The hostilities of the Asia- Pacific war ended over 80 years ago. It was a war that by most estimates took more than 30 million Asian lives, the vast majority of whom were neither combatants nor Japanese. We have considered the currents of history that brought us to the doorsteps of war, over the threshold into war’s carnage, until its end which was possibly inevitable even from its beginning. Was it inevitable? Some historians answer, “yes,” but there are always choices. It is just that you might not like any of the choices available. 

By the 1930s it was clear that Japan viewed its role as the leader of the Asia-Pacific region in every aspect by which a modern, great-power nation should be seen. The slow morphing of its self-understanding was traced in the post Japan Apart. It was not as simple as Japan understanding itself to be superior in terms of civilization, military strength, institutional stability, and a host of other measures – it was now a matter of destiny. Japan’s self-assigned role in the modern era was to be the leader, guardian and protector of Asian nations against the incursions of western colonialism that had left its mark through all reaches of the Asia-Pacific region. To their thinking, only they had risen above the grasp of western powers. They were possessed of the destiny to assume the role of leadership of a greater Asian prosperity sphere: an oriental Monroe Doctrine.

The previous several posts have added information and insights to draw closer to uncovering why Japan would draw the United States into the already ongoing conflict in the Asia-Pacific region. Was it inevitable? Some historians answer, “yes,” but there are always choices. It is just that you might not like any of the choices available. And how the choices are viewed and evaluated are “in the eyes of the beholder.” 

By 1941 Japan was bogged down in China fighting a war it started and, despite early successes, had very little chance of winning but every chance of experiencing the endless quagmire that had always been China. The fighting was already draining Japanese national reserves, was being fueled (literally) by oil and gasoline from the U.S., and was beginning to drastically reduce the standard of living among the Japanese people on the home islands. And yet Japan started armed combat with the U.S., a battle that the leaders of Japan knew they could not win militarily. It was a war the Japanese government’s Total War Research Institute reported there was no chance of winning. Even the best minds in Japan argued against the possibility of success. But as Prime Minister Tōjō once remarked: “Occasionally, one must conjure up enough courage, close one’s eyes and leap off the veranda of the Kiyomizu Temple.” Their actions were not rational; made no sense to the Western mind. 

The presumption of irrationality is natural when considering the latent military and industrial power of the U.S.. But “counting the costs” was not the criteria employed by Japan. Their decision for war has to be seen in the light of the alternatives available to them: economic suffocation or surrender of Tokyo’s empire and imperial ambitions/destiny on the Asian mainland. The choices made by the United States have to be seen in the light of the alternative available to them at the same crossroads of history.

Japanese aggression in East Asia was the root cause of the Asia-Pacific War. Given that perhaps war was inevitable, but the road to Pearl Harbor was paved with American as well as Japanese miscalculations.

Rationality

History does not lack accounts of the irrational. Consider Winston Churchill and Britain in 1941. The British army had been driven off the continent as the last soldier evacuated from Dunkirk. By mid-1940 there was no one who could challenge Hitler’s control of Europe.

Was Churchill’s decision to fight on after Dunkirk rational? In May-June 1940 Britain had no means of effectively challenging Hitler’s on the European continent. Britain was down to its last hope: American and Soviet entry into the war. The Soviets had a non-aggression pact with Germany and the situation in Europe was not enough to bring America “off the sidelines.” The people of the United States were not interested in again being drawn into “European affairs” as they were in 1917. Only profound mistakes by Germany and Japan would change Britain’s strategic fortunes to bring the United States into the war.

A rational Winston Churchill would have explored the possibility of accepting German rule on the continent in exchange for allowing Britain to withdraw from the war and save the remains of its empire. Perhaps this was the sun beginning to set on the British Empire. Was it rational to continue the good fight? It would have been epic, heroic but ultimately foolhardy and futile. The choices were the heroic last stand, negotiate peace, or hold on until the Axis powers take irrational actions.  

In June 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union. In December 1941 Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. They were the seismic events that changed the tide of history. 

American naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison called Tokyo’s decision for war against the United States “a strategic imbecility.” [Quoted in Gordon Prange’s Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History] Apart from all the reasons already noted in previous posts, the United States lay beyond Japan’s military reach. Though Japan could fight a war in East Asia and the Western Pacific, it could not threaten the American homeland. In attacking Pearl Harbor, Japan elected to fight a geographically limited war against an enemy capable of eventually waging a total war against the Japanese home islands themselves.

Dean Acheson, who in 1941 was Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, declared before Pearl Harbor that “no rational Japanese could believe that an attack on us could result in anything but disaster for his country.”³ Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson believed the Japanese, “however wicked their intentions, would have the good sense not to get involved in a war with the United States.”⁴ Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto certainly had good sense. In October 1940 he warned that to “fight the United States is like fighting the whole world.   Doubtless I shall die aboard the Nagato (his flagship). Meanwhile, Tokyo will be burnt to the ground three times.” 

Perhaps the most savage indictment is that of historians Haruo Tohmatsu and H. P. Willmott: “[N]o state or nation has ever been granted immunity from its own stupidity. But Japan’s defeat in World War II was awesome. The coalition of powers that it raised against itself, the nature of its defeat across an entire ocean, and the manner in which the war ended represented an astonishing and remarkable, if unintended, achievement on the part of Japan.” (A Gathering Darkness: The Coming of War to the Far East and the Pacific, 1921-1942, p. 1) Wilmott, a top tier historian, is noted for his acute and searing analysis.

Thucydides famously explained the desire of ancient Athens to retain its empire by declaring that “fear, honor, and interest” were among three of the strongest motives.  Japan’s decision for war has to be seen in the light of the alternatives available to them: war, economic suffocation or surrender of Tokyo’s empire and imperial ambitions/destiny on the Asian mainland. These seem to fall within Thucydides categories of the strongest of motives. Japan’s decision for war was made after months of agonizing internal debate by leaders who recognized America’s vast industrial superiority and who, in the more sober moments, suffered few illusions about Japan’s chances in a protracted war against America. Japan’s leaders did not want war with the United States, but by the fall of 1941 few saw any acceptable alternative to war and they resigned themselves to it.

The Blind Alley

All the above being true in perception, it would seem that the 20th century had seen a dynamic in which Japan was working its way deeper and deeper into labyrinth of international complexities with nations that were well familiar with the twists and turns of the morass. Japan has been isolated from the world for centuries, only emerging some 60 years prior. It entered the labyrinth with a certain presumption about its readiness for the adventure. By the end of the 1930s their undisguised military aggression had created a situation in which the survival of Japan as a great power, and of her conception of an Asian empire, did indeed hang in the balance. They had essentially walked themselves into a dead end with absolutely no allies in the region. It is like the driver who is lost, refuses to ask directions, won’t admit he can’t read a road map, and nonetheless pride moves him ahead deeper into an increasingly blind alley. Arguments of honor, humiliation and subjugation can be hoisted – and even agreed they don’t have to be rational – but it does not exonerate the choices made. Or the inability to see what Japan feared as economic subjugation was more likely the start of an economic partnership that would benefit Japan in ways it could not imagine. Consider the economic fortunes of Japan in the last 80 years.

But by the fall of 1941 the question had come to be not whether there was to be a war with the Western powers, but, given the regional and world situation, whether Japan’s leaders could imagine a more favorable time to solve Japan’s resource problems by military action. Japan’s relative naval strength would never be better than in 1941. In capital ships, Japan’s fleet was 70% of the size of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. It was more modern, more practiced, and already had established the ability to operate multiple aircraft carriers as a single, coordinated air fleet (something the U.S. did not figure out until late 1943 and early 1944). But during the course of the war, the United States built 8,812 naval vessels to Japan’s 589. In 1941 the United States produced 1,400 combat aircraft to Japan’s 3,200; 3 years later, the United States built 37,500 to Japan’s 8,300. Japanese leaders reasoned, better war now than later. While the odds were never in their favor, Japan’s chances of defeating the United States were better in 1941 than in any subsequent year.

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archive | Source credit: Samuel Elliot Morse quote taken from Gordon Prange’s Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History | Tohmatsu and Wilmott quote taken from A Gathering Darkness: The Coming of War to the Far East and the Pacific, 1921-1942 | Utley quote taken from Going to War with Japan 1937-1941 | Tojo quote taken from Nobutake Ike, ed. and trans., Japan’s Decision for War: Records of the 1941 Policy Conferences. |

In the previous posts we considered the strategic and tactical plans that began to take shape in 1940 into 1941 – the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) war planning and the Germany-first strategy by the United States. Underneath all that, both Japan and the United States approached the coming conflict with deeply rooted presumptions about culture, race, and military capability. These assumptions shaped strategy, diplomacy, and expectations about how the war would unfold. In many cases, they proved to be serious misjudgments on both sides.

Japanese leaders believed their society possessed a unique moral cohesion derived from loyalty to the emperor and a strong collective identity. The ethos of duty, sacrifice, and endurance often summarized in terms such as seishin (spiritual fighting spirit) was thought to provide a decisive advantage in war. This belief led many Japanese officers to assume that national willpower could compensate for material disadvantages. Military training emphasized discipline, courage, and willingness to die for the state, which were viewed as traits lacking in Western societies.

At the same time, Japanese observers also believed that American society was overly individualistic, comfort-oriented, and politically divided. Because Americans valued personal prosperity and safety, Japanese planners assumed the United States might lack the resolve to sustain a long and costly war far from home. These assumptions helped support the belief that a sudden shock, such as the attack on Pearl Harbor, might move the United States to negotiate rather than fight a prolonged war.

In Japan, modern nationalism incorporated ideas that the Japanese people were a uniquely pure and spiritually superior race. As Japan’s power expanded in Asia, this belief blended with the claim that Japan was the natural leader of the region. Many Japanese leaders saw Western colonial dominance in Asia as hypocritical and believed Japan had a mission to reshape the regional order.

American perceptions of Japan were shaped by a mixture of limited knowledge, racial stereotypes, and strategic complacency. Many Americans saw Japan as a small, resource-poor nation that could not match the industrial strength of the United States.

Culturally, Americans often viewed Japanese society as rigid, authoritarian, and overly obedient, assuming that soldiers trained in such a system would lack initiative or flexibility in combat. There was also a tendency to believe that Japan relied heavily on imitation of Western technology rather than genuine innovation. American planners expected Japanese forces to fight aggressively at the outset but believed that Japanese morale and capacity would eventually collapse under sustained pressure.

In the United States, racial attitudes toward Japan were shaped by decades of exclusion laws, immigration restrictions, and popular stereotypes. Japanese people were often portrayed as inscrutable, fanatical, or technologically inferior, while Western societies were assumed to possess inherent cultural and scientific advantages. These mutual racial assumptions deepened mistrust and contributed to a climate in which both sides underestimated the capabilities of the other.

While Japanese racism was evident in its views of their Asian neighbors, the United States, not without its own parochial and racial views of the Japanese, lacked understanding of Japan’s history and culture that was considered secondary to the assumption of a general superiority of peoples of European descent. Prior to December 1941, the assumed moral high ground was proven by the widespread accounts of Japanese atrocities in Nanking, Shanghai, and other events. Besides, according to some experts, the IJA had been bogged down in China for four years; the Soviets had made quick work of them at Nomonhan and the Japanese Navy had not been engaged in battle on the high seas since 1905. How accomplished could their military be? Even after the attack at Pearl Harbor, U.S. Secretary of War Stimson, asserted that Nazi Germany must have planned the attack, apparently thinking the blitzkrieg at Pearl Harbor was beyond Japan’s military planning capabilities. Stimson must have been unaware the “sneak attack” was actually a hallmark of the Japanese military as the Russians discovered in 1904. So embedded were such convictions, widespread within the Roosevelt administration, that key policymakers were blinded  to the likely consequences of the decisions to impose what amounted to a complete trade embargo of Japan in the summer of 1941.

A Matter of Honor

By the beginning of 1941, Japan ruled over Korea and Manchuria, had conquered much of China north of the Great Wall and made inroads into central China, seized all of China’s major ports and islands in the South China Sea, and established a military presence in northern French Indochina. Japan was poised to invade resource-rich Southeast Asia, which Japanese propagandists had long and loudly proclaimed was rightfully within Japan’s sphere of influence, notwithstanding the fact that almost all of Southeast Asia lay under British, Dutch, French, and American colonial rule.

Japan had signed the Tripartite Act which the U.S. rightly understood as intended to deter the United States from going to war with Germany or Japan by raising the specter of a two-ocean war. Their signature transformed Japan from regional threat into a potential extension of Hitler’s agenda of aggression, especially with respect to the Soviet Union after the Nazi invasion of June 22, 1941. The hardliners in Washington DC correctly predicted that now Japan would turn towards Southeast Asia.

For the Japanese all things were a matter of honor and destiny. After the embargo it became a matter of necessity. Japan’s leaders were not certain that moving on Southeast Asia would cause a U.S. reaction but assumed that it would. The Roosevelt administration regarded a Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia, especially the oil-rich Dutch East Indies and tin and rubber-rich British Malaya, as strategically unacceptable. Control of Southeast Asia would weaken the British Empire and threaten India, Australia, and New Zealand allies in the war against Germany. Also, it would also afford Japan access to oil and other critical raw materials that would reduce its economic dependence on the United States, weakening the effect of other economic sanctions as controls on Japanese aggression.

While it might seem the U.S. reaction was simply an economic consideration. The more important consideration was keeping Britain in the war. It was a fundamental strategy of the United States and Britain that they could not afford to lose the raw material wealth and the sea lanes of Southeast Asia even if it meant war. Though the administration was never prepared to go to war over China, it regarded an extension of Japan’s empire into Southeast Asia as unacceptable. Thus Japan provoked a strong American response when Japanese forces occupied southern French Indochina in July 1941 as an obvious preliminary to further southward military moves. Operating out of southern French Indochina, the superior long-ranged Japanese naval bombers could provide air control of the seas around Singapore and support ground operations in Malay – both interim steps to the oil riches of Sumatra, Borneo and Java.

The United States was prepared to declare economic war on Japan as a means of deterring—or at least delaying—a Japanese advance into Southeast Asia, and that is exactly what the Roosevelt administration did in July 1941. The post The Financial Freeze details how those actions unfolded. In Going to War With Japan: 1937-1941, the author Jonathan Utley argues that the intent of the financial freeze was not to cut off all oil, but to ration it at a rate that let Japan know we control the spigot. Or as Roosevelt famously remarked it was to be like a noose around Japan’s neck which he would give it a jerk now and then to keep their attention. But by the end of August 1941, Roosevelt declined to reverse the decision. The reasons remain unclear. Perhaps he believed that a reversal would look like a retreat, or perhaps he had come to regard a Japanese advance into Southeast Asia as inevitable. 

What was intended and what eventually happened is the nature of unintended consequences.

The consequence was that as a result of the de facto embargo and in conjunction with the seizure of Japanese assets by Great Britain and the Netherlands, there was a complete suspension of Japanese economic access to the United States and the destruction of between 50 and 75 percent of Japan’s foreign trade. No nation would meekly accept this situation – certainly the U.S. would not if such had been imposed on them. And neither did the Japanese.

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archive | Utley quote taken from Going to War with Japan 1937-1941

From early 1941 onward, the Japanese were establishing and refining their war strategy which, as regards the U.S., which translated into a three part movement: attacking the Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor, establishing a defensive line across the Central Pacific, and attriting the U.S. fleet when they moved westward. Meanwhile, the United States did not want war with Japan and yet ended up in exactly the war Japan did not want: an extended war of attrition and logistics pitted against the manufacturing power of American industry and resources.

The historical record is quite clear that the Roosevelt administration was committed to a “Germany-first” strategy, stopping Hitler in Europe. Hitler’s facism was viewed as the modern plague that must be stopped lest it infect the whole world. In 1941 the U.S. was  engaged in an undeclared shooting war with Nazi submarines in the North Atlantic that was a precursor to what awaited the U.S. in the event of a declared war. In the first half of 1942, almost 600 allied merchant ships were lost to German U-boats. The Roosevelt Administration needed to keep Britain in the war with supplies and a key to that was avoiding war with Germany. The last thing Roosevelt wanted was a war in the Pacific. 

Jonathan Utley observes “No one during the fall of 1941 wanted war with Japan. The Navy preferred to concentrate on the Atlantic. The Army said it needed a few more months before it would be ready in the Philippines. Hull had made the search for peace his primary concern for months. Roosevelt could see nothing to be gained by a war with Japan. Hawks such as Acheson, Ickes, and Morgenthau argued that their strong policies would avoid war, not provoke one.”

The administration maintained military sales to China with the goal of keeping the Soviets in the fight, focused on Germany without having to worry about an eastern front attack by Japan. With military supplies delivered via the “Burma Road” the Chinese were able to continue to keep IJA troops engaged, bogged down, and thus Japan was unable to initiate any incursions into Siberia or Mongolia. This ensured that the Soviets did not have to wage a two-front war. 

But there was a limit: the U.S. administration was not willing to go to war with Japan over China. With Japan controlling all significant Chinese ports, the only two available supply routes were the Burma Road and smuggling via Hong Kong. The U.S. goal was to provide enough arms to China so as to deter or inhibit a Japanese advance into Southeast Asia.  This goal was advanced by relocating the Pacific Fleet to Pearl Harbor from their California ports, the imposition of economic sanctions, and beginning a slow build up on forces and long-range bombers in the Philippines. The administration was mistaken in their belief. The U.S. presumed realism and rationality on the part of the Japanese and failed to understand that severe sanction (i.e. the financial freeze and de facto oil embargo) would be tantamount to an act of war.

The Germany First Priority

The U.S. posture vis-a-vis Japan was complicated by a “Germany First” outlook that guided U.S. policy even before Pearl Harbor and shaped military planning and diplomacy. President Roosevelt and military planners believed that Nazi Germany posed the greatest global threat. In November 1940, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Harold Stark recommended a defensive posture in the Pacific as regards Japan while prioritizing the defeat of Germany and Italy in Europe. He produced this recommendation in a memorandum that came to be known as “Plan Dog” which laid out U.S. options in the event of war against Germany, Japan, or both. He reviewed several possible scenarios and plans, lettering them from “A” through “D,” and ultimately recommended Plan “D.” At that time, the U.S. Navy’s phonetic alphabet for “D” was “dog”: hence the name.

U.S. leaders came to realize that the scenarios underlying the older “color-coded” war plans were based on the assumption that the United States would fight a war against a single enemy one-on-one. It was increasingly clear that these were no longer realistic assumptions. The United States was increasingly likely to face war against multiple enemies across the globe. In which case, the country would need allies, which meant Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands, all of whom had interests in the Southwest Pacific. 

By November 1940, France had fallen, and Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany and its Italian allies. The German bombing campaign against Britain had begun. Recognizing the consequences of a British defeat, President Franklin Roosevelt had been gradually increasing U.S. support to the United Kingdom, first through the “cash and carry” policy in September 1939, and then through the “destroyers for bases” deal in September 1940  which became the December 1940 Lend-Lease program. In Asia, meanwhile, Japan’s invasion of China continued, and in September they occupied the northern part of French Indo-China. 

Roosevelt was constrained by public opinion, which strongly opposed U.S. involvement in another major foreign war. Stark’s memorandum, therefore, came at a critical time—before the United States was formally at war, but as war was looking more and more likely. It was by no means clear what course the United States should or would follow. Admiral Stark laid out the essence of the grand strategic problem facing the United States, and he concisely crafted the best courses of action. Plan A was war with Japan only and no allies. Plan B was war with Japan only supported by British Allies. Plan C was war with the Axis allies and no allies of our own. Plan E was no stay out of the wars all together

Plan Dog was we’d be at war with Germany and Italy in support of Britain while Japan was not yet involved. Any involvement with Japan would be at the initiation of the United States.

“…our major national objectives in the immediate future might be stated as preservation of the territorial, economic, and ideological integrity of the United States, plus that of the remainder of the Western hemisphere; the prevention of the disruption of the British Empire… and the diminution of the offensive military power of Japan, with a view to the retention of our economic and political interest in the Far East. It is doubtful however that it would be in our interest to reduce Japan to the status of an inferior military and economic power. A balance of power in the Far East is as much to our interest as a balance of power in Europe.” (emphasis added)

Admiral Stark was not optimistic of Britain’s ability to remain in the war and as a result he recommended an immediate, intentional build up of U.S. Army and Navy capability. He wrote, “Until such time as the United States should decide to engage its full forces in war, I recommend that we pursue a course that will most rapidly increase the military strength of both the Army and the Navy, that is to say, adopt Alternative (A) without hostilities.”

President Roosevelt took Stark’s recommendations regarding the build up of the nation’s military capability, but President Roosevelt soon concluded that Nazi Germany posed the greatest global threat. The Plan Dog memorandum recommended that if the United States were forced into war against both Germany and Japan, it should fight defensively in the Pacific while concentrating resources on defeating Germany in Europe. As a result U.S. rearmament focused heavily on the Atlantic theater, increasing support was given to Britain through Lend-Lease, and the Navy was deeply engaged in convoy protection in the Atlantic and already clashing with German submarines.

Because Roosevelt wanted to prevent Japan from expanding while the U.S. focused on Europe, Washington set out to deter Japanese expansion through economic pressure rather than immediate war. Japanese diplomats and naval intelligence closely followed these developments. Tokyo concluded that the United States expected eventual war with Germany, were prioritizing European commitments and so the U.S. resources would be divided between two oceans. From the Japanese perspective, this created a temporary window of opportunity in the Pacific.

The “Germany First” strategy shaped Japanese thinking in two ways. First, it suggested that the United States might avoid a prolonged Pacific war if forced to fight Germany simultaneously. Second, Japanese planners believed that if the Pacific Fleet were crippled, the United States would be strategically compelled to concentrate on the European war. This assumption encouraged the idea that a surprise strike could secure time for Japan to seize Southeast Asian resources, establish a defensive perimeter in the Central Pacific, and force the United States to negotiate their exit from the Asia-Pacific conflict

The unintended consequence of all this was “Plan X” – not envisioned by Admiral Stark: war with the Axis allies, a two-ocean war, all initiated by Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.  Japan’s reasoning underestimated American political and military capacity. Instead of forcing strategic restraint, the attack on Pearl Harbor produced immediate ramp-up in U.S. mobilization and a long-term industrial expansion that Japan could never hope to match.

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archive | Plan Dog available online at the FDR Library at Marist College.