Why did Japan achieve its initial success in the beginning of the pacific war against the allies?
While this is all true of the USA, there were other allies in the Pacific: China, Great Britain, Australia, and the Dutch. In truth, much the same could be said for these forces as for the US, but the more important factor to the early Japanese success was the fact that the European theater had already been at war for more than two years. The British Commonwealth was aware of the Japanese threat but, in hindsight, did not accord it sufficient weight. It was not suspected that the Japanese could launch a major, muli-axis offensive all over the Pacific with air support and amphibious forces. Thus, most of the British Far East squadron had been redeployed to protect shipping in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, much more crucial theaters to Great Britain. The forces that remained were focused on the defense of India and Malaya, not the Central or South Pacific. Of course, Hong Kong was also a critical British colony, but the Chinese army was still operating in southern China at the time
The reason that Japan was able to achieve its initial success in the beginning of the Pacific campaign is because they managed to take the US by surprise and severely cripple the US military assets in the Pacific with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Not only did this attack succeed in disabling or destroying all of our Pacific battleships, but it also destroyed a large portion of the Army Air Corps’ aircraft as well as a number of lesser ships. Add to this the fact that, at the beginning of the war, the US forces were still under strength as a result of the reductions that had occurred at the end of WWI and as a result of the Great Depression. Because of these factors, the US was not initially able to put up the kind of fight necessary to stop Japan. We even had to abandon the troops that we had stationed in the Philippines because we did not have the ability to either supply them or pull them out. It took about six months for the US Navy to recover sufficiently from the attack on Pearl Ha
