Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe. Max Hastings
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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.
As it was, though Japan’s 1941–42 Asian conquests shocked and appalled the Western Powers, they were assuredly reversible if Germany could be beaten. No one in London or Washington doubted that Japan’s defeat would be a lengthy and difficult task, partly because of the distances involved. But few thoughtful strategists, and certainly not Admiral Yamamoto, doubted the inevitability of America’s eventual triumph, unless its national will collapsed in the face of early defeats. Given that Japan could not invade the United States, American power must ultimately prove irresistible by a nation with only 10 per cent of US industrial capacity and dependent on imports for its existence.
Japan made an essential preliminary move for its descent on Malaya by occupying all of neighbouring Indochina at the end of July, without incurring Vichy French resistance. On 9 August, Tokyo made a final decision against launching an attack on Russia, in 1941 anyway. By September, Japanese thinking was dominated by the new reality of the US oil embargo, an earnest of Roosevelt’s resolve, though there is evidence that his subordinates translated a presidential desire to limit Japanese oil supplies and thus promote strategic restraint, rather than to impose an absolute embargo that accelerated the slide to war. Tokyo concluded that its only options were to bow to US demands, the least palatable of which was to quit China, or to strike swiftly. Emperor Hirohito pressed his government for further diplomacy, and prime minister Prince Konoe accordingly proposed a summit between himself and Roosevelt. Washington, recognising an attempt at prevarication, rebuffed this initiative. On 1 December an imperial conference in Tokyo confirmed the decision to fight. War minister Gen. Hideki Tojo, who assumed the premiership on 17 October, said: ‘Our empire stands at the threshold of glory or oblivion.’ Thus starkly did Japan’s militarists view their choices, founded in a grandiose vision of their rightful dominance of Asia. Yet even Tojo recognised the impossibility of achieving outright victory over the US. He and his colleagues instead sought to empower themselves by battlefield triumphs to achieve a negotiated settlement.
Japan launched its strike against Pearl Harbor and its assault on South-East Asia on 7 December 1941, just twenty-four hours after the Russians began the counter-offensive that saved Moscow. It would be many months before the Western Allies recognised that the Soviet Union would survive. But if Japan’s emissaries had better understood the mood in Berlin, been less blinded by their admiration for the Nazis and thus capable of grasping the gravity of Germany’s predicament in the east, Tojo’s government might yet have hesitated before unleashing its whirlwind. With hindsight, Japan’s timing was lamentable: its best chance of exploiting its victims’ weakness was already past. A cardinal Japanese error was to suppose that Tokyo could set limits for the war it started, notably by staying out of the German–Soviet struggle. In reality, once Japan had transformed the European war into a global conflict, inflicting humiliation upon its Western enemies, the only possible outcomes were either absolute victory or absolute defeat. Japan attacked on the basis of calculations which were introspective – indeed, self-obsessed even by the normal standards of nation-states – and matched by stunning geopolitical ignorance.
The nakedness of America’s Pacific bases continues to puzzle posterity. Overwhelming evidence of Tokyo’s intentions was available throughout November, chiefly through decrypted diplomatic traffic; in Washington as in London, there was uncertainty only about Japanese objectives. The thesis advanced by extreme conspiracists, that President Roosevelt chose to permit Pearl Harbor to be surprised, is rejected as absurd by all serious historians. It remains nonetheless extraordinary that his government and chiefs of staff failed to ensure that Hawaii, as well as other bases closer to Japan, were on a full precautionary footing. On 27 November 1941, Washington cabled all Pacific headquarters: ‘This dispatch is to be considered a war warning. An aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days…Execute appropriate defensive deployment.’ The failure of local commanders to act effectively in response to this message was egregious: at Pearl Harbor on 7 December, anti-aircraft ammunition boxes were still locked, their keys held by duty officers.
But it was a conspicuous feature of the war that again and again, dramatic changes of circumstance unmanned the victims of assault. The British and French in May 1940, the Russians in June 1941, even the Germans in Normandy in June 1944, had every reason to anticipate enemy action, yet responded inadequately when this came, and there were many lesser examples. Senior commanders, never mind humble subordinates, found it hard to adjust their mindset and behaviour to the din of battle until this was thrust upon them, until bombardment became a reality rather than a mere prospect. Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Walter Short, respectively navy and army commanders at Pearl Harbor, were unquestionably negligent. But their conduct reflected an institutional failure of imagination which extended up the entire US command chain to the White House, and inflicted a trauma on the American people.
‘We were flabbergasted by the devastation,’ wrote a sailor aboard the carrier Enterprise, which entered Pearl Harbor late on the afternoon of 8 December, having been mercifully absent when the Japanese struck. ‘One battleship, the Nevada, was lying athwart the narrow entrance channel, beached bow first, allowing barely enough room for the carrier to squeeze by…The water was covered with oil, fires were burning still, ships were resting on the bottom mud, superstructures had broken and fallen. Great gaps loomed where magazines had exploded, and smoke was roiling up everywhere. For sailors who had considered these massive ships invincible, it was a sight to be seen but not comprehended…We seemed to be mourners at a spectacular funeral.’
The assault on Pearl Harbor prompted rejoicing throughout the Axis nations. Japanese Lt. Izumiya Tatsuro wrote exultantly of ‘the glorious news of the air attack on Hawaii’. Mussolini, with his accustomed paucity of judgement, was delighted: he thought Americans stupid, and the United States ‘a country of Negroes and Jews’, as did Hitler. Yet fortunately for the Allied cause, American vulnerability on Hawaii was matched by a Japanese timidity which would become an astonishingly familiar phenomenon of the Pacific conflict. Again and again, Japanese fleets fought their way to the brink of important successes, then lacked either will or means to follow through. Admiral Chuichi Nagumo was stunned by the success of his own aircraft in wrecking five US battleships in their Sunday-morning attacks. For many years, it was argued that he wilfully missed the opportunity to follow through with a second strike against Pearl Harbor’s oil storage tanks and repair facilities, which might have forced the Pacific Fleet to withdraw to the US west coast. Recent research shows, however, that this was not feasible. The winter day was too short to launch and recover a second strike, and in any event Japanese bombloads were too small plausibly to wreck Pearl’s repair bases. Even the problem created by destruction of shore oil tanks could have been solved by diverting tankers from the Atlantic. The core reality was that Nagumo’s attack sufficed to shock, maul and enrage the Americans, but not to cripple their war-fighting capability. It was thus a grossly misconceived operation.
For many months, Winston Churchill had been haunted by apprehension that Japan might attack only the European empires in Asia, so that Britain would confront a new enemy without gaining the US as an ally. Hitler meanwhile contemplated a mirror image of this spectre, fearing that America might enter the war against Germany, while Japan stayed neutral. He had always expected to fight Roosevelt’s people once he had completed the destruction of Russia. In December 1941 he considered it a matter of course to follow Japan’s lead, and entertained extravagant hopes that Hirohito’s fleet would crush the US Navy. Four days after Pearl Harbor, he made the folly of the strike comprehensive by declaring war on the United States, relieving Roosevelt from a serious uncertainty about whether Congress would agree to fight Germany. John Steinbeck wrote to a friend: ‘The attack, whatever it may have gained from a tactical point of view, was a failure in that