British and Japanese Military Leadership in the Far Eastern War, 1941-45

Brian Bond, Kyoichi Tachikawa, Brian Bond, Kyoichi Tachikawa

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135766238
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Japanese History

Some sixty years after the Far Eastern War ended, this innovative new collection brings together five distinguished UK-based scholars and five from Japan to reappraise their respective country's leadership in the Malaya and Burma campaigns. This leadership is analyzed on various levels, ranging from the grand strategic to operational.

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BRITAIN’S GRAND STRATEGY AND ANGLO-AMERICAN LEADERSHIP IN THE WAR AGAINST JAPAN

Saki Dockrill

Introduction

The war in the Far East—more commonly known as the Pacific War—began with a series of Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, the Malayan peninsula, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and islands in the Central Pacific. The Second World War suddenly spread to the other side of Eurasia, spilling into the huge Pacific Ocean. Hearing of Japan’s December 1941 onslaught, one official in the British Foreign Office noted in his diary: ‘We never thought she would attack us and America at once. She must have gone mad.’ In Australia, a newspaper reported it as the ‘Gravest hour in the country’. Panic engulfed the United States: people in the West coast claimed that ‘Japanese planes had been over San Francisco on the night of 7 December’, while in Washington, DC, several senators claimed that they heard that enemy planes were only ‘150 miles from Washington’. The White House’s response was one of relief: ‘the indecision was over, and a crisis had come in a way that would unite all our people’.¹Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, reacted similarly: when he retired to bed on the day of Pearl Harbor, he said ‘so we had won after all’. The entry of the United States on the side of Britain increased Churchill’s confidence in achieving victory in the global conflict. As he recalled, ‘Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese they would be ground to powder.’²

The United States played the leading role in defeating Japan, and, because of this, analysis of Britain’s strategy has tended to be overshadowed or neglected by Japanese and other Western writers. Moreover, how Britain developed its Far Eastern strategy prior to, and after, the outbreak of the Pacific War was often misunderstood. It is sometimes argued that Britain greatly underestimated Japan’s military threat and as a result lost its Eastern Empire, or that Churchill ‘belittled’ the importance of Asia and the Pacific. Alternatively, Britain was already a spent force, and the ‘special relationship’ forged between Churchill and the US President, Franklin Roosevelt, helped Britain to win victory in the war against Japan.³ This paper intends to demonstrate that none of these views are entirely correct.

As Britain was a global actor, with vast strategic and trading interests across the world, its grand strategy in war and peace was never formulated in a vacuum, or on a single regional basis. In order to examine Britain’s strategy at highest levels during the Pacific War, it is important first to assess where Britain’s security interests lay, how they were prioritised during the inter-war period and how they were affected by the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939–41. Secondly, by the time Japan attacked South-East Asia, Britain had formulated a clear strategy about how to prosecute the war on the global level, with the Asian-Pacific war constituting only part of Britain’s military undertaking. Although Britain became part of a coalition, with the Anglo-US alliance at the core, this did not in the final analysis compel Britain to change its priorities. How did Britain overcome its initial differences with the United States, and how did the European war impact on the Anglo-US strategy in the Pacific War? Third, the China factor remained a divisive issue in the Anglo-US alliance in their approaches to the war in South-East Asia. The chapter examines how the China factor affected the timing and nature of Britain’s war strategy for Burma. As the end of the European war approached, Britain took a serious interest in participating in the final campaign in the war against Japan. The final section discusses Britain’s strategy for the defeat of Japan.

Grand strategy

The word ‘strategy’ is often used in parallel with ‘tactics’. According to Carl von Clausewitz, tactics are ‘the art of using troops in battle’, whereas strategy is the ‘art of using battles to win the war’. However, with the passage of time, both words require modification, as they tend to be used in a much wider context than a purely military one, such as ‘economic strategy’, or ‘a strategy for peace’. ‘Grand strategy’ is more than just strategy in that it embraces both wider goals and long-term goals, that is, the art of managing and controlling national resources to ensure that national interests of all kinds—economic, military, political and cultural (values and beliefs)—are maintained at a minimum cost.⁴ National leaders must have the ability to integrate a nation’s economic, political and military needs into a grand strategy which will survive not only war but also into the peace. Grand strategy is the art of making both means and ends meet, and of balancing priorities to achieve the nation’s requirements.

Britain’s grand strategy is no exception, and it was developed in line with the British way in warfare, which was broadly characterised by its preference for economic warfare and for coalition fighting. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this peripheral strategy allowed Britain to maximise its strengths. Britain deployed its naval superiority to blockade Continental enemies, destroy their fleet and launch raids against the enemy’s homeland and overseas possession. Traditionally reluctant to send British troops to the European Continent, Britain was instead able to employ European mercenary troops, rely on the forces of its allies or use imperial forces under Britain’s leadership.⁵ Britain’s diverse worldwide trade and strategic interests meant that Britain needed stability on the European Continent and tried to prevent any single power from becoming so dominant as to upset the balance of power there. After the mid-nineteenth century, Britain preferred more subtle, more indirect and less expensive ways of extending Britain’s power and influence, through free trade or treaties, rather than building a formal empire in a closed imperial economic bloc. The so-called ‘British Empire’ had never been a static or unified entity but it retained an amorphous existence consisting of colonies, protectorates, dependent territories and self-governing dominions. Britain’s empire was largely the outcome rather than the end of Britain’s external activities, and Britain had never considered its empire as ‘defining’ its security, strategic or trade interests.⁶ The world was then Britain’s oyster, and its empire was the manifestation of Britain’s predominance.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Britain’s fortune began to change, as the spread of the industrial revolution to the Continent and the United States began to erode Britain’s supreme naval strength and its wealth. The first break with the traditional grand strategy came during the First World War–while it was still a coalition warfare, Britain had been forced to send large numbers of troops to the Continent, to which Indian and Dominion forces contributed significantly. The end of the First World War brought Britain added responsibilities for enforcing peace in Europe as a result of the defeat of Germany, and also in the Middle East as a result of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Altogether, Britain’s relative power increased because its rivals either disappeared or became regional powers. The United States had by then surpassed Britain in its economic and industrial strength, but Washington retreated into isolation after the First World War. As a result of all this Britain remained the only global power, even though its economic health had been weakened as a result of the recent war.⁷ Britain then came to rely on its empire more for its trade and as the source of manpower in case of Continental and overseas crises.

After the First World War, the Dominions (self-governing states within the British Empire) were more reluctant to sacrifice their manpower to meet the security interests of the mother country, although they expected Britain to protect their security against the growing Japanese threat in the Asian-Pacific theatre. Prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, Australia and New Zealand spent less than 1 per cent of their GNP on defence, while Britain was spending five times as much in relation to its GNP. India, previously Britain’s vital source of manpower, began to oppose the use of its forces outside India, and after 1933 the British government had to pay for enlisted Indian forces deployed outside the subcontinent, making the imperial defence force much more expensive. With British society becoming more democratic after the 1918 Reform Act, and in the wake of the costly First World War, the British public demanded a reduction of the military burden and an increase in the provision of social security.⁸

These adverse circumstances did not immediately affect Britain’s security interests per se, as the lessening of military threats after the First World War allowed Britain to adopt, in 1919, the Ten Year Rule, assuming that there would be no war on the Continent for ten years. Successive governments kept defence expenditures to a minimum. Britain monitored increasing Japanese and US naval capabilities which might eventually challenge Britain’s naval power in the Far East. In 1919, Admiral Lord Jellicoe advocated the construction of a naval base in Singapore, but the cost was then regarded as too high to be worth proceeding with. However, in June 1921 Britain announced the construction of the Singapore base as a means of deterring a possible Japanese naval threat. The fleet could be sent to the base in an emergency. Aware of the United States’ potential power, Britain had by then discounted the possibility of an exhausting and costly Anglo-American war. Instead it was decided that Britain’s security lay in cooperation with the United States. South Africa and Canada also warned the British that maintaining the Anglo-Japanese alliance would harm its relations with the United States and the Empire. The Anglo-Japanese alliance lapsed when the five major naval powers, including Japan, the USA and Britain, concluded the Washington naval treaty in 1922.⁹ Churchill recalled that ‘it was with sorrow’ that he supported the end of the alliance with Japan from which ‘we derived both strength and advantage’, but that, ‘as we had to choose between Japanese and American friendship, I had no doubt what our course should be’.¹⁰ A semblance of stability was also restored to Europe by the mid-1920s. The British government decided in 1928 to extend the Ten Year Rule on a rolling basis, and Britain postponed a number of defence projects, including the construction of the Singapore base. Germany was still bound by the Locarno and Versailles Treaties, and the post-1925 climate of British—French—German rapprochement would preclude Japan from allying with any major European power. Up to 1933 Britain persisted in the belief that Japan was unlikely to become an actual threat to Britain, while the Foreign Office was then more concerned about the growth of Chinese communism and its effect on the British presence in Shanghai.¹¹ During the early part of the inter-war period, Britain’s grand strategy in peace sought to deter possible enemies by diplomacy and by the conclusion of treaties, and it was certainly most reluctant to start preparing militarily against potential or imagined threats.

Prioritising Britain’s global security interests, 1931–41

After 1931, the international system was rapidly changing for the worse. Japan expanded into Manchuria, and created a Japanese puppet state, Manchukuo, withdrawing from the League of Nations in March 1933. Tokyo also walked out of the London Naval Conference on 15 January 1936. At the end of 1933, Germany, now led by Adolf Hitler, had also withdrawn from both the disarmament conference and the League, and these two powers were to be joined by Benito Mussolini’s Italy in November 1937 to form the Anti-Comintern Pact, which, in September 1940, was developed into the Tripartite Axis Pact. The time had come for Britain to prioritise its security interests.

In 1934, the newly established Defence Requirements Committee chaired by Sir Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet Secretary, concluded that Germany, by virtue of its geographical proximity and its economic potential, was to be regarded as the ‘greater adversary’ than Japan. For the defence of the Eastern Empire, the Committee recommended the completion of the Singapore base (its construction had resumed in the previous year), but it hoped that Japan could, and should, be pacified by diplomatic means.¹² Accordingly, in the British rearmament programme, air defence was given the first priority, followed by the protection of seaborne trade and the defence of the Empire, while the expeditionary force came a poor third. It was also important to strike the right balance between defence and economy. Between 1934 and 1937, Neville Chamberlain, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, tried to ensure that rearmament did not affect the civilian sector of the economy or erode living standards. In fact Britain was spending only 3 per cent of its gross national product on defence in 1935, rising eventually to about 18 per cent by 1939, while German expended 8 per cent in 1935, increasing to 23 per cent prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. Japanese rearmament began in earnest in 1937, and by 1940 nearly half of the national budget was absorbed by military expenditures. This meant that in Japan by 1941 no oil or petrol was allocated for civilian use (cars had to be driven by coal-fired steam engines), while essential foodstuffs and goods (coal, sugar, matches, rice, salt and cotton) were severely rationed.¹³

Britain’s priorities further sharpened during 1939–41. In June 1940, France surrendered (and Britain lost its only major ally in the European war), while Italy joined in the war on the side of the Axis powers and Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941. All of these factors impinged upon Britain’s ability to prepare for the defence of Singapore, an issue which had been regarded as urgent by Australia and New Zealand for some time. The Royal Air Force had been built up to attack Germany, not to defend the Eastern Empire. To keep the new ally, the Soviet Union, in the war was another important consideration in the context of the war in Europe, as Britain initially under-estimated Moscow’s military capabilities in the wake of the Great Purges of 1937–38. Churchill was, despite his long-standing hatred of the Bolsheviks, determined to give ‘all encouragement and any help we can spare to the Russians following [the] principle that Hitler is the foe we have to beat’. In September 1941, Britain’s precious fighters were sent to Russia instead of to Malaya and Singapore.¹⁴

Perhaps the most important obstacle to Britain’s Singapore strategy was the combination of France’s defeat and Italy’s entry on the side of the Axis. The former made it easier for Japan to expand into Indochina, which made war in the East more probable, while depriving Britain of France’s naval strength to help contain Italy in the Mediterranean. Although the Singapore base had been finally completed in 1938, the British fleet was now concentrated in the Mediterranean. With an eye to the Italian threat, the Chiefs of Staff maintained in November 1939 that ‘the sea route through the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to the East, was Britain’s “primary” strategic interest in that theatre, followed by the Anglo-Iranian oilfields and the Indian Northwest Frontier’.¹⁵ Italy’s entry into the war threatened the second pillar of Britain’s security. The defence of the Eastern Empire lagged even further behind. Britain’s Singapore strategy was further undermined by the United States’ unwillingness to defend Singapore and Malaya or help Britain in any way to protect the British Empire in the East.¹⁶

Between 1939 and 1941, Britain’s security interests were prioritised, with the defence of Britain against a possible German invasion as the top priority. Within the British Empire, the defence of the Mediterranean/Middle East came first, followed by the defence of the Eastern Empire. Despite prodding from the Pacific dominions, Britain could not give a firm guarantee to defend Australia and New Zealand in the event of a major crisis in the East. Japan had in any case been engaged in war in China after 1937. Britain, sympathetic towards China’s plight but primarily because of its trade and strategic interests in Shanghai and Hong Kong, sought to assist China. Of course, Britain had little interest in Manchuria, which, it believed, had never been an integral part of China. Many of the British leaders had little objection to Manchuria being governed by Japan which would have the obvious merit, in London’s eyes, of diverting Japan from expanding into the Pacific.¹⁷ In any case Britain was not involved in the detailed US-Japanese negotiations prior to the outbreak of the Pacific War. Britain regarded the question of resolving the Japanese-Chinese conflict as primarily the United States’ affair.¹⁸ In the wider contex...