A History of Japan: From Stone Age to Superpower (61 page)

That may have been for the best, for JB 355 was operationally almost doomed from the start. At some 2,000 km from their bases in China these slow bombers would have been outside the range of protection by their fighter escorts, and would almost certainly have been promptly destroyed by Japan’s state-of-the-art Mitsubishi Zero fighters. One can only attribute this moment of seeming folly, when experienced military men and political leaders agreed to such an improbable plan, to sheer frustration at Japan’s behaviour. Certainly, leading figures such as Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Roosevelt himself were on record more than once around this time expressing their anger at the Japanese and their wish somehow to teach them a lesson.
⁵⁴

The oil embargo was far more effective than JB 355 would have been. It left Japan with very limited oil reserves. Obviously, this was an untenable situation. As early as 3 September 1941 the nation’s leaders decided to go to war with the United States if the situation regarding oil could not be resolved by early October. (The deadline was later extended to 30 November.)

At the same time, an attack on Pearl Harbor, which had been proposed in January that year by Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku (1884–1943), was finally approved, and rehearsed at Kagoshima Bay in southern Ky
sh
. There were some in Japan who hoped that diplomacy might still prevail, such as Prime Minister Konoe (despite his belligerence towards China), but Hull in particular remained adamant that Japan should drastically change its policy before any concessions could be made. He wanted the Japanese to withdraw not just from Indochina, but from China as well. Konoe resigned in October, to be replaced as prime minister by Army Minister General T
j
Hideki (1884–1948).

Japan made its final concession in late November, agreeing to withdraw from southern Indochina but not from China. Hull did not accept. Japan did not expect him to. Under the command of Admiral Nagumo Ch
ichi (1887–1944), its fleet was already setting sail from the Kuriles towards Hawaii. It was a large fleet on deadly business, comprising six aircraft car
riers with more than 400 planes between them, two battleships, three cruisers, nine destroyers, and more than a score of submarines.

Emperor Hirohito gave his formal approval for war on 1 December, claiming later that ‘[a]s a constitutional monarch in a constitutional political system, I had no choice but to sanction the decision by the T
j
cabinet to begin the war’.
⁵⁵
However, more importantly, he also said that ‘I probably would have tried to veto the decision for war
if at the time I had foreseen the future
’ [my italics].
⁵⁶
That is, it was not that he felt totally unable to intervene, but that he was unwilling to try, because he thought at the time that the outcome of the war would be favourable to Japan.

Hirohito had for some time believed it was possible to strike a decisive blow against the Americans and then move to a peace policy.
⁵⁷
In this he shared the view of the majority. Only the most fanatical in Japan believed they could defeat America totally. Nor was it a traditional Japanese practice to confront directly a more powerful enemy and risk a humiliating defeat. But there was a widespread fatalistic acceptance that some sort of show-down with America was necessary, and most thought they had a very good chance of winning an honourable draw, as they had with Russia. That is, they could fight the more powerful foe to a point where it grew weary and was prepared to discuss terms of peace, terms which would leave Japan in a better position than it was in during 1941.
⁵⁸
Or so they thought.

5.5   The Pacific War

The first Japanese strike in the Pacific War was not against America at Pearl Harbor. It was against the British in Malaya. About 90 minutes before Pearl Harbor, some 5,000 Japanese troops successfully attacked a British force in Kota Bharu, in the Kelantan Sultanate.
⁵⁹

The Japanese realised that in any event war against America almost certainly meant war against Britain too. They needed the resources of Malaya as soon as possible for their war effort, and they knew they had little to fear from Britain. Some months earlier, in a rare display of German assistance to Japan, a German U-boat commander had passed on to them a captured top-secret report from the British Chiefs of Staff to the War Cabinet.
⁶⁰
The report stated that Singapore and other British territories in southeast Asia were considered indefensible against Japanese attack and would receive little if any military reinforcement. This knowledge not only gave the Japanese the reassurance they needed to attack British positions, it also dispelled any reservations they might have had about committing so many resources to the attack on Pearl Harbor and American positions.

The attack on Pearl Harbor came just before 8 o’clock on the morning of 7 December (local time). The first strike was a wave of 183 bombers. A second wave of 167 bombers hit about an hour later. The American forces there were completely unprepared. They suffered over 4,500 casualties (of whom about three-quarters were killed or missing presumed killed). America also lost four battleships, about 180 aircraft, and three destroyers. In addition, heavy damage was sustained by four more battleships, some 80 planes, and three light cruisers. On the Japanese side, losses amounted to just five submarines, 29 aircraft, and around 60 men.

Though considerable, the damage at Pearl Harbor could and should have been worse. Admiral Nagumo was criticised by a number of his colleagues for making only two air strikes, and for failing to destroy large stocks of oil, machine shops and other repair facilities, aircraft hangars, and numerous undamaged or only partly damaged vessels and aircraft.
⁶¹
Militarily, the attack was not really as successful as it should have been. It was as if the Japanese could somehow not believe their luck in being able to inflict the very considerable damage that they did, and withdrew prematurely.

The attack was not a model of operational efficiency but it was of course enough to bring America immediately into the war, with a vengeance. Non-interventionism was effectively neutralised by public outrage at what was seen as a sneaky and dishonourable attack.

The fact that the Japanese struck before formal notification of intent was for many the clear proof of this sneakiness. The Japanese claimed this was due not to deliberate omission on their part but to diplomatic bungling by Japanese embassy staff in Washington, which resulted in the notification arriving one hour after the attack instead of half an hour before it. This remained a matter of some controversy for some decades, but recent research has shown that it was a deliberate ploy by the general staffs of army and navy to delay and obfuscate the message, and that the embassy staff were scapegoated.
⁶²
In any event, the whole issue is rendered academic by the overlooked attack on Kelantan. Even if the notification had arrived on time, half an hour before Pearl Harbor, it would still have come an hour after Kelantan, which was similarly unannounced. In other words, despite official Japanese denials, there is no doubt Pearl Harbor was a deliberate attack without due formal warning – a matter viewed with shame by many of Japan’s own top military men, including its leading fighter pilot Sakai Sabur
.
⁶³
On the other hand, this ‘surprise
attack’ should not really have been any surprise at all to anybody in view of Japan’s earlier tactics against China and Russia.