Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [86]
The Japanese had of course recognized that even before it happened, and they had been planning war since at least mid-summer. Once the Americans had frozen Japanese assets, the military planners had gone to work. Army and navy leaders sat down together and worked out their war plans. The most noted of their military men was an admiral, Isoroku Yamamoto, internationally known and widely respected in naval circles. Yamamoto spoke fluent English, having spent several tours of duty in the United States. He was an expert on oil and on naval aviation. He was also remarkably ambivalent in his attitudes toward the Americans, swinging between contempt for their casual approach to affairs—their navy was “a social organization of golfers and bridge players”—to undisguised admiration for their industrial power and their organizing ability. He was practically the only high-ranking Japanese officer to say that for Japan to fight the United States was folly. Having said that, he then went ahead and planned the war.
In 1894, an ostensibly weak Japan had gone to war with China. Launching a preemptive strike, she had seized what she wanted, and then negotiated peace. In 1904, she had done the same with Russia. Now she was going to do it with the United States. Yamamoto guaranteed his government six months of victory; after that it would be an open ball game. But the Japanese military planners said they had all the oil they needed to start their war. Six months would enable them to overrun the Southern Resources Area and the islands of the western Pacific. They could establish a defensive perimeter based on the East Indies and the mandated islands of the mid-Pacific. After that the Americans could do as they pleased. Let them bang their heads against the perimeter until they learned to accept the situation. Americans were not fighters, and eventually they would make a negotiated peace; Japan would have what she wanted. In all of the western Pacific, indeed from Panama all the way to Suez, there was really only one obstacle to Japanese aggrandizement: the United States Pacific Fleet.
Just how strong that was, or how strong the Allies were, was a matter of conjecture. On both the Japanese and the Allied side, force levels were fluctuating rapidly, and both sides had extensive commitments already.
The armed forces of the United States consisted of about a million and a half men, over a million of whom were but partially trained and poorly armed. The United States Army Air Force had 1,200 combat aircraft, including 150 four-engined bombers. The United States Navy possessed 347 warships, including seventeen battleships and seven aircraft carriers. A substantial amount of this American strength was committed to the Atlantic or to the defense of continental United States, however. It was more realistic to count what the Allies, the United States, Britain, Australia, the Netherlands East Indies government, had in the Pacific. There were about 350,000 troops, all of them poorly equipped and scattered here and there in penny-packet garrisons. There were about ninety warships, and less than a thousand aircraft, many of them obsolete. These forces were spread from the Indian frontier all the way to the American West Coast. The only major homogeneous unit was the Pacific Fleet. After the spring maneuvers of 1940, the fleet was based out of Pearl Harbor rather than its usual West Coast ports, as a means of putting pressure on Japan to behave. Late in 1941, the British too agreed to increase the pressure, and sent the battleship Prince of Wales and the battle-cruiser Repulse out to Singapore. They wanted to send an aircraft carrier as well but could not spare one.
The Japanese had about