From: fester@island.COM (Mike Fester)
Subject: Re: US colonializing (Was: An open letter to the Emperor Akihito of Japan)
Organization: /usr/local/rn/organization
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1992 18:48:53 GMT

In article <jwb.715225686@capek.rdt.monash.edu.au> jwb@capek.rdt.monash.edu.au (Jim Breen) writes:
>miklg@acuson.com (Michael Goldman ) writes:

>>	I have seen this argument before, and it is hard for me to understand.
>>	The US was far superior in industrial and military capacity to Japan
>>	at the time Japan was grabbing its sphere of influence in the 1890's.
>>	In fact, the Russo-Japanese War was largely fought with war ships
>>	made in the US and the UK to order of the combatants.  

>From my reading, all the Russian ships were made in Germany or Russia, and all the
>Japanese ships were made in the UK or Japan. Do you have any information on ships
>made in the US?

While not having information on the combatant ships, even the ships built
in Japan were built mostly by foreigners (British and French are mentioned
prominently) on dockyards built and supervised by foreigners. See the oft-men-
tioned Chamberlain book, under "Navy in the table of contents. If the point 
Mr Goldman was making was that the US could certainly have put a better naval
force in that area than the Japanese, the point still stands. (And given his
series on the Russo-Japanese war, until evidence to the contrary is presented,
I'll tend to believe his statement about where the ships were built).

>>       By the end
>>	of the US Civil War the US had the best Army and largest Navy in the
>>	world, and at any time after that could have carved out whatever
>>	piece of China she had a desire for.  

>Your patriotism has shanghaied your statistics here. Certainly in 1865 the Union Army
>was large and battle-hardened, but within a decade it was run right down. As for the
>"largest Navy in the world", this is sheer fantasy. At no time during the Civil War
>did the combined Union and Confederate navies reach the size of the French navy, much
>less the Royal (British) Navy. In ship numbers the USN trailed the Brits until after
>WWI. In technology, it lagged behind both Britain and Germany in the "Dreadnaught"
>revolution in naval architecture of the early 1900s.
>
>>       If Japan could get terrtorial
>>	concessions from China in the 1890s certainly the US could have as well
>>	had she wanted them.  That she chose not to could be due to a number
>>	of reasons, but military inability seems hard to credit.

>It was busy at the time snatching colonies off Spain: (Philipines, Cuba, ...)

With the navy you just decried in value?

Seriously, the war with Spain was rather brief, and came at about the same 
time as Japan's concession's from China. As Germany was eventually the main
beneficiary of those concessions, and Germany's navy was certainly not on
a par with ours (as they were to find out in 2 wars) it is hard to see how
the point is negated. Certainly, had we wanted those concessions, we could
have taken them (not to mention that, at the time of Perry, we certainly could
have taken the entire Japanese archipelago, had we so desired.)

Mike
-- 
Disclaimer - I'm only doing what the little voices tell me to do.