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WORLD
WAR II
W h a t I f. . .
…Japan Hadn’t Attacked Pearl Harbor?
By Mark Grimsley
J
apan never seriously considered
the following scenario—but might
have been wise to do so.
On December 15, 1941, naval and air
units of the empire of Japan suddenly
and deliberately attack the Dutch naval
squadron at Batavia in the Netherlands
East Indies (present-day Indonesia). They
destroy or damage all five cruisers and eight
destroyers, leaving fifty-five-year-old Vice
Adm. Conrad Emil Lambert Helfrich with
only twenty submarines and numerous but
frail torpedo boats with which to retaliate.
Shortly thereafter the Japanese Sixteenth
Army invades the Dutch portion of the
island of Borneo—scrupulously avoiding
portions administered by Great Britain—
then rapidly follows up with attacks on
Java, Sumatra, Sulawesi, and other major
islands in the East Indies archipelago. The
puny Dutch garrisons are swiftly overrun,
the Dutch naval bases at Batavia and
Surabaya quickly fall, and by the end
of February 1942, Japan has secured the
Netherlands East Indies’ cornucopia of
petroleum, natural gas, tin, manganese,
copper, nickel, bauxite, and coal.
The Japanese government had taken the
first step toward an attack on the East
Indies in July 1941, when it demanded
and received from Vichy France the right
to station troops, construct airfields, and
base warships in southern Indochina. The
German invasion of the Soviet Union the
previous month had removed any threat
from that direction and cleared the way
for a thrust southward. The southward
move, in turn, was predicated on Japan’s
desire to secure enough natural resources
to become self-sufficient. It was dangerously dependent on America for scrap
iron, steel, and above all oil: 80 percent of
its petroleum came from the United
States. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
administration had been attempting for
years to use economic sanctions as leverage to force Japan to abandon its invasion
ULLSTEIN BILD/THE GRANGER COLLECTION
Bypassing
U.S. and British
targets in the
Pacific might
have better
served Japan’s
strategic goals.
of China. As expected, the move into
southern Indochina triggered a total freeze
of Japanese assets in the United States and
a complete oil embargo.
Japanese leaders initially assume that if
they proceed with their intention to grab
the Dutch East Indies, the inevitable consequence will be war with both the British
Commonwealth and the United States.
Consequently, plans also include attacks
on British bases at Singapore and Hong
Kong, American bases in the Philippine
Islands, and even the forward base of the
U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.
Careful review of the British and
American situations, however, prompts a
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W h a t I f. . .
reconsideration by Japan’s planners. They
conclude that the beleaguered British
cannot afford to add Japan to their existing adversaries, Nazi Germany and fascist
Italy. Britain especially cannot do so without a guarantee that the United States will
enter a war with Japan. And although the
Roosevelt administration might engage in
threats, American public opinion is so
averse to war that the president has been
unable to persuade the country to enter
also, of course, refrained from an air strike
against Pearl Harbor.
The British plainly could not have sustained such a war without American help.
True, Great Britain and the United States
had been steadily making common cause
against Nazi Germany. The U.S. Congress
had passed the Lend-Lease Act in March
1941, and U.S. destroyers had begun
escorting convoys bound for Great Britain
to the mid-Atlantic before handing them
together.” When the ambassador pressed
him to be specific, Roosevelt replied that
the British could count on “armed support” from the United States.
But the president also worried about his
ability to do so if American possessions
continued to be spared by the Japanese.
As historian David Reynolds points out,
“Roosevelt could only propose war;
Congress had to declare it. From a purely
diplomatic point of view, Pearl Harbor
Japan bet that the blow would convince America to throw in the towel
the fight against the Nazis despite their
conquest of most of Europe. Indeed, a July
1941 bill to extend the nation’s peacetime
draft—which the Roosevelt administration deemed fundamental to U.S. national
security—passed by a single vote.
The revised Japanese plan therefore
contemplates an attack on the Dutch East
Indies alone, albeit with most of the
Imperial Japanese Navy held in reserve
should either Great Britain or the United
States declare war.
Events completely vindicate Japan’s
gamble. British prime minister Winston
Churchill reinforces Singapore but
otherwise adopts a defensive posture in
Southeast Asia. Already thwarted in his
efforts to make the case for war against
Hitler’s Germany, neither Roosevelt nor
his advisers can think of a rationale persuasive enough to convince the public
that American boys should fight and die
because the Japanese have overrun an
obscure European colony.
H
ow plausible is this scenario?
There is little doubt that Japan
could have swiftly defeated the
Dutch and seized the East Indies in midDecember 1941. Even when (as occurred
historically) the Americans, British, and
Australians added their available warships
to the defense of the Dutch colony, the
Japanese had little trouble overrunning
the entire archipelago by March 1942.
The harder question to answer definitively is what course Britain and America
actually would have pursued if Japan had
bypassed their Pacific possessions and
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off to their British counterparts. In August,
Churchill and Roosevelt had met for a
secret conference in the waters off Newfoundland, a summit that had included
military as well as diplomatic discussions.
And by the autumn of 1941, the U.S. Navy
was engaged in an undeclared but lethal
war with German U-boats.
Cooperation to prepare for a conflict
with Japan, however, was considerably less
advanced. At the Atlantic Conference, the
British had given the Americans text for a
proposed warning to Japan to be sent
jointly by Great Britain, the Netherlands,
and the United States, stating that if Japan
pursued further aggression in Southeast
Asia, the three countries “would be compelled to take counter measures even
though these might lead to war.” Roosevelt
agreed to make such a stern statement—
but unilaterally, not jointly—and as matters turned out, the president told the
Japanese ambassador merely that if Japan
struck southward, he would take steps
“toward insuring the safety and security of
the United States.”
As the crisis with Japan deepened,
Roosevelt’s top military advisers told him
that while they preferred a less provocative diplomatic line toward Japan, the
United States could not stand by if the
Japanese struck American, British, or
Dutch possessions and would have no
choice but to take military action in that
case. Privately Roosevelt agreed, and on
December 1 he told the British ambassador that in the event Japan attacked the
Dutch East Indies or British possessions in
Southeast Asia, “we should all be in this
was therefore a godsend.” It would have
been difficult to persuade Congress that
an attack upon the Dutch East Indies
alone demanded a military response; it
might well have proved impossible.
In the end the dilemma never arose
because the Japanese never considered
such an alternative strategy. Once the
Japanese government decided that it must
seize the natural resources of the Dutch
East Indies, it never seriously considered
any plan but a simultaneous attack against
the British and the United States in the
Pacific. This decision was driven overwhelmingly by operational considerations: Japan’s military planners believed
they could not run the risk of leaving the
American air and naval bases in the
Philippines athwart their line of communications with the East Indies. For that
reason they concluded the Philippines
must be captured as well.
Ironically, by refusing to run such an
operational risk, they wound up taking an
even larger strategic risk, for the attack on
Pearl Harbor was premised on the highly
tenuous assumption of a short war with
the United States followed by a negotiated
peace that would allow Japan to keep its
territorial gains. Japan bet that American
public opinion would never countenance
a prolonged and bloody Pacific war and
that the combination of the blow to the
U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor and Japan’s
erection of a hermetic defensive perimeter
in the Central and South Pacific would
convince America to throw in the towel.
As actual events subsequently showed,
that was a poor bet. ✯