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Japan's ruthless empire building in the 1930s put the United States on red alert-but could Roosevelt persuade the reluctant public to oppose the rising sun? Francis Pike believes that the tension between the two countries on the road to Pearl Harbor...
This game is now over
In mid-September 1931, Japanese military officers involved in the conspiracy to annex Manchuria in northern China received a warning telegram from Tokyo: "The conspiracy is exposed. Take action before the arrival of TATEKAWA." The Japanese government did not approve the conspiracy, and had sent Yoshiki Tachikawa. The major general stopped. With a hunch, on the evening of September 18, when the train from Lichuan arrived in Fengtian City, the officers took him to the best tea house in town-Wenju Tea House, where Lichuan happily used tea, sake, a bed and A cup of geisha.
At 10:20 in the evening, with the participation of other government envoys, the planner detonated a small bomb near the Japanese-controlled railway track near Fengtian. Although the Japanese army did not cause any losses, they quickly accused the Chinese army of crimes and took action. By noon the next day, most of the hub cities and towns on the Nanman-Manchurian Railway had been occupied; other parts of the province soon followed. Thus began the 15-year war, which is widely known in Japan, and the surrender of Emperor Hirohito ended shortly after the drop of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
The Manchu tactics of the Japanese army could not deceive anyone. On September 22, 1931, United States Secretary of State Henry Stimson (Henry Stimson) sent a telegram to the League of Nations (League of Nations): "It is obvious that the Japanese army has been carefully prepared before launching a broadly expanding aggressive campaign..." Knowing what will happen is called the "Fengtian Incident" will inevitably lead to the Pearl Harbor Incident. Stimsonism followed closely-the U.S. government's refusal to recognize the policy of a country established by force-essentially a letter to the Japanese government telling it not to interfere with China-this country has been Asia until the 1820s The most powerful country, but now torn apart by civil war and threatened by Japan and the Soviet Union’s plans to dismember it.
In January 1919, when the great powers held the Paris Peace Conference, which marked the end of World War I, Japan was tied for the top spot with the United States, Britain, France, and Italy. Nevertheless, this Asian country still feels like an outsider.
Japan entered the negotiations with two main goals. First, it hopes to insert a clause on racial equality in the Treaty of Versailles. This requirement stemmed from the passage of a series of anti-Japanese race laws in the United States, which eventually formed the California Foreign Land Law of 1913, which prohibited immigrant farmers from owning land. Racist treatment of Japanese businessmen is also seen as popular in Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai and other outposts of Western empires. The feeling of racial conspiracy was so strong that Duke Yutomo Yamagata, a politician who modernized the Japanese army after the overthrow of the Shogunate in 1868, warned that “it is very important to take measures to prevent the establishment of white alliances... the yellow race”. However, the Western powers cancelled the requirement to include a race clause in the Treaty of Versailles—a decision that will be integrated into Japan’s ultra-nationalist narrative in the next few years.
Japan's second request-the permanent transfer of German empire assets in Asia-only slightly succeeded. Japan seized the 213-square-mile concession in Jiaozhou Bay, Germany, located on the eastern coast of China, and was forced to return it to China. As for Germany's South Pacific Empire, Japan was forced to share the spoils with Britain and Australia.
The Washington Naval Conference that began in November 1921 soon caused a greater insult to Japan's national dignity. The purpose was to establish a multilateral arms limitation treaty by restricting the construction of warships-weapons of mass destruction at the time. As a result, the United States and the United Kingdom were each limited to 525,000 tons, while Japan was limited to 315,000 tons (a ratio of 5:5:3). This did not convince Japan's ultra-nationalists that Anglo-Saxon countries are fair competition. In response to the Washington Naval Treaty, the influential nationalist intellectual Mikawa Kametaro claimed that the Western powers "conspired to conquer Asia completely by the end of the 20th century."
Despite these setbacks, mainstream Japanese politicians continue to support a global post-war solution, the two pillars of which are the League of Nations and the Washington Naval Treaty. However, the Japanese democratic system, which has worked well since the overthrow of the Tokugawa feudal dictatorship in 1868, was later replaced by the Meiji Constitution (a mixture of an ambiguous constitutional monarchy and an autocratic monarchy), and was eventually dismantled in the early 1930s. . The Great Depression undermined Japan's democratic constitution. Factions in the armed forces and the press use popular dissatisfaction to advance their nationalist and anti-capitalist agendas. Moreover, the young Emperor Hirohito did not use the supreme power granted to him by the Meiji Constitution to fight back against the army.
On November 14, 1930, Prime Minister Daiko Hamaguchi was shot and seriously injured when he entered Tokyo's main train station. His health could never be restored, and he passed away eight months later. His attackers were members of the ultra-nationalist Patriot ("Patriot Association") Party, which was one of a group of such groups that emerged in Japan in the 1920s. The prospect of a recession in the economy, coupled with widespread hostility to the 1930 London Naval Treaty-which reignited differences between Japan and the West-meant that the attack caused little public condemnation.
Eighteen months later, on February 9, 1932, a former finance minister was shot dead by a student member of the ultra-nationalist Ketsumeidan ("Blood Alliance"). The next baron Takuma Dan, an MIT graduate who sympathized with the West, was murdered outside the office of Mitsui Bank where he was an executive. It is no coincidence that Baron Dan has just received a visit from Earl Lytton, chairman of the League of Nations committee investigating the Fengtian incident. Worse still is to follow. On May 15, 1932, another anti-capitalist group, this time composed of junior naval officers, organized a strike group of famous liberals. Prime Minister Inui was murdered at home; his tenant Charlie Chaplin, a legendary Hollywood comedy star and a famous Westerner, was also his target. Chaplin was lucky to watch sumo wrestling with Inui's son outside. As a sign of Japan's growing nationalist sentiment, these assassins were not condemned, but were widely celebrated and sentenced to short-term imprisonment.
The political consequences of the assassination are far-reaching. The emperor did not choose Inui’s successor from the majority of the Sangyou Party, but appointed Vice Admiral Makoto Saito as the head of the unified government. Since then, political parties were abolished before they were abolished in 1940, when Prime Minister Fumima Konoe accepted their "voluntary" liquidation and absorbed them into his Imperial Rule Aid Association-an attempt to establish a model of a one-party state. German Nazi Party.
On February 26, 1936, growing opposition to liberals, capitalists, and internationalists reached its peak when 19 young military officers launched a coup to protect the emperor and maintain the quintessence of Japan (the “quintessence of Japan”). Their views reflect military education based on the edict of seamen and soldiers, which is a code of ethics in 1882 that all personnel must remember, which promotes their mission as guardians of the "sacred nation" and absolute loyalty to the emperor. This 2,700 Chinese-character [character] document is a powerful example of brainwashing, combining the bastard samurai values based on Bushido ("Warrior's Way") with modern weapons and training.
Many high-ranking generals of the Japanese army were also instilled in the mythological worship of the god emperor, and they gave a tacit understanding to the young officers. However, the emperor himself was very angry. Unlike in 1932, rebel officers tried to overthrow the government itself. Hirohito ordered them to be tried, convicted and executed. To the Japanese post-war myth, he was a powerless constitutional monarch.
However, after the attempted coup, Hirohito did not take action to contain the power of the army, but allowed it to consolidate its political position. In May 1936, the law was amended to allow only active generals and admirals to serve as ministers of war. This seemingly trivial constitutional adjustment actually gave the army and navy the right to veto the formation of the Japanese government. This was a tipping point that led Japan to ruthlessly move toward a military dictatorship.
Only a year later, Japan went to war with China again-this time to control the entire country. The Fengtian incident of Japan's conquest of Manchuria ended with the Tanggu Armistice in 1933. China's humiliating terms not only ceded Manchuria to Japan, but also controlled the Great Wall and the 100-mile restricted area to the south. By 1937, the gradual invasion and occupation of the Japanese Kanto (Manchurian) army had almost surrounded Beijing.
On July 7, 1937, an unplanned skirmish at Marco Polo Bridge south of Beijing triggered an all-out war between Japan and China. The major battles in Taiyuan and Shanghai were followed by the infamous Nanjing Massacre, in which as many as 300,000 men, women, children, and children were killed-the prelude to a decade of war and occupation that will result in the deaths of more than 20 million Chinese. An active international alliance is taking shape. In November 1936, Japan and Nazi Germany signed the "Anti-Communist International Treaty", and the two sides tried to contain Stalin's emerging Soviet Union. Another final Axis country, Italy, will join in a year's time.
After 1936, the command economic model developed by the Kwantung Army in Manchuria was increasingly deployed in Japan. Through the Japan Industrial Bank, the government provided loans to war material producers. Further command economic measures were taken through the National Mobilization Act of 1938, which reduced domestic consumption: the focus was on guns rather than butter. This is an economic model that is synchronized with the German national socialist policy. Japanese ultra-nationalists who dominate the army and navy are now preparing to create an economically self-sufficient "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Circle" aimed at weakening the Western influence in the region. For Japan’s leaders, its imperial plan is existential, driven by Darwin’s belief in the survival of the fittest. "Obviously," the philosopher Kazunobu Kanokogi observed, "if Japan cannot establish an empire on the Asian continent, [as a country] we are all doomed to destruction."
Towards the basis of a full-scale war is the natural next step. In addition to the war with China, Japan’s fear of the Soviet Union led to the outbreak of a full-scale border conflict, and eventually Japan was defeated at the Battle of Kalxin Gol on the Mongolia-Manchurian border. But as the treaty signed with the Soviet Union in April 1941 cancelled the northern border, Japan turned its attention to the south to complete the siege of the army loyal to the nationalist leader of the Republic of China, Chiang Kai-shek. The remote city of Chongqing in the west. In order to cut off Chiang’s supply, the Japanese army occupied northern French Indochina in September 1940.
By 1941, in a suffocating decade of military conquest, the Japanese empire had expanded from 245,000 square miles, including North Korea and Taiwan, to 1.6 million square miles, covering Indochina (today Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). And eastern China. The number of people living under Japanese rule has tripled, from 100 million to 300 million.
When Japan is tearing up the geopolitical map of Asia, where is the United States? In the 19th century, the United States sent naval expeditions to open trade to Japan, fought on Chinese soil to defend trade rights, conquered the Kingdom of Hawaii, and seized the Philippines. But in the 1930s, the world's undisputed economic superpower disappeared.
After the First World War, the United States turned to isolationism. The dominant narrative is that World War I was the product of a corrupt and undemocratic monarchy in Europe. The huge profits of the war have also been criticized. "Death Merchant" was a bestseller in 1934 and one of many controversial publications that made the American public neutral in international affairs. The Great Depression after the Wall Street crash of 1929 only increased introspection. The protectionist Smoot-Hawley Act (1930) raised tariffs on more than 20,000 imported goods, confirming the United States’ isolationist position. The legendary columnist Walter Lippmann wrote in 1936: “The policy of the United States is to maintain freedom and liberation.” In 1932 and 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) was isolationist. ticket. In fact, as the commander-in-chief, the armed forces led by Roosevelt ranked only 18th in the world, with fewer soldiers than Belgium, Portugal, and Switzerland.
However, just a year after his second election victory, Roosevelt signaled a change of course. In a speech in Chicago on October 5, 1937, Shanghai was under siege and America’s most important trade concession was threatened. He warned: “The peace in the world today is under threat... We are determined to stay away from war, but we cannot ensure that we are immune from war. The catastrophic effects of the war and the danger of involvement."
In Roosevelt's leadership, public opinion followed. Every new action by Japan has weakened the American isolationist determination: the "Nanjing Massacre", the invasion of Indochina, and the firing of the USS Panay on the Yangtze River. However, for the American public, the tripartite agreement signed by Germany, Japan, and Italy in September 1940 may be the most shocking public opinion. The American people, like Roosevelt, began to fear being isolated in a totalitarian world. Roosevelt increasingly launched a secret defense against the free world. Although the Lease Act of March 1941 was mainly aimed at providing military aid to the United Kingdom, it also began to fund Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist Kuomintang troops to resist Japan.
Most importantly, the hawks in the Roosevelt administration finally defeated his dovish Secretary of State Coldell, who has consistently rejected calls for meaningful sanctions against Japan. On July 25, 1941, Roosevelt froze all monetary assets held by Japan in the United States, which immediately threatened Tokyo's ability to supply its war machine. The Japanese Cabinet Committee reported that “the empire will soon fall into poverty and become unable to support itself”. It predicts that by 1942, stocks of 8 of 11 important commodities will be depleted by 50% or more. Most importantly, Japan cannot buy oil from California Standard Oil Company, which previously provided about 80% of its demand.
With the reduction of oil supply, Japan faces the dire prospect of having to abandon its ambitions of the “co-prosperity circle”. In response to the US financial freeze and the de facto oil embargo, on September 3, 1941, the Cabinet of Prime Minister Konoe convened a meeting to discuss the "Outline Plan for the Implementation of the Empire's National Policy" formulated by the Imperial General Command. Ranking of army and navy officers. Unless the Western powers make concessions, the cabinet decides to "...if necessary, war with the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands."
The recognized strategy for fighting the West is for Japan to act quickly to ensure the safety of the oil-rich Dutch East Indies and the Philippines, a colony of the United States. It is said that the strong British military and naval garrisons in Singapore will be occupied, as well as the commodity-rich Malaya and Burma. At the same time, the main force of the Japanese Navy will wait for the approach of the U.S. fleet to rescue the Philippines while sailing-this is indeed the proposal of the "Orange War Plan" envisaged by the Joint Commission of the U.S. Army and Navy. 1920s. Here, in the Marshall Islands on the west coast of the Pacific Ocean, the Japanese Navy will annihilate the U.S. Navy, just as the legendary Admiral Togo annihilated the Russian Navy in the Battle of Tsushima in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905.
However, as Commander-in-Chief of the Joint Fleet, Admiral Yamamoto, who played a key role in Japan's war strategy against the United States, had other ideas. He planned to launch a surprise attack on the main U.S. Pacific naval base in Hawaii, subverting conventional wisdom. By sinking the U.S. Pacific Fleet in a surprise attack—especially its aircraft carrier fleet, Yamamoto believes that this is a key maritime weapon for the upcoming war—he will seek to delay the advancement of the U.S. Navy. This will give Japan time to build defenses on the Pacific islands and secure its resource supply lines within its newly acquired Southeast Asian empire. At best, Yamamoto speculated that Washington might even provide a truce after the US Navy was destroyed at Pearl Harbor.
This is a risky strategy that was opposed in Tokyo because the plan exposed Japan’s six major fleet aircraft carriers to the possibility of detection and destruction. In addition, the aircraft carrier is a weapon system that has hardly been tested. Only the British attacked the Italian navy in the Battle of Taranto as an example of aircraft carrier engagement. However, Yamamoto was confident in the capabilities of Japan’s world-class torpedo aircraft, as well as the capabilities of the torpedoes themselves, which were kept highly secret during the two world wars to provide unparalleled speed, range, and accuracy. In the face of continued opposition from his colleagues in Tokyo, Yamamoto threatened to resign and promoted the decision in his own way.
As tensions with the United States intensified, on November 27, 1940, Japan dispatched former Foreign Minister Yoshisaburo Nomura as its ambassador to Washington. His task is to negotiate a lasting peace. According to Stimsonism, the United States requires "opening up" of trade. Unless it is peacefully and not interfering in the affairs of other countries, Asia cannot change regimes. After the tripartite agreement was signed, the United States insisted on severing relations between Japan and Adolf Hitler. These already difficult conditions have become more severe. In July 1941, the collaborating enemy Vichy government of Japan and France signed the "Protocol on Joint Defense and Joint Military Cooperation", which effectively ceded control of French Indochina to Tokyo, and the opportunity for diplomatic breakthroughs became even greater. Slim.
Japan’s suspicion is that the United States is delaying time, and Roosevelt has loosened the purse of Congress and began to rebuild American military capabilities. At the same time, Japan’s stocks of raw materials—especially oil—are running out. As the Japanese cabinet requires the United States and its Western allies to abandon the asset freeze, there is limited room for compromise. On October 17, 1941, when Emperor Hirohito's advisers suggested that he choose the militant General Hideki Tojo as prime minister, the road to peace became narrower and narrower. Tojo is an ultra-nationalist who asserted in an article published in 1934 that Japan must "spread [its own] moral principles to the world [because] the cultural and ideological war of the'Imperial Way' is about to begin ".
At the imperial meeting on November 5, Hirohito approved Yamamoto's offensive plan. The next day, Ambassador Nomura submitted a final concession to Washington, namely Proposal A, demanding that Japan partially withdraw its troops from China. The United States rejected this proposal because they learned from their codebreaking interception that another proposal would follow. On November 20, Japanese proposal B proposed that if the United States unfreezes Japanese assets and ceases to provide troops to Chiang Kai-shek in China, Japan will withdraw its troops from southern Indochina. Both proposals were rejected. Knowing from the interception on November 26 that Japan would launch an attack sometime after November 29, Roosevelt knew that war was almost inevitable. Based on the detected forces, it is assumed that the target will be somewhere in Southeast Asia, although the whereabouts of the Yamamoto combined fleet is still uncertain. In fact, it is hidden under the radio silence of the remote Kuril Islands in the northernmost part of Japan.
At the same time, U.S. Secretary of State Cordel Hull achieved nothing in the negotiations and proposed a 10-point ultimatum to Ambassador Nomura, including requesting Japan to withdraw from China and Indochina. On December 1, 1941, Hirohito faced complete failure and humiliation at a meeting with General Tojo, and finally approved simultaneous attacks on Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and British Malaya. The Fengtian Incident, which began in 1931 in Japan's invasion of China, has become an excuse for Japan to go to war with the world's largest empire, Britain, and the world's most powerful country, the United States.
In April/May 1940, Admiral Yamamoto, Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Joint Fleet, first conceived the idea of attacking Pearl Harbor, "in order to give the enemy fleet a fatal blow."
On January 7, 1941, Yamamoto wrote to the Secretary of the Navy, Admiral Koshiro Oikawa, from the cabin of the Nagato battleship in Hiroshima Bay. He wrote in the letter that conflicts with the United States and Britain were "inevitable." Therefore, Yamamoto said, "We should do our best at the beginning of the war with the United States... to decide the fate of the war on the first day." This is best achieved through the "violent" attack on Pearl Harbor.
On January 27, the U.S. Ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, issued a warning to Washington. He received warnings from multiple sources, stating that if there is a conflict, Japan will "use all its military facilities to launch a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor." ".
On February 1, US naval intelligence officials informed Grew's warning to the new commander-in-chief of the US fleet, Admiral Husband E Kimmel, but added that they "do not believe these rumors."
On March 27, a young Japanese diplomat named Tadashi Morimura arrived in Honolulu on the Shintamaru cruise ship. In fact, he was Takeo Yoshikawa, the top intelligence officer of the Japanese Navy, and his order was to "report the daily status of the US fleet and its bases in accordance with the Diplomatic Code."
As of May 12th, Yoshikawa has a comprehensive understanding of the US fleet at Pearl Harbor and the identity and location of battleships.
As Yamamoto perfected his strategy for attacking Pearl Harbor on July 24, diplomatic negotiations between the United States and Japan continued. President Roosevelt told Japan,
If they agree not to occupy Indochina, he will ensure that they get rice and minerals in the area. The proposal was ignored. In response to the Japanese occupation, Roosevelt froze all Japanese assets in the United States on July 26. (Japan formally rejected Roosevelt's proposal on August 6.)
At a top-secret naval meeting held in Japan on September 24, the date of the attack on Pearl Harbor was chaired by Admiral Shigeru Fukuru and Mi Ugakijima. It is agreed that Sunday will be the best day to catch the Americans off guard, and November 23 has been determined-but only if the First Air Force is ready for combat.
On September 24, the Japanese Consulate in Honolulu received a message from Tokyo, requesting a grid of the exact locations of the Pearl Harbor vessels, especially “when there are two or more vessels next to the same pier, Mention this fact". This information was intercepted by the US intelligence agency through its "magic" procedure, which could decipher Japanese diplomatic letters.
Although the Americans had cracked the Japanese cipher on October 9, it still took time to translate the information, and the Japanese telegram sent on September 24 had not been decoded for two weeks. The news was called a "bomb conspiracy" by the US intelligence services, but it was dismissed as a "device to reduce the amount of radio communication." Neither Admiral Kimmel nor Lieutenant General Walter Short, the military commander responsible for protecting US military installations in Hawaii, were informed of the news.
On November 3rd, the Chief of the General Staff of the Imperial Japanese Navy, Nosomi Nagano, was received by Emperor Hirohito at the Imperial Palace and disclosed the details of the upcoming attack on Pearl Harbor.
On November 4, Yamamoto decided on the date of the attack codenamed "Operation Hawaii" and informed Ugaki that X day would be Sunday, December 7.
On November 15th, Tokyo instructed its consulate in Honolulu that due to the deterioration of Japan-US relations, the "port and ship report" should be conducted twice a week. In addition, the telegram also urged the consulate to "pay extra attention to confidentiality." The US intelligence service decoded the news, but did not pay any attention to its disturbing content.
After several months of negotiations on November 20, Japan presented their final proposal to the U.S. Secretary of State Coldel Hull, which he compared to an "ultimatum." Tokyo asked for the required amount of oil, ended the freeze on its assets and stopped aid to China, in return, only promised to withdraw its troops from Indochina.
On November 22, the last Japanese task force arrived in the remote Hitokappu Bay on Etorofu Island in the Sea of Okhotsk in northeastern Japan. The commander of the Navy’s First Air Fleet and Admiral Nan Yun has not disclosed the reason for their appearance.
On November 23, in front of the captain and staff of the task force, Admiral Nan Yun announced: "Our mission is to attack Pearl Harbor." Then he described the details of the operation, which will involve more than 350 aircraft at a time. The two waves of aircraft attack are designed to provide a "full-scale lethal strike."
At noon in Washington, DC on November 25 (6:30 a.m. Pearl Harbor time), Roosevelt said at his war committee meeting that he expected the Japanese to attack a place because they “were attacked without warning. And notorious".
On November 26, on the same day that the U.S. Secretary of State submitted the so-called "Hull Note" to Tokyo-Japan's final request for Japan to withdraw its troops from Indochina and China-the imperial task force set sail from Hitokappu Bay. 3,500 miles east of Pearl Harbor. It consists of 6 aircraft carriers, 2 heavy cruisers, 1 light cruiser, 2 battleships, 9 destroyers and 8 oil tankers (23 fleet submarines and 5 small submarines sail respectively). A seaman Kazuki Kuramoto wrote in his diary: "Air strikes on Hawaii! Dreams come true. What do people in China think when they hear this news?"
On November 27, Kimmel and Short received a "war warning" from Washington. They were told that Japan had ignored their final request and the negotiations now "seem to be terminated." Therefore, the possibility of attack is high. Short believes that the most likely form of attack is sabotage, and he ordered all aircraft to be concentrated at their airports to prevent this behavior.
At 08:10 on December 5, the aircraft carrier USS Lexington departed Pearl Harbor, accompanied by three heavy cruisers, to transport the sea dive bomber to Midway Island. Now, none of the three aircraft carriers of the Pacific Fleet remain in Pearl Harbor.
15:00 The destroyer Ralph Talbot made underwater contact with a submarine five miles away from Pearl Harbor. The senior officers refused to allow a deep charge on the unidentified submarine, claiming that it was just a black fish. "If this is a black fish," commented the captain of the Ralph Talbot, "it has a motorboat at the stern!"
At 02:30 on December 6th (08:00 in Washington), American officials began to receive the first part of the 14-part message from Tokyo in response to the recent talks.
11.30 The Japanese task force, less than 600 miles from the target, swung southward at a speed of 24 knots. From the aircraft carrier Akagi came a message from General Yamamoto: "The rise and fall of the empire depends on this battle. Everyone will do their part."
13:00 Takeo Yoshikawa spent the morning conducting final surveillance of the parked US fleet, and submitted a report to Tokyo that "there was no sign of barrage balloon equipment," and he did not see any torpedo nets to protect the battleship.
16:30 (Washington time 22:00) 13 of the 14 parts of the Japanese information have been decoded by the US intelligence agency and sent to Roosevelt at the White House. The President read the content in the company of Harry Hopkins, his closest adviser, and concluded: "This means war." The Japanese have not yet sent the 14th and final part.
This article is an excerpt from the Pearl Harbor Book of the BBC Collector's Edition, first published in 2019
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