Extracted from SOYMB post 12 December, 2012.
'Ask most Americans why
the United States got into World War II, and they will talk about
Pearl Harbor. December 7, 1941. Ask why the Japanese attacked Pearl
Harbor and many Americans will struggle for an answer, perhaps
suggesting that the Japanese people were aggressive militarists who
wanted to take over the world. Ask if the United States provoked the
Japanese, and they will probably say that the Americans did nothing:
we were just minding our own business when those crazy Japanese,
completely without justification, mounted a sneak attack, catching us
totally by surprise at Pearl Harbour. Don’t bother to ask the
typical American what U.S. economic warfare had to do with provoking
the Japanese to mount their attack, because they simply won’t
know.
In the 1930s, the US as one of the world’s
leading industrial powers was constantly looking out for sources of
inexpensive raw materials such as rubber and oil, as well as for
markets for its finished products. Already at the end of the
nineteenth century, America had consistently pursued its interests in
this respect by extending its economic and sometimes even direct
political influence across oceans and continents. This aggressive,
“imperialist” policy – pursued ruthlessly by presidents such as
Theodore Roosevelt, a cousin of FDR – had led to American control
over former Spanish colonies such as Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the
Philippines, and also over the hitherto independent island nation of
Hawaii. America had thus also developed into a major power in the
Pacific Ocean and in the Far East.
However, the US faced the
competition there of an aggressive rival industrial power, one that
was even more needy for oil and similar raw materials, and also for
markets for its finished products. That competitor was Japan which
sought to realize its own imperialist ambitions in China and in
resource-rich Southeast Asia and, like the US, did not hesitate to
use violence in the process, for example waging ruthless war on
China. Japan as an expanding industrial nation required access to raw
materials and energy. In the Great Depression, as trade dried up and
unemployment grew, an ultra-nationalist clique within the Japanese
military sought to secure the markets and raw materials Japan so
desperately wanted. For a time there were two competing strategies to
capture oil, the Strike North route to acquire the USSR's and the
Strike South route to capture the Dutch East Indies, one being mainly
land-based and army dominated, the other mostlly naval. 1938 saw the
defeat of an attempted Japanese invasion of the USSR , (which brought
General Zhukov to prominence). Therefore Japanese diplomacy became
centred upon the views of the naval commanders.
What bothered
the United States was not how the Japanese treated the Chinese or
Koreans but that the Japanese intention was to turned that part of
the world into what they called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity
Sphere, i.e., an exclusive economic zone with no room for the
American to trade (albeit Japan was prepared to make major
concessions, such as “sharing” China with the US.) America
was to be squeezed out of the lucrative Far Eastern market. By the
summer of 1941, Japan had further increased its zone of influence in
the Far East, e.g. by occupying the rubber-rich French colony of
Indochina and, desperate above all for oil, and was obviously vying
to occupy the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. The American capitalist
class was virtually unanimously in favour of a war against Japan but
public opinion was strongly against American involvement in any
foreign war. Roosevelt’s solution was to provoke Japan into an
overt act of war against the United States to rally behind the Stars
and Stripes. FDR’s Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s noted “The
question was how we should maneuver them [the
Japanese] into
… firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to
ourselves.”
In 1939 the United States terminated the 1911 commercial treaty with
Japan. July 2, 1940, Roosevelt signed the Export Control Act,
authorizing the President to license or prohibit the export of
essential defense materials. Under this authority, exports of
aviation motor fuels and lubricants were restricted. The
Roosevelt administration froze all Japanese assets in the United
States. In collaboration with the British and the Dutch, the US
imposed severe economic sanctions on Japan, including an embargo on
vital oil products and steel. Washington demanded Japan’s
withdrawal from China. Roosevelt obligingly arranged for such a war,
not because of Tokyo’s unprovoked aggression and horrible war
crimes in China, but because American corporations wanted a share of
the luscious big “pie” of Far Eastern resources and
markets.
Japan was certainly not averse to attacking others
and had been busy creating an Asian empire. And the United States and
Japan were certainly not living in harmonious friendship. But what
could bring the Japanese to launch an attack on America? Foreign
Minister Teijiro Toyoda in a communication to Ambassador Kichisaburo
Nomura on July 31: “Commercial
and economic relations between Japan and third countries, led by
England and the United States, are gradually becoming so horribly
strained that we cannot endure it much longer. Consequently, our
Empire, to save its very life, must take measures to secure the raw
materials of the South Seas."
PM
Konoe set about arranging a meeting with Rooseveldt in a last ditch
attempt to restore trade relations and avoid war in the Pacific.
While FDR initially welcomed Konoe's planned visit, his inner circle,
as they had for decades, viewed Japan as untrustworthy and
vulnerable, and steadfastly opposed the idea of a Pacific summit.
Hull, Hornbeck, Stimson and others shared the view of senior military
officials that a successful summit could have disastrous consequences
for America's strategic position in Asia. A negotiated end to the war
in China and the prompt withdrawal of Japanese forces would be the
core of any agreement and this, that military officials argued,
America must avoid. In October 1941, Hayes Kroner, chief of the
British Empire Section for the War Department General Staff, informed
Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, as follows "At
this stage in the execution of our national strategic plan, cessation
of hostilities in China...would be highly detrimental to our
interests." By
early November, Tojo and Togo overcame substantial cabinet opposition
to continued negotiations and won approval for talks based on two
proposal. In Proposal A. Tokyo pledged to immediately withdraw forces
from Indochina, remove troops from all of China except Hainan Islans
and the far north and respect the Open Door. Japan also agreed to not
automatically support Berlin in the event of a German-American war.
Proposal B sought only a limited agreement in which Japan pledged to
refrain from further offensive operations in return for normalized
trade relations and a US promise not to take such actions as may
hinder efforts for peace by both Japan and China.
When
President Franklin Roosevelt visited Pearl Harbor on July 28, 1934,
seven years before the Japanese attack, the Japanese military
expressed apprehension. General Kunishiga Tanaka wrote in the Japan
Advertiser, objecting to the build-up of the American fleet in Hawaii
and the creation of additional bases in Alaska and the Aleutian
Islands. "It
makes us think a major disturbance is purposely being encouraged in
the Pacific." In
March 1935, Roosevelt gave Pan Am Airways a permit to build runways
on Wake Island, Midway Island, and Guam. Japanese military commanders
announced that they were disturbed and viewed these runways as a
threat. The U.S. Navy spent the next few years working up plans for
war with Japan, the March 8, 1939, version of which described “an
offensive war of long duration” that
would destroy the military and disrupt the economic life of
Japan.
As early as 1932 the United States had been talking
with China about providing airplanes, pilots, and training for its
war with Japan. In November 1940, Roosevelt loaned China one hundred
million dollars for war with Japan, and after consulting with the
British, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau made plans
to send the Chinese bombers with U.S. crews to use in bombing Tokyo
and other Japanese cities. On December 21, 1940, two weeks shy of a
year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, China’s Minister
of Finance T.V. Soong and Colonel Claire Chennault, a retired U.S.
Army flier who was working for the Chinese and had been urging them
to use American pilots to bomb Tokyo since at least 1937, met in
Henry Morgenthau’s dining room to plan the firebombing of Japan.
Morgenthau said he could get men released from duty in the U.S. Army
Air Corps if the Chinese could pay them $1,000 per month. Soong
agreed. On May 24, 1941, the New York Times reported on U.S. training
of the Chinese air force, and the provision of “numerous
fighting and bombing planes” to
China by the United States. “Bombing
of Japanese Cities is Expected” read
the sub-headline. By July, the Joint Army-Navy Board had approved a
plan called JB 355 to firebomb Japan. A front corporation would buy
American planes to be flown by American volunteers trained. Roosevelt
approved, and his China expert Lauchlin Currie, in the words of
Nicholson Baker, “wired
Madame Chaing Kai-Shek and Claire Chennault a letter that fairly
begged for interception by Japanese spies.” Whether
or not that was the entire point, this was the letter: “I
am very happy to be able to report today the President directed that
sixty-six bombers be made available to China this year with
twenty-four to be delivered immediately. He also approved a Chinese
pilot training program here. Details through normal channels. Warm
regards.”
In
the eyes of the Japanese press they were being corralled “First
there was the creation of a superbase at Singapore, heavily
reinforced by British and Empire troops. From this hub a great wheel
was built up and linked with American bases to form a great ring
sweeping in a great area southwards and westwards from the
Philippines through Malaya and Burma..."
On
November 15th, Army Chief of Staff George Marshall briefed the media
on something we do not remember as “the Marshall Plan.” In fact
we don’t remember it at all. "We
are preparing an offensive war against Japan,” Marshall
said.
The idea that it was a defensive war because an innocent
imperial outpost in the middle of the Pacific was attacked out of the
clear blue sky is a myth that deserves to be buried.'
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2012/12/americas-good-war-part-two-japan.html
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