Poland had been on the carving block since April 1939, when Germany renounced its 1934 nonaggression pact with Poland and made Polish territory a way-station on the drive to destroy the USSR. Hitler could not imagine the British coming to the aid of Poland after sacrificing Czechoslovakia, and he had ordered the German High Seas Fleet to move into full-scale production of battleships, cruisers, and submarines based on a long-range plan for war with England after Jewish Bolshevism had been eradicated. Nonetheless, the stubborn British gave Poland a territorial guarantee in August 1939, complicating Hitler’s schemes. As an Anglo-French mission left for Moscow to discuss alliances with Stalin, Hitler was forced to abruptly modify his plans.
Stalin despised the Nazis and feared a German invasion as much as Hitler hated Bolshevism and wished to avoid a two-front war. This focus on a common desire for harmonious relations (temporarily) between their two nations produced a terrifying international alignment of totalitarian gangsters. Moreover, there was a precedent indicating coming events—Mussolini had aligned with Germany in May 1939 with the “Pact of Steel,” and promptly plunged into Albania two weeks later. Now the Nazis wooed Stalin, sending Joachim von Ribbentrop to meet with the Soviet dictator, not least to forestall any possible rapprochement between Britain and the Soviet Union. Ribbentrop’s reply indicated that the Soviets, too, wanted an arrangement. A division of Poland seemed just the sweetener for the deal.
Addressing the German High Command on August 22, Hitler announced he would “provide the propagandistic pretext for launching the war, no matter whether it is credible,” and directed his generals to “Close your hearts to pity. Proceed brutally.”131 The next night, in the Kremlin, Ribbentrop sealed the agreement with Stalin, receiving the dictator’s toasts to Hitler, looking much like Chicago mobsters from a decade earlier as they divided up territory between phony handshakes and sloppy kisses. The nonaggression pact virtually ensured that Poland would vanish as a state. Wisely, the Soviets waited until September 17 to seize their part of Poland, allowing Germany to attack first on September 1 and Britain and France to declare war on Germany as the sole aggressor. Stalin was correct that neither Britain nor France would desire war with the Soviet Union in addition to Germany and would overlook the Soviet role in dismembering Poland. In fact, they would turn a blind eye to anything else Stalin would do while at war with Germany, and the pact allowed Stalin to crush the Baltic states and move with impunity against Finland and parts of Romania. Stalin reveled in the deal as he now had free rein, and declared war on Finland in November. Germany, described as a “partner” by Stalin, suddenly benefited from an ironic and ridiculous overnight shift in worldwide Communist propaganda. Whereas only a week earlier Communist publications in England and America had denounced fascism, now Hitler was a friend; war was to be resisted and peace sought.132
As long as the pact lasted, Stalin guaranteed Hitler raw materials, including copper, zinc, tin, and food. Both dictators slobbered over each other with grandiose statements, Stalin becoming an originator of “Slavonic-Muscovite nationalism” and creator of “Slavonic fascism.” The Soviet premier described Hitler as much like himself, weeding out “extremists.”133
Samurai and Supermen
Germany’s obsessive march to war in Europe would have occurred without any similar actions in the Far East by Japan during the 1930s. Indeed, except for the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936—which jointly pledged Japan and Germany to resist the Communist International, or Comintern—Japan and Germany had few initial mutual goals. But as European colonial possessions in the Far East became vulnerable after 1940, the Empire of Japan and Nazi Germany found their interests aligning. Germany’s Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 constituted the sole hiccup in the relationship: it seemed to violate the anti-Communist understanding with Japan. Under this pledge, Germany and Russia agreed to a nonaggression pact that permitted the Soviets to invade Poland from the east without fear of German retaliation as the Nazis moved into Poland from the west. Hitler personally saw the German-Soviet agreement as a mere truce to be broken at a time of his choosing, and he assumed Stalin did as well.
Japan remained to be drawn into Germany’s alliances, in spite of Hitler’s agreement with Stalin, for two reasons: to act as a diversion to keep the United States occupied in the Far East, and as a possible partner in the eventual war against the Soviet Union, whenever Hitler decided to take that plunge or if Stalin attacked Germany first. Not wanting to unduly alarm Stalin and provoke an untimely conflict while Britain and France remained undefeated, Hitler put off Japan for a year.
It was not until September 25, 1940, that Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop informed Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, that Germany and Italy had signed a military alliance with Japan. He attempted to reassure Molotov that this was not directed at the USSR. Quite the contrary, Ribbentrop said it was designed to warn off elements in the United States who might be considering entering the European conflict. The resulting alliance, signed in Berlin as the Tripartite Pact, formally established Germany, Italy, and Japan as the Axis Powers.
By that time, however, Japan had come to resemble Germany a great deal, and its own path of destruction through the 1930s seemed to lead inevitably toward just such an alliance. For this reason it is useful to review the decade for Japan as it unfolded half a world away from the coming blitzkriegs in Poland and France.
Even in its doctrines of racial superiority and imperial expansionism, the underlying philosophies of the Empire of Japan started to resemble the Nazi program in almost every facet. Where the Nazis had their doctrines of Aryan supermen, Japan would belatedly produce in 1943 its own view of racial domination as elucidated in “An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus” that plotted to populate Asian soil with “Japanese blood.”134 In contrast, Chinese were described as “bacteria infesting world civilization,” and “Nanking vermin.”135 Just as the Third Reich had its grandiose scheme for resettling Poland and Russia with Aryans, so too the Japanese envisioned an ambitious global policy that, in its final stage, would incorporate not only China and Southeast Asia and India, but also Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan.136 By 1942, a geographer working for the imperial government categorized Europe and Africa as part of Asia and proposed renaming America “Eastern Asia” and Australia “Southern Asia.” The world’s oceans would be renamed the “Great Sea of Japan.” A book of the same year, The Establishment of the Greater East Asian Order, claimed that “Asia was on the verge of overturning European control everywhere.”137 Another document, the “Investigation of Global Policy,” envisioned 12 million Japanese settlers living in these new lands, including 2 million in Australia and New Zealand. The Japanese language would become the official language of all, and a colonial-style industrial relationship would be imposed in the “southern areas.” While many of these planning documents appeared after Japanese military successes early in the 1940s, they all reflected intrinsic and well-established Japanese attitudes throughout the previous decade.
Unlike the Nazis’ race policies, the Japanese did not envision extermination of their “parasitic” enemy, but rather the subjugation and quasi-assimilation of these peoples into Japan’s empire. All Asians in Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” introduced in 1943, would be required to learn Japanese; and Japanese settlers had to be wary of racial “pollution.” There was to be no intermingling with the Han (Chinese), and personal relationships with people in “child countries” occupied by the Empire would not be permitted. A contemporary and accurate model was available in Korea, which Japan had annexed in 1910 (although the Korean emperor never signed the document). As early as 1939, the Korean language was banned from schools and all Koreans were required to attend Shinto services. Korean laborers were shipped to Japan, just as Poles, Czechs, and Jews of all nationalities were shipped to Germany to work for the Nazis. Without a doubt, the policies of militant Japan were as racist as those of Nazi Germany. While fascism and Bushi
do could provide a vision of the future in which Japan and Nazi Germany could coexist in principle, the racial demands of each doctrine promised a future conflict even if wars with the Americans, British, and Soviets had not intervened first. It is significant, therefore, that the totalitarians’ mind-set was quite uniform. In each case, the violence with which their ideas were implemented spawned substantial resistance within conquered territories, while simultaneously producing a number of toadies who sought self-preservation or some level of power within the system. This helps explain how 136 million Germans and Japanese could dominate seven times their number of subjugated peoples. Contrary to the history of the British Empire, however—where the actual military presence was minuscule and the level of violence relatively minor—the Axis nations employed both a large martial footprint and brutal, murderous tactics to ensure compliance.
Just as Hitler perceived America to be the most significant long-term threat to Germany, so too did the Japanese. As early as 1907, Japan identified the United States as the “sole imaginary enemy” in its “National Defense Policy.”138 American bases in the Philippines, in particular, galled the Japanese, posing in their view a threatening naval presence in Japanese waters. Of the many naval lessons of World War I, Imperial Japanese Navy authorities took from the Battle of Jutland the maxim that a 40 percent advantage in ships and firepower was necessary to achieve victory at sea. Attaining this ratio—or, at least, preventing the United States from reaching it—demanded that Japan have a 70 percent superiority ratio over the United States in the Pacific.139
A thirst for resources led Japan into its decade-long entrapment in China, an adventure that finally produced war with the United States. Some of its aggression derived, as Hitler’s did, from the perception of Western weakness. Britain’s signature of the London Naval Treaty in 1930, which limited the size of certain classes of warships (at a fixed disadvantage for Japan), symbolized the end of the Royal Navy as the premier force of its kind in the world. The treaty also insulted Japan by imposing lower limits than on the “white” nations, contributing to Japan’s decision to ignore the treaty and eventually leave the League of Nations. There seemed to be little danger, since Singapore’s defenses had been neglected as numerous British leaders called for reductions in the naval budget and overseas expenditures, citing pledges by Japanese leaders to resolve disputes peacefully.
Although the Soviet Union threatened to halt Japanese expansion on the Asian continent, the Japanese increasingly viewed the United States and Britain as the primary enemies. Smoot-Hawley Tariff increases convinced the Japanese they could not trust the United States as an economic partner, since after the act went into effect, silk prices plummeted by half and prices of imported food threatened the nation’s ability to feed its population. Most zaibatsu heads (the leaders of Japanese industrial and banking conglomerates) and other officials in Japan had already determined that only through imperialism could Japan solve its problems of overpopulation and underproduction. Kingoro Hashimoto, a soldier in the Japanese Imperial Army and a politician, wrote in Addresses to Young Men in 1939 that expansion of territory constituted the only one of the three options open to Japan for growth, with the other two (emigration and free trade) closed off.140 Like most predator states, however, Japan responded to domestic hardship by increasing spending on the military, ramping up the defense budget to nearly half of the government’s total expenditures.
To portray Japan’s aggression in the 1930s, however, as solely or even substantially a reaction to American and/or British policies misinterprets the reality and rationale of Japanese imperialism. Some historians have seen a cold, logical quest for raw materials and a response to economic deficiency.141 And while one could contort the facts to play the resource card, it simply would not win the hand. Japan, pure and simple, fomented what John David Lewis called a “social pathology” and what Kazuko Tsurumi labeled a “socialization for death.”142 The belief in Japanese superiority permeated the educational system, the compromised Shinto religion, and every aspect of Japanese life. Bushido warriors were lionized as the embodiment of the new military ethic. Racial dominance of Japanese was preached at every opportunity, and reinforced in all literature. Concepts of “saving face” and family honor in service to the emperor were enshrined as sacred behavior.
Assassination was so commonplace as to become just another aspect of Japanese protest. Enshrined and venerated as gekokujo (insubordination), young officers and patriots could and did honorably call senior officials and officers to account for their perceived deviations from kokutai (national policy) through outright political murder. Of course, the lives of the perpetrators were forfeit, and that was expected to occur through ritual suicide (seppuku). From 1912 to 1945, six prime ministers and a dozen cabinet ministers were killed. By 1930, the army had also forced out two civilian prime ministers. After Prime Minister Osachi Hamaguchi received a mandate to reduce the armed forces, he was assassinated; then his successor had to resign before being gunned down as well. The plotters of the assassination of the last prime minister, Ki Inukai, intended to shoot him with the visiting American superstar actor Charlie Chaplin, who escaped death only when the ringleaders learned that Chaplin’s reception plans had changed. When asked during trial what the significance was in killing Chaplin, one of the conspirators said the actor was “the darling of the capitalist class…. killing him would cause a war with America….”143 Invoking kokutai, killers and mutineers could threaten any politician with death. Japan therefore drifted into a shadow fascism wholly unrecognizable from British or American representative constitutional government.
Japanese society had became increasingly militarized after the Meiji Restoration, with the army as the instrument of the emperor’s divine will and officers expected to fulfill that will with their lives. The connection between the army and the cult of assassination cannot be overemphasized: when Prime Minister Hamaguchi’s murderers came to trial, the court received a petition for clemency signed by thirty thousand holders of the Order of the Golden Kite, Japan’s highest military decoration.144 Perhaps the most influential figure of the day, War Minister General Sadao Araki, was described as “a ferocious bushido ideologue…who ran a Hitler-style youth movement.”145 Araki had led a group of officers in “the imperial way,” or Kodo. An ardent expansionist whose musings encapsulated the Japanese sense of victimhood and grievance, he cited European incursions into China as having no justification.
In stark contrast to purported Japanese racial superiority was the island’s perpetual shortage of raw materials so desperately needed for the industrial age. Japan was entirely devoid of oil, had few iron deposits, and needed growing imports of rubber, tin, and other resources—all of which reinforced Japan’s key weaknesses. Manchuria offered a solution to many of those deficiencies, particularly iron. As Czechoslovakia had constituted low-hanging fruit to Hitler, Manchuria dangled as a resource-rich plum to be plucked by the Japanese militarists. In 1931, a group of Japanese army officers constructed a plot to blow up a Japanese-owned railway outside Mukden, South Manchuria, and blame it on Chinese dissidents to provide an excuse for the Japanese Kwantung Army to invade North Manchuria. When War Minister Jiro Minami sent a representative to curb gekokujo in the Kwantung Army, the officers quickly put their plan into motion and detonated their explosives. They followed that up by using artillery against the Chinese garrison in Mukden. The Japanese then attacked and took Mukden, killing 500 Chinese soldiers in the process. In the aftermath of the “Chinese provocation,” the Japanese established a puppet state called Manchukuo in 1932.146 No military leaders were reprimanded for acting without authority, for to do so would have run against the grain of Japanese society as a whole.
Japan’s postwar intellectual heritage had come in large part from the ideas of Ikki Kita, who in 1919 wrote A Reconstruction Program for Japan that blended socialism, Japanese imperialism, and Shintoism into a single code. Kita’s Reconstruction Program justified coups d’état as a m
eans of changing governments, a rejection of parliamentary democracy, support of a dictatorship under the emperor as the representative of the nation, and the prohibition of all political criticism.147 Kita himself would later be arrested and executed for complicity in the 1936 plot to decapitate the Japanese civilian government.148
Beneath the cover of the Shinto religion—itself nonaggressive, but within Bushido, a militarized system as all-influencing as Nazism or communism—Japan turned into a total authoritarian state by the early 1930s. Christian missionaries had made only minor inroads in Japanese society, while attempts to inculcate Western-style individual rights and the respect for the rule of law proved even less sturdy, withering under calls for a totalitarian state. All around them, the Japanese saw powerful dictators rewarded and the response of the pacifistic democracies ignored. Less than a month after Hitler repudiated the Versailles Treaty, mobs carried books of Japan’s leading apologist for Western constitutions, Tatsukichi Minobe, to a public book burning on top of the Tokyo Military Club.149 Minobe was derided as “theoretically a materialistic individualist and morally an anarchist.”150 A subsequent statement of “the Japanese mind” issued by the Ministry of Justice held that “there has been no conception of the individual as opposed to the state….” Individuals, noted the ministry, “participate in the highest and greatest value when they serve the state….”151 In effect, Japanese individuals had become interchangeable parts serving the Japanese state. Neither Stalin nor Hitler could have wished for more.
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