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
The war in China had not been won, yet abandoning it would mean admitting a failure so severe that it would have shaken the ideological institutional foundations of military supremacy in Japanese politics.
The only apparent ways that have required pushing further in.
More conquest, more extraction, more expansion.
The logic was brutally clear and profoundly destructive.
The Roosevelt administration watched these developments with growing alarm.
Though still formally neutral, the United States was already using Lend Lease to provide major assistance to Britain and the Soviet Union in their struggles against Germany.
It now expanded aid to China as well.
On February tenth, Roosevelt's representative, Lachlan Curry, visited Chongqing to inform Chiang Kai-shek that the United States would soon provide forty-five million in military equipment.
General John McRudder, head of a small AMM ISCA mission, the American military mission in China, had been sent to Chongqing in September of nineteen forty one as part of a quiet preparation for a possible Chinese entry into an alliance against Japan.
The China branch of the OSS, the precursor to the CIA, was led by General William Wild Bill Donovan, whom Roosevelt had dispatched also to China in early nineteen forty one.
The Americans repeatedly tried to discourage Japan from moving south into Southeast Asia, but relations only grew more confrontational.
Japan occupied the southern part of French Indochina, and in response the United States imposed an oil embargo in July of nineteen forty one.
Great Britain and the Netherlands followed suit.
The consequences were immense.
Japan imported around eighty percent of its oil from the United States, and with Great Britain and the Netherlands added to that, it's something like ninety one percent.
Without its supply, its navy, the essential instrument for southern expansion, had reserves for perhaps eighteen months.
The real question facing Tokyo then was not whether it was going to act, but how soon.
Unable any longer to resist mounting military pressure for war, Kanoi resigned on October the 16th and he was replaced as premier by Hideki Tojo.
Tokyo accelerated its preparations for conflict with the Western powers.
Plans targeted Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaya, the Netherlands, East Indies, and the Philippines.
Showing 601–620 of 4,699 · page 31 of 235
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