Pearl Harbor: The ultimate pre-emptive strike- Justified?

[chequita guevara]

The government pretended it was and many Americans believed it to be. Many millions of people, some even on this board, seemed to believe it was only a mtter of time before Hussein gave his entire chemical-biological-nuclear arsenal to al-Qaeda who would then attack us with it. The guy I car ride with to work in the morning believes this, and he is an otherise intelligent fellow.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Azazel
What a bunch of crapola.

Of course supplying the islands wouldn't be easy, but I don't exactly see the US operating too far without Hawaii.

Really, could US ships go very far without hawaii?

It's a standard line of supply problem. Hawaii was too far out for the Japanese to reliably invade (it was stretching fuel limits to attack from the air), and attempting to invade would have left the Japanese fleet extremely vulnerable, and left the ground force unsupplied for a significant length of time.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
The guy I car ride with to work in the morning believes this, and he is an otherise intelligent fellow.

You should explain to him the difference between pre-emptive and preventative.

[Dr Strangelove]

A war can be just only if it has a chance of succeeeding, but the Japanese had no chance of winning a Pacific war against the US. Even when they did achieve thweir objective, seizing the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies they lacked the means of exploiting their gains. They were never able to pump, transport and refine enough oil to meet even a fraction of their needs.

Also expecting the Iraqi army to collapse with just a little shove was realistic, it had happened before after all. Expecting the US to collapse after minor setbacks in the Pacific was unreasonable, and in fact was based upon Japanese bigotry. They expected the Americans to be about as competent as the Tzarist Russians.

[chequita guevara]

I never said they were right.

[Shi Huangdi]

The Japanese certainly felt so, they felt a US attack would be inevitable and they had the best chance of a strike. Of course in reality it was a retarded move, the Japanese got themselves into a fight they couldn't win. I think Japan severely underestimated isolationist sentiment in the US at the time, it was strong enough to make any intervention in war unlikely.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove
Expecting the US to collapse after minor setbacks in the Pacific was unreasonable, and in fact was based upon Japanese bigotry. They expected the Americans to be about as competent as the Tzarist Russians.

If the attack had gotten the carriers, or even if the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbour another time, they would have enough time to build defenses to stall the US for a very long time.

[Ted Striker]

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove
A war can be just only if it has a chance of succeeeding, but the Japanese had no chance of winning a Pacific war against the US. Even when they did achieve thweir objective, seizing the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies they lacked the means of exploiting their gains. They were never able to pump, transport and refine enough oil to meet even a fraction of their needs.

Also expecting the Iraqi army to collapse with just a little shove was realistic, it had happened before after all. Expecting the US to collapse after minor setbacks in the Pacific was unreasonable, and in fact was based upon Japanese bigotry. They expected the Americans to be about as competent as the Tzarist Russians.

Doc once again has it right.

[Dis]

Che you are always bringing current politics into these threads.

There are people who truelly believed the U.S. was a paper tiger. Need I make a thread on it? I'll leave that for someone else to do. And I don't blame them for thinking this way. After Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton. Yes even Reagan gets into that group.

[Chris 62]

It was SOP for Japan, they did it in two sucessful previous wars.

Their "justifacation" was to be permitted to continue the rape of China undisturbed.
Somehow, the two cases don't match, no matter how hard some people would try to link the modern war into the past.

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


If the attack had gotten the carriers, or even if the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbour another time, they would have enough time to build defenses to stall the US for a very long time.

Actually they didn't have the capacity to build their defences up much more than they managed. Furthermore the US had an enormous number of carriers in various stages of planning or construction. At best the Japs might have been able to complete their conquest of the Solomon Islands, but it wouldn't have done them any good because they simply didn't have the resources to complete the blockade or invasion of Australia. Fortifying the islands further would have delayed the US advance very little actually, since the build up of American naval forces proceeded at an almost geometric rate. By late 1944 the US had carriers, planes, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, transports and submarines coming out the wazoo. They didn't even really need the bombing campaign to cripple Japan's economy, the horde of American submarines was doing a fine job of that. Perhaps if the Japanese had managed to destroy the two extra carriers at Pearl Harbor Fat Man and Little Boy would have been dropped from planes based on Midway or mainland China. Would it have mattered? The primary effect of having the war drag on further would have been more Japanese deaths.

[Az]

So, is there no way the Japanese could've mounted an invasion of the Hawaii Islands? That, I think could very much interfere with the US' plans.

[Drake Tungsten]

I've never thought that the attack of Pearl Harbor was "unjustified", but then again I consider most attempts at justifying military action to be bull****. I condemn the attack on Pearl Harbor not because I think it was wrong, but because I think it was really stupid. As Shi already said, the Japanese would've been much better off using the isolationist sentiment in the US to prevent US intervention.

[Dr Strangelove]

The attack on Pearl Harbor was unjustified. Japan had begun a war of purely imperial agression against China in the 1930s. Japan didn't even really need to expand into China, its economy was doing relatively well without the war, but conservative, pro-military factions felt they needed a war to maintain their grip on Japanese society. This portion of Japanese society, while enthusiastically embracing western technology dreaded the social changes gradually eroding traditional culture, and felt that war and conquest was the only way tomaintain the "purity" of Japanese society. During their military campaigns in China the Japanese military allowed themselves a wide variety of utterly unnecessary depradations against the natives of the country. FDR tried in vain to talk the Japanese into relinquishing their criminal campaigns of conquest, and when words failed he resorted to an embargo of essential resources against the Japanese empire. The embargo was completely legal, the goods were ours to sell or not as we chose to. The Japanese attacked not because they wanted to force open the doors of American commerce, but instead they feared to leave a potential adversary intact along their planned invasion of the East Indies. They reasoned that so long as the Phillipines remained in American hands the US would have a base with which to cut them off from lands gained in southern asia. The Japanese attack on Hawaii was unjustified because it was used as a means to support another unjust war, Japan's war on the innocent people of China.

[Zero]

Answer is just too easy.
If you're pro-imperial japanese yes
If you're anti-imperial japanese No

Simple as that.