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

When it became clear on October 15, 1941, that agreement was impossible, Hideki Tojo, leader of the activist military group in Japan, forced Prince Fumimaro Konoye to resign. The new Cabinet had General Tojo as Premier, Minister of the Army, and Minister of Home Affairs (controlling domestic police). This was clearly a war government, but the negotiations continued in Washington.

On November 10th operations orders were issued to the Japanese Navy to destroy the American fleet in Pearl Harbor on December 7th. Orders had already been issued to conquer Thailand, Malaya, the Philippines, Borneo, and Sumatra; the rest of the Netherlands East Indies were to be taken in a second movement and all the conquered areas enclosed in a defensive perimeter to run from the Japanese Kurile Islands, through Wake Island and the Marshall Islands, along the southern and western edges of Timor, Java, and Sumatra, to the Burma-India border. By November 20th the American defensive forces knew that Japan was about to strike but still felt that the blow would be southward.

On November 27th a war warning was sent from Washington to Pearl Harbor, but no changes were made there for increased precautions or a higher level of alertness. Fortunately, the three carriers of the American Pacific Fleet were not in Pearl Harbor on the morning of the attack, but the Japanese had detailed anchorage sites for the vessels which were there, including seven battleships and seven cruisers. The Japanese attack force consisted of six carriers with 450 planes escorted by two battleships, two cruisers, eleven destroyers, twenty regular submarines, and five midget submarines. This force, in complete radio silence and without encountering any other vessels, sailed in 11 days in a great northward circle from the Kuriles to a point 275 miles north of Pearl Harbor. From that point, at 6:00 a.m. on December 7, 1941, was launched an air strike of 360 planes, including 40 torpedo planes, 100 bombers, 130 dive-bombers, and 90 fighters. The five midget submarines, dropped from larger submarines, were already operating at Pearl Harbor and were able to enter because the antitorpedo net was carelessly left open after 4:58 a.m. on December 7th. These submarines were detected at 3:42 before they entered the harbor, but no warning was sent until 6:54 after one had been attacked and sunk.

About the same time, an army enlisted man, using radar, detected a group of strange planes coming down from the north 132 miles away, but his report was disregarded. At 7:30 an enlisted sailor noticed two dozen planes about a mile over his ship but did not report it. In the next half-hour these early arrivals from the Japanese carriers were joined by others, and at 7:55 the attack began. Within thirty minutes the Battle Line of the Pacific Fleet had been wiped out. The American losses included 2,400 men killed, almost 1,200 wounded, four battleships sunk with three others badly damaged, many other vessels sunk or damaged, and hundreds of planes destroyed on the grounds. The greatest damage was inflicted by special shallow-water torpedos launched from planes which came in below the 100-foot altitude. In all, the Japanese losses were small, amounting to no more than a couple of dozen planes, because the surprise was so great. The Japanese fleet was not found after the attack, because the search order was issued 180 degrees off direction through an error in interpretation.

Pearl Harbor was but one of several attacks made by the Japanese in their opening assaults on December 7th-10th. Air attacks on Wake Island, Midway Island, Guam, the Philippines, and Malaya destroyed hundreds of planes, mostly on the ground, and set fire to large stores of supplies. Lack of antiaircraft facilities, inadequate air power and fields, and carelessness by higher officers transformed the defenders’ situations from critical to hopeless, although personal bravery and resourcefulness made the Japanese pay heavily for their gains.

Midway Island, 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu and linked to it by a very important cable, survived a hit-and-run attack of December 8, 1941, and by 1942 was America’s westernmost base, especially valuable for planes, submarines, and reconnaissance. Wake Island, 1,200 miles southwest of Midway, was struck on December 8th and surrendered on December 23rd after a heavy two-day assault. Guam, 1,500 miles west of Wake and in the midst of the Japanese-mandated Mariana Islands, was invaded at the beginning and gave up on December 10th. The Philippines, 3,000 miles west of Wake, were attacked by landings at nine points in the seventeen days before Christmas; by December 27th the Japanese had compelled the American ground forces to evacuate Manila and to retire into their last defense areas, the rocky caves of the island of Corregidor and the forests of the Bataan Peninsula. Savage fighting continued until May 6, 1942, when the last American forces on Corregidor surrendered. The commanding officers, General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Thomas Hart, had already withdrawn to Australia.

Fifteen hundred miles west of the Philippines, a Japanese army invaded Thailand from Indochina, and on December 9th captured Bangkok without a struggle. About the same time Japanese landings were made on the Malay Peninsula north of Singapore. When the British battle cruiser Repulse and the new battleship Prince of Wales ventured north without air cover (since their accompanying carrier, Indomitable , ran aground), they were sunk by Japanese land-based planes (December 10th). These were the only Allied capital ships west of Pearl Harbor. But the event had much more significance than this. It showed that the capital ship was no longer the mistress of the seas, as it had been for at least two generations, and, by doing so, it showed that the American losses at Pearl Harbor, concentrated as they were on battleships, were not nearly so important as they had seemed to be. But, even more significant, these sinkings off the east coast of Malaya marked the end of British supremacy on the seas which had begun with the destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588. For the next two years supremacy on the seas was in dispute, but at the end of that time the decision was falling clearly in favor of a new champion, the United States.

Fanning outward as they spread over the southwestern Pacific and southeastern Asia, the Japanese forces captured Hong Kong on December 25, 1941 and advanced on Singapore across the swamps on its landward side. This great naval base, the bastion of all British power in the Far East, had to surrender on February 15, 1942, without even being able to defend itself, its great guns, aimed seaward at an army which never came, being completely useless against the Japanese who crept up on it from the landward side.

Lying north of Australia in a great curve from Singapore to New Guinea was the Malay Barrier, originally intended to form the southern perimeter of the Japanese defense area. Like beads on a necklace across a distance of 3,500 miles were stretched dozens of islands: Sumatra, Java, Bali, Lumbok, Flores, Timor, New Guinea, and others. These were taken so rapidly by the Japanese octopus that the straits between the various islands were closed before some Allied ships could escape through to the south. Five Allied cruisers and many destroyers were caught in this way and sunk in the week of February 26, 1942; Sumatra, Java, and Timor surrendered by March 9th; and Netherlands forces were wiped out, British forces withdrew to Ceylon, and the few surviving American vessels limped home for repairs. Rangoon, the Burmese capital, surrendered on March 8th, and exactly a month later the triumphant Japanese naval forces swept westward to strike at Ceylon. In the first week of April, Holy Week of 1942, Japanese Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who had led the attack on Pearl Harbor, made a similar attack on Ceylon, sinking the British carrier Hermes , two heavy cruisers, and many lesser vessels (including 136,000 tons of merchant ships).