Ships in flames in the aftermath of the suprise Japanese attack on US Naval Base Pearl Harbour in Hawaii in1941 that led to the US entering World War II.
- By TOM GILLING 12:00AM DECEMBER 11, 2020
- https://www.theaustralian.com.au/ar...r/news-story/e2363b9aaf7e7994b7267d78d8067721
At 8am on December 7, 1941, torpedo bombers launched from Japanese carriers 400km out to sea attacked the US Pacific Fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor, sinking or damaging 18 ships, destroying 350 planes and killing more than 2400 Americans.
In his speech to Congress the following day, US President Franklin Roosevelt famously proclaimed it as a ‘‘date which will live in infamy’’. Roosevelt stressed the ‘‘premeditated’’ nature of the raid, noting that ‘‘the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago’’.
In fact, as Japanese-German historian Takuma Melber explains in his succinct and thought-provoking account, the attack on Pearl Harbor was the culmination of a series of diplomatic and military manoeuvres that had begun not days or weeks but months earlier.
The Pacific War started as a trade war, with the US squeezing Japanese oil supplies in retaliation for Japan’s occupation of the Chinese mainland. Eager to establish itself as the dominant power in Asia, Japan had invaded Manchuria in September 1931.
Then-US President Herbert Hoover resisted imposing sanctions, but international outrage over Japanese atrocities helped convince his successor, Roosevelt, to provide financial support for the Chinese nationalists and, in October 1940, to slap a crippling embargo on shipments of scrap iron and other essential goods, including aircraft fuel, from the US to Japan.
With the embargo in place, Japan faced running out of the oil and other resources needed to continue the war in China. It responded by pressuring the Dutch for oil from the Dutch East Indies and later by moving troops into French Indochina.
Pearl Harbour, by Takuma Melber
To America, there could only be one solution: withdrawal from Indo-China, a ceasefire in China and acceptance of a set of principles that included ‘‘respect for the territorial integrity and sovereignty of all states’’. To Japan’s military elite, however, such a solution represented ‘‘not a political option but a humiliation’’.
Not all Japan’s leaders wanted war with the US: Emperor Hirohito was pro-American, while senior naval staff were less gung-ho than their army counterparts. But the hardliners held sway and Hirohito — in Melber’s words ‘‘neither a strong personality nor a man of resolute words and decision’’ — fell into line.
Not even the hawks believed that Japan could defeat the US but they were deluded enough to think that decisive early victories — including the destruction of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor — would put them in a strong position to negotiate advantageously for peace.
As Japanese diplomats shuttled back and forth in a last-minute effort to find a face-saving resolution, the carrier task force set sail for Hawaii. Left in the dark by their own government, the diplomats were ordered to deliver their final rejection of US terms at 1pm Washington time – 7.30am in Hawaii – but the coded instructions from Tokyo did not arrive until after the first torpedoes had been dropped.
The Japanese had hoped to find aircraft carriers berthed at Pearl Harbor, but they were out of luck (a day later and they would have caught the USS Enterprise). Had an American carrier or two been sunk, the course of the war might have been different. While Japanese dive bombers caught the rest of the fleet cold and destroyed hundreds of aircraft on the ground, most of the damaged ships and many of the aircraft were able to be repaired.
The truly decisive blow came later, at the Battle of Midway, when four Japanese aircraft carriers were destroyed, forcing Japan into the defensive and putting an end to its hopes of naval dominance.
Melber’s slim volume – first published in German in 2016 and now translated into English – offers a penetrating study of one of the key events of the 20th century from the Japanese rather than the usual American perspective.
Melber’s nuanced picture of Japanese wartime decision-making exposes the deep rifts in the country’s military and civilian leadership. His clinical analysis of the diplomatic to-and-fro between Tokyo and Washington in the months before the attack lays bare the inevitable slide towards war.
Could the Americans have prevented the attack? Melber records that in November 1941 the US Secret Service in Washington intercepted instructions sent to the Japanese consulate in Honolulu to ‘‘report twice a week on the position of the ships in the US Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor’’.
The US ambassador in Tokyo also passed on comments by a ‘‘well-informed Peruvian envoy’’ that ‘‘a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor was planned by the Japanese military forces in case of ‘trouble’ between Japan and the United States’’. This precondition had clearly been met by the end of 1941.
Melber concludes that there ‘‘can be no doubt’’ that in the run-up to the attack, US intelligence and military chiefs in Washington ‘‘failed to correctly interpret the information provided and to draw the necessary conclusions regarding … Japanese war intentions’’. Half a century later, much the same was said about the failure of US intelligence to anticipate the 9/11 attack.
At a time of gargantuan military tomes that leave nothing about their subject unsaid, Melber’s concise and crisply written book feels almost like a publishing aberration. With China bullying its way to regional domination, it is a useful reminder of how trade wars can turn into something more dangerous.
Pearl Harbor By Takuma Melber Translated by Nick Somers Polity Press, 220pp, $41.95 (HB)
