A World at Arms (53 page)

The Japanese in mid-November wrapped up the last details of their political plans. Germany and Italy would be notified just before war started and requested to join in, with the proviso that if Japan were asked to join Germany’s war on the Soviet Union, she would decline. Thailand would be occupied and all foreign concessions in China seized.
The Japanese would meet European Axis forces in the Indian Ocean, crush Britain, arrange a German-Soviet separate peace, and after defeating the United States offer to sell her rubber and tin as an inducement to get her to accept Japan’s dominance of East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
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There was only one possible fly in the ointment. The United States might at the last moment make an offer that some in the Japanese government might wish to accept. Like the Germans, the Japanese did not intend to be cheated of war.

This explains the way in which the Japanese government, which wanted war, reacted to the last proposal discussed by their diplomats in Washington with the American government, where
both
parties to the talks wanted peace. The idea was to return to the situation before the Japanese move into South Indo-China in July 1941. The Japanese would pull out their troops from South Indo-China and the Americans would resume selling oil. In other words, the Japanese would abandon their push south and could purchase what materials they needed. This was under no circumstances acceptable to the government in Tokyo, whose interest was in buying oil to stockpile for war against the Western Powers, a war which they intended to launch in part from South Indo-China. The emissaries in Washington-Kurusu had been sent to assist Nomura-were immediately told that this idea was absolutely out.
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If there was one thing the Japanese government did not want at this time it was a settlement which delayed or otherwise interfered with the rush to war.

The Japanese had decided to provide a public explanation by making extensive demands on the United States which they expected to be refused and which could be increased if accepted. A lengthy memorandum was therefore sent to Washington following on earlier such demands. In between, they received and disregarded a restatement of the American position (which they afterwards for propaganda purposes called an ultimatum). All this was shadow-boxing. The Japanese government had decided on war; had kept this fact from their own diplomats in Washington so that these could appear to be negotiating in good faith; and instructed them to present a lengthy note in time for Japan to initiate hostilities.
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Like the war plan as a whole, this small portion miscarried.

The timing issue was of interest for Japan because of a major change made in October 1941 in their plan for the war in the Pacific. Their concept of war had for decades assumed two inter-related projects. There would be a series of assaults in the south designed to seize as rapidly as possible as much of Southeast Asia as they could. It was always believed that the American navy on the Pacific flank of this advance would come either to the relief of the Philippines or to assault Japan or to
cut the Japanese line of communication to the newly conquered southern empire. This fleet was to be harried on the way across the Pacific by Japanese submarines and possibly also destroyers and so weakened that when it met the battle fleet in a great sea battle Japan would win. The Japanese therefore built up a large fleet of submarines designed and trained for action against warships and a battleship navy including several super-battleships designed for a slugging match in the open sea.

Once the Japanese government had decided in July 1940 that this was the time to move south, preparations for war with the United States in immediate reality rather than distant speculation began. In September and October of 1940, the navy took its first big steps in this direction, and on November 15, 1940, came the comprehensive order for its mobilization.
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The Flag Officers’ code was changed on December 1 and not broken by the United States until after Pearl Harbor.
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Ten days later the Cabinet approved a new materials program which for the first time gave priority to the navy over the army.
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All army and navy war plans discussions in early 1941 assumed that war would be against Britain, the United States, and the Dutch,
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a perception of the coming war generally shared in the Japanese government: by the end of January 1941 the Minister of Finance authorized the printing of occupation currency for the Philippines, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies.
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All these plans assumed war with the United States according to the naval strategy long believed appropriate. There now came into this picture an alternative approach proposed by Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, the Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet. He took the decision of the government to move south as a decision to fight the United States.
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As early as March or April of 1940 he had begun to talk about an attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor as an alternative to the established strategy of harassing that fleet and then meeting it as it came across the Pacific.
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In December 1940, he appears to have concluded that this was a far better procedure,
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perhaps influenced by the British success against the Italian fleet at harbor in Taranto the month before. On January 7, 1941, he explained to Navy Minister Admiral Oikawa that a surprise attack by carrier-borne planes on the American fleet at harbor would destroy it, and thus American morale. Similar surprise attacks would precede landings in the Philippines and Singapore. If such an operation against Pearl Harbor were not mounted, the United States might burn Japan’s cities as a result of air attacks of its own.
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Over the following months, Yamamoto and his staff developed the details of this project and carried out war games employing it rather than the traditional strategy. In heated arguments, Yamamoto and his assistants tried to convert the navy leadership to his concept, which
required split-second timing with all the other operations geared to the surprise Sunday attack on Pearl Harbor scheduled and worked out ahead of time. Only by threatening to resign at key points in October 1941, when war had already long been decided upon and the Admiralty staff did not want to lose its most important fleet commander just before the start of hostilities, could Yamamoto get his way. On October 20, the Chief of the Admiralty Staff finally consented. All was now geared to Yamamoto’s plan for an attack on December 7/8.
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There were several conceptual difficulties with this project. In the basic sense, it ran counter to Japan’s over-all strategy for the war. If surprise were attained, it was more likely to arouse the United States to fight a long war than break morale and enable Japan to secure American agreement to a new situation in East Asia. At one of the key planning meetings, Rear Admiral Onishi Takijiro pointed out that while a war which began with an attack in the south might be ended in a compromise, an attack on Pearl Harbor would destroy any hope for a compromise settlement.
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There was a further basic flaw: the project assumed that there was a threat to the flank of the Japanese advance south which needed to be dealt with by either the old or the new strategy, when in reality there was no such threat, and the Japanese had simple ways of knowing it. The fleet in Pearl Harbor did not have the tankers and other supply ships it would need for an attack across the Pacific; something the excellent Japanese spy network operating out of the consulate in Honolulu knew perfectly well. The knowledge of this by the Americans in Pearl Harbor contributed to their discounting the risk of a Japanese attack.
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Furthermore, as already mentioned, a large portion of the American fleet had been transferred from Pearl Harbor to the Atlantic. In spite of their knowledge of these publicly conspicuous transfers, Yamamoto persisted with what has to be considered a manic single mindedness. In the Japanese navy war game conducted in September 1941, the aircraft carrier
Yorktown,
which had left for the Atlantic the preceding April, was “sunk” in Pearl Harbor!
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Since Yamamoto’s idea involved an attack in a shallow port on a Sunday, it had two other implications that were easily predictable and closely related to the rebuilding of the American navy in any longer war. In the shallow harbor the ships would be grounded, not sunk, and could therefore most likely be raised and eventually repaired and returned to service. The Japanese knew of the shallow water and especially altered their aerial torpedoes to run at minimal depth; the last shipment of the modified torpedoes being delivered on November 17, just before the fleet sailed.
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In addition, most of the American crew members were likely to survive, either being on shore leave at the time of the raid or
rescued as the ships were grounded in port. In both of these respects, any action in open seas, as anticipated by the earlier plan, would have had very different results. Neither strategic nor practical considerations, however, held back Yamamoto, who thought only of tactical success.
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In the Pearl Harbor planning, some thought was given to a landing to seize the islands but ruled out; landing forces were needed for the southern push.
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The day before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Chief of Staff of the Combined fleet, Rear Admiral Ugaki Matome, wrote in his diary: “When we concluded the Tripartite Alliance and moved into Indochina, we had already burned the bridges behind us in our march toward the anticipated war with the United States and Great Britain.”
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Having established the need for a big navy by pointing to the United States as the enemy to fight, the Japanese navy could hardly say it was unable to fight. It had pushed for war, and itself set the framework for starting it.
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On December 7 in the early morning six Japanese aircraft carriers launched an attack on the United States Pacific fleet which, as was the custom of its commander, Admiral Kimmel, was at anchor in Pearl Harbor. Attacking in two waves, the Japanese planes, which arrived undetected, dropped bombs and torpedoes which blew up the battleship
Arizona
and grounded seven others, sank or damaged ten other ships, and destroyed or damaged most of the army’s planes on the ground. The Japanese lost several small submarines and a few planes. Over 2400 Americans were dead and another 1100 wounded. The two American aircraft carriers still with the Pacific fleet were out at sea and thus escaped; the Japanese aircraft carriers returned unscathed to Japan.

Soon after, Japanese forces invaded Thailand, beginning what they called freeing Asia from European control by seizing Southeast Asia’s only independent country. Landings on the Malay coast would prepare for the seizure of Singapore. On the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, they surprised MacArthur in the Philippines as effectively as they had Kimmel and his army associate, General Short, in Hawaii, and soon followed this operation with landings on the Luzon coast. Its flank shielded by the elimination of the American fleet, the Japanese southern advance was on.

It had been a fixation on the unfolding of the preparations for this advance that had mesmerized Washington. The leakage by an air force officer of the American program for building up and deploying forces if the country were drawn into the war to the
Chicago Tribune
in early December caused a flurry in Washington but extraordinarily little reaction in either Germany or Japan.
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The major question agitating the
administration was: If the Japanese by-passed the American Far Eastern possessions and attacked the British and Dutch, what should the United States do?
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As more and more details poured into Washington about what looked like an imminent attack in the south, the administration saw little sense in further negotiations with Japan, and a meeting was scheduled for the afternoon of December 7 in the White House to consider the problem.
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By the time they met, the President and the military and civilian leaders knew of the attack, and Hull had already given the Japanese diplomats, who were as surprised as the Americans, a piece of his mind. The following morning the President asked for and Congress voted a declaration of war. When half a year later Hull asked the President about a plan to publish a compilation of American documents on United States–Japanese relations 1931–41, including many statements and meetings of Roosevelt’s, and worried whether the President wanted it all published in full, Roosevelt told him to “cover it all.”
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Immediately after the attack, all sorts of speculations grew up about the causes for the surprise, and some found it–and still find it–expedient to invent various explanations suggesting the government knew of or even invited the attack beforehand. Whatever the results of confusion in the administration, the key point was the unwillingness of the navy and army commanders in Hawaii to credit the Japanese with the skill and daring to pull off precisely what in staff courses and field exercises they had been told for years was the most likely Japanese way of starting hostilities. Then, as occasionally later, Americans assumed that the Japanese had to be manipulated and favored by others, that they could not keep a secret or maintain radio silence.
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If it is any consolation, the British were afflicted with the identical concomitant of racist thinking. Eden noted on April 23, 1941, that the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, had recently told him that he rated the Japanese air force below the Italian one.
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The British like the Americans had some hard lessons to learn.

In reality, the Pearl Harbor attack proved a strategic and tactical disaster for Japan, though the Japanese did not recognize this. The ships were for the most part raised; by the end of December, two of the battleships Yamamoto had imagined sunk were on their way to the West Coast for repairs. All but the
Arizona
and
Oklahoma
returned to service, and several played a key role, as we will see, in a great American naval victory in October 1944.
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Most of the crew members survived to man the rebuilding American navy. These tactical factors were outgrowths of the basic strategic miscalculation. As anyone familiar with American reactions to the explosion on the
Maine
or the sinking of the
Lusitania
could
have predicted, an unprovoked attack in peacetime was guaranteed to unite the American people for war until Japan surrendered, thus destroying in the first minutes of war Japan’s basic strategy. The hope that the American people would never expend the blood and treasure needed to reconquer from Japan all sorts of islands–most of which they had never heard of–so that these could be returned to others or made independent, became completely unrealistic with the attack on Pearl Harbor. The attainment of surprise guaranteed defeat, not victory, for Japan.