Craig Watson
speaker
4,699 appearances
13 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 17 Aug
Craig Watson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 13 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 5.
Appearances
Whether posterity would judge that conduct prudent or collaborative was a question he could neither settle nor live to see resolved to his satisfaction.
Summer of nineteen forty one marked a major geopolitical turning point in the war.
Until then, the conflicts in China and Europe had remained quite separate, if desperate struggles on the Eurasian continent.
Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union now forced Japan to decide whether it too would enter in a war against the OSSR.
Debates in Tokyo were brief.
Although some officials, including Foreign Minister Matsuoka, favored striking north before moving south, both the Quangtong Army and the Navy advised against helping Germany, at least until Germany had succeeded in drawing substantial Soviet forces away from Siberia, and then into Europe.
Konoe, once again Prime Minister, agreed.
With the northern option set aside, Japanese leaders turned towards another great power instead: the United States.
Japan's failure to gain further decisive momentum in China had fueled demands for broader regional expansion, especially into Southeast Asia, with its abundant oil, rubber, and other strategic resources.
From nineteen forty onwards, measures such as the pressure to close the Bourbon Road made it increasingly obvious that Tokyo had adopted a more aggressive posture in Asia.
Unable to subdue China, Japanese policymakers chose instead to escalate the conflict still further.
Japanese political life had become ever more dominated by the unresolved war in China.
As early as nineteen thirty eight, military expenditures consumed about seventy percent of the national budget.
And that same year, a national mobilization bill granted the government total war control over the Zaibatsu.
Japan's major industrial conglomerates.
By nineteen forty, the new order was making itself felt throughout everyday life.
With campaigns against luxury and extravagant consumption taking on new prominence.
In February of nineteen forty, a parliamentarian was expelled from the diet simply for daring to criticize the holy war in China.
In such an atmosphere, retreat from imperial ambitions became increasingly unthinkable.
That figure, seventy percent of the national budget devoted to the military, is worth dwelling on, because it reveals something essential about the trap in which Japanese strategists had placed themselves.
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