by Hew Strachan
He was encouraged in this policy by the British ambassador in Peking Sir John Jackson, who shared Yuan’s fear of Japan’s ambitions on the Chinese mainland. In America too, the State Department was ill disposed towards Japan and was supportive of China’s republic, which it saw as an agency for Christianity and democracy. On 1 August China called on the United States to neutralize China and the Pacific, a plea to which the Dutch added their voice on 3 August. William Jennings Bryan, the secretary of state, was optimistic, believing that the maintenance of neutrality throughout the Far East might be possible. But on 6 August Woodrow Wilson’s wife died, and with the president in seclusion American foreign policy drifted until his return.32
On the very day on which Japan affirmed its neutrality, British policy began to shift. The Royal Navy’s worries for the defence of British trade, coupled with the rough equivalence of German forces in Far Eastern waters, prompted a mood of near panic in the Admiralty—a mood which was to find endorsement at the meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence subcommittee the following day. Although the seizure of Tsingtao was the most obvious immediate action in the Pacific theatre, it was rendered impossible first by the CID’s requirement that Britain itself should use only local forces, and second by the need to restrict Japanese expansionism. But, if Tsingtao was unassailable, the German cruiser threat remained proportionately greater. What the Admiralty, therefore, wanted was the Japanese navy—fourteen battleships (four of them Dreadnoughts), a battle cruiser, fifteen cruisers, eighteen light cruisers, fifty-one destroyers, and thirteen submarines.33 Only with this addition could the Royal Navy hope simultaneously to blockade Tsingtao, protect the Pacific’s shipping lanes, and hunt down German ships. On 6 August, therefore, Grey found himself changing tack. He now sought Japanese assistance, but of a particularly limited variety. He was conscious of the United States’s desire that the Pacific remain a neutral zone; he was aware of the fears of the Dutch East Indies and of the British Dominions that Japan as an active belligerent would soon convert to Japan as a south Pacific power. Therefore, all that he asked of Japan was that it seek out Germany’s armed merchantmen: the Royal Navy would take on the task of dealing with German warships. Grey’s diplomatic hand was not an easy one to play.
Britain’s request was a lifeline to the Japanese navy. The victory over Russia had brought it from under the army’s shadow, and its dominant Satsuma clan had established close connections with the Seiyukai party in the Diet. By 1910 the Japanese navy was twice as big as it had been in 1904, and in 1911, with a Seiyukai prime minister, the cabinet approved the construction of one battleship, Kongo, and four battle cruisers. The former, laid down in 1912, had twelve 14-inch guns and a displacement of 29,330 tons, making it at the time the most powerfully armed and largest battleship in the world. The battle cruisers, developed in emulation of the Royal Navy’s, had eight 14-inch guns and a speed of 27.5 knots. Naval spending approached that of the army. Although the army toppled the Seiyukai-controlled government in December 1912, the navy and the Seiyukai prevented the formation of a pro-army cabinet. In 1913 Admiral Yamamoto Gombei became prime minister. Naval spending now outstripped that of the army. Three more battleships were approved, and the navy’s ambition of a programme of eight battleships and eight battle cruisers looked closer to fulfilment. Then, in January 1914, its grip on politics was shattered by the revelation that admirals had accepted bribes in the allocation of shipbuilding contracts. Public demonstrations in February and an attack on the naval estimates in the House of Peers in March forced Yamamoto to resign. The navy needed the opportunity to restate its case which war would present.34
The navy’s building standards were set by the United States. Its leading strategic theorist, Sato Tetsutaro, argued that Japan’s maritime security was contingent on its ability to strike a decisive blow against the enemy in the latter’s home waters. He concluded that the Japanese navy therefore required a capability equivalent to 70 per cent of that of the United States. This was a figure which reflected the global consequences of regional naval arms races: Theodore Roosevelt’s battleship programme, which found part of its justification through Tirpitz’s expansion of the German fleet, increased the American ‘threat’ to Japan, but at the same time the American navy’s division over two oceans diminished it.
The navy had selected the United States as its yardstick for the convenience of its building programme. But the rivalry was given an edge by anti-Japanese racism in California, and derived geopolitical reality from America’s westward extension across the Pacific, to Hawaii, Samoa, the Philippines, and Guam. The Japanese fleet’s manoeuvres of 1908 assumed that its enemy was the United States, and in 1910 the Japanese navy studied the problems of attacking the Philippines.
The United States did not figure on the army’s list of potential enemies. Its focus was not maritime but continentalist; its expansionism was directed not into the Pacific but to the mainland of Asia. Thus, the rivalry between the two services had a strategic spine. The navy saw the army’s continentalism as risky and expensive. Japan in Asia should emulate Britain in Europe: it should seek an ally, in this case China, in order to create a protective buffer against Russia. But in 1910 rebellion in Korea gave the army its opportunity to further its continental interests. It suppressed the rising with considerable ferocity, and the formal annexation which followed brought Japan’s frontier adjacent to that of Russia. In 1912 the minister of war accordingly demanded an additional two divisions, and when he was thwarted brought down the government. Dominated by the Choshu clan, and close to the emperor, the army exploited constitutional division between civil and military authority to plough a politically independent furrow. Katsura Taro, a product of the general staff, was prime minister in 1901–6,1908–9, and 1912–13.35
The army was particularly influential among the genro (or elder statesmen, a group without formal standing but which linked the government to the emperor). Their uncertainties concerning the government formed in April 1914 ensured that its dominant personality, Kato Takaaki, was offered not the premiership but the foreign ministry. As a former ambassador in London, Kato was a supporter of the Anglo-Japanese alliance. But he also saw in the war an opportunity to further Japan’s interests in China. From the beginning of August his response to the British was both warmer and more bellicose than the state of the alliance or Japan’s indifference to German aggression in Europe would have led the Foreign Office to expect. In January 1913 Grey, in a conversation with Kato shortly before he left London, had conveyed to the latter his recognition of the reasonableness of at least limited Japanese expansion in mainland Asia. Thus the war provided Kato with the opportunity to use the alliance in the way which made best sense to Japan, as a vehicle for the joint Anglo-Japanese exploitation of China.
Domestically, the decision to enter the war required of Kato some adroit political footwork. On 7 August the cabinet convened to consider Britain’s request. Kato persuaded it to support him. But cabinet government in Japan, still largely shaped and staffed by the bureaucracy, was not powerful enough to proceed without the backing of the genro, the navy, or the army. On 8 August the cabinet reconvened with the genro in attendance. The latter were cautious, given Germany’s military prowess and Japan’s relative economic weakness. The services, on the other hand, saw in war the opportunity for the implementation of both their spending programmes. Kato emerged triumphant. Japan told Britain that it would declare war on Germany, arguing that the latter was threatening peace in the Far East and that the alliance had therefore been called into operation. The claim was doubtful. Formally speaking, Germany had done nothing to trigger the terms of the alliance, but, by insisting that this was the banner under which Japan fought, Kato gave himself the maximum freedom of movement within the Far East while eschewing any wider obligations to Europe—or specifically to France and Russia—which would have followed from cleaving to the Entente.36 Japan’s purpose was to eliminate German influence in China.
Kato wanted to c
apture Tsingtao. China, and those Britons involved with China, were alarmed. Grey replied that he would rather Japan did not enter the war than that it should do so on such terms. The alliance was committed to the maintenance of China’s integrity, not to its partition. Kato now argued, somewhat spuriously, that public opinion in Japan was sufficiently agitated to make it impossible for him to reverse his policy. It was true that the Tokyo crowd played an active role in Japanese politics after 1905, and that by 1918 the violence of its demonstrations on four occasions led to cabinet changes;37 it was also true that party politics were playing a growing role in the Diet, in the press, and even in cabinet formation (Kato himself derived part of his authority in the ministry from his leadership of the Doshikai party). Entry to the war was calculated to appeal to Japanese nationalism, and to the demands for an aggressive foreign policy manifested by populists. But in fact the outbreak of the First World War was not marked by crowd demonstrations; anti-Germanism was both tardy and somewhat contrived. However, once again Kato’s tactics succeeded. The danger that Kato’s appeal to Japanese domestic feeling opened up before Grey was far more awful than that of Japanese entry on the side of the Entente—it was that of Japan’s abandonment of the alliance and even of its siding with Germany if that served the interests of its China policy. Britain therefore accepted Japan’s involvement in the war. Its statement, that Japanese action would be restricted to the China Seas, to the ‘Asiatic waters westward of the China Seas’, and to ‘territory in German occupation on the continent of eastern Asia’, was designed to appease the United States and the Dominions. Japan neither approved it nor honoured it. Kato’s policy after 11 August was entirely self-interested. The ultimatum issued to Germany on 15 August was framed without reference to Britain; the alliance had become no more than a legitimizing cloak for the prosecution of Japanese aims, but a cloak under which—by virtue of its own weakness in the Pacific— Britain too was forced to shelter.38
In ten days Kato had effectively played off against themselves and against each other Japan’s ally, Japanese domestic opinion, and the Japanese bureaucracy. The only remaining hurdle was Germany.
Without Japan in the war, and with Britain concentrated on Europe, Germany’s prospects for a successful defence of Tsingtao—at least in the short to medium term—were reasonable. Japan’s entry, on the other hand, promised Tsingtao’s fall with a speed and certainty that were ineluctable. The voluntary abandonment of the colony therefore had merits likely to commend themselves to the German general staff. Tsingtao’s return to China would permit German reservists in the Far East to make their way back to the fatherland. Its surrender to Japan in exchange for some sort of alliance would have more far-reaching strategic implications, forcing Russia to leave troops in Siberia rather than concentrate them in the west. Germany’s diplomats in Peking and Tokyo, operating in isolation from Berlin, tried a third tack. They exploited the desire of many of those in the region—particularly China itself—for neutrality. But their intermediary in this process was the United States, and although America favoured neutrality for the Pacific, it was not prepared to make its prestige in the area contingent on such a policy. The German proposal for neutrality was both overambitious and late. It embraced the entire Pacific Ocean, from east of India to Cape Horn, an extension that was likely to be unacceptable to Britain, and that was unrealistic given the simultaneous machinations of the German navy. For, while Germany’s diplomats looked for peace in the region, Germany’s sailors made ready for war. Tsingtao’s governor, Meyer-Waldeck, was drawing in men and supplies in preparation for a siege. He was told by the Kaiser, always more concerned about face than about practicality, that ‘it would shame me more to surrender Kiaochow to the Japanese than Berlin to the Russians’.39 Tokyo’s ultimatum, dispatched on the day in which Germany’s proposal for neutrality arrived, 15 August, asked Wilhelm to do exactly that. Its focus was on continental China, not the western Pacific; it eschewed any specific reference to the Anglo-Japanese alliance, preferring language that was unilateral. Berlin had a week in which to reply. Japan was quite happy to achieve its objectives by means of German prudence rather than by belligerence. On 23 August, the ultimatum having expired, Japan declared war on Germany.
MAP 16. CHINA AND THE FAR EAST
Japan’s immediate objective, the capture of Tsingtao, highlighted the tension between the Entente’s military needs and the long-term commercial and diplomatic implications of their fulfilment. The Japanese plan, developed from 1907 and concocted in 1913, reflected their practice in amphibious warfare rather than international law. By landing forces 130 kilometres to the north of Tsingtao, at Lungkow, they isolated their objective from the mainland, while maritime blockade cut it off from the sea. Their main body went ashore 24 kilometres from Tsingtao at Laoshan Bay. Their aim was a slow build-up from the landward side, to be followed by a rapid final assault. But both Lungkow and Laoshan Bay lay in Chinese neutral territory. The Japanese maintained that a direct assault on Tsingtao would be impossible because the maritime approaches would be mined—as indeed they were after the Germans had evacuated their families on 22 August.40
China had declared its neutrality on 6 August. In reality, the network of leases and informal spheres of influence meant that its neutrality was bound to be conditional. Tsingtao was connected to the main internal communications of China by a railway to Tsinan. The line was not owned by the German state, but was nonetheless the fruit of Sino-German commercial collaboration. The Germans used it to draw into Tsingtao their reservists scattered throughout China; Japan, in its turn, once landed on the Shantung peninsula, extended its control over the railway as far west as Tsinan itself. Germany protested on 20 August. Yuan lacked the military capability to defend China’s neutrality. The Japanese had given him oral undertakings concerning the integrity and internal stability of China, but no written guarantee. Britain was his main support, and yet Britain was at war with Germany. Although the British ambassador assured Yuan that the British were acting with the Japanese at Tsingtao, the British declaration on Chinese integrity of 18 August proved to be a unilateral—not a joint—statement. Yuan’s efforts to insist on neutrality in regard to the Japanese when he had not insisted on it with regard to Germany, and when the Japanese could cite the precedent of their attack across Chinese territory on Port Arthur in 1905, were doomed to failure. His only option, short of war with Japan, was to isolate Shantung by declaring it a war zone.41
The principal defence of Tsingtao in the event of war was intended to be maritime, the East Asiatic Squadron. Meyer-Waldeck’s peacetime garrison amounted to a battalion of naval infantry, a field artillery battery, and some naval guns. In the light of the Boxer rebellion, its task was to deal with an attack by the Chinese. Therefore the main defences were landward and were adapted to a technology inferior to that possessed by the Japanese. By drawing in the units based at Peking and Tientsin, and by incorporating the reservists working in China, Meyer-Waldeck swelled his complement to 184 officers and 4,390 men. He also mustered ninety land-based guns, although most of them were of small calibre and the larger pieces had no more than twenty rounds each.
The slowness of the subsequent assault was as much the product of the weather and of Japanese caution as it was of Meyer-Waldeck’s energetic efforts to protract Tsingtao’s resistance. Japan’s forces totalled 60,000 men; this included, to the detriment of allied relations, a British and an Indian army battalion. Heavy rain for the first two weeks of September washed away roads and railways. Thus, although the first Japanese landed at Lungkow on 2 September, there was no contact with the Germans until 18 September, and the advance on the main German positions did not begin until the 25th. The Japanese superiority in artillery was crushing—100 siege guns with sufficient shells to fire eighty rounds a day for fifteen days, plus the offshore support of the guns of the Japanese fleet. The broken nature of the ground in the German centre, with ravines to break up the defences and so aid the Japanese advance, led the German
s to expect the Japanese to exploit their superiority in a rapid assault. The Japanese preferred instead the gradual methods of siege warfare. Unlike the Germans, they had experienced—in 1904–5—positional warfare under the conditions created by modern firepower. The capture of Prince Heinrich Hill in a desperately fought night attack on 17 October gave the Japanese gunners observation over the whole position. The subsequent use of their artillery was instructive; they forebore from preliminary registration to avoid revealing the guns’ positions or their fire plan; when the artillery attack opened, on 31 October, it included the use of counter-battery fire; by night the Japanese continued with shrapnel to prevent the Germans repairing the damage done by high explosives during the day. The Japanese infantry consolidated the ground they gained by pushing forward their trenches under cover of dark. Equally innovatory was the Japanese employment of airpower, not only for the purposes of reconnaissance but also for bombing. By 2 November the German artillery was running out of shells. On 7 November Meyer-Waldeck sought an armistice.42
In curbing Japanese expansionism in 1914 the gaze of the powers was focused on China. Their aim was to minimize the impact of the Japanese army on the Asiatic mainland. The result was that even powers with interests in the Pacific, and particularly the United States, temporarily neglected the naval dimension to Japan’s ambitions. Japan’s ultimatum to Germany made specific reference only to Shantung, but in failing to mention Germany’s Pacific colonies Kato had not foreclosed on the possibility of action to the south as well as to the north. Britain’s hope that the Japanese fleet could be confined to the China Sea was operationally nonsensical if the target was the German East Asiatic Squadron: its commander, Graf von Spee, would not feel obliged so to confine his movements, particularly when the German islands of Micronesia provided him with a supporting network across the length of the western Pacific. In fact Spee had already left the Marshall Islands by 14 September, when Japan’s 1st South Seas Squadron sailed, and when it first occupied Jaluit on 30 September the counsel of those anxious to appease Britain (and particularly Kato) prevailed, and the island was abandoned.