Sarah Paine: prediction

Transcript context

…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. ve - 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. Earlier in the war, here's his take before all that bad stuff had happened: "It's too bad for the officers and men of the submarine service that they have not yet sunk any important men of war, only merchant men." Well, his disdain for the target would cost him. And he noted, later on, when he's trying to - it's the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, when he's trying to account for why the Battle of Guadalcanal is going so badly for Japan, he said, "The aim and transport to the front has not even been half fulfilled each time. It led those on the verge of death”- i.e. the army- “to be extremely skeptical about the Navy and thinking that the Navy is just sacrificing the army." 0:40:19 Well, no kidding that's what the army thought. Because for an expeditionary force, you absolutely need the Navy to deliver you there, to maintain your supplies there and they're thinking, the army's thinking, you navy are being irresponsible, not doing any of these things. So there are tremendous inter-service rivalries between the army and navy in Japan. And it goes back to the pre-war budget wars where Japan's a resource poor country, and both services have what they consider absolutely essential things to be funded. Japan didn't have the money to fund both. And then when you get in war and you start expending these things, you need even more money. 0:40:58 And so the disagreements were brutal. But before I get there, the in-group, out-group differences that stovepipe things and cause problems aren't simply between Army and Navy. They're within each service. So I'm going to start there, and I'm going to be, to be fair, I'm going to provide one example for each service. I'll start with the Army. It was the Kwantung Army, or Japan's Army in Manchuria, that decided to invade all of Manchuria back in '31. It was not the home office back in Tokyo, but it's this branch that turns out kicks off a 15-year war. So these folks think that they know what's best for Japan and how best to defend the empire and they're just off and running. 0:41:44 Meanwhile, there are a series of coup attempts. Some of them were Navy as part of it. A lot more of them were the army that's dealing with it, going back and forth. And at the very end when Emperor Hirohito is capitulating, there was one last coup attempt which, amen, it failed, because the war might not have turned out quite the way it did if it had succeeded. So the point is, if you've got coups running on, that is not called unified command. It's a mess. And the Navy wasn't any better. I have a different sort of example here. During the war, the U.S. Air Service, people who were flying planes, they would alternate combat and training missions so that you would bring back someone who had survived and learned something from combat to tell new people the things to avoid, how not to get yourself killed and some other things.…

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