Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941

by Ian Kershaw

  Konoe repeated the sentiments, in part almost word for word, in a speech in November 1935, less than two years before he became Japan’s Prime Minister. He saw two basic causes of war: the unfair distribution of territories, and the maldistribution of resources, among nations. Lasting peace could only come about by rectifying the imbalance among leading nations. But the postwar settlement had sought to eradicate war while doing nothing about the underlying injustice which brought it about. He rejected the principle of peace simply to uphold this situation. ‘Our leaders’, he declared, ‘cannot seem to come out and declare the need for territorial expansion by acquisition, unlike German and Italian politicians. We have been so brainwashed by the virtually sacred Anglo-American idea of a peace structure based on the status quo that we defended our action in the Manchurian Incident like the accused standing before a judge. World peace can no longer be guaranteed by this peace structure. Japan and the other late-coming nations should have demanded a worldwide "new deal” long ago.’44 It was a political philosophy that would ultimately drive Japan, like Germany, down the road to perdition.

  In June 1937 Konoe became Prime Minister, a position he would eventually hold three times. He enjoyed great popularity at the time. He cut an imposing figure–tall, elegant, suave, urbane and at 45 years of age youthful for a Japanese Prime Minister (though he would later come to suffer so badly from piles that he sometimes had to sit on an inflated rubber tyre for comfort).45 Enormous hopes were invested in him. The army, too, welcomed his appointment, confident that his popularity would help to further its own interests.46 Within a month the war in China began. Konoe soon found himself presiding over the escalation of a conflict which Japan could not end. He proved in practice to be a weak and ineffectual individual, unable to offer a clear lead to the Cabinet, given to helpless hand-wringing, resigned apathy and lamentations at his inability to shape events.47 Towards the end of his life, just before his suicide in December 1945, Konoe would seek to portray himself as the helpless victim of an army out of control. But while he certainly did voice private misgivings about the imbroglio in China, he never distanced himself either from the policy aimed at Japanese domination or from the terrible cruelties perpetrated by the army, most notably in Nanking. And his own government, as we have seen, attempted to impose extremely harsh terms on China in December 1937, just prior to breaking off diplomatic relations with Chiang Kai-shek’s regime and the expansion of the war in 1938.48 By the end of that year Konoe had engineered the arrangement with the would-be puppet leader of China, Wang Ching-wei. But dejected, unable to conclude the war and increasingly feeling himself to be the victim of the military forces he had been instrumental in mobilizing, Konoe resigned in January 1939.

  In a memorandum written the following year, Konoe revealed that, if the course of the war in China gave him great anxiety, he accepted its necessity. His views were no different from those he had expressed in 1918. The policies of the great powers, he claimed, were threatening Japan through economic blockade, depriving the country of overseas markets and raw materials. The ‘Manchurian Incident’ had broken this blockade, and the ‘China Incident’ was destined to lead ultimately to the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’–a term invented in 1940 to mean Japanese dominance in the entire east Asian region, seen as Japan’s necessary Lebensraum.49

  The inventor of the phrase was Matsuoka Yosuke, appointed Foreign Minister in the new Cabinet which Konoe, returning as Prime Minister, formed in July 1940, a time of high excitement in Japan following the dramatic events in Europe. Small, thickset, a flamboyant personality with a rate of verbal output that had him dubbed ‘the Talking Machine’,50 as head of the Japanese delegation Matsuoka had led Japan out of the League of Nations in March 1933. His dramatic defiance of the League turned him into a national hero within a jubilant Japan. It also established his reputation as a proponent of an assertive foreign policy. As a former President of the South Manchuria Railway, Matsuoka was well known for his advocacy of revisionism.51 He was a forceful individual, given to bursts of temper, self-promoting, arrogant, keen to occupy the limelight. One prominent figure thought Matsuoka had ‘the good point of coming up with splendid ideas, but…the fault of recklessly advancing in the wrong direction’.52 His prima-donna tendencies made him a fractious colleague. But he was a skilled negotiator, combining shrewdness with single-mindedness. The American Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, thought he was ‘as crooked as a basket of fishhooks’.53 On the other hand, Joseph Grew, who as American ambassador in Tokyo had frequent personal dealings with Matsuoka, thought, initially at least, that he was ‘a loose talker but…a man who is patently straightforward and sincere according to his lights’.54 At this critical juncture, Matsuoka was the army’s choice.55 The day before he took office, he gave a little-noticed interview to an American journalist in which he made no attempt to conceal his future expectations and political preferences: ‘In the battle between democracy and totalitarianism the latter adversary will without question win and will control the world. The era of democracy is finished and the democratic system bankrupt.’56 He thought it a ‘historical inevitability’ that Japan and the United States, the two leading Pacific powers, would collide.57 Such certainties determined Matsuoka’s actions and policy recommendations in 1940 and 1941.

  A third member of Konoe’s second Cabinet, in July 1940, would also play a fateful role in events during those years, and during the war that followed (when, for most of the time, he served as Prime Minister). This was General Tojo Hideki, born in 1884, hard as nails, an experienced military administrator known as ‘the razor’, former commander of the military police then chief of staff of the Kwantung Army, a leading spokesman of the uncompromisingly expansionist faction in the army, a man of few words, but an outspoken advocate of Japan’s imperialist ambitions, and now given a key role as Army Minister.58

  Beyond the offices held by Konoe, Matsuoka and Tojo, the most important Cabinet position in arriving at the key decisions in the summer of 1940 was that of the Navy Minister. In any southern advance, the role of the navy was self-evidently crucial. But the navy’s accord with the broader strategy under contemplation was also vital. And when Admiral Yoshida Zengo, appointed Navy Minister in July 1940, found himself, despite his commitment to expansion, out of step with the dominant forces keen to forge a military alliance with Germany and Italy he soon had to make way for a more pliant successor, Admiral Oikawa Koshiro.59

  III

  The Konoe Cabinet, formed on 19 July 1940, lost no time in responding to the drastically changed situation in Europe. But in fact the ground had already been laid during the preceding administration, headed by Admiral Yonai Mitsumasa. Yonai’s Cabinet had been more conciliatory towards the west. Yonai, and his Foreign Minister, Arita Hachiro, who had come into office on 16 January 1940, had opposed the closer ties with the Axis powers which the army favoured. Arita was keen to improve relations with Britain and the United States, a policy which drew the ire of the dominant groups in the army. An essential contradiction in Arita’s approach was, in any case, the strong advocacy by the Yonai administration of the ‘new order’ in east Asia, which the Americans were determined to block.60 Arita also hinted more than once at Japan’s readiness to exploit any change in the status of the Dutch East Indies. But while wanting to avoid damaging relations with the western powers, the Yonai government was starting to contemplate the ‘southern advance’ which would do precisely that.61 There was, therefore, no disagreement among the Japanese power-elites about the need to establish a ‘new order’, aimed at securing the raw materials of east Asia for the Japanese Empire and ending the dominance in the region of Britain, America, France and the Netherlands. The disagreement was about how to achieve these goals.

  Even before Konoe had formed his second Cabinet, therefore, the impact of the upheaval in Europe was reshaping Japanese thinking on expansion.62 The chance had opened up of attaining self-sufficiency through conquest in south-east Asia and destroying the
hold of the European colonial powers there. It was seen as too good to miss. Excited by the events in Europe, the manipulated mass media pressed the case. The heavily censored press ‘spewed out adjectives in defence of Japan’s "just cause’’ and buried news under mountains of mystical philosophising in an attempt to beautify the underlying opportunism of Hirohito’s national programme’.63 The corollary, however, was the need to adjust Japan’s relations with her old enemy, the Soviet Union. A war on two fronts, while still tied down in China, was unthinkable. So for the first time, the prospect of a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union started to gain favour among army leaders. Alongside this, the feeling rapidly gathered strength that a military alliance with the new force in Europe, Germany, was desirable.

  A decisive shift in policy began to take shape even as Hitler’s army was advancing through the Low Countries and northern France. In late May the Yonai government had already exerted pressure upon the authorities in the Dutch East Indies to guarantee supplies of tin, rubber, petroleum, scrap iron and nine other vital raw materials.64 Then, following France’s surrender on 17 June, the Japanese forced the beleaguered French and British governments to suspend the supply of vital aid to Chinese nationalists through Indochina, Burma and Hong Kong, a temporary, but humiliating, admission of weakness by the western powers.65 The French surrender also prompted heated debates in the army about exploiting the opportunity to expand to the south. On 25 June the Army Minister, Hata Shunroku, told his staff members: ‘Seize this golden opportunity! Don’t let anything stand in the way!’ Some, riding the wave of an excitedly chauvinist public opinion, called for immediate preparations for a drive to the south. One senior spokesman, though a lone voice at this time, pressed for a surprise attack on Singapore. Wiser counsels prevailed. No agreement was reached.66

  But Japan’s military leaders ran war games and came up with draft contingency plans for establishing airbases in Indochina and Thailand and carrying out a lightning attack on the Dutch East Indies.67 The navy’s war games led to the disconcerting conclusion that an attack on the Dutch East Indies would ultimately result in war against the United States, Britain and the Netherlands. It was also concluded that, without imports of oil from the United States, and unless the oil of the Dutch East Indies could be captured, safely transported and exploited, Japan would only be able to fight a war for four months. Even with the oil, ‘should the war continue beyond a year, our chances of winning would be nil’.68 It was little wonder that the navy leadership was still hesitant about plunging into a high-risk expansionist drive to the south, even though planning for such an eventuality dated back to 1936 and even though strident voices had been advocating that the time was ripe for it since the beginning of the European war in September 1939.69 But section chiefs within the naval General Staff carried much weight in shaping policy, and by April 1940, even before the German offensive in western Europe, they were claiming that ‘the time has come to occupy the Dutch East Indies’. Orders to prepare an increased state of readiness were issued to the fleet. The chief of staff, Prince Fushimi Hiroyasu, told the Emperor that five to six months would be needed to prepare the navy for war.70 Events in Europe then greatly bolstered the optimism of those who thought that a military occupation of the Dutch East Indies might be possible without involving Japan in conflict with either a weakened Britain or an indecisive United States. The hawks were gaining ground.

  This was the case in the army, too. By the last weeks of June, the army authorities–the navy General Staff had earlier that month been informed of their thinking71–were drafting a policy statement on an advance to the south. They worked fast, under the heady influence of the German victories in Europe. They were confident that Britain’s defeat by Germany was imminent, and that Japan would be the beneficiary in south-east Asia. Driven by this confidence, they undertook no careful analysis of Japan’s material capability of sustaining a major southern expansion.72 The presumption was that military conquest would itself provide the necessary resources. By 3 July the draft had reached the stage where it could be adopted by the Army Ministry and the General Staff under the rubric: ‘Outline of the Main Principles for Coping with the Changing World Situation’. It was an important document, determining the thrust of army policy, and eventually that of the government, down to the beginning of the Pacific War in December 1941.73

  The preamble indicated the priorities of settling the ‘China Incident’ as quickly as possible and seizing the most opportune time ‘to solve the problem of the south’. It held out the possibility that southern expansion could take place even if the war in China had not been ended. Whether or not that was the case, ‘preparations for war should be completed generally by the target date of the end of August’. In foreign policy, the emphasis was placed upon ‘strengthening Japan’s political solidarity with Germany and Italy’ and ‘improving rapidly its relations with Soviet Russia’. The imperative of closing off routes providing aid for Chiang Kai-shek was underlined. The resources of the Dutch East Indies were vital for Japan, and to be attained by force if diplomacy failed. The concluding section struck a belligerent note. Japan would use the right moment for military action in the south. ‘It will attack Hong Kong and the Malay peninsula, restricting insofar as possible its operations to Britain alone.’ War with the United States was to be avoided. However, the statement ended ominously, ‘anticipating that in the end it will resort to the use of force against the United States if the situation requires, Japan will make the necessary military preparations’.74

  The ‘Outline’ was presented to navy representatives the following day. The army spokesmen pressed the case for action to be taken without delay, before the European conflict ended, to free Japan from her dependence on Britain and the United States by establishing ‘a self-sufficient economic sphere’ with its core in Japan, Manchuria and China, but stretching from the Indian Ocean to the South Seas north of Australia and New Zealand. ‘Never in our history has there been a time like the present,’ the army’s statement read, ‘when it is so urgent to plan for the development of our national power…We should grasp the favourable opportunity that now presents itself.’ There was no time to lose. Japan should not miss her golden opportunity.75

  The navy came up with some amendments, and a second joint conference on 9 July arrived at fundamental agreement. Far from diluting the army’s blueprint for aggression, the navy’s intervention reinforced it. Though aware from its war games that southern expansion would lead to conflict with the United States, the navy now advocated a firmer approach to the possibility of war with America. In the section dealing with Hong Kong, for example, the navy, while agreeing that a military offensive should be avoided as far as possible, proposed that ‘if the situation permits, an offensive will be carried out with a firm resolution for war against Britain (or even against the United States)’. And the army’s concluding statement, stressing the avoidance, if possible, of war with the United States was hardened into the formulation: ‘While operations should be structured so that no war against the United States results, sooner or later military action against the United States may become inevitable.’ Moreover, the earlier pessimism about Japan’s long-term chances should it come to war with America had now given way to increasing confidence among navy officers that, providing due preparations were made, Japan would prove victorious.76 The view marked the triumph of hope over reason.

  The shift in the army’s position from its traditional focus upon Russia in the north to expansion in the south had, therefore, coincided with the navy’s long-standing interest in a southern strategy which obviously necessitated a major expansion of the fleet. From the navy’s perspective, the principle of the new policy, ‘northern defence and southern advance’, could only be welcomed. The alternative scenario, avoiding war with the United States in order to target the Soviet Union, would have meant, inevitably, sacrifice of the naval budget to the needs of the army.77 In any case, that would have left the decisive issue of Japan’s dependen
ce upon the western powers for its raw materials still unresolved. On this issue rested not only Japan’s potential for fighting a war against the Soviet Union, but also for a successful outcome to the war in China–an unending drain on resources and on morale. The marriage of convenience, therefore, swiftly concluded to transcend the traditional rivalry between army and navy interests, was held together by a massive gamble that a Japanese offensive which would most likely involve war with America would prove victorious.