The Pacific War

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THE many difficulties which face Japan today, both at home and abroad, stem from a fundamental crisis in grand strategy. The fact is that Japan’s resources and manpower, her social organization and military indoctrination, have been prepared for a type of war which we are not going to fight.

Japan prepared for wars of aggression. In the interval between her immediate conquests and her proposed expansion, she expected nothing more than weak and desperate assaults on her island outposts by navies constituted in the traditional manner. When Japanese leaders claimed that it would cost us a million men to take the Marshall Islands, they were not bluffing. If our knowledge of amphibious tactics and the range of our battle fleets had remained static after 1941, they would have been right. We should have paid the price of Tarawa at every island beachhead without the satisfaction of taking the islands. In this way Japan’s theory of “bleeding operations” might have worked.

The passing of naval bases

Why are we not fighting Japan’s kind of war? In the first place, we are independent of naval bases. When the Washington treaties were signed, the assumption was that war could not occur between Japan and the United States, because neither had bases near enough to the other to permit their fleets to meet. The operative range of battleships was then around 2500 miles.

But today we have a battle fleet that can circle the globe twice without stopping at any base at all. Accompanied by its train of varied craft — ammunition ships, tankers, tenders, hospital, supply, and repair ships — the modern fleet can strike at long distances and keep on striking. Japan has been unable to produce this sort of second navy upon which the fighting craft can depend.

Tremendous technological developments make this new kind of fleet possible. New methods of construction and new steel alloys provide increased storage capacity and greater protection without sacrificing speed. We have floating drydocks that can house battleships.

When we took Kwajalein, the smoke of battle had hardly cleared before the second invasion began, headed by bulldozers, steam shovels, and floating cranes. Along with these came everything from refrigerated foods to prefabricated houses. After attacking Truk, five carrier groups refueled at sea and proceeded on to the Marianas. The fleet has conquered the problem of naval bases by taking them with it.

Every Japanese sailor has read Mahan, but Mahan did not provide for contingencies such as these. The Japanese, for their part, now discover that their own naval bases are useless if there is no navy to defend them. We can bomb Truk at the same time that we are bombarding Palau. The multitude of aircraft carriers and the technical superiority of our planes appear to have destroyed our fear of land-based planes.

Attrition and starvation

The Japanese Navy is in difficulties. The dilemma of whether to use available resources to build ships or planes is a very real one. It is created by the successful operation of our submarines and our air forces against the supply lines upon which Japan depends. Ships cannot be protected without planes — but how can planes be built unless ships bring the raw materials from Southeast Asia?

Japan is not bleeding us; we are bleeding Japan. By a series of brilliantly executed outflanking movements, we have isolated large numbers of Japanese troops. It is estimated that 65,000 were cut off on New Ireland and New Britain, 25,000 on Bougainville, and thousands in the Marshall Islands. Here they are left to starve or surrender.

A large part of the Japanese submarine fleet is engaged in the expensive task of bringing in supplies to isolated garrisons or in evacuating key personnel. The effects on morale, both of submarine crews, to whom this is a much more dangerous operation than combat, and to troops, who see the state to which the Navy has been reduced and resent the evacuation of key personnel, is obvious.

Foreseeing their difficulties when the tide of battle turned against them last year, the Japanese began to build wooden ships of between 100 and 250 tons. These are no answer to the basic problem of supplying the outposts. Such vessels are difficult to construct with unskilled native labor; they demand a high proportion of trained crews in relation to the weight carried; they are uneconomical to load and unload; and they form easy targets for the fiftycaliber machine guns of American planes.

No wonder Japan has to exert every effort to recruit Japanese and native seamen, as well as to raise their morale. It is something new to find the Japanese press discussing the security and living conditions of seamen. The most tangible improvement is likely to be in the way of awards, certificates of commendation, and the multiplication of ceremonies in honor of merit. So long as Japan is losing more ships than she can replace, material improvement for her seamen is not very likely.

Japan knuckles down to Russia

The Soviet Union was among the first to perceive and to profit from Japan’s difficulties and changed strategic position. The Soviet-Japanese agreement on Sakhalin, and the Fisheries Convention of March 30, demonstrated dramatically the diplomatic isolation and weakness of Japan. The government took great pains to explain and to justify the agreement to their own people, and stressed heavily the complex procedure, involving even the Emperor, by which such agreements had to be ratified.

The renewal of the Fisheries Convention of 1928 for five years and the payment of five million rubles by the Soviet are as nothing to the other terms of the Convention. This agreement annulled the RussoJapanese Convention of 1925, granting Japan oil concessions in Northern Sakhalin. Those parts of the Treaty of Portsmouth (1905) relating to Japan’s fishing rights were modified. Among other things, the Japanese are no longer allowed to fish in or conduct aerial navigation over Eastern Kamchatka waters for the duration of the war.

The coal and oil production of Northern Sakhalin was not a large proportion of the total used by Japan, but at times like these, any loss is serious. The limitation on fishing rights can hardly please the Japanese. In 1925 the Japanese worked 88 per cent of the fishing lots. By 1939, this had been reduced to 40 per cent. Now it is even less. At the same time the rental has steadily gone up. Russians have more and more replaced Japanese seasonal labor, and Soviet fishermen have been supplanting Japanese fishermen.

The Soviet press has not refrained from pointing out to Japan the reasons for the change in her bargaining position. They are simplicity itself — the change in the position of the Soviet Union and the turn of events in the Pacific war. Pravda and Izvestia reminded the Japanese of the time when they thought that Hitler’s blitzkrieg in Russia would be successful, and that Germany, as an ally of Japan, attacked the Soviet Union only two months after the signing of the Soviet-Japanese non-aggression pact.

Izvestia’s comment to the effect that the new agreement showed appreciation of the military situation of Russia’s allies in the Pacific, whatever its other implications, is good nerve war against the Japanese. It is significant that Japan’s militarists have tried to put some of the responsibility on the shoulders of the Emperor. This, presumably, puts the matter beyond the realm of criticism.

The attack on India

The Japanese may be in difficulties, but they still have plenty of fight left in them. The invasion of India follows the usual Japanese pattern of seeking to destroy our preparations for assault on Tokyo by well-timed and daring action. Among other things, the invasion serves to remind us that Japan is a continental as well as a naval power. The Burma fighting from our side is a highly coördinated process of encirclement.

By using imaginative and daring tactics, which cost the life of General Wingate, we are trying to lop off large sections of the Japanese garrisons in Burma and to reopen some kind of land route to our ever growing bases in China. Japanese stockpiles of arms and ammunition in Burma must be replenished mainly by the long supply route beginning at Bangkok, stretching by rail to Moulmein, then to Rangoon and up the Irawaddy. Allied planes have been pounding this communication strip for months.

Politics on the march

The attempt to invade India and to cut the AssamBengal railway must be looked upon therefore as a desperate venture in which political motives are even more important than military. Here the greatest political triumphs, or boosts, could be made in return for the least expenditure of effort.

Home audiences were given the cheering news that Indians welcome liberating Japanese armies, as an antidote perhaps to the fears already aroused by careful descriptions, in home broadcasts, of the various types of American planes now in China. These are now estimated by Tokyo as between 1000 and 2000 planes. If our Burma operations meet with reasonable success, the antidotes to this antidote should be dropping over Tokyo long before the end of the year.

It certainly has been the Japanese intention to exploit what differences there might be between China and her allies on the one hand, and between us and the British on the other. In view of this purpose, public discussion has its dangers, and certainly no one wishes to provide ammunition for the enemy. But the time is rapidly approaching when we shall have to clarify to ourselves and to others the part we think we are playing in the continental war in Asia.

The Chinese, usually the first to announce their policies, have already taken up the question of how to deal with puppets serving the Japanese. The Ta Kung Pao argues that such puppets must be relentlessly punished, and that plans should be made to punish all traitors. This much is simple, but there are apparently three grades of puppets: those who have deliberately betrayed their country; those whose crimes are of a secondary nature; and those who have been forced to aid the Japanese invaders. These last, it is argued, should be pardoned but deprived of civil rights.

It is going to be hard to prove whether a man was forced to serve the Japanese or willingly became a puppet, but the tone of the approaches shows that the Chinese recognize the seriousness of the problem. There is particular venom against those in high places who joined the Japanese to serve their personal ends.

The Ta Kung Pao merely raises the question, and with it comes the whole question of the attitude of conquered people and the further question of how to clear up the political wreckage of years of enemy rule. The possibilities for bloodletting are enormous. It is well to establish now the principle that even a long-suffering and righteous indignation can be expressed through legal channels.

Where do we stand?

Our traditional policy in Asia has been to insist upon a free hand. We have refused alliance with anyone, but have broken down any alliances, such as the Anglo-Japanese, when they seemed too powerful for us to handle.

Is this going to be our line for the future? If so, where are we going to throw our weight? Will it be with the British, who are apparently bent on recovering their former position in the Far East? Will it be with the Chinese, to whom vast territories and responsibilities will be restored, but who, for many years, will be the industrial Cinderella of Asia? Or will it be with the Russians, whose voice in Far Eastern affairs will be ignored at our peril.

When the war is over, the two greatest Far Eastern peoples, from a military-industrial point of view, will be no match for the three great powders. How are we going to make sure that this area does not become the breeding ground of further wars?

Certainly it will not be enough merely to extend our Pearl Harbors to the China coast and to surround a defeated Japan with guns and fortifications. This effort would merely make it a little easier to start the next war. Somehow or other we must act in such a way as to ensure a peaceful Asia. It is either peace or police — and no country would tire of policing sooner than the United States.

This is where the trouble begins. How can we ensure peace, not in terms of military security, but in terms of the inner development of Far Eastern peoples. Do we know them well enough?

The British, with a deep sense of responsibility, have their ideas of how to organize the Far East. The Russians have also done plenty of thinking about it — as we shall discover, perhaps, when the fate of Korea approaches solution and the many thousands of Koreans who live in the wartime provinces show an interest in their homeland.

We have done some thinking about China, to be sure, and we have strong views about the demilitarization of Japan, but we have no territorial or political anchors on the Asiatic mainland. Unless there is some kind of international organization, therefore, covering the whole of Eastern Asia and the Southwest Pacific, we shall have no influence in Asia (except, perhaps, for the Philippines) comparable to that of our allies.

By force of circumstances, we are driven to the closest possible understanding with China as the basis of political influence in Asia. To achieve such cooperation it is not enough to dissociate ourselves from the political ambitions and methods of our allies while giving full military assistance in Burma, Malaya, and Indonesia, and probably French Indo-China. We must think out our position long before the fighting is over and the real political maneuvering begins, for the problems of Europe will look simple compared with those of Asia.