Attack on Pearl Harbor Read Online Free PDF

seaplanes, medium bombers, and submarines. For the fleet, all that would be needed would be facilities in home waters.
    This strategy was exploded when it was decided to invade and hold the forward resource areas in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Now, the Navy was being asked to take and hold islands thousands of miles from Japan. Under these new circumstances, the other primary reason for minimizing development of remote bases came to the fore: lack of resources, coupled with a lack of priority.
    The Japanese economy was under a severe strain. They had been at war with China since 1931. Japan was smaller than the United States, in land, population, and resources. Remarkably, Japan had nearly matched US military expenditures during the interwar years with an economy no more than 15% as large. However, there was little remaining slack in the economy, and few civilian production facilities left to convert to war production. The competition for resources with the Army meant that the Navy could not have everything it needed. “The IJN was hard into the stops on the nation’s total steel supply,” critical for ammunition and ship production. 61
    Under those circumstances, and in accordance with their national psychology, the Japanese chose to invest in the means to attack rather than the means to defend and sustain. This makes sense on a superficial level: if the forces created to empower the attack did not succeed, any infrastructure of stores or facilities on remote bases could not reverse a setback in the Final Decisive Battle.
    This logic holds only if the enemy fights the type of war that you expect, that you want him to fight. If the enemy should operate otherwise, choosing to exploit Japan’s weaknesses rather than confront its strength, then the strategy is exploded, and what was a minor weakness becomes a major handicap.
    The operation to invade Midway reflected Yamamoto’s attempt to defeat the Americans’ will to fight on his terms, with Japan on the offensive. It was to force the Americans into a decisive, morale-busting battle before the flood of new U.S. construction made the force ratios impossible. Instead, the loss of four Japanese fleet carriers made a shambles of Japanese pre-war strategies.
    With the defeat at Midway the Japanese became reactionary, waiting to oppose an American fleet that they expected to concentrate into one large mass, a reversion to Zengen Sakusen . Instead, the war became a struggle of attrition on the fringes, a war of outposts, of cruisers and destroyers and submarines and carrier raids devoid of the massive Jutland-style fleet confrontation upon which the Japanese hopes were centered. Losses were nearly equal, losses which the Americans could replace but the Japanese could not.
    Eventually, after the predicted massive American reinforcements arrived, the U.S. fleets concentrated and offered the prospect of a decisive battle, but with force ratios that the Japanese had little hope of overcoming—especially after the cruisers, destroyers, and aircraft that they had built to execute Interceptive Operations and bleed the American fleet had themselves been bled white in the war of outposts. The Marianas and Leyte became American-instigated Decisive Battles on American terms, after irreparable attrition to the Japanese forces on the periphery of the Co-Prosperity Sphere.
    The lack of forward fortifications concerned the Japanese from the outset. An American move to take the Marshalls early in the war would both threaten the flank of the Japanese drive south as well as create an early breach in Japan’s planned outer defensive arc. The Japanese felt that the Marshalls were not fortified sufficiently to thwart such a move. This was one of the considerations that argued for an initial strike against the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. 62
    Given the attitudes that resulted in minimalist facilities, it is not surprising that the Japanese had not considered the possibility that