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
