Pearl Harbor
- History Fix Podcast
- 2 hours ago
- 23 min read
Episode 142: Why Japan Attacked Pearl Harbor, Seemingly Out of Left Field, and Involved Itself in World War II
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“Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan… No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. I believe I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.” That was the voice of US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt speaking on December 8th, 1941, the day after the December 7th attack on Pearl Harbor in which the US Pacific fleet was damaged and 2,400 Americans lost their lives. As FDR said it would, the day, December 7th, today, does live in infamy. The attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan was a defining moment in American and world history. In fact, most would argue that it was this single less than 2 hour event, this attack, that prompted the US to finally enter World War II, a war that desperately needed their help. But, World War II, wasn’t that being fought in Europe against Hitler and the Nazis? What does Japan have to do with anything? Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and this is History Fix where I tell surprising true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. World War II is a little confusing because it’s almost like there were two different World War IIs happening at the same time. There was the European Theater which we mostly think about in the western world at least, Nazi Germany and all that, and then there was the Pacific Theater, Japan. To be honest, I’ve never fully understood how or why Japan was involved. What did Japan have to do with Nazi Germany? And, more importantly, why would Japan, seemingly out of left field, attack the United States which wasn’t even involved in the war at the time. None of it’s really ever made sense to me. But that’s, of course, because I never bothered to actually learn about what was happening with Japan leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack. So, if you’re like me, then it’s time we finally fix that. Now, because I’m admittedly not an expert, I brought in someone who is to help me tell this story.
Quin: My name is Quin Cho. I am a fellow at Pacific Atrocities Education. This past year, I've written a book about the Kwantung Army. It's entitled The Rise of the Kwantung Army, Japan's Empire in Manchuria to 1932. Prior to this year, I also was an intern at Pacific Atrocities Education and wrote a book about the Burma campaign of World War II entitled, Competing Empires in Burma, a chronicle of the China-Burma-India theater of World War II. I was a student at uh USC where I graduated summa cum laude after double majoring in history and international relations. I've been interested in history for a very long time, ever since I was a child. It's a very strong passion for me, especially second World War military history.
Shea: Yeah, absolutely. I'm fairly knowledgeable about World War II. I've done a lot of research and I've covered it in kind of different ways on my show, but I find myself lacking a lot in the Asian part, the Pacific theater and the Asian involvement in that war. And I think that if I am, a lot of other people probably are too, a lot of Americans at least, or people in the West are probably, you know, we're a little more familiar with the European part of that war. But as far as what was happening in Asia and how Asia got involved, I don't think many people know a lot about. So can you tell me a little, what was actually happening in Asia, you know, with Japan and China and whoever else may have been involved before World War II started? What was going on over there that would ultimately lead to their involvement?
Quin: There's still historiographical arguments to be made about when exactly World War II started. And I think that the Asian in the Asian theater, you could certainly date it back to 1937 or 1931. But even before these dates, you can see the roots of a conflict brewing in the region. So you have several key trends. I would say one, especially after 1911 and the Chinese revolution that toppled the Qing dynasty, which was China's old empire. And it was based on the dynastic system of the kind of emperors and their successors was the rise of Chinese nationalism, which was kind of progressively making its way northwards, especially after the 1920s and the Northern Expedition of 1926, in which the Chinese Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang (KMT), and its armed force under its command, the National Revolutionary Army advanced north against a variety of different warlords that were in ensconced and entrenched in uh key regions, but were nevertheless uh rooted out. As these forces began making their way north, they began threatening Japanese interests in places such as Manchuria or the three eastern provinces as it's also called, which are respectively Fangtian, Jilin, and Heilongjiang.
Shea: To recap, Quin traced the roots of what was happening in Asia leading up to World War II all the way back to 1911. In 1911, a revolution in China put an end to the monarchy, the Qing dynasty that was in charge there. This was a turning point in Chinese government, much as both the American Revolution and the French Revolution had been. The old way, the imperial monarchy, was out and the new way was in. And that new way was the Republic of China which came to be characterized by a strong sense of nationalism. So, to be clear, nationalism is not a form of government. China changed from a monarchy to a republic. Nationalism is more of an ideology, a way of thinking, that stresses loyalty and devotion to the nation over everything else. Because of the nature of that way of thinking, what happens with nationalism is the country tends to see itself as better than other countries, superior. There’s this superiority complex that emerges. And so, when that superiority emerges with the new Republic of China and the Chinese Nationalist Party which is called the Kuomintang (quo-min-tong) of KMT, they start to want to free the country from the economic control of neighboring countries, one of them being Japan. China is seeking independence and self-sufficiency. This party, the KMT, sends an army up into a region in the northeastern part of the country called Manchuria. But this was a problem for Japan.
Quin: The advance north of the KMT with its avowedly nationalist program, which sought to completely, or at least in word, do away with the system of extraterritoriality and the system of foreign economic dominance over China was a threat to Japan, which had for the better part of the 20s been operating through its client, uh a warlord by the name of Zhang Zuolin, to ensure its interests in the region, its economic and strategic interests, most notably.
Shea: Enter Zhang Zuolin (Jhong Zwo-lin). Zhang Zuolin (Jhong Zwo-lin) was Chinese. He was a Chinese warlord who ruled over this northeastern region of China that was called Manchuria. But Zhang Zuolin (Jhong Zwo-lin) was supported by Japan. They liked Zhang. They felt like he was prioritizing their economic interests in Manchuria. This is a problem though of course for the new Chinese Nationalist Party, the KMT. They don’t want Manchuria supporting Japanese economic interests. It’s all about China now. And so they head towards Manchuria in order to put a stop to that.
Quin: But Zhang Zuolin also began to stray from the Japanese line. He began refusing to build railways that the Japanese wanted, and he also began starting to sponsor Chinese-built railways and economic enterprises and initiatives. So these actions of both Zhang who was previously a Japanese client, and the Chinese KMT, which was a nationalist force that could potentially threaten Japan's position in Manchuria, led to a Japanese government taking power in 1927 that adhered to a policy known as the positive policy. This is the government of a man by the name of Tanaka Giichi. And the positive policy was different from a previous Japanese policy pursued by a foreign minister named Shidehara who sought to engage in a friendship policy that was more predicated on respect for China's territorial integrity and, at least in word, economic cooperation. But positive policy more openly embraced the deployment of troops and the utilization of force, if necessary, to protect Japanese interests and citizens and their rights in places like Manchuria.
Shea: So we saw a shift in Chinese government back in 1911, right? They changed from a monarchy to a republic that subscribed heavily to this ideology of nationalism. Now, in 1927, we see a shift in Japanese government in response to the changes in China. The old friendship policy is out and this new, what was called the positive policy is in. The positive policy meant that Japan began deploying troops, their army which was called the Kwantung Army, to protect their economic interests in places like Manchuria. This put people like Zhang Zuolin (Jhong Zwo-lin), the Manchurian warlord who had historically sort of sided with the Japanese, this put him in a sticky situation.
Quin: So consequently in the 20s, get uh deployments of Japanese troops to places like Jinan, where there was an incident between the Japanese and the KMT forces that were advancing northwards. And you also eventually, because of the advance of the KMT and the withdrawal of Zhang Zuolin's forces into Manchuria, you get the assassination of Zhang Zuolin who was previously a Japanese client, but a Kwantung Army colonel named Komoto Daisaku decided to blow up his train unilaterally without permission from the government in Tokyo. And he killed Zhang Zuolin with the idea that he could blame the Chinese for it. [He] used it as an excuse to invade Manchuria.
Shea: Here we have a classic, what’s called a false flag operation. This is where one group commits some sort of atrocity or attack and blames it on another group. So in this case, Japan assassinated Zhang Zuolin (Jhong Zwo-lin) and blamed it on China. Why? Because it gave them an excuse to invade China, to invade Manchuria which was a region of China. There has to be a reason, right? You can’t just attack unprovoked. Now they are justified, except not really because it’s all just deception. But they can at least pretend that they are justified.
Quin: While Komoto's gambit was unsuccessful because of his lack of planning and coordination with other elements within the Kwantung Army and even the general staff, the point still remains that the Kwantung Army, uh especially from the assassination of Zhang on forward, even before that, but especially after Zhang's assassination, was a very much a rogue, free-spirited force. And it became even more of a rogue, free-spirited force after the onset of the Great Depression and the subsequent radicalization of the Imperial Japanese Officer Corps, which was very much in tune with the suffering of the peasantry and the common man in Japan. So for reference, the Japanese silk exports declined precipitously during the Great Depression due to a decline in global demand and because of a tariff regime that was put in place in the United States in the form of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. So this really exposed the limitations of Japan's economic system and the corruption that was present within the political scene that was often in the so-called monopolies like Batsu, conglomerates. But the solution that these officers, these new radical young officers, decided to take up was to invade Manchuria, or that was at least one of the solutions and try to begin a process of expanding on the Asian mainland.
Shea: Enter the Great Depression. We think about the Great Depression a lot of times as being an American thing, a thing that only really affected the US. But, while it did mostly start in the US with the stock market crash of 1929, it affected the entire world, in a big bad way. Economic pressures because of the Great Depression led to extremist government regimes in both Germany, Hitler and the Nazis, and Japan with this rogue Kwantung army, the positive policy, and the invasion of Manchuria in order to make it part of the Japanese Empire to benefit from its resources, most notably iron and coal.
Quin: These officers, some of them, namely a fellow by the name of Ishiwara Kanji and another by the name of Itagaki Seisiro, two colonels, were made, were appointed to be staff officers in the Kwantung Army in 1928 and 1929, respectively, and began planning an attack into Manchuria that would absorb the region into the Japanese Empire. After two years of planning, they conducted a false flag attack on the South Manchuria Railway on September 18, 1931. This served as the impetus to invade Manchuria and after a series of other kinds of false flag incidents, continually expand the incident and conquer the whole region by 1932. And then after the invasion of Manchuria, in order to secure the western flank of Manchuria and the new puppet state of Manchukuo, the Kwantung Army and various other Japanese army elements on the ground initiated a series of other invasions and attempts at meddling in China's internal affairs.
Shea: The attack on the South Manchuria Railway that Quin mentioned is called the Mukden Incident and it’s significant because, while there was a whole series of false flag attacks going on, the Mukden incident in 1931 is really what allowed Japan to invade and successfully take control of Manchuria. It wasn’t anything major. Basically, Japanese forces detonated some dynamite close to a railway owned by Japan near the city of Mukden which was the capital of Manchuria. So the Japanese blew up their own railroad. Except not really, it was just a small explosion and it didn’t even damage the tracks. In fact, a train passed by the site of the explosion right afterwards and was totally fine. But, Japan blamed China for the attack and responded by invading and taking over Manchuria which became Manchukuo (Man-chew-kwo), a puppet state. A puppet state is an area with its own independent government that’s actually controlled by another government, like a puppet. Manchukuo (Man-chew-kwo) wasn’t officially Japan but it was controlled by Japan.
Now, you may be wondering, where is China in all this? Why isn’t China defending itself? Well China’s president Chiang Kai-shek (Chong Kai-Shek) is focusing on other things. But, someone is paying attention, Zhang Xueliang. Yes, you’ve heard the name Zhang before. Zhang Xueliang is the son of Zhang Zoulin who was assassinated by Japan’s Kwangtun Army in that other train related false flag attack. Zhang’s son, Zhang Xueliang (Jhong Sway-long) has taken over for his father and he’s paying attention. How is Japan getting away with all this? Why isn’t China doing anything? Zhang Xueliang (Jhong Sway-long) comes up with a plan to force China into action.
Quin: Zhang Xueliang, the son of Zhang Zuolin, who replaced him, kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek, took him hostage, and basically threatened him because he'd been following a policy in which he wouldn't resist the Japanese because he instead was trying to prosecute a war with the Communists and the other warlords that opposed him. He threatened him and said, We need to create a united front to resist Japan. And Chang obliged and thereafter he was no longer so willing to allow Japanese incursions into his country. And this led to the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese war in 1937.
Shea: This war was particularly brutal. Japan didn’t just take Manchuria, they invaded and conquered other areas in China as well and they were ruthless about it, eventually employing a sort of policy called the “three alls,” that is “kill all, burn all, loot all.” According to the National World War II Museum quote “Cities who resisted, like Nanjing in 1937, suffered the consequences, with Japanese troops slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians,” end quote. The Nanjing Massacre is an extreme example but it demonstrates the sort of force the Japanese were willing to use, even against civilians to get what they wanted. According to History.com quote “Entire families were massacred, and even the elderly and infants were targeted for execution, while tens of thousands of women were raped. Bodies littered the streets for months after the attack. Determined to destroy the city, the Japanese looted and burned at least one-third of Nanjing's buildings,” end quote.
Shea: So, so far, I mean, it sounds like these are these conflicts between Japan and China. These are so far, these are completely separate from what's happening in Europe. I mean, there's no, this is like about, it sounds to me like Japan trying to be this independent country and what's happening in China is interfering. And so they're trying to sort of conquer some of the mainland there in order to improve their own situation. Right now it's completely separate from World War II. At what point does it cross over and become one conflict?
Quin: I would say that Europe, the second world war, becomes a broader conflict, a more global conflict. I would say with the entry of the Soviet Union and the United States into the war, due to their combination of size, geostrategic location, and also industrial potential and capacity. I think that World War II in a sense was a world war prior to 1941, but it's truly completed or becomes complete as a world war after the entry of the US and the USSR into the conflict in 1941. The USSR in June after Germany invades, and then the United States in December after Japan bombs Pearl Harbor.
Shea: Why, from what you understand, why did Japan bomb Pearl Harbor? Because to me, I'm just like, that doesn't seem like a good idea, but they clearly had reasons. From what you understand, why do you think they did that?
Quin: Basically, the need to bomb Pearl Harbor stems from the desire to prevent the US Pacific fleet from intervening in Japan's strike south into Southeast Asia. So to kind of give a context as to what the strike south is, the Japanese, after invading China in a more full-fledged sense in 1937, assumed they could defeat China in the space of about three to six months. This is what the Army General Staff and Army Ministry assumed, but this was a mistaken assumption for a variety of reasons that I think could be addressed in a more in-depth way in a video about the Second Sino-Japanese War. Basically, to make a long story short, China was very big and had a significant population and an army at its disposal. And even though was, this army was somewhat inferior to what Japan had in terms of command and control, equipment, leadership and supply, it was nonetheless able to in a series of key, in a series of kind of protracted uh in a protracted struggle, kind of, uh attrit Japan's resources and formations. Japan was not able to sustain its advance into the interior of China throughout the 37, 38, 39, 40. And because they couldn't end the war in China quickly enough, Japan lost, began hemorrhaging key resources, namely rubber and tin, and eventually oil.
Shea: That’s right, what Japan assumed would be a quick takeover of Chinese territory stretched on and on, depleting resources like rubber, tin, and oil. They had seen China’s army as inferior because it was less advanced and organized than theirs. But, in doing so, they completely overlooked its obvious strength: size, numbers. Now Japan had a resource problem and, to solve it, they began venturing into southeast Asia to get what they needed. But this was a risky move because much of southeast Asia, at that time, was colonized by European countries, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands as well as the US which controlled territory in the Philippines.
Quin: After the United States put an embargo on oil in 1941, when the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy secured bases in southern French Indochina, which was a signal that Japan wanted to try and reserve the right to invade various other European colonies in Southeast Asia. The Dutch East Indies, which had a lot of oil at its disposal, British Malaya, which had rubber. Myanmar which was a supply route to China because of Burma Road and also had certain key raw materials to some degree. So in order to protect this, the kind of maritime flank of this invasion, the Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, who was uh probably Japan's one of, if not the most respected naval officers, decided that Japan needed to conduct a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, where the lion's share of the United States’ Pacific fleet was headquartered and based as of 1941.
The fear that Yamamoto and others had was if the US Pacific fleet were free to either dash across the Pacific, which was still a fear within the Imperial Japanese Navy, or alternatively, it existed as a foundation from which the US could build upon and construct a blue water Navy that significantly outdid Japan's due to it the US's significantly greater industrial capacity, which probably was at least 10 to 12 Yamamoto estimated it to be 10 times greater. There's probably even more than that. Quite honestly, due to these factors, any existing force that the US had had to be destroyed so that the US would be forced to play from behind so to speak and give Japan enough of a window to conquer Southeast Asia and basically force the US to fight their way tooth and nail across the Pacific against an enemy that had a significant force advantage… And so Yamamoto proposed the bold idea of destroying the American Pacific fleet, with a particular emphasis on the battleships. He believed that Yamamoto and others, that Japan needed to use its naval air arm embodied in the carriers, the fleet carriers, the so-called Kido Butai in the IJN, to strike Pearl Harbor in a surprise attack to disable the American fleet and demoralize the Americans so much so that maybe they would sue for peace without having the necessary heart to pursue a long protracted drawn-out struggle in the Pacific.
Shea: There’s a bit of a chess game going on here, isn’t there? Japan needs to invade Southeast Asia to get resources it’s been hemorrhaging in its war with China but invading Southeast Asia means messing with Europe and the US. Now, Europe’s pretty far away from Southeast Asia and also completely distracted by World War II at the moment, attempting to defend their actual borders from German invasion. But, you know who isn’t distracted? The United States. The United States has resisted entering the war in Europe thus far. But Yamamoto knows they won’t take kindly to Japan invading their territories in Southeast Asia. He also knows the US has a fleet of warships stationed not all that far away in Hawaii, Pearl Harbor. If he can cripple that US fleet, the biggest potential threat to their plans, this Southeast Asia idea might actually work. He hopes to cripple them physically by taking out a bunch of their battleships and whatnot but he also hopes to cripple their morale, he hopes to, as Quin said, demoralize the US so that they might not have the necessary heart to counter attack. This is where, I think, Yamamoto completely misjudged the American spirit. But he may have misjudged the physical attack too.
So let’s talk about what actually went down on December 7, 1941. And, you have to remember, this was a complete surprise attack. The mainstream belief, at least, is that the US had no idea whatsoever that this was coming. Around 8 o'clock in the morning on December 7th, the sky above the Pearl Harbor naval base on the island of Oahu in Hawaii suddenly filled with Japanese planes. Bullets and bombs began raining down on the US Pacific fleet stationed there. At 8:10 am, an 1,800 pound bomb smashed through the deck of the battleship USS Arizona and into the ammunition magazine where all of the ammunition was stored. This caused the battleship to explode and sink almost instantly with around 1,000 men trapped inside. The battleship USS Oklahoma was struck by torpedoes and also sank while carrying 400 men. The battleships were the clear focus of the attack. Every battleship at Pearl Harbor was hit but only the Arizona and the Oklahoma were completely lost. The others were able to be salvaged. In all, the attack crippled or destroyed around 20 ships and more than 300 airplanes. It also claimed the lives of around 2,400 Americans, mostly those aboard the USS Arizona but also some civilians.
I know that all sounds terrible but it wasn’t actually as crippling as Yamamoto had hoped it would be. He had gone after the battleships but, by the 1940s, the battleships weren’t as important as they had once been. It was all about the aircraft carriers now and all 3 of them stationed at Pearl Harbor were absent during the attack. They also failed to destroy storage depots, shipyards, repair shops, and submarine docks which allowed the US to make repairs and rebound very quickly from the attack.
Quin: Many people, many historians I have read believe his calculus was fundamentally flawed. For one thing, the ships at Pearl Harbor, even if you sink a lot of them, they can be kind of resuscitated because the harbor is shallow and so they're not lost permanently. There's also the fact that actually during the attack, the carriers, the three American carriers were out at sea. A couple of them were, I think, sending planes to reinforce American garrisons at Wake Island and Midway, if I'm not mistaken. There was also the fact that even with Japan striking Pearl Harbor, U.S. industrial capacity was so much greater than that of Japan that it really didn't have a chance of emerging victorious in World War II. Its margin for error was extremely limited. And in warfare, nothing is perfect. So uh you… Japan was inevitably going to lose is the line of thinking. That being said, Yamamoto's calculus was understandable, if not completely correct, because many in Japan were committed to, and completely committed to the idea of striking the United States and conducting the strike south policy and putting it into action. If you are going to do it, you do have to mitigate the American industrial advantage somehow. And the first strike on Pearl Harbor was his attempt to do so. But did he underestimate America's resolve and Americans' outrage over a surprise attack on American ships in American territory? Yeah, he did.
Shea: it seems like it was almost a gamble. Like it's either going to go in our favor and it's gonna make them leave us alone or cripple them to the point where they can't mess with what we're trying to do down here. Right? Or, what actually ended up happening is it's going to incite them to actually interfere with what we're doing. So do you think that that just came down to underestimating the U.S. as far as, you know, how how far they were willing to go to not only, you know, I don't want to say like get revenge, but like retaliate against this attack, but also just the sort of resources that the US had to be able to like, yes, that the Japanese were successful in Pearl Harbor, but the US obviously quickly bounced back and then were able to retaliate. Do you feel like that just came down to underestimation there?
Quin: I think Yamamoto himself properly or at least to some extent, understood America's industrial capacity. Maybe not entirely, but more so certainly than his colleagues in the Imperial Japanese Navy. He had been to the United States. He had studied in the United States. He understood the U.S. more than probably most Japanese at the time. Certainly in the people in the army who had primarily were focused on the Soviets and the Russians as their primary enemy or alternatively the Chinese, they've been fighting for four years. But really, I would say that Japan's road to Pearl Harbor, the road to war in Southeast Asia and with the United States and with Britain actually lies in China. The start of it is in China with the invasion of China in 1937, the various, and before that the incursions into Northern China in 1933, 35 and 36. And even before that, the Mukden incident in 1931 and the Kwantung army’s actions in 1931 and that's why I wrote the book. I think that the root of the whole war in the Asia Pacific region is the Mukden incident In China, it is the war is now taught this way. It's taught as the 14 year war Starting in 1931 and ending in 1945 and it dates from beginning as the Mukden incident, the false flag attack on the South Manchuria railway and the subsequent Kwantung army invasion of much of Manchuria.
Shea: Right. Yeah, that's so interesting because I don't think many people know the first thing about that attack on the railway and how it seems like it actually, it's this moment that is most people don't know about, it seems like it actually sent out like these shockwaves that actually led to a lot that we do know about, right? Like Japanese involvement in World War II. I mean, do you feel like that, could you say that that directly led to Japan's involvement in World War II? Or is that like a little bit far-fetched to claim?
Quin: Directly might be a little bit of a far-fetched claim. I mean, because there are a lot of steps along the way. And you could go more in depth even kind of than I did and really like parse out everything that happens between 31 and 37 and then in turn between 37 and 41 and really lay out in detail what happened down to the day or the week. And, but, with that being said, do I think that there is a through line, if not a, you know, from the Mukden incident to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the strike south, if you will, and Japan's war in the Asia Pacific region? I do. I do think there's definitely a through line there. I think it's very traceable. Basically, without the invasion of Manchuria and the Mukden incident, I don't think that any of the events that occurred afterwards would have necessarily occurred the same way or even maybe happened at all. It's hard to say.
Shea: I find it so interesting because it's like these two different conflicts developing in two very different parts of the world. You have what's going on in Germany and then you have what's going on between Japan and China kind of at the same time. And even down to this sort of like what you call a false flag incident, it reminds me of the Reichstag fire in Germany and, you know, which very well may have been set by the Nazis themselves. And then it's blamed on, you know, others. And this leads to the sort of oppression that starts to happen there. It's very similar. It's very interesting to see these two similar situations kind of parallel, unrelated to each other, and then kind of come together into one conflict. Just like, it gives me chills to think about. So that's very, and it's I guess it's a coincidence, but the timing of that, it all seems so strange. But I guess that's how things happen sometimes.
The more I think about all this, the more it somehow feels like more than a coincidence. It’s so uncanny that it’s actually sparked conspiracy theories in the US that Pearl Harbor was allowed to happen in order to justify US involvement in World War II, a sort of false flag operation itself. I’m going to explore that theory more in a mini fix on Wednesday so be looking for that over on Patreon. To me, it almost feels like divine intervention or something. The way these two forces evolved separately, Germany and Japan. Two completely different conflicts, although both spurred along by the floundering global economy during the Great Depression. Japan’s decision to attack the United States, the sleeping bear, at Pearl Harbor which to me has always seemed so nonsensical, Quin did a great job describing Yamamoto’s tactical and strategic reasons for that. He was playing a chess game. He was trying to take out one chess piece, the US, in order to safely gain access to another, Southeast Asia. You don’t play chess one move at a time, not well anyway. A good chess player thinks things out several moves ahead. That’s what Yamamoto was doing. His plan ultimately failed but the consequences, the result, was much much more than just the United States declaring war on Japan the day after the Pearl Harbor attack, it affected the other half of the war too, the European side of things in a big and much needed way. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor woke that sleeping bear and the bear, the US, not only declared war on Japan, it also entered the conflict in Europe and arguably, along with the Soviet Union, helped to end that conflict.
I can’t help thinking that the whole thing, the Pacific theater, the European theater together was one giant chess game played out by fate, spirit, God, the universe, whatever you want to call it. Like, in the same way that Yamamoto’s attack on Pearl Harbor was move one of two in Japan taking Southeast Asia, it was also move one of two in ending these violent extremist regimes, Nazi Germany ravaging Europe and Japan’s atrocities in China, by forcing US involvement, by waking the sleeping bear. There is a discernable through line there. The Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941 was a horrible tragedy. But, in many ways, it was a necessary tragedy. It was the catalyst that put an end to the madness.
Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. A huge thank you to Quin Cho for sharing his wealth of knowledge with us. If you’re interested in his books, I have those linked in the description. As always, source material for this episode can be found in the show notes. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.
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