by John Keegan
Japan had by now installed an ambassador in Washington, Admiral Nomura, whose personal relationship with American officials was excellent and whose commitment to the views of the Japanese navy, far more moderate and realistic than those of the army, was genuine. At home, however, the army was pressing for deadlines. On 6 September, at a cabinet conference held in the presence of the emperor, Hirohito, the alternatives were reviewed in their starkest form: to start preparations for war at once; to continue negotiations; or to acquiesce in America’s restrictions on Japanese strategic activity, including a withdrawal from Indo-China. Tojo, the Minister of War, had insisted that they be presented in this form. Like the others he was abashed when the emperor reminded his ministers of the awesome consequences of what they were deciding. The conclusion of the conference nevertheless was to continue negotiating while adopting outright preparations for war, the deadline for a successful outcome to be fixed for 10 October.
Delays in negotiation over the next weeks made it obvious that the deadline would have to be set back, and this aroused civilian and naval doubts over the rightness of considering the war option at all. Tojo, as leader of the army party and much influenced by popular impatience with government hesitancy, held out for the aggressive solution. On 5 October a conference convened in his office concluded that diplomacy would settle nothing and that the emperor must be petitioned to approve a military offensive. Over the next week Tojo heightened military pressure on Konoye to choose war and on 14 October made the issue one of the army’s confidence in his premiership. Three days later Konoye resigned and Tojo took his place as Prime Minister.
Contrary to Allied wartime propaganda, Tojo was not a fascist, nor ideologically pro-Nazi or pro-Axis; though he was to be executed as a war criminal under the code devised for the Nuremberg trials, his motivation to war and conquest was not the same as that of Hitler and his followers. He did not seek revenge, nor was his racism particular or annihilatory. He was strongly anti-communist and feared the growing power of Mao Zedong in China; but he harboured no scheme to exterminate Japan’s Chinese enemies or any other group who might stand in Japan’s way in Asia. On the contrary, his chauvinism was exclusively anti-Western. Tojo cultivated the alliance with Germany for wholly expedient reasons and he harboured no illusion that, had Germany rather than America or Britain been a dominant power in the Pacific, it would have behaved any more generously than they to Japan’s national ambitions. Tojo’s code was simple: he was determined to establish Japanese primacy in its chosen sphere of influence, to defeat the Western nations (eventually and if necessary Russia, the traditional enemy) which would not accept it, to subdue and incorporate China within the Japanese empire, but to offer other Asian states (Indo-China, Thailand, Malaya, Burma, the East Indies) a place within Japan’s Asian ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ under Japanese leadership. His vision was of an Asia liberated from the Western presence, in which Japan stood first among peoples who would recognise the extraordinary effort it had made to modernise itself.
On 1 November he chaired a meeting of army, navy and civilian representatives convened to consider the issues of war, peace and the deadline with America. The meeting decided to confront the Americans with one of two new proposals, identified as A and B. By the former the Japanese would offer the Americans a withdrawal of Japanese troops from China to be completed twenty-five years in the future – on the rational supposition that the Americans would reject it. Proposal B would offer a withdrawal of troops from southern Indo-China, where they had just arrived, if the Americans would sell Japan a million tons of aviation fuel. Both moves were to be linked to the establishment of a general peace in the Pacific. Tojo, as Prime Minister but also as representative of the military war party, was momentarily torn; he agreed that a final effort should be made to avoid war by engaging America in discussion of proposal B, however unlikely it was that Washington would accept it. The following day, however, in the presence of the emperor, he expressed his fear that, if Japan did not seize its advantage now, ‘I am afraid we would become a third-class nation in two or three years. . . . Also, if we govern occupied areas with justice, the hostile attitude towards us will probably soften. America will be outraged at first but then she will come to understand. Anyway, I will carefully avoid making this a racial war.’ The emperor did not on this occasion remind his advisers of the awesomeness of the issues they were discussing. In effect, therefore, in the absence of a subsequent American decision to withdraw from confrontation with Japan, the decision for war was sealed on 5 November; as the generals had brought the admirals to agree the previous day, 30 November was the last date on which American concessions would be accepted. By 25 November the Japanese naval attack force would have sailed from home ports to open the offensive against the United States bases in the Pacific, and Japanese army forces in Indo-China would have begun moves to enter southern Thailand, with the object of invading the British colony of Malaya and, beyond that, Burma and the Dutch East Indies.
Because of their access to Japanese diplomatic traffic through the Magic system, the Americans were aware as early as 7 November 1941 that 25 November marked a key date in the progress of their negotiations with Tokyo. They suspected that it might be the day after which Japan would regard itself as committed to war. However, even though they also had cryptanalytic access to Japanese naval ciphers, they had not identified the preliminary military moves ordered by Tojo and his cabinet, because of the stringent radio silence imposed by Japanese headquarters on the movements of the Combined Fleet and the Twenty-Fifth Army in southern Indo-China. During the second two weeks of November, often in conclave with the British, Dutch and Chinese, the State Department discussed proposal B at length with the Japanese representatives in Washington. The negotiations were fraught with ambiguity. Since Hull knew that the Japanese were proceeding with military preparations while professing to conduct a frank diplomacy, he was disinclined to accord weight to their offers and counter-offers; since they – Nomura and a professional diplomat, Kurusu, sent to assist him – were honourable men, their efforts at negotiation were hamstrung by their personal embarrassment at the double-dealing to which Tojo had made them party.
All ambiguities were resolved on 26 November. Then Cordell Hull bluntly presented them with the United States’ ultimate position, which was a firm restatement of the position from which it had begun. Japan was to withdraw its troops not only from Indo-China but also from China, to accept the legitimacy of Chiang Kai-shek’s government and, in effect, to abrogate Japan’s membership of the Tripartite Pact. The Hull note reached Tokyo on 27 November and provoked consternation. It appeared to go further than any American counter-proposal yet issued. Not only did it link the relaxation of economic embargoes to a humiliating diplomatic surrender. It also demanded, by the Japanese interpretation, a withdrawal from the whole territory which the Chinese emperors had formerly ruled – Manchuria as well as China proper. Since Manchuria was technically not part of ethnic China, and since the Japanese believed they had conquered it by four-square means, this provision of the Hull note confirmed Tojo’s belief in the rectitude of his policy. It revealed, as he and his followers had long argued, that the United States did not regard the Japanese empire as its equal in the community of nations, that it expected the emperor and his government to obey the American President when told to do so, and that it altogether discounted the reality of Japanese strategic power. The army and navy at once agreed that the note was unacceptable and, while Tojo instructed his Washington emissaries to persist in the talks, ships and soldiers were meanwhile directed to proceed to their attack stations. A longwinded and misleading restatement of Japanese grievances was transmitted to the Japanese embassy in Washington for presentation to Cordell Hull on the morning of 7 December, intended by Tojo to stand as a declaration of war. Although it was intercepted by Magic, delays in its translation meant that its contents were not formally presented at the State Department until after two o’clock in the afternoon, over an hour after
the deadline stipulated by Tokyo. By then Pearl Harbor was under heavy attack, with the result that Tojo as a military leader had the satisfaction of presiding over one of the most shattering surprise attacks in history but as a Japanese traditionalist had the ignominy of inaugurating what Roosevelt denounced as the ‘day of infamy’.
THIRTEEN
From Pearl Harbor to Midway
Sunday, 7 December 1941 found the American Pacific Fleet peacefully at anchor in its Hawaiian base of Pearl Harbor. Until April 1940 the fleet’s permanent port was at San Diego, California; but the surprise attack on France in May by Germany, Japan’s European ally, had caused the Navy Department to decide that the fleet’s spring cruise to its forward base in Hawaii should be prolonged pending the return of calm to its western waters. In the Pacific Japan maintained a fleet as strong in battleships as that of the United States and even stronger in aircraft carriers, and was meanwhile prosecuting a great war in China which still left a force of eleven divisions – considerably larger than the American army as then constituted – for operations elsewhere. The Pacific Fleet remained at Pearl Harbor throughout 1940. While its sister formation, the Atlantic Fleet, began to undertake active escort operations off the American eastern seaboard during 1941 in support of Roosevelt’s policy of denying those waters to the U-boats, the Pacific Fleet continued its programme of exercises and cruises. Since June 1940 it had undertaken three major alerts and many anti-aircraft and anti-submarine drills; and since October 1941 it had been at a permanent state of readiness. However, the protraction of the warning period had blunted the edge of preparedness. In peacetime the Pacific Fleet always observed Sunday as a holiday. Many officers slept ashore, the crews woke to a late breakfast. So it was on 7 December, the day, Roosevelt was shortly to tell Congress, that would ‘live in infamy’.
The Japanese navy was acutely aware that the Pacific Fleet was vulnerable to surprise attack, and its plans were based on the supposition that surprise could be achieved. These plans, devised quite separately from the grand strategic debate in the cabinet, foresaw Japan’s war falling into three stages. In the first stage the Combined Fleet would attack the United States Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor, while other naval and military forces simultaneously destroyed enemy ships and units and seized essential territory in the so-called ‘Southern Area’, comprising Malaya, the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines. In an extension of these operations, the army and navy would set up a defensive perimeter in Japan’s larger islands and archipelagos in the western Pacific, which would deny America and its allies the opportunity to strike back into Japan’s area of strategic dominance. The logic of the Japanese plan rested on the perception that, while the eastern Pacific between California and Hawaii is empty ocean, offering no bases or points of replenishment to a fleet or amphibious force based in the continental United States, the western Pacific is a constellation of islands, whose forward edge might be fortified to make the whole complex impenetrable to an outsider. Moreover, the long eastern flank of this island zone could be so armed with air and naval striking forces that an American fleet sailing to the Western powers’ bases in Australia and New Zealand would suffer such damage on passage that no counter-offensive could be mounted there.
The second stage of Japan’s plan was to make good the logic of its strategic thinking by constructing fortified bases along a chain running from the Kurile Islands, off Russian Siberia, through Wake (an American possession), the Marshall Islands (ex-German possessions allocated, with the Carolines and Marianas, to Japan at Versailles), the Gilberts (British), the Bismarcks (ex-German, now Australian), northern New Guinea (Australian), the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya. Stage three was to be concerned largely with consolidation: it included the interception and destruction of Allied forces which violated or approached the defensive perimeter, the waging of a war of attrition against the United States with the object of wearing down the American will to fight, and also the extension of the war, if necessary, into the British area of dominance in Burma, the Indian Ocean and perhaps India itself.
The perimeter strategy was rooted deeply in the psyche and history of the Japanese who, as an island people, had long been accustomed to using land and sea forces in concert to preserve the security of the archipelago they inhabit and extend national power into adjoining regions. The key to this strategy was the destruction of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Without that, the second and third phases of their war plan would crumble from the outset. The devising of the plan was consigned, paradoxically, to Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, who was opposed to the Tripartite Pact, admired America and was pessimistic about the outcome of a Japanese-American war; but he conceived it his duty as a patriot and a professional naval officer to construct a feasible scheme.
Yamamoto was by origin a surface fleet officer; he had fought and been wounded in a cruiser at the decisive battle of Tsushima against the Russians in May 1905. Subsequently, however, he accepted that the aircraft carrier was the naval weapon of the future and had learned to fly. However, he still mistrusted his grasp of the essentials of air-sea operations and so, early in 1941, he enlisted the assistance of an outstanding younger naval aviator, Minoru Genda, to help him construct the attack plan. During the spring and summer outline plans were reviewed and criticised within the Combined Fleet and in September were submitted to the Naval General Staff. They comprised five separate but simultaneous operations. On Z-Day (Z was the flag flown by Admiral Togo to signal the opening of battle against the Russians at Tsushima in May 1905) two small amphibious forces would move against the American outposts of Wake and Guam islands, to wipe out those footholds inside the perimeter surrounding the ‘Southern Area’. Another amphibious force, concentrated from Japanese bases on Formosa, Okinawa and the Palau Islands, would begin landings in the Philippines, taking the large islands of Mindanao and Luzon as their targets. Land, sea and air forces based in southern Indo-China and south China would invade Malaya (via a lodgement seized in the Kra isthmus of Thailand) and the Molucca Islands in the Dutch East Indies. Meanwhile, in the central act on which the success of all other four depended, the Combined Fleet, with its four large (and later two small) aircraft carriers, would have approached Pearl Harbor by stealth to within a range of 200 miles, launched and recovered its air groups, and departed, leaving the American Pacific Fleet’s eight battleships and three carriers burning and sinking at their moorings. Japanese confidence in the viability of the plan was heightened by the Royal Navy’s use of carrier aircraft against the Italian fleet in Taranto harbour in November 1940, an operation which Yamamoto’s staff officers closely analysed.
There were two impediments to the success of the plan. One was that Japanese torpedoes could not run in the shallow waters of Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor, but modifications were soon made. The other was the danger that the Combined Fleet might be spotted on passage and its security compromised – even though it was to approach Hawaii by the most circuitous of routes, beginning in the stormy waters of the Kurile Islands between Japan and Siberia, and proceeding south-eastward by a route far from commercial shipping lanes. An experimental voyage was sailed by a Japanese liner in October 1941, and when it reported that it had not seen another ship or aeroplane the danger of compromise was discounted.
On 26 November the Carrier Strike Force sailed; the subordinate attack forces followed from their separate ports in the next few days. Nagumo commanded six carriers, two battleships and two heavy cruisers, three submarines, a covey of escorts and an attendant fleet of oilers to support his striking force over its long voyage; the Japanese, with the Americans, were pioneers of replenishment at sea, a technique which enormously extended the range and endurance of an operational fleet. The kernel and justification of his command, however, was his squadron of six carriers which between them embarked over 360 aircraft, including 320 torpedo- and dive-bombers and their fighter escorts for the air strike on Pearl Harbor. If they could be brought to their launch point, 200 miles north of Oahu where
Battleship Row lay, the chances of their being deflected from their mission were remote.
Neither American strategic nor tactical intelligence of the planned Japanese strike against Pearl Harbor was adequate. American historians have disputed for years the issue of whether Roosevelt ‘knew’: those who believed he did imply that he had sought and found in foreknowledge of Japanese ‘infamy’ the pretext he needed to draw the United States into the war on the side of Britain. It is an extension of the charge that there was a secret understanding between Roosevelt and Churchill, perhaps concluded at their August meeting in Placentia Bay, New-foundland, to use Japanese perfidy as a means of overcoming American domestic resistance to involvement. Both these charges defy logic. In the second case, Churchill certainly did not want war against Japan, which Britain was pitifully equipped to fight, but only American assistance in the fight against Hitler, which a casus belli in the Pacific would not necessarily assure; as we have seen, Hitler’s perverse decision to declare war on the United States in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor solved problems of diplomacy which might otherwise have needed months of negotiation between the White House and Congress. In the first case, Roosevelt’s foreknowledge can be demonstrated to have been narrowly circumscribed. Although the American cryptanalysts had broken both the Japanese diplomatic cipher Purple and the naval cipher JN 25b, Purple was used only to transmit instructions from the Japanese Foreign Office to its diplomats abroad; in the nature of things, such instructions did not include details of war plans and, though their contents during the last months of peace aroused the suspicions of the American eavesdroppers, suspicion did not amount to proof. War plans, which would have supplied proof, were not entrusted to JN 25b. So stringent was Japanese radio security in the weeks before Pearl Harbor that all orders were distributed between Tokyo, fleet and army by courier, and the striking forces proceeded to their attack positions under strict radio silence. As an added precaution, Nagumo’s fleet approached Pearl Harbor inside the forward edge of one of the enormous weather fronts which regularly cross the Pacific at warship speed. This technique, long practised by the Japanese, ensured that the fleet’s movements would be protected by cloud and rainstorm from the eyes of any but a very lucky air or sea reconnaissance unit – from any systematic means of surveillance, indeed, except radar.
