Air University Review, November-December 1979

War, Politics, and Grand Strategy
in the Pacific, 1941-1945

THE Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 was one of those rare occasions in which the course of human events was dramatically changed in a single moment. It ended American neutrality in the European war and initiated the war in the Pacific. Shortly thereafter, the fall of Hong Kong and Singapore not only ended British preeminence in the eastern Pacific but signaled the end of the British Empire in the Far East. The inevitable defeat of Japan meant the end of the Japanese Empire as well, and the consequent emergence of the United States, which filled the postwar power vacuum and took up the burden of a Pax Americana. Thus, for these three great nations--Japan, Britain, and the United States--Pearl Harbor and the ensuing war was a crucial turning point. It should not be surprising, however, that the lessons of that war have differed for historians of each nation.

The central question for Japanese historians has been Why? Why did Japan's ruling military elite commit its people to such devastation, and, even more fundamentally, why did Japan in 1941 find itself ruled by army officers so reckless as to advocate such a commitment? For Americans, to whom the Pacific war was a crusade, histories of the war seemed to call less for introspection and more for dramatic storytelling. It was, after all, not only a story of initial setbacks and great peril but also of ultimate triumph. For British historians, the Pacific war produced elements of both experiences: ultimate victory in partnership with the United States but also the end of British dominance in the Far East. To the ruling masters of both outdated empires, the Pacific war brought painful and unwelcome realizations. For Americans, those realizations would come much later. These varying viewpoints are evident in a spate of recent books about the Pacific war.

At Pearl Harbor, the empire of Japan committed political suicide. It was not a sudden death, but it was violent. The motives that impelled this small island nation to take such a drastic and irrevocable step have been analyzed by American and Japanese historians ever since, but never with the depth of feeling and self-critical analysis of Saburo Ienaga's The Pacific War, which has become available to American readers in an English language edition translated by Frank Baldwin.* Ienaga's bitter account, first printed in Japan ten years ago, casts new light--and new shadows--on that conflict and should lead American historians to a little self-analysis of their own.

*Saburo Ienaga, The Pacific War, World War II and the Japanese, 1931-1945, translated by Frank Baldwin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978, $10.00), 316 pages.

Ienaga's history of the war is really a historical essay, and to appreciate its significance one must understand its role in Japanese historiography of the war. Japanese histories published in the first few years after 1945 clearly accepted Japan's culpability for the war. But in the early 1950s, thanks mainly to American efforts to recast Japan as a Western ally against Asian communism, a new tone crept into Japanese accounts. The war was depicted as a noble and honorable, if ultimately hopeless, struggle against overwhelming odds--a struggle which was forced on Japan by circumstances. A twelve-volume history, Hiroku dai Toa senshi, published in 1953, described the War as gallant and heroic and was characterized by a virulent anti-Chinese racism similar to that which was dominant in Japan during the war. Then, in 1964 Ueyama Shumpei's Dai Toa Senso no imi (The Meaning of the Greater East Asian War) offered the interpretation that Japan's expansion in the 1930s and early 1940s was an attempt to liberate Asia from Western dominance.

To Ienaga, this trend in historical analysis was both tragic and dangerous. He feared that "nostalgia and time" were "eroding the reality of the war." (p. 254) To explode that nostalgia, Ienaga exposes the war as neither noble nor redeemed by any motive save greed. He attacks Shumpei's claim that Japan's goal was to "liberate" Asians from Western domination. The goal of the greater East Asia Sphere was not "Co-Prosperity" at all, he argues, but exploitation. This is clear not only because of Japan's exploitive economic policies, which might otherwise be attributed to wartime expediency, but also because of Japan's blatant racial policies that held Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Burmese, Malayans, and Filipinos to be inferior racial types. Japanese treatment of the Chinese, for example, was generally as conscienceless and occasionally more violent than Western treatment. For Asians, liberation by the Japanese was a change from bad to worse. The argument that the Japanese aided Asian self-rule was a justification thought up after the fact to excuse the inexcusable.

Ienaga also attacks the assertion that Japanese forces fought heroically and nobly against the American onslaught. A key chapter in the book entitled "The Horrors of War" details the barbarities committed by soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army against prisoners, civilians, and even against each other. According to Ienaga, "The atrocities committed by the Imperial Army and Navy attest to the moral degeneration of the ruling elite." (p. 190) Japan's ruling military elite was certainly morally bankrupt, and Ienaga offers no excuse for them. But the real culprit here, as throughout the book, is the war itself. Ienaga emphasizes the darker aspects of war: the death, maiming, and terror of the bombing raids. Rather than directly criticize Americans for their use of unrestricted submarine warfare or for dropping the atomic bombs, he blames these atrocities--like those committed by Imperial forces--on the war itself. In the final analysis, all the "horrors of war" are only more eloquent testimony against the militaristic policymakers who initiated the conflict in 1931.

Ienaga's essay, therefore, is less a military history than a social comment. The militarists in Japan were able to conduct their wicked policy, he says, because the government sponsored patriotic propaganda and stifled criticism. Children were taught patriotic slogans in elementary schools and learned to read from texts that exalted Japanese military achievements. Ienaga feels compelled to remind the generation of the 1960s, to which he addresses himself, of the dangers of such a policy, for he fears that the United States ("the new aggressor in Asia") may be using Japan for its own ambitious and morally bankrupt purposes. His goal, clearly, is to firm up Japan's resolve to remain neutral and unarmed.

For those more interested in the military activities of the Pacific war, two new books by American historians shed light on that aspect of the war. The first, a popular history by Duane Schultz,* concerns the defense of Wake Island in the first weeks after Pearl Harbor. Ienaga would no doubt object to the tone of this book, for it is a paean to the heroism and determination of the garrison of Wake Island. Schultz succeeds in capturing the heady mood of those desperate days when the only good news from the Pacific was that Wake Island was still holding out. Though it offers no new information, it is a readable, well-paced narrative.

*Duane Schultz, Wake Island, the Heroic, Gallant Fight (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978, $8.95), 247 pages, appendixes.

A longer and more scholarly offering is Paul Dull's battle history of the Japanese Imperial Navy.* Dull, a former Marine Corps officer and Asian scholar at the University of Oregon, is one of the few Americans to have made extensive use of the Japanese operational records stored on 260 microfilm reels in the United States Naval Historical Center. Having mined this voluminous source, Dull pieced together a detailed account of the surface battles of the Japanese Imperial Navy. Dull's title is explicitly accurate: His book is a "battle history."

*Paul S. Dull, A Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy: 19411945 (Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute, 1978, $23.95), 342 pages, appendixes.

The easiest thing in the world for a reviewer to do is to criticize the "book not written," but it is impossible not to express disappointment that a man with Dull's unique, expertise did not go beyond the chronological blow-by-blow of naval actions. He does a superb job of describing what happened, but often leaves one wondering why. The Japanese admirals who planned and executed Imperial naval battles remain faceless names without personalities. In fairness, Dull does make an effort to explain Admiral Ozawa's apparent brashness in the Battle of the Philippine Sea--he had been lied to by the Japanese commandant on Guam about the strength of Japanese air power on that island--and he offers a sympathetic analysis of Admiral Kurita's stunning decision to retreat after closing Leyte Gulf. But these are the exceptions. Nevertheless, Dull's contribution is original, and his book should prove a useful reference work for future historians of the Pacific war, as well as a useful companion piece to Samuel Eliot Morison's History of United States Naval Operations in World War II.

Dull's central theme is that personnel and material attrition had made Japanese victory impossible by late 1942. To this end, the series of naval actions in the Solomon Sea during the Battle for Guadalcanal was critical. The Japanese Combined Fleet, though frequently victorious in these battles, was bled in much the same way that the Confederate Army was bled by its victories in the American Civil War (my comparison, not Dull's). Nevertheless, Japanese leaders were incapable of facing reality and ending their hopeless war.

On this point, Ienaga agrees with Dull. The determination to fight on for a lost and bankrupt cause, he argues, was "a defense strategy worthy of little boys playing samurai; the military were as dangerous as they were ridiculous." (p. 230) General Mutaguchi Yukiya, commander of the 15th Army, personifies this spirit. Invading India, he sent inadequately prepared, poorly armed men against a superior army, and, when defeated, he refused to authorize a retreat and instead ordered his men to hold and fight. According to Ienaga, "This ridiculous offensive was a miniature version of the Pacific War." (p. 147)

Both Ienaga and Dull argue the point -perhaps somewhat academic by now -that Japan did not intend to strike at Pearl Harbor without a declaration of war. A diplomatic announcement was supposed to have preceded the attack by a half hour; that it was delayed was an accident of history. Yet this fine point is of questionable importance since the decision for war had been made as early as 6 September. Japan's military leaders waited until December only to be certain that their own preparations were complete and that Germany would, indeed, defeat Russia, If they had waited a few weeks more, the success of Zhukov's counterattack (launched 6 December) might have led them to reconsider, But it is doubtful, for, as Ienaga himself points out clearly, army leaders had lost touch with reality.

One last point of comparison is deserving of comment. Ienaga dates the Pacific war from 1931 and claims that the attack on Pearl Harbor a decade later was a lineal development of the war in China, which for the Japanese was the central theater. Both Schultz and Dull, indeed most American historians, date the war from December 1941. This is perhaps natural, but Ienaga's argument is compelling. It was the Japanese involvement in China that strained their resources so severely as to lead army leaders to urge an attack to the south and a war against England, Holland, and the United States. To Ienaga the diplomatic negotiations were not critical because the diplomats had lost control of the situation--indeed, had lost it in 1937 and never regained it.

By contrast, diplomacy is the central theme of Christopher Thorne's Allies of a Kind,* a sequel to his The Limits of Foreign Policy; The West, The League, and The Far Eastern Crisis of 1931-1933. As in that book, Thorne has undertaken meticulous research in preparing this volume. Unfortunately, he also has a tendency to repeat himself, and his prose is at times tedious.

*Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind, The United States, Britain and the War Against Japan, 1941-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978, $29.50), 772 pages.

Frequently overlooked in histories of the war in the Pacific is the fact that more than two powers were involved. By 1945, Japan was at war with more than fifty nations--half the world. The United States was thus the leader of an enormous grand alliance. Of course, since the United States contributed most of the troops and weapons, it could unilaterally determine strategy on its own. Indeed, the most serious strategy arguments about the Pacific theater took place between the American Army and Navy: between MacArthur and Nimitz within the theater and between Marshall and King in Washington. But the United States did have allies, Britain being by far the most important. The relationship between Britain and the United States as it concerned the war in the Pacific is the subject of Thorne's book.

It was an unequal partnership. Britain was painfully aware of its dependence on the United States, a dependence which Thorne infers was unfortunate, for the underlying theme of Thorne's book is that the British Were thoroughly realistic about the political situation in the Far East whereas the Americans were not. Thorne, who is himself British, contends that the British grew tired of America's facile idealism, especially since the United States could not be counted on to back up its high-minded phrases with action. According to Thorne, America's Far East policy was characterized by "a singular blend of evangelicalism, political calculation, benevolent paternalism and crude self interest." (p. 23) Roosevelt's China policy, for example, was "ill-conceived, inefficient, and irresponsible," especially when compared to "Whitehall's positive approach." (pp. 174,196)

Much of Thorne's criticism of American policy is no doubt deserved. What is less certain is his claim that British policymakers were any more far-sighted or realistic. He insists, for example, that the British recognized Chiang for the charlatan that he was, doubted that his defeat would mean Japanese victory, and knew that

Chiang was hoarding weapons for the postwar and showdown with the Communists. Perhaps so. But Thorne also claims that Britain had no desire to maintain any special interests of its own in the postwar era. The British were willing, even eager, to surrender their special privileges in Asia, and they delayed doing so only because they did not want to encourage the impression that they were acting out of weakness. "Many Americans," he writes, "would have been surprised to learn of the degree of willingness over the surrender of extraterritoriality that existed in London." (p. 195) Indeed.

Most likely, American attitudes about British postwar intentions derived from Churchill who, Thorne suggests, was not generally really representative of British views. Churchill was an imperialist and a racist, a holdover from the Romantic era. There is little doubt that maintenance of the British Empire was a primary goal of his policy. But Churchill was not Britain. Indeed, "Churchill formed a major obstacle to the development and approval of plans concerning imperial territories after the war." (p. 716) Churchill notwithstanding, the Pacific war was a British defeat. They lost first to the Japanese at Hong Kong and Singapore and then to the Americans in the political haggling that accompanied the wartime alliance. They have never recovered.

By anyone's criteria, the Pacific war was a world event of the first magnitude. It destroyed the two empires that had shared naval dominance in the western Pacific for half a century; the Japanese Empire died with a bang, the British Empire with a whimper. Consequently, Ienaga and Thorne regret that the war had to be fought at all. For Schultz and Dull, the only regret is that the American victory was not quicker and less costly. Americans are not introspective about the Pacific war; we have instead become introspective about Vietnam, and we now ask questions similar to those which concerned Ienaga and Thorne about the Pacific war: Why did it happen? The answer to this question, however, awaits another generation of historians.

Craig Symonds (BA, University of California at Los Angeles; MA, Ph.D., University of Florida) is Assistant Professor of History, US Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland He is the author of Charleston Blockade (1976), published by the Naval War College Press, and Navalists and Antinavalists (1979), published by the University of Delaware Press.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

Air & Space Power Home Page | Feedback? Email the Editor