On 27 May 1941, following the fall of Greece and Crete, eighty-five million Americans listened to Roosevelt’s national radio broadcast, in which he warned of the perils of Nazi victory. The nation was, in one historian’s words, ‘afraid, unhappy and bewildered’. The president concluded by declaring a ‘state of unlimited national emergency’. No one was sure what this meant, save that it brought war closer and increased the powers of the executive. Many towns, especially in the South, began to experience economic booms on the back of military and naval construction programmes. Yet labour disputes dogged the nation: some industrial workers felt as alienated from America’s national purposes, and from their employers, as their counterparts in Britain. Unregulated mining killed nearly 1,300 US underground workers in 1940 and maimed many more. Passions ran so high that strikes were often violent: for instance, four men died and twelve more were badly injured during a 1941 dispute in Harlan County, Kentucky.
Popular sentiment strongly resisted admitting foreign refugees, victims of Nazi persecution: in June 1941 it was decreed that no one with relatives in Germany could enter the US. The isolationists never quit. There was a powerful Irish lobby, most stridently represented by Father Charles Coughlin, a pamphleteer and radio star. Roosevelt wrote on 19 May 1941 to one of Coughlin’s supporters, James O’Connor of Montana, an extreme isolationist congressman: ‘Dear Jim, When will you Irishmen ever get over hating England? Remember that if England goes down, Ireland goes down too. Ireland has a better chance for complete independence if democracy survives in the world than if Hitlerism supersedes it. Come down and talk to me about it some day – but do stop thinking in terms of ancient hatreds and think of the future. Always sincerely.’
Senator D. Worth Clarke of Idaho, another isolationist, suggested in July 1941 that the US should draw a line across the ocean behind which Americans would stand, taking peaceful control of their entire hemisphere, South America and Canada included: ‘We could make some kind of an arrangement to set up puppet governments which we could trust to put American interests ahead of those of Germany or any other nation of the world.’ His remarks were gleefully reported in the Axis media as evidence of Yankee imperialism. Informed Germans assumed US participation in the war much more confidently than did the British, or indeed many Americans. Back in 1938, Reich finance minister Schwerin von Krosigk anticipated a struggle that ‘will be fought not only with military means but also will be an economic war of the greatest scope’. Von Krosigk was deeply troubled by the contrast between Germany’s economic weakness and the enormous resources available to its prospective enemies. Hitler believed that these would include America from 1942. He preferred not to hasten US belligerency, but was untroubled by its prospect, partly because his own grasp of economics was so weak. Amid so many American domestic divisions, so much equivocation and hesitation, it was fortunate for the Allied cause that the decisions which brought the United States into the war were made in Tokyo rather than Washington, DC.
Japan’s military leaders made their critical commitment in 1937, when they embarked upon the conquest of China. This provoked widespread international hostility, and proved a strategic error of the first magnitude. Amid the vastness of the country, their military successes and seizures of territory were meaningless. A despairing Japanese soldier scrawled on the wall of a wrecked building: ‘Fighting and death everywhere and now I am also wounded. China is limitless and we are like drops of water in an ocean. There is no purpose in this war. I shall never see my home again.’ Though the Japanese dominated the China war against the corrupt regime and ill-equipped armies of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, they suffered debilitating attrition: 185,000 dead by the end of 1941. Even a huge deployment of manpower – a million Japanese soldiers remained in China until 1945 – proved unable to force a decisive outcome upon either Chiang’s Nationalists or the communists of Mao Zhedong, whose forces they confronted and sometimes engaged across a front of 2,000 miles.
Western perceptions of the war with Japan are dominated by the Pacific and South-East Asian campaigns. Yet China, and Tokyo’s refusal to abandon its ambitions there, were central to Japan’s ultimate failure. Between 1937 and 1939, major war-fighting took place, largely unrecognised in the West, in which Japanese forces prevailed, but at the cost of heavy losses. Japan’s withdrawal from the mainland in 1940 or 1941 could probably have averted war with the United States, since Japanese aggression there, and the culture of massacre symbolised by the deaths of at least 60,000 and perhaps many more civilians in Nanjing, was the principal source of American animosity, indeed outrage. Moreover, even if China’s own armies were ineffectual, Japan’s commitment imposed a massive haemorrhage of resources. The curse upon the Tokyo government was its dominance by soldiers committed to the perceived virtue of making war for its own sake. Intoxicated by a belief in their warrior virility, they failed to grasp the difficulty, even impossibility, of successfully making war upon the United States, the world’s greatest industrial power, impregnable to assault.
Japan’s 1941–42 military triumphs caused the Western Allies to over-rate its army, as they might not have done had they known of a significant earlier clash, which it had suited both parties to cloak in secrecy. In the summer of 1939, skirmishes between the Japanese and Russian armies on their common border dividing Manchuria from Mongolia erupted into full-scale war, commonly known as the Nomonhan Incident. Since the beginning of the century, powerful voices in Japan had urged imperialist expansion into Siberia. In the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, for some time Japanese forces deployed there, hoping to stake claims which could later be formalised. Only the belated decision of the Western Powers to support a stabilised, unified Soviet Union caused them to withdraw. In 1939, Tokyo judged the Russians weak and vulnerable, and committed an army to test their resolve.
The outcome was a disaster for the Japanese. Gen. Georgy Zhukov launched a counter-offensive, supported by powerful armoured and air forces, which achieved a comprehensive victory. Published casualty figures are unreliable, but probably totalled at least 25,000 on each side. Peace was restored in October, on Moscow’s terms. The strategic consequences were important to the course of the Second World War: the Japanese army set its face against the ‘strike north’ policy, flinching from renewed conflict with the Soviet Union. In 1941 Tokyo signed a neutrality pact with Moscow. Most of Japan’s leaders favoured honouring this, believing that the Western empires in South-East Asia offered softer targets for national expansion. They expected Germany to win the war in Europe. Japanese military attachés in London and Stockholm who reported that the Germans were ill-equipped to launch an invasion of Britain were rebuked by their superiors in Tokyo, to whom such views were unacceptable. Germany’s war in Europe was overwhelmingly responsible for precipitating Japan’s war in Asia: Tokyo would never have dared to attack, but for its conviction that a Hitlerian triumph in the west was imminent.
On 27 September 1940, the Tripartite Pact signed in Berlin between Germany, Italy and Japan promised mutual assistance if any of the parties was attacked by a nation not engaged in the European war. This was a move designed to deter the United States from exerting further pressure on Japan, and it failed. The US, implacably hostile to Japanese imperialism in China, imposed further sanctions. In response, the Japanese committed themselves to execute the ‘strike south’ strategy. They prepared to seize the West’s ill-defended south-east possessions in a series of lightning operations, bludgeoning America into acquiescence by evicting its forces from the western Pacific.
In the middle of 1941, the Japanese military drafted their optimistically titled ‘Operational Plan for ending the war with the US, Britain, the Netherlands and Chiang Kai-shek’. Initially, they intended to ‘await a good opportunity in the European war situation, notably collapse of mainland England, ending of the German–Soviet war and success of our policies towards India’. Emperor Hirohito said, after studying the plan: ‘I understand you are going to do Hong Kong after Malaya sta
rts. Well, what about the foreign concessions in China?’ His Majesty was assured that such European properties would indeed be seized. Tokyo was disappointed, however, in its hopes of delaying a declaration of war until Germany’s victory in the west became complete. This miscalculation was almost as fundamental as the Japanese misreading of the enemy’s character. With the notable exceptions of a few such enlightened officers as Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, naval commander-in-chief, Japanese regarded Americans as an unwarlike and frankly degenerate people, whom a series of devastating blows would reconcile to a negotiated peace.
Hesitation and incoherence characterised Japan’s pre-Pearl Harbor motions. In 1940, Tokyo committed troops and aircraft in French Indochina, with Vichy’s assent under duress. The Indochinese supply route to China was closed, increasing pressure on Chiang Kai-shek. Japan’s foremost objective in South-East Asia was the oil of the East Indies, to which the Dutch exile government in London continued to refuse access. For a time, Japan’s generals cherished hopes of confining an assault to the European colonies, sparing America’s Philippines dependency. But in the early months of 1941, Japanese naval commanders convinced their army counterparts that US belligerence was inevitable in the event of any ‘strike south’. Tokyo’s planners thereupon set about devising plans for a series of swift thrusts that would overrun the weak defences of Malaya, Burma, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, creating new realities which the United States would deem it too costly to try to undo.
The calculations of Japan’s militarists were rooted in conceit, fatalism – a belief in shikata ga nai, ‘it cannot be helped’ – and ignorance of the world outside Asia. Japan’s soldiers had remarkable powers of physical endurance, matched by willingness for sacrifice. The army had good air support, but was seriously deficient in tanks and artillery. The country’s industrial and scientific base was much too weak to support a sustained conflict against the US. Germany and Japan never seriously coordinated strategy or objectives, partly because they had few in common beyond defeat of the Allies, and partly because they were geographically remote from each other. Hitler’s racial principles caused him to recoil from association with the Japanese, and only grudgingly to acknowledge them as his co-belligerents. It is just possible that, if Japan had struck west into Russia soon after the German invasion of June 1941, such a blow would have tipped the scale against Stalin, making possible Axis victory, and delaying if not averting a showdown with the United States. Foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka resigned from the Tokyo government when this option, which he favoured, was rejected by his colleagues.
As it was, though Japan’s 1941–42 Asian conquests shocked and appalled the Western Powers, they were assuredly reversible if Germany could be beaten. No one in London or Washington doubted that Japan’s defeat would be a lengthy and difficult task, partly because of the distances involved. But few thoughtful strategists, and certainly not Admiral Yamamoto, doubted the inevitability of America’s eventual triumph, unless its national will collapsed in the face of early defeats. Given that Japan could not invade the United States, American power must ultimately prove irresistible by a nation with only 10 per cent of US industrial capacity and dependent on imports for its existence.
Japan made an essential preliminary move for its descent on Malaya by occupying all of neighbouring Indochina at the end of July, without incurring Vichy French resistance. On 9 August, Tokyo made a final decision against launching an attack on Russia, in 1941 anyway. By September, Japanese thinking was dominated by the new reality of the US oil embargo, an earnest of Roosevelt’s resolve, though there is evidence that his subordinates translated a presidential desire to limit Japanese oil supplies and thus promote strategic restraint, rather than to impose an absolute embargo that accelerated the slide to war. Tokyo concluded that its only options were to bow to US demands, the least palatable of which was to quit China, or to strike swiftly. Emperor Hirohito pressed his government for further diplomacy, and prime minister Prince Konoe accordingly proposed a summit between himself and Roosevelt. Washington, recognising an attempt at prevarication, rebuffed this initiative. On 1 December an imperial conference in Tokyo confirmed the decision to fight. War minister Gen. Hideki Tojo, who assumed the premiership on 17 October, said: ‘Our empire stands at the threshold of glory or oblivion.’ Thus starkly did Japan’s militarists view their choices, founded in a grandiose vision of their rightful dominance of Asia. Yet even Tojo recognised the impossibility of achieving outright victory over the US. He and his colleagues instead sought to empower themselves by battlefield triumphs to achieve a negotiated settlement.
Japan launched its strike against Pearl Harbor and its assault on South-East Asia on 7 December 1941, just twenty-four hours after the Russians began the counter-offensive that saved Moscow. It would be many months before the Western Allies recognised that the Soviet Union would survive. But if Japan’s emissaries had better understood the mood in Berlin, been less blinded by their admiration for the Nazis and thus capable of grasping the gravity of Germany’s predicament in the east, Tojo’s government might yet have hesitated before unleashing its whirlwind. With hindsight, Japan’s timing was lamentable: its best chance of exploiting its victims’ weakness was already past. A cardinal Japanese error was to suppose that Tokyo could set limits for the war it started, notably by staying out of the German–Soviet struggle. In reality, once Japan had transformed the European war into a global conflict, inflicting humiliation upon its Western enemies, the only possible outcomes were either absolute victory or absolute defeat. Japan attacked on the basis of calculations which were introspective – indeed, self-obsessed even by the normal standards of nation-states – and matched by stunning geopolitical ignorance.
The nakedness of America’s Pacific bases continues to puzzle posterity. Overwhelming evidence of Tokyo’s intentions was available throughout November, chiefly through decrypted diplomatic traffic; in Washington as in London, there was uncertainty only about Japanese objectives. The thesis advanced by extreme conspiracists, that President Roosevelt chose to permit Pearl Harbor to be surprised, is rejected as absurd by all serious historians. It remains nonetheless extraordinary that his government and chiefs of staff failed to ensure that Hawaii, as well as other bases closer to Japan, were on a full precautionary footing. On 27 November 1941, Washington cabled all Pacific headquarters: ‘This dispatch is to be considered a war warning. An aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days … Execute appropriate defensive deployment.’ The failure of local commanders to act effectively in response to this message was egregious: at Pearl Harbor on 7 December, anti-aircraft ammunition boxes were still locked, their keys held by duty officers.
But it was a conspicuous feature of the war that again and again, dramatic changes of circumstance unmanned the victims of assault. The British and French in May 1940, the Russians in June 1941, even the Germans in Normandy in June 1944, had every reason to anticipate enemy action, yet responded inadequately when this came, and there were many lesser examples. Senior commanders, never mind humble subordinates, found it hard to adjust their mindset and behaviour to the din of battle until this was thrust upon them, until bombardment became a reality rather than a mere prospect. Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Walter Short, respectively navy and army commanders at Pearl Harbor, were unquestionably negligent. But their conduct reflected an institutional failure of imagination which extended up the entire US command chain to the White House, and inflicted a trauma on the American people.
‘We were flabbergasted by the devastation,’ wrote a sailor aboard the carrier Enterprise, which entered Pearl Harbor late on the afternoon of 8 December, having been mercifully absent when the Japanese struck. ‘One battleship, the Nevada, was lying athwart the narrow entrance channel, beached bow first, allowing barely enough room for the carrier to squeeze by … The water was covered with oil, fires were burning still, ships were resting on the bottom mud, superstructures had broken and fallen. Great gaps loomed whe
re magazines had exploded, and smoke was roiling up everywhere. For sailors who had considered these massive ships invincible, it was a sight to be seen but not comprehended … We seemed to be mourners at a spectacular funeral.’
The assault on Pearl Harbor prompted rejoicing throughout the Axis nations. Japanese Lt. Izumiya Tatsuro wrote exultantly of ‘the glorious news of the air attack on Hawaii’. Mussolini, with his accustomed paucity of judgement, was delighted: he thought Americans stupid, and the United States ‘a country of Negroes and Jews’, as did Hitler. Yet fortunately for the Allied cause, American vulnerability on Hawaii was matched by a Japanese timidity which would become an astonishingly familiar phenomenon of the Pacific conflict. Again and again, Japanese fleets fought their way to the brink of important successes, then lacked either will or means to follow through. Admiral Chuichi Nagumo was stunned by the success of his own aircraft in wrecking five US battleships in their Sunday-morning attacks. For many years, it was argued that he wilfully missed the opportunity to follow through with a second strike against Pearl Harbor’s oil storage tanks and repair facilities, which might have forced the Pacific Fleet to withdraw to the US west coast. Recent research shows, however, that this was not feasible. The winter day was too short to launch and recover a second strike, and in any event Japanese bombloads were too small plausibly to wreck Pearl’s repair bases. Even the problem created by destruction of shore oil tanks could have been solved by diverting tankers from the Atlantic. The core reality was that Nagumo’s attack sufficed to shock, maul and enrage the Americans, but not to cripple their war-fighting capability. It was thus a grossly misconceived operation.
All Hell Let Loose Page 27