If this was a trite assertion of the American Dream as the nation joined hostilities, it seems nonetheless to reflect its dominant mood. The struggle would cost the United States less than any other combatant – indeed, it generated an economic boom which enabled Americans to emerge from the war much richer than they started it. But many suffered a lasting sense of unfairness, that the wickedness of others had invaded and ravaged their decent lives. Like hundreds of millions of Europeans before them, they began to discover the sorrow of seeing their nearest and dearest leave home to face mortal risk. Mrs. Elizabeth Schlesinger wrote about the departure of her son Tom for the army: ‘I knew after Pearl Harbor that his going was inevitable. I won’t let myself think personally about it. I am only one of millions of mothers who love their sons and see them go off to war and my feelings are universal and not mine alone. I have accepted what I must face and live with for many future months and perhaps years. Tom said, “Why, I thought you would be much more upset by my going.” Little does he know the depths of what it means to me and the countless anxieties that clamor for my thoughts.’
In the absence of Pearl Harbor, it remains highly speculative when, if ever, the United States would have fought. In John Morton Blum’s words, ‘The war was neither a threat nor a crusade. It seemed, as Fortune put it, “only a painful necessity”…Within the United States, Americans never saw the enemy. The nation did not share or want to share in the disasters that visited Europe and Asia.’ For all the exuberant declarations of patriotism that followed the ‘Day of Infamy’, many Americans remained resentful about the need to accept even a modest share of the privations thrust upon most of the world’s peoples. Early in 1942, Arthur Schlesinger visited the mid-west on a tour of army bases for the Office of War Information: ‘We arrived in the midst of the whining about gas rationing, and it was pretty depressing. The anti-administration feeling is strong and open.’
Fortunately for the Allied cause, however, the leadership of the United States showed itself in this supreme crisis both strong and wise. At Roosevelt’s Washington summit with Churchill at the end of December 1941, the US confirmed its provisional commitment, made during earlier staff talks, to prioritise war with Germany. Since 1939, American military and naval preparations – notably Plan Orange, eventually translated into Rainbow 5 – had assumed the likelihood of a two-front struggle. The army correctly judged that this could not be won ‘primarily by naval action’; that the creation and deployment overseas of large land forces would be indispensable. Admiral Harold Stark wrote to the secretary of the navy on 12 November 1940: ‘Alone, the British Empire lacks the manpower and the material means to master Germany. Assistance by powerful allies is necessary both with respect to men and with respect to munitions and supplies.’ Stark anticipated the likelihood that, if the Japanese struck, the British would lose Malaya. He proposed a blockade of Japan, to which its absolute dependence on imports rendered it exceptionally vulnerable; then envisaged fighting a limited war in the east, while sending large land and air forces to Europe.
The US chiefs of staff recognised that Germany represented by far the more dangerous menace. The Japanese, for all their impressive front-line military and naval capability, could not threaten the American or British homelands. Of the white Anglo-Saxon nations, only Australia lay within plausible reach of Tokyo’s forces, which prompted intense bitterness among Australian politicians about Britain’s unwillingness to dispatch substantial forces to its defence. In the event, while the broad principles established by Stark were sustained, the dominance of Russia in defeating the Wehrmacht – wholly unanticipated in December 1941 – somewhat altered the balance of America’s wartime commitments. While the army the United States eventually dispatched to Europe was large, it was nothing like as powerful as would have been necessary had the Western Allies been obliged to fulfil the principal role in defeating Germany. As a corollary of this, once Russia’s survival and fighting power became plain in 1943, the American chiefs of staff felt able to divert significant strength to the Pacific sooner than expected. Popular sentiment, so much more hostile to Japan than to Germany, made this politically expedient as well as strategically acceptable.
Geoffrey Perrett has observed that the United States was not ready for Pearl Harbor, but was ready for war. This was true only insofar as large naval building was in progress: in the week following the attack, American yards launched thirteen new warships and nine merchantmen, harbingers of a vast armada that was already on the stocks, and would be launched during the next two years. The nation had under construction fifteen battleships, eleven carriers, fifty-four cruisers, 193 destroyers and seventy-three submarines. Nonetheless, it was plain to the governments of Britain and America, if not to their peoples, that a long delay was in prospect before Western land forces could engage Germany on the Continent. For years to come, Russia must bear the chief burden of fighting the Wehrmacht. Even if, as the US chiefs of staff wished, the Western Allies launched an early diversionary landing in France, their armies would remain relatively small until 1944.
Roosevelt and Churchill consequently accepted, as some of their commanders did not, the necessity to undertake secondary operations, plausible only in the Mediterranean theatre, to maintain a sense of momentum in the minds of their peoples. The bomber offensive against Germany would grow as fast as the necessary aircraft could be built. But as long as the Eastern Front remained the decisive ground theatre, aid to Russia was a priority. Even if quantities of material available for shipment remained relatively small until 1943, both Washington and London acknowledged the importance of making every possible gesture to deter Stalin from negotiating a separate peace. Anglo-American fears that the Russians would be beaten, or at least driven to parley with Hitler, remained a constant spectre in Alliance relations until the end of 1942.
Meanwhile in the east, Japan held the initiative, and deployed formidable forces on land, at sea and in the air. ‘We Japanese,’ asserted the field manual distributed to all Hirohito’s soldiers as they embarked for their assault on the Western empires, ‘heirs to 2,600 years of a glorious past, have now, in response to the trust placed in us by His Majesty the Commander-in-Chief, risen in the cause of the peoples of Asia, and embarked upon a noble and solemn undertaking which will change the course of world history…The Task of the Sh
9
Japan’s Season of Triumph
1 ‘I SUPPOSE YOU’LL SHOVE THE LITTLE MEN OFF’
Many Japanese welcomed the war, which they believed offered their country its only honourable escape from beleaguerment. Novelist Dazai Osamu, for instance, was ‘itching to beat the bestial, insensitive Americans to a pulp’. But it would be mistaken to imagine Osamu’s society as a monolith. Lt. Gen. Kuribayashi Tadimichi, who had spent two years