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The Japanese navy's most experienced pilots and air crews were assigned to Plan Z - as the operation was known - and technicians were put to work developing armor-piercing bombs and torpedoes that would run true in the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor. And in November 1940, a handful of obsolescent British torpedo planes had devastated the Italian fleet as it lay at anchor at Taranto.Ī diplomatic ballet - designed to mask Japanese intentions - unfolded in Tokyo and Washington as Yamamoto prepared for the attack. fleet exercises, Pearl Harbor had been successfully "raided" by carrier planes one quiet Sunday morning. Surprise was a cardinal principle of Japanese military doctrine, and such attacks had come at the beginning of wars with China and Russia. There was ample precedent for such a strike. In January 1941, Yamamoto began planning a surprise air strike against the American battleships and carriers as they lay at anchor at Pearl Harbor. Pacific Fleet in Hawaiian waters can be destroyed." Having seen America's industrial might at first hand as a naval attache in Washington, he declared that Japan had no hope of winning a war with the United States "unless the U.S. Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of the Combined Fleet, conceived of a much more daring plan. Once they had consolidated their conquests, they would confront the advancing Americans in a climatic sea battle in the Central Pacific.
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Japan's original strategy called for an attack on the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia, a rich source of oil and other raw materials) with a possible strike at American bases in the Philippines to protect their flank. Japanese policy had its own dynamic, and American concessions were regarded as weaknesses that invited further demands. On the other hand, it is doubtful whether concessions would have placated Japan. Never believing that Japan would commit national suicide by going to war with the Western powers, Roosevelt was convinced that through firmness he could force the Japanese to moderate their course. As a result of popular idealization of China, the United States allowed the keystone of its Far Eastern policy to be based upon a issue extraneous to its basic interests: the integrity of China. The control of Manchuria, China and Southeast Asia was absolutely essential to Japan's existence as a first-rate industrial power.Īmerican policy, on the other hand, confused reality with morality. Surely, said the Japanese, the United State must understand that as a modern industrial nation Japan must have access to raw materials and markets. To the Americans, it meant a cessation of Japanese aggression in China and elsewhere to the Japanese it meant an East Asia dominated by Japan. Both wanted peace, but they had different definitions of what constituted peace. War resulted from a miscalculation by Japan and the United States of the intentions of each other.