CHAPTER 14
Between July and December 1940, the United States Government, disturbed by the increasingly belligerent tone of the Japanese, had proceeded by degrees towards an effective embargo on the sale of scrap iron and war materials to Japan. Hitherto it had put no great hindrance in the way of trade with Japan, and China was able to argue, with reason, that Japan’s operations, in the first three years of its warfare, had been made possible economically because of United States policy. The American Government took advantage of the rising temper of the US to act resolutely, but it still had to move cautiously. Its action was an attempt to halt Japan’s military activity against China.
A new way of conducting diplomacy was being tried out: the method of using economic pressure to effect political ends. Ever since the covenant of the League of Nations was drafted, the efficiency of economic sanctions had been in dispute. They were tried out against Italy, unsuccessfully, and deliberately with so many imperfections that they were bound to fail (because that was the intention of some of the Great Powers which had been coerced by pressure of their electorates into taking part in the operation) at the Abyssinian Crisis. But, as enforced against Japan, in the peculiar conditions of the time, they had an indisputable effect. They suggested to President Roosevelt the line of government action which, because of the caution of public opinion, he would not have dared to propose that America should take by more political means.
Over 40 per cent of Japanese exports and more than half her imports were with the United States. Japan’s balance of payments situation was precarious, and her financial future was in American hands. Although government controls in Japan succeeded in limiting Japanese imports to essential materials, the trend over the first two and a half years of the China Incident was for Japanese exports to fall sharply while imports from the United States continued to rise. Traditionally, Japan had been dependent upon the British Empire and the United States for vital strategical raw materials ranging from tin, nickel and zinc to oil, iron and steel. The British calculated that a mutual British-Japanese trade embargo would hurt the British Empire more than Japan, but it was evident to all that confiscation of Britain’s considerable assets in Japan would not begin to compensate for the losses Japan must suffer in the event of joint Anglo-American sanctions. This difficulty for Japan increased substantially when the European War began in September 1939: alternative sources of supply for some strategical materials vanished along with an important segment of the Japanese export market. Meanwhile, yen-bloc countries such as Formosa, Korea and Manchuria absorbed an increasing proportion of Japanese industrial production while contributing a disappointingly low proportion of Japanese war requirements. Self-sacrifice by Japanese consumers permitted the war to continue indefinitely, but it was universally accepted that Japan had no margin of safety against firm Anglo-American economic sanctions.
In July 1941 the Japanese extended their political control of Indo-China from the north to the south. Their motive was plain: the places Japan had demanded to occupy were those which the military experts regarded as essential for an operation to reduce South-East Asia. Japan had seized the opportunity of the desperate situation of the French in Indo-China, and of the inability of France, following its collapse, to give the local French Government any decisive aid. The American press digested the facts, debated them, and had seen that the damage, which might or must result to the security of the United States, was put before the American public. Even now the American will to peace, and the concern over its neutrality sentiment, remained strong. Its propagandists continued to warn that the United States was being led along the path to war by appeal to fear and sympathy. Many of them feared that the United States was being led by the back door of war with Japan into the war which they feared and opposed: war with Germany. In spite of the alarm which they expressed, President Roosevelt responded firmly in the crisis over Indo-China. He tightened very greatly the economic war which he had begun against Japan. He froze Japanese assets. He proclaimed what amounted to an embargo on Japanese trade in oil and steel, and in the next few months he issued executive orders which extended that embargo to cover scores of other commodities ranging from metals, chemicals and plastics to machinery, hides, skins, leather goods, vegetable fibres and manufactures, even wool. This was a vital stage in the development of the crisis. The American Government had suddenly stiffened its policy. It did so to the surprise of many of the parties concerned, including the Japanese. It had moved somewhat in advance of the change in the mood of the country. It had taken steps which it knew to be desperately inimical to Japan.
The effects on Japan were immediate. It was especially susceptible to pressure from the oil sanctions. Japan had stored enough oil for two years of war. Denied the opportunity of replenishing these stores from the United States, it had to recognize in the circumstances of the time that it could not gain oil from alternative sources of supply. The United States was immediately followed in its embargo by the British Empire and the Dutch in Indonesia: Japan discovered that there was no possibility of driving a wedge between them. Each month brought the prospect of the exhaustion of its supplies that much nearer. It knew that its aggressive policies, and Japan itself, must wither away when the time limit arrived – because the vital commodities which sustained them would no longer flow.
The United States during these months was in an extraordinary state. Roosevelt steered it resolutely on a course of economic strangulation so intense and so aggressive that it must result in war or the abject surrender of Japan to America’s implacable demands. But Roosevelt did not make the decision publicly: and the majority of the American public, though more deeply stirred by Japan than in previous years, still wanted peace, not war. A certain amount of the exchange of views with Japan was behind the scenes: but much of it leaked to the public. In the last period before the final catastrophe American feeling had moved towards greater caution, so that an impartial observer, if he believed that the great decisions followed the popular will, would have said that the chances of the United States going to war were lessening, not increasing. But the country had the sense that it was in the grip of uncontrollable necessity. Like a sleepwalker, it moved towards war.
The President, though he believed that war was perhaps inevitable, was willing to test the possibility of curbing Japanese expansion without fighting: he would have abandoned larger projects if he could have gained acceptable guarantees of a reversal of Japan’s policies in China and Asia generally. Such a degree of unreality has seldom been equalled by a Great Power. The outcome of American economic pressure was not certain. The United States might indeed have forced Japan into belligerent action, but against the British in Malaya and the Dutch in the Netherlands East Indies, not against the United States itself. The American Administration, handcuffed by the Neutrality Act, might have been helpless while its Allies in South-East Asia went down before Japanese attack.
By the later part of 1940 Prince Konoye’s Government in Japan had already come to believe that a political settlement of the China Incident was possible only through American mediation, and it was for that reason as well as in response to the direct American economic pressure upon Japan that his Government began to send out signals indicating its desire to open the bilateral negotiations with the United States which finally began in the spring of 1941. After the war, American investigators asked Konoye to explain why Japan had not deployed against China the tremendous military power she was to display at the outbreak of the Pacific War. He replied that the Japanese had come to the conclusion that ‘it was almost impossible to gain a decisive victory over China’ and that Japan must commit itself to the real possibility of achieving a political settlement.
When Japan proposed a final effort to come to terms which would make the impending Pacific War unnecessary, Roosevelt, and his closest advisers, entered with some hopefulness on the negotiations. They did so with the more readiness because they knew (and nobody else then knew) that they had the great advantage of seeing into the mind of their adversary. The United States had got possession of Japanese ciphers (one of the most notable feats of code-breaking in history), and during these weeks no communications passed between the Japanese Embassy in Washington and its home base in Tokyo without the US Government being aware of it. The putting of the Japanese war machine into readiness, its dispatch into action, all took place under the eyes of the American Government, which knew that it was provoking Japan unendurably.
Unhappily, so highly did the Americans value this means of overhearing the conversation of its adversaries, so resolute was it to defend the secrecy of its knowledge, that the circulation of this Intelligence was rigidly circumscribed. Extremely few men were privy to it – President Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Chief of Staff General George Marshall, and barely a handful of others – and all of them, to guard the secrecy, read the messages and destroyed them on the spot within sight of the bearer. They called it ‘Magic’. Whether adequate advantage was taken of this unique knowledge at this stage of events is questionable. Undoubtedly intense precautions to guard security prevented it from being properly digested, and opportunities were missed. Later, after March 1942, summaries of ‘Magic’ intercepts were prepared and circulated together with background information to an ever-widening circle of Allied officers after the outbreak of the Pacific Conflict, and in terms of their sophistication, general strategical utility and extensive circulation, these summaries came to have immense practical usefulness in the overall conduct of war operations in terms of Total War. In this respect ‘Magic’ eventually had far more influence on Allied policy formulation than the famous ‘Ultra’ messages decoded by British cryptographers at Bletchley Park, which were made available in undigestible form as raw intercepts, never enjoyed a wide circulation and remained chiefly of tactical assistance.
In the conduct of the pre-war diplomatic negotiations with Japan, the United States rightly perceived that the interests of friendly Powers with East Asian and Western Pacific involvements were engaged. It informed Britain, in particular, step by step of their progress. Churchill, for his part, offered no resistance, encouraged the United States to persevere, and blocked those within the British Government who wished to urge the United States into considering alternative policies towards Japan. Churchill, indeed, was less than clear-sighted about Japan. He tended to discount the conviction shared by many people in Washington – and London – that war was imminent. To the last, rather like Secretary of War Stimson, Churchill believed that Japan would probably back down: it must be said that the Greater East Asia and Pacific War surprised both men. Churchill, indeed, culpably neglected the defence of Britain’s Eastern Empire prior to the outbreak of war in the East, even wilfully preferring to reinforce the air strength of the Soviet Union than to fulfil the sacred trust of self-defence. His crony, the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook, persuaded Churchill that national prestige was better served by diverting Hurricane and Spitfire fighters to Russia than in shipping them to Malaya: the British Government then persuaded the United States that some of the obsolescent American Brewster Buffalo fighter aircraft which the United States had earmarked for the reinforcement of the Soviet Union ought to be sufficient to meet Britain’s imperial air defence requirements in East Asia. It was important for the world to appreciate that Britain, too, was a first-class Power capable of making a significant contribution to the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union against their common foe in Europe. Not for the first time, nor for the last, Great Men, with their grand sense of occasion, refused to listen to the wise counsel of their aghast but too timorous professional advisers. Air Chief Marshall Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, then British Commander-in-Chief, Far East, whose Intelligence left much to be desired, said he was satisfied that the Buffaloes would prevail against the Japanese.
The vital negotiations were started through the initiative of some bumbling but well-intentioned amateurs of diplomacy, the clerics of the Catholic mission in East Asia known as the Maryknoll Fathers. Their intervention is an interesting story. On the one side they misunderstood and immensely over-simplified the complexity of the issues dividing Japan and the United States. They viewed the imminence of war with horror, and were convinced that, by taking diplomacy out of its accustomed rut, they could give men of goodwill on both sides the opportunity to turn their natural benevolence to useful account. In their opinion, in the new atmosphere which they tried to generate, matters which had appeared as great obstacles, matters which had in them the seed of war, would be found unexpectedly tractable and would shrivel away.
On the other side, their over-simplification of the issues, which they minimized for lack of adequate appreciation of them, led in the long run to increased confusion, and had the effect of making agreement harder to reach. They roused hopes on both sides by deliberately misrepresenting the exact nature of the demands being made. Thus they stirred up the expectations of a settlement which was found impossible when the exact terms of the other side were clarified. The possibility of an accord receded. It left disillusionment, and made the situation seem more hopeless than before.
The contribution which amateurs can make in complicated dealings between Great Powers is always apt to run into this difficulty. The work of experts is written off, and it is assumed that a fresh approach by fresh minds is likely to succeed: in the end it so often is found that the expert has the dreary and hard truth on his side. In the present case, the Maryknoll Fathers undoubtedly for a time raised hope in certain quarters in the United States and in Japan also, of being able to draft a kind of Monroe Doctrine for the Far East which would be acceptable to those circles in the United States which were anxious before all to secure peace. Determined men in Japan seized on this – in the Army and Navy as well as in court and diplomatic circles – and translated it into a draft agreement between the two Powers, which they sought constantly to put forward as the basis of negotiation. But their draft treaty revealed the insubstantial basis on which they proceeded. They would have been better advised to realize that in seeking an agreement of this kind they were bashing their heads against a stone wall.
The enterprise of the Maryknoll Fathers was a little like that of Swedish philanthropic interlopers who tried to come between Germany and the West in the years before the European War. They were prompted by goodwill: but their initiative did not achieve much.
The Maryknoll negotiations led on to official negotiations which began in July 1941. By November they had reached their climax.
Japan had begun them out of desperation, but it hoped little from them. The sanctions were pressing hard. It is true that there were powerful influences in Japanese Government circles which dreaded war, which were opposed to all the least fortunate tendencies which Japanese foreign policy had given rise to, and which snatched at Japan’s peril to recommend that safety lay in retreat: these men, including high-ranking soldiers, sailors, diplomats, economists and courtiers, were quite sincere in wanting a rapprochement with the United States. But Japanese foreign policy was made now chiefly by generals and admirals who had come to the conlusion that war was the only policy which could effect sufficient change to offer hope of an acceptable negotiated settlement. They were being egged on by their exchanges of view with Germany, which in these months was urgent that they should embarrass Britain by attacking Singapore, and which supplied all kinds of information about how easy Japan might find this adventure to be. Contrary to the judgements of war crimes courts after the war, such men were not wicked or bloodthirsty. With troubled minds but the clearest of consciences they merely judged that sooner or later war would be inevitable, and that Japan stood a better chance by having the war then rather than later.
Many others in Japan took a contrary view, feeling that widening the East Asian War until it covered the whole of the Western Pacific and South-East Asia offered Japan no hope of victory, but that the United States might be brought to its senses, especially if Germany won the European War. Others were apprehensive that the Soviet Union posed a much clearer danger to Japanese security and believed that the survival of the Japanese Empire depended upon Japan’s withdrawal from China as well as Indo-China. Scarcely anyone, however, believed that it would be realistic for Japan to abandon what were regarded as its responsibilities in Manchuria.
By November the United States was satisfied that general talks were fruitless. In this perception the United States Government was almost certainly wrong and, as British, Dutch and many individual American diplomats appreciated, the course which the American Administration pursued was singularly ill-conceived. However, the negotiations with Japan had been interrupted by a government crisis in Tokyo: the resignation of the sometimes moderate but hopelessly vacillating Prince Konoye, and his replacement in October 1941 by his own War Minister, General Tōjō Hideki.
No one believed that Japan was capable of winning a war outright against the United States: the purpose of any resort to arms would be to create the conditions which would permit Japan to extricate itself from the China Incident without submitting to American hegemony in East Asia. The Japanese Government had more or less lost its way. At an Imperial Conference held on 6 September, the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Sugiyama Hajime, recommended that Japan should go to war by mid-October if the outcome of the negotiations with the United States did not appear to be favourable. Tōjō took the same view. The Chief of the Navy General Staff, Admiral Nagano Osami, remarked that ‘We can successfully oppose the United States in war for a period of two years. Any longer conflict would tend to be unprofitable for Japan.’ The Emperor himself emphasized his own hope that his Government would pursue peaceful negotiations energetically. His Government tried and failed. Now it was Tōjō’s turn.
Tōjō was a military man, not in the highest position of control of the Japanese Army but a product of fashion, diligence and rather fine staff work. He had no special political ideas or standing, but represented in general certain unfortunate attitudes which were common among Army officers who had spent their careers engaged in Japan’s military adventures on the Asiatic mainland: contempt for Britain and the United States, faith in what he regarded as the superior qualities of his native culture, willingness to take extreme risks against appalling odds, ignorance of the politics of the world. But Tōjō was also astute enough to recognize the underlying volatility of Japanese domestic politics and knew from personal experience the realities of Japan’s predicament in China. He had been active in the Manchurian Incident but had done his level best to prevent the outbreak of the China Incident. His concern about the danger of war against the Soviet Union was acute. The Government which he led was serious in its aim to achieve a breakthrough in its negotiations with the United States, but Tōjō and his supporters were determined to end the policies of drift which had characterized the interplay between Japanese domestic political factions and had been manifest in the country’s foreign relations with potential friends and foes for many years. Tōjō had acquired a well-deserved reputation for decisiveness. He also believed that only the manifestation of firmness on the part of Japan stood any chance of motivating the United States Government to seek a just resolution of the China Incident and any other disputes at issue with Japan.
Accordingly, Tōjō and his Cabinet more or less resolved in principle to go to war against the combined forces of the United States and its Allies; his Government nevertheless was ready to see whether anything would be offered by the United States which would make war unnecessary. Twice a deadline for a breakdown of the negotiations was fixed and later postponed. The absolute decision for war was not made until very late in the day. Even then, and until the end, the fleet, which was to deliver the first blow, was ordered to leave room for calling off its operations, so that it could return to Japan with peace preserved.
The Japanese did not seek to rely in their negotiations upon tactical threats or bluff: the negotiations begun by the second and third Konoye Governments and continued by Tōjō’s Government were no idle game and the Japanese understood that oriental subtlety was wasted upon the kind of American gangbusters and coarse political hacks who did as much as America’s career diplomats and xenophobic military advisers to influence the American President’s conduct of American foreign policy. The negotiations were conducted in Washington, DC, because the Americans wanted it that way.
To lead the Japanese team, Admiral Nomura Kichisaburō, once a leading moderate in the inner counsels of the Navy, then called briefly from retirement to be Foreign Minister of Japan during the difficult months that followed the outbreak of the European War in September 1939, was chosen to be the Japanese Ambassador to the United States in January 1941. His appointment was meant to provide reassurance to the United States that the Japanese Navy itself fully supported the efforts of Japan’s diplomatic corps to restore satisfactory relations between Japan and the United States. Recognizing his own limitations in the field of diplomacy, however, Nomura sought to obtain the assistance of a first-class professional Ambassador to provide him with help, someone who could guide him through the treacherous waters of diplomacy up the Potomac. The seriousness of the situation was so evident to the authorities in Tokyo that they sent him Ambassador Kurusu Saburō, formerly a Japanese consul in Chicago, later an Ambassador to Belgium (1937–9) and to Germany (1939–40). Kurusu seemed to be an ideal Special Envoy. He knew and liked America, he had an American wife, and, as the man who had signed the Tripartite Pact in Berlin on behalf of Japan, he could indicate to the Americans how truly insubstantial Japan’s relations were with the European Axis Powers. A rather slick but well-intentioned banker named Ikawa Tadao, a crony of Prime Minister Konoye, who knew the United States well, was added to the team as an ‘unofficial’ participant. And backing up Nomura, Kurusu and Ikawa was a Japanese Army colonel, Iwakuro Hideo, who was sent in response to Nomura’s request for a military aide who could advise him concerning the actual state of affairs in the China Incident. Iwakuro had been at the Army Affairs Section of the War Ministry’s Military Affairs Bureau since 1938 and had headed it for the past couple of years. He had a reputation for excellent staff work, an even temperament and honesty. He had an intimate understanding about how the Army authorities viewed the history of the China Incident, but just as importantly he was chosen for secondment to the Japanese Embassy because he enjoyed the full confidence of Major General Mutō. Akira, Chief of the Military Affairs Bureau, and Tōjō himself (who continued to hold the portfolio of War Minister after becoming Prime Minister).
Both Governments, however, handled the negotiations badly from start to finish. Neither Nomura nor Iwakuro recognized that their unofficial intermediaries had no standing with either the President or his Secretary of Staff. Nomura’s command of English may not have been as poor as the Americans believed, but he certainly appeared to be exceptionally slow to grasp points of substance as well as of detail, and in any case he found particular difficulty in penetrating Secretary of State Hull’s Tennessee accent and speech defects. Worse still, Nomura failed to keep his Foreign Ministry informed concerning precisely what Hull had to say regarding the manner in which the United States was prepared to receive the proposals being bandied about. Apparently he regarded Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yōsuke as so inimical to the peace negotiations that he deliberately sought to isolate the Foreign Ministry and win the general support of his Government by appealing to the Navy Minister and the Chief of the Naval General Staff. In this he did achieve considerable success, for Matsuoka was becoming such an embarrassment that he was ditched from power in July 1941. His replacement, Admiral Toyoda Teijirō, was another amateur in diplomatic affairs but was also one of Nomura’s long-standing allies. Long before then, however, matters had become so confused by Nomura’s unorthodox and selective reportage that the Japanese Government was heartened by the impression that a draft understanding largely composed by Iwakuro was in fact an American initiative and that the encouraging Japanese response which eventually emerged in reply to that supposed initiative was regarded in Washington as Japan’s first official proposals. Cordell Hull took the view that
As the document stood, it offered little basis for an agreement, unless we were willing to sacrifice some of our most basic principles, which we were not. Nevertheless, it was a formal and detailed proposal from Japan. To have rejected it outright would have meant throwing away the only real chance we had had in many months to enter with Japan into a fundamental discussion of all the questions outstanding between us…
Consequently, we decided to go forward on the basis of the Japanese proposals and seek to argue Japan into modifying here, eliminating there, and inserting elsewhere, until we might reach an accord we could both sign with mutual good will.∗
Everything now began to go utterly haywire as the Japanese gained the misimpression that the United States had been acting in bad faith all along. That misimpression was never corrected. Eventually a critical stage was reached during July 1941, after the Japanese had decided to occupy the southern half of French Indo-China – but before the Americans imposed a freezing order on all Japanese assets within the United States – when for a period Hull refused to have anything to do with Nomura. All of this had serious consequences in terms of Japan’s continuous monitoring of the prospect of a favourable outcome to the discussions. Equally unfortunately, Nomura himself seems to have believed that failure of the negotiations would produce nothing more catastrophic than a break in diplomatic relations between Japan and the United States. He apparently remained utterly unaware that his Government was finding itself driven to the point of having no alternative but to initiate an all-out attack upon the United States and its British and Dutch handmaidens.
Believing, rather like the Japanese, that their adversaries understood only the meaning of force, the Americans anyway were unusually inflexible in their approach to the negotiations and failed to appreciate the extent to which the Japanese yearned for a reasonable compromise. Though preparing for war, the Government of the United States had scant regard for the military resilience of the Japanese and accordingly did not expect to suffer any mortal injuries or even unduly serious consequences from any miscalculations which might lead to war. America went through the motions of manoeuvring for peace, knowing full well that Allied sanctions would become progressively more debilitating for the Japanese. At the end of the day, however, the United States decided to offer Japan a final ‘bargain’. The embargoes on oil, steel and long lists of other commodities, which threatened to cut not only Japan’s freedom of action on the Asiatic mainland but its very independence as a nation, were to be lifted: in return, Japan would need to give territorial guarantees. But what? Over this there was a great deal of debate: and the United States consulted its friends abroad.
The first attitude was to let Japan down lightly. Withdrawal from Indo-China would suffice. It was hoped that this would lead on to a general withdrawal from the Asiatic mainland: but this was not to be rushed, and was not to be included in the immediate terms.
But here came in the China lobby. Chiang Kai-shek had been informed of what was to be offered. He was indignant: he reported it as unlikely that China would be able to continue to fight Japan. He telegraphed London and, as an unlikely partner, he enlisted Churchill in representations. Churchill, ever conscious of the importance of the American deterrent to Japanese aggression against the territorial and commercial interests of the British Empire, mildly suggested to President Roosevelt that the proposed modus vivendi seemed to offer Chiang ‘a rather thin diet’. Meanwhile, all the China lobby was turned on to the President and Cordell Hull, a cantankerous and notably inflexible Secretary of State. In the result they stiffened the terms and called on the Japanese to evacuate not only Indo-China, but the whole of China as well, including Manchuria. In return for this, the United States would rescind its oil embargo.
In the negotiations, Hull took a stiffer line than Roosevelt. The President had been willing to accept an invitation from the Japanese Prime Minister, Prince Konoye, while he was still in power, to negotiate personally. In an unprecedented step for a Japanese Prime Minister, Konoye offered to meet the President in Hawaii, risking everything (including the probable loss of his own life at the hands of Japanese political extremists) on the outcome. Remembering the fate of those who had aroused the fury of Japanese radical elements during the Washington and London Treaty negotiations, Konoye’s proposal, which was evidently entirely his own although warmly welcomed by his Cabinet and Emperor, was exceptionally courageous. One wishes that it could counteract the unfortunate impression made by Konoye’s otherwise rather uneven contributions to his country’s political welfare, but alas it seems only to confirm the rather manic-depressive tendencies that we can discern in Konoye’s behaviour. This, after all, was a man who was subject to extremes: when the political parties of Japan were troublesome because of the China Incident, he had abolished them at a stroke and created a peculiar non-party apparatus headed by something which he called the Imperial Rule Assistance Association. He was always starting balls rolling and then backing away. This time, however, Konoye would have had no chance to back away. It was a marvellous opportunity. Cordell Hull intervened, however, and killed Konoye’s initiative stone dead. Konoye had gone so far as to propose that the two leaders should make a preliminary temporary pact under which Japan would agree not to make war on the United States even if American activities led to war with Germany in the Atlantic Ocean. This meant that Japan was prepared to repudiate its Tripartite Alliance with Germany and Italy. The purpose of that Alliance had been to deter the United States from intervention in the German War by the threat of collision with Japan. Konoye’s offer demonstrates the extent to which Japanese high officials recognized that their association with the European Axis Powers had been a grievous miscalculation. Apparently Secretary of State Hull, however, felt that Konoye was offering an engagement which he would not be permitted to fulfil. It would appear that Hull also feared that President Roosevelt would give away too much to the Japanese.
Once the United States Administration had responded to the China lobby and Churchill’s remarks, the possibility of any real modus vivendi receded to vanishing point. The Japanese, their backs to the wall, recognized the utter futility of any further talk. President Roosevelt made what appeared to be a final attempt at peace by appealing over the heads of politicians to the Japanese Emperor. But this action, though it may have been meant as a serious contribution to world peace, probably sprang more from the President’s self-interested desire to go down well in the history books. Whether or not his motives were misunderstood, the President’s final message to the Emperor was scorned and resented by the Japanese.
On 7 December Japan sent a note which recognized that the negotiations had failed. By the time it was delivered, the consequences of the recognition were also clear: the Japanese were bombarding Pearl Harbor, which they had decided to do if the negotiations ended in deadlock. It is interesting to find that the US Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, when news of the bombardment was first given to him, is reported to have said incredulously that it must be mistaken: Japan would have bombarded Singapore, not American territory. This is unlikely to be a measure of the failure of the Japanese to wring final advantage out of the preoccupation of the American public with remaining neutral. It is merely consistent with the certain knowledge shared by those privy to the most secret British and American Intelligence that a major Japanese task force had been shadowed on its way towards the Malayan coast for days. Above all, it must be stressed that the inevitable consequence of the economic pressures imposed by the United States upon Japan, and of America’s failure to pursue its diplomatic negotiations with appropriate vigour, flexibility and imagination, was that Japan finally had no alternative to the Pacific War other than submission to abject surrender. The fact of the matter is that it lay within the power of the United States and the United Kingdom to adopt policies towards Japan which might have avoided that war.