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By late 1941, most people in the know anywhere, knew that
war was coming soon. The Japanese army was bogged down in China,
going nowhere fast. The Japanese Navy needed a dependable source of
fuel and was also worried about the American embargo on scrap
metal -- without such things, navies are just really expensive,
well-trained floating tourist attractions. It was a catch-22 for
Japan:
- Give in to American demands and lose pretty much everything they
had spent the last ten years working for.
- Do nothing and lose everything when the Army and Navy ran
out of materiel.
- Expand the fight in hopes of getting what they need so they can
then defend what they had against their now much expanded roster of enemies.
The decision to expand the fighting is really not that hard to make,
given the alternatives. There is room here to argue that American
diplomacy, by failing to give Japan a way out, facilitated the
coming of war. There is also plenty of room for reflection on how
war begets war. Regardless, the real question for Japanese planners
was how to get what they needed. They could go north, into Siberia,
gambling that the Russians would be too preoccupied with the German
Army to react effectively. The other option was to go south, into
the oil- and mineral- rich areas of South East Asia.
The admirals and generals decided to go south. They believed that,
like Russia, the European nations concerned would be too busy with
Nazi Germany to do much about Japan taking their colonies.
Two things of note here:
- The Japanese government decided to go south for the minerals,
their decision had nothing to do with respecting their non-aggression
treaty with Russia, although that treaty was one factor that they
considered. There is every reason to believe that had they viewed
Siberia as a better place to get what they wanted, the Japanese
leaders would have sent their armies to make war on Russia.
- Despite the PR noises, the goal of Japanese leaders, especially
military leaders, was not the liberation of Western colonies in Asia.
Japan had its own Asian colonies that it was not about to liberate,
and had been fighting for years in China against the Chinese. Although
there might have been some in the government who believed that Japan
should liberate Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philipines, and other
Western colonies, the fact is that the military was after raw
materials and those Western colonies were either where the material
was or were strategically important for defending the colonies.
The problem the Japanese military faced was how to grab the lands
they wanted and then have time to entrench, prepare for possible
counter-attacks, and set up governments, all the while making use of
their new supplies.
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