Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…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. 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. 0:42:40 Well in Japan, in-groups out-groups - you sign up together, you train together, you fight together and you die together. It doesn't mean the Japanese couldn't have grafted people between groups. It's just culturally it's not the natural thing that comes to mind. Moreover, and this apparently applies to the present, that in the U.S. military, they have what are called hot washes after different operations, where you come back and you're very self-critical about all the things that went wrong, to figure out how to do it better the next time. Well, there are cultural reasons why you would not want to do that in Japan, just, it's different. So, if these in-group, out-group things are causing problems within services, and it gets toxic between the services and I've got four examples and I'm going to start with organizational issues. 0:43:31 So it's only in 1944 that the Army and Navy finally get it together to have regular liaison meetings in Tokyo. Just in time to, you know, figure out how the capitulation is going to work. And then, the army wanted to unify the two high commands. The navy wanted nothing to do with that one because they knew they'd just become the box lunch delivery service for the army. Didn't want to do that. So, by 1945, they did unify their information department. Great. They can spew the same propaganda and maybe share Tokyo Rose on a good day, who knows? But there was no planning even under the imminent threat of invasion to how they're going to coordinate their assets to protect the home islands. They aren't even coordinating their air assets. Disaster. 0:44:22 And this disaster goes back way in time. They had very- far back in time. They had a very successful war against Russia that ends in 1905. But afterwards, in 1906, immediately afterwards, the Army and Navy are allowed to have completely separate war plans. The Army plan is all about fighting Russia for the big land grab in Eurasia. The navy plan has a completely different set of enemies. It'd be the United States and Britain for the big gambit - you're not gonna use ships in Siberia - the big gambit for empire in the Pacific. And each of these plans, A, they're secret from the other service and B, each plan assumes the other service is going to do all kinds of important things for them. Okay, great. So, I guess the idea of secrecy and surprise, normally you apply that to your enemies, not your sister service, but that's how it works in this setup. Now, the army does come around to the Navy plan. Why? Because they get walloped by the Russians on the Mongolian border at the Battle of Nomonhan. The Russians just decimate them in 1939. 0:45:35 So now the army says, okay, okay, maybe that southern advance thing wasn't such a bad idea. And so the Navy thinks this is great. And they do their Southern advance. Let me see where I am here. They go zooming down and the Japanese mind over matter stuff seems to be going really well.…

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