Show 64 - Supernova in the East III

Introduction to Series

0:01What you're about to hear is part three of a multi-part series on the Second World War in the Asia-Pacific Theater. If you don't mind your story starting in the middle and you haven't heard the first couple of editions, well, this is a perfect place to start. If you like your stories with the background and the context and all that, well, you might want to catch up on the first two shows. If you already caught up on the first two shows, well, welcome to the long-awaited, sorry about that, part three. Part of the reason it's a little long-awaited is I wrote a book. If you want to find out more about it, go to our website, fast-forward to the end of this show, or just wait till you get there naturally.

0:35In the meantime, Supernova in the East, part three.

December 7th 1941

0:41December 7th, 1941.

0:46It's history. A date which will live in infamy. That's one small step for man. The events. One giant leap for mankind.

1:02The figures. Not quite to the noise, man. Let's open humanity from this time and place. I take pride in the words, Ich bin ein violiner. The drama. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this world. The deep questions.

1:34I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their president's a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. If we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. One of the reasons you can't put much trust in the idea of, the lessons of history, especially when it applies to specific situations,

2:06is that we human beings see the sorts of behaviors that we admire,

Lessons of History

2:13and then we choose the examples that fit our bias. So, for example, we all have this tendency to celebrate resolute defiance and strength and willingness to confront things like, you know, we like our Churchillian confrontation with evil, the ideas, the strong ideas of, we learned from 1938 in Munich that you can't appease dictators. You know, this idea of strength is much lauded in the lessons of history, but we never take the opposite lesson, assuming that this is some kind of lesson,

2:45to heart. And that's that sometimes one might suspect it would be worth putting a statue up to somebody in a government that caved in to his adversaries, that submitted, that cried uncle. Well, the reason I bring that up is because if you could have found somebody in the Japanese leadership, and that may have included the emperor, who would have done something like that, he would have saved his country from the worst disaster it ever had.

3:19And yet, think of how impossible it is to imagine a person in that situation doing that. One of the reasons we spend so much time, and everybody else does, on the dysfunctional development of the Japanese government, is because this December 7th, 1941 incident is where it fails. In the worst possible way.

Japanese Government Failure

3:37I mean, to quote one of, well, 97% of the historians of the world who think this is the, like, one of the worst decisions ever, naval historian Craig L. Simons called the attack at Pearl Harbor one of the most reckless and irresponsible decisions in the history of warfare. And the reason it's reckless and irresponsible is because the chances of success in this Japanese war plan are so small. I mean, when are these gambles okay? If you're talking about risking an entire country, right, when is the cost-to-benefit ratio lining up all right for you?

4:11I often wonder how much better life would be for the average German today if, you know, Germany had won the war in the Second World War. Are they all living like Kardashians today, or are they mildly better off than they would be anyway, right? How much of this actually filters down to the average person as a sort of a counterbalance to balance out the risk that you're taking that you might lose the war? If you look at Germany's risk in 1914, when they march into Belgium, assuming that the British won't get involved and World War I breaks out anyway, say what you want, and it's a horrible risk, because it doesn't just lead to World War I,

4:42but the interwar years, the rise of Nazis in World War II, I mean, it's a disaster, but Germany had a decent chance in that war. They could have won it theoretically in the last year of the conflict. So as bad of a decision as that was, it's worlds apart from the Japanese decision, which has just as much in the way of cataclysmic ramifications if you lose, but your chances of winning are so much smaller. You want to think percentile dice, you Dungeons & Dragons fans? Ninety-seven or above Japanese come out of this in any way, shape, or form.

5:13Okay. Let's review, shall we, their, you know, if you go to the Japanese Optimist Society, that the military, I made this up, but the, you know, imagine the most rose-colored glasses of the Army and Navy guys, and they're thinking about the multiple ways that they could win this war. We already talked about the first one, and that's going to come into play right after Pearl Harbor, and that is the idea that they are going to explode across the region, take over a whole, you know, think about a circular area, sort of roughly kind of like an egg maybe,

5:43that encompasses all the resources they need to be self-sufficient, and then they're going to fortify it all and make the other side take it back in what would be, in their minds, if you're the rose-colored glasses-wearing optimists here, an island, an archipelago version of the First World War Western Front Trenches that would also include a web of air cover as the Japanese see it. So, number one is we take it all, and we make you take it all back, and this is where, by the way, the Japanese hope to maximize

6:14one of the few advantages they have as they see it over the other side, and that is morale. We started off this entire series talking about these Japanese people who stayed on the islands decades after the war was over. How do you leverage that into winning somehow? Well, this strategy of occupying these islands, fortifying them, and then making the Allies take them back, well, that's maximizing them, right? Because you're assuming they're going to get tired of losing people for these little sandy atolls in the Pacific more quickly than you are.

6:45Now, number two possible way that the Japanese win here, if you're in the optimist's room, the Axis wins the war. I mean, if the Germans win, then maybe everything changes. It should be noted, by the way, that as Pearl Harbor is happening, the Soviet Union's Red Army are mustering their forces for the big counterattack at Moscow that will change the entire complexion of the war in Europe. So the timing on this could not be worse. Right as we're finding out that, hey, Germany's probably not going to win the war,

7:16is basically right around the same time period we're at right now. Well, finally, number three, and this is the most interesting way

Japan's Chance of Winning

7:22that Japan wins this war somehow, is what happens if this pan-Asianism idea that, you know, a lot of the Japanese leadership sort of sees as a more PR marketing tool, although some really believe it, but what if that catches on? Remember what that is? All of Asia in this time period, with the exception of Japan and, you know, one or two scant other places, are colonial possessions or places like the Philippines that aren't officially colonies but have a relationship with the United States that's subordinate. Let's put it that way.

7:52There is a lot of anger, as you might imagine, seething in these areas, and these peoples have never been able to confront the Western colonizers in any sort of military sense. But here's a power from Asia that can, and that at least with the marketing material, is suggesting that that's exactly what they're doing. In the fantastic rose-colored glasses dreams of the optimists in Japan, they see a giant rising of all of the peoples of Asia, you know, to sort of rally to Japan's banner and leadership.

8:25But if those things don't happen, Japan is going to be, as Winston Churchill said, ground to powder. A better metaphor, if you want to be more accurate, would be burnt to cinders. And the only person who perhaps could have saved them would have been somebody who stood up and said at the last minute when there were no real options, uncle. And we don't put statues up to people that give in to our enemies, even if they save our entire society by doing so.

8:58Now, in all fairness, people have always made the argument that this is exactly the role the emperor eventually played in ending the war. More on that later, of course. But that he bravely, as the only person who really could, said enough. But investigators looking into these things at the Tokyo war crimes trials wanted to know that if he had the power to do that at the end of the war, why didn't he use it before the war broke out? And that's when you get back to the whole dysfunctional Japanese government and all the reasons it was. Let's not forget, for example,

9:29about assassinations and how much of a tool to prevent thinking that wasn't patriotic enough from being publicly expounded upon. I mean, there was a period in Japanese history that we talked about where historians sometimes call it government by assassination. And it was the most extreme in Japanese society sort of driving the bus, if you will. And remember, Japan was following the trend of places like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union where any sort of dissent

10:01or not towing the party line was less and less accepted. And super patriotism was sort of the new minimum standard allowable and unquestioning loyalty to the state was required. And Japan had spent at least the decade previous to this sort of purging itself of leftists and anarchists and people that wrote bad things about the government and the ones who weren't in prison or under surveillance were cowed. So the voices that might get up and speak against suicidal decisions aren't really in a position to do that

10:33by the time December 7th rolls around. And let's remember, almost every country in this story has a nice proportion of its citizens who believe that phrase, my country right or wrong. Well, remember in Japan, they not only believe that phrase probably at higher levels than most people, a significant chunk of them believe that their emperor is a living god. So if you want to sort of have unquestioning loyalty in the state, when the state is a living god, you can just ratchet that,

11:04you know, normal level of patriotism that most people think is good way up to 11 off into super patriot land when it can become destructive.

11:13But of course, let's remember, it takes somebody like a super patriot sometimes, or as we said in the Second World War here in the United States, a fanatic, to be willing to kill themselves diving their aircraft into an enemy ship in the hopes of making any little difference in the war effort for their country or their emperor or their beliefs. And the beliefs are interesting

11:44from a really human standpoint. there's a great book called Japan at War, an oral history by Haruku Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook that is an oral history with Japanese voices talking about all these different kinds of things. And the introduction talks about how there are certain wartime phrases that were really only used in wartime, but that came out in the interviews because there's nothing else that describes them. And I was interested in why some of these people fought.

12:17Because like every army during this period, there's a lot of conscripts. There's a lot of people that go because they have to or because everyone else is going who don't think too much about the causes. But there's a lot of these people, and especially the super patriots, the ones who feel very strongly, who have thought deeply about what they're doing and why. And I was interested in the similarities between the university and high school professors in Germany in the First World War and in Japan before the Second.

12:48If you go read any number of accounts, but All Quiet on the Western Front's the most famous, they all talk about how their professors, it's funny, it's like the opposite of today's stereotype of the Marxist leftist professor that corrupts the young minds that come into the classroom and makes them anti-government. Before the First World War, these German high school professors were famous for whipping their students up into patriotic frenzy, getting them to join the military. What are you going to do for the empire? What are you, you know? And getting them all fired up patriotically.

13:18And in the Second World, before the Second World War, you see this same dynamic going on in Japan. And in the book Japan at War and Oral History, one of the people that they quote is one of these young people who gets fired up for idealistic reasons that, you know, it's funny, you could see college students getting fired up about today in a broad sense. The student's name is Noji Harumichi, and he talks about getting fired up by a professor. Quote,

13:49The man who really got me all stirred up about colonialism was Professor Aimamura Chosuke. He was the founder and head of the Department of Colonial Economics at Nihon University, the private college we called Nichidai. He'd say in class, I've been to Shanghai, where signs say, dogs and yellow people, no entry. I've been to the South Seas, an area controlled entirely by the white man. He'd ask us, what are you going to do to knock down this structure?

14:20He had studied in America and was a professor of current events, but he devoted himself to rousing speeches like this. My feelings resonated with him. I burned with the desire to act. Given an opportunity, I want to go to the front. I want to go to China. I want to do something myself. That's what we all said. He continued, and this gives us an idea of how some of the passionate people, you know, on the other side, especially the young idealists, might have felt

14:51given what they were being taught. Quote, America and Britain had been colonizing China for many years. Japan came to this late. China was such a backward nation. At the time of the Manchurian incident in 1931, we felt Japan should go out there and use Japanese technology and leadership to make China a better country. What was actually happening on the battlefield was all secret then, but I felt sure that the greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere

15:21would be of crucial importance to the backward races. Japan and Germany would only have to combine forces to break the Anglo-Saxon hold on Asia and redistribute the colonies. That's how we felt then. End quote. It's interesting if you compare why that person thinks they're going to go off and fight to why, say, Americans in Korea or in Vietnam felt like they were going off to fight. A high-minded,

15:53you know, I knew people like this who went there because they thought they were helping to keep or to free other people, right? We were risking our own blood and treasure not for our own strategic interest, but literally to help these other people. It was almost a mission of mercy. Now, as everyone knows, once you get onto the battlefield and see what's going on, ideas like mission of mercy sound very different, but what motivates a person to want to go do these things are sometimes the most idealistic and high-minded reasons.

16:24So there's a real irony there when the Japanese army will go act the way that they act in all these other countries that so many of them felt so idealistically connected to, you know, when their professors whipped them up into the idea of a crusade to help the other yellow peoples. You know, the term of the time, right? The yellow races, the white races.

16:48Now, let me pause for a second because it may seem as though we're artificially injecting some of the modern racial discussion into these events from the past. In other words, viewing it through that lens, but nothing could be further from the truth. Many of you have read the primary sources. You know what I'm talking about. This is a major component of the whole thing. I mean, the racial aspect, forget about the Pacific and the white man and the yellow man, and we're going to use those terms because that's the terminology

17:19of the time, but forget about all of that for a minute and just remember what's going on in Europe where we have the concept of the master race and slave races like Slavs and Untermenschen who are to be wiped out in camps. I mean, so this whole question of ethnicity and race and superior and inferior beings, this was already going on in the Second World War before this whole part of the world was officially part of the Second World War. And the question of colonialism

17:49was longstanding, obviously, and it puts the United States, just for those of you who maybe don't remember, in a very strange position in this whole affair because unlike Britain, France, the Netherlands, and these other countries that have been in the colonial game for a long time, the United States is officially an anti-colonial country, flirted with it during the Spanish-American War, but even when they have a pseudo-colonial relationship in a place like the Philippines, we don't treat it the same way because we have a self-image that says we're not a colonial people.

18:20And the Japanese, by the way, bought into some of that marketing, too. And, you know, sometimes the most interesting stuff you'll read about the Second World War comes from authors. And Len Dayton, who wrote an interesting book on the whole war, asked a question that I've seen before, but you don't even think about it very much, and that's, why'd the Japanese have to involve the Americans in this at all? They could have been fighting an anti-colonial war against the colonial powers in Asia, left the United States out of it, might have saved themselves a loss in a war.

18:51Well, there's a lot of reasons, including the Philippines and whatnot, and a growing antipathy in the United States. It was a public opinion poll, he quotes, taken two days before Pearl Harbor that said almost 70% of Americans wanted some sort of controls put on Japan's expansion, and the U.S. always had a soft spot in its heart for China, which was being basically raped by the Japanese. So, things were edging towards this point anyway. But this is more than a racial war on very simplistic, you know, yellow and white questions,

19:22because the Japanese themselves are involved in this, let's call it, trend of this era of superior and inferior beings, Dr. Seuss's star-bellied sneetches. The Japanese do not see themselves as the equals of all these yellow peoples in Asia that they are freeing, using my fingers as air quotes from their European colonial masters. They don't see themselves as the equals of the Koreans

19:53or the Chinese or the Malays or the Filipinos. They see themselves as superior to them in a racial and ethnic sense, the same way that the Germans see themselves as superior to the Slavic people. Now, let's put an asterisk next to this whole affair so that when the time comes to talk about it continually in the future, we'll all understand that within all these countries,

20:23and I always try to remember this, whether we're talking about Nazi Germany or Japan or the Soviet Union or, well, any country you can think of, there are people that do not match the tenor of the times, that do not match the attitudes of the country and the government. You know, anti-Nazi Germans in Germany who have to have their house bombed during the bombing raids just like the Nazi next door who supported the government every step of the way, right? There are Japanese humanitarians who hate what's going on here every step of the way and who would never behave like this and, of course, who,

20:55because we're all caught up in the gears of history and subject to the randomness or the cosmic decision, however you want to phrase it or put it, of being born when we're born and where we're born, we sometimes avoid such terrible dilemmas, but so let's understand when I talk about how Germany is or how Japan is, that may be a national sort of stance, the master race idea in Germany, but it doesn't mean that every German believed in that at all, just like it doesn't believe that every Japanese person believed in the superiority of the Yamato race

21:26and that, you know, the idea, as we said from that student, I mean, it's a spectrum. Let's call it a spectrum thing of how Japan felt about the rest of Asia. On one end of the spectrum is that student that we just quoted that makes the peoples of Asia like the Chinese people sound like Native Americans or Aboriginals in Australia, just, you know, sort of a backwards, primitive people. All they need is some, you know, they would have said in the Old West, some Christianizing, we'll send them

21:56to some Indian schools, we'll bathe them, we'll dress them upright, we'll, you know, get rid of all that mumbo-jumbo they grew up with and in a generation or two, you'll have, you know, good old Americans Americans that blend right in. The Japanese were, that student was feeling similarly about the Chinese. They just need leadership, help, technology, some of our values and ethics. We'll shape them right up, right? We'll help those people. That's one end of the spectrum. That's the one that wants to go help, right? They're still inferior, but they can be fixed. This is a Japanese version of the Peace Corps, my goodness.

22:28Then you got all the way over to the opposite end of the spectrum where you will find these Japanese thinkers who remind you of, like, Nazi scientists who have a racial view of people like the Chinese as subhuman, genetically inferior, to be sterilized at least, wiped out maybe. I mean, they're the kind of people that we might as well just try some experimentation like infecting a bunch of fleas with the bubonic plague and dropping them over their cities and see what happens, which, by the way, they did.

22:58So it runs the gamut, right? But it's the same idea. The Japanese are fighting their own race war on two fronts. One is against these, you know, white folks who think they're so superior and have taken over almost all of Asia. The other is against all these Asians who aren't good enough to be Japanese people but would be better off, you know, with us running an empire. I mean, from the standpoint of a lot of these colonial peoples, they are being

23:28thrown out of the frying pan and into the fire.

23:35The transition moment

Japanese Blitzkrieg

23:37from frying pan to fire for a lot of these people will be at about the same time that the bombs are actually dropping on Pearl Harbor. It's easy for Americans, myself included, to get so focused on what's going on in Hawaii and the surprise attack that was so shocking that we missed the many other aspects of this Japanese blitzkrieg occurring in many cases simultaneously and completely coordinated around Asia and the Pacific

24:07for the first 48 to 72 hours of this affair. I mean, at the moment the bombs are falling on Pearl Harbor, there are Japanese bombers in the air en route to Wake Island to bomb there. A couple hours before Pearl Harbor, there are landings of Japanese troops in northern Malaya. They will bomb the Philippines. They will bomb Guam, they will bomb Wake, they will bomb Midway, Hong Kong, all in the first few hours. They will bomb Singapore and kill 61 people before Singapore even knows they're at war. This is astounding. And the scope

24:38of Japanese operations is breathtaking. Let's remind ourselves the chutzpah involved here, though. I mean, you could easily describe the Japanese right at the time of Pearl Harbor. Remember, bogged down in China for years now, a country the size geographically about of the United States. They are trying to eat an elephant, figuratively speaking, and they're choking on it. And on December 7th, 1941, they decide to order a couple more elephants because that's what they're doing here. If this were a movie

25:09and you are the person who's writing it, you love this idea because, I mean, this is swinging for the fences, right? But as we said earlier, the chances of success are so small, and yet the Japanese are trying to maximize those chances. There are a bunch of things they're going to do at every level to try to compensate for their deficiencies. At the grand strategy level, what we're talking about here, when you go attack all these countries that are so much bigger and have more industrial might and more manpower than you, what do you do? Well, you use things like speed

25:40and audacity to disorient your opponent, give you an early edge, take advantage. I mean, think about it. Like a pro wrestling match and there's always those matches where the champion turns around, the good guy, and he starts to take off his robe and he's not looking and the little guy from behind when no one is looking hits him, you know, in the back of the head and then for the first five minutes kicks him around and tries to take advantage of making him groggy before the big guy comes to. That's kind of what the plan is here.

26:07Surprise and audacity will confuse and disorient an opponent, at least for a while. I mean, think about the Americans who wake up the next morning after Pearl Harbor open up their newspaper to find out that they're at war and in the very same newspaper, they find out that their Pacific fleet has already been eliminated for the most part. That will compensate for some deficiencies, won't it? And it's not the only thing the Japanese are doing because when the bombs are falling on Pearl Harbor,

26:38as we said, the Japanese are attacking locations all over Asia and the Pacific, if not simultaneously, than near simultaneously.

26:46They have advantages in addition to surprise, although, as we said, I mean, the idea that the Japanese were going to attack was not a complete surprise because people had seen troop ships and whatnot, but their ability to do this and carry it out effectively and the speed at which they were doing it, and most importantly, if you read the primary sources, the aircraft and the air power, I mean, the Japanese really established almost air supremacy quickly, and this was unexpected. There were a bunch of unexpected things, by the way. You open up Winston Churchill's

27:17History of the Second World War, which is, of course, more like a personal memoir, but it's, I was starting to count how many times he talked about the Japanese and say that we underestimated them. He always threw in the Americans, too, to diffuse the blame a little bit. The British and Americans underestimated the Japanese capabilities. We can tie this back sort of, though, into the racism thing, too, and there's so many sources that point out that a lot of these, I mean, the British are famous for it in this particular case, but it affected everyone,

27:48where they just didn't see the Japanese as a capable opponent, and because of that, underestimated them, and because of that, are now paying the price. I mean, take, for example, I always use this example because it's, I think it highlights the whole thing, but there is a plane that will be one of the big fighter planes in the earliest part of this conflict on the American side, and the Americans gave it to the British and some other flyers. It's called the Brewster Buffalo. It's a bad plane. It's a bad fighter plane.

28:20The only reason that the Brewster Buffalo is here in the Pacific is because it's assumed to be good enough in the Pacific. People like the Americans and the British are going to be shocked when they run into the Japanese fighter planes and how good they are. I mean, the famous Zero, for example. And this goes back to underestimating the Japanese as a people because the stereotype of them before the Second World War when it came to things like innovation and design and building was that they were a kind of a copycat people, that they could build

28:50a good replica of some other person's design, but they weren't capable of coming up with their own advanced designs themselves, which is why when they run into these fighter planes and they are better than anything the Allied powers have in the theater, it's a shock. And it will be just the first of many to get an idea of how the racism allows the Japanese to be underestimated. Arthur Len Dayton quotes a number of people to show this sort of sniffy, superior attitude

29:21that some colonial British had concerning the locals. And he quotes, for example, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke Popham, who commanded that whole region and had seen Japanese soldiers close up in December 1940. And Dayton says that he didn't think much of them. And now quoting the Air Chief Marshal, quote, I had a good close up across the barbed wire of various subhuman specimens dressed in dirty gray uniform, which I was informed

29:51were Japanese soldiers. End quote. Dayton says he told his masters in London and then added, quote, I cannot believe they would form an intelligent fighting force. End quote. Dayton continues, quote, Such low opinions of the Japanese were prevalent in the British Far Eastern forces. More realistic estimations were not welcomed. In April 1941, the British military attache in Tokyo told officers of the Singapore garrison that he regarded

30:22the Japanese army as a first class fighting force, well trained, well officered, and possessing high esprit de corps. As the talk ended, Lieutenant General Lionel Bond, head of Malaya command, rose to declare that such talk was, quote, far from the truth. He added, you can take it from me that we have nothing to fear from them. End quote. When the British general woke up the governor of Singapore to tell him that the Japanese were landing north of them in Malaya,

30:54the governor, and this is according to Dayton also, was recorded as saying, quote, well, I suppose you'll shove the little men off. End quote. So see, we're not bringing up this racism stuff to make some sort of racism point. We're pointing out that it helps explain how the Japanese were so fatally underestimated. I mean, if you watch how they dominate the skies