"The Japanese were Irresistible because..." Topic

You were asked – TMP link

What made the Japanese Empire so apparently irresistible in the early days of WWII?

47% said "underprepared and poorly equipped Allied militaries"
24% said "Japanese forces were underestimated"
12% said "Japanese had benefit of surprise"

It was the trousers.

Both of the first two are correct…

The Western powers always underestimated the Asians – wee bit o' racism there.

This lead to ill prepared defenses in the colonies.

I think it should always be noted the colonial powers in the far east were already defeated or neutralised in Europe, the US being an exception.The British were stretched by their campaigns in the middle east.There was additionally a lot of distance from the parent countries to these remote colonies.
Also, the Japanese had been brainwashing their population in a sort of Neo-Bushido way of thinking, which made them highly motivated and confident.

> The Western powers always underestimated the Asians – wee bit o' racism there.

Not going to argue the Western allies were racist – but so were the Japanese and they paid for it in spades starting just a few short months after Pearl Harbor.

Japanese were way more racist. They considered Chinese and Koreans as sub-humans and treated them that way.

Anyone interested in why the Japanese were so successful need go no further than a close reading of the Malaya/Singapore campaign. A substantially outnumbered Japanese force with strictly limited logistical support under General Yamashita succeeded in overrunning Malaya and capturing the huge fortress of Singapore in 69 days, invading Malaya on 8 December 1941 and securing the surrender of Singapore on 15 February 1942.

Yamashita completely out-generaled Percival.

B

There is some body of work on why surprise attacks work so well so often, which suggests that there is, psychologically, a very substantial barrier between not-fighting and fighting.

It is usually examined at the level of the individual. But I expect that it also accumulates in military hierarchies and societies as a whole.

An individual who is already adapted to fighting, is already emotionally and rationally on the fighting side of the divide, has a great advantage over an individual who is on the not-fighting side emotionally and rationally.

None of the actions of the fighting individual will fit into normal action-reaction paradigms expected by those who are not fighting, and so the not-fighting individual won't know how to react to actions already witnessed, nor how to anticipate the next actions of the fighting individual. Until the mindset is shifted, the not-fighting individual will be stuck in a sort of paralysis, trying to gather enough information to make sense of what's going on, rather than acting on what has already been observed.

The scenes in Fury where the new guy doesn't shoot his gun because he doesn't understand what's going on around him, and just kind of gapes at the noise and flashing lights rather than participating, is actually a reasonable illustration of the phenomenon.

It's not only contributes to the success of surprise attacks, but also to veteran formations vs. green formations, and to rapidly escalating the violence of a response beyond proportion to the original stimulus -- in any case you have one side that already has a clear understanding that the fighting paradigm is what's going on, the other other that doesn't start with that understanding, and has to get to that understanding before any useful decisions can be made.

Looking at Singapore in particular, there seems to be an institutional version of this going on. Percival and the British hierarchy just didn't have a wartime mindset. Maybe a policing the colony mindset, maybe a "they'd never dare to try" mindset, but not an "oh sh!t we better be ready for a real fight" way of thinking.

The Japanese in 1941 had already been actively at war for several years. They were fully acclimated to the "oh sh!t we better be ready for a real fight" way of thinking. That provides a very significant advantage.

At least that's my read of it all…

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

Japanese were way more racist. They considered Chinese and Koreans as sub-humans and treated them that way.

I'm not sure how one would measure the degree of racism with a particular population, especially as it applies to populations of other countries. That said, I agree that the Japanese held the Chinese and Koreans in complete contempt, and the repercussions of that continue to this day.

Mk 1's point is apt too. The militaries of the countries with large colonial empires (e.g. France and the U.K., but also to a lesser extent, the U.S.) seem to have tended to sink into what I call a "constabulary mindset." That is: "We may, from time to time, be called on to suppress some minor, poorly-armed insurgency, or border incursion, but we have better armed troops and better technology, so we won't have any major difficulty. Damned shame that the polo match will need to be rescheduled." Those armies were in for a rude shock when, for instance, they ran into Boers armed with modern rifles and artillery; or Japanese, whose navy and naval aviation was as good, if not better, than their own. Interestingly, the Japanese seem to have fallen into the same trap – having beaten the Russians in 1905 and over-run China, starting in 1931, the Japanese got it into their heads that they were invincible, and that the U.S. would crumble just as Russia and China had.