The tragic miscommunications that led to the bombing of Pearl Harbor
Japan and the U.S. tried, but failed, to reach an understanding
When Japanese civilians learned their navy had bombed the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7, 1941, they were jubilant. For years, people had suffered under austerity brought on by U.S. sanctions and the country’s mobilization for war. With the assault, the mood quickly changed.
Pundits have long puzzled over why Japan, embroiled in an unwinnable war in China, attacked a country that supplied most of its oil and had an economy 70 times its own. Recent scholarship has shown Japan’s leaders were by no means in agreement on a course for war. Expressing that disagreement was a big part of the problem, as they debated “two repugnant alternatives”: surrender the empire or destroy it through war.
In July 1937, Japan invaded Northern China. What was expected to be a quick victory became a bloody stalemate. In December, Japanese troops massacred 300,000 Chinese civilians in the notorious “rape of Nanking.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt protested the invasion, but didn’t impose sanctions until the next year, further tightening them in 1940. To deter Japan from invading the resource-rich U.S. and European colonies of Southeast Asia, America’s Pacific Fleet relocated from Southern California to Pearl Harbor.
In September 1940, three months after the Nazis marched into Paris, Japan made a serious miscalculation. It went against its emperor’s wishes and signed the Tripartite Pact, allying with Germany and Italy. As Jeffrey Record of the Strategic Studies Institute put it, this alliance “transformed Japan from regional threat into a potential extension of Hitler’s agenda of aggression.”
Japan did have designs on the West’s colonies in Southeast Asia, but also dreamed of controlling a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” including China and Korea. The first step was seizing the northern half of Indochina from the conquered French. The next was drawing up plans to attack Pearl Harbor.
Roosevelt, meanwhile, was waiting for Japan to reply to his generous offer: If Japan didn’t expand her occupation to the southern half of Indochina— America’s source of rubber and tin—sanctions would be eased. Because Japan’s war in China didn’t affect U.S. interests, he was careful not to link it to the deal. But, unsure of Roosevelt’s commitment to Southeast Asia, Japan annexed southern Indochina anyway, on July 28, 1941. Hawks on Roosevelt’s staff cut off all U.S. trade with Japan.
“The U.S. decision to embargo 90% of Japan’s petroleum and two-thirds of its trade led directly to the attack on Pearl Harbor,” writes Roland Worth, Jr in his book No Choice But War.
Many Japanese leaders were privately against war, but none would say so to one another. Politeness, political self-preservation, and moral cowardice made it unthinkable to reverse policies once they’d been approved, especially by the emperor.
Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro thought Roosevelt’s proposal was too politically sensitive to discuss in his meetings with the military. But he did believe he could make peace if he met Roosevelt personally — so long as it took place far from Japan’s war hawks.
Roosevelt was amenable, but a series of crossed wires prevented the summit from happening—not to mention that hawkish Secretary of State Cordell Hull insisted that Japan first had to agree to some conditions. He wanted the end of not just the Indochina occupation, but also the Axis alliance, and the war in China. A summit was no longer a possibility.
Japan continued war preparations, though most officials still hoped an increasingly unlikely summit would ensure peace. Konoe penned a deal that met U.S. demands, but he failed to stand behind it when his own foreign ministry drafted a tougher proposal. The deal sent to Washington didn’t promise to end the Indochina occupation, the China war, or the Tripartite Pact.
“Konoe had, yet again, let down his strongest supporters,” writes Eri Hotta, in Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy, “revealing that peace in the Pacific hinged on a man who could not even stand up for his own proposal in a liaison meeting he himself convoked!”
Leaders set a mid-October deadline for a diplomatic solution. Though the Japanese plan sounded hawkish, it may have been a cover for the army, which fully expected to make concessions, to save face while joining their dovish colleagues.
Still timid, Konoe asked the emperor (who was merely a figurehead) to step in and declare that diplomacy, not war, was Japan’s top priority. Emperor Hirohito’s spokesman asked the army and navy what they wanted to happen. When no answer came, Hirohito broke convention by saying aloud that their silence was “regrettable.” He then read a poem his grandfather had written, which went, in part, “In all four seas all are brothers and sisters. Then why, oh why, these rough winds and waves?”
Hirohito intended this pacifist lament to indicate his desire for peace, but it was too ambiguous. Army Minister Hideki Tojo and many others took it as a fatalistic acquiescence to war. If Hirohito had stated his position explicitly, or rejected their plans, war might have been avoided.
The leaders of the army and navy tried to convince one another to face public humiliation and admit they were against war. Tojo — who’d been the leading hawk — stepped up now as the advocate for peace. He planned to urge Prime Minister Konoe to take the blame and resign. Konoe beat him to it: the premier and his entire cabinet stepped down after one of his advisers was arrested for spying. The emperor summoned Tojo to the palace. Expecting to be fired, Tojo was named prime minister.
Tojo convened a marathon series of meetings on November 1. Despite continued misgivings, army leaders remained pro-war — and navy leaders soon joined them. In the end, they agreed to offer America two deals. The first offered Roosevelt none of what he had asked for. The second included the withdrawal from southern Indochina, but the army doomed it, by once again tying it to the China issue. Japan’s leaders then set a deadline of December 1 for a diplomatic solution. The next day, they presented the emperor with their plan to attack Pearl Harbor on December 7, if no peace deal was reached. A saddened Hirohito advocated peace, but seemed resigned to war.
Tojo’s speeches to Japanese leaders and public gave no indication that he actually hoped for a diplomatic solution. Washington assumed Tokyo wanted war.
With time running out, Tojo needed a quick deal. A distrustful Roosevelt, not knowing about the December 1 deadline, thought he had plenty of time. The submarines of Japan’s Pearl Harbor strike force left on November 10. On November 26, the aircraft carrier force set sail.
Japan sent an anti-war diplomat to Washington to negotiate for one of the two plans. In a final blunder, he was the man who had been pictured with Hitler, signing the Tripartite Pact. There would be no last-minute breakthrough.
Japan had planned to declare war shortly before its planes bombed the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, but a series of errors by typists and translators prevented the Japanese embassy from giving Washington the declaration in time.
Thus, an unintended stench of deceit clung to the attack on what Roosevelt called “a date which will live in infamy.”
In The Rising Sun, John Toland writes that “a war that need not have been fought was about to be fought because of mutual misunderstanding, language difficulties, and mistranslations.”
American public sentiment turned pro-war almost immediately. In the final irony of Japan’s stumbling and at times incomprehensible path to war, its leaders did what even Nazi Germany hadn’t. They brought America into World War II, and less than four years later, Imperial Japan would cease to exist.
