America in the Forties

War in the Pacific

71 War in the Pacific V ICTOR Y OV ER GER M A N Y was merely a partial triumph over the Axis powers , and only after a defeat of Japan in September 1945 was the world finally at peace. The war in the Pacific represented the culmination of a series of controversies between the United States and Japan dating back to the early 1900s. Even though U.S.–Japanese relations improved after World War I, American military planners had already begun to consider the possibility of war with this rising Pacific power. Relations between the two nations soured during the 1930s when a more militant government came to power in Japan. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 initiated a sharp decline in relations between these future antagonists, which lasted throughout the decade. The Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, followed years of failed efforts to resolve foreign policy differences between the two powers, igniting a war that would last more than three and a half years. Knowing that its expansionist policy might lead to war, Japan had been rearming for years during the 1930s and would be a formidable enemy should a war with the United States break out. By the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, its army contained more than 5 million fully and partially trained soldiers, matched against approximately 350,000 poorly equipped U.S. troops in the Pacific. However, the United States was much better prepared with its navy than its ground forces. When the war began, the United States had seventeen battleships, six aircraft carriers, and thirty-two cruisers, distributed about equally between the Atlantic and the Pacific. The Japanese had ten battleships, nine aircraft carriers, and forty-six cruisers, all stationed in the western Pacific. Helping the Japanese was the fact that the United States was engaged in a two-front war and was not willing to commit more 72 A M E R I C A I N T H E F O R T I E S than 15 to 30 percent of its overall war effort to the Pacific war. This tilt toward Europe reflected U.S. military thinking that Nazi Germany was the more dangerous enemy. With the Pacific military balance clearly in its favor, Japan was optimistic about the war’s outcome. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was central to its strategy to defeat the Americans. Japan had decided on a plan—known as the Southern Operation —to attack the East Asian mainland and various Pacific islands that it had long desired to dominate and gain access to their natural resources. When it was warned by the United States to leave its neighbors alone, relations seriously deteriorated. Japan then concluded that to succeed with the Southern Operation, it must first destroy the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. With the attack so carefully planned, Japan was very confident of success, believing that the “decadent self-indulgent Americans had no stomach for war’s hardship ” and would be so traumatized by Pearl Harbor that they would quickly sue for peace.1 For Japan, the possible consequences of the attack on Pearl Harbor were enormous. Admiral Isaroku Yamamoto, who had studied at Harvard in the 1920s, was in charge of the operation. He knew the vast U.S. industrial base and large population would make the United States a formidable foe in a fight and probably an invincible one if the conflict were prolonged. Yamamoto , who had fought in Japan’s great victory at Tsushima Straits during the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, felt that success at Pearl Harbor might persuade the United States to accept Japanese domination over China and the Pacific. At a minimum, he hoped that crippling the U.S. Pacific fleet would buy time for Japan’s war strategy to go forward unmolested and allow Japan to consolidate its hold on the soon-to-be conquered areas in Southeast Asia and the western Pacific. He also knew that a surprise Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor might so enrage the Americans that they would continue fighting until Japan was totally defeated. Yamamoto realized that Japan’s resources were limited and that unless it could bring the United States to the peace table in a reasonably short time, a prolonged struggle would work against it. Although fighting a seemingly endless war in China since 1937, the Japanese were confident of victory in a major war with the West. Its future enemies, the United States and England...