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

Roosevelt gained domestic support for both aid to Britain and US rearmament by adopting the argument advanced by Gen. John Pershing, his nation’s most famous soldier of World War I: his policies would not hasten engagement in the conflict, but instead push it away from America’s shores. The British were obliged to pay cash on the nail for every weapon shipped to them until their cash and gold reserves were exhausted, and Lend-Lease became effective, late in 1941. It was as a defensive measure that Roosevelt reconciled the American people to the September 1940 destroyers-for-bases deal with Britain, which even the isolationist Chicago Tribune welcomed: ‘Any arrangement which gives the US naval and air bases in regions which must be brought within the American defense zone is to be accepted as a triumph.’ Churchill heeded urgent and frequent warnings from Washington, that he should say nothing publicly before the 1940 US election which suggested an expectation that America would fight in Europe.

The Luftwaffe’s defeat in the Battle of Britain significantly shifted American sentiment not in favour of joining the fight, but towards a belief that Churchill’s people might hold out. That September, secretary for war Henry Stimson wrote in his diary: ‘It is very interesting to see how the tide of opinion has swung in favour of the eventual victory of G[reat] B[ritain]. The air of pessimism which prevailed two months ago has gone. The reports of our observers on the other side have changed and are now quite optimistic.’ Meanwhile, the Tripartite Pact signed by Germany, Italy and Japan strengthened American public perceptions of a common evil threatening the world: the United States and Britain now found themselves two among only a dozen surviving democracies. An October opinion poll showed 59 per cent American support for material aid to Churchill’s people, even at the risk of war.

But isolationism remained a critical force in the 1940 presidential race. Though Republican candidate Wendell Willkie was at heart an interventionist, during the campaign his rhetoric was stridently hostile to belligerence. Roosevelt became alarmed that, as a supposed advocate of war, he was threatened with defeat. Gen. Hugh Johnson, a Scripps-Howard syndicated columnist, wrote: ‘I know of no well-informed Washington observer who isn’t convinced that if Mr. R is elected he will drag us into war at the first opportunity, and that if none presents itself he will make one.’ A Fortune poll on 4 November 1940 showed that 70 per cent of Americans saw at least an even chance of America getting into the war; but while 41 per cent favoured giving Britain all possible material aid, only 15.9 per cent advocated sending Americans to fight. Lyndon Johnson, a Democratic Congressman close to the administration on almost all domestic issues, secured big pork-barrel funding for Texas from the surge in defence spending. Johnson nonetheless spoke out against US involvement in Europe, telling his constituents in June 1940: ‘The ability of the American people to think calmly and act wisely during a crisis is going to keep us out of a war.’ He changed his mind only in the summer of 1941, when British defeats in the Mediterranean persuaded him that the threat of an Axis triumph was unacceptable to the United States.

The strength of isolationism caused FDR to make a declaration during a 1940 campaign broadcast which became one of the most controversial of his life: ‘And while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.’ The president’s wife Eleanor was among those dismayed by this remark. In her newspaper column ‘My Day’, she qualified it importantly: ‘No one can honestly promise you today peace at home or abroad. All any human being can do is to promise that he will do his utmost to prevent this country being involved in war.’ The president’s penchant for opacity, indeed deceit, was well recognised. But the enigma which so troubled Winston Churchill as well as the American people in 1940–41 will never be susceptible to resolution: whether Roosevelt could ever have made the United States a full fighting partner in the war, had not the Axis precipitated such an outcome.

On polling day, 5 November 1940, the president secured 55 per cent support for his re-election, 27.2 million votes to 22.3 million. The US minister to Ireland, who was Roosevelt’s uncle, described British reaction to the result: ‘The gentlemanly announcer on the BBC this morning at eight o’clock began “Roosevelt is in!” His voice betrayed relief and some exultation’. But the election outcome emphasised the strength of continuing opposition to the president. Many millions shared the views of George Fisk of Cornell University, who argued that ‘no war ever accomplished what it was intended to’. In December, Roosevelt emphasised to the British government the need for absolute secrecy about the details of arms purchases – for his own domestic political reasons, not those of security.

American writer Joe Dees wrote to a British friend from New York in January 1941: ‘All talk centers around aid to England. Americans are proud of the way England is sticking it out, excited by the successes in Albania and Libya, worried over Ireland’s suicidal obstinacy [in remaining neutral], fearful of entry ourselves, yet wanting to help out as much as possible.’ But Dees displayed a shrewd understanding of the range of sentiment in his own country when he wrote later in the year: ‘Some of my friends hold the opinion that Roosevelt should take stronger measures, full-out convoying with American war vessels etc. They think FDR is behind the national tempo instead of ahead of it. But I think he’s driving us as fast as we’ll allow. “We” means 130 million people, includes a mass of corn and wheat-growing, cattle-raising mid-westerners who are sentimentally anti-Nazi but can’t see how the Germans could come all the way across the ocean and do anything when they get here. I couldn’t call the American public unaware. It is aware all right. But it hasn’t that driving conviction that made men die in Spain and other men join the Free French.’

The arguments advanced by Roosevelt for supporting Britain mirrored those later deployed by the Western Allies to justify assistance to the Soviet Union: material aid saved American blood, just as Russian blood spared many British and American lives. The March 1941 Lend-Lease Act authorised credit deliveries: only 1 per cent of munitions used by Churchill’s forces that year was Lend-Lease material, but thereafter the programme provided most of the island’s food and fuel, together with a large part of its armed forces’ tanks, transport aircraft and amphibious operations equipment. The British focused their own industrial production on combat aircraft, warships, army weapons and vehicles. From 1941 onwards, they were almost wholly dependent upon American credit to pay for their war effort.

Though Winston Churchill strained every sinew to induce the US president to lead his nation into belligerence before Pearl Harbor, it was fortunate that his efforts failed. In the unlikely event that Roosevelt could have forced a declaration of war on Germany through the US Congress, thereafter he would have led a divided nation. Until December 1941, public opinion remained stubbornly opposed to fighting Hitler. A much higher proportion of people favoured stern action against the Japanese, a policy most conspicuously manifested in the July 1941 freeze on Japanese assets and embargo on all exports, which was decisive in committing Tokyo to fight, since 80 per cent of its oil supplies came from the US and the Dutch East Indies. The embargo was far more popular at home than Roosevelt’s escalation of the US Navy’s role in the Battle of the Atlantic – escorting convoys to Britain progressively farther east, and sporadically exchanging fire with U-boats.

Whatever the president’s personal wishes, Congress remained a critical check upon American policy until Tokyo and Berlin put an end to argument. Historian David Kennedy has suggested that, since Germany was always the principal enemy of the democracies, Roosevelt would have better served his nation’s interests by averting war with Japan in order to concentrate upon the destruction of Nazism: ‘a little appeasement – another name for diplomacy – might have yielded rich rewards’. Once Hitler was beaten, Kennedy argues, the ambitions of Japan’s militarists could have been frustrated with vastly less expenditure of life and treasure, by the threat or application of irresistible Allied power. But this argument raises a large question: whether Roosevelt could ever have persuaded his people to fight the Germans, in the absence of overwhelming aggression such as Hitler refused to initiate.

Even after war was declared in December 1941, and indeed until the end of hostilities, few Americans felt anything like the animosity towards Germans that they displayed against the Japanese. This was not merely a matter of racial sentiment. There was also passionate sympathy for the horrors China had experienced, and continued to experience, at Japanese hands. Most Americans deplored what the Nazis were doing to the world, but would have remained unenthusiastic or indeed implacably hostile about sending armies to Europe, had not Hitler forced the issue.

On 27 May 1941, following the fall of Greece and Crete, eighty-five million Americans listened to Roosevelt’s national radio broadcast, in which he warned of the perils of Nazi victory. The nation was, in one historian’s words, ‘afraid, unhappy and bewildered’. The president concluded by declaring a ‘state of unlimited national emergency’. No one was sure what this meant, save that it brought war closer and increased the powers of the executive. Many towns, especially in the South, began to experience economic booms on the back of military and naval construction programmes. Yet labour disputes dogged the nation: some industrial workers felt as alienated from America’s national purposes, and from their employers, as their counterparts in Britain. Unregulated mining killed nearly 1,300 US underground workers in 1940 and maimed many more. Passions ran so high that strikes were often violent: for instance, four men died and twelve more were badly injured during a 1941 dispute in Harlan County, Kentucky.

Popular sentiment strongly resisted admitting foreign refugees, victims of Nazi persecution: in June 1941 it was decreed that no one with relatives in Germany could enter the US. The isolationists never quit. There was a powerful Irish lobby, most stridently represented by Father Charles Coughlin, a pamphleteer and radio star. Roosevelt wrote on 19 May 1941 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 industrial and scientific base was much too weak to support a sustained conflict 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 it solidified the country. But we’ll lose lots of ships for a while.’

In the course of 1941, the Ladies’ Home Journal had published a fascinating series of domestic profiles of Americans of all social classes, under the heading ‘How America Lives’. Until December, the threat of war scarcely impinged on the existences of those depicted. Some struggled financially, and a few acknowledged poverty, but most asserted a real satisfaction with their lot which explains their dismay, following Pearl Harbor, at beholding familiar patterns broken, dreams confounded, families sundered. LHJ editor Mary Carson Cookman wrote a postscript, reflecting on the profiles published earlier in the year, and the new circumstances of Americans: ‘War is changing the condition of life everywhere. But…the people of the United States are good people; they are almost surprisingly modest in their demands upon life. What they have is precious to them…What they hope to achieve, they are willing to work for – they don’t want or expect it to be given them…What we have now will do. But it ought to be better, it must be better, and it will be better.’

If this was a trite assertion of the American Dream as the nation joined hostilities, it seems nonetheless to reflect its dominant mood. The struggle would cost the United States less than any other combatant – indeed, it generated an economic boom which enabled Americans to emerge from the war much richer than they started it. But many suffered a lasting sense of unfairness, that the wickedness of others had invaded and ravaged their decent lives. Like hundreds of millions of Europeans before them, they began to discover the sorrow of seeing their nearest and dearest leave home to face mortal risk. Mrs. Elizabeth Schlesinger wrote about the departure of her son Tom for the army: ‘I knew after Pearl Harbor that his going was inevitable. I won’t let myself think personally about it. I am only one of millions of mothers who love their sons and see them go off to war and my feelings are universal and not mine alone. I have accepted what I must face and live with for many future months and perhaps years. Tom said, “Why, I thought you would be much more upset by my going.” Little does he know the depths of what it means to me and the countless anxieties that clamor for my thoughts.’

In the absence of Pearl Harbor, it remains highly speculative when, if ever, the United States would have fought. In John Morton Blum’s words, ‘The war was neither a threat nor a crusade. It seemed, as Fortune put it, “only a painful necessity”…Within the United States, Americans never saw the enemy. The nation did not share or want to share in the disasters that visited Europe and Asia.’ For all the exuberant declarations of patriotism that followed the ‘Day of Infamy’, many Americans remained resentful about the need to accept even a modest share of the privations thrust upon most of the world’s peoples. Early in 1942, Arthur Schlesinger visited the mid-west on a tour of army bases for the Office of War Information: ‘We arrived in the midst of the whining about gas rationing, and it was pretty depressing. The anti-administration feeling is strong and open.’

Fortunately for the Allied cause, however, the leadership of the United States showed itself in this supreme crisis both strong and wise. At Roosevelt’s Washington summit with Churchill at the end of December 1941, the US confirmed its provisional commitment, made during earlier staff talks, to prioritise war with Germany. Since 1939, American military and naval preparations – notably Plan Orange, eventually translated into Rainbow 5 – had assumed the likelihood of a two-front struggle. The army correctly judged that this could not be won ‘primarily by naval action’; that the creation and deployment overseas of large land forces would be indispensable. Admiral Harold Stark wrote to the secretary of the navy on 12 November 1940: ‘Alone, the British Empire lacks the manpower and the material means to master Germany. Assistance by powerful allies is necessary both with respect to men and with respect to munitions and supplies.’ Stark anticipated the likelihood that, if the Japanese struck, the British would lose Malaya. He proposed a blockade of Japan, to which its absolute dependence on imports rendered it exceptionally vulnerable; then envisaged fighting a limited war in the east, while sending large land and air forces to Europe.

The US chiefs of staff recognised that Germany represented by far the more dangerous menace. The Japanese, for all their impressive front-line military and naval capability, could not threaten the American or British homelands. Of the white Anglo-Saxon nations, only Australia lay within plausible reach of Tokyo’s forces, which prompted intense bitterness among Australian politicians about Britain’s unwillingness to dispatch substantial forces to its defence. In the event, while the broad principles established by Stark were sustained, the dominance of Russia in defeating the Wehrmacht – wholly unanticipated in December 1941 – somewhat altered the balance of America’s wartime commitments. While the army the United States eventually dispatched to Europe was large, it was nothing like as powerful as would have been necessary had the Western Allies been obliged to fulfil the principal role in defeating Germany. As a corollary of this, once Russia’s survival and fighting power became plain in 1943, the American chiefs of staff felt able to divert significant strength to the Pacific sooner than expected. Popular sentiment, so much more hostile to Japan than to Germany, made this politically expedient as well as strategically acceptable.

Geoffrey Perrett has observed that the United States was not ready for Pearl Harbor, but was ready for war. This was true only insofar as large naval building was in progress: in the week following the attack, American yards launched thirteen new warships and nine merchantmen, harbingers of a vast armada that was already on the stocks, and would be launched during the next two years. The nation had under construction fifteen battleships, eleven carriers, fifty-four cruisers, 193 destroyers and seventy-three submarines. Nonetheless, it was plain to the governments of Britain and America, if not to their peoples, that a long delay was in prospect before Western land forces could engage Germany on the Continent. For years to come, Russia must bear the chief burden of fighting the Wehrmacht. Even if, as the US chiefs of staff wished, the Western Allies launched an early diversionary landing in France, their armies would remain relatively small until 1944.

Roosevelt and Churchill consequently accepted, as some of their commanders did not, the necessity to undertake secondary operations, plausible only in the Mediterranean theatre, to maintain a sense of momentum in the minds of their peoples. The bomber offensive against Germany would grow as fast as the necessary aircraft could be built. But as long as the Eastern Front remained the decisive ground theatre, aid to Russia was a priority. Even if quantities of material available for shipment remained relatively small until 1943, both Washington and London acknowledged the importance of making every possible gesture to deter Stalin from negotiating a separate peace. Anglo-American fears that the Russians would be beaten, or at least driven to parley with Hitler, remained a constant spectre in Alliance relations until the end of 1942.

Meanwhile in the east, Japan held the initiative, and deployed formidable forces on land, at sea and in the air. ‘We Japanese,’ asserted the field manual distributed to all Hirohito’s soldiers as they embarked for their assault on the Western empires, ‘heirs to 2,600 years of a glorious past, have now, in response to the trust placed in us by His Majesty the Commander-in-Chief, risen in the cause of the peoples of Asia, and embarked upon a noble and solemn undertaking which will change the course of world history…The Task of the Sh

wa Restoration, which is to realise his Imperial Majesty’s desire for peace in the Far East, and to set Asia free, rests squarely on our shoulders.’ Having devastated the battleships of the US Pacific Fleet, the Japanese now fulfilled their longstanding ambition to seize the American dependency of the Philippines, together with the vast natural resources of the Dutch East Indies – modern Indonesia – British Hong Kong, Malaya and Burma. Within the space of five months, against feeble resistance, they created an empire. Even though this would prove the most short-lived in history, for a season Japan gained dominance over vast expanses of the Asian landmass and Pacific seascape.

9

Japan’s Season of Triumph

1 ‘I SUPPOSE YOU’LL SHOVE THE LITTLE MEN OFF’

Many Japanese welcomed the war, which they believed offered their country its only honourable escape from beleaguerment. Novelist Dazai Osamu, for instance, was ‘itching to beat the bestial, insensitive Americans to a pulp’. But it would be mistaken to imagine Osamu’s society as a monolith. Lt. Gen. Kuribayashi Tadimichi, who had spent two years in the United States, wrote to his wife asserting his strong opposition to challenging so mighty a foe on the battlefield: ‘Its industrial potential is huge, and its people are energetic and versatile. One must never underestimate the Americans’ fighting ability.’ Eighteen-year-old Sasaki Hachiro mused to his diary: ‘How many really die “tragic deaths” in this war? I am sure there are more comical deaths under the disguise of tragic deaths…Comical deaths involve no joy of life, but are filled with agony without any meaning or value.’ Hachiro at an early stage resigned himself to his own extinction, and volunteered as a pilot with an almost explicit determination to satisfy fate, as indeed he did – shikata ga nai. His disdain for Japan’s militarists never faded: he persuaded his younger brother to become a science student with immunity from conscription, so that he, at least, might survive.

Hachiro’s contemporary Hayashi Tadao was another fatalist, strongly opposed to the war. His diary repeatedly expressed disgust towards his own country. He asked himself: ‘Japan, why don’t I love and respect you?…I feel that I have to accept the fate of my generation to fight in the war and die…We have to go to the battlefield without being able to express our opinions, criticise and argue pros and cons of issues…it is a great tragedy.’ Japan’s 1941–42 successes against feeble Western resistance caused both sides to overrate the power of Hirohito’s nation. Just as Germany was not strong enough to defeat the Soviet Union, Japan was too weak to sustain its Asian conquests unless the West chose to acquiesce in early defeats. But this, like so much else, is more readily apparent today than it was seventy years ago, in the midst of Japanese triumphs.

Until December 1941, the sluggish, humid, pampered rhythm of colonial life in Asia was scarcely interrupted by events in Europe. In America’s Philippines dependency, army nurse Lt. Earlyn Black was one of thousands of expatriates who revelled in a life of comfort and elegance, cushioned by submissive servants: ‘Each evening we dressed for dinner in long dresses, the men in tuxedos, dinner jackets with cummerbunds. It was very formal-type living. Even to go to the movies, we’d put on a long dress.’ Another nurse, twenty-five-year-old Lt. Hattie Brantly from Jefferson, Texas, found the notion of war with Japan inconceivable: ‘It was a joke and our Chief Nurse would say in the mess, “Have another biscuit, girls. You’re going to need this when the Japs get us”…We just sort of rocked along and were happy, and didn’t give it too much thought.’

Likewise in British Singapore, a Czech engineer, Val Kabouky, described the white residents as ‘modern Pompeians’. Even after more than two years of war, 31,000 Europeans among a population of five million Malays and Chinese kept up a parody of imperial privilege. New Western arrivals wishing to learn as much as was necessary of the local language could purchase a phrasebook entitled Malay for Mems – short for ‘Memsahibs’. It was couched in the language of command: ‘Put up the tennis net,’ ‘You must follow the Mem,’ ‘Shoot that man.’ In 1941 arriving troops, especially Australians, were disgusted to find themselves excluded from the colonists’ social bastions. Indians were not permitted to ride in the same rail carriages as the British, nor to enter their clubs. There was a mutiny in the Hyderabad Regiment when an Indian officer was ordered home for having sexual relations with a white woman; he was reinstated and the affair hushed up, but bitterness persisted. Lady Diana, wife of British minister Duff Cooper, wrote with aristocratic scorn for the pretensions of the British expatriates, ‘most frail, tarty and peasant-pompous’. Her own enthusiasm for Singapore’s tourist charms struck a bizarre note as catastrophe unfolded further north: ‘There is the working life of the Chinks going on before your eyes down every street – coffin-making, lantern-painting, and a tremendous lot of shaving. I never tire of strolling and savouring.’

In Malaya, Britain’s military commanders and rulers alike reflected paucity of talent. The Empire seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of unwarlike warrior chieftains. Air Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, Commander-in-Chief Far East until the end of 1941, was a sixty-three-year-old former governor of Kenya. Lt. Gen. Arthur Percival, the army commander, was a long-serving staff officer whose meagre operational experience had been gained against the Sinn Féin insurgency in Ireland. Sir Shenton Thomas, the colony’s governor, said to the generals as the Japanese began to land in the north early on 8 December: ‘I suppose you’ll shove the little men off.’ His contempt might have been enhanced by reading the orders issued to Japan’s soldiers committed to the assault on Malaya, which included homely injunctions to avoid constipation and heartburn, and to employ deep-breathing exercises to escape sea-sickness: ‘Remember that in the dark and steaming lowest decks of the ship, with no murmur of complaint of their treatment, the Army horses are suffering patiently.’ Men were urged: ‘When you encounter the enemy after landing, regard yourself as an avenger come at last face to face with your father’s murderer.’

Although British and imperial troops were deployed in northern Malaya in expectation of a Japanese amphibious assault from Siam, the onset of war inflicted as devastating a cultural shock as it did upon Pearl Harbor. Each society around the world which found itself overtaken by the contagion of violence responded with initial disbelief, even if logic had been proclaiming its inevitability from the rooftops. When the first Japanese bombs fell on Singapore in the early hours of 8 December, Australian engine-room artificer Bill Reeve was asleep in his bunk in the harbour aboard the destroyer Vendetta, fresh from months of heavy action in the Mediterranean. On hearing explosions, Reeve thought he was having a bad dream of battles past: ‘I said to myself, “You silly bastard, roll over.”’ A heavy concussion close at hand caused him to acknowledge reality, yet even as successive sticks of bombs fell, the city’s street lights blazed on.

Churchill had made a brutal and probably inescapable decision to concentrate the best of the Empire’s forces in the Middle East. The air defence of Malaya mustered just 145 aircraft, of which sixty-six were Buffaloes, fifty-seven Blenheims and twenty-two Hudsons. The obsolescence of most of these aircraft was less significant than the overwhelming superiority of Japanese pilots in experience and proficiency to those of the Allies. When the Japanese began to land at Kota Baharu, the defenders’ response was pitifully limp. It was some hours before local RAF commanders bestirred themselves to launch strikes against the invasion fleet. When they did so, British and Australian planes, along with the shoreline defenders, inflicted over a thousand casualties. Not all the invading troops showed themselves heroes: a Japanese officer described how ‘one section of non-commissioned officers of the Independent Engineers had…become panic-stricken at the enemy’s bombing. Without orders from the troop leader, they boarded the large motor boats…and retreated to the open sea off Saigon.’

The Pacific Theatre (#ulink_870eadfe-e206-5019-b108-bfdc31609c19)

Yet by the end of the first day, British air strength in northern Malaya had been halved, to around fifty serviceable planes. Many senior officers and ground crews failed to act effectively: the pilots of a section of Buffalo fighters which took off to intercept attacking Japanese were disgusted to discover that armourers had failed to load their guns. At Kuantan airfield, hundreds of ground personnel fled in panic. ‘How is this possible? They are all sahibs,’ a bemused Indian driver of the Royal Garwhal Rifles asked his officer as the two contemplated a chaos of equipment, personal baggage, tennis rackets and debris strewn around airfield buildings. The young lieutenant snapped back crossly: ‘They are not sahibs, they’re Australians.’ But British soldiers and airmen were also fleeing. Some Indian units collapsed in panic; the British CO of a Sikh battalion was believed to have been shot by his own men before they bolted. ‘We now understood the capacity of the enemy,’ wrote a Japanese officer contemptuously. ‘The only things we had to fear were the quantity of munitions he had and the thoroughness of his demolitions.’