Rusted Sky

Posted on another forum but I thought it might be appropriate here also:

In September 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria. The invasion was a blatant attempt to seize the naturally resource rich area of China for the new Imperial Japanese war machine that had in the previous decades defeated Russia and Germany and gained control of large land and sea territories from them.

The primary target of the invasion was the iron rich deposits in Manchuria as well as the land itself, highly suitable to growing many of the staple foodstuffs that Japan no longer had enough tillable land to grow.

In 1931 Hitler had yet to seize total power in Germany and Herbert Hoover was still in the White House. The League of Nations condemned the military take over by Japan in the strongest terms but their protests were ignored.

In the following years Japan built up its control of Manchuria and eventually extended it through most of the Chinese mainland eventually seizing the British Colony of Singapore in 1942.

Historians are in near unanimous agreement that the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 was the primary initiator of the fifteen year long stretch of global conflict that killed hundreds of millions of people, destroyed untold trillions of dollars worth of property, and eventually came to be known as World War II.

The moral question is this: If Herbert Hoover had had the atomic bomb in 1931 and had used it to destroy Hiroshima in order to force the Japanese Imperial High Command to order the Japanese Army to pull back from Manchuria would it have been a disproportionate response to Japan's illegal military action?

otpu

Interesting question. It doesn't address the Germans...
Without Hitler and the lack of effort to stop his power grabs, would the Japanese problem have been as much of an issue?

Were our interests in the far east at the time sufficient to warrant our being involved if the Japanese hadn't attacked us at Pearl Harbor? (and I understand that was caused at least in large part due to our cutting off their fuel supply) Or would we have just minded our own business, so to speak?

It is my understanding that, if the Japanese had left the U.S. and its overseas territories alone, we PROBABLY wouldn't have gone to war with them, although treaty obligations with Britain would have probably brought us into the Pacific War if the Japanese had attacked Britain's territories. But most historians agree that what made WWII a WORLD war was Hitler and his ambitions; since most of the colonial powers were European, a war there necessarily included their colonies (Germany had a school for prospective colonists, who were to take over the conquered colonies; I read a fascinating book once on the German Home Front...). Japan's expansionist policies would have eventually drawn it into conflict with the European powers, but without Hitler WWII would not have been a world war, but one confined to Asia and the Pacific, in my opinion.

Hmmm. You and I seem to be in conflict with the view of the historians.

We probably need to learn more. Or something.

What I found striking was the fact that Japan's invasion of Manchuria actually predated Hitler's final rise to power and Roosevelt's election in 1932 by more than a year.

Even though Hitler's rise to power and his subsequant rebuilding of Germany's military in direct violation of the Treaty of Versallies are considered to be the primary cause of WWII, I question if it would have ever happened if there had been a strong and resolute response to Japan's military encursions on the Chinese mainland more than a year earlier.

otpu

SueK:

Another area of conflict with the historians:

Neville Chamberlain's attitude of appeasement at Munich in 1938 and the subsequent granting of Hitler's territorial demands for Germany to be allowed to annex Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland probably hastened the end of WWII by at least 5 years and maybe as many as 10.

My reasoning for this:

England's lack of resistance to Germany's demands in 1938 prompted Hitler into moving up his schedule for territorial expansion by at least 5 years and put him on the path to starting his war plans way before Germany was really ready to conduct a Pan-European war.

Otpu