Sarah Paine: belief

Transcript context

…w what? Here, China had never been able to threaten the Japanese home islands. Well the United States - here, the United States was totally isolationist. Most Americans couldn't find Japan on the map. Well, after Pearl Harbor, they sure could. And suddenly, the United States isn't isolationist anymore, and they're coming to get the Japanese. So, you can see the samurai values in operation here; “Just try harder”. “More dosages of willpower”. “Eventually you'll win or you'll die trying”. Okay. Another operational preference that you can see, which is these, [inaudible] surprise or preemptive attacks. And this is how Japan began all of its wars. The First Sino-Japanese War and the Second Sino-Japanese War, Russo-Japanese War, and the Pacific War. This is how all of them begin. 0:30:07 And finally, Miyamoto offers some advice on how you break the enemy willpower. And in this case, you've already won conventionally. But they're waging an insurgency against you. I'm modernizing the terminology. And the idea is you want a psychological victory. You want them just to quit and somehow you're gonna break their will to resist. And I suspect this is what the Japanese thought they were doing in the Rape of Nanjing and other atrocities. That they were going to do these horrifying things and that would break the will of the other side. Okay, be careful whom you put on death ground. The Japanese were repeating a mistake done by the Nazis, which is if you're dealing with even a failing state, which Russia was - Stalin had shot so many of his officers in the thirties and then he inflicted a famine on Ukraine - but when the Nazis came in and they were going to wipe out not only the Russian government, but also the Russian people, you will superglue people, government, and military, and you will transform a failing state into a lethal adversary. And this is what Nazi brutality does to Russians, what Japanese brutality does to Chinese, and what Russian brutality today is doing to Ukraine. Don't do it. Bad strategy. 0:31:34 All right, there are strategic implications from these values. One is this emphasis on the offensive preemption. It's emphasis on military action to solve all your problems. And you have a fixed policy objective, whatever it is. And if you're in a given battle, you have to win that battle. It's not, "Oh, I have an overarching objective. It's too costly here. I'm going to call off this battle and I'm going to try again somewhere else." Uh-uh. This is your field, the moment your plan has failed, you're a failure. So they're not thinking of planning in terms of branches of sequels and there'll be unexpected events that take place you'll adapt to - none of that. You're a failure if any of that stuff happens to you. So there's a real insensitivity to risk and there's no grand strategy. 0:32:26 But if you believe these things you will be lethal in warfare. You're not going to give up easily at all. And so you look at the Japanese at the end of the war and go why don't they quit a lot earlier? Well, it's because in a way, they're already dead men. They suffered social death. And so they're going to keep on until the very, very end of all of this. ar and go why don't they quit a lot earlier? Well, it's because in a way, they're already dead men. They suffered social death. And so they're going to keep on until the very, very end of all of this. And it's a great sin of omission, this absence of grand strategy. The Japanese aren't the only ones to have done this. The belligerents on all sides in World War I were thinking all in terms of using the military instrument, got themselves into trouble. So if you look at what the Japanese are doing, they had some vague ambitions and wanted to take advantage of opportunities. But there's no definition of what "win" in this war is. How much territory should Japan take? And then call it a day. Say, done, we've been successful here. Rather, their territorial acquisitions are really a function of what they were able to take and what, in anger, they did take, but also a function of strategic failure. No matter what they did, it never pacified the China theater. Problem for them. 0:33:42 Okay. Alice, that was Wonderland. Now we're going to get to how it works, how other people live - of if you believe these things, how does it help explain what actually happened in World War II? And I'm going to start with two sins of omission, the Japanese neglect of paying more careful consideration to logistics. And then another sin of omission is a neglect of protecting their sea lines of communication. And then I'm going to - the last two are about these in-group, out-group divisions and the problems it caused for within each military service, intra-service rivalries, and then between the two services, the Navy and the Army in the war that caused them such difficulties. Okay. The Japanese, if you start at the beginning of the war, Japan never produced more than 1/13th U.S. steel and coal production. It never did more than 10 percent of what U.S. munitions productions were. I believe if you do the math and take all the battleships and divide people into… everything, that each U. S. soldier had four tons of equipment per, whereas each Japanese soldier had about two pounds of equipment. Japanese main weapons in this war were the grenade and the bayonet. Their artillery and machine guns were totally, were very obsolete, what they had going in the Pacific War. 0:35:07 And then you flip it around and look at the United States. The United States had about 18 men in- or men and women, but mostly men- in supply services supporting each rifleman at the front. Other militaries in this period had about an 8 to 1 ratio, Japan had about a 1 to 1. So Japan's already suffering food shortages before Pearl Harbor. And then when you get to the winter of 1942-43, the Japanese are having critical shortages of oil, so they no longer can deploy the fleet at will. That means forget about convoying anything because you just haven't got the oil to do it. And yet when you get to '45, when they're predicting they're going to have absolutely zero aviation fuel and other fuel by the end of '45, you have the government saying still we're going to fight on for this honorable whatever it's going to be. These bushido ideas that you just persevere - loyalty, honor, duty. Keep going. e end of '45, you have the government saying still we're going to fight on for this honorable whatever it's going to be. These bushido ideas that you just persevere - loyalty, honor, duty. Keep going. 0:36:08 I'm going to be quoting this gentleman's diary, Admiral Ugaki Matome. He was the chief of the staff of the combined fleet until his plane and Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku's plane were shot down. US code breaking was quite good. We figured out where they were and we killed Admiral Yamamoto, but this man survived. And by the time he wrote this entry, he was the head of an air fleet in the home islands sending kamikaze flights out, because Japan simply lacked the ability to do too much else this late in the day. And here is his last diary entry written on August 15th, 1945. This is after two atomic bombs had been dropped and after the Russians had deployed into Manchuria. 0:37:01 And he said, okay, “there are various causes for today's tragedy. And I feel that my own responsibility is not light, but more fundamentally it was due to the great differences in national resources between the two countries." It's too late to come to that conclusion. U.S. production statistics had been on the books forever. But when Japanese read these numbers, they thought they were ludicrously high and discounted them as propaganda. And those who knew better, who'd done tours of duty in Britain or the United States, they weren’t promoted because they were defeatists. I believe that Admiral Ugaki kept and maintained his diary is because he was an honorable samurai. He had believed in Bushido, the ability of material, of willpower, to more than compensate for inferior resources, but the war's outcome had proved him incorrect. And so, as an honorable samurai, he paid with his life, and he kept his diary - nothing to be ashamed of, he’d done what he was going to do. 0:38:10 Here I have the last Prime Minister of Imperial Japan, Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko, talking about his take on the war. He said, "I think the basic cause of defeat was the loss of transport shipping." Okay, by the end of the war Japan was down to one ninth of its transport shipping. It meant the empire was paralyzed. What's the point of taking all these territories if you can't get the resources back? The navy had always focused on the mission by Alfred Thayer Mahan – who's from where I work, back in the day. It was all about fleet on fleet engagements and things. But it turns out that the Japanese navy hadn't focused on convoy duty. Mahan had called that a promising secondary operation. Actually, it turned out to be primary in the Pacific that U.S. submarine services paralyzed their sea lines of communication. Go submarines! 0:39:14 But so here's Admiral Ugaki Matome who is talking- he eventually comes around to recommending a more defensive strategy of not having this fleet on fleet because they don't have - they've lost a lot of the fleet and then they don't have the fuel to run it. But by the time he's recommending a more defensive strategy, they don't have the fuel or the assets to do that either.…

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