Talk:Operation Starvation

Perhaps we should mention submarines? Their losses in minelaying were far less than aircraft, & their effectiveness was far & away higher. As for the opinion of the Japanese minesweep CO, given how derisively bad his efforts were, it's a wonder the '29s didn't do better... See Parillo, Japanese Merchant Marine. Trekphiler 09:26, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

But, as I understand it, Starvation was a Army Air Forces operation, though the targets were nautical. Were the submarines more effective at the mining mission? They only got into the Sea of Japan a few times; did they ever get into the Inland Sea? My impression is that the submariners didn't care for mining. For obvious reasons: you sneak into dangerous waters and ... drop off your mines, and sneak away, and maybe later hear an intelligence report that some ship you never saw sank.

Maybe we need a more general article on Mine warfare in the Pacific War, or some such?

—wwoods 01:24, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Cleanup of Grammer

This article was edited for review of grammar. Was found satisfactory to comply with Assessment Criteria 4 of Assessment Quality scale B.perseus71 (talk) 18:41, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

New section: Legality

These edits object to the creation of this section: [1] [2]

Addressing the concerns in those edits: the Avalon Project is used on Wikipedia for many articles that reference international law, including the page for the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 themselves. The second link is to the Red Cross, also seen as a reliable source.

Many articles make references to the legality of various actions, which were also seen as important at the time. Charges against German admiral Karl Dönitz were dropped because the US knew it would invite a comparison to the same strategy used by the US against Japan. Similarly, nations in WWII avoided using chemical weapons because it was illegal (though war was also illegal). The legality of the strategy described in this article is relevant.

Reintroducing the section until an intent is shown to discuss the topic on this talk page. 50.135.249.113 (talk) 18:20, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

No, WP:BRD says it stays out until there's consensus it should be in. And there is no consensus. At any rate, you've provided a couple primary sources here: That the US is a party to the Hague Convention, and that the Hague Convention forbids mining of commercial shipping. You can't use multiple disconnected primary sources to put forth a conclusion that isn't explicitly stated in those sources. See WP:SYN. While I would not be surprised if this operation was violative of the Hague Convention, you need to provide a scholarly source asserting that. —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 20:50, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

I looked through the literature about Operation Starvation and found almost no reference to the Hague Conventions. There was one very relevant find, though: Howard S. Levie's 1992 Mine Warfare at Sea. Levie says quite a lot about the Hague Convention's great attention to the "submarine mine", that is, the naval mine. He says that mines were laid by all major belligerents, with Japan laying 50,000 mines during WWII. As far as I can tell, Levie never says that Operation Starvation was considered illegal, but he says that Germany's Admiral Rader was let off the hook for his mining operations because the US did not want Operation Starvation scrutinized in the same manner as German mining blockades. Levie says that a naval blockade of mines is not illegal, if the goal is to deny a port rather than to sink commercial vessels. He says the initial goal of the US was to deny ports, assuming that Japanese ship captains would not brave the mine fields, but there was an attendant goal of sinking as much commercial shipping as possible, a goal which rose in importance when it was seen that plenty of ships were trying to cross through the mines.

I am not in favor of a discussion of legality based only on Hague documents, but a summary of Levie's analysis might be suitable. Binksternet (talk) 21:28, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

While I could cite 'rules' from Wikipedia, one of those 'rules' is "ignore all rules".

It's also important that Japan is, and was, a party to the convention. The text of the convention states that it's only valid if both belligerents are a party to it. The "no original research" policy was originally in relation to scientific theories, where it's easy for something to seem reasonable but be very hard to verify. Would you need a news article to explicitly state that a specific crime was illegal to be able to say in Wikipedia that this crime was, in fact, illegal? Or by not saying that, is Wikipedia being ambiguous about whether that particular crime was illegal?

Your point of contention is that intercepting commercial shipping was not the "sole object" of the mines. It would appear that Japan's mine-laying was against purely military targets. A different article says Japanese submarines on the coast of the US had "orders to attack warships whenever possible", with no specific source given for that sentence (sources only being required for contentious statements), and does not mention them laying any mines.

While many people these days think it's normal to accept the argument "it's fine to kill 10 civilians if it also kills one 'bad guy'" (see for example civilian casualties from so-called drone strikes in Pakistan), the convention states that "When anchored automatic contact mines are employed, every possible precaution must be taken for the security of peaceful shipping." A military mine-laying operation that did not lead to losses for commercial shipping was the North Sea Mine Barrage in WWI; 70,000 mines resulted in the destruction of numerous military submarines and only two civilian vessels are mentioned as having been sunk by mines, both after the war had ended. The 670 Japanese ships sunk or damaged by mines could have been an accident, from poor placement by the US, but it seems unlikely as it would mean the US had been shockingly incompetent in its assessment of shipping patterns.

Battle of Leyte Gulf states, with two references, that "The majority of [Japan's] surviving heavy ships, deprived of fuel, remained in their bases for the rest of the Pacific War" after October 1944, and that "The only major operation by these surface ships between the Battle for Leyte Gulf and the Japanese surrender was the suicidal sortie in April 1945." The operations described in this article took place in March and April 1945, when Japanese naval (military) activity was minimal or nonexistent.

The article as it currently stands states that "This mining proved the most efficient means of destroying Japanese shipping during World War II." Is this not meant to imply the the goal was, in fact, to destroy shipping? These would be civilian vessels, not military... the article later explicitly says "to strike harder against merchant shipping", and "shipping" is used to refer to civilian vessels in other articles like Battle of the Atlantic and Tonnage war.

Do you have any sources which say that the primary purpose of the mines was to destroy warships, or, for that matter, that any warships were sunk by them? 2601:8:9780:1EE:50DC:CC3F:41AA:A502 (talk) 01:13, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

Your scattergun approach to debate is distracting. Basically, you appear to be saying that the Hague Conventions should be discussed in the article just because it was part of the legal fabric of the day. However, Wikipedia goes by reliable sources, weighing the sources to give the reader an appropriate summary of the topic. Hardly any sources discuss the Hague Conventions. I found one source, a good one by Levie, which discusses various legal aspects. You might try reading the Levie book to extract a proper summary of its analysis. Unpublished analysis will not be accepted in this article. Binksternet (talk) 21:41, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

A related article, and one which I am also currently interested in: Corfu Channel case

While I am currently involved in a discussion about whether the 1907 Hague Convention VIII should be mentioned in the article, it was in fact given by the British government as one of the reasons the International Court of Justice should hold Albania responsible for damage to British warships caused by mines. It was the only international treaty or similar agreement that the British government mentioned.

It seems to also have been less relevant than the British government claimed because unlike Japan and the US, Albania was not a party to the treaty and thus had no obligation to abide by its rules. But if you accept the concept of certain acts by governments having a property of being "legal" or "illegal" at all, and say that part of the reason a government may be held financially or responsible for certain actions is that they are "illegal", the case for the subject of this article having been illegal is much stronger than for the Corfu Channel incident to have been.

There is much evidence that people do feel that "illegal" actions by governments exist. Some of them have an entirely separate article to explain the existing arguments or opinions on whether an action was or is "illegal".

In fact, Commando Order references "illegal executions" and implies that government actions are illegal if they violate the laws of war. That article states that

In addition, the Nuremberg War Trial judgment on "The Law Relating to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity"[10] held, under the guidelines Nuremberg Principles, that treaties like the Hague Convention of 1907, having been widely accepted by "all civilised nations" for about half a century, were by then part of the customary laws of war and binding on all parties whether the party was a signatory to the specific treaty or not.

If an action can be illegal if it violates a treaty that a country has not even signed, then, to borrow a random latin legal phrase that I recently encountered, a fortiori a nation that violates a treaty that it has actually signed has done something illegal.

Are you saying that people are not interested in whether it was illegal, and therefore it has no place in the article? 50.135.249.113 (talk) 22:02, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

Whatever quantity of text you add to this talk page does not change the fact that very few writers connect the Hague Conventions with Operation Starvation. Per WP:WEIGHT, we should not devote much ink to the issue. Your desire to add some of your own analysis to the article is not going to be endorsed by any veteran Wikipedia editors. Binksternet (talk) 00:02, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

It is in the nature of an encyclopedia to inform readers of things they do not know. Whether they would expect those connections beforehand is irrelevant.

If you're old enough to have read books (or it might appear in visual form too), a fairy tale: The Emperor's New Clothes. Just because people do not mention something doesn't mean it's irrelevant, or unimportant. 2601:8:9780:1EE:4058:55D0:A1B1:D756 (talk) 00:23, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

Good luck with that. You might get more traction with another online encyclopedia. Or you could write your own book. Binksternet (talk) 01:19, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

Indeed, 50./2601: seems to be pushing for some newfound relevance to the Hague Conventions within the context of certain international disputes... which really has no place on Wikipedia. There's some additional dispute going on at Talk:Corfu Channel case about the Conventions to that legal case. As Binksternet says, the answer is not to publish here, but elsewhere. Seriously. Draft a manuscript of your theories—one that's well cited—and start shopping it around the various law journals. There are untold numbers of law schools that would be interested in publishing a good article on that treaty. Wikipedia just isn't the place to do that. —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 05:43, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

You seem to be confused about what to call "research". The most relevant contention that has been made is that implying that the operation was illegal is original research. Would it be more encyclopedic to add to the section "However, as nations cannot agree on what constitutes an illegal action by a nation, the operation was not illegal."? I am not going to make the article worse like that in order to your concerns that some readers might make that conclusion. Illegal: "Illegal, or unlawful, is used to describe something that is prohibited or not authorized by law." Law: "Law is a system of rules enforced by governments to govern behaviour." "Public international law has a special status as law because there is no international police force, and courts (e.g. the International Court of Justice as the primary UN judicial organ) lack the capacity to penalise disobedience." Public_international_law#War_and_armed_conflict has the main article Law of war; regardless, it's questionable whether it's accurate to say that international acts can have the property of being legal, because by the definition of law used by Wikipedia, laws are enforced, and international law is not. If you think that readers of Wikipedia are stupid enough not to understand this, we can add it to the section. 2601:8:9780:1EE:1CFE:53C:4ED0:76B2 (talk) 12:26, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Maybe I'm a bit too mean; your summary of the book says that "the initial goal of the US was to deny ports". If you read the Hague convention in question, when it says that using mines with the sole purpose of sinking commercial shipping is prohibited, a reasonable person would understand that the reason for including "sole purpose" is due to the use of mines to sink military vessels. The convention states that "The belligerents undertake to do their utmost to render these mines harmless within a limited time, and, should they cease to be under surveillance, to notify the danger zones as soon as military exigencies permit, by a notice addressed to ship owners". The article Prize rules quotes the 1856 Treaty of Paris, which talks about placing the crews of merchant ships in a place of safety. The US didn't sign that particular treaty, but it's the common understanding which underlaid the language of the 1907 Hague treaty VIII. Blockading ports with ships was fine, to deny the use of that port; sinking merchant ships was not. The summary of a book by Howard S. Levie does not seem to be saying the initial purpose was to deny the use of ports to military ships only, but even if it had been the summary states that the aim migrated to just sinking commercial ships. A 'valid' use of mines around a port can be found in one or both of Japan's wars with Russia, where I believe some Russian warships that were blockaded in a port were sunk by mines while attempting to move around. 2601:8:9780:1EE:1CFE:53C:4ED0:76B2 (talk) 14:44, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

This is all very interesting but if you want to change the article text you will have to cite a publication which makes the observation. The encyclopedia is a summary of published thought, not a place to assemble factors from several sources to arrive at a new conclusion. Binksternet (talk) 15:28, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Could you explain what in the disputed edit (the link works, despite being red) doesn't have a citation? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:8:9780:1EE:1CFE:53C:4ED0:76B2 (talk) 17:29, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

The presence of that paragraph makes the assumption that the Hague Convention is relevant. The sources do not connect the Hague to the topic. Binksternet (talk) 19:16, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

The Hague Convention in question concerns the laying of automatic submarine contact mines. This article concerns an operation where the primary activity was laying automatic submarine contact mines. Do you think other editors would agree that the Hague convention isn't relevant? If you continue to be unreasonable, I can take appropriate measures to prevent you from disrupting the improvement of this article. 2601:8:9780:1EE:393C:B840:5370:C2C7 (talk) 07:26, 26 April 2015 (UTC)