by Craig Nelson
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On June 12, code breakers at England’s Bletchley Park decrypted a conversation between Adolf Hitler and Japan’s ambassador to Germany that said Russia would be the Nazis’ next target. Five days later, another decrypt revealed Tokyo requesting German help in forcing the Vichy French to give it air and sea bases across French Indochina in Saigon, Siem Reap, and Phnom Penh.
Just before dawn on June 22, Nazi troops invaded the Soviet Union with twenty-seven hundred tanks in an immense wedge that pushed aside Russian defense forces. Within two days, the Soviets had lost over two thousand aircraft, and within a month the Nazis were triumphant, the Wehrmacht a mere 130 miles from the nation’s political heart: the Kremlin. It was one more of Hitler’s immensely triumphant blitzkriegs.
Now extending from the shoals of France in the west to the onion domes of Moscow in the east, and from the midnight sun of the Barents Sea in the north to the Arab Sahara of Africa in the south, the Nazi empire, conquered and amassed in a bare three years, was incomprehensibly vast, and menacing.
The effect in Tokyo of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was political consternation. Matsuoka called for an immediate audience with the emperor and insisted Japan should fight simultaneously with the Germans against the Soviets in the north and against the Anglo-Saxons to the south. This meeting so upset Hirohito that he concluded the foreign minister had become unhinged and immediately suggested to the prime minister that Matsuoka be removed from the cabinet. Prince Konoye received this news enthusiastically. Originally a strong supporter of the Tripartite Pact, he had, by that summer of 1941, turned entirely against the Axis and wanted to dramatically improve relations with the United States. He assumed Matsuoka’s exit would do just that, but under the constitution, Japan’s prime minister couldn’t dismiss a cabinet member, and Matsuoka refused to resign.
Prime Minister Konoye asked the Cabinet Planning Board’s general director, Teiichi Suzuki, to meet with War Minister Hideki Tojo to ask him if, since the Nazis had so viciously abrogated their treaty with the Soviet Union, couldn’t Japan now ignore the Tripartite Pact and negotiate treaties of nonaggression with Britain and America? Tojo was grievously offended, shouting at Suzuki, “Do you really think we can act in such an immoral way, against humanity and justice?”III Days later, a Naval Affairs Bureau officer begged Navy Minister Osami Nagano not to let the army push the navy into joining Hitler in the war against Russia. Nagano, knowing the army’s vehement reaction to Hull’s treaty terms, snorted, “You’re telling me. We’re on the verge of war with the United States!”
One military faction now urged a “green persimmon” policy—based on the idea that shaking the tree, and getting green persimmons, was a better harvest strategy than waiting for the fruit to ripen and fall—meaning, Japan should join Hitler and attack Russia. The opposition, those in favor of the “ripe persimmon” strategy, pointed out that, if an attack began in June 1941, twelve divisions and eight hundred Japanese planes would face thirty Russian divisions and twenty-eight hundred planes. Naval Minister Osami Nagano additionally noted that attacking the Soviet Union would assuredly mean war with Great Britain and the United States, and that if the army’s southward advance continued, another American embargo would result, forcing a seizure of the Netherlands East Indies’ oil fields, leading directly to war with the Americans, the British, and the Dutch.
The persimmon debate seemed abstract enough, but its framing led Japan’s leaders into a collective and fatalistic belief that war was inevitable. They only needed to answer one question: Who would be the enemy?
The moderates did have some reassuring news; using diplomacy instead of conquest, Japan had succeeded in taking over the northern section of French Indochina, and had even mediated a territorial dispute in Thailand’s favor. That June, the army sided with the navy in pushing for expanding into the rest of the French colony using the same method of diplomacy to allow more access to rice, tin, and rubber, as well as to be able to extort the Netherlands East Indies for more oil. With this compromise, the army stopped insisting on an all-out war in China against both the Chinese and the Soviets, but left open the option of attacking if an opportunity—say, a great exodus of Russian troops from the Pacific theater to fight the Nazis on the Western Front—arose.
Later that month, the army’s war guidance officer noted in the Confidential War Journal:
No new developments
Days of agonies and ruminations continue
One day’s delay means waste of so much oil
One day’s delay means sacrifice of so much blood
Yet they say we must avoid a hundred years’ war with America!
Across 1941, the Imperial Japanese Army regularly advocated war against the United States, while the civilian government equivocated, and the navy opposed. Yet the army did little to get ready for such a great step, its war plan cavalierly stating, “Operations against the United States were primarily the responsibility of the Navy and victory or defeat was to be determined in an all-out battle between the main naval forces of the two nations; therefore operations involving the Army would be limited.” Japan’s generals hoped that by taking over the great natural resources of Southeast Asia, their Chinese catastrophe could be forgiven and forgotten, while the navy’s plan was that Britain would fall to the Nazis and the Americans would give up, conceding to Japan her Asian territories. If there was one great moment of Japanese fascist insanity, it was this, for no further details of strategy, operations, technology, or economics for victory in a titanic war against the United States were developed by either service.
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On July 2, in the Meiji Palace’s First Eastern Hall conference room bedecked with European chandeliers and purple Asian silks, Japan’s Privy Council president met the nation’s leaders at what would be the first of four imperial conferences leading to December 7. While the emperor sat silently by, listening in, generals, admirals, and ministers were questioned in detail on their plans and expectations.
“Imperial conferences were a curious thing,” Hirohito later explained. “The emperor had no deciding power, unable [even] to dictate the atmosphere of the conference.” This system rendered political decisions apolitical, turning the crafting of policy into a group consensus, and relieving individuals of responsibility for their decisions. The question that day continued the persimmon debate: Should Japan attack Russia or occupy southern Indochina? The answer was a compromise both expedient and opportunistic. While preparing to invade the south and “construct the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere regardless of the changes in the world situation,” if it looked as though the Russians were clearly losing to the Germans, Japan would attack them, too.
Included in the imperial conference policy statement that day was “War preparations against Great Britain and the United States [must] be stepped up [and] the Empire shall not flinch from war with Britain and the United States.” When the navy’s chief of staff, Osami Nagano, returned from the conference and faced his officers, he found they were stunned that he had agreed to this clause, with Second Fleet commander Mineichi Koga in near hysterics: “How could you have endorsed such a critical policy without consulting us? What if a war really broke out? You can’t just tell us then, ‘Okay, you go ahead and fight.’ We won’t win!” Isoroku Yamamoto diplomatically asked the key question—“Are we really ready for an aerial war?”—knowing that the answer was no. Though he’d actively politicked against the army’s plans, Nagano now employed the imperial conference excuse with his men: “What can I say? The government decided on it.”
On July 4, the US State Department directly asked Prime Minister Konoye to address rumors it had heard from “various sources” that Japan would attack Russia. On the eighth, Japan replied that she hadn’t yet considered the possibility and always desired peace in the Pacific.
On July 14, Walter Short began a six-to-eight-week infantry training of Hawaiian Air Force enlistees, telling Marshall that since full co
mbat required only 3,885 of the Air Corps’ 7,229 men, 3,344 had nothing to do during maneuvers and would need to be turned into infantry if the islands were invaded and all their aircraft destroyed. In fact, what these air crews needed was aerial gunnery training, which they wholly lacked, as well as flight time, having averaged a mere two hundred to three hundred hours.
During this period, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes was overseeing petroleum production for national defense and needed to ration New England’s supply of heating oil. On June 23, he wrote the president, “To embargo oil to Japan would be as popular a move in all parts of the country as you could make. There might develop from the embargoing of oil to Japan such a situation as would make it, not only possible but easy, to get into this war in an effective way. And if we should thus indirectly be brought in, we would avoid the criticism that we had gone in as an ally of communistic Russia.”
In what should be a clear refutation for “back door to war” conspiracists, Roosevelt’s answer to Ickes on July 1 explained that a great argument was raging among Japan’s leaders at that moment about whether to fight the Soviets, to attack Southeast Asia, or to “sit on the fence and be more friendly with us. . . . Please let me know if this would continue to be your judgment if this were to tip the delicate scales and cause Japan to decide either to attack Russia or to attack the Dutch East Indies. . . . It is terribly important for the control of the Atlantic for us to keep peace in the Pacific. I simply have not got enough Navy to go round—and every little episode in the Pacific means fewer ships in the Atlantic.”
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After continually telling Washington of its peaceful intentions, 125,000 Japanese troops invaded the southern districts of French Indochina on July 22 to erect air and naval bases. This infuriated Roosevelt, and he had Sumner Welles tell Nomura the next day that American-Japanese negotiations were finished. When Nomura said that the Imperial Japanese Army’s invasion was merely taken to ensure a steady flow of rice and other raw materials, Welles replied that, since the only reason this arrangement was made was through threats of force, the United States believed its real purpose was “offering assistance to Germany’s policy of world domination and conquest.”
In the escalating crisis, Nomura met with Roosevelt and Welles at 5:00 p.m. in the White House on July 24. After the admiral described how Tokyo felt itself encircled by what it called the ABCD powers, the president said it was absurd to think that China, Great Britain, the Netherlands, or the United States was threatening Japan, and that American leaders were nearly unanimous in thinking Hitler was behind Japan’s military expansion to the south. Nomura claimed this was not so. The president then said that if Japan tried to take the Dutch oil fields by force, there would be more economic sanctions, and perhaps war.
Nomura insisted that he was personally opposed to the country’s course in Indochina, and according to Welles’s notes, FDR replied, “That the Japanese Government did not understand as clearly as we that Hitler was bent upon world domination; that if Germany succeeded in defeating Russia and dominating Europe and Africa, Germany thereafter would turn her attention to the Far East and to the Western Hemisphere; and that it was entirely possible that after some years the Navies of Japan and of the United States would be cooperating against Hitler as a common enemy. . . .
“[The president then explained that] had Japan undertaken to obtain the supplies she required from Indochina in a peaceful way, she not only would have obtained larger quantities of such supplies, but would have obtained them with complete security and without the draining expense of a military occupation. . . . [and] if the Japanese government would refrain from occupying Indochina . . . [President Roosevelt] would do everything within his power . . . to regard Indochina as a neutralized country in the same way in which Switzerland had up to now been regarded by the powers as a neutralized country. . . . Japan would be afforded the fullest and freest opportunity of assuring herself of the source of food supplies and other raw materials in Indochina which she was seeking to secure.” Nomura replied that “such a step would be very difficult at this time on account of the face-saving element involved on the part of Japan and that only a very great statesman would reverse a policy at this time.”
Just after this meeting, Roosevelt wrote Harry Hopkins, then on a diplomatic mission in London, “Tell [Churchill] also in great confidence that I have suggested to Nomura that Indo-China be neutralized . . . [and] I have no answer yet. When it comes it will probably be unfavorable but we have at least made one more effort to avoid Japanese expansion to South Pacific.” Churchill replied to Roosevelt that he was absolutely certain Japan didn’t have the wherewithal to simultaneously attack America and Britain, that instead Tokyo would wait for London to fall to Berlin, then strike the United States.
In reporting to Tokyo on FDR’s offer to Switzerlandize Indochina, Nomura said that he’d “received the impression that some kind of an economic pressure will be enforced in the near future.” On July 25, the president froze Japanese assets in the United States, a policy adopted in turn by Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines.
Japanese leaders had been so focused on their imperial dream of what part of the world to conquer next, whether to drive communist Russia out of Asia or to take control of the whole of the Southeast Asian subcontinent, that they hadn’t thought through the global repercussions. The asset freeze threw them into collective shock, with Tokyo newspaper Miyako calling it “a declaration of economic war.” “We had no inkling that the United States would be so angry over our going into southern French Indochina,” First Division of Military Affairs Chief Toshitane Takada said. “We, myself included, thought that advancing as far as southern French Indochina would—and should—be all right. It was a groundless conviction.”
On the twenty-sixth, Roosevelt ordered a change in policy; now, each time Japan wanted to buy American oil or gas, she would need an export license, meaning that Washington could refuse to issue the license and cut off the supply at any time. The president then sailed to meet with Churchill off the coast of Newfoundland to coordinate the Allies’ defense in what would be known as the Argentia Conference. When this new export licensing system went into effect, however, Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Dean Acheson and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. worked in concert so that Japan’s frozen funds would not be released to buy American petroleum, creating a full embargo. Hull and Roosevelt did not understand what had happened until early September, and Roosevelt was talked out of reversing the policy by the cabinet’s hard-liners, who said doing so would look like a sign of weakness to the Japanese.
Joseph Grew’s diary summary for July 1941: “The vicious circle of reprisals and counter-reprisals is on. . . . Unless radical surprises occur in the world, it is difficult to see how the momentum of this downgrade movement in our relations can be arrested, nor how far it will go. The obvious conclusion is eventual war.”
On July 30, a squadron of Japanese naval planes was flying over Chongqing when one pilot pulled away from formation and bombed US gunboat Tutuila as she anchored in the river next to the American embassy. Joseph Grew reported, “By the grace of heaven the bomb missed the Tutuila by about eight yards, although the ship was damaged and another bomb again came dangerously near our Embassy. Fatalities were escaped only by a miracle.” Japan promptly apologized, and the United States accepted.
The next day, Tokyo’s foreign office sent Berlin a message to soothe her Nazi allies: “Our Empire must immediately take steps to break asunder this ever-strengthening chain of encirclement which is being woven under the guidance and with the participation of England and the United States, acting like a cunning dragon seemingly asleep. This is why we decided to obtain military bases in French Indo-China and to have our troops occupy that territory. . . . I know the Germans are somewhat dissatisfied over our negotiations with the United States, but we wished at any cost to prevent the United States from getting into th
e war.” When Stimson showed the MAGIC version of this memo to Cordell Hull, the head of the American state department “made up his mind that we have reached the end of any possible appeasement with Japan and that there is nothing further that can be done with that country except by a firm policy and, he expected, force itself.”
Prime Minister Konoye told his war and navy ministers that Japan was “only a step this side of entering into a major war” with the Anglo-Saxons. War and navy insisted the asset freeze was an act of war, and it should be met with an act of war. The timing would be based on when Japan ran out of oil, meaning the military had four months to create a strategy of attack.
When Roosevelt during this period suggested ending the crisis by giving up China, he was harshly rebuked by Churchill, Chiang, Morgenthau, Ickes, and Stimson. In the conflict between Japan and the United States that would become World War II’s Pacific theater, China held a similar position to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in World War I. What is incomprehensible now was once so crucial, so important, so decisive. But the benefit was, at the very least, that China bogged down Japan, in the same way that Russia engulfed the Nazis, giving the Anglo-Saxons what they needed most: time.
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I. As the threats from Japan grew, however, in the first week of December 1941, RCA chief David Sarnoff agreed to have his company cooperate.
II. In time, Miss Aggie and her colleagues would crack it well enough for breakthrough victories at the Coral Sea and Midway—as well as to use it to assassinate Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto—while December 7 would dramatically change the manpower given to American code-cracking. During the war, military decrypt teams would grow to a population of sixteen thousand in Washington alone and in 1952, it would become the National Security Agency—the NSA. One aspect of MAGIC, however, remains current and controversial. Did its revelations of Tokyo’s recruitment of those living in the United States to serve as spies, combined with Washington’s knowledge of Nazi-allied fifth columnists in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Balkans, lead directly to February 19, 1942’s Executive Order 9066—the interning of Japanese American citizens?
