From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (87 page)

A Japanese threat to resource-rich Southeast Asia led to the imposition of sanctions. Germany's lightning thrust through Western Europe in 1940 inextricably bound together heretofore separate wars on different continents. The defeat or preoccupation of the European colonial powers left French Indochina and the Dutch and British East Indies exposed. These colonies lay astride vital shipping lanes. They possessed a bounty of raw materials such as oil, rubber, tin, and tungsten that provided the sinews of modern war. Control of Southeast Asia offered Japan the means to tighten the noose around China and free itself from dependence on the west for vital resources. Thus, in the summer of 1940, Tokyo announced plans for a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a wordy—and transparent—euphemism for economic and political hegemony in East and Southeast Asia. It compelled France to stop the flow of supplies to
China through Indochina, and Britain to close the Burma Road. Shortly after, it demanded of France air bases and permission to station troops in northern Indochina.
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The prospect of Japanese encroachment on Southeast Asia in the fall of 1940 raised alarm bells in Washington. Loss of the region's resources could further cripple Britain's already reeling effort to resist Germany and hamper U.S. rearmament. Now secretary of war, Stimson, along with Treasury Secretary Morgenthau and other hawks in the cabinet and Congress, insisted that full-fledged sanctions would compel Japan to scale back its ambitions. Even ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew, who had opposed sanctions, now agreed upon the importance of sending a clear message to Tokyo. At a time when the United States was preoccupied with events in Europe, Roosevelt and Hull still refused to risk a complete break. The administration again adopted limited measures in hopes of checking further aggression without war, using legislation that permitted the president to hold back items vital for national defense to impose an embargo on aviation gasoline and high-grade scrap iron. Two months later, after Japan had moved into northern Indochina and amidst rumblings of a possible Japanese alliance with Germany, the embargo was expanded to include all scrap iron and steel.
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Japan and the United States now found themselves caught up in a tangle of miscalculations and conflicting aspirations. Even all-out sanctions have a bad track record historically, and a limited embargo did enough to alarm the Japanese without altering their behavior. Eager to capitalize on Germany's stunning military success and enticed by irresistible opportunities in Southeast Asia, Japan just days after the United States announced sanctions joined a Tripartite Pact with Italy and Germany, one article of which was plainly directed against the United States. Japanese leaders hoped to intimidate Washington into acquiescing in their grand design for Asia—"Only a
firm response
will prevent war." As with U.S. sanctions, the result was the opposite of what was intended. The pact linked Japan with America's de facto enemy Germany in what FDR called an "unholy alliance" out to "dominate and enslave the entire human race," thereby stiffening U.S. resolve.
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In late 1940, the United States expanded the embargo to include iron ore, pig iron, copper, and brass, deliberately leaving oil as the ultimate bargaining
instrument. Through major miscalculations on both sides, Japan and the United States were fixed on a collision course.

An effort to resolve differences in early 1941 only compounded them. Through two well-meaning but ill-informed American missionaries in Japan, word reached Washington in January that Japan wished to improve relations with the United States and would even make major concessions. Shortly after, a new Japanese ambassador, Adm. Kichisaburo Nomura, opened extended discussion with Hull, frequently meeting in the secretary's Washington apartment. Nomura had served as naval attaché in Washington during World War I and had a far more realistic assessment than many of his cohorts of the costs of war with the United States. He viewed the pursuit of expansion in Asia and accommodation with the United States as like "chasing rabbits in two different directions" and was committed to the latter.
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Despite good intentions, his efforts were unavailing. He and Hull often talked past each other. They spoke without an interpreter, and Nomura's limited understanding of English at times misled him regarding the progress that had been made. Differing translations of documents added to the problems. Nomura led his superiors to believe Hull had approved a draft agreement far more generous than was the case. They thus sought additional concessions. When Nomura came back with a much tougher proposal, Hull felt betrayed; when the Japanese realized the real U.S. position, they were angered. This diplomatic imbroglio, the result of sometimes amateurish diplomacy and a language barrier, made clear the extent of the impasse and heightened an already substantial distrust on both sides.

Hitler's bold, indeed reckless, invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, a massive assault sending 3.2 million men along a two-thousand-mile front, offered new opportunities for the United States—and new perils. By linking events on three continents, it helped clarify U.S. policies and bring the nation closer to war. The immediate effect, of course, was to ease pressures on Britain. Thus, despite his long-standing and often virulent opposition to Bolshevism, Churchill immediately offered to assist Moscow. "If Hitler invaded hell," the prime minister declared, "he would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil."
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Roosevelt also welcomed the respite afforded Britain and feared the consequences of a Soviet collapse. But Soviet-American relations had deteriorated sharply since the brief thaw of 1933–34, and there was strong opposition to aiding
Russia. After Stalin's bloody purges of dissidents, the Nazi-Soviet pact, and the rape of Poland, many Americans viewed him, in the words of
Time
magazine, as "a sort of unwashed Genghis Khan" with "blood dripping from his fingertips"; the only difference between Stalin and Hitler, some critics quipped, was the size of their respective mustaches.
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Many of Roosevelt's top military advisers doubted that the Russians could withstand the Nazi onslaught and feared that equipment sent them would be wasted. From the outset, FDR seems to have believed that Soviet survival was the key to Germany's defeat, which, in turn, he saw as essential to U.S. security. Thus he agreed to assist the Soviet Union but offered only limited aid and required payment in return.

Following Germany's invasion of Russia, the United States and Britain drew closer to each other, and FDR moved closer to active participation in the Battle of the Atlantic. On July 1, the United States assumed responsibility for the protection of Iceland, a key refueling station for British and U.S. ships and the island outpost guarding the Denmark Strait, through which German ships passed into the western Atlantic. At about the same time, FDR authorized the navy to begin planning for convoys. In August, Roosevelt and Churchill met secretly in Argentia, Newfoundland, appropriately aboard vessels of war at a naval base turned over to the United States in return for the destroyers. At this first summit, amidst the paraphernalia of war and the pomp of Anglo-American unity—including a joint religious service in which "Onward, Christian Soldiers" was sung—they agreed on the Atlantic Charter, a broad statement of principles upon which the war would be fought. Roosevelt also committed the United States to assume responsibility for convoys in the western Atlantic on September 1.
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An incident in early September provided the pretext for implementing this promise, making the United States in effect a cobelligerent. Uneager for conflict with America while the war in Russia still raged, Hitler had ordered his U-boat commanders to exercise maximum restraint. On September 4, the destroyer USS
Greer,
en route to Iceland, was tracking a submarine and radioing its position via Washington and London to British aircraft on the scene. When the aircraft attacked with depth charges, the U-boat retaliated by firing torpedoes at the
Greer
. The torpedoes missed, but an opportunist FDR used an allegedly unprovoked attack to escalate
the naval war. He concealed the extent to which the
Greer
had provoked the attack, thus leaving himself open to later—entirely justified—charges of deception. Rather, he cast the incident in terms of an imminent and urgent German threat to freedom of the seas. Denouncing the U-boats as "rattlesnakes," he insisted the navy must not wait until they struck before taking action to "crush them." He used the occasion to assume responsibility for convoys as far as Iceland and to announce a policy of "shoot on sight."
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The U.S. Navy was now involved in an undeclared naval war in the Atlantic. In mid-October, a torpedo hit the destroyer
Kearney,
killing eleven seamen. Two weeks later, another torpedo sank the
Reuben James,
taking the lives of 115 sailors. Almost as an afterthought, Congress in mid-November repealed the major provisions of the Neutrality Acts.

Concern for the survival of the USSR also hardened the standoff with Japan.
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Japanese leaders disagreed whether to move north against Soviet Russia or into Southeast Asia, but their first response to the Russo-German war was to secure from French colonial authorities the right to station troops in southern Indochina. For the United States and Britain, Russia and the Atlantic had priority over East Asia, but they recognized that a Japanese move in either direction would threaten these more vital interests. They thus sought to deter Japan through economic and military pressure without provoking war. In late July, the United States broke off the now desultory Hull-Nomura discussions. Aware that a Japanese military presence in southern Indochina directly threatened the Philippines, it beefed up the defense of islands whose independence it had pledged just seven years earlier. To bolster Chinese resistance, it sent a lend-lease mission to China and agreed to provide more than three hundred aircraft and to help train pilots. Japan's move into Indochina gave hawks in Roosevelt's cabinet the upper hand in the ongoing struggle over economic pressure. Still certain that full sanctions would force the Japanese to give in, they secured on July 25 an order to freeze Japanese assets in the United States and used the resulting licenses and controls to turn the oil spigot off and on as they chose. As actually implemented by hard-liners in the bureaucracy, the freezing order became a de facto embargo of all trade with Japan. With a mere eighteen months' oil supply in reserve, Japan had to regain access to U.S. sources or secure alternative supplies in Southeast Asia.
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By the late summer of 1941, the two nations had reached an impasse. Predictably, even a complete shut-off of trade refused to bend Japan to
America's will, but the oil embargo forced it to choose between concessions or war. Some leaders recognized that a long war with the United States could be disastrous, and this brought about frantic, if sharply constrained, efforts to reach a modus vivendi. From July until late November, each side issued various proposals that were dutifully discussed with no tangible result. The younger officers now driving Japanese policy were proud, aggressive inheritors of a samurai spirit that favored death over surrender. The government offered some concessions on Southeast Asia and the Tripartite Pact in return for restoration of U.S. trade, but it refused to withdraw from China.

Already on the verge of conflict with Germany and not prepared for a war on one front, much less on two, a more prudent United States might have pursued at least a temporary arrangement with Japan even at the expense of China. But U.S. officials remained adamant on that issue. Hull continued to handle most of the negotiations on the U.S. side, and he had come to doubt the sincerity of the Japanese—as "crooked as a barrel of fish hooks," he once labeled them. Welles viewed a settlement without China as like the play
Hamlet
without "the character of Hamlet."
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For their own reasons, Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek denounced concessions to Japan as tantamount to appeasement that might demoralize the anti-Axis coalition at a critical point in the war. FDR was especially concerned about Russia, which was again reeling before the German advance. The discussions thus produced no breakthrough. The Japanese had already decided that if there was no settlement by November 30, they would go to war.

War came on December 7, 1941. In a desperate effort to solve their problems and, they hoped, intimidate the United States into acquiescing to their East Asian design, the Japanese mounted a bold attack by carrier aircraft against the U.S. naval and military bases at Pearl Harbor. They achieved complete surprise, catching the Americans asleep on a Sunday morning, with devastating results, killing 2,500 soldiers and sailors, destroying 152 of 230 aircraft, sinking five battleships, and damaging numerous other vessels.

Ever since that day of "infamy," Roosevelt haters, revisionists, and conspiracy theorists have charged that the president through MAGIC intercepts and other sources knew of the attack but withheld critical information to ensure its success, thereby pushing an unwilling nation into an unnecessary war. Like other conspiracy theories, this one will not go away.
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Such
charges ignore the skill of the enemy. The attack was brilliantly planned and executed. It benefited from good luck in the form of cloud cover that hid the fleet during part of its passage across the Pacific. On the United States side, there was a major intelligence failure. Americans had broken the Japanese diplomatic code. Those intercepts made clear an attack was coming but did not point to Pearl Harbor as the target. And they were not supplemented by human intelligence or other reliable sources of information. Most important was a failure of imagination. Americans knew an attack would soon take place, but they looked toward Southeast Asia and the Philippines, where the brunt of the Japanese assault did occur. Underestimating their adversary, they did not believe that Japan would even attempt such an audacious scheme, much less pull it off.
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