The Pacific War grew out of Japan’s China War renewed in 1937. It was essentially the future of China that four years later led Japan to war with the US. The decision for war was taken in Tokyo in September 1941 because the US was seen as the enemy unalterably opposed to Japan’s concept of its right to a dominant role in China and eastern Asia. The only chance for peace was a change in the course of American policy as perceived by the Japanese, and this did not happen. The Japanese leaders believed that the choice before them was to fulfil the task of conquest or to acquiesce in Japan’s national decline.
But the course of events that led to war was not so straightforward when looked at in depth, and raises fascinating questions. Was the Japanese perception of US policy correct? Britain and the US, moreover, were not the only two strong Western powers with interests in eastern Asia. From the beginning of Japan’s expansion in China, the only country capable of challenging Japan’s army on land, with an army of millions, other than Nationalist China, was Russia. At the time, in the mid-1930s, the Japanese military asked themselves whether Japan’s empire could ever be completely safe without first removing the potential Russian threat. Should therefore a war against its northern neighbour precede the efforts to control China? Indeed, might an alliance with China against the Soviet Union be possible? And if the Soviet Union was to be fought, or checked from interfering in Japan’s China policy, then might not Europe help?
Such a view corresponded with the traditions of Japanese foreign policy. From 1902 until its dissolution at the Washington Conference two decades later, Japan had enjoyed the support of the Anglo-Japanese alliance. In the new conditions of the 1930s, Hitler’s Germany was the obvious counterweight to Bolshevik Russia. The history of German-Japanese relations from 1936, when Japan first joined the Anti-Comintern Pact, to the close of the Second World War is another important theme.
The roots of the conflict lie in the militaristic-spiritual values that Japanese education inculcated. During the 1930s these values were translated into politics by the small group of military, naval and political leaders who exercised power. They now controlled a highly centralised bureaucratic state, having reversed the earlier broadening of political participation which had taken place during the so-called era of Taisho ‘democracy’ of the 1920s. Men like Prince Konoe, prime minister in 1937-9 and 1940-1, believed that Japan had a right to achieve equality with other great powers. Unlike the US and the British Empire, Japan lacked the necessary resources within its own tightly packed islands to fulfil the role of a great power. It was a have-not nation, so some Japanese argued, claiming only the opportunity for prosperity and strength to which its advanced culture, civilisation and capacity for modern technical development entitled it. For Konoe’s foreign minister, Matsuoko, Japan’s international conduct was also a question of national pride. No Japanese must accept the insulting, inferior role the Western imperialists assigned to them. Only by showing forceful courage would the West ever be convinced of the equality of Japan. The view of many American politicians was precisely the counterpart of this; the Japanese would give way if shown a firm hand.
While Western Realpolitik was certainly practised by Japanese policy makers, the ultimate factor deciding national policy was not rational policy but chauvinism masquerading as spiritual values. The chief of the Japanese naval general staff, for instance, urged in 1941 that Japan should wage war to remain true to the spirit of national defence, saying, ‘even if we might not win the war, this noble spirit of defending the fatherland will be perpetuated and our posterity will rise again and again’. The ‘spirit’ of war itself was glorified; a nation that denied this spirit and did not rise against injustice would deserve to decay. The ‘injustice’ referred to was America’s denial that Japan had the sole right to shape China’s destiny. All this chauvinistic spirituality was not the inevitable heritage of Japanese beliefs. There were opposing views, socialist, pacific views based on different Japanese traditions.
Britain and the US formally protested at Japanese aggression in China, but there was no thought in the 1930s of resisting it by force so long as only China was involved. Japan, moreover, stressed the anti-communist aspect of its policy when concluding the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany in November 1936. The following summer of 1937 was decisive in the policies pursued by the Kwantung and Manchurian armies. In June Russia’s capability to hinder Japanese objectives in China was tested. There was more sporadic fighting on the borders with Russia in 1938. The fighting capacity of the Soviet Union had recovered sufficiently from Stalin’s purges of the armed forces to inflict a severe defeat on the Japanese army at Nomonhan in August 1939. More than 18,000 Japanese were killed. This evidence of Soviet strength, coming close on the heels of the German-Soviet NonAggression Pact, led the Japanese to revise their estimate that Russia was too weak to interfere in China. The Soviet Union became an important factor in Japan’s calculations. Meanwhile the die in China had long been cast, but the Japanese army, despite its victorious advances, could not bring the China War to an end.
The Japanese army had continued to interfere and expand its influence in northern China from 1933 to 1937, but in the whole of northern China the Japanese garrison was only 6,000 men. Then, near Peking, on an ancient bridge, Chinese and Japanese soldiers clashed in July 1937. The Marco Polo Bridge incident was in itself minor; exactly how a small number of Japanese and Chinese troops came to clash is still obscure. There is no evidence (unlike in Manchuria in 1931) that the Japanese army had planned war against China and provoked the conflict. There were divided counsels in Tokyo. The hawks won. At first, sharp local actions were undertaken in the expectation that Nationalist China would be overawed. Full-scale war ensued when Chiang Kai-shek chose to resist instead. The war quickly spread from northern China. The Japanese attacked Shanghai and by December 1937 the Nationalist capital of Nanking had fallen. Japanese reinforcements had been rushed to China. In the Shanghai-Nanking operation the Japanese suffered 70,000 casualties and the Chinese at least 370,000. By then 700,000 Japanese troops were engaged in China. After 1938 close to 1 million Japanese troops were fighting some 3 million Chinese troops. The Japanese troops behaved with the utmost brutality, massacring, raping and looting. The ‘rape of Nanking’ leaving 20,000 Chinese civilians dead, became a byword for barbarity, shocking the West. It was not the end of the war, as the Japanese hoped, but its beginning. The China War became a threesided struggle between the Chinese Communists, the Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese. The Communists’ main priority was to gain control over as much of the territories evacuated by the Nationalists as they could. The Nationalist Chinese armies bore the brunt of the regular fighting.
The sinking of the US naval vessel, Panay, and damage to the British Ladybird in December 1937 directly involved the two Western powers in the conflict. Since the autumn of 1937 Roosevelt had been searching for some effective counterblast to German, Italian and now Japanese aggression. He gave expression to his desire for ‘positive
Japan's war in Asia, 1937-45
Endeavours to preserve peace’ in his well-known ‘Quarantine’ speech in Chicago on 5 October 1937. He called on the peace-loving nations to make a ‘concerted effort’ in opposition to the lawless aggressors; that lawlessness, he declared, was spreading and the aggressors, like sick patients, should be placed in ‘quarantine’. It was rousing stuff but meant little in concrete terms. The depression preoccupied the US and Britain at home. Neither Congress in America nor Parliament in Britain would contemplate war with Japan. After the Panay incident, and before full Japanese apologies were received, Roosevelt for a short while had considered economic sanctions. What destabilised relations further was a renewed naval race between Japan and the US.
Meanwhile, the powers with interests in China had met in Brussels but the conference assembled there could achieve nothing. Britain would not act without US backing, or in advance of American policy. The needs of the Dominions, Australia and New Zealand, for adequate protection or peace in the Pacific were obvious. Britain could not match the worldwide defence requirements of its Commonwealth with its available military resources, which had been neglected for years. As the crisis mounted in Europe the British navy was needed in home waters and the Mediterranean and could not be spared for Singapore. Although recognising clearly the threat Japan posed to British interests in China and Asia, a cautious policy had to be followed: conciliation and firmness without risking war at a time of European dangers. In 1939 the Japanese blockaded the British concession in Tientsin, demanding that Britain in effect abandon Nationalist China. It was a serious crisis but the simultaneous threat of war in Europe decided the British Cabinet in June 1939 to reach a compromise with Japan.
The first tentative shift of American policy, nevertheless, did occur just after Britain’s climb-down in the summer of 1939. Of fundamental importance for the history of eastern Asia was that for a decade the US felt uncritically anti-Japanese while Chiang Kai-shek became an American folk hero.
The prime minister, Prince Fumimaro Konoe, would have liked to bring the war in China to an end but his ‘solution’ implied Chinese acceptance of Japan as the senior member of the Asian ‘family’. That is how the Japanese deluded themselves that their aggression was really for the good of all the Asian people. The vastness of Chinese territory denied the Japanese army the possibility of conquering the whole of China, even after eight years of warfare. Within the huge areas they did occupy, despite the utmost barbarity of the occupation, which would have been unthinkable in the Meiji era, much of the countryside remained under Communist or Nationalist control. The Japanese for the most part could make their occupation effective only in the towns and along the vital railway lines.
Encouraged by moral and some material American support, Chiang Kai-shek refused all peace terms that would have subjugated China in the manner of Japan’s Twenty-One Demands. In November 1938 Konoe sought to make it clear to Chiang Kai-shek, and the world, that Japan would never leave China. Japan would establish a New Order in Asia through the economic, political and cultural union of Japan, Manchukuo and China. The new order served notice to the Western powers that there would be no room for Western interests of the kind that had existed in China before. Early in 1939 Konoe resigned. It is certainly mistaken to see him as a peaceful moderate, though he endeavoured to avoid war with the US without abandoning Japan’s anti-Western policy in east Asia. German victories in Europe from September 1939 to July 1940 greatly strengthened the impatient military. With the abolition of political parties Japan became more authoritarian.
In July 1940 Konoe headed a second government. Japan drew closer to Germany, concluding, as a result of Foreign Minister Matsuoka’s urging, the Three-Power Pact (Italy was also a signatory) on 27 September 1940. It purported to be an agreement on the division of the world. Japan recognised Germany’s and Italy’s leadership in the establishment of a ‘new order in Europe’; Germany and Italy recognised the ‘leadership of Japan in the establishment of a new order in Greater Asia’. With the reservation of Japanese neutrality towards the Soviet Union, the three powers promised to help each other by all means, including military, if attacked by a ‘Power at present not involved in the European War or in the Sino-Japanese Conflict’. That article (three) pointed to the US. What was the purpose of the alliance? Both the Japanese and the Germans at the time hoped it would act as a deterrent against the US involving itself in a war over Asian issues. Hitler, furthermore, hoped Japan would attack Singapore, thus increasing the pressure on Britain to make peace with Germany or to face even worse military complications in defence of its empire. In Tokyo, in all probability without Berlin having any knowledge of it, the German ambassador in an additional exchange of notes with Matsuoka conceded to the Japanese a good deal of flexibility in the honouring of their obligations to help Germany militarily if, in fact, the US went to war with Germany alone and not with Japan.
The existence of the treaty made a deep impression on Roosevelt, who saw it as confirmation that all the aggressors in Europe and Asia were linked in one world conspiracy of aggression. Roosevelt discovered that this was not, in fact, so when the Japanese-American confrontation had reached the point in September 1941 at which war was seen by the Japanese as the only way out. But the prime cause of US-Japanese tension was not the German-Japanese alliance. That lacked all substance on the Japanese side. Konoe instructed the Japanese Embassy in Washington in September 1941 to tell the US that if it went to war with Germany in Europe, Japan would not feel itself bound to declare war on the US in the Pacific but that the ‘execution of the Tripartite Pact shall be independently decided’.
The account of how the US and Japan came to be engaged in the Pacific War is a twisted and tangled one. Roosevelt did not want a war in the Pacific, believing that the defeat of Nazi Germany should take priority. Hitler urged the Japanese to strike at the British Empire in Asia, thereby weakening Britain’s capacity to oppose him in Europe and the Mediterranean. If the Japanese decided they had to attack the US simultaneously, they were assured of Germany’s alliance. What the Japanese wanted was to finish the war in China, not to have to take on America as well.
In Britain both Chamberlain before May 1940 and Churchill afterwards wished to avoid the extension of war in the Pacific. In 1940 and 1941 Britain was engaged in fighting in the Mediterranean and the Middle East to preserve its power there. The Dominions of New Zealand and Australia, moreover, clamoured for adequate defence in eastern Asia; that defence would best be served by peace and deterrence. But Churchill believed that for deterrence to have credibility the US and Britain would need to form a counterpart to the Triple Alliance of Japan, Germany and Italy, so that Japan would realise that its expansion beyond the limits which Britain and the US were prepared to accept in south-east Asia would result in war. Thus both Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s thinking was based on the theory of deterrence.
The mutual policies of deterrence - of the Japanese on the one hand, and of the US and Britain on the other - failed. The US was not deterred by Japan’s alliance with Germany and Italy from continuing to play a role as an eastern Asian power. Indeed, it stepped up its support for Chiang Kai-shek. Without Nationalist Chinese resistance, the ever-growing pretensions of Japan’s co-prosperity sphere would become a reality, placing Western interests completely at Japan’s mercy. For Britain, the vital regions were those bordering on the British Empire in Malaya, Burma and India. In this way the French colonies of Indo-China, the Dutch East Indies, independent Thailand and the American Philippines came to be seen as the key areas to be defended against Japan. But the ‘firm’ policy towards Japan eventually adopted by the US to impede Japanese expansion triggered off among Japan’s leaders an almost fatalistic response that war with the US and Britain was preferable to the kind of peace, a return to the Washington peace structure of the 1920s, which the two Western powers sought. The crux was China. Britain and the US were not prepared to accept Japanese domination over China. Roosevelt held to the simple truth that China was for the Chinese. Furthermore, if the Japanese were allowed to achieve their aims in China no Western interests in eastern Asia would be safe.
The course of US policy from 1940 to 1941 was nevertheless not clear or consistent. It is sometimes difficult to fathom precisely what was in Roosevelt’s mind. He was sensitive to American public opinion, which increasingly demanded tough measures, short of war, to restrain Japan from ousting US commerce from China. Yet, with war raging across the Atlantic, Roosevelt genuinely wished to preserve peace in the Pacific for as long as possible, though not on Japan’s terms. The US possessed powerful retaliatory economic weapons: the American market for Japanese goods, American raw materials essential to Japan, including oil, and capital for Japanese industry. Secretary of State Cordell Hull advised caution in applying any economic sanctions; but some of Roosevelt’s other advisers, including the powerful secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau, believed that Japan would have to accept American conditions for a just settlement in China once the US made use of its economic muscle, for oil and raw materials were essential to sustain a Japanese war against the West. Roosevelt followed an uncertain middle course. In July 1939, the Japanese were informed that the treaty of commerce with the US would be terminated in January 1940. This was the first tentative application of economic pressure and shocked the Japanese leaders. After its termination it would be possible to impose sanctions other than ‘moral embargoes’.
With the defeat of the Netherlands and France by Germany in the summer of 1940, the chances of peace in the Pacific grew less. French and Dutch possessions in south-east Asia now became tempting targets for Japan, which cast covetous eyes particularly on the Dutch East Indies with their valuable raw materials of tin, rubber and oil. But the American administration made clear that it would regard any change in the status quo of these European possessions as endangering American interests and peace in the Pacific. In 1940 Japan increased the pressure on France and Britain to block aid to China. Vichy France had to accept the stationing of Japanese troops in northern Indo-China and for a time Britain agreed to close the Burma Road along which supplies had been sent to Nationalist China. If the US were not prepared to use its economic weapons, then, the British argued, there was nothing left for them to do but to attempt to appease Japan.
In July 1940, Roosevelt took a second step to apply economic pressure on Japan. He ordered that the export of petrol suitable for aviation fuel be restricted, in addition to lubricants and high-grade scrap metal. Although this was intended as a limited embargo, there were those in Washington who, rightly as it turned out, foretold that turning the screw would not make for peace but would lead the Japanese in desperation to attack the Dutch East Indies. Roosevelt was well aware of the danger and characteristically wanted to apply some pressure but not push Japan too hard. The Tripartite Pact, which Japan, Germany and Italy concluded in September 1940, hardened Roosevelt’s attitude. In a speech soon after the conclusion of the pact, Roosevelt declared: ‘No combination of dictator countries of Europe and Asia will stop the help we are giving to. . . those who resist aggression, and who now hold the aggressors far from our shores.’ All the same, from the summer of 1940 to the summer of 1941 Roosevelt attempted to dampen down the crisis in the Pacific. He gave some additional help to China, but also urged restraint on Japan. He also made it clear that he was still willing and anxious to negotiate a settlement. Meanwhile he rejected Churchill’s urging that the US and Britain should jointly take steps so that the Japanese should be left in no doubt that further aggression in Asia meant war.
Negotiations got under way in Washington between the Japanese ambassador Nomura and Secretary of State Cordell Hull in the spring of 1941. Meanwhile, the Japanese signed a neutrality pact with the Soviet Union and were extending their military bases to southern Indo-China in the obvious direction of the Dutch East Indies. A crucial decision was taken in Tokyo that affected the whole course of world history. The plan to strike north from China and join Germany in the war against the Soviet Union was rejected. Japan would advance to the south to secure the raw materials vital to its own needs. An imperial conference on 2 July 1941 gave its seal of approval to that decision. The goal was the Dutch East Indies. Japan did not wish to go to war with the US and the British Empire. Its diplomats would try to convince London and Washington that for Japan this was a question of survival. If Britain and the US, however, opposed the southern drive, the Japanese Empire would not shrink from war either.
Roosevelt proposed that, if Japan withdrew from southern French Indo-China, the raw materials it needed could be guaranteed by the powers and the region would be neutralised. What impressed the Japanese more was the order freezing Japanese funds in the US and an American trade embargo which, despite Roosevelt’s initial intentions, included oil. But Roosevelt’s object was still to avoid war in the Pacific, while somehow getting the US in on the side of Britain in Europe. After the German invasion of Russia during the summer of 1941, he also ordered that ways be found to provide all-out aid to the Soviet Union.
So when in mid-August 1941 Nomura suggested the continuation of informal negotiations to settle American-Japanese differences, Roosevelt agreed. Nomura suggested a meeting between Prime Minister Konoe and the American president. Roosevelt was excited by the idea, but followed the advice of the State Department and insisted that first the Japanese government should accept a number of basic propositions: they should desist from a southern drive of conquest (that is, in the direction of the Dutch East Indies), they should agree to withdraw troops from China and to give up any economic discrimination, and they should detach themselves from the Tripartite Pact. All but one of these preconditions were entirely unacceptable to the Japanese. They might have been willing to halt their southern expansion on their own terms, but not to make any but token withdrawals from China.
What the Americans were really demanding was the Japanese abandonment of the basic tenets of their co-prosperity sphere. The negotiations dragged on through October and November. The gulf between the Japanese and American concepts of the future peace of eastern Asia was as wide as ever, despite the search by the diplomats for some middle ground. As late as mid-November 1941, Roosevelt was searching without success for a compromise that would lead to a postponement of war for at least six months. This shows that for Roosevelt, in any case,
Germany still came first, but his judgements proved very changeable.
In Tokyo the basic countdown to war was decided upon at the Imperial Conference which took place on 6 September 1941. Prime Minister Konoe opened the meeting saying that Japan must complete its war preparations, but that diplomacy should be given a last chance to resolve peacefully the problems facing it. If diplomacy failed, and only a limited time could be allowed for its success, then Japan must fight a war of selfdefence. The US’s conditions for a settlement, involving not only a barrier to the southern drive of Japan but also American insistence that Japan withdraw its troops from China and abandon its demands for exclusive economic control, were, Konoe claimed, tantamount to denying Japan’s right to exist as an equal and Asian power. Without oil and a certain source of essential raw materials Japan was at the mercy of foreign powers. That was Japan’s interpretation of the American proposals for a peaceful settlement. The chief of naval staff, Admiral Nagumo Osami, moreover, was confident that the Japanese navy’s early victories would place Japan in an ‘invincible position’ even in a long war. The Japanese army chief of staff urged the opening of hostilities as soon as possible while Japan still enjoyed a relative military advantage. The tone of the conference was therefore that war with the US and Britain would become inevitable unless American policy rapidly altered course. In October, Konoe resigned and made way for a new government headed by General Hideki Tojo, a clear indication that the moment for war was drawing close.
The outcome of these Tokyo conferences became known in Washington from the intercepted instructions cabled from Tokyo to Ambassador Nomura, who was still negotiating with Cordell Hull in Washington. The Japanese code had been broken by the Americans, who were now privy to the Japanese secrets. They thus learnt that the Japanese had a time limit in mind for the success of these negotiations. Furthermore, that there could be no question of any genuine Japanese withdrawal from China and that when the time limit expired the Japanese army and navy would extend the war by continuing their drive southward against the Dutch and British possessions. What was not clear was whether the Japanese intended to attack the US simultaneously in the Pacific. The Americans, therefore, were aware while negotiating that unless they were prepared to abandon China war would become inevitable. The Japanese might be brought to compromise on their ‘southern’ drive in return for American neutrality but not on the issue of the war in China. The Hull-Nomura negotiations were thus unreal, maintained on the American side mainly in the hope of delaying the outbreak of war. It is in this light that Roosevelt’s remarks at a policy conference that took place on 25 November must be judged. Roosevelt by this time regarded war as virtually inevitable, observing: ‘The question now was how we should manoeuvre them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.’ But the well-known Hull Note of the following day, sent in reply to an earlier Japanese note, was couched in the form of a ‘tentative outline’ to serve as a ‘basis for agreement’. It set out America’s ideas for a settlement point by point. The Japanese could look forward to a normalisation of trade and access to raw materials in return for peace in eastern Asia; the Japanese must promise to respect the territorial integrity of all its neighbours; the ‘impossible’ American condition from the Japanese point of view was that both Japan and the US should give up their special rights in China and that Japan should withdraw all its military forces from China and Indo-China.
At the Imperial Conference in Tokyo on 1 December 1941, this note was placed before the assembled Japanese leaders as if it were an ultimatum. It was a deliberate misrepresentation by the Japanese themselves, intended to unite the ministers. Differences were now, indeed, reconciled. The decision was reached to attack Britain, the Netherlands and the US simultaneously.
The Japanese sent a formal declaration of war to Washington, intending it to be delivered fifty minutes before the carrier planes of Admiral Yamamoto’s task force, which was at that moment secretly making for Pearl Harbor, attacked America’s principal naval base in the Pacific. Unfortunately, the Japanese Embassy was slow in decyphering the message and so the Japanese envoys appeared at the State Department almost an hour after the start of the Pearl Harbor attack on the US fleet. That made 7 December 1941 an unintentional, even greater ‘day of infamy’.
Japan had decided to start the war having clearly set a time limit for negotiations in September. It was self-deception to believe that the US was about to make war on Japan after Hull’s note on 26 September, even if Roosevelt thought war virtually inevitable. There is no evidence that Congress would have allowed the president to declare war for the sake of China or of any non-American possessions in Asia attacked by the Japanese. The traumatic loss of lives and ships, the fact and manner of the Japanese attack, now ensured a united American response for war. For Churchill a great cloud had lifted. With the US in the war, he knew that Hitler would now be defeated. Furthermore, the US found herself simultaneously at war with Germany, not by resolution of Congress, which might still have been difficult to secure, but by Hitler’s decision to declare war on America. In this way it came about that in December 1941 all the great powers of the world were at war.
It was Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, commander-in-chief of the Japanese navy, who had planned the daring pre-emptive strike on Pearl Harbor. The actual task force was commanded by Vice-Admiral Nagumo Chuichi. The Japanese warships reached a position 275 miles north of Pearl Harbor, escaping detection; Nagumo ordered the carrier planes, two waves of bombers and fighters, into action and they hit Pearl Harbor on a Sunday morning. The naval base was unprepared. Six battleships were sunk and the remaining two damaged; many planes were destroyed on the ground; 2,403 servicemen and civilians were killed. The unexpected position of the Japanese task force, and lack of proper service cooperation in Washington were responsible for the disaster. That Roosevelt and Churchill wanted it to happen belongs to the legend of conspiracy theories. The US Pacific fleet was only temporarily crippled; of the eight battleships six were repaired and saw action again.
World History
