One of those sailors who felt suspicious of this outpouring of friendship was a young American naval ensign and recent Annapolis graduate named William F. Halsey aboard the battleship Kansas. “Bull” Halsey, destined for fame as a U.S. Pacific Fleet commander during World War II, recalled, “I felt that the Japanese meant none of their welcome; that they actually disliked us,” he wrote afterward. “Nor was I any more convinced of their sincerity when they presented us with medals confirming the ‘good will’ between our two governments.”7
* * *
With the outbreak of the First World War, Japan weighed her options and sided with the Allies, but her role in the fighting was limited to the comparatively easy task of ejecting the Germans from their mid-Pacific colonial possessions in the Marshall and Gilbert Island chains. At the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919 Japan was rewarded by being given a “mandate” over these former German territories, which would prove to be terribly costly for the American armed forces during the Second World War.
Following the end of World War I the major Allied powers, principally the United States, had become distressed over the expensive and threatening race by nations to build ever more and ever larger naval warships. This resulted in the 1921—22 Naval Armament Limitation Conference, held in Washington, D.C. As there were only three major navies left in the world, it was agreed between the United States, Great Britain, and Japan that the ratio of “capital ships” (battleships and later aircraft carriers) should henceforth be 5:5:3, with the Japanese begrudgingly accepting the smaller number. In exchange, the United States agreed to halt further fortifications of its Pacific island possessions the Philippines and Wake, Guam, and Midway Islands.* As well, the three parties agreed to take a ten-year-long “naval holiday” on new warship construction, after which a second treaty conference was to be held.
Not only that but other international agreements arising from the conference led to treaties between Japan and those Western democracies that had possessions or interests in the Far East, pledging mutual respect of each other’s rights and territories, principally in turbulent but resource-rich China, which was even then on the verge of civil war. From this point on events moved rapidly and relentlessly toward the deterioration of relations between Japan and the Western democracies—mainly the United States.
First, beginning in the mid-1920s, there was a rise in militarism in Japan. The militarists, often influential and with access to the press, protested that the naval arms-limitation treaties had placed Japan in second-class status and jeopardized her national security. They also objected to Japan’s signing of the treaties pledging mutual respect for Western interests in Asia. The way the Japanese militarists saw it Asia, in particular China with its lucrative markets, was in Japan’s sphere of influence, and Westerners had no legitimate business there.
Then, in 1924, the Japanese were insulted yet again by the old “yellow peril” specter. Until then the United States was taking in just about everybody on earth to fuel its voracious need for labor and settlement. But by 1924 the hordes of immigrants from central Europe, Soviet Russia, and other poverty-stricken nations had led many Americans to conclude that they were being swamped by foreigners. Congress responded by enacting an immigration law that set quotas on U.S. immigration from the various countries of the world—all except Japan. Under the Exclusion Act, Japanese—who were by then becoming the most numerous of the Asian immigrants—were forbidden entirely from settling in the United States. Naturally, the Japanese saw this as new evidence of anti-Oriental racism and “a gratuitous affront.”8 Again riots erupted in Tokyo, and “Westerners were refused rooms in some hotels, publicly insulted and occasionally beaten in sight of police.”9
In 1930 the second Naval Armament Limitation conference convened in London. Japan demanded a more equitable parity of ships but was rebuffed, further fueling the militarists’ charges that she was being treated with scorn.* Meantime, in Manchuria, the so-called Japanese Kwantung Army, stationed there ostensibly to guard the Japanese-owned railroad, in 1931 created an “incident” that set off Japan’s fatal gamble for Asian domination. “This military establishment,” wrote foreign minister Shigenori Togo from his jail cell after the Second World War, “had come to regard itself as the chosen instrument of Japan’s manifest destiny ... and had developed a certain impatience with civilian governments which failed to evince sufficient concern for Japan’s prestige as a continental power.”10
Acting without approval from anyone in Tokyo, Kwantung Army officers manufactured a story that a Chinese bomb had blown up a railroad track and they forthwith set about seizing strategic positions all over Manchuria. Despite orders from Tokyo to cease their aggression, the army commanders proceeded apace, and within three months the Japanese occupied all of Manchuria. Presented with a fait accompli the Japanese government collectively shrugged its shoulders and welcomed Manchuria into the new Japanese empire, renaming it Manchukuo.
The “Manchurian incident,” as the Japanese officially chose to call it (there would be other “incidents” as well, which led to war and Japanese occupation of her neighbors), demonstrated a peculiar quirk in the Japanese national persona. In any other country a military commander who flagrantly disobeyed orders from his civilian superiors would have been sacked and punished. But in Japan, often as not, this wasn’t the case and would lead to much trouble and suffering down the road. The League of Nations deplored the “incident” and its consequences, and dispatched a commission to Manchuria to investigate the affair. When the commission returned in 1932 with its report, the League voted 42 to 1 (all but Japan herself) to condemn Japan for its aggression. As in the upcoming cases of Hitler and Mussolini, however, no punitive action was taken. Nevertheless, her pride wounded, Japan walked out of the League, branded with the international mark of Cain.
From that point on Japan seemed content with having become a pariah to most of the world. For the next five years, through the good offices of the Kwantung Army, she created almost countless “incidents” against the Chinese, after which demands were made and ultimatums issued, until it became obvious to even the remotest Chinese peasant that his country was being relentlessly gobbled up by the empire of Japan. The Japanese dilemma was described thusly by the Australian prime minister, who, upon his return from the 1921 naval conference, had seen the handwriting on the wall. “For us, the Pacific problem is for all practical purposes the problem of Japan. Here is a nation of 70 millions of people, crowded together in narrow islands, its population increasing rapidly, and is already pressing on the margin of subsistence. Japan then, is faced with the great problem which has bred wars since time began. For when the tribes and nations of the past outgrew the resources of their own territory they moved on and on, hacking their way to the fertile pastures of their neighbors. This is the problem of the Pacific—the modern Riddle of the Sphinx.”*11
Be that as it may, the increasingly disastrous Japanese foreign policy was made possible by what was then a time-honored Japanese tradition: government by assassination. In the period between the wars no less than three Japanese premiers and a wide assortment of other high government officials met their deaths at the hands of the militarists. Toward the end of the 1930s multiple conspiracies within the officer ranks of the army and navy resulted in a perfect orgy of assassinations and assassination attempts, most of which, according to Japanese custom, went unpunished. Voices of moderation were silenced by murder or other means and by 1937 the army effectively ran the government.
Worse, Japan’s status as an outcast nation drew her into collaboration with the two other international outcasts, Germany and Italy. In 1936 Japan signed an anticommunist pact with Hitler—and later with Mussolini—dedicated to suppressing the spread of communism but obviously aimed at Soviet Russia, then the world’s only communist power.
All the while, Japanese editorialists and writers were fanning the flames of racial hatred of the Americans and Europeans. In particular, they justified their attempt to t
ake over China and create an “Asia for Asians” sphere in the East on the grounds that the Americans, British, French, and Dutch had taken over, respectively, the Philippines, India-Burma-Malaya—Hong Kong, French Indo-China, and the countries now comprising Indonesia. Thus, the argument went, why should Japan, now the major power in the Orient, stand by while white Christians controlled large parts of Asia and they themselves were being vilified for trying to grab China?
These Japanese writers and opinion makers cited as particularly odious American expansionism over Mexican territory in 1848, including California and the Southwest, as well as the usurpation of American Indian lands. What they failed to emphasize, however, was that all of these imperialistic endeavors, including American occupation of the Philippines, had occurred primarily in the previous century, and that British, French, and Dutch colonial conquests went back much further than that; and that with the dawn of the new century and the enlightenment that followed the tragedy of World War I, these Western powers had actually begun agreeing to return many (but of course not all) of their overseas possessions to the native inhabitants. (There is a rather small school of thought even today that agrees with this Japanese logic and its rationale for the Japanization of all Asia, and their point might be well taken but for the horrific brutality that the Japanese demonstrated toward those benighted peoples once they had conquered their countries.)
In the summer of 1937 the Kwantung Army, or so it is generally believed, precipitated its most ambitious “incident” of all, which would lead ultimately to world war in the Far East. Japanese troops on a night-training maneuver near the ancient bridge named for the Italian explorer Marco Polo claimed they had been shot at by Chinese soldiers in the area. The Japanese army general staff ordered a retaliation, seizing the Chinese capital Peking (Beijing). Fighting soon broke out all over China and the Japanese used the opportunity to initiate a full-scale war. They captured one major Chinese city after the next, including Soochow, Shanghai, Hankow, and Canton, as the nationalist government of General Chiang Kai-shek fled into the vast Chinese interior, ultimately setting up the capital at Chungking, far to the west.
The Japanese were not benevolent rulers. They rounded up thousands of Chinese, tied them to poles, and used them as live guinea pigs for bayonet practice and to refine their swordsmanship; a Japanese soldier was expected to be able to chop off a human head cleanly, in a single stroke.
One Japanese described the experience: “I personally severed more than forty heads. Today I no longer remember each of them well. It might sound extreme, but I can almost say that if more than two weeks went by without my taking a head, I didn’t feel right. But even I sometimes botched the job. Their bodies tended to move. They swayed. Sometimes I’d hit the shoulder. Once a lung popped out, almost like a balloon. Most of the officers did this. If they didn’t, their authority was weakened.”12 The Japanese army also operated so-called comfort stations for their soldiers in China, Manchuria, and Korea. Some 200,000 “illiterate rural women” were told they were being sent to high-paying factory jobs. In reality, they were placed in barracks and required “to sexually service up to fifty Japanese soldiers a day.” The soldiers called these women “public toilets.”13
Frustrated by lack of quick victory, the Japanese singled out for particular attention the peaceful Chinese metropolis of Nanking, exacting upon it an almost unimaginable savagery, which would come to distinguish the new breed of Japanese soldier. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, it was remarked worldwide how the Japanese treated prisoners and civilians alike with unusual courtesy and respect. But these new type of soldiers, conscripted from the illiterate peasant class, were too often brutish creatures, drunk on notions of power, superiority, and invincibility imbibed from their superiors and, worse, far worse, unrestrained by their officers. In what the international newspapers and newsreels recorded as the Rape of Nanking, the Japanese murdered some 300,000 helpless civilians of that city. More than 80,000 women were raped, some of them seventy and eighty years old; children were speared on bayonets; looting was the order of the day and much of the city was burned to the ground; and citizens were roasted alive in a reign of cruelty so abominable that people still writhe at the telling of it.
Despite world outrage and condemnation, the Japanese claimed the reports were exaggerated, though subsequent investigation proved they were not. Soon Japan had an army of more than a million men fighting on Chinese soil but, in spite of holding almost all of coastal China, the Japanese army, then some two million strong, had overextended itself in the immensity of that huge country, where a bleak and murderous stalemate ensued until the outbreak of World War II.
Chapter Three
By 1940 thoughtful Americans perceived the unfolding world events with almost breathless consternation. Across the Atlantic, England was fighting alone for her life against the ever expanding Axis powers; across the Pacific, the Japanese appeared to have a death grip on China. Anyone with a grasp of history and geography realized that if both the British empire and China fell, the fascist dictators and their communist allies would soon seize and control most of the world and its resources and that America would be squeezed to death between them; that with modern armaments the great oceans no longer provided the security they once had; that international trade, upon which much of the American economy depended, would be strangled until the Great Democracy became, of necessity, a vassal state to wicked and rapacious empires.
These were no idle fears. Allied counterintelligence had intercepted an astonishingly detailed Nazi scheme for dividing up South America and Central America for the new German empire. A Nazi courier from the German embassy in Argentina was shanghaied by British agents and in his pouch was found a top-secret map showing how South America—then composed of fourteen separate nations—was to be consolidated into five huge Nazi puppet states, one of which included Panama and the Panama Canal. The American public was not much comforted when President Franklin D. Roosevelt revealed news of this plot, declaring, “The geographical experts in Berlin have ruthlessly obliterated all the existing boundary lines to bring the whole [South American] continent under their domination.”1 Accordingly, Roosevelt commissioned some gunboat diplomacy of his own, ordering a number of large American warships to cruise offshore of Brazil and other South American countries where Nazi-inspired movements seemed to be making inroads.
Furthermore, Roosevelt himself was privy to a Japanese plan divulged to him years earlier when he was assistant secretary of the navy by a Japanese who informed him “in confidence” of his government’s intention to annex the American Pacific possessions as well as Mexico and Peru.2 By 1940 U.S. intelligence had revealed a renewed Japanese interest in these areas.
Much as Roosevelt recognized the mounting peril, he knew that politically his hands were nearly tied. National polls showed that up to 70 percent of the American population wanted no part of war, and in Congress powerful isolationist forces had him hamstrung. Additionally, surely his mind was on the fact that he was up for reelection in 1940, for he was already—like Woodrow Wilson before him—publicly promising not to “send American boys to fight in foreign wars.” But with the fall of France and continued Nazi conquests in Europe, Roosevelt did manage to persuade Congress in September 1940 to pass the Selective Service Act, which called for a draft of 900,000 men, but whose terms of service would expire in one year without renewed congressional approval.*
Worse for Roosevelt was the U.S. Neutrality Act of 1936, sardonically described by the playwright Robert Sherwood, who worked in the White House during the war years: “It was born of the belief that we could legislate ourselves out of war, as we had once legislated ourselves out of the saloons (and into the speakeasies). Like Prohibition, it was an experiment ‘noble in motive’ but disastrous in result.”3
The Neutrality Act forbade the United States from aiding or trading with any warring power, but Roosevelt managed to get around it at least once—in order to help stave off the German i
nvasion of England in late 1940—by trading fifty World War I—vintage U.S. destroyers for long-term American leases on British naval bases in the western Atlantic and Caribbean. This transaction ignited such an uproar from the isolationists that it convinced the politician in Roosevelt yet again that he had best move very carefully.
One thing he could do, and it was one of the most important things he did do in all the war, was set science into motion in October 1939, when the president received a letter from the famous mathematics and physics professor Albert Einstein, who had escaped Nazi Germany and was then teaching at Princeton. Einstein informed the president that he and other distinguished scientists had calculated that “splitting the atom” was theoretically possible and, more ominously, that the Germans were actually well along in the process. “This new phenomenon,” Einstein told Roosevelt, “would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.”
Roosevelt, whose mind was undoubtedly on many things beyond any theoretical exploration of the tiny atom, scrawled a note on Einstein’s letter: “We ought to do something about this.” He might easily have tossed the letter in the trash or simply had his secretary dictate a thank-you note to the old mathematical genius.4