The Eagle Against the Sun | The Second World War in the Pacific
Welcome to a special two-part episode of 15-Minute History. Seven years ago, when Joe came to me with the idea for this podcast, we started with a two-part summary of the Second World War in Europe. I remember commenting to Joe—I think it was in an early discussion—that we ought to cover the Pacific War. So here it is, inexcusably too late, but we have had so many great topics to discuss over the years that this one got lost in the shuffle. I’ll be bringing you the war in back-to-back podcasts this week and next, then Joe and I will range across the world in what I expect will be an epic discussion in both length and breadth. So here we go!
On Sunday, December 7, 1941, the Japanese Empire launched one of the most successful surprise attacks in world history. Planes from six aircraft carriers bombed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. For the preceding year, the two countries had been negotiating over the issues that had led to the Pacific crisis: the Japanese war in China and America’s embargo on military supplies and seizure of Japanese assets. However, even after Tokyo decided to attack the United States, its representatives continued to insist at every meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt and his aides that Japan only wanted peace.
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who planned the attack, hoped to damage or destroy the Pacific Fleet’s three aircraft carriers, as these would be America’s primary weapon in the war. However, the ships were not in port on December 7th; the Navy Department had sent them to deliver aircraft to other bases in the Pacific. But the results of Japan’s attack were devastating. Four US Navy battleships were sunk, including the USS Arizona, and four others were severely damaged, as were nine smaller warships. Nearly two hundred planes, the bulk of the Navy and Army Air Force’s strength in Hawaii, were also destroyed on the ground or shot down by faster and more maneuverable Japanese fighters. Over 2,400 men and women were killed in the attack, while Japan lost the crews of five midget submarines sunk while trying to enter the harbor and the pilots of 29 aircraft—total Japanese casualties were 64 killed.
Pearl Harbor ended the two-year debate over American neutrality in the Second World War. Fury gripped the nation unlike anything seen since the Civil War. When he returned to Pearl Harbor aboard the Enterprise a day after the attack, Admiral William Halsey said, “Before we’re through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell.” When he rose to address Congress on December 8th, President Roosevelt described it as “a date that will live in infamy” and called on members to formally declare war on Japan. Congress approved the war resolution an hour later by a vote of 82-0 in the Senate and 388-1 in the House of Representatives. In bomb-scarred London, Prime Minister Winston Churchill had issued Great Britain’s declaration of war on Japan after its attack on Singapore and Hong Kong nine hours earlier; Canada and Australia followed suit days later. The great English-speaking nations were now united in common cause against the forces of totalitarianism. Churchill later wrote of that day, “I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”
A War of Resources
The Pacific War was less the result of one man’s actions, as with the European War and Adolf Hitler’s bloodlust, and more about Japan’s position relative to other great powers. The empire’s war with China was going badly as Chiang Kai-Shek’s troops stubbornly refused to surrender. Victory depended on the Japanese gaining additional supplies of rubber, oil, and iron to fuel their war machines; without it, they would have to scale back their operations in an unacceptable reversal of power and prestige. Tokyo began to eye the resources of the Dutch East Indies, far to the south in modern-day Indonesia. By 1940, with much of Western Europe dominated by German power, Japan seized control of French Indochina as a base for future aggression.
In Washington, President Roosevelt responded to this move by freezing Japanese assets in the United States and cutting off the sale of all military supplies and natural resources. The generals who ruled in Emperor Hirohito’s name now faced a dilemma. They could not attack the Dutch East Indies without provoking an armed response from the United States, but they would not back down to regain access to American resources. They chose the lesser of two evils and began planning for a war that would span the length and breadth of the Pacific Ocean.
Japanese commanders met in Tokyo in August 1941 to discuss the strategic situation. America had a significant Army presence on the ground in the Philippines but few ships stationed in the archipelago. The US Navy was positioned in the more central Hawaiian islands with small garrisons and aircraft at Guam and Wake. To reach the Dutch East Indies, Japan would have to go around the Philippines, and the army proposed invading the islands with overwhelming force and then awaiting the American response. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto disagreed and instead laid out a three-part offensive that, he believed, would cripple the United States and its British allies everywhere in the Pacific. First, the Japanese navy would launch a massive attack on the American Pacific Fleet in Hawaii to cripple its fighting strength. The Air Force then would bombard the two major British positions in the Pacific: Hong Kong and Singapore. Finally, the army would land in the Philippines and destroy the American forces in the islands. General Hideki Tojo, the Japanese prime minister, agreed to Yamamoto’s plan, and it then received the emperor’s assent. On November 30, 1941, six aircraft carriers and their escorts left the Home Islands and sailed east.
Early Responses
In the weeks after Japan’s surprise attack, the United States moved quickly to strike back. Admiral Halsey and the Enterprise raided small islands in the Central Pacific, earning the carrier the nickname “the Grey Ghost” for its ability to appear, attack, and disappear with ease. Various proposals from the War Department came to President Roosevelt’s desk for hitting the Home Islands, but none were feasible given the military situation. Hawaii was too far for Army Air Force bombers, and Navy planes were too small to carry enough armament to damage Japanese infrastructure. British colonies in South Asia were under enemy assault and could not be used as a base for bombing operations. Chinese airfields were being attacked daily by the Japanese. And the Soviet Union would not permit American planes to fly from its soil (Joseph Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact with Japan to free up Siberian troops to defend Moscow in mid-1941). The president then learned of a plan to launch twin-engined B-25 “Mitchell” bombers off carriers, and Roosevelt gave the project to Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle of the Army Air Force. Doolittle assembled a flight of sixteen B-25s and recruited eighty volunteers to crew them. After stripping the planes of excess weight, they were loaded onto the deck of the USS Hornet, which had recently arrived in San Diego from the Atlantic Fleet. The Hornet met the Enterprise in Hawaii on April 1, 1942, and the task force sailed west toward Japan.
Doolittle planned to launch the planes four hundred miles off the Japanese coast, hit their targets, and then fly on to land in China. Unfortunately, an enemy patrol boat spotted the American carriers on April 18th, more than seven hundred miles away from the Home Islands. Doolittle gave the order to launch the planes, and they soared into the sky one by one. The Hornet and Enterprise then came about and sailed for Hawaii, unwilling to proceed further now that their cargo had left the deck. The raiders flew low to avoid detection for almost five hours, then climbed high into the sky once they reached the coast. The crews dropped their ordinance on four Japanese cities, including Tokyo, but did little real damage because the planes carried only two bombs each. The raiders then tried to make it to China, but the added flight time had drained their fuel reserves. Twelve crash-landed on Chinese soil, three ditched in the sea off the Chinese coast, and one landed in the Soviet Union (where its crew were imprisoned for a year). Three Americans died during the operation and four more in Japanese captivity. The rest were rescued by the Chinese and returned to the United States.
The “Doolittle Raid” did not seriously impact Japan’s wartime production, but it had a tremendous psychological effect on the leaders in Tokyo. As the B-25s were large Army bombers and had come in from the sea, the Japanese could not determine their origin. After the raid, Japan pulled twelve fighter squadrons back from China and the South Pacific to protect the Home Islands. The army desperately needed these planes at the fighting fronts, but the government was determined to protect the homeland—and Emperor Hirohito—from the Americans.
“Running Wild”
In a conversation with a former Japanese prime minister before Pearl Harbor, Admiral Yamamoto had said, “I can run wild for six months…after that, I have no expectation of success.” Fundamentally, Japan’s strategy rested on its ability to grab as much Pacific territory as possible before the United States could recover its strength, mobilize for war, and strike back with all its fury. Japan would then have to make the war so terrible that the American people would tire of it and demand that Roosevelt make peace. In the months that followed Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto and the other Japanese military commanders launched a staggering number of successful campaigns against the Allies. They invaded British-controlled Burma as a prelude for an attack on India, conquered Malaya and Singapore, forced Hong Kong to surrender after a long siege, captured the American naval stations at Guam and Wake Island, and bombarded General Douglas MacArthur’s forces in the Philippines. With American ships still burning at Pearl Harbor and the ill-equipped Asiatic Fleet based at Manila almost destroyed by mid-February, Japan faced little opposition.
The assault on the Philippines began shortly after Pearl Harbor, and in the weeks that followed, General MacArthur faced the real prospect of defeat. The islands had been an American colony since the Spanish-American War but were too far from Hawaii to receive any reinforcements—the Navy simply could not risk losing its carriers. Japanese troops landed on the main island of Luzon in late December and forced the Americans back to the Bataan Peninsula by the day after Christmas. The capital city of Manila fell that same day, and the Japanese then prepared for a final assault on MacArthur’s troops. Despite the lack of support from home, the Americans held off their enemies for almost two months. MacArthur, whose father had been the Philippines’ military governor, felt a bond with the islands and the Filipino people. He cared deeply for their fate and begged President Roosevelt to send him reinforcements as he sat in his underground headquarters on the tiny island of Corregidor. But these calls went unanswered, as the Navy Department was unwilling to risk sending a large fleet with slow transport vessels across the vast Pacific. On March 11, 1942, Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to evacuate to Australia. The general complied and departed his beloved Philippines. In a broadcast to the Filipino people and the Americans still holding Bataan, he declared, “The President of the United States ordered me to break through the Japanese lines and proceed from Corregidor to Australia for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American offensive against Japan.” He then made a promise that echoed in the hearts of the men and women of the Philippines for the next three years: “I came through, and I shall return!”
The defenses at Bataan collapsed days later, and the Japanese captured the peninsula. Over seventy thousand American and Filipino soldiers surrendered, and the victors forced them to march through the jungle to prisoner-of-war camps. The seventy-mile “Bataan Death March” saw some of the worst Japanese crimes of the war. The prisoners received little food or water, and injured men were left behind to die or bayonetted or beheaded if they moved too slowly. Those who made it to the camps endured horrific physical and psychological abuse that matched the brutal treatment of Jews by the Nazis in the death camps of Poland. With the fall of Bataan, the last remaining American position was the well-fortified island of Corregidor in Manila Bay. Now led by General Jonathan Wainwright, MacArthur’s former deputy, the brave defenders endured repeated Japanese bombardment throughout April. On May 1st, as Japanese infantry began landing on Corregidor, Wainwright dispatched his final report to Washington that his men were hours away from defeat. They ended up holding out for another five days before Wainwright surrendered himself and his command. He spent the next three years in a Japanese camp, the highest-ranking American prisoner of war in the conflict.
As victory in the Philippines approached, Admiral Yamamoto began to plan a move south through the Dutch East Indies—which were now in Japanese hands and churning out resources for its war effort—toward Australia. An invasion force departed southern China and the Philippines in late April and landed on the island of New Guinea to attack Port Moresby, the last British fortress between them and their target. A Japanese fleet then sailed into the Coral Sea southeast of the island, hoping to tempt the Americans into battle. The plan worked, and the Americans moved in from the east on May 4, 1942. Two carriers, Lexington and Yorktown, sent their planes aloft to hunt for the enemy, and the Japanese did the same. The Battle of the Coral Sea was the first in history in which neither side’s warships exchanged direct fire—planes from one side bombed the other’s ships instead. Two large Japanese fleet carriers were damaged and a smaller escort carrier sunk, but the United States lost the Lexington. The battle was technically a Japanese victory, as it had destroyed an American fleet carrier, but Yamamoto pulled his forces back and abandoned the plan to invade Australia. The Coral Sea was ultimately a strategic victory for the United States because Japan’s withdrawal opened up new opportunities to go on the offensive in the South Pacific. The Yorktown, badly damaged, limped back to Pearl Harbor and was repaired just in time for the great turning point battle of the Pacific War.
Yamamoto still hoped to invade Hawaii, but first, he had to capture or destroy the American troops on Midway, a tiny atoll about halfway between Hawaii and the Home Islands. He also needed to sink the four American carriers in the Pacific—Enterprise, Hornet, Yorktown, and Saratoga. The last was at San Diego undergoing repairs and thus beyond his reach, but the other three were operating out of Pearl Harbor. If Yamamoto could destroy them, America would be unable to project power across the Pacific and threaten the empire he and his superiors in Tokyo had built.
American cryptologists in Washington and Honolulu learned of the plan to attack Midway in the nick of time. Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet, sent out false messages that the island was running low on fresh water to lure the Japanese in, and Yamamoto took the bait. A large strike force, including four of his six fleet carriers, attacked Midway on June 4, 1942. The American fleet southeast of the island sent its planes up two days later but missed the enemy ships. Japanese torpedo bombers hit the Americans that afternoon and damaged the Yorktown, which was then scuttled. They then returned to their carriers to rearm for a second strike, and as the decks were loaded with planes, fuel trucks, bullets, and bombs, the Americans appeared overhead and attacked. The pilots sank three enemy fleet carriers and set a fourth afire—it sank later that evening—in less than an hour. By an unbelievable stroke of luck, the United States had crippled the Japanese navy in a single battle and shifted the war’s momentum almost six months to the day since the attack at Pearl Harbor. Admiral Yamamoto had been correct.
Good Idea, Bad Idea
Whether or not it was a good idea for Japan to attack America is almost a farce given how the war turned out. So instead, let me pose a question to you that I ask my history students every year when we cover the Pacific War: should the United States have cut Japan off from industrial and military exports and forced its government to choose to either disengage from the war in China or risk war with America? Historians will probably debate this until the end of time, so let’s consider a couple factors—then you get to answer that question for yourself.
First, most of the world had seen America’s economic and military potential in the First World War when it tore Germany apart (with help from Britain and France) in only a hundred days in 1918. Admiral Yamamoto, who deeply feared the prospect of war with America, had spent time in the United States and understood its culture and military ethos. However, most Japanese Army officials believed that the isolationist sentiments that took hold after the Great War would slow America’s response to an attack, and they chose to risk it all rather than be humiliated by withdrawing from China.
Second, did the United States need to protect the Chinese from Japan? Its interest in East Asia was mostly economic, and the American economy did take in a lot of money from trade with China. But its larger concern was Japan’s overt aggression and the danger it might pose to America’s Pacific possessions—especially Hawaii and the Philippines. Japan clearly had imperial ambitions, and Washington’s experts advised Roosevelt that it would be better to stop the Japanese by supporting China rather than face them on the battlefield.
Third, could Japan have obtained the resources its military needed from elsewhere in the world? Not really. The European powers were either under Axis occupation or throwing everything they had into resisting Hitler and Mussolini, so they had few supplies of oil, steel, etc. to sell to the Japanese (even if they wanted to do so). Since much of what we now call the “Third” or “developing” world was made up of European colonies or American allies, this closed off India, the Middle East, and the global south to Japanese trade. America was truly Japan’s only source of the materiel its armies and fleets needed.
So was the war inevitable? Could leaders have made different choices? Joe and I will discuss this next week, but the answer is ultimately in your hands.
Image courtesy of historyonthenet.com.