The evolution of the strategic doctrine of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1921-1941 : an honors thesis [(HONRS 499)]

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Authors
Weir, Gary A.
Advisor
Hamori, Paul A.
Issue Date
1978
Keyword
Degree
Thesis (B.?.)
Department
Honors College
Other Identifiers
Abstract

By 1921, the Imperial Japanese Navy had come to view the United States of America as its "hypothetical enemy" for the purpose of strategic planning. This perception was based on the appreciation that America had the power, geographic position, and resolve to thwart the Imperial Navy’s Southward Advance Policy. The Washington Trenty of 1922, which restricted the size of the Japanese fleet and gave the U.S. fleet a comfortable margin of superiority, served to increase the problems facing Navy strategies.Drawing on its experiences in the Russo-Japanese War, the Imperial Navy worked out an “offensive-defensive” strategy for use in a war with America which called for attrition tactics against the U.S. fleet until it was so reduced in size that it could be defeated by the qualitatively superior Japanese battle fleet. However, this doctrine was faulty in that it surrendered the initiative to the enemy, did not contemplate the possibility of a war against more than one nation, and was little more than an overblown tactical plan.When Japan found herself faced with the probability of a two-front war in 1941, Commander-in-Chief Combined Fleet Admiral Yamamoto to revolutionize the Navy’s traditional strategic doctrine by seizing the initiative at the vary start of hostilities by means of a surprise carrier air strike against the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. By the time the U.S. Navy could be rebuilt, Japan would have prepared an impregnable defensive perimeter along the fringes of her Empire which might convince America of the desirability of a negotiated peace.Although this strategy was not successful in practice—in part because the Imperial Navy became overconfident after the outbreak of war—Yamaoto’s “new look” in strategic doctrine was a true strategy which acknowledged the close relationship between political, economic, and military factors. Had the Japanese Navy adopted such a realistic attitude in its planning at a much earlier date, the history of the Pacific war read very differently.