H-Ref-EWV-T

Extracted from “The Pacific Campain” by D. Van-der-Vat

View from East

View from West

Torpedoes

The View from the East

Japan's southward advance, even though it was in the opposite direction from all its previous expansion, derived directly from its military adventures, political scheming and economic ambitions on the Asian mainland. This is not to say that the move south was immutable fate, either for Japan or for its victims: the Japanese were and are as responsible for their own actions and choices as everyone else, regardless of foreign provocation's and errors. Nevertheless, the short but brutish and nasty story of Japanese imperial expansion has features only too familiar to the students of past empires, whether the ancient Roman or the modern Russian. A power on the make begins to expand by "absorbing" its immediate neighbor (in Japan's case, Korea in 1910); to protect its acquisition, it conquers its neighbor's neighbor (Manchuria), sets up a buffer state (Manchukuo), creates another buffer (northern China), and uses that as a base to move against its next victim (China), and possibly its most deadly rival (the Soviet Union). We see imperialism imitating scientific principles such as Newton's first law of motion whereby movement continues unless halted (imperial inertia); the abhorrence of nature for a vacuum is parodied by imperialist opportunism, which drew Japan first into China, then down upon the Asiatic empires of the European powers involved in the war with Hitler's Germany.

It is not customary to refer, in the context of the Second World War, to "Tojo's Japan," or even Hirohito's; nor do we equate the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, formed in 1940 to absorb all Japanese political parties, with the National Socialist party, the only legal one in Hitler's Germany, even though the former was in some respects a conscious imitation of the latter. The truth is that the Japan which took on the world at war and lost was run by a military junta of no fixed composition a shifting, authoritarian oligarchy rather than a totalitarian dictatorship.

It came to the fore in Manchuria in 1928, when the "Kwantung Army," as the Japanese garrison was called, killed an intractable local warlord by causing an explosion on the Japanese-controlled South Manchurian Railway (SMR). The junta won the support of most Japanese admirals in 1930, after the perceived "humiliation" of Japan at the London Naval Conference, about which more later. Japan was easily humiliated: rejection of any of its demands was enough. Aggravated by Japan's severe suffering in the Slump, which helped to undermine moderate, civilian influence in government, the rising junta's Kwantung branch staged another explosion on the SMR at Mukden in September 1931 as an excuse for conquering the rest of Manchuria in a few months. This euphemistically named "Manchuria Incident" led to the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo under the "Emperor" Pu-yi, scion of the deposed Manchu dynasty, which had ruled China until 1911. Encouraged by this cheap success and undeterred by international condemnation, which merely provoked Japan to flounce out of the tottering League of Nations in 1933, the junta ran off the rails altogether in 1937. At the Marco Polo Bridge outside Peking, the Japanese "China Garrison Force," in place since the international suppression of the xenophobic Boxer Rebellion of 1900, engineered a clash with a Chinese Army patrol. This was then used as an excuse to attack northern China all without consulting civilian or military superiors in Tokyo. The latter managed, however, to do what was expected of them: they sent reinforcements. The ensuing war, unwinnable for either side, spread across China; to the Japanese it always remained simply "the China Incident." It is not unreasonable to see in the manufactured clash of July 1, 1937, so similar to Hitler's ploy against Poland two years later, the true start of the Second World War, because these two participants fought each other continuously from then until 1945.

In its bid to become the USA of the western Pacific ( a strictly economic ambition), Japan classed itself as a "have-not" nation with a legitimate grievance. What it really "had not," like Germany and Italy among the larger powers, was territorial acquisitions to exploit the only contemporary yardstick of greatness, even more important than a big navy. The rest of the world soon came to see Japan as an acquisitive aggressor, inordinately ambitious and completely ruthless. Japan came late -- indeed, last -- to old-style colonialism, but chose to learn nothing from its predecessors in this pursuit. Like them, it cared little for the feelings of the colonized; unlike them, it was never deterred by the views of the other powers, which it either ignored or used as grounds for more aggression while it built up its own empire. In this outlook it was very similar to Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II, and even more under Hitler: unable or unwilling to distinguish between its needs and its wants, Japan helped itself to what it fancied and was quite often genuinely perplexed by the hostile reaction. Like Germany, where almost everyone who could walk and talk hated the Treaty of Versailles, Japan had an almighty bone to pick with the rest of the world. Most Japanese people regarded anyone who questioned their country's ambition as hostile and did not try to understand any other party's point of view. Where the rest of the world went wrong was in foolishly underestimating the unique capacity for self-sacrifice with which ordinary Japanese supported their country's aim to be a first-rate power.

There was much less disagreement among the Japanese (or in Germany) on the end than on the means of achieving the fulfillment of their country's "just demands." Hitler came to power on the back of the German national sense of grievance, and was as conscious as the Japanese military of the lessons of 1918. Like the Japanese, he thought his country was overcrowded and needed more territory, a rationalization of imperial ambition throughout the ages. The Nazis, like the Italian fascists, were a mass movement that rose to power from the grass roots under a populist leader, whereas the Japanese junta manipulated a complaisant emperor to impose its will from the top. But each Axis regime drew the same conclusion from Germany's defeat in 1918: the next war would be long, and therefore autarky, economic self-sufficiency, was the key to national security, military success and world domination. That was the only way to avoid a repetition of the blockade by sea and land which defeated Germany in 1918.

So, while Hitler schemed to acquire Lebensraum and Mussolini concentrated on empire-building in northeastern Africa, the Japanese were busy inventing the "New Order in East Asia" (1938) and the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" (1940), both designed to subordinate the region to the perpetual benefit and glory of a self sustaining, greater Japan. Tokyo had some success at first in presenting this as a crusade against Euro-American domination of Asia. It won over many indigenous nationalists in British, French and Dutch colonies at least until the Japanese Army arrived and lent new vigor to the old military customs of rape and pillage. The Germans made exactly the same error in the Soviet Union: each army behaved as the master race in arms; each used the stratagem of surprise attack without declaration of war, and then Blitzkrieg tactics, to get its way. But whereas Hitler dominated his generals and admirals the Japanese general staffs dominated Japan. The consequences for their victims were remarkably similar. There was, for example, not much to choose, except in such matters as climate and language, for the doubly unfortunate Dutch between life in the Netherlands under Nazi rule and in the East Indies under the Japanese.

Small wonder that Reich and Empire were to become allies regard less of reciprocal racial disdain. The first concrete sign of things to come was Japan's decision to sign the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany in November 1936 (the Comintern -- Communist International -- was the Soviet mechanism for controlling foreign communist parties). A secret provision required each signatory not to help the Soviet Union if the other went to war against it; the published text was a vague commitment to oppose communism and all its works wherever they might be found. The future Axis partners had identified their overwhelming common interest: the Soviet Union, principal potential enemy of each.

For Japan this was just one of many fateful decisions that led to its disastrous war with the United States. The Slump became a time for taking tough measures at home -- and taking sides abroad. The Pacific Campaign cannot be properly understood unless it is seen in the context of Japan's prewar domestic and foreign policies and the links between

the two, as summarized below.

Foreigners had (and have) great difficulty in understanding how Japan worked as a state and who was really in charge. The Japanese had gone so far as to imitate the West in having a symbolic head of state and an executive, a legislature, a judiciary, an army, and a navy all formally answerable to him. The fact that the Army and the Navy were, as centers of power in the state, at least equal to the civilian organs of government rather than subject to their authority was not outside Western experience. In making this ultimately disastrous arrangement in the constitutional changes of 1889, the Japanese were only copying the Prussians who dominated Europe as the world's strongest military power for more than half a century, until 1918, on just such a basis (the Japanese chose to copy the British in establishing a House of Lords and a battle fleet and imitated the French in such areas as law and education ). The independence of the military dated from the creation, in 1878, of general staffs for Army and Navy directly under the emperor and outside the control of the Diet (parliament) or even the Cabinet. The paradox was that the emperor, unlike the Kaiser, did not feel free to intervene in government. He exercised his influence through his personal advisers or in private meetings with those, such as key ministers and chiefs of staff, who had the right of access to the throne. Thus his divine status was protected by noninvolvement in day-to-day policy with all its disputes, errors, and corruption; by the same token, those with real power could hide behind the facade of imperial rule whenever convenient, an excellent incentive for irresponsibility on all sides.

This gave very broad latitude indeed to leaders whose actions were rendered immune from challenge by the simple device of being declared as done "in the name of the emperor." A general could tell Hirohito, with the customary groveling and outward respect, what he was planning; the emperor had no power to stop him, so the general could then inform the Cabinet of what he was about to do, overriding any objections by laying claim to imperial sanction. From the turn of the century, the ministers responsible for the Army and the Navy had to be officers from the relevant service. After 1936 they had to be on the active list, to prevent the appointment of men from the retired list as a means of getting round the wishes of the serving generals and admirals. This gave the general staffs not only the decisive say (or veto) on individual appointments to these posts but also the power to prevent the formation of a new government, simply by refusing to supply serving officers to fill them. If they did not like a prime-ministerial nominee, they would decline to provide a general (as the Army did in 1940, for example) or an admiral as Army or Navy minister -- even if the would-be premier had found favor with palace advisers and been recommended by them to the emperor. The three key men in each service -- minister, chief of staff, and inspector-general of education and training -- were thus free to pick their own successors without consulting any outsider, whether emperor, prime minister or the rival service.

The two armed forces were not required to inform the Cabinet of their strength and dispositions, in peace or even in wartime. Thus the claims by such as ex-Prime Minister Tojo and ex-Foreign Minister Togo at the Tokyo war-crimes trial that they were not told in advance of the Pearl Harbor plan (or of the great American victory at Midway for weeks after the event) are not as ludicrous as they seemed when they were first made. With this kind of contemptuous conduct as the norm in the highest ranks, it is hardly surprising that the Japanese forces were more Prussian than the Prussians, not to say medieval, in their approach to discipline. Brutality was institutionalized to a degree probably unparalleled anywhere in the modern world. Boy officer-candidates were put in harsh premilitary academies and cadet schools with narrow curricula, hard physical routines and very little intellectual training (something the Germans did not neglect). Free discussion and intelligent questioning were forbidden on pain of severe punishment, ensuring that the Japanese military elite was unimaginative, rigid, undemocratic, inflexible and totally lacking in initiative. This goes a long way toward explaining the sheer, all-embracing inadequacy of the Japanese leadership, overwhelmingly military in background as it was, before and during the war.

Training was aimed at producing in all ranks total, unquestioning obedience to orders, including standing prohibitions against retreat, surrender, and being taken alive. If captured wounded or unconscious, the Japanese officer or enlisted man was expected to kill himself for shame when he was able to, even if he had managed to return to his own side. Such was the "Japanese spirit" inculcated at all levels, the mind over-matter approach which persuaded hundreds of thousands to fight on beyond reason and throw their lives away. This, the unimportance of the individual in Japanese society at large and the psychic and physical explosion which took place when the constraint of total obedience was lifted from victorious troops licensed to rape and pillage after a victory, goes a long way toward explaining the peculiar horrors inflicted by the Japanese upon the troops, civilians and even the children of the enemy. Life was cheap in Japan; those in its services were as unlikely as anyone else to place greater value on an enemy than they did on themselves.

Japanese military leaders chose to believe that Germany's 1918 defeat was overwhelmingly caused by lack of raw materials. The idea that constitutional flaws such as over exaltation of the Kaiser or the assignment of undue weight to the opinions of the general staff might have contributed to driving Germany into an avoidable war did not occur to them. It was one of those errors Japanese officers were not intellectually trained to identify. Officers accepted no blame for their actions because they were obeying orders or executing the emperor's will (theoretically the same thing). There was nobody in a position to correct them, even if the emperor occasionally would not conceal his displeasure over military mistakes. But failure, if identified and made public, meant shame, and shame entailed ritual suicide in the samurai's Bushido code. Further, generals and admirals, exhausted in late middle age by a lifetime of repression and out of touch with the lower orders, fell under the influence of the younger, more vigorous middle-rankers. The captains, majors and colonels commanded the individual ships, battalions and squadrons or did all the work on the staff; they often came from rural backgrounds and were in touch with the peasants in uniform who constituted the majority of their men. These officers too were unable to act on their own, and drew courage from combining in various right-wing societies and clubs to impose their collective will on their flagging superiors. It was these middling commanders who increasingly saw the force at their immediate disposal as the instant solution to Japan's growing problems between the wars. Senior commanders, clinging to office to avoid sinking into obscurity on a poor pension, not only encouraged them but were also prepared to use them in furtherance of disputes with rivals among their own contemporaries.

Internal pressures had more to do with Japan's drift into the Second World War than external factors. Between the revolution of 1868, which formally restored rule by the Emperor, and 1930, the population of the Home Islands rose from thirty to sixty-five million; by the end of 1941 it was about seventy million. Small wonder that Japan became an importer of food for the first time at about the turn of the century and felt insecure as a result. It had never been dependent on the outside world before, yet became even more so when its new industries demanded fuel and raw materials from abroad. Japanese interest in expansion on the Asian mainland was based as much on a desire to ease its population problem by emigration as on colonialist emulation of the West.

By the time of the "incident" at Mukden in 1931, therefore, at least one million Japanese had migrated to Manchuria (ex-servicemen were preferred, on the ancient Roman colonial model). This substantial figure was, however, dwarfed by the huge migration from China proper into the region. According to Japanese sources, in the quarter-century from 1907 to 1931 the population very nearly doubled, from seventeen to thirty-three million. Even after allowing for incoming Japanese and natural increase, this represents a massive influx -- one of the great migrations of the century -- which contemporary Japanese officials naturally attributed to the orderly conditions and flourishing economy of the southern part of the region, under their control since 1905. In 1937, as Japan went to war with China, Tokyo planned to settle one million Japanese households -- five million people -- in Manchuria and northern China in the twenty years until 1957: some five hundred thousand actually emigrated in a couple of years; of these, half were farmers and one-fifth teenagers. Whether the Japanese (today 125 million) actually needed Lebensraum is debatable; but they certainly did their best ex post facto to justify their claim to it.

In Japan itself, the decade that followed the end of the First World War was relatively stable, especially when compared with the thirties, despite increasing diplomatic and economic difficulties. Nominally at least, and a strongly authoritarian social structure notwithstanding, the civilians were in charge under a two-party system: they even defeated the Navy in forcing acceptance of the Washington Treaties of 1922 and managed to impose cuts in military and naval budgets. There was not much to choose philosophically between the Minseito party, financed mainly by the Mitsubishi corporation, and the Seiyukai, backed by the Mitsui concern; both were middle-of-the-road and by and large took turns governing in the broad interests of their backers and the new urban middle class. The absence of a parliamentary tradition only served to encourage generalized corruption on a huge scale. This bred a general contempt for politicians, their big-business backers in the Zaibatsu (the cartel of the leading conglomerates) and the political process in a country only recently emerged from feudalism and still strongly agricultural. Indeed, the level of tension between the traditional Japanese way of life and the swift spread of many aspects of western civilization -- economic problems, jazz, modern clothes, rapid urbanization, women office workers, mass media, political ferment on left and (especially) right, trade unionism, an incipient youth culture, class conflict, cocktail parties and even potatoes had no parallel in any other society. It was a powerful and dangerous social brew, and it soon went to people's heads especially when Japan was forced to import the effects of the "Wall Street Crash."

As Crown Prince, Hirohito caused one sensation after another in 1921 with his unprecedented overseas tour by battleship to various parts of the British Empire, Britain itself, France and Belgium (including the First World War battlefields ), the Netherlands, Italy and the Vatican and the tastes he brought back with him. These included the great British breakfast of eggs and bacon, to which he remained loyal, except in wartime as a gesture to austerity, for the rest of his life. He also learned to like horse-racing, nightclubs and golf, all Japanese passions to the present day. When he came back, he was cheered to the echo by huge crowds which had been following his travels through the press, newsreels and radio: it was an all too brief suspension of the xenophobia and intolerance endemic in contemporary Japan. His taste for Western dress was made harder to satisfy by his divine status, which prevented tailors from measuring him except by the unreliable eyeball, applied fleetingly and at a suitably respectful distance. Hence the famous baggy clothes of so many early photographs. But his best attempts to dilute the stifling formality of palace life failed. He was wont to say in later years that his visit to England, especially his time in Oxford, gave him the happiest days of his life. He envied the informality (strictly relative) of the British House of Windsor, of which he was reminded when the Prince of Wales ( later briefly King Edward VIII) returned his visit in 1922: they played a lot of golf together.

Hirohito was born on April 29, 1901, the eldest son of Crown Prince Yoshihito and Princess Sadako, and was, inevitably, brought up at the court of the Emperor Meiji. Considering the stuffiness associated with the imperial court, Meiji was a surprisingly convivial, uninhibitedly bibulous man: Hirohito is said to have been put off alcohol for life when he was made drunk by his father, and given an appalling hangover, before he was of school age. He was placed under the tutelage of General Nogi Maresuke, the intellectual war hero who defeated the Russians in 1905. Nogi saw to it that the always frail-looking Hirohito became a competent all-round sportsman as well as a conscientious student at the special school for the offspring of the Japanese peerage. The general was an ascetic and instilled the virtues of austerity into his pupil: displaying these qualities became the youth's way of rebelling against the licentious example set by his grandfather and even more so by his father. Meiji died of cancer in 1912, whereupon Yoshihito became the Emperor Taisho, Hirohito became Crown Prince -- and Nogi committed ritual suicide. The general thus kept the promise he made when he lost both his sons in the bloody struggle with the Russians for Port Arthur in 1905, a commitment deferred on Meiji's order. It was a terrible, pointless example for such a gifted man to give to lesser mortals; it was also a trauma for the reflective Hirohito.

The new chief tutor was the other superhero of the Russo-Japanese War, Admiral Togo Heihachiro, victor in the Battle of Tsushima. But as a teacher the admiral was as disappointing as the general had been inspiring. Because his science tutors were better than his arts teachers, and probably also because he had an inquiring mind, Hirohito took most interest in the natural sciences. He eventually became an amateur marine biologist of repute largely on the strength of discovering a hitherto unrecorded species of prawn at the age of seventeen. His strongest academic interest proved to be history, especially military; his heroes were Napoleon, Lincoln and Darwin, whose portraits were always to be seen on the walls of his study.

The year 1921 proved to be the most traumatic in the peacetime experience of the earnest Crown Prince. He became engaged to Princess Nagako -- his own choice -- after a convoluted dispute at court, ostensibly over the hereditary color-blindness in her family but actually between two powerful aristocratic clans for domination of the imperial household. A leading extreme-nationalist group (Japan had hundreds) was used to mobilize public opinion in favor of Nagako. As soon as the row was settled, Hirohito was almost bundled out of the country on the foreign tour already mentioned, disconcerting his British hosts by starting a week early and staying longer then originally planned. Nonetheless, he always remembered the warmth of his welcome abroad at all levels, especially in Britain. He was nothing if not sentimental.

While he was still away, a right-wing extremist assassinated the prime minister, Hard Takashi, the first untitled occupant of the post, in protest against Japan's participation in the Washington Conference, negotiating the relative strengths of the world's leading navies. This was just one instance, and not the most dramatic, of the extraordinary fanaticism evoked by the stresses and strains of Japan's struggle to excel in a world dominated by the West and its values. Society's readiness to understand if not condone such extreme reaction was symbolized by the assassin's sentence of twelve years on a capital charge, as if his had been a sexual rather than a political crime passionel.

On the right, the most radical (a large and growing element) took the view that all "eight corners of the world" should be united under Japanese domination. To the left, liberal, socialist and communist groups also existed. But they were having an increasingly hard time making themselves heard, let alone exercising the basic freedoms taken for granted in democratic societies but increasingly hard to come by in an instinctively authoritarian Japan. Hirohito had glimpsed such social and political freedoms being enjoyed during his grand tour. Though there was not much he could do about politics when he got home, he did what he could to ease the social atmosphere by getting rid of as much palace protocol as he dared.

His wishes soon carried rather more weight among the nebulous groups of courtiers whose self-appointed role was to "protect" the throne (mainly from scandal, as they chose to define the term). On November 25, 1921, Hirohito, still not twenty-one years old, became regent when the eccentricities of his father merged into madness. The Crown Prince's taste for informality was allowed to run to one fairly rowdy palace party in December. After that it was back to the old ritual, with one major if superficial change: Western dress now effectively became compulsory except on the stuffiest ceremonial occasions. But it was Western attire of the most sober kind. Even so, for a few years, until Hirohito's marriage in 1924, the palace became the venue for an open ended association of high-flying younger officers, bureaucrats, and other "junior leaders," who would gather at the Regent's behest to debate the issues of the day or listen to lectures from leaders in the academic, administrative, and military fields. This was a uniquely elitist club-cum secret-society of the kind to which so many Japanese, with their strongly developed sense of "family," loved to belong.

But life in Japan was becoming no easier. At lunch time on September 1, 1923, the worst earthquake in Japanese history, which is saying a great deal, laid waste the Tokyo-Yokohama region, causing huge fires and deaths in six figures. Millions were made homeless, and Hirohito's wedding was postponed. The superstitious saw this disaster as punishment for Japanese flirtation with Western decadence. They took out their feelings on left-wingers, with their foreign ideas, and on Korean immigrants, who did the most menial jobs; thousands were massacred. On his way to open the new Diet on December 27, Hirohito narrowly escaped being shot by another of Japan's plentiful supply of extremists. This one, who was executed, was officially said to be a left-wing revolutionary, but he had more obvious links with the court faction that had lost the battle over Hirohito's fiancee. Unwilling to face another postponement, and undeterred by his brush with the violence never far from the surface of his simmering nation, Hirohito married his princess thirty days later, on January 26, 1924.

The omens notwithstanding, it proved to be a happy marriage. Its first three years were also a period of unusual calm, despite the death of Taisho in December 1926. Thereupon Hirohito, now the 124th emperor, followed ancient custom by choosing "Showa" as the name by which he was to be officially remembered. The word means "enlightened peace": hindsight enables us to savor the irony in full. The underlying, authoritarian social trend, however, continued unabated. It was fostered by a frustrated military which felt its marginal role in the First World War had caused it to fall behind, both in the international league and in the estimation of the nation. From 1926 onward, education was militarized, even at the elementary level, a reversion to past strictness after an unconvincing dabble with well-diluted liberal ideas. Emperor worship, aimed at the institution as the source of all legitimacy rather than the person, was nurtured; small boys put on uniforms and drilled with wooden "rifles." Discipline among adults was fostered by the foundation in 1928 -- twenty years before George Orwell made the term famous -- of the "Thought Police," whose role was to stamp out Western ideas such as communism, socialism, liberalism, materialism and individual rights.

But if the authorities automatically assumed that the really dangerous ideas came from the left, the most dangerous people, as so often in history, were to be found at the other end of the political spectrum. The wild men in the Kwantung Army killed Marshal Chang Tso-lin, the Manchurian warlord who obstructed Japanese domination of the region, by blowing up his train on the Southern Manchurian Railway in June 1928. The civilian government of the Seiyukai party, led by retired General Tanaka Gfichi as prime minister, had wanted to use Chang as a counterweight to Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese nationalists in the Kuomintang, in a divide-and-rule strategy for northern China. The fire eating colonels and majors were not interested in such subtleties. Their stupidity was made manifest when Chang's son, the "Young Marshal," took over, had two Manchurian officers shot for collaborating with the Japanese and then declared for the Kuomintang. Few assassinations can have proved quite so counterproductive quite so quickly.

The middle-rankers were unfazed by such setbacks; as will soon become clear, their invariable remedy for the failure of violence was more violence. They were also unable to appreciate the prudence which led Tokyo to give diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union, their "enemy number one," five years before Washington did so. The Chang murder was ascribed to "bandits" and two officers were suspended for failing to guard the railroad adequately. The scapegoat for the cover-up, which held until after the war, was Premier Tanaka, who lost his nerve in the behind-the-scenes political row about high-level indiscipline in the Army. He resigned early in 1929, once the elaborate and protracted ceremonies attending the formal enthronement of Hirohito at the turn of the year were out of the way.

It was Minseito party's turn to form a government, and the task, a bed of nails as usual but also a poisoned chalice on this occasion, was awarded to Hamaguchi Osachi, a notably moderate civilian; his foreign minister, Baron Shidehara Kijuro, had a reputation for flexibility on China policy. Overseas observers of the increasing ferment in Japan were commensurately relieved, but the issue that was to determine the struggle between diluted democracy and mounting militarism for primacy in Japan was already looming: the strength of the Navy.

The Washington Conference of 1921-22 had, among other things, led to a naval treaty fixing the ratios of the American, British, and Japanese navies as 5:5:3 (and setting a tonnage limit on capital ships: one already commissioned first-rate Japanese battleship had to be scrapped as it was four thousand tons over). All this stuck in the craw of the ultra nationalists. So did such serious grievances as the principle of "inferiority" imposed or accepted by treaty, the ban on Japanese migration to the Western hemisphere (South as well as North America) and Australia (New Zealand as well as Australia), and the failure of Japan to extract a commitment to racial equality from the Western powers, whether at Versailles, the League of Nations or other international gatherings. The younger officers in the middle ranks and a surprisingly large proportion of the general public regarded all these setbacks as insults or outright humiliations. The Navy itself -- or, more precisely, the officer corps -- divided into "fleet" and "treaty" factions, a maritime reflection of the Army's extremist and purportedly moderate tendencies. The latter, confusingly, has also been labeled the "total-war faction," a most revealing clue to the true meaning of "moderation" in prewar Japanese history: in this context, moderation meant keeping out of war but only until Japan was totally ready to wage it! The senior bureaucrats in the civil service, the men who really ran the country, were similarly divided. It cannot be stated too often that agreement on the country's right to pre-eminence was not far short of universal in Japan. Factional differences on the issue were concerned only with the means of realizing this Oriental version of manifest destiny.

In the Navy the fleet faction had fought to the limit in 1921 for a ratio of 10:10:7 and against 5:5:3, claiming that this tiny margin made all the difference between subservience and superiority vis-a-vis the Americans, whom they already saw as the obvious potential enemy at sea: a prime example of the Japanese capacity to extract the maximum heat from a minimal divergence of opinion. Behind the ridiculous and irrelevant demand for "70 percent or bust" lay a determination to hang onto the colossal one-third of the national budget the Navy was consuming at the time (the Army's share took military expenditure up to 60 percent of the total). The Navy's enthusiasm for southward rather than northward expansion was intimately related to the fact that this course required Japan to be ready for war with America and Britain, which entailed a very large, modern fleet. The Army's preference for the opposite course was no less closely related to the consequent need to muster huge new armies, over and above those already in Korea, Manchuria and China, for war against the Soviet Union, in which the more costly, oil-thirsty Navy would have a minor role. The naval argument revived in 1929, as contacts took place among the powers m preparation for the London Naval Conference of 1930, where the Japanese delegation was to include Rear Admiral Yamamoto. He already believed that 5:5:3 was perfectly adequate for Japan's purposes: it was not the tonnage but the types of ship, especially carriers, that mattered in his eyes -- quality rather than quantity -- even if he saw no harm in taking up a 10:10:7 position for negotiating purposes. But by this time the hawks had raised the ante: nothing less than parity would do. Indeed, any limitation on armament was (or could conveniently be represented as) an attack on the imperial prerogative to determine Japanese policy: divinity does not compromise or take orders from foreigners.

So, when the Japanese delegation got as near as made no difference to 10:10:7 for cruisers and other noncapital ships, Prime Minister Hamaguchi's reward for association with this solid diplomatic success was to be shot in the stomach on November 14, 1930. Perhaps his real offense had been to force a cut of 25 percent in the 1931 naval budget. At any rate, he took nine months to die from his excruciating wounds. Before he did so, he bravely whispered his argument for the reduced naval allocation on his last appearance before Parliament. Any samurai would have approved. But it was a pointless act of defiance: the Army, itself smarting from Hamaguchi's fiscal razor, still took the view that the Navy was getting far too much. His assassin, in the pay of radical officers who were never fully identified, was sentenced to death three years after his crime -- and pardoned three months later, another extraordinary example of the dangerous Japanese practice of turning a blind eye to politically motivated crime.

Wakatsuki Refijiro of Minseito served as acting premier. His brief term was remarkable for two things: he survived it by many years, and he was in office over the period when the military hawks planned and provoked the "Manchuria Incident." When rumors of the Kwantung Army plot, aided and abetted by the Army of Korea, to extend Japanese control over the whole of Manchuria spread round Tokyo in the summer of 1931, Wakatsuki sent a major general to warn off the trio of colonels at the core of the conspiracy. They belonged to the "Cherry Blossom" secret society, the biggest and most important right-wing association among Army officers ranking from captain to full colonel. It had many friends and supporters wherever Japanese Army units were stationed. The general, himself a sympathizer who was on public record as favoring the outright annexation of Manchuria, made haste as slowly as possible and delivered the written warning on September 19 the day after the Japanese blew up a section of the South Manchurian Railway at Mukden. When a Chinese Army patrol went to investigate the blast, it was fired upon. So, at the same time, were other installations belonging to the Chinese nationalists and their local ally, the "Young Marshal" Chang. The Chinese Army was blamed.

It may be noted for the record that the Japanese Army code of the time decreed, in article 35: "A commander who opens hostilities with a foreign country without provocation shall be punished by death." Article 31 provided the same penalty for one who moved troops out of his defined area without permission. Thus the commanders of both the Kwantung and Korean armies should have been court-martialed and executed. They were not put on trial. Hirohito cautiously limited him self to expressing displeasure; the military command in Tokyo took no action; the government was no more energetic. By November, all Manchuria was under Japanese control, and preparations were well in hand to establish the puppet state of Manchukuo under the "Emperor" Henry Pu-yi, the last of the Manchus. The League of Nations Council urged a negotiated settlement by a margin of thirteen to one (Japan) and sent a commission of inquiry under the British Lord Lytton to investigate. When it uncompromisingly found against Tokyo in February 1933 the League as a whole accepted the Lytton Report by forty-two votes to one (Japan again), the Japanese delegation was led out of the chamber at Geneva by Matsuoka Yosuke, the future foreign minister, never to return. Japan formally withdrew from the League one month later.

Faced with this level of military intransigence, Wakatsuki saw no alternative but to resign over the Manchuria Incident in December 1931. The next prime minister was due to come from the Seiyukai, which put forward the frail party-leader, Inukai Tsuyoshi, aged seventy five. Appointed by Hirohito at the beginning of 1932, he lasted barely four months before being fatally shot in the face by a naval officer, one of a group of mainly military extremists who burst into his official residence on May 15, 1932. His financial minister and a leading banker, both moderates, had fallen victim to the new wave of terrorism before him. This "May 15 Incident" was, sadly, far from unprecedented. When viewed alongside the Manchurian affair, it was also a turning point: it effectively marked the end of civilian government in prewar Japan. The military was now unquestionably in command of Japan's destiny.

Yet, rather than diminishing, the political violence in Japan in creased as the impatience of the radicals knew no bounds. Nor did the territorial ambitions of the Kwantung Army and its many supporters in high places at home. They overreached themselves in the spring of 1932 by staging the first "Shanghai Incident" as an excuse to enter China's largest city and main center for both industry and foreign, especially Western, settlement. Their purpose was to put down an effective local boycott of Japanese goods organized by the Chinese nationalists. The League of Nations managed to negotiate a Japanese withdrawal, a "humiliation" that was the immediate provocation for the murder of Prime Minister Inukai. In January 1933 the Japanese helped themselves to the Chinese province of Jehol, adding it to Manchuria. Inner Mongolia and Hopei Province, inside the Great Wall of China, were next on the list; what the Kwantung Army really wanted was the mineral resources of Shansi, in northern China. A truce was arranged by international diplomatic intervention in May 1933 and a demilitarized zone temporarily established between Peking and the Great Wall. Even so, Japan's naked aggression and rampant ambition in China were not seriously challenged by the outside world, which was in the depths of the Depression, even when American and British nationals or other Westerners were insulted and assaulted by Japanese soldiers.

It was in 1933 that the first maps appeared in Japanese schoolbooks showing French Indochina, Siam (Thailand), Malaya and Singapore, the Philippines, and the Netherlands East Indies -- all the military objectives of 1941-42 -- under the Rising Sun flag, as the new American ambassador to Tokyo, Joseph C. Grew, soon reported with alarm to Washington. In December the Empress Nagako gave Hirohito a son and heir, Akihito (the present emperor), after nine years of marriage. Any hopes that this long-awaited event would calm the ultra-imperialists, who had constantly bemoaned the lack of a crown prince, were soon dashed.

Internationalism, never much in fashion in Japan, now went out of style elsewhere as individual nations tried to find one-country solutions to the threats posed by creeping economic paralysis. In Japan the silk industry, which had been the mainstay of exports, collapsed as American and other foreign customers ran out of money for such luxury. The result was acute misery and deprivation in the Japanese countryside, from which so many Army recruits, including officers, were drawn. In the cities the country's comparatively small new industrial base, not yet strong enough to stand up to competition from the major powers after the First World War, was also weakened, but the paternalism of the big employers in the Zaibatsu cartel eventually cushioned some of the worst sufferings of the workers. A large gap opened between the urban and rural economies and standards of living. But policies such as the American New Deal and the British Imperial or Commonwealth Preference only underscored the arguments of the moderate expansionist majority in Japan as well as the extremists (and the Nazis in Germany): autarky was the only guarantee of national security.

With the London Naval Agreement due for renewal in 1935 and the Washington Naval Treaty by 1936, the exploratory talks convened in London late in 1934 on extending naval disarmament assumed great importance. Yamamoto, now a vice-admiral, was at the head of the Japanese delegation for this preliminary round. His job was made no easier by Tokyo's self-contradictory desire to see Washington, the principal pact, lapse and yet to continue with naval arms limitation. Admired both at home (sacks of fan mail were forwarded to him in London) and in the West for his bluff-sailor approach with no trace of dissimulation, Yamamoto set out to obtain Anglo-American consent to parity for the Imperial Navy, triumphantly transcending the pitfalls of a relentless social round (and relieving the British First Sea Lord of (L)20 at bridge). The Western powers were naturally hostile but wanted Japan to be the party that broke off the talks. They got their wish at the turn of the year. Japan gave due and proper notice of intent to abrogate both London and Washington and was soon in a position to build some of the finest warships ever sent to sea. By 1939 the Japanese had the strongest naval presence in the Pacific, and two years later they constituted the most formidable challenge ever faced by the US Navy.

But the wildest of the wild men were still to be found in the Japanese Army, and they finally ran amok in Tokyo itself in 1936, on February 26 (the "2/26 Incident"). The trigger was the trial of a lieutenant colonel who had murdered a general on the staff of the Army Ministry in revenge for the dismissal of another general, the colonel's hero and a rabid nationalist like himself. Elements of the Imperial Guards and first divisions -- some twenty-four officers backed by twelve hundred men with heavy weapons -- tried to stage a military coup in support of the accused. They issued a manifesto demanding immediate expansion abroad and death for imperial advisers classified (by the rebels) as "disloyal." But for the bloodshed, the incompetence of the ringleaders would have made a good plot for the Marx Brothers. The conspirators thought they had killed the prime minister, Okada Keisuke, at his home, but he hid in a linen closet after his brother-in-law had been mistaken for him and gunned down. A moderate general and the Lord Privy Seal, a key palace official, were also murdered. The Grand Chamberlain, Suzuki Kantaro, another important servant of the emperor and a future prime minister, was left for dead but survived; the office of Japan's leading newspaper, the moderate Asabi Shimbun, was briefly occupied. Hirohito, faced with the most serious domestic threat to his throne in a reign that endured for two-thirds of a century, acted with a degree of resolution and ruthlessness not seen from him before or after. Loyal army units sealed off an area in the center of Tokyo of about one square mile. A new prime minister was appointed (Hirohito learned of Okada's survival only later), and when all was ready, on February 28, the emperor ordered the rebels to withdraw. On the 29th tanks and aircraft were called in to decide the issue, and the mutinous units surrendered. A purge of the officer corps followed; but, prevented at home from taking direct control of the state, the many extremist officers still in the Army looked abroad for the means to get control of imperial policy specifically to China.

A series of generals now succeeded one another as premier, as if through a revolving door, until Hirohito found himself a more durable incumbent Prince Konoye Fumimaro, a retired admiral, appointed in June 1937 and destined to hold office, with interruptions, for more than four years. Ten years older than the emperor, Konoye was a generally popular radical nationalist, on terms with Hirohito as close to informal as the monarch and prevailing custom ever permitted. Unfortunately he was also lazy, temperamental and chronically indecisive. The first week of the following month brought a long overdue, if also uneasy, alliance against Japan between warring nationalists and communists in China, a chance for those Japanese officials of the "reds-under-the-bed" persuasion to say, with as much satisfaction as fear, "I told you so." General Douglas MacArthur came to Tokyo at this juncture for his first meeting with Hirohito, over lunch at the palace, in company with President Quezon of the Philippines.

But even if Japan, Konoye's appointment, like the execution by firing squad of nineteen rebel ringleaders on July 17, was completely overshadowed by the latest and most fateful violent "incident" of them all, on the 7th. The clash between patrols carefully engineered by the Kwantung colonels at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Peking plunged Japan and China into war, and large reinforcements were soon on their way from the Home Islands. For more than eight years, an apparently endless conflict in the apparently infinite spaces of China was to be the principal drain on Japan's resources of manpower, arms and money. China came to play the same role in the Far Eastern war as Russia did in the war in Europe. China became the giant, indestructible shock absorber which tied down the bulk of the enemy armies, while the United States and its allies built up their aerial and naval firepower for amphibious counterattack on the other front, with much investment in technology and much fewer casualties.

Japan's involvement, first in Manchuria and then in the rest of northern China, put it on a collision course with the Soviet Union, whose long, indeterminate Asiatic borders now touched territory controlled or claimed by the Japanese. The Russians, ever mindful of the Germans, were remarkably circumspect, virtually abandoning their internationally recognized sphere of influence in Manchuria. But they were not prepared to appease Japan to the extent of overlooking serious incursions. Not content with plunging their country into an unwinnable war with China, the hotheads on the Japanese Army staff were more than ready to provoke the Soviets at any time of day or night. Amid the chain of events that led Japan into conflict with the West in the Pacific, there occurred an all but forgotten war between the Japanese and Red armies in 1938-39. It is important because it made both sides resolve not to repeat the experience, a decision that had obvious implications

for each in the coming war on its other front.

There were nearly three thousand exchanges of fire between Soviet and Japanese forces in the two decades after the Russian Revolution, and nearly two hundred armed skirmishes along the straggling Manchurian border. The worst of these thus far began in June 1937 over the ownership of some midstream islands in the Amur River (which have since been fought over by the Soviet Union and the Chinese People's Republic). Amid ill-concealed panic in both Tokyo and Moscow as rapid escalation threatened after the sinking of a Soviet gunboat, the Red Army pulled back into Siberia and the Kwantung Army reoccupied the islands. The affair was barely settled before the Japanese provoked their "China Incident" on July 1. The clashes between Russians and Japanese and their respective clients continued. Meanwhile, in August 1937, Moscow concluded a non-aggression pact with Chiang's nationalists.

As the Sino-Japanese war broadened and deepened, Moscow officially maintained a wary policy of nonintervention, because of the potential threat from Hitler on its western front. But the Red Army quietly built up its infantry, armor and airpower in the Far East. There were unconfirmed rumors in the West that Soviet fliers were aiding the Chinese, just as the American Colonel (later Major General) Claire L. Chennault's volunteers -- the "Flying Tigers" -- were already doing. But on July 30, 1938, there erupted a Russo-Japanese border incident of a much greater order of magnitude, at Chang-ku Feng. The name belongs to a mountain on the then disputed borders of Korea, Manchuria and the Soviet Union, close to the coast of the Sea of Japan. Remarkably inventive propaganda from both sides and a lack of impartial foreign observers forever obscured precisely what happened, but Soviet troops are known to have entrenched themselves on top of the mountain. It was left to the Japanese "Army of Korea" reduced to one thin but tough division by the China Incident to deal with the crisis; wisely, it chose at first not to exacerbate the situation, regarding the matter as one for Moscow and Tokyo to settle by diplomacy. The Kwantung Army, aggressive as ever, fumed. The frustration spread to the usual coterie of malcontent middle-rankers among the Korea Army officers, who decided to "reconnoiter in force" up the mountain and promptly got involved in a battle that ended in the displacement of the Russians. Several Soviet counterattacks failed, despite the Red Army's three-to one numerical advantage and local superiority in air, armor, and artillery. Fighting went on for two weeks.

Both sides suffered disproportionately heavy casualties more than one in five. Their military weaknesses, in the region and in general, were laid bare for those in a position to see. The Russians were seriously incompetent in several branches, the Japanese strategically exposed by long and vulnerable supply lines. Hirohito took the extraordinary step of rebuking his war minister, General Itagaki, who had also been deeply involved in provoking the Manchurian and Chinese "incidents," and the Army high command. Japanese anxiety, because of the war in China, to settle the matter without further ado was revealed to Moscow by Richard Sorge, the anti-Nazi German journalist who was the most effective Soviet spy of the period (he later warned vainly of the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union ). The Russians therefore played hard to get

diplomatically and were rewarded with a Japanese military withdrawal, transforming Moscow's tactical discomfiture into a political victory (which did not save the Soviet commander from execution in Stalin's

still continuing, paranoid military purge).

The outcome of the Battle of Chang-ku Feng, grossly underreported in the outside world, was read in various ways, according to taste, by the other powers. But it was eclipsed altogether only nine months later and seven hundred miles to the northeast. Lieutenant General Veda Ken kichi, Kwantung Army commander, had worked himself into a lather over the perceived disgrace of the Korea Army at Chang-ku Feng. On May 11, 1939, after a series of border clashes which had been going on all year, he disobeyed standing orders from Tokyo to avoid major incidents: he let a cavalry regiment cross into the Soviet puppet state of Outer Mongolia at Nomonhan, in "hot pursuit" of insurgent Mongolian horsemen who had fired on a Manchukuo Army detachment. Some one thousand Japanese infantry followed. Mongolian tanks and guns massacred the intruders in a carefully prepared trap.

Recognizing the serious potential consequences of an escalation, the Japanese, even the Kwantung Army, stayed their hand. To rub in the humiliation, the Russians, guided once again by Sorge's priceless inside information, warned that an attack on Mongolia would be treated as an invasion of the Soviet Union itself. Sorge was accurately reporting that the Japanese were determined not to be provoked; the Red Army therefore crossed the frontier from Mongolia into Manchukuo on June 18.

The Japanese colonels and majors who contributed so much to the ruination of their country got the upper hand in the Kwantung Army command in the ensuing, heated debate on what to do next, forcing

through a plan for revenge. A reinforced infantry division with air, armored, and artillery support assembled against a numerically inferior Soviet-Mongolian force and reopened hostilities with a pre-emptive air strike against the Red Army's air strength -- once again without waiting for sanction from Tokyo. A heavy clash on the ground at the beginning of July, however, led to an uncharacteristic Japanese withdrawal after a couple of days. The Kwantung Army's tanks proved to be seriously outclassed. The Japanese also lost a furious exchange of artillery barrages a few days later. As Tokyo struggled with mixed success to hold back its wild men -- especially from aerial bombardment, which was

rightly regarded as the ultimate provocation of the Russians -- the latter built up their forces in Mongolia to five infantry divisions and five tank brigades under General Georgi Zhukov, the future marshal and hero of the Soviet Union. Outnumbered nearly five to one, the Japanese were routed and fled back into Manchuria. The Russians showed good discipline by halting and digging in on what they claimed was the true border.

The Japanese, with willful stupidity, took this as proof that the Russians had lost their stomach for a fight -- otherwise they would surely have followed the ancient military injunction to make the most of victory by pursuing the beaten enemy. They scraped together five divisions for a counteroffensive, which the Kwantung Army at least saw as round one of an all-out war against the Soviet Union, to start in mid-September 1939. But diplomatic events supervened: the Russians and the Germans signed a nonaggression pact on August 23, 1939. This supreme piece of political cynicism by two totalitarian regimes with diametrically opposed long-term interests shook the world in general and Tokyo in particular. Japan was totally isolated in the midst of a war with Russia which could hardly be regarded as small and might easily become vast now that the enemy had no potential second front to worry about. Therefore, despite the seventeen thousand Japanese and Manchurian casualties (over 30 percent) sustained in more than three months of fighting, Imperial General Headquarters (Army) decided on September 2, the day after Hitler attacked Poland, to cut its losses and order a general withdrawal. In the meantime, the Japanese government of Baron Hiranuma Kiichiro fell victim to the Nazi-Soviet Pact and resigned on August 29, taking the pathologically aggressive War Minister Itagaki with it. The new Cabinet under ex-General Abe Noboyuki set out to end the Soviet war at once by negotiation, leading to a cease-fire on September 16. In the talks that ensued until formal settlement in July 1940, the anxious Japanese conceded in all directions and a border commission was set up to forestall future clashes. Frontier incidents inevitably continued, but none was allowed to escalate into a major conflict again.

The consequences of the Nomonhan campaign were momentous in the extreme. The Japanese Army lost its bloodthirsty enthusiasm for the "northern option" in imperial strategy. The Soviet Union was now an immediate threat for which serious provision ( arbitrarily fixed at sixteen divisions on permanent standby in Manchuria) must be made, over and above the draining commitment to China proper and the extra needs of a southward strategy. The Nomonhan "dress rehearsal" deterred both Japan and the Soviet Union from a war on two fronts and therefore made a major contribution to Hitler's fate, sealed when he attacked an undistracted Russia. When he did, Zhukov was free to rush west and save Moscow at the turn of 1941-42. As long as the China Incident continued, war with the Soviet Union was something Japan had to avoid at all costs. It was only when Stalin lost faith in his pact with Hitler, early in 1941, that Moscow and Tokyo suddenly signed the Russo-Japanese Neutrality Pact on April 1A, 1941 Tokyo's revenge for the tawdry deal between Hitler and Stalin in 19S9. Ironically, Japan signed because it regarded a war between Germany and Russia as highly unlikely. Had it thought otherwise and been in a position to attack the Soviet Union at the height of the German inroad from the west, the world war an subsequent history might have gone very differently indeed. Even so, the pact held until the last week of the war.

The Nomonhan disaster, actually a blessing in disguise for Japan, broke the Kwantung Army both as a fighting force and (rather too late) as a disruptive factor in Japanese military planning and international relations. Finally, and most significantly for our narrative, the Japanese Army henceforward took a rather more positive an sympathetic view of the Navy's preference for the southern (and therefore largely seaborne) strategy: only if the Russians were thoroughly beaten by the Germans would the northern option regain its appeal for the Japanese Army General Staff.

The general yearning among military leaders or a Japan as sufficient as it had been during the centuries before the West forced it to take cognizance of the outside world was really a rationalization of their desire to have their cake and eat it, an option humanity tends to go for whenever it seems to be within reach. They wanted autarky, a closed economy. Having won access to Korea seen as a Chinese dagger pointed at Japan from only a hundred miles away by defeating China in 1895, and having annexed the peninsula outright in 1910 (subsequently industrializing it at breakneck speed), the Japanese established themselves in neighboring southern Manchuria. Once drawn into that power vacuum, left by a weak and divided post-Manchu China, they were duly caught up in the classic cycle of imperial inertia already described. Their holdings in what had been or what legally still was Chinese territory expanded until they collided physically with Russia's to the north and west, and diplomatically with the interests of a weakened West in China as a whole. Continued expansion, therefore, now entailed an armed confrontation to the south and east.

The underlying aim was an economic zone within which Japan could support itself without recourse to outside, meeting all its needs in oil and other minerals, rice and other foods, steel and other industries. But in order to stabilize this new yen-zone -- which meant not only fighting the inefficient Chinese, who never the less stubbornly refused to concede, but also guarding against Russian intervention -- Japan had to import more and more from the United States and other territories in or controlled by the West. The fight for autarky was making Japan even less self-sufficient than it had been when it started. The deeper it sank into the Chinese mire, the more raw materials, oil and food it needed from America and Western possessions in Asia. Thinking officers who recognized this strategic Catch-22 often found it frustrating to the point of exploding with rage. Even Hirohito was moved to complain more than once, not about the war in China as such but rather about the generals' repeated failure to deliver the victory so confidently promised. Yet, the harder they tried to win it, the further it seemed to recede into the future.

One possible Western response in such circumstances to find a suitable form of words, cut one's losses and withdraw from an unwinnable struggle -- was not available to the Japanese, who would have lost face throughout Asia and the world. "Losing face" is of itself no more than an oriental synonym for injured pride, and fear of it is not confined to the Far East. The difference is that it could prompt suicide in Japan, where public shame far outweighs private guilt as a social inhibitor. A "withdrawal to prepared positions," meaning a forced retreat to some where that looks defensible, was an option not available to the Japanese soldier, any more than surrender or captivity. The result for the Japanese in China was to follow the example of the despairing gambler who doubles his stake every time he loses. They were still trying to "bring an early end to the China Incident" well into 1945 and even then, for midable fighters that they were, they nearly succeeded.

The autarkists found natural allies in the senior levels of the bureaucracy, who were subject to a familiar inertia of their own: administrative difficulties, of which Japan had more than its fair share, could best be dealt with by increasing the power of the administrators in the civil service. If force did not work abroad, try more force; if regimentation did not work at home, try more regimentation. If Japan was to be self-sufficient, such resources as it had, especially the people, should be properly mobilized to the best effect as if, indeed, they were soldiers. This lay behind the bureaucrats' call for "reform," which was their harmonious counterpoint to the military demand for autarky. The Japanese fully understood teat in a total war everything and everybody had to be thrown into the struggle and there was no such place as "behind

the lines."

Japan's military leadership, however, had nothing more to offer than an unthinking, unchallengeable discipline of the barrack square, whence it had come, with which to motivate the emperor's subjects: civilians too were only there to obey orders. The result was that the phenomenal capacity for individual self-sacrifice, readily made, among ordinary Japanese citizens was never forged into an instrument representing the will of the nation, a fact for which, in retrospect, Japan's enemies had every reason to be thankful. One of the greatest ironies of the Second World War is that the democracies proved much better than the totalitarian countries, including their own ally Russia, at total mobilization; the secret of their success was that they had elective legislatures to debate and vote on such measures, and that in general they treated the public as adults. Britain, the most exposed of the undefeated Allies, went furthest, introducing limitations on the liberty it was fighting for that would have been unthinkable in peacetime.

Both purported solutions to Japan's self-imposed problem autarky and reform gained much ground in the Depression. In a country with little experience and less faith in Western-style democratic institutions and here the parallel with the Weimar Republic, which gave way to Nazism in Germany, is almost total the general population found it easy to blame parliament, politicians and the civilian establishment in general for what was really a worldwide malaise. Meanwhile "one country" solutions were increasingly favored round the world, from America with its New Deal and Britain with its abandonment of the gold standard ( slashing the prices of its exports ), to Russia with its new five-year plans and Germany with its regimented labor-force and its dream of Lebensraum. Even in the democracies there was widespread support for authoritarian solutions. With its twin aims of autarky and reform, the ruling elite in Japan was thus marching to the same tune as the governments of the other leading powers; nor was it lagging behind in the broad drift toward totalitarianism -- on the contrary.

Increasing regimentation of the population through modern media and communications was common to the democracies and the dictator ships alike. In Japan, where the economy was reeling in the Slump, strict exchange controls and government expenditure cuts were imposed in the early thirties. In 1935 the Cabinet Deliberative Council was set up to bring political and business leaders together; its bureaucratic instrument was the Cabinet Investigative Bureau, which coordinated the work of senior and middling ministry officials. Out of this apparatus in 1937, after the China Incident, grew the Cabinet Planning Board or CPB (and ultimately out of that the Ministry for International Trade and Industry MITI which has done so much to make the postwar Japanese economy the world's most powerful). A Welfare Ministry was established at the same time to improve the health of the people; the Army, worried by the poor quality of recruits as more men were needed in China, was deeply involved from the first. On the consciously adopted model of the Tennessee Valley Authority, electric power was nationalized in 1938; on the Nazi model, an agricultural relief program was introduced. The CPB took an interest in all major aspects of the nation's life, including not only business, finance and industry but also communications and culture. Industry was to make Japan self-sufficient in liquid fuels by manufacturing synthetic petroleum products, as a result of which a huge investment in unperfected technology produced barely one sixth of the planned output. Even the Germans, who led the world in this field and helped the Japanese, got nowhere near being able to dispense with the real thing.

Nonetheless, all these measures looked like a convincing first set of steps toward the long-term goal of autarky if only Japan could have five years of peace to complete its program. But, thanks to the impatience of the extremists in the Army ( the autarkists, as ever, representing the moderate tendency), the China Incident put that, and with it self sufficiency in the yen-zone of Japan-Korea-Manchuk an, beyond reach. Autarky was the prerequisite for future expansion; now expansion was the prerequisite for autarky. The oil of the Indies, the rice in Indochina, the rubber and tin of Malaya had to be added immediately to Japan's resources if it was to solve the China problem without continued dependence on an increasingly irritated America. Those officers who feared the Soviet Union most of all advocated coming to terms with Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists and persuaded their colleagues to drop the idea of a second puppet state alongside Manchukuo in northern China. But a negotiated settlement of the China Incident came to nothing, because of Japanese arrogance and Chiang's determination to use anti-Japanese sentiment to unite his country.

In Chicago in October 1937, soon after the Kwantung Army had badly injured the British ambassador to China and damaged Nanking, Chiang's capital at the time, by bombing, Roosevelt made his renowned " quarantine" speech, advocating the isolation of "lawlessness" to prevent an epidemic. It was a message meant for Tokyo above all, but it was not accompanied by threats or any practical suggestion as to how to force patients suffering from congenital aggressiveness into a straitjacket. The US administration was deeply divided, White House versus State Department, over whether to begin tough measures against Japan. From his increasingly difficult outpost in Tokyo, Ambassador Grew suggested mediation, but Washington feared being drawn into an appeasement policy on the Anglo-French model. The nations that had signed the Nine-Power Treaty guaranteeing the rights of China met in Brussels at the end of 1937 and adjourned without agreement -- forever, as it turned out. On December 13, 1937, the American gunboat USS Panay was sunk by Japanese Navy warplanes as she escorted three Standard Oil tankers on the Yangtse River. On the insistence of Admiral Yamamoto, now C-in-C of the Combined Fleet, who was not involved in the incident, Japan apologized and paid compensation: but that was only one more "humiliation" abroad for the fire-eaters to add to all the rest. Meanwhile, on the same day, the Japanese Army tried a new method of putting a quick end to the China Incident by unleashing its victorious troops on the surrendered soldiers and civilian population of Nanking. Nobody knows how many people died in the ensuing orgy of mass murder, rape and looting, but the total ran well into six figures, in one of the worst single atrocities of a bloodstained century. General Matsui Iwane, the Japanese C-in-C in China, was executed for it by the Allies after the war, even though the massacre had flouted his express orders. The only step taken by Tokyo was quietly to reassign eighty staff officers to duties elsewhere. It was in China too that Army Unit 731, ostensibly an engineer outfit concerned with water purification, conducted unspeakable experiments in chemical and biological warfare on civilians and prisoners of war, equal in horror if not in scope to anything undertaken by the Nazis at Auschwitz and elsewhere.

But the growing list of Japanese war crimes prompted nothing more from Roosevelt at this stage -- early 1938 -- than a call for a "moral embargo" of Japan by US exporters, especially of arms and the means to manufacture and use them. The moral embargo was clarified as a policy in July 1938, following the Japanese bombardment of Canton. When Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, sent a long letter in protest against Japan's conduct in China in October, Prime Minister Konoye replied in November with his declaration of a "New Order in East Asia," under which Japan would entrench its domination of Manchuria and China regardless of anyone else's "rights" in China. The president knew that the American public, despite this loud and contemptuous slamming of

the "Open Door," would not abide sanctions, for opinion polls were already ill common use. US neutrality legislation prevented him from acting against Japan on its own: any formal embargo would also have to be applied to China, which desperately needed US aid, as well as Japan, which did not (though it needed imports from America more than ever).

Even so, the moral embargo was a turning point in the unfolding tragedy of mutual incomprehension that was already pointing to war. It was the first concrete expression of American displeasure with Japan, and it soon proved palpably if patchfly effective. Some major US companies refused to sell to the Japanese, despite the 1911 Treaty of Commerce and Navigation between the US and Japan, which was another legal obstacle to mandatory sanctions. The Americans gave the requisite six months' notification of termination of this accord at the end of July 1939. Japan had already made a mockery of it by closing the Open Door, but Washington quite rightly took the view that it should adhere to the "no-reprisals" clause. Frustrated American officials were reduced to hoping that a Japan indifferent to international law would fall victim to the laws of economics: surely Tokyo had bitten off much more than it could possibly chew in Manchuria, let alone China? It had, but chose to ignore the fact, an attitude to which there was no effective diplomatic or even logical response. Japan was simply immune to argument, persuasion, moral appeals, sanctions, all measures short of war, and ultimately war itself: only superior force would bring it to change its ways; only destruction, over and above complete military defeat, could put an end to its territorial ambition.

Yet, just as Britain could unilaterally have stopped Mussolini's expansion in Africa by closing the Suez Canal to him, and just as France could have stopped Hitler by overturning his reoccupation of the Rhine land, so the United States could have forced the Japanese war machine to grind to a halt with a handful of selected sanctions in the late thirties. Japan at this time depended on America for half its copper, two-thirds of its machine tools, three-quarters of the scrap metal from which it made new steel for arms, four-fifths of its fuel oil, and over nine-tenths of its high-grade petroleum products (including machine oil, gasoline and aviation fuel); and the Japanese were using up their stocks at an alarming rate in China. Japanese fears, premature though they turned out to be, that Washington would make full use of its economic leverage to save its diplomatic position in China, caused Tokyo to cast its eye on the conveniently located resources of Dutch and British territory in the Far East long before the European owners became embroiled with Germany. A clear warning of what could lie in store was given in July 1940, when the President of the United States, under the nee National Defense Act, banned exports of aviation fuel and some other special petroleum products just after huge Japanese orders had been placed for these items to meet needs in China.

With typical opportunism, the Japanese Army swung fully round to the southern strategy in June 1940, when Hitler's European Slitzkrieg had triumphed, Holland and France had fallen and the defeat of Britain seemed imminent. The junta innocuously titled its new program an "Outline for Dealing with the Changes in the World Situation." The aim was autarky; meanwhile there was to be an alliance with Germany, maximum austerity at home, and the establishment of a Japanese lien, by diplomacy or by force, on French and Dutch possessions in South east Asia and the Pacific. Force having failed to settle the China Incident, the Army now seriously proposed dividing Japan's already stretched resources by risking the opening of a huge and complex new front. But at least the generals had the wit to limit their designs to French, Dutch and (only if unavoidable) British possessions, leaving out all American territories such as the Philippines. They were clearly gambling that a German defeat of Britain would force America to concentrate on its Atlantic front. The Navy, understanding more about the inherent strategic advantages of large islands, did not think a British collapse likely. The admirals therefore disagreed with the generals. The residual Dutch and minimal British maritime presence in the Far East was not enough to justify the Navy's voracious budgetary plans, past, present or future. Conveniently, their staff war-games late in 1940 were supervised by Yamamoto himself, and showed that an attack on French and Dutch possessions in the Far East would bring first the British and then the Americans into the ensuing war. The Navy argued that the Netherlands, Britain and the United States were inseparable, that leaving the Philippines untouched would expose the flank of a Japanese southward advance -- and therefore that, instead of the risk of ignoring the US, the much bigger risk of attacking its interests should be taken from the first! The student of Japanese strategic thinking at this period cannot fail to be struck time and again by the numbing, mountainous stupidity of the generals and admirals and those who supported them. It was on such a grand scale that the human mind is hard put to encompass the magnitude of the error. Seen in this light, the last-minute addition of Pearl Harbor to the finalized plan at the insistence of Yamamoto, the serious gambler, looks like a minor embellishment of an elaborate program for national suicide. The phenomenal success of postwar Japan as dependent as ever, in an unstable world, on imports for oil and nearly all its raw materials makes the logic of the time look even more bizarre.

Yet the Navy came to terms with the Army on a program that required, first, a move into northern Indochina (rapidly completed in September 1940) to cut off Chiang and to be well placed for a move farther south, thus keeping all options open; second, diplomatic pressure on the Dutch to supply more oil, rubber and tin (which failed: Japan had to accept the half or thereabouts which the Dutch and US oil companies in the Indies offered, and to pay for it in cash); and third, the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, signed on September 27, 1940.

In the Army the extremists were now completely in charge: the more calculating "total-war" faction was not extinct, but it was deeply depressed to the point of impotence. Autarky had been seriously deferred by the war in China; to get the resources to win that enervating conflict, the Army now proposed to move southward, which would lead to immediate suspension, before the targeted territories could be acquired, of deliveries of the vital materials needed for their conquest. This would therefore have to be completed, and secured against counterattack, with such stockpiles as Japan had managed to accumulate. Autarky would thereupon vanish over the horizon; the original Catch-22 of the China adventure was now to be squared. The only answer the extremists could produce was supplied by their friends in the bureaucracy -- even more austerity at home, in the form of a maximum diversion from civilian to military use of such items as fuel, steel and shipping, and of course money. Such was the background to the speech by Admiral Konoye, just back as prime minister after a short absence, in August 1940, announcing a "New Economic Order" and national self reliance for Japan. On the day before Japan threw in its lot with the Axis, the United States announced an embargo on all exports of scrap iron and steel except to the Western hemisphere and Britain, on the grounds of its own national security. There was no need to explain that Japan was the true target, thus to be punished for its precipitate advance into northern Indochina.

The Hawaiian Islands in the mid-Pacific, roughly halfway between the West Coast of North America and East Asia, had been taken over as a territory by the United States in 1898. They offered the ideal advance base for US naval operations in the Far East specifically against Spain in the Philippines shortly afterward. Pearl Harbor, on the southern coast of the main island of Oahu, rapidly became an important facility for the expanding US Navy. It was therefore an obvious target for the Japanese Navy as the Empire nurtured its expansionist ambitions, fully aware that the only power capable of challenging it was the American fleet in the Pacific. All this was so self-evident that the British journalist Hector Bywater published his ideas about a naval attack on the base as early as 1925. Two years later a mere lieutenant commander in the Imperial Japanese navy -- Kusaka Ryunosuke, a staff college instructor in aviation -- drew up a plan for an air attack. The possibility was no less obvious to the United States Navy by 1932 at the latest: Captain Ernest J. King, USN, then commander of the aircraft carrier Lexington, launched a "successful" mock air attack on Pearl during maneuvers. Its importance as a base (and by the same token as a potential target) increased exponentially when the administration decided to make Pearl rather than the West Coast the principal base of the US Fleet in May 1940. The motive was political, to deter the Japanese from opportunistic ventures in the Pacific. The Netherlands had just been overrun by the Germans, presenting the oil-obsessed Japanese with a very strong temptation to make a move against the Dutch East Indies, whose home government had fled to England. The ensuing fall of France also drew acquisitive Japanese eyes to French Indochina, as we have seen.

The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 1, 1941, which achieved total surprise despite a series of alerts from Washington, including a war warning on November 21, will forever be associated with the name of Yamamoto. It was he who conceived the operational plan in the latter part of 1940 and sent a nine-page memorandum on it to the Navy Ministry on January 1, 1941. He then used his unique personal prestige to force its adoption by Imperial General Headquarters as the final embellishment, Operation Z, of the overall strategy for southward conquest. The rationale was simple: given that Japan required the resources of the Indies and was resolved to seize them, it needed a defensive perimeter large enough to protect them and the Home Islands of the Empire from attack by sea or air, including naval airpower. This perimeter would be much more secure, and Japan would gain a priceless margin of time, if the only force strong enough to disrupt the Empire's grand design the United States Navy could be crippled at the outset. After that the American will to fight a difficult campaign for the recovery of European colonies in Asia, taken over by a strong and entrenched opponent who held the initiative, would be so weak that Japan would be able to exact a profitable peace. The hawks were only encouraged in this belief when the House of Representatives voted on August 13, 1941, by a margin of only 203 to 202 to renew the military draft.

The Pearl Harbor operation, like the Imperial Navy itself in its formative years, drew heavily on British ideas, and not just those of Mr. Bywater, which were well known to Yamamoto. There was the classic example of Nelson, who destroyed the Danish Fleet in port in 1801 and thus gave the English language the verb "to Copenhagen" for a naval pre-emptive strike. Rather more recently, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunning ham, British commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean, had launched a devastating torpedo-bomber attack -- the first in history -- from the carrier HMS Illustrious against the main base of the Italian Navy at Taranto on November 11, 1940. Royal Navy pilots eliminated three out of four enemy battleships and tilted the balance of naval power in the ocean in Britain's favor. There was thus, as so often, nothing new under the Rising Sun. But there was one fundamental difference: the British were already at war on each occasion; Japanese diplomats in Washington were still negotiating with the United States at the time of the attack on Hawaii.

Yamamoto Isoroku, the man who issued the order to go ahead with it, was the sixth son of a former samurai. Born in 1884 at Nagaoka, Yamamoto entered the Naval Academy and graduated in 1904, just in time for the war with Russia. He was badly wounded at the decisive Battle of Tsushima, won by the Japanese Navy's big guns in 1905. He went to the United States as a junior naval attache just after the First World War and then visited Europe. He was already forty years old when he presciently switched his professional specialism from gunnery to aviation in 1924; nobody was to play a greater role in educating the Japanese Navy in the importance of the new seaborne airpower. He became senior naval attache in Washington in 1926-28 with the rank of captain, then commanded a cruiser and next the carrier HIJMS Akagi before distinguishing himself as a delegate to the London naval disarmament conference of 1930, an event that made him a public figure in Japan. As a rear admiral, Yamamoto served as head of the technical division of the Navy's Aeronautics Department and then commander of the First Carrier Division (on the Akagi again). Promoted to vice admiral, he became chief of the entire Aeronautics Department, and then deputy Navy minister in 1936. Paradoxically, his strong opposition to war, which exposed him to death threats from extremists, led to his appointment as commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet, the main body of the Japanese Navy, on August 30, 1939. His moderate friends in high places thought he would be safer if protected by the forty thousand sailors then manning the fleet. He was promoted to full admiral in 1940 at the age of fifty-six.

He was short and slight, even by the diminutive Japanese standards of the time: five feet three inches tall with a noticeable stoop and weighing barely 130 pounds. The index and middle fingers of one hand were missing, shot off at Tsushima; as his biographer, Hiroyuki Agawa, reveals, he was therefore known to the geisha girls whose company he liked so much as "80 sen" the price of a geisha manicure then being 100 sen ( 1 yen). His spotless uniform concealed many other scars from the battle, but he prided himself on his fitness: even when past fifty he demonstrated it by doing head- or handstands on minimum provocation or none at all. His neatness extended to the calligraphy for which he was also well known (even the toughest Japanese officers were wont to cultivate gentler talents such as brushwork and poetry, in keeping with the samurai tradition; Yamamoto's poems are, however, described as plodding). But his taste for order did not extend to his private life. Married in 1918 and the father of two sons and two daughters, Yamamoto was never close to his wife, Reizo, preferring the geisha Kawai Chiyoko, whose professional name was Umeryu .This relationship endured from 1934 until his death; when it was revealed by her in 1954, it caused a sensation in Japan. There were occasionally other women too, giving the lie to the forbidding public face.

He was quite capable of enjoying himself, but he was essentially a loner inclined to melancholy. Presented by the slavish Japanese press on his elevation to supreme command as the strong, silent type, Yamamoto was in fact outspoken to the point of rudeness and no respecter of persons. He liked to drink Scotch whisky and smoke expensive cigars in late-night sessions with colleagues or journalists, or at parties in the geisha houses. Those who knew him in relaxed mood, when the stony mask of the Japanese officer could be set aside, found his character most attractive. His greatest off-duty passion was gambling, on everything from shogi (Japanese chess) to Chinese mah-jongg and Western billiards, roulette, poker and bridge.

In his years in Tokyo from 1935 until his final appointment, Yamamoto was frozen out by the militant tendency in Navy, Army and government. The hard-liners did not have the moral courage to sack him as deputy Navy minister but did all they could to prevent him from converting his personal prestige into political power as a force for moderation. He found it acutely depressing to have little or nothing to do. Both the enmity and the prestige derived from his high-profile performances as a delegate to disarmament conferences, assiduously reported by his journalist friends. He was thought by the militants to be too accommodating to foreign opinion because he was that rare contemporary manifestation, a Japanese leader who understood the art of compromise and appreciated the need for it. But, like most influential Japanese, he also thought his country should have a place at the top table of world power -- even if he opposed force as a means to that end and regarded war with the United States in particular as suicidal. Not until he had reluctantly concluded that such a war was inevitable did he argue that Japan should make the strongest possible pre-emptive strike against the United States: the only strong enemy should be knocked out at the beginning. If, as Japanese strategists insisted, Holland, Britain and America were strategically inseparable because an attack on the Far Eastern interests of one inevitably entailed war against all three, Yamamoto's gamble was not even a calculated risk but a move that the rules of the game required him to make.

In September 1940 he told Prime Minister Konoye: "If we are ordered to [go to war with America] then I can guarantee to put up a tough fight for the first six months but I have absolutely no confidence about what would happen if it went on for two or three years.... I hope you will make every effort to avoid war with America." And as late as October 1941 he told a friend: "I find my present position extremely strange -- forced to make up my mind and unswervingly follow a course [war with America] which is exactly the opposite of my personal views." These observations, made in private and never intended for external consumption, clearly represent the true feelings and opinions of Admiral Yamamoto on war with the United States. The intercepted signal of early July 1941 mentioned at the beginning of this book, which convinced the US administration that Japan would go to war in the Pacific in a matter of weeks if not days, was meant to be just as private, a fact which did nothing to deter the US eavesdroppers from over reacting -- on the contrary! The text on which the American deduction was based seemed clear enough clearer by far than the elaborately oblique and bland documents and statements supplied on purpose by the emperor's representatives to foreign governments. Leaving aside the content and its implications, the message, by definition not intended for foreign eyes, might well have seemed positively refreshing to the Americans precisely because of its candid duplicity and cynical opportunism. It said in part:

In order to guarantee the security and preservation of the nation, the Imperial Government will carry on with all necessary diplomatic negotiations concerning the southern regions [relative to Japan].... in case diplomatic negotiations break down, preparations for a war with England and America will also be carried forward. First of all, the plans which have been made with regard to French Indochina... will be followed through in order to consolidate our position in the southern lanes.... We shall not be deterred by the possibility of becoming embroiled in a war with England and America.... All plans will be executed so as to place no serious obstacles in the way of our basic military preparations for a war with England and America.... We shall turn our attention at once to putting the nation on a war footing and shall take special steps to strengthen national defense.

The text summarized a resolution passed on July 2 at an "imperial conference," a meeting of military and government leaders in the presence of Emperor Hirohito. It began by setting out the need to force an end to the inconclusive war of expansion in China so foolishly provoked by Japan four years earlier. This was one of two reasons for moving south from the bases in northern Indochina acquired from a helpless Vichy France in September 1940: such a stroke would serve to isolate the stubbornly struggling Chinese nationalist regime of Chiang Kaishek. The other reason, also unmentioned in the message but so familiar as to be taken for granted by all its recipients, was to gain forward bases from which to be able to attack British and Dutch possessions in Malaya, Borneo and the East Indies, with their abundant oil and other strategic raw materials. The whole world knew that this was now the central aim of Japanese diplomatic, economic, and military policy. The Japanese, ever opportunistic, would stay out of the war with the Soviet Union begun by their Axis partner Germany just ten days earlier, the dispatch went on to say unless a chance presented itself to eliminate the Russian threat from the north to Japan's interests on the Asian mainland.

Japan, it seemed to Washington, had at last resolved its long standing strategic dilemma between a move north against Russia and a move south against Western positions in the Far East. The Americans could put two and two together like anyone else. Unfortunately on this occasion they came up with an answer considerably greater than four. They had been seriously misled by their own cleverness in cracking Japanese codes and ciphers. How they achieved that will be described in chapter 2; it is enough to observe here that the intercepted dispatch concealed far more than it revealed about the state of mind of Japan's deeply divided leadership. The text seen by the Americans was precisely translated and completely correct as far as it went. But it did not go anywhere near as far as Washington thought. For the few American policymakers in the know, it was effectively the point of no return, beyond which war with Japan was inevitable. But for Japan a war with the United States became inevitable only as the result of the Americans acceptance at its face value of a message written for a different audience altogether. Washington thus ignored the long-running, strategic north south dispute in Japan, of which it was fully aware, and which it might have known, on reflection, could not have been resolved overnight or by a single meeting. And Tokyo never got the slightest inkling that the Americans had read what in any case was only a summary.

The Foreign Ministry's smooth resume of the conference naturally gave no hint of the abiding divisions between advocates of the northern and southern strategies, within and between the Army and the Navy, and between the armed services and the government, over peace and war. It was merely reporting the latest round in an intractable debate which both sides assumed would go on for a long time yet. There was no need to record all the well-worn arguments, even more familiar to Japanese diplomats than to the Americans who themselves had heard them times out of number from orthodox as well as clandestine sources. Indeed, Washington itself might well have come round to a more relaxed assessment of the text in due course -- but for the Japanese ultimatum in the middle of the month to Vichy France. This demanded the right to station troops and aircraft in southern Indochina, to which the Petain regime acceded on July 21. The consent for bases in the north had been won by diplomacy in 1940 (although Japan knew it could not be denied, because it held all the cards while France, newly defeated by Tokyo's Nazi allies, had none).

For Japan, therefore, the ultimatum in July 1941 was a watershed, akin to Hitler's occupation of what remained of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, just a few months after winning the Sudetenland by negotiation at Munich. It too represents the transition from acquisition of foreign soil by diplomacy, however aggressive, to seizure by force or the threat of force. For the United States it was confirmation that the intercepted message had indeed revealed a Japanese decision on an imminent advance southward. The Americans, still deeply isolationist, did not want war any more than Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's appeasement-minded Britain had wanted it in the spring of 1939; but, like the British after the German takeover of the rump of Czechoslovakia, the Americans now resolved that aggression had gone far enough. Washington's equivalent of the fateful British guarantee to Poland was its decision, announced on July 25, to ban exports to Japan of high octane gasoline (suitable for aircraft), to limit all other petroleum exports to normal levels and to freeze Japanese assets in the United States.

The latter measure, originally intended to deny funds to the Japanese spies assumed to be everywhere and to retaliate for tight Japanese exchange controls, had devastating implications. The freeze effectively prevented Tokyo from buying any oil at all, or other raw materials needed to sustain the war in China, for which it was still overwhelmingly dependent on the United States. This was a far more serious sanction than the limited steps notably a ban on exports of new steel and reusable scrap which had followed upon Japan's initial advance into Indochina ten months earlier. For Tokyo it was the realization of its most persistent nightmare: America was about to bleed Japan to death by forcing it to rely on its precious oil reserve. The oil embargo, supported by the British and the Dutch with their huge oil fields in Borneo and the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia), was the casus belli both feared and desired by the all-powerful Japanese military. We shall look more closely at the thinking of the generals and admirals below. Japanese troops began to occupy southern Indochina bases of July 23, and forty thousand reinforcements began to land there only five days later. The events of the next four months drove Japan and the United States into a war that both had intermittently seen coming for more than twenty years.

At this time General George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the United States Army, publicly announced that Washington intended to reinforce its ground and air garrisons in the Philippines, hitherto privately regarded by Washington as indefensible in a war against Japan. General Douglas MacArthur was recalled from the United States Army's retired list to command in the great archipelago, which had been under the American flag since the war with Spain of 1898. Boeing B-17 "Flying Fortresses" the latest high-level strategic American bombers started to arrive at Clark Field in the Philippines at the end of July, immediately after delivery to the US Army Air Force. Some seventy-five thousand troops were earmarked for transfer from the United States, the Philippine Army was incorporated into the US Army, and eventually MacArthur was meant to have two hundred thousand men under his command. The underlying strategy, to which MacArthur had won over a skeptical Marshall, was to defend Luzon Island for long enough to enable the American main fleet to fight its way across the Pacific and use the Philippines as its forward base for operations against Japan. Admiral Thomas H. Hart, USN, commander-in-chief of the Asiatic Fleet, redeployed his meager forces from China to the Philippines area, with Manila Bay as his principal base. On August 1, the Senate extended the period of service for draftees in the armed forces by six months, to eighteen.

At this point an alarmed Japanese government proposed a summit conference between Prime Minister Konoye and Roosevelt. Secretary of State Cordell Hull finally got around to rejecting the proposal on October 2. Although diplomatic contacts were to continue even beyond the last moment of peace, the failure of the summit proposal seemed to both sides at the time to indicate that all efforts to achieve an accommodation would be in vain. At this stage the US government was playing for time, at the urgent request of Marshall and his opposite number, Admiral Harold R. Stark, chief of naval operations, so that Army and Navy could complete their preparations for war by the spring of 1942 if all went well. But their own government's miscalculation of Japan's mood in July ensured that they did not get their wish. In Japan, by contrast, the generals and admirals contemplated the embargo and their steadily dwindling oil stocks and pressed for war as soon as possible. This recourse had become a case of "when" rather than "whether" on September 6, 1941. On that day an imperial conference of military and government leaders with the emperor agreed on a statement that bore the innocuous title "The Essentials for Carrying out the Empire's Policies." It had been adopted by a "liaison conference" (the same cast of characters without the emperor or palace officials, the mechanism for coordinating military and government policies) on the previous day.

Protocol at imperial conferences was stiff to the point of immobility. The emperor wore a long black morning coat with striped trousers, and all present were required to do likewise unless entitled to wear uniform. Hirohito sat on a plain throne on a dais, looking down the length of a pair of long tables covered in silk cloth that reached to the floor. The inner sides of the tables were unoccupied, while the outer sides were each lined with a row of officials sitting to attention. The emperor left the chore of questioning ministers to the president of his Privy Council, Hard Yosimichi. There was no debate; participants took it in turn to deliver prepared statements and answer Hara's questions in staccato fashion, as if on parade. The document from the liaison conference was, as usual, adopted without amendment. Its main effect was to harden into policy, complete with deadlines for a decision on peace or war and for actually going to war, the tentative program formulated on July 2, described above. The "humiliation" of a surrender to pressure was not an option for the Japanese junta, as United States officials should have known. Washington had therefore made the gross psychological error of leaving its antagonist no means of preserving his pride except by going to war. American sanctions, intended to prevent the war that the July 2 message foreshadowed, only served to make it inevitable. The key sections of the September 6 resolution were as follows:

In view of the current critical situation, especially the offensive attitudes that such countries as the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands are taking toward Japan... we will carry out our policy toward the south... as follows.

1) Our Empire, for the purposes of self defense and self preservation, will complete preparations for war, with the last ten days of October as a tentative deadline, resolved to go do war with the United States, Great Britain and the Netherlands if necessary.

2) Our Empire will concurrently take all possible diplomatic measures toward the United States and Great Britain and thereby seek to gain our Objectives....

3) In the event that there is no prospect of our demands being met by the first ten days of October through the diplomatic negotiations... we will immediately decide to commence hostilities against the United States, Britain and the Netherlands....

And so, with a few unimportant delays and adjustments, it was to turn out. There was only one surprise at this portentous meeting, where Japan's chiefs of staff and most senior ministers formally decided, in the divine presence of their emperor, to go to war with the West unless diplomatic means succeeded after all, against the perceived odds. The sensation was provided by the emperor himself, and only after the adoption of the policy statement: Hirohito spoke. His unprecedented intervention, not to be repeated until all was lost in August 1945, took the form of quoting an ode composed by his grandfather the Emperor Meiji, which translates approximately as follows:

All men are brothers, like the seas throughout the world;

So why do winds and waves clash so fiercely everywhere?

All present were deeply moved by the piping voice, which they other wise heard only during the private audiences with the emperor to which their exalted offices entitled them. A few manly tears were shed but the policy as dictated by the military was not modified by so much as a comma. Yet the two chiefs of staff, General Sugiyama of the Army and Admiral Nagano of the Navy, rightly took this recitation ex catbedra as a rebuke and disingenuously promised, contrary to the general drift of the policy statement, that the emphasis would be put on diplomacy rather than preparation for war.

When the deadline came, the Cabinet split over the war issue, Konoye resigned, and General Tojo Hideki, the Army minister, succeeded him on October 17. Thereafter air forces (military and naval) and eleven Army divisions were assembled for a remarkably complicated multiple thrust southward across a six-thousand-mile front; so was almost every ship in the formidable Japanese Combined Fleet, commanded by Admiral Yamamoto. The war plan for the southern option had existed, subject to various adjustments, for years; major change to it, added on Yamamoto's insistence, was officially less than a year old. To execute it, Vice-Admiral Nagumo Chuichi's mighty Mobile Force, six aircraft carriers with powerful escort, sailed into the bleak North Pacific in the utmost secrecy on November 26, 194 1, under strict orders to maintain wireless silence. It was Japan's turn to make a historic mistake, and this was to be a much greater one than the American error, which did not cause but did precipitate the execution of Japan's long-standing program of conquest.

View from the West

The Belated and forced entry into the war of the United States, the last and most powerful of the major combatants, was neither as sudden nor as clear-cut as it may appear.

What we know as the Second World War is generally held to have begun two years and fourteen weeks earlier, on September 1, 1939, when Hitler sent the Wehrmacht into Poland after faking a raid by "Polish troops" across the border. Two days later, Britain and France, in keeping with their guarantee of Poland's borders, and having had no answer to their demand that the Germans withdraw, declared war on the Third Reich. (A contemporary inhabitant of Manchuria would, how ever, have regarded these dates as eight years after the true start of the war. ) Hitler's real motive was to acquire Polish territory ( some of it had been German until 1918) as a jumping-off point for a later invasion of the Soviet Union. Stalin, meanwhile, cynically consented to accept a share of the spoils -- eastern Poland -- from the quick German victory over the Poles and held to his alliance with the Nazis, in keeping with the non-aggression pact concluded by the two totalitarian rivals on August 23, 1939. Having for the moment settled Eastern Europe to his satisfaction, Hitler was free to turn west and put an end to the deceptively quiet "Phony War," as the British called it, in which the French Army, reinforced by a relatively small British Expeditionary Force, waited without enthusiasm for something to happen. Having won the race against Britain and France to occupy Norway and Denmark in April 1940, Hitler launched his Blitzkrieg (lightning war) against the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France on May 10. Superbly trained tank forces, closely supported by the dive-bombers and fighters of the Luftwaffe and the world's best infantry, took a mere six weeks to force the French into an armistice on June 2 1, 1940. Italy entered the war on Hitler's side on June 10. The British evacuated most of their Army, without its equipment, in "the miracle of Dunkirk," but an invasion seemed imminent until mid-September 1940, when the Royal Air Force won the Battle of Britain. Too weak to assail what was rapidly becoming "Fortress Europe," Britain fell back on her traditional stratagem of the flank attack and took on the Italians in the Mediterranean and North Africa. Troops from Britain and the Commonwealth won easy victories on land and sea until Hitler came to the rescue of his Axis partner, sending Rommel with a corps to Africa, and submarines, E-boats, paratroops and strong air forces to the Mediterranean.

Meanwhile, Japan, Italy and Germany signed the Tripartite Pact formalizing the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis on September 27, 1940. The spreading conflict underwent its mightiest shift on June 22, 1941, when Hitler, his western defenses secure and his Mediterranean commitment manageable, launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union with 143 divisions. Everything he had done in power since 1933 and in the war up to now was for Hitler secondary to this, his main thrust for Lebensraum in the east, as foreshadowed in his book, Mein Kampf. For the four years until the German surrender, this was to be the bloodiest killing ground of the war. The Germans got to the outskirts of Moscow in the opening months; what saved the Soviet capital was Zhukov's arrival from Soviet East Asia with seasoned troops. Stalin, though surprised on the day despite countless Allied warnings (shades of Pearl Harbor!), knew that a war with Hitler's Germany was well-nigh inevitable, whereas war with Japan was avoidable. Tokyo was inclined south ward and wanted to shield its northern front in China from the Russians. Japan thus sealed the ultimate fate of its Nazi ally by its diplomatic accord with Moscow.

The Americans, under the wily master politician Roosevelt, sat out these momentous events even as he initiated his unique correspondence with Winston Churchill on September 11, 1939, which was kept up until the president's last illness. His clear understanding that a German victory was against his country's interests conflicted with the palpable desires of the American people not to get involved in the murderous conflicts of Europe for the second time in less than a quarter of a century. The US administration was also worried about the possibility of a war on two fronts. So many Americans or their forebears had emigrated to the United States to get away from Europe's rival nationalism’s and the often oppressive regimes that represented them. There was a widespread and deeply held feeling among ordinary citizens that the United States had been tricked into the First World War to bail out the British and the French ( and their empires ). Whether this was true or not, it was certainly undeniable that the Europeans had hardly made the best of the short interlude of peace between the previous conflict and the present one-even if the collapse of the peace was also partly due to the errors of President Woodrow Wilson, his successors and the US Congress in 1918-20 and after.

Nonetheless, under Roosevelt a neutral United States moved step by step to a position from which it was doing everything except actually fighting Germany "all aid short of war," as the president defined it. America soon became, in another of his well-remembered phrases, "the great arsenal of democracy" which supplied the British with what their leader, Churchill, called "the tools to finish the job" armaments of all kinds, aircraft, equipment, ships and food. American aid enabled the British island fortress to hold out and to defy Hitter by bombing German cities. The Nazi leader's greatest error was now exposed: he had opened a second front without closing the first. Britain mounted a colossal naval effort to fend off the U-boats attacking the transatlantic supply line, which was already the main artery of the war against Nazism. On September 3, 1940, Roosevelt agreed to exchange fifty old destroyers for bases in British colonies in the western Atlantic; on March 11, 1941, he signed the Lend-Lease Act, whereby America "loaned" Britain vast amounts of war materiel. The arsenal of democracy was also the arsenal of Chinese nationalism and of Soviet communism. The United States Navy defined and patrolled a huge protected zone in the western Atlantic, closed except to powers with territory in the Americas (thus open to Britain and its ally Canada). In 1941, well before they officially went to war, the Americans sent Marines to relieve the Anglo Canadian garrison in Iceland guarding the North Atlantic route, began to escort convoys, set up bases in the United Kingdom and Newfoundland, and even got involved in skirmishes with U-boats.

At the beginning of the year, from January 29 to March 27, elaborate and detailed staff talks took place between British and American military leaders in Washington "American-British Conversation Number One," or ABC-1. These took the broadest possible international and strategic view, anticipating American belligerence against not only Germany an Italy but also Japan, with which war was regarded as very likely. These talks agreed on the "Germany-first" policy, which was to last until 1945. It was officially confirmed at the Anglo-American "Arcadia" summit conference in Washington at the turn of 1941-42, which set the seal on the Anglo-American alliance.

"Germany first" may have been the policy of the United States from before its baptism of fire, but the war with Japan took and held first place American public interest. The Pacific was overwhelmingly the main front for the protagonist in our narrative, the United States Navy and its Marine Corps, and the chief drain on American industrial resources. We have seen how Japan came to be at war with America; we now need to recall how America slid into war with Japan.

No sooner was the First World War formally ended at Versailles in June 1919 than the signatories, including America and Japan, began to fall out among themselves. Congress kept the United States out of the new League of Nations, even though it had been invented by President Wilson. The powers disagreed not only over European issues but also over their future relations, above all about armaments, especially naval, the battleship being the ultimate strategic weapon of the period. Exhaustive efforts were made to settle these differences by negotiation, at a series of international conferences. The first and most important of those that concern us was the Washington Conference of 1921-22, the earliest serious postwar attempt to defuse international tension and rivalry by negotiation.

This complex gathering, called by the newly inaugurated President Warren Harding, toured the entire horizon of relations among the major powers, though defeated Germany and the new Soviet Union were not present. Among the dozen resolutions and nine treaties from a conference that came remarkably close to achieving long-term harmony among the powers were agreements on foreign interests in China, the relative strengths of the leading navies and, by implication, Japan's position in the world, the underlying key issue. Britain, forced to choose between good relations with the United States, a potentially insuperable naval rival in the Atlantic, and her now embarrassing alliance with Japan of 1902, picked the former. Japan's "compensation" was a four-power treaty with America, Britain and France of mutual respect for one an other's rights in the Pacific region.

A treaty signed by these four and Italy fixed the relative capital strengths of the world's five largest navies at 10:10:6 for Britain, America, and Japan and 3.3 each for France and Italy. A limit of thirty-five thousand tons was set for individual vessels, and a ten-year "naval holiday" from new construction was declared. As a concession to Japan, it was agreed that no power would increase the strength or number of its outlying bases in the Pacific; Hawaii and Singapore were excepted, but the provision favored Japan as the mandated occupant of most of the ex-German islands in the western Pacific.

A nine-power treaty sought to regulate and reconcile the Chinese interest of the signatories, including America, Britain and Japan. The pact piously looked forward to Chinese equality and the return of all enclaves and extraterritorial rights held by foreigners. Respect was promised for Chinese independence and territorial integrity as the foreigners clung to their concessions in Shanghai, in Manchuria and on China's coast. This commitment to Augustinian "virtue but not yet" was a perfect example of imperialist rationalization. As one of the nine signatories, China, with saintly forbearance but also mindful of its recent experience of Japanese ambition, went so far as to accept the Open Door, the American policy of equal rights in China (for all except the Chinese). The main effect of all this was to deny Japan a free run while increasing American interest in China, thus ensuring the aggravation of

a rivalry that turned to hostility and finally to war. The clash between America and Japan over China was a root cause of the war in the Far East.

Another was racial prejudice. It is a pity that the distinction once made between "racism" (the idea that ability is determined by race) and "racialism" (the idea that one race is superior to the rest) has faded, for the former suits prewar white imperialist attitudes and the latter Japanese. At Washington, as at every other prewar international forum, including the League of Nations, Japan demanded (but never got) true equality while firmly believing that the Japanese people, descended from the gods, was superior to all others. Like Europeans, Americans tended to regard the Japanese as stunted, bow-legged creatures with bad teeth and pebble glasses self-evidently inferior. Illogically, however, they also feared these "stunted" aliens, who had established themselves by immigration in large number in Hawaii and the West Coast states over the preceding half-century. The US Supreme Court cravenly decreed in 1922 that ethnic Japanese could not become citizens, and in 1923 that they could not own or lease land. In 1924 Congress passed the Exclusion Act, banning further Japanese immigration. This was also the hey day of the "White Australia" policy. Such white prejudice was excellent ammunition for the many xenophobes in ambitious Japan, a society which so suppressed aggression that it was all the more terrible when unleashed. White racism underestimated the Japanese, just as their own racialism led them to underestimate their future American enemy.

American disapproval of Japan's designs on China marched hand in hand with US domestic policy against Japanese immigrants, but there was as little desire among Americans for war in the Pacific as in the Atlantic. The pendulum had swung toward foreign adventure at the end of the nineteenth century, aggressively extending manifest destiny, which had brought expansion to the West Coast, across the Pacific to Japan, the Philippines and China. In 1918 it swung the other way, to isolationism, and stayed with it for the twenty-three years between the Armistice and Pearl Harbor. This was one of many reasons why the Japanese regarded America as lacking in "sincerity," a term they defined differently from Americans. In Japan it meant total commitment to a goal, regardless of cost or means ( including deception ); in America it meant genuine straight forwardness. Thus the Japanese regarded American reluctance to fight, or otherwise pay the full price for what they wanted, as insincere, whereas the Americans saw the deviousness of Japanese diplomacy as no less so.

Had Japanese diplomats been doing their job, or had they exercised more influence over diehard elements in Tokyo, Pearl Harbor and the Philippines might have been left out of the grand-slam strategy with which Tokyo went south. The diplomats would have interpreted Roosevelt's support for Britain as the preferred alternative, rather than the prelude, to belligerence. Avoiding US possessions would have left the administration with a choice between antagonizing the isolationist majority by a decision for war over Europe's Asian colonies or else procrastinating as before. Roosevelt was notorious for deferring unpleasant decisions, a tactic that had become a policy. Further, since secrets had such a brief lifespan in Washington, it must have been well known to the Japanese embassy that the American forces did not feel ready for war. The fact that the Nazis were stoking up isolationism with slush funds, lobbying, and propaganda through such organizations as the German-American Band and the Make Europe Pay Its War Debts Committee does not disprove the sincerity (in every sense) of grass roots and highly placed isolationists alike.

These included the Republican Senator Burton K. Wheeler from Montana, who said Roosevelt was bent on dragging America into a war that would "plow under every fourth American boy." It was an idea he got at dictation speed from a German-American lobbyist for Hitler, and it infuriated the president like no other accusation, not even the senator's cry of "warmonger" when Roosevelt appealed, at Christmas 1940, for all possible aid to Britain. Wheeler was the leader of the Committee to Defend America First, better known as the America-First Committee. Its most prominent supporter was Charles A. Lindbergh, still a national hero after making the first solo, nonstop flight across the Atlantic in 1927, but naive and a knee-jerk conservative in politics (he took one look at what the Luftwaffe chose to show him on a prewar visit to Germany and concluded it was invincible). Roosevelt received him privately at the White House in April 1939 and completely failed to win him over, concluding that he was a dangerous man. On the outbreak of war in Europe, the president offered to create for Lindbergh the post of secretary for air if he gave up preaching isolationism. The eccentric aviator, a sad figure since his child disappeared in a sensational kidnapping, was not so easily bought.

Also beyond the president's reach in the Wheeler camp was Colonel Robert R. McCormick, proprietor of the Chicago Tribune and congenital haler of Roosevelt, the consummate populist, whose many enemies were singularly passionate in their loathing. McCormick's cousin Eleanor "Cissy" Patterson owned one of the main Washington news papers. As the Federal capital's leading hostess, she dominated a coterie dismissed by Roosevelt as "the American Cliveden set" (British socialites and appeasers led by Lord and Lady Astor of Chveden House). Cissy's brother, Captain Joseph Patterson, owned the New York Daily News. These three papers and the Hearst Press, founded by William Randolph Hearst (model for Orson Welles's Citizen Kane), formed a powerful and strident anti-FDR chorus which did not shrink from fighting dirty, as we shall see. They helped to turn Roosevelt against the press as a whole and toward radio as a direct line to the voters. The press tycoons' hostility, based on opposition to the New Deal with its welfare provisions and state intervention in the economy, turned to hate when the Lend-Lease Act, a monstrosity to all Anglophobes, became law.

The strength of anti-British sentiment in a nation full of people of Irish and German origins was illustrated by the popularity before Pearl Harbor of an isolationist diatribe, England Expects Every American to Do his Duty, by one Quincy Howe. Admiral Nelson, RN, was clearly as quotable in the United States as in Japan. Pacifists, communists, fascists and the mineworkers' leader John L. Lewis, prominent opponent of conscription, also belonged to the diverse cross-section of Americans who translated isolationist sentiment into a political tendency transcending party. No politician, least of all Roosevelt, could afford to take it lightly.

But opposing Roosevelt over something he held dear was also not to be undertaken lightly. For all the privileges that went with the nearest thing America has produced to an aristocracy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a graduate of the University of Hard Knocks. Born in 1882 at Hyde Park in upper New York state of an indulgent father and ferociously dominant mother, both of impeccable early-settler stock, Franklin was spoiled as a child. Privately tutored until fourteen, he was sent to Groton, modeled on the English "public" school (meaning open to all with inordinately rich and influential parents) and founded only a few years earlier, complete with instant arcane "traditions." At eighteen he went on to Harvard to read history, literature, and politics in breadth if not in depth. He played football, rowed, joined a glee club, and worked for the student press. In the long summer vacations he accompanied his parents to Germany, France, and Britain.

In 1901 his distant cousin, Theodore, already his partner in a mutual-admiration society, became president on the assassination of McKiniey. This gave Franklin an early glimpse of life in the White House, which he loved. By the time he left college, if not sooner, the young Roosevelt was a consummate manipulator of people, not least young women, an expert at compromise with an instinct for seizing the middle ground. He was quite clearly inspired to develop these skills by the need to get round his mother, Sara. In 1902 he met the other principal woman in his life Eleanor, niece of Theodore. They married in 1905 and had six children, one of whom died in infancy. Franklin completed his formal education at Columbia Law School in New York City in 1907 and became an attorney. But he was already committed to following in his illustrious Republican cousin's footsteps as closely as possible, even if he was a Democrat. In the same year, he predicted that he too would become, successively, a New York state legislator, assistant secretary of the Navy, governor of New York, and finally president of the United States! And so he did, starting in 19 10. A series of illnesses gave the lie to his general air of athletic fitness. He suppressed his distaste for pork-barrel politics when he realized he would get nowhere without the backing of the Democratic state political machine at Tammany Hall.

His stint in the Navy Department lasted the seven years until 1920; it was marked by feverish wartime activity, including a visit to England and the western front in France, and by an enormous, politically almost fatal scandal at its end, just as Roosevelt was preparing to run for vice-president. The row centered upon Roosevelt's investigation of a homosexual corruption network at the naval training station in New port, Rhode Island. Liberal use was made of entrapment. In 1921 a Senate subcommittee concluded that Roosevelt must have known of the dubious methods and had therefore perjured himself before the court of inquiry. This low point in his career was swiftly followed by the low point in his life (no coincidence, we may surmise): he came down with infantile paralysis (poliomyelitis) in the summer of 1921 and never walked unaided again. In the seven hard years that ensued, he learned compassion and self-reliance and became a much more serious individual: life had ceased to be a game. His political comeback as state governor led to his nomination for the presidency in 1932; on March 4, 1933, just seventeen days after a near-miss assassination attempt at Miami, Florida, a second Roosevelt moved into the White House. He was to be its most enduring tenant, and began his twelve years in power with a record-breaking first hundred days of frenetic economic legislation. It was nothing less than a bid to outlaw the Slump, and it succeeded not least because of the stupendous economic activity generated by Hitter's war, begun two hectic years before this glad-handing cripple led America into battle as its commander-in-chief.

Whatever the shortcomings of the United States and its C-in-C as Japan so brusquely catapulted them into combat, there was no shortage of information about the new enemy. Indeed, hindsight provides many reasons for believing that there was too much of this normally scarce commodity, a veritable cornucopia of intelligence, in the military sense of the word, not matched by intelligence of the other, higher kind: the wit to interpret the secretly acquired information correctly and draw the right conclusions. But the dearth of assessment and application skills should not be allowed to detract from the sheer brilliance of the American intelligence-gathering effort between the wars, all the more remarkable for being so haphazard -- sometimes downright chaotic -- and involving such extraordinary, not to say bizarre, individuals.

The story goes back to the First World War, when American forces did no more than lay the foundations of their own signals-intelligence ("sigint") efforts. First in the field was Colonel George Fabyan, who was not even a real colonel (the honorary title was awarded by the state of Illinois for his part in the American mediation that ended the Russo Japanese War in 1905 ). Fabyan, a wealthy eccentric, ran a biological laboratory at Geneva, Illinois, where his amateur interest in cryptography led him to set up a cipher department before the US entered the war in April 1917. Fabyan had been decoyed up this intriguing linguistic byway while trying to prove by verbal analysis that the works of Shakespeare had been written by Francis Bacon. The first head of the department was one Elizebeth Smith, and it soon began to undertake assignments for the US departments of State, War, Navy, and Justice, none of which had any such facility.

Smith was soon succeeded by a young geneticist on the laboratory staff who also took an initially amateur interest in codes and ciphers: William F. Friedman, born in Russia in 1891 and brought to Illinois by his immigrant parents in the following year. He was a graduate in biology from Cornell University. Until diverted to cryptanalysis, Friedman had been experimentally mating fruit flies as part of a study of how to control them. A rare photograph of Friedman in later life shows a dapper, clever-looking man with a long nose and a short mustache over a shiny bow tie with diagonal stripes, all reminiscent of the film actor Adolphe Menjou. It thus comes as no surprise to learn that he was a snappy dresser fond of ballroom dancing; he also kept a carbon copy of every written communication he ever made, which may help to explain his reputation for phenomenal recall. He did much original intellectual work on the application of statistics and coincidence theory to cryptanalysis.

Meanwhile, late in 1917, the United States Army appointed Herbert 0. Yardley, a young coding clerk in the Department of State, to head the brand-new cryptanalysis section of Army Intelligence, MI-8. Yardley had come to official notice and proved himself up to the job by breaking into presidential cables in his spare time, even though he was not privy to the ciphers used for them. He was a "natural" at this kind of thing, and his name soon came up when the Army was looking for a suitable candidate.

One of his very first colleagues was Friedman, who was taken into the US Army Signal Corps as a second rietifenanf, to serve the last six months of the war in staff-section G-2 (intelligence) at General Pershing's American Expeditionary Force headquarters in France, in the Code and Cipher Solving Section. Friedman, relying strongly on intuition because his training in higher mathematics was weak, established himself by penetrating the "unbreakable" new British Army encipherment machines intended for Anglo-American communications; eleven thousand of them had to be scrapped as a result. On his return to the laboratories at Riverbank after the war, he surpassed this feat by breaking into an AT&T cipher-teleprinter that was also, rashly, billed in advance as "impenetrable." Small wonder that in January 1921 the Army decided it could not do without Friedman's services. The Signal Corps gave him a six-month contract as a civilian employee, the start of a "temporary" attachment which lasted for thirty -four years. Even after his retirement in 1955, Friedman continued as a consultant, most notably in 1957, when he wrote a secret critique of the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory (file SRH 125 at the US National Archive) which can reasonably be described as crushing. His main claim to fame, however, is the penetration of the Japanese diplomatic cipher-machine code named "Purple" by the US, the basis of the entire "Magic" campaign of cryptanalysis a word coined by Friedman, the greatest American practitioner of this secret art ( see below).

But in the immediate aftermath of 1918 the running was made by Yardley, still hard at work eavesdropping on German wireless traffic at the Versailles peace conference. No sooner was this concluded in June 1919 than Yardley proposed to his masters in the State and War departments the establishment of a permanent cryptanalytical service. The result was the clandestine creation, with secret funds from both departments, of what soon became known to those privy to the operation as the Black Chamber, at an office in lower Manhattan. It passed itself off as the Code Compilation Company. By the time of the Washington Conference, which opened in November 1921, its prime target was already Japanese diplomatic traffic. After a year's work and in time for the all-important conference, an outstanding diplomatic event in Japanese history between the wars, Yardley broke through. He was therefore able to tell Charles Evans Hughes, secretary of state, leading the American delegation, first that the Japanese representatives had been ordered to avoid a row with the US and then that Tokyo was prepared to go along with the 10: 10:6 naval ratio for Britain, America and Japan. This gave the Americans the confidence at the talks to persist with their underlying aim of torpedoing the prewar Anglo-Japanese alliance while Limiting the size of the world's leading navies (and thus the US budget).

The British, not in on the secret and unable at that time to penetrate Japanese ciphers, were alarmed by American persistence in attacking an apparently unyielding Japanese position. Unfortunately, as we have seen, this diplomatic victory proved to be something of a military boomerang. For the diehards in Japan "compromise" was a synonym for "humiliation" and 60 percent of American or British worldwide maritime strength left Japan with de facto naval supremacy in the Pacific, even before she cast aside all Limitations on her own armaments. The collateral ban on expanding ocean bases also left Japan with far more naval facilities in the Pacific than any other power. Nonetheless, Yardley was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal in 1922, ostensibly for his war work but in fact for his undoubted intellectual and technical triumph against Japanese ciphers after the war. Despite his disgraceful subsequent conduct, he cannot be blamed for the fact that the US administration too often misinterpreted or ignored the flood of information from Japan which he inaugurated.

The Black Chamber was mainly an Army enterprise. The Navy was slower off the mark, having relied almost totally on the superb British effort, run from Room 40 at the Admiralty, against the Germans in 1917-18. Washington's decision to allocate $100,000 to naval sigint in 1918 came too late to be significant for World War I: $65,000 still remained in this secret war-chest when a singularly upright intelligence chief returned it to the US Treasury in 193 1 in order to keep his hands clean!

It was only when Captain Andrew Long, USN, became director of the Office of Naval Intelligence_(ONI) late in 1920 that the Navy began to acquire its own cryptanalysis section. Young naval-officer volunteers were sent to the American embassy in Tokyo to learn the language. In

1924 the Navy's Code and Signal Section (CSS), part of the Office of Naval Communications (ONC ), set up a Research Desk under Lieutenant Laurence L. Safford the root of an intra-service rivalry between ONI and ONC which was to have its grotesque culmination during the Pacific Campaign. Meanwhile Safford, originally supported by one cryptanalyst, Mrs. Agnes Drisco!l, nee Meyer, and two typists, went to work on the "Red Book," a two-volume copy, with translations, of the Japanese consular code, bound in red cloth by the Americans (hence the name ). This seminal aid to eavesdropping was put together in a series of illegal and secret raids by naval, FBI and police agents, abetted by a convicted safecracker, on Japanese premises in New York, including the offices of an assistant naval attaché and the Imperial Railways, during which the code was photographed page by page. The agents had followed several Japanese spies usually Army and Navy officers pretending to be visitors to these buildings, which were clandestinely collecting large quantities of raw intelligence of all kinds on the USA. In the process, access was also obtained to the main naval code-book. It was not the burglaries in retrospect, despite the provocation and the far reaching results, still a recklessly cavalier undertaking but the hard work put in afterward that was the real achievement of "Red Magic." Armed with the code (a system where words, letters, or digits stand for names, phrases or references), the cryptanalysts had only to solve the essentially mathematical problem of the cipher (where one letter or digit stands for another). Even so it took nearly two years.

In October 1925 Lieutenant (J.G.) Joseph J. Rochefort, USNR, a graduate and former World War I enlisted man, joined Safford at the Research Desk. It is difficult to determine which of the two was the more eccentric. Safford, who graduated from the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1916, was one of those people who are the despair of uniform tailors as well as orderly organizations. He wore his hair in the "mad-professor" style and talked disjointedly because his mouth could not keep up with his mind; his forte was pure mathematics. Rochefort was mild-mannered, dedicated, and serious but also persistent, energetic and impatient of hierarchies and bureaucracy, his mind unfettered by orthodox officer-training. He eventually went to Tokyo for three years to learn Japanese. Forced to work in a dank redoubt at Pearl Harbor during the war, he habitually wore carpet slippers and a red velvet smoking jacket on duty to keep himself warm. This provoked senior officers without affecting the quality of his intuitive cryptanalytical work, which was the foundation of America's most important naval victory, as will be seen in chapter 5.

Neither man would have achieved what he did without the inspiration and practical training provided by the no less extraordinary Agnes Meyer. Like Yardley, she was originally a humble coding clerk, but in the Navy Department; like Friedman, she could not resist the challenge of cracking an "unbreakable" cipher invented and submitted to the Navy in 192 1 by Edward Hebern, a manufacturer of encipherment machines (Friedman was able to deduce the random internal wiring of one such from only ten messages passed through it). Hebern had the wit to offer Meyer a job in California, but within a year she married Michael B. Driscoll, a lawyer, and returned with him to Washington, where she went back to work for the Navy in 1924 at the age of thirty-five. Elegant, demure and aristocratic in bearing, Mrs. Driscoll was unsurpassed in the United States, both as cryptanalyst and instructor. Not even a serious car-crash in 1937, which maimed her, could prevent her from playing a key role in sigint throughout the war.

Such was the original team of three which went to work on Japanese codes and ciphers for the Navy in Washington. Friedman's later conquest of the "Purple" diplomatic cipher seems more glamorous and was at least as difficult but could give no clue to Pearl Harbor. Had more urgent attention been given to the humbler Red, Washington might have got its warning after all, as will be shown shortly.

Soon ONC set up listening posts ("Y-stations") at Guam, Shanghai, Peking, Cavite in the Philippines and Pearl to intercept Japanese radio traffic, but then rather negated the value of the exercise by not forwarding what it got to ONI on spurious "security" grounds. It was all part of the internal struggle for control of the Code and Signal Section, which ultimately (see chapter 5) became Op-20-G, directly under Admiral Ernest J. King as C-in-C, US Fleet (COMINCH), and chief of naval operations (CNO ). In view of this, it will hardly come as a surprise to the reader that no thought had yet been given to cooperation with the Army in the new sigint.

The latter service all but retired from the field in 1929, when President Herbert Hoover's conspicuously honorable new secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, reacted angrily to the Japanese intercepts appearing daily on his desk. "Gentlemen do not read one another's mail " he decreed, and ordered it stopped, together with funding for the Black Chamber, which was officially closed down in May. Stimson's naive diktat was a blessing in disguise, because it prompted a long-overdue reorganization of Army sigint. By then the Chamber was already moribund, with little to do but still retaining a staff of six and a payroll of which Herbert Yardley was helping himself to three-eighths. The Stimson order coincided with the conclusion of a Signal Corps investigation which had uncovered Yardley's penchants for poker and philandering.

The work of this free-lance subcontractor was taken back under direct Army control, independent also of the State Department. The Signal Corps, apparently concluding that what Mr. Stimson did not know would not hurt him, set up the Signal Intelligence Service to handle attacks on foreign codes and ciphers as well as provide the Army with homegrown ones for its own use. Friedman, still a civilian though an officer in the Army Reserve, was the obvious candidate to take charge of it. Starting with a staff of six, he built it up step by step to more than three hundred by the end of 1941 (and ten thousand by the end of the war). The SIS was the direct ancestor of the Armed Forces Security Agency ( 1 949 ) and the National Security Agency ( 1 952 ). Friedman was midwife to both, and retired as special assistant to the director of the latter, which is now the largest and most important American intelligence organization. The NSA listens to the world on a colossal scaly not least to forestall being caught out again, as at Pearl Harbor on December 1, 1941.

Unfortunately, Yardley was not prepared to allow his dismissal to pass unavenged. He coolly published a book entitled The American Black Chamber in 1931, as well as a series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post but not before approaching the Japanese with an irresistible offer to sell them everything he knew for $7,000. Had they waited a few weeks, the information would have cost them no more than the couple of dollars needed to buy a copy of his expose in a bookstore. Yardley planned a follow-up, to be called Japanese Diplomatic Secrets, but the US government managed to find a means of preventing its appearance. The Japanese Foreign Ministry complained bitterly of American deceit (perhaps twice over, once for the penetration of its communications and then for Yardley's confidence trick). One of the most surprising aspects of this extraordinary double betrayal was that the Japanese did not become permanently alert to American interest in their secret communications and the lengths to which US agents were prepared to go. Perhaps they preferred to regard Mr. Stimson rather than Mr. Yardley as truly representative of American attitudes.

Ten years after its foundation, the SIS under Friedman's personal leadership was hard at work on breaking into the cipher used with the new Japanese diplomatic encipherment-machine, Purple. It took the team eighteen months to build an analogue of the machine, during which the highly strung, depressive Friedman, who knew no Japanese but oily English, came close to nervous collapse more than once. The foundation of his team's triumph, apart from very hard work, was a huge blunder by the Japanese. The Purple machine was technologically straightforward but intricate in structure and slow in manufacture. It was therefore introduced piecemeal, first on the Tokyo-Washington circuit in February 1939 and then gradually to Japanese embassies round the world. The Americans guessed correctly that general messages being sent by Purple to some recipients had to be sent by, Red to the rest and were able to use the latter, already penetrated, to help break the former.

The Purple machine, like other electromechanical cipher machines of the period, had a typewriter keyboard. When a key was pressed, a current passed through a series of mechanical parts with asymmetrical internal wiring (not wheels, as in other such machines, but selectors, as used in old-fashioned telephone systems) and electrical circuits to encipher the chosen letter. Each time a key was pressed, at least one of the moving parts inside the machine took up a different position relative to the rest, so that each letter of the message was separately and differently enciphered. To decipher the signal, the recipient had only to set his machine in the same starting position as the sender and run it through. The main flaw in this complex device was that it used different circuits for vowels and consonants, which helped the American cryptanalysts. Their version was actually superior technically to the Japanese original, because it used brass rather than copper contacts and therefore took much, longer to wear out (when this happened, messages were garbled). The Friedman team got its first break into the system in August 1940 and decrypted its first complete message on September 25, just in time to filch the text of the Tripartite Pact binding Japan, Germany and Italy, which was signed two days later.

This American achievement was the perfect counterpart to the British successes against the German "Enigma” cipher-machine, to be crowned in May 1941 with the breach of naval Enigma, the best defended system. The British had not tackled Purple but had, like the Dutch, made considerable progress since the early 1920s, more than the United States, against Japanese naval and military ciphers. Thus, when the British Technical Mission arrived in Washington in August 1940 to arrange exchanges of technological expertise so as to offset dwindling exports and reserves, the foundation of a crucial swap in sigint equipment and ideas was laid more than a year before the United States actually went to war. Friedman was to have gone to Britain in the spring of 1941 as a result of the agreement to pool this vital information, but he collapsed from exhaustion. The Purple triumph was by no means the end of his enormous contribution to wartime US signals intelligence. He wrote at least sixteen training manuals, ran a training program, did much valuable work in such diverse areas as codes and ciphers for the US Army (Congress belatedly paid him $100,000 by way of lost patent rights for these in 1956), location by radio direction-finding, and even invisible ink.

Perhaps most important of all was the personal link he established with Safford at Navy, a lateral move that was the basis of a highly unusual interservice cooperation before and through the war. The most obvious result was the avoidance of duplication by two already over stretched sigint operations. The Army carried on with its work on Purple while the Navy tackled other diplomatic traffic, as well as the main Japanese naval system and its variants code-named JN25 (JN25b was introduced six days before the Pearl Harbor attack, to the temporary discomfiture of the US eavesdroppers; they would, however, have been none the wiser had they been able to penetrate it at once). The two services pooled their work on Red, leaving the Americans weakest against Japanese Army signals, which proved exceptionally stubborn. This did not resolve the struggle for control of sigint within the Navy, which was beyond Friedman's powers, but opened the way to an exceptionally fruitful, not to say exemplary and much too rare, exercise in interservice cooperation in the United States. That the British sigint operation at Bletchley Park, northwest of London, was also remarkable for the degree of cooperation among Royal Navy, Army and RAF helps to explain why Anglo-American intelligence collaboration in World War II was in itself one of the most successful alliances in military history.

But the palmy days of total Allied superiority in sigint still lay in the future on the morning after Pearl Harbor. At that moment, the burning question in Washington and wherever the American flag flew was how such a devastating stroke could have been delivered with impunity. A huge row broke out in Hawaii and erupted in the United States proper as soon as the news 'of the ruination of the American battle fleet came through. The row has gone on ever since, and has become deeper and more complex with the passage of time. As the Americans went to war with the battle cry "Remember Pearl Harbor!" they were already demanding to know how it could have happened and whether it could have been prevented. This natural reaction rapidly developed into a hunt for scapegoats (the easy part) and for the proverbial "smoking gun," which has still not been found, despite more and more ingenious theories and the outpouring of millions of words. Most of these have shed more heat than light on that most vexed of questions: was the Pearl Harbor debacle the result of confusion or conspiracy? That it was most obviously the result of a brilliantly planned, ruthlessly executed surprise attack by a bold enemy has not dampened half a century of fierce debate which no contemporary historian can afford to ignore.

It has been proved that the United States forces did possess intelligence information which could have alerted them to the specific threat to Pearl Harbor. It has been alleged on the basis of this established fact that President Roosevelt knew the Japanese were coming and did nothing to save the fleet, so as to ensure that America was forced into the war. It has also been claimed, more subtly perhaps, that Roosevelt did not know but Churchill did, and that "perfidious Albion" withheld the information to make sure that the United States came into the war on Britain's side.

British furtiveness has given the latter charge a longer life than it might otherwise have merited. The morbid British obsession with official secrecy has allowed half a century to go by without the release of a single syllable of the intelligence material British agencies acquired about and from Japan. Indeed, London has never officially admitted to possessing any, even though American and other sources have shown otherwise. Professor Hinsley's official history of British Intelligence in the war is no less coy. The field of historical speculation is thus abandoned to the diehard skeptics, the conspiracy theorists, and the paranoid. They have had a wonderful time arguing that, if the British are hiding so much, there must be something monumental to hide; that there can be no smoke without fire; that there are a few veterans whose belated revelations in old age, even if sometimes extracted by leading questions, "prove" the British knew and never told. None of these people have logically proved the point to my mind, even though some have unearthed a great deal of circumstantial evidence of a kind flat denials or shifty silences from Whitehall will never demolish unaided. But as long as the British government is so childish about superannuated secrets, it positively deserves to be accused of perfidy in 1941 and there will always be something of a case to answer. Indeed, the recent shift of target from Roosevelt to Churchill in the tireless hunt for the smoking gun may well derive from the fact that nothing has been found in the open US archives, whereas so many British records remain closed. As long as that is true, the speculators can say what they like without fear of contradiction.

Like Washington's accurate error of July 1941, the irrepressible suspicion that the United States could have forestalled Pearl Harbor derives from America's own brilliance in signals intelligence between the wars. We now know that the United States was able to read Japan's diplomatic traffic at consular and ambassadorial levels alike, with little delay and almost as if it were an open book. The US code word for the resulting intelligence was "Magic." The Americans had also made great progress in penetrating Japan's military codes and ciphers by 1941 (code word "UItra," also used by the British for military signals intelligence, which they exchanged with the Americans). Sometimes information from one source filled out, clarified, or confirmed interceptions from another. It is hardly surprising that for some people the question has become, not "Did we know?" but "How could we not have known?" But is that fair?

First the facts. The Americans in Washington, Hawaii, and the Philippines, the British in Singapore and Hong Kong, and the Dutch in Bandung, Java, collectively intercepted a number of Japanese messages which indicated war was imminent in the Far East. The armed forces of the three powers exchanged information via liaison officers stationed in one another's Asiatic intelligence bureau throughout 1941. Anglo American cooperation in this field was agreed upon in July 1940 and formalized by a written agreement between the chiefs of staff of the two countries in December. The Dutch "Black Chamber" or "Room 14" decryption center had been making inroads into Japanese consular, diplomatic, and naval ciphers since 1932 but destroyed the records ten years later, when the Japanese invaded: the obvious reason why the Dutch contribution has usually been underestimated. The American Army completed its assault on the two ciphers used by Japanese consulates Red, in 1936, and the much more sophisticated Purple used by embassies in September @940. The US Navy started to breach the main Japanese naval cipher, JN25, about the same time, and could read a significant and growing proportion of the traffic by a combination of hard graft and good guesswork.

The Americans gave the British three of their then extant stock of eight painstakingly constructed imitation Purple machines between January and September 1941. The third would otherwise have gone to the US Army at Pearl Harbor, which thus was unable to obtain its own Magic. Nor could the US Navy in Hawaii extract its own Ultra, as the copy of JN25 originally intended for its cryptanalysts at Pearl had also been given to the British in January 1941. US forces in Hawaii were therefore totally dependent on Washington for relevant Magic and Ultra material; from the crucial month of July 1941 onward the supply even of these predigested extracts was cut off, partly for fear of leaks and partly because the circuits were said to be overloaded. But since Purple Magic provided only diplomatic material ( including priceless strategic, economic and political information about Germany, as transmitted from the Japanese embassy in Berlin to Tokyo), it would not have given the slightest hint of planned or impending Japanese military operations against Pearl Harbor or anywhere else. The absence of a machine at Pearl, of which so much has been made elsewhere, is thus a purple herring: the presence of one in the Philippines, complete with an excellent team of cryptanalysts, demonstrably did MacArthur no good at all.

Since the Mobile Force of the Combined Fleet had been briefed on its Hawaiian mission while ashore and observed strict radio silence while at sea no transmissions, only a listening watch Ultra from the new JN25b would have revealed little of value to Pacific Fleet head quarters in Hawaii, even if they had been able to unravel the material. Its unavailability is thus another distraction from the main issue. Nagumo's carriers followed a route across the North and Central Pacific that was out of range of Allied land-based aircraft and hundreds of miles off the main sea-lanes. It was under orders to sink any Allied or neutral merchant ship sighted, to prevent her from sounding the alarm by radio. The carriers met just one cargo vessel, which turned out to be Japanese: she sailed blithely homeward as if alone on the broad ocean.

The Americans made an understandable error in handling Red Magic. Because it was derived from the humble consular material, it was decrypted last and often delayed in distribution or ignored on receipt as it was mostly routine. Although it too contained no operational information, since the civilian Foreign Ministry, and thus its diplomatic and consular officers, were systematically denied such matter by the military even more strictly in Japan than in other countries, it held clues that would have alarmed intelligence officers. For example, there was a long message on December 3, 1941, from Consul Kilo in Honolulu listing US Navy ships in Pearl Harbor. Because of the pressure on the cryptanalysts, this was not deciphered until December 11. The hyperactive Honolulu consulate, a round-the-clock espionage center, had earlier been ordered to impose a grid pattern on a map of Pearl Harbor and to report daily what ships were in each square. The resident chief spy was Ensign Yoshikawa Taken of the IJN Reserve, alias Foreign Ministry clerk Morimura Tadachi, who garnered priceless information by such means as taking a job washing dishes in officers' clubs.

There were also the notorious "winds" messages. The Foreign Ministry told its consulates on November 19, 1941, that certain phrases would be inserted in Tokyo's shortwave international weather forecasts to indicate the imminent outbreak of war. "North wind cloudy" meant war with Russia; "west wind clear," war with Britain "east wind rain " war with America. This was only translated a week or more later by the overworked Americans. But an alert was sent to all American listening posts to monitor the Japanese radio forecasts, and to listen for the follow-up messages the signal to execute orders previously sent, to destroy sensitive papers together with cipher machines and take other precautions. At least one senior American cryptanalyst came to believe such a "winds-execute" message had been picked up a few days before Pearl Harbor, but no second source has confirmed it beyond reasonable doubt. Japanese diplomatic traffic increased hugely from about December 3, adding to the workload of the American eavesdroppers.

One such Lieutenant Howard Brown, the radio-interception officer whom we met in MacArthur's office in Manila recalled receiving a message from Washington on or about December 5, asking for an immediate report, to be marked "urgent," on any short Japanese language signal transmitted from Tokyo and ending with the English word "stop ." He said such a signal was picked up at 5:00 A.M. Washington time on December 7 (l1:30 p.m. on the 6th in Hawaii). If such messages were indeed sent, they would in all probability have been intercepted by the Dutch, who had to destroy their records, and/or the British, who have been too devious, stubborn, or perhaps ashamed to say, although one or two former Allied naval officers emerged in the late 1980s claiming to remember such interceptions. Even though the memory of the very old for events in the distant past can be exceptionally clear, corroboration is still required. And nobody claims that such a message, if any, contained the slightest hint of an attack on Pearl. Not even the exhaustive, fourteen-point message from Tokyo to its negotiators in Washington on December b1, read in full by the Americans and concluding with precise instructions on when to hand over a quasi ultimatum (half an hour before the Pearl raid), gave such a clue.

Intriguing though all the above may be, there is no indication that any of these Japanese signals (except the delayed Red Magic decryptions from Honolulu) gave the slightest inkling of a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor or any other specific place. That being so, hard though it may be on the "revisionists" the historians who believe Roosevelt and/or Churchill knew and did nothing all this is entertaining but completely irrelevant.

The only significant messages known for sure, apart from the daily shipping report from the Honolulu consulate, to have been transmitted to Nagumo after he sailed were from Yamamoto and were not acknowledged. The first was sent in the evening (Tokyo time) of December 2, the date of the last prewar imperial conference, which confirmed once again the decision to go to war. The message was from Yamamoto himself and said simply: "Climb Mount Niitaka 1208." There was no need for prefix, address or signature: only Nagumo and his staff could have known what this prearranged message signified. Further, it is hard to understand why Yamamoto or anyone else should have run the unnecessary risk of repeating a long and complex operational order, unaltered since given to its addressee in writing long in advance, as well as sending this cryptic confirmation. The reference to Japan's highest mountain meant that hostilities against the United States were to begin on December 8 (Tokyo time). The implication was that taking on America was the hardest task in the forthcoming general offensive; but no Allied cipher-expert would have been able to deduce a raid on Pearl Harbor from this apparently innocuous signal either, even though it could well have been taken as meaning that something big was going to happen on December 7, Western time.

On that day, Yamamoto sent the traditional Nelsonian admonition to a fleet about to go into battle: "The fate of the Empire rests on this enterprise. Every man must devote himself totally to the task in hand." (Nelson would have recognized this as a distorted echo of his "England expects every man to do his duty" at Trafalgar in 1805. Nagumo's own flag-signal to his fleet repeated the pithier version of the same sentiment by the no less imitative Admiral Togo to his battleships at Tsushima a hundred years after Nelson: "The future of the Empire depends on this battle. All men must give their utmost.")

There remains Mr. James Rusbridger, a former British intelligence officer and veteran of the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park, base of the highly successful British wartime decryption effort. His attempts to substantiate the revisionist theory (which was first aired in 1945 and is best known from the books of the historian John Toland) are rare in recognizing the need for logical argument as well as circumstantial evidence of which he appears to have found at least as much as anyone else. According to him, on November 21, 1941, the Dutch broke into a JN25 signal to Nagumo's task force, sending it to sea (it left on the 26th) and giving December 8, Japanese time, as "X-day." This was passed, it is claimed, to the Dutch naval attaché in Washington; he allegedly forwarded it to US naval intelligence, where it was disregarded. The Dutch decryption as recalled long after the war (there being, of course, no written record of it), apparently echoed a paragraph in Admiral Yamamoto's operational order to Nagumo, a copy of which was found by divers aboard the Japanese heavy cruiser Nacbz, sunk by US aircraft in Manila Bay in January 1944.

In 1989 Mr. Rusbridger presented for publication in Britain the story of a ninety-year-old former Royal Australian Navy officer who was also the co-author. Captain Eric Nave, RAN, veteran of the Far East Combined Bureau (the British decryption station in Singapore and later Colombo ), had no doubt that the Japanese intention to attack Pearl Harbor was known in advance to the British, who had got into the Japanese ciphers by or during 1925. The book claims that the departure of Nagumo's task force and its refueling at sea eight days later were detected by sigint, and speculates that Churchill withheld the information from Roosevelt to ensure American participation in the war. The temptation, if any, to laugh this out of court must be tempered by the scarcely credible reaction of the Britain government: it blocked the book by effectively challenging the publisher to an unequal courtroom battle under the recently revised Official Secrets Act. The only factor that prevents the present author from automatically assuming that Rusbridger and Nave must therefore be right is personal experience of the congenital paranoia of British officials when reluctantly storing away records for posterity. Papers infuriatingly locked up for as long as seventy-five years and then released have turned out to be inexplicably, even boringly, harmless. But -- in this case especially -- nobody can be certain. Betrayed at Pearl Harbor was eventually published simultaneously in the U.S. and Britain in the summer of 1991.

In the absence of the last few vital pieces of the conspiracy theorists' elaborate jigsaw puzzle, we are reduced to logic as the only instrument for testing their belief that "People in High Places" knew of Pearl Harbor in advance.

If we start with Churchill, it has to be asked whether he would connive at the destruction of the American battle fleet, on which Britain, as it fought for its life in the West, relied to preserve its own and Holland's large interests in the Far East. There is evidence (but not in their correspondence) that Churchill sent Roosevelt a vital message on November 26; its contents are buried at the Public Record Office in London until the year 2016 "in the interest of national security." This telegram might have been the alleged Pearl warning; or it might have been a tip that Japanese convoys were moving southward from French Indochina, which officially convinced the administration on November 27 that war was absolutely inevitable and imminent, leading to a de facto ultimatum from Washington (by which time the Japanese carriers were already on their way). Or it could have been something entirely different. The risk involved for Churchill in finding out, not telling, and later being discovered to have known -- a very real risk, considering how closely Anglo-American intelligence staffs worked together and the short shelf-life of American official secrets -- would surely have been too high even for such a scheming gambler.

Moving on to Roosevelt, we are asked to believe that this erstwhile assistant Navy secretary connived at the destruction of the bulk of the Pacific Fleet -- its pride and joy, the battleships -- to save Britain's bacon in North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Far East (and to win the election in November, even though polling inconveniently preceded the attack). All this from a man who loved the service, of which he was now commander-in-chief, so much that he usually referred to the Navy as "us" and the Army as "them" during the war, to the lasting chagrin of Army chiefs. Hence, no doubt, the provocative transfer of the fleet from the West Coast to its exposed position in Hawaii. Given the strength of the isolationists, it was essential that Japan strike the first blow (a thought unwisely uttered in public by Henry L. Stimson, Roosevelt's stickler of a war secretary). To get away with it, the president would surely have needed the cooperation of Admiral Harold R. Stark, chief of naval operations, and General Marshall, perhaps the finest individual ever to grace an American uniform, and at the very least their intelligence staffs, including the junior officers and enlisted men who worked on raw sigint.

Forewarned, Roosevelt could have set a trap for the Japanese, dispersed his own fleet, or proved Japanese aggressive intent to the world by having Nagumo caught red-handed on his approach. There was no need to throw away the battleships in order to use them as a lure -- to say nothing of thousands of American lives. The very absence of the aircraft carriers can of course be used to support the conspiracy theory: Roosevelt's foresight told him this type of ship was to win the war, so he saved them by sending them to sea (unfortunately, as we have seen, the Enterprise should have been in Pearl on the 7th). Once again the risk of subsequent discovery looks prohibitive, especially in a country as unsecretive as the United States. And the most likely result of an American sally by a maximum of three carriers against Nagumo's six would have been a reverse Battle of Midway. The core of the United States Navy's air strength would have been outclassed, outgunned and outflown by veteran pilots from the war in China, attacking a fleet that had never fought in the air. Indeed, on this basis the raid of Pearl begins to look like a positive favor to the American Navy. A lost carrier-battle on day one would have made the wait to turn the tables much longer than the six months between Pearl and Midway.

So what is the truth about Pearl Harbor ? The answer is not tidy but is certainly, if not wholly, psychological. Washington could not bring itself to believe that the Japanese would be so bold indeed, so stupid as to do what they did against the United States. No matter that all Japan's previous wars in half a century had opened with a surprise attack; no matter that Ambassador Grew sent a warning from Tokyo about a surprise attack on Pearl in the event of war as early as January 27, 1941, less than three weeks after the Japanese finally adopted the idea. Since he got it from the Peruvian ambassador, it must have been common gossip in the Japanese capital. No matter either that Japanese and American naval officers and amateur naval strategists round the world regarded a strike against Pearl Harbor as obvious. Such a move was still included in the assumptions made in American naval war plans as late as May 1 94 1, although the possibility seems to have slipped out of sight by December. But not on one battleship, where officers had discussed at length what they would do in an air raid: the USS West Virginia, though badly hit twice, fought back with exceptional vigor when it came. That Washington was not entirely silly to regard such an attack as unlikely, which is no excuse for not preparing for the contingency, is shown by the initial resistance of the two Japanese high commands to Yamamoto's scheme. The Army's original plan to avoid American territory would have presented Roosevelt with the uncomfortable choice between continuing to appease the isolationists and going to war to recover European colonies in Asia.

The other important factor behind the humiliation, if such it was, of Pearl Harbor has to do with the processing of intelligence about a potential enemy before he has declared himself by an act of aggression. We have seen that the Americans were culling masses of information out of the airwaves and sending it up the line to Washington. Although interservice and international cooperation in this area was extraordinarily good, there was no coordinating American brain sifting everything that came in to get the full picture -- not in the White House or the War or Navy departments, not at State, or on the staffs of the two services, or in any intelligence organization. Success comes not from collection, which is easy, but from collation and evaluation. From July 194 1 distribution of Magic and Ultra was severely restricted; MacArthur was an exception, but he made no profit from this advantage, any more than he did from the many hours of grace he was given by the Pearl attack and the accident of fog over Formosa. Neither the British nor the Dutch were able to turn their sigint from Japan to good account. A British double agent, Dusko Popov, revealed in the summer of 1941 that the Japanese had asked the Germans to get them information on Pearl Harbor from their sources in the United States, but J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, would give no credence to this unusual, not altogether respectable source.

Farther afield, Stalin knew the Germans were coming but was still caught napping; the British knew the German battle squadron was going to run for home from France in 1942 and drew up a plan to deal with it but failed on the day. Good intelligence and the slogan "Never Again" the corollary of "Remember Pearl Harbor! " did not prevent the American Army from being badly surprised at the Battle of the Bulge, or the British at Arnhem, in 1944. Admiral Kimmel and Lieutenant General Waiter C. Short at Pearl Harbor were given war warnings on November 21 the strongest of several alerts over the year but took them as no more than a reminder to guard against sabotage. Thus the US aircraft came to be neatly lined up on the tarmac for the convenience of Commander Fuchida and his comrades. But as the American herald of seapower, Admiral Alfred T. Mahan, used to say, hindsight is always better than foresight.

There is no evidence that the Japanese diplomats involved in the last ditch attempt to settle their country's irreconcilable differences with the United States at talks in Washington had any foreknowledge of the attack on Pearl Harbor. There is plenty of evidence that even the highest Japanese officials, even in Tokyo and even if they could still lay claim to an admiral's or a general's title, were not in on the plan: there has probably never been a stricter interpreter of the "need-to-know" rule than Imperial General Headquarters. Indeed, IGHQ (Navy) saw no need to inform IGHQ (Army) of the final, fateful embellishment to the fleet's operational plan for day one of the southward-expansion strategy before the first week in November 194 1. To see the last contacts between America and Japan in their proper context, we need briefly to review the relevant aspects of Japan's foreign policy between the start of the war in Europe and its extension to the Pacific more than two years later.

Matsuoka Yosuke (1880-1946), a radical nationalist barely in control of his unpredictable emotions and widely regarded even by other Japanese leaders as not right in the head, nevertheless tried to do his best for his country, with astounding results. It fell to him, as noted in chapter 1, to lead the Japanese delegation in its histrionic walkout at the League of Nations when the atrocities in China came home to roost in 1933. He was appointed foreign minister in Prince Konoye's second Cabinet on July 26, 1940 (alongside General Tojo as war minister). Konoye's ambitious program included plans to curb the military by establishing the Imperial Rule Assistance Association as the single permitted political organization and thus an alternative center of power; to settle the "China Incident" and to improve japan's strained foreign relations. Autarky was the central economic aim; there was to be a New Order in Greater East Asia, including Manchukuo and China and starting with "reform" the total mobilization and arming of the people in the Home Islands. Japan was to have a "National Defense Economy" (which in essence it still has, according to some observers).

Abroad, Matsuoka negotiated Japan's fateful accession to the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, signed in September 1940. Originally seen by the Cabinet and the Army as a means of neutralizing the threat of the Soviet Union, the pact came to be regarded as insurance against Britain and America as the war in China dragged on and Japan developed its designs on French, British, and Dutch colonies in "Greater East Asia." A ministerial delegation went to Batavia (now Jakarta), capital of the Netherlands East Indies, in September and October 1940, with a view to obtaining Dutch "cooperation" in the New Order entailing unrestricted Japanese access to raw materials and the oil owned and exploited by Dutch, British, and American companies. The Dutch colonial administration, even though its home base was under Nazi occupation, summoned up all its notorious national stubbornness and held out. The Japanese, for the moment, decided to grin and bear what many of them inevitably saw as an unforgivable insult. For such people, the proposition that the other party to a negotiation had a right to different views or interests was not only inadmissible but utterly alien. This terrifying intransigence was more than a match for the blind arrogance it so often encountered on the Western side, where the emphasis was different: but Europeans and Americans too seldom tried to see themselves as others saw them, especially when the others came from another race. The collision between these two failings was a powerful psychological recipe for a catastrophe based on total mutual incomprehension.

Matsuoka now turned his attention to Japan's strained relations with her main strategic supplier, the United States. He decided a new ambassador was needed if the climate was to be improved, and made a considered choice in November: Admiral Nomura Kichisaburo (1877-1964), formerly of the naval staff, delegate at the Versailles and Washington conferences, and briefly foreign minister in 1939. He had served as a naval attaché in Washington during Roosevelt's term as assistant Navy secretary and was thus acquainted with the president, to whom he presented his credentials on February 11, 1941. Six feet tall, two hundred pounds in weight, and no less heavy in manner, he spoke poor English but genuinely liked America. Another ambassador, Kurusu Saburo, was to come and support him in time for the eleventh hour on November 15, 1941; meanwhile, there was Colonel Iwakuro Hideo, previously chief of the military-affairs section of the Ministry for War, to represent the Army's interests. These men conducted the last rounds of talks with the administration in Washington before the Pacific war.

In the spring of 1941 Matsuoka was off on his travels again. They culminated in another breathtaking diplomatic coup: the neutrality pact with the Soviet Union which he signed on April 13. The Russians signed because they feared a war with Germany, and the Japanese because they feared there would not be one: thus do diametrically opposed interests and completely irreconcilable views of the world sometimes perfectly converge. The energetic foreign minister came back to a popular hero's welcome after his undoubted triumph in Moscow.

But there had been portentous and peculiar developments in Tokyo's relations with Washington while he was away. Exhausted by his efforts and keen to catch up on sleep lost courtesy of the Trans-Siberian Railway, Matsuoka was not best pleased to be presented on his return, as a fait accompli, with what purported to be nothing less than a break through in relations with Japan's most important trading partner and main source of strategic materials. What was more, his prime minister, Konoye, was fully informed of these events and had not told him even though it was one of Matsuoka's rare but intense bursts of charm amid his customary emotional rambling that had helped to bring it about.

Visiting Japan just before Matsuoka's momentous spring tour, Bishop James E. Walsh and Father James M. Drought of the Roman Catholic Maryknoll Fathers, a missionary organization, had the unusual honor of being received by the foreign minister. He managed to convince them of Japan's pacific, as distinct from Pacific, intentions. As soon as they got home, they approached a prominent Catholic in the administration, Postmaster General Frank C. Walker. He in turn went to Roosevelt to propose an unofficial channel of communication with Tokyo via the missionaries and, on the Japanese side, Ikawa Tadao, a banker with an entree to Prime Minister Konoye, and Colonel Iwakuro, an intimate of War Minister Tojo (and a man of much experience in espionage). Ready to try even this unlikely "para-diplomacy" in the hope of getting through to the junta, Roosevelt agreed. Secretary of State Cordell Hull was no more in the picture than Mitsuoka, his Japanese opposite number. Walker provided the two clerics with government funds to hire a room in a New York hotel as headquarters for their spatch-cocked but indubitably well-meant peace initiative.

On April 19 they surprised Hull with a proposal for a "draft understanding" between Japan and America, personally delivered by Colonel Iwakuro on his arrival in the US. It was mainly a reiteration of well-known Japanese economic and political demands and positions, but it did seem to indicate that Japan would not use force in pursuit of its Pacific aims and would not go to the aid of Hitler unless the US attacked Germany if Washington merely lifted sanctions, abandoned Chiang Kai-shek in China, and distanced itself from Britain in the Far East. Hull sat down and rewrote the "draft," summoning Ambassador Nomura to tell him that, if it were to be resubmitted in its thus amended form, it could lead to serious discussion. Nomura dangerously misinterpreted this as meaning the amended text was America's blueprint for a settlement, requiring only the redrawing of details.

In fact, Hull appended four "points of principle" which made negotiation useless, because if Japan accepted them talks would be unnecessary, and if it did not they would be a waste of time. In brief, Japan was required to respect (1) the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations, (2) noninterference in the affairs of other nations, (3) equal commercial opportunity for all nations, and (4) the status quo in all Pacific territories unless changed by peaceful means. In other words, Japan should abandon all thought of expansion. Compounding the rampant misunderstanding, Nomura decided not to send this rather serious set of qualifications to the amended text until Tokyo had had time to digest the "draft understanding" itself. On May 8, however, Matsuoka rejected the unexpected fruits of his politeness to the priests out of hand, even before the "but"s arrived; one week later, he demanded a neutrality pact from Washington which would leave Japan a free hand in China and the Pacific. Five weeks after that, Hull counterproposed that Japan withdraw from the Tripartite Pact, China and Indochina.

The next day, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. The volatile, pro Nazi Matsuoka immediately called for war with Germany's new enemy, even though the ink was barely dry on his neutrality pact with Moscow. Konoye, however, viewed Hitler's scuppering of the Nazi-Soviet Pact as treachery to Japan and saw no profit in gratuitously taking on the Russians when the southward-expansion policy was gaining ground with the junta. America, Britain and Holland would be enough new enemies for the time being, when there was no sign of victory in China. On July 2 an imperial conference took the "twin-track" decision to prepare for a military move southward while simultaneously pursuing the diplomatic option. Konoye determined on a spectacular initiative in the latter field, but first he had to dispose of his embarrassing foreign minister. This was smoothly done on July 26, when, after a quiet word with the emperor and his advisers, he resigned. The rest of the Cabinet was as usual obliged to follow suit, including Matsuoka, the object of the exercise. Two days later, Konoye was back in office with the same ministers bar one: Matsuoka was replaced by Admiral Toyoda Teijiro. The prime minister then publicly proposed a summit meeting with Roosevelt.

By Magic, the Americans, as we have observed, were secretly able to follow some, but only some, of the feverish debates over external policy going on behind the scenes in Tokyo. They inevitably came to the conclusion that the junta, which they mistakenly regarded as monolithic, was up to its eyes in deceit, with a foreign minister privately telling his ambassador the opposite of what that envoy was saying to the administration (Roosevelt described Matsuoka's diatribes to Nomura as "the product of a mind which is deeply disturbed and unable to think quietly or logically"). There was very nearly a disaster in April 1941, when the British Embassy relayed some Magic material about the impending German invasion of Russia, which it had been given by the State Department, to London. German intelligence broke into the message and told the Japanese that their diplomatic traffic was compromised; Matsuoka warned Nomura early in May, but, inexplicably, the Japanese took no further action beyond tightening handling procedures. It can only be deduced that, utterly confident in the security of their codes and ciphers, they must have assumed that the leak had occurred in Washington after decipherment. The Magic flowed on, and once Washington got over the shock of almost losing it, its distribution was reduced to an absolute minimum. Even the White House ceased to get more than a digest or extracts until November 1941, when Roosevelt specifically ordered the restoration of a complete service. Hindsight surely makes a moot point of whether the loss of Magic would have been more tragic for the Americans than its retention.

But the July 2 message was passed on in full, and more sanctions were therefore imposed at the very moment that Japan pounce on southern Indochina and its prime minister offered a summit conference. Roosevelt's main motive now in continuing negotiations was to buy time for the US Army and Navy to get ready for a war with Japan, hence forward regarded as inescapable. But the evidence suggests that the president would have gone to a meeting -- Alaska being the favored venue -- had Konoye been able to offer a single genuine and substantive concession on Japan's entrenched and hardening position over ma and the Far East. The danger of another "Munich" unless a real success was guaranteed in advance was clearly appreciated. Cordell Hull was totally opposed to a meeting on any basis; he could not get over the contrast between Nomura's blandishments and the malevolence in his Magic extracts. Hull's formal rejection of the invitation was followed by Konoye's third and last resignation from the premiership on October 16. This was the moment at which the junta stopped vacillating and determined that diplomacy had failed: to keep to the schedule for war by the end of November as laid down by the imperial conference of September 6, the Army had to start moving troops that very day -- or accept the unthinkable loss of face involved in a climbdown. The weasel suggestion from a Navy secretly unsure of victory in a long war (not so secretly in Yamamoto's case) to continue on the twin tracks of diplomacy and mobilization was rejected by Tojo: the scale of the military preparations could no longer be disguised as aimed at China and would render the diplomacy nugatory. And the oil reserve was beginning to run down. The "civilians" (among whom we must count Konoye and Toyoda in this instance) and the Navy were still unable to choose between the two options at a ministerial meeting on the 12th. On the 18th Tojo was made prime minister and the die was cast.

Nomura, unable to straddle the gap between developments at home and the assurances he was still giving to Washington, offered his resignation four days later. He was overruled and therefore stayed abroad to lie for his country just a little longer. Even so, the support for the diplomatic option was not yet extinguished in Japan, as a liaison conference lasting more than twelve hours showed on November 1 but not to the unaware Americans. The Army wanted to go to war on the 13th, and the Navy on the 20th; the civilians wanted a last chance for peace and a halt to mobilization while the chance was being explored. At midnight it was decided to give the negotiators until December 1; war would begin a few days later if they failed. Mobilization would continue. An imperial conference confirmed the decision the next day. Two days after that, the first meeting was held of the Supreme War Guidance Council of the most senior military leaders in the presence of the emperor. Magic revealed no hint of all the tension or how hard fought the decisions were -- it never did -- but it left no room for doubt that the political temperature was rising in Tokyo; Nomura, however, did not know how far things had gone at home.

The cabinet tried to bolster Roosevelt's confidence on November 6 by concluding unanimously that the American public would support a naval campaign against Japan, even if he precipitated it rather than await an incident. On November 18 Tojo's new envoy, Kurusu, and Nomura had a three-hour session with Hull which broke down over Japan's adherence to the Axis alliance. The next day, Bishop Walsh of Mary knoll reinserted his toe in the heated diplomatic water (or put his foot in it) by calling upon Nomura and asserting that US oil would flow again if Japan withdrew from Indochina. This right-reverend demarche was no more productive than its predecessor.

On November 20 the Japanese Ambassador communicated to us proposals for a modus vivendi [wrote Roosevelt to Churchill on the 24th: the phrase could just as well have been replaced by the single Latin word "ultimatum"]. This Government proposes to inform the Japanese Government that... [the] proposals contain features not in harmony with the fundamental principles which underlie the proposed general settlement and to which each government has declared that it is committed. It is also proposed do offer to the Japanese Government an alternative proposal for a modus vivendi... [do] remain in force for three months.... This seems to use a fair proposition for the Japanese but its acceptance or rejection is really a matter of internal Japanese polities. I am not very hopeful and we must all be prepared for real trouble, possibly soon.

Japan's five-point last word was a summary of its final diplomatic position ( its irreducible, nonnegotiable minimum ) as thrashed out in the Tokyo meetings in the first week of November: no troop movements by either side in Southeast Asia; Japan to withdraw from southern to northern Indochina and to leave altogether on peace with China; Japanese American "cooperation" on access to raw materials from the Dutch East Indies; unfreezing of assets; an end to American aid for China. There was no "or-else" clause, but it was obvious that Japan would neither yield nor offer anything more: if Washington could not swallow this list whole, there would be war. For modus vivendi, or accommodation, read sine quanon. For the sake of form, the Americans countered on November 26 with their five-point alternative: joint commitment to peaceful means; no further advance by force or threat; Japan to withdraw from southern to northern Indochina and to reduce its forces there; resumption of trade on a month-by-month basis for civilian needs; Japan to negotiate fairly with the Chinese nationalist government in Chungking. Nobody in Washington thought for a moment that this would be acceptable in Tokyo. Once again the Americans were utterly convinced that war was imminent. This time they were right.

Of course it is for you to handle this business [Churchill replies on the 26th] and we certainly do not want an additional war. There is only one joint that disquiets us. What about Chiang Kai-shek.? Is he not having a very thin diet.? Our anxiety is about China. If they collapse our joint dangers would enormously increase. We ace sure that the regard of the United States for the Chinese cause will govern your action. We feel that the Japanese are most unsure of themselves.

This response appears to show a deeper understanding in London of the profound tensions and divisions within the Japanese leadership which lay behind the outwardly hardening intransigence of their "negotiating" position; but it also overlooks the "loss-of-face" factor, which decrees that a position, once publicly taken up, cannot be abandoned without "humiliation." Given that the Americans, like the French in 1914, were absolutely determined not to strike the first blow, the issue of peace or war now lay entirely with the junta. For Tojo and the generals the choice looked significantly different: war, or abject surrender with no room for compromise, a position that they were psychologically incapable of seeing was entirely their own fault. But the president was absolutely right in absenting that war or peace depended not on external factors but on the internal politics of Japan.

On November 26 (the day, let us recall, on which the Mobile Force set sail for Hawaii) Roosevelt was given hard military intelligence that a large Japanese convoy with some fifty thousand troops was at sea south of Formosa (the force that was to make the landings in Thailand and Malaya), even as the Nomura-Kurusu double act was discussing the possibility of a military withdrawal from the Indochina area. Hull there fore met the envoys again that evening and made them an offer he knew they could not accept an accommodation dependent on a Japanese withdrawal from Indochina and China. The two envoys suspended their customary bowing and smiling and gaped: there was no point in for warding such an idea to Tokyo, they said with uncharacteristic bluntness.

The next day, the US Army alerted its forces, and Admiral Stark, chief of naval operations, sent this unequivocal but verbose message to Admirals Kimme] and Hart of the Pacific and Asiatic fleets in Pearl and Manila:

This dispatch is do be considered a war warning. Negotiations with Japan looking toward stabilization of conditions in the Pacific have ceased. An aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days. The number and equipment of Japanese troops and the organization of naval task forces indicates an amphibious expedition against either the Philippines, Thai or Kra [Malaya] Peninsula or possibly Borneo. Execute appropriate defensive deployment preparatory to carrying our the tasks assigned in Warplan 46.

Convinced beyond argument that the Americans could not be persuaded to make any concession to Japan's "just demands" and plans for East Asia, the imperial conference of December 1 formally resolved to go to war one week later.

On the evening of Saturday, December 6, Roosevelt decided on one last effort -- a direct appeal as head of state to Emperor Hirohito himself. The State Department sent it by radio to Ambassador Grew that evening. War broke out before it could be delivered. At the same time a very long message, in thirteen parts, was coming in the opposite direction, from Tokyo to the Japanese Embassy in Washington. The transcript, all of fifteen pages, restated Japan's position in completely intransigent terms. "This means war," said Roosevelt when he had scanned the Magic intercept. On the Sunday morning, a fourteenth and last part of the message was intercepted, telling Nomura to present the entire document at precisely 1:00 P.M. Washington time. At noon Nomura duly telephoned to ask for an appointment at that time with Hull. Shortly afterward he asked for a deferment. Some serious Saturday night drinking among the embassy's cipher clerks had delayed transcription and translation of a text the Americans had already seen!

Roosevelt and his closest adviser, Harry Hopkins, were at lunch at the White House at 1:40 P.M., when Navy Secretary Frank Knox telephoned the news that Pearl Harbor was under air attack. Twenty-five minutes later, Nomura and Kurusu arrived in Cordell Hull's outer office and were made to wait while the secretary of state completed his telephone conversation with the president, who had just told him of the raid. Hull pretended to read the text he already knew when the envoys presented it to him -- and then orally blasted them out of the building. The attack had started seven minutes early, and Japan's message heralding it had been delivered sixty-five minutes late. Tokyo's plan was to give half an hour's notice of the outbreak of hostilities (without saying where), so as to be able to deny attacking without warning. The point is a quibble: an ultimatum with an intended duration of half an hour is indistinguishable from an undeclared war. The raid on Pearl Harbor and all the other opening moves in the Japanese plan were sneak attacks. But that was the Japanese way: the Bushido code says all is fair in war.

Torpedoes

"Torpedoes" was probably the only branch of naval warfare in which the United States Navy was markedly inferior to the Japanese. The reason for this inferiority lies deep in the organization of the US Government and the psychology of its people. It certainly cannot be shifted off as solely the responsibility of a small group of technicians.... Undoubtedly torpedo inferiority added months to the war and thus cost the US thousands of lives and billions of dollars of treasure.”

So says the unpublished Submarine Operational History (SOH), on page 699 of volume two, a source that can hardly be gainsaid. Since 1869 America's torpedoes had come from the Torpedo Station in Newport, Rhode Island, a key contributor to the economy of the smallest US state, and, from 1940, a new station at Alexandria, Virginia. Both were Navy facilities, and between them they enjoyed a monopoly. Officers did a two- or three-year stint at Newpott just as they did in other posts ashore between tours at sea, so there were few or no real technical experts in the service and none at all outside it. In practice firings, the expensive, complicated and slowly manufactured missile ($10,000 each) was deliberately set to pass under the target to preserve both for reuse! As long as the torpedo ran in a straight line, everyone was satisfied; no check was ever made on the depth at which it ran, difficult though this is to believe. The arrival of the magnetic pistol allegedly made accuracy of depth less important, but this exploder was never tested in advance in simulated combat conditions, and a really inaccurate depth vitiated the effect of a torpedo altogether; the depth problem was compounded, as we have seen, when heavier, live warheads replaced the practice dummies. "The war began with an entire generation of submarine personnel none of whom had ever seen or heard the detonation of a submarine torpedo," says the SOH.

Not only were the torpedoes feeble; they were also scarce. The Navy started the war with a few hundred submarine torpedoes (Type X for the S-boats, Type XIV for the rest), of which nearly half 233 were lost through abandonment in the Philippines. Disgracefully, submarines had to be sent to sea with only two-thirds of their complement of torpedoes. Production capacity at the beginning of 1942 was all of sixty per month; orders to conserve torpedoes reduced or destroyed the effect of many attacks even when inherent inaccuracy was offset by skilled operators. COMSUBSOWESPAC had a standing order to keep torpedoes for large targets only; single shots instead of salvos, and small salvos instead of large ones, were so ineffectual that they actually increased the waste which the conservation measures were supposed to reduce; skippers were praised, in a war, for not expending their ammunition! Yet, over the year, 2,010 missiles were fired and 2,382 were manufactured.

But the resistance within the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance to the monopoly was coming to a head after eight years of bureaucratic guerrilla warfare; private manufacturers had already become involved in making torpedoes for planes and surface ships soon after America entered the war. Westinghouse Corporation was called in to make the new Mark XVIII electric torpedo. The Mark XXIII was introduced to simplify production -- essentially the twenty-one-inch Mark XIV deprived of its near-useless slow-speed option, but the consequent loss of range on a missile already seriously underendowed with that commodity only showed up the overwhelming superiority of the Japanese Long Lance. In the South-West Pacific, submariners concluded from carefully collected evidence that the main problem with American torpedoes was that they ran deep. Lieutenant J. W. One of USS Skipjack fumed after a patrol in June 1942: "To make round trips of 8,500 miles into enemy waters, to gain attack position undetected within 800 yards of enemy ships, only to find that the torpedoes run deep and over half the time will fail to explode, seems to me to be an undesirable manner of gaining information which might be determined any morning within a few miles of a torpedo station in the presence of comparatively few hazards." Nevertheless, he sank four ships on his patrol.

In the same month, Rear Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, commander of Task Force 51 (MacArthur's submarines) and soon to become chief of Nimitz's Pacific boats, ordered Skipjack to conduct such a test off Western Australia. A Mark XIV torpedo set to hit at ten feet was fired just 850 yards into a net which it struck twenty-five feet below the surface. A second missile set for ten feet hit at eighteen, a third set at zero feet hit at eleven and showed signs that it had hit the seabed on the way to the target. Lockwood reported this to the Bureau of Ordnance on June 22 1942. Two days later, COMSUBPAC reported that a Mark XIV set in error at zero had struck at eight feet on an exercise. The bureau at first replied that the test conditions had been "improper" and no conclusion was possible; conceding shortly afterward that there were indications of deep running, it invited submarine crews on active service to pay special attention to "variables introduced by operational conditions" of which it knew nothing. This shifted the burden of experimentation to the front line, the most inappropriate address. On July 21 a furious COMINCH intervened, abruptly ordering the bureau to test the submarines' Mark XIV and the destroyers' Mark XV torpedoes. Even so, they used tubes placed on a barge rather than a real, live

submarine or destroyer for the tests, which, unsurprisingly, were inconclusive. Only on August 1 1942 did the bureau report that the torpedoes ran ten feet deeper than set in tests at Newport; on the 24th proper tests by the bureau itself confirmed this treacherous foible. A new depth-control accurate to within three feet was hurriedly introduced from the autumn of 1942. One of the many curiosities in this sorry tale is that the Royal Navyhad a similar problem for similar reasons in the First World War and corrected it, a fact that should have been well known in American submariner- circles.

Yet the difficulties continued, because one problem solved tended to reveal the existence of another, previously masked by the former. The detonators were even more unreliable than the torpedoes. When the depth problem was solved, for example, the number of premature detonations rose, because the missiles were upset by having to run through the more turbulent water close to the surface of the sea. When that was dealt with, the Mark VI detonator's magnetic exploder was revealed as hypersensitive: instead of going off a few feet under the enemy ship's bottom, as intended, it might detonate as much as fifty feet short of her side, creating a lovely splash but no damage. However, the effectiveness of American torpedoes when they did hit was considerably enhanced in February 1943 on the introduction of the new and more powerful Torpex torpedo explosive. When an American interrogator asked a prisoner from a Japanese submarine whether his Navy had any problem with premature torpedoes, the sailor smiled and replied: "We don't, but you do!" When desperate captains deactivated the magnetic exploder and relied on the simpler contact pistol in the Mark VI, the high proportion of dud torpedoes, which would not go off at all, was revealed in all its shame. As late as July 1943 USS Tinosa conducted a remarkably cool and dispiriting experiment near Truk. Having paralyzed a tanker with two torpedoes that struck home out of six fired, Commander Daspit fired nine more from right angles at 875 yards. All hit; none exploded. He took his last five home for tests while the Japanese came out of Truk and saved their tanker. Tests in Hawaii revealed that the firing pin of the contact pistol did not hit the primer with enough force to set it off. This fault was corrected by October 1943, at which time the torpedo crisis is usually regarded as having come to an end. Subsequent torpedo-performance does not bear that out: indeed, the US Navy can fairly be said not to have solved the problem at all during the war.

Meanwhile, captains were carpeted for poor attack records, fell out with their technicians on missions, were betrayed to the enemy by "prematures," lost their nerve or were ignominiously transferred because authority was so slow to acknowledge that American submarines had been sent to sea with an unreliable main armament. How the morale of the service survived the protracted ordeal is hard to imagine, but some how it did, and the destructive harvest reaped by the American boats grew steadily with their numbers until it became the principal strategic factor in the decline of Japan's ability to wage total war. The American experience of 1941-43 closely parallels where it does not surpass the German torpedo problem of 1939-40. The Germans too gave their Navy a torpedo monopoly, had trouble with magnetic pistols and stole foreign (British) ideas as a stopgap until they came up with something better. The American crisis lasted rather longer, but early in 1942 they captured a complete German G7e electric torpedo and commissioned Westinghouse to copy it: easier said than done because of the very different technical standards and measurements of the two opposed belligerents. Further, the dead-handed Bureau of Ordnance was developing one of its own, the Mark II electric, and refused to cooperate with the company until King intervened. This was the origin of the Mark XVIII, but submariners were leery of it even after all its many teething troubles were resolved.

For a long time electric torpedoes, even though they left no telltale wake, were only carried voluntarily, and in the submarines' finest hour, 1944, less than one in three torpedoes fired was electric. Only in 1945, after much combat experience had been gained with them, were two electrics fired for every Mark XIV "steam" torpedo. Remaining briefly ahead of ourselves, we may note here that, in the war as a whole, the Mark XXIII was the most effective American torpedo in terms of percentages of hits; that the Pacific Fleet consistently outshot the South West Pacific command; that the Mark XVIII had the fewest hits; and that a Pacific Fleet submarine equipped with Mark XIVs was more likely to score hits than any other US boat. The overall hit-rate claimed was 34 percent, or one in three; one enemy ship was recorded sunk for every eleven fired.