JAPAN's OFFENSIVE

The Japanese launching of war in East Asia was designed to secure control of the resources of Southeast Asia as rapidly as possible; the attack on the United States navy at Pearl Harbor being designed to shield the flank of this operation from American interference, as the neutrality treaty with the Soviet Union and the maintenance of substantial forces in Manchuria were to protect its rear from Soviet intervention. These were, however, subsidiaiy moves. The major objective was a rapid seizure of the Philippines and Malaya as a preparatory step for the conquest of the Netherlands East Indies. Combined with an occupation of Burma and the seizure of added portions of New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Marshall and Gilbert Islands, this new empire would assure Japan both control of the oil, rubber, and tin producing lands she coveted and a perimeter of bases from which to defend that empire against any who might try to wrest it from her.

The detailed military plans to implement this program had been carefully worked out in the fall of 1941, but while they included careful schedules for the offensive operations, they were totally deficient in two critical ways. There was no agreed plan for going forward thereafter if the planned conquest succeeded and there was no plan to go back if it failed. As the Germans had, earlier in 1941, assumed that the war on the Eastern Front would end when their armies had reached the Archangel- Astrakhan line, so the Japanese assumed that their war would end when it had reached the perimeter of their newly won empire. But there was never any prospect of this happening; had there ever been one, they had themselves eliminated it with the attack on Pearl Harbor, because the calculation that the Americans would never expend the blood and treasure to reconquer for others a whole host of islands and other places most of them had never heard of, and did not care about if they had, was invalidated by the way in which the Japanese had started war with the United States. It took them until 1945 to discover their error because, even after the tide of battle had turned against them, they invariably returned to the same fundamentally erroneous strategic concept of trying to raise the cost for the Americans to a level the latter would not pay.