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By Root 1027 0

Germans had expected to win by now; they had summer uniforms, summer equipment, and lightweight oil in their guns and engines. Overnight the temperature dropped and kept on dropping; it finally clunked to the bottom at forty degrees below zero, with the wind blowing straight from the North Pole. A last spastic effort carried the German 3rd and 4th Panzer Groups to within twenty-five miles of Moscow. That was as close as they ever got; no free German would march through Red Square in this war, and precious few of those German prisoners who did would ever come home to tell about it. The German drive collapsed on the 5th; the Russians, incredibly, opened a counteroffensive on the 6th. The next day, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

14. Japan and the Road to Pearl Harbor

THE JAPANESE AIR STRIKE at the United States Pacific Fleet in its base at Pearl Harbor on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, transformed the wars in Europe and Asia into one gigantic, global struggle. Ever since 1939, the United States had moved closer and closer to war, without getting fully involved in it. Except for ships on the North Atlantic convoy runs, Americans were still determinedly aloof; finally, it was not escalation of the U-boat war, but the quite uncoordinated activities of Japan in the Far East that catapulted America into the ranks of the belligerents. The ultimate irony of the whole situation is that Japan went to war not because she thought she could defeat the massive industrial power of America, but because she was already frustrated by her inability to defeat China.

Ever since the China Incident in 1937, the Japanese armies had moved from triumph to triumph on the Asian mainland. They overran large areas of northern China; they forced the Chinese government twice to move its capital. In 1938, they adopted a policy of military occupation of the coastal areas, and therefore of economic strangulation. Early in the year they took Tsingtao. The Chinese rallied, but after some checks in the spring the Japanese advance resumed. The old nineteenth-century treaty ports went one by one, Amoy, Suchow, and on down the coast. On the Manchurian border ebullient Japanese troops clashed with the Russians. In September, the nucleus of a puppet government was established, and in October, after months of ruthless and indiscriminate bombing, they took the city of Canton, upriver from British Hong Kong, and the greatest port of entry remaining to the Chinese; Hankow fell a few days later and the Nationalist government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek fled upstream to Chungking. The Western Powers protested ineffectually, but by early 1939, most of China’s access to the outside world was gone. Only a few tenuous links were left; through Russia, up from the south through Burma, and up the Red River from French Indochina. As the imperial powers became more and more preoccupied with matters nearer home the Japanese turned to economic and political pressure designed to drive them completely out of China.

For all their victories, the Japanese could not, in Clausewitzian terms, win the war. The Chinese people had consolidated behind Chiang’s government, and all parties, even to some extent the Communists, cooperated against the enemy. The ultimate aim of war is to break the opponent’s will, so that he no longer offers opposition; the Chinese refused to be broken. The string of victories seemed endless, but the reservoir of Chinese seemed inexhaustible. Like others before her, Japan was wearing herself out killing Chinese.

The Japanese were also bothered by European affairs. As they were willing to take advantage of the early 1939 crises to enhance their own Asian position, so they felt threatened by the Russo-German Nonaggression Pact. This seemed to be encouraging Russia to turn east, and in fact was regarded in Japan as a considerable betrayal by Hitler. The army lost some of its political prestige through this, as it had been strongly pro-German. Through the last months of 1939, there was some diminution of the direct pressure on China