CHAPTER 1
Japanese troops parade through the Chinese city of Shanghai, which they captured in November 1937 after more than four months of fighting.
After many centuries of isolation from most of the world, Japan was well on its way to becoming a modern country by the 1930s. With seventy million people to feed, Japan welcomed Western technology but lacked natural resources, such as oil and rubber, which were vital for a modernizing country. Unlike nations such as Britain and France, Japan also lacked an overseas empire in Asia that could provide it with wealth and natural resources. To remedy this, Japan took aggressive action to occupy Manchuria (a region in northern China) in 1931. Six years later, Japan extended its control by going to war with China. This 1937 invasion of China, however, did not lead to a complete victory there.
A WAR ECONOMY
During the 1930s, governments in Japan spent more and more on their military buildup. These statistics show Japan developing a war economy.
Military budget as percentage of total government spending:
1931 29 percent
1932 38 percent
1933 39 percent
1934 44 percent
1935 47 percent
1936 48 percent
1937 72 percent
1938 75 percent
1939 72 percent
1940 66 percent
—From The Oxford Companion to World War II, edited by I.C.B. Dear
When World War II started in 1939, it was at first a European war that mainly involved Germany fighting other western European nations. This outbreak of war in Europe encouraged Japanese leaders who saw further military expansion as the only way to make their country rich. By 1941, France and the Netherlands had been defeated by Germany, and Britain seemed reluctant to interfere. Japan seized this opportunity to take over the Asian colonies of these weakened European powers. The natural resources of these colonies would enable Japan to defeat China, build up its own empire, and stop relying on imports from hostile foreign countries like the United States.
THE UNITED STATES The United States was the major stumbling block to Japan’s ambitions. Although only the Philippines and a few islands in the Pacific were under U.S. control, the United States had its own ambitions in the region. The United States particularly wanted to influence events in China, and had no intention of sharing naval power in the Pacific with Japan. In 1941, Japan began to run out of essential imports after the United States restricted its trade. This economic war got more bitter when Japan moved into southern French Indochina (now Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam). The United States and Britain froze all their Japanese funds and cut essential oil supplies to Japan.
Japan either had to back down, by withdrawing from Manchuria, China, and French Indochina, or seize control of both the European colonies in Asia and their natural resources. This would bring armed conflict with the U.S., but one way of dealing with this threat would be to launch a surprise attack on the U.S. Navy and destroy its Pacific fleet.
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Commander in Chief of the Japanese Navy, planned a surprise attack on Hawaii that was meant to destroy the U.S. fleet that had been stationed there since the previous year. In late November 1941, Yamamoto sent the code “Climb Mount Niitaka” for six Japanese aircraft carriers to set sail from the northeast of Japan and travel some 4,039 miles (6,500 km) to Hawaii, maintaining radio silence to avoid detection.
Japan, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the United States held possessions with key natural resources in the Southwest Pacific before war broke out in December 1941.
On December 7, early in the morning, 183 Japanese planes gathered in a V-formation after taking off from the six aircraft carriers positioned north of Hawaii. It took them more than an hour to reach the island of Oahu, guided to their target by music from a local radio station. Shortly before 8 A.M., bombs began to rain down on the island’s harbor and airfields. A second wave of attackers arrived at 8:40 A.M. and inflicted more damage. U.S. losses totaled eighteen sunk or badly damaged ships, including six battleships, 162 aircraft, and the lives of 2,403 servicemen and civilians. The Japanese lost twenty-nine planes and their crews.
U.S. naval power was not destroyed, however, mainly because the three aircraft carriers based at Hawaii were all out at sea at the time of the attack. A third Japanese attack, targeting the harbor’s fuel tanks and repair facilities, was called off for fear of a counterattack from the aircraft carriers. If the fuel dumps had been destroyed, Pearl Harbor would have been permanently put out of action.
The United States and Japan were now at war. Various claims have been made that advance warning of the attack was kept secret by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and by Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime leader, because they wanted the United States to go to war. Historians have found no convincing evidence for this. There were intelligence reports that had indicated that something was to happen in December, but no one put them together and drew the conclusion that Pearl Harbor was in danger of attack.
Unlike the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor, the British were expecting the Japanese to attack Malaya (now W. Malaysia). They knew the Japanese would probably land on the beaches in the border area around north Malaya and south Siam (now Thailand). That is exactly what happened shortly after midnight on December 8, 1941. Local time in Hawaii was then 6 A.M. on December 7. It would be almost two hours before the first wave of planes reached Pearl Harbor, so the landings in south Siam and Malaya were Japan’s first aggressive action in the Pacific war.
The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was a complete surprise because no one expected a long-distance attack from the north.
EYE WITNESSES
Leonard J. Fox, writing a letter home on board the U.S.S. Helena at the time, remembers what he saw on the ground: “Torpedo planes swooped in from almost over my head and started toward ‘Battleship Row’ dropping their lethal fish [torpedos]. First the Oklahoma … then it was the West Virginia taking blows in her innards … and now it is the Arizona … Men were swimming for their lives in the fire-covered waters of Pearl Harbor.”
—From The Pacific Campaign, Dan Van Der Vat
U.S. warships in Pearl Harbor proved an easy target because few of their guns were manned and the ammunition was locked away.
Japanese forces gather at the southern tip of the Malayan peninsula.
THE INVASION OF MALAYA Waiting for the Japanese was a large army of British-led troops, composed mostly of Indians and some Australians. Although outnumbered, the Japanese forces advanced at a blistering pace down the peninsula towards Singapore.
The Japanese attack on Malaya, planned to begin at exactly the same time as the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, accidentally began a short while earlier. Siam was also attacked.
Most of the Japanese forces had no previous experience of jungle warfare but they were battled-hardened from fighting in China. Many of the troops they were fighting were inexperienced, and some of the Indian troops had never seen a tank before they faced some of the eighty transported by the Japanese. The Japanese also brought bicycles to travel down the well-maintained roads, and they used maps copied from school atlases. When faced with enemy resistance, one Japanese tactic was to go around the obstacle through the jungle or to use boats to bypass it along the coastline. The Japanese were also able to attack from the air, flying in from Indochina (now Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam) and attacking British airfields. They quickly gained control of the skies over Malaya.
The defenders were not prepared for the well-trained and experienced Japanese who easily brushed aside attempts to hold them back. In only ten weeks, the Japanese had reached the southern tip of the peninsula. At this point, only a narrow stretch of water divided the mainland from the island of Singapore, where the retreating Allied soldiers were now concentrated for a final battle with their enemy.
The islands of the Philippines—which served as a U.S. military base in Asia—were around 6,835 miles (11,000 km) from the U.S. West Coast and 4,971 miles (8,000 km) from Pearl Harbor, but only 1,243 miles (2,000 km) from Japan. General Douglas MacArthur, military commander of U.S. forces in the Philippines, argued that the islands could be defended. He built up a force of 30,000 U.S. troops and more than 100,000 Filipinos. The Philippines had the largest concentration of U.S. air power in the Pacific, with B-17 bombers and more than one hundred P-40 fighter aircraft.
LOSS OF BATTLESHIPS
Two British battleships, HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, were dispatched from Singapore to intercept Japanese invasion forces. They were sunk off Malaya’s east coast on December 10, 1941 in a land-based air attack; 840 men lost their lives. War correspondent O.D. Gallagher was on the Repulse “ … They were bombers. Flying straight at us. All our guns pour high-explosives at them, including shells so delicately fused that they explode if they merely graze cloth fabric. But they swing away, carrying out a high-powered evasive action without dropping anything at all. I realise now what the purpose of the action was. It was a diversion to occupy all our guns and observers on the air defence platform at the summit of the main mast. There is a heavy explosion and the Repulse rocks.”
—From the Daily Express, December 12, 1941
Before 1941, few thought that battle cruisers like HMS Repulse could be sunk from the air.
The controversial General Douglas MacArthur was admired as well as criticized by historians.
Unlike Pearl Harbor, an attack on the Philippines was anticipated, but U.S. forces were still defeated.
Japanese General Masaharu Homma sets foot on Philippine soil to oversee the capture of the islands.
Over nine hours passed between news of Pearl Harbor first reaching MacArthur’s headquarters and the arrival of Japanese attack planes over Luzon. Some historians question why nothing was done during this period, and why B-17s and P-40s were still on the ground at Clark airfield for the Japaneses to attack and destroy. The Japanese also surprised and wiped out a squadron of U.S. aircraft then returning from a patrol. MacArthur had lost half of his aircraft on the same day (December 8, 1941) that Japanese troops began landing on the Batan Islands north of Luzon.
Japanese soldiers celebrate the capture of a large American gun on Bataan; it took three months before they were finally able to capture the peninsula, early in April 1942.
Smaller landings took place over the next few days, but the main Japanese invasion force arrived on December 22 in Lingayen Gulf on the west of Luzon. Two days later, more Japanese landed on the east coast in Lamon Bay and it became clear that General Masaharu Homma, commanding the Japanese, hoped to trap the defending forces in a pincer movement. MacArthur realized this and decided to withdraw from around the capital city of Manila. Troops were ordered to retreat to the Bataan peninsula while the military command and the Philippine government withdrew to the island of Corregidor, south of the peninsula. MacArthur needed reinforcements, but U.S. military commanders back in Washington D.C. did not want to risk further losses. President Roosevelt told MacArthur to hold on for as long as possible. A siege of the Bataan peninsula followed, squeezing some 67,000 Filipino troops, over 12,000 Americans, and 26,000 civilians onto a strip of land about 25 miles (40 km) long and 20 miles (32 km) wide.
BOMBING MANILA
Carlos Romulo was working in Manila on December 8 when Japanese planes suddenly appeared in the sky: “Fifty-four Japanese sky monsters, flashing silver in the bright noonday, were flying in two magnificently formed Vs. Above the scream of the sirens the church bells solemnly announced the noon hour.
Unprotected and unprepared, Manila lay under the enemy planes—a city of ancient nunneries and chromium-fronted night clubs, of skyscrapers towering over nipa [palm] shacks, of antiquity and modernity, of East and West.
… Something pressed between my feet. It was Cola, the office cat, her feline instincts alarmed by the sirens. Their screaming stopped, and in their place we heard the throbbing of the planes.”
—Quoted in How It Happened: World War II, edited by Jon E. Lewis
As the year 1942 began, Japan drove into the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia), the British fell back toward Singapore, and the Americans and Filipinos dug in on the Bataan peninsula. Japanese troops, under General Masaharu Homma, attacked early in January and broke through around Mount Natib in the Philippines. The U.S. forces withdrew to a line of defense between Bagac and Orion, and forced Homma to cease further attacks. The siege that followed lasted over two months.
British General Arthur Percival (on the extreme right) on his way to sign a formal declaration of the surrender of Singapore in February 1942.
By the beginning of February, all the British-led troops were on Singapore island (see page 8) and another, shorter, siege began. With 70,000 soldiers, British General Arthur Percival made the mistake of trying to defend Singapore’s entire northern coastline and the Japanese were able to break through. Despite having only 35,000 troops and little ammunition left, the Japanese commander, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, held on. The city of Singapore was demoralized. Some troops panicked and began to desert, and, in the middle of February, Percival surrendered to Yamashita. Churchill called it “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history.”
Meanwhile, MacArthur had been instructed to leave Corregidor and seek safety in Australia. The troops he left behind were under orders not to surrender, but this became increasingly difficult. Food was in short supply, and malaria and other illnesses afflicted the men, which made resistance futile when the Japanese attacked once again in April. The American in charge, Major General Edward King, disobeyed MacArthur and surrendered on April 9 to save unnecessary deaths. Nearly 80,000 survivors were marched out of the peninsula on what became known as the Bataan Death March (see pages 26–27).
There was such a shortage of food that the defenders on Bataan were reduced to eating horses and water buffalo before surrendering to the invading Japanese forces.
THE WAR SPREADS
By April 1942, Japan had not only conquered Malaya, Singapore, and the Philippines, but also the greater part of the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia). Hong Kong surrendered. The Japanesse defeated the British in southern Burma (now Myanmar) and, following the invasion of Malaya, Japan was officiallly at war with Britain. Japan and the U.S. were at war since the attack on Pearl Harbor. Since Germany had also declared war on the U.S., World War II was now a truly global conflict.
DEMORALIZED SURRENDER IN SINGAPORE
A Singaporean, Lee Kip Lin, and a British soldier, J. O. C. Hayes, were among those who witnessed the appalling lack of discipline in the final days before the surrender of Singapore: “We drove down Orchard Road and I remember very distinctly hundreds of these soldiers … sprawled all over the road, drunk. And they broke into the shops opposite the Orchard Road Market… the streets were full of obvious deserters. They loitered in twos and threes, armed and shouting the news that ‘they [the Japanese] won’t be long now.’”
[From Singapore, Alan Warren]
Jubilation breaks out when Japanese soldiers are told that the U.S. and Filipino troops who were defending Bataan have surrendered.
The fortified island of Corregidor finally surrendered on May 7, 1942.