THERE HAD BEEN plenty of indications that Japan was heading towards war, although none that suggested the US Pacific Fleet based at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii was the target. In fact, Admiral Husband Kimmel, the commander of the Pacific Fleet, had sent his three aircraft carriers west towards the Pacific islands of Midway and Wake in case hostilities broke out, which meant, crucially, they had not been in harbour when the Japanese struck.
Japan’s move towards war with the West had been a long time in coming and, as with Germany’s aggression, at its core lay the urgent need for resources. The herald for this change in Japanese ambition lay in the Meiji Revolution of 1868, in which practical imperial rule was restored and the old feudal shogunate thrown aside. While the Emperor was restored, practical government was handed to an oligarchy that was conscious that Japan was lagging industrially and commercially behind Britain, the United States, France and other global powers. In the decades that followed, Japan modernized very fast, with a massive growth in industry and infrastructure. Shipyards were built, so too was a national railway, and the largely rural population began to migrate rapidly to the cities. The trouble was, Japan was fairly resource-poor and her burgeoning urban population and growing middle class needed the food and comforts of a modern, industrialized nation. Britain, similar in size to Japan, had a large global trading empire and overseas possessions; clearly, Japan needed overseas possessions of her own.
Japan had invaded Manchuria in north-east China in 1931, but, while there were numerous engagements and sporadic fighting in the years that followed, it was not until 1937 that Japan and China fell into full-scale war. Despite sweeping Japanese victories – and merciless brutality towards many hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians – the Chinese, under the military rule of Chiang Kai-shek, offered more stubborn resistance than Japan had anticipated. In fact, Japan’s situation was not improving through war with China but worsening. In the summer of 1939, there was a drought and critical water shortage, made worse by a shortage of coal, which led to restrictions in electricity. The drought, which also extended to Japanese-controlled Korea, led to a drastically reduced production of rice. By early 1940, the trade treaty with the USA had lapsed with no hope of renewal. Fear that imports, especially those from the US, would be cut off, led to urgent purchasing of overseas war materiel, which in turn meant foreign-exchange reserves were being allowed to run low.
By the autumn of 1941, Japan held most of the eastern coastal area of China and Indochina (Vietnam), but at great cost and with ongoing resistance and guerrilla fighting with which to contend. Militarily, Japan was reasonably well equipped with soldiers, aircraft and a large Navy, but was dependent on America, especially, for steel, oil and other essential raw materials. Once the American source was cut off, her ability to build on that would be limited unless she could successfully tap the resources of the Far East, the best of which lay in the hands of Britain, the US and the Dutch.
As with Germany, there was also a pressing and increasing shortage of food. Japan was not self-sufficient and, as always happened when prosperity and urbanization grew rapidly, how to feed the burgeoning population was a major conundrum. The answer, Japan’s leaders believed, was the creation of a Pacific bloc, but that would mean war with Britain, America and the colonial Dutch.
Britain and the United States had been watching Japanese aggression with increasing alarm throughout the 1930s. The Tripartite Pact between Japan, Germany and Italy in September 1940 was hardly an encouraging sign for the West, but it was the Japanese move in September 1940 into French Indochina, geographically close to Malaya, Singapore and the US Philippines, then the non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in April 1941 that rapidly escalated matters. Japan and Russia had been old enemies and had clashed in the 1930s. So long as the two were at loggerheads, Britain and the US had correctly assumed that Japan would not risk further conflict with the West.
None the less, as Germany launched its offensive against the Soviet Union in June 1941, both Britain’s and America’s leaders still felt confident that Japan was unlikely to risk attacking their possessions in the Far East any time soon. Even so, tensions in the Far East continued to rise. By July 1941, with ever-more Japanese troops moving into Indochina, the United States finally imposed an embargo on all oil and fuel. The following month, on 17 August, President Roosevelt warned that the US would take steps against Japan if it attacked any neighbouring countries, including the oil-rich Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia). American diplomacy then tried to warn Japan further by increasing aid to Chang Kaishek’s Chungking Government, and by sending a number of B-17 bombers to the US Philippines and transferring the Pacific Fleet to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
There were plenty in Japan who believed that, if it came to conflict, the combined might of the USA and Britain would be too great, especially since Japan was also still at war with China. One of those was Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe, who preferred to find a diplomatic solution. Konoe offered to withdraw from most of China and even Indochina after peace had been made with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists.
These proposals were rejected by the Americans, however. Konoe also offered to meet Roosevelt for talks, but the President rejected this proposal too, despite the recommendations of the US Ambassador in Japan to the contrary. Roosevelt, unquestionably a great statesman, arguably demonstrated a lack of judgement in rejecting this offer. Tragically, the Americans had underestimated Japan’s dilemma, and in so doing overestimated the strength of their own hand.
By October, Konoe’s Cabinet was fatally split over whether they should continue to pursue a peaceful solution or risk war; there was, however, a growing realization that enough concessions had already been offered to the Americans. Thus, a diplomatic impasse had now been created. And the alternative to that was war.
Events now moved swiftly. After a self-imposed deadline for a diplomatic resolution passed with no progress, the Japanese Prime Minister resigned. His replacement, appointed by Emperor Hirohito, was General Hideki Tojo, one of Japan’s leading hawks. Since Tojo not only retained his position as Army Minister, but also became Home Minister, his power and influence was suddenly immense. At an Imperial Conference in early November 1941, his new Government concluded eventual war with the Western powers was unavoidable.
This was based on a number of assumptions. The first was that Germany would win in Europe, and the second that the British, already weakened, would be unable to defend her Far East territories successfully. The United States was more of a problem. Not only had the US provided most of Japan’s resources for war, but Japan, still a growing nation, had lacked sufficient designers, engineers, draughtsmen, mechanics and pilots. Many had been trained in the US, while Japan had also bought designs from America. All this would be cut off the moment war was declared. The answer was to strike swiftly and decisively and in such a way as to give Japan breathing space to reap the benefits of new conquests. The plan was thus as follows: rapidly to grab British and Dutch possessions and eventually to come to a settlement with the Americans based on destruction of the US Fleet.
Ten days later, on 15 November, the basic strategy for war, the ‘Plan for the Successful Conclusion of Hostilities with Great Britain, the United States, the Netherlands and the Chungking Regime’, was agreed. Japan had crossed its Rubicon.
Out of this had emerged the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese and US navies were of roughly equal size except in one area: aircraft carriers, of which the US had three in the Pacific and Japan had eleven. The aim of a stealth attack by Japanese naval aircraft flown off her aircraft carriers was to cripple the US Pacific Fleet long enough to allow Japan to get her foothold in the Pacific region. By the time America was strong enough to fight back, Japanese strength would have grown sufficiently to be able to resist. That was the theory, at any rate. Like Hitler’s decision to invade Poland, however, it rested on a large number of ifs and buts, and, as such, was an incredibly high-risk strategy. The Tojo Government, however, had convinced itself not only that it had no choice, but also that it would succeed.
The subsequent attack on Pearl Harbor was brilliantly executed and certainly caught the Americans off guard. It was, however, flawed, because Pearl Harbor was quite shallow, which meant the ships attacked were grounded rather than comprehensively sunk, which would make salvage probable. Second, the all-important American aircraft carriers were not there. Third, the attack coincided with the moment US rearmament was about to accelerate.
Pearl Harbor stunned America and particularly her leaders, who had hoped recent measures would be enough to deter Japan. Logically, the risk to the Japanese had seemed too great. Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, heard the news directly from Roosevelt, but his own reaction was one of relief that the long period of indecision was over and that a crisis had come that would at last bring the country together. ‘I feel that this country united,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘has practically nothing to fear.’1 The drawn-out arguments in Congress were now a thing of the past; no longer would the administration have to produce arms on a wartime scale with a peacetime attitude; the strikes that had so blighted 1941 would surely be behind them too. The business of war would be easier now they were in it themselves.
In Britain that Sunday evening, 7 December, Churchill was at the Prime Minister’s official country residence, Chequers, dining with John Winant, the US Ambassador, and Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s personal envoy to Britain. Quite casually, they switched on the radio to listen to the news and heard a small comment about a Japanese attack on US shipping in Hawaii. They almost missed the item, but Churchill’s butler then came in and confirmed it. He had heard it on the wireless too. There was silence around the table, then Churchill got up and went through to his office to call the President.
‘It’s quite true,’ Roosevelt told him.2 ‘They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now.’
Churchill was overjoyed: while he had remained unshaken in his belief that Britain would be ultimately victorious, the route to that victory now seemed more clear. ‘United we could subdue everybody else in the world,’ he noted grandly.3 ‘Many disasters, immeasurable cost and tribulation lay ahead, but there was no more doubt about the end.’
Hitler’s response was, curiously, much the same as Churchill’s. ‘We can’t lose the war at all,’ he exclaimed.4 ‘We now have an ally which has never been conquered in 3,000 years.’ For him, Japan’s entry into the war was no death knell, but rather a renewed cause for hope. With the United States doing more and more sabre-rattling, Hitler had accepted it was increasingly likely that America would, at some point, enter the war. His nightmare was that the US and Japan would resolve their differences, leaving both Britain and America to fight Germany without being drawn into conflict in the Far East.
Following the Japanese decision to prepare for war against the Allies, they immediately began contacting Berlin to find out what Germany’s attitude might be. From Hitler’s point of view, this was the best possible news, because they now had the chance to fight a joint war against the US rather than being left to fight it alone. Suddenly Germany had the opportunity to create a global strategic alliance, not just a European one. And so the Führer had immediately made it clear that if Japan declared war on the US, then he would follow suit.
He now had a revised strategy in mind, although it was not one he chose to share with his senior commanders. The British, he reasoned, would lose in the Far East, which would fatally weaken them. Collapse would then be inevitable – so that was Britain sorted. Without having to worry about Britain, German victory in the Soviet Union would be equally inevitable – they had learned the lessons, and this coming summer of 1942 they would complete what they had failed to do the previous summer. There was also hope that Japan would be able to help against the Soviet Union too; at any rate, Japan would certainly be able to tie down a substantial part of Anglo-US forces for a considerable period. With this in mind, a two-ocean offensive would be impossible for the United States and, clearly, the Far East would have to take precedence.
This was a strategy based on wishful thinking rather than any careful or considered appreciation. Hitler had never been to Japan – he had barely travelled outside the Reich – and apart from ambassadorial reports had no real understanding of the Japanese military other than what he was told or what could be studied on paper. As usual, he had made no effort at all to see others from their own perspective but continued to view them through the prism of his own exceptionally narrow and ideologically warped world-view. That the Japanese were – compared with his own view of Aryans – racially inferior, was not a concern. That this contradicted his racial ideology towards Slavs or black Africans, for example, does not appear to have crossed his mind.
So it was that while Britain immediately declared war on Japan, four days later Hitler and his entourage headed to Berlin. There, without any consultation with his senior commanders, the Führer declared war on the United States. Principally, this was to help bind Japan to the now global war, but also because he preferred to be the initiator rather than the recipient of a declaration of war. What Hitler failed to realize, however, was that his declaration of war was exactly what Roosevelt needed to persuade the American people of the policy that had already been agreed with the British in the ABC-1 talks at the start of the year, and again at the meeting at Placentia Bay in August: that the priority of the Allied war effort should be Nazi Germany not Imperial Japan. Without Hitler’s declaration of war, persuading both Washington and the wider American public to this way of thinking would almost certainly have been a great deal more difficult.
On the eve of BARBAROSSA, Nazi Germany had just one enemy. Now, on the evening of Thursday, 11 December, just under six months later, it had three: Great Britain (and her Empire), the Soviet Union, and now the United States, each with access to vast pools of both manpower and resources. In contrast, Germany had neither. Already the Wehrmacht was in crisis: not enough planes, not enough men, not enough armaments, and certainly not enough U-boats. Germany was short of money, short of food, and short of coal, fuel and other crucial resources needed for all-out long-term war. In the last war, Germany had signed the Armistice in November 1918 because the country had run out of money and was no longer going to win. Men like Walter Rohland, Fritz Todt and even von Brauchitsch understood that the same moment had arrived in this war too, which was why they had urged Hitler to seek a way out.
That, however, was not Hitler’s way. For him, the world was a very black-and-white place, and Germany would either be triumphant and there really would be a Thousand Year Reich, or it would fail in this struggle and Armageddon would follow. In this second week in December 1941, that the latter now seemed almost certainly the fate that would befall Germany was not something Hitler was ready yet to acknowledge.
His will and his iron grip on the German people ensured that, as a result, the war still had a long, long way to go.