Pacific Campaign: The U.S.-Japanes Naval War 1941-1945

The Chicago Tribune An unsparing indictment of Japan's culpability in bringing about the Second World War....It blows away the rubbish....Van Der Vat writes with clarity and understanding.

Autorentext
Dan van der Vat is the author of The Atlantic Campaign, The Ship That Changed the World, Gentlemen of War, and The Grand Scuttle. He lives in London, England.

Klappentext
Using previously neglected archives of firsthand accounts, Dan van der Vat interweaves eyewitness testimony with sharp, analytic narrative in a vivid account of the war in the Pacific. Filled with startling new insights, he examines strategic and political aspects of the war, on both sides and at all levels. 24 pages of photographs.

Zusammenfassung
Dan van der Vat's naval histories have been acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic as “definitive,” “extraordinary,” and “vivid and harrowing.”

Now he turns to the greatest naval conflict in history: the Pacific campaign of World War II. Drawing on neglected archives of firsthand accounts from both sides, van der Vat interweaves eyewitness testimony with sharp, analytical narration to provide a penetrating reappraisal of the strategic and political background of both the Japanese and American forces, as well as a major reassessment of the role of intelligence on both sides. A comprehensive evaluation of all aspects of the war in the Pacific, The Pacific Campaign promises to be the standard work on the U.S.-Japanese war for years to come.

Leseprobe
Chapter One

THE VIEW FROM THE EAST

Japan's southward advance, even though it was in the opposite direction from all its previous expansion, derived directly from its military adventures, political scheming and economic ambitions on the Asian mainland. This is not to say that the move south was immutable fate, either for Japan or for its victims: the Japanese were and are as responsible for their own actions and choices as everyone else, regardless of foreign provocations and errors. Nevertheless, the short but brutish and nasty story of Japanese imperial expansion has features only too familiar to the students of past empires, whether the ancient Roman or the modern Russian. A power on the make begins to expand by "absorbing" its immediate neighbor (in Japan's case, Korea in 1910); to protect its acquisition, it conquers its neighbor's neighbor (Manchuria), sets up a buffer state (Manchukuo), creates another buffer (northern China), and uses that as a base to move against its next victim (China), and possibly its most deadly rival (the Soviet Union). We see imperialism imitating scientific principles such as Newton's first law of motion whereby movement continues unless halted (imperial inertia); the abhorrence of nature for a vacuum is parodied by imperialist opportunism, which drew Japan first into China, then down upon the Asiatic empires of the European powers involved in the war with Hitler's Germany.

It is not customary to refer, in the context of the Second World War, to "Tojo's Japan," or even Hirohito's; nor do we equate the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, formed in 1940 to absorb all Japanese political parties, with the National Socialist party, the only legal one in Hitler's Germany, even though the former was in some respects a conscious imitation of the latter. The truth is that the Japan which took on the world at war and lost was run by a military junta of no fixed composition -- a shifting, authoritarian oligarchy rather than a totalitarian dictatorship.

It came to the fore in Manchuria in 1928, when the "Kwantung Army," as the Japanese garrison was called, killed an intractable local warlord by causing an explosion on the Japanese-controlled South Manchurian Railway (SMR). The junta won the support of most Japanese admirals in 1930, after the perceived "humiliation" of Japan at the London Naval Conference, about which more later. Japan was easily humiliated: rejection of any of its demands was enough. Aggravated by Japan's severe suffering in the Slump, which helped to undermine moderate, civilian influence in government, the rising junta's Kwantung branch staged another explosion on the SMR at Mukden in September 1931 as an excuse for conquering the rest of Manchuria in a few months. This euphemistically named "Manchuria Incident" led to the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo under the "Emperor" Pu-yi, scion of the deposed Manchu dynasty, which had ruled China until 1911. Encouraged by this cheap success and undeterred by international condemnation, which merely provoked Japan to flounce out of the tottering League of Nations in 1933, the junta ran off the rails altogether in 1937. At the Marco Polo Bridge outside Peking, the Japanese "China Garrison Force," in place since the international suppression of the xenophobic Boxer Rebellion of 1900, engineered a clash with a Chinese Army patrol. This was then used as an excuse to attack northern China -- all without consulting civilian or military superiors in Tokyo. The latter managed, however, to do what was expected of them: they sent reinforcements. The ensuing war, unwinnable for either side, spread across China; to the Japanese it always remained simply "the China Incident." It is not unreasonable to see in the manufactured clash of July 7, 1937, so similar to Hitler's ploy against Poland two years later, the true start of the Second World War, because these two participants fought each other continuously from then until 1945.

In its bid to become the USA of the western Pacific (a strictly economic ambition), Japan classed itself as a "have-not" nation with a legitimate grievance. What it really "had not," like Germany and Italy among the larger powers, was territorial acquisitions to exploit -- the only contemporary yardstick of greatness, even more important than a big navy. The rest of the world soon came to see Japan as an acquisitive aggressor, inordinately ambitious and completely ruthless. Japan came late -- indeed, last -- to old-style colonialism, but chose to learn nothing from its predecessors in this pursuit. Like them, it cared little for the feelings of the colonized; unlike them, it was never deterred by the views of the other powers, which it either ignored or used as grounds for more aggression while it built up its own empire. In this outlook it was very similar to Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II, and even more under Hitler: unable or unwilling to distinguish between its needs and its wants, Japan helped itself to what it fancied and was quite often genuinely perplexed by the hostile reaction. Like Germany, where almost everyone who could walk and talk hated the Treaty of Versailles, Japan had an almighty bone to pick with the rest of the world. Most Japanese people regarded anyone who questioned their country's ambition as hostile and did not try to understand any other party's point of view. Where the rest of the world went wrong was in foolishly underestimating the unique capacity for self-sacrifice with which ordinary Japanese supported their country's aim to be a first-rate power.

There was much less disagreement among the Japanese (or in Germany) on the end than on the means of achieving the fulfillment of their country's "just demands." Hitler came to power on the back of the German national sense of grievance, and was as conscious as the Japanese military of the lessons of 1918. Like the Japanese, he thought his country was overcrowded and needed more territory, a rationalization of imperial ambition throughout the ages. The Nazis, like the Italian fascists, were a mass movement that rose to power from the grass roots under a populist leader, whereas the Japanese junta manipulated a complaisant emperor to impose its will from the top. But each Axis regime drew the …

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