I have never understood why the Two-Ocean Navy Act didn't send greater shockwaves through the IJN - at least, that I have been able to discern from English language scholarship. It was a plan to build what was basically 1.5 additional IJNs, on top of the existing USN. - ThreadSky

bretdevereaux.bsky.social • 63 days ago

I have never understood why the Two-Ocean Navy Act didn't send greater shockwaves through the IJN - at least, that I have been able to discern from English language scholarship.

It was a plan to build what was basically 1.5 additional IJNs, on top of the existing USN.

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sfkissinger.bsky.social•63 days ago

The IJN seems like they were convinced any war with the United States would be short (1 or 2 decisive battles), and the act was scheduled to take six years for the expansion to be complete, with even that timeline considered optimistic when shipyard capacity was compared to its goals.

ramsandhoosiers.bsky.social•63 days ago

Implicit assumption throughout the interwar period is that is the war is protracted Japan is going to lose. Of course they also assumed they’d be on the strategic defensive post Philippines and had no idea for a real endgame if the US didn’t oblige with accepting attrition to fight off Japan early

dalassa.bsky.social•63 days ago

Japan had a problem with recognizing reality by that point. They really did buy their own propaganda.

gilmanhernandez.bsky.social•63 days ago

Recently finished Shattered Sword (on your recommendation) and it really paints the picture that Japan saw the US like a Saturday Morning Cartoon villain. Big and strong, but lumbering, inevitably subject to being outsmarted and humiliated by their greater unity of purpose.

nudraxon.bsky.social•63 days ago

Recently, I had an epiphany that the propaganda trope of an enemy who is simultaneously "too strong and too weak" is just taking the conventions of an underdog story and applying them to real life. I haven't been able to unsee it since.

gilmanhernandez.bsky.social•63 days ago

I fear that Eco line gets misunderstood a lot, since all enemies have strengths and weaknesses, often proportionately great to each other, but yeah, the Ur-Fascist is enslaved to the aesthetics of their stories so they just have to keep mashing the narrative onto real life.

justincidentals.bsky.social•63 days ago

Maybe it did? Building the sense that “we’d better grab it while we can. And don’t worry, they’re soft. They’ll never try to get it back”. Yamamoto certainly knew better, but I’d like to know more about how hard he tried to communicate.

saphroneth.bsky.social•63 days ago

That and the Selective Service Act. It meant that the US had been effectively cutting years (2ON) or a year (SSA) off the time before they would have additional deployable military forces of quality on top of the prewar state.
Shifting US industrial/mobilization to start AT Pearl is a major delay.

aidanglc.bsky.social•63 days ago

I think you belatedly see it in a lot of the early-1942 assessments (esp. from Yamamoto) that the IJN had a 6-10 month window to run riot before vastly superior US output caught up - and in some of the stranger dicerolls in 1942-3 (converting Shinano mid-construction comes most readily to mind)

christosilvia.bsky.social•63 days ago

So maybe Two Ocean Navy goes into the pot of "moves the US meant to signal superiority and deterrence", which the Japanese interpreted as "reasons we absolutely have to attack right now or it'll be too late"

aidanglc.bsky.social•63 days ago

(In many ways Pearl Harbor is one of those dicerolls: the longer they waited the more uneven the balance of forces became, and the growing imbalance pretty much necessitated throwing the first punch - and throwing it unannounced)

bretdevereaux.bsky.social•63 days ago

That calculus is a classic example of operational or grand tactical thinking usurping strategy.

The correct question was not "how do beat the US Navy?" but "should we fight the United States?" and the answer was, "fuck, no."

shoutingboy.bsky.social•63 days ago

And *given* the high likelihood that the U.S. would get pulled into a war in Europe, I have to think FDR would have been willing to come to some accommodation that would keep it out of a Pacific war too.

jamestiv.bsky.social•63 days ago

The problem is that deciding not to fight the US would mean giving up on the China adventure which was equally unacceptable.

mathewson.us•63 days ago

Curious about this statement. I’ve never heard this connection before. Why would avoiding conflict with the US preclude Japan from consolidating its empire in China?

lightningpeak.bsky.social•63 days ago

Because Americans could read about what the Japanese army was doing in China, and they didn't like it. Fighting in China lead to the US embargoing oil and aluminum to Japan, among other things

hdp.omg.lol•63 days ago

(drink!)

aidanglc.bsky.social•63 days ago

The best discussion of this is Evans & Peattie's in "Kaigun" - the IJN built their fleet + tactics + strategy for a brief, limited war with a reluctant US and then got total war with the world's largest industrial power in the mood for vengeance. A world-historic misread of the strategic situation.

ritterteufeltod.bsky.social•63 days ago

The degree to which the surprise attack and Japanese atrocities made peace impossible seems undereemphasized in most histories to me. The execution of the Japanese plan made its grand strategic goals impossible.

nooneofcons.bsky.social•62 days ago

You also have to factor in that the last two times Japan did that, they beat Russia and China, so surely a war against the USA would be the same.

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