Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (77 page)

In Japan’s governing atmosphere of heroic anarchy, however, madness went almost unnoticed. Once embarked on the China campaign, Japan had become morally isolated from the rest of the world. Hitler’s destruction of France tipped the balance in favour of temptation. As the British Ambassador, Sir Robert Craigie, put it, ‘How … could Japan expect Hitler to divide the spoils with them unless she had been actively associated in the spoliation?’
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This was the background to the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy which Matsuoka signed in September 1940. The way in which Japanese policy was determined inhibited sensible discussion. Democracy had been killed in 1938. The parties were abolished in 1940, being replaced by the Imperial Rule Assistance Association.
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The cabinet ceased to function on important issues. Decisions were supposed to be taken at the liaison conferences, attended by the Tenno, the premier and Foreign Secretary, the two Service ministers (sometimes chiefs of staff also) and two court ministers. But the services would not confide in the politicians – each ran its own diplomatic network through service attachés – or in each other.

Tojo, the War Minister from 1940, concealed his plans from the navy, which he regarded as unreliable and cowardly. He sought to get his way and keep himself informed by doubling-up offices. Thus he became Home Minister, Foreign Minister in July 1941 (when Matsuoka was ousted over the Nazi invasion of Russia) and finally Prime Minister on 18 October. Even so, he knew nothing of the navy’s Pearl Harbor plan until eight days before it was put into execution. It was, in fact, impossible for any one man to assert effective central control without adopting a posture of arrogance which invited instant assassination. It is significant that Tojo, the ‘Southern strategy’ fire-eater – he was known as ‘Razor’ – became much less aggressive once he took over as prime minister, and denounced the Pearl Harbor plan (when he learned of it) as ‘entirely impermissible, being in contravention of accepted procedure … hurtful to the national honour and prestige’.
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Yet the war, and the plan, went ahead just the same.

The liaison conferences inhibited honesty. The Emperor-God sat between two incense burners, on a dais in front of a gold screen, with the mere mortals at two brocade-covered tables at right angles to him.
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A special archaic court language had to be used. The Tenno could signify approval by banging his gold seal. Normally he did not speak; or if he did speak it was against protocol to take down his words, so the record is missing. Once (6 September 1941) he issued a warning by reading out an allusive poem written by his grandfather. He was not allowed to ask questions or express opinions: that was done for him by the President of the Council, on the basis of what he
thought the Tenno intended to say.
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Often the real decisions, if any, were taken in whispered bilateral deals, or everyone simply went ahead and acted as they thought best.

The conference of 19 September 1940, when the alliance with the Nazis was approved, showed the system at its worst. Afterwards, Hirohito called it ‘the moment of truth’ and said his failure to break protocol and voice his objections was ‘a moral crime’. The unstable Matsuoka took this view even before Pearl Harbor, went to the Tenno to ‘confess my worst mistake’, warned of ‘calamity’ and burst into tears.
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All found the system intolerable, and it provoked the impulse to escape into furious activity – always appealing to the impatient Japanese. Tojo, in his frustration, took to riding round the Tokyo markets on horseback, and in reply to the complaints of the fishermen that they had no petrol for their boats would shout, ‘Work harder, work harder!’ He told a colleague, ‘There are times when we must have the courage to do extraordinary things, like jumping with eyes closed off the veranda of the Kiyomizu Temple!’
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Jumping blindfold off a temple is, in fact, an accurate image of the Japanese decision to go to war. The records of the policy conferences reveal four things: that all Japanese leaders believed she must obtain access to South-East Asia and its raw materials to survive; that Japan was being pushed into a corner by America and Britain; that there was a general willingness to take risks, so that mere deterrence did not work; and that there was a corresponding unwillingness to discuss the consequences of failure. When Germany knocked France out, the Japanese demanded and got airfields in Indo-China: that provoked the first American economic sanctions. At this stage only the army definitely wanted war. In 1941 Indo-China was occupied, and on 28 July America applied total sanctions, including oil. That, in effect, brought the matter to a head. Thereafter, Japan was reducing her oil reserves by 28,000 tons a day and her only prospect of replenishing them was by seizing the Dutch East Indies. The navy insisted there must be either a negotiated settlement or war. As Nagano put it: The Navy is consuming four hundred tons of oil an hour …. We want it decided one way or another quickly.’
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Could America have successfully ‘appeased’ Japan? Did it wish to? The service chiefs, General Marshall and Admiral Stark, undoubtedly did, since they thought the destruction of German power must have priority, and they wanted time to strengthen the defences of the Philippines and Malaya. Unlike the Japanese side, where the military were pushing the civilians to war, they tried to exercise restraint on the Roosevelt administration.
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Roosevelt himself was passionately pro-Chinese. He could be termed a founder-member of the ‘China Lobby’, which was already in vociferous existence by 1940 and
included his cronies Harry Hopkins and Henry Morgenthau. He had long believed in the existence of a secret (in fact mythical) one-hundred-year ‘plan of conquest’ which the Japanese had drafted in 1889.
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In contrast to his unwillingness to take action in the European theatre, Roosevelt had always been aggressive-minded in Asia, proposing to Britain a total blockade of Japan as early as December 1937. Hostility to Japan, as he knew, was always popular in America. He regarded war with Japan as inevitable and, unlike the brass hats, saw advantages in precipitating it. Always pro-Soviet, his bellicosity increased sharply once Russia entered the war. His close colleague, the Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, wrote to him the day after Russia was invaded:

To embargo oil to Japan would be as popular a move in all parts of the country as you could make. There might develop from the embargoing of oil to Japan such a situation as would make it, not only possible but easy, to get into this war in an effective way. And if we should thus be indirectly brought in, we would avoid the criticism that we had gone in as an ally of communistic Russia.
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The ‘Magic’ intercepts fortified Roosevelt in his war policy because they showed clearly that, in the long negotiations which followed the oil embargo and lasted until the Japanese attack itself, Japan was systematically practising deception while planning aggression. But the intercepts did not tell the whole story. If Roosevelt and Cordell Hull had possessed transcripts of the liaison conferences they would have grasped the confusion and the agonized doubts which lay behind Japanese policy. At the 1 November liaison conference, which took the final decision to go to war (while continuing to negotiate), the level of strategic debate was not high:

Finance Minister Kaya:
If we go along as at present without war, and three years hence the American fleet comes to attack us, will the navy have a chance of winning or won’t it?
(Question asked several times.)

Navy Chief of Staff Nagano:
Nobody knows.

Kaya:
Will the American fleet come to attack us, or won’t it?

Nagano:
I don’t know.

Kaya:
I don’t think they will come.

Nagano:
We might avoid war now, but go to war three years later. Or we might go to war now and plan for what the situation will be three years hence. I think it would be easier to engage in a war now.
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The navy and army were quite clear what they intended to do in the initial stages of the war, to last from three to six months. Thereafter plans, and means to carry them out, became increasingly vague. The navy and army’s independently calculated steel-supply
requirements, for instance, each made sense only if the other’s was scaled down to the point where carrying on the war became impossible.
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After the initial operations were completed, there was a theoretical intention to move against India and Australia. But there was no plan at all to invade America, knock her out of the war or destroy her capacity to wage it. In short, there was no strategic war-winning plan at all. Instead, there was an optimistic assumption that, at some stage, America (and Britain) would negotiate a compromise peace.

Even on a tactical level, there was a huge hole in the Japanese war-plan. The navy had almost completely neglected submarine warfare, both defensive and offensive. The army’s ‘Southern strategy’ was based on spreading its resources in occupying thousands of islands over millions of square miles of ocean, all of which would have to be supplied by sea. The contempt for the submarine meant the navy had no means of ensuring these supplies; or, conversely, of inhibiting the Allies from moving their own supplies. The last omission meant that, in the long run, Japan could not prevent America from developing a war-winning strategy. Granted America’s enormous industrial preponderance there was thus no real incentive for her to seek a compromise peace, however spectacular Japan’s initial success. Regarded logically, therefore, Japan’s decision to go to war made no sense. It was
hara-kiri.

Moreover, the circumstances of the Japanese attack might have been designed to create American intransigence. Throughout their calculations from 1937 onwards, Roosevelt and his advisers had always assumed that the fury of the Japanese attack would fall on the British and Dutch possessions. True, the Philippines might also be at risk. But the notion of an attack on Pearl Harbor seems never to have been considered. Ambassador Grew had reported (27 January 1941): ‘There is a lot of talk around town to the effect that the Japs, in case of a break with the US, are planning to go all out in a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.’ No one took any notice.
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Yet the idea had been knocking around since 1921, when the
Daily Telegraph
Naval correspondent, Hector Bywater, wrote
Sea Power in the Pacific
, later expanded into a novel,
The Great Pacific War
(1925). The Japanese navy had both translated and put the novel on the curriculum of its War College.
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The idea slumbered until Yamamoto became so impressed by improvements in carrier-borne aircraft training that he decided it was feasible. In the meantime, the concept of a series of army landings in the tropics had been developed by a fanatical staff officer, Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, so full of Shinto that he had tried to blow up a prime minister with dynamite and actually burned down a brothel full of officers out of sheer moral indignation. His
ideas for the invasion of Malaya, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies and other targets required the elimination of the American Pacific Fleet during the landings period. That, in turn, gave a kind of strategic virtue to the Pearl Harbor project: the American fleet would be destroyed at anchor, and while it was being rebuilt Japan would lay hands on all of South-East Asia. The Pearl Harbor plan itself, which meant getting a huge carrier force unobserved over thousands of miles of ocean, was the most audacious and complex scheme of its kind in history, involving creating a special intelligence network, devising new means to refuel at sea, designing new torpedoes and armour-piercing shells, and training programmes of an intensity and elaboration never before undertaken. The final naval planning conference at the Naval College near Tokyo on 2 September 1941 was something of a prodigy in naval annals, since it embraced attacks and landings over several millions of square miles, involving the entire offensive phase of the war Japan intended to launch.

Yet all this ingenuity went for nothing. The Far East war began at 1.15 am on 7 December with a sea-bombardment of the Malayan landing area, the attack on Pearl Harbor following two hours later. The Pearl Harbor assault achieved complete tactical surprise. All but twenty-nine planes returned to their carriers and the fleet got away safely. But the results, though they seemed spectacular at the time, were meagre. Some eighteen warships were sunk or badly damaged, but mostly in shallow water. They were raised and repaired and nearly all returned to active service in time to take part in major operations; losses in trained men were comparatively small. As luck would have it the American carriers were out at sea at the time of the attack, and the Japanese force commander, Admiral Nagumo, had too little fuel to search and sink them, so they escaped completely. His bombers failed to destroy either the naval oil storage tanks or the submarine-pens, so both submarines and carriers – now the key arms in the naval war – were able to refuel and operate immediately.

All this was a meagre military return for the political risk of treacherously attacking a huge, intensely moralistic nation like the United States before a formal declaration of war. This may not have been the Japanese intention (it is still being argued about) for their arrangements were a characteristic mixture of breathtaking efficiency and inexplicable muddle. But it was the effect. Secretary of State Hull knew all about the Pearl Harbor attack and the ultimatum by the time the two Japanese envoys handed him their message at 2.20 pm, and had rehearsed his little verdict of history (he was a Tennessee judge): in all my fifty years of public service I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehood and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today
that any government on this planet was capable of uttering them.’ Then, to the departing diplomats: ‘Scoundrels and piss-pants!’
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Thus America, hitherto rendered ineffectual by its remoteness, its racial diversity and its pusillanimous leadership, found itself instantly united, angry and committed to wage total war with all its outraged strength. Hitler’s reckless declaration the following week drew a full measure of this enormous fury down upon his own nation.