Ep. 142 Pearl Harbor: Why Japan Attacked Pearl Harbor, Seemingly Out of Left Field, and Involved Itself in World War II

I feel pretty well versed when it comes to World War II. I understand fairly well what was happening in Europe at least with Germany and whatnot. I know that the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 (84 years ago today) was the event that drew the United States into the war. But Pearl Harbor wasn't bombed by Germany. It was bombed by Japan. Wait, what? Japan? What does Japan have to do with Nazi Germany and World War II? This week I sit down with Quin Cho, an expert on the Pacific Theater during World War II, to talk about what was happening in Asia leading up to that fateful attack on Pearl Harbor. He'll fill us in on the rising action, like the Mukden Incident and the Second Sino-Japanese War, that led to the collision of two different war theaters into one big, bad world war. 

Quin's books: 

• "Rise of the Kwantung Army: Japan's Empire in Manchuria to 1932"
• "Competing Empires in Burma: A Chronicle of the China-Burma-India Theater of Operations in World War 2"

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Sources:

• The National WWII Museum "Pearl Harbor Attack, December 7, 1941"
• Office of the Historian "The Mukden Incident of 1931 and the Stimson Doctrine"
• Office of the Historian "The Chinese Revolution of 1911"
• History.com "Pearl Harbor"
• Wikipedia "Zhang Zoulin"
• Wikipedia "Mukden Incident"