Overview

World War 2 began ten years after the 1929 start of the Great Depression. In a militaristic culture such as Japan, with an overheated economy spending a disproportionate amount of national income on preparation for aggression, it was easy to develop a misplaced sense of economic and military superiority. However, America, though still in the midst of economic doldrums, nevertheless had:

• Twice the population of Japan
• Seventeen times Japan's national income
• Five times Japan's steel production
• Seven times Japan's coal production
• Eighty times Japan's automobile production.

Japan attacked Pearl Harbour in December 1941 and even though America's war-making potential was mainly used at first against Germany, whose defeat had priority, American factories turned to producing vast quantities of war equipment, not only for their own forces but also those of Great Britain and the USSR. As the European war progressed, America's allies suffered rduced productivity due to damage to or destruction of industrial bases, constriction of resources and sheer exhaustion of manpower. The United States suffered none of these and as a consequence its economy grew at an annual rate of 15% throughout the war. Progressively also its industrial strength was able to be deployed more and more against Japan. Its productivity continuing to improve, by 1945 the U.S. accounted for over 50% of total Global Gross National Product.

The world's seas became areas of contest of merchant shipping capability, in that practically everything needed to wage the various campaigns against Germany, Italy and Japan had to be transported across vast stretches of ocean. Japan itself also had to maintain her vital supply lanes to places like Borneo and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in order to keep her industrial base supplied. A look at the relative shipbuilding output of the two Pacific war antagonists is enlightening.

Merchant Ship Production (in tons)

Year	United States	Japan
1939	376,419	320,466
1940	528,697	293,612
1941	1,031,974	210,373
1942	5,479,766	260,059
1943	11,448,360	769,085
1944	9,288,156	1,699,203
1945	5,839,858	599,563
Total	33,993,230	4,152,361

Conclusion
In retrospect, it is difficult to comprehend how Japan's leadership managed to rationalize its way around the economic facts when they contemplated,and eventually undertook, making war with the United States. The Japanese embarked on what can only be described as a suicidal venture, against an overwhelmingly large foe. Their chief error lay in misreading the will of the American people, who did not lapse into despair as a result of the early defeats they suffered, but rather awoke in a rage and applied every ounce of industrial might with a cold methodical fury against their foe.

The grim price Japan paid - 1.8 million military casualties, half a million or so of civilians killed, and the utter destruction of practically every major urban area within the home islands - bears testimony to the folly of its militarist leaders.

Information extracted from Grim Realities article www.combinedfleets.com 2/12/2023

Further additional information on Japans lack of intelligence  regards  factual  wartime production of the Allies during the Pacific Campaign extracted from R$ise and Fall of Great Powers, Shadows Edge.