Japanese Hubris in WWII

In regard to Keegan's emphasis on chance.  It seems that Parshall & Tully's dealing so much from the standpoint of Japanese leadership diminishes the idea of chance playing a very important roll.  The hubris of Japanese leadership, the fact that they at the Battle of Midway had gone "all in" whereas the Americans were back home churning out another battle fleet much better than the one facing the Japanese at Midway (something the Americans could and did do many times over, but the Japanese fleet at Midway was all there was.  They never again had a battle fleet that could match the ones the Americans were turning out in abundance.  They never even tried to match them again.). 

If all the listings of chance had gone for the Japanese instead of the Americans they may have delayed the final defeat of the Japanese, but not by much. 

When a Japanese carrier was taken back to Japan for repair, it was most likely out for the entire war.  When an American carrier was taken back to Pearl Harbor for repair, that repair would take place so quickly it could sometimes be sent back to the same battle it had limped away from. 

Carriers were no good without planes, and the Americans shot almost all the Japanese planes down.  If I remember correctly, one last attempt by the Japanese to damage an American carrier at Midway occurred when all they could put in the air were 13 planes. 

I have been reading someplace that the mindset of the Japanese and Germans was similar.  Neither had an adequate battle plan.  The idea of the Germans imagining they could conquer the Red Army by chasing it over the Urals in winter on horseback can seem Quixotic if we don't focus on all the people dying.  We excuse the Japanese from folly because Yamamoto understood that American industrial resources would eventually wear the Japanese down, but he nevertheless underestimated the Americans to a fatal degree. 

Yamamoto made his name because of his "success" at pearl harbor, but he didn't manage to damage a single carrier, and his plan was to sink them all.  That isn't success.  Also, this attack at Pearl Harbor that had the Japanese cheering back home, had the effect of pissing the Americans off so that they transformed themselves on that day from a nation that was predominately isolationist to nation that was in a brief period to become the most powerful in the world.  If Yamamoto had left Pearl Harbor alone, it is unlikely that America would have gone to war against Japan.  America was counting on its embargoes, and it is true they were hampering Japans ability to conquer the Chinese.  So instead of finding another way, or even giving up the idea of conquering China, Yamamoto took the Japanese into a war he, we are told, knew the Japanese couldn't win. 

Yamamoto's poor battle plan at Midway condemned the Japanese to early defeat.

Yes, I recall reading in the past that if in both the Japanese and German portions of World War II things gone just a little more their way, that they could have won that war, but in the stuff I've been reading recently, I don't believe that was ever going to happen.  Neither the Japanese nor the Germans had the manpower nor the resources to win.  

On underestimating America

I’m about 10% through Weinberg’s A World At Arms.  He discusses, as everyone seems to, how leaders in Germany and Japan underestimated the military potential of America.  Americans were doing that as well, and undoubtedly still do – at least according to a brief review I read in the November/December 2018 issue of Foreign Affairs: 

Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the Word’s Sole Superpower by Michael Beckley, Cornell University Press:

“. . . He does not dispute that the United States has its problems or that misguided leaders often squander its advantages.  But he points out the United States’ deep geographic, demographic, and institutional reserves give the country unique resilience.  The United States is the only great power without regional rivals.  Its companies and universities dominate the world.  And most important, Beckley argues that it has by far the best fundamentals for future economic growth, thanks to its abundant natural resources, favorable demographics, secure property rights, and lasting political institutions.  China’s growth prospects, in contrast, are ‘dismal.’. . .”

I recall being impacted by three “America’s in decline.  We are being surpassed by nation X” 

1.      The USSR.  When I went to work at Douglas Aircraft company in 1959, Engineers were sincerely debating the “better red than dead” controversy.  The majority, if I remember correctly, were leaning toward “better red.”

2.     The Arabs, especially Saudi Arabia is buying up our nation. As rich as they are we shall soon all be working for them.

3.     The Japanese.  Their work ethic is much better than ours.  We went through a number of mandatory courses learning the superior ways of the Japanese so we could better compete against Boeing and the Europeans.

4.     And now the Chinese . . . yawn.

I was watching a Youtube interview of Victor Davis Hanson in regard to his The Second World Wars, How the first global conflict was fought and won (published in 2017).  Hanson is apparently somewhat worried about North Korea having the capability of bombing our West Coast.  He worried that North Korean leaders probably didn’t understand that we don’t do “tit for tat.”  “If North Korea bombs Spokane,” be began, shaking his head.  “They might think we will bomb just Pyongyang in return, but it won’t be just Pyongyang . . .” He wore a worried expression.  The audience got the impression (or at least this viewer did) that if North Korea bombed Spokane,  North Korea would cease to exist. 

Gerhard Weinberg and Hari Seldon

On page 29 of A World at Arms, Gerhard Weinberg writes, “The personal element was Hitler’s fear of an early death for himself or, alternatively, the preference for leading Germany into war while he was still vigorous rather than aging.  Identifying Germany’s fate and future with his personal life and his role in its history, Hitler preferred to lead the country into war himself, lest his successors lack the will to do so.  He also thought of his age as a factor of importance; it is impossible to ignore his repeated extraordinary assertions in 1938 that he preferred to go to war at the age of forty-nine and in 1939 that he would rather lead his nation at the age of fifty than go to war when fifty-five or sixty years old.  In this regard one enters a realm yet to be seriously and reliably explored by psychohistorians. . . .”

I’m obviously not far into Weinberg’s book, but I’ve already encountered several comments that have puzzled me.  The above is one of them.  What Hitler is doing here is, it seems to me, little more than “counting the cost.” 

            For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace.  [From Luke 14]

I have been doing something like this for a long time in regard to my dogs.  I haven’t had normal hearing for a long time and so appreciate having a dog who can warn me of various things on hikes and more recently when Amazon or UPS is delivering a package downstairs.  Earlier last year I was counting the ages of my dogs: Ben and Duffy both turned nine.  Jessica turned three.  There was nothing physically wrong with me, and family and friends thought I would live to a hundred.  Shoot, maybe I would, in which case I might even out-live Jessica.  I was definitely slowing down, maybe the dog after Jessica should be less energetic . . . that was my thinking before one or more of my dogs knocked me down from the stairs and I ended up with a broken patella which doctors didn’t want to repair because of my age.  And while no other ailment has been discovered, I do feel less permanent and have quit worrying about what dog to get after I lose Jessica.  I think more nowadays of which one of my kids would be best to take Jessica when she outlives me.  

Don’t most of us do this sort of thing?  Do we all need psychohistorians? 

Or . . . is Gerhard Weinberg making a joke?  I haven’t heard the term “psychohistorian” since reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation.  I thought of that and Hari Seldon, but then I thought, surely not.  Surely Weinberg is being serious.  Someone I read said historians keep advancing (or something like that).  Maybe modern historians use the term (knowingly borrowed from Asimov) to refer to historians who delve into psychological elements of a major-person’s history.  Shoot, I don’t know. 

Weinberg's Men at Arms

I bought a copy of Weinberg’s book in the past, but since that time I discovered that too much hard-copy reading gives me eye-strain & so I buy a Kindle copy as well whenever one is available and read that.  I still like having a hard copy in order to use indices and more easily find references.  So I’m a long way from being paperless. 

I see from the Kindle copy that Weinberg wrote a preface to a reprint ten-years after his 1994 original; so if one orders a new copy he will have that as well.  If one orders a used copy without the 2004 preface, not to worry.  He made only minor corrections that people found in his original.  He corrected them but there is no errata for the original edition. 

My Russian friend thought that most historians of WWII writing in English neglect the Eastern Front but Weinberg apparently gives it adequate coverage.  Weinberg describes his intention to do that in his introduction. 

Weinberg also says he is not going to dwell upon the blood and guts of individual battles.  He says there are plenty of other books that do that.  Those “other books” are apparently the ones I read in regard to the Eastern Front.

Weinberg was born January 1, 1928; so he is 92 and probably more ambulatory than I am.  I read that he was in the Army (his parents fled Germany & ended up in the U.S. so Weinberg is a U.S. citizen) in Japan during the 1946-1947 occupation.  I don’t have a good sense of this occupation.  I was sent to Japan by means of the General Gordon troop ship in I think March of 1953 and from there flown to Korea in a DC-3.  At one point during the 13 months I was in Korea, I went with a group on R&R to Itami Air-Base in Japan, and from there to a town off the beaten R&R path.  So my friend and I were rubbing shoulders with a great number of Japanese a very short time after their surrender – at least it seems like a short time from my present vantage point, but at the time we gave that war no thought.  We had a new war to think about and by the time I got to Korea it was winding down.  The truce with North Korea was signed when I was on Cheju Island next to a Prison Camp.  After the truce was signed the prisoners were simply turned loose and told to make their own way to the North.  [That doesn’t sound reasonable now, but that is what we were told at the time.]  Some chose not to go north and instead to hide up on Cheju Mountain.  We could see camp fires burning up there at night. 

Slezkine's House of Government

The House of Government strikes me as a very strange book – the sort of book I vaguely recall encountering during a course I once took called “Techniques of Literary Research.”  I encountered books created by very fastidious and painfully accurate historians that comprised details that more imaginative historians could put to good use.  Slezkine isn’t completely in that mold.  He strikes me as extremely imaginative, especially in the way he adapts his (IMHO) poorly supported Apocalyptic ideas to the inner workings of the Soviet Revolution.  And yet he also provides page after page of details about individuals the average (or at least this average) reader will have no interest in, but a “more serious” (?) historian might. 

And so it is strange to see the bulk of his book devoted to what used to be called scholarly “mule work” while the rest is the elevated literary part that supports Slezkine’s desire to write something more like a novel. 

On continuing to read House of Government

    The skins of the pod
    Burn away one at a time
    As I hurtled earthward
    Once more – this flinging
    Of myself is as old as I
    Sleeping through the routine
    And the darkness

    Listening for the proximity
    Warning – not hearing as
    Well as I wish – one more
    Meteor, it seems fitting
    Accepting the flesh
    And blood along with
    Iron Pyrite.  Sparkles

    Now appear though I
    Am still quite high.
    Below they know and fire
    At where they think I am.
    My shield, if it works will
    Deflect it all as it has
    Before.  I search my

    Helmet display – see the
    Dnieper further away than I
    Thought.  I’ll stretch though
    With One good leg enough to
    Reach it and then deploy in
    Something I expect will sail
    Me sleeping into the Black sea.