I keep going back to Ian Kershaw's utterly brilliant book "Fateful Choices". Happily, it is one of those books that is designed to allow you to read one chapter and then set it aside in favour of something else before returning for another chapter. It deals with the decisions taken during 1940-41 which have had such a profound effect on our poor, old, long-suffering globe. I still haven't quite finished it but I have read enough to hand out some prizes! First, the top prize possible for the author who is, in my opinion, a historian and writer of the very top rank. As for what I might call the dramatis personae contained within his book, the prize for the most inspirational goes to Churchill (who else?), the prize for the most pragmatic goes to Roosevelt, the most diabolical to Hitler and, after something of a tussle, the prize for the dumbest-beyond-belief to the Japanese establishment, with Stalin coming in close on the rails!
When reading it, it is important to bear in mind the different levels of international power politics as expressed in military terms. Tactics is the dogma that governs how soldiers, sailors and airmen conduct their activities on the battlefield. However, grand tactics (or 'the operational', to use the modern term) is the way in which a commander in the field will manouvre his forces in order to bring them to the battlefield with advantage. Strategy covers the decisions taken as to where, when and how to deploy your military resources, but grand strategy is the level at which decisions are taken as to where to deploy all your national resources, not only the military but the political, diplomatic, financial, industrial and so on. Hovering above all these is an area called geopolitics which seeks to deduce certain fundamental imperatives that will be likely to drive a nation to one set of actions rather than another by deep study of its geography, using that word in its widest sense. It should also enable one to weigh up the relative strengths and weaknesses of potential enemies - and friends!
In the 1930s you really did not need a degree in Geopolitics (a GCSE pass at D- would do) to 'guesstimate' the relative strengths of a tiny island lying off China with a minuscule population and absolutely no natural resources of its own, especially oil; as against the USA. That truly is, to use the modern argot, a 'no-brainer'! And yet ... and yet ... virtually the entire Japanese military, political and imperial establishment marched determinedly to war with America. It defies belief! The Japanese military, in particular, come out it of looking far more moronic than, say, the hapless Generals of the Western Front, struggling with a type of warfare that had no solution. The Japanese navy had a superb grand tactical plan to sweep the Americans from the Pacific and turn it into a Japanese lake, but none of them seemed to ask, what happens after that ...? Well, to be fair, one did, Admiral Yamamoto. He wrote nearly a year before Pearl Harbour, "Should hostilities once break out between Japan and the USA, it is not enough that we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco. We should march into Washington and sign the treaty [ie, dictate the terms of peace] in the White House". In other words he understood the difference between a victory at the level of grand tactics, which Pearl Harbour would have represented, and a victory at the level of grand strategy which would be needed for Japan to win outright. It is a dismal footnote to that prescient letter that even Pearl Harbour was not, in fact, any sort of victory at all because the crucial target, the American carriers, were not there.
When one contemplates the death and destruction that the Japanese establishment brought down on themselves and their people, who were, it should be made clear, enthusiastic supporters for war and conquest, it nearly makes you weep. And the irony, as Kershaw points out, is that after it all, Japan was indeed reduced to the penury and American hegemony that they feared, but from it they arose like a phoenix from the fire to establish themselves as one of the great economic forces in the world, and they did it without firing a shot in anger!
Churchill wrote to the effect that "I repeatedly avowed my disbelief that Japan would go mad. I felt certain that such a step would ruin Japan for a generation. Madness is however an affliction which carries with it the quality of SURPRISE."
Posted by: Laban Tall | Tuesday, 16 October 2007 at 22:20