Marines on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, wiring the US flag onto a pole for the first flag raising at that site. It was later deemed “not impressive enough” and they found a better, larger flag and flag pole and that became the most famous picture to come out of the Pacific. (Tom Laemlein)
ON THE EVENING OF December 8, 1941, I sat huddled with my parents in front of our radio, listening to the first reports coming in of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. I was five at the time but the impact of the news was so great that I can still recall it clearly. Although we were in Melbourne, Australia, and a long way from the scene of the American disaster, there were only meagre British, Dutch, and Australian forces between ourselves and the oncoming Imperial Japanese forces. Two days later we were shaken by news of the sinking off the coast of Malaya of the only British capital ships in regional waters, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. We began building air raid shelters in our back-gardens and thinking about evacuation to the countryside. My father patrolled the streets at night as an Air Raid Precautions warden, enforcing the blackout of house and external lighting to deny any Japanese bombers an aiming mark.
How had this disaster for the United States and its friends and Allies happened in so short a time? Could the advance of the Japanese armed forces be halted? What would it take to hurl them back onto their home soil and force them to surrender? This very timely volume offers in depth answers to the second and third of these questions, but let me address some thoughts by way of reply to the first, with gratitude to my paternal grandfather who fought against the Boxer Rebellion in China, 1900–01, and in World War I, on each occasion with Japanese as allies. He had 40 years of naval experience between 1888 and 1928, and was a keen observer of strategic matters in the Pacific. In turn, he helped to develop my interest in these issues while I was in my teens.
Japan discovered the potential of modern seapower in the 1880s and through British naval tutelage and the purchase of British warships, it soon had a powerful fleet led by competent officers. The Japanese sank the Chinese Navy in two major battles of 1894 (the Yalu River) and 1895 (Wei Haiwei), and proved themselves as the top naval power of north-east Asia. Japan had been fostering the expertise of the remarkable man who was to be known as “the Nelson of the East,” Admiral Heihachiro Togo, by sending him to Britain for seven years of training and experience. In 1902 the British went so far as to conclude a formal alliance with Japan – which was particularly helpful for Britain, Australia, and New Zealand in resisting German pressures during World War I. The combination of even more powerful British-made warships and Togo’s leadership enabled the Japanese to defeat the strong fleet that Russia sent to the Far East at the battle of Tsushima in 1905. As a result, Japan was fully established as a major Pacific naval power.
It took remarkably little time for the Japanese to develop naval airpower. In September 1914 they made the first successful attack by naval aircraft in the history of warfare when they struck the Germans in the battle of Tsingtao, China. Having removed the German Navy from western Pacific waters, the only potential rival that the bold, thrusting Japanese naval leadership then faced was the United States Navy. The Americans had been keeping a close eye on the Japanese since their victory over the Russians in 1905, and in 1906 the US moved ahead to develop a war plan to defeat any future Japanese naval threat to US interests in the Pacific. American authorities formally adopted the final version of this plan, Plan Orange, in 1924, although it had its origins in the thinking of Rear Admiral Raymond P. Rodgers from as early as 1911. It assumed that, in the event of hostilities, the initial Japanese pressure would be applied to the Philippines and the small Pacific island bases of the US. The American response, after a period of mobilization and force concentration, would be to re-take their own island bases, and remove the Japanese from theirs, while US naval forces were en route to relieve the Philippines. The US fleet would then confront the Imperial Japanese Navy in a fight to the finish. Japan was then to be brought to her knees by a naval blockade.
The Japanese, for their part, correctly assessed the nature of the US war plan and made their own which would allow a US fleet to reach the Philippines, while suffering losses from Japanese naval air and submarine attacks along the way. This weakened fleet would then be annihilated by the Japanese in a great naval battle, similar to the one that the US Plan Orange envisaged.
The development of the striking power of the respective fleets in the 1920s and 30s was thus crucial to the course of the war in the Pacific. Another factor strengthening the Japanese hand was its acquisition of mandates from the League of Nations to govern the former German islands of the northern and central Pacific: the Carolines, the Marianas, and the Marshalls. These mandates placed the islands virtually under Japanese law but, like all mandate holders, they were not permitted to fortify them. Nonetheless, that is what the Japanese did, creating a strategic barrier through which US forces intending to relieve the Philippines in a future war would have to fight their way.
The Japanese became the object of US diplomatic pressure soon after World War I. The Americans wanted to end the Anglo-Japanese alliance and to constrain the further growth of Japanese naval power. Both objectives were secured at the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–22. The Japanese were both humiliated and angry at this outcome, and this in turn fed the tensions that caused the war in the Pacific. Severe limitations on Japanese migration to the US, pressure to withdraw from former German territory in China, and trade restrictions aggravated the Japanese further during the 1920s and 30s. All of this played into the hands of military and political leaders who wanted to exploit Japan’s naval strength in the Pacific to create a new international order there and in China.
In the meantime both the US and Japan had gone ahead with the planning and development of through-deck aircraft carriers, so that by the 1930s both navies had formidable airpower capabilities. Despite their differences and enmity, the Japanese and the Americans made sporadic efforts to settle their differences peacefully. These initiatives proved unsuccessful and the Japanese finally decided in 1941 to use force. In turn, the British, having alienated the Japanese by commencing construction of a great naval base at Singapore, had scaled down their presence, and were no longer a great naval power in the Pacific. By 1941 Britain had little power to spare as it was heavily engaged in action in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. When the Japanese decided to strike they had only the United States to focus on, enabling the execution of the bold and complex plan for striking the US Navy in its base at Pearl Harbor.
This book examines the complex series of events leading up to the attack of December 7, 1941, the attack itself, and the bloody consequences which were to follow. I invite the reader to study and evaluate the expert views set forth in the following chapters, and to think about the question of whether so great a catastrophe could befall a major power in the Pacific in the 21st century.
Professor Robert O’Neill
June 2011