The Road to Pearl Harbor

...Bitterness over the settlement, Howarth says, left a mistrust in Japan for all future Western-sponsored diplomatic arrangements...

...Rather, they concluded, as British historian Stephen Howarth writes in this excellent chronicle, that without a navy "Japan would never know security again...

...Until Commodore Perry arrived in 1853, the island nation saw little reason to maintain a fleet or even coastal lighthouses...

...Howarth's subtitle accurately describes his book as a drama...

...The attitude was instilled in them at Etajima, Japan's Annapolis, and it disappeared only when the Navy itself was transformed into a small coast guard...

...The pact had anchored Japan, albeit loosely, to the Western world...

...The sole defense against this form of attack is a battle fleet of sufficient power to sweep the outer seas and make it impossible for the enemy to send out his aircraft-carrying vessels...

...Compounding the resentment over the territory's loss was a five-power agreement on naval strength drawn up at the same meeting, largely thanks to British and American lobbying...

...The Washington Conference, as British Admiral of the Fleet Lord Chat-field wrote some years afterward, had turned " a proven friend...

...its theme is an examination of why nations go to war...

...To the Japanese mind, war with the United States began in July 1941, when President Roosevelt embargoed oil shipments and seized Japanese assets in the U.S...

...And in 1937, Yamamoto himself was heard to remark: "Military people always carry history around with them in the shape of old campaigns...

...another—physically one of the largest, militarily one of the strongest...

...In their pathetic way, the kamikazes symbolized both the chief deficiency and the greatest strength of the Imperial Navy...

...into a potential and powerful foe...

...Ironically, too, some of the Imperial Navy's highest officials had pointed out its critical weaknesses well before 1941...

...An indignant London demanded compensation...

...He followed this with what became known as "the Togo turn," a 360 degree arc that placed his fleet parallel to and slightly ahead of the Russians...

...With the cable cut, and the enforced naval inferiority a perennial insult to national pride, the Japanese were set to drift in the currents of fanaticism that marked the 1930s at home and in Europe...

...Kagoshima became the Hiroshima of its day, but the lesson the Japanese drew from it was not the wisdom of disarmament...

...In World War II, one of Japan's motives, certainly, was fear of overpopulation and of being cut off from natural resources, which are close to nonexistent on the home islands...

...In hindsight, the fighting at Midway on June 4-6, 1942, was the critical defeat for the Japanese, who lost four carriers, a heavy cruiser, 322 aircraft, and, most irreplaceable, more than 5,000 highly trained seamen...

...But Japan's Admiral Togo was lying in wait off Tsushima, and upon sighting the Russian fleet he issued what Howarth describes as "the most celebrated signal in Japanese naval history: 'The fate of the Empire depends on this battle...

...Japan managed to hold on to the conquest at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, only to be forced out at the Washington Conference of 1921-22...

...After the loss of men and materiel suffered at Midway, such an effort became increasingly impossible—and America's superiority in the skies gave it a well-nigh insurmountable advantage for the rest of the war...

...Yet two months afterward, in the battle of Savo Island off Guadalcanal, the Imperial Navy delivered a heavy blow to the U.S., sinking four American heavy cruisers and killing 1,000 men in a stretch of water that was thenceforth nicknamed Ironbottom Bay...

...Whatever the case, Howarth writes, "The point that few British people, and still fewer Americans, had grasped was the emotional importance of the alliance to the Japanese...

...The rest of the world thought the Japanese churlish for demanding so much money, but the truth was the war had left them broke...

...If shrewd advice were always heeded in civil, military or personal affairs, the course of all human history, not merely World War II, would naturally be very different...

...was able to mobilize its superior resources fairly quickly, but only in 1944 did Washington thoroughly secure the supply lines to its island-hopping troops...

...As Yamamoto feared, the U.S...

...Reviewed by Matthew Stevenson Contributor, Washington "Post," "VanityFair," "Harper's" There might never have been an Imperial Japanese Navy, or at least not one strong enough to threaten world order, had the Western countries that ended Japan's isolation in the mid-19th century been less heavy-handed...

...Eleven of Tsar Nicholas' ships were sunk and six captured...

...In less than a century, the Imperial Navy, fighting for the Fascist axis, routed the British themselves from many of their prized colonial territories, and fought valiantly for some three and a half years against the mighty United States...

...It ended a year and a half later when the world's first large-scale sea battle since 1827 was waged off Tsushima, the hilly island that straddles the Korean Strait, Asia's English Channel...

...General Billy Mitchell, an early advocate of air power development, sank a22,440 ton battleship from the air in a prearranged test, a Japanese admiral named Nakamura warned: "It would be within the power of a superior naval opponent to strangle our commerce and cut off our supplies without sending a single ship into the Sea of Japan...

...Japan mostly got the upper hand in fighting that was extraordinarily ruthless...

...Sea power and air power have become synonymous terms...

...To this ongoing effort Stephen Howarth has contributed admirably...

...Although the Imperial Navy was ruined in the Pacific, it put up a stubborn struggle...

...As Howarthsays: "Indeed to die, especially for the Emperor, could literally be the apotheosis of the individual—a man could become not merely a spirit, but one of the gods...

...Feuding between the Japanese Navy and Army persisted through the Chinese conflict, but by 1941 the two branches had patched their differences sufficiently to agree on a Southern strategy...

...While the Russians were banned from both Korea and Manchuria, the Japanese demand for $600 million in reparations was rejected...

...After Japan refused, Rear Admiral Kuper of the Royal Navy decided that the best way to settle the dispute was to bombard Kagoshima, a coastal city of 180,000...

...The fighting began in February 1904 when the Japanese, reacting to spreading Russian influence in Korea, mounted a sneak attack on Port Arthur at the tip of Russian-controlled Manchuria's Kwantung Peninsula...

...The total number of Russian dead was 4,830...

...Instead, it turned east to the Solomons and New Guinea, with results that are well known...

...The Army, trained by the Prussians, refused to let the Navy, schooled by the British, pull the country into the alliance against the Kaiser...

...How-arth quotes a Diet member wondering aloud as early as 1920: "What is the purpose of [America's] colossal Navy if it is not to make her power supreme in every part of the Pacific...

...Japanese doctrine relied far too heavily on superbattleships...

...As far back as the early 1920s, after U.S...

...Just how powerful became apparent when Japan invaded China in 1937...

...In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, the leaders of the Land of the Rising Sun may have seized upon the Tsar's imperialism in the Far East as a pretext for a conflict that would secure their place among modern societies...

...In the peace treaty signed at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, however, the Western powers forced concessions from the Japanese negotiators that, once the news reached home, sparked riots in Tokyo's Hibiya Park...

...Indeed, the shoguns did not understand the difference between naval and merchant seamen, as is clear from Perry's demand that shipwrecked American civilians not be treated as prisoners of war...

...only three escaped into the mist...

...The fires ignited by the shells were fanned by the winds of a typhoon, and the town, a maze of bamboo and rice paper, burned to the ground...

...The incident was touched off when a group of Japanese horsemen killed a visiting Briton named Charles Richardson...

...The Imperial Navy's strong suit was the devotion of its men...

...The conclusion was acted upon with rare industriousness...

...In that first year Japan sank the British ships Repulse and Prince of Wales, took Hong Kong and Singapore, and might have changed the complexion of the entire War had it followed its advantage in the Indian Ocean by heading for the Red Sea...

...Howarth notes the likelihood that U.S...

...for the first six months or a year...

...Unable to survive without alternative sources of fu'el, and fearful that Washington would attack on its flank while it drove south to the Indonesian oil fields, Tokyo decided that its best option was to try to knock out the U.S...

...If the Japanese had been as farseeing as they were tenacious, they might have proved an even more fearsome foe...

...The only hope of offsetting this imbalance was to hit at U.S...

...The deficiency was in supporting air power...

...By May 27, 1905, Russia's Baltic squadron, under Admiral Rozhdestven-sky, had nearly completed an 8,000-mile voyage aimed at linking up with the remnants of the Pacific squadron at Vladivostok...

...The natural wealth of Indochina and Indonesia was needed to run the Empire's expansionist machinery, and there was a growing fear that if these lands were not conquered quickly, the United States might get to them first...

...If any place on earth was destined to be the site of a historic naval encounter, this was it...

...If I am told to fight regardless of the consequences," he said, " I shall run wild...

...To make matters still worse, Washington, no doubt foreseeing competition with Japan in the Pacific, insisted at this point that London break its alliance with Tokyo...

...Ten years later, following a tragic confrontation with the British, Japan firmly committed itself to becoming a sea power of the first rank...

...In the space of less than two generations, Japan built a fleet that, beyond simply defending its shores, could serve as a spearhead in a victorious war with Russia...

...but I have no confidence in the second or third years...

...This allotted Japan no more than three-fifths the number of capital ships that each of the two English-speaking powers fielded...

...And the Japanese were definitely in until the last call...

...in addition, 5,917 prisoners were taken...

...in response to the invasion of Indochina...

...The reality is that students of history can only tell us what might have been, and suggest what could be, by learning from what actually was...

...Japan lost six ships and 117 sailors...

...Still, not even Yamamoto was truly eager to take on the Americans, and by implication the British...

...The Russo-Japanese War," Howarth writes, "was a huge experiment, a true child of the 20th century: A small nation, new to modernity, challenged...

...aircraft carriers so severely that they could not be fully brought into play in major combat situations...

...Japan was neutral in World War I, a stance that reflected interservice rivalry more than pacific sentiments...

...During the Imperial Navy's approximately 50-year lifetime, Japan fought four countries (China was the fourth), and for reasons more complex than a plain desire to rule the Pacific...

...Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor...

...These battleships will be as useful to Japan in modern warfare as a samurai sword...

...Nevertheless, the Emperor's forces did take advantage of the international situation to seize the Chinese province of Shantung from the Germans in 1914...

...They carry obsolete weapons like swords and it is a long time before they realize they have become purely ornamental...

...At the famous "rape of Nanking," for instance, an estimated 20,000 Chinese woman and children were violated, and over 200,000 soldiers and civilians were killed—more than died at Hiroshima...

...Let every man do his utmost.' " Togo succeeded in crossing the Russian T—that is, maneuvering his fleet to a position where all its guns were directed against the line of enemy ships...

...In 1934, Tokyo gave notice that, beginning in 1936, it would no longer adhere to the 3:5:5 ratio...

...Appropriately, it also witnessed the first of the famed kamikaze attacks...

...Leyte was the last grand sea conflict of its kind, the end of an era that began at Tsushima...

...Not until the battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944 was Tokyo handed a defeat that could be called irreversible...

...intelligence broke Japan's diplomatic code, discovering that its bargaining position was weaker than had been supposed...

...The date was August 9, two days after United States Marines had hit the shore, and the land and sea struggle for Guadalcanal continued until February 1943...

...the wounded were never counted...

...The 2,500-square-mile island became the center of a high-stakes poker game, each country repeatedly raising the other...

...Tensions between the two nations were so high that Tokyo launched its attack allegedly in reprisal for the disappearance of a Japanese border guard during a trip to the bushes to relieve himself...

...The Japanese were aided by the failure of many Russian shells to explode throughout the long engagement...

...The message was delivered to Japan's fellow signatories by Admiral Yamamoto, who seven years later organized the attack on Pearl Harbor...

...America's longstanding suspicion of Japanese designs had been at least reciprocated every step of the way...