Origins of the Second World War in Asia and Pacific Review of Akira Iriye's (New York: Longman, 1987)
Brad DeLong, Professor of Economics U. Cal. Berkeley June 12, 1997
I know quite a lot about the origins of World War II in Europe: the Great Depression, the rise of the Nazi Party, appeasement of Hitler in the hope that his demands would stop at some reasonable limit; general recognition after the March 15, 1939 conquest of Czechoslovakia that Hitler's demands were not unlimited; Britain and France's spring 1939 attempt to bluff Hitler into quiescence by guaranteeing the integrity of Poland and Romania; the fall 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact; Hitler's attack on Poland; and the decision by the British House of Commons and the French Chamber of Deputies to honor their guarantees to Poland--making Britain (along with the Dominions of the British Empire) and France the only powers involved in World War II to declare war on Hitler, rather than waiting until Hitler declared war on them.
World War II in Asia has always been much murkier to me. There was a Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931, and a Japanese attack on China in 1937. There were military clashes between Japanese and Soviet troops in Mongolia in 1938-1939. There was a Japanese attempt to profit from Hitler's early victories in Europe by demanding that France allow it to occupy the French colonies of Indochina, and that Britain shut off the supply road from its colony of Burma to the Chinese. After the French occupation of Indochina in July 1941 President Roosevelt embargoed oil shipments to Japan; and on December 7, 1941 the Japanese navy and air force struck not just south to occupy Dutch-ruled Indonesia and acquire an alternative source of oil, but everywhere else in the Southwest Pacific to enlarge the Japanese Empire--and at Pearl Harbor as well.
But the logic of events--why was a Japan focused on Indonesia skirmishing with Soviets in Mongolia? Why was a Japan already bogged down in China seeking additional enemies by occupying Indochina? --escaped me.
When I would complain about how the origins of World War II in the Pacific seemed to me to make no sense, I would receive a stock answer: "read Akira Iriye's book, 'The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific'." I have now read Akira Iriye's book. I report that the logic of events in the Pacific still eludes me.
The chain of events still seems highly unlikely--and to reflect mammoth stupidity on the part of the Japanese government. The goals that the Japanese government and military thought that they were pursuing still seem elusive and illusory. For Japan to have found itself at war with all of the other Pacific powers--the Soviet Union, China, Britain, Australia, and the United States--with its closest and only allies some 12,000 miles away still seems to me to exhibit a high order of diplomatic ineptness.
Begin with the balance of industrial resources. China--especially after the occupation of North China by Japan's Kwantung and Tientsin armies, the lower Yangtze valley around Shanghai, and the Guangzhou region around Canton--had no factories with which to make modern weapons. China's armies depended on Soviet or Anglo-American weapons brought in over land. But China aside Japan was by far the least of the potential great powers: its heavy industrial capacity was perhaps twenty-five percent of Germany's, perhaps twenty percent of Britain's, perhaps fifteen percent of the Soviet Union's, and perhaps five percent of America's. Japan's pre-war battle fleet and air force were substantial. But the industrial base to keep planes, newly trained pilots, and ships flowing to the front was not.
Given Japan's relative industrial weakness, the first principle of its leaders'--even the most militarist and aggressive of leaders--strategies should have been to choose targets carefully. Perhaps Japan had the strength to evict the Soviet Union from the Far East, and add Vladivostok, Sakhalin, Kamchatcka, and Siberia up to Lake Baikal to its empire--as long as the Nazis distracted Stalin by threatening Moscow and killing tens of millions of his citizens. Perhaps Japan had the strength to drive up the Yangtze to Chiang Kai-shek's western refuge capital of Chungking and impose a peace of its choosing on the Chinese Nationalists--as long as Britain, America, and the Soviet Union were more worried about Europe and Germany. Perhaps Japan had the strength to take advantage of the fall of Western Europe to the Nazis by snapping up the colonies of Indochina and Indonesia, establishing puppet "nationalist" government, proclaiming the end of the era of European imperialism, and forming a Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
But to try to do all three--or even any two--at once? To refuse to choose? To court war (and prepare for aggressive war) with Stalin, invade China, and fail to conciliate the United States in the western Pacific? That shows a radical disproportion between available means and desired ends.
Why the disproportion? Because there was no referee inside the Japanese government. The army--especially those elements already involved in China--generally sought to settle the China question by force. The navy and air force worried about the vulnerability of their oil supplies, sought expansion into Indonesia to achieve self-sufficiency and sought conquest of the Philippines to keep the Indonesia-Japan oil lifeline. The foreign ministry (especially after the signing of the anti-Comintern pact, aimed at "militarist Japan" among others) tended to advocate the expulsion of the Soviet Union from East Asia. A few--Sato Naotake and Ugaki Kazushige during their short tenures at the foreign ministry, for example--wished for Japan to embrace interdependence, and to accommodate its policies in order to preserve good relations with Britain and America; but for most of the 1930s these "internationalists" were out of power: some were dead, assassinated by young army officers, and the voices of others were drowned out by the nationalist and imperialist media. And in the absence of a referee, the answer to the question "which do you choose?" seemed to be "all."
For example, in a relatively short period in 1938 and 1939 the Japanese (a) established a puppet government in China and announced that they would never negotiate with Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalists, (b) provoked military clashes with the Soviet Union in Mongolia, and (c) occupies Hainan and the Spratly islands in the South China Sea as stepping-stones for attacks in the southwestern Pacific. In the summer of 1941, the Japanese (a) mobilized to attack Siberia in response to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, (b) occupied southern Indochina to gain further bases for airplanes in the southwestern Pacific, and (c) sought to "bring the war in China to a conclusion."
The Japanese occupation of northern Indochina in 1940 had brought with it an embargo on U.S. exports of iron and steel to scrap to Japan. The Japanese occupation of southern Indochina in 1941 brought with it another sanction, the freezing of Japanese assets in the United States. The freezing of Japanese assets turned into a de facto embargo on oil exports: Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson would only issue licenses for oil exports to Japan if they were paid for out of "hidden" funds that had escaped the freezing process that Acheson was sure the Japanese possessed, and no such hidden funds were forthcoming.
In the aftermath of the freezing order, Japan shifted its military away from preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union and for preparations for attacks in the southwestern Pacific--and on Pearl Harbor. Japan could not wage war on China (let alone the Soviet Union) without supplies of oil; the Japanese navy did not believe that it could secure and hold oil-rich Indonesia as long as the undamaged U.S. battle fleet remained in the Pacific.
Thus that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941 appears to be the responsibility of--Dean Acheson. Had he administered the asset-freezing order more liberally, and had the flow of oil to Japan continued, the end of 1941 would have seen the Japanese army attacking Vladivostok and toward Lake Baikal. There would have been no reinforcements from Siberia to defend Moscow against the German final fall offensive.
It is not at all clear how those in the Japanese government who began the Pacific war expected it to end. Perhaps they thought that their allies, the Germans, would conquer in Europe--and that Britain would have much worse to worry about. Perhaps they really did hope that they could win a few victories at sea against the Americans, then offer peace, and have the (effete, degenerate) Americans agree to Japanese predominance in the Philippines, in Indonesia, and in the whole western Pacific. Perhaps they foresaw total German victory in Europe over the Soviet Union and Britain--in which case America would have other things to worry about than the western Pacific.
There is simply no rational vision of the universe that would support Japan's rulers' policy decision to expand the Pacific War beyond China.
