I think that racism played a huge part in the early failures of the British Commonwealth and US forces at the hands of Japan. British pilots were told the Japanese couldn't fly properly as they'd been carried on their mothers backs as children and that the shape of their eyes meant they couldn't aim properly. In Singapore Australian's were boasting they'd spear two Japanese on their bayonets at once. These things induced an atmoshere of gross negligence as the Japanese were fatally under estimated. Just a few weeks prior to was MaCarthur was informing his superiors in Washington that he couldn't wait for war and how he's dispatch the japs in short order, oh dear.... One of the most fundamental problems at Pearl was that the USN command just didn't credit the IJN with the skill or capability to launch so ambitious an attack so didn't consider any real counter as they didn't consider a real threat to counter, the same negligence that led the RN to committ two battleships into battle off Malaya with no air cover. One of the problems is that Japan was a particularly brutal regime with dreadful war crimes to their account. In the West very few people know of events in China, what happened in China was truly barbaric, and even makes the treatment of allied PoW's pale in comparison. Hence, the Asian war has tended to be portrayed in rather simplistic terms with no real attempt to examine the Japanese perspective. The fact they were a violent, ruthless, barbaric regime doesn't alter the fact that there was a Japanese view that is very different from our own and worthy of consideration, after all history doesn't happen in a vaccum. Take care,
Justin
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