Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941

by Ian Kershaw

  The Japanese takeover in Manchuria was a watershed. There was no intrinsic connection with the ‘China Incident’ six years later. But the forces it helped unleash had become strengthened in the interim. And Japan had become internationally more isolated. Populist clamour and militarist expansionism in the army combined in 1937 to turn the ‘China Incident’ into an unending war which sucked in manpower and resources for diminishing returns, and at the same time became the single most important stumbling block to any accommodation with the United States. But the idea of a ‘holy war’ against China stretched beyond military factions of the Japanese government. There was practically no voice among leading civilian politicians which opposed the war. Prince Konoe, Prime Minister for the first time and four years later a desperate advocate of a last-minute deal to avoid a Pacific War, was only one of its ardent advocates. Again, the government in Tokyo had a choice. It could have decided not to expand the initial minor incident into a major conflict. It chose, instead, to try to destroy China. This, with the attendant atrocities that shocked the west, backed Japan much further into a corner from which it became ever more difficult to extricate herself.

  We have followed the making of crucial decisions in 1940 and 1941 in close detail. Though the factional nature of Japanese government meant that nuances of policy were frequently proposed, and decision-making was a complex and often laborious business, by 1940 no significant individual or faction, the military least of all, stood against the imperative of expansion in the near future into south-east Asia to create a Japanese economic imperium. Expansionism had by now become a universally accepted ideology among the ruling elites. It was most fervently held among the strongest sections of those elites: among the leadership and middle-ranking echelons of the army and the navy. In the summer of 1940, again the following summer and, finally, in autumn 1941, policy options were available. But they were narrowing.

  Once the decision was taken in summer 1940 (exploiting the disarray of Great Britain following Hitler’s western offensive) to advance to the south, this became a further non-negotiable element in the pursuit of any diplomatic settlement. Japan tied herself even further into an anti-American, as well as anti-British, stance with the consequential decision, later that summer, to form a military alliance with the Axis powers. By now, the collision course with the United States was becoming ever clearer. The Japanese government had been aware that it was taking this course, and of the dangers that entailed. It nevertheless chose to embark upon it. The option, still available, of backing down from expansion, with the growing prospect of military conflict with a mighty enemy, in favour of re-entry into international trade, with its inbuilt competition (seen to disfavour Japan), was rejected outright.

  In the summer of 1941, the gods had appeared to favour Japan once more. Germany’s sudden attack on the Soviet Union and rapid inroads into the country, accompanied by devastating blows against the Red Army, offered the potential to attack the beleaguered traditional enemy from the east. For six weeks or so this was actively deliberated. But the choice was made to continue the preparations for the southern advance. By now Japan was completely locked in to her own economic and ideological imperatives. These, intertwined, became even more apparent once the Americans turned off the oil-tap following the Japanese dispatch of troops into French Indochina in July. From now on, war was inevitable unless a conscious decision were made to avoid it.

  Important voices from within the Japanese leadership were indeed raised in the autumn of 1941 in favour of a decision for war. But by now, there was great apprehension blending into outright fear at the consequences for Japan of a war with America. The Emperor himself wanted to avoid war. So did Prince Konoe, now serving his third term of office as Prime Minister and desperately seeking a personal meeting with President Roosevelt to head off conflict–a course of action which eventually brought down his government. When Konoe’s Cabinet fell, even Tojo, the new Prime Minister and previously an ultra-hawk, became an earnest advocate of a negotiated accommodation with the United States. His Foreign Minister, Togo, was chosen with a view to engineering such an arrangement. The dispatch of Kurusu as special envoy to assist the beleaguered ambassador in Washington, Nomura, was a further sign of the seriousness of Japan’s attempt, at the eleventh hour, to find a way out of the impasse. As late as 29 November 1941, the day before the Imperial Conference confirmed the decision to go to war, most of the jushin–the group of senior statesmen, former Prime Ministers–still wanted to prevent the conflagration they feared so much.

  If such weighty figures were speaking out in favour of peace, why was the ultimate decision one for war? Part of the answer lies, of course, in the hardening position of the United States, which pushed Japan ever further into a tight cul-de-sac. There has been much subsequent speculation about the likely or possible course of events had the American administration, above all the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, been less intransigent, more open to negotiation, especially in autumn 1941. Could it not have been in America’s own interests, at least short-term, to weaken her commitment to China in favour of a settlement with Japan instead of rigid insistence on Japanese withdrawal from a country in which the United States had no prime stake?159 Might not peace in the Pacific have been saved had Roosevelt indeed consented to meet Konoe?160 Could not even a last-minute prevention of war have been attained if the United States, instead of bringing down the shutters at the end of November through Hull’s peremptory Ten Points, had been prepared to continue with the President’s suggested ‘modus vivendi’? Some who had participated in the tortured process in Tokyo that ended in the decision for war later claimed that had Roosevelt’s ‘modus vivendi’ been received by the Japanese government, or even had Hull’s ‘Note’ excluded Manchukuo from the demand for troop withdrawals from China instead of mistakenly allowing the presumption that it was included, then new proposals and new compromises would have been forthcoming. Possibly, so the counter-factual argument ran, Tojo’s government might have fallen and been replaced by a pro-peace Cabinet. Possibly, the further debate in the Liaison Conference, prompted by the ‘modus vivendi’, would in any case have necessitated a postponement of the mobilization for war.161 And once the war machine had been halted, even if only temporarily, it could not have been restarted until the spring. A respite would have been gained, perhaps leading to a permanent new basis of power-relations in the Far East.

  It seems wishful thinking. Certainly, the Roosevelt administration had become more intransigent. But the American stance had hardened precisely in response to Japan’s refusal at any point since 1937 to halt her relentless pursuit of expansion and dominance in the Far East. And, as war approached, intelligence intercepts provided confirmation that expansion with a view to establishing a ‘new order’ in the region was non-negotiable. The issue of withdrawal from the Chinese mainland was equally intractable. China had become such a breaking point in all attempts at negotiation not just for idealistic reasons, although China had indeed become a moral cause in America, and the anti-Japanese backlash in the United States stirred by accounts of atrocities by Japan’s army against Chinese civilians had certainly made American public opinion a factor which the Roosevelt administration could not ignore in its treatment of the Far East.162 Nor were economic concerns the prime determinant in the American adherence to the cause of the Chinese nationalists. The Pacific, rather than the Asian continent, was central to American interests in the region. The chief consideration, becoming more rather than less important, was the need to hold together what had come to be known as the ABCD coalition–the loose alliance of America, Britain, China and the Dutch East Indies authorities. To have abandoned China would have had the most serious consequences for Britain’s position in the Far East. This would have put relations between the United States and Britain under intense strain at a crucial juncture in the Atlantic War, and in the wider struggle against Nazi Germany–still seen in America, too, as the priority–particularly since Japan was in formal alliance w
ith the Axis powers. For this reason above all, China remained the pivot. The United States could not contemplate undermining Chiang Kai-shek for short-term gain in preventing an immediate war in the Pacific, not least since it was all but certain that Japanese designs on power in the region would most likely have meant that war was simply being postponed, not avoided.163

  The main reasons for the narrowing of Japan’s options to the point where she was left with war as the only remaining course of action are to be found not in Washington, but in Tokyo. Certainly, the wish to avoid war was voiced in prominent quarters in the autumn of 1941. But the same individuals who now wanted peace had at every stage up to then supported the steps which had led to the point where Japan was peering into the abyss of war. Konoe is a prime, but far from isolated, example of those who had avidly backed aggressive expansionism until it had left no exit route from impending disaster. But fear of war did not equate with opposition to the policy decisions that had taken Japan to the brink. At no point was there a concerted and forthright rejection of policy choices that were seen to bristle with danger. For no faction of the elites could there be a retreat from the goals of a victorious settlement in China and successful expansion to establish the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’–or, in other words, Japanese domination of the Far East. These aims had not just become an economic imperative. They reflected honour and national pride, the prestige and standing of a great power. The alternatives were seen as not just poverty, but defeat, humiliation, ignominy and an end to great-power status in permanent subordination to the United States.

  Such thinking had become all-embracing in Japan over the previous decade, as the Depression had destabilized politics and society, discrediting belief in the virtues of an Anglo-American-dominated international economy. It permeated both the power-elite and the mass of the population, whose shrill chauvinism had been deliberately encouraged, where not directly manufactured, by government-inspired mass media ever since the ‘Manchurian Incident’. Most important of all, it allowed the influence of the most powerful faction, the military, to become completely decisive. Although the army and the navy had differing interests and agendas, the combination of the quest for dominance in China (along with bolstering defences in the north against the Soviet Union) and the prospect of expansion to the south was more than enough to hold them together. Moreover, the military always held the trump cards in the political debate: withdrawal from China would mean accepting that the huge sacrifices since 1937 had been in vain; abandoning the southern advance would mean that prosperity and security would be surrendered in favour of poverty and deprivation; pulling back from the Axis would mean lasting submission to the United States; and refusal to go to war in the autumn of 1941 would mean postponing inevitable conflict to a time when the balance of power would be less favourable to Japan. At every stage, as the political options narrowed, the chiefs of the General Staffs of both armed services, urged on by gung-ho middle-echelon officers in their planning and operational sections, were the most forceful and outspoken advocates of war. By the late summer of 1941, they had pushed through, against no serious opposition, a commitment to military action before the end of the year. The last serious political choice made by the Japanese leadership was to agree to a military timetable which meant that diplomacy, however faint its prospect of success, was forced to compete against the clock. The weakness of the other factions of Japan’s elite had allowed the army and navy General Staffs increasingly to dictate policy options, down to the point where those options gave way to the military imperative: war.

  Ironically, when that terrible war was finally over, Japan found herself more dependent economically upon the United States than had been foreseeable before the conflict, deprived of any great-power status, shorn of all military capability, but, over time, enjoying a prosperity unimaginable to the citizens of the country in the troubled and turbulent interwar era.

  9

  Berlin, Autumn 1941

  Hitler Decides to Declare War on the United States

  He emphasizes the extraordinary significance of the Japanese entry into the war, above all with regard to our U-boat war…The Führer is convinced that even if Japan had not joined the war, he would have had to declare war on the Americans sooner or later. Now the east Asian conflict drops like a present into our lap.

  Reported comments of Hitler to his party leaders,

  12 December 1941

  It has been described as the ‘most puzzling’ of Hitler’s decisions during the Second World War.1 At the climax of his long speech in the Reichstag on the afternoon of 11 December 1941, Hitler announced that the attempt by Germany and Italy to prevent the war widening, and to maintain relations with the United States of America, despite years of ‘intolerable provocation by President Roosevelt’, had failed. Consequently, in accordance with the terms of the Tripartite Pact of 27 September 1940, Germany and Italy saw themselves compelled, alongside Japan, ‘together to carry out the struggle for defence, and thereby for the upholding of freedom and independence of their peoples and empires against the United States of America and England’.2 The formal declaration of war had been starchily read out earlier that afternoon to the American chargé d’affaires in Berlin by Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Reich Foreign Minister, whose curt bow at the end of the audience had terminated relations between Germany and the United States.3

  Four days later, the regular digest of opinion soundings among the German people, compiled by the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, SD), which had begun life as the Nazi Party’s own surveillance organ and had later become part of the regime’s huge and expanding SS-police network, claimed that ‘the declaration of war on the United States did not come at all as a surprise and was widely interpreted as official confirmation of what already existed in reality’. How accurate this lapidary description of opinion was can only be surmised. Even the same report went on to record ‘very occasional remarks of surprise and a certain concern about the addition of a new enemy’ to be heard in the countryside. And there was evidently, so the report indicated, speculation about what this implied, with expectations of a long-drawn-out war at sea lasting for years.4 Even before the declaration of war on America, pessimistic voices could be heard out of earshot of police informers prophesying that the war would last five years, that American aid had saved Britain, that perhaps Germany would not win and that in the end a compromise settlement would be reached.5 One ordinary soldier, confident that Germany would eventually prove victorious, nevertheless confided to his diary on the day of Hitler’s Reichstag speech, that it meant ‘war for our lifetime’. ‘Poor parents,’ he added.6

  Those worried and horrified at the war now stretching out way into the future, and extending to a mighty new belligerent with access to unimaginable resources, were well advised not to broadcast their views. But privately such anxieties were widespread. Memories of the First World War were still painfully strong. According to reports filtering out of underground socialist sources, many Germans had ‘not forgotten that it was America’s participation in the last world war which decided its outcome and sealed the fate of Germany’.7 A German officer based in Warsaw, in a letter to his wife on the day after the declaration of war, wrote that the news had struck him ‘with horror’. ‘What probably every German feared’, he added, ‘has become true.’8 Such fears came on top of immense worries about loved ones in an army bogged down in Russia’s icy wastes and facing Germany’s first serious military crisis since the war had begun over two years earlier.

  Even Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister and one of his closest and most trusted associates, obliquely hinted at his apprehension about bringing a powerful new enemy directly into the conflict. Jotting down the gist of a telephone conversation with Hitler, soon after the news broke in Berlin of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Goebbels noted that Germany ‘on the basis of the Tripartite Pact’ would ‘probably not avoid a declaration of war on the United States’. Then came a telling phrase
in his diary. ‘But that’s now not so bad’, since, he presumed, American supplies to Britain would have to be diverted to the war in the Pacific.9 It was the merest unwitting intimation that Goebbels, too, saw war against the United States as a worrying development. And the subconscious doubt rapidly disappeared, of course, beneath the usual effusions of confidence.

  The military leadership, already only too well aware of the magnitude of the crisis on the eastern front, were less sanguine, at least if we can rely upon their postwar recollections. Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, just back from a month’s leave, was told that Pearl Harbor provided a signal for Germany to declare war on America. He was shocked, he later wrote, at Hitler’s ‘cluelessness’ about the American ‘potential’, the economic and military power which had been decisive once before, in the First World War. He saw it as an expression of Hitler’s ‘dilettante’ approach and his limited knowledge of foreign countries.10

  Rear Admiral (as he then was) Karl Dönitz, Commander-in-Chief of the German U-boat fleet and a firm Hitler loyalist in the ranks of the higher officer corps, was equally taken aback by the news that Germany was at war with America. He had told Hitler in September that, should the United States be drawn into the war, he wished to be given due warning so that his U-boats would be properly placed to take full advantage of the element of surprise to strike a major blow while anti-submarine defences were still weak. ‘In the event,’ he later wrote, ‘things turned out differently. German High Command was itself taken by surprise by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941; and at that time there was not a single German U-boat in American waters.’11