Download or read book Will To Fight Japan s Imperial Institution And The U S Strategy To End World War II written by Major Eric S. Fowler and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-15 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sun Tzu asserts that success is not winning every battle fought, but subduing the enemy’s will without fighting. Nevertheless, modern military thought fails to distinguish an enemy’s will-to-fight from their means to do so, limiting the ways military leaders apply operational art, problem framing, and conflict termination in pursuit of strategic objectives. The author asserts that gaining and maintaining a position of relative advantage for favorable conflict resolution requires leaders to understand the enemy’s will-to-fight with equal fidelity as their means. This study examines U.S. planning efforts for post-WWII Japan from 1942 to 1945, focusing on the options planners possessed to achieve their ends; their choice to safeguard the Japanese Emperor; their understanding of the Japanese will-to-fight; and the way planners developed that understanding. The record reveals that-despite more forceful options-planners favored safeguarding the Imperial Institution; planners considered the Japanese people’s will-to-fight as inexorably linked to the condition of their Sovereign, increasing in response to threats against Japanese national identity; and planners developed this understanding through discourse among experts in diplomacy, military governance, political culture, anthropology, and military intelligence. The implication-an enemy’s will-to-fight can be targeted separate from their means and doing so may not require fighting.
Download or read book Will to fight written by U.s. Army Command and General Staff College and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2014-10-22 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sun Tzu asserts that success is not winning every battle fought, but subduing the enemy's will without fighting. Nevertheless, modern military thought fails to distinguish an enemy's will-to-fight from their means to do so, limiting the ways military leaders apply operational art, problem framing, and conflict termination in pursuit of strategic objectives. The author asserts that gaining and maintaining a position of relative advantage for favorable conflict resolution requires leaders to understand the enemy's will-to-fight with equal fidelity as their means. This study examines U.S. planning efforts for post-WWII Japan from 1942 to 1945, focusing on the options planners possessed to achieve their ends; their choice to safeguard the Japanese Emperor; their understanding of the Japanese will-to-fight; and the way planners developed that understanding. The record reveals that—despite more forceful options—planners favored safeguarding the Imperial Institution; planners considered the Japanese people's will-to-fight as inexorably linked to the condition of their Sovereign, increasing in response to threats against Japanese national identity; and planners developed this understanding through discourse among experts in diplomacy, military governance, political culture, anthropology, and military intelligence. The implication—an enemy's will-to-fight can be targeted separate from their means and doing so may not require fighting.
Download or read book Japan s Imperial Institution and the U S Strategy to End World War II War College Series written by Eric S Fowler and published by War College Series. This book was released on 2015-02-23 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a curated and comprehensive collection of the most important works covering matters related to national security, diplomacy, defense, war, strategy, and tactics. The collection spans centuries of thought and experience, and includes the latest analysis of international threats, both conventional and asymmetric. It also includes riveting first person accounts of historic battles and wars.Some of the books in this Series are reproductions of historical works preserved by some of the leading libraries in the world. As with any reproduction of a historical artifact, some of these books contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. We believe these books are essential to this collection and the study of war, and have therefore brought them back into print, despite these imperfections.We hope you enjoy the unmatched breadth and depth of this collection, from the historical to the just-published works.
Download or read book Japan s Struggle to End the War written by United States Strategic Bombing Survey and published by . This book was released on 1946 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Japan s Decision for War in 1941 written by Jeffrey Record and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Unconditional Defeat written by Thomas W. Zeiler and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2004 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unconditional Defeat-the second book in a Pacific War trilogy that is part of SR Books' Total War series-examines the concluding stages of World War II in Asia and the Pacific, from November 1943 until September 1945. Thomas W. Zeiler argues that this "war without mercy" could only come to one conclusion: the complete, unconditional defeat of Japan by a mobilized, overwhelming, vengeful United States. Zeiler describes these final 22 months of the Pacific War as a story of contrasts. While the U.S. launched a methodical, smothering attack with all the means at its disposal, Japan fought a fierce yet hopeless defense with diminishing supplies. By November 1943, Japan lacked the necessities not just for victory, as in the earlier phases of the war, but for adequate defense. The Japanese had no options. The strategic planning rested with the Americans. Zeiler's gripping and thorough overview discusses other contrasts between the two foes. The Americans planned multiple advances in the Pacific Ocean and on the Asian mainland. They used a massive number of troops, devised and adopted new amphibious techniques, and deployed the new nuclear category of weapons. The Japanese stubbornly but desperately clung to their territory, often with the basest of defenses. By August 1945, the United States' forces at sea, on land, and in the air had brought Japan near complete defeat. In addition, the Japanese Empire was diplomatically isolated. Japanese politics was in turmoil, the government faced rebellion, and the Emperor stood on the brink of extinction. Wracked by the destruction of the homeland from the air and blockade by sea, Japanese society veered near chaos and the people peered into the abyss of an uncertain future. In the meantime, America's military had experienced such horrors at the hands of Japan that the U.S. made the difficult decision to unleash the atomic bomb. Despite the stark differences between the U.S. and Japan, argues Zeiler, there was one aspect of the war that both sides held i
Download or read book Imperial Eclipse written by Yukiko Koshiro and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-15 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "Pacific War" narrative of Japan's defeat that was established after 1945 started with the attack on Pearl Harbor, detailed the U.S. island-hopping campaigns across the Western Pacific, and culminated in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan's capitulation, and its recasting as the western shore of an American ocean. But in the decades leading up to World War II and over the course of the conflict, Japan’s leaders and citizens were as deeply concerned about continental Asia—and the Soviet Union, in particular—as they were about the Pacific theater and the United States. In Imperial Eclipse, Yukiko Koshiro reassesses the role that Eurasia played in Japan’s diplomatic and military thinking from the turn of the twentieth century to the end of the war.Through unprecedented archival research, Koshiro has located documents and reports expunged from the files of the Japanese Cabinet, ministries of Foreign Affairs and War, and Imperial Headquarters, allowing her to reconstruct Japan’s official thinking about its plans for continental Asia. She brings to light new information on the assumptions and resulting plans that Japan’s leaders made as military defeat became increasingly certain and the Soviet Union slowly moved to declare war on Japan (which it finally did on August 8, two days after Hiroshima). She also describes Japanese attitudes toward Russia in the prewar years, highlighting the attractions of communism and the treatment of Russians in the Japanese empire; and she traces imperial attitudes toward Korea and China throughout this period. Koshiro’s book offers a balanced and comprehensive account of imperial Japan’s global ambitions.
Download or read book Japanese Military Strategy in the Pacific War written by James B. Wood and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative history, James B. Wood challenges the received wisdom that Japan's defeat in the Pacific was historically inevitable. He argues instead that it was only when the Japanese military abandoned their original strategic plan to secure resources and establish a viable defensible perimeter that the Allies were able to regain the initiative and lock Japanese forces into a war of attrition they were not prepared to fight. The book persuasively shows how the Japanese army and navy had both the opportunity and the capability to have fought a different and more successful war. If Japan had traveled that alternate military road the outcome of the Pacific War could have been far different from the ending we know so well-and perhaps a little too complacently accept.
Download or read book Unconditional written by Marc Gallicchio and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-02 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new look at the drama that lay behind the end of the war in the Pacific Signed on September 2, 1945 aboard the American battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay by Japanese and Allied leaders, the instrument of surrender that formally ended the war in the Pacific brought to a close one of the most cataclysmic engagements in history. Behind it lay a debate that had been raging for some weeks prior among American military and political leaders. The surrender fulfilled the commitment that Franklin Roosevelt had made in 1943 at the Casablanca conference that it be "unconditional." Though readily accepted as policy at the time, after Roosevelt's death in April 1945 support for unconditional surrender wavered, particularly among Republicans in Congress, when the bloody campaigns on Iwo Jima and Okinawa made clear the cost of military victory against Japan. Germany's unconditional surrender in May 1945 had been one thing; the war in the pacific was another. Many conservatives favored a negotiated surrender. Though this was the last time American forces would impose surrender unconditionally, questions surrounding it continued through the 1950s and 1960s--with the Korean and Vietnam Wars--when liberal and conservative views reversed, including over the definition of "peace with honor." The subject was revived during the ceremonies surrounding the 50th anniversary in 1995, and the Gulf and Iraq Wars, when the subjects of exit strategies and "accomplished missions" were debated. Marc Gallicchio reveals how and why the surrender in Tokyo Bay unfolded as it did and the principle figures behind it, including George C. Marshall and Douglas MacArthur. The latter would effectively become the leader of Japan and his tenure, and indeed the very nature of the American occupation, was shaped by the nature of the surrender. Most importantly, Gallicchio reveals how the policy of unconditional surrender has shaped our memory and our understanding of World War II.
Download or read book What Future for Japan written by Rudolf V. A. Janssens and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 1995 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within a few months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States government began to plan a policy for a defeated Japan. In order to avoid any future attacks on the United States, Japanese society had to be changed. Politicians, Japan specialists, historians, political scientists, and anthropologists debated the future of Japan. Topics ranged from the future role of the Emperor and politics, to Japanese economy, to re-education of the Japanese people. Eventually an overall policy for postwar Japan was formulated, which was to a high degree executed by General Douglas MacArthur during the Occupation of Japan. This study is based on research in the records of the government policy planners, both private papers and official records. It is the first book-length study of the American planning for the occupation of Japan, including the drafting of policy, not only in the State Department but also in the War Department, Office of Strategic Services, and the Office of War Information. The analysis focuses on the development of strategies for remodeling postwar Japan as well as on the meaning of Japan constructed by various planners and decision makers and the impact of their constructions on American Occupation policy.
Download or read book Japan s Decision for War in 1941 written by Jeffrey Record and published by . This book was released on 2009-02-27 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Japanese decision to initiate war against the United States in 1941 continues to perplex. Did the Japanese recognize the odds against them? How did they expect to defeat the United States? The presumption of irrationality is natural, given Japan's acute imperial overstretch in 1941 and America's overwhelming industrial might and latent military power. The Japanese decision for war, however, must be seen in the light of the available alternatives in the fall of 1941, which were either national economic suffocation or surrender of Tokyo's empire on the Asian mainland. Though Japanese aggression in East Asia was the root cause of the Pacific War, the road to Pearl Harbor was built on American as well as Japanese miscalculations, most of them mired in mutual cultural ignorance and racial arrogance. Japan's aggression in China, military alliance with Hitler, and proclamation of a "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere" that included resource-rich Southeast Asia were major milestones along the road to war, but the proximate cause was Japan's occupation of southern French Indochina in July 1941, which placed Japanese forces in a position to grab Malaya, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies. Japan's threatened conquest of Southeast Asia, which in turn would threaten Great Britain's ability to resist Nazi aggression in Europe, prompted the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt to sanction Japan by imposing an embargo on U.S. oil exports upon which the Japanese economy was critically dependent. Yet the embargo, far from deterring further Japanese aggression, prompted a Tokyo decision to invade Southeast Asia. By mid-1941 Japanese leaders believed that war with the United States was inevitable and that it was imperative to seize the Dutch East Indies, which offered a substitute for dependency on American oil. The attack on Pearl Harbor was essentially a flanking raid in support of the main event, which was the conquest of Malaya, Singapore, the Indies, and the Philippines, Japan's decision for war rested on several assumptions, some realistic, others not. The first was that time was working against Japan-i.e., the longer they took to initiate war with the United States, the dimmer its prospects for success. The Japanese also assumed they had little chance of winning a protracted war with the United States but hoped they could force the Americans into a murderous, island-by-island slog across the Central and Southwestern Pacific that would eventually exhaust American will to fight on to total victory. The Japanese believed they were racially and spiritually superior to the Americans, whom they regarded as an effete, creature-comforted people divided by political factionalism and racial and class strife. U.S. attempts to deter Japanese expansion into the Southwestern Pacific via the imposition of harsh economic sanctions, redeployment of the U.S. Fleet from southern California to Pearl Harbor, and the dispatch of B-17 long-range bombers to the Philippines all failed because the United States insisted that Japan evacuate both Indochina and China as the price for a restoration of U.S. trade. The United States demanded, in effect, that Japan abandon its empire, and by extension its aspiration to become a great power, and submit to the economic dominion of the United States-something no self-respecting Japanese leader could accept.
Download or read book Downfall written by Richard B. Frank and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2001-05-01 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a riveting narrative that includes information from newly declassified documents, acclaimed historian Richard B. Frank gives a scrupulously detailed explanation of the critical months leading up to the dropping of the atomic bomb. Frank explains how American leaders learned in the summer of 1945 that their alternate strategy to end the war by invasion had been shattered by the massive Japanese buildup on Kyushu, and that intercepted diplomatic documents also revealed the dismal prospects of negotiation. Here also, for the first time, is a comprehensive account of how Japan's leaders were willing to risk complete annihilation to preserve the nation's existing order. Frank's comprehensive account demolishes long-standing myths with the stark realities of this great historical controversy.
Download or read book Fighting to a Finish written by Leon V. Sigal and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, most Americans rejoiced that the strategy hastened the surrender of Japan. Shortly thereafter questions emerged about necessity and morality of the nuclear attacks and whether the bombings should be seen as the end of World War II or as the beginning of the Cold War. The author skillfully untangles bureaucratic conflicts in U.S. and Japanese governments to show how U.S. demands for unconditional surrender and the agonized Japanese response delayed the war's end--Publisher's description.
Download or read book Embracing Defeat Japan in the Wake of World War II written by John W. Dower and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2000-06-17 with total page 692 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Nonfiction Finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize Embracing Defeat is John W. Dower's brilliant examination of Japan in the immediate, shattering aftermath of World War II. Drawing on a vast range of Japanese sources and illustrated with dozens of astonishing documentary photographs, Embracing Defeat is the fullest and most important history of the more than six years of American occupation, which affected every level of Japanese society, often in ways neither side could anticipate. Dower, whom Stephen E. Ambrose has called "America's foremost historian of the Second World War in the Pacific," gives us the rich and turbulent interplay between West and East, the victor and the vanquished, in a way never before attempted, from top-level manipulations concerning the fate of Emperor Hirohito to the hopes and fears of men and women in every walk of life. Already regarded as the benchmark in its field, Embracing Defeat is a work of colossal scholarship and history of the very first order.
Download or read book Japan s Decision For War In 1941 Some Enduring Lessons written by Dr. Jeffrey Record and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-06 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan’s decision to attack the United States in 1941 is widely regarded as irrational to the point of suicidal. How could Japan hope to survive a war with, much less defeat, an enemy possessing an invulnerable homeland and an industrial base 10 times that of Japan? The Pacific War was one that Japan was always going to lose, so how does one explain Tokyo’s decision? Did the Japanese recognize the odds against them? Did they have a concept of victory, or at least of avoiding defeat? Or did the Japanese prefer a lost war to an unacceptable peace? Dr. Jeffrey Record takes a fresh look at Japan’s decision for war, and concludes that it was dictated by Japanese pride and the threatened economic destruction of Japan by the United States. He believes that Japanese aggression in East Asia was the root cause of the Pacific War, but argues that the road to war in 1941 was built on American as well as Japanese miscalculations and that both sides suffered from cultural ignorance and racial arrogance. Record finds that the Americans underestimated the role of fear and honor in Japanese calculations and overestimated the effectiveness of economic sanctions as a deterrent to war, whereas the Japanese underestimated the cohesion and resolve of an aroused American society and overestimated their own martial prowess as a means of defeating U.S. material superiority. He believes that the failure of deterrence was mutual, and that the descent of the United States and Japan into war contains lessons of great and continuing relevance to American foreign policy and defense decision-makers.
Download or read book A War It Was Always Going to Lose written by Jeffrey Record and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2011 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Makes sense of Japan's seemingly incomprehensible decision to go to war against the United States.
Download or read book We the Japanese People written by Dale M. Hellegers and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the definitive story of how the United States attempted to turn Japan into a democratic and peace-loving nation by drafting a new constitution for its former enemy--and then pretending that the Japanese had written it. Based on scores of interviews with participants in the process, as well as exhaustive research in Japanese and American records, the book explores in vivid detail the thinking and intentions behind the drafting of the constitution. Confusion and strife marked planning for the democratization of Japan, first in Washington, then in occupied Tokyo. Policy makers in the State, War, and Navy departments, the Joint Chiefs, and the White House contended bitterly over how to devise an "unconditional surrender" that would minimize Allied casualties while according the victor supreme authority over a soundly defeated Japan. By war's end, there were still no firm guidelines on a host of crucial issues, including how the Japanese system of government could be made acceptably democratic. The first months of occupation were chaotic, with General MacArthur organizing his staff around loyal followers and edging out experts sent from Washington. Hampered by a narrow interpretation of the terms of surrender and wishful thinking about Japanese compliance with American expectations, MacArthur set in motion a fiasco. Because of a translator's error, Prince Konoye, three-time Prime Minister of Japan, thought MacArthur had entrusted him with revising the Japanese constitution and assembled a staff of constitutional law experts and set to work. However, conservatives in the Japanese cabinet denounced his efforts and produced their own version, which MacArthur found unacceptable. MacArthur then secretly instructed his staff, with its very limited knowledge of either Japan or constitutional law, to draft a new Japanese constitution, which amazingly they did in a week's time. Expecting approval of its own draft, the Japanese cabinet was stunned when presented with a completely different American document. So unrelenting was the pressure exerted by MacArthur's officers that it was clear to members of the cabinet they had no choice but to adopt the American draft more or less intact, and publish it as their own. Because of the broad range of its meticulous research, the book will be a standard reference not only for students of Japanese history but also for legal scholars, diplomatic historians, and political scientists.
