Tourists who visit Hawaii, in addition to being fascinated by the nature of the places, cannot fail to be struck by two things: first of all, by the “Arizona Memorial”, the monument to the fallen in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, of which today marks the eightieth anniversary. It is a walkway that allows you to see from above what remains of the wreck of the battleship “Arizona”, one of the three battleships sunk during the attack.
The other striking and surprising aspect is the large number of Japanese couples on their honeymoon in Hawaii. Although Japanese emigration is relatively recent, and dates back to 1866, the archipelago has always been considered – rightly or wrongly – as the place of origin of the Japanese people, and this belief encourages young spouses to spend the moon there. honey. The archipelago, therefore, is considered a little part of Japanese tradition and culture, and this attention is one of the elements at the origin of the growing tension between the United States and Japan, between 1898 and 1941. From one rivalry to enmity
It is not surprising that the annexation of the archipelago by the United States in 1898 provoked a strong reaction on the part of Japanese public opinion, which has since begun to see the United States as a Opposing nation. This view was reinforced by the behavior of the Washington government, which had proposed itself as a mediator to negotiate a peace treaty between Russia and Japan, which had defeated the adversary at the end of almost two years of hard struggle on land and sea. .
With the Treaty of Portsmouth, in fact, the United States imposed a peace whose terms were considered extremely unfavorable to the victor. Clearly, this bias in mediation indicated that, in the US, the belief was gaining ground that Japan, on the other side of the Pacific, was an emerging power with which, sooner or later, it would have to come to terms.
As if that weren’t enough, massacres of Japanese immigrants to California occurred in the same year. These events, coupled with legal provisions that imposed restrictions on immigrants’ property rights, and segregated their children, forcing them to attend separate schools, caused such an uproar in Japan that the Washington government commissioned the Navy in 1907. to draw up a war plan, known as “Plan Orange”, which was quickly put into oblivion, however, when an agreement was reached between the two countries to control the migratory flow.
Pearl Harbor
The same happened in 1913, when other violence struck the Japanese community of California, whose government had passed other restrictive laws against emigrants, but again the two governments found a modus vivendi and the plan was put back in the drawer.
In reality, the fire continued to smolder, as Japan had set its sights on China, and intended to subjugate it, after heavily defeating it in 1895, while the United States wanted China to become a large market open to all. but above all to them, and they had promulgated their “Open Door Policy” as early as 1899. The diktat of the “21 requests”, which Japan imposed on China in 1915, effectively transforming it into a protectorate, only confirmed the existence of a conflict that was becoming abysmal.
The First World War seems to put an end to this conflict, with Japan having joined the Entente, and therefore, together with China, had also become an ally of the USA. In the meantime, however, Japan had taken care to occupy all the Pacific islands owned by Germany, in order to create a series of bases capable of controlling the southern half of that ocean, and this did not escape American attention. .
However, this move was endorsed by the victorious powers in the treaty at Versailles, albeit in the form of a mandate from the League of Nations, and with the obligation not to militarize the islands under Japanese control. The militarization of the new possessions by the Tokyo government, in defiance of the treaties, again raised suspicions in Washington that Japan was pursuing ends opposite to those of the United States. Plan Orange was resurrected and, since then, regularly updated.
The first opportunity to weaken Japan came from the Washington Conference of 1922, on the limitation of naval armaments. The United States, in that circumstance, ordered Great Britain not to renew the alliance with Japan, which dated back to no less than 1902, and confined the latter to a level of naval armaments equal to 35% of the quota of tonnage that the US had carved out for itself.
It took a few more years for the disputes between the two countries to turn red. The occasion was the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. The United States provided economic and military support to the Chinese government, even sending a Corps of Air Force Volunteers, the so-called Flying Tigers, flying on Curtiss P-40 fighters. , even before going to war.
The invasion of Indochina by Japan convinced the Washington Administration that Japanese expansionism should be stopped, and in July 1941, an oil embargo was proclaimed against Japan, in addition to the closure of the Panama Canal. to Japanese merchant ships.
This move led to a radical change in Japanese plans, which until then had been geared towards attacking the Soviet Union, in sync with Germany. In fact, to survive, Japan needed raw materials and energy. Not being able to import them from the United States anymore, the only possibility of obtaining them was by invading South East Asia, where colonial power had been eliminated, due to the French, British and Dutch defeats in Europe.
For a time, Japanese diplomacy, supported by the Navy, tried in every way to avoid the war against Japan, despite some army officers, of extremist ideas, had even unleashed a targeted campaign of assassinations against opponents to such will. Significant, in this regard, was the declaration of Admiral Yamamoto , commander in chief of the Navy, who – knowing the United States well, where he had served as Naval Attaché – I affirm that it was necessary to force the United States to peace within six months, otherwise Japan would have been crushed by the mighty opponent.
From that moment, the spiraling towards war picked up speed. As early as 1939 the United States had moved the Pacific Fleet from the Californian coast to the forward base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, a move that was interpreted in Tokyo as a hostile act, negotiations to find a modus vivendi conducted no less than from Prince Konoye , very close to the Emperor, they failed due to American intransigence, and Japan prepared the plan of attack on the United States.
It must be said that these preparations did not take place in impenetrable secrecy, given that the Americans had managed – thanks also to British help – to penetrate the Japanese codes, and when the Tokyo Embassy in Washington began to receive the first parts of the declaration of war, the relative text was regularly decrypted and placed on the table of the War and Navy Ministers, as well as, of course, the President.
An irreversible situation had therefore been reached, after almost forty years in which the efforts of the United States, in the search for a compromise with Japan on the control of East Asia, had lost vigor, over time, to the point of yielding the I pass to an uncompromising will to bend the opponent.
The Washington administration, however, was under the illusion of being able to achieve the Japanese downsizing only with diplomatic and economic means, without the need to resort to weapons: everyone in Washington knew, in fact, that a war in the Pacific, against Japan, it would be long and painful. But the delusion that Japan would withdraw from China without a fight was a pious illusion. The vulnerability of Pearl Harbor
Not all US Navy Chiefs were convinced of the wisdom of moving the Pacific Fleet from the Californian coast, where it could best defend the country from an adversary attack, to the relatively new Pearl Harbor base on the island of Oahu. This reluctance was the result, not only of the numerous war games, which had shown how vulnerable the fleet was to a surprise attack, but also, and above all, of the fleet’s annual exercises.
The particular, on February 7, 1932, the Orange Party, led by Rear Admiral Harry YarnellI launched an air attack on the base, taking the opposing party’s defenses by surprise. It should be noted that the attack had been launched from the north, where Yarnell had positioned the aircraft carriers, taking them away from the reconnaissance of the opposing party. Although the adjudicating committee decided that the attack was invalid because it was not foreseen by the exercise, it remained with the most astute leaders the belief that Pearl Harbor could easily turn into a mousetrap.
This belief was confirmed, in 1938, by another exercise, in which the Navy air forces, this time headed by Admiral Ernst King – the future Chief of Naval Operations in World War II – repeated Yarnell’s exploit, causing also this time the anger of the right-thinking.
It is surprising, therefore, the relative calm with which President Roosevelt ‘s decision to move the Pacific Fleet to Hawaii was accepted. In the days immediately preceding the attack, however, rumors of an imminent conflict between the US and Japan had reached Oahu, so much so that some precautionary measures were taken, some of which were agreed with Washington.
The first measure was the decision to place a radar station on a peak to the north of the island, to monitor any movements of planes coming from the north (a reminder of the Yarnell planes’ enterprise
). The second was the order given to aircraft carriers, commanded by Admiral William Halsey, to transfer a group of fighter planes to the Midway Island military airport, just under 1,000 miles away, and – oddly enough for Americans – to do so over a weekend. The third was the deployment of two long-range B-17 bombers from California to Hawaii to increase the capacity for action against the enemy in the event of war.
This suggests that the military and navy authorities in Hawaii did not think about the possibility of such a deep attack by Japan and considered these few precautionary measures to be sufficient, also because communications between Washington, where the crisis was followed step by step. step, with concern, they were extremely scarce and their content vague. In essence, no one in Washington or Pearl Harbor thought that the Japanese would dare so much, even if they took the precautions we have just seen to be more ready to react, in the worst case.
Admiral Yamamoto, on the other hand, was determined to create the conditions for a short war, precisely for the reasons he had expressed at the time. He had been informed of the vulnerability of the Pearl Harbor base and of the exercises that had confirmed it: Japanese spies, in fact, were not lacking in the archipelago and news such as that of the Yarnell exploit had made the rounds of the population.
But the British attack on Taranto, on 11 November 1941, made it clear to the Japanese Admiral that he could rely not only on bombers, for the attack, but also on torpedo bombers: it would have been enough to modify the control surfaces of the torpedoes, to limit the depth of the “bag” (the underwater trajectory that the torpedo makes immediately after impact with the water, before it starts its run), as the British had done.
Thus it was that he initiated the attack plan, once he obtained the approval of the government: as in the time of Yarnell, the force of the aircraft carriers headed north to attack from that direction, and modified torpedoes were used, which had proved, in the previous days, to work even in relatively shallow waters.
The Admiral in charge of the action,Chuiki Nagumo , however, was aware that the odds of escaping an enemy reaction, if triggered by American aircraft carriers, were not very high. When he learned that the latter were not in the port, he alarmed and canceled the second wave of attack, for fear of being caught in turn by an air attack.
Indeed, we know that Admiral Halsey’s force, returning from Midway, was informed not only of the attack, but also that the attackers were along a north-south axis from Oahu. Unfortunately, the means of the time did not allow to know which side the enemy was, whether to the north of the island or to the south. Instinctively, he sent the scouts south of Hawaii, convinced that the winter season would lead to the exclusion of an attack from the north, and missed the opportunity to instantly avenge the enemy aggression. It must be said that this was not the only occasion in which instinct betrayed the American Admiral. Conclusion
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was just the last link in a perverse chain of bilateral relations that went from mistrust to enmity, to hatred between the two nations. The gap between the aims that Japan set itself and those of the United States, in fact, was unbridgeable, and the inevitable conclusion was the war, which Japan unleashed, knowing that it would almost certainly lose it, if the first blow did not had been enough to bend a country like the United States, which was almost impossible to achieve.
The second consideration concerns the leadership of the United States, convinced that it can bend the counterpart without risking open conflict, considering muscular diplomacy (“gesticulations”, a term indicative of this type of approach), as well as economic sanctions, to be sufficient. The latter, as various scholars have shown, is often a double-edged sword, and this is proved again this time.
Of course, those responsible for the failure to defend the American fleet were removed (even if, after the war, they were reinstated), but it can be seen that the political decisions taken by the Washington government, starting with the order to the Pacific Fleet to displace Pearl Harbor, a base still not sufficiently protected, to continue with an inflexible conduct of the negotiations, and to end with the lack of general alert on the imminence of war, indicate a superficial approach towards Japan, so incredible that there was a cry of conspiracy, a series of omissions of warnings and defenses wanted by Washington to force American public opinion to go to war.
I don’t think there have been any conspiracies on the American side: accepting a bloody attack, such as to cause 2,500 deaths, almost as many as the victims of September 11, 2001, is not an approach consistent with the values of a nation, such as the United States, which they were the first to speak – over two centuries ago – about the rights of individuals.
Superficiality, on the other hand, is a frequent problem in every country whose leaders are elected for internal reasons, and then find themselves having to face the complex international scene. This is, for me, the most plausible explanation of the incredible lack of realism, of which the Roosevelt Administration has stained itself, in the management of the crisis with Japan, showing the iron fist, on the one hand, and not preparing itself adequately to a conflict on the other.
