на главную | войти | регистрация | DMCA | контакты | справка | donate |      

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
А Б В Г Д Е Ж З И Й К Л М Н О П Р С Т У Ф Х Ц Ч Ш Щ Э Ю Я


моя полка | жанры | рекомендуем | рейтинг книг | рейтинг авторов | впечатления | новое | форум | сборники | читалки | авторам | добавить



Chapter 55. The Rising Sun in the Pacific, to 1942


Traditionally, American policy in the Far East had sought to preserve the territorial integrity and political independence of China and to maintain an "Open Door" for China's foreign trade. These goals became increasingly difficult to achieve in the course of the twentieth century because of the growing weakness of China itself, the steady growth of aggression in Japan, and the deepening involvement of other Powers with Far Eastern interests in a life-or-death struggle with Germany. After the fall of France and the Low Countries in the summer of 1940, Britain could offer the United States little more than sympathy and some degree of diplomatic support in the Far East, while the Netherlands and France, with rich colonial possessions within reach of Japan's avid grasp, could provide no real opposition to Japan's demands. After Hitler's attack on Russia in June 1941, the Soviet Union, which had actually fought Japanese forces in the Far East in 1938 and again in 1939, could exert no pressure on Japan to deter further Nipponese aggression. Thus, by the summer of 1941, Japan was ready for new advances in the Far East, and only the United States was in a position to resist.

This situation was complicated by the domestic political divisions within the United States and Japan. In general, these divisions tended to postpone any showdown between the two Powers. On the one hand, the American government had developed a fissure between its military strategic plans and its diplomatic activities, just at the time when isolationist opinion within the country was making its most vociferous objections to the Administration's policies in both these fields. On the other hand, the Japanese government was by no means united, either on the direction or on the timing of its next moves.

The divisions in public opinion within the United States and even within the Roosevelt Administration are obvious enough to Americans, but the equally great divisions in Japan are largely ignored. It should be recognized by Americans today, as it was recognized by the Japanese leaders at the time, that the Japanese aggressions of 1941 which culminated in the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th were based on fear and weakness and not on arrogance and strength. To be sure, the earlier aggressions which began in Manchuria in 1931 and in North China in 1937 had been arrogant enough. The Japanese had been supremely confident of their ability to conquer all China, if necessary, even as late as 1939. As a consequence, their advance had been accompanied by brutality against the Chinese, by various actions to drive all Europeans and all European economic enterprises out of China, and by insults and humiliations to Europeans found in China, especially in Shanghai.

By 1939 all of this was beginning to change. The attack on China had bogged down completely. The Japanese economy was beginning to totter under a combination of circumstances, including the exhausting effort to strangle China and to administer a fatal blow to the retreating Chinese government by octopus tactics, the reorganization of Japan's home industry from a light basis to a heavy industrial plant (for which Japan lacked the necessary resources), the gigantic capital investment in Manchuria and North China, the growing restrictions on Japanese trade imposed by Western countries, and, finally, the combination of a rapidly growing population with acute material shortages. Problems such as these might have driven many nations, even in the West, to desperate action. In Japan the situation was made more critical by the large-scale diversion of manpower and resources from consumption to capital formation at a very high rate. And, finally, all this was taking place in a country which placed a high esteem on military arrogance.

In theory, of course, Japan might have sought to remedy its material shortages in a peaceful way, by seeking to increase Japan's foreign trade, exporting increasing amounts of Japanese goods to pay for rising Japanese imports. In fact, such a policy had obvious weaknesses. The world depression after 1929 and the growth of economic autarchy in all countries, including the United States, made it very difficult to increase Japanese exports. The excessively high American Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, although not so intended, seemed to the Japanese to be an aggressive restriction on their ability to live. The "imperial preference" regulations of the British Commonwealth had a similar consequence. Since Japan could not defend itself against such economic measures, it resorted to political measures. To do otherwise would have been contrary to Japanese traditions. But, by embarking on this course, Japan was heading in a direction which could hardly have a favorable outcome. If Japan adopted political measures to defend itself against economic restrictions, the Western Powers would inevitably defend themselves with even greater economic restrictions on Japan, driving Japan, by a series of such stages, to open war. And, in such a war, in view of its economic weakness, Japan could hardly hope to win. These stages were confused and delayed over a full decade of years (1931-1941), by indecision and divided counsels in both Japan and the Western Powers. In the process Japan found a considerable advantage in the parallel aggressions of Italy and Germany. It also found a considerable disadvantage in the fact that Japan's imports were vital necessities to her, while her exports were vital necessities to no one. This meant that Japan's trade could be cut off or reduced by anyone, to Japan's great injury, but at much smaller cost to the other nation.

The steps leading to open war between Japan and the Western Powers were delayed by the long-drawn indecision of the Sino-Japanese War. For years Japan hoped to find a solution for its economic and social problems in a decisive victory over China, while in the same years the Western Powers hoped for an end to Japanese aggression by a Japanese defeat in China. Instead, the struggle in that area dragged on without a decision. The Western Powers were too divided at home and among themselves, too filled with pacifism and mistaken political and economic ideas to do anything decisive about China, especially when open war was impossible and anything less than war would injure China as well as Japan. Thus, no sanctions were imposed on Japan for its aggression on Manchuria in 1931 or for its attack on North China in 1937. The American Neutrality Act was not applied to this conflict because President Roosevelt adopted the simple legalistic expedient of failing to "find" a war in the Far East. But the mere existence of laws which might have imposed economic sanctions or economic retaliation on Japan revealed to that country the basic weakness of its own position.

In 1937 Japan received a series of lessons in the precarious state of its strategic-economic position. In the first half of that year, as background for its growing military pressure on China, Japan bought a record amount of American scrap iron and steel, 1.3 million metric tons in six months. Agitation to curtail this supply, either by applying the Neutrality Act to the Sino-Japanese conflict or by some lesser action, was growing in the United States. Early in October 1937, President Roosevelt caused a controversy by a speech suggesting a "quarantine" of aggressor nations. Isolationist sentiment in the United States, especially in the Midwest, was too strong to allow the administration to take any important steps toward such a "quarantine." Nevertheless, Stimson, who had been American secretary of state at the time of the Manchurian crisis in 1931, made a public appeal for an embargo on the shipment of war materials to Japan. A month later, November 3-24, 1937, a conference of the signers of the Nine-Power Treaty of 1922, which guaranteed the integrity of China, met at Brussels to discuss what steps might be taken to end Japan's aggression in China. There was considerable talk of economic sanctions, but no Great Power was willing to light the fuse on that stick of dynamite, so the occasion lapsed, and nothing was done. But the lesson was not wasted on Japan; it intensified its efforts to build up Japanese power to a position where it could use political action to defend itself against any economic reprisals. Naturally, the political actions it took in this direction served only to hasten economic reprisals against itself, especially by the United States, the world's most devoted defender of the status quo in the Far East and the only Great Power in any position, especially after Hitler's attacks, to adopt an active policy against Japan.

Japan could have achieved little toward a political solution of its problems if it had not been for the aggressions of Italy and Germany on the other side of the world. A full year before the Brussels Conference, on November 25, 1936, Japan had joined the league of aggressors known as the Anti-Comintern Pact. Discussions seeking to strengthen this arrangement into a full German-Japanese alliance went on for years, but were not concluded until September 1940.

Hitler was not sure whether he wanted Japanese support against the Western democracies or against the Soviet Union, and, accordingly, sought an agreement which could be swung either way, while Japan was interested in a German alliance only if it ran against the Soviet Union. At the same time, Germany objected to the Japanese war on China, since this prevented Japan's strength from being directed against either of Germany's possible foes, and jeopardized German economic interests in China. All these difficulties continued, although Ribbentrop's advent to the post of foreign minister in Berlin in February 1938 inaugurated a period of wholehearted cooperation with Japan in China, replacing Neurath's earlier efforts to maintain some kind of neutral balance in the Sino-Japanese War. The German military advisers with Chiang Kai-shek were withdrawn, although some of them had been in their positions for ten years and were likely to be replaced by Soviet advisers; the German ambassador was withdrawn from China, and the protection of German interests was generally left to lesser officials, using Japanese officials in areas under Japanese occupation; the Japanese regime in Manchukuo was explicitly recognized (20 February 1938); all shipments of German war materials to China (which reached a value of almost 83 million marks in 1937) were ended, and in-completed contracts totaling 282 million marks were canceled; the Japanese claim that their attack on Nationalist China was really an anti-Communist action, although recognized as a fraud in Berlin, was tacitly accepted; and the earlier German efforts to mediate peace between China and Japan ceased.

In spite of these concessions, Japan continued its efforts to curtail German economic enterprises in China, along with those of other Western nations. The alienation of these two aggressor countries by the summer of 1939 can be judged by the fact that the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 1939 was made in flagrant violation of the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Agreement of November 1936, since this latter document bound the signers to make no political agreements with the Soviet Union without the previous consent of the other signatory state. This was regarded in Tokyo as such a blow to the prestige of the Japanese government that the prime minister resigned.

In the meantime the American government began to tighten the economic pincers on Japan just as Japan was seeking to tighten its military pincers on China. In the course of 1939 Japan was able to close all the routes from the outside into China except through Hong Kong, across French Indochina, and along the rocky and undeveloped route from Burma to Chungking. The American government retaliated with economic warfare. In June 1938 it established a "moral embargo" on the shipment of aircraft or their parts and bombs to Japan by simply requesting American citizens to refuse to sell these articles. Early in 1939 large American and British loans to China sought to strengthen that country's collapsing financial system. In September 1939 Washington gave the necessary six-month notice to cancel the 1911 commercial treaty with Japan; this opened the door to all kinds of economic pressure against Japan. At the same time, the "moral embargo" was extended to eleven named raw materials which were vital to Japan's war machine. In December this embargo was extended to cover light metals and all machinery or plans for making aviation gasoline.

In general, there was considerable pressure in the United States, both inside the administration and elsewhere, to increase American economic sanctions against Japan. Such a policy was opposed by the isolationists in the country, by our diplomatic agents in Tokyo, and by our quasi-allies, Britain, France, and the Netherlands. These diverse opinions agreed that economic sanctions could be enforced, in the long run, only by war. To put it bluntly, if Japan could not get petroleum, bauxite, rubber, and tin by trade, it could be prevented from seizing areas producing these products only by force. To avoid this obvious inference, Cordell Hull sought to make America's economic policy ambiguous so that Japan might be deterred from evil actions by fear of sanctions not yet imposed and won to conciliatory actions by hopes of concessions not yet granted. Such a policy was a mistake, but it obtained President Roosevelt's explicit approval in December 1939. It was a mistake, since it paralyzed the less aggressive elements in Japanese affairs, allowing the more aggressive elements to take control, because the uncertainty it engendered became so unbearable to many, even of the less aggressive, that any drastic action seeking to end the strain became welcome; there was no real faith in America's intentions, with the result that the period of sustained uncertainty came to be interpreted in Japan as a period of American rearmament preliminary to an attack on Japan, and the ambiguity of American commercial policy toward Japan was, over the months of 1940-1941, slowly resolved in the direction of increasing economic sanctions. There was a steady increase in America's economic pressure on Japan by extensions of the "moral embargo," by the growth of financial obstacles, and by increasing purchasing difficulties, presumably based on America's rearmament program.

Japan continued to advance in China with brusque disregard of Western interests, citizens, or property. By the end of 1939, Japan controlled all the chief cities, river valleys, and railroad lines of eastern China, but faced constant guerrilla opposition in rural areas and had no control over the deep interior of China, which remained loyal to Chiang Kai-shek's government in far-off Chungking on the Upper Yangtze in southwestern China. In March 1940 the Japanese set up a puppet Chinese government at Nanking, but the reality of its power deceived no one.

In the winter of 1939-1940, Japan began to make vigorous commercial demands on the Netherlands East Indies. These demands, chiefly concerned with petroleum and bauxite, were increased after the German victories in France and the Low Countries. From these victories and from Hull's doctrinaire refusal to encourage any Japanese hope that they could win worthwhile American concessions from a more moderate policy, the advocates of extremism in Japan gained influence. A Japanese demand was made on France, following the latter's defeat by Germany, to allow Japanese troops to enter northern Indochina, in order to cut off supplies going to China. This was conceded at once by the Vichy government. At the same time (June 1940), Britain received a demand to withdraw its troops from Shanghai and close the Burma Road to Chinese imports. When Hull refused to cooperate with Britain, either in forcing Japan to desist or in any policy aiming to win better Japanese behavior by concessions, Britain withdrew from Shanghai and closed the Burma Road for three months.

Just at that moment a powerful new weapon against Japan was added to the American arsenal, by an amendment to the National Defense Act giving the President authority to embargo the export of supplies which he judged to be necessary to the defense of the United States. The first presidential order under this new authority required licenses for many goods which Japan needed, including aluminum, airplane parts, all arms or munitions, optical supplies, and various "strategic" materials, but left petroleum and scrap iron unhindered.

As France was falling in June 1940, Roosevelt, for reasons of domestic policy, added to his Cabinet two leaders of the Republican Party, Henry L. Stimson and Frank C. Knox; both of these were interventionists in behalf of Britain, while Stimson, for years, had been demanding economic sanctions against Japan, assuring the more cautious of his audience that such a policy would bring about a Japanese retreat rather than any war. The error in this point of view was clearly revealed at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, but the exact nature of the error is not always recognized.

The real error in the American negotiations with Japan in 1940-1941 was a double one. On the one hand, there was no correlation between our demands on Japan and our actual power in the Pacific, since our demands were vastly more extensive than our strength. On the other hand, there was no correlation between our strategic plans and our diplomatic activity, with the consequence that there was no correlation between our German policy and our Japanese policy. The American strategic plans were based on the premise that Germany must be defeated before Japan. From this perfectly correct premise followed several corollaries which were not fully grasped by American leaders, especially by the nonmilitary leaders. One of these corollaries provided that America must not get into war with Japan before it got into war with Germany, for, if it did so, it would either have to abandon its strategic plans and proceed to fight Japan or declare war on Germany itself. The much greater danger from Germany, and especially from a German victory over either Britain or the Soviet Union, made the first of these unacceptable, while American public opinion would never have accepted an American declaration of war against Germany when we were already in a state of war with Japan. A second corollary from all these conditions was that American diplomatic pressure on Japan must be timed in terms of American-German relations and not in terms of American-Japanese relations in order to avoid pushing Japan into desperate action before American-German relations had passed the breaking point.

As we shall see, American diplomatic pressure on Japan was increased on the basis of moral outrage, high-flown principles, incidental retaliation, and an unrealistic conception of international legality, without any attempt to coordinate this pressure either with our relations to Germany or, what was even worse, with our actual power in the Pacific. Hull was able to do this because his attitudes were generally shared by the civilian heads of the two service departments, by Stimson as secretary of war, and by Knox as secretary of the navy; thus the more realistic views of the military and naval leaders, and their better appreciation of the implications of America's strategic plans, did not have their proper weight on America's policy-making on the Cabinet level or even at the White House. Fortunately, America was saved from many of the consequences of these errors when Hitler made his greatest mistake by declaring war on the United States.

By the beginning of 1941, the Japanese attack on China had bogged down and was in such imminent danger of collapse that something drastic had to be done. But there was no agreement within Japan as to what direction such drastic action should take. A timid majority existed, even within the Japanese government itself, which would have been willing to withdraw from the Chinese "incident" if this could have been done without too great "loss of face." On the whole, this group was timid and ineffectual because of the danger of assassination by the extreme militarists and hyper-nationalist groups within Japan. Moreover, it was impossible to reach any agreement with the Chinese Nationalist government which would allow Japan to retain its "face" by covering a real withdrawal from China with an apparent diplomatic triumph of some sort.

The advocates of an aggressive policy in Japan were divided among the insignificant group who still believed that an all-out assault on China could be brought to a successful conclusion and the more influential groups who would have sought to redeem the stalemate in China by shifting the offensive against either Soviet Siberia or the rich Anglo-Dutch possessions of Malaysia and Indonesia. In the long run, the group which advocated a drive to the south was bound to prevail, because Malaysia and Indonesia were obviously weak and rich, while Soviet Siberia lacked those items (such as petroleum, rubber, or tin) which Japan most urgently needed, and it had demonstrated its power in the battles of 1938-1939. Germany, which originally encouraged the Japanese to move southward against British Malaysia and then, when it was too late, sought to redirect the Japanese blow against Siberia, played an insignificant role in Japan's policy. The decision to move southward, where the defense was weaker and the prizes so much greater, was made in an ambiguous and halfhearted way in the summer of 1941. The critical turning point was probably during the last week in July.

During the six-week period, March 12 – April 22, Matsuoka, the fire-eating foreign minister, was absent from Tokyo on a visit to Berlin and to Moscow. In the German capital he was advised to make no political agreements with the Soviet Union, because of the imminent approach of war between that country and Germany. Matsuoka at once went to Moscow, where he signed a Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact on April 13, 1941. In the meantime, in March, Japanese diplomats won special economic concessions in Siam, while in June the nine-month-old trade discussions with the Netherlands East Indies broke down without Nippon obtaining any of the concessions it desired. These agreements, if obtained, might have put Japan in a position where it could have withstood a total American petroleum embargo. Failure to obtain these meant that Japan's large oil reserves would continue to decrease to the point where Japan would be militarily helpless from total lack of oil. America could accelerate this process either by curtailing the supply of oil or by forcing Japan into actions which would increase the rate of its consumption. Japanese oil production in 1941 was only three million barrels a year compared to a consumption rate of about 32 million barrels a year. Reserves, which had been 55 million barrels in December 1939, were below 50 million in September 1941, and fell to about 43 million by Pearl Harbor.

On July 21, 1941, Japan's threats won from Vichy France the right to move troops into southern Indochina. This was a threat to British Malaya rather than to the Burma Road in China. Within a week, on July 26, 1941, the United States froze all Japanese financial assets in the United States, virtually ending trade between the two countries. The members of the British Commonwealth issued similar orders, while the Netherlands Indies established special licenses for all exports to Japan. No licenses were issued for vital commodities like oil or bauxite. In the same week, an American military mission went to China, and the Philippine Army was incorporated into the American Army.

As a result of these pressures, Japan found itself in a position where its oil reserves would be exhausted in two years, its aluminum reserves in seven months. The chief of the General Staff of the Japanese Navy told the emperor that if Japan resorted to a war to break this blockade it would be very doubtful that it could win. The president of the Japanese Planning Board confirmed this gloomy opinion. The armed forces insisted that Japan had a choice between a slow decline to extinction under economic pressure or war which might allow it to break out of its predicament. The navy had little hope of victory in such a war, but agreed with this analysis. It was also agreed that war, if it came, must begin before the middle of December, when weather conditions would become too adverse to permit amphibious belligerent operations; it was clear that economic pressure was too damaging to allow Japan to postpone such operations until the resumption of good weather in 1942. Accordingly, the decision was made to make war in 1941, but to continue negotiations with the United States until late October. If an agreement could be reached by that date, the preparations for war could be suspended; otherwise the negotiations would be ended and the advance to open war continued. Matsuoka, the foreign minister, who was opposed to continuing the negotiations with the United States, was dropped from the Cabinet on July 16th; from that date on, the civilian portion of the Cabinet desperately sought to reach an agreement in Washington, while the military portion calmly prepared for war.

In the course of 1941, Japan's preparations for war were gradually expanded from a project to close the southern routes into China by an attack on Malaya, to an attack on the United States. The decision to close the Burma Road by force meant that Japan must move into French Indochina and Siam, and cross British Malaya, after neutralizing the British naval base at Singapore. Such a movement had numerous disadvantages. It would mean war with Britain; it would leave the Japanese lines of communication southward open to a flank attack from American bases in the Philippines; it was doubtful if China could be defeated even when all Western supplies were cut off (after all, these supplies were so insignificant that in 1940 American arms and munitions to China were worth only $9 million); even a total defeat of China would leave Japan's material shortages acute, especially in respect to the greatest material need, petroleum products. In view of these disadvantages, under which Japan would expend so much to gain so little, it seemed to many Japanese leaders that very considerable gains could he obtained with only a slight additional effort if an attack on the rich Netherlands Indies were combined with the attack on Malaya and the Burma Road. Such an advance to the tin and bauxite of Malaya and to the oil of the Dutch Indies had every advantage over any alternative possibility, such as an attack on eastern Siberia, especially as the Japanese Army (but not the Navy) had a higher opinion of Soviet power than they had of Anglo-American strength.

Having given the attack on Malaya and Indonesia the preference over any possible attack on Siberia, the Japanese leaders accepted the fact that this would mean war with Britain and the United States. In this they were probably not wrong, although some Americans have claimed that America would not have gone to war if Japan had passed by the Philippines and left other American territories untouched on its road to the south. It is certainly true that such actions would have touched off a violent controversy within the United States between the isolationists and the interventionists, but it seems almost certain that the policies of the Roosevelt Administration would have been carried out, and these policies included plans for war against Japan's southern movement even if American areas were not attacked. In any case, judging American reactions in terms of their own, the Japanese decided that an American flank attack from an untouched Philippines on their extended communications to the southward would be too great a risk to run; accordingly, an attack on the Philippines to prevent this was included in the Japanese plans for their southern movement.

This decision led at once to the next step, the project to attack the American fleet at Pearl Harbor on the grounds that an inevitable war with the United States could be commenced most effectively with a surprise attack on the American Navy rather than by waiting for an intact American fleet to come to seek out the Japanese in their zones of active operations in the southwestern Pacific. It must be recognized that one of the chief factors impelling the Japanese to make the attack on Pearl Harbor was that few Japanese (and these mostly in the army) had any hope that Japan could defeat the United States in any war carried to a decisive conclusion. Rather, it was hoped that, by crippling the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, Japan could conquer such a large area of the southwestern Pacific and southeastern Asia that peace could be negotiated on favorable terms. Here, once again, the Japanese misjudged American psychology.

The negotiations in Washington between Kichisaburo Nomura and Secretary Hull were among the strangest diplomatic discussions ever carried on. Although Nomura probably was not informed of the Japanese plans to make war, he could not have failed to infer them because he had received instructions that he must reach an agreement by late October if peace were to be preserved. He found it impossible to reach such an agreement because Hull's demands were extreme, and his own superiors in Tokyo were unwilling to make any political concessions to win a relaxation of economic restrictions.

The Americans had a clear view of the situation because they had broken the secret Japanese codes and generally had Nomura's instructions from Tokyo before he did. Thus the Americans knew that Nomura had no powers to yield on any vital political issue, that he had been given a deadline in October, and that war would begin if he failed to obtain relaxation of the economic embargo before that deadline. They did not, however, have any details on the Japanese military plans, since these were not communicated by radio, and they did not realize that these plans included an attack on Pearl Harbor. In the course of November American Naval Intelligence knew that Japanese armed forces were mobilizing and moving southward; by November 20th it became clear that a task force of the navy, including four of the largest Japanese aircraft carriers, had vanished. At the end of November intercepted Japanese messages showed clearly that the negotiations were no longer of significance. In early December these showed that the Japanese Embassy in Washington had been ordered to destroy all its codes and to prepare its staff for departure.

The negotiations between Hull and Nomura were lengthy, technical, and hopeless. In essence they boiled down to the conclusion that America would not relax its economic restrictions on Japan unless (1) Japan promised to refrain from acts of force in the southwest Pacific area; (2) Japan agreed to violate its treaty with Germany to permit the United States to support Britain even to the point of war with Germany without any Japanese intervention on the side of Germany; and (3) that Japan would agree to withdraw its armed forces from Indochina and from China and restore equality of economic opportunity in the latter country on a schedule to be worked out later.

When it became clear on October 15, 1941, that agreement was impossible, Hideki Tojo, leader of the activist military group in Japan, forced Prince Fumimaro Konoye to resign. The new Cabinet had General Tojo as Premier, Minister of the Army, and Minister of Home Affairs (controlling domestic police). This was clearly a war government, but the negotiations continued in Washington.

On November 10th operations orders were issued to the Japanese Navy to destroy the American fleet in Pearl Harbor on December 7th. Orders had already been issued to conquer Thailand, Malaya, the Philippines, Borneo, and Sumatra; the rest of the Netherlands East Indies were to be taken in a second movement and all the conquered areas enclosed in a defensive perimeter to run from the Japanese Kurile Islands, through Wake Island and the Marshall Islands, along the southern and western edges of Timor, Java, and Sumatra, to the Burma-India border. By November 20th the American defensive forces knew that Japan was about to strike but still felt that the blow would he southward.

On November 27th a war warning was sent from Washington to Pearl Harbor, but no changes were made there for increased precautions or a higher level of alertness. Fortunately, the three carriers of the American Pacific Fleet were not in Pearl Harbor on the morning of the attack, but the Japanese had detailed anchorage sites for the vessels which were there, including seven battleships and seven cruisers. The Japanese attack force consisted of six carriers with 450 planes escorted by two battleships, two cruisers, eleven destroyers, twenty regular submarines, and five midget submarines. This force, in complete radio silence and without encountering any other vessels, sailed in 11 days in a great northward circle from the Kuriles to a point 275 miles north of Pearl Harbor. From that point, at 6:00 A.M. on December 7, 1941, was launched an air strike of 360 planes, including 40 torpedo planes, 100 bombers, 130 dive-bombers, and go fighters. The five midget submarines, dropped from larger submarines, were already operating at Pearl Harbor and were able to enter because the anti-torpedo net was carelessly left open after 4:58 A.M. on December 7th. These submarines were detected at 3:42 before they entered the harbor, but no warning was sent until 6:54 after one had been attacked and sunk.

About the same time, an army enlisted man, using radar, detected a group of strange planes coming down from the north 132 miles away, but his report was disregarded. At 7:30 an enlisted sailor noticed two dozen planes about a mile over his ship hut did not report it. In the next half-hour these early arrivals from the Japanese carriers were joined by others, and at 7:55 the attack began. Within thirty minutes the Battle Line of the Pacific Fleet had been wiped out. The American losses included 2,400 men killed, almost 1,200 wounded, four battleships sunk with three others hardly damaged, many other vessels sunk or damaged, and hundreds of planes destroyed on the grounds. The greatest damage was inflicted by special shallow-water torpedoes launched from planes which came in below the 100-foot altitude. In all, the Japanese losses were small, amounting to no more than a couple of dozen planes, because the surprise was so great. The Japanese fleet was not found after the attack, because the search order was issued 180 degrees off direction through an error in interpretation.

Pearl Harbor was but one of several attacks made by the Japanese in their opening assaults on December 7th-10th. Air attacks on Wake Island, Midway Island, Guam, the Philippines, and Malaya destroyed hundreds of planes, mostly on the ground, and set fire to large stores of supplies. Lack of antiaircraft facilities, inadequate air power and fields, and carelessness by higher officers transformed the defenders' situations from critical to hopeless, although personal bravery and resourcefulness made the Japanese pay heavily for their gains.

Midway Island, 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu and linked to it by a very important cable, survived a hit-and-run attack of December 8, 1941, and by 1942 was America's westernmost base, especially valuable for planes, submarines, and reconnaissance. Wake Island, 1,200 miles southwest of Midway, was struck on December 8th and surrendered on December 23rd after a heavy two-day assault. Guam, 1,500 miles west of Wake and in the midst of the Japanese-mandated Mariana Islands, was invaded at the beginning and gave up on December 10th. The Philippines, 3,000 miles west of Wake, were attacked by landings at nine points in the seventeen days before Christmas; by December 27th the Japanese had compelled the American ground forces to evacuate Manila and to retire into their last defense areas, the rocky caves of the island of Corregidor and the forests of the Bataan Peninsula. Savage fighting continued until May 6, 1942, when the last American forces on Corregidor surrendered. The commanding officers, General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Thomas Hart, had already withdrawn to Australia.

Fifteen hundred miles west of the Philippines, a Japanese army invaded Thailand from Indochina, and on December 8th captured Bangkok without a struggle. About the same time Japanese landings were made on the Malay Peninsula north of Singapore. When the British battle cruiser Repulse and the new battleship Prince of Wales ventured north without air cover (since their accompanying carrier, Indomitable, ran aground), they were sunk by Japanese land-based planes (December 10th). These were the only Allied capital ships west of Pearl Harbor. But the event had much more significance than this. It showed that the capital ship was no longer the mistress of the seas, as it had been for at least two generations, and, by doing so, it showed that the American losses at Pearl Harbor, concentrated as they were on battleships, were not nearly so important as they had seemed to be. But, even more significant, these sinkings off the east coast of Malaya marked the end of British supremacy on the seas which had begun with the destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588. For the next two years supremacy on the seas was in dispute, but at the end of that time the decision was falling clearly in favor of a new champion, the United States.

Fanning outward as they spread over the southwestern Pacific and southeastern Asia, the Japanese forces captured Hong Kong on December 25, 1941 and advanced on Singapore across the swamps on its landward side. This great naval base, the bastion of all British power in the Far East, had to surrender on February 15, 1942, without even being able to defend itself, its great guns, aimed seaward at an army which never came, being completely useless against the Japanese who crept up on it from the landward side.

Lying north of Australia in a great curve from Singapore to New Guinea was the Malay Barrier, originally intended to form the southern perimeter of the Japanese defense area. Like beads on a necklace across a distance of 3,500 miles were stretched dozens of islands: Sumatra, Java, Bali, Lumbok, Flores, Timor, New Guinea, and others. These were taken so rapidly by the Japanese octopus that the straits between the various islands were closed before some Allied ships could escape through to the south. Five Allied cruisers and many destroyers were caught in this way and sunk in the week of February 26, 1942; Sumatra, Java, and Timor surrendered by March 8th; and Netherlands forces were wiped out, British forces withdrew to Ceylon, and the few surviving American vessels limped home for repairs. Rangoon, the Burmese capital, surrendered on March 8th, and exactly a month later the triumphant Japanese naval forces swept westward to strike at Ceylon. In the first week of April, Holy Week of 1942, Japanese Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who had led the attack on Pearl Harbor, made a similar attack on Ceylon, sinking the British carrier Hermes, two heavy cruisers, and many lesser vessels (including 136,000 tons of merchant ships).

At this dark moment, mid-April of 1942, the tide of battle in the Pacific began to turn. The three American aircraft carriers which had been spared at Pearl Harbor (Lexington, Enterprise, and Saratoga) were joined by one of the two carriers from the Atlantic (Yorktown). These, with cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and supply ships, became nuclei for "task forces" which relentlessly prowled the Pacific. On April 2, 1942, the new carrier Hornet, with sixteen United States Army Mitchell bombers (B-25's) wedged on its deck, sailed from San Francisco with a message for Tokyo. Escorted by the Enterprise Task Force to a point 850 miles from the Japanese capital (and thus 2,100 miles from their assigned landing fields in China) the sixteen B-25's were taken off the plunging deck of the carrier by their army crews of eighty men led by Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle. Four hours later they dumped sixteen tons of bombs on the Japanese capital, and continued westward to China. Fifteen planes crashed in China after running out of gasoline, while the sixteenth found internment in Siberia. With Chinese help, seventy-one of eighty crew members returned to America. The whole episode was more spectacular than fruitful, but it did give a great boost to American morale, and frightened the Japanese so badly that they kept four Japanese air groups in Japan for defense.

During this period of the war the United States had amazingly correct information regarding Japanese war plans. Some of this came from our control over the Japanese codes, but much of the most critical intelligence came from other sources which have never been revealed. Through these channels, while Admiral William Halsey was still en route back from the Tokyo raid with two carriers, American naval authorities learned of two Japanese projects. The first of these planned to send an invasion force from Rabaul in New Britain, north of New Guinea, to capture Port Moresby on the southern shore of New Guinea. The second plan hoped to extend the Japanese defense perimeter eastward by seizing the Aleutian Islands and Midway Island in the northern Pacific. The former project was frustrated in the Battle of the Coral Sea, May 7-8, 1942, while the second project was disastrously defeated in the decisive Battle of Midway, June 4, 1942.

The Coral Sea, brilliantly blue and white, forms a rectangle more than 1,000 miles wide from east to west and slightly longer from north to south. Open on the south, it is boxed in on the other three sides with Australia to the west, the New Hebrides and New Caledonia to the east, and New Guinea and the Solomon Islands to the north. On May 8th, as the Japanese invasion force for Port Moresby came into this area from the northwest, it was intercepted by an American task force, including the carriers Lexington and Yorktown. The invasion force was turned back, a small Japanese carrier was sunk, and a large carrier severely damaged, while fires on both American carriers were extinguished. After the battle, however, the Lexington blew apart from gasoline fires ignited by an electric-motor spark deep within its hull.



Chapter 54. The Nazi Attack on Soviet Russia, 1941-1942 | Tragedy and Hope | Chapter 56. The Turning Tide, 1942-1943: Midway, El Alamein, French Africa, and Stalingrad