2013-03-22, 11:54 AM
KhainiWest Wrote:"The U.S. just had better infrastructure/economy to keep our military strong while Japan had difficulty sustaining its fighting capability through losses."
That's not true, we placed an embargo on them which made them desperate which is why they went out of their way to decide to invade indonesia. They did one attack essentially on our pacific fleet in attempt to demoralize us from intervening. It has nothing to do with them running out of resources to fight us, they had no intention too besides demoralizing us. The 2-4 years we were fighting was just a snowball effect of them trying to keep us back while they tried to steal resources.
[COLOR="#cc8899"]That's what I was trying to get at without going into the weeds of it. I suppose I oversimplified it, but the economies of both countries played a major role in the conflicts between the U.S. and Japan. We had the ability to quickly repair our carriers and replace lost/damaged aircraft and had a strong enough infrastructure that we could continue production despite the ongoing war. Japan, meanwhile, had nowhere near the capability to sustain its own production and its training programs couldn't produce quality pilots fast enough.
Midway solidified that advantage - a combination of bad intel (on the part of Japan), good intel (on the part of the U.S.), luck, and some poor distribution of forces by Japan, the U.S. gained a lot of momentum and Japan couldn't recover.
As for Pearl Harbor, that was Japan's attempt to crush our Pacific naval forces before they became a factor. Most of the critical assets that they wanted to hit, however, weren't there at the time - what was a preemptive strike to grant Japan naval dominance instead provoked us into entering the conflict.
I didn't mean to imply that the economy was the entire reason Japan lost the war, I meant to say that it was a major factor in keeping Japan from recovering from its losses after overextending.
As for the metaphor, [MENTION=8017]CrazyForDex[/MENTION]; , North Korea views the U.S. as its primary enemy as a result of the war several decades ago. Because we're still technically at war with them, Japan and Guam are enemies by extension because they harbor our military. [/COLOR]