The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (61 page)

Because of conscription, the Japanese army had ready access to manpower and could ingrain the recruits into its traditions of absolute obedience and mass maximum effort. While it had kept the size of the army limited in earlier years, its expansion program saw the 24 divisions and 54 air squadrons of 1937 grow to 51 active service divisions and 133 air squadrons by 1941. In addition, there were 10 depot divisions (for training), and a large number of independent brigade and garrison troops, probably equal to another 30 divisions. By the eve of war, therefore, Japan had an army of over 1 million men, backed by nearly 2 million trained reserves. It was not strong in tanks, for which neither the terrain nor the wooden bridges of much of East Asia were suitable, but it had good mobile artillery and was well trained for jungle work, river crossings, and amphibious landings. The army’s 2,000 first-line aircraft (like the navy’s) included the formidable Zero fighter, as fast and maneuverable as anything produced in Europe at the time.
⁶³

Japan’s military effectiveness, therefore, was extremely high; but it was not free of weaknesses. Government decision-making in the 1930s was rendered erratic and, at times, incoherent by clashes between the various factions, by civil-military disputes, and by assassinations. In addition, there was the lack of proper coordination between the army and the navy—not a unique situation by any means, but the more dangerous in Japan’s case since each service had a quite different enemy
and
area of operations in mind. While the navy anticipated a future war with either Britain or the United States, the army’s eyes were fixed exclusively upon the Asian continent and the threat to Japanese interests there posed by the Soviet Union. Since the army was much more influential in Japanese politics and also dominated imperial general headquarters, its views generally prevailed. There was no effective opposition, from either the navy or the foreign office, although both were reluctant, when in 1937 the army insisted upon taking further action against China following the contrived Marco Polo Bridge incident. Despite a large-scale invasion of northern China from Manchurian soil, and landings along the Chinese coast, the Japanese army found it impossible to achieve a decisive victory. While
losing great numbers of troops, Chiang Kai-shek kept up the struggle and moved even farther inland, pursued by Japanese striking columns and aircraft. The problem for Imperial General Headquarters was not so much the losses this campaigning involved—the army probably suffered only 70,000 casualties—but the stupendous costs of such inconclusive and extended warfare. By the end of 1937, there were over 700,000 Japanese troops in China, a number which steadily increased (though Willmott’s figure of 1.5 million by 1938 seems far too high)
⁶⁴
without ever managing to force the Chinese to surrender. The “China Incident,” as Tokyo referred to it, was now costing $5 million a day and causing an even larger rise in defense spending. Rationing was introduced in 1938, as were a whole series of enactments which virtually put Japan onto a “total war” mobilization. The national debt spiraled upward at an alarming rate as the government borrowed more and more to pay for the enormous defense expenditures.
⁶⁵

What made this strategy even more difficult to sustain was Japan’s shrinking stocks of foreign currency and raw materials, and her increasing dependence upon imports from the disapproving Americans, British, and Dutch. After her air forces had used up large amounts of fuel in the China campaigns, “factories were ordered to reduce their fuel by 37 percent, ships by 15 percent and automobiles by 65 percent.”
⁶⁶
This situation was the more intolerable to the Japanese since they believed that Chiang Kai-shek’s forces were only able to keep up their resistance because of the flow of western supplies, via the Burma Road, French Indochina, or other routes. Logically, inexorably, the conviction grew that Japan would have to strike south, both to isolate China and to gain a firm grip upon the oil and other raw materials of Southeast Asia, the Dutch East Indies, and Borneo. This was, of course, the direction which the Japanese navy had always favored; yet even the army, despite its prior concern about the Soviet Union and its extensive operations in China, was forced slowly to admit that action was necessary to ensure Japan’s economic security.

This led to the gravest problem of all. Given the armed strength which they had built up by the late 1930s, the Japanese could easily sweep the French out of Indochina and the Dutch out of the East Indies. Even the British Empire would have found it difficult to hold its own against Japan, as the strategic planners in Whitehall secretly admitted during the 1930s; and by the time war had broken out in Europe, a full British commitment to the Far East was impossible. It was quite another thing, however, for the Japanese to go to war against either Russia or the United States. In the prolonged and bloody border clashes with the Red Army around Nomonhan between May and August 1939, for example, Imperial General Headquarters was alarmed at the clear superiority of Soviet artillery and aircraft, and at the firepower of the much larger Russian tanks.
⁶⁷
With the Kwantung (Manchuria)
army possessing only half the number of divisions that the Russians had placed in Mongolia and Siberia, and with large forces increasingly bogged down in China, even the more extremist army officers recognized that war against the USSR had to be avoided—at least until the international circumstances were more favorable.

But if a northern war would expose Japan’s limitations, would not a southern one also, if it ran the risk of bringing in the United States? And would the Roosevelt administration, which so strongly disapproved of the Japanese actions in China, stand idly by while Tokyo helped itself to the Dutch East Indies and Malaya, thereby escaping from American economic pressure? The “moral embargo” upon the export of aeronautical materials in June 1938, the abrogation of the American-Japanese trade treaty in the following year, and, most of all, the British-Dutch-U.S. ban of oil and iron-ore exports following the Japanese takeover of Indochina in July 1941 made it clear that “economic security” could be achieved only at the price of war with the United States. But the United States had nearly twice the population of Japan, and
seventeen
times the national income, produced five times as much steel, and seven times as much coal, and made eighty times as many motor vehicles each year. Its industrial potential, even in a poor year like 1938, was seven times larger than Japan’s;
⁶⁸
it might in other years be nine or ten times as large. Even granted the high level of Japanese patriotic fervor and the memory of its staggering successes against far larger opponents in 1895 (China) and 1905 (Russia), what it was now planning bordered on the incredible—and the absurd. Indeed, to such sober strategists as Admiral Yamamoto, an attack upon a country as powerful as the United States seemed folly, especially when it became clear that most of the Japanese army would remain in China; yet
not
to take on the United States after July 1941 would leave Japan exposed to western economic blackmail, which was also an intolerable notion. Unable to go back, the Japanese military leaders prepared to plunge forward.
⁶⁹

    In the 1920s, Germany appeared to be by far the weakest and most troubled of those Great Powers which felt dissatisfied by the postwar territorial and economic arrangements. Shackled by the military provisions of the Versailles Treaty, burdened by the need to pay reparations, constrained strategically by the transfer of border regions to France and Poland, and convulsed internally by inflation, class tension, and the corresponding volatility and confusion of the electorate and the parties, Germany possessed nothing like the freedom of action in foreign affairs enjoyed by Italy and Japan. While things had vastly improved by the late 1920s in consequence of the general prosperity and of Stresemann’s successes in enhancing Germany’s position by diplomacy, the country still was a politically troubled “half-free” Great
Power when the financial and commercial crises of 1929–1933 devastated both its precarious economy and its much-disliked Weimar democracy.
⁷⁰

If the advent of Hitler transformed Germany’s position in Europe within a matter of years, it is important to recall the points made earlier: that virtually every German was a “revisionist” to a greater or lesser degree and much of the early Nazi foreign-policy program represented a
continuity
with the past ambitions of German nationalists and the suppressed armed forces; that the 1919–1922 border settlements in east-central Europe were seen as unsatisfactory by many other nations and ethnic groups, who pressed for changes long before the Nazis seized power, and were willing to join Berlin in amending them; that Germany, despite its losses of territory, population, and raw materials, retained the industrial potential to be the greatest of the European powers; and that the international balances which were needed to contain a resurgence of German aggrandizement were now far more disparate, and much less coordinated, than prior to 1914. That Hitler soon achieved staggering successes in his scheme to improve Germany’s diplomatic and military position is undoubted; but it is also clear that many existing circumstances favored his ruthless exploitation of opportunities.
⁷¹

Hitler’s “specialness,” so far as the themes pursued in this book are concerned, lay in two areas. The first was the peculiarly intense and manic nature of the National Socialist Germany which he intended to create: a society racially “purified” by the elimination of Jews, gypsies, and any other allegedly non-Teutonic elements; a people whose minds and souls were given over to unquestioned support of the regime, which would thereby replace the older loyalties of class, church, region, and family; an economy mobilized and controlled for the purposes of expanding
Deutschtum
whenever or wherever the leader decreed that to be necessary, and against however many of the Great Powers; an ideology of force and struggle and hatred, which rejoiced in smashing foes and scorned the very idea of compromise.
⁷²
Given the size and complexity of twentieth-century German society, it hardly needs remarking that this was an unreal vision: there were “limits to Hitler’s power”
⁷³
across the country; there were individuals, and interest groups, which supported him in 1932–1933, and even until 1938–1939, but with decreasing enthusiasm; and no doubt for all those who openly opposed the regime there were many others who developed a mentally internalized resistance. But despite such exceptions, there was also no question that the National Socialist regime was immensely popular and—even more important—absolutely unchallenged in respect to its disposition of national resources. With a political culture bent upon war and conquest and a political economy distorted to the extent that by 1938 52 percent of government expenditure and a massive
17 percent of gross national product was being poured into armaments, Germany had entered a different league from any of the other western European states. In the year of Munich, indeed, Germany was spending more upon weapons than Britain, France, and the United States combined. Insofar as the state apparatus could concentrate them, all German national energies were being mobilized for a renewed struggle.
⁷⁴

The second major feature of German rearmament was the frighteningly precarious state of the national economy as it heated up during this expansion. As has been noted above, both the Italian and the Japanese economies manifested similar problems by the late 1930s—and the same would happen to France and Britain when they sought to respond to the fantastic pace of arms increases. But in none of those countries was the buildup of the armed forces as sudden as in Germany. In January 1933 its army was, legally, supposed to be no more than 100,000 men, although well before Hitler’s accession the military had secret plans to expand from a seven-division force to a twenty-one division force—just as it had privately prepared for the reestablishment of an air force, tank formations, and other elements banned by the Versailles Treaty. Hitler’s general instruction of February 1933 to von Fritsch, “to create an army of the greatest possible strength,”
⁷⁵
was simply taken by the planners to be the go-ahead to turn the earlier scheme into effect, free at last from financial and manpower restrictions. By 1935, however, conscription was announced and the army’s ceiling raised to thirty-six divisions. The acquisition of Austrian units in 1938, the takeover of the Rhineland military police, the creation of armored divisions, and the reorganization of the Landwehr sent that figure ever higher. In the crisis period of late 1938, the army totaled forty-two active, eight reserve, and twenty-one Landwehr divisions; by the next summer, when the war began, the German field army’s order of battle listed 103 divisions—a jump of thirty-two within one year.
⁷⁶
The Luftwaffe’s expansion was even greater and faster. German aircraft production of a mere thirty-six planes in 1932 rose to 1,938 in 1934 and 5,112 in 1936, and the service’s twenty-six squadrons (July 1933 directive) rose to 302 squadrons, with over 4,000 front-line aircraft, at the outset of war.
⁷⁷
If the navy was less impressive in size, then that was to a large degree due to the fact that (as Tirpitz earlier discovered) the creation of a powerful battle fleet took at least one to two decades. Nonetheless, by 1939 Admiral Raeder commanded a number of fast, modern warships, the navy had five times the number of personnel that it possessed in 1932, and it was spending twelve times as much as before Hitler came to power.
⁷⁸
At sea, as well as on land and in the air, the German rearmament program was intent upon altering the balance of power as soon as possible.