Sept. 1, 2025

MM#431: The Fatal Miscalculation: How Japan Lost WWII

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message What catastrophic miscalculations led to Japan's defeat in World War II? This episode dives deep into the strategic blunders, economic impossibilities, and cultural misunderstandings that sealed Japan's fate long before the atomic bombs fell. Drawing on historian Victor Davis Hanson's meticulous research from his book "The Second World Wars", we explore how Japan's military planners fundamentally misunderstood American resolve and...

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message

What catastrophic miscalculations led to Japan's defeat in World War II? This episode dives deep into the strategic blunders, economic impossibilities, and cultural misunderstandings that sealed Japan's fate long before the atomic bombs fell.

Drawing on historian Victor Davis Hanson's meticulous research from his book "The Second World Wars", we explore how Japan's military planners fundamentally misunderstood American resolve and industrial capacity. When the US imposed oil sanctions in 1941, cutting off 93% of Japan's petroleum supply, Japanese leadership faced an impossible choice: abandon imperial ambitions or attack the very nations that supplied their essential resources. Their decision to strike Pearl Harbor, intended to demoralize Americans, instead awakened the world's most formidable industrial power.

The numbers tell a devastating story. Japan began the war with only 18 months of oil reserves, depending on conquered territories that ultimately supplied just 35% of their needs. By 1944, American submarines and bombers ensured only half of this vital resource reached the Japanese homeland. Meanwhile, America's production juggernaut created an insurmountable advantage, manufacturing more Essex-class carriers, submarines, and bombers than Japan could ever hope to counter. As Hanson notes, the question wasn't whether Allied bombers could be shot down, but whether Japan could stop the production of 40,000 four-engine heavy bombers lighting up their homeland.

Japan's defeat reminds us that military power ultimately rests on economic foundations, and that strategic decisions based on cultural misunderstandings and wishful thinking lead to disaster.

Key Points from the Episode:

• Japan's formal surrender on September 2, 1945 marked the end of WWII after fighting for 8-14 years depending on whether you count from 1931 or 1937
• The US oil embargo of 1941 cut off 93% of Japan's oil supply, creating a desperate "now or never" mentality that led to Pearl Harbor
• Japan completely misread American resolve and industrial potential, mistaking prosperity for weakness
• Japanese leaders developed racist assumptions about Americans, failing to understand the industrial tiger they would awaken
• Japan's economy was structured only for regional conflict but attempted to fight a global war
• By 1943, American production capabilities were overwhelming Japanese resources
• Japan lacked a coherent grand strategy, with competing service branches pursuing contradictory objectives
• The loss of experienced pilots at Midway created a downward spiral in naval aviation that Japan never recovered from
• Japan's defensive strategy of making island conquests costly ultimately backfired by eliminating the possibility of negotiated peace

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00:00 - Introduction to Japan's Surrender

04:38 - Japan's Years at War

08:44 - Oil Crisis and Strategic Miscalculation

13:52 - Fatal Misreading of American Resolve

18:10 - Industrial Capacity Mismatch

22:43 - Three Key Reasons for Japan's Defeat

WEBVTT

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Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life.

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Now here's your host, david Kaiser.

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Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Mojo Minute.

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In our last Mojo Minute we discussed and dismissed the revised history coming out of the United States and its use of atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945.

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So be sure to check out the podcast, the previous podcast, where we received some great feedback on it.

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But for today's show we are going to discuss why and how did Japan lose World War II and to set the stage and the context.

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We know that Japan's formal surrender happened on September 2nd it will be one day from this airing of the broadcast which will happen on September 1st and this marked the end of World War II.

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It took place aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, where representatives of the Japanese government signed the instrument of surrender.

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Allied Supreme Commander General Douglas MacArthur, along with representatives of the United States, united Kingdom, the Soviet Union, china and other allied nations, accepted that surrender.

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The ceremony followed the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki August 6th and 9th, respectively, 1945, and Japan's announcement of intent to surrender on August 15th 1945.

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The document officially ended hostilities with Japan, agreeing to the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, which demanded unconditional surrender and outlined the post-war occupation and demilitarization.

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The event was a pivotal moment in history.

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It concluded the global conflict that had lasted over five years over five years, now, keep in mind, with Japan's formal surrender in 1945, it marked the end of its involvement in World War II.

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But Japan had been fighting well before its attack on the United States in December of 1941.

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You must remember they were involved in the Second Sino-Japanese War, which lasted from 1937 to 1945.

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That's Japan's large-scale invasion of China, began on July 7, 1937 with the Marco Polo Bridge incident.

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This conflict is often considered the start of Japan's major wartime aggression in Asia, though there were earlier incidents, like the 1931 invasion of Manchuria, which could be included in a broader context.

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But the war with China continued until Japan's surrender in 1945.

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And then, as we know, japan expanded its conflict to include other neighbors and allied powers with the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 7, 1941.

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That attack was followed by simultaneous invasions of territories like the Philippines, malaya and Thailand.

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This marked the entry of Japan into the broader Pacific theater of World War II, involving the United States Kingdom, australia and many others.

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So if you were going to do back of the envelope math, you would say that some historians would include that broader context of Japan's militaristic expansion into Manchuria in 1931.

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So they could have been at war for some 14 years, from 1931 to 1945.

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However, most historians commonly reference Japan's major wartime engagement, beginning with its neighbors in 1937 and the invasion of China.

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So that means for most historians they believe Japan was at war for some eight years and two months, from July 1937 to 1945.

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So why and how did Japan lose the Second World War?

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Let's go to one of our favorite historians here at the Mojo Academy, victor Davis Hanson, and, I might add, one of the hardest working historians I've ever seen.

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This guy puts out just tons of content.

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It's just unbelievable.

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He does his own podcast, he does other guest podcasts, he has Hillsdale online courses which we use to research this topic, or we use this research for today's topic, and VDH, as we like to call him here, is just a huge content producing gem.

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And in fact let's grab our first pull quote from his monumental book the Second World Wars, which has won critical acclaim.

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Going to the book, japan, even with access to some oil in Taiwan, korea and Manchuria, produced less than 10% of its oil needs.

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In July 1941, the United States had embargoed petroleum exports to Japan.

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That accounted for over 80% of its pre-war oil consumption, even with stored oil, along with a small amount of domestic production and alternate sources of importation.

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With a small amount of domestic production and alternate sources of importation, japan began the war with only about a year and a half of reserves.

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By 1941, the oil fields of Borneo, java and Sumatra produced about 65 million barrels, or about 4% of the world's annual output.

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In theory, the Dutch East Indies could satisfy all Japan's planned wartime consumption.

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Yet given that the Dutch blew up several hundred wells in the Dutch East Indies, japan's grand plans to replace American oil with Asian supplies were only partially realized.

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At its best, japan managed to tap only 35% of its annual consumption from those fields and refineries that had not been either fired by the Dutch or later bombed.

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The challenge was not so much restoring Royal Dutch shell production as getting the oil through the American air and submarine blockade to the Japanese mainland.

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By 1941, I'm sorry, by 1944, only half of the oil and refined petroleum products from the Dutch East Indies ever arrived in Japan.

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And by 1945, most Japanese tankers were being torpedo or bombed and oil importation stopped altogether.

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So VDH forcefully argues that Japan's decision to bomb Pearl Harbor was tactically successful but strategically very, very bad.

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He emphasizes that Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was driven primarily by economic desperation rather than military confidence.

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When the United States imposed oil sanctions in 1941, cutting off some 93% of Japan's oil supply, the Japanese faced what VDH describes as an impossible choice surrender their imperial ambitions in China or seize the resources they needed by force.

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The oil embargo was partially and particularly devastating because Japan's economy was completely dependent on imported resources, as VDH explains in his analysis, japan's economy was completely dependent on imported resources.

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As VDH explains in his analysis, japan's leaders calculated they had approximately 18 months before their wartime machine would collapse without access to American oil.

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This created a quote now or never mentality that led to the Pearl Harbor attack and ever mentality that led to the Pearl Harbor attack.

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However, vdh argues this desperation clouded their strategic judgment and led them to make decisions based on wishful thinking rather than the realistic assessment of their capabilities.

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Now, another major point on the failure of Japan to win World War II was a complete misreading of American resolve.

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Wow, did Japan completely misread the American character and especially its industrial potential?

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Japanese leaders, including Yamamoto, viewed American isolationism and reluctance to enter the European war as evidence of weakness and a lack of resolve.

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But BDH notes that the Japanese leaders concluded if America won't come to Britain's aid while it's burning down, surely they won't care about a few battleships at Pearl Harbor.

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They won't care about a few battleships at Pearl Harbor.

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This heavy miscalculation was compounded by racist assumptions about the American society.

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Vdh points out that Japanese leaders who had lived in America in the 1920s including Yamamoto, to be specific developed contempt rather than respect for the American society.

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Yamamoto's observations that Americans quote have nice cars and wear spats reflected a profound misunderstanding of its industrial capacity and the social cohesion that produced such a prosperity.

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Let's grab another quote from Victor's wonderful website.

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If you haven't read it, the Blade of Perseus is the name of the website and we are going to go to a wonderful posting back in July I'm sorry, december of 1941.

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But this posting was 2021 by VDH.

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Let's go to that article about Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.

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In some it was largely Yamamoto's enormous ego and his tactical genius and his strategic ineptitude, along with Japanese hubris, that explains the strategic idiocy of a brilliant but short-lived victory at Pearl Harbor.

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But to be fair, no student of military preparedness, economic resources or social organization could have ever believed that a relatively vulnerable and isolationist United States, still reeling from the recurring cycles of depression, in less than four years would have fought simultaneously across the Pacific and Europe with a 12 million person military, the largest economy in history and the world's most formidable weapons, such as Essex-class fleet carriers, balliot submarines, b-29 long-range bombers, hellcat and Mustang fighters and the world's first atomic bombs.

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Yes, the American industrial tagger was awoken while at peace in December of 1941.

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Japan's complete dependence on imported raw materials created an impossible strategic situation.

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Vdh notes that Japan imported not only oil but also rubber and iron and other essential materials, primarily from the very countries they intended to fight.

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The irony was inescapable Japan needed to wage war to secure resources, but lacked the resources necessary to wage war effectively.

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The Japanese economy had become more dependent on American materials throughout the 1930s, not less.

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As the VDH documents, japan's imported scraps of metal from the United States increased from 500,000 tons annually 1929 to 1932 to 2.5 million tons by 1937.

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To 2.5 million tons by 1937.

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This growing dependency made Japan increasingly vulnerable to the economic pressure, precisely when their imperial ambitions were expanding.

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Furthermore, the Japanese military-industrial complex was fundamentally structured for just regional warfare, not global conflict.

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Japan lacked the industrial infrastructure to produce the weapon systems necessary for victory against industrial superpowers and, most critically, japan.

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Japan had no true long-range bomber capability and no aircraft carriers capable of matching American production.

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While Japan began the war with a qualitative advantage in certain areas, particularly in naval aviation, they lacked the industrial base to sustain that advantage.

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Once the war became a production contest.

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Once the war became a production contest.

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Yet by 1943, may of 1943, the Axis goal of cutting off Allied supplies once more had proven an illusory episode.

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Further down the page we read this the American fleet, in a series of battles at the Coral Sea and Midway and Slugfest around Guadalcanal, kept the Pacific sea lanes of supply open and fought the Japanese Navy to at least a draw.

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Already, by 1943, there were unprecedented expansions in Allied production, in the size of their armies and navies.

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Still could the Axis powers have incorporated their winnings, dug in and made the counterattacks of the ascendant Allies too costly to achieve their ambitious strategic goals of unconditional surrender?

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In theory, given the resources of populations still under Axis control by mid-1942, there was no intrinsic reason why Hitler, in Soviet style of 1941, could not have immediately reorganized Axis-controlled Europe from the Atlantic to Moscow to ensure greater industrial production and conscripted armies as large as those of the Soviet Union and the Japanese-held Pacific, and occupied Asia from northern China to Burma and from the Aleutians to Guadalcanal, offered nearly as many natural resources and recruits as were available to North America and the British Dominions.

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Several obvious reasons explained why the Axis powers failed to mobilize the assets under their occupation and control, all largely innate to their pre-war cultures of Japan, germany and Italy themselves.

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As noted earlier, the craft-based factories of the fascist powers did not quickly enough appreciate the basic principles of industrial production, especially the importance of setting and settling on a few practical designs of tanks, planes, trucks and guns and then fabricating them in mass and at little cost.

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Early victories of the Axis countries likewise created a sense of complacency, a quote victory disease that worked against full mobilization of their economies.

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Not only had Allied bombing hampered German, italian and Japanese production, but private industrial fiefdoms, endemic corruption and bureaucratic infighting and suspicion had as well all characteristic of non-transparent autocracies.

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Non-transparent autocracies.

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At issue is not whether a B-17 or B-24, an Alvaro Lancaster or B-29 was vulnerable to German and Japanese flak and fighters and thus was often shot down in great numbers, but whether the Axis powers could stop the production of over 40,000 of these four-engine heavy behemoths that lit up their homelands?

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Or could they themselves send comparable air fleets to do the same to the allied homeland factories?

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They clearly could do.

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Neither Wow clearly could do, neither Wow.

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There was the great VDH, the great Victor Davis Hanson, on full display.

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Just incredible research and analysis to teach us the three main reasons why Japan and how Japan lost World War II.

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Furthermore, japan's early advantage in naval aviation was, just frankly, unsustainable due to training and resource limitations.

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The loss of experienced pilots at the Battle of Midway for Japan and subsequent battles created a downward spiral from which Japan never recovered.

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Unlike American training programs that could rapidly produce large numbers of competent pilots, japanese training was both limited in scale and inefficient in execution.

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And, to add insult to injury, japan lacked an effective defensive strategy.

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Japanese defensive strategies in the Pacific proved inadequate against American combined arms operations.

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Despite their elaborate fortifications on the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, japanese defenders were systematically overwhelmed by American material advantages in artillery, air power and naval gunfire.

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The Japanese strategy of making each island conquest as costly as possible for American forces ultimately backfired.

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Rather than discouraging American advance, these bloody battles convinced American leadership that not only unconditional surrender was acceptable, eliminating any possibility of a negotiated peace.

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So, in summary, three fundamental causes were the reasons for Japan's defeat Strategic overreach.

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Based on a fundamental miscalculation, japan attacked the United States while completely misunderstanding American industrial potential, its social cohesion and its national resolve.

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Pearl Harbor was designed to demoralize Americans into accepting Japanese expansion, but it instead awakened the American tagger, american anger, and mobilized an unprecedented amount of industrial resources.

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Unlike anything the world has ever seen, japanese leaders, influenced by racist assumptions and wishful thinking, failed to comprehend that attack on America and how America would unleash the world's most powerful economy against them.

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This wasn't merely poor intelligence, it was frankly a catastrophic failure to understand the nature of their opponent.

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Now, economic and industrial impossibility of victory was Japan's second mistake.

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It was completely dependent on imported resources, particularly oil, yet it chose to fight the very countries that supplied these materials to them.

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It just lacked Japan.

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Lacked the industrial infrastructure for global warfare.

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Japan could never match American production capacity that by 1945, get this exceeded all other major powers combined.

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Japan's economy was structured only for regional conflict, not global war, making sustained military operations against the industrial superpowers economically impossible from the beginning.

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And thirdly, japan never developed a coherent grand strategy.

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Instead, it pursued contradictory objectives through competing service branches.

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Their submarine doctrine, for example, ignored commerce raiding in favor of fleet actions.

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Their defensive strategies relied on unsustainable tactics like kamikaze attacks, and their planning consistently assumed enemies would behave as Japanese strategists hoped, rather than the rational actors they would actually behave like.

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This represented just a systemic failure in strategic thinking that no amount of tactical skill or fighting spirit could ever overcome.

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So in today's Mojo Minute, let us read history to understand the mistakes of others, especially that of Japan and its imperial designs on its neighbors in 1930 through 1945.

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And, most importantly, let us appreciate all of those American and allied service personnel who fought and won a victory in the Second World Wars which ultimately shaped the current world we live in.

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Read history because in doing so you will be living a flourishing life and, as always, keep fighting the good fight.

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Thank you for joining us.

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We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast.

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Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources.

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Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.