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Conclusion And the Japanese were right to do it. From their point of view we were their mortal enemy. As long as we existed, we were a deadly threat to them. Their only mistake was that they failed to finish us at the start. —Professor Groeteschele in Fail-Safe (1964) It should be remembered that three centuries ago a great Japanese leader started out to conquer China and that ultimately the Japanese nation gave up on that idea. . . . Not long after the Japanese Army and Navy had withdrawn . . . another great Japanese leader decided to make Japan an isolated and secluded hermit nation. —Stanley Hornbeck (1940) In the autumn of 1941, America’s carefully crafted containment strategy brought on the war its creators sought to avoid. In Washington, the dream of achieving long-term objectives and short-term imperatives, safeguarding the Open Door and breaking the Axis Alliance, led senior military and civilian leaders to reject an eleventh-hour compromise. In turn, this decision left the Japanese government with no choice but war. In explaining why negotiations failed, Foreign Minister Togo pointed to problems that had plagued Japanese-American relations for decades. “The United States Government,” he declared, “has persistently adhered to its traditional doctrines and principles . . . in East Asia.” If Japan were to accept Washington’s latest proposal, he argued, the empire’s “very survival would inevitably be threatened.” His colleague, Privy Council President Yoshimichi Hara, agreed. To accept Hull’s offer meant erasing “in one stroke not only our gains in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars but also the benefits of the Manchurian Incident.” For Tojo, Washington’s final proposal simply “threatened the very existence of our empire.”1 If US policy, especially the transition from containment to rollback, convinced the Tojo cabinet that war was preferable to diplomacy, it persuaded its American counterpart that conflict was preferable to compromise. Stimson, who continued to see Thailand as Japan’s next victim, grew so anxious to prevent a last-minute accord that he badgered Marshall and Stark not to suggest “to the President that he request Japan to reopen the conversations.” While “glad to have more time” to prepare for war, he “didn’t want it at any cost of 252 The Currents of War humility on the part of the United States or of reopening the thing which would show a weakness on our part.” He need not have worried. Rather than pleading for additional time, Marshall and Stark simply told Roosevelt that the latest Japanese troop movements suggested a southern advance. While they could not specify a likely target, they did inform FDR that, rather than Malaya, Singapore, or the East Indies, the Japanese would in all probability strike the Burma Road, Thailand, or the Philippines. Despite this sobering news and their conclusion that “the desirable strength has not been reached,” neither insisted on additional concrete steps to buy more time. They even noted that, from the standpoint of coalition defense, “Japanese involvement in Yunnan or Thailand up to a certain extent is advantageous” as it “leads to further dispersion, longer lines of communication and an additional burden on communications.”2 As Japanese forces continued to move, Stimson, Knox, and Hornbeck drew up for the president to send to Congress a war warning that, like Hull’s ten-point plan, sought to rally the nation should the administration decide to defend either Thailand or British and Dutch colonial possessions. The president , who left for Warm Springs, Georgia, even before his aides completed the warning, was also not overly concerned about the prospect of war. Recent intelligence indicating that Japanese troop transports were heading for Saigon rather than points further south convinced Stimson that the Japanese were “evidently not going to make the attack at once and are . . . not even going to invade Thailand at once.” The coalition, he believed, had gained a further delay.3 At the State Department, meanwhile, rollback’s most stalwart supporters were, like Stimson, more concerned with the prospect of a last-minute American compromise than with the chance of a Japanese-American conflict. Hull wanted “the President to take a stiff stand,” while “Hornbeck was urging determination to act by force of arms” to defend Thailand. Harry Hopkins and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Felix Frankfurter also sought “decisive action,” and Hopkins, who enjoyed as close a relationship with the president as any man, roused himself from his hospital bed in order to lunch with FDR. After their meeting, Hopkins...

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