The Pacific War

ON THE WORLD TODAY

AT THE time of Pearl Harbor the Japanese had every reason to hope that Russia would soon be a military cipher and that German arms in the Middle East would choke the British Empire to death. The strength of the United States would be consumed in the defense of her own shores and in coping with invasion from South America. American production would never get started, because of internal disunity and lack of vital raw material.

That this plan did not succeed was the first important blow to Japan’s hopes. The aid we gave to the Soviet Union and Great Britain, in the nick of time, at Stalingrad and El Alamein, was a blow at the island empire also.

Empires built overnight

The bitter land, sea, and air struggles in New Guinea, the Solomons, and the Aleutians recovered the initiative. Long before the Japanese planned for our return, we were at their throats. They had not had time to digest what they had so recently bitten off. A rough impression of how much time Japan would have required to consolidate her gains can be obtained from a study of her previous experience. It took many years to pacify Formosa and to lay the foundations of imperial rule in Korea; Manchuria took at least five years to organize. This was all without the strain of war in other places.

At the time of Pearl Harbor, North China, after four years of occupation, was still a battlefield. To this load were added the peoples and territories of the Southwest Pacific and Southeast Asia — a stupendous problem certainly not solvable in the brief time Japan had at her disposal.

Empire-building is a slow, difficult, and expensive process. In what position does this unexpected development put the Japanese? Now that the tide of battle has turned, we can see more clearly what action the enemy is likely to take.

Japan’s hope

Are the Japanese now trying to lull us with the propaganda that they have lost the war? Our chief sources of information about Japan are what the Japanese choose to tell us themselves and what we overhear them telling their own people. No source of information could be more suspect. The only way in which we can hope to get at the facts from such information is to analyze it in the light of Japan’s strategy and present purposes. What is their position?

Japanese diplomacy must aim at securing the friendliest relations with the Soviet Union, at arranging a Soviet-German peace, and at steeling the German will to continue the fight in the West. Japanese leaders are attacking this seemingly hopeless task with all the singleness of purpose with which they are justly credited.

There is good reason to believe that the Japanese tried to persuade the Germans to make peace with the Soviet Union a year ago. At this time the Japanese argued that Germany could withdraw with dignity. Japan must now persuade the Soviet Union to make peace with Germany at the time when Stalin can bring home peace with victory.

Japan must re-establish her land connections, and that means getting the Soviet Union out of the war. But she does not want to get Germany out of the war with Great Britain and the United States. It is to Japan’s interest that Germany should cut her losses on the eastern front in order to consume even more of American and British production and manpower than she is now doing.

Hence the strenuous efforts Japan is making on the propaganda and diplomatic fronts to secure friendly relations with the Soviet Union. The Japanese people are being slowly acquainted with the real strength of Russian arms, while the attention of Germany is drawn towards the so-called iniquities and barbarities of the British and American air forces.

One sure indication that the Soviet Union understands the weakness of Japan’s position is the steadily growing reaction in the Soviet press. Feeling perhaps that Japan has missed her chance to attack the Soviet Union, the Russians have become very outspoken in predicting Japan’s defeat. According to War and the Working Class, a Soviet trade-union journal, “ Disappointment over the military might of Germany is growing in Japan. . . . The facts show that the temporary advantage of Japan is a thing of the past. . . . Now she has to remember an old Eastern proverb: ‘He who mounts the tiger cannot easily dismount.’ ” The Soviet press would hardly be taking this line if the Kremlin feared a Japanese attack.

Hitler’s propaganda line is in no way inconsistent with Japan’s. The attempt to persuade us that he has lost the war and that we should therefore assist him in stemming the onrush of Russian Communism might well be a smoke screen to cover up the attempts of some sections of the German command to end the campaign in the East.

Knowing what we do of the Soviet Union, the aims of Japanese diplomacy sound fantastic. But what else can the Japanese hope to do? There seems good reason to believe the report that the Teheran Conference caused panic in Tokyo.

Japan’s picture of us

Where do we fit into the picture? The Japanese cannot hope to get us out of war. But, feeling that the United States is convinced of victory, they are repeating the lines they used before Pearl Harbor. The Foreign Minister, Shigemitsu, gave this statement of what he hoped we would believe in his address before the Eighty-fourth Imperial Diet: “The American people appear to be having difficulty in understanding for what purposes they are fighting in the remote parts of East Asia which have no relation whatsoever to the security of their country. . . . There was nothing to menace the security of the entire continent of the United States. . . . The President drove them into a dangerous venture for which they are now forced to make unnecessary and costly sacrifices.”

There is an echo of Hitler strategy in the Shigemitsu statement that “the current war is a war of defense. . . . If there should be such a thing as collapse by our people, then the existence of Imperial Japan will not only be permanently denied but East Asia also will be forced to its former status, and the opportunity for complete sovereignty and independence will be lost forever.” In this way the decision of the Cairo Conference to strip Japan of its empire is turned against us, and full advantage is taken of our intentions to restore colonial Asia to its former status.

When Japan talks to Asia

When Japan speaks to the occupied countries of Asia, she represents us as imperialists. The British are described as being indifferent to the famine sufferers of India, and American imperialism is causing revolts in South America. In contrast to this, Japan — she says — is bringing racial equality, national independence, and justice to Asiatic peoples. She gives the impression that the whole Co-prosperity Sphere is bursting with prosperity and progress and all peoples are collaborating with Japan.

The people at home, however, hear much more about the possibility of future air raids and the increasingly serious war situation. They are getting a much more realistic picture of the war (apart from the claims of great naval victories which never occurred) than the occupied countries. Far from neglecting the raids over Germany, Japan’s leaders use them to stress the morale of the German people under the strain of “terror raids” and thus by indirection prepare their own subjects for the wrath to come.

The official mood is frank. Our advances are admitted and explained in terms of superior numbers and weight of equipment. A Japanese naval commentator speaking of the United States said: “We know that we are fighting against a powerful enemy.

. . . We have studied the strong points of America and are not overoptimistic about the grim situation in which we find ourselves.” There is constant emphasis upon our air power and even our fighting spirit, once held in contempt.

What does all this mean? On the facts we can check, the Japanese are often right. There is no question but that we are throwing at them, where we choose to fight, a weight of ships, guns, and planes that is usually overwhelming. We can expend ammunition in prodigal manner—to the expressed amazement of Japanese naval commentators. This has been matched by the growth of an air strategy which is marked not only by the scope and range of our operations but also by flexibility in the kind and weight of our attacks.

Japanese air power

The Japanese use of air power in the first six months of the war is crude compared with the refinements of strategy which are now employed by the Allies. It is significant that we have built more airfields than we have captured, thus making Japan’s fixed defenses a most unprofitable business. As one returning pilot put it, “We hit them where they ain’t and surround them where they are.”

We destroy large numbers of planes on the ground, make airfields useless at the time of attack, cut off large garrisons from their supplies, and play havoc with shipping, whether it is large or small. Short of a great Japanese naval victory, there is no answer to this strategy except more planes, more supplies, and an equal capacity to construct landing fields with that great ally of air power, the bulldozer.

Nor is this picture limited to the Pacific. The pattern of bombing from the bases in India and China extends all over Burma, Thailand, and even Formosa. Air power supplies the Chinese troops protecting the Ledo Road, which is being pushed into Burma to bring up supplies for more advanced air bases and to supply Kunming directly overland.

The offensive against Burma will depend more on communications than on monsoons, and here the Japanese have the advantage of already bringing to completion the Bangkok to Moulmein railroad and of driving through the military road linking Chiengmai in Thailand with Kengtung in Burma. But the constant bombing of rail and river lines of communication in Burma makes life difficult and expensive for the Japanese. There is no question that the enemy has much to fear in the war for air supremacy.

Japan’s shipping

Japan has another worry which can be deduced by examining the spate of speeches which we have had from the Premier and his Ministers since the turn of the year. The shipping shortage is so serious that they have difficulty deciding whether to assign critical raw materials to ships or to planes. It hinders disastrously the full exploitation of the resources of East Asia. Japan robs Indo-China of rice, where it is short, rather than Burma, where it is plentiful.

Japan’s economic situation and plans do not suit her military needs. Determined to be the center of Asiatic commercial, industrial, and military power, Japan finds herself the only arsenal in the Co-prosperity Sphere. Resources must be brought from outlying regions to Japan to be processed, then returned to those areas for the purposes of war. There is no return flow of consumers goods to the non-manufacturing parts of the empire.

Such industry as China has is close to the firing lines. We have spent two years helping to build up war industries in India in order to save shipping, and have done much to develop the industrial capacity of Australia.

The decisive battles against Japan will probably be fought in those areas farthest removed from the one source of military supplies — with one exception, Manchuria. Here there is a base of no small magnitude both in the production of war materials and in food.

Tojo mulls it over

Premier Tojo and his chief Ministers, especially those for Foreign Affairs, Finance, and Agriculture, are telling Japan and the world not the whole truth but a goodly proportion of the truth. They have obvious reasons for doing this at home, for they need all the production of food, ships, and planes they can possibly get. But why tell us? The conclusion must be that they are hoping to persuade us that they are much weaker than they really are, and so encourage in us the mood of overconfidence which is now their best weapon.

This will hardly influence the men who have to do the fighting at the front; but it might, so argue the Japanese, work well in America. The case is simple: “What are you fighting for so far from home? Why bother to spend all this blood and treasure for islands and natives? Why not call the boys back home and enjoy the blessings of peace? We are willing to accept the fact that you are defeating us. Why not make an honorable peace?”

It was the appreciation of these things, rather than the war loan and other motives, which must have been in our minds when we decided to release the flood of Japanese atrocity stories late in January.

Whatever the occasion for the release of the story of the march of death, the case for such action seems obvious. The State Department had made every effort by conventional diplomatic means, as their own documents show, to persuade the Japanese to give better treatment to prisoners of war. Patience was tried to the utmost.

REMEMBER THIS

Surely the only possible way of dealing with the Japanese was to insist on our rights, to advertise the treatment we were getting and so bring the case before the bar of world opinion. We had nothing to lose and everything to gain. And if we are correct in our estimate of Japan’s position, perhaps she is a little more sensitive to world opinion today and more anxious to be considered a member of civilized society than she was in the spring of 1942. Finally, the American people can never learn too well the lesson that the Chinese tried to teach us — that no compromise is possible with the militarists of Japan. That is the real theme of the atrocity stories.