Pearl Harbor

Japan's Attack and America's Entry into World War II

Takuma Melber, Nick Somers

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781509554911, 9781509537204
• eBook ISBN: 9781509537211
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Hawaii, 7th December 1941, shortly before 8 in the morning: Japanese torpedo bombers launch a surprise attack on the US Pacific fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor. The devastating attack claims the lives of over 2, 400 American soldiers, sinks or damages 18 ships and destroys nearly 350 aircraft. The US Congress declares war on Japan the following day. In this vivid and lively book, Takuma Melber breathes new life into the dramatic events that unfolded before, during and after Pearl Harbor by putting the perspective of the Japanese attackers at the centre of his account. This is the dimension commonly missing in most other histories of Pearl Harbor, and it gives Melber the opportunity to provide a fuller, more definitive and authoritative account of the battle, its background and its consequences. Melber sheds new light on the long negotiations that went on between the Japanese and Americans in 1941, and the confusion and argument among the Japanese political and military elite. He shows how US intelligence and military leaders in Washington failed to interpret correctly the information they had and to draw the necessary conclusions about the Japanese war intentions in advance of the attack. His account of the battle itself is informed by the latest research and benefits from including the planning and post-raid assessment by the Japanese commanders. His account also covers the second raid in March 1942 by two long-range seaplanes which was intended to destroy the shipyards so that ships damaged in the initial attack could not be repaired. This balanced and thoroughly researched book deepens our understanding of the battle that precipitated America's entry into the war and it will appeal to anyone interested in World War II and military history.

1
The Background

The road to Pearl Harbor

On Friday, February 14, 1941, Nomura Kichisaburō made his way to the White House, residence of the US president, in Washington.¹ As a proven expert on America, the sixty-three-year-old Nomura had been appointed Japan’s ambassador to the USA.² He had already lived in Washington from 1916 to 1918 as a naval attaché. A few years later, he returned as Japan’s representative at the Washington Naval Conference.

After its victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904/5, Japan joined the group of major powers. The Japanese navy or Nihon Kaigun played a decisive role and was the military calling card of the Japanese Empire. In particular, the Battle of Tsushima (May 27/28, 1905), in which the navy commanded by Admiral Tōgō destroyed the Russian fleet, earned the country great respect. From that time on, Japan was recognized internationally as a serious naval power. Some fifteen years after this major military triumph, the Washington Naval Conference of 1921/22, at which Nomura represented the interests of the Japanese navy, agreed on a fleet ratio of 5:5:3 between the US navy, the British Royal Navy, and the Nihon Kaigun. According to the agreement, Japan undertook not to launch any battleships for the following ten years. The Western powers were seeking to limit Japan’s naval strength and to keep it at a lower level than their own, in terms of both quality and quantity, in order to preserve the balance of power in the Pacific in their favor. This thwarted Japan’s plan to build its “Eight-Eight Fleet” (hachihachi kantai) – eight new battleships and eight new cruisers – in the mid-1920s. Just a few years later, however, the Japanese navy was able to negotiate a more favorable ratio at the London Naval Conference in 1930 of 10:7:7 in favor of the USA. Japan’s representatives even achieved a parity ruling for submarines with the Anglo-American naval forces.

When Nomura was sent back to Washington some twenty years after his participation in the Washington Conference, these maritime agreements were already a dead letter. In the mid-1930s Japan withdrew from the Washington and London treaties. A few years earlier, it had revealed its ambitions in the Asia-Pacific region by invading Manchuria on the Chinese mainland in September 1931. Japan wanted to become the dominant power in Asia, and to achieve this aim the government in Tokyo had gradually embarked on a new political course. Hard hit by the 1929 world economic crisis, it had set out in a political direction determined increasingly by the military. Territorial expansion was now at the top of Japan’s foreign policy agenda. The invasion of Manchuria, rich in iron ore, coal, and grain, was the first step to solving Japan’s own economic problems – by acquiring new land for its growing population and gaining access to natural resources. The members of Japanese naval circles, who saw the results of the international naval conferences that guaranteed the balance of power in the Pacific as a limitation on the Nihon Kaigun, were making themselves increasingly heard in public and in politics. But it was not only in naval matters that Japan was assuming a more determined diplomatic attitude towards the Western powers. This attitude was also reflected in foreign policy, with Japan’s withdrawal in 1933 from the League of Nations, which had been established by President Woodrow Wilson as a reaction to the horrors of World War I. Japan was distancing itself increasingly from its most important naval interlocutors: Great Britain and the USA. Instead it turned to the rising German Reich and Fascist Italy – a process that culminated in the Tripartite Pact and the formation of the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis in 1940. The common denominators uniting the three signatories were an aggressive foreign policy and the desire for territorial expansion. The Pact called for the signatories to assist one another in the event that any of them was attacked by a country not yet involved in the wars in Asia and Europe, notably the USA. The Axis powers also divided the world into spheres of interest: east Asia for Japan, eastern Europe for the German Reich, and the Mediterranean for Italy.

By the time Nomura started his diplomatic service in the USA in February 1941, Germany and Italy were already waging war in parts of Europe. The German Wehrmacht invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and in summer 1940 large parts of northern and western Europe, including France and the Netherlands, were occupied by the Germans. Hitler’s army also attempted to defeat Great Britain, the last major opponent in Europe. In the Mediterranean, meanwhile, Italy was pursuing its own expansion plans as Mussolini’s troops engaged the forces of the British Empire in North Africa.

War had broken out in Asia earlier on. After Japan’s intervention in Manchuria and the establishment of its puppet state Manchukuo, and following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in Peking on July 7, 1937, when Chinese and Japanese soldiers exchanged fire, the Japanese armed forces were now opposed by Chinese government troops commanded by Chiang Kai-shek, and by the Chinese communist forces. Large parts of China, particularly the north and coastal regions, were occupied by Japan. The capital Nanking fell in December 1937.³ The Japanese army committed unspeakable atrocities there and massacred thousands of Chinese civilians. This did not by any means mark the end of the conflict. On the contrary, the military situation in the Chinese theatre of war soon became “bogged down.”⁴ Japan’s advance came to a standstill, and the conflict degenerated into a veritable positional war. The Japanese army units in the hinterland met with constant resistance from Chinese guerrillas. Supplies for the Japanese were slow in arriving, while aid from the West ensured the survival of the Chinese troops. Overall, the war against the Chinese was proving wearing and tough for Japan’s army. Many political and military experts in the Japanese Empire sought an end to the hostilities – albeit in the form of either total victory over China or a peace treaty on Japanese terms.

When the Manchurian crisis erupted in September 1931, the then US president Herbert Hoover had rejected the idea of sanctions against the Japanese aggressor. Under Franklin D. Roosevelt, who succeeded Hoover in 1933, US foreign policy in the region changed tack – from isolation to intervention. The willingness of the new president to remain as a bystander in the war on the Chinese mainland had reached its limits. News of the atrocities committed by the Japanese, combined with the outcry in the international media, persuaded Roosevelt and his government to oppose Japanese expansion and side with China. The decision was prompted not only by humanitarian considerations, however, but also by the desire to safeguard the influence of the USA in Asia and, in particular, to protect US economic interests. Roosevelt sought to achieve these aims not by force of arms but through economic pressure on Japan. The first step was taken in 1939, when the US government announced its intention not to renew the US-Japanese trade treaty established in 1911 and due to expire the following year. This measure had its impact, given that the Japanese economy was highly reliant on the USA. The previous year, Japan had exported 23 percent of its goods there, and 34 percent of its imports – including more than half of its imported oil, iron, and steel – came from the USA.⁵ In spite of the cancelation of the trade treaty, Japan still sought to establish its hegemony on the Chinese mainland and to become the dominant power in Asia. This course of aggressive expansion was to be continued. The Open Door Policy pursued by the Americans since the late nineteenth century – designed to give the USA, the European colonial powers, and the Japanese Empire equal access to China as a trading partner and market – had already been rejected by the Japanese government in 1938. In March 1940, Japan installed a new pro-Japanese government in China, led by Wang Jingwei.⁶ The US government responded by granting loans worth millions of dollars to the Chinese nationalist government in support of Chiang Kai-shek. After the success of the German Wehrmacht campaign in the west, culminating in the fall of Paris and the occupation of France, Japan exerted pressure on the Dutch government in exile in London to obtain oil from the Dutch East Indies, its colony in Asia. It was also authorized by the pro-German Vichy government in France to station its fighter units in French Indochina so as to be able to launch aerial attacks on central China from there. In September 1940 Japanese troops even occupied the north of French Indochina so as to gain access to its natural resources and to block an important Anglo-American supply route to Chiang Kai-shek. They hoped in this way to be able to end the war in China. The reaction of the major European powers was not long in coming, however. Great Britain resumed the halted provision of supplies to China via the Burma Road. The US government also stepped up its financial support for China and introduced an embargo in mid-October 1940 that drastically limited deliveries of scrap iron and metal and other vital goods, including aircraft fuel, from the USA to Japan. A total oil embargo, as demanded by hardliners such as Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, was not instituted. Even in 1940, Japan obtained over 90 percent of its oil from the USA.⁷ The advocates of a more moderate course still held sway, in particular Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Under Secretary of State Benjamin Sumner Welles, supported by representatives of the US navy. They sought at all costs to avoid provoking the Japanese into a panicked military response.

A mood of crisis thus prevailed between Japan and the USA when the Japanese government sent Nomura to Washington as ambassador in early 1941. In particular, the “China question,” the resolution of the military conflict on the Chinese mainland, which had hardened into an unyielding positional war, put a great strain on bilateral relations. At the time, therefore, it was not in Japan’s interests to exacerbate the diplomatic ill feeling between Japan and the USA to the point of making a military conflict inevitable. Ambassador Nomura’s priority was thus to prevent a war between the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Prologue
• 1 The Background
• 2 The Japanese War Plan
• 3 The Attack
• 4 Consequences
• Epilogue
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement