Napoleon is famously, though erroneously, credited with saying that “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” In fact, it was Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke who said in 1871 that “no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.”
It is hard, therefore, to write a hypothetical narrative of a hypothetical military campaign beyond its opening days, just as it is hard for a commander to prepare for all contingencies. Often things go as planned, but almost never exactly, and frequently not at all.
There are unexpected moments of failure and cowardice, just as there are unexpected moments of heroism and improbable successes. The best that a commander can hope for is that he has covered, or at least considered, the possible as well as the probable.
Had the Japanese invaded the West Coast, the United States might have lost most if not all of the opening battles. Masaharu Homma’s 14th Army might have defeated John Porter Lucas’ 7th Infantry Division in a battle between Olympia and Tacoma. If Joyce had committed Horace Fuller’s 41st Infantry Division, the Americans might have prevailed, since one of Homma’s divisions was south of Portland.
In actual history, Homma defeated the U.S. Army’s Philippine Division and 26th Cavalry Regiment in a 140-mile, week-long drive from Lingayen Gulf to Manila in December 1941. It is therefore reasonable to assume that he could have successfully made a sixty-mile drive from Olympia into Seattle via Tacoma in the same length of time.
Would Tacoma have been destroyed to intimidate Seattle into surrender? Would the 110,000 civilians in Tacoma have fled? What then of 370,000 people of Seattle? Certainly, the employees at Boeing and the shipyards of Seattle would have had time—more than would have been available in Southern California—to destroy their facilities and any completed aircraft to keep them out of Japanese hands.
Would Portland have been captured, and how soon? Would the U.S. Army or civilian personnel have been able to destroy the Route 99 bridge and the railroad bridges across the Columbia River, thus, isolating Oregon from Washington?
In history, Takashi Sakai’s 23rd Army captured Hong Kong in about two weeks during December 1941, though five days in the middle were spent in the preparation for crossing the harbor from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island. Once on the island, it took seven days to subdue a city with a population of 625,000 swelled by innumerable refugees. At San Diego, Sakai would have found a city with a prewar population of around 200,000, and many of these people would have fled inland before the Japanese closed in. From Hong Kong, there was nowhere to escape.
At San Diego, Sakai would have had a straight drive of fifty miles on a good highway without the interruption of a ten-mile water crossing. However, Hong Kong was defended by a collection of British battalions of less than division strength. In San Diego, Sakai would have found himself facing a Marine division augmented by a large number of sailors from the naval base. As the Battle of San Diego would have taken place a day or two after the invasion, there would also have been time for the U.S. Army to redeploy coastal artillery troops as infantry.
Tomoyuki Yamashita’s incredible campaign in December 1941 and January 1942 earned him the nickname “Tiger of Malaya.” Then, he captured “impregnable” Singapore in a week, even though he was outnumbered by more than two-to-one. If he had instead been auditioning for the role of “Tiger of Hollywood,” how would he have fared in Southern California?
With 2.8 million people, Los Angeles County alone had five times the population and fifteen times the area of Singapore. Beyond that, while Singapore is an island, Southern California stretches into the distance for hundreds of miles.
Yamashita would certainly have taken the airfields and the aircraft factories, and, if he possessed a flair for the dramatic, he could have staged an elaborate surrender ceremony at City Hall, though perhaps not until as late as December 18 or 19. In the ensuing days, he would have sent his army up the Arroyo Seco Parkway and through the Hollywood Hills into the vast San Fernando Valley, where he probably would have found the sprawling Lockheed facilities in Burbank ablaze. After that, he would have turned his army eastward toward the USAAF base at March Field in Riverside and Joe Stilwell’s Southern Sector headquarters at San Bernardino. Capturing the runways at March, and perhaps other facilities, would have been extremely useful, though Stilwell would have long since abandoned the California Hotel for a new headquarters in the mountains farther north and east.
Back in San Francisco, inside the Presidio, had he not managed to escape from the Presidio and reestablish his headquarters in the Sierras or elsewhere, General DeWitt would have faced the bitter humiliation of surrender, probably in a ceremony on the great Presidio Parade Ground which slopes down to its spectacular view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Had he done so, DeWitt would have the distinction of being the highest-ranking United States general to surrender his command, a distinction that in actual history would go to Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright after the fall of the Philippines in May 1942.
What exactly would DeWitt have surrendered? Theoretically, because he commanded the Fourth Army and the entire Western Defense Command, he would have surrendered all United States forces in California, Washington and Oregon, as well as in Alaska. There is little doubt that General Count Hisaichi Terauchi, commander of the America Expeditionary Army Group, would have demanded exactly this.
In the Philippines, prior to his own surrender, General Wainwright had anticipated this demand and had transferred the forces in the southern Philippines under Major General William Sharp to the command of General Douglas MacArthur in Australia. When Wainwright surrendered to Masaharu Homma, he intended to surrender only the forces under his immediate command on Corregidor. In turn, Homma refused his surrender and insisted that Wainwright surrender all American troops in the Philippines, including Sharp’s. Unless Wainwright did so, Homma told him, the Japanese would consider all captured American troops from Corregidor, Bataan and elsewhere, not as prisoners of war, but still as combatants—or essentially as hostages—subject to being killed. Faced with the prospect of a massacre, Wainwright complied with Homma’s demands and ordered Sharp, who was still fighting, to give up.
DeWitt could have transferred command of the Fourth Army and the Western Defense Command to Stilwell in Southern California, assuming that Stilwell could rally enough troops to continue to resist. Furthermore, there is every probability that President Roosevelt might have relieved DeWitt and ordered that any unit still capable of fighting do so and refuse any order to surrender. It is also hard to believe that, faced with an invasion of their home soil, American forces would have ignored any order to surrender and implacably avenged any massacre of captured American fighting men.
What might have happened in the days and weeks that may have followed the Pacific Coast invasion are open to speculation.
How would General Terauchi have ruled the Pacific Coast? As a nobleman, a former governor general of Korea and the ninth prime minister of Japan, he was a politician first, and a soldier second, so he may have erred on the side of conciliation. Faced now with ruling nine million Americans who did not want to be ruled by Japan, and who were well-armed and independence-minded, he almost certainly would have faced a long and intractable guerilla war that could not be won.
Would it have come to this at all? Would the Pacific Coast invasion and occupation plan have succeeded?
There were an enormous number of moving parts, and therefore a myriad of opportunities for it to go wrong. Still, it would have probably taken until January for Marshall to start sending reinforcements from the east, ample time for the Japanese to prepare their defenses.
The USAAF might have used bases in Spokane, Sacramento and Fresno to begin launching air attacks on the Japanese, but these bases were within range of Japanese medium bombers flying from the Coast. The next line would have been bases at Missoula, Salt Lake, and Phoenix, but these were around 1,500 round trip air miles from the targets and could be used only by heavy bombers. In December 1941, the USAAF had only about 200 B-17 Flying Fortresses and fewer than one hundred B-24 Liberators. With Boeing in Seattle and Consolidated in San Diego under Japanese control, there would be no more of either.
The U.S. Navy would have rushed battleships and carriers from the Atlantic Fleet. Via the Panama Canal, they would have arrived in strength by Christmas, but what if they had been intercepted by aircraft from the Shokaku and Zuikaku of Chuichi Hara’s 5th Carrier Division when they emerged from the Canal? If the canal locks were put out of action, the Atlantic Fleet would have had to spend more than a month traveling around Cape Horn. Had the fleet made it through to the Pacific, they might have won a Midway-style victory over the 5th Carrier Division, but they would still have other battles to fight, and they were far from home. Whereas the U.S. Navy at Midway was about 1,300 miles from its base at Pearl Harbor, the Atlantic Fleet operating off California would have been roughly 15,000 miles from Norfolk via Cape Horn.
If, by some measure of luck, the later land battles on the Pacific Coast would have been won by Americans, there is a big question whether World War II in the Pacific would have happened as it did, or whether, having thrown the invaders into the sea at great cost, the Americans would have been content to concede the South Pacific and Southeast Asia to the Japanese Empire.
Inside the Pacific Coast, the battles would have continued, with or without immediate reinforcements. The U.S. Army would have regrouped, and throughout the mountains of the West, well-armed civilians would have made life difficult for the invaders. In the Philippines and Southeast Asia the Japanese ruled though a combination of intimidation and currying favor with local populations fed up with colonial rule, but on the Pacific Coast, they would have faced an almost universally hostile population unwilling to submit easily to occupation. The situation would have required more carrot than stick, and even then, managing nearly 10 million independence-minded Americans would have been impossibly difficult.
Whether Terauchi chose to rule as a beneficent monarch or as a monster, the whole enterprise would probably have been doomed to failure on many levels. The Japanese would have been at the end of a supply chain that stretched over thousands of miles, and it would have consumed much of the available Japanese shipping, creating shortages and logistical nightmares throughout the Japanese Empire. Given that food shortages existed in Japan itself, the occupation would have needed to exploit the natural resources of the Pacific Coast states. To take over the vast agricultural lands, they would have faced the same labor shortages as the Americans did, something that might have been resolved by attempting to use slave labor, but this would have backfired.
They would have occupied the aircraft factories, oil fields, refineries, and shipyards, but the Japanese would have had to import management and technical personnel, and even factory labor, or face threats of sabotage. Then, of course, there would also have been the subtle impediments to using American industrial plants, issues ranging from non-metric calibration to English-language documentation.
Although a great deal of American manufacturing would have been lost, the industrial powerhouse that stretched from Chicago through Detroit and into the Northeast would have been untouched. Likewise, all the great shipyards of the Atlantic and the Gulf Coasts, and the oilfields and refineries of Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana would have still been in American hands. Most of the biggest plane makers would have been gone, but steps had already been taken to move some of their production inland, and manufacturers such as Bell, Curtiss, Grumman, Martin, and Republic would have been among those that remained. Also still available to the American industrial machine was virtually all of its aircraft and other vehicle engine manufacturing. History shows that American industry did rise to the occasion during World War II, and that it achieved a production miracle of unprecedented proportions.
Most important, the sole focus of the United States armed forces and the American people would have been the reconquest of the West Coast. Everything would have been directed toward this purpose.
The American fighting spirit would have been galvanized as never before. Having shed so much blood in the creation and preservation of an independent union in the wars between 1776 and 1865, there remained in 1941 and 1942, an unwillingness in the American spirit to surrender when that spirit did not perceive itself to have been defeated—and indeed, that spirit is something which cannot be defeated—and, therefore, America would ultimately have triumphed.