Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  Brilliant operation though it was, the attack did not achieve its aim: to destroy American war-making capacity long enough for the Japanese to conquer their Co-Prosperity Sphere, by which time the United States would negotiate a peace. It did not take out the Pacific Fleet’s two aircraft carriers (and a third was on the way from San Diego) or the heavy cruisers, which were at sea; it only sank three destroyers out of the twenty-nine moored in the harbour; it had not touched the dry dock; and it failed to take into account the speed at which the American ship-building industry could repair and replace when it really had to – three of the battleships were back in commission by the end of the month. That said, Pearl Harbor did come as a great shock to the American people, psychologically as much as militarily, and it did unite them behind their president in declaring war against Japan. Technically, the attack was part of a ‘Day of Infamy’, as Roosevelt put it, having been carried out without a declaration of war. The Japanese embassy was supposed to deliver a declaration some hours before the attack, but delays in deciphering the message from Tokyo and further delays as the Japanese ambassador waited to see the American Secretary of State meant that it was not delivered until Admiral Nagumo was on his way home. Numerous investigations during the war and a Congressional inquiry after it all blamed Kimmel and Short, while carefully ensuring that none of the blame stuck to the president or to the administration. Both men were relieved of their commands, reduced to their substantive ranks of rear admiral and major-general respectively and compulsorily retired.* Years later, a Congressional committee, set up under the Clinton administration in 1999, exonerated Kimmel and Short, saying that they had been denied intelligence available in Washington, and restored them to their held ranks. As both men were long dead, this was rather akin to the efforts of the Richard III Society in absolving Richard of the murder of the Princes in the Tower, but it was a nice gesture.

  On the same day that Pearl Harbor was bombed, a task force under Rear Admiral Kajioka Sadamichi attacked the United States’ most westerly Pacific base, Wake Island, but with rather less success. The defenders, men of the US Marine Corps, manned anti-aircraft guns and shore batteries while a squadron of fighters repulsed an attempted landing, sinking two Japanese destroyers. With the support of two carriers returning from Pearl Harbor, Sadamichi tried again on 23 December 1941, and this time he did succeed in taking the island, but at considerable cost, the tiny garrison accounting for four Japanese ships, twenty-one aircraft and around 900 men.

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  Three hours and forty-five minutes after Nagumo’s second wave of aircraft had turned away from Pearl Harbor, at 2330 hours on 7 December GMT, or 0800 hours on 8 December local time, the British crown colony of Hong Kong became the next target for the Japanese, as Lieutenant-General Tadayoshi Sano’s 38 Division of the Japanese Twenty-Third Army, hardened by years of fighting in China and desensitized by years of butchery of Chinese civilians, hurtled across the Shum Shun river. Here the governor, Sir Mark Young, and the Commander British Forces, Major-General Christopher Maltby, were well aware that they would not be reinforced and were going to be defeated, although bellicose statements by some civilians and soldiers not in the know that Hong Kong was impregnable were difficult to refute without lowering morale. Malaya and Singapore would hold out, but Hong Kong could not, although its garrison had to resist for as long as possible, and do as much damage to the attacking Japanese as it possibly could.

  There had been ample warning of Japanese intentions and from 5 December Maltby was deploying his troops to their battle positions, with a covering force of one company of 2/14 Punjab Regiment supported by armoured cars forward on the frontier, with the aim of identifying any incursion and then delaying the enemy’s approach to the main defensive position, the so-called Gin Drinker’s Line which stretched from Tsun Wan to Tide Cove, on the mainland north of Kowloon. By the time the news of Japanese landings in Malaya had been received by radio, all the troops in Hong Kong were at their stand-to positions, anti-aircraft guns were manned and the demolition of road and railway bridges in the frontier area had begun. As the Japanese infantry, led by local guides and supported by mountain artillery, with Chinese civilians pressed into service as carriers of ammunition, water and rations, crossed the frontier, the Japanese air force bombed Kai Tak airfield, destroying all five of the RAF’s aircraft parked there. The covering force began to withdraw and scored a local victory at Tai Po, where they ambushed the Japanese tootling along in column of route and caused significant casualties. The Japanese advance was nevertheless faster than expected, largely owing to the excellence of their engineers, who were little inconvenienced by the demolished bridges and cratered roads.

  In Hong Kong and amongst those who are or have been connected with Hong Kong, the defence of the colony has been talked up into a gallant and heroic defence carried out by brave and dedicated men who made the attackers fight for every inch of ground and were only defeated by overwhelming force. The truth is perhaps a little different. The Royal Scots, the First of Foot, acquired the nickname of the ‘Fleet of Foot’ or the ‘First and Worst’, having supposedly run away from the Gin Drinker’s Line back to Hong Kong Island. They did not run away, but they did not defend the left-hand portion of the line with any great enthusiasm, and when the Japanese captured the Shing Mun redoubt, the lynchpin of that part of the line, their commanding officer declined to counterattack it. When the Scots eventually gave way, the Indian battalions in the centre and right could not stay where they were and had to withdraw to conform. Maltby ordered a withdrawal to Hong Kong Island, and after a number of delaying actions by the Indian battalions the troops were taken off, an operation not assisted by the desertion of the Chinese crews of the ferries, and further complicated by panicking defenders opening fire on the cargo vessel shifting the garrison’s store of explosives from Green Island; the ship promptly blew up, severely depleting the ability of the Engineers to create obstacles on the island. By 13 December, Kowloon and the mainland had been abandoned to the Japanese.

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  The last of the initial Japanese strikes was on the Philippines, when at 0500 hours on 8 December GMT, 1230 hours local time, an air raid from Formosa caught most of General MacArthur’s air force on the ground at Clark Field and destroyed eighteen B-17 bombers, fifty-six fighters and a host of miscellaneous aircraft. It is difficult to excuse this, although MacArthur, unlike his colleagues at Pearl Harbor, got away with it. He had ample warning, having been told of the Pearl Harbor attack nine hours before, at 0330 hours local. By his own account, General Louis Brereton, commanding the USAAF Far East Air Force, immediately asked permission to launch an attack on Japanese air bases in China but was refused by MacArthur. MacArthur denied this, and said later that, even if the raid had taken place, the heavy defences of Japanese air bases and the lack of American fighter cover for the small bomber force would have rendered any such action suicidal. Brereton’s version of events is the more credible, however, and MacArthur did authorize a raid much later, when it was too late. Had the raid been authorized immediately, the bombers would have been in the air rather than parked on the ground when the Japanese arrived. It seems that MacArthur still hoped that the Philippines would somehow remain neutral and avoid being attacked, whereas a glance at the map would have shown him that the Japanese had no choice but to take the Philippines once they embarked on their planned expansion.

  In the teeth of overwhelming air superiority, Brereton now withdrew most of his remaining aircraft to Australia and to Java, in the Dutch East Indies, leaving MacArthur with only a handful of fighters. The US Navy too decided to withdraw, when the sixty-four-year-old Admiral Thomas Hart, commanding the American Asiatic Fleet, learned of the fate of his friend Phillips in the Prince of Wales. Hart was an innovator in using air power against ships and knew full well that, with the removal of USAAF aircraft and the preponderance of Japanese air power, to leave his ships where they were would invite destruction. He ordered his ships to the Dutch East Ind
ies, to the anger and consternation of MacArthur, who signalled Washington, demanding that aircraft carriers be sent out to strike a blow against the Japanese. But Washington was not terribly interested in the Philippines, or in MacArthur, and was certainly not going to risk valuable carriers in the defence of somewhere the US Navy had already written off. MacArthur now knew that with the withdrawal of the navy his small American army and fledgling Filipino militia would have to fight alone and that eventually they would run out of supplies. Dispersed landings by small bodies of Japanese troops had begun on 10 December, but MacArthur realized that these were intended to make him split his forces and declined to move. As with every other Western possession in South-East Asia, it would now be only a matter of time before the Philippines too succumbed.

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  On 11 December 1941, while the Americans were still clearing the rubble of Pearl Harbor, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse had been sunk, the evacuation of Kowloon was in full swing and MacArthur was wondering what to do now that the US Navy had gone, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States of America. It was a decision taken by Hitler alone, without consulting his military advisers, and was preceded by the hasty signing of an agreement by Germany, Italy and Japan that none would seek a separate peace. Hitler did not have to declare war on America, the agreements with Japan were consultative and defensive, and the whole point of including Japan in the Tripartite Pact of September 1940 was to deter America from entering the war. He accepted that war with the United States was inevitable eventually, but he wanted to delay it as long as possible, and ideally until the war in Europe was won. Now that Britain was, contrary to German expectations, still fighting on, Hitler had been encouraging Japan to attack British possessions in the Far East, and after June 1941 to attack Russia, but had advised her not to attack America. Things had changed, however. By the autumn of 1941 it was clear that the war would not be won by a short, sharp stroke – Germany must prepare for a long war. Barbarossa had failed in the sense that it had not brought a result before the winter of 1941; the United States was providing far more support to Britain than a neutral nation should, and she had amended her Neutrality Acts to extend Lend-Lease to the USSR. American ships were reporting the position of German ships to the British, were depth-charging German submarines and would come into the war very shortly. If this were unavoidable, then Hitler would prefer to be the initiator rather than the recipient of a declaration of war.

  To the British, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was a delightful Christmas cake, and the German declaration of war was the marzipan on it. Churchill had always hoped that the United States would come into the war, and his whole war and foreign policy was predicated on this assumption. Many conspiracy theories have grown out of Pearl Harbor. It has been suggested that Roosevelt and his advisers knew about the Japanese intention to attack the Pacific Fleet’s base and deliberately let it happen to allow the president to bring America into the war. Another theory has it that the British knew of the attack from intercepts long before it happened and did not tell the Americans. (A particularly entertaining theory posted on a website some time ago and now, sadly, removed had it that the attack on Pearl was actually carried out by RAF aircraft with Japanese markings.) It is probably unnecessary to say that there is not a shred of evidence to support any of these suggestions.

  In the week immediately following the outbreak of war with Japan, Churchill and President Roosevelt met in Washington at the Arcadia Conference to discuss a joint strategy. For Roosevelt and the American planners the question now was what policy to adopt. Most American military activity so far was in the Atlantic, and most Americans had become accustomed to following the war there, in Europe and in the Mediterranean. To concentrate against Germany would therefore dovetail into what was happening anyway. To those on the west coast of the United States, however, Hitler’s Germany, while undoubtedly a thoroughly nasty regime, did not pose an obvious threat to the United States, whereas Japan clearly did. To concentrate equally against both enemies east and west would stretch American military strength, even though this was now swiftly increasing, so a decision had to be made. The British view was that, despite the imminent loss of large chunks of their Asian empire, the long-term threat was from Germany, not Japan, and this was the side of the argument favoured by Roosevelt, against the advice of the US Navy, which wanted to go for Japan first and then turn on Germany. Field Marshal Sir John Dill, who had just handed over to Brooke as CIGS, accompanied Churchill to Washington and remained there as liaison with the United States Chiefs of Staff. He would establish excellent relations with them but, despite his best efforts, there was some suspicion of the British in both political and military circles. Because two nations speak a version of the same language, and because many of the citizens of one of those nations originate from the other, does not mean that each has the same agenda, and the Americans often tended to give the British far more credit for deviousness and subtlety than was perhaps warranted, seeking for hidden motives when one was not always present – although to be fair it often was: the British, as a nation old in the art of duplicitous diplomacy, conduct their foreign and defence policy in accordance with what they see as the national interest, and not along the lines of some abstract idea of freedom or fairness, although they would, if pushed, subscribe to both. From the American point of view, far too many of the British that they encountered seemed supercilious and arrogant, and the natural British reserve was interpreted as disdain. The Americans saw the British as class-ridden, and men like ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, the American military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek, and Stanley K. Hornbeck, a political adviser in the State Department, were particularly scathing in imitating the way British officers spoke and their obsession with tea. As one of the less scurrilous efforts circulating in Washington at the time put it:

  To lunch they go at half past one –

  Blast me old chap, the day’s half done

  They lunch and talk and fight the Jap

  And now it’s time to take a nap

  The staff study starts at three fifteen

  Such progress here you’ve never seen

  They’re working now as you can see

  But blast me down, it’s time for tea…54

  Indeed, many Americans were conscious that in 1776 they had opted out of empire, and had little sympathy for – and, in many cases, some real antagonism towards – the British Empire. In some instances this stemmed from a genuine belief that the American system of democracy should be enjoyed by all the peoples of the world; in others it was the realization that America’s chief trade rival was Britain and her Empire – as Admiral Benson, US Chief of Naval Operations from 1915, had explained when trying to persuade Congress to fund a massive ship-building programme.‘The British,’ Benson had said,‘have always gone to war with their trade rivals eventually, and they have always won.’ Nobody seriously thought that Britain and America would go to war, but even as late as 1941 many Americans thought that it was the Royal Navy that was the greatest barrier to American control of the world’s oceans, rather than the Germans or Japanese.

  Meanwhile, for many of the British who worked in the United States as diplomats or military liaison officers, the Americans were far too prone to emotion and exaggeration; they wore their hearts on their sleeves, were naive and, while criticizing the existence of British colonies, were quite happy to oppose the granting of independence to the Philippines. Some Britons questioned whether fifty clapped-out destroyers was a fair price for the UK base facilities granted to the United States (it wasn’t, but the British had to have those destroyers), and Vichy France was a serious sticking point. The Vichy regime was a legal government: it was not established by coup or imposed by the Germans, but created by vote of the French parliament giving supreme power to Marshal Pétain, who then negotiated a surrender in June 1940. It was recognized by Britain until Vichy broke off diplomatic relations after the attack on the French fleet in Mers el Kebir. Most of the Briti
sh Dominions and the United States maintained embassies there in Vichy, and the American view was that only by being nice to Vichy, or at least treating it seriously, could a post-war liberal democratic France in the Western orbit be assured. The British, on the other hand, saw Vichy as being devoid of any credibility and promoted Charles de Gaulle, difficult to deal with as he was, as the only man who could unite all Frenchmen and keep the spirit of French glory and pride alive. The Americans were particularly irritated when de Gaulle’s Free French, egged on by the British, seized some French islands off the coast of Newfoundland in late 1941, and the question of the leadership of anti-German French elements was to be a constant source of disagreement throughout the war.

  Given the differences in perspective, in national character and in ambitions for the post-war shape of the world, the fact remained (and still remains) that the British (and their white Dominions) and the Americans had more in common with each other than with any other country. Both were democracies, both were governed by the rule of law and both shared ideals of fair play and essential decency. As the war went on, the British would have to accept that more and more they would become the junior partner, and that they could not bring the war to a conclusion they could accept without the United States. Fortunately there were enough men on each side to ensure a generally harmonious relationship, despite occasional personal rivalries and disagreements on strategy. For the moment, the Royal Navy despatched an aircraft carrier to the Pacific to serve under the command of the US Pacific Fleet, and agreement was reached to set up a joint American, British, Dutch and Australian (ABDA) command for the Far East to be commanded by General Archibald Wavell, whose appointment was an American recommendation.