The path to Pearl Harbor, including American policy in Asia, the oil embargo of July 1941, the Hull-Nomura negotiations, and the Japanese attack of 7 December 1941

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to give an integrated account of the path from the Stimson Doctrine of 1932 to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Strong answers integrate the structural conflict over the East Asian order, the war in China from 1937, the escalating American economic sanctions, the Tripartite Pact, the asset freeze and oil embargo of July 1941, the failure of the Hull-Nomura negotiations, and the Imperial Japanese decision for war.

The answer

The structural conflict

The United States had been committed to the Open Door in China since Secretary of State John Hay's notes of 1899 to 1900. The Washington Conference Nine-Power Treaty (6 February 1922) committed all major powers, including Japan, to respect Chinese sovereignty.

Japan, under the leadership of an officer corps shaped by the Meiji modernisation and the late-Meiji acquisition of Taiwan (1895) and Korea (1910), saw the Washington system as a Western attempt to freeze Japan into a permanent second-tier status. The Imperial Navy's discontent with the Washington 5:5:3 capital ship ratio fed the political ascent of the Army.

The Mukden Incident (18 September 1931), staged by Kwantung Army officers, gave Japan a pretext to seize Manchuria. Stimson's note of 7 January 1932 announced that the United States would not recognise any territorial change effected in violation of treaty rights or the Kellogg-Briand Pact (the Stimson Doctrine). The League's Lytton Commission (October 1932) condemned the invasion. Japan left the League on 27 March 1933 and established the puppet state of Manchukuo.

The war in China

The Marco Polo Bridge Incident on the outskirts of Beijing (7 July 1937) opened the full-scale Second Sino-Japanese War. Japan took Shanghai (November 1937), Nanjing (the Nationalist capital, on 13 December 1937), and Hankou (October 1938). The Rape of Nanjing (December 1937 to January 1938) killed an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 Chinese.

The Panay incident (12 December 1937), in which Japanese aircraft bombed and sank the gunboat USS Panay on the Yangtze, killed three Americans. The Japanese government apologised and paid 2.2 million dollars in compensation; the incident hardened American opinion without producing a policy break.

Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government retreated to Chongqing and continued resistance with American volunteer support (the American Volunteer Group of Claire Chennault's "Flying Tigers" from August 1941) and Lend-Lease aid (from May 1941).

Escalating American sanctions

Roosevelt's approach was gradualist economic pressure: each step would, he hoped, induce moderation in Tokyo.

• Moral embargo on aircraft sales to Japan (July 1938).
• Abrogation of the 1911 Commercial Treaty announced on 26 July 1939, in effect from 26 January 1940. This stripped Japan of trade privileges.
• Export Control Act (2 July 1940) restricted scrap iron and steel.
• Aviation fuel and lubricants embargo (31 July 1940).
• Scrap metal embargo (16 October 1940).
• Steel embargo (10 December 1940).

The Japanese response was to step up southward expansion to secure raw materials from the European colonial empires whose home countries had been overrun by Germany.

The Tripartite Pact and the southward move

The Tripartite Pact (27 September 1940, Berlin), signed by Ribbentrop, Ciano, and Saburo Kurusu, allied Germany, Italy, and Japan. Article 3 pledged mutual assistance if any of them were "attacked by a power at present not involved in the European war or in the Sino-Japanese conflict". The reference to the United States was unambiguous.

Japan occupied northern French Indochina under an agreement with Vichy on 22 September 1940, with the formal aim of cutting Chiang's southern supply lines. The United States embargoed scrap iron three weeks later.

The Japanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact (13 April 1941) secured Japan's northern flank against the USSR. Hitler invaded the USSR on 22 June 1941, opening the question whether Japan would join. Japan instead committed to the southern strategy.

The decisive step was the occupation of southern French Indochina on 23 to 28 July 1941. Japanese forces took bases at Saigon and Cam Ranh Bay, within striking distance of Malaya, the Philippines, and the Dutch East Indies. The Roosevelt administration concluded that the southern advance now threatened the British and Dutch colonies and Malayan rubber.

The oil embargo

Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8832 on 26 July 1941, freezing Japanese assets in the United States. Britain and the Netherlands East Indies followed within days. The order required licences for export of oil and other goods. Acting Secretary of State Sumner Welles and Treasury Assistant Secretary Dean Acheson administered the licensing in a way that produced a de facto complete oil embargo from August 1941, going further than Roosevelt may have intended.

The effect was strategic. Japan was importing around 80 per cent of its oil from the United States. Existing reserves would last around 18 months at peacetime use, less at wartime use. Japan faced three options: withdraw from China and Indochina, seek negotiated relief, or seize the oil of the Dutch East Indies by force.

Hull-Nomura and the Hull Note

Negotiations between Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura had run from April 1941. Special envoy Saburo Kurusu joined Nomura in November.

Two Japanese proposals were tabled in November:

• Proposal A (7 November) offered a vague Chinese withdrawal over 25 years and continued Japanese rights in Manchuria.
• Proposal B (20 November) offered withdrawal from southern Indochina in exchange for restoration of trade and American disengagement from China.

The American counter-proposal, drafted by Hull and approved by Roosevelt on 25 November, was the Hull Note (delivered to Nomura on 26 November 1941). It demanded Japanese withdrawal from all of China and Indochina, recognition of Chiang's Nationalist government, and effective dissolution of the Tripartite Pact, in exchange for restoration of trade and an unfreezing of assets.

The Japanese government treated the Hull Note as an ultimatum. The Imperial Conference of 1 December 1941 confirmed the war decision taken in principle on 5 November. Admiral Yamamoto's Kido Butai (the Pearl Harbor strike force) had sailed from Hittokappu Bay on 26 November.

The attack on Pearl Harbor

The Kido Butai (six fleet carriers under Admiral Chuichi Nagumo) launched two air waves on 7 December 1941 from a point around 230 miles north of Oahu. The attack began at 7.55 am Hawaii time (1.25 pm Washington).

The strike force was 353 aircraft. American forces lost:

• 8 battleships hit: USS Arizona (destroyed, 1,177 dead, around half the total American dead), USS Oklahoma (capsized, 429 dead), USS California, USS West Virginia, USS Nevada, USS Maryland, USS Tennessee, USS Pennsylvania.
• 188 American aircraft destroyed on the ground at Hickam, Wheeler, and Ford Island airfields.
• 2,403 American dead and 1,178 wounded.

Japan lost 29 aircraft and 5 midget submarines, with 64 personnel dead. The carriers of the Pacific Fleet (USS Enterprise, USS Lexington, USS Saratoga) were not at Pearl Harbor and survived.

The attack was diplomatically badly handled. Nomura was instructed to deliver a 14-part note breaking off negotiations to Hull at 1 pm Washington time, but transcription delays at the Japanese embassy meant Nomura delivered it at 2.20 pm, after the attack had begun. Roosevelt could call the attack a "sneak attack" the next day.

Declaration of war and the Axis declarations

Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress on 8 December 1941. The "Day of Infamy" speech (six minutes, read from a typescript with a single emphasised opening: "yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy") asked for a declaration of war. The House voted 388 to 1 (Republican Jeannette Rankin of Montana the lone dissent, the same vote she had cast against the First World War in 1917). The Senate voted 82 to 0.

Germany declared war on the United States on 11 December 1941, and Italy followed. Hitler's gamble was that Japanese pressure in the Pacific would draw American resources away from the European theatre. The United States declared war on Germany and Italy the same day, 393 to 0 and 88 to 0.

Why Japan attacked

Three explanations are usually offered.

Resource scarcity. The oil embargo gave Japan around 18 months. Reaching the Dutch East Indies required taking Malaya (British) and the Philippines (American), which made war with the United States part of the calculation.

Pacific strike to buy time. Yamamoto designed Pearl Harbor as a temporary disabling of the Pacific Fleet that would give Japan 6 to 12 months to fortify a defensive perimeter. He warned the government that beyond that period he could not guarantee success.

Bureaucratic and ideological politics. The Army's Manchurian and Chinese commitments, the Navy's southern ambitions, and a culture that placed national honour above material calculation made retreat from China politically impossible.

Historiography

Robert Dallek (Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1979) is the standard.

Akira Iriye (The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, 1987) is the standard Japanese-perspective study.

Eri Hotta (Japan 1941, 2013) is the standard recent study of the Imperial decision-making.

Roberta Wohlstetter (Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, 1962) is the standard intelligence study.

Gordon Prange (At Dawn We Slept, 1981) is the standard narrative.

The conspiracy theory that Roosevelt knew of the attack and allowed it ("back-door to war") was advanced by Charles Beard (President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1948); it has been rejected by mainstream scholarship.

Common exam traps

Treating the Hull Note as an ultimatum. It was a comprehensive American counter-proposal; whether Japan was right to read it as an ultimatum is a question of interpretation.

Forgetting the southern Indochina date. 23 July 1941; the asset freeze followed on 26 July.

Overstating Pearl Harbor. The Pacific Fleet's carriers survived; Japan failed to destroy the dockyards and oil tanks; the Fleet was operational again within six months.

In one sentence

War between the United States and Japan in December 1941 was the product of structural conflict over the East Asian order, the war in China from the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 7 July 1937, escalating American sanctions culminating in the asset freeze and oil embargo of 26 July 1941, the failure of the Hull-Nomura negotiations and the Hull Note of 26 November 1941, the Tripartite Pact of 27 September 1940, and the Japanese Imperial Conference decision of 1 December 1941, culminating in the strike on Pearl Harbor at 7.55 am Hawaii time on 7 December 1941 (2,403 American dead) and the American, German, and Italian declarations of war of 8 to 11 December.