Pacific Onslaught: 7th Dec. 1941/7th Feb. 1943

Military explosion

Introduction by Barrie Pitt

It is not generally appreciated in the West that, for Japan, the attack on Pearl Harbor was just another event in a war she had already been waging for over four years. Undoubtedly it was an extremely important event, but one undertaken not so much for reasons of hostility to the United States—though this certainly existed—as for the necessity to obtain the essential raw materials which would enable her to consolidate her hard-won gains in China.

When Japan went to war against China in 1937 she did so with the tacit permission and indeed encouragement of the United States, who wanted Japanese ambition diverted from the Pacific and also as much commercial advantage as could be obtained from any situation. As month followed month, the Japanese armies by their very success moved further and further away from the homeland, needing more and more trucks to move the men, more armoured vehicles to protect thin-skinned transport, and more air cover to protect them all. And much more oil to fuel everything.

At first Japan had little difficulty in securing everything she needed, and her military adventure prospered, driving deeper and deeper into China, occupying more and more territory. Then came 1940 and a sudden, severe curtailing of essential supplies; in September America imposed an embargo on rubber and in July 1941 froze all Japanese assets in the United States and announced an oil embargo against ‘all aggressors’—letting Japan know quite clearly that this was a category in which she herself was included.

Almost ninety per cent of Japan’s oil supplies vanished at a stroke, together with important proportions of other essentials. Japan was faced with either abandoning the hardly-won gains of two years’ fighting, together with a loss of prestige and face which no eastern nation could afford, or else acquiring other sources of supply. As it happened, other sources of the essential oil were not far away; Borneo, Java, and Sumatra could supply Japan’s foreseeable needs and there was also what could be regarded as a reserve supply farther north in Burma—but the only way in which to obtain them was by the rapid, comprehensive, and successful military occupation of a vast area.

Different nations possess different philosophies and different attitudes to such matters as war, because they have experienced different histories. As a result of the tradition of western thought, we of the West tend to look upon 7th December 1941—the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor—as The Day of Infamy, and on 15th February 1942—the day Singapore surrendered—as a Day of Tragedy.

There is a different point of view. To the Japanese 7th December 1941 was the day on which they chose enormous risk, with valour and honour, instead of weak capitulation with cowardice and shame; and 15th February 1942 was The Day of Infamy, when, to their incredulous eyes, beings wearing the uniform of soldiers were so lost to all idea of honour that they gave up fighting while still in possession of their faculties, while they still possessed arms with which to defy their foes. One Japanese soldier was so stricken by the sight that, even while his spirits were buoyed up by victory, he was made to feel ashamed of his humanity by this demonstration that human beings could act so basely.

Japan obtained the sources of oil, and the equally essential clear passageway for the oil back to the mainland, in an explosion of military energy which astounded the world. As Dr Kennedy says in this fascinating book, ‘The Japanese onslaught in the Far East was one of the most successfully swift and extensive campaigns in the history of warfare. Within four months they had captured Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, southern Burma and most of the Philippines; within another month Corregidor was to surrender and the British be pushed out of Burma. And the cost to Japan of this great victory?—15,000 men, 380 aircraft and 4 destroyers.’

And this did not seem to be the end. The Battle of the Coral Sea did not immediately appear as an American victory, and indeed it needed the prescience of Yamamoto to realise that Midway was a disaster for Japan from which it was unlikely she would be allowed to recover. The bitter agonies of Guadalcanal and the Kokoda Trail would last for many months before signs appeared that the flood tide of the Japanese Empire was over—was in fact about to turn.

This vast panorama of military conquest is depicted here by Dr Kennedy with a lucidity and excitement which compels the highest admiration, and I have no doubt that all readers of the pages which follow will anxiously await its sequel, now in preparation, which will tell the story of the long road back for the Allies, and the eventual collapse of Japanese military ambition.

Origins of the Pacific war

The war in the Far East was well into its fifth year when Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japanese aircraft on the morning of 7th December 1941. Moreover, this act, although it came as a tremendous shock to most of the world, was in its way merely another extension, albeit a large one, of a conflict which had been steadily widened in scope since the beginning of that war. Indeed, in view of the events which had preceded this attack it is clear that the destruction of the US Pacific battlefleet was nothing more than the logical military consequence of a far larger struggle, which had become deadlocked in the hills and river valleys of China. The Pacific war, as we westerners fondly like to think of it, was a side-effect of Japan’s China war, which began in July 1937.

The origins of this struggle are to be found back in the 19th Century, in the period after the Meiji restoration of 1868, when Japan transformed herself from being a feudal state into a highly industrialised and modernised one. Having imitated the advanced western nations so far, it was not surprising that the Japanese should wish to go further and obtain overseas possessions, just as the imperialist powers had done. Here, however, the difficulty arose, for the latter were not prepared to see a yellow-skinned people enter their rather exclusive club and share the privileges which they were hoping to secure for themselves in Asia. In 1894/95 Japan fought and defeated a weaker, more backward China and attempted to annex important parts of her coastal territories; but due to the pressure of Russia, France and Germany most of these gains were given back to the Chinese. In 1904, taking alarm at the Russian encroachments in Manchuria, Japan launched a surprise attack upon the Czar’s Far Eastern Fleet anchoring in Port Arthur. In the following year, she defeated the Russian army at Mukden and annihilated the Russian fleet at Tsushima, thereby forcing her enemy to sue for peace. She had now become a power worthy of respect and one without whose co-operation little could be done in the Far East; she had also shown that the white man could be defeated.

Yet to the Japanese people the gains from this war were scarcely enough to satisfy their prestige and sense of power, or to provide sufficient markets and raw materials for their rapidly growing industries. Compared with the rich empires of other nations, her overseas territories were still puny and insignificant. Moreover, although advanced industrially, Japan was still somewhat of a feudal state, where the Emperor was looked on as divine and where the warrior rather than the businessman was exalted. The internal forces pressing for expansion were very strong and the army was very influential politically, while the foundations for democracy remained weak. Although further gains were made in 1914, when Japan, liberally interpreting her 1902 alliance obligations to Britain, seized the German sphere in north China as well as the Marshall, Caroline and Mariana groups in the Pacific, her ambitions were not satisfied. Believing the other powers to be too engaged in the European war to trouble about events in the Far East, she made her ‘Twenty-one Demands’ upon China, which would have given her virtual predominance in that ramshackle empire. Alarmed at this development, however, Britain and the United States pressed Japan so hard in 1915 that the plan was dropped; but of course the desire to dominate China, which to the Japanese appeared to be a natural area for exploitation, was not erased, merely suppressed. Indeed, one could say that the wish to carve out a great empire in China was perhaps the leading aim in Japanese foreign and military policy for the fifty years following 1894.

Japanese troops man the gun of an armoured train in their lightning conquest of Manchuria

Moreover, the crisis over the Twenty-one Demands had revealed the key political alignment of the future: Britain joined with the United States, both anxious to preserve China’s independence—and Japan eager to reduce it. The Versailles settlement of 1919, which confirmed Japan’s acquisition of Germany’s former colonies, did not change this state of affairs, for the Japanese still felt deprived while the Americans were alarmed because the Philippines were now cut off from Hawaii by Japan’s possession of the Pacific island mandates. War plans and calculations were already being made, and Japan became America’s Number One potential enemy while the United States occupied that position in the Japanese naval calculations; on the other hand, the Japanese army was always more fearful of Soviet Russia, whose large forces in Asia were regarded as a much greater threat to Tokyo’s continental designs.

During the 1920s a number of developments drove Japan and the western powers further apart. Britain, under heavy pressure from the United States, terminated the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1921; three years later, the British decided to construct a naval base at Singapore. Furthermore, the international naval and diplomatic discussions in Washington in 1922, which had placed the Japanese battle fleet on an inferior basis (the ratio was 5-5-3) compared with the British and American navies, persuaded a reluctant Tokyo to hand back Shantung province to the Chinese, and guaranteed the maintenance of the political and military status quo in the Far East. Finally, the United States closed the door to all Japanese immigrants in 1924. All this appeared to indicate that the Anglo-Saxon powers were ‘lining up’ against Japan in order to prevent her further expansion, and the liberal Japanese politicians who had negotiated these Washington agreements were to be strongly attacked by the military in the years following. Nevertheless, the treaty prevented other nations from building bases in the Pacific and from enlarging their navies; and since Japan secretly flouted the limitations on warship size and gunnery, and continued to prepare for a conflict, she undoubtedly benefited from this arrangement until she rejected it in 1934.

Japanese marines prepare the way for the forces of occupation

Chinese towns yield to the threat of destruction

The Japanese were particularly badly hit by the world economic crisis of 1929, which caused great unemployment and domestic discontent. In such circumstances the power of the militarists grew, while liberal politicians were discredited and even assassinated by extremists. Moreover, the young army officers were yearning for action, and neither their seniors nor the government felt able to stop them even had they wished to. In September 1931 Japanese troops guarding the treaty railways in Manchuria overran Mukden and proceeded to conquer the rest of the country, claiming that they were acting in self-defence against a threatened Chinese attack. Since the swiftly-established puppet state of Manchukuo, as Manchuria was to be called thereafter, was recognised neither by the League of Nations nor by the United States, Japan left the League in 1933. Encouraged by the lack of physical opposition, and by the coming to power of the Nazis in that same year, the army could plan for further expansion. It was in these years that the concept of the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’, which meant in fact Japanese dominance of East Asia and the Western Pacific, began to be widely aired.