by Ian Kershaw
Oikawa must have been acutely aware that the Navy Ministry’s hesitations had not been shared even within the navy itself. An insight into the thinking of the navy General Staff, on far bolder, and far riskier, lines than that of Oikawa himself, was provided by the comments of its vice-chief, Kondo Nobutake, at the Liaison Conference on 14 September, recorded in a memorandum of the Prime Minister, Prince Konoe:
The navy is not yet prepared for war against the United States, but preparations will be completed by April of next year [1941]. By that time we shall have equipped the vessels already in operation and shall have armed 2.5 million tons of merchant ships. After we have completed this, we will be able to defeat the United States, provided we carry on blitz warfare. If we do not carry on blitz warfare and the United States chooses a protracted war, we will be in great trouble. Furthermore, the United States is rapidly building more vessels, which means that the difference between the American fleet potential and ours will become greater, and Japan will never be able to catch up with it. From that point of view, now is the most advantageous time for Japan to start a war.110
The crucial intervention at the Liaison Conference was that of Matsuoka himself. The Foreign Minister saw Japan at a crossroads. She needed to decide which way to turn. Should she go with Britain and the United States, or with Germany and Italy? He posed the alternatives. He first envisaged Japan rejecting the German proposal for an alliance. Germany, he stated categorically, would conquer Britain. Germany might even establish a European federation, come to an agreement with the United States and ‘not let Japan lay even one finger on the colonies of Britain, Holland, and other powers in the federation’. On the other hand, if concluding an alliance were to lead to war with the United States, then the Japanese economy would suffer severely. He then, however, posed the costs to Japan of an alliance with Britain and the United States. The conditions for this, he stated, would be ‘that we should have to settle the China Incident as the United States tells us, give up our hope for a New Order in East Asia, and obey Anglo-American dictates for at least half a century to come’. Would this be acceptable to the people of Japan? he asked. ‘Would the hundred thousand spirits of our dead soldiers be satisfied with this?’ he added, in a rhetorical flourish. In any case, he argued, the material difficulties would only be avoided in the short term. He reminded his colleagues of the disadvantages that Japan had faced after the settlement following the First World War. ‘Who knows what bitter pills we should have to swallow this time?’ he asked. His conclusion was obvious: ‘an alliance with the United States is unthinkable. The only way left is to ally with Germany and Italy.’111 He was, following the lobbying, pressing and cajoling of the previous weeks, speaking largely to the converted. Even so, this, effectively, was the moment that defined the new course of Japanese foreign policy.
The decision to proceed with the alliance was rubber-stamped at the Imperial Conference, in the presence of the Emperor, on 19 September.112 Even now, apprehension was voiced that a pact with Germany might incite the United States to intensify the economic pressure upon Japan and increase her aid to Chiang Kai-shek. However, the worries about Japan’s oil supplies only reinforced the views, as voiced by Tojo, the Army Minister, that ‘the question of oil can be equated with the question of the Dutch East Indies’, and that the decision had already been taken to secure essential resources from that region, if possible by diplomacy, but if not by force.113 Southern expansion was, in other words, the premiss of Japanese action. This was accepted by all sections of the power-elite. Starting from that premiss, it was difficult, if not impossible, to argue convincingly against a treaty with Germany that, by deterring the United States, was seen as a vehicle to safeguard that expansion. After the conventional rituals of questioning Matsuoka on the pact, therefore, the Imperial Conference duly ended by giving the formal alliance with Germany the seal of the Emperor’s approval.
Hirohito was himself full of foreboding. But he accepted the need for the pact. ‘Under the present circumstances, this military agreement with Germany can’t be helped,’ he remarked privately to Konoe on 16 September. ‘If there is no other way to handle America, then it can’t be helped.’ With some pathos, he then asked Konoe: ‘What will happen if Japan should be defeated? Will you, Prime Minister, bear the burden with me?’114 Konoe, equally pathetic, was reduced to tears.115
There were still complex negotiations, with difficult moments, to be conducted.116 Japan’s insistence upon retaining her freedom of action was a sticking point. The Germans wanted a firmer commitment to involvement in a potential German–American war. But the pressures on Matsuoka to resist such a commitment were heavy. In the end, the Germans gave way, even if an element of ambiguity was retained in the final wording of the treaty. As late as 26 September, the very eve of the signing, Japanese leaders, meeting in the Privy Council, were still expressing their worries about the implications of the pact. There were deep concerns about deteriorating relations with America, and about supplies of oil and steel if the worst came to the worst and Japan and the United States went to war. Some reassurance was given about the stockpiling of essential resources. But there was more wishful thinking than hard calculation. Tojo remarked that military equipment was being obtained from Germany, passing through Siberia with Soviet consent. He pointed out, too, the necessity of improving relations with the Soviet Union so that Japan was not faced with conflict in the north as well as in the south. Konoe emphasized that the underlying thought behind the treaty was avoidance of conflict between Japan and the United States–the idea of deterrence–adding, however, that ‘a humble attitude will only prompt the United States to become domineering’, so ‘a demonstration of strength is necessary’. This was the view of Matsuoka, the prime mover of the treaty. The Foreign Minister, pointing to the threat posed by the increasingly anti-Japanese stance of the United States, claimed there was ‘no alternative but to take a resolute attitude’.117
The ‘debate’ had been largely formulaic. It was part of the elaborate process of confirming a decision that had already been taken at the Liaison Conference, then ratified at the Imperial Conference. It was nonetheless revealing. Japan’s leaders sensed that their country was at a turning point. They faced a fateful choice. It seemed to them that they had to yield to long-term American domination, or take irrevocable and dangerous steps, with unforeseen and incalculable consequences, to resist it.118 They chose the latter course. At midnight the Privy Council, in the Emperor’s presence, unanimously approved the treaty. The following day, 27 September, the Tripartite Pact was finally signed in Berlin. Its key clause pledged the signatories ‘to assist one another with all political, economic, and military means when one of the three Contracting Parties is attacked by a power at present not involved in the European war or in the Sino-Japanese conflict’.119 It was plainly aimed at America. How would the United States react?
VI
It was soon plain that Japan’s calculation had backfired. The American response quickly revealed the folly of Matsuoka’s claim–a presumption, too, of the German Foreign Ministry, and accepted in varying degrees within Japan’s power-elite–that the Tripartite Pact would serve as a deterrent. Instead, it merely confirmed American views that Japan was a belligerent, bullying, imperialist force in the Far East, an Asian equivalent of Nazi Germany, and had to be stopped.120 Such views seemed confirmed by the entry of Japanese troops into French Indochina on 23 September. This followed intensified pressure on the French to allow right of transit by Japanese forces and use of Indochinese airfields, and took place even as negotiations were continuing. After two days of skirmishes between French and Japanese forces, the French surrendered. Northern Indochina was now occupied by Japan.121
Some in the Roosevelt administration had for some time been pressing for a tough line against Japan. The most prominent ‘hawks’ were the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, and Secretary of the Interior,
Harold Ickes. They favoured a total embargo on oil supplies to Japan. This hard line was resisted by the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, and Under-Secretary Sumner Welles. Backed by Admiral Harold R. Stark, head of Naval Operations, and Admiral James O. Richardson, Commander-in-Chief of the United States fleet, they argued that all-out oil sanctions would simply incite a Japanese attack which the American navy would be powerless to prevent. The authorities of the Dutch East Indies had already made the State Department aware that they did not want American action that would expose them to the threat of Japanese invasion. For the time being, Roosevelt sided with the ‘doves’, at least in part. An oil embargo was not imposed. However, news that the Japanese and Germans were negotiating a pact was answered by the imposition on 19 September (to take effect from 16 October) of a complete embargo on the export of iron and scrap metal.122 Even though the dominant forces in the United States administration were still not ready to push Japan over the brink and into war, the scrap metal embargo was a plain signal that America was not going to bow to the pressure that Japan was seeking to exert through the Tripartite Alliance. Washington agreed to warn the Japanese of the continuing American commitment to the status quo in the Far East.123 This meant further, and increased, support for Chiang Kai-shek, an advantage which the Chinese nationalist leader rapidly recognized. For Japan, it meant that the disastrous imbroglio in China was set to continue indefinitely. Tokyo’s recognition in November of the Nanking puppet administration of Wang Ching-wei, when Chiang had predictably refused the terms Japan dangled before him, was met by Roosevelt’s announcement that he was considering a huge loan of $100 million to the Chinese nationalist government.124 By autumn 1940, therefore, relations between Japan and the United States had deteriorated still further. Since neither could back down, it was becoming increasingly evident that only a trial of strength would decide control over south-east Asia.125
The essential purpose of the Tripartite Pact, from the Japanese perspective, was to deter the United States from intervening to prevent the southern advance seen as necessary to ensure Japan’s control of raw materials and, therefore, her future economic and political security. The gamble in the pact was self-evident. What if the United States did not regard the pact as a deterrent, but as a provocation? What if the effect was to reinforce the determination to prevent Japanese expansion by threatening the lifeline of oil supplies? But from a Japanese perspective at the time, the gamble had to be taken. To take it held great dangers, but also the potential of enormous rewards. Not to take it meant long-term servitude to the Anglo-American powers. It meant, too, that the China War had been in vain. The need for boldness, not caution, carried the day in such a mentality. Profound fears for the future had not been overcome. But they were met with fatalistic resignation. Characteristic in his expression of such an attitude, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, former Navy Vice-Minister and soon to become the planning mastermind behind Pearl Harbor, remarked in October 1940: ‘It’s out of the question! To fight the United States is like fighting the whole world. But it has been decided. So I will fight my best. Doubtless I will die on board the Nagato [his flagship].’126
Those voicing deep apprehensions, however, were sidelined. In Matsuoka’s summary of the issues at the Liaison Conference, the risk was less damaging for Japan’s long-term future than not taking it. It was a recipe for disaster. But Matsuoka’s penchant for high-flown rhetoric, his belief in diplomatic force and his underlying brinkmanship came into the political equation at a moment when the Japanese military and also the civilian government had become committed to southern expansion, and when American threats to Japan’s economy were real, and growing.
The Tripartite Pact was less formidable in reality than in appearance.127 Its symbolic importance was, nevertheless, great. It confirmed that Japan saw her future shaped by the struggle against the Anglo-American supremacy in the Far East. Though the beginning of open hostilities would take place more than a year later, Japanese strategy and diplomacy were now framed by that imperative.128 The path to collision with the United States was opening up.
The collision was not inevitable. There had been no invisible hand of destiny guiding Japan on the course to a war against the might of the United States which even her own military were not confident of winning. That disastrous course was the consequence of the fateful choices made by Japan’s leaders in the summer and autumn of 1940. Those choices were, however, in good measure shaped by mentalities forged over the previous twenty years or so, and by the way those mentalities interpreted economic realities.
The obvious economic reality was that Japan depended upon the vagaries of world trade for her future prosperity. As a group of islands off the east Asian mainland, Japan could be no more self-sufficient from her natural resources than could Great Britain. But Britain ruled a world Empire. This was seen to provide the classic model for a world power. The leading political philosophies of the time, as Japan was modernizing and beginning to flex her muscles, assumed that acquiring an empire provided the basis of prosperity and future national security. A modern version of mercantilism preached that control over raw materials, and the territory that provided them, offered the route to power and prosperity. Subordination of weaker forces, in order to establish the imperial dominance which was the hallmark of a great power, was inevitable, and justified. Japan came to see herself, much as did Italy and Germany in the European context, as a ‘have-not’ nation, with a right to expand to safeguard her own survival and security. The western great powers, America most of all, stood in the way of this through their control of resources in south-east Asia, most notably in China itself, and through American naval might in the Pacific. Japanese dependence upon America for essential supplies of oil and metal exposed her Achilles heel as a would-be great power. It highlighted the underlying weakness of her position.129 Hence, the liberal, democratic principles of the postwar settlement could increasingly come to be interpreted as self-serving for the west, but directly harmful for the ‘have-not’ nation of Japan.
With Japan in the throes of internal crisis during the 1920s, the bitter wrangles and deep divides in domestic politics seemed to mirror the country’s external subservience to the western powers, sealed by the postwar Washington Conference. This provided the backcloth to the upsurge in nationalist-imperialist assertiveness during the 1930s, fired by the success in Manchuria and then the prospect of the much bigger prize in China. Economic imperatives drove the new ideology, resting upon the ‘imperial way’ embodied by the deified Emperor, eventually pulling politics into their slipstream. The new, shrill and aggressive nationalism rapidly caught hold among younger officers in the army and the navy, penetrating via military training to the more plebeian recruits to the rank and file. Older officers, and an older generation of civilian politicians, still held to less abrasive ideas of international cooperation. But they gradually but inexorably lost ground to the forces representing the new ideology. By the time the war in China began in 1937, politicians favouring the expansionism that the mentality of the ‘imperial way’ had spawned were in high offices of state. Konoe epitomized them. But by now politics were in any case being ever more determined by the demands of the army.
China held the key. The longer the war dragged on, the less Japan was capable of cutting her losses and reaching some sort of peace deal that was the basic premiss of improved relations with the United States. The more Japan became mired in an expanding war, at enormous human and material cost, the more hardliners in the army ruled out any retreat. Following the massacres in Shanghai and the ‘rape of Nanking’, Japan’s international standing had fallen drastically. As the United States toughened her stance, the chances of any settlement of the ‘China Incident’ dwindled. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt had used American pressure to broker an end to the war between Japan and Russia. Thirty-five years later there was no prospect of his namesake, the second President Roosevelt, intervening to engineer a settlement of the war between Japan and China. With the lesso
ns of appeasement in Europe fresh in the mind, there was no appetite in America for attempting to appease Japan. But without such a settlement, American-Japanese relations could only worsen. And with that, Japanese oil supplies would inexorably become more endangered. Unwilling to yield to such a threat, the response of Japan’s leaders was the turn to a policy of imminent southern expansion. As night follows day, this increased the prospect of war with the United States, a war which even Japanese ‘hawks’ thought Japan could only win if she could land a swift knockout blow.
By the time the fateful decision for the southern advance was taken, in July 1940, therefore, it was impossible to put forward a convincing alternative strategy. Variants of emphasis certainly existed, often related to the differing levels of fear of war with America. But the fundamental imperative of southern expansion was by now generally accepted throughout Japan’s power-elite. Simply to contemplate an alternative was to dismiss it. The very premiss could not be entertained. Better relations with the United States–that is, the avoidance of risk of war–meant effectively to capitulate over China. In the eyes of Japan’s leaders, that would have entailed a colossal loss of prestige, with incalculable internal consequences. It would have been portrayed as an insult to the memories of those who had fought, suffered and died for Japan in the war in China, and it would have left Japan, her international strength undermined, even more dependent on America for the long-term future than she had been before embarking on the war in China.
