Author: Bill Coffin (---.rimsmail.org)
Date: 09-10-2002 13:43
First off, kudos to Brian for a nicely written article. I especially enjoyed the links ot the fight cards.
My only gripe is on Brian's assessment of Pearl Harbor, which really has less to do with the jist of his article and more about me being nitpicky on matters concerning WWII. His article is still a very good one, and one that I enjoyed reading.
Pearl Harbor was indeed a strategic blunder for Japan, but not because Japan supposedly squandered an opportunity to take what it wanted from Asia while placating the United States diplomatically. By the time of Pearl Harbor, as far as Japan was concerned, the time for diplomacy was at an end and the time for direct action was at hand.
During the 1930s, there were numerous diplomatic tussles between Japan and the United States, including at least one case where Japanese aircraft fired opn an destroyed American military personnel and equipment. Clearly, Japan was testing the American resolve to answer such actions, to see exactly how prepared the United States was to go to war in the Pacific. The reason for this is simple: Japan desired to increase its resources and riches throughout the region, and the only real power standing in their way was the United States, which had naval installations, ships and aircraft stationed throughout the Pacific Rim. By the time Pearl Harbor had come, Japan had decided that America, even though it had endured Japan's increasing aggressiveness for years, would not stand for the empire's planned invasion of Southeast Asia. Indeed, it was the only major obstacle standing in the way of Japanese ambitions to take the entire region for itself. No, for Japan to prevail, it would have to destroy America's considerable (at least in terms of manpower and equipment) Asian presence, starting with the Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor.
The strike on Pearl Harbor did not destroy the fleet, but it certainly did rob it of its prestige battleships (which ironically, would have proven of little use in the coming Pacific theatre anyway -- the vast stretches of ocean made aircraft carriers, not battleships, the real workhorses of both Imperial and American fleets). Afterwards (and many folks do not know this), the Japanese carried out successive, and similarly devastating raids on American installations throughout Southeast Asia, destroying many ships and aircraft. By the beginning of 1942, the American presence in Asia was in utter shambles, and indeed, it looked like the Japanese gambit had prevailed.
But where the Japanese truly blundered was not in mis-gauging the American wilingness to fight (German U-Boat activity against American shipping would have eventually provoked some kind of military action, I think), but in mis-gauging the American industrial capacity to rebuild its shattered Pacific fleet. Even had the Americans not prevailed at the Battle of Midway and mortally wounded Japan's naval abilities, (a victory aided considerably by blind chance, some would say, referring to the fortuitious American dive-bomber attacks that crippled the bulk of Japan's aircraft carrier fleet), the truth remains that the United States could put far more ships to sea and aircraft in the sky than could Imperial Japan -- and at a faster pace, too. In the end, Japan made the same blunder Germany did in underestimating the industrial brawn of the United States, and the role her "arsenal of democracy" would play in the greatest conflict of the 20th century.
Having said all that, Brian was correct in saying that Japan did hope to crush the American resolve to come back from late 1941's devastating raids. However, it did not pin its chances of Pacific triumph entirely on those hopes. With the United States already dedicating a substantial portion of its industrial base to aiding Great Britian in its struggle against Nazi Germany, Japan gambled, I believe, on the chance that America would have thought it unfeasible to fight wars on both fronts and would instead give up where its forces had already been defeated, and focus entirely on securing victory in Europe. In this, I believe Japan was not acting on its evaluation of American courage or character, but military and industrial reality. (Some historians will point out that prior to Pearl Harbor, Hitler implored Imperial Japan to attack the United States in order to draw the country into conflict and thereby reduce the amount of help it could afford to give to Great Britain. I am personally unsure of how much this really factored into Japan's strategic decision making. I think Japan had ambitions for controlling all of Southeast Asia regardless of the turmoil in Europe at the time, and to accomplish that goal, the American Pacific Fleet would have to be destroyed, making an attack on Pearl Harbor a strategic option to be considered, Hitler or no Hitler.
Ultimately, of course, Pearl Harbor *was* a major blunder on Japan's part, and one that ultimately spelled its doom. In the context of Brian's article, though, how does this play into G.M.s running combat? Simple -- it is a good example of how a very competent enemy can still make major mistakes not because it is stupid or because it is "evil" but because it simply misread the realities of the situation and ended up paying the price for it. This is something else for G.M.s to consider when running or designing any kind of fight, battle, or conflict situation -- sometimes a side might not prevail simply because it wasn't in the cards, or because it made a huge mistake that otherwise might have driven the situation to have a completely different result. In the dramatic terms of role-playing, where reality need not always govern *every* element of the situation, factoring in a critical error on the part of the enemy might be a great tool for the G.M. to level the playing field for seriously outgunned PCs, to add an element of unpredictability in what might otherwise be a fairly straightforward and foreseeable outcome, or to stick all parties involved in a situation where everybody's notions of what "should" be have gone out the window, thereby encouraging people to take chances, throw caution to the wind, and fight like there is no tomorrow.
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