Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe. Max Hastings
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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