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I always found the oil embargo on Japan to have an ironic result. One of the reasons why America imposed the oil embargo (and other embargoes) on Japan was because they feared if Japan succeeded in its war, Japan would not honor the Open Door Policy and would lock the US out of the Chinese market. Of course after Japan was defeated, China became Communist and seized all foreign assets, defaulted on all of its foreign debts, and locked out all foreigners from its market; which was pretty much worse than the worst case scenario of what the US feared would happen if Japan succeeded. So what are some of the other ironic moments in WWII?
Great Britain went to war with Germany because Poland was being occupied by a hostile, totalitarian foreign power. Great Britain was on the winning side and at the war's conclusion, Poland was occupied by a hostile, totalitarian foreign power.
-- Germany was forbidden by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, to have an Air Force.
So Stalin gave the Nazi's a site and facilities in the USSR to develop and train a secret Air Force (Luftwaffe). A big mistake ! since ironically, Germany later attacked the USSR.
-- Stalin had thousands of Polish officers executed in the famous "Katyn Forest massacre". This weakened Poland's defenses, and several years later, made it easier for Germany to invade Poland and USSR.
-- The Nazi's had an obsession with "Aryan" racial purity. Ironically, after combat losses resulted in a shortage of eligible German men, many German women either married or had affairs with African American G.I.'s.
-- Stalin had thousands of Polish officers executed in the famous "Katyn Forest massacre". This weakened Poland's defenses, and several years later, made it easier for Germany to invade Poland and USSR.
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The German conquest of Poland was September of 1939. The Soviets seized their portion of Poland in mid September.
The massacres you reference did not take place until April and May 1940, long after Poland had already fallen.
One Japanese expantionist aim was to break the European colonial hold on Asia and replace it with their own. They succeeded in the first part of that goal, but not at all on the ultimate terms they had in mind, as the Japanese brutality and heavy-handedness is still resented to this day in places like China and Korea.
Even though the ultimate end of European colonialism in Asia would occur, in many cases, several years after the end of World War II (French in Indochina, British in India, Dutch in the East Indies), it was the defeat of those European powers by the Japanese that took away their mystique in the eyes of the native peoples and made the demise of European colonialism in that part of the world inevitable.
So the European powers who joined the US as victors aboard the USS Missouri for the ceremony were actually the losers in Asia. And the Japanese, who were the abject losers in August of 1945, were the ultimate victors in defeating European colonialism in Asia.
German science, particularly physics, was leading the world in the 1920's and early 1930's in the person of people like Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, and Wolfgang Pauli. American students of physics, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, flocked to Europe to study. Discoveries of that time period, made almost entirely in Europe, were the foundation of the knowledge which led to the making of the atomic bomb. The Nazi anti-Jewish laws caused a massive exodus of that talent to Britain and America, not only from Germany itself but also in cases like Niels Bohr from Denmark and Enrico Fermi from Italy. Therefore Hitler's belief in Aryan superiority resulted in Germany's inability to make progress in building an atomic bomb, which was instead created (at least in large part) by people he considered inferior. And had the war in Europe not ended when it did, that atomic bomb probably would have been used on Germany.
Zyklon poison gas was enthusiastically developed for warfare during World War I by Fritz Haber, who was born a Hasidic Jew. Ironically, a generation later, Zyklon gas was used to exterminate millions of Jews - Haber's relatives.
The Nazis believed they were the superior race because they were tall, strong and blond...
...but none of their leaders had these qualities.
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