Sunrise: Japan's Leap for Empire
History of Naval Warfare, Part 16
The Pacific War, fought between the Empire of Japan and the United States of America and her allies between 1941 and 1945, stands apart in the long annals of military history as an essentially unique conflict: a true sui generis war. The scale is an obvious place to begin; given that the theaters of the war encompassed much of the Pacific Ocean, continental East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean, it is fairly self evident that this war absolutely dwarfed all others in geographic scope. While Europe’s grand era of colonialism saw wars in which conflicts in continental Europe had colonial theaters in places like the Americas, India, and Africa, what distinguishes the Pacific War was the fact that this enormous battlespace - ranging some 4,500 miles north to south and nearly 7,000 miles east-west - was contiguous and connected by internal Japanese lines of communication. No other conflict in human history has ever come even remotely close in the size of its contiguous theaters.
Size impresses, to be sure, but beyond the sheer scale of the conflict the Pacific War is unique in that it consisted of highly systematic operations with positional characteristics, but with the unique qualifier of being fought from the sea. Although the vast ocean gives the impression of immense operational flexibility and free movement, the dynamics of the Pacific War, in operational terms, reflected traditional continental warfare in ways that are not often appreciated at first glance, with systematic offenses moving through island strongpoints, great attention given to supply lines (in the form of shipping lanes), and recognizable concepts like flanks and positional leveraging. While cosmetically the Pacific appears to be a vast and open expanse, operationally it presented a complex web of interconnected engagement zones.
Therein arises the problem with casual historiography of the war. Popular knowledge of the Pacific War generally consists of a series of vignettes - Pearl Harbor, Midway, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and the atomic bombs - which form a mostly satisfying narrative chain, but become dissipated operationally. It is not immediately clear, for example, how the carrier battles at Midway and the Coral Sea relate to the gruesome island fighting in places like Guadalcanal, or the Japanese assault on Singapore.
Of course, this is hardly vital knowledge for most people, but in general it is fair to say that the operational schema of the Pacific War are less easily understood than those of the simultaneous war fought in Europe. In part this is because the geography of the Pacific is less widely understood than that of Europe: many people can find Poland, the Baltic Sea, and Paris on a map, but relatively few can pinpoint the Truk Atoll, the Solomon Islands, or Saipan. More to the point, however, the Pacific War was immensely complex, with telescoping scales: battles could range across many hundreds of miles in fleet actions, or shrink to tiny islands barely ten miles square.
This was a very strange war. The battlespace extended across millions of square miles, but frequently condensed the violence into tiny and claustrophobic zones. It was fought in three dimensions, with air power, submarine forces, conventional surface warships, and amphibious operations all playing vital roles. The Japanese fought to the end with a divided and internally bickering command structure, and yet no Japanese operational unit ever independently surrendered until the end of the war. This was, again, a unique pattern of war-making, characterized by a dysfunctional and factious high command with essentially unrivaled devotion and fanaticism in the field. Japanese forces demonstrated extreme levels of tactical proficiency early in the war, but suffered from egregious strategic lapses.
On the other side, American victory is often portrayed as a simple function of the United States’ laughably superior industrial and economic power. To be sure, the deck was stacked economically against Japan in every conceivable way. By war’s end, American GDP dwarfed Japan’s by a 7:1 ratio: a figure that understates Japan’s absolute poverty in the critical inputs of an industrial war. American production of coal outstripped Japan’s by nearly 1200%. The equivalent figure in iron ore was some 1,750%, and in crude oil it was a colossal 16,000%. In virtually no relevant category of either industrial potential or military production did Japan ever do much better than scraping 25% of American totals.
Clearly all of this mattered, but dismissing the Pacific War as yet another mechanistic result of economic potential belies two important facts about the conflict. First and foremost, the Pacific War was immensely battle-centric: that is, the United States shattered much of Japan’s combat power in battles early in the war, during the period where the force generation of the two sides was roughly equivalent and even in Japan’s favor. In critical encounters during the first phase of the war - in the Coral Sea, in the Solomons, and especially at Midway - the United States and her allies blunted Japanese momentum and inflicted catastrophic losses on the Japanese without the benefit of the massive material overmatch that would come into play during the latter years of the war. Even in the context of an unfair industrial slugfest, battles do matter a great deal, and the Pacific War was full of them.
The second point which bears considering is that, although America’s economic advantages predicted an eventual victory for the United States, American forces leveraged the outputs of the American industrial powerhouse in a specific way, so that American forces in the Pacific were much more than a mere oceangoing steamroller. In particular, the United States made enormous innovations and breakthroughs in the tactics of massed naval aviation (the fast carrier task force), amphibious operations, and submarine warfare. While it was certainly true that the United States could build more ships, more planes, and more bombs than any enemy, it is important to understand that the American armed forces in the Pacific could also do things - tactically, technically, and operationally - that nobody else could do. That too mattered a great deal.
As we embark on a prolonged treatment of the Pacific War, we will begin with respect for Japanese agency and strategic concepts on their own terms. Japan may have been hopelessly outmatched in a war of industrial attrition with the United States, but this does not mean that Japanese leadership was willingly and knowingly embarking on a course of national suicide. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, Japan was a country that had mostly won its recent wars. Its ranks were staffed with talented officers and superbly trained fighting men. It disposed of the single most powerful naval asset in the world, in the First Carrier Fleet. It unleashed the largest and most destructive naval war in history. The Pacific War began with the attack on Pearl Harbor, which was at the time one of the longest ranged military operations in history. It ended with those thousands of miles in operational range condensed to the infinitesimal space inside a splitting atom.
The Grand “Strategy” of Japan
Recent years have seen something of a cottage industry spring up for books dedicated to the “grand strategy” of states, both currently extant and historical. A quick perusal of current offerings turns up works on the grand strategies of Iran, the Habsburg Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the United States, the Roman Empire, Ancient Sparta, Russia, China, Singapore, Imperial Spain, and of course, Imperial Japan.
In many ways, the proliferation of such books is understandable. Grand Strategy, as such, becomes useful shorthand for the full range of policies and mechanisms by which states pursue their interests over an extended period of time - though even this is somewhat thorny, because it is not always clear who defines those interests, and internal consensus over the state’s goals is hardly trivial to achieve. In some cases, it is genuinely possible to speak of a “grand strategy”, where a state - over an extended period of time lasting even multiple generations - utilizes a consistent toolbox of diplomatic and military mechanisms and displays a largely coherent schema of behavior that is open to analysis.
In other cases, however, states exhibit what we might term strategic schizophrenia. Their actions are motivated less by a coherent and consistent strategic scheme, and more by opportunism, dissipation, and internal disunity. Scarcely has this been more true than in the case of Imperial Japan. Japan’s political system was characterized by an astonishing a essentially unrivaled level of infighting and competition which frequently spilled over into open bloodshed. In the 1930’s, during the critical build up to the Pacific War, three Japanese Prime Ministers were assassinated, to go along with an army colonel who was killed when assassins mistook him for Prime Minister Keisuke Okada. The country would have an eye popping 14 different Prime Ministers in the decade before Pearl Harbor, part and parcel of a fluid, factuous, and poorly defined leadership group.
As a result of the unique internal dynamics of the Japanese state, a unifying Japanese grand strategy is difficult to elucidate from the history, and Japanese strategic thinking is significantly harder, both to understand and to lay out in narrative, than that of the other major combatants in the Second World War. Indeed, the convoluted inner workings of the Japanese regime were themselves a major contributor to the beginning of the Pacific War. This was not only because of the decisions made and policies pursued by the Japanese themselves, but also because the Roosevelt Administration in Washington had a poor understanding of the inner workings in Tokyo and badly misinterpreted Japanese thought. On some occasions, Washington had access to remarkably accurate intelligence from Tokyo which they could not accurately assess due to a poor understanding of the state’s internal dynamics.
We can, however, trace two important threads of Japanese “strategy” which led to the beginning of the Pacific War. These include both the strategic choices which led Japan to make its leap for empire in Southeast Asia (the trigger for war with America), and the operational particulars of its war plans, particularly on the part of the navy. In other words, we should seek to understand both how and why Japan ignited the Pacific War, and how they designed the operational agenda - including the attack on Pearl Harbor.
In broad terms, Japan’s strategic “problems” are fairly well known. Japan has a mountainous, resource poor, archipelagic geography which lacks the critical material inputs to power an industrial economy, is expensive and resource-intensive to integrate and industrialize, and vulnerable to both invasion and economic strangulation from the sea. All of this is fairly elementary, but it does not follow that a simplistic story unfolds where Japan simply chose to go to war to secure a resource base. In thinking of Japan’s “grand strategy”, it is much more accurate to describe a series of feedback loops, wherein Japanese expansion exacerbated the resource problems it was designed to solve, and these resource constraints in turn drove inter-service disagreements and strategic confusion.
To the extent that there is specific departure point where Japan began the road to the Pacific War, it was the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War on July 7, 1937, with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. This ignominious episode was stochastic and consequential, akin to the shooting of Archduke Ferdinand. A Japanese units from the Beijing Garrison (a holdover from the international intervention against the Boxer Rebellion in 1901) went out to conduct exercises at night. When a certain Private Shimura Kikujiro went missing during the maneuvers (sources disagree on whether he had slipped off to visit a brothel or was merely relieving indigestion in the woods), the Japanese unit demanded entry to the walled Chinese town of Wanping. The Chinese refused. Shots were fired. Men were killed. The war was started. Private Shimura later turned up, apparently unaware that he had started the Second World War in Asia.
After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, the situation in China rapidly escalated, and an abortive attempt at a ceasefire collapsed as the Japanese surged forces into Northern China. The Japanese launched a full offensive into China, and by the end of 1937 they had captured Shanghai and Nanking, with the famously associated massacres to follow in that unfortunate city.
This is not a history of the Second Sino-Japanese War. For our purposes, however, three vital threads emerge from the beginning of that conflict. First, that the Japanese incorrectly anticipated a quick victory in northern China, after which they would begin to digest the region’s economic resources. Secondly, the rapid and unexpected expansion of the fighting in China created an enormous drain on Japanese resources which led directly to the economic pressures which created the Pacific War. Third, that same resource crunch sparked and escalated the inter-service disagreements and factionalism which characterized Japanese leadership throughout the war.
In the context of Japan’s larger imperial ambitions and strategy, it is difficult to imagine a more severe backfire than the decision to launch into northern China in 1937. Japanese planners initially hoped for a quick and decisive victory using limited forces. In July 1937, Army operational plans sketched out an offensive using just three divisions which were expected to overrun the Beijing area and crush the enemy’s main forces, at which point Chiang Kai-shek was expected to sue for peace. The idea that Chiang might still be in the field, fighting, even after the loss of both Shanghai and his capital at Nanking was unthinkable, but that is precisely what happened.
The natural result, therefore, was rapid and massive escalation of Japanese resource commitments in China as the war spilled its banks. The optimistic initial estimates - three divisions, three months, and a total cost of just 100 million yen - were swept aside, and the Japanese General Staff found itself preparing to mobilize the entire army for action on an indefinite timetable. Three divisions became twenty; 100 million yen became 2.5 billion.
The ballooning demands of the field army in China pushed Japan into a bona fide economic crisis. Tokyo initially hoped that the field army could finish the fight on those materials that had already been stockpiled in the theater, but these had been exhausted by the end of 1937, with no end to the conflict in sight. Munition and fuel stocks in China were on empty, but that was not all. Even the munitions stocks in Japan were barely sufficient to supply ongoing operations in China, which meant that a Soviet attack on Manchuria - a longstanding and ever present Japanese fear - could quickly create a critical situation.
In short, the stubborn refusal by Chiang to simply collapse and sue for terms as expected had created an enormous resource sink which forced Japan into a full war economy in a state of near crisis. Most disconcertingly, the only way for Japan to make up the critical shortfalls in key materials - above all fuels of all types - was by massively increasing imports from the United States. On December 24, 1937, Japan’s Planning Board submitted its materials mobilization plan for 1938, which estimated that Japan would need 4.1 billion yen worth of imports, in a year where only 2.6 billion yen of foreign exchange was expected to be available.
Given this immense shortfall, Japan was forced to begin war economy measures to make ends meet. Civilian stockpiles of raw materials would have to be drawn down, scrap materials would be recycled, and rationing went into effect. The railroads received a 25 percent reduction in their steel allocation, while shipbuilding was cut by 15 percent. Fuel rationing was even more extreme. A new national mobilization bill compelled all Japanese subjects to register their professional and technical skills with the government, granting the state the power to move labor between or within industries to increase production of key material. The state also appropriated for itself the power to appropriate factories and land for wartime manufacturing.
The basic picture that emerges, then, is that of a Japanese economy which abruptly mortgaged its future by signing on for a war in China that radically exceeded expectations in its scale, intensity, and duration. In response, Japan plunged headlong into a command economy, with resources strained to the max and dependence on foreign imports (especially from America) rising to unprecedented levels. The state budget for fiscal year 1938 exploded to 8.4 billion yen, after clocking just 2.8 billion in 1937.
Japan, therefore, was unique among the major combatants of the Second World War, in that its economy was already in a state of crisis with wartime measures in effect as early as 1938. In the spring of that year, the Army’s chief economic officer submitted an estimate of material needs for planned operations in China, which suggested that the China army alone would consume more material than Japan could import for the entire year. Tokyo, however, could never commit to the obvious (to us, at least) course of retrenchment and drawdown in China. Although the Planning Board repeatedly recommended winding down commitments in China, the Army’s operations planners always countered with yet another offensive with which they promised to knock Chiang out of the war once and for all. Like an alcoholic, they deferred quitting until after just one more drink. Then another, then another.
The ledger, then, was not promising. Japan faced a multi-dimensional economic crisis, with exploding deficits, a collapsing consumer economy squeezed by manpower shortages and rationing, shortages of raw materials, falling exports, insufficient shipping capacity (the army had requisitioned a great deal of shipping to supply the field army in China), and growing dependence on imports from America. All of this spoke to a colossal backfire of the war in China, which had become a black hole for resources rather than an opportunity for exploitation.
It is obvious how this can lend itself to a sense of strategic desperation, but what is often unappreciated is the fact that the crisis of the war economy drove the inter-service rivalry that characterized the wartime Japanese regime. The Army and the Navy now competed not only for prestige and to advance their particular strategic vision, but also to claim their share of the dwindling resource pool. In 1939, for example, the Navy reacted viscerally to cuts in its steel quota. The emerging question of an alliance with Germany exacerbated the split with the Army and galvanized the Navy into more assertively advancing its strategic animus.
The idea of the “Axis” is a deeply engrained concept in the historiography of World War Two. Rarely is it appreciated that the Axis was not a functioning military alliance in any real sense. Germany and Japan did not coordinate military operations, lend meaningful economic or technological aid to each other, or pursue a coherent, unified vision of victory. It is also rarely noted that the alliance with Germany was not a point of consensus within Japanese leadership. The Navy, in particular, waffled somewhere between lukewarm suspicion and outright opposition. Their reasoning was straightforward: an alliance with Germany seemed to be aimed at the Soviet Union, which suggested further Japanese military commitments on the continent (think of hypotheticals where the Japanese invade Siberia after Operation Barbarossa). This was all bad news for the Navy, in that it threatened to pull Japanese resources deeper into continental Asia, rather than into the Pacific.
The Navy resolved, then, to sell their support for the German alliance in exchange for concessions that advanced their own interests. Naval officers at a ministerial conference in January 1939 insisted that any alliance with Germany could not specify the Soviet Union as a target. At this same conference, they acquired the Army’s concession to move forward with the seizure of the Chinese island province of Hainan, in the South China Sea, for the basing and support of future operations to the south. The Navy would later demand revisions to the mobilization plan, including a doubling of its steel rations, before they would agree to the alliance with Germany. The cabinet decided to pay the Navy’s price.
This is all very odd, and in more ways than one. The internal dynamics of the Japanese regime were strange enough, and exacerbated by the economic crisis and material rationing. More to the point, however, the Navy’s opposition to the German alliance neutralized much of that alliance’s military utility. An alliance between Japan and Germany was obviously useful only in the context of pinning the Soviet Union with a two-front war, and yet the Navy agreed to the alliance only on the condition that it not become the instrument for launching a Soviet-Japanese conflict.
The great irony of the Japanese Navy is that, although it became the iconic villain of the Pacific War in American eyes, the service as a whole was among the more war-adverse elements of the Japanese state. The Navy was obviously opposed to war with the Soviet Union, because further expansion of Japan’s military enterprise on the continent threatened to diminish the Navy’s standing in favor of the Army. Yet it would be wrong to assume that the Japanese Navy was spoiling for a fight with the United States. Naval leadership was strongly preoccupied with the fleet as a deterrent (not unlike German thought vis a vis the British in the runup to World War One), and frequently raised the specter of American power to justify higher naval expenditures. The chief of the navy’s research section, however, confided after a minister’s conference that “the navy, although prepared to use Britain and the United States as pretexts for a budget, actually did not want to confront them.”
And where was the United States in all of this? Pop history tends to place the American orientation towards Japan at opposite ends of the spectrum, ranging from the conventional victimhood of Pearl Harbor - America was a pacifistic nation attacked in its sleep on Sunday morning - all the way to the more explosive notion that the Roosevelt Administration deliberately provoked Japan into starting the war. Such views have been further complicated by more recent research showing that key personnel in Washington who drafted policy towards Japan - men like Harry Dexter White, for example - were Soviet intelligence assets, suggesting a third position: that America was steered into a war with Japan by Moscow.
In fact, America’s actions did push Japan into launching the Pacific War, but they were motivated by a relatively mundane problem: the Roosevelt Administration consistently misinterpreted Japanese actions and intentions and failed to understand that policies designed to deter and checkmate Japan were in fact driving Tokyo to launch the war.
The analytic errors underpinning the American position can be personified by two men. On the one hand was the American ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew. A realist about Japanese militarism, Grew understood both the divisive internal dynamics of the Japanese regime and - above all - that Japan was fundamentally a desperate nation, fighting off a severe economic crisis sparked by the war in China, and led by desperate men. This desperation, he argued, might well lead the Japanese to a war with the United States, regardless of the outcome. He would later write:
I know Japan; I lived there for ten years. I know the Japanese intimately. The Japanese will not crack. They will not crack morally or psychologically or economically, even when eventual defeat stares them in the face. They will pull in their belts another notch, reduce their rations from a bowl to a half bowl of rice, and fight to the bitter end.
Grew argued that Japan’s desperation called for American moderation. In particular, he suggested that Washington must avoid backing Japan into a corner, and that a heavy hand would only lend ammunition to Japanese hardliners who believed war with America was inevitable.
At the opposite end of the spectrum was Stanley Hornbeck, the State Department’s chief of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs. A Sinophile who had lived in China for several years, Hornbeck understood as well as Grew that the China War had put Japan in a dire economic trap, but he drew the opposite conclusion. In his eyes, Japan was not a desperate nation willing to fight its way out of a trap, but a drained and exhausted state that would not dare fight a war with the United States, which it was sure to lose. Hornbeck was an advocate for maximal economic pressure, particularly when it came to oil.
Of course, America’s actual policy towards Japan was significantly more convoluted, but the positions of Grew and Hornbeck showed the range of analytic confusion that reigned in Washington when it came to Japan. Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull came to the rather odd conclusion, for example, that an embargo on oil would likely lead Japan to attack the Dutch East Indies, but embargoes on other raw materials like scrap iron would not. Policy questions were further complicated by America’s own rearmament, which suggested a need to limit the export of vital materials, and a growing consensus against “appeasement”.
American policy towards Japan was implicitly oriented towards containment, if not outright hostility, given both American affinity in China and Washington’s commitment to the “Open Door Policy”, which aimed to preserve free access to Asian markets for all outside powers (and was therefore opposed to Japanese efforts to absorb and monopolize Chinese economic resources). However, the drift to open war can be largely explained by three major events: the Japanese invasion of French Indochina, the collapse of diplomacy between Cordell Hull and Japanese Ambassador Kichisaburō Nomura, and the America embargo of Japanese oil. All of these, obviously were interlinked and fed into each other.
The Japanese move into northern Indochina in 1940, ostensibly submitted to under duress by French colonial officials, was motivated by an attempt to cut off the flow of material into southern China, in the hopes that this would isolate and - at long last - collapse Chiang’s forces. This was in itself concerning to Washington, but the real crisis emerged on July 28, 1941, when Japanese troops invaded southern Indochina in violation of the previous year’s agreements with the French colonial government. What is perhaps most interesting about the Indochina crisis, however, is that it led the United States to incorrectly interpret intelligence which was superficially accurate.
Washington had advance notice of Japan’s intention to thrust further south into Indochina, courtesy of the excellent MAGIC Cryptanalysis office, which had long since broken Japan’s diplomatic communications (though not, we should note, the naval cipher, which is why the Americans had no forewarning of the Pearl Harbor attack). MAGIC had revealed in advance the Japanese move into Indochina, but what it could not reveal was the context of Japan’s internal deliberations. It could not reveal the extent to which Japanese foreign policy was being guided by a sort of internal bartering, with strong disagreements over Japan’s vectors of expansion and a deep rift between Army and Navy.
American intelligence was almost totally unaware of this unique internal dynamic. When MAGIC tipped Washington that the Japanese were moving deeper into Indochina, this was interpreted as a point of consensus among the Japanese leadership group. There was no sense that the Japanese regime was bartering with itself, that the Imperial Navy was attempting to string the Army along for more steel, or that the Navy still hoped to avoid a war with the United States. Joseph Grew’s suggestion that the Japanese were fundamentally desperate, and that an escape hatch should be left open for Japan to moderate itself, was forgotten.
The latter half of 1941 was something of a whirlwind. The United States responded to the Japanese move into southern Indochina on July 26 with escalated economic pressure, including a ban on the export of high grade gasoline, caps on other petroleum products, and a freeze on Japanese assets in the United States. The latter amounted to a de-facto embargo on oil by precluding Japan’s ability to pay. From there, it was largely an inevitability that diplomacy between Hull and the Japanese ambassador would gradually collapse, though the minutia of that process remain interesting. On November 27, Hull told the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson: “I have washed my hands of it, and it now in the hands of you and Knox - the army and the navy.” It was only a few days later, on December 1, that Emperor Hirohito met with the new cabinet of Hideki Tojo and presided over a unanimous vote for war.
The point of this admittedly verbose amble through the diplomatic and economic backdrop to the Pacific War has been, primarily, to emphasize that there was no coherent Japanese “Grand Strategy” which included a confrontation with the US Navy in the vast Pacific. Japan’s actions were characterized above all by desperation, time pressure, and a lack of options. The catalyst for all of this was primarily the botched war in China, which began optimistically in 1937 with hopes of a quick and decisive campaign, but quickly spiraled out of Tokyo’s control.
The China war had already put Japan’s economy in crisis by 1938 and put the country in a state of quasi-total war, with central economic controls, rationing, and mobilization. These problems were then intensified by repeated Japanese escalation in China, with a series of operations designed - over and over again - to crush the Chinese once and for all. The move into Indochina, in turn, was fundamentally another front in the China War, which was designed to cut off the flow of foreign supplies. Rather than a quick campaign which allowed Japan to exploit Chinese economic resources, the Japanese were left with a metastasizing conflict which strained the economy to the utmost. The economic calculus of the China War had gone exactly opposite to the plan, but that very cost made it impossible for Japan to walk away.
The sudden resource crunch intensified the drift between army and navy and amplified the bizarre internal dynamic of “self bartering.” This was all very strange: the more desperate Japan’s situation became, the less unified and the more erratic the regime became. Little wonder that the United States struggled to interpret Japanese actions and diplomacy.
Above all, however, the American side made one fundamental miscalculation: they assumed that Japan understood that it would lose a war with the United States and therefore would not dare to try its luck. Even Roosevelt, who understood that an oil embargo would provoke the Japanese, was mostly concerned that they would attack the Dutch East Indies and seize the oil fields there. The idea that Japan would attack the United States did not seem to register as a real possibility.
It was perhaps natural, therefore, that Washington believed a program that mixed rearmament and economic pressure would checkmate Japan. At one point, Cordell Hull even channeled President Roosevelt’s famous cousin and wrote to FDR:
It may be advisable - in light of indications from the Far East - to “speak softly” (carefully avoiding any word that might to a wishful thinker imply that we would consider offers of “compromise”), while simultaneously giving by our acts in the Pacific new glimpses of diplomatic, economic, and naval “big sticks.”
The reality, however, was that Japan’s failure to resolve the China War, and the ensuing economic crisis, had already created a genuine state of strategic desperation, which the United States intensified by its rearmament and especially by the 1941 strangulation of oil exports to Japan. This latter move, in particular, immediately put the Japanese on the clock and created the consensus for war. Since Japan’s existing stockpiles of oil were sufficient for perhaps 18 months of normal consumption, the loss of American exports put Japan at a fork in the road and pressured them to act immediately.
The United States succeeded, broadly speaking, in economically and diplomatically cornering and checkmating the Japanese. With Japan’s economy already in a state of crisis, the oil embargo threatened to cave the entire structure in. By any reasonable measure, the United States did indeed have the Japanese backed into a corner. The miscalculation was the assumption that Japan would not attempt to fight its way out against desperate odds.
Offering Battle: Japan’s Naval Schema
What we have endeavored to show with this admittedly overwrought prologue is that the Japanese launched the Pacific War against the Anglo-American powers largely out of a sense of economic crisis and geostrategic checkmate. Japan’s urgent need to acquire an independent supply of oil, which it attempted to solve by seizing the Dutch East Indies, is by far the best known element of this crisis, but it is important to understand that the Japanese economy was already under incredible strain in domains that went far beyond fossil fuels.
This general sense of crisis related directly to the scale and aggression of Japan’s opening offensives. The Japanese famously exploded out of the box in 1941-42, with operations in Malaysia, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, New Guinea, the central Pacific, and of course, Hawaii. This massive Japanese offensive was shaped by a particular mixture of desperation and long held assumptions about how a Pacific War would be fought. Japan had to accomplish a huge list of operational tasks in the opening phase of the war, and this list was dictated by both the immediate economic crisis and an idiosyncratic theory of war.
