The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (77 page)

The Japanese had sought living space in China. Now they had it. All that remained was to stamp out the Communist guerrillas behind their own lines– ironically, the chief beneficiaries of Japanese victories over the Nationalists – and to finish off the apparently isolated Chiang. This, however, was easier said than done. The Japanese responded to Communist attacks with the brutal ‘three all’ policy: ‘Take all, kill all, burn all.’ They reacted to Chiang’sretreat into Sichuan with air raids on Chongqing. In one important respect, this strategy bore fruit: in January 1941 the Second United Front between the Guomindang and the Communists fell apart when Nationalist troops attacked Ye Ting’s New 4th Army at Maolin in Anhui. Yet still victory seemed to elude the Japanese commanders. And the more bogged down their operations in China became – a metaphor that Chiang’s destruction of the Yellow River dykesturned into muddy reality – the more tempting it became to seek some kind of strategic breakthrough elsewhere.

Already in 1940 there were those in Tokyo who argued that it was Western aid that was keeping Chinese resistance going, despite the very limited amount of material that was reaching Chiang’s forcesin Hunnan from British-ruled Burma
*
and French Hanoi. In the words of General Nishio Toshizō in 1940:

The true cause of the current conflict derives from the forgetfulness of the Japanese and Chinese peoples of the fact they are East Asians. They have succumbed to the maddening influence of the individualistic materialism of Europe and America… Britain, the United States, France, and other powers
are providing aid to Chongqing in order to perpetuate China’s dependent status.

In late 1938, the new Deputy Minister for War, Tōjō Hideki, denounced not only Britain for assisting the Chinese, but also the Soviet Union and the United States. The difficulty with this diagnosis was that it was unclear which of these external threats should be confronted first. The Kwantung Army had a historic predilection for confrontation with Russia. But by mid-1938 forces in the North had been so depleted by the war in China that the odds were heavily in the Red Army’s favour. Two ‘incidents’ in 1938 and 1939 – border clashes at Changkufeng Hill on the eastern Manchurian-Soviet border and at Nomonhan on the border with Outer Mongolia – exposed the limitations of Japanese arms. Although the former clash could be regarded as a minor Japanese victory (though for no territorial gain), the latter was a disaster. The Japanese 6th Army was all but obliterated by the tanks, artillery and aircraft of the First Soviet Mongolian Army Group, under the command of Lieutenant-General (later Marshal) Georgi Zhukov. One reason the Japanese elected not to wage war against the Soviet Union – an option that would have been far superior from the point of view of combined Axis strategy in 1941 – was their realization that they might actually lose out in such a contest, so clear was their inferiority in terms of both tanks and planes. This, combined with the vain hopes of Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yō suke that the Soviet Union might somehow be brought into the Tripartite Pact, helps to explain the Japanese readiness to sign a non-aggression pact with Stalin in April 1941. The Japanese never quite believed in this arrangement, keeping between thirteen and fifteen divisions along their northern borders throughout the war for fear of a Soviet surprise attack, but it did more or less rule out a Japanese offensive in the North. When Matsuoka argued for such an attack in support of Hitler’s invasion just two months later, he was overruled and ousted from office.

The preference of the Navy Staff was to launch assaults on Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaya, while at the same time overrunning Dutch Sumatra, Borneo and Java. Their assumption, which proved entirely correct, was that the European empires in Asia had been dealt
a lethal blow at home by the German occupation of the Netherlands and France and the continuing German threat to the British Isles. The Dutch colonies, in particular, looked like easy quarry; they had the added allure of being oil-rich. Malaya, meanwhile, was the world’s biggest producer of rubber. Living space for Japanese settlers was all very well, but the Japanese Empire needed strategic raw materials far more urgently. In 1940 army planners had argued for an invasion of Indo-China, to provide new bases from which to attack the Chinese Nationalists in Sichuan. As War Minister in the new Cabinet formed by Prince Konoe in July 1940, Tōjō had insisted that unless Japan struck soon, she risked being too late. By 1941, it is true, some senior generals had become less enthusiastic about this idea. But by now the proponents of the Southern strategy had the upper hand.

So much better known is the war in South-East Asia and the Pacific that it is easy to forget that these theatres were always subordinate to China in terms of the resources committed by the Japanese. China was to Japan what the Soviet Union was to Germany, absorbing the greater part of its military manpower – up to a million men at the peak. In all, 52 per cent of Japanese military personnel deployed overseas served in China, compared with 33 per cent in the Pacific theatre and 14 per cent in South-East Asia. These figures also provide some indication of the relative ease with which the Japanese were able to oust the European empires. By any standards, these were low-hanging fruit. The Dutch colonies were defended by a fleet of 5 cruisers, 8 destroyers and 24 submarines, an air force of 50 obsolescent planes and an army of just 35,000 regulars with 25,000 reservists. Singapore, the supposedly impregnable British fortress, was woefully short of anti-aircraft guns and had virtually no armour. So certain were British planners that the base would face only a naval challenge that itsrear was virtually undefended. Even a naval as sault might have succeeded, since there was never any serious intention of sending the British fleet east in the event of a war in Asia. Malaya at least had men, altogether around 80,000 Australian, British, Indian and Malay troops. But its air defences were feeble. With good reason the forces of the European empires in Asia have been called ‘Forgotten Armies’; in some respects they had been forgotten even before the war began.

The first Japanese move was against French Indo-China. In early
1939 the islands of Hainan and the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea were seized. In June the following year – by which time France had succumbed to the German blitzkrieg – the Japanese demanded that the French authorities admit a forty-man military mission whose role would be to prevent the shipment of war supplies to Chongqing. The French Governor-General acquiesced, but bid for a mutual defence pact in the hope of preserving the colony’s integrity. Matsuoka dismissed this, demanding instead rights of transit for Japanese forces through Indo-China and the construction and use of airfields, as well as the stationing of Japanese troops to guard them. Realizing that they stood no chance if it came to a fight, the Vichy authorities agreed to this, leaving it to the Governor-General to handle the practicalities. However, the Japanese government grew impatient and on September 20 delivered an ultimatum to Hanoi, stating that Japanese troops would cross the border in two days’ time with or without the consent of the French authorities. Once again the French capitulated. By September 23 northern Indo-China was in Japanese hands. Six months later the Japanese intervened to end clashes that had broken out between French forces and neighbouring Thailand. The effect of the resulting compromise was to bring Thailand too into the Japanese orbit. At the end of July 1941 Japanese troops completed the takeover by occupying southern Indo-China.

After the Netherlands succumbed to German invasion the government of the Dutch East Indies chose to align itself with the Dutch government in exile in London, but from a military standpoint their position was not much better than the French position had been in Indo-China. Once again the initial Japanese moves were diplomatic: demands for a huge increase in oil exports to Japan. Once again the colonial authorities attempted to be accommodating. Former Foreign Minister Yoshizawa Kenkichi’s mission presented the Dutch with what amounted to a shopping list: 3,800,000 tons of oil, 1,000,000 tons of tin, 400,000 tons of bauxite, 180,000 tons of nickel, 30,000 tons of coconut oil, 30,000 tons of rubber and 10,000 tons of sugar. The Dutch haggled about quantities, insisting that there be no re-exports to Germany. By May 1941, however, the increasingly assertive Tōjō was once again losing patience. On June 17 Yoshizawa’s mission departed for Tokyo. On September 25 the Chiefs of Staff, with Tōjō ’s
support, told Konoe that he had until October 15 to arrive at a diplomatic solution of Japan’s problems; this was the deadline for war. Since Konoe resigned on the 16th, allowing Tō jō to form a war government, only one thing can explain its subsequent extension for a further month and a half. This was the realization that any further moves against the European empires in South-East Asia would inevitably entail a confrontation with the United States.

The sole obstacle to Japanese hegemony in South-East Asia was America. On the one hand, it was clear that the United States had scant appetite for war, in Asia or anywhere else. On the other, Americans had little desire to see Japan as sole master of China, let alone the whole of East Asia. But those who ran US policy in the Pacific believed they did not need to take up arms to prevent this, because of Japan’s dependence on trade with the United Statesand hence its vulnerability to economic pressure. Around a third of Japan’s imports came from the United States, including copious quantities of cotton, scrap iron and oil. Her dependence on American heavy machinery and machine tools was greater still. Even if the Americans did not intervene militarily, they had the option to choke the Japanese war machine to death, especially if they cut off oil exports. This was precisely what made it so hard for American diplomats and politicians to foresee the attack on Pearl Harbor. As normally risk-averse people, they could not imagine the Japanese being so rash as to gamble on a very swift victory when the economic odds were stacked so heavily against them. They assumed that the partial sanctions imposed after the Japanese invasion of Indo-China would send a clear enough signal to deter the Japanese. The effect was precisely the opposite.

The path to war in the Pacific was paved with economic sanctions. The Japanese-American Commercial Treaty of 1911 was abrogated in July 1939. By the end of the year Japan (along with other combatants) was affected by Roosevelt’s ‘moral embargo’ on the export of ‘materials essential to airplane manufacture’, which meant in practice aluminium, molybdenum, nickel, tungsten and vanadium. At the same
time, the State Department applied pressure on American firms to stop exporting technology to Japan that would facilitate the production of aviation fuel. With the National Defense Act of July 1940 the President was empowered to impose real prohibitionson the exports of strategic commodities and manufactures. By the end of the month, after a protracted wrangle between the State Department and the Treasury, it was agreed to ban the export of high-grade scrap iron and steel, aviation fuel, lubricating oil and the fuel blending agent tetraethyl lead. On September 26 the ban was extended to all scrap; two months later the export of iron and steel themselves became subject to licence. No one knew for sure what the effect of these restrictions would be. Some, like the State Department’s Advisor on Far Eastern Affairs Stanley Hornbeck, said they would hobble the Japanese military; others, like the US ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph Grew, that they would provoke it. Neither view was correct. The sanctions were too late to deter Japan from contemplating war, since the Japanese had been importing and stockpiling American raw materials since the outbreak of war in China. Only one economic sanction was regarded in Tokyo as a
casus belli
and that was an embargo on oil. That came in July 1941, along with a freeze on all Japanese assets in the United States – a response to the Japanese occupation of southern Indo-China. From this point, war in the Pacific was more or lessine vitable.

For a long time the Japanese Foreign Ministry had found it hard to imagine the United State staking up arms against a victorious combination of Germany, Italy and Japan, especially if the Soviet Union were on friendly terms with that combination. A guiding assumption was that the American public was staunchly isolationist, and that the victoriesof Japan and her allies would reinforce rather than reverse that sentiment. The army was also reluctant to confront the United States, hoping that the conquest of European possessions in Asia could somehow be achieved without precipitating American intervention. Until September 1941 Japan’s naval strategists were the only ones prepared to contemplate a war with America. However, they ultimately could see no other way of winning it than to deal a knockout blow to the US Navy at the outset. Conveniently, the main Pacific base of the American fleet had been moved to Hawaii in 1940; had it remained on the Californian coast, a lightning strike would
have been out of the question. By April 1941 Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku had convinced himself that the ships stationed at Pearl Harbor could be sunk in one fell swoop. All six Japanese aircraft carriers would be needed, several submarines and around 400 planese quipped with torpedoes or armour-piercing shells. On November 1 Lieutenant-General Suzuki Teiichi assured the participants at a Liaison Conference
*
that supplies from the territories to be occupied would be sufficient to meet Japan’s material needs. ‘In 1943,’ he declared, ‘the material situation will be much better if we go to war.’

This was not the same as saying that Japan’s material situation was equal to the challenge of war against the British Empire, the Dutch East Indies and the United States. All Suzuki meant was that Japan’s material situation was bound to deteriorate the longer war was postponed. The navy alone was consuming 400 tons of oil an hour, just idly waiting; after eighteen months its stocks of fuel would all be gone. It therefore followed that it was better to strike now than to wait. This rationale was sufficient to commit Japan to war if no diplomatic break through had been achieved by midnight on November 30, 1941.