china burma india theater world conqueror 2

The Foreign Office squelched the plan, remarking “we are not at war with Japan, and.

In January 1940, French authorities and Britain’s Ministry of Economic Warfare explored the possibility of curtailing the sale of Southeast Asian rice to Japan in order to deter japan’s aggressive designs on the region. Desperate to maintain home-front morale, the Japanese government took the unprecedented step of purchasing large quantities of rice from outside the Japanese empire, from Thailand, British Burma, and French Indo-China. According to British sources, rice shortages gave rise to widespread popular dissatisfaction with the Japanese state’s policies which fed on overall weariness with the nation’s three-year-old war in China. The Japanese empire no longer enjoyed self-sufficiency in food because of poor rice harvests in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.

In autumn 1939, the British embassy reported a glaring vulnerability in japan’s strategic position. The first file, “Japanese Agriculture under War-time Conditions,” tells the little known story of British attempts to prevent Japanese expansion on the eve of the Pacific War. In both, British officials presupposed that targeting civilians might be an effective means of deterring or defeating the Japanese war machine. Among the gems in the Foreign Office Files for Japan are two files that consider the role of the enemy’s “civilian morale” in war and diplomacy.

China burma india theater world conqueror 2