By Eri Hotta
Amazon Kindle: $4.99 (Four and a half stars)
Pub: Random House
Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asian-Pacific War, Vol. I: July 1937 – May 1942
By Richard B. Frank
Amazon Kindle: $20.42 (Four and a half stars)
Pub: W.W. Norton & Co.
If you are like me, you have often wondered, “how could the Japanese have been stupid enough to attack Pearl Harbor and start a huge war with the United States?” It's even worse than that, because as part of the same plan, they were attacking the entire British Empire, starting with Hong Kong, Malaya, and Singapore. Almost as an afterthought, they were attacking the Netherlands as well. The Dutch East Indies are rich in oil, you see.
The quick-response to that question is, “oh, they thought that Germany was winning the war in Europe, and that all of this was just low-hanging fruit.” Besides, thought the Japanese, “we're Japanese! We have Japanese fighting spirit! We are the Yamato people! Soon all of Europe will be German colonies and client states, and the Americans, they're just a mongrel race that thinks of nothing but Hollywood movies and dancing to jazz music.”
I happen to love the history of this period. It turns out to be a perfect example of how fast the “quick-response” evaporates in the face of real history in real books.
The problem is that it takes a long time for all of the necessary books to be written. For all of the necessary documents to become available to historians. Things were classified; or diaries were held back by families fearing embarrassment; or important sources were left in old boxes full of “unimportant documents.” I've been reading about the war in the Pacific since about 1960, and I will admit that my interest started out as that of a child. “Zero Pilot,” by Saburo Sakai. (Also called, I think, “Samurai.”) In the fullness of time, I read more serious books, but even then, historians are just as liable as anyone else to be drawn to the sexy aspects of the war. Pearl Harbor! Midway! Guadalcanal! The Marianas Turkey Shoot! One must be patient. As every decade has passed, additional sources have been exploited by new generations of historians, and more aspects of the war have been held up to the light.
I have recently read two giant books that concern topics that for me were issues of first impression. “Tower of Skulls,” by Richard B. Frank, starts around the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, with lots of flashbacks to when Japan really started going for China's neck. (i.e. the seizure of Manchuria in 1931) The book ends a few months after Pearl Harbor, having covered four years of the miserable, unproductive war with China, and the first few months of glorious Japanese victories that kicked off World War II in the Pacific. I had only read very shallow, fast coverage of the China war, so all of that part was new to me. Honestly, I had also been very vague on the drive into Malaya, Singapore, Borneo, Sumatra, and Java. The details were fascinating, and remarkably brutal.
Professor Frank is a great historian and a great writer, but he is anything but prolific. I had read his book, “Downfall,” which is a close examination of the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan, and also “Guadalcanal,” a terrific history of that important campaign. Those two represented his entire output between 1990 and 2020. For years I had been checking periodically to see if he had written another book. I knew that he was alive and working. Finally, this one showed up. It's the first of a trilogy covering the entire pacific war! I hope that he lives long enough to finish it. I doubt if I will live long enough to read it all.
The real surprise in both of these books was how far on the back foot Japan was after a few years of fighting in China. The Chinese military performed much better than the usual brief histories give them credit for, and the Chinese generals won some clever victories. That was way before the Japanese even seriously considered starting a war with the United States. By 1940, the domestic situation in Japan was dire. It's a bit shocking to read that long before Pearl Harbor, even expensive restaurants in Tokyo were using mashed potatoes to extend their small allotment of white rice. Tokyo had been famous for its ornamental metal gates, fences, and building accents, but they were all gone before Pearl Harbor. Gone to be recycled by the military. Even as early as 1939, there was a serious shortage of military manpower. Japan started drafting men in their thirties, men who had businesses and families. By early 1941, meat and fish were very difficult to find, the supply of fresh vegetables was limited and getting more expensive, and white rice was being rationed. (So was beer.)
This is the situation that generated one of the greatest leaps of illogic in political history: Japan needs food and natural resources; there is plenty of food and natural resources in South East Asia, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies; all of the colonial powers are tied up in this European war; we can simply seize all of that territory and steal all of the food, aluminum, rubber, oil, etc., and ship it thousands of miles back to Japan! We'll discourage America and Britain with overwhelming surprise attacks! That way we will have the resources that we need to fight the war!
Got that? The plan was to start the war, and then seize the resources that were absolutely necessary to fighting the war. That's really leaving a lot to luck.
Only low and middle level Japanese military officials and officers actually believed that there was even a small chance that that plan could succeed. Everybody at the top knew that it was a foolish dream that would destroy Japan. But after four years bogged down in China, Japan's pride was at stake. They had to save face. They chose destruction over the shame of being seen as a second-class power.
The other book is, “Japan 1941,” by Eri Hotta, a Japanese historian of considerable power and authority. (Some quotes follow.) Here the intense focus is on the workings of the Japanese government leading up to the decision to launch a sneak attack against Pearl Harbor. Oh, there are asides concerning certain events in the Chinese debacle, but the laser focus is on the important players in the government's decision to “go south,” starting a war with America and Britain.
The amazing truth is that none of the major players wanted the wider war with America and Britain. They all knew that it was suicidal. They were all well informed about Japanese industrial capabilities, and they all knew the difficulties of transporting the natural resources of the southern islands back to the factories of Japan. They knew how much shipping they had, and they accurately predicted how much shipping they would lose in such a war. They could almost predict the very day in 1943 when they would run out of oil. It was like a high-stakes poker game where they were holding a pair of fours, tops. Their plan was to play them hard, and try to bluff it out. They knew they could have a good few months, and they were hoping that FDR was so focused on Europe that he would quickly negotiate a peace deal favoring Japan. That was a really, really stupid plan.
And they all knew it! To watch all of these officials twist themselves in knots trying to have it both ways is amazing. They feel obligated to talk big in official settings and demand war with the racist, domineering United States, while in private they are all begging each other for help getting out of it.
Many of those Japanese officials had been to America, and they had seen it all first hand. They knew that Japan didn't stand a chance in a protracted war, and they knew enough about the American people to realize that the bluff thing was a joke. They knew that an attack on Pearl Harbor, a sneak attack, and undeclared act of war, would trigger in Americans a desire for pay-back that would be deep and wide. They were still afraid to speak publicly against starting a war. Common sense was a rare thing at those meetings. When someone mentioned the “Japanese spirit” at a top-level meeting, one brave soul yelled, “don't forget! They have their Yankee spirit too!” No one paid attention. All of them, all of the officials and the military officers, had two goals: to save face, and to avoid blame. Professor Eri is merciless in describing the selfishness of important people who put their own needs before the needs of Japan.
Even Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku knew the enterprise was doomed from the start. He had studied at Harvard, worked in Washington D.C., and traveled coast to coast by train. He gets the credit for planning the attack, but he was just doing his job. Those decisions are made above my pay grade, thought Yamamoto. They want a plan? I'll give them a plan.
These books get fascinating quickly as one sinks deeper into the details. As I just said, Yamamoto gets credit for planning the attack. But Professor Eri informs us that one of his staff officers, Kuroshima Kameto, did most of the grunt work, with big assists from air group leaders Onishi and Genda.
Kuroshima is one of those individuals that shows up frequently in Japanese history. An extreme eccentric. He was in his late forties. He was born very poor and orphaned young. He had to work his way through night school, and he was such a good student that he was admitted into the elite Japanese Naval Academy, and then to the super-elite Japanese Naval War College. He had been a staff officer to Yamamoto since 1939.
But he was not the typical picture of a fastidious, aristocratic naval officer. Even other officers from humble beginnings displayed the pomp and circumstance of high-class dandies. No, Kuroshima was a “tall willowy man with a gaunt face and a bald head.” His nickname behind his back was, “Gandhi.” He “rarely bathed,” and he smoked cigarettes constantly, allowing the ashes to fall wherever gravity claimed them. When he was working on a project, like Pearl Harbor, he would lock himself in a dark room, filling the place with smoke from incense and cigarettes. He would sit there naked, waiting for inspiration. When he had it worked out in his head, he would write it all out “in a frenzy” until he was done.
Discovering details like this is a big part of what I call, “the Miracle of Reading Books.”
Anyway, that's the story. “Keep it movin 'ere, Mr. Blogga,” says the nice officer with a wave of his stick, “dis ain't War and Peace.”
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