All Hell Let Loose (33 page)

American writer Joe Dees wrote to a British friend from New York in January 1941: ‘All talk centers around aid to England. Americans are proud of the way England is sticking it out, excited by the successes in Albania and Libya, worried over Ireland’s suicidal obstinacy [in remaining neutral], fearful of entry ourselves, yet wanting to help out as much as possible.’ But Dees displayed a shrewd understanding of the range of sentiment in his own country when he wrote later in the year: ‘Some of my friends hold the opinion that Roosevelt should take stronger measures, full-out convoying with American war vessels etc. They think FDR is behind the national tempo instead of ahead of it. But I think he’s driving us as fast as we’ll allow. “We” means 130 million people, includes a mass of corn and wheat-growing, cattle-raising mid-westerners who are sentimentally anti-Nazi but can’t see how the Germans could come all the way across the ocean and do anything when they get here. I couldn’t call the American public unaware. It is aware all right. But it hasn’t that driving conviction that made men die in Spain and other men join the Free French.’

The arguments advanced by Roosevelt for supporting Britain mirrored those later deployed by the Western Allies to justify assistance to the Soviet Union: material aid saved American blood, just as Russian blood spared many British and American lives. The March 1941 Lend-Lease Act authorised credit deliveries: only 1 per cent of munitions used by Churchill’s forces that year was Lend-Lease material, but thereafter the programme provided most of the island’s food and fuel, together with a large part of its armed forces’ tanks, transport aircraft and amphibious operations equipment. The British focused their own industrial production on combat aircraft, warships, army weapons and vehicles. From 1941 onwards, they were almost wholly dependent upon American credit to pay for their war effort.

Though Winston Churchill strained every sinew to induce the US president to lead his nation into belligerence before Pearl Harbor, it was fortunate that his efforts failed. In the unlikely event that Roosevelt could have forced a declaration of war on Germany through the US Congress, thereafter he would have led a divided nation. Until December 1941, public opinion remained stubbornly opposed to fighting Hitler. A much higher proportion of people favoured stern action against the Japanese, a policy most conspicuously manifested in the July 1941 freeze on Japanese assets and embargo on all exports, which was decisive in committing Tokyo to fight, since 80 per cent of its oil supplies came from the US and the Dutch East Indies. The embargo was far more popular at home than Roosevelt’s escalation of the US Navy’s role in the Battle of the Atlantic – escorting convoys to Britain progressively farther east, and sporadically exchanging fire with U-boats.

Whatever the president’s personal wishes, Congress remained a critical check upon American policy until Tokyo and Berlin put an end to argument. Historian David Kennedy has suggested that, since Germany was always the principal enemy of the democracies, Roosevelt would have better served his nation’s interests by averting war with Japan in order to concentrate upon the destruction of Nazism: ‘a little appeasement – another name for diplomacy – might have yielded rich rewards’. Once Hitler was beaten, Kennedy argues, the ambitions of Japan’s militarists could have been frustrated with vastly less expenditure of life and treasure, by the threat or application of irresistible Allied power. But this argument raises a large question: whether Roosevelt could ever have persuaded his people to fight the Germans, in the absence of overwhelming aggression such as Hitler refused to initiate.

Even after war was declared in December 1941, and indeed until the end of hostilities, few Americans felt anything like the animosity towards Germans that they displayed against the Japanese. This was not merely a matter of racial sentiment. There was also passionate sympathy for the horrors China had experienced, and continued to experience, at Japanese hands. Most Americans deplored what the Nazis were doing to the world, but would have remained unenthusiastic or indeed implacably hostile about sending armies to Europe, had not Hitler forced the issue.

On 27 May 1941, following the fall of Greece and Crete, eighty-five million Americans listened to Roosevelt’s national radio broadcast, in which he warned of the perils of Nazi victory. The nation was, in one historian’s words, ‘afraid, unhappy and bewildered’. The president concluded by declaring a ‘state of unlimited national emergency’. No one was sure what this meant, save that it brought war closer and increased the powers of the executive. Many towns, especially in the South, began to experience economic booms on the back of military and naval construction programmes. Yet labour disputes dogged the nation: some industrial workers felt as alienated from America’s national purposes, and from their employers, as their counterparts in Britain. Unregulated mining killed nearly 1,300 US underground workers in 1940 and maimed many more. Passions ran so high that strikes were often violent: for instance, four men died and twelve more were badly injured during a 1941 dispute in Harlan County, Kentucky.

Popular sentiment strongly resisted admitting foreign refugees, victims of Nazi persecution: in June 1941 it was decreed that no one with relatives in Germany could enter the US. The isolationists never quit. There was a powerful Irish lobby, most stridently represented by Father Charles Coughlin, a pamphleteer and radio star. Roosevelt wrote on 19 May 1941 to one of Coughlin’s supporters, James O’Connor of Montana, an extreme isolationist congressman: ‘Dear Jim, When will you Irishmen ever get over hating England? Remember that if England goes down, Ireland goes down too. Ireland has a better chance for complete independence if democracy survives in the world than if Hitlerism supersedes it. Come down and talk to me about it some day – but do stop thinking in terms of ancient hatreds and think of the future. Always sincerely.’

Senator D. Worth Clarke of Idaho, another isolationist, suggested in July 1941 that the US should draw a line across the ocean behind which Americans would stand, taking peaceful control of their entire hemisphere, South America and Canada included: ‘We could make some kind of an arrangement to set up puppet governments which we could trust to put American interests ahead of those of Germany or any other nation of the world.’ His remarks were gleefully reported in the Axis media as evidence of Yankee imperialism. Informed Germans assumed US participation in the war much more confidently than did the British, or indeed many Americans. Back in 1938, Reich finance minister Schwerin von Krosigk anticipated a struggle that ‘will be fought not only with military means but also will be an economic war of the greatest scope’. Von Krosigk was deeply troubled by the contrast between Germany’s economic weakness and the enormous resources available to its prospective enemies. Hitler believed that these would include America from 1942. He preferred not to hasten US belligerency, but was untroubled by its prospect, partly because his own grasp of economics was so weak. Amid so many American domestic divisions, so much equivocation and hesitation, it was fortunate for the Allied cause that the decisions which brought the United States into the war were made in Tokyo rather than Washington, DC.

Japan’s military leaders made their critical commitment in 1937, when they embarked upon the conquest of China. This provoked widespread international hostility, and proved a strategic error of the first magnitude. Amid the vastness of the country, their military successes and seizures of territory were meaningless. A despairing Japanese soldier scrawled on the wall of a wrecked building: ‘Fighting and death everywhere and now I am also wounded. China is limitless and we are like drops of water in an ocean. There is no purpose in this war. I shall never see my home again.’ Though the Japanese dominated the China war against the corrupt regime and ill-equipped armies of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, they suffered debilitating attrition: 185,000 dead by the end of 1941. Even a huge deployment of manpower – a million Japanese soldiers remained in China until 1945 – proved unable to force a decisive outcome upon either Chiang’s Nationalists or the communists of Mao Zhedong, whose forces they confronted and sometimes engaged across a front of 2,000 miles.

Western perceptions of the war with Japan are dominated by the Pacific and South-East Asian campaigns. Yet China, and Tokyo’s refusal to abandon its ambitions there, were central to Japan’s ultimate failure. Between 1937 and 1939, major war-fighting took place, largely unrecognised in the West, in which Japanese forces prevailed, but at the cost of heavy losses. Japan’s withdrawal from the mainland in 1940 or 1941 could probably have averted war with the United States, since Japanese aggression there, and the culture of massacre symbolised by the deaths of at least 60,000 and perhaps many more civilians in Nanjing, was the principal source of American animosity, indeed outrage. Moreover, even if China’s own armies were ineffectual, Japan’s commitment imposed a massive haemorrhage of resources. The curse upon the Tokyo government was its dominance by soldiers committed to the perceived virtue of making war for its own sake. Intoxicated by a belief in their warrior virility, they failed to grasp the difficulty, even impossibility, of successfully making war upon the United States, the world’s greatest industrial power, impregnable to assault.

Japan’s 1941–42 military triumphs caused the Western Allies to over-rate its army, as they might not have done had they known of a significant earlier clash, which it had suited both parties to cloak in secrecy. In the summer of 1939, skirmishes between the Japanese and Russian armies on their common border dividing Manchuria from Mongolia erupted into full-scale war, commonly known as the Nomonhan Incident. Since the beginning of the century, powerful voices in Japan had urged imperialist expansion into Siberia. In the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, for some time Japanese forces deployed there, hoping to stake claims which could later be formalised. Only the belated decision of the Western Powers to support a stabilised, unified Soviet Union caused them to withdraw. In 1939, Tokyo judged the Russians weak and vulnerable, and committed an army to test their resolve.

The outcome was a disaster for the Japanese. Gen. Georgy Zhukov launched a counter-offensive, supported by powerful armoured and air forces, which achieved a comprehensive victory. Published casualty figures are unreliable, but probably totalled at least 25,000 on each side. Peace was restored in October, on Moscow’s terms. The strategic consequences were important to the course of the Second World War: the Japanese army set its face against the ‘strike north’ policy, flinching from renewed conflict with the Soviet Union. In 1941 Tokyo signed a neutrality pact with Moscow. Most of Japan’s leaders favoured honouring this, believing that the Western empires in South-East Asia offered softer targets for national expansion. They expected Germany to win the war in Europe. Japanese military attachés in London and Stockholm who reported that the Germans were ill-equipped to launch an invasion of Britain were rebuked by their superiors in Tokyo, to whom such views were unacceptable. Germany’s war in Europe was overwhelmingly responsible for precipitating Japan’s war in Asia: Tokyo would never have dared to attack, but for its conviction that a Hitlerian triumph in the west was imminent.

On 27 September 1940, the Tripartite Pact signed in Berlin between Germany, Italy and Japan promised mutual assistance if any of the parties was attacked by a nation not engaged in the European war. This was a move designed to deter the United States from exerting further pressure on Japan, and it failed. The US, implacably hostile to Japanese imperialism in China, imposed further sanctions. In response, the Japanese committed themselves to execute the ‘strike south’ strategy. They prepared to seize the West’s ill-defended south-east possessions in a series of lightning operations, bludgeoning America into acquiescence by evicting its forces from the western Pacific.

In the middle of 1941, the Japanese military drafted their optimistically titled ‘Operational Plan for ending the war with the US, Britain, the Netherlands and Chiang Kai-shek’. Initially, they intended to ‘await a good opportunity in the European war situation, notably collapse of mainland England, ending of the German–Soviet war and success of our policies towards India’. Emperor Hirohito said, after studying the plan: ‘I understand you are going to do Hong Kong after Malaya starts. Well, what about the foreign concessions in China?’ His Majesty was assured that such European properties would indeed be seized. Tokyo was disappointed, however, in its hopes of delaying a declaration of war until Germany’s victory in the west became complete. This miscalculation was almost as fundamental as the Japanese misreading of the enemy’s character. With the notable exceptions of a few such enlightened officers as Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, naval commander-in-chief, Japanese regarded Americans as an unwarlike and frankly degenerate people, whom a series of devastating blows would reconcile to a negotiated peace.

Hesitation and incoherence characterised Japan’s pre-Pearl Harbor motions. In 1940, Tokyo committed troops and aircraft in French Indochina, with Vichy’s assent under duress. The Indochinese supply route to China was closed, increasing pressure on Chiang Kai-shek. Japan’s foremost objective in South-East Asia was the oil of the East Indies, to which the Dutch exile government in London continued to refuse access. For a time, Japan’s generals cherished hopes of confining an assault to the European colonies, sparing America’s Philippines dependency. But in the early months of 1941, Japanese naval commanders convinced their army counterparts that US belligerence was inevitable in the event of any ‘strike south’. Tokyo’s planners thereupon set about devising plans for a series of swift thrusts that would overrun the weak defences of Malaya, Burma, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, creating new realities which the United States would deem it too costly to try to undo.

The calculations of Japan’s militarists were rooted in conceit, fatalism – a belief in
shikata ga nai
, ‘it cannot be helped’ – and ignorance of the world outside Asia. Japan’s soldiers had remarkable powers of physical endurance, matched by willingness for sacrifice. The army had good air support, but was seriously deficient in tanks and artillery. The country’s industrial and scientific base was much too weak to support a sustained conflict against the US. Germany and Japan never seriously coordinated strategy or objectives, partly because they had few in common beyond defeat of the Allies, and partly because they were geographically remote from each other. Hitler’s racial principles caused him to recoil from association with the Japanese, and only grudgingly to acknowledge them as his co-belligerents. It is just possible that, if Japan had struck west into Russia soon after the German invasion of June 1941, such a blow would have tipped the scale against Stalin, making possible Axis victory, and delaying if not averting a showdown with the United States. Foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka resigned from the Tokyo government when this option, which he favoured, was rejected by his colleagues.