Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [84]
The campaigns of 1940 and the fall of France changed all that. The all-too-apparent weakness of the democracies and their imperial holdings in the Far East encouraged the Japanese to increase their pressure once again. Though active fighting in China was burning down from mutual exhaustion, the economic stranglehold was tightened. The Imperial Navy too became increasingly interested. Hitherto, the Japanese Navy had had little to do with the China Incident; China had no navy of her own to speak of, and the sailors had been more or less bystanders to the soldiers’ war. Now Japan’s naval leaders cast increasingly covetous eyes southward. A move into Southeast Asia and the islands of the East Indies might achieve much. Occupation of Thailand, Burma, Malaya, French Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies would give Japan enormous opportunities for exploitation. There were tungsten, rubber, tin, rice, oil, quantities of things Japan needed and did not have; there was the chance to cut off all western access to China. There was also the chance for the navy to make its contribution to Japan’s bid for hegemony.
Even better, there was not too much in the way. French Indochina was garrisoned by a weak and isolated force getting orders, but not much else, from the Vichy government. The British were fully committed in Europe; they were running Malaya and Burma on a shoestring. The Dutch government after May of 1940 was in exile, operating out of rented space in London. Russia had no interests in the south, indeed would be delighted to see the Japanese turn in that direction. The only power still able to do anything about a Japanese advance into the “Southern Resources Area” was the United States. The Japanese planners assessed that if the Americans would not fight for Paris, they would not fight for Saigon.
For the next two years, therefore, from early 1940 to late 1941, the Japanese gradually expanded their influence and their control in the direction of Southeast Asia. Slowly the tension between them and the United States mounted.
In June of 1940, Japan demanded that the Vichy government grant it concessions in Indochina. Vichy agreed, being able to do little else, and Japanese warships immediately appeared in Indochinese ports. Troops entered the northern part of the country in September. Meanwhile, the British, under the same kind of pressure, agreed to close the Burma Road, the last line by which supplies could be pushed through to the Chinese Nationalists. In August, the British pulled their garrisons out of the international settlements in Shanghai and northern China. At home in Japan, a new cabinet under Premier Prince Konoye began to reorganize the government along militarist and totalitarian lines. Konoye’s Minister of War was a man named Hideki Tojo. A soldier, former military attaché in Germany, he had been chief of the secret police in the Kwantung Army in Manchuria, then its chief of staff. He was known as a leading militarist, and his promotion into the cabinet meant a measurable escalation of militarist attitudes.
In September, Japan reaffirmed her relations with Germany and Italy; in spite of the Russian affair the community of interest among the dictators was too strong to be ignored, and they now signed a tripartite pact which pledged them to full support should any one of the three become involved with a country not yet at war. The Germans thought that clause applied to Russia; the Japanese thought it applied to the United States. By the end of the year Japan had allied wih Thailand, and in 1941 she concluded a neutrality pact with Russia, and then in July fully occupied the remainder of Indochina, leaving the Vichy French to lead a sort of half-life under Japanese domination. By then, too, Japan had decided to go to war with the United States.
As Japan became more overtly expansionist, the United States became more overtly disapproving. Each Japanese territorial initiative was matched by an American diplomatic or economic response. Gradually, the two countries moved onto a