The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  After the Netherlands succumbed to German invasion the government of the Dutch East Indies chose to align itself with the Dutch government in exile in London, but from a military standpoint their position was not much better than the French position had been in Indo-China. Once again the initial Japanese moves were diplomatic: demands for a huge increase in oil exports to Japan. Once again the colonial authorities attempted to be accommodating. Former Foreign Minister Yoshizawa Kenkichi’s mission presented the Dutch with what amounted to a shopping list: 3,800,000 tons of oil, 1,000,000 tons of tin, 400,000 tons of bauxite, 180,000 tons of nickel, 30,000 tons of coconut oil, 30,000 tons of rubber and 10,000 tons of sugar. The Dutch haggled about quantities, insisting that there be no re-exports to Germany. By May 1941, however, the increasingly assertive Tōjō was once again losing patience. On June 17 Yoshizawa’s mission departed for Tokyo. On September 25 the Chiefs of Staff, with Tōjō ’s support, told Konoe that he had until October 15 to arrive at a diplomatic solution of Japan’s problems; this was the deadline for war. Since Konoe resigned on the 16th, allowing Tō jō to form a war government, only one thing can explain its subsequent extension for a further month and a half. This was the realization that any further moves against the European empires in South-East Asia would inevitably entail a confrontation with the United States.

  THE LOGIC OF PEARL HARBOR

  The sole obstacle to Japanese hegemony in South-East Asia was America. On the one hand, it was clear that the United States had scant appetite for war, in Asia or anywhere else. On the other, Americans had little desire to see Japan as sole master of China, let alone the whole of East Asia. But those who ran US policy in the Pacific believed they did not need to take up arms to prevent this, because of Japan’s dependence on trade with the United Statesand hence its vulnerability to economic pressure. Around a third of Japan’s imports came from the United States, including copious quantities of cotton, scrap iron and oil. Her dependence on American heavy machinery and machine tools was greater still. Even if the Americans did not intervene militarily, they had the option to choke the Japanese war machine to death, especially if they cut off oil exports. This was precisely what made it so hard for American diplomats and politicians to foresee the attack on Pearl Harbor. As normally risk-averse people, they could not imagine the Japanese being so rash as to gamble on a very swift victory when the economic odds were stacked so heavily against them. They assumed that the partial sanctions imposed after the Japanese invasion of Indo-China would send a clear enough signal to deter the Japanese. The effect was precisely the opposite.

  The path to war in the Pacific was paved with economic sanctions. The Japanese-American Commercial Treaty of 1911 was abrogated in July 1939. By the end of the year Japan (along with other combatants) was affected by Roosevelt’s ‘moral embargo’ on the export of ‘materials essential to airplane manufacture’, which meant in practice aluminium, molybdenum, nickel, tungsten and vanadium. At the same time, the State Department applied pressure on American firms to stop exporting technology to Japan that would facilitate the production of aviation fuel. With the National Defense Act of July 1940 the President was empowered to impose real prohibitionson the exports of strategic commodities and manufactures. By the end of the month, after a protracted wrangle between the State Department and the Treasury, it was agreed to ban the export of high-grade scrap iron and steel, aviation fuel, lubricating oil and the fuel blending agent tetraethyl lead. On September 26 the ban was extended to all scrap; two months later the export of iron and steel themselves became subject to licence. No one knew for sure what the effect of these restrictions would be. Some, like the State Department’s Advisor on Far Eastern Affairs Stanley Hornbeck, said they would hobble the Japanese military; others, like the US ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph Grew, that they would provoke it. Neither view was correct. The sanctions were too late to deter Japan from contemplating war, since the Japanese had been importing and stockpiling American raw materials since the outbreak of war in China. Only one economic sanction was regarded in Tokyo as a casus belli and that was an embargo on oil. That came in July 1941, along with a freeze on all Japanese assets in the United States – a response to the Japanese occupation of southern Indo-China. From this point, war in the Pacific was more or lessine vitable.

  For a long time the Japanese Foreign Ministry had found it hard to imagine the United State staking up arms against a victorious combination of Germany, Italy and Japan, especially if the Soviet Union were on friendly terms with that combination. A guiding assumption was that the American public was staunchly isolationist, and that the victoriesof Japan and her allies would reinforce rather than reverse that sentiment. The army was also reluctant to confront the United States, hoping that the conquest of European possessions in Asia could somehow be achieved without precipitating American intervention. Until September 1941 Japan’s naval strategists were the only ones prepared to contemplate a war with America. However, they ultimately could see no other way of winning it than to deal a knockout blow to the US Navy at the outset. Conveniently, the main Pacific base of the American fleet had been moved to Hawaii in 1940; had it remained on the Californian coast, a lightning strike would have been out of the question. By April 1941 Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku had convinced himself that the ships stationed at Pearl Harbor could be sunk in one fell swoop. All six Japanese aircraft carriers would be needed, several submarines and around 400 planese quipped with torpedoes or armour-piercing shells. On November 1 Lieutenant-General Suzuki Teiichi assured the participants at a Liaison Conference* that supplies from the territories to be occupied would be sufficient to meet Japan’s material needs. ‘In 1943,’ he declared, ‘the material situation will be much better if we go to war.’

  This was not the same as saying that Japan’s material situation was equal to the challenge of war against the British Empire, the Dutch East Indies and the United States. All Suzuki meant was that Japan’s material situation was bound to deteriorate the longer war was postponed. The navy alone was consuming 400 tons of oil an hour, just idly waiting; after eighteen months its stocks of fuel would all be gone. It therefore followed that it was better to strike now than to wait. This rationale was sufficient to commit Japan to war if no diplomatic break through had been achieved by midnight on November 30, 1941.

  It is sometimes suggested that the decision-makers in Tokyo were succumbing to some kind of irrational Oriental fatalism, an impression heightened by Tō jō’s assertion on October 14 that ‘a man sometimes must dare to leap boldly from the towering stage of Kiyomizu Temple.’ Links have been drawn between the decision for war against the United States and the samurai code, or a specifically Japanese siege mentality, if not collective hysteria. Yet in many respects this way of thinking was more Western than Eastern in its provenance. Unknowingly, Tōjō was echoing Bethmann Hollweg’s arguments for a German war against Russia in 1914 and Hitler’s arguments for a German war against the Western powers in 1939. Even the time frame was similar:

  Two years from now [that is, in 1943] we will have no petroleum for military use; ships will stop moving. When I think about the strengthening of American defences in the south-western Pacific, the expansion of the US fleet, the unfinished China Incident, and so on, I see no end of difficulties. We can talk long about suffering and austerity but can our people endure such a life for long?… I fear that we would become a third class nation after two or three years if we merely sat tight.

  Thus, when Tōjō spoke of ‘shutting one’s eyes and taking the plunge’ he was making a very German argument: to gamble on immediate war rather than submit to relative decline in the near future; to put to use military assets that would certainly bankrupt the country if they continued to sit idle. In the words of a High Command policy paper presented to the Imperial Conference of September 6, 1941, the American aim was ‘to dominate the world’; to this end the United State saimed ‘to prevent our empire from rising and developing in East Asia’. Japan was in ‘a desperate sit
uation, where it must resort to the ultimate step – war – to defend itself and ensure its preservation’. The alternative was to ‘lie prostrate at the feet of the United States’.

  The Japanese were not fantasists. For Matsuoka, Pearl Harbor was the disastrous culmination of a strategic miscalculation. He had assumed that the combination of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy and the Neutrality Treaty with the Soviet Union would deter the United States from resisting Japanese expansion in Asia. ‘The Tripartite Pact was my worst mistake,’ he told his adviser Saitō Yoshie on December 7, 1941, the day Japan attacked. ‘I hoped to prevent the United States from entering the war. I wanted to adjust our relations with Soviet Russia through the Alliance. I hoped peace would be maintained and Japan would be placed in a secure position. Instead… the present calamity… indirectly resulted from the Alliance.’ Nomura Kichisaburō, the last pre-war ambassador to Washington, had favoured a more moderate policy, seeking a return to the Open Door regime in China, rather than risk war with the United States. Nor were all Japan’s senior naval officerspersuaded by Yamamoto’s plan. Nagano Osami, Chief of the Navy Staff, argued that Japan was ‘bound for self-destruction and… destined for national extinction’ – though he regarded this, somewhat paradoxically, as true to ‘the spirit of defending the nation in a war’. In the summer of 1941 the Economic Mobilization Bureau produced a report which concluded that after two years of hostilities, Japan’s economic resources would probably not suffice to sustain air and naval operations. Nagano expected that ‘the situation [would] become increasingly worse’ as early as the second half of 1942. Tōjō himself admitted that he did not know what Japan would do if war continued after 1943. It wasnot hubris that led to Pearl Harbor, but a conviction that it was preferable to take the chance of defeat in war than ‘to be ground down without doing anything’.

  Perhaps the real fantasists were the Americans, who adopted a remarkably confrontational stance in the final pre-war months, given the vulnerability of their own military installations in the Pacific, particularly the Philippines. The British were markedly more conciliatory, even temporarily closing the Burma Road – 700 mostly mountainous miles along which supplies were travelling to China – in response to Japanese pressure. For reasons that are not easy to fathom, Roosevelt consistently exaggerated the actual economic and future strategic importance of China and underestimated the perils of war with Japan. He declined an invitation from Konoe to attend a summit conference in the summer of 1941. Secretary of State Cordell Hull wanted complete withdrawal of Japanese troops from China and Indo-China; he would not hear of any suspension of US aid to Chiang, which the Japanese demanded. In his fateful note of November 26, Hull even proposed a mutual surrender of extraterritorial rights in China – an end, in effect, to the old Open Door system – and recognition of the Guomindang government. With some justification, the policy of the United States to wards Japan in this period has been likened to her policy to wards the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

  Though aware that Japanese troops were heading from Indo-China towards Malaya and Thailand, the American government appears to have been oblivious to the progress of Admiral Nagumo’s strike force, which set sail for Pearl Harbor on November 26. How far this was the result of in competence and how far the result of conspiracy – to be precise, the deliberate with holding by the British government of intelligence about Japanese naval movements – continues to be debated, though it is very hard indeed to see why Churchill would have regarded the destruction of the American Pacific fleet as helpful to the British cause. The prospects of American intervention in Asia were by this time too good to necessitate such a gross betrayal of transatlantic trust, for Roosevelt had already given Halifax (now Britain’s ambassador in Washington) a clear commitment of American support in the event of war on December 1 – six days before Pearl Harbor.

  THE CENTRIFUGE

  The Japanese knew the odds were at best even and, after 1942, would lengthen against them. Yet victory is victory, and for a time it seemed as if the war really would be over before 1943. At minimal cost to itself, Admiral Nagumo’s strike force* wreaked havoc at Pearl Harbor on December 7. True, the American carrier sturned out to be away from their base, but the destruction or serious damaging of eight battleships, three destroyers, three light cruisers and three auxiliaries, to say nothing of the 177 planes that were rendered irreparable, was no mean achievement. The Japanese had lost just twenty-nine aircraft in action and fifty-five men, compared with total US military fatalities of 3,297. The vengeful American response is well known; the euphoric Japanese response less so. The literary critic Okuna Takao recalled how

  the attitudes of ordinary people, who had felt ambivalent about the war against China, and even of intellectuals who denounced it as an invasion, were transformed as soon as the war against Britain and the US began… There was a sense of euphoria that we’d done it at last; we’d landed a punch on those arrogant great powers Britain and America, on those white fellows. As the news of one victory after another came in, the worries faded, and fear turned to pride and joy… All the feelings of inferiority of a coloured people from a backward country, towards white people from the developed world, disappeared in that one blow… Never in our history had we Japanese felt such pride in our selvesas a race as we did then.

  And this was merely the opening salvo. Thereafter, Japanese forces fanned out across the Pacific and South-East Asia in a vast centrifugal offensive that achieved breathtaking speed and success. On December 8, the first Japanese troops landed on the eastern side of the Malay peninsula, followed two days later by the rest of General Yamashita Tomoyuki’s 25th Army. Naval aircraft based in Saigon smashed the British naval force off Malaya, sinking the battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse. Lieutenant-General Iida Shōjirō’s 15th Army stormed up the Kra isthmus into the heart of Burma, routing better-armed but less mobile British forces. British Borneo was invaded on December 16; a month and three days later it surrendered. Hong Kong’s garrison of 12,000 held out for barely a week after Japanese troops landed there on December 18; it surrendered on Christmas Day. Mean while the 25th Army was advancing down the Malayan peninsula towards Singapore, using bicycles to speed down the well-tended plantation roads. On February 15 Lieutenant-General Arthur E. Percival and his garrison of 16,000 Britons, 14,000 Australians and 32,000 Indians surrendered, unaware of the exhausted condition of their 30,000 adversaries, who had all but run out of food and ammunition. Here was a humiliation even worse than that of May 1940, and there was more to come. Rangoon fell in March, despite Chinese attempts to assist Burma’s beleaguered British-Indian defenders; Mandalay followed on May 1, along with the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. As General Henry Pownall admitted, the British had been ‘out-generalled, out witted and out fought… by better soldiers’.

  The same went for the Americans. On December 8 the first units of General Honma Masaharu’s 14th Army landed on the island of Luzon, after air raids had smashed defences at Manila. Further land-ingson the 22nd and 24th were followed by the surrender of the Filipino capital on January 2. In the Central Pacific, Guam, Wake and the Bismarck Islands were all in Japanese hands by the end of January 1942. On April 9 American-led forces on the Bataan peninsula surrendered, followed a month later by those still fighting on Corregidor; this effectively ended resistance in the Philippines. The spring of 1942 also saw Japanese forces take the Admiralty Islands and the Bismarck Archipelago, including the Solomon Islands. The Dutch, too, crumbled in the face of the Japanese onslaught. General Imamura Hitoshi’s forces made their first landing in Dutch territory on the northern Celebes. By the end of February all of Sumatra had been taken and a makeshift Allied fleet had been wiped out off Java. On March 8 the Dutch surrendered. That same month their resistance in southern Borneo also collapsed. All this was achieved with a smaller military force than was stationed in either Manchuria or China.

  The Germans had already made the concept of ‘lightning war’ their own. But nev
er in military history has lightning struck in so many places with such devastating results as it did in Asia and the Pacific between the beginning of December 1941 and the end of April 1942. Moreover, the distances involved were vastly greater than those being covered simultaneously by the Germans in Europe. At its maximum extent, the Japanese Empire stretched 6,400 miles from west to east and 5,300 miles from north to south; itscircumference was a staggering 14,200 miles. By the beginning of May 1942 the Japanese could plausibly contemplate attacks on Midway, New Caledonia, Fiji, Samoa, New Guinea and even Australia, Ceylon and India.

  The European empires had simply caved in, as if the Japanese attack had exposed a fundamental loss of self-belief. An English teacher, hearing the desperate destruction of the causeway between Singapore and the mainland, asked a passing young man what the noise was. Lee Kuan Yew (who would be Singapore’s first Prime Minister after independence) replied: ‘That is the end of the British Empire.’ And so it seemed to be. Stories are legion of British troops taking to their heels in the face of the Japanese advance, their officers in the lead. Practically the first effectual resistance the Japanese encountered was from Australians on the Kokoda Trail in New Guinea. Nor was the initial American response especially impressive. General Douglas MacArthur’sexit from the Philippines was precipitate to say the least. The Americans’ fighting spirit was not a great deal better than that of their British counterparts. In the words of American Marine Chester Biggs, captured by the Japanese in 1941: ‘It is all right to die for a cause if the cause is a good one, but to die just for the sake of saying “We fought to the last man and didn’t surrender” is not a very good cause.’ It was the same story at Bataan. As American PoW Andrew Carson recalled: