Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…30 years after the end of the war? Carrying on the war in isolation. I don't believe this is how most other armies work or soldiers in them. Different culture, different things you do with your life. And here is Sir William Slim, Field Marshal, British 14th Army, that he led in Burma, commenting on his experiences: "If 500 Japanese were ordered to hold a position, we had to kill 495, the last five committed suicide before we could take the place." And “it was this combination of obedience and ferocity that made the Japanese so formidable”. 0:20:12 Okay, this brings me to another value that's emphasized in Bushido: willpower. Back to Yamamoto: "There is nothing that cannot be done. The way of the Samurai is in desperateness. Simply become insane and desperate, and it'll somehow work out for you. One can accomplish any feat." Think of Pearl Harbor. And this emphasis on willpower and just trying harder, it denigrates strategy. And here you see a picture of the supreme example of honor and loyalty and willpower - the kamikaze pilots. But if this is what you're doing, you're denigrating strategy. And here Yamamoto's talking about tactics, but it has operational and strategic implications. He says, "Learning such things as military tactics is useless. The way of the samurai is one of immediacy and it is best to dash in headlong. If one were informed of military tactics, he would have many doubts." 0:21:14 So the idea is if you think about these things in peacetime, you'll start hesitating in wartime. It won't work out for you if you do this. "During times of peace, when listening to the stories of battle, we should never say 'In facing such a situation, what would a person do?'" Well, so much for my job at the Naval War College. So much for the case studies. "No matter what the circumstances might be, once you be of the mind to win, once you'd be holding the first spear to strike." So, here's the implications, if you believe this. What you're doing, it's a very unanalytical way to approach wars. It's all about, whatever it is you want, you just steel the will and go for it, and somehow you'll get it if you want. There's a lack of grand strategy. What's grand strategy? It's integrating all the instruments of national power, not just the army, or the army and the navy, which is what the Japanese are trying to do. But all instruments of national power in pursuit of - if the bigger aim is to stabilize China and keep the communists out, there ought to be some diplomacy and some other things going on. But that's not what's happening in the samurai literature. It's a focus on the military instrument exclusively. 0:22:31 So, I'll give you an example of how this works out. Before the Imperial Japanese Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy invaded French Indochina, neither one of them did a little study saying, "Hey, if we do that, let's check the other side of the tennis court net and what other people, how they might react." They just steel the will and march right on in. Okay, that triggered the U.S. 100% oil embargo. That's a problem. Strategy operational success, strategic mess. hat other people, how they might react." They just steel the will and march right on in. Okay, that triggered the U.S. 100% oil embargo. That's a problem. Strategy operational success, strategic mess. Focusing on just the operational level is the basis for this ill-founded optimism with which the Japanese just took territory after territory without saying, "Hey, what about the cost of actually occupying these places?" Oh, we're going for these places for resources. So maybe we ought to check it out with the finance ministry and others about how we’re ever going to get these resources back home? None of that's going on. It's a disaster for them. 0:23:34 Okay. I'm going to talk about a couple of secondary theorists. One of them is Taira Shigesuke, who is a contemporary of Yamamoto because he provides a really concise definition of the operative values of samurai culture. Only three things are considered essential: loyalty, duty, and valor. So steadfastly loyal as to disregard his own life. What he's actually talking about is group loyalty. In the West, the basic unit composing society is the individual. Well, in the East, it's the group. And group interests take primacy over individual interests. And for the Japanese, society is divided by in-groups and out-groups. The most basic in-group, biggest overarching one, is the Japanese people vis-a-vis everybody else. But within Japan everybody comes from a different province, a different locality. They go to different educational institutes. They graduate from different kindergarten classes, I kid you not, and college classes. If they work for different companies or they work for the military, they're in different branches. 0:24:49 And you also have family loyalties and you owe each of these nested and overlapping groups different obligations, and sometimes these obligations conflict. And if they're really - if the conflicts are really awful, that's another reason for committing suicide. And then if you look at the Japanese language - the moment a person opens their mouth to speak to another Japanese, you can immediately listen to the grammatical forms that are being used, the specific word choices to know what's the degree of hierarchy, like where do they sit in this unequal hierarchy and whether it's in-group, out-group. 0:25:27 So everybody feels, or most people feel, some level of group loyalty. This is human. But in Japan, the levels of membership are much more finely calibrated and they're re-emphasized by these social, cultural and linguistic reasons. So this group membership and stove-piping ultimately is going to be a much stronger feature of Japanese culture than some other places. All right. Last theorist is Miyamoto Musashi who unlike the other two actually did a little fighting. He was born a little earlier and he was a master samurai who taught people martial arts. And from him you get a sense of some of the operational preferences deriving from these values and I'm going to go through all of these in turn. he was a master samurai who taught people martial arts. And from him you get a sense of some of the operational preferences deriving from these values and I'm going to go through all of these in turn. 0:26:15 First is risk intolerance because remember at the beginning I started with the two flag officers saying “well, we're going to do this war in the Pacific when it's unlikely we're going to succeed but we're going to do it anyway”. And here is Miyamoto: "Furthermore, to fight even five or ten people single-handedly in duels, that's what my military science is all about. So what's the difference between the logic of one person beating up ten people and a thousand people beating ten thousand?” Logistics, my friend, but never mind. And then another thing that he emphasizes, and in addition, don't expect long odds to deter the Japanese back in the day. Surprise is another one - a situation that has stalemated and is going nowhere, which is what the China theater was for the Japanese. And how do you get out of it? And the answer that Miyamoto has is: not come up with a new policy objective, but come up with a tactic that'll somehow put your enemy off balance and then get what you want that way. 0:27:22 And the way the Japanese did this was often by opening a new theater in a war, by surprising people by the new places that you were going to start engaging in military operations. And here's how it worked: China had been a failed state since 1911. And it had had an escalating series of warlords fighting each other in this multilateral civil war and the Japanese were appalled particularly after the United States passed the Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1930 that cut them off from international trade. So then they're thinking, now what? Well we're going to need an empire big enough to survive since no one's going to trade with us. And so they invade all of Manchuria in 1931 and they have it pretty much stabilized by 1933. So okay, that was surprise number one, but the rest of China's a mess and the Japanese - it's coalescing into a bilateral communist-nationalist, nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek, communists under Mao Zedong fight with increasing dosages of Soviet aid and the Japanese are appalled with all this. 0:28:31 And so it's time to surprise everybody again in 1937. And that's when they invade all the way down the Chinese coast and up the Yangtze river. And it works: they take a lot of territory really fast, but then they get to the end of the railway system. Oh, and by the way, China's not pacified. It's just churning and so now Japan is even more overextended. As a result of doing that, Russian aid goes up and then you're going to get US aid in there. So the problem's actually getting worse. Time for another surprise - really big one on that infamous day in December '41. It wasn't just Pearl Harbor. That's Team America focusing only on Team America. The Japanese attacked all across the Pacific that day. 0:29:16 Uhh, okay. Now 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.…

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