FOUR Showdown in the Pacific
NEWS OF ARGENTIA BROKE up Washington’s summer doldrums, at least for a time. Democratic leaders in Congress hailed the Atlantic Charter as a magnificent statement of war aims—indeed, as a signpost to “real and lasting peace.” Hiram Johnson and Robert Taft accused Roosevelt of making a secret alliance and planning an invasion of Europe. The New York Times, billing the pledge to destroy Nazi tyranny in an eight-column headline, proclaimed that this was the end of isolationism, while the New York Journal-American accused the President of retracing, one by one, all the steps toward war taken by Wilson. Colonel McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, irked by the Roosevelt-Churchill togetherness, reminded its readers that the President was “the true descendant of that James Roosevelt, his great-grandfather, who was a Tory of New York during the Revolution and took the oath of allegiance to the British King.” Both friend and foe saw the meeting as a prelude to more aggressive action.
But not Roosevelt, evidently. Having taken a dramatic step forward, he executed his usual backward hop. Aside from a lackluster message to Congress incorporating the declaration, he took little action to follow it up. At the first press conference after the meeting, on the Potomac, reporters found him cautious. What about actual implementation of the broad declarations, he was asked. “Interchange of views, that’s all. Nothing else.” Were we any closer to entering the war? “I should say, no.” Could he be quoted directly? “No, you can quote indirectly.”
But the meeting at sea did seem popular with the people, according to the pollsters. Seventy-five per cent of those polled had heard about the eight-point credo, and of those about half indicated full or partial approval, while only a quarter of them were cool or hostile. Many were indifferent or uninformed, however, and this number grew as time passed. Five months later most people remembered the two men meeting, but few remembered anything about the Charter itself.
Nor did the conference seem measurably to change popular attitudes toward Roosevelt’s aid-to-Britain program. Those attitudes seemed almost fixed during most of 1941. Asked in May, “So far as you, personally, are concerned, do you think President Roosevelt has gone too far in his policies of helping Britain?” about a quarter answered “too far,” about a quarter “not far enough,” and half “about right.” This pattern persisted with remarkable stability into the fall; evidently the President was shifting step by step with the movement of opinion. On the face of it he was acting as a faithful representative of the people; a majority endorsed his policies and he fell evenly between the critics of both wings. As he took increasingly interventionist action “short of war,” he was holding the great bulk of public support.
The troubling question remained whether, in view of the critical situation abroad, he should be more in advance of opinion than representative of it, more of a catalytic or even a divisive agent than a consensual one, more of a creator and exploiter of public feeling than a reflector and articulator of it.
This was the question Stimson kept raising. When the President phoned him early in the summer to tell him that he had some good news—that a forthcoming Gallup Poll was going to be much more favorable than the Gallup people had expected—Stimson reminded him again that all these polls omitted one factor which the President seemed to neglect—“the power of his own leadership.” Roosevelt had not denied this but had complained that he simply did not feel peppy enough.
It was leadership and decision, after all, that American strategists needed, not merely symbol and pageantry. Early in July the President had asked Stimson to join with Knox and Hopkins in exploring over-all production needs in order to “defeat our potential enemies.” For ten weeks the defense Secretaries had struggled with the question, and then given up. Everything depended on what assumptions they were working under, Stimson wrote to his chief—whether the United States promptly engaged in an avowed all-out military effort against Germany, or merely continued its present policy of helping nations fighting the Axis with munitions, transport, and naval help. The Army, Navy, and Air strategists were united in preferring active participation in the war against Germany, Stimson went on, but work could not be concluded until the President’s views were known.
The military uncertainty was reflected right down the army line. A Nation reporter spent ten days in August tramping up and down Times Square talking with over three hundred Regular soldiers, draftees, National Guardsmen. They were a breezy, cocky lot, confident that any one of them could lick the Germans or an infinite number of Japanese. But, except for the Regulars, they hated the Army, Roosevelt, General Marshall, and Negroes in about equal degree. Few had any idea why they were in the Army or what the Army was for. Some were America Firsters—but they had little suspicion that the Commander in Chief was trying to drag the United States into war. They simply seemed confused. They neither attacked nor defended Roosevelt’s foreign policy; they just did not seem to care.
But there was some logic to their position. They understood the President’s policy of aid to Britain short of war, but if the nation was not preparing to fight Germany, “Why this Army?”
THE WINDS AND WAVES OF STRIFE
The President had promised Churchill at Argentia that he would use hard language in his message to Tokyo; the Prime Minister had feared that the State Department would try to water it down, and he was right. Hull and his aides felt that the warning might arouse the extremist wing in Japan, and by the time they finished massaging the message it was one more general warning. The President went along with the change. He decided that he could deliver the warning more effectively at a direct confrontation with Nomura. On Sunday afternoon, August 17, 1941, the Japanese Ambassador arrived at the White House.
The old Admiral was hard of hearing, had a glass eye, spoke English uncertainly, and was so fuzzy at times that Hull wondered if he understood his own government’s position, let alone Washington’s. But he was affable and had an encouraging way of nodding responsively, with an occasional mirthless chuckle, to Roosevelt’s and Hull’s main points. The President, in fine fettle after his two weeks at sea, made some pleasant remarks and then spoke gravely, contrasting his country’s peaceful and principled record in the Far East, as he saw it, with Japan’s conquests through force. Did the Admiral have any proposal in mind? Nomura did. Pulling a paper from his pocket, he said that his government was earnestly desirous of peaceful relations—and Premier Konoye proposed a meeting with the President midway in the Pacific.
The President seemed unperturbed at losing the initiative just as he was about to issue his warning. He read the watered-down statement anyway. Even this weak message Roosevelt presented almost defensively. Indeed—or so Nomura reported to Tokyo—the President finally handed him the oral remarks as a matter of information. The lion’s roar of Argentia had become a lamb’s bleat. Even so, Roosevelt reported to Churchill that his statement to Nomura was “no less vigorous” than the one they had planned.
Konoye’s offer to meet Roosevelt was a weak card played from a shaky hand. Dropping Matsuoka had not eased the Premier’s situation at home. Washington’s reaction to the Indochina occupation had been sharper than Tokyo expected; the freeze seemed a direct threat to national survival. The Emperor, Konoye knew, was uneasy about the drift toward conflict with America. The Army under Tojo still took its old expansionist line, but now, to the Premier’s alarm, the oil-conscious Navy was swinging to a more militant stance. The jingo press was attacking Washington for sending oil to Russia via Vladivostok and “Japanese” waters; officials lived under heavy police guard against assassination; extremists in the middle ranks of the Navy and Army were a constant threat. A dramatic meeting with Roosevelt might break the deepening spiral, Konoye calculated, arouse the moderates among the people, enlist the Emperor’s backing, and present the militarists with a fait accompli. He won Tojo’s grudging acquiescence to a parley on condition that if the meeting failed—as the War Minister expected it would—the Premier would return home not to resign but ready
to lead the war against the United States.
Playing for the highest stakes, Konoye was so eager for a summit conference that he had Foreign Minister Toyoda sit down with Ambassador Grew and plead, on a long, stifling evening, for Grew’s support for the idea. He prepared a special ship for the voyage to the conference and planned to take a brace of admirals and generals, all of them moderates, to “share responsibility” with him. In order to bypass Hull, Nomura would deliver Konoye’s invitation to the President personally; a conciliatory note was prepared for Hull in a style calculated not to excite him.
The notes that Nomura handed Roosevelt on the morning of August 28 were full of benevolence and vague promises. Konoye renewed his invitation to meet—and to do so soon in the light of the present situation, which was “developing swiftly and may produce unforeseen contingencies.” Roosevelt remarked that he liked the tone and spirit of Konoye’s message. The note from the Japanese government indicated its willingness to withdraw from Indochina as soon as the China incident was settled, not to attack Russia, and indeed not to attack anyone, north or south. Roosevelt interrupted the reading of the note to offer some small rebuttals, and he could not resist the temptation, with what seemed to Nomura a cynical smile, to ask whether there would be an invasion of Thailand while he might be meeting with Konoye, just as Indochina had been invaded during Hull’s conversations with Nomura.
Still, Roosevelt was sorely tempted to parley. A rendezvous in the Pacific would be a dramatic counterpart to his trip to Argentia; the Japanese seemed to be in a conciliatory mood; and he always had confidence in his ability to persuade people face to face. He even proposed Juneau as a place to confer, on the ground that it would require him to be away two weeks rather than three. But now the President ran into serious difficulties among his advisers.
Hull and the old Far Eastern hands in his Department opposed a conference unless the major questions were settled—and settled to Washington’s liking—in advance. The Secretary seemed to take a mixed approach to Japan: he never tired of stating his principles and flailing Japan for not living up to them; he opposed conciliation because he had no faith in Konoye’s ability to check the military; but he also opposed drastic action. He had both a devil theory of Japanese politics and an aversion to a showdown—an ambivalence that precluded any consistent policy except endless pieties, conversations, and delays. And Hull could hardly have welcomed another ocean conference where the President, off in the heady sea breezes with advisers like Welles and Hopkins, might take steps—like the warning to Japan drawn up at Argentia—that could upset Hull’s patient diplomacy.
In Tokyo, Grew took the opposite stand. Though long a hardliner toward Japan, he had seized on a Pacific rendezvous as the last-best hope of averting a showdown. He urged Hull not to reject the Japanese proposal “without very prayerful consideration.” Konoye would not request such a meeting, he argued, unless he was willing to make concessions; he was determined to overcome the extremists, even at peril to his own life. At the most, Grew contended, Japan would make concessions on Indochina and China; at the very least a meeting would slow the growing momentum toward a head-on collision. He ended with a grim warning: if the meeting did not take place, new men would come to power and launch a do-or-die effort to take over all of Greater East Asia—which would mean war with the United States.
When faced with conflicting advice Roosevelt rarely made immediate clear-cut choices; in this case he took the expedient course of continuing to talk hopefully of a meeting while following Hull’s advice to demand agreement on fundamental principles before consenting to a rendezvous. Calling Nomura to the White House on September 3, the President carefully dealt with the Japanese proposal of the week before. He appreciated Konoye’s difficulties at home, he told the Ambassador, but he had difficulties, too. While Hull sat by, Roosevelt read the Secretary’s four fundamental principles: respect for other nations’ territorial integrity and sovereignty; noninterference in other nations’ internal affairs; equality of commercial opportunity; nondisturbance of the status quo in the Pacific except through peaceful means. He was pleased, said the President, that Japan had endorsed these principles explicitly in its note of August 28. But, since there was opposition to such principles in certain quarters in Japan, what concrete concessions would Tokyo make in advance of the summit conference?
While Roosevelt played for time, other less visible decision makers in Japan were facing their own urgencies during August. Washington’s freezing order of late July along with increasing indications that Russia would hold on were forcing Army and Navy planners in Tokyo to abandon thoughts of attacking the Soviets from the rear, at least during 1941, and to look south. The only way to overcome American, British, and Dutch power, it was decided, was through a series of lightning attacks. Such a plan would be heavily dependent on weather—on tides, phases of the moon, monsoons—and on moving fast, before oil gave out. On September 3 the military chiefs and the Cabinet met in a liaison conference. “We are getting weaker,” Navy Chief of Staff Osami Nagano stated bluntly at the outset. “The enemy is getting stronger.” A timetable must be set. Military preparations must get under way even while diplomacy continued. While Cabinet members sat by, Navy and Army chiefs soberly discussed plans. Finally it was agreed: “If, by the early part of October, there is still no prospect of being able to attain our demands, we shall immediately decide to open hostilities against the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands.”
So a timetable had been set. In all the tortuous windings toward war, this was the single most crucial step. Why did Konoye agree? Partly because he had high hopes for his conference with Roosevelt—he would let the military play their game if they would let him play his. And partly because of the Emperor, who presumably could keep the military in line. On September 5 Konoye’s Cabinet unanimously approved the action of the liaison conference. The Premier then hurried to the palace to inform the Emperor.
Hirohito was in an almost imperious mood. He listened to Konoye with apparently rising concern, then questioned him sharply. Were war preparations gaining precedence over diplomacy? Konoye said no, but suggested that the Emperor ask the military chiefs. Nagano and the Chief of the Army General Staff, Hajime Sugiyama, were summoned to the throne room. The Emperor questioned Sugiyama on military aspects of the plan. How long would a war with the United States last? For the initial phase about three months, the General said. The Emperor broke in: Sugiyama as War Minister in 1937 had said that the China incident would be over in a month; it was still going on. This was different, Sugiyama said; China was a vast hinterland, while the southern area was composed of islands. This only aroused the Emperor further. “If you call the Chinese hinterland vast would you not describe the Pacific as even more immense?” Sugiyama looked down at his boots and was silent.
Next morning Hirohito called in his Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Koichi Kido. In a few minutes an imperial conference was to start; the Emperor had decided that he would speak out, he told Kido, and inform the military that he would not sanction war as long as the possibility of a settlement remained. Kido said smoothly that he had already asked Yoshimichi Hara, the President of the Privy Council, to ask the questions for the Emperor; it would be more appropriate for His Majesty to make any comments at the end.
Soon the Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff were seated across from the Emperor on hard chairs in the east wing of the palace. One after another his ministers went through their carefully prepared recitations. The Empire would go to war by the end of October, declared Konoye, unless diplomacy had achieved its “minimum demands.” These were: America and Britain should not hinder settlement of the China incident; they would cease helping the Chungking regime; they would not strengthen their military position in the Far East; they would co-operate with Japan economically. Japan’s “maximum concessions” were: not to advance militarily from Indochina; to withdraw its forces from Indochina after peace was established; to guarantee the neutrality of the Philipp
ines.
Nagano spoke next. Vital supplies—especially oil—were dwindling. Time was vital. He sketched the necessary strategy if war broke out. If the enemy aimed for a quick war and early decisions and dispatched their fleet, “this would be the very thing we hope for.” With aircraft “and other elements” he could beat them in the Pacific. More likely, though, “America will attempt to prolong the war, utilizing her impregnable position, her superior industrial power, and her abundant resources.” In a long war Japan’s only chance, after the first quick strikes, was to seize the enemy’s major military areas, establish an impregnable position, and develop military resources. Sugiyama then spoke up. He expressed the Army’s complete agreement with Nagano. Japan must not mark time and be trapped by Anglo-American intrigue and delays. Intensive troop movements were required. If negotiations failed, a decision for war must be made within ten days of the failure at the latest. Others spoke, but there was no break in the united front.
The Emperor became flushed as Hara went through set questions and received set replies. A hush fell on the room. His Majesty was not satisfied with the assurances about diplomacy first. He drew a slip from his pocket and in his high voice read a poem composed by his grandfather the Emperor Meiji:
“All the seas, in every quarter, are as
brothers to one another,
Why, then, do the winds and waves of strife
rage so turbulently throughout the world?”
The Emperor’s meaning was clear. All present were struck with awe, Konoye remembered, and there was silence throughout the hall. Nagano assured the Emperor that the whole Cabinet favored diplomacy first. The meeting adjourned in an atmosphere of unprecedented tension.
At just about this moment, on the other side of the world, the American destroyer Greer was speeding through North Atlantic waters on a mail run to Iceland. These waters were in both the German war zone and the American defense zone. A British patrol plane signaled her that a submerged U-boat lay athwart her course ten miles ahead. The Greer speeded up, sounded general quarters, zigagged toward the submarine, made sound contact, and began trailing the U-boat and reporting its exact position to the plane, but with no intention of attacking it. After an hour the plane dropped four depth charges without effect and turned back to refuel; the Greer hung on her quarry’s trail. After two hours of this the submarine suddenly launched a torpedo at the Greer, and then one or two more. The Greer dodged them and began dropping a circle of depth charges, meantime losing contact. Over two hours later the Greer made contact again and dropped eleven more depth charges. The Greer trailed the U-boat a while longer, then broke off the pursuit, leaving it in the hands of British destroyers and planes in the area.
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