American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Only three weeks after the Argentia rendezvous, the American destroyer Greer encountered a U-boat southeast of Iceland, tracked it for several hours, all the while reporting its location to a nearby British bomber, and later became itself engaged in an indecisive battle of depth charges and torpedoes with the German submarine, which assumed its adversary was British. Six weeks later the American destroyer Kearny sped four hundred miles to the aid of a stricken convoy, joined in depth-bombing the attacking wolf pack, and was hit by a torpedo that killed eleven American seamen and put the Kearny out of action.

  Roosevelt grossly exaggerated the provocativeness of the German actions and minimized that of the American in his public reaction to the incidents. Following the Kearny episode he said in a major address, “Very simply and very bluntly—we are pledged to pull our own oar in the destruction of Hitlerism.” Berlin boiled with indignation. For once the master falsifier had been outfalsified. From Hitler’s headquarters on the Russian front came a statement that “the United States has attacked Germany.” But Hitler would not yet escalate incidents into war.

  Things were somewhat quieter—but potentially even more explosive— on the opposite side of the globe.

  Each of the big powers in the Pacific played from poker hands that changed month to month as the shifting circumstances of war dealt out the cards. The problem was not so much lack of communication as too much of it. As factions tussled for influence in each capital—diplomats against soldiers, politicians against bureaucrats, old diplomatic hands against new—the official and unofficial channels were a source as much of confusion as of clarity. Amid the day-to-day chatter and bustle the leaders lost perspective on the towering conditions and events, hopes and expectations, that were holding the Pacific theater in their grip.

  The most crucial of these forces was the increasing determination of the Japanese to hold and extend their presence in China. This was a matter not simply of global strategy but of national pride and ideology. The Japanese could not forget the American exclusion of Orientals and other racist discriminations; they could not ignore America’s use of the Monroe Doctrine to buttress its political and economic power in Latin America; they could not ignore Washington’s imperial and colonial ventures in the Pacific. The jingoists of Tokyo were demanding that Japan pursue its old nationalist and imperialist ambitions. Japan was heavily dependent on external sources, including the United States, for economic and military materials, and Washington was withholding high-octane gasoline and scrap iron; warriors and diplomats in Tokyo were therefore determined to extend their grip to Indochina and to the economic lifelines in the South Seas.

  Half a world away Churchill had a clear set of priorities, or at least hopes. His greatest hope was that the United States would declare war on Germany, but he saw this as unrealistic in view of Hitler’s spurning the gage of battle in the Atlantic. The next great hope in his global wish list was for a war between Japan and the United States, which Britain would join “within the hour,” but Washington would take the lead in protecting both American and British interests in the Pacific. His mortal fear was that events would leave Britain facing Japan alone and thus locked into the kind of two-front war that all the contestants sought to avert. Hence the Prime Minister devoted much time in 1941to helping stiffen Washington’s posture toward Tokyo.

  And Roosevelt? He too had his priorities, but his wish list was the shortest and simplest of them all. He hoped above all not to be involved in a shooting war in the Pacific when the real enemy was Adolf Hitler. He too feared a two-front war. He recognized, of course, that understandings between the two Axis countries would sooner or later turn a war against Japan into a war with Germany, but much depended on what was sooner and what was later. Hence Roosevelt’s essential stratagem, through all the diplomatic windings and twistings of fall 1941, was to play for time—to drag out negotiations, to be conciliatory at one point and tough at another, all the while coping with pressures from London and Chungking to be more resolute. And he needed time for rearmament.

  But time, more than Roosevelt realized, was an even greater imperative for the Japanese; they were as insistent on speed as Roosevelt on delay. Tokyo diplomats and militarists alike recognized that the only chance for Japan in a total war was a smashing victory over its adversaries, the establishment of a huge and impregnable defense bastion, and the rapid military and economic consolidation of conquests in China and to the south. Otherwise the immense economic and military power of the United States and Britain would prevail in two or three years. For some months during 1941 the military leaders of Japan allowed the diplomats to pursue their negotiations in case Japan could achieve its goals through parleys rather than war. Early in September they set a deadline—if there was no agreement by mid-October, Japan would prepare itself for battle against the United States, Britain, and Holland. This was the most momentous decision in the tortuous road to war in the East.

  For there was no agreement. The more the Japanese and American leaders understood each other, the more they understood how much they disagreed. Tokyo was bent on expansion to the west and south, Washington on stopping it. Both sides were the victims of miscalculation, false hopes, unreal expectations—Tokyo that it could win a lasting victory through a quick stroke, Washington that the Japanese would strike south toward the possessions of beleaguered Britain, France, and Holland, possibly toward the Philippines, but certainly not at Oahu. That island, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall had assured Roosevelt in May 1941,was “the strongest fortress in the world.”

  In the White House during the evening of December 6, a young naval aide carried up to the President’s study a locked pouch containing communications from Tokyo to the Japanese embassy in Washington. For over a year these messages had been decoded by American cryptanalysts. The President was seated at his desk; Hopkins paced slowly back and forth. Both men carefully read through the messages. The young aide later recalled their reactions:

  “This means war,” Roosevelt said.

  Since war would undoubtedly come at the convenience of the Japanese, Hopkins observed, it was too bad that the United States could not strike the first blow and prevent a surprise.

  “No, we can’t do that,” the President said. “We are a democracy and a peaceful people.” Then he added, raising his voice a bit, “But we have a good record.”

  That same evening Japanese carriers northwest of Oahu were turning to starboard and speeding south with relentless accuracy, amid mounting seas, toward Pearl Harbor.

  Thundering down over the green fields of Oahu, the attacking aviators could hardly believe how calm and orderly everything seemed—Pearl Harbor and Honolulu bathed in the bright morning sunlight, the orderly rows of barracks and aircraft, the while highway wriggling through the hills, and the great battlewagons anchored two by two along the mooring quays. Their commander, Fuchida Milsuo, remembered the mightiest fleets he had seen assembled in German and French harbors, but, he said later, he had never seen warships anchored so closely together. In the next 140 minutes 181 Japanese fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo planes ranged up and down Oahu almost at will, leaving four battleships sunk or sinking, four others mauled, 150 aircraft destroyed, barracks and airfields ravaged, more than 2,300 soldiers and sailors killed. The Japanese lost around thirty planes before turning back to their carriers.

  It was a brilliant stroke, planned with imagination and painstaking care, executed with audacity, and backed up with a superbly equipped and trained naval force. The Japanese had some luck—their flattops had been undetected—but they had bad luck too, for of the carriers they expected to find at Pearl that day, one was being repaired in Puget Sound and two were off on sea missions. The Japanese gained, however, from the poor military intelligence and the lazy security and communications arrangements of the American command. Above all, they benefited from the Americans’ faulty ideas—especially the idea that the “Japs” would never— never—attack the powerful fortress on Oahu. Despite later acc
usations, Washington did not “plan it that way”; the Japanese did that. Not a conspiracy theory but a complacency theory explains the surprise at Pearl Harbor—pervasive complacency in Washington and at every other level over Hawaii’s state of readiness, over Tokyo’s alleged military weakness, and over the degree of American knowledge of Japanese intentions and capabilities.

  In Washington, Navy Secretary Knox exclaimed “My God!” when the flash came in: AIR RAID ON PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NO DRILL. “This can’t be true! This must mean the Philippines.” Knox telephoned the President, who was sitting at his desk talking with Hopkins. There must be some mistake, Hopkins said. Roosevelt disagreed; it was just the kind of unexpected thing, he said, that the Japanese would do. Soon the horrifying details were coming in.

  In Tokyo hundreds of loudspeakers blared out the news in the streets. Some older people moved off to the Palace gates to pray for victory. The Emperor toned down an imperial rescript, adding his personal regret that the Empire was at war. In a radio address Prime Minister Tojo warned of a long war for the future of Japan and East Asia. There followed a recorded martial song:

  Across the sea, corpses in the water;

  Across the mountain, corpses in the field.

  I shall die only for the Emperor,

  I shall never look back.

  At Chequers, Winston Churchill had a moment of pure joy. So he had won after all. Yes, after Dunkirk, the fall of France, the fear of invasion, the U-boat struggle in the Atlantic, after seventeen months of Britain’s lonely fight—the war was won. England would live; the Commonwealth and the Empire would live. The war would last long, but all the rest would be merely the proper application of overwhelming force. People had said that the Americans were soft, he reflected—divided, talkative, affluent, fearful of shedding blood. But he knew better—he had studied the Civil War, fought out to the last desperate inch.

  In Berlin, just returned from the Russian front, where the Red Army was vigorously counterattacking, Adolf Hitler had little hesitation in fulfilling his obligation to his Pacific ally, even though Tokyo had not given him advance word of Pearl Harbor. He and Ribbentrop had orally promised Japan that Germany would fight the United States if Japan did. But this promise was not the main reason for Hitler’s decision. The Führer felt that the Americans had already declared war on him by attacking his ships—a feeling confirmed when Roosevelt in a fireside chat two days after Pearl Harbor declared flatly that “Germany and Italy, regardless of any formal declaration of war, consider themselves at war with the United States at this moment just as much as they consider themselves at war with Britain or Russia.” Both Hitler and Roosevelt recognized the inevitably wide involvement of nations locked in a global war. Even so, there was a manic quality to Hitler’s decision to war on the United States. Audacity and bravado had worked for him in the past; they would work again. He loathed Roosevelt personally with almost hysterical intensity. This manic quality explains in part the only real mystery in Hitler’s behavior after Pearl Harbor—his failure to press Japan harder to attack Russia, as a quid pro quo. Perhaps, though, Hitler recognized reality here. The Japanese would never take on the colossus to the north as long as they were so engaged in operations to the south.

  And engaged they were in the weeks after Pearl Harbor. Some hours after Pearl Harbor—long enough to be fully alerted—Douglas MacArthur’s air and naval forces were devastated in the Philippines. If confusion was the story of Pearl, befuddlement and indecision marked MacArthur and his commanders on Luzon. So dense was the fog of battle that a half century later historians were still trying to pierce it. Washington had contributed to complacency by sending out a handful of heavy bombers as a deterrent to Tokyo; these and most of MacArthur’s other aircraft were smashed on the field. Once again the Japanese bombers and fighters left virtually unscathed.

  After immobilizing American bases on Luzon and crippling British sea power in the Pacific by sinking the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, the Japanese carried out their audacious and carefully planned strategy of expanding their island empire through Malaya, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, and the western Pacific islands. To the amazement of the Allied defenders, within an incredibly few weeks after Pearl Harbor the empire threatened Midway and Hawaii to the east, Australia to the south, and even India to the west.

  The bombs and torpedoes that shattered the towering battlewagons at Pearl Harbor and MacArthur’s forces on Luzon on Sunday, December 7, 1941, had shattered also some of the towering illusions of the day: that the Japanese would back down if American and British deterrence was powerful enough; that the enemy would not really fight because he was under-trained and ill equipped and even—in the case of Japanese aviators—too nearsighted to fly planes; that if the Japanese did go to war, they would attack British or Dutch possessions and not American; or if they did have the nerve to take on the United States they would attack the Philippines and perhaps Guam but never Pearl Harbor. Shattered also was Roosevelt’s notion that he could pursue undisturbed his strategy of aggressiveness in the Atlantic and caution in the Pacific. Now he faced the two-front war that he had tried so hard to avoid; and for months he would have to fight on the wrong—the far western—front.

  Britain’s enemies boxed the compass: Nazi sea power to the west and north and east, German land power to the south in France, Italian naval forces in the Mediterranean, the Japanese by land and by sea in Asia and the Pacific. Both Germany and Japan now confronted adversaries on several fronts. Only Russia now faced just one foe—but one was enough. The million or more German troops grinding their way eastward into the Russian heartland comprised at this time land power without parallel in history.

  Both the Allies and the Axis were forced to conduct coordinated strategies, since concentration on one front inevitably robbed others. Hence each coalition strove for unity. But each nation had also separate interests, hardly papered over by the much-publicized conferences and consultations. Some American leaders, with eyes to public opinion as reflected in Congress, were tempted to turn westward against the Japanese, especially after the loss of Luzon and the agonizing siege of Corregidor. British leaders, scourged by memories of the bloodbaths of World War I, feared launching a premature invasion of France that could lead to another stalemate. The Russians had one central interest outside their borders—a massive Anglo-American cross-Channel attack to lighten the awful German pressure on the Soviet Union. And each nation had some separate leverage. The Americans could shift their forces between the two oceans, the British could build up attacking power along the whole periphery, the Russians could warn of impending collapse or even loft hardly veiled threats of another deal with Hitler.

  These global coalitions and conflicts weighed heavily on Roosevelt and Churchill when the Prime Minister late in December arrived at the White House for a long Christmas visit. Churchill had the delicate double objective of concentrating the Anglo-American effort in Europe rather than the Pacific, yet avoiding a commitment of the European effort to a cross-Channel attack. Soon he presented his case to Roosevelt and the Joint Chiefs of Staff for an Allied invasion of northwestern Africa, designed to hook up with British troops renewing their drive west along the North African coast into Tunisia.

  The Prime Minister promptly ran head-on into the sturdy opposition of General Marshall. The quintessential professional soldier, the Chief of Staff had been raised in the American military tradition, symbolized by Ulysses S. Grant, of massing central and coordinated forces for assaults straight into the enemy heartland. Marshall feared not only dispersion of effort in Africa but even more that success in the Mediterranean, with all its enticing openings for future moves, would pull men and munitions away from the central effort in Western Europe. With Roosevelt not committed in either direction, except to the primacy of Europe in general, the African issue was left unresolved. This made the outcome more dependent on events—that is, on the actions of lesser leaders.

  The top leaders found it easier to agree, with their
allies, on the ends for which the vast conflict would be fought. In jointly composing a “Declaration of United Nations” Roosevelt and Churchill could accord on almost all items except freedom for India. Far stickier, in view of the need to gain the adherence of the atheistic Russian leaders, was the President’s insistence on “religious freedom” as a goal. Only after Roosevelt had convinced envoy Maxim Litvinov, plucked out of obscurity by Stalin as a gesture to his allies, that religious freedom included the right to have no religion at all, and only after Litvinov won the permission of a dubious Number One in Moscow, could a proud President and Prime Minister issue the declaration. Signed by twenty-six nations—an array much like the group that both Roosevelt and Hitler had appealed to in 1939—the central provision made it the purpose of the Allies “to defend life, liberty, independence, and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands.”

  Victory seemed far away in the following weeks of early 1942, however, as the Japanese extended their grip on the western and southwestern Pacific and the Nazis continued to hammer Russia. For months the Allies knew nothing save defeat. But before the end of 1942 they had fought three crucial battles that if lost would have meant a very different war and a far longer struggle.

  The first of these critical battles was a series of engagements in the southwestern Pacific that continued through most of 1942.

  While still consolidating their hold on the Philippines and routing a fleet of American, British, and Dutch warships in the Java Sea, the Japanese began a 2,000-mile advance through eastern New Guinea and further southeast through the Solomon Islands. Early in May a large Japanese fleet, covered by three carriers, sped west through the Coral Sea to seize Port Moresby, a key Australian base on the narrow eastern neck of New Guinea. Alerted to Japanese plans by cryptanalytic intercepts, an American fleet, protected by the carriers Yorktown and Lexington, moved to the attack. In the first sea battle in history fought only by carrier planes, the American fleet under the command of Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher sank one Japanese carrier and damaged other warships, while losing the Lexington. This indecisive engagement was enough to stem Tokyo’s southern advance.