JAPANESE STRATEGIC FAILURES IN THE SPRING OF 1942 Essay

To begin with, FDR characterizes Japan and the nature of attack. FDR shows how the Japanese are Deceptive and cowardly. FDR shows how the Japanese are Deceptive because they " . . . contained no threat or hind of war or of armed attack.” (4). This evidence presented shows how the Japanese figuratively stabbed us in the back and didn't even give the U.S a chance to counter the Japanese forces. This leads to the other way FDR characterized Japan and the nature of the attack. By saying this FDR means that Japanese didn't want any chance that the U.S would be able to retaliate. This

Assisting its European allies in the war against the Nazi’s, the U.S. was focusing much of its attention on the Atlantic and European theatre. During this time most of the United States was focusing on the war planes and sending soldiers to help fight. With the focus being almost entirely on the Atlantic the U.S. Navy was slowly cannibalizing the Pacific fleet to help block shipping lanes and fight the German U-Boats that were ravaging the Atlantic coastlines and shipping lanes. With the war raging on so far to our east and at the time, no viable threat laid to our west. During this year diplomatic peace talks had begun with the Japanese in the attempt to strengthen our relationships with non allied countries in the western pacific. The Japanese on the other hand had a different idea of things to come. Prior to 1941, the Japanese thought that if a war were to begin that the United States would be their only enemy, however, Japan's entry into the Tripartite Alliance and the United States' aid commitments to Britain had created a new international line-up which made previous Japanese naval planning obsolete. [1] With previous planning now obsolete a new concept to include war against the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands was now a necessity. In January of 1941 Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander-in-chief of the Japanese combined fleet conceived a plan of a surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl

What happened during this battle? The Japanese really practiced and prepared carefully for their attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Battle of the Philippine Sea was the end of Japanese competiveness in the air. This Battle gave way to the United States’ ability to project its military power further into the heart of Japan with little to no resistance from the Japanese Fleet in the form of aerial warfare. It also left the Japanese desperate to find new ways of fighting American naval forces in ways other than the standard convention. The Battle of the Philippine Sea was “not the decisive battle in World War II”7; however, it did help accelerate the United States’ takeover of the auxiliary islands with the destruction of Japanese conventional air warfare.

Japan during the 1940’s was a nation that prided itself on the concept of never surrendering. It was something that they took fierce and obsessive pride in. Their culture dictated that they are never to give up, even if they fought until every single man,woman, and child living in Japan was slaughtered, they would never surrender. This doctrine was one of the key deciding factors that influenced Truman in making the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Several weeks before the Atomic bomb was dropped, The Untied States of Military issued a warning to the Japanese government. “It warned the Japanese to surrender immediately or face ‘prompt and utter destruction.” (Yes! Harry Truman’s Simple Decision) Unfortunately, a mere two weeks before the first atomic bomb dropped, the Japanese prime minister publically dismissed the warning and refused to surrender. Even after the bombing of Hiroshima, the Japanese government refused to stand down. Even though they had suffered over 225,000 civilian casualties in the attack, the Japanese military refused to surrender. It took until the second bombing of Nagasaki to finally force the Japanese to surrender on American

Despite all the success Japan had early in the war, they did not do as much damage to the United States Pacific fleet as they would have like to have done. This gave America a false sense of security at the time when Japan was preparing to take stronger action. Rear Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s plan was to draw in the remaining American ships into an area where they could be attacked and destroyed by a much greater number of Japanese vessels. Admiral Yamamoto thought that if Japan captured valuable territory like the Midway Islands that the United States could not afford to give up, he could destroy the remaining American ships with ease because the Americans would have no supply chain.

………Japan plan a attack that was the turning point in the war, just not in the way they expected. The battle of midway was supostto take out Americas already weekend nave. In the end it failed they tried a sneak attack which back fired on them losing more than they gained. The battle of midway was japans down fall.

Years ahead of the war, the Japanese leadership identified that they could not militarily defeat the Russian Empire, but believed a series of quick victories would help force the Russian Empire to negotiate a favorable end to the conflict. This belief helped craft a plan to win key military

would surely lose with how strong America's navy was. Luckily for America Japan had no

A year before the US placed the embargo of aircraft and aircraft parts against Japan, the US Pacific Fleet was in California but a year after we placed the embargo against Japan President Roosevelt ordered the fleet to be moved to Pearl Harbor as a show of American power (Doc C). When Japan seized southern French Indo-China in July of 1941, Roosevelt responded by freezing Japanese assets in the United States and ending sales of oil to Japan. Japan chose to continue its diplomatic talks with the United States while at the same time secretly preparing for a coordinated assault throughout the Pacific. Japan’s leaders hoped that a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor would destroy American resolve and cripple the American navy for at least six months, giving Japan time to consolidate its new empire

The Japanese had several victories in the Pacific, it seemed as if they were unstoppable. For example, Guam

Hart (2007) describes the Pearl Harbor incident as a failed “level of naval preparedness” due to the disregard by Admiral Kimmel of the warning signs sent from the White House. The U.S. Navy believed that the Japanese would not dare make an assault on U.S. soil, nor did they have the technology to perform an attack across the 4,000 miles of blank sea. This egotistical decision making, or the lack of, had devastating effects that consequently led the U.S. into declaring war on Japan the following

However, it can be argued that by not seriously dealing with this threat until the 1940's, America had left things too late and faced an opponent who would not back down. Japan was a country of

suffered a major defeat at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet, took advantage of the situation the U.S. was put in after its losses during Pearl Harbor (“Japs Risk Large Naval Units...”). With the backbone of U.S. Pacific Fleet torn out, Japan made several attempts to dominate the Pacific. Japan was anxious to settle their differences with the U.S., so they began risking large naval units in Pacific battles. An article posted in the Los Angeles Time, “Japs Risk Large Naval Units in Blows at U.S.” says, “For the sixth time in six months Japan made a deadly bid to capture the mastery of the Pacific, and for the sixth time she has failed after paying a price that is fast becoming prohibitive,” (“Japs Risk Large Naval Units...”). This article was posted days after the Battle of Midway, on June 7th, 1942 reflecting the actions of the Japanese Navy in the previous months. The Japanese were anxious to pounce on the weakened U.S. after Pearl Harbor, backing their attacks with large naval units. The Japanese felt that they needed to take over Midway Island in order to claim dominance over the U.S. in the Pacific.

Although the United States had begun a late rearming in the 1930s, the Japanese remained convinced that in a naval battle, their ships, planes and personnel were just as modern and plentiful, if not better than what the United States had