Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (46 page)

The transformation was remarkable. The 1894–95 war with China had not only crushed the disorganized armed forces of that decrepit empire but also brought to Japan the strategically vital island of Taiwan. In 1904–5 Japan shocked the world by defeating czarist Russia, at sea (Tsushima) and on land (Port Arthur, Mukden), thus gaining both southern Manchuria and the Korean peninsula. The most remarkable battle of that war was the overwhelming victory of the Japanese navy over the Russians at Tsushima (May 1905); Admiral Tojo’s achievement inspired the service for decades to come. Nine years later, invoking in a very liberal sense the terms of its alliance with Britain, Tokyo took advantage of the outbreak of the First World War in Europe in 1914 to seize Germany’s eastern empire, that is, the treaty concessions in northern China, Shantung and Tsingtao, plus the Central Pacific island groups of the Carolines, Marshalls, and Marianas—obscure enough at the time, but absolutely vital in the Pacific War thirty years later.
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At this stage, Japan’s geopolitical position was very strong. With the European Great Powers embroiled in war and Woodrow Wilson’s America trying very hard to stay out of things, Tokyo had a free hand across the entire region.

Yet Arimoto and his fellow nobles were, in temperament, not unlike their British aristocratic equivalents or the Prussians after 1871:
they knew when to stop, when to display moderation, and, in Japan’s case, when to compromise with great powers who in military-industrial terms were much bigger than they were. In 1915 the Japanese Foreign Office had made its infamous “21 Demands” upon China (which would have led to a virtual Japanese suzerainty) but backed away quite swiftly following vigorous American diplomatic protests. It was surely more important to get international recognition of its takeover of the German colonies, which it duly did at Versailles. There was also great prestige for any Asian nation that occupied a prominent place among the “big five” in the Paris negotiations, and to take equally prominent membership in the League of Nations.

The older Japanese elites were, therefore, as willing as those in other governments to settle for compromise solutions in the Washington treaties of 1921–22: all participants accepted recognition of the territorial status quo across the entire East Asian and Western Pacific region, promises about the nonfortification of bases, and, in particular, very strict limitations on the number, size, and tonnage of the world’s leading navies. But that was probably the limit of Japanese willingness to proceed by negotiation. The refusal of the West to agree to a racial equality clause regarding all peoples at Versailles, the British abandonment of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1922, the passing away of the old
genro
(the traditional aristocrats, somewhat like the English Whigs), the rise of new nationalist ideas about the country’s special culture and special place in the world, the radicalization of the junior army officer corps, and the inherent weaknesses at the very top of the political system pushed Japan away from being a status quo power to being a revisionist power, just a few years ahead of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy.
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The revisionist events followed helter-skelter upon each other: the Kwantung Army’s coup in Manchuria from 1931 onward, the seizure of those massive lands, the decision to defy world opinion and leave the League of Nations in the same year (1933–34) as Hitler’s Germany did, the notification in 1935 that Japan would no longer consider itself as
being bound by the Washington and London naval treaty restrictions, the adhesion to the Anti-Comintern Pact and the large-scale move into China proper in 1937, and the various efforts (including “accidental” bombings of their warships) to push the West out of East Asia. By 1940–41 there occurred another major coup, the takeover of French Indochina from a very reluctant but helpless Vichy regime, a move that in turn not only threatened Chinese Nationalists along a new flank but gave Japanese naval airpower control over the South China Sea and beyond.

Up to this point, things had gone extremely well for Japan.
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Then came the decision by Roosevelt in July 1941, supported by the British and the Dutch, to freeze all Japanese commercial assets, essentially cutting off Japan’s consumption of oil (88 percent of which was imported). The empire of the Rising Sun could either buckle under or strike out to gain its needed energy supplies and other vital war materials. If it did not strike, its economy would grind to a halt, and its China campaign would crumble. The air force’s planes would sit quietly on the runways, and the navy’s warships would remain at their moorings. Unless it resisted this foreign pressure, the argument went, Japan would be tumbled back to its pre-Meiji, medieval condition.

Accepting second-class status was simply inconceivable to this generation of Japanese military and naval leaders. Virtually all of them—Admiral Nagumo (who was to head the Pearl Harbor operation), General Tojo (who pushed so hard for the war), the brilliant Admiral Yamamoto (who headed the navy in 1941)—had been young officers in the First World War; they had witnessed Japan’s advances then, and had seen it recognized as a great power in the Versailles territorial carve-ups. They could only go forward, to fulfill the national destiny and end the West’s dominance in East Asia. The military logic followed from this political and economic rationale. Thus the compelling commercial need to gain the oil and rubber and tin of Sumatra and Malaya led to the operational decisions to strike at Hong Kong, the Philippines, Borneo, Java, and Singapore, eliminating American, British, and Dutch armed forces and seizing their bases. And the strategic need to defend
all the newly acquired lands in turn led to the idea of a garrisoned “perimeter rim” that swept from the Aleutian Islands to the Burma-India border.

Even today, few Western readers understand the logic chain of Japanese military thinking or Tokyo’s sense of priorities. The decisive act was
not
the simultaneous strikes against Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and Hong Kong on December 7–8, 1941. The major move had been made back in the summer of 1937, with the Japanese army’s invasion of mainland China. Everything else that followed was, in a way, merely an operational or diplomatic consequence: the tightening of ties with Nazi Germany, the maintenance of neutrality toward the USSR (despite severe border clashes in northern Manchuria), the 1941 move into the southern parts of French Indochina, the decision to go for the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies, the operational need to take out British and American bases in Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Philippines, and—as a final security measure—the decision to destroy the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor to prevent it from blocking this drive to the south. But the big show, from the standpoint of the Japanese military, was in China itself.

Thus, the June 1941 German attack on the USSR and the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor less than six months later, however much we link them in our present understanding of the Second World War, could not be more different in terms of the military resources allocated. For Operation Barbarossa, Hitler committed as much as three-quarters of all Axis divisions. For the war in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, Imperial General Headquarters committed less than one-quarter of its million and a half troops. This bald comparison explains much of the unfolding of the 1941–45 struggle across that vast region.

In terms of comparative military effectiveness, Japan’s leaders could be well pleased with themselves, perhaps too pleased. Determined never to be dominated or intimidated by Western practices, the Japanese had had no hesitation in copying foreign technologies, personnel structures (including ranks), command structures, and the like. While the people’s standard of living was still far lower than those in Europe and America, the massive national savings of Japan were directed to a “hothouse” development of industry, science, modern warships, steadily
improved aircraft, and extraordinarily high levels of training in their officer corps.

Like all interwar militaries, the Japanese forces possessed varied strengths and weaknesses. The army had been the dominant service since the successful Russo-Japanese War and was oriented toward the Asian continent, with a particular concern about a coming war with the USSR. Thus the Americans and British were of much less interest to the generals, until, of course, their economic blockades crippled the Japanese war machine. The army was large and disciplined, and both its choice of weapons systems and its training pointed to its vision of future conflicts. There was little effort to follow Liddell Hart, Fuller, Guderian, Tukhachevsky, and other Western advocates of fast armored warfare, for where could one deploy main battle tanks in Asia when no bridges were strong enough and few metalled roads existed? On the other hand, there was an increasing interest in preparing for and practicing landings from the sea, river crossings, and jungle and mountain warfare in Southeast Asia. Taking distant Pacific islands was not on their mind. Nor was there any point in creating an expensive long-range strategic bombing force, since what modern industrial targets were there to bomb—the wooden shanties of Shanghai? The fishing wharfs of Vladivostok?

The army’s relations with the Japanese navy were fractured, and this wasn’t just because of those typical interservice quarrels of the 1920s and 1930s about budgets. It was a far deeper quarrel about the nation’s strategic purpose, since the navy thought a large entanglement on the Asian continent was folly and, having thoroughly imbibed the doctrines of Alfred Thayer Mahan, called instead for a focus upon the threat from the Western sea powers. The army, by contrast, was imbued with the Prussian military tradition and particularly impressed by the Elder Moltke’s three swift land victories (1864, 1866, 1870–71) that led to the unification of Germany. Since neither side would concede to the other’s viewpoint, the two services tended to go their own ways. While this threatened to make any larger military policy incoherent, it helped the navy in other respects. Above all, it meant that it could develop its own naval air arm, with a carrier fleet and suitable planes. Because the navy was much more invested than the army in twentieth-century
technologies, and therefore more knowledgeable than their army equivalents about America, Britain, and Germany, some naval leaders (above all Yamamoto, who had been a naval attaché in Washington) were concerned about Japan’s overall economic disadvantage. Still, when the decision for war was made in late 1941, the services felt they were ready.
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The amazingly wide Japanese tide of conquest lasted a mere six months, from December 1941 until June 1942. By that time, the Japanese Fifteenth Army had reached the border between Burma and Assam, in British India; it could go no farther. The carriers of the Imperial Japanese Navy had struck hard against Ceylon and the inadequate British naval forces in the Indian Ocean during early April 1942 and had the capability to move farther westward, against Aden and Suez; but they were pulled back from that intriguing possibility (which the army never liked) for operations elsewhere.
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The navy’s slightly later foray toward Australasia was blunted by the Battle of the Coral Sea (off southeast New Guinea) on May 7–8—where neither side won decisively, but which prompted the Japanese to withdraw northward for a while. The Japanese army’s move from the north shores of New Guinea toward Port Moresby in the south was held in the mountainous jungles by hastily assembled American and Australian divisions under General Douglas MacArthur. Most important of all, the prospect of a Japanese drive across the Central Pacific, seizing Hawaii and thus threatening the American West Coast, was crushed at the vital carriers-only battle near Midway Island on June 4, 1942. Pearl Harbor was in large part revenged in the waters hundreds of miles west of Hawaii.

Such setbacks, however, were not regarded by Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo as disastrous, perhaps not even as serious. In fact, while the naval leadership might be yearning to finish off the Allied (chiefly American) fleets once and for all, the dominant army faction could view the situation in Southeast Asia and the Pacific with some equanimity. Japan’s armed services had done what was wanted, which was to tumble the hated Americans, British, and Dutch out of their own future Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. They had seized the absolutely critical oilfields of Java, Sumatra, and North Borneo, which meant that Tokyo’s most important strategic mission could be pursued more energetically than ever—that is, the subjugation of
China and achievement of unchallenged primacy over mainland East Asia. Amazingly, the Japanese army had deployed a mere eleven of its fifty-one divisions to achieve this vast array of conquests across the Western Pacific and Southeast Asia. All that was necessary now was to strengthen the outer perimeter rim with a series of island strongpoints and beat off any impertinent Western counterattacks. Once American and British noses had been bloodied, the effete democracies would recognize this strategic fait accompli and negotiate a peace in a year or two’s time.