During World War II, many people did not understand why Japan would sneak into Pearl Harbor and push the United States, a behemoth, into the arms of the Allies.
Here we have to talk about a very important figure, that is, the Japanese admiral - "Yamamoto Fifty-Six".
Commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet, Isoroku Yamamoto
Speaking of Yamamoto Isoroku, we can see from his various policy statements about Japan that he had a completely different position from the extreme right-wing forces in Japan at that time, that is, to try to prevent Japan from joining the Axis powers, and to try to avoid direct military contradictions and conflicts between Japan and the United States.
However, in the end, it was such a pro-American Japanese admiral who launched the Attack on Pearl Harbor.
Today, I will tell you why Isoroku Yamamoto, a high-ranking pro-American Japanese general, launched an attack on the United States.
The victories in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars cultivated a full gamble for Japan
In 1884, Yamamoto was born in Japan during the Meiji Restoration, that year the Sino-French War broke out, China was undefeated and defeated, France was victorious and victorious, leaving a profound impact on the Japanese, they originally thought that the powerful Qing Dynasty, but so weak, so Japan up and down their ambitions against the Qing Dynasty, which was still seemingly powerful at this time.
Ten years later, Japan invaded Korea under the pretext of a peasant uprising of the Korean "Dongxue Party" in Korea. The Qing Dynasty entered Korea at the request of Korea to quell the chaos, thus beginning the Sino-Japanese Sino-Japanese War.
Sino-Japanese Sino-Japanese War
In this battle for the rise of the East Asian monster house, Japan, which paid more attention to innovation and gambled on its entire wealth, won the final victory of this war.
Ten years later, through the Russo-Japanese War, Japan once again defeated Tsarist Russia by gambling all its wealth and truly established its absolute superiority in East Asia.
Both the Sino-Japanese Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War made every effort to mobilize national forces, gamble all their wealth, and eventually won victories, but this victory often made Japan full of gambles in the choice of direction of the national strategy.
The young officers studied in the United States and witnessed the strong potential of industrial warfare in the United States
Yamamoto grew up in a gambling-obsessed environment in Japan, not only participating in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, witnessing Japan's madness, but also showing a feverish war after graduating from the Japanese Naval Academy in 1916.
The situation in the First World War
But in 1919, after the end of World War I, he was given the opportunity to be sent by Japan to study at Harvard University in the United States, which gave him a glimpse of the true strength of the United States and completely changed the kind of fanatical self-confidence he held with ordinary Japanese officers.
At that time, Japan, which had completed its initial modernization, had fundamentally not completely transformed its economic and military system.
When Yamamoto went to the United States, he found that white sugar was originally available openly in the United States, while the rationing system was used in Japan.
Here, women can not only go to university, but also take on the work of social needs, which is very different from the situation in Japan where women can only work in happy houses except for their husbands and children and farming and supporting their families.
U.S. Assembly Line
What shocked him most was that Detroit's auto industry and Texas's oil fields provided powerful momentum for the economic development of the United States, and it was also found that there were still countries in the world that built warships like dumplings.
Yamamoto, who originally thought that Japan was already very powerful, originally thought that the United States was an upstart who used the First World War to make a lot of war money, and did not attach great importance to it.
However, after understanding the all-round information of the United States in terms of economy, personnel, materials, and war potential, he realized that with japan's size and deformed mode of relying on war development at that time, there was a huge gap between Japan and the United States, and Japan's best choice was not to go to war with the United States.
World War I American Great White Fleet
Only when Japan's own strength develops to the point where it can compete with the United States can it be an enemy, otherwise it is bound to awaken the United States, the world factory, prematurely, and bring Japan a doomed end.
Japan launched a war of aggression against China, sinking deeper and deeper, and urgently needed a new market for resources to make up for the losses in the early stage
After returning to Japan from the United States, Yamamoto served as an instructor at the Japanese Naval University, becoming the most staunch pro-American faction and aircraft carrier faction in Japan, and focused on promoting the construction of the Japanese naval aviation force.
However, at this time, Japan was no longer satisfied with the war dividends obtained in the Sino-Japanese Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, and was limited by the deformed development model of Japanese militarism, and its domestic economy was already very fragile.
In 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake with a magnitude of 8.1 on the Richter scale occurred in Japan, during which the fire and tsunami caused by the earthquake brought great losses to the Japanese economy. This has led to very serious social and economic problems.
The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923
However, the Japanese government at that time was unwilling to face up to the problem and resolve its own internal contradictions, but instead used the rumor that "Koreans want to hold a riot" to dispatch the army and police to kill more than 6,000 Koreans and more than 600 Chinese, so as to divert the contradictions and pressure of distrust of the government in Japan.
To this end, Japan accelerated its invasion plan against China, creating the May Thirtieth Massacre in 1925, the Jinan Massacre in 1928, and killing Zhang Zuolin in Huanggutun in Shenyang in a vain attempt to invade and occupy northeast China.
In 1931, Japan created the "918 Incident" to invade and occupy northeast China, officially opening the prelude to the war of aggression against China. Since then, it has continued to create incidents and occupy Chinese territory. Later, on July 7, 1937, the "Lugou Bridge Incident" began an all-out war of aggression against China.
However, after the Japanese launched an all-out war of aggression against China, they found that the slogan that they had originally clamored to destroy China in three months was very ridiculous.
Although Japan quickly occupied a large amount of territory along the eastern coast of China in the early days of the war of aggression against China. However, as they continued to attack the Chinese mainland, they found that the Japanese army's superiority over the Chinese army began to gradually decline.
The Chinese military and people insisted on exchanging space for time and retreating into advance, so that the Japanese army's front in China became invisibly long and incomparable, and fell into the quagmire of war in China's huge combat space.
Distribution of World War II casualties in Japan
In early 1937, for example, Japan invested a total of 1.35 million troops in the Chinese battlefield, and the total strength of the Japanese army at this time was only about 2 million, accounting for almost two-thirds of the total strength of the Japanese army.
Investing so much, but not being able to quickly defeat its opponents like the previous Sino-Japanese Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, in order to compensate for Japan's war losses, will undoubtedly make it worse for Japan's fragile economy.
Then for the Chinese battlefield, which cannot achieve results quickly and cannot quickly get out. At this time, there were two voices in Japan, "going south" and "going north", and compared with the direction of Southeast Asian aggression in the south, because the main people occupying this place are the old colonial powers such as Britain, France and the United States, Japan does not have the confidence to achieve this goal for the time being.
So they turned their minds to the Soviet Union in the north, and for this reason the Japanese army launched a tentative war against the Soviet Union in the north of the Nomonkan region.
The Japanese were defeated at Nomonkan
However, I did not think that the Japanese army encountered the famous Soviet general Zhukov this time, and Zhukov saw the tentative move of the Japanese army at a glance. So he directly extinguished the offensive arrogance of the Japanese Kwantung Army at the cost of the Trans-Siberian Railway operating at almost full capacity for two months, directly consuming 31,000 tons of shells.
In this battle, the Soviet army directly defeated the Japanese army at a greater cost than the Japanese army, forcing The Japanese to dare not provoke a war to the north, and gained rare stability for the Soviet Union's eastern front.
The japanese army, which was confused, after being fooled by the Soviet army in the north direction, made a wrong judgment, stopped the elite troops of the Japanese Kwantung Army that continued to drive to the front, and began to turn their strategic goals to the south, not knowing that the Soviet eastern front troops led by Zhukov at this time had almost exhausted the inventory they had painstakingly accumulated for 2 months.
Britain, France, and the United States launched a resource embargo against Japan to force Japan to do something to them
After the Japanese army began to switch to the "southward" strategy, it began to expand its influence in Southeast Asia, which made the contradiction between Britain, France, and the United States, the main colonial powers in Southeast Asia, and Japan begin to deepen.
Germany, Italy, and Japan signed a treaty of alliance
In 1940, Japan, Germany, and Italy signed the Treaty of The Three-Power Alliance between Germany, Italy, and Japan in Germany and formally joined the Three-Power Axis. At the same time, Germany defeated Poland and France on the European battlefield, seriously threatening British security, and Japan began to accelerate its strategy for Southeast Asia.
At this time, the United States, as the largest support of Britain and France, in order to give Japan a warning, announced in July 1940 the implementation of measures such as "moral embargo", "export license", "economic embargo" and other measures against Japan, and after Japan entered the Indochina Peninsula, it implemented a scrap steel export license system for Japan, and before the United States imposed the above economic sanctions on Japan, 90% of Japan's steel and oil came from the United States, and after the economic sanctions of the United States began, Japan's oil inventory was only enough to operate for less than a year. This is undoubtedly fatal to Japan, which has no oil source.
This makes Japan face two choices, either to be strangled by Britain and the United States, trapped alive, and ultimately controlled by Britain and the United States. Or choose to make a desperate bet, launch a war against Britain and the United States and other countries, realize the "southbound" strategy, conquer Southeast Asia and other places, and obtain oil and ore resources such as Indonesia.
And "southbound" has almost become Japan's only choice.
The gambling nature of the Japanese nation made them frantically launch a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in the United States
At this time, Japan up and down had long been misled by the superficial victory in the war of aggression against China. They thought they could continue to defeat their enemies, as they did during the Sino-Japanese Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War.
U.S. Pacific Fleet
To this end, they do not hesitate to gamble on the whole country.
But before they could implement the "southbound" strategy, they had to eliminate the Japanese Navy's greatest threat, the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
To weaken the U.S. military, it is necessary to choose the person who is most familiar with the U.S. army to command, and this person is undoubtedly Yamamoto Isoroku.
Yamamoto Isoroku, who was originally the most pro-American in Japan and strongly opposed Japan's entry into the German-Italian axis, resisted this strategy.
Pacific War
However, after seeing that Japan had made up its mind, he found that only he could play the role of the Pacific War to the best, so he would accept this appointment, of course, he may also have a little luck, thinking that he might be able to command the Japanese Navy to win the Victory in the Pacific Theater and win the same gambling victory as before.
epilogue
The development of history has finally proved Japan's short-sightedness, and the clever Yamamoto Isoroku, even if his judgment is prescient, cannot stop the crazy expansion ambitions of Japanese militarism. It eventually became a booster in itself, and it was difficult to escape the punishment of justice.