Japanese Military Strategy in the Pacific War:Was Defeat Inevitable?

by: James B. Wood (Author)

Publication Date: 5 Aug. 2007

Language: English

Print Length: 152 pages

ISBN-10: 074255340X

ISBN-13: 9780742553408

Book Description

In this provocative history, James B. Wood challenges the received wisdom that Japan’s defeat in the Pacific was historically inevitable. He argues instead that it was only when the Japanese military prematurely abandoned its original sound strategic plan–to secure the resources Japan needed and establish a viable defensible perimeter for the Empire–that the Allies were able to regain the initiative and lock Japanese forces into a war of attrition they were not prepared to fight. The book persuasively shows how the Japanese army and navy had both the opportunity and the capability to have fought a different and more successful war in the Pacific that could have influenced the course and outcome of World War II. It is therefore a study both of Japanese defeat and of what was needed to achieve a potential Japanese victory, or at the very least, to avoid total ruin. Wood’s argument does not depend on signal individual historical events or dramatic accidents. Instead it examines how familiar events could have become more complicated or problematic under different, but nevertheless historically possible, conditions due to changes in the complex interaction of strategic and operational factors over time. Wood concludes that fighting a different war was well within the capacities of imperial Japan. He underscores the fact that the enormous task of achieving total military victory over Japan would have been even more difficult, perhaps too difficult, if the Japanese had waged a different war and the Allies had not fought as skillfully as they did. If Japan had traveled that alteate military road, the outcome of the Pacific War could have differed significantly from that we know so well-and, perhaps a little too complacently, accept.

About the Author

Review [Wood’s] carefully constructed arguments stem from a wide reading and understanding of the war’s historic literature, and his suggested alteative courses of Japanese actions are entirely credible . . . [his] careful examination of alteative possibilities in the Pacific War is an impressive example of good counterfactual history.–Col. Stanley L. Falk “The Joual of the Australian Society of Archivists”This impressive counterfactual analysis demonstrates that the course of the Pacific War was not set in stone. Wood demonstrates, through careful analysis of alteatives actually discussed by Japan’s leaders, that the decision to go to war was not an exercise in national suicide. Instead, specific choices closed a window of opportunity for Japan to have bought more time and might well have altered fundamentally the war’s conclusion.–Dennis E. Showalter, Colorado College; author of Patton and Rommel:Men of War in the Twentieth CenturyWood has raised many provocative points worthy of debate. Recommended.– “Choice Reviews”
About the Author
James B. Wood is Charles Keller Professor of History at Williams College.

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