The Pacific War

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THE Japanese, like ourselves, have never lost a war. It is not easy for such a people to recognize the approach of defeat. What does defeat taste like to the Japanese?

The Japanese began the war with glory, as we began it in gloom. Early victories and a tradition of invincibility have helped rigid control of press and opinion to delay the impact of our advances. Japan had a cushion of success, and lacks the inoculation of doubt and anxiety we underwent in our own dark days.

Our cracking of Japan’s inner military defenses by the conquest of the Marianas opened a breach in Japan’s political and psychological defenses as well. As her home islands feel our naval and air strength, not only Japan’s military power but the social, political, and economic foundations of it become our targets. It becomes increasingly important for us to know and to understand both the disposition of Japan’s military resources and her internal situation as well.

Our ignorance about Japan has in the past been a useful weapon in the hands of Japan’s military leaders. It continues to be useful to them in bolstering Japan’s will to fight.

No prisoners

In the earlier stages of the war the refusal of the Japanese fighting man to surrender endowed him in our minds with certain mysterious attributes which made it seem that we were fighting an inhuman and unknowable enemy. Japanese unwillingness to surrender and our apparent unwillingness to take prisoners were considerable assets to the Japanese High Command.

No surrender meant that we could obtain no tactical information through interrogation of Japanese prisoners, and also maximum casualties for our men. It strengthened the Japanese belief in the invincibility of the Imperial forces, and made us feel that to win the war we might have to kill every Japanese fighting man, a magnification of the task ahead.

The process of fighting Japan has taught us much. The battle for the Marianas indicated that both Japanese soldiers and civilians respond to disaster like everybody else — that they are not nearly so strange, remote, and inhuman as they once seemed. Saipan was not only an important chapter in the education in defeat that Japan is receiving. It also serves to remind us that our enemies have many characteristics that we know and understand. Victory must educate us about the Japanese and Asia if we hope for a decent and lasting peace.

Crushing military defeat will be neither the first nor the final step in the re-education of the Japanese people. Economic and social dislocation have occurred in Japan during the past years. Defeat in a total war is not merely a military event; we must take cognizance of the deep-seated changes that accompany it.

Exit Tojo

The fall of the Tojo Cabinet taught us that Japan is politically less monolithic than she seemed. Victories, not political adroitness alone, made Tojo the strongest man that Japan has known for centuries. Defeats swept him from office.

Tojo’s defeats were not purely military; they included the failure to solve certain domestic difficulties which may prove to be insoluble, because they spring from Japan’s attempt to fight a modern war with a semifeudal economic, political, and social structure. The fall of Saipan, shocking as it was to the Japanese people, only highlighted Tojo’s predicament. It was not a primary cause for his fall.

The Koiso Cabinet is not a peace Cabinet; no peace party could have found in Japanese public opinion an adequate basis for support. The peacemakers would have been viewed as betrayers. Japan’s leaders may know today that they are faced with an impossible situation; Japan’s people still see only difficulties, not impossibilities.

When the new Premier, General Kuniaki Koiso, assumed a Cabinet post in 1939, he said, “The national destiny must be developed actively in pursuit of the object of propagating the Japanese spirit all over the world.” These are not the words of a man who would head a “moderate” or “peace” Cabinet. Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai, the new Navy Minister and Koiso’s deputy, does not have the same reputation as a fire-eater, but has been known as an anti-parliamentarian. The Cabinet has a greater infusion of businessmen, former party politicians, and career bureaucrats than the one it replaced.

It is difficult to determine what precise forces deposed Tojo. It is likely that a combination of influential military and civilian elements, alarmed by the course of the war and dissatisfied with Tojo’s attempts to solve home-front difficulties, banded together and forced the resignation. The shake-up in both Army and Navy High Commands, the assumption of the important Munitions Ministry portfolio by a civilian, the preponderantly civilian nature of the new Cabinet, the widespread changes in domestic administrative officers, and — for Japan — the outspoken criticisms of the Tojo Cabinet that were permitted after its fall all hint at protracted negotiations behind the scene before the move was made.

Most of the present officials have been deeply involved in Japan’s Manchurian adventure, commercially and militarily. The change in personnel, drastic as it was, changes neither Japan’s primary problems nor the character of her leaders and aspirations. Perhaps the riders were changed in midstream, but it is the same horse.

The present government of Japan is stressing the gravity of events, developing a mood of crisis, and attempting to prepare the home front for greater sacrifices and greater endurance. Both militarily and politically, the strength of Japan is more decisively dependent on the home front as we shear away her conquests.

Watch the pig boats

The astonishing success of Allied submarines against Japanese shipping is one of the deciding factors of the war; it is also having a great effect on Japan’s present and post-war economy. We have been sinking irreplaceable tonnage and irreplaceable materials in almost every part of Japan’s waters, while our own extended supply lines have been virtually free from attack. Here is one aspect of the war in which Japan’s technological inferiority is clearly visible.

Both submarine and anti-submarine warfare are highly complex technical operations. We have shown ourselves the masters of one in the Pacific and of the other in the Atlantic. Guile, daring, and seamanship still play their part, but physics — radar, asdic, and the phenomenal devices of both offensive and defensive undersea warfare that have been developed, and about which we have been told so little — have given us a new dimension in which to operate.

Japan has been unable to counter our submarine fleet without the scientific resources that would enable her to evolve, produce, and man efficiently the detection instruments we have found so valuable. Modern war depends greatly on the quick production in great quantity of complex instruments. This demands uniformity of materials for mass machining and tools, and workmen capable of high-precision operations. These require a technological maturity Japan does not possess — a fatal weakness in days when a faulty vacuum tube may mean a lost ship.

We have conquered the menace of the submarine by a combination of physics and the massive fleet of convoy and patrol craft, the destroyer escort and carrier escort team, and the long-range patrol plane. Japan cannot build the great fleet of convoy craft that her extended network of waterways requires.

A vanishing merchant marine

Meanwhile, Japan is losing ships at a rate far beyond her replacement capacity. This loss of tonnage is not only a grave impairment of her military potential; it does permanent damage to one of her major peacetime resources. The highly developed Japanese merchant marine was a source of Japanese national pride and national wealth. In 1939 Japan’s merchant fleet of almost six million tons was the third-largest in the world, much of it new, fast tonnage that brought large commercial returns.

Japan’s industrialists—both men like Ayukawa, whose fortunes derive from Japan’s recent aggressions on the continent, and long-established magnates like Mitsui — must be concerned over the fate of their interests, not only as sources of Japan’s war supplies, but as the sources of Japan’s economic strength and their own.

Japan’s great industrial trusts have always been close to the government, in spite of their apparent unwillingness, in the early 1930’s, to go along with the militarists’ program of conquest. Their factories, furnaces, shipyards, and mills are now the targets of our B-29’s. It is reported that the Japanese government has instituted an elaborate plan of wartime insurance for both property and lives; yet mere money cannot furnish adequate replacement for the capital goods destroyed by our aerial bombardments.

Japan’s industrialists may be able to salvage sizable portions of their personal fortunes out of the wreckage of war, but the permanent bases of their economic power are likely to be wiped out. The destruction of Japan’s heavy industry will not only cripple Japan’s war potential; it will be a long step toward elimination of the great monopoly trusts which were so much the root of Japan’s economic inequalities.

Other domestic headaches plague the government, and they will be intensified by our military pressure. Manpower shortages that make necessary the utilization of more women in industry, and that disrupt the educational system, affect Japan’s social structure. So do the shifts of population that accompany decentralization and the evacuation of target areas.

Japan when Germany sinks

Changes in the Cabinet and in the High Command cannot alter Japan’s basic military situation. They cannot prevent the release of Allied power for use against them that will result from German defeat. But Japan’s rulers can still preserve Japan’s will to fight, and hope that they can keep us at a distance and deny us the use of bases from which we can deploy our augmented strength fully against them.

This hope still remains, despite the failure of the Manipur offensive to cut off the Allied troops fighting to reopen the overland road to China, the failure to hold the Central Pacific, and the vulnerability of the Bonins and the home islands to our carrier forces.

The conquest of the southern Marianas gave us, as Secretary Forrestal pointed out, 300 square miles of territory, seven airfields, and five harbors. The casualties we sustained were large; but here for the first time we were engaged in achieving absolute conquest of an area, instead of following our earlier practice of seizing key points and by-passing and neutralizing others.

We needed more than steppingstones for quick leaps, like Hollandia, Kwajalein, and Arawe. We could not leave Saipan to wither like Truk and Rabaul. Here we had to make a frontal attack on a major strong point, reduce it, and secure the neighboring areas. We needed a position that would allow us to accumulate power massive enough for sustained major drives. But even this area, 1500 miles from Japan, is not an adequate base for the strength necessary to crush her. It should not be necessary to achieve in the Philippines the kind of extermination of Japanese strength that was required in the Marianas. Action against the Philippines can be supported by land-based planes: we can count on a welcome from the Filipinos; we have a wide choice of beachheads, and we face an enemy whose forces, necessarily dispersed, cannot be readily concentrated against us.

We still face a hard fight in the Pacific. Although the loss of sea-borne air strength greatly weakened Japan’s fleet, she has been hoarding her air forces. For months the government’s propaganda has exhorted, commanded, and beseeched Japanese workers to turn out planes, and Japan can still put a sizable number in the air to defend vital points.

And as we converge on Japan, we face the demand for closer coöperation with our allies — a franker confrontation of our differences, a closer integration of military action. The rapid progress of the war in Europe permits the British a fuller disposition of their forces against Japan. The appointment of Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser to command of the British Eastern Fleet is an excellent one. He has had wide experience of operations against an enemy in narrow seas, and is accustomed to working closely with other commands. The promotion of “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell to full general is another sign of the coming concentration on the Pacific theater and the importance of land operations in Asia.

China’s place in the war

In the final defeat of Japan we must still be dependent on China’s geography and on China’s ability to support our landings.

The most effective use of our huge B-29’s in the strategic bombing of Japan, and also the defeat of Japan’s land power and our effective use of China’s coastline, depend upon China’s internal accord and the maintenance of her power of resistance. Our advance against Japan’s communications and South Pacific areas increases the importance to her of her military positions on the continent of Asia, both as lines of withdrawal and communication and as bulwarks for defense of the approaches to Japan’s inner fortress.

The recent succession of distinguished visitors to Asia and the Pacific cannot have been a source of much comfort to Japan’s leaders. They remind us that the Pacific war has aspects that demand the concern of our statesmen as well as of our military. And they remind Europe, which is even more remote from the Pacific both psychologically and geographically than we are, and increasingly more preoccupied with its present struggles and its future, of the tasks in Asia.