I wonder how many readers know the name “Harry Dexter White.” Not a lot I suspect. I know that I didn’t before researching and writing this series. White is best known as the high-ranking U.S. Treasury official and influential economist who served as a primary architect of the postwar international financial system. As a key aide to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., White was the creative mind that led to the creation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank agreed to at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference. He served as the first U.S. executive director of the IMF in 1946. He was accused in 1948 of spying for the Soviet Union, which he adamantly denied. Although he was never a Communist party member, his status as a Soviet informant was confirmed by declassified FBI documents related to the interception and decoding of Soviet communications, known as the Venona Project. Shortly after defending himself against these charges before Congress, White died of a heart attack in August 1948.

…and what does this have to do with the Asia Pacific War? White served as the director of the Division of Monetary Research and later as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, shaping U.S. financial policy during World War II. In May 1941 he began a draft of a bold proposal to change the direction and tone of U.S. negotiations with Japan. The draft proposal was submitted to Treasury Secretary Morgenthal on June 6, 1941. As part of the submission, the background briefing described White’s view of the pattern of diplomacy that had been the craft of the Secretary of State Hull:

“19th century patterns of petty bargaining with its dependence upon subtle half promises, irritating pin prinks, excursions into double dealing, and copious pronouncements of good will alternating with vague threats – and all of it veiled in an atmosphere of high secrecy designed or at least serving chiefly to hide the essential bareness of achievement…Where modern diplomacy calls for swift and bold action, we engage in long drawn out cautious negotiations; where we should talk in terms of billions of dollars, we think in terms of millions; where we should measure success by the generosity of the government that can best afford it, we measure it by the sharpness of the bargain driven; where we should be dealing with all embracing economic, political and social problems, we discuss minor trade objectives or small national advantages; instead of squarely facing realities, we persist in enjoying costly prejudices; where we should speak openly and clearly, we engage in protocol, in secret schemes and subtleties.”

To put it mildly, he was not a fan of Hull’s modus operandi. From his position at Treasury he had watched 4 years of ineffective diplomacy as the nation moved closer to war. White believed it was time for boldness and one that addressed Japan’s interests more broadly than “stop aggression.”

The White Plan

Drafted before the de facto oil embargo and before Japan’s move into southern Indochina, Washington still hoped to avoid war through phased de-escalation. Perhaps the key feature of the June draft of the White Plan was that there was no demand for immediate and total Japanese withdrawal from China. The draft indicated that a gradual, staged withdrawal, tied to restoration of peace in China and stabilization of East Asia was acceptable.  Implicitly, if not explicitly, the draft offered continued recognition of Japan’s existing position in Manchuria. The tone and emphasis was on non-aggression, respect for national sovereignty, and equal commercial opportunity in the region. To that end, the draft proposed that Japan would halt further expansion and that the U.S. would resume trade, including oil, under controlled conditions. The plan anticipated a multilateral framework involving China and other powers, but without forcing immediate regime change or humiliation of the current aggressive Japanese governing system. This version assumed that China policy could evolve over time and that Japan might be persuaded to disengage without losing face.

The June draft’s resumption of trade envisioned a restoration of the U.S.–Japanese trade, including strategic materials; unfreezing of Japanese assets under controlled conditions; renewed Japanese access to dollar earnings through exports so as to reduce pressure on the yen and improved Japan’s balance-of-payments position which was becoming an increasingly unmanageable problem. White’s draft reflected the belief that some economic relief could reinforce moderation in Japanese policy and give any moderate element in the Japanese government some leverage during internal debates. From a trade perspective the language of the June draft reveals White’s view that U.S. policy was treating Japan as a second tier power rather than a negotiating partner – which was a Japanese complaint for all of the 20th century up to 1941. White’s thinking was incremental: first stabilize behavior, then normalize trade and only then consider deeper financial engagement. Hull’s policy had been complete agreement on the end game without incremental stages along the way.

One of the elements in a May 1941 draft that was dropped after discussions with Morgenthal was a substantial line of credit. Morgenthal and other Treasury officials were cautious because a line of credit before stabilized behavior could be seen as subsidizing Japanese aggression. Also, in general Congress and public opinion were hostile to aiding Japan. And so the idea of loans or a line-of-credit was deliberately removed to preserve the possibility of future financial assistance after some evidence that Japanese behavior in the region was stabilized and some level of trade was restored with existing Japanese assets. The Treasury leadership wanted maximum leverage with minimal commitment. But it is also an indication of the thinking that was not constrained by Secretary Hull’s less-than-flexible process of diplomacy.

Another element of the May draft that was removed: modification of the 1924 Immigration Act: specifically, removal of the provision that excluded all Japanese from immigrating to the U.S and then setting quotas for Japanese as had been set with other nations. This was a major issue of honor for Japan, but by the summer of 1941 was a non-starter for the American public and Congress.

When the June draft was forwarded from the Treasury Department to the Far East Division with the State Department, who quickly endorsed it and adapted it into diplomatic language. It was then circulated through the War and Navy Departments for review and comment.

This was the first wave of reviews, strike outs, revisions, and rewording by various groups, departments, and leaders. Long story told short: in the end the intent of the original author had disappeared and the document morphed into another version of Cordell Hull’s “four principles.”  Perhaps its weakness was its radical departure from previous and current U.S. diplomatic engagements and the associated uncertainty of how it would be received. Not in content, but in motivation. Would it appear that the U.S. was trying to appease Japan because it feared combat in the Pacific? If the U.S. would offer this, would Japan assume that if pressed, there might be more that the U.S. was prepared to offer?

Would the original White Proposal have made a difference? Hard to say.

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

This is intentionally a post for a Saturday morning. It is longer than average and traces the “history” of how historians have treated the year 1941 as regards U.S.-Japanese relationships. As with most things, even when historians can agree on the events and sequence of events, the role of historian is more than a news reporter. A historian’s role is to research, analyze, interpret, and write about the past. They gather and critically evaluate primary sources (letters, records, artifacts, photos) and secondary sources (other historians’ work). They then determine the authenticity, significance, and context of historical information to form a coherent understanding of events. The historian then constructs and writes detailed accounts, reports, articles, and books that tell the story of the past. In essence, historians are detectives of time, piecing together human history to make sense of the what, when, where of things in order to understand the “why.”

When considering a single event in history, such as the oil embargo, one quickly discovers it is not a single event. The event has people who are animating history with choices and decisions. The event has precursor events (which might need their own “histories”). The event is part of a chain of larger events, later events, and a complex web of factors large and small. All of this leads to different “schools of thought” among historians.

In the case of the 1941 oil embargo by the United States against Japan, there are the following schools of thought – interpretive camps, if you will:

• The Original Camp,
• The Provocateur Camp,
• The Coercion and Constraint Camp
• The Turning Point Camp
• The Contemporary Camp

These names are my own and (hopefully) offer a reasonably accurate 30,000 ft view of the positions. Over simplification and errors are mine, and so apologies in advance to the historians referenced if I have misunderstood or misinterpreted their work.

The Original Camp were the first wave of historians such as Herbert Feis and Samuel Eliot Morison who wrote in the later 1940s and early 1950s. As they were first to publish their work formed an initial orthodoxy regarding the oil embargo. Their conclusions were that Japan was solely responsible for the U.S. entry into the war. They judged U.S. policy to be defensive and reactive to Japan’s provocation with the ultimate treachery being the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the island of Oahu, Hawaii. 

The work did not address prior U.S. economic sanctions and actions, internal policy debates within the U.S. State department and regulatory agencies, external policy debates with Britain over support and prosecution of the already on-going war in Europe, North Africa, and in the steppes of Russia. 

The work did not have the available resources, and as such insufficient  attention was paid to the internal dynamics of Japanese governance which was divided among the militarism and the moderates – with Emperor Hirohito seemingly passively on the sidelines. The treatment of the internal Japanese governance is as though it were monolithic when it was anything but. As a result there was limited consideration of internal Japanese deliberations which caused Japanese diplomatic responses and actions to appear opaque, intentionally vague, and even deceptive. In parallel, these authors were not insightful or critical of U.S. diplomacy which seemed blunt and imperious to the Japanese. There is very little recognition of U.S. errors in policy or decisions.

Lastly, given the period in which they worked, they relied almost entirely on U.S. sources.

The Provocateur Camp argues that U.S. policy made war so likely as to make war unavoidable regardless of who fired the first shot. In historiography circles, they are known as the “Revisionists.” I am not a fan of that title in this particular case as “revisionists” often just refers to the next generation with access to additional source materials. In this case, “Provocateur” seems the better moniker. Historians that I would place in the category include Charles Beard and Charles Tansill who published in the period 1950-1956. While they had some new materials, like all historians of their age they lacked access to all the classified war information that was only made available to researchers in 1995. While different in content, these writers contend that President Roosevelt deliberately maneuvered Japan to the brink of war knowing sanctions and embargoes were provocative. 

While neither entertain the “Roosevelt knew Pearl Harbor would be attacked and did nothing” theory. They both hold Roosevelt and his cabinet as the provocateurs of the war. They conclude that Roosevelt knew the U.S. entry into the war with Germany was inevitable, and so used Japan as the “back door” to enter into the global conflict. Roosevelt’s concern was fascism’s (Germany. Italy, and Japan) deconstruction of liberal governmental and economic policies resulting in a new “dark ages” for the world order. The oil embargo was a virtual declaration of war as U.S. leadership understood Japan could not accept the embargo without collapsing as a power in the Asia-Pacific region where the U.S. had traditional trade and business interests. The weakness of this historical view is that it glosses over Japan’s “power” and, in effect, downplays the raw military aggression Japan had waged throughout the 1930s into the 1940s.

The Coercion and Constraint Camp are less conspiratorial but argue that U.S. actions left Japan with no acceptable alternatives. Writers such as William Williams and Gabriel Kolko might be considered part of this school of thought, writing in the period 1959-1968 – again researching in an age before the declassification of WW II records. A later work by Sidney Pash (2014) revisits some of the same archival information, but unlike Williams (an economic determinist), Pash emphasizes more traditional diplomatic concepts such as the balance of power and containment.

The principle argument is that the U.S. spoke of an open door policy of trade and commerce in the Asia Pacific region, but the real goal was a type of benign imperialism under the guise of open markets and free trade. It is argued that the U.S. insistence of principles such as respect for national boundaries, respecting the sovereignty of other nations, not interfering in other nations internal politics, and openness to trade and commerce failed to acknowledge the Japanese strategic realities of a lack of natural resources, burgeoning population, and a view of themselves as the rightful leader of the Asia-Pacific region. 

In general this camp does not excuse Japanese aggression, but sees the U.S. as implementing systematic coercion and constraints to control events in the region. One view is that the U.S. did not realize the effects of systematic coercion and constraints they were attempting to put into play – nor the Japanese reactions to them. Unlike the “Provacteur Camp” there is no conspiracy to start conflict. It is more of a clumsiness and bias in operating the available levers of power. But like their historiographical elders, they too gloss over the manner in which Japan projected power, paying little attention to the rise of militarism and nationalism that were the drivers behind their naked invasion of other countries, and just seem to ignore that no Asia-Pacific nation wanted their leadership. Some work focuses only on diplomatic encounters of the moment while paying scant attention to other internal elements. A good example is the treatment of the 1922 Washington Conferences and naval limitation treaty. The conclusion reached is that the U.S. and Britain (two-ocean navies) were trying to control Japan’s shipbuilding projects (one-ocean navy) without ever mentioning that other than the military, the rest of Japan’s governance welcomed the limitation because they wanted to avoid an arms race they couldn’t afford while in the midst of their own financial crises.

The Turning Point Camp largely wrote in the late 1980s. Some consider this as an extension of the Revisionists Camp. Writers include Jonathan Utley, Waldo Heinrichs, and Akira Iriye. These historians focus on July-August 1941 as the turning point of the pre-Pearl Harbor period after which war between Japan and the United States was a given. Their focus is largely upon diplomacy and the currents of power/views within Washington DC and Tokyo. This group of writers had the advantage of access to non-military documents, war time diaries, translated Japanese documents, memoirs of key actors, and correspondence in the arena of governance and diplomacy. These were resources not available to previous historians. 

A compilation of the central tenet of this camp might be captured in the problem of disinstantiated communication. In other words, “that’s not what I meant!” vs. “but that’s what I understood.” This was fueled by preconceptions, misconceptions, and presumptions of “national character.” And in some cases, the barrier of language and cultural norms. As a result, the actions and understandings were miscalculations rather than conspiracy. The “Hull Note” in late November 1941 is an example of such. Although it should be noted that Kido Butai, the Japanese fleet that attacked Peart Harbor, had already set sail, battle plans in hand, and under strict radio silence.

While acknowledging these shared problems, this camp finds fault with U.S. policymakers who:

• underestimated Japanese willingness to fight, 
• overestimated the impact of embargoes and trade sanction on Japanese military and economic collapse
• insisted on principles Japan could not accept without abandoning its empire, making war likely, 
• Did not realize that there was a “manifest destiny” operative in the politicized Shinto myth of the “eight corners of the world”
• did not recognize that their (U.S.) actions were escalatory in effect, 
• were unwilling to compromise, and
• assumed Japan would eventually back down.

Instead, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and across the Southwest Asia region as a response to constraints applied by the U.S. These historians acknowledge that Japanese military aggression in the region over the decade was a war already begun. Their view is that the U.S. did not force Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, but it pursued policies attempting to control Japanese aggression that increased the probability that the U.S. would be drawn into armed conflict with Japan.

The Contemporary Camp is the current era of historians (e.g., Sadao Asada, Richard Frank) share a view with the “Original Camp” that holds Japan fully and wholly culpable for the Asia-Pacific War, but also recognize elements and nuance of the “Turning Point Camp.” What is different is the trove of new materials that have been made available, especially Japanese language sources, diaries, letters, previously unknown documents.  They are more attentive to the chaotic rise and fall of Japanese cabinets, the veto power of the military, the popular support for the Japanese military, and the increasing alignment with fascist ambitions in the region. 

These later historians are much more balanced in understanding the role of Nazi Germany in Roosevelt’s thinking. FDR understood that the U.S. was in no way prepared to enter war with Germany (which was the priority) much less war with Germany and Japan. What industrial capacity was available was geared to keep Britain “in the fight” as well as the Soviet Union (which Germany attacked in later June 1941).

While recognizing the impact of the “oil embargo”, these historians are more likely to call the timing of and the attack on Pearl Harbor the turning point in the broader was for these reasons:

• On December 5tn, the Soviets began a massive counter-attack on German forces at Moscow and attacks across a broad front in other regions. The strength and impact of this would not be known to Hitler for several weeks.
• Japan “declared war” on by the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941
• Germany formally declared war on the United States on December 11 in accord with the Tripartite Pact
• By Dec 16th, Hitler was aware of the seriousness of the Soviet’s advances.

If Pearl Harbor had been planned for January 1942, realizing the problems on the German eastern front, would Germany have declared war on the United States? An interesting counter-factural, but the point is the broader view held by these historians.

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives.

The previous post ended by comparing the current and flows of the events of 1941 as an “external and internal dynamics [that make] the path to diplomatic resolution akin to walking a moonless night in the wilderness with but only a lighted candle to show the way. There is light but its glow only reveals so much of the dark night. And as we will see in the next post, there are lots of things that “go bump in the night.” In the final months before Pearl Harbor we find one of those “bumps.” 

In 1941 U.S.–Japanese diplomacy operated on two parallel planes. One was the formal, authorized negotiation between Japan’s Foreign Ministry and the U.S. State Department. The other was a private, unauthorized, and deeply fragile backchannel, involving two Maryknoll priests who sought out of moral urgency, without any official mandate, to open a path toward dialogue and de-escalation. The existence of this unofficial channel illuminates not only the desperation of late 1941, but also the fragmentation of authority, trust, and purpose within both governments. Examining the ebb and flow of this effort alongside the official negotiations reveals how diplomacy failed not for lack of contact, but because no shared political or moral common ground would be found. It either simply did not exist or was completely obfuscated by the many voices and channels working at cross purposes.

One way to describe the official diplomatic track is a system of increasing formalism and decreasing flexibility and imagination. By early 1941, official U.S.–Japanese diplomacy was already strained by mutual suspicion.  Negotiations between Ambassador Kichisaburō Nomura (Ambassador to the U.S. and an acquaintance of President Roosevelt) and Secretary of State Cordell Hull were formal, cautious, and increasingly rigid. Nomura was not a diplomat; he was a retired admiral who had served as naval attache in Washington when Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the 1920s. Hull was a career diplomat and a graduate of Yale and Havard Law who was connected in U.S. and international circles. While Japanese ambassadors came and went, Hull remained and consistently insisted on a principles-based approach—non-aggression, respect for sovereignty, and equality of trade—while Japanese negotiators often changed, were given differing instructions but often sought pragmatic accommodations that would preserve their position in China and Southeast Asia while asking immediate actions from the U.S. with delayed or vague actions on their part. Nomura arrives in Washington at the start of 1941 with no instructions at all.

As Japan moved into southern French Indochina in July 1941, the atmosphere hardened decisively. The U.S. freezing of Japanese assets and effective oil embargo transformed negotiations into a race against time, particularly for Tokyo. Within the U.S. government, confidence grew that Japan was negotiating in bad faith, using diplomacy to buy time for military preparations. Within Japan, civilian leaders feared economic collapse, while the military saw compromise as tantamount to surrender. This context is essential. By autumn 1941, official diplomacy would become procedural rather than exploratory. Notes were exchanged, positions clarified but over time imagination, trust, and risk-taking disappeared.

Maryknoll and John Doe

Against this bleak backdrop, two Maryknoll priests, Bishop James Walsh and Father James Drought became involved in a private initiative to foster dialogue. Maryknoll, as an American Catholic missionary order with deep experience in East Asia, occupied a unique moral and cultural position. Its members were neither diplomats nor intelligence officers, yet they were trusted by some Japanese interlocutors and respected within certain American circles, especially Irish Catholic Americans. The priests’ motivation was fundamentally pastoral and moral. They had already seen the devastation of combat in the Sino-Japanese war since 1937 in terms of 7 million Chinese deaths, devastation of major cities, and millions of millions of Chinese as refugees within their own country. They feared an expansion of the war if the U.S. were drawn into the war. They believed they could still find accommodation. Their effort was unauthorized, informal, and explicitly separate from official diplomatic channels, yet it unfolded in parallel with them, sometimes intersecting with individuals close to power.

As the Maryknoll effort developed in mid-winter and into the summer of 1941, it drew in a widening circle of intermediaries: Japanese civilians and former diplomats sympathetic to peace, American Catholic figures and lay intermediaries, and individuals connected indirectly to political leaders, including those who later were aware of Konoe’s last attempts to avoid war. All of these people shared a belief, already fading within governments, that personal trust and moral appeal might succeed where formal diplomacy had failed. 

The Maryknoll contingent first proposed an outline of proposals to leaders in the Japanese government via Todao Ikawa, a senior banker and financier, thought to have a friendship with Prime Minister Konoe. In addition, the proposal was presented to Col. Hideo Iwakura, Chief of Military Affairs in the Ministry of the Army (War) said to be an important leader of the young officers and confidant of Army Minister Tojo. When the Maryknoll contingent left Japan in January 1941 they brought a concept of a Konoe-FDR summit, a clear message of Japan’s regional “Monroe Doctrine” aspirations, and a plan…that was not the same as they had presented in Japan (for reasons why, not clear). 

Arriving in Washington DC, they bypassed the State Department and were able to secure a private meeting with FDR that lasted several hours. They assured the President that they had access to the moderates, the young conservative Army officers, and the Prime Minister. Soon after FDR pulled Ambassador Nomura into the conversation – but not Hull and the State Department.

Nomura found his naval attache, Capt. Yokoyoma, shared his perspective that a way to peace was necessary as Japan would ultimately lose in a war with the U.S.  Nomura, Yokoyoma and two other staffers in the Washington DC embassy (unnamed and called “John Doe”) were then drawn into this parallel diplomacy effort.

The Maryknoll father’s Tokyo connections were in fact not that well connected, and did not represent either the moderates or the conservatives. But by March 1941, FDR had drawn Hull into the dialog. Long story short, in the end the stream of off-the-books diplomacy went nowhere. However it had three deleterious effects. 

Nomura and Hull negotiated secretly. When the modified-Maryknoll proposal was presented to Tokyo and the Foreign Ministry, Nomura presented it as an American proposal without revealing the Maryknoll connection, sending inconsistent signals to Tokyo leading them to assume America’s resolve was weakening and that more concessions could be extracted. 

In the end, Hull slowly morphed the draft to be the same as his four fundamental principles which asked for a permanent solution tied to concepts and lacking specificity. But it was understood that the U.S. wanted Japan to immediately withdraw from China – which was a not-starter for China.

It absorbed Secretary Hull’s time and energy from March to June when he realized this path was leading nowhere. In June he started an extended vacation and time away from Washington DC. Thus, he was not present in DC when Japan moved into Southern French Indochina (South Vietnam), the financial freeze was set, Dean Acheson slow-rolled the license approval in the FFCC, and the “oil embargo” began.

As we move into the summer of 1941 there are many dialogues and many distractions.

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives. | Original timeline by G. Corrigan