‘VICTORY DISEASE’
After Japan was defeated in World War Two, there was a lot of analysis about why. Of course, one big reason why was that the US out-produced Japan by a huge factor, even taking into account that the majority of American war production was applied against Germany and Italy. But there was another factor which Japanese analysts identified. They called it 'victory disease'. Beginning with Pearl Harbor, and for the next five months or so, it seemed that nothing the Japanese did could possibly go wrong. And they became cocky. Then there was the Battle of Midway, which gutted their naval aviation, and it was virtually all downhill from there on.
'Victory disease' was the term coined by the Japanese themselves to describe the over-confidence which led them to take on too much with too little. Like the Germans in Russia, they found that their initial successes gave them an extended front which was one long salient, and salients are as vulnerable to enemy counter-attacks as they are helpful to expansion. When transplanted into the realities of the Pacific war. However, this meant considerably more problems for the Japanese than they had had at the beginning of the war. Theirs was not a continuous land front but an invisible perimeter: dots of land interspersed with thousands of miles of open sea.
And the outermost islands under Japanese control were uncomfortably close to others under Allied control.
What the Japanese strategists found, after the first intoxicating run of victories, was that there were a lot of loose ends still to be tied up. To the southeast, the Allies were still holding on in southern New Guinea, stalling the effective isolation of Australia. To the East, the Americans were still established on Midway Atoll, the western extremity of the Hawaiian chain. If New Guinea, and with it New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa could be added to the list of Japanese conquests, not only Australia but New Zealand could also be cut off. If Midway could be taken, the Hawaiian Islands themselves, and the all-important Pearl Harbour naval base, could later be taken, which would push the Americans right back to the Pacific coast of the United States.
None of these new objectives had formed part of the initial plan, which had centred on the reduction of the 'Southern Area': the Philippines, Malaya, and the East Indies. This was to have been followed by a period of consolidation. But the ease with which the first objectives were gained led the Japanese High Command to formulate new plans which would keep up the pressure while the going was good. Therefore, draft plans were prepared for the New Guinea -Samoa drive.
In purely logical terms, the confidence with which the Japanese turned to these ambitious new projects can be explained easily enough. After all, the entire scope of the 'Southern Area' campaign had been no less ambitious, and the result had been as overwhelmingly successful as it was economical. But the new plans meant expanding from an already expanded perimeter, using forces which were already widely dispersed and must now be dispersed still more. And unless the Allied forces still resisting in the Pacific were totally destroyed this time, even partial failure would give Japan nothing more than thousands more miles of vulnerable flank. It was the refusal to consider even partial failure, which was the worst symptom of 'victory disease'.
The origin of the term in Japanese is associated with the Japanese advance in the Pacific Theater of World War Two , where, after attacking Pearl Harbour in 1941, Japan won a series of nearly uninterrupted victories against the Allies in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Although the Japanese had planned to establish a perimeter and go on the defensive, victories encouraged them to continue expanding to where it strained logistics and the navy. This culminated in the Battle of Midway in 1942, a catastrophic defeat of the Japanese navy: all four Japanese aircraft carriers involved were sunk, and the hitherto unstoppable Japanese advance was blunted
Initially, the Japanese had considered two separate strategies to gain access to more raw materials; the Northern strategy which would give them access to Siberia and the Southern strategy that would give them access to Southeast Asia. On the Mongolian border, they tested their 'Northern" strategy', and promptly got badly beaten by Zhukov's Soviet troops. It was not really a thorough test of the two armies, but the supporters of the Northern strategy had made their assessments based on the Japanese humiliation of Czarist Russia in 1905 and the recent purge of generals that Stalin had launched. So when their troops were de