Inferno - Max Hastings [126]
The calculations of Japan’s militarists were rooted in conceit, fatalism—a belief in shikata ga nai, “it cannot be helped”—and ignorance of the world outside Asia. Japan’s soldiers had remarkable powers of physical endurance, matched by willingness for sacrifice. The army had good air support, but was seriously deficient in tanks and artillery. The country’s industrial and scientific base was much too weak to support a sustained conflict against the United States. Germany and Japan never seriously coordinated strategy or objectives, partly because they had few in common beyond defeat of the Allies, and partly because they were geographically remote from each other. Hitler’s racial principles caused him to recoil from association with the Japanese, and only grudgingly to acknowledge them as his cobelligerents. It is just possible that, if Japan had struck west into Russia soon after the German invasion of June 1941, such a blow would have turned the scale against Stalin, making possible Axis victory, and delaying if not averting a showdown with the United States. Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka resigned from the Tokyo government when this option, which he favoured, was rejected by his colleagues.
As it was, though Japan’s 1941–42 Asian conquests shocked and appalled the Western powers, they were assuredly reversible if Germany could be beaten. No one in London or Washington doubted that Japan’s defeat would be a lengthy and difficult task, partly because of the distances involved. But few thoughtful strategists, and certainly not Admiral Yamamoto, doubted the inevitability of America’s eventual triumph, unless its national will collapsed in the face of early defeats. Given that Japan could not invade the United States, American power must ultimately prove irresistible by a nation with only 10 percent of U.S. industrial capacity and dependent on imports for its existence.
Japan made an essential preliminary move for its descent on Malaya by occupying all of neighbouring Indochina at the end of July, without incurring Vichy French resistance. On 9 August, Tokyo made a final decision against launching an attack on Russia, in 1941 anyway. By September, Japanese thinking was dominated by the new reality of the U.S. oil embargo, an earnest of Roosevelt’s resolve, though there is evidence that his subordinates translated a presidential desire to limit Japanese oil supplies and thus promote strategic restraint into an absolute cut off that accelerated the slide to war. Tokyo concluded that its only options were to bow to U.S. demands, the least palatable of which was to quit China, or to strike swiftly. Emperor Hirohito pressed his government for further diplomacy, and Prime Minister Prince Konoe accordingly proposed a summit between himself and Roosevelt. Washington, recognising an attempt at prevarication, rebuffed this initiative. On 1 December an imperial conference in Tokyo confirmed the decision to fight. War Minister Gen. Hideki Tojo, who assumed the premiership on 17 October, said: “Our empire stands at the threshold of glory or oblivion.” Thus starkly did Japan’s militarists view their choices, founded in a grandiose vision of their rightful dominance of Asia. Yet even Tojo recognised the impossibility of achieving outright victory over the United States. He and his colleagues instead sought to empower themselves by battlefield triumphs to achieve a negotiated settlement.
JAPAN LAUNCHED its strike against Pearl Harbor and its assault on Southeast