The Pacific War

ON THE WORLD TODAY

OUR strategy in the Pacific is a combination of two things: a war of attrition waged by submarines and air power against Japan’s vulnerable supply lines, and a war of movement against her bases and island bastions. The first, which has been going on for some time, has compelled Japan to convoy her ships and forced her to worry about the economic development of an empire which is held together by shipping. The second will rip great gashes across the lines of communication upon which Japan depends. We are beginning to use that combination of sea and air power at which General MacArthur hinted months ago.

The “master races” of Europe and Asia are now isolated from each other.

How impregnable are the fortresses of Germany and Japan? How will their peoples stand up to the experience of being attacked when they have fed so long on unhindered victories?

Japan alone

Japan, like Germany, is isolated; but unlike Germany, she has the strength to break through the ring we are trying to close around her. The campaign against her, therefore, will take a different form from that against Germany. The noose cannot be pulled tight until we are certain that the rope is strong enough. We must always remember two things: our lack of industrial potential and raw materials in the areas where our bases must be established, and the importance of building up bases before the enemy eliminates them.

In the Southwest Pacific this task was successfully completed by a very narrow margin. In the North Pacific we succeeded because the Japanese chose to attack at Midway instead of throwing everything they had against Dutch Harbor. To Japan’s disadvantage, we have good communications with Alaska and have now established impregnable bases there. The rope that keeps Japan from overrunning continental Asia, however, is badly frayed, and the struggle to strengthen it will be hotly contested.

The Japanese have long prepared for the counteroffensive against them. All the evidence goes to show that their pattern of development in the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere has been one of building a fortress within a fortress. They have steadily built up their inner defenses — in Japan, Manchuria, North China, and Formosa — the basis of their power. To these areas they have brought the spoils of war. Here Japan expects to be able to resist for many years, even if the newly won territories are lopped off.

Japan’s political successes

At the same time the process of political consolidation has been pushed with one main objective in view: the elimination of all Anglo-American influence in the Co-prosperity Sphere. The greatest efforts have been expended in China — which is the greatest problem. Here the main “concessions” have been made in an effort to build up the prestige of Chinese quislings and to lower the prestige of the AngloAmerican powers. Japan realizes the importance of turning Chinese opinion against us more keenly than we understand the need of having it on our side.

That Japan has had some measure of political success in Occupied China cannot be denied; she is building up large vested interests around her rule by bringing out the worst features of Chinese political and social life — that is, by exploiting the cupidity, corruption, and disaffection of antinationalist groups.

Reports of travelers indicate that life in Free China is preferable, for most people, to that in Occupied, but Japan is using puppet troops in spite of defections to Chungking. Japan’s armies secure most of their food from areas they occupy, and valuable raw materials are smuggled into Japanese hands.

Japanese-occupied China is blockading Chungking as far as materials of war are concerned, but is selling to it consumers’ goods on a large scale. Organized popular resistance behind the Japanese lines is still most successful in the border region of Hopeh and Shansi.

Does the New Order work?

The New Order in East Asia resembles that in Europe in some respects. Japan, like Germany, has attempted to bring occupied and satellite peoples into her economic and political system to such a degree that their fates are bound up with her own. She has cornered commodities, set up rationing systems. Occupied China compares well with France in that Japan has drafted labor for field and factory and has elaborated the hostage system, terrorized opposition, and corrupted politics.

We have ties with the conquered peoples of Europe which may yet be of vital assistance to our arms, but what way have we of reaching the two million Koreans in Japan, the people of long-occupied Manchuria, the thousands of Chinese laborers working in Japanese fields and factories? We cannot frighten Tokyo with the specter of popular resistance to its rule. This is where the Asiatic New Order differs from the European.

Churchill’s Guildhall speech, indeed, showed a measure of increasing respect for the difficulty of our Pacific task, even if it was bad news for Tokyo. “Every man, every ship, and every airplane . . . that can be moved to the Pacific will be sent and will there be maintained in action by the peoples of the British Commonwealth and Empire ... for as many flaming years as are needed to make the Japanese in their turn submit or bite the dust.”

Respect for Japan’s strength should be for the things in which she is strong, however, not for her weaknesses. We are in danger of swallowing Japanese propaganda hook, line, and sinker — the propaganda that the Japanese are completely united, that they never surrender, that they are dedicated, every last one of them, to the greater glory of the Emperor.

Japan is strong in leadership, planning, military skill, and above all in strategic position. Her industry is modest but potentially significant, certainly sufficient for immediate tasks. These are the things we underestimated before Pearl Harbor. Now we overestimate her political unity and fighting spirit, in particular her “No surrender” line.

Japan’s weakness

Japan, first of all, needs more than time to complete the political and economic conquest of the Coprosperity Sphere. According to a report of the Institute of Pacific Relations, the Japanese, given several years of uninterrupted exploitation, might overcome the tremendous difficulties facing them today by harnessing the resources and manpower of Asia. But the present difficulties are real. They come from the economic disruption arising from the war itself as well as from the attempt to adjust Japan’s economy to that of Eastern Asia instead of the United States and the rest of the world.

There are technical difficulties in pig iron and steel production. There are the limits beyond which Japan cannot go in the curtailment of civilian consumption. There is the labor shortage, which arises in an acute form when industrial expansion is pushed to the limit in a country which relies so much on backward methods of agriculture and industrial production.

Japan is rationed

The Japanese, who are peculiarly sensitive to deterioration in the food situation, are rigidly rationed. There is no evidence that the Japanese people have benefited from the conquered areas so far as food is concerned. There is plenty of evidence that countries with a rice surplus, such as Burma, are unable to export on the former scale. It is significant that when Shimomura was comparing Europe with Japan, the best consolation he could offer was that Europe was suffering even more. “In some large cities in Europe the people are fighting over rats and crows. There is not a single person in Japan who is living on rats and crows.”

The thought of coming air raids was in Shimomura’s mind also. Tojo was thinking of the same thing when he streamlined the Tokyo metropolitan administration in July. At every crisis in the war he has strengthened his control over domestic and imperial administration.

If the Japanese ever ceased to obey, or thought for themselves, the system would collapse. Hence the insistence on “No surrender.” But the severe controls established to prevent men from letting themselves be made prisoner, the mutilation promised them at the hands of their enemies if they should do so, indicate the weakness of the Japanese soldier as a fighting man.

Morale based on rigid social controls and horrible fears will work on islands where men are under the complete control of their officers, but it will not survive large-scale defeat. It cannot compare with the morale of troops who can be trusted to fight to the end of useful resistance but can accept defeat when wasting more life would serve no purpose. Japan’s hysterical insistence on “No surrender,” like all totalitarian devices, will ultimately defeat itself.

The much vaunted Japanese unity, in other words, conceals very real conflicts within Japanese life, such as the rivalries between army groups. Much of the coming and going in Occupied China can be explained by the economic rivalries between the Japanese armies and their respective Chinese quisling collaborators in Central China, North China, and Inner Mongolia. The Kwantung army has always been a law unto itself. There are conflicts between the Army and the Navy, between officers and men, even between troops from one district and those from another.

The desperate energy with which the Japanese seek to control thought and to organize obedience is in itself an indication of the strength of factional tendencies. This partly explains why the Japanese can set up the most elaborate political organization to perpetrate the most stupid political blunders.

One third of the world

Japan’s military successes are on record. But what of the breath-taking effort to regiment over one third of the world’s population? We do not always realize how ambitious this enterprise is. A summary of Japan’s political activities and propaganda efforts since Pearl Harbor would fill volumes.

The topheavy framework of Japan’s economic life rivals that of Germany. Japanese leaders, experts, organizers, and carpetbaggers have swarmed restlessly throughout the empire. During the last twelve months Tokyo has welcomed Wang Ching-wei from China, U Ba Maw from Burma, Bose from India, and assorted quislings from other parts of the Co-prosperity Sphere.

No other people, except perhaps the Germans, would have undertaken such a task. To attempt it argues a rare combination of political arrogance and unsophistication. The Japanese will fail not so much because of military miscalculation as because of failure to comprehend the life and aspirations of their neighbors. The attempt to conquer China, though perilously approaching success, was a political blunder of the first order. After brilliant victories it bogged down into a political stalemate.

The conquest of the Anglo-American powers began with the same initial success, but that too bogged down. The same desperate men, if they pour their forces into the maritime province of the Soviet Union, may well accomplish initial gains, but they will just as certainly lose the prize they so urgently seek. No other country ever embarked on such great adventures so ill equipped.

Can we win?

Japan will fail because she has undertaken the impossible. But we shall not win by that fact alone. In contrast to the political wisdom which has held the British Empire together and has characterized the relations between North and South America, the Japanese are trying to organize their relations with other peoples in the most difficult way possible. Politically speaking, they have made things so much easier for us than we deserve that we do not take their efforts seriously enough.

Apart from the obvious interest we have in enlisting the good will of Asiatic peoples in the fight against Japan, we have the same task in Asia that we have in Europe — the task of replacing the Co-prosperity Sphere with something that will work much better. It is one thing to show that the Japanese do not have the political capacity to organize Asia, but it is another thing to do it ourselves.

We are making arrangements for the military government of reoccupied areas, a task which we shall probably carry out with humanity and efficiency. But the important question to the politically conscious people of Asia is the same one that concerns similar people here: In what direction are we going?

The Chinese, for example, follow the domestic political developments in America with urgent interest, for it is in the crystal ball of American public opinion that they read their future. They fear — who knows how rightly? — an American imperialism on the one hand and American indifference on the other. And only a brave man will assume the responsibility of predicting the political climate of America at the end of the war.

In this context, therefore, recent efforts in the Senate to commit us to international obligations have a close connection with the winning of the war.

An example of the need to define our economic policies, for instance, has arisen out of the development of synthetics. Our boast that we are going to make enough synthetic rubber for all our domestic needs has disastrous effects among people vffio have been asked to expend every effort in developing natural rubber. Such fears must be dispelled.

In one sense the war in the Pacific can be won only if it lasts long enough — long enough to bring about among the powers who are fighting Japan a common agreement on the major lines of an Asiatic settlement.