Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Japan continued to advance in China with brusque disregard of Western interests, citizens, or property. By the end of 1939, Japan controlled all the chief cities, river valleys, and railroad lines of eastern China, but faced constant guerrilla opposition in rural areas and had no control over the deep interior of China, which remained loyal to Chiang Kai-shek’s government in far-off Chungking on the Upper Yangtze in southwestern China. In March 1940 the Japanese set up a puppet Chinese government at Nanking, but the reality of its power deceived no one.

In the winter of 1939-1940, Japan began to make vigorous commercial demands on the Netherlands East Indies. These demands, chiefly concerned with petroleum and bauxite, were increased after the German victories in France and the Low Countries. From these victories and from Hull’s doctrinaire refusal to encourage any Japanese hope that they could win worthwhile American concessions from a more moderate policy, the advocates of extremism in Japan gained influence. A Japanese demand was made on France, following the latter’s defeat by Germany, to allow Japanese troops to enter northern Indochina, in order to cut off supplies going to China. This was conceded at once by the Vichy government. At the same time (June 1940), Britain received a demand to withdraw its troops from Shanghai and close the Burma Road to Chinese imports. When Hull refused to cooperate with Britain, either in forcing Japan to desist or in any policy aiming to win better Japanese behavior by concessions, Britain withdrew from Shanghai and closed the Burma Road for three months.

Just at that moment a powerful new weapon against Japan was added to the American arsenal, by an amendment to the National Defense Act giving the President authority to embargo the export of supplies which he judged to be necessary to the defense of the United States. The first presidential order under this new authority required licenses for many goods which Japan needed, including aluminum, airplane parts, all arms or munitions, optical supplies, and various “strategic” materials, but left petroleum and scrap iron unhindered.

As France was falling in June 1940, Roosevelt, for reasons of domestic policy, added to his Cabinet two leaders of the Republican Party, Henry L. Stimson and Frank C. Knox; both of these were interventionists in behalf of Britain, while Stimson, for years, had been demanding economic sanctions against Japan, assuring the more cautious of his audience that such a policy would bring about a Japanese retreat rather than any war. The error in this point of view was clearly revealed at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, but the exact nature of the error is not always recognized. The real error in the American negotiations with Japan in 1940-1941 was a double one. On the one hand, there was no correlation between our demands on Japan and our actual power in the Pacific, since our demands were vastly more extensive than our strength. On the other hand, there was no correlation between our strategic plans and our diplomatic activity, with the consequence that there was no correlation between our German policy and our Japanese policy. The American strategic plans were based on the premise that Germany must be defeated before Japan. From this perfectly correct premise followed several corollaries which were not fully grasped by American leaders, especially by the nonmilitary leaders. One of these corollaries provided that America must not get into war with Japan before it got into war with Germany, for, if it did so, it would either have to abandon its strategic plans and proceed to fight Japan or declare war on Germany itself. The much greater danger from Germany, and especially from a German victory over either Britain or the Soviet Union, made the first of these unacceptable, while American public opinion would never have accepted an American declaration of war against Germany when we were already in a state of war with Japan. A second corollary from all these conditions was that American diplomatic pressure on Japan must be timed in terms of American-German relations and not in terms of American-Japanese relations in order to avoid pushing Japan into desperate action before American-German relations had passed the breaking point.

As we shall see, American diplomatic pressure on Japan was increased on the basis of moral outrage, high-flown principles, incidental retaliation, and an unrealistic conception of international legality, without any attempt to coordinate this pressure either with our relations to Germany or, what was even worse, with our actual power in the Pacific. Hull was able to do this because his attitudes were generally shared by the civilian heads of the two service departments, by Stimson as secretary of war, and by Knox as secretary of the navy; thus the more realistic views of the military and naval leaders, and their better appreciation of the implications of America’s strategic plans, did not have their proper weight on America’s policy-making on the Cabinet level or even at the White House. Fortunately, America was saved from many of the consequences of these errors when Hitler made his greatest mistake by declaring war on the United States.

By the beginning of 1941, the Japanese attack on China had bogged down and was in such imminent danger of collapse that something drastic had to be done. But there was no agreement within Japan as to what direction such drastic action should take. A timid majority existed, even within the Japanese government itself, which would have been willing to withdraw from the Chinese “ineident” if this could have been done without too great “loss of face.” On the whole, this group was timid and ineffectual because of the danger of assassination by the extreme militarists and hypernationalist groups within Japan. Moreover, it was impossible to reach any agreement with the Chinese Nationalist government which would allow Japan to retain its “face” by covering a real withdrawal from China with an apparent diplomatic triumph of some sort.

The advocates of an aggressive policy in Japan were divided among the insignificant group who still believed that an all-out assault on China could be brought to a successful conclusion and the more influential groups who would have sought to redeem the stalemate in China by shifting the offensive against either Soviet Siberia or the rich Anglo-Dutch possessions of Malaysia and Indonesia. In the long run, the group which advocated a drive to the south was bound to prevail, because Malaysia and Indonesia were obviously weak and rich, while Soviet Siberia lacked those items (such as petroleum, rubber, or tin) which Japan most urgently needed, and it had demonstrated its power in the battles of 1938–1939. Germany, which originally encouraged the Japanese to move southward against British Malaysia and then, when it was too late, sought to redirect the Japanese blow against Siberia, played an insignificant role in Japan’s policy. The decision to move southward, where the defense was weaker and the prizes so much greater, was made in an ambiguous and halfhearted way in the summer of 1941. The critical turning point was probably during the last week in July.

During the six-week period, March 12-April 22, Matsuoka, the fire-eating foreign minister, was absent from Tokyo on a visit to Berlin and to Moscow. In the German capital he was advised to make no political agreements with the Soviet Union, because of the imminent approach of war between that country and Germany. Matsuoka at once went to Moscow, where he signed a Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact on April 13, 1941. In the meantime, in March, Japanese diplomats won special economic concessions in Siam, while in June the nine-month-old trade discussions with the Netherlands East Indies broke down without Nippon obtaining any of the concessions it desired. These agreements, if obtained, might have put Japan in a position where it could have withstood a total American petroleum embargo. Failure to obtain these meant that Japan’s large oil reserves would continue to decrease to the point where Japan would be militarily helpless from total lack of oil. America could accelerate this process either by curtailing the supply of oil or by forcing Japan into actions which would increase the rate of its consumption. Japanese oil production in 1941 was only three million barrels a year compared to a consumption rate of about 32 million barrels a year. Reserves, which had been 55 million barrels in December 1939, were below 50 million in September 1941, and fell to about 43 million by Pearl Harbor.