For those unfortunates who made it alive into American hands, widespread torture was the rule. Harvard-educated First Lieutenant Grover Flint later recalled for a Senate panel the routine torture of Filipino combatants and civilians—thirty here, forty there. Lieutenant Flint described the “water cure,” the standard U.S. Army torture:
A man is thrown down on his back and three or four men sit or stand on his arms and legs and hold him down, and either a gun barrel or a rifle or a carbine barrel or a stick as big as a belaying pin . . . is simply thrust into his jaws and his jaws are thrust back, and, if possible, a wood log or stone is put under . . . his neck, so he can be held firmly.
Senator Julius Caesar Burrows of Michigan interrupted to ask, “His jaws are forced open, you say? How do you mean, crosswise?”
Lieutenant Flint: Yes, sir, as a gag. In the case of very old men I have seen their teeth fall out—I mean when it was done a little roughly. He is simply held down, and then water is poured into his face, down his throat and nose from a jar, and that is kept up until the man gives some sign of giving in or becoming unconscious, and when he becomes unconscious he is simply rolled aside and he is allowed to come to. . . . Well, I know that in a great many cases, in almost every case, the men have been a little roughly handled; they were rolled aside rudely, so that water was expelled. A man suffers tremendously; there is no doubt about that. His suffering must be that of a man who is drowning, but he cannot drown.
President Theodore Roosevelt excused his army’s atrocities in the Philippines and hailed “the bravery of American soldiers” who fought “for the triumph of civilization over the black chaos of savagery and barbarism.” To Roosevelt, the extermination of hundreds of thousands of noncombatant civilians and defenseless POWs in the Philippines represented “the most glorious war in the nation’s history.”
When Japanese military men asked themselves how the Christians could be so hypocritical about Japan doing exactly what they had done, there was one clear answer: racism. Off and on for years, the United States Congress had threatened discriminatory immigration bills against yellow Japanese. In October 1906, a year after the Portsmouth treaty, the San Francisco school board had ordered all Japanese children to attend the Oriental school in Chinatown. The Japanese government winced at this “act of discrimination carrying with it a stigma and odium which it is impossible to overlook.” Later, Congress overwhelmingly approved an immigration bill denying visas to Japanese and other Asians.
To Japanese military men, the League of Nations could as well be called the “League of Christian Anti-Japanese Nations.” Japan had sided with the Allies in WWI, sat at the reparations table at the Paris Peace Conference as the only non-Western power, and been awarded German islands in the Pacific. But Japan feared that “the West intended to use the League of Nations to perpetuate the ascendancy of the white race. ‘Our real fear [wrote delegate Prince Fumimaro Konoe] is that the League of Nations might let the powerful nations dominate the weak nations economically, and condemn the late-coming nations to remain forever subordinate to the advanced nations.’”
Indeed, when the League passed a resolution calling for self-determination for countries and the end of colonialism, the United States slipped in a clause exempting itself. Freedom was a nice concept, but in the real world, Washington preferred its Monroe Doctrine lock on power in the Americas. So why should Japan, the only civilized power in Asia, not have similar rights in its backyard?
Japan was so convinced of gaizin prejudice that it requested a racial equality clause be added to the League’s covenant. “The proposal was a blandly worded declaration that member nations would not discriminate against one another on the basis of race or nationality and would try ‘as much as possible to grant de jure equality’ to foreign subjects living in their territory.” Not one western country voted for the clause.
The final straw came in 1931, when the westerners in the League decided to investigate Japan’s “aggression” in China without mentioning how they had happened upon their own colonies. Delegate Yosuke Matsuoka, who had studied at the University of Oregon, rose to defend Japan in a classic Hakko Ichiu speech: “China lacked a legitimate government that could maintain law and order; it was weak and ‘backward,’ a country ‘in an appalling condition of disintegration and distress’ where ‘tens of millions of people have lost their lives as a result of internecine warfare, tyranny, banditry, famine and flood.’ Japan, in contrast, was ‘a great civilizing nation’ that ‘has been and always will be the mainstay of peace, order and progress in the Far East.’ In a region that was hopelessly disorganized, Matsuoka argued, Japan had made Manchuria into an island of stability and prosperity.” But the speech fell on deaf ears. The League members who were “helping” their subjugated colonists around the globe voted unanimously against Japan, which cast the only vote in its own favor. Matsuoka and the entire Japanese delegation walked out of the League for good.
How could the Christian imperialists have the gall to tell Japan it wasn’t supposed to be involved in countries next door when the westerners had come from across the globe to subjugate Asian nations? The United States had taken the Philippines and Hawaii by bayonet. Washington was constantly invading countries in the Caribbean and Central and South America. If America was sincere about freedom, it could divest its colonial holdings. Japan knew the money it paid for Indonesian oil and Vietnamese rubber went directly to the Dutch and French treasuries in Europe. Laotians who challenged French rule ended up hanging from ropes. The Europeans had exploited Africa without pause or mercy. Where were the calls for independence for the colonies of the Christians?
In July 1939, the United States announced that it was ending its twenty-seven-year-old commercial treaty with Japan. Japan’s hated enemy Chiang Kai-shek had convinced FDR to apply economic sanctions against Japan to try and force it into a negotiated settlement with China. “According to an opinion poll, 75 per cent of the American public agreed” with this provocative anti-Japanese action.
Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and one month later, in October of 1939, Roosevelt ordered a large part of the American fleet to Pearl Harbor. From the Japanese point of view, this was an extremely threatening move. There were no free countries on the Pacific rim to protect, only American, British, French, and Dutch colonies.
In June of 1940, Germany overran France. Japan pressured the new French government to cut off supplies flowing into China through its colony French Indochina, and persuaded the beleaguered British—who had no other choice—to stop supplies to China from their colony in Burma. America, on the other hand, banned the export of aviation gasoline, lubricating oil, and scrap iron to Japan.
To Japan, it was all very suspicious. America aided China and the white colonial powers of Asia just enough to keep Japan’s troops bogged down, while the Yankees simultaneously rearmed and negotiated in a desultory manner. Now it looked as though the mighty U.S.A. wanted to choke Japan with economic sanctions. The Tokyo press spoke of the “ABCD encirclement.” The abbreviation referred to the “American-British-Chinese-Dutch” mob that was trying to squeeze the life out of Japan.
Seeking friends in a hostile world, Japan allied with Italy and Germany in the Tripartite Pact. And if Americans didn’t like it, Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe announced where they could stick it: “If the United States does not understand the positions of Japan, Germany, and Italy, and regards our pact as a provocative action directed against it, and if it constantly adopts a confrontational attitude, then the three countries will fight resolutely.”
Later that month, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who had spent years “lecturing the Japanese about the ‘principles of good behavior,’” handed Japan’s ambassador a list of demands for normalized relations. “Known as Hull’s Four Principles, they included respect for the territorial integrity of other nations, noninterference in the internal affairs of other countries, the maintenance of equal commercial opportunity for all and no alteration to the
status quo except through peaceful means.”
The Japanese must have wondered if Secretary Hull was a comedian and if this was a joke. Western militaries had subdued countries all across Asia and Africa, and now the secretary expected Japan to play by different rules.
But it was no joke, and Roosevelt upped the ante with audacious displays of American power and Anglo-American-Dutch unity. He ordered American naval officers to “participate openly in staff conversations at Singapore with high-ranking British, Dutch, Australian, New Zealand, and Indian officers in April.” The American president also sent a message to Emperor Hirohito describing Japanese troops in Indochina as creating a “deep and far-reaching emergency” that threatened the Philippines, the East Indies, Malaya, and Thailand, and peaceful relations with the United States. Roosevelt proposed that the Japanese “dispel the dark clouds” in Asia. But Tokyo only saw dark clouds drifting from the West.
In July 1940, Japan occupied French Indochina in an attempt to encircle China, cut off her lifeline, and end the conflict on Japan’s terms. “When the Japanese army moved to occupy southern Indochina, despite American warnings, the [Japanese] government had already calculated that the only way to break the stalemate in China was to risk a war with the whole world.”
The U.S. reacted in August by dispatching the largest fleet of U.S. warplanes—more than four hundred from the growing fleet FDR was now building in the shadow of threats from Germany and Japan—to America’s colony the Philippines. FDR also promoted Manila-based General Douglas MacArthur as commander in chief of all U.S. military forces in the Far East.
Shortly thereafter, FDR froze all Japanese assets in the United States, ended all trade with Japan, and cut the flow of precious oil. The other white colonizers, Britain and Holland, followed suit. Japan’s oil reserves would last only twenty months. Without a source of oil, Japan would be paralyzed, as helpless as a beached whale.
Japan tried to negotiate. If the U.S. would only cut off aid to China and allow Japan access to oil, the emperor’s divine peace would rule throughout Asia. All would be well.
The United States countered: Get out of China and we’ll sell you oil.
Get out of China! How about Roosevelt withdrawing from California and returning it to Mexico? Or France granting independence to Algeria or Churchill listening to Gandhi’s pleas for Indian control of India? FDR had earlier “predicted that Americans would question continued relations with Tokyo ‘if the Japanese government were to fail to speak as civilized twentieth-century human beings.’” Civilized? Just months before, the French had razed villages in the Mekong Delta, arrested eight thousand people, including old women and children, run wires through their palms and heels to chain them together, and transported them by barges for days as they roasted under a tropical sun. Was that the civilized behavior Mr. Roosevelt was referring to? Any visitor to the United States could see the “Whites Only” signs, the black bodies swinging from the lynching trees, the dusty Indian reservations where America warehoused its conquered. The United States Congress had enacted fourteen separate discriminatory immigration laws to keep Chinese out of the U.S.—and FDR lectured Japan on how to treat them “fairly.” Civilized?
The coming confrontation was a chance for Hirohito to emulate Grandpa Meiji’s great military triumph. But when he asked, no one would promise Meiji’s forty-year-old grandson that Japan could win a war against the United States. The Spirit Warriors just puffed up their chests, saying Japan must strike while the iron was hot.
The Keystone cops quality of the deliberations leading up to war is illustrated by an exchange between the godly commander in chief and his army and navy heads—General Hajime Sugiyama and Admiral Nagano—in imperial conference on September 5, 1941. Hirohito inquired how long it would take to “dispose of the matter,” meaning war with the United States. General Sugiyama responded that “the operations in the South would take about three months. The Emperor broke in at once, tersely observing that as war minister in 1937, Sugiyama had said the China Incident would be over in about a month. That had been four years ago and the fighting was still in progress.”
General Sugiyama explained that while China was a vast hinterland, the Pacific was composed of islands, so the problem was not the same. Hirohito responded with incredulity, “If you call the Chinese hinterland vast, would you not describe the Pacific as even more immense? With what confidence do you say ‘three months’?”
In other top councils that would have been the end for this general. But Sugiyama just hung his head and maintained his role as the emperor’s top army adviser, “perhaps because putting anyone on the spot was considered a rather drastic thing to do.”
In early November, Hirohito reviewed the Pearl Harbor attack plan and heard the military pitch its grand strategy for the Pacific war. It was here that the god-emperor, the Boy Soldier trained for war, could have revealed the Spirit Warriors’ utter lack of coherent strategy and paucity of planning. They presented him with a “first stage offensive”—the knockout punch at Pearl Harbor and the invasion of Malaya, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. But there were no follow-up plans, just a “hypothesis” that Japan would later answer enemy responses with brilliant counterthrusts. No one mentioned estimates of potential losses, numbers describing Japan’s financial ability to support a war, definitions of adequate supply, manpower requirements, or raw material calculations. How exactly was Japan going to defeat an industrial behemoth like the United States? The U.S. annually produced twelve times the steel, five times the number of ships, one hundred and five times the number of automobiles, and five and a half times the amount of electricity that Japan did.
But to the Spirit Warriors this was just nit-picking. The United States had material strength but lacked the most important virtue. Any Spirit Warrior knew victory was the result of material strength multiplied by spiritual strength. Yamato damashii would be the secret ingredient to break the ring of the ABCD encirclement. Japanese leaders reasoned that Yankee culture was soft and that the average American was too selfish to support a long war in a distant place. Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, one of Japan’s top war strategists, later said, “Our candid ideas at the time were that the Americans, being merchants, would not continue for long with an unprofitable war, whereas we . . . could carry on a protracted war.”
In November of 1941, U.S. Naval Intelligence detected the first faint signals indicating Japan was about to strike. They were detected by a pipe-smoking man dressed in slippers and a red smoking jacket in a windowless basement room at Pearl Harbor. He was Joseph Rochefort, chief of the navy’s Combat Intelligence Unit. The signals emanated from radio transmission stations on Chichi Jima. When Commodore Perry had first beheld Chichi Jima, he had seen two peaks on the tiny island. Now the Imperial Japanese Navy had built reinforced concrete radio buildings on those same mounts.
On November 8, Rochefort compiled the information gleaned from Chichi Jima’s transmitters into a “Communication Intelligence Summary” and wired it to Washington. The Chichi Jima signals described a “two-prong” attack, one going east from Japan, the other south.
On November 27, 1941, the U.S. chief of naval operations wired an urgent dispatch to all Pacific stations:
THIS DISPATCH IS TO BE CONSIDERED A WAR WARNING NEGOTIATIONS WITH JAPAN LOOKING TOWARD STABILIZATION OF CONDITIONS IN THE PACIFIC HAVE CEASED AND AN AGGRESSIVE MOVE BY JAPAN IS EXPECTED WITHIN THE NEXT FEW DAYS
Americans would always “Remember Pearl Harbor.” But the attack against Hawaii was a sideshow meant to cripple America’s ability to blunt Japan’s all-important thrust to “the South.” The opening salvo of the Pacific war occurred one hour and twenty minutes before the strike at Pearl Harbor, when General Hirofumi Yamashita landed his 20,000 troops on the east coast of Malaya. Britain’s 88,000 troops vastly outnumbered the Japanese, but the Brits lacked Yamato damashii and soon surrendered to the better-motivated sons of the gods.
In his declaration of war, Prime Minister Hideki Tojo sa
id the conflict was the fault of “the United States and England for supporting and encouraging the Chinese in disturbing the peace of East Asia, in pursuit of their inordinate ambition to dominate the Orient.” Tojo said the “Emperor’s profound hope is that peace be maintained,” but the gaizin showed “not the least spirit of conciliation,” so “Our Empire, for its existence and self-defense, has no other recourse but to appeal to arms and to crush every obstacle in the path.” Yamato damashii would defeat the American “merchants.”
When Japanese leaders referred to Americans as “merchants” they were thinking of one particular Dutchman in the White House. But Tojo and the emperor had miscalculated. In Franklin Roosevelt they were tangling with a man who had had his life devastated by polio and then willed himself into becoming president of the United States. This was a man who had led his citizens through the dark days of the Depression with a smile that radiated confidence from his soul. This Dutchman feared nothing—not even fear itself.
After Japan attacked America, President Roosevelt thought deeply about how best to respond. He evaluated the plans of his military advisers, but they weren’t imaginative enough for him. Then he hit upon an idea no military man could have conceived of, because it was presumed to be impossible. When FDR first told his advisers, they were dumbfounded. But since Japanese experts also considered such a concept impossible, they would be taken by surprise when America finally manifested the Dutchman’s idea.
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