[News] Pearl Harbor: the other places attacked by Japan at the same time as the port (and how they affected world geopolitics)

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That morning, the Japanese imperial forces advanced under the cover of darkness and began a series of air strikes that caught the Western powers by surprise, starting World War II in the Pacific.

By then, the sun had not yet risen in Hawaii and the bombing of Pearl Harbor was still over an hour away.

And it is that although traditionally reference is made to the aggression against that US naval base, located in Honolulu, as the starting point of the War of the Pacific, that December 7, 1941 the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a series of coordinated and parallel attacks to the of Pearl Harbor that lasted for about seven hours against territories controlled by the United States and the United Kingdom in Southeast Asia.

In a sweeping campaign, Japan defeated US forces on Guam and the Wake Islands; as well as in the Philippines and did the same with the troops of the United Kingdom in Hong Kong and in what was then called British Malaysia.

"The Japanese victories were very, very fast; and when they entrenched themselves, they made it very difficult for the allies to reconquer those areas," says Mark Roehrs, professor of history at Lincoln Land Community College (Illinois, USA) and co-author of the book "World War II in the Pacific: never look back", to BBC Mundo.

 

The consequences of these Western defeats would be felt even after the end of World War II and would indelibly affect geopolitics in Southeast Asia.

But what was Japan looking for with the conquest of these territories?

Clearing the way for war
Japan was not at war with either the United States or the United Kingdom when it attacked these territories in Asia. However, since 1937 it was immersed in a regional war with China that was generating friction with the West.

 

 

"The main reason why Japan was expanding in the Pacific is because their own territory is not very rich in natural resources, so they were looking to get colonial possessions that would provide them with the resources they lacked. They were looking for things like rubber , rice, tin and bauxite, resources that they would find in the islands of the center and the south of the Pacific ", says Roehrs.

Of all raw materials, the one most required by Japan was oil.

"Oil was the really crucial issue, because the Japanese had nothing and if they were going to fight a war they had to have a secure source of oil," says Raymond Callahan, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Delaware, to the BBC. World.

He points out that, paradoxically, the territories that simultaneously attacked Pearl Harbor were not particularly rich in those resources.

"The oil fields they were targeting were not actually in the Philippines or British Malaysia. They were in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. And they knew they had to eliminate US forces from the Philippines and British troops in British Malaysia and Singapore, because those forces were on the sides of the Japanese route to the south, towards the Dutch East Indies, "he says.

Once most of the European powers had transferred their local forces to the Old Continent to deal with the war raging there, the greatest obstacle facing the Japanese in the Pacific was the US military presence.

"The reason Japan attacked the United States was to try to neutralize its fleet, the only force that remained intact and that posed a real threat to Japan's advances into the South and Southwest Pacific," says Roehrs.

 

LINK: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-internacional-59499468