"Why Japan Really Lost The War" Topic

"It's no secret that Japan was, shall we say, 'economically disadvantaged' in her ability to wage war against the Allies. However, the sheer, stunning magnitude of this economic disparity has never ceased to amaze me. So, just go give you an idea of the magnitude of the mismatch here, I decided to compile a few statistics. Most of them are taken from Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" (which, among other things, contains an excellent analysis of the economic forces at work in World War II, and is an all-around great book) and John Ellis' "World War II: A Statistical Survey." In this comparison I will focus primarily on the two chief antagonists in the Pacific War: Japan and the United States. They say that economics is the 'Dismal Science'; you're about to see why….

By the time World War II began to rear its ugly head (formally in 1939 in Poland, informally in China in 1937), America had been in the grips of the Great Depression for a decade, give or take. The net effect of the Depression was to introduce a lot of 'slack' into the U.S. economy. Many U.S. workers were either unemployed (10 million in 1939) or underemployed, and our industrial base as a whole had far more capacity than was needed at the time. In economic terms, our 'Capacity Utilization' (CapU), was pretty darn low. To an outside culture, particularly a militaristic one such as Japan's, America certainly might have appeared to be 'soft' and unprepared for a major war. Further, Japan's successes in fighting far larger opponents (Russia in the early 1900's, and China in the 1930's) and the fact that Japan's own economy was practically 'superheating' (mostly as the result of unhealthy levels of military spending -- 28% of national income in 1937) probably filled the Japanese with a misplaced sense of economic and military superiority over their large overseas foe. However, a dispassionate observer would also note a few important facts. America, even in the midst of seemingly interminable economic doldrums, still had:…"
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Amicalement
Armand

It's easy they Sucked! They had a decent Navy and Air arm but no way to replace loses, they counted on the United States being a paper tiger like Russia was. Their army was crap but filled with men of conviction but not vision a poor combination. They had really poor infantry weapons and even worse armor. Their experience in warfare was fighting the Chinese and not an industrial nation.

Ding ding ding, give the man a prize!!

No oil, no rubber, no steel or any other strategic materials. Plenty of hubris. The Navy always knew it was a lost cause but the Army was almost religious in their belief of their moral superiority and fighting spirit and that would be enough to make the US think about a negotiated peace rather than fight it out.

Interesting read.

Yes, but! The Japanese of that day would not have considered the economics to be important. What mattered to them was the spirit, morale, and elan on their soldiers. In their way of thinking, the soldier mattered more than the equipment or the supplies.

(Similar concepts were held by the U.S. Marines and the WWII Italians.)

Looking at the numbers I was kind of surprised at the large number of Japanese submarines made. I know they had some success in the Pacific but it is not talked about at the same level as German U-Boat proficiency and the US vs Japan comparative numbers are quite close in that one category. Good, brief article accessing the economic elements of the war in the Pacific.

Looking at the numbers I was kind of surprised at the large number of Japanese submarines made.

The problem there was a mix of doctrinal, leadership/psychological and geographic.

Doctrinally, the Japanese didn't build lots of big 'fleet boats' (designed for long range and good speed) like the US did. So their boats were less capable of taking the fight to the US, while US boats could operate clear into the Sea of Japan and kill Japanese coastal freighters.

Leadership/psych-wise, the Japanese didn't go after US logistics, they only wanted warship kills. The US declared Unrestricted Submarine Warfare about noon on Dec7th, with hunting instructions that basically said, "anything flying a meatball flag dies." Merchant or Warship.

Geographically, the Japanese could not do anything to prevent raw materials from getting to US factories, and had a hard time preventing completed naval supplies from getting to Pearl Harbor, since there aren't any chokepoints between the West Coast and Hawaii. Just look at a map of the western pacific, there are thousands of places a sub can ambush traffic coming to Japan!

And they sucked.

No, the Japanese didn't suck. Sorry just not factual. The "cutting" edge of their armed forces were very good, effective, and in many cases very good, equipment, well trained and well led. Witness Pearl Harbor, Singapore, the Phillipines, Savo Island.

Their problem was they lacked the manufacturing and logistical base to fight a long war.

Most of the Japanese knew they couldn't win a long war with the US. That's why their whole strategy was to give us a bloody nose assuming we'd quit. They knew about our material strength. What they woefully underestimated was the strength of our morale.

After Pearl Harbor we were not going to give up until we pounded them into dust. They lost the war because they didn't understand that "they had awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve"

Cheers!

The Japanese in WWII would be a comedy if it wasn't so horribly dramatic.

The Japanese hadn't cut themselves off from the rest of the world in the Edo period, in fact they were studying western development and the leadership had a fairly good idea of how the rest of the world was doing, but Japan didn't care. But this primer allowed them to develop "rapidly" once Perry "opened them up"

The rapid development was always a bit of an uneven affair. Japan always had to make choices and for a long time it had to rely on a mix of cheap goods and aggressive export tactics to make money to invest in their industry, but Japan was still a huge importer of western goods and raw resources, as a result they had a perpetual trade deficit, which remained tolerable because despite low wages, prices of imported goods remained extremely low, giving the average Japanese more buying power than average.

Japanese industry had two major problems, the critical lack of natural resources and the fact that it could produce either commercial goods or produce weapons.

With the rapid growth of militarism they gambled on the idea that they could gain a colonial empire of their own and become a superpower, their excellent military record seemingly confirming the thesis.

The big problem was the US. Japan was aware that the US had been very actively working itself into East Asia since the early 20th century. They were after the setbacks of the Great War and the Great Depression, the only true major power in the region, the French, Dutch and British being forced to scale down military presence in the region.

So Japan came up with their own concept of manifest destiny. It would "liberate" Asia from its colonial oppressors to become a superpower that could take on their greatest enemy, the US. To do so they had to grab this colonial empire, even if it meant attacking the US first.

Note there is a bit of a logic flaw in the plan.

Japan, like Germany needed a very modern army, one that consumed vast amounts of steel and oil, resources lacking for both. They could every only win a short war, trying to go for quick, decisive victories, which they both achieved until their luck finally ran out.

The reasons for Japan's downfall are many.

They had to rely on resources which made them vulnerable and forced them to do things that were not in their strategic advantage.

The leadership was keenly aware of the problem, but they had the junior officer corps breathing down their necks, too scared to cross them, they ended up pushing the senior leadership into rash decisions, and were only able to apply the brakes when most of them had been killed in the war and ceased to be a problem.

The logic of building up to attack the US some days went completely wrong when it became "We need to attack Pearl Harbor to get the resources to attack the US …"

They meticulously planned everything until Midway where they hoped to get that decisive battle that would force the US on its knees, when it didn't happen they never recovered.

Japan tried to defeat the US by forcing them to fight tactical battles on Islands, the US fought a Strategic naval campaign. They completely diluted their military by sending their army to occupy countless islands.

Even with resources they simply never had the means to get them to their destination, wasted whatever they could feed into their industrial complex on the pacification of China and the island campaign.

More importantly their industry failed to get in line, they produced tens of thousands of aircraft, but could only ever produce a fraction of the required engines, the numbers being useless because the fuel situation was critical.

They remained myopic to the reality of the situation in the face of the destruction caused by the war. Millions displaced within Japan, their industry all but crippled, devastated cities and a crippled infrastructure, not to mention two atomic bombs, yet they wanted to believe the US would be equally exhausted and would rather sit at the negotiation table than invade Japan and if they did, the Japanese people would fight to the very end.

Japan was doomed to lose at some point. Everything was stacked against them.

Agree with the above – Japan beat the Russkies in 1905 but the US was not the Romanoff Empire!

…the large number of Japanese submarines made…

…and then they dumped their worst officers into subs, it wasn't seen as a prestigious arm of service.

I thought Japan lost because of the shortage of school girls trained to pilot giant robots.

Nope, I'm sure of it, they sucked!! When the Japanese did win it was because they fought a tactically inferior foe; Singapore is in my opinion a good example, same with the Philippines. In the Philippines the Japs did well until they had to pull a veteran division out they started to do badly, it was only when that unit returned did they pick up their pace again. No the Japs had guts and spirit but they had crap for weapons and armor and had no out of the box thinking.

Its a nice summary above, & I agree. I'll also throw in that the Japanese were a few years behind the US specifically technologically. They weren't able to put out high HP aero engines until late in the war, & as the article points out, when they were able to produce better aircraft, they were drowned by the sheer quantity of competitive or superior US aircraft that we could field, not to mention the contribution of Commonwealth forces. While the Zero had good performance at the time, it did so by sacrificing quite a bit to get there, & the air frame didn't have the "space" or capacity to be upgraded to keep it competitive (as opposed to the Spitfire, FREX, which gained something like 100mph performance over the course of the war). Finally, when they were able to produce competitive aircraft, the experienced aircrews they needed were mostly dead.

With the resources Japan had, they had to make choices on where to concentrate their resources: they could have a top-rate Navy or Army, not both. So they invested in the Navy & kept the Army largely equipped with less than competitive weapons compared to the US, because their army was structured to fight the Chinese, which were in an even worse situation. It was better to produce thousands of light tanks as opposed to hundreds of medium tanks, because any tank is good when your enemy doesn't have much to counter them with.

Damon.

It's nice to know that many people here would not dare let the facts influence their opinions! BTW did the Japs fight in the European or Pacific Theater? Cheers!

PS. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of WWII Vets and Historians that would disagree that the Long Lance Torpedo, Zero, and other weapons, like the bombers that sank the Prince of Wales sucked. And I doubt that many US Navy Vets would tell you that their Kamikazes sucked.

True some weapons like their tanks were inferior, but tanks were never a major factor in the Pacific war. The US M3 was more than a match for most of them and MacArthur had a 100 in 2 Battalions so why didn't he throw them back into the sea?

The US fought long and hard to beat Japan, so to say that they sucked insults a lot of Vets!

Both my Grandfathers fought in the Pacific both Marines. They had nothing but contempt and hate for the Japs, the only good thing they said was the Japs didn't quit. Their rifles sucked, there machine guns sucked, so did their pistols.

I never claimed the Japanese were weak or bad, they made some very shrewd decisions and their military campaign of 1941-1942 is highly impressive and the Japanese did their best to fight the enemy tooth and nail till the bitter end.

To a novice of WWII history Japan may come across as the reverse of Germany. How could a nation like Japan achieve so much, while most people have a cursory look at Tigers and ME 262 jets and can't figure why Germany could ever lose and the notion that the Allies just barely manage to inch out a victory.

In reality they had excellent equipment, and developed sound modern tactics and strategies that served them well in the early phase, catching their enemies unaware, once the war went into prolongation, their inability to keep on feeding the meatgrinder did them in.

To have a good, well trained fighting force is one thing, having the industry and supply system to sustain it under the conditions you might end up facing is another.

The actual equipment doesn't matter all that much, most advantages get buffed out by the enemy adapting to the problem. The US had a massive advantage in naval and air firepower while the Japanese simply dug in deep. The Japanese had some of the best fighters that could turn on half a dime, US pilots simply refused to get suckered into dogfighting and would mug them with a high speed fly by shooting, letting .50 cals and the odd 20mm do the job on a plane that usually lacked armour and self-sealing tanks.

The Japanese were strong believers in modernity and innovation, the idea that Japanese officers were all nostalgic wanna-be samurai is a post-war myth, invented both by post-war Japan and Hollywood. Japanese officers listened to jazz music, loved the modern age and if they did look back at their martial past it was much the same as many officers in other countries did, looking back at their glorious past. Horrocks of XXX Corps believed that if the Germans broke through in the Ardennes, he would meet them at Waterloo, that doesn't make him a crazy weird nostalgic of the Napoleonic era …

We still have major gaps in our understanding of Japan before and during the war, but what little we know of today shows that Japan was very aware of the problems it faced and much of their decisions were very rational and carefully weighed. The fact that reality has a way to kick sand in your best laid plans is a factor you can't always plan for. Japan did meticulous work until 1942 when it failed to destroy the US fleet as planned and everything seemed to escape their control. Yet they were still able to fight and pose a serious threat, though like Germany once they went past tipping point they could only make small tactical gains, while losing the overall strategic campaign.

The Japanese were out-fought and out-produced. We broke their codes which aided the former and because of the latter, we had access to advanced technologies which also fed into the former.

Read your histories. Too many countries go to war because they 'wanna' and anyone who cites cold hard facts is silenced as a defeatist. Such as Japan.

Their ground force equipment, e.g. Infantry weapons and AFVs, as already mentioned were, junk in most cases.

The USA's ability to again to out produce and out fight. The IJFs had never understood logistics.

Their samurai spirit, bushido code, loyalty to the emperor, fight to the death, Banzai tactic, etc. can only take you so far.

Their methods seemed to cost them as much or more losses to non-combat deaths. Than that were actually killed by Allied weapons.

Good thread Patrick!… as usual…

Amicalement
Armand

Bushido code combined with the lousy equipment they had was "suicide by war declaration".

They lost in the Pacific because 75% of their ground forces weren't in the Pacific.

50% of their land forces were in China and 25% more were on the Burma front.

They had a reasonable navy but one it had taken them 30 years to accumulate. They had insufficient capacity to replace its losses.

I agree with Lee494. The Japanese fought well and hard until almost the very end of the war. Any U.S. Marine who landed on any Pacific island will tell you that they weren't push-overs. As Armand mentioned, they suffered from a poor manufacturing base, and a dependence on strategic materials that could easily be interrupted by enemy submarines. They also suffered from a badly fractured high command with very different objectives, and because the Emperor was largely a symbolic leader, there was nobody to set national priorities, so the inter-service rivalries between the Army and Navy lead to the wasting of resources that they had. We were fortunate, or they were unfortunate, depending on your perspective, that the U.S. was emerging from the Great Depression and had industrial capacity to spare.

4th Cuirassier,

The Japanese put as may forces on islands as they could fit or support. This led to their defeat in piecemeal island battles where they had no chance of logistical support, initiative, reinforcements or maneuver.

Based on what the Russians did to them in Manchuria I doubt if they would have held up very well against a combined arms assault by the US and their allies.

I think that overall the only strategy they had, to delay and make the US pay a price, worked out fairly well. Each successive battle from Guadalcanal was more costly culminating with Okinawa which was a larger invasion than Normandy. The causality figures were so high on Iwo Jima Roosevelt did not release them to the public until after the battle was over.

It's hard to convince the people you are winning when their kids are dying in larger and larger numbers. They need convincing because they were paying for the war too and the War Bond drive before Iwo Jima didn't go very well. The people's will to fight was starting to waver.

The Japanese only hope of a "victory" was to defeat the will of the people like VN did in 1975. You can do that without winning a major military victory, especially if the enemy propaganda machine is actually on your side.

Wolfhag