by Herman Wouk
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was tactically an excellent operation, comparable in many ways to Barbarossa. In both cases a small poor nation caught a big wealthy nation off guard, despite a tense war atmosphere and all manner of advance warnings and indications. In both cases surprise was exploited to destroy on a great scale the enemy’s first-line forces. The Barbarossa surprise depended on the nonaggression treaty, then in force with Soviet Russia, to lull the enemy. The Japanese went us one better by attacking in the middle of peace parleys.
At the time of both attacks, of course, there were loud outcries of “infamy” and “treachery,” as though these terms of private morality had any relevance to historical events. A poor nation seeking to supplant a rich one must use the best means it can find; moreover Thucydides said long ago that men by a natural law always rule where they are strongest. In history what is moral is what works. The will of God, Hegel taught, reveals itself only in historical outcomes. So viewed, Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor were both idealistic thrusts toward a heroic new world order.
The difference was that Barbarossa was strategically impeccable and would have resulted in victory if not for unlucky and unforeseen factors—including this very Japanese attack five and a half months later, which, contrariwise, was such a strategic miscalculation that for once Churchill speaks no more than the truth in calling it suicidal madness.
One violation of a cardinal rule is enough to invalidate a strategic plan. The Japanese surprise attack violated two.
The two iron laws of warfare that Japan disregarded were:
1. Strike for the heart.
2. Know your enemy.
“Strike for the Heart”
The rule “Strike for the heart” is only a corollary of the first principle of warfare, the Concentration of Force. This was what Japan’s military leaders overlooked.
From the moment they correctly decided that the war in Europe was their big chance to take East Asia, a hard choice confronted them: should they first move north against the Soviet Union by invading Siberia; or south, to scoop up the weakly held treasures of the European colonies? The move south was the more tempting, of course. But in warfare one must not be misled by mere easy loot or the line of least resistance.
The stakes of the war comprised nothing less than political redistribution of the world’s landmasses. It was a radical global conflict, the first true World War. The lineup was classical: the rich against the poor, gold against iron. Germany was the only first-class power on the ascendant side, the side that was seeking to draw a new world map, and her attack on the Soviet Union was her great bid. Once master of Russia, Germany would have been invincible. It followed that the Japanese should have moved to help Germany crush the Soviet Union. With Germany triumphant, Japan could have taken and held anything in East Asia she wanted. But with Germany beaten, Japan had small hope of keeping even the vastest gains.
Had Japan invaded Siberia in 1941, the German drive to Moscow would have succeeded. The Russian counterattacks in December would not have been mounted. The Bolshevik regime would either have fallen or made a second peace of Brest-Litovsk. For what saved Moscow in December was only Stalin’s desperate denuding of the Siberian front for reserves to throw into the battle, tipping the scales at the last second by a hair.
Moreover, if Napoleon’s maxim holds that the moral is to the physical in warfare as three to one, the mere fact of a Japanese assault on Siberia in the autumn might have brought on a Russian collapse. In mid-October panic gripped the Bolsheviks to the highest levels of government, with whole departments fleeing Moscow in disgraceful tumult, and the frightened dictator issuing shrill orders for a levée en masse to save the city. There is even an unconfirmed story that Stalin himself secretly fled, secretly returned when the panic subsided, and had everybody shot who knew of his disgraceful act. Russian rulers operate inside a Byzantine maze, and there is no way of checking this episode.
In any case, this was surely the psychological moment of World War II, the once-in-a-thousand-years opportunity for the Japanese nation. Its irresolute leaders, poorly trained in military thinking and subject to the strange Oriental character mixture of excessive rashness, caution, and emotion, let the moment slip through their fingers to all eternity. History, like a woman, must be firmly taken when she is ready. Otherwise she scorns the fumbler, never forgives him, and never offers him another chance.
“Know Your Enemy”
The first mistake, then, was to go south instead of north, and to snatch booty instead of striking at the heart. But the Axis might still have won the war, despite this dispersion of effort, had Japan not compounded the blunder with a second one that verged on true insanity.
Granted the southward strategy, the obvious course was to move into the East Indies with maximum speed and force, consolidate rapidly, and prepare to defeat any American countermove. The Americans might not have moved at all. Tremendous opposition existed in the United States to sending American boys to die for the pukka sahibs in Asia. Roosevelt might have just sputtered harsh words, as he had after all of Adolf Hitler’s triumphs. Roosevelt never moved one visible step beyond the range of public opinion. This was the master key to the nature of the enemy. Japan was oblivious to it, because of the distortions of Oriental thinking.
Even if Roosevelt had sent his Navy, defying half his public, against the entrenched Japanese in East Asia, this fleet would have fought its showdown battle at the end of a long supply line, in enemy waters, within range of Japan’s land-based air force. It would have been another Battle of Tsushima Strait, with air power added. This humiliating slaughter in an unpopular cause might have brought on the impeachment of the none too popular Machiavellian in the White House.
But even this was not the worst aspect of the Japanese blunder.
America had the largest and most advanced industrial plant on earth. This mercenary nation, devoted to the almighty dollar and blessed with wonderful mineral resources stolen from the Indians, had reared an immense plant capacity for making toys and trifles. But it was a capacity readily convertible to munitions manufacture on the most fantastic imaginable scale. The whole hope of Axis victory in World War II lay in keeping America divided and soft until the time came to deal with her as an isolated unit without allies.
This prospect was in sight. Half of America would have rejoiced at a German victory over the Soviet Union. The Lend-Lease program was bogged down in red tape and inertia the day before the Pearl Harbor attack, reflecting the discord and confusion in the people.
For this, great credit goes to Adolf Hitler. He was a narrow-minded man, appallingly ignorant of the United States. But his almost female intuition warned him that he must give his blood enemy, Roosevelt, no chance to unite the Americans against him. That is why the Führer swallowed all the President’s scurrilous public abuse and compelled the U-boat arm to endure appalling provocation.
This wise strategy of the Führer was blown to smithereens by Pearl Harbor. Overnight a hundred thirty million quarrelsome, uncertain, divided Americans became one angry mass thirsting for battle. Roosevelt rammed through Congress gigantic war plans and expenditures which a few days earlier would have been utterly inconceivable. The Congress, which in August had extended a mild draft law by a single vote after weeks of debate, now unanimously passed fierce declarations of war, and all Roosevelt’s long-plotted stupendous war programs, in a matter of hours.
This was the chief result of Pearl Harbor, for the fleet was soon repaired and expanded. In one week Germany passed from the strategic offensive, with world empire in her grasp, to the strategic defensive, with no long-range prospect but to be crushed unless our enemies did something just as stupid and self-destructive.
Nonexistent “Axis”
If one asks, “How did Germany permit such a catastrophe to occur?” the answer is that we were not consulted. We found out that Pearl Harbor was the target when the Americans did—when the torpedoes and bombs exploded.
The “Axi
s” of Germany, Japan, and Italy never existed as a military reality. It was a ferocious-looking rubber balloon blown up by propaganda. Its purpose was bluff. The three nations went their own ways throughout the war, and usually did not even inform their partners in advance about attacks, invasions, and strategic decisons.
Thus, when Hitler attacked Poland, Mussolini suddenly declined to fight and did not jump in until France was toppling. The Italian dictator invaded Greece without notifying Hitler. Hitler did not inform II Duce of the attack on Russia until just before the event. But for this he had good reason. Our intelligence had advised us that anything Mussolini knew went straight to the British via the Italian royal family.
Not once did real staff talks take place among the “Axis” armed forces. England and America were having such conferences a year before Pearl Harbor! They followed a combined strategy throughout in close cooperation with the Bolsheviks. Now they can reflect at leisure on the wisdom of helping Stalin destroy us, and loosing the Slav flood to the Elbe. But Allied operations were a model of combined strategy, while “Axis” strategy was a nullity. It was every man for himself, and unhappy Germany was tied to second-rate partners who made rash wild plunges that ruined her.
Yamamoto’s Role
Why did Japan take this aberrant, foredoomed course?
She had burst into modern history with the sneak attack on the Russian navy at Port Arthur in 1904, and perhaps was obsessed with this way for yellow men to beat white men. The Japanese Naval Staff favored the right move: a seizure of the Indies, and a showdown with the United States Navy—if one should occur—in Japanese waters. But Pearl Harbor was conceived by one Admiral Yamamoto, the commander-in-chief of the fleet, who forced it on his navy and government by threats to resign. Yamamoto opposed the war with the United States entirely, on the grounds that against an enemy with an industrial superiority of seven to one, the attempt was hopeless. But he insisted that if he had to fight, he wanted to knock out the American fleet at the outset. To the broader effects of the attack, he was blind. The Naval Staff considered the attack too risky a gamble, but Yamamoto prevailed. Tactically, of course, he was vindicated. As long as men read and write, “Pearl Harbor” will be a synonym for successful surprise attack. It is as much a part of world language as “Waterloo.”
How, indeed, could the Japanese fleet assemble, steam across the Pacific to within two hundred miles of Hawaii, elude all United States intelligence efforts and all its sea and air patrols, and catch its Army and Navy by surprise? This mystery is doubled and tripled by the postwar revelation that the United States had broken Japan’s codes and was reading her secret diplomatic cables! The record of the Pearl Harbor investigation by the American Congress runs to millions of words. Still the mystery remains.
As a German staff officer, I look upon Pearl Harbor as an abstract battle problem like Salamis or Trafalgar. Yamamoto’s operation surprised the Americans precisely because it was such a foolish thing to do, such an outrageous gamble, such bad strategy, such muddled politics, and such unsound psychology. Even if it succeeded, it was just about the worst move the Japanese could try. Therefore the Americans made the mistake of shutting it from their minds. The Japanese irrationally went ahead and did it, and it happened to work.
A little-noted passage in the hearings, from the interrogation of the cashiered Admiral Kimmel, may provide a key to the mystery. Aerial torpedoes in those days needed to be dropped in deep water in order to straighten out and make their run. The minimum depth, according to American technical opinion, was about seventy-five feet. Pearl Harbor is thirty feet deep. The danger of a torpedo plane attack on the battle fleet was therefore called “negligible,” and no torpedo nets were rigged. On December 7, aerial torpedoes hit seven battleships and wreaked vast havoc in Pearl Harbor. For the Japanese had devised a torpedo that could be launched in less than thirty feet, and their pilots had practiced shallow launchings from May to December! This sums up the mental difference in 1941 between the two nations.
Did Roosevelt Plan It?
The historical suspicion arose, and still lingers, that Roosevelt and his top aides conspired to cause the Pearl Harbor defeat. On this theory, they concealed from the Hawaiian command their certain knowledge that Japan was about to strike, obtained from decoded diplomatic telegrams, so as to keep the armed forces there unprepared for the blow. Roosevelt, on this view, decided that getting America solidly into the war was more important militarily than the loss of his battleships. This conjecture originated with the military leaders who were caught napping. They and their supporters maintain it to this day.
Roosevelt was, of course, capable of this dastardly action. He was capable of anything. But the record shows that the Pearl Harbor command, and all the United States forces in the Pacific, certainly knew that war was imminent. Indeed, all they had to do was read the newspapers. In any case, there is no acceptable excuse for professional military leaders ever to be surprised, even under the most lulling and peaceful of circumstances. It happens, but it is not excusable.
No evidence has turned up, in exhaustive investigations, that Roosevelt knew where the blow would fall. The Japanese kept the secret of the intended target perfectly. Their own top diplomats did not know it. Our Supreme Headquarters did not know it. It was never entrusted to a coded cable.
The American military men were surprised because, like the Red Army in June, they were psychologically unprepared for war. On the eve of the attack, the officers at Pearl Harbor no doubt observed the sacred American Saturday night ritual of getting stinking drunk, as did most of their men, and so when the first bombs fell, they were incapable of manning their numerous planes and A.A. guns to defend themselves. Here the rule “Know the enemy’” definitely helped the Japanese. If American forces, wherever stationed, are ever attacked again, the proper time will always be Sunday morning. National character changes very slowly.
Roosevelt would have been far better served by a victory at Pearl Harbor than by a disaster. Success in repelling the blow would have raised the martial spirit higher. The Americans were a long time recovering mentally from the Pearl Harbor defeat. Roosevelt was not an imbecile, and only an imbecile would have forgone a chance to countersurprise the oncoming exposed Japanese fleet and sink it. Roosevelt did not warn the Pearl Harbor command of an imminent air strike because he, like everybody else, did not know and could not guess that the Japanese would act as grotesquely as they did. The conspiracy theory of Pearl Harbor is a trivial excuse for professional failure.
It is of course absolutely the case that by cutting off Japan’s oil supply and then brusquely demanding, as the price of restoring it, that the Japanese make peace in China and stay out of East Asia, Franklin Roosevelt forced Japan to attack. There was no other honorable escape for this proud warlike nation from the corner into which he squeezed them. But these global political maneuvers, at which he was a grand master, he performed openly. The newspapers were full of the diplomatic exchanges, so talk of conspiracy is silly. Roosevelt probably hoped to the last that he could bully and bluff this smaller, weaker nation into obeying him without war. Hitler would have played that situation exactly the same way. However, there was this difference: the German armed forces would not have let him down by being surprised, as Roosevelt’s did. We were soldiers.
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TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Roon’s professional acumen is most striking when German conduct is not in the picture. With his appraisal of the Pearl Harbor surprise, I unhappily concur. He neglects the real bungling and stupidity that went on in Washington during those days, as well as in Hawaii; but his conclusion must be accepted that there is never an excuse for commanders in the field to be surprised. A similar failure by our armed services in the nuclear age will spell the end of American history. There will be no margin for recovery next time.—V.H.
58
ASENSE of lost time haunted Victor Henry as he sat on the back lawn of the Army and Navy Club in Manila at three o’clock in the morni
ng, listening to a broadcast of a football game going on eleven thousand miles away. Overhead, as always on Army-Navy game night, Orion sprawled brilliantly across half the heavens. On the roads outside Moscow the constellation had blazed brightly, too, but far down toward the southern horizon.
Pug sat on the grass amid a crowd of officers from both services, and a sprinkling of their Filipino girlfriends. Wives had long since been sent home. The old smells of Army-Navy night—fresh-cut lawn grass, frangipani, rum, women’s perfume, and the rank smell of harbor water—the paper lanterns, too, the heat, the sweaty feeling even in a cotton shirt and slacks, the old interservice jokes and insults, all pulled him back in spirit a dozen years. Life in Manila was amazingly unchanged. The jumpy overwrought embassy people in Tokyo had been speculating that there might be no Army-Navy game, that either the Japanese would go to war by Thanksgiving, or that at least the American armed forces would be on full alert. Yet there stood the same old display board, with the flat white football that would slide back and forth on a string across the painted gridiron. There were the mascot animals—Army mule in a brown blanket, Navy goat in a blue one—tethered and waiting for the comic moments. It might just as well be sleepy 1928, Pug thought. Only the floodlights blazing across the bay at the Cavite Navy Yard for all-night repair work suggested that it was November 1941, and that the Navy was slightly bestirring itself for an emergency.
