"Morale, of course, is a psychological state, isn't it? So right now we're in the realm of harder to pin down and harder to say that what applies to Person A will apply to Person B, necessarily. But morale is one of those things that on a tactical level, on a battlefield level is undeniably huge, and they've been writing about it, military strategists, since the Bronze Age. The idea is not to kill everybody on a battlefield traditionally, it's to kill enough people to break their will to continue fighting right? To destroy their morale. Killing is a means to an end. Nobody denies this. What is interesting though, is to try to extrapolate what applies, and that is, if not provable, then demonstrable, right? You, you might not be able to prove it in a laboratory, but it's been shown to be true enough times. So you could say reliably, right?
Morale is the most important thing on a tactical battlefield. Is it the most important thing on the strategic one? Does it apply to whole nation states? Can you break their morale? This is an open question in the Second World War. Some people say you can, some people say you can't. Some people say you can but only if you do it this way. Some people say you can but only if you do it that way, what breaks the nation's morale? And what proof do you have that that's something that even occurs? Much of the justification for some of the bombing that's going to be done from the air on cities and populations in cities is based on this idea that you will get them to, you know, petition their governments and say we must have peace now. We can't be bombed anymore...
This is part of the interwar years of aerial development and theory on how aircraft are going to be these great peacemakers sometimes, because very quickly, the populations will tell their governments, you know, you got to get a peace deal going right now, we're not gonna put up with this. And then the Germans bomb places like London, and the evidence seems to contradict that 180 degrees. The people in London and Britain weren't ready to give in because they were being bombed, they were pissed off. Now, does this mean that it doesn't work? No, it means that the jury's still out, right? We're not bombing enough. We're not bombing with the right kinds of bombs, the right kinds of planes. Now, the technology hasn't caught up with theory yet. I mean, there are still people that think once we use these nuclear weapons, we can finally get that morale question working at the grand strategy level the way designed. And by the way, when Germany at the end of the war was bombed to rubble, they finally saw something more akin to numbness creeping into the population, rather than a sense that, you know, they wanted the war to end at all costs, that they were ready to give in, that it made you more likely to surrender. At the very, very end, I think they may have seen some of that, but by that point, you already destroyed all the industry in Germany. So why did it, I mean you didn't bomb them for morale reasons then. You just leveled them and if you want to say it worked, okay, but let's be honest about why...
Civil Rights and wartime are two things that we all understand are sort of at odds with each other. It's tough to maintain peacetime levels of civil rights in wartime, especially Total War. But the problem is, in this conflict in the second world war, this is something that the framework exists, the propaganda is geared toward and people understand it as a war between people who believe in things like what we would call civil rights, and people who don't. And so there's an irony attached to it that in order to beat the people who don't believe in civil rights, you have to do things that reduce the amount of civil rights in the countries that are fighting for that. There's a quote from, I think it's from Mein Kampf, a famous Hitler quote where he said that the great strength of a totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it...
[This] reminds me of some of the critiques of the US Founding Fathers about wars’ danger to political and civil liberty. Wartime exalts the power of the state over the individual, for obvious and understandable reasons. But that's why the fascist states like war and praise war because it dovetails into something they already believe in: the power of the state. In the western democracies that are supposed to have the civil protections that tend to get steamrolled in wartime. Well, it works against the basic, you know, framework of the system as it's at least advertised. If you want a practical example, I would only cite executive order 9066, which is infamous, but if you read it it doesn't sound like it should be.
This is an executive order signed by President Roosevelt... it along with several subsequent sorts of orders and directives, ends up creating a situation where you get 110 to 120,000 people of Japanese birth or descent. The majority of them by the way, you know, 60 or 70% of them American born citizens, sent to what we used to call and it sounded better than, relocation camps. When I was a teenager it got changed to the more ominous internment camps. And now it's common to see the much more ominous, but not Nazi death camp, equivalent of concentration camps. If you actually go read executive order 9066 it, it sounds short. It sounds vague and it sounds something that's sort of commonsensical. I mean, if you look at it, you just think, well, I'd be mad at a president, it would be dereliction of duty if he didn't do something like this...
The Constitution gives the US president a lot of warfighting authority. And so to quote Harry Truman, Roosevelt's successor, when it comes to ultimate responsibility for things, the buck stops here, meaning the President's desk and in the case of Roosevelt, you know, when weighing decisions versus outcomes, the buck stops there. But when you think about it, that's pretty common, isn't it? I mean, certainly in the Third Reich, the buck stops with Hitler, doesn't it? In the Soviet Union, it sure as heck stops with Stalin, doesn't it? He's the one with the responsibility. I think it's fair to say the buck stops with Churchill in the UK, even though that's a Western democracy and they have a parliament.
Who does the buck stop with though in Japan? Earlier we spent quite a bit of time talking about the unique way that the Japanese system, its politics and its culture developed, after, well, really for more than a century before the Second World War and how the system itself would break down. In the war, this is one of the ways it breaks down. There is no place the buck stops, when it comes to Japanese military responsibility. And if you're analyzing the Second World Wars from sort of the big picture level, this is one of the strangest things.
The Japanese command and control, their leadership situation, none of this is anything like any of the other powers. We'd said it's got a very sort of uniquely Japanese sort of feel to it. At the same time, this diffusion of responsibility is something that the other governments either did away with because they're totalitarian, they don't believe in diffusion of power anyway. Or temporarily suspended a lot of it like in the US in the UK with their wartime governments, the Japanese kind of don't. And it's because they can't. There are certain elements that are built into the system right? American propaganda used to always lump the Japanese in with the Germans and the Italians, right? It was always the big three: Hitler Mussolini and Tojo. Is that they're all totalitarians, all fascists, all dictators.
But Tojo wasn't. Might have liked to have been. Japan might have done better if he was. He was the most powerful Prime Minister John L McClane says in A Modern History of Japan, the most powerful Prime Minister of Japan had ever had. Gobbled up a couple of other political offices too, seems to be consolidating his power. Still couldn't control his underlings. He's an army general, couldn't even totally control the army. Forget about the Navy. We talked about the fact that the Japanese have the most hostile inter-service rivalry problem I've ever seen. Army and the Navy actively dislike each other. Don't tell each other things. There really is nobody who can tell them what to do.
When you hear the way sometimes Tojo is treated by his supposed underlings. Well that puts the lie to the idea that they're anything like Hitler or Stalin in terms of their power because a Hitler’d kill ya. So would Stalin if a general walked in to the office, demanded that you overturn a decision and then called you a stupid fool to your face, James L McLean tells a story in his book where that's exactly what happened to Tojo. Tells another story of another general who walks in, bursts into to Tojo’s office and demands that he either resign or shoot himself…
There's no one here who can override one side, referee disputes. What do you do if the Army and the Navy have disagreements on how to fight the war? And you can't make them agree with each other and unify? And we're all on the same team here, right? What if they go their own way? What if they don't even tell you? Some of the things they're doing, the Japanese war effort throughout the entire conflict looks very strange"
