The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [108]
The United States then adopted a classic carrot-and-stick approach towards Japan: the US Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, spent more than a hundred hours negotiating with Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura at the State Department, while Roosevelt himself warned publicly on 17 August that further Japanese attempts at Asian hegemony would lead America to take active measures to safeguard her interests in the region.4 To support these warnings, the US Pacific Fleet was transferred from California to Pearl Harbor, aid to the Chinese Kuomintang Nationalists fighting against Japan under the leadership of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was increased, and thirty-five B-17 bombers were transferred to the Philippines – which had been an American protectorate since the close of the nineteenth century – from where they could bomb the Japanese home islands.
Tragically, the Roosevelt Administration – and Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs Dean Acheson in particular – dangerously underestimated the pride of Showa Dynasty Japan, which mistook these attempted acts of deterrence as unacceptable provocations. Despite the example of over ten years’ campaigning in China, Japan was not taken seriously enough by American policy-makers. It did not help that many senior politicians and soldiers genuinely believed that the slanted eyes of Japanese pilots meant they could not undertake long flights; as one historian has put it, ‘American leaders, harboring all sorts of racist stereotypes about the Japanese, did not think that they were capable of such a feat’ as the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which was 3,400 miles from the Japanese homeland.5 ‘Nobody now fears that a Japanese fleet could deal an unexpected blow on our Pacific possessions,’ declared Josephus Daniels, a former secretary of the US Navy, in 1922. ‘Radio makes surprise impossible.’ Nor was this absurd overconfidence confined to Americans: in April 1941 the Chief of the British Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, told the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden that he rated the Japanese Air Force as ‘below the Italian one’.6
Hopes for peace faded perceptibly on 17 October when Lieutenant-General Hideki Tojo, nicknamed Razor, came to power in Tokyo, heading a militarist government supported by the Chiefs of the Army and Naval Staffs. Within three weeks the Imperial General Headquarters had finalized plans to attack Pearl Harbor and to invade the Philippines, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, Thailand, Burma and the Western Pacific, setting up a perimeter around what it privately called its Southern Resources Area and which was to be publicly dubbed the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The second phase of operations would be to protect this area from Allied counter-attack, by making such assaults too costly. The third phase would involve attacking the Allies’ long lines of communication until they were forced to accept the concept of a Japanese-dominated Far East in perpetuity.7 There were also advocates of a strategy that involved invading and subjugating Australia, and another to assault India and link up with Germany in the Middle East. The creation of the Southern Resources Area was part of a plan to seize raw materials that was no less ambitious than Hitler’s plan for Lebensraum, and it similarly depended upon a quick, Blitzkrieg-style victory, starting with a surprise attack that would neutralize the US Pacific Fleet. It was risky, of course, and was nearly ditched by the Naval Staff in August 1941, but in heated arguments Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet – who was against going to war – threatened to resign unless Pearl Harbor were attacked, insisting that the plan was Japan’s