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The Pacific, December of 1941

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:

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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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Next: The Occupation of Japan Up: World War 2 Previous: World War 2   Contents   Index