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A VICTORY THAT GUARANTEED DEFEAT
By Bill Fawcett
Know your enemy, know your enemy, know your enemy.
Two mistakes were made in December of 1941 that led directly to the defeat of both Japan and Germany in WWII. What is ironic about those mistaken decisions is that both were contrary to the actual needs of those nations. The decisions not only proved wrong over the long term, but were counterproductive at the time they were made.
It began with Japan. That nation was a modern industrial power that had been an ally of the British and Americans in WWI. Its problem was a lack of resources. Virtually everything that was needed to maintain a modern industrial state had to be imported. This included raw materials, from steel and oil to rubber and food. Virtually every decision and action the Japanese took up to 1941 was inspired by this need. Their first efforts to ensure the flow of materials they needed was the invasion of Manchuria. This helped provide minerals, but little else, as the country itself was a cold, forbidding waste. There was no chance for the Japanese to export excess population or to grow crops of significant yields. After absorbing Manchuria, now renamed Manchukuo, the next source of raw materials the Japanese eyed was China.
There was a long tradition of outside powers exploiting China. The European nations had maintained enclaves, such as Hong Kong, and forced trading concessions from the Chinese for more than a century. The Dutch and French held most of Indochina, and the Americans had grabbed the Philippines from the Spanish in 1898. Why should the Japanese not emulate what the other advanced nations had already done and grab what they wanted from the weaker nations around them? So Japan invaded China in 1931, quickly occupying much of northern China and most of its coast. But the Chinese resisted and this meant constant fighting on a large scale. Two million Japanese soldiers fought in China in the 1930s. This made the country a drain on, not a provider of, resources and put pressure on the Japanese leaders. For the next several years, the necessary raw materials could be imported from the largest Pacific Rim supplier of basic industrial materials, the United States. But the sheer brutality of the Japanese occupation of China eventually caused the USA to stop shipping it some strategic supplies.
So, to accomplish their goal of self-sufficiency in natural resources, the Japanese decided to seize the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina. These were resource-rich areas controlled by two colonial powers that had been conquered by Japan’s ally, Nazi Germany. They were virtually defenseless and, when attacked, fell easily. What concerned the Japanese was not France or the Netherlands. Both nations were under the boot of Nazi Germany and there was little their governments in exile could do. The Japanese concern was for the British and Americans. So long as the USA held the Philippines and, thereby, the central Pacific Ocean, it could easily interdict from the air all the merchant shipping sailing from the Indies to Japan. The Japanese solution to this problem was their big mistake. That solution was to knock out the American Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor and then occupy the Philippines themselves. Destroying the only other large fleet in the Pacific Ocean would ensure Japanese control of the sea-lanes and allow them to easily invade the Philippines. Once they occupied the Philippines, Japanese shipping would be safe from enemy aircraft.
It was short-term thinking, without consideration of all possible options. The plan also overlooked some important points about America and its Pacific navy. Simply put, there was no need to be in a war with the USA. Many Japanese leaders and commanders had worked and studied there. They knew the industrial potential of the nation. Contrary to the myth of foppish jazz lovers fostered by both their own and Nazi propaganda, they also knew that, if attacked, Americans could fight well. Nor would the loss of the Pacific fleet force America to accept any treaty the Japanese proposed. There was no chance Japan could actually attack the US mainland, or even hold on to Hawaii, for any significant period of time.
The political situation in America was such that, even though President Franklin Roosevelt was determined to fight against Hitler and feared what might happen if the Nazis were left to occupy all of Europe, the antiwar feeling limited American support of Britain and Russia. The president was so frustrated with the strong isolationist feelings of his country that the baseless rumor that he allowed the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor is still repeated. America did not want a European war. It certainly would not have been enthusiastic to fight an Asian war, whose purpose was to gain colonies lost by other countries. It seems unlikely that Roosevelt could have rallied a nation that was unwilling to fight to free France to instead fight a hard and distant war over Dutch possessions—on the far side of the world, in places most Americans had never heard of. Even if the Japanese had attacked the Philippines, the response would have been strong, but the USA would have been open to negotiations. But rather than try a diplomatic solution or attacking in the traditional manner, the Japanese leaders chose the one option guaranteed to change a reluctant participant into a devoted enemy. This was the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, designed to knock out the Pacific fleet. It was just about the only way to guarantee that all Americans would rally behind the war effort. Yet the Japanese chose it.
On both a military and a political level, the attack on Pearl Harbor was pretty much the worst possible way to achieve their goal of controlling Indochina. The attack was not even needed to guarantee Japanese naval supremacy in the western Pacific. If the Pacific fleet had sailed to support MacArthur in the Philippines, it would likely have been a disaster. There were only three fleet carriers in the Pacific, compared to six for the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN). There were eight American battleships and many smaller supporting ships, but most were of WWI vintage. The Japanese fleet was newer, better trained, and included two massive battleships armed with eighteen-inch guns, whose abilities were totally unknown to the Americans.
The American naval air doctrine was not yet refined and would also have left the US vulnerable. For example, it called for each carrier to operate independently at some distance from the others. What this meant was that all six Japanese carriers, working together, with their more highly trained pilots and superior aircraft, would have defeated each American carrier, working alone. Nor would the American surface ships have done well. Even if most of Admiral Kimmel’s ships had survived the multitude of waiting Japanese submarines (which were armed with the revolutionary Long Lance torpedoes) on their three-thousand-mile journey, they would have been outmatched by the main Japanese fleet when they met. With the USN force outranged, outgunned, and without control of the air, a Tsushima-style defeat was possible, even likely.
The attack on Pearl Harbor was a complete mistake, one that was years in the planning and brilliantly executed, but unnecessary. Diplomatically, the nature of the attack made certain that the desired treaty with the USA would never happen and that Roosevelt could rally a divided nation behind the war effort. Although militarily, the IJN was superior enough to badly punish the Pacific fleet, or worse, it was a victory that guaranteed eventual defeat.
The second decision made because of Pearl Harbor made even less sense. On December 11, 1941, Adolf Hitler declared war on an already-enraged United States. This was Hitler’s decision and no one else’s. At this point, having led Germany in successfully invading and defeating most of Europe, he personally controlled the nation. But Hitler had nothing to gain by formally going to war against the United States. President Roosevelt had long favored supporting the nations opposing the Nazis. But he had run into massive resistance in Congress and the idea of a new war in Europe was unpopular. Just a few days before the Pearl Harbor attack, there had been a massive antiwar rally, with thousands demanding that America stay out of Europe. Tons of goods and food were already crossing the Atlantic to England and newly attacked Russia. Declaring war would allow German U-boats to attack the eastern American coast, but this was not enough to even slow the shipments. The bottom line is that, viewed through the lens of history, Hitler gained virtually nothing by declaring war on the United States. So why did he do it? Perhaps he expected gratitude from the Japanese. He probably hoped they would attack Russia where it bordered Manchuria. Yet records and biographies show that the Japanese never had any interest in getting involved in another land war in Russia. Their army was already strained with occupying and suppressing much of China.
So, by declaring war on the United States four days after Pearl Harbor, the Nazis gained nothing but fewer restrictions on where their submarines could hunt. What Hitler lost was this: on December 6, 1941, a large number of American voters and Congress had opposed any involvement in Europe. So many that their president could do little even to assist Britain. On December 12, still angry over the sneak attack, all Americans actively supported war on both fronts. Roosevelt got to direct a great deal of the American war effort to Europe, as he desired. The flow of materials to Germany’s enemies increased and soon tens of thousands of soldiers would follow. In the long run, forcing the entry of the USA into the war virtually guaranteed a resource-poor Germany that the largest industrial, food-producing, and financial power in the world would be its enemy.
So why did Hitler make the mistake of declaring war on an already enraged United States? Certainly the timing could not have been worse. It may just come down to that constant theme in any book about mistakes: Victory Disease. Germany had conquered France in weeks, and occupied Norway, Denmark, the Benelux countries, and Poland without taking significant losses. At this point, Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia, was going magnificently. Entire Russian armies were being surrounded and destroyed by the Führer’s panzers and the Red Army was falling back. Literally tens of thousands of square miles of Russian land had already been occupied. Expectations of a total victory within weeks were so high that no preparation was made for winter coats, because everyone in power was sure that the war would be over before it got cold.
The attack on Pearl Harbor was a mistake and Hitler’s reaction to it was almost as great a blunder. Both had the opposite effect of what was expected. Had the Pearl Harbor attack not happened, it might have taken many more months or years before the United States joined WWII. Germany would have been tied up in Russia, but Japan could have been able to move on Australia, as the Japanese once hoped, or at least entrench itself on more islands and in Indochina. Had Roosevelt had his way, there might not even have been a war against Japan. He saw a Nazi Europe with manufacturing capability as great as the Americas united under the Nazis as the greatest threat. Even after Pearl Harbor, a much greater part of the American war effort was directed to Europe and Russia than to Japan.
So if the Japanese had not made the mistake of carrying out a sneak attack, American isolationist and antiwar factions might have given them months, or even years, before they had to fight against the US. If they had just done nothing, it was even possible that Roosevelt would have negotiated with them, in order to free himself to act against the Nazis. If Hitler had not reacted with his declaration of war, he might also have bought himself and the Third Reich many more months before the American people plunged into another world war. Neither the German nor the Japanese mistake was necessary. Both went about accomplishing their desires in the wrong way, and their actions had the opposite effect of that intended. The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war it inspired in Adolf Hitler were mistakes that greatly contributed to both nations losing the war.