Campfire - I think what was in the minds of...

1. the Japnnese Army Cabinet (which was the ruling entity in Japan at the time) was this:

FDR has cut off all our supplies of oil and steel (early in 1941).

Without the oil and steel our military machine will become virtually helpless within 1 to 2 years.

This will mean the abandonment of our military position in mainland Asia and China, to which we have devoted our whole national effort.

This will mean defeat and total humiliation for Japan, without firing a shot. It will also mean humiliation for the Army Cabinet, and its rapid fall from political power in Japan.

We cannot accept that. We will fight the Americans unless they restore our trade access to oil and steel (and FDR had no intention of doing that).

It's very risky, but we have no choice. To do otherwise means total defeat in any case, and loss of honour, and loss of power.

2. And the Navy? They thought...

All of the above...tempered by the knowledge that Japan had absolutely no chance of winning a long naval war, because America had much greater resources of production.

Therefore, if given the order to fight, they had to somehow make it a short war.

The only way to do that would be to inflict so disastrous a series of early defeats on the Allied forces as to dissuade them from the costs of waging a long term counterattack.

It was a VERY long shot, but it was better than simply lying down and dying (from the Japanese point of view).

The Pearl Harbour attack was intended to make it possible for Japan to do such massive early damage to the American fleet.

Psychologically, however, it had the exact opposite effect the Japanese had intended. It made Americans determined to fight, and go on fighting, until total victory. The Japanese would probably have been better off to have never attached Pearl Harbour at all.

Had they not done so, but restricted their activities to Asian waters, I suspect the American fleet would have sailed to the Phillipines in the early spring of 1942 to fight the Japanese in an old style battleship duel, without benefit of being very aware of the true capabilities of the Japanese carrier forces.

And there they would probably have suffered a pretty catastrophic defeat at the hands of Admiral Ozawa's crack aircraft carrier squadrons (backed up by land-based planes on Phillipine airfields), with far worse results than Pearl Harbour. Besides their battleships, they might very well have lost the American carriers too (Enterprise, Hornet, Wasp, Lexington, and Saratoga). And without those carriers they would have been blind and almost helpless at sea.

Even that, though, would probably have not saved the Japanese from in the end losing that war. They simply didn't have the material resources to fight the USA, although they certainly had the expertise and the will.

Japan in 1941 was between a rock and a hard place. Damned if they did and damned if they didn't.

Of course, had they not embarked on a lengthy national policy of military aggression and expansion in China and elsewhere, they would not have been in that situation...but then you'd have to roll back pretty well everything that had occurred since Admiral Togo's defeat of the Russian navy in 1905 (Tsushima).

As it says in the Taoist teachings: to attack an "enemy" gives him strength. The wise nation attacks no one, but simply defends itself resolutely if attacked. Japan's Army Cabinet was proud, but they were not very wise, and in the end they paid the price for it.

- LH