(06-20-2014 05:14 PM)Kittonhead Wrote:  

(06-20-2014 11:23 AM)49RFootballNow Wrote:  

(06-20-2014 05:53 AM)Kittonhead Wrote:  Japan never should have entered the war against the US. That never made sense why they did that.

Had they concentrated on China they could have overthrown the government there and installed a puppet while keeping Korea and Manchuria as territories.

In the long term the US probably would have gone for a friendly Japan with Korea and Manchuria that was a bulwark against Communism in Asia. It could have been the Japanese in Vietnam fighting Communism in the backyard instead of the US.

You can't run a war, even in 1930's China, without oil and metal; two things the Japanese certainly didn't have at home or in the lands they had conquered up to that point. When the Japanese invaded French Indochina Roosevelt imposed a scrap metal embargo against the Japanese and also closed the Panama Canal to their shipping. 75% of Japanese scrap metal and 95% of all copper (electrical wires) came from the U.S. In the Summer of '41 they added an oil embargo which would completely shut down the Japanese military and economy within months. That's why Nomura and Kurusu were still negotiating with Cordell Hull up to December 7th.

Pearl Harbor attack by Japan was then a move in desperation?

Well they certainly thought so.

Roosevelt's reaction to them taking French Indochina convinced them the U.S.'s only move if they made grabs for further resource-rich territories was going to be war; so they thought why not get the jump on us and knock our Pacific Fleet (really the better quality part of 65% of our naval strength) out of action. Then they would have a free hand to grab the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies (today's Indonesia).

In hindsight, the Japanese could have grabbed the Dutch East Indies, British Malaya and Burma, even move into British India and we'd probably have done nothing but cut off all trade with them entirely. The Pacific wasn't the war Roosevelt wanted to get into (Europe first proved that). Plus it would have been really hard to convince the American people of 1941 that they should send their sons to die to keep Britain's, France's and The Netherlands' colonies in their possession. As long as the Japanese sailed past Guam and the Philippines nicely then Roosevelt's only military option would have been to move the old battlewagons to Subic Bay and put signs up in Kanji saying "bomb here please".