Sunrise: Japan's Leap for Empire - Big Serge Thought

 The Pacific War, fought between the Empire of Japan and the United States of America and her allies between 1941 and 1945, stands apart in the long annals of military history as an essentially unique conflict: a true sui generis war. The scale is an obvious place to begin; given that the theaters of the war encompassed much of the Pacific Ocean, continental East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean, it is fairly self evident that this war absolutely dwarfed all others in geographic scope. While Europe’s grand era of colonialism saw wars in which conflicts in continental Europe had colonial theaters in places like the Americas, India, and Africa, what distinguishes the Pacific War was the fact that this enormous battlespace - ranging some 4,500 miles north to south and nearly 7,000 miles east-west - was contiguous and connected by internal Japanese lines of communication. No other conflict in human history has ever come even remotely close in the size of its contiguous theaters....

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https://bigserge.substack.com/p/sunrise-japans-leap-for-empire?publication_id=1068853&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=y7h5a&utm_medium=email 

....The reality, however, was that Japan’s failure to resolve the China War, and the ensuing economic crisis, had already created a genuine state of strategic desperation, which the United States intensified by its rearmament and especially by the 1941 strangulation of oil exports to Japan. This latter move, in particular, immediately put the Japanese on the clock and created the consensus for war. Since Japan’s existing stockpiles of oil were sufficient for perhaps 18 months of normal consumption, the loss of American exports put Japan at a fork in the road and pressured them to act immediately.

The United States succeeded, broadly speaking, in economically and diplomatically cornering and checkmating the Japanese. With Japan’s economy already in a state of crisis, the oil embargo threatened to cave the entire structure in. By any reasonable measure, the United States did indeed have the Japanese backed into a corner. The miscalculation was the assumption that Japan would not attempt to fight its way out against desperate odds.

Offering Battle: Japan’s Naval Schema

What we have endeavored to show with this admittedly overwrought prologue is that the Japanese launched the Pacific War against the Anglo-American powers largely out of a sense of economic crisis and geostrategic checkmate. Japan’s urgent need to acquire an independent supply of oil, which it attempted to solve by seizing the Dutch East Indies, is by far the best known element of this crisis, but it is important to understand that the Japanese economy was already under incredible strain in domains that went far beyond fossil fuels.

This general sense of crisis related directly to the scale and aggression of Japan’s opening offensives. The Japanese famously exploded out of the box in 1941-42, with operations in Malaysia, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, New Guinea, the central Pacific, and of course, Hawaii. This massive Japanese offensive was shaped by a particular mixture of desperation and long held assumptions about how a Pacific War would be fought. Japan had to accomplish a huge list of operational tasks in the opening phase of the war, and this list was dictated by both the immediate economic crisis and an idiosyncratic theory of war.