or 1947 before we could be in position to drop atomic bombs on Japan because first we would need to get close enough to stage aircraft within striking distance (our atomic bombs were delivered by B-29s that were stationed on the island of Tinian) because at that time, our bombers did not have the range that they have today.
The Japanese vastly underestimated America’s resolve. They thought we’d act like Czarist Russia after getting our nose bloodied.
Yamamoto, who had studied at Harvard and been assigned to the embassy in Washington warned the War Cabinet, “We’ll have to march into Washington and dictate the peace treaty.” in order to win. The Japanese thought that after the defeats at Pearl Harbor, the Phillipines and the western Pacific, the Americans would sue for peace.
We did not feel obligated to honor their assumptions.
The first A6M Zero prototype went to the test airfield in an oxcart - using trucks on Japan’s unpaved roads tended to damage the aircraft. California alone had more paved roads and more railroad than Japan. In American we would have called that a clue.
The Japanese went to war with us because they imagined that we would not fight. That difference in petrol production was one of the reasons they went to war. They wanted to “unite” (i.e. conquer) all of SE Asia and grab the resources for themselves.
Interesting set of opinions.
I think something that is partially being left out of this is that the Japanese home islands have almost no natural resources. Few minerals, oil, gas, coal, etc. Even farmland is in short supply to support the population.
Japan cannot possibly exist as an industrialized modern nation based strictly on its own resources. It must bring in resources from elsewhere.
Like anybody else, they have the choice of taking resources by force (which has a cost of its own) or trade for them.
The problem is that in the 1930s nobody much wanted to buy what Japan had to sell, generally for protectionist reasons. If they couldn’t sell stuff, they wouldn’t have money to buy what they needed. The invasion of China was to a considerable extent a search for markets.
So in 1941 the Japanese had a very real dilemma: Option A - retreat out of China to the empire or even to the home islands. They would be unable to support a modern military, leaving them at the mercy of any power that still had one. They might not even be able to feed their whole population.
Option B - they could strike for an expanded empire large enough to provide both the resources and the markets they needed to support their military and industry.
They were aware Option B was a huge gamble, but to their minds Option A wasn’t even a gamble, just a guarantee of slow or fast decline back to powerlessness.
With B they had a chance, with A none. It’s difficult for me to argue with their analysis given the situation at the time.
Japan has done well since WWII, but that’s because the USA and the rest of world is willing to buy what they have to sell.