Publicity about the Hull-Nomura talks created a further obstacle. Churchill’s broadcast on August 24 alerted America’s partners, no less than Japan’s, to the pourparlers and roused anxieties. The White House made no attempt to keep Nomura’s visit of August 28 secret, and Nomura himself, upon emerging from the president’s office, told newsmen that he had delivered a message from Premier Konoe. The same day Wilfred Fleischer, formerly a journalist in Tokyo and now correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, stopped at the Japanese embassy to say that he gathered from an interview with the president several days earlier that Konoe would like a meeting in Hawaii. A chorus of newspaper speculation followed.11 At the same time Tokyo made no secret of its displeasure over shipments of American oil to Vladivostok and Washington responded with disdain for Japan’s complaints.12 On September 4, Nomura reported to Tokyo his impression that the American attitude had “very much stiffened.”13
On the evening after the Imperial Conference of September 6, Ambassador Grew and Counselor of Embassy Dooman, who was fluent in Japanese, dined with the premier at Prince Konoe’s invitation. Every precaution was taken to keep the meeting secret: use of the home of a friend, license plates removed from the car, servants sent away. Konoe began by saying he desired that his statements be conveyed directly to the president. While it was true, he said, that he was fully responsible for the deplorable state of relations between the two countries, it was equally true that only he could repair the damage, and he was determined to spare no effort to succeed.
The American government seemed to doubt his ability to carry a peace program against the military, but it was mistaken, he insisted, because army and navy leaders had from the beginning supported the talks in Washington and had promised to send high-ranking officers with the premier to a meeting with President Roosevelt. Konoe said he believed that a basis already existed for agreement, but he added as further encouragement his personal, and therefore his government’s, hearty concurrence with Hull’s four principles: the territorial integrity and sovereignty of all nations; non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations; the open door for trade; and preservation of the status quo except for change by peaceful means. He “repeatedly stressed,” Grew reported, that time was of the essence. The two governments must reach an overall accord now and work out details later. The reverse approach, working out all details first, might take them past the time when he could put an agreement into effect.14
Konoe’s initiative was strongly reinforced by Grew in a flow of telegrams during September and a personal letter to the president. Seeing war clouds looming as he had in Berlin, where he served as counselor of embassy on the eve of American entry into World War I, the ambassador urgently and eloquently pressed the case for a leaders’ meeting. American firmness and the German attack on Russia had thoroughly discredited Matsuoka diplomacy, he argued, generating a fundamental realignment of Japan’s policies and a recrudescence of moderate and liberal leadership. He had been told that in a personal encounter with Roosevelt, Konoe would be in a position to make “far-reaching concessions” and with the emperor’s support enforce these on the army and navy. A meeting, he believed, would at least produce explicit assurances effectively ending Japan’s Axis connection and begin a process of regeneration in Japanese-American relations. But the American government must not expect satisfactory specific commitments in advance of a meeting, for these could be used by pro-Axis elements to prevent one; it must trust Konoe and the process of step-by-step conciliation. The alternative, he warned, was replacement of the Konoe cabinet by a military dictatorship and a steady drift to war.15
The State Department was not impressed. The man who had been prime minister when the China war started, when Japan moved into northern and southern Indochina, and when Japan joined the Axis did not seem likely to be able to force the Japanese army to withdraw now. Grew was an old hand at diplomacy and had an expert staff, but he had a record of periodic overoptimism about the forces of restraint and moderation in Japan. Weakening Grew’s argument now was his failure to provide any concrete illustration of how the two sides might bridge their differences.16
As the Japanese position unfolded under persistent American probing during September, it became evident that these differences were especially great on China issues; in fact Japan’s terms were stricter in September than they had been in May. The Konoe government still insisted that the United States cease assistance to China and that any settlement permit the stationing of Japanese troops in China. Now, however, it also stipulated that, while American trade in China would be permitted on an “equitable” basis, Japanese trade there would proceed under the principle of “geographical propinquity,” a characteristic Japanese and imperialist euphemism for hegemony. Furthermore, the United States would have to cease all military preparations in the region and restore normal trade before Japan reached a settlement in China and withdrew its forces from Indochina.17
Despite the apparent stiffening, from the State Department’s perspective the slender possibility of a shift in the Japanese position justified the tedious process of discovery. But discovery also assisted the more fundamental object of delay. The trick, Stimson believed, was to string out the negotiations without letting them ripen into a leaders’ meeting.18 As September passed and impatience and despair mounted in Tokyo, Hull and his Far Eastern experts—Hamilton, Ballantine, and Max Schmidt, as well as Grew and Dooman in Tokyo — questioned, compared, and criticized the Japanese terms. Somewhat like the Foreign Funds Control Committee in the matter of shutting down trade, they kept asking for further clarification and explanation without registering either progress or impasse.
For example, in one important respect Japanese terms of September were an improvement over those of May: they stressed Japan’s independent interpretation of its obligations under the Axis alliance in case of war between Germany and the United States. Matsuoka had resisted any such weakening. Clearly Japan would not let its relationship with Germany stand in the way of an improvement in relations with the United States, provided that East Asian problems could be resolved. The State Department was silent on the shift until October 2, when it noted this step “with appreciation” but asked for “additional clarification” on Japan’s ties with the Axis.19
Tokyo’s shifting tactics and the ineptitude of its diplomats greatly facilitated delay. On September 6, Foreign Minister Toyoda, trying to avoid becoming bogged down in details, presented through Nomura the outline of a possible bargain, concentrating on the main issues in contention. Was this not a narrowing of Japan’s position, the Americans asked, compared with the comprehensive draft understandings of April and May and Prince Konoe’s assurances to Grew of adherence to American principles? In the September 6 proposal Japan promised to make no military advance from Indochina or southward generally. What about attacks northward, the Americans wanted to know. The Japanese promised an open door for trade in the southwest Pacific region, but what about the Pacific as a whole? Ambassador Nomura tangled communications himself on September 4 by presenting his own unauthorized proposal, couched in the comprehensive format of the earlier discussions. The American embassy in Tokyo was still trying to sort out the resulting confusion two weeks later.
Finally on September 25 through Grew and on September 27 through Nomura, Toyoda presented Japan’s position in the established comprehensive format and most urgently requested an explicit American response setting a date and place for a leaders’ meeting. With the president’s approval, the State Department prepared its first written response to the Japanese proposals, which Hull delivered on October 2. Japan’s offer was a disappointment, it said, because it seemed to narrow and qualify the principles and assurances upon which the talks were being conducted. If that impression was correct, the statement asked, would a meeting of leaders “be likely to contribute to the advancement of the high purposes which we have mutually in mind?” The American government invited “renewed consideration of these fundamental principles
” and offered the “earnest hope” that this would lead to the desired meeting. Well into October the Japanese persisted in trying to elicit American counterproposals, both through Grew and Nomura, without success. On October 16 the Konoe cabinet, with nothing to show for its diplomacy and riven with dispute over further pursuit of it, resigned. Roosevelt had hoped to gain from thirty to sixty days by talks. As he wrote Churchill, they had gained “two months of respite in the Far East.”20
The attention of Washington was devoted less to the tottering Konoe cabinet, however, than to the crumbling outer defenses of Moscow. On October 2, German Army Group Center launched a giant offensive to encircle Moscow and “finish the Russians off.”21 Already strongest in Panzer forces, Von Bock’s group was further reinforced for this final blow by transfer of all the armor from the northern group of armies and a Panzer corps from the southern. Attacking on a 150-mile semicircular front west of Moscow were six German armies. The plan was to punch a hole in the middle of the Russian defenses, between Bryansk and Vyazma, to sweep in behind these twin citadels on the road to Moscow and destroy the main forces defending it, and then to send the flanking Panzer armies of Hoth and Guderian north and south of the capital in a climactic encirclement.
The German tanks broke through quickly and completely. In the Bryansk and Vyazma pockets more than 500,000 Russian troops were lost. Guderian, circling to the south, seized Orel and moved on Tula, due south of Moscow, while Hoth took Kalinin, opening the way to the Moscow-Volga Canal, and Moscow from the north. Between these pincers German infantry and armor, against desperate Russian resistance, fought their way eastwards along the Smolensk road as far as Mozaisk, fewer than fifty miles from Moscow. There at night they could see the glow of anti-aircraft fire over the capital. Radio Moscow admitted that the inhabitants were in “immense danger.”22 Fear filtered into the city, leading to wild rumors, evacuation of government offices, looting, and panicky flight by some Moscovites. The embassies moved with the foreign ministry to Kuibyshev, more than 500 miles southeast of Moscow.
To Berlin, victory seemed almost in the palm of the hand. Nazi propaganda boasted of motorized columns “streaming four abreast” down highways toward Moscow. At the front, however, a deepening sense of foreboding accompanied the exhilaration of conquest. Each encirclement led only to new Soviet defense lines. The Russians fought savagely and, after Marshal Georgi Zhukov took command of the front October 10, more resiliently. The Soviet T-34 outperformed the heaviest German tank. At Mozaisk, German troops in summer denim first encountered hardy Siberian troops in their white, quilted winter clothing. They also encountered worsening weather, now heavy cold rains, mud, and impassable roads, now frost and the first light snow. The last leaves were off the birches, maples, and oaks, and “ominous black clouds would build up far in the distance, towering high above the steppe,” harbingers of the “ice wind, now gathering strength over the Aral Sea.”23 These, however, were portents not deeds.
The German drive on Moscow came as a distinct shock to Washington. Signs of an offensive were not lacking: a warning on October 1 from London based on ULTRA, Hitler’s reference on October 3 to a “vast drive” in progress, an American diplomat’s glimpse on October 6 of a Finnish war map showing “two German pincer thrusts in the direction of Moscow.”24 But the Germans were tight-lipped, and it was not until October 8, when the Vyazma and Bryansk encirclements were complete, that they beat the victory drums. Then banner headlines (six columns in the New York Times) brought a frightening sense of the size and import of the battle. The British War Office considered the whole Russian war now “at crisis.” The Germans appeared to be throwing “their entire war machine into this all-out effort to take Moscow at any price.” A usually optimistic Churchill estimated the chances of the Germans taking Moscow as even, his director of military intelligence as slightly better than even. When would winter in the Moscow region begin “in earnest,” the prime minister asked? American army intelligence expected that the loss of Moscow would result in a “radical change of regime.” At risk, too, were the supply routes from the West through Archangel and the Persian corridor, for the Germans were also racing toward Rostov. News from Russia, Stimson noted October 10, was “very bad”: it was “nip and tuck” whether the Germans would not finish their war before winter. Even the imperturbable Berle confessed anxiety.25
As the German-Soviet war provided the central dynamic in world power relations, the repercussions of this October crisis were far-ranging. Fears revived of German attacks elsewhere, especially in the Middle East, once Moscow fell and the eastern front stabilized.26 The failure of Britain to meet urgent Soviet requests for dispatch of British forces to the Russian front, either in the north or in the Caucasus, left British-Soviet relations “badly strained,” Steinhardt reported. A sullen Molotov complained that such American P-40 fighter aircraft as had been delivered had engine defects. Leahy reported that Britain’s failure to help its ally at this critical moment was having a great effect on Vichy, always a barometer of Axis military fortunes. France now expected a German victory in Russia and new pressure for German bases in French Africa.27
Of immediate importance to the American government was the possible effect on Tokyo of either the fall of Moscow or the withdrawal of Soviet Siberian armies to prevent its fall. Would Japan attack northward? Barring a Soviet collapse, Japan had no such intention. By October, Moscow knew this from definitive reports of Richard Sorge, a spy on the staff of the German embassy in Tokyo, and began to withdraw about half the divisions as well as 1,000 aircraft and 1,000 tanks from its Far Eastern command for the Moscow battle.28 Washington, however, did not know. True, American consular reports from Harbin, Mukden, and Dairen showed that reinforcement of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria had practically ceased, but this fact could be taken to mean that preparations for attack were complete.29
The fall of the Konoe cabinet on October 16 (the same day diplomats evacuated Moscow) and appointment as prime minister of General Tōjō Hideki, previously war minister, intensified concern. Tōjō was known for his “particular dislike of the Russians” and his prediction in 1938 that Japan would have to fight the Soviet Union.30
Most observers believed that Japan would wait for a decisive turn of events on the European front, but on October 17 high Chinese military officers, upon learning of a reduction in Soviet Far Eastern forces, predicted an attack in a few days.31 Winter was a limitation, but the possibility remained, and was discussed, of an attack aimed only at an isolated Vladivostok.32 On October 21, army intelligence judged the Kwantung and Siberian armies as roughly matched, but a reduction providing the Japanese with a two-to-one superiority would probably lead to a Japanese attack and three-to-one would certainly do so. The navy, strongly influenced by Admiral Turner’s conviction that Japan would turn north rather than south, warned that hostilities between Japan and the Soviet Union were now a “strong possibility.”33 Roosevelt himself told Lord Halifax on October 10 that he feared a Japanese attack on Vladivostok. On October 15 he wrote Churchill that the “Jap situation” was “definitely worse” and that he thought they were “headed North.”34
Evidence was not lacking, however, that the Japanese might choose to attack southward. On October 3 the French governor-general of Indochina told the American consul in Hanoi that the Japanese had demanded four more air bases in Cambodia and expressed his “grave apprehension” of further Japanese advances to the south. Soon after, Grew reported preparations to send an additional 50,000 troops to Indochina. Worrisome, too, was a public statement by the director of Japanese navy intelligence that his service was “itching” for action against the Americans. The Japanese navy, it seemed to Stimson, was “beginning to talk almost as radically as the army,” and the time had come to draw lines which, if crossed, would manifestly justify a military response.35 These southern threats, however, seemed still some what distant and directed toward Yunnan province (as the Japanese hoped they would seem) or Thailand. Naval analysts accepted that Jap
an was mobilizing for war, but was not yet ready. At the moment naval forces were moving from southern areas back to home waters, not the other way around. Most observers probably agreed with a British War Office estimate that the Japanese would prefer to avoid the danger of involvement with Britain and the United States.36
Discordant signs in MAGIC intercepts failed to attract special attention, such as a request that Japanese agents in Manila investigate coastal defenses on Luzon and the sending of a ship to bring Japanese home from the Middle East, India, and East Asia by November 20. An order decrypted and translated October 9 directed the consul in Honolulu to report the precise location of Pacific Fleet vessels in Pearl Harbor with greater attention to those in fixed and predictable positions such as wharves, docks, and buoys than those at anchor. Yet intelligence fitted this into the category of typical, widespread reporting of American ship movements.37
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