“The Japanese,” wrote Joseph Grew to President Roosevelt’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull in May 1933, are “extremely nationalistic [and] war-loving.” They had already become, at the time, observed Roosevelt’s Ambassador in Tokyo, “a tremendously powerful fighting machine.” Nearly a decade later, three years before the end of World War II, Grew reconfirmed his earlier assessment. “I know Japan,” he said, “I lived there for ten years…. The Japanese will not crack. They will not crack morally or psychologically or economically, even when eventual defeat stares them in the face. They will pull in their belts another notch…and fight to …read more
Source: The American Interest
