Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 Read online

  Mahan was no less taken aback by Togo’s victory. It was an event, he wrote, that had “fairly startled the world.” Mahan was one of a handful of Westerners who had personally witnessed the turmoil of the Meiji Restoration. He had first visited the country in 1867, as a twenty-eight-year-old lieutenant commander on the USS Iroquois. While the ship was anchored off Kobe, a pair of samurai sought refuge there from enemies on shore. Mahan was impressed by their intense, martial bearing and obvious physical strength—he observed that they were “as thick almost as blackberries”—but they were also helpless landsmen, incapable of keeping their feet in the boat that brought them out to the anchorage. Thirty-eight years later, on hearing the news of Tsushima, Mahan was reminded of the sight of those dispossessed swordsmen as they had stood on the deck of the Iroquois, “cold, wet, and shivering,” and he marveled at the rise of Japan. “Were not our shaking morning visitors of the same blood, the same tradition, and only one generation in time removed from the soldiers and seamen of the late war?”

  After Tsushima, both combatants in the Russo-Japanese War had good reasons to seek an end to hostilities. Russia was on the verge of revolution, and Tsar Nicholas was forced to keep his best troops near St. Petersburg to suppress a general uprising. Japan had financed the war with foreign borrowing, but its ongoing deficits were vast and unsustainable, and bankers in London and New York were shutting off the spigots. When Roosevelt offered to mediate peace talks in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, both sides readily agreed. After prolonged, angst-ridden negotiations, the Russians agreed to sign over leasehold rights to Port Arthur, cede the southern half of Sakhalin Island, withdraw their troops from Manchuria, and acquiesce in Japanese domination of Korea—but they flatly refused to pay a war indemnity, which the Japanese had earlier demanded as a sine qua non. Moved by a personal appeal from Roosevelt, and keen to avoid a collapse in the talks, the Japanese negotiators at last dropped their demand for an indemnity, and the Treaty of Portsmouth was signed on September 5, 1905.

  The treaty was a triumph of American diplomacy, and Roosevelt would be rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906. But when the transpacific telegraph cable carried the news to Tokyo, hours after the signing, the Japanese people exploded in rage and incredulity. Having rejoiced at the sweeping victories of their army and navy, and fallen under the sway of an inflammatory press, public opinion had anticipated a fat war indemnity and the annexation of all of Sakhalin Island. Learning that they would have no indemnity, and only half of Sakhalin, many Japanese supposed the Western imperial powers had closed ranks to deny them their hard-won spoils of war. In Tokyo, the American legation was attacked and set on fire by rioters carrying Japanese flags draped in black crepe. Thirteen Christian churches were vandalized, looted, or burned to the ground. There were public calls for the assassination of the Japanese envoys who had signed the treaty, and in Hibiya Park, crowds marched behind brass bands, chanting: “The war must go on!” Armed mobs charged and trampled police barriers; police stations were attacked and occupied; hundreds were arrested. When the riots came to an end two days later, a thousand people had been wounded or killed.

  The violent public reaction fit a pattern that would continue until 1941. Western diplomacy was suspected as an elaborate conspiracy to encircle, suppress, and persecute Japan. International treaties were scrutinized obsessively, not only by governing elites but in the press and among citizens at large. The Japanese people received little candid or useful information about the world beyond their shores. There was a tendency to go hard on the diplomats, men who had traveled widely, learned foreign languages, and affected Western dress and manners—they were distrusted as a fifth column, as men who had fallen under insidious foreign pressures and were no longer authentically Japanese. Nowhere in the Tokyo newspapers was it reported that Russia was moving reinforcements into Manchuria and was evidently willing to fight on rather than meet the terms demanded, or that Japan was tottering on the verge of national bankruptcy. Truthful appraisals of Japan’s limitations were rarely aired in public, and that was another part of the tragic pattern that would lead to the Second World War.

  Unpopular as it was, the treaty won ratification in Tokyo, and the whole imbroglio might have blown over quickly if a second provocation had not burst into the headlines the following year. It occurred in San Francisco, California, in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake and fire of April 1906, which killed some 3,000 people and left the city a charred and rubbled wasteland. Two weeks after the holocaust the School Board decreed that ethnic Japanese students would be forced into a segregated school, so that white children “should not be placed in any position where their youthful impressions may be affected by association with pupils of the Mongoloid race.” Henceforth, Japanese children residing throughout the stricken city would be forced to make their way through streets still littered with smoking wreckage and swarming with hooligans to an “Asians-only” school in Chinatown.

  It was the latest affront in a long campaign of persecution against California’s immigrant Japanese. The movement had been ginned up by local and state politicians, union bosses, and the fiercely nativist press—most infamously, by the San Francisco Chronicle, which seized on the issue to gain an edge in its cutthroat circulation battle with its archrival, the Examiner. The Chronicle’s editorial pages returned to the subject almost daily, shouting (for example) that “The danger to American institutions from the flood of Japs must be apparent to every thinking man.” “Brown men,” it warned, were “an evil in the public schools,” and a “menace to American women.” A headline on March 1, 1905, read: “Unclean Practices of Orient Bringing Degradation and Debasement in the Train of Unrestricted Immigration.” An editorial four days later: “Japan sent us not her fittest, but her unfittest; she has sent us the scum that has collected up on the surface of the boiling waters of her new national life, the human waste material for which she herself can find no use.”

  Post-earthquake San Francisco was a desperate and lawless place, in which local authorities could do little to stop a surge of looting, robbery, armed thuggery, and mob violence. San Francisco’s Japantown (Nihonjinmachi) had been devastated in the earthquake, and thousands of homeless refugees were forced to spread out into adjacent neighborhoods in search of shelter, bringing them into collision with hostile whites who had also been burned out of their homes. City officials and the police were suspected of tacitly encouraging an anti-Japanese pogrom. Japanese were chased and beaten in the streets; rocks were thrown through the windows of their homes; and Japanese-owned businesses were plastered with signs warning, “White men and women: Patronize your own race.”

  Japan had donated $246,000 in disaster relief for the stricken city, exceeding the combined relief pledges of every other nation in the world. When a prominent Japanese seismologist arrived from Tokyo to lend his expertise to the rebuilding effort, he was waylaid in the streets and beaten by a mob.

  Events in San Francisco received headline coverage in the Tokyo press, and some of the more flamboyant broadsheets called for the recently victorious Japanese navy to stage a rescue mission. “It will be easy work to awake the United States from her dream of obstinacy when one of our great Admirals appears suddenly on the other side of the Pacific,” the Hochi Shinbun declared on October 22, 1906; “We should be ready to strike the Devil’s head with an iron hammer for the sake of the world’s civilization.” The government of Japan lodged angry protests with the Roosevelt administration, claiming that the measures enacted in California were a breach of the Japanese-American treaty of 1894. Secretary of State Elihu Root suspected that Japan had held secret talks with the government of Colombia to establish a base on the South American mainland. A New York Sun correspondent based in Tokyo told his editors that Japanese public opinion was not easily aroused by events so far from home, “but the exclusion of Japanese children from the public schools of California cuts this child-loving nation to the quick.”

  President Roosevelt was disgusted,
not only because the Californians had embarrassed the nation by their troglodytic behavior, but because most of the state’s representatives in Congress had opposed the president’s naval buildup. As the president saw it, the state’s leaders were foolishly provoking Japan “while at the same time refusing to take steps to defend themselves against the formidable foe whom they are ready with such careless insolence to antagonize.” Roosevelt sent a cabinet member to San Francisco with hopes of persuading the School Board to reverse its decision. When the overture was spurned, Harper’s Weekly published a cartoon on its cover depicting the city of San Francisco as a mischievous-looking boy with a slingshot, and suggested that Japan should open a school of manners for white Californians. “The feeling on the Pacific slope,” the president wrote Lodge, “is as foolish as if conceived by the mind of a Hottentot.”

  In a fervently worded passage of more than 1,200 words in his Annual Message to Congress, Roosevelt denounced the segregation order as a “wicked absurdity” enacted by a “small body of wrongdoers.” The Japanese, he declared, “have won in a single generation the right to stand abreast of the foremost and most enlightened peoples of Europe and America; they have won on their own merits and by their own exertions the right to treatment on a basis of full and frank equality.” He added: “We have as much to learn from Japan as Japan has to learn from us; and no nation is fit to teach unless it is also willing to learn.”

  The president’s dogged diplomacy led to the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of 1908, in which the San Franciscans agreed to rescind the segregation order in exchange for a Japanese promise to limit emigration of its citizens to the United States. But negotiations took place amid a series of sensational war scares. Digging was proceeding at a furious pace in Panama, but the canal would not be completed until 1914: in the meantime the main fleet of the U.S. Navy could reach San Francisco only by a grueling 13,000-mile journey around Cape Horn. The Japanese fleet at Yokohama lay just half that distance away. Would it strike now, when the canal was unfinished and the American navy powerless to intervene? Rumors flourished, especially in the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst—a Japanese fleet had been sighted offshore; a secret Japanese base was under construction in the Aleutians; Japanese envoys were seeking a hostile alliance with Mexico; local Japanese women had been enlisted as “breeding machines” in a slow but sure demographic conquest, so that their offspring would eventually engulf the region. Dime store novels imagined the “Yellow Peril,” a lurid scenario in which Asian hordes descended on the west coast and pushed the whites east of the Rockies.

  Roosevelt had done his best to defuse the crisis, and his efforts had not been entirely unsuccessful, but there was no doubt in his mind that Japan posed a threat. “I had been doing my best to be polite to the Japanese,” he later wrote, “and had finally become uncomfortably conscious of a very, very slight undertone of veiled truculence in their communications in connection with things that happened on the Pacific Slope; and I finally made up my mind that they thought I was afraid of them.” More than the security of California was at stake. Hawaii was not much closer to North America than it was to Japan, and it was home to a large and growing community of immigrant Japanese. Guam was unfortified and defenseless, lying 5,800 miles from San Francisco and a quarter of that distance from Japan. The Philippines, an archipelago of some 7,000 islands with a combined coastline as long as that of the entire United States, lay right on Japan’s southern doorstep. The Japanese navy could easily blockade Manila, wipe out the feeble U.S. Asiatic Fleet stationed there, and land an invasion force at any one of a thousand beachheads on the main island of Luzon. “The Philippines form our heel of Achilles,” Roosevelt told War Secretary William Howard Taft in August 1907, and the analogy was fitting: every candid strategic-military study concluded that the islands would quickly fall to a determined Japanese naval-amphibious attack.

  Confounded by the various complications and contradictions, and hoping to keep a lid on the Japanese crisis until the work in Panama was completed, Roosevelt devised a plan to send the main U.S. battle fleet on a goodwill tour around the world. If a war broke out with Japan, he told Lodge, the navy “would have a good deal to find out in the way of sending the fleet to the Pacific.” A practice run would allow the navy to discover “all failures, blunders, and shortcomings in time of peace and not in time of war.” The Great White Fleet (so-called because the ships were painted white) would comprise sixteen battleships and a large number of auxiliary vessels, manned by about 18,000 men. It was a technically and logistically demanding exercise, and it was also unprecedented—no nation had ever dispatched its entire navy to circumnavigate the globe.

  On December 16, 1907, the fleet departed from Hampton Roads with crews manning the rails and bands striking up tunes, and fired a 21-gun salute in honor of Roosevelt, who watched from the presidential yacht, the Mayflower. “Did you ever see such a fleet?” Roosevelt asked. “Isn’t it magnificent? Oughtn’t we all feel proud?” The long line of ships stretched for seven miles across the sea. They rounded Cape Horn and touched at several ports of call in the Pacific, including Yokohama, Japan. In Tokyo, the American officers were received by the emperor at the Imperial Palace. In a voyage of fourteen months, the fleet touched at six continents, returning by the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean. In an American newspaper cartoon, one of the battleships was done up as a likeness of Roosevelt himself. The president’s face was represented as her bow, with the brim of his Rough Rider’s hat as her foredeck; his open mouth was swallowing the advancing sea. The fleet returned from its 46,000-mile voyage in the days just before Roosevelt left office. Again he watched from the deck of the Mayflower, and again he received 21 guns from each ship. In his speech, given afterward on the flagship, he congratulated the officers and men: “This is the first battle fleet that has ever circumnavigated the globe. Those who perform the feat again can but follow in your footsteps.” The cruise of the White Fleet, said Roosevelt, demonstrated that “the Pacific was as much our home waters as the Atlantic.”

  IN JANUARY 1914, the first ship passed through the Panama Canal. In July of that year, Europe plunged into the Great War. In December, Alfred Thayer Mahan died in his bed, aged seventy-four.

  The future U.S. admirals of the Pacific War had reached their late twenties and early thirties. They had risen to the rank of lieutenant or lieutenant commander. Having already been marked as officers destined for high command, they were sent off to the Naval War College in Newport, where they would study, debate, and plan for prospective future naval wars. Scenarios were played out on tabletop game boards, with model ships to represent the contending fleets and throws of the dice to decide the fortunes of battle. The place was said to be haunted by the ghost of Mahan, and the games assumed that the forthcoming war would climax in a clash of battleships in the western Pacific, in one of Mahan’s archetypal “decisive battles.”

  “War Plan Orange,” the American playbook for a war in the Pacific, envisioned that “Orange” (code name for Japan) would strike suddenly and with devastating success, overrunning the Philippines, Guam, and possibly Hawaii. The small U.S. Asiatic Fleet, based at Subic Bay in the Philippines, would destroy its shore facilities and all supplies it could not carry away, and flee to safer waters. Within a week of the war’s breaking out, the main battle force of the U.S. Navy, probably stationed on the east coast, would raise steam and put to sea in a grand odyssey of conquest and liberation. Passing through the Panama Canal, it would push on across the interminable wastes of the central Pacific, pausing to attack and seize Japanese-held atolls along the way. Arriving months later in the western Pacific, the fleet would hunt down and annihilate the main battle fleet of the Japanese navy. The victorious American fleet would blockade Japan’s home islands and throttle its trade, forcing capitulation.

  The flaws in the plan were plain to see. Roosevelt’s White Fleet had proven only that a fleet of battleships could sail around the world in a peaceable goodwill tour. To repeat the per
formance in wartime, in hopes of vanquishing the formidable Japanese fleet in its home waters, was a different prospect. Under optimal conditions, a battleship of that era might sustain a long-distance cruising speed of 10 or 12 knots. A chain of well-stocked and properly defended fuel stations would have to be maintained along the way. As the weeks at sea wore on, wear and tear would accumulate and crew efficiency and morale could be expected to deteriorate. Drawing closer to the war zone, the fleet would need to remain hypervigilant to the danger of surprise attack. At any moment, with little or no warning, the officers and men might be called upon to fight and win the all-determining battle for which they had traveled so far. They would be pitted against an enemy fleet that had been biding its time, lying in wait within easy reach of its major bases, with officers and crew rested and ready and ships in good repair. War Plan Orange seemed to recap the dismal career of the Russian fleet under Admiral Rozhestvensky in 1905, and who could say with confidence that the result would not be the same?

  Only a handful of iconoclasts guessed that airplanes and submarines would rewrite all the rules of naval warfare, that by the late 1930s battleships would be worse than useless (because of the money and manpower they diverted), and that Mahan’s three dogmas were sinking rapidly into obsolescence. The First World War revealed glimpses of the future. The German U-boats proved that submarines could menace seaborne supply lines. The war in Europe hinted at the possibilities of airpower, and by the end of the war the British had demonstrated that airplanes could take off from and land on ships. Jutland, the largest naval battle of the conflict, neither bore out Mahan’s doctrines nor completely refuted them. But none of the lessons of the First World War could break the power of the battleship cult, whose acolytes dominated the ranks of all the world’s major navies until the opening salvos of the next war.