WWII–-75th ANNIVERSARY POLLS--#14 SEPTEMBER 1940

RJL518

The Tripartite Pact, also known as the Berlin Pact, was an agreement between Germany, Italy and Japan signed in Berlin on 27 September 1940 by, respectively, Adolf Hitler, Galeazzo Ciano and Saburō Kurusu. It was a defensive military alliance that was eventually joined by Hungary (20 November 1940), Romania (23 November 1940), Bulgaria (1 March 1941) and Yugoslavia (25 March 1941), as well as by the German client state of Slovakia (24 November 1940). Yugoslavia’s adherence provoked a coup d’�tat in Belgrade, and Italy and Germany responded by invading Yugoslavia (with Bulgarian, Hungarian and Romanian assistance) and partitioning the country. The resulting Italo-German client state of Croatia joined the pact on 15 June 1941.

The Tripartite Pact was a piece of propaganda directed primarily at the United States. Its practical effects were limited, since the Italo-German and Japanese operational theatres were on opposite sides of the world and the high contracting powers had disparate strategic interests. Some technical cooperation was carried out, and the Japanese declaration of war on the United States propelled, although it did not require, a similar declaration of war from all the other signatories of the Tripartite Pact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripartite_Pact

We finally get a question about Japan in these polls.
Did Japan do the right thing signing the infamous Tripartite Pact which officially formed the AXIS powers? What should have Japan done if you think they shouldn’t have joined the AXIS?

CWO Marc

I’d say that the Tripartite Pact was a great bargain for Japan. It came at no cost to Japan, because for all practical purposes Japan and the European Axis powers fought separate wars in separate parts of the world, with none of the partners directly participating in each other’s campaigns to any significant degree and with no significant coordination of efforts or of strategic planning between them. And it can be argued that it turned a war that the US was fighting against Japan into a war that the US was fighting against Japan and Germany – something which more than simply doubled the size of the problem the Americans had because Germany was far more powerful and dangerous than Japan. I say “it can be argued” because the cause-effect relationship isn’t clear-cut in this case. The Tripartite Pact didn’t require Germany to go to war against the US because technically it only applied to a situation in which the US was the aggressor (which it was not in this case, because it was Japan which had attacked the US), and at any rate Hitler was well-known for tearing up treaties when it suited him…so one interpretation of Hitler’s DoW against the US would be that it had nothing to do with the Tripartite Pact. On the other hand, the Pact’s existence certainly didn’t deter such a DoW, and it may have at least contributed to Hitler’s decision to go to war against the US. So basically, Japan had nothing to lose from signing the Pact, it potentially had a lot to gain from the Pact in theory and it may have actually have gained a lot from it in actual fact.

Private-Panic

@RJL518:

Did Japan do the right thing signing the infamous Tripartite Pact which officially formed the AXIS powers?

Maybe.

Japan’s aim of eradicating western imperialism from Asia was fine in itself. That aim was tarnished by association with the Nazis, as it was by so many other things - barbarism, savagery, Japanese imperialism and war itself.

A (superficially) combined axis foe created competing priorities for initially stretched allied resources. Would the allies have found themselves at war in both Europe and Asia without the tripartite pact? Britain certainly - Japan declared war on both the US and British Empire at the same time. The US probably - although Roosevelt was unreliable in some ways, he had been on a trajectory towards war against Germany for some time. Nevertheless, there is always a possibility that Japan’s belligerence could have diverted the US from this course, which brings us back to Roosevelt’s unreliability.

@RJL518:

What should have Japan done if you think they shouldn’t have joined the AXIS?

War against the British Empire and US effectively labelled Japan as Axis regardless of the tripartite pact.

The alternative option would have been not to have gone to war with the BE & US. That is an interesting question. For as long as the BE & US were focussed on Germany, J would presumably have had a free hand in China. Following the defeat of G would the BE & US have ducked the J dilemma as they did the Soviet one? Might J (over time) have persuaded Roosevelt that the BE was a greater threat to the US than they were? After-all, there is evidence that he perceived Stalin as his ally against the BE after WWII was won.

CWO Marc

The eradication of western imperialism from Asia wasn’t a Japanese aim, it was a Japanese claim. By which I mean that Japan’s “Asia for Asiatics” slogan was simply that – a slogan. What Japan really wanted was to expand its existing colonial empire. The initial territories it started conquering – starting back in 1931 with the occupation of Manchuria, and then continuing to the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (which last from 1937 to 1945) – belonged to China, so those particular campaigns of aggression can hardly be characterized as the liberation of fellow Asians from Western colonialism. Later, in 1941, Japan started to make a grab for various additional pieces of desirable real estate. Those ones happened to be under the control of various Western powers, but that wasn’t the reason Japan attacked them; it did so to take control of their valuable resources. The fact that they were Western-controlled simply gave the Japanese the chance to claim (for P.R. reasons) that they were doing their fellow Asians a favour by setting up their so-called Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. As one of Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight” narrators sarcastically expressed it, the real plan was that “The Japs would get the Prosperity and the others would get the Co”. As for the notion that the Japanese were tainted by association with Nazi barbarism, it’s my understanding that even Nazi Germany was shocked (or at least professed to be shocked) by the Rape of Nanking in (I think) 1937 and offered its services to mediate the “dispute”, since Germany traditonally had close ties with China.

Private-Panic

Quite right Marc. And much more clearly put than my opening paragraph.

KurtGodel7

Well prior to the U. S. declaration of war, FDR had launched an undeclared war against Germany. (As Hoover described in Freedom Betrayed.) Hitler declared war on the U.S. partly because of that, partly because he saw a chance to sink Lend-Lease ships in the Atlantic while most of the U.S. navy was engaged in the Pacific, and partly because he was convinced FDR would eventually succeed in his objective of turning his undeclared partial war against Germany into a full scale war.

Germany was tied down by its wars against the Soviet Union and Britain. It was not in a position to do anything at all to the United States, except for sinking Lend Lease ships en route to the Soviet Union or Britain. (Also there was the sinking of American ships in the Caribbean and South Atlantic.) The Tripartite Agreement might have created in Japan the false confidence that if they went against the U.S. at least they wouldn’t be going it alone. And it’s certainly true that Germany received the brunt of the American war effort. But because Germany was never in a position to threaten American security, the U.S. always had the option of devoting the entirety of its war effort against Japan, if that was what was necessary to stave off defeat in the Pacific. The “Germany First” strategy was adopted to protect the Soviet Union, not the United States. Had Japan ever been close to achieving military victory in the Pacific, FDR might have been forced to abandon his “Germany first” strategy in favor of a “protect America first” plan.

1/3 of America’s war effort was devoted to Japan, the other 2/3 devoted to Europe. But as of December 1941, Japan had only 10% of the industrial capacity of the United States. Nor was America Japan’s sole opponent: it was engaged in an unwinnable war in China, and was in conflict with the British Empire. Under those circumstances military victory was never an option for Japan–at least not in a war against the U.S. If Japan couldn’t even defeat the 1/3 of the American war effort it faced, it certainly couldn’t have defeated America had all 3/3 of the U.S. war effort been directed against it. As that effort would have been, had Japan ever been close to decisively ending the war through military means.

Its only chance of victory would have been to avoid war against America if possible, and focus on the Soviet Union and/or the British and Dutch empires instead. The question there is: if Japan had attacked the British or Dutch Empires, would the U.S. have declared war? Prior to Pearl Harbor, the FDR administration was very pro-war, and the American people were very anti-war. Given the sentiments of the latter, it’s unlikely that Congress would have approved a declaration of war. If we weren’t willing to go to war over the fall of France, why would we go to war to save European colonialism?

The Tripartite Pact could have been an important component of an anti-Soviet or anti-British strategy. But it was never a useful tool for dealing with American interventionism. Because this tool was used for the wrong purpose, I see it as a defeat for Japan. I voted for the “maybe” option in the poll. Like any tool, the Tripartate Pact could have been used for a logical purpose or for something illogical. The Tripartite Pact was not to blame for the FDR administration’s increasingly inflammatory actions against Japan, nor for the resultant Pearl Harbor attack. Pearl Harbor was an emotion-driven decision.

Narvik

@KurtGodel7:

If we weren’t willing to go to war over the fall of France, why would we go to war to save European colonialism?

Good point, I guess Lafayette must have turned face down in his tomb

Frederick II

I’m saying no because if they did Pearl Harbor then Germany wouldn’t have to declare war on US and that would really help out them in many ways, even though it would hurt Japan and I think in late 1942 US would declare on Germany, but thats a maybe. :|

KurtGodel7

Narvik wrote:

Good point, I guess Lafayette must have turned face down in his tomb

In 1917, the French and British conned the United States into going to war against Germany. They told wild stories about the very large numbers of Belgians and others the Germans had supposedly murdered. After the war, the American people learned the atrocity propaganda had been a pack of lies.

The American people were also told that the Allies had gone to war for idealistic reasons: to promote self-determination, and to make the world safe for democracy. After the war was over, it was learned that “self-determination” didn’t apply to the Germans in the Rhineland, the Germans in the Sudetenland, or the Germans in West Prussia. Nor did “make the world safe for democracy” include any sort of plan for dealing with Soviet expansionism. The Allies simply ignored the Soviets’ invasion of Poland in 1919 - '20; leaving the Poles to deal with the problem on their own as best they could. Germany was almost completely disarmed by the Versailles Treaty, and in no position to deter that or any future Soviet invasions of Europe.

Given that the French had duped the United States into sending hundreds of thousands of its own men home in body bags, in a war which bore no relation at all to any of Allied propagandists’ lofty claims, they had sacrificed whatever right they might otherwise have had to request American aid the next time they went to war under false pretenses. It’s not the United States’ responsibility to turn its wives into widows, or its children into orphans, just because some sleazy French politicians chose to lie to the Polish in 1939.

WraithZer0

I don’t think so much was a French duping as it was the unrestricted sub warfare in the Atlantic shipping lanes, involving a lot of US ships. But hey, wars have been fought over less, and I would not be in the least bit surprised by propaganda usage.

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