The other thing that 20/20 hindsight blinds us to in this case is exactly how flummoxed we were over the Japanese mindset. Nowadays, it's much easier to see how ill-prepared Japan was to prosecute a war like this. However, I don't think even the Japanese ever really caught on as to how dysfunctional their military was.
I had a friend that used to work in mental health. He'd worked at the state hospital until it closed and then volunteered here and there around town. One day, he showed up at my place in a particularly foul mood. It took a while for me to sort out what was the matter. The police had cornered some guy at a half-way house that had gone off the deep end. The loon tried to threaten the 6 cops with a steak knife and the cops had responded by pumping a dozen rounds into him. John was all upset over this. He'd befriended the loon years ago. Yes, he was nuts. Yes, he had a history of doing stupid stuff like this. John had needed to disarm him on one occasion. I forget the guy's name. We'll call him Joey.
"Everyone else was panicked," said John. "I walked up to Joey, and he was threatening to stab anyone that came near him. All the while, he was humming a tune. I recognized the tune and started humming it along with him. Pretty soon, Joey calmed down and gave me the knife. That's all it took."
Japan is Joey in this story. If you didn't get the totally alien mindset of the Japanese, they seemed to be absolutely crazy. The U.S. were the 6 cops. I frankly didn't agree with John on his assessment. Yes, maybe if the cops had all been trained social workers, Joey might still be alive today running around half-way houses threatening the staff. The reality of the situation is both Japan and Joey went off the rails to such an extent that they needed to be put down like mad dogs and the sooner the better.
" I don't think even the Japanese ever really caught on as to how dysfunctional their military was." This is another key, but it needs explaining. So much of what drove the Japanese military was just plain ka-ka. Take any engagement we had with Japan and you can see some really weird, counter-productive and even self-destructive behaviors. I'm not going to go into details here; you can probably all cite examples. If you want to discuss it, we'll start another thread. My point is that so much of Japan's efforts in the Pacific were wickedly stupid.
The Japanese fought the way East Asian militaries fight. The Chinese basically fought the same way in Korea.
