The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

by Andrew Roberts

  Tragically, the Roosevelt Administration – and Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs Dean Acheson in particular – dangerously underestimated the pride of Showa Dynasty Japan, which mistook these attempted acts of deterrence as unacceptable provocations. Despite the example of over ten years’ campaigning in China, Japan was not taken seriously enough by American policy-makers. It did not help that many senior politicians and soldiers genuinely believed that the slanted eyes of Japanese pilots meant they could not undertake long flights; as one historian has put it, ‘American leaders, harboring all sorts of racist stereotypes about the Japanese, did not think that they were capable of such a feat’ as the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which was 3,400 miles from the Japanese homeland.5 ‘Nobody now fears that a Japanese fleet could deal an unexpected blow on our Pacific possessions,’ declared Josephus Daniels, a former secretary of the US Navy, in 1922. ‘Radio makes surprise impossible.’ Nor was this absurd overconfidence confined to Americans: in April 1941 the Chief of the British Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, told the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden that he rated the Japanese Air Force as ‘below the Italian one’.6

  Hopes for peace faded perceptibly on 17 October when Lieutenant-General Hideki Tojo, nicknamed Razor, came to power in Tokyo, heading a militarist government supported by the Chiefs of the Army and Naval Staffs. Within three weeks the Imperial General Headquarters had finalized plans to attack Pearl Harbor and to invade the Philippines, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, Thailand, Burma and the Western Pacific, setting up a perimeter around what it privately called its Southern Resources Area and which was to be publicly dubbed the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The second phase of operations would be to protect this area from Allied counter-attack, by making such assaults too costly. The third phase would involve attacking the Allies’ long lines of communication until they were forced to accept the concept of a Japanese-dominated Far East in perpetuity.7 There were also advocates of a strategy that involved invading and subjugating Australia, and another to assault India and link up with Germany in the Middle East. The creation of the Southern Resources Area was part of a plan to seize raw materials that was no less ambitious than Hitler’s plan for Lebensraum, and it similarly depended upon a quick, Blitzkrieg-style victory, starting with a surprise attack that would neutralize the US Pacific Fleet. It was risky, of course, and was nearly ditched by the Naval Staff in August 1941, but in heated arguments Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet – who was against going to war – threatened to resign unless Pearl Harbor were attacked, insisting that the plan was Japan’s best chance for glory. Three days after Tojo came to power in October, it was formally adopted in its entirety.

  Yet the plan had severe flaws. The shallow harbour on Oahu meant that the American ships would be grounded rather than sunk, as they would have been in open water, and therefore might eventually be refloated. It was clear from the reports of spies on Oahu that Pearl Harbor did not have the tankers and supply ships necessary for a westward attack on Japan, so this was not an act of self-defence. Nor would a surprise attack allow for an eventual American acceptance of Japanese conquests elsewhere; as one of the planners, Rear-Admiral Onishi Takijiro, pointed out, American pride was such that there could never be a compromise settlement if Japan attacked without a declaration of war.8 The precedents of the sinking of the Maine in 1898 and Lusitania in 1915 should have been enough to underline that. Fearing the loss of Japan’s most prestigious field commander just before war broke out, however, the Naval Staff and Tojo Government embraced Yamamoto’s demands.

  The opposing naval forces in the Pacific theatre in December 1941 were so closely balanced except in one area – aircraft carriers – that if the Japanese had succeeded totally at Pearl Harbor they might indeed have bought enough time to consolidate the Southern Resources Area and make it vastly more difficult for America to bring her much larger resources to bear. The Japanese had eleven battleships and battle cruisers against the Allies’ eleven; eighteen heavy (that is, 8-inch-gun) cruisers against the Allies’ thirteen; twenty-three light (6-inch-gun) cruisers against twenty-one; 129 destroyers against 100; and sixty-seven submarines against sixty-nine. American naval planners had therefore balanced everything perfectly in the Pacific, with the vital exception that Japan had eleven aircraft carriers against the Americans’ three.9 (There were four other US carriers – Ranger, Hornet, Wasp and Yorktown – in the Atlantic.) If the Lexington, Enterprise and Saratoga, and their supporting heavy cruisers, had been in port at Pearl Harbor on the morning of 7 December 1941, the history of the Second World War might have been very different indeed. Fortunately, Admiral Husband Kimmel, the commander of the US Pacific Fleet, had sent the carriers westwards, with additional fighters on board, to support Midway and Wake Islands in the event of hostilities breaking out. It was one of the only correct decisions he had made in the whole sorry affair, but it was the crucial one.

  Kimmel had every reason to suppose that war was indeed about to break out, though few reasons to suppose that Pearl Harbor would be the first target. On 24 November, Washington warned him that the ‘chances of [a] favorable outcome of negotiations with Japan [are] very doubtful’ and that ‘a surprise aggressive movement in any direction including attack on Philippines or Guam is a possibility’. Three days later, he received an even more unequivocal cable, stating, ‘This dispatch is to be considered a war warning. An aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days,’ and ordering him to ‘Execute appropriate defensive deployment.’10 There are still those who consider Admiral Husband Kimmel and the Army commander in Hawaii, Lieutenant-General Walter C. Short, who were both dismissed soon after the attack, to have been made political scapegoats to protect the Administration, but in fact they were both culpably negligent and complacent. That said, the attack on Pearl Harbor was minutely and brilliantly planned. Vice-Admiral Chuichi Nagumo sailed east from the Kurile island of Etorofu on board his flagship Akagi on 26 November 1941 (or 25 November Washington dateline). His First Air Fleet consisted of six aircraft carriers, two cruisers, two battleships and a destroyer screen and eight support vessels.11 It sailed inside a moving weather front, which served to disguise it, and maintained strict radio silence throughout the voyage. Refuelling was achieved despite heavy seas, and sailing north of the normal trade routes ensured that the large flotilla was not spotted.

  Meanwhile, an intricate deception operation lulled Allied suspicions, insofar as there were any, about the Fleet’s whereabouts. On 15 November, Special Ambassador Saburo Kurusu arrived in Washington to discuss American demands for a Japanese withdrawal from French Indo-China and official recognition of Chiang Kai-shek. Radio messages were sent to the ‘phantom’ fleet as if it was stationed in Japanese home waters in the Inland Sea between Honshu and Shikoku islands, knowing that Allied transmitters would be monitoring the frequency of signal. The luxury liner Tatsuta Maru set out on a twelve-day journey to San Francisco, albeit with orders to turn around and return to Yokohama at midnight on the night before the attack. Although the American Army Signal Corps had broken the Japanese Government cipher – codenamed Purple – in the 1930s, by a process codenamed Magic (the equivalent of the British Ultra), it was no help. Nagumo’s fleet sent out no messages, so there was no indication of where it was. Even before Ambassadors Nomura and Kurusu requested a special audience with Hull timed for the exact moment of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Americans knew from intercepts that they were going to break off negotiations, but since the message from Tokyo mentioned neither war nor Pearl Harbor, Washington was none the wiser.12 The Administration’s expectation was that the blow would initially fall on British and Dutch possessions in South-East Asia, and possibly the American-controlled Philippines, and nothing from the cryptologists could have prepared them for what was about to happen.

  When Nagumo’s fleet reached a point 275 miles north of Oahu, the detailed operation masterminded by Commander Minoru Genda, the planner on board Akagi, was
put into action. Genda had studied the British use of aircraft carriers as offensive weapons during the raid on the Italian fleet at Taranto in 1940, and Japanese spies on Oahu had provided him with a detailed grid-referenced map of the principal American military assets on the island. Torpedoes with specially adapted fins were developed which could be dropped by bombers into shallow water, as well as newly invented armour-piercing shells dropped as bombs.13 (Because Pearl Harbor was not deep, no torpedo nets had been placed in front of the ships for protection.) The plan provided for a first wave of aircraft to attack the ships and planes at Pearl Harbor from the west at 07.55 hours, a second wave from the east at 08.45 with the same targets, and then, as the Americans were reeling from the destruction of their fleet and air force, a third wave would destroy the massive oil installations and ship-repairing facilities on the island, effectively wiping Pearl Harbor off the map as a functioning naval base and forcing the fleet back to California for the foreseeable future.

  At 06.00 (Hawaiian time) on 7 December, the first wave set off and Fuchida guided them unerringly to their target. They reached Oahu undetected because Kimmel had chosen to concentrate aerial reconnaissance on the 2,000 miles of the south-western sector, facing the Japanese Marshall Islands, rather than on the northern approaches. There were only three American patrol aircraft aloft that morning, and none covering the north. The Japanese Kate bombers and their Mitsubishi A6M2 Zero-Sen fighters (Zeros) therefore found seven American battleships moored in a row alongside Ford Island in the harbour and an eighth – the Pennsylvania – in dry dock. For fear of sabotage, the USAAF planes had been packed close together, which made them easier to guard. It also made it hard for the well-trained, veteran Japanese bomber pilots to miss. The anti-aircraft batteries had no ready ammunition, and the keys to the boxes were held by the duty officer. Only one-quarter of the Navy’s machine guns were manned, and none of the main 5-inch batteries was. One-third of the ships’ captains were ashore.14 It was a Sunday morning, after all.

  By 10.00 it was all over. Of the eight American battleships in port, three were sunk (that is, grounded), one – Oklahoma – capsized, and the others were more or less seriously damaged. Three light cruisers, three destroyers and other vessels were also sunk or seriously damaged, but vitally no submarine was affected.15 Only 54 Navy and Marine planes out of 250 either survived intact or were reparable, but 166 out of the 231 USAAF planes also survived. The American death toll amounted to 2,403 servicemen and civilians killed and 1,178 wounded.16 The Japanese lost only twenty-nine planes and a hundred lives, but all five midget submarines, only one of which made it inside the harbour, were sunk. Yet what was an undoubted disaster for America could easily have been a catastrophe. Fearing a counter-attack because the American aircraft carriers were not in harbour, Nagumo did not send in the third wave of bombers to destroy the very installations – oil depots and repair yards – that the Pacific Fleet would need to reconstitute itself. It was one thing for Pearl Harbor to be effectively neutralized for six months, but complete destruction would have been quite another. Even as their men celebrated, Nagumo, Genda (who was to command the Japanese Air Force from 1959 to 1962) and Fuchida (who was to become a Protestant pastor and in 1966 an American citizen) knew they had not achieved what they needed to. As it was, all the ships except two destroyers would be repaired and rejoin the Pacific Fleet. (The Arizona remains a tomb to this day.) Once Yamamoto had realized that the attack on Pearl Harbor had fallen far short of his original plans he dolefully wrote in a letter: ‘A military man can scarcely pride himself on having “smitten a sleeping enemy”; it is more a matter of shame, simply, for the one smitten. I would rather you made your appraisal after seeing what the enemy does, since it is certain that, angered and outraged, he will soon launch a determined counterattack…’17

  The very completeness of the surprise attack has spawned many conspiracy theories and accusations of cover-ups regarding Pearl Harbor, which allege that the Roosevelt Administration (and sometimes also the Churchill Government) had prior warning of the attack but deliberately failed to warn Kimmel and Short in order to bring the United States into the war. This is nonsense: Roosevelt was keen to provoke Germany into conflict, it is true, but he did not want a war on two fronts, and indeed he would have liked to transfer part of the Pacific Fleet to the Atlantic.18 Moreover, FDR loved the US Navy, had been its under-secretary during the Great War, and any such conspiracy would have needed the co-operation of, at the very least, the War Secretary Henry L. Stimson, Navy Secretary Frank Knox, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall and Navy Chief of Staff Admiral Harold Stark, all of them honourable and patriotic men. ‘Nor was anything to be gained by allowing the great ships to be destroyed at their moorings if they could have been alerted and at sea,’ states Roosevelt’s biographer, Conrad Black. ‘An ineffective Japanese attack would have been just as good a casus belli.’19 Kimmel’s culpability was all the worse because Churchill had sent Roosevelt the official summary of how the Taranto raid had been carried out; Roosevelt sent it to Stark, who sent it on to Kimmel, who ignored it.

  Pearl Harbor certainly was the perfect casus belli, however. Recruitment offices had to stay open throughout the night as Americans volunteered for service; trade union leaders cancelled strikes, and on Monday, 8 December Congress voted 470 to 1 (the pacifist Jeannette Rankin of Montana) for war. This was the opportunity for Roosevelt to rally the nation with the words: ‘Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a date that will live in infamy – the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.’ As well as the fact that ‘very many American lives have been lost,’ he reported attacks on Malaya, Hong Kong, Guam, the Philippines and Wake and Midway Islands. ‘No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.’20 The speech to Congress was only twenty-five sentences long, but so often was he interrupted by applause that it took him ten minutes to deliver.

  Three days later, in a speech to the Reichstag on the afternoon of 11 December 1941, Hitler declared war on the United States, even though Germany was not obliged to come to Japan’s aid under the terms of the Tripartite Pact of 27 September 1940 if Japan were the aggressor. It seems an unimaginably stupid thing to have done in retrospect, a suicidally hubristic act less than six months after attacking the Soviet Union. America was an uninvadable land mass of gigantic productive capacity and her intervention in 1917–18 had sealed Germany’s fate in the Great War. ‘The Navy and I had no idea that an attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor was planned,’ Admiral Raeder stated at Nuremberg; ‘we learned of this only after the attack had been carried out.’21 This was true, and hardly the way allies should treat each other, giving Hitler the perfect let-out if he had wanted one, but he did not. Instead he exulted in Japan’s ruthlessness, taking it almost as a compliment to himself on the basis of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.

  By 1943 the number of aircraft lost at Pearl Harbor represented only two days of American production, and in the calendar year 1944, while the Germans were building 40,000 warplanes, the United States turned out 98,000, underlining Hitler’s catastrophic blunder.22 In his 8 December 1941 speech to Congress, Roosevelt had not mentioned Germany or Italy because he did not have the political support necessary for including Japan’s allies in the request for a declaration of war, especially when faced with the powerful America First movement and other isolationist organizations in the United States. Now, the Führer had solved Roosevelt’s problem at a stroke. Hitler believed he was simply normalizing a state of affairs that had already been in de facto existence for many months, and in such a way that gave German U-boats the right to torpedo American warships that had been attacking them for over a year. Direct American support for Britain and the USSR could now be countered actively, even while the United States had her hands full in the Pacific. Hitler had long considered war with America to be inevitable:
he thought it better to have the prestige of instigating it and to help the Japanese by forcing on America a war on two fronts.23 Coming within a week of the checking of his offensive against Moscow, when Russians started taking German prisoners for the first time, it is now easy to see precisely when the seeds of Germany’s defeat were sown.

  Frederick Oechsner, the Berlin correspondent of United Press International, noted in the late 1930s that, when he was war minister, Blomberg had ‘presented Hitler with 400 books, pamphlets and monographs on the United States armed forces and he has read many of these’.24 It was the very worst time to have mugged up on the American war machine, as it scarcely existed then, with the United States still in the grip of isolationism. If Hitler divined from these monographs a sense of America’s military weakness – the US Army numbered only 100,000 men in 1939 – he was soon to be sorely disabused: by 1945 General George C. Marshall and Admiral Ernest J. King had managed to put 14.9 million Americans into uniform and the Army Hitler had so despised from his reading of soon-to-be-out-of-date pamphlets would in 1952 – while it was still occupying Germany – blow up his beloved Berghof.25 ‘The entry of the United States into the war is of no consequence at all for Germany,’ Hitler had told Molotov in Berlin on 12 November 1940, ‘the United States will not be a threat to us in decades – not in 1945 but at the earliest in 1970 or 1980.’ It was one of the greatest miscalculations of history.