The navy itched to demonstrate its parity/superiority to the white powers.
They were desperate. The oil embargo + the Dutch East Indies also embargoing them + the Americans planning to build ten fleet carriers in 1942 and a hell of a lot of escorts and battleships meant they had limited time left to act before they got crushed. Roosevelt was clearly moving towards war with Japan, as could be interpreted from his rhetoric, rebasing the Pacific fleet to Pearl Harbour, the oil embargo, US volunteers in China, B-17s being deployed to the Philippines and the gargantuan military build-up. The US negotiating position was pretty heavy-handed too, demanding unilateral withdrawal from China, Manchuria and Indo-China.
Plus Japan fought well at Midway and lost the battle due to factors beyond their control - the US having broken their codes and the dive-bombers appearing out of a cloud at the absolute worst time.
Do you think it was luck that german and japanese codes were broken? Just one of the myriad of easily predictable weaknesses the axis leaders had to ignore before embarking on their doomed adventure.
When the US makes a “heavy-handed” demand that Japan leave China, it is not merely a question of the morality, of whose right it is to occupy the country. The real question is whose will is backed by superior might. And clearly, the japanese miscalculated. They were as wrong as one can be, and even they knew it. Surprised Drmanhattan didn’t give that yamamoto quote: ‘“In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain, I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.”
One can talk of the memory tsushima, of the luck of the dive bombers (forgetting all the things that did go wrong), of the parallel operations, of the crippled aircraft carriers that didn’t get swapped, but really, the whole war was stupid and decided before it began. If it wasn’t midway, it would have been another, even more dominating one. I think nimitz was crazy to give battle at merely better than even odds. Why give them the ‘decisive battle’ they want for some useless bait like midway, literally the only way they could possibly eke out a limited win, when the alternative is far more punishing for them? Just sit back, strangle shipping with ironed out sub torpedoes, fight purely training & PR battles until every battle odds estimate reads north of 95%. The fabian strategy doesn’t require weakness.
Do you think it was luck that german and japanese codes were broken? Just one of the myriad of easily predictable weaknesses the axis leaders had to ignore before embarking on their doomed adventure.
How could they possibly know that their codes would be broken? What could they have done about it? If you told Hitler 'oh the Poles have stolen one of your enigma machines and somehow managed to get it to England, a submarine will get boarded and they'll capture another one + the Allies have unprecedented electronic technologies you don't know about...' what is he supposed to do? They did add an extra rotor in '43. How is this remotely foreseeable? It's just bad luck, like when their magnetic mines got captured and countermeasures developed shortly after being deployed. There were many legitimate Axis errors like the bad plan at Midway, or Germany not fully mobilizing its economy sooner. Failing to perceive massive Allied codebreaking operations is not one of them. If the Cold War went hot in the 1980s and the US lost because of this guy, that's not really a US error (though trusting a felon with such important information is a dubious decision): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Anthony_Walker
Japan rolled a dice stacked against them and lost, they thought they had no other choice but to go in at Pearl Harbour or otherwise they'd certainly get crushed.
It is worth noting that the Japanese were not actually aware that carriers were in the South Pacific until the Battle of Coral Sea. They initially assumed that land-based aircraft were attacking them in a prior operation.
I can hardly fault them for thinking that maybe, just maybe, the carriers of the US were engaging in their own operations and it was just happenstance that the two forces happened to meet. But it's the job of military planners to assume the worst, so the Japanese definitely failed to be good analysts in that regard.
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Notes -
They were desperate. The oil embargo + the Dutch East Indies also embargoing them + the Americans planning to build ten fleet carriers in 1942 and a hell of a lot of escorts and battleships meant they had limited time left to act before they got crushed. Roosevelt was clearly moving towards war with Japan, as could be interpreted from his rhetoric, rebasing the Pacific fleet to Pearl Harbour, the oil embargo, US volunteers in China, B-17s being deployed to the Philippines and the gargantuan military build-up. The US negotiating position was pretty heavy-handed too, demanding unilateral withdrawal from China, Manchuria and Indo-China.
Plus Japan fought well at Midway and lost the battle due to factors beyond their control - the US having broken their codes and the dive-bombers appearing out of a cloud at the absolute worst time.
Do you think it was luck that german and japanese codes were broken? Just one of the myriad of easily predictable weaknesses the axis leaders had to ignore before embarking on their doomed adventure.
When the US makes a “heavy-handed” demand that Japan leave China, it is not merely a question of the morality, of whose right it is to occupy the country. The real question is whose will is backed by superior might. And clearly, the japanese miscalculated. They were as wrong as one can be, and even they knew it. Surprised Drmanhattan didn’t give that yamamoto quote: ‘“In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain, I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.”
One can talk of the memory tsushima, of the luck of the dive bombers (forgetting all the things that did go wrong), of the parallel operations, of the crippled aircraft carriers that didn’t get swapped, but really, the whole war was stupid and decided before it began. If it wasn’t midway, it would have been another, even more dominating one. I think nimitz was crazy to give battle at merely better than even odds. Why give them the ‘decisive battle’ they want for some useless bait like midway, literally the only way they could possibly eke out a limited win, when the alternative is far more punishing for them? Just sit back, strangle shipping with ironed out sub torpedoes, fight purely training & PR battles until every battle odds estimate reads north of 95%. The fabian strategy doesn’t require weakness.
How could they possibly know that their codes would be broken? What could they have done about it? If you told Hitler 'oh the Poles have stolen one of your enigma machines and somehow managed to get it to England, a submarine will get boarded and they'll capture another one + the Allies have unprecedented electronic technologies you don't know about...' what is he supposed to do? They did add an extra rotor in '43. How is this remotely foreseeable? It's just bad luck, like when their magnetic mines got captured and countermeasures developed shortly after being deployed. There were many legitimate Axis errors like the bad plan at Midway, or Germany not fully mobilizing its economy sooner. Failing to perceive massive Allied codebreaking operations is not one of them. If the Cold War went hot in the 1980s and the US lost because of this guy, that's not really a US error (though trusting a felon with such important information is a dubious decision): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Anthony_Walker
Japan rolled a dice stacked against them and lost, they thought they had no other choice but to go in at Pearl Harbour or otherwise they'd certainly get crushed.
I think the blob says how they could have known:
_
If my adversary has broken my codes then I'd avoid orchestrating a large military operation that relies on my adversary not knowing it is a trap.
It is worth noting that the Japanese were not actually aware that carriers were in the South Pacific until the Battle of Coral Sea. They initially assumed that land-based aircraft were attacking them in a prior operation.
I can hardly fault them for thinking that maybe, just maybe, the carriers of the US were engaging in their own operations and it was just happenstance that the two forces happened to meet. But it's the job of military planners to assume the worst, so the Japanese definitely failed to be good analysts in that regard.
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