Threshold of War

by Heinrichs, Waldo;

  What American planes might deter heavily depended on how far they could reach. The B-17C, the version sent in September, had a combat radius with a half-load of bombs of 900 miles. Formosa, Shanghai, even Okinawa, were within striking distance, but not the home islands of Japan. The B-17E, however, the new version to be sent thereafter, had a somewhat longer reach which might place Kyushu, the southern island of Japan, within striking distance. The army’s War Plans Division began a special study of these and other strategic possibilities of air power in the Philippines on September 16.81

  Enthusiasm for the project did not wait. The B-l7s authorized at Argentia, which would bring the total in the Philippines to thirty-five, prepared to move in October. The day the first nine B-l7s arrived in the Philippines, Marshall ordered a second group of thirty-five across in December—as soon as it had new planes—for a total of seventy. The Air Corps was pressing for more, asking MacArthur how many could be accommodated on existing fields in three months and how many in six.

  Bombers alone, of course, would be helpless. The Air Corps received authorization September 12 for a broad-based buildup including a group of fifty-four dive bombers and an additional group of fighters (130), as well as reconnaissance, air warning, command, ordnance, and engineering units. The army was preparing to send the tanks, artillery, and anti-aircraft guns authorized in August. This was the sort of power, Stimson believed, that would “keep the fear of God in Japan.” Not infantry yet, however: the army was considering sending a National Guard division but asked MacArthur’s views on the subject, warning that the demand for shipping was heavy.82

  The oil embargo and air reinforcement of the Philippines were both meant to halt Japanese expansion but there the similarity ends. The reinforcement project aimed at making a Japanese attack northward or southward too costly and risky. This deterrent effect itself was speculative and would not in any case be fully realized for several months when runways were extended and planes, ground personnel, munitions, and gasoline arrived. Therefore it might prompt Japanese action before the military capability was in place. Nevertheless, the aim of the reinforcement was to encourage Japanese inaction. The oil embargo, however, if fully implemented and joined in by the British and Dutch, would have an immediate and growing impact and carry beyond deterrence to coercion. The clock would be ticking toward the moment when Japan would lack the fuel to send armies and fleets into battle and it would have to attack, change its aims, or subside in influence. It would suffer severe penalties from inaction.

  The decision on an oil embargo was closely held and deviously managed. Action proceeded not in the formal realm of peacetime quotas and proclamations restricting export, for on paper Japan was supposed to receive some quantities of some kinds of oil, but in the shadowy world of inaction, circumvention, and red tape.83

  Upon the freezing of Japanese assets in July, the United States required both export licenses and licenses to withdraw funds to pay for the exports. Before leaving for Argentia, Welles had directed Acheson to withhold action on exchange licenses for the time being, in effect while the president and he were absent. Most export licenses were denied, but a few were approved, and these came before the Foreign Funds Control Committee, which before long would have to give reasons for delay. Then, as Dean Acheson later explained to Sir Ronald Campbell of the British embassy, the committee “discovered by accident the technique of imposing total embargo by way of its freezing order without having to take decisions about quotas for particular commodities.”84 In anticipation of the freezing order, Japanese banks had sequestered dollars in the United States and Latin America. Aware of this plunge into cash and foreign accounts, the committee insisted that these funds be used before releasing frozen assets. The Japanese demurred.

  This was the state of affairs Acheson reported to Welles the day before the president returned from Argentia.85 Undoubtedly either by phone or in person on August 21 or 29, when he saw the president alone, Welles reported the situation to Roosevelt, and no countervailing directive was issued.86 Japanese trade, Acheson noted on August 20, was “a matter of confidential discussion between the President and Secretary Hull.” On September 5, a day Hull had lunch with the president, the secretary of state gave departmental sanction to these stalling maneuvers. The United States had imposed an embargo without saying so. It was in a position, said Acheson, to point out to the Japanese that they had “imposed {an} embargo upon themselves by their lack of loyalty to {the} American freezing order.”87

  The de facto embargo worked this way. The Japanese embassy asked Foreign Funds whether it would accept payment for pending oil shipments by assets transferred from Brazil. The answer was that this was a hypothetical question. The Japanese would have to transfer the funds, risking their being frozen, and then apply. The Japanese offered silk for cotton and oil and were told the United States did not need silk. They then offered release of exports to America which they had halted in retaliation, but were asked to present a list and then told the list was incomplete, and that in any event an exchange was impossible because there were no Japanese purchases which had been paid for. The Japanese proposed to ship dollars from Japan, but Foreign Funds wanted proof these were legally obtained abroad. The Japanese suggested gold in payment and received no answer. They then returned to the idea of remitting balances from South America and met silence again. Finally, in early November two Japanese tankers on the West Coast, which had been “gathering oysters” on their propellers awaiting cargo since July, weighed anchor and returned to Japan empty.88

  Trade did not stop immediately. One ship was allowed as ballast a cargo of low-grade lubricating oil, asphalt, cotton, and cocoa beans. Some iron ore moved to Japan from the Philippines, some cotton to Japanese-occupied China. Dollars and yen were unfrozen to pay diplomatic staffs.89

  The stall only gradually surfaced. For weeks the British and Dutch were left in ignorance of the American intent. They learned September 13 that the embargo was “practically absolute” but that Hull wanted no publicity “which might demonstrate the completeness of the present embargo or suggest greater severity.” On September 26, Acheson apologized for the problems caused by the “somewhat opportunist measures” he had been obliged to follow, and he finally explained to the British and Dutch how the embargo worked and urged them to achieve the same result. They were already well on the way. Certain Indian trade with Japan posed a problem, and Britain was anxious to secure as much magnesium as possible from Japan for the making of incendiary bombs, but Japan’s trade outside its orbit in East Asia had been practically closed down by October.90

  With the single exception of a stringent war warning, Roosevelt by October had fulfilled the commitments he made at Argentia. He had reaffirmed and indeed reinforced and extended the new policy directions he had chosen in the wake of the German attack on Russia. He had entered the Battle of the Atlantic, though on his own terms, extended the best aid possible to the Soviet Union, begun the buildup of a deterrent force in the Philippines, applied maximum economic pressure against Japan, and entangled the Japanese in complex and prolonged diplomatic talks. He had established, if not a formal alliance, an intimate political relationship with Great Britain. He had chosen courses risking war in the belief that alternative courses seemed riskier to American vital interests. The central dynamic of his policies was the conviction that the survival of the Soviet Union was essential for the defeat of Germany and that the defeat of Germany was essential for American security. This more than any other concern, to his mind, required the immobilization of Japan.

  No single decision or day marked the point when Roosevelt crossed over from benevolent neutrality to belligerency and risk of war. The process was complex and extended from late July to mid-September. One particular day, however, seems to epitomize the transition: Friday, September 5, 1941. This was the day following the Greer incident when he ordered the start of convoy escort, the day he received Stalin’s ominous message and promised his three best transports for reinfor
cement adjacent to the Russians in the Middle East. It was also the day Secretary Hull formalized within government the undercover embargo and when the first B-l7s departed for Manila and the 19th Bombardment Group was ordered to follow in October.

  Chapter 7

  October-November Race Against Time

  In early August, just as President Roosevelt was deciding that the Soviets might survive the German onslaught, the Japanese government was reaching the same conclusion. Ironically the United States then took steps to prevent a Japanese attack northward at precisely the moment Japan decided to postpone it. On August 9, the day before the start of the Argentia conference, the Japanese government formally decided against operations in Siberia that year.

  Besides offering surprisingly strong resistance in the west, the Soviet Union was slow to withdraw its forces from the Far East. The Soviets maintained some thirty tough, experienced divisions, three cavalry brigades, sixteen tank brigades, and 2,000 tanks and aircraft east of Lake Baikal, most of the infantry manning extensive fortifications along the Ussuri and Amur rivers on the northern and eastern borders of Manchuria. Japanese intelligence noted a westward movement of forces in July, but only a few formations and these from the Baikal area rather than the more critical Amur-Ussuri front, which in fact was being strengthened. A decision for war by August 10 was necessary for an attack at the end of the month and completion of the campaign by mid-October, when the bitter cold and snows of the Siberian winter would set in.1

  Along with fading prospects of quick success in the north came the “staggering blow” of American sanctions.2 Some of the more cosmopolitan officials in finance, foreign affairs, and the navy had feared some such severe American response to the move into southern Indochina, but the army as a whole and the militant elements of the navy in the vanguard of the southern advance movement were taken entirely by surprise. Japanese insiders, aware of the hesitations and divergent ambitions composing the southern Indochina decision, found it hard to understand the severity of the American response but were quick to assume the worst, that the embargo was total. While testing American regulations for whatever oil might still be obtained, the Japanese government was of one mind: exchange controls that placed the American government in a position to turn the tap at will, on or off, day to day, were intolerable.3

  The German-Russian Front: New York Times, November 9, 1941.

  The Japanese nation, in the eyes of its leaders, faced a supreme crisis. Access to the world’s resources was suddenly disappearing. Gone now was Japan’s trans-Siberian link to Germany and supplies of key metals and machinery. Denied access to oil outside the empire, Japan had two years’ supply in stockpile, and less under the demands of war. As it was, the supply was diminishing by 12,000 tons each day. A feeling of desperation took hold: Japan was “like a fish in a pond from which the water was gradually being drained away.”4

  The Tokyo atmosphere was heavy with the paranoia of encirclement. Japanese could gaze upon Soviet and American-chartered tankers plying La Perouse Strait between Hokkaido and Japanese-held southern Sakhalin with oil products for Vladivostok. Consuls reported the opening of an American naval air base at Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians, the arrival of a Soviet air mission in the United States and its inspection of an American heavy bomber. They speculated on the possibility of the United States supplying airplanes to the Soviet Union by way of Alaska and even eventually establishing a bombing force in Siberia. Japanese consuls also reported construction of an airfield at Davao in the Philippines suitable for use by bombers and the arrival of American reinforcements at Manila. A British warship was noted visiting Manila as well as the cruisers St. Louis and Phoenix from Hawaii, which, according to rumor, departed for Singapore. Japanese intelligence noted the arrival in China of American pilots and planes and construction there of new air bases with British, American, and Russian help.5 The oil embargo seemed to be, in the words of one authority, the “final, major link in a chain of encirclement” by the ABCD powers, a culmination of years of effort on their part “to deny Japan her rightful place in the world by destroying her only available means of self-existence and self-defense.” Unless Japan could break the “circle of force” by diplomacy and quickly, the reasoning went, it must fight.6 President Roosevelt had succeeded better than he knew in preoccupying Japan with the south.

  The Japanese army was of one mind on the necessity for attack southward including war with the United States. Even proponents of an attack northward were converted by the necessity of first securing adequate resources in the south. Further negotiation seemed futile but was tolerable so long as a decision for war was reached by early October for attack in November.

  The position of the navy was more complex, but the upshot was the same. Whereas the army required Imperial sanction and a long lead time to gather and deploy forces and transports for attack, and therefore required an early formal decision for war, the navy was already close to a war footing and could move quite soon after a decision. So it could allow diplomacy more time. Japan’s navy was also dissatisfied with the army’s plan of attack: it wanted the army to commit more divisions and include initial landings in the Philippines to forestall American use of the islands.

  If not more sanguine about negotiations, the navy was more serious.7 Although war enthusiasts on the naval general staff tended to ignore or underestimate America’s war production capability, leading admirals were aware of the huge building plans of 1940–41, including seventeen battleships completing, abuilding, or ordered, and twelve attack carriers. The American navy would add 178 destroyers to the fleet in 1942 and 1943. By current Japanese navy estimates, the United States had not far from three times the warship tonnage under construction that Japan did. A few admirals such as Yamamoto Isoroku, commander of the Combined Fleet, warned that the prospects in a long war were very bleak.

  Naval leaders, then, hoped against hope that some further shift in the fluctuating and unpredictable balance of world forces or in American intentions would open the way for a Japanese-American compromise that guaranteed Japan access to oil and other war resources. Less involved in China, the navy was more flexible than the army on the issue of retaining troops there. It stood more strongly for trying diplomacy before reaching a decision for war.

  Yet the current was flowing toward war in the navy, too. The other side of the coin in the Japanese-American naval balance was that at the moment, in late summer 1941, the Imperial Navy outnumbered the Anglo-American-Dutch forces facing it eleven to nine in battleships and ten to three in carriers and that the enemy forces were scattered from Singapore to Pearl Harbor. Against the American building program, however, Japan’s advantage would steadily decline, and after 1943 precipitously. Never would Japan have a more favorable moment to strike. For the navy, dwindling oil supplies made all the difference between taking to the blue waters and rusting in port. Control of East Indies oil, staff officers argued, would enable Japan to fight a protracted war. A psychology of desperation, characterized by “do or die,” “fight or surrender,” and “now or never” dichotomies, percolated upward from middle echelon officers to Admiral Nagano Osami, chief of the general staff, and Admiral Oikawa Kojirō, navy minister.

  The same sense of desperation affected the civilian leadership of Japan but led to a different conclusion: somehow diplomacy must be made to work so as to avoid war. Prime Minister Konoe, monitoring the military’s turn toward the south in the wake of the American embargo, decided to play his high card: a bid for a meeting with the American president. Thus Ambassador Nomura’s suggestion of August 6 met by Roosevelt’s seemingly encouraging response of August 17.

  It was a move founded on hope, not substance. This melancholy nobleman, on whom the emperor and court had lavished such hopes for wise leadership, had already proven to be a weak reed for peace. His first and second cabinets had led Japan into the war in China, the Axis alliance, and the southward advance—in short into the predicament it now faced. Disdainful of Western liberalism and
much taken by the expansionist notions of the thirties, he was ambivalent about power and flaccid in its use.8 Konoe now suddenly determined to reverse the tide by a supreme act of political will and skill. The army was certain he would fail, the navy only less so. At the least the premier’s initiative would quiet uncertainties about going to war while preparations for attack continued. Japan’s terms for peace must remain the same, however, the army insisted. Konoe could offer no substantial concession and must promise that if diplomacy failed he would not resign but lead the nation into war.

  On the basis of these understandings between the armed services and between them and the cabinet, the government met in Imperial Conference September 6. Hara Yosimichi, president of the privy council, pointed out that plans placed greater emphasis on war than diplomacy, and, when neither of the uniformed chiefs of the armed services responded, the emperor himself intervened with a rebuke to the supreme command. He read from a poem of his grandfather, the Emperor Meiji:

  Throughout the world

  Everywhere we are all brothers

  Why then do the winds and waves rage so turbulently?

  After a stunned silence Admiral Nagano insisted that Japan would choose war only as an “unavoidable last resort.”9 On that basis the conference concluded that, if early October brought no prospect of Japan’s demands being met, the nation would then decide to go to war with the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. This was the same day (September 5, Washington time) on which American policy respecting the Battle of the Atlantic, aid to Russia, the oil embargo, and reinforcement of the Philippines solidified all across the line.

  Meanwhile the Japanese were not finding prospects for a leaders’ meeting encouraging. Nomura saw the president on August 28 and September 3, each visit sandwiched between talks with Hull. Roosevelt had suggested a mid-October rendezvous. The ambassador urged September 21. The president had engagements in late September. The Japanese said the meeting was an essential first step, a means of discussing all issues from the broadest standpoint and exploring every means of “saving the situation.” The Americans regarded the meeting as a last step, to be devoted to ratification of agreements previously reached on all fundamental questions. Discussion along these lines, a continuation of the Hull-Nomura format of the spring, Konoe warned, “did not meet the need of the present situation which is developing swiftly and may produce unforeseen contingencies.” First, the Americans insisted, the Japanese government must show it stands “earnestly” for the principles the United States had been proclaiming and the practical application thereof. Then the British, Chinese, and Dutch would have to be “prevailed upon.”10