4. How American Polcy Toward Japan Contributed to War in the Pacific

4 HOW AMERICAN POLICY TOWARD JAPAN CONTRIBUTED TO WAR IN THE PACIFIC by WILLIAM L. NEUMANN Japan has never harmed us. Japan is not threatening us. Japan has treated us better than any other wodd power in the matter of paying debts, courtesy to our visitors and residents, and never attempting to meddle in our affairs. Japan is the only world power that has paid back all sums borrowed without delay or default on a single penny. If we are going to answer this fair treatment of us by enmity, no incentive is left for any country to treat us well in the future. —CALIFORNIA COMMITTEE ON PACIFIC FRIENDSHIP, November, 1937 Today we have fallen heir to the problems and responsibilities the Japanese had faced and borne in the Korean-Manchurian area for nearly half a century, and there is a certain perverse justice in the pain we are suffering from a burden which, when it was borne by others, we held in such low esteem. What is saddest of all is that the relationship between past and present seems to be visible to so few people. For if we are not to learn from our own mistakes, where shall we learn at all.

—GEORGE F. KENNAN, American Diplomacy, igoo-1950 William L. Neumann was born in Buffalo, N.Y., on March 4, 1915. He received the degree of B.S. from the New York State Teachers College in Buffalo in 1938. He carried on graduate work in history at the University of Michigan, from which institution he received his Ph.D. degree in 1947. Dr. Neumann has taught history at the University of Michigan, Howard University, the University of Hawaii, and the University of Maryland. He acted as executive secretary of the Foundation for Foreign Affairs and was editor of American Perspective until it ceased publication in the autumn of 9 The main interest of Dr. Neumann in history has been in the field of international relations and diplomatic history. He wrote a brochure on The Genesis oi Pearl Harbor in 1945 which was one of the very first examples of revisionist historical writing as applied to the second World War. He is also the author of Recognition of Governments in the Americas (1947) and Making the Peace, 2941-1945 (1950). The latter is the best account we have to date of the wartime conferences which saw the loss of the peace for the United States and its Allies. Dr. Neumann is about to publish a comprehensive study of the relations of the United States with Japan from Commodore Perry to the present time.

I. BASIC ASSUMPTIONS IN THE JAPANESE POLICY OF THE UNITED STATES The war between the United States and Japan was neither, as official and semiofficial histories paint it, a struggle between good and evil nor a contest between a peaceloving nation and an arrogant proponent of aggression and chaos. These are the conventional labels used by nations to describe their enemies. Every victorious power attempts to certify similar interpretations of recent wars as eternal truths. While such moralistic simplifications have their value as nationalist propaganda, they have no place in an honest attempt at an unbiased study of international issues. Righteousness has never been the exclusive preserve of any one nation, nor has virtue been completely wanting among even the most chauvinistic peoples. If the Pacific conflict is to be the subject of moralizing, it might better be described as a tragedy of errors and as the unwanted offspring of false assumptions and follies on both sides of the Pacific.

The errors and fallacies of Japanese policy have often been set forth for Americans with a rich collection of assorted invectives. Stripped of all gratuitous adjectives and adverbs, Japan's course is clear and the errors of Japanese assumptions then become patent. An island nation with a growing population, stimulated by Western penetration, found its resources inadequate to achieve its aspirations for a higher standard of living. Following the Western pattern, Japan looked abroad for land, markets, and raw materials. Japan also developed aspirations for the status of a major power, again stimulated by Western influences, particularly by the humiliating experiences of the early post-Perry decades. It was in these formative years that Japan learned how helpless a small power could be in the face of energetic Western imperialism, backed by hostile naval squadrons. These two aspirations combined to create an expansionist movement in Japan which looked 233 234 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE primarily to Asia for its fulfillment. When economic penetration of Asia was checked by political obstacles in the form of intransigent Chinese war lords, Japan turned to the ultimate weapon of imperialism, military force.

Japanese expansionism also brought to the fore a chauvinistic group of military leaders who developed a racialist concept of Japan's manifest destiny. They believed that Asia was at last to find peace and economic progress under Japanese leadership in the form of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity sphere. No alien nation, neither Russia nor the United States, was to be permitted to stand in the way of this goal. To this end Japan fought a border war in Manchuria against the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1939. When the United States, from 1931 onward, stood firmly behind the Chinese Nationalist government, Japan's best customer became Japan's enemy. When other methods seemed unavailing, Japan prepared for a trans-Pacific war to remove the American barrier to an area which Japan believed was vital for national security and prosperity. But the willingness of the people of the United States, once attacked, to fight a long and costly war over a cause remote from their shores was not foreseen by Japan's leaders. This was the fatal error of Japanese policy. This was the false assumption which was to bring that nation to defeat and to destroy the accomplishments of two generations of vigorous diplomacy.

Americans have given little attention to the errors of their own Far Eastern policies. Self-examination is not a characteristic of the victor, even when the fruits of victory prove bitter. Most studies of the coming of the Pacific war by Americans still accept the official assumptions as valid.1 The United States is seen as a force exerted in behalf of peace and stability in Asia. American attempts to maintain the status quo and uphold the integrity of China are judged wise even though they failed. More important, the basic premise of American policy from 1931 onward—that the United States had a vital national interest in blocking the expansion of Japan in Asia—is seldom questioned. Yet on this premise any justification of the diplomacy of Secretary of State Henry Stimson or of the foreign policy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration must make its case.

HOW AMERICAN POLICY CONTRIBUTED TO PACIFIC WAR 235 With the passage of time the propaganda of the war years will fade and a more objective appraisal of the issues will be possible. International antagonisms and friendships directly influence the writing of national histories. The shifting of these international alignments requires a rewriting of the past to keep pace with the orientations of the present. New enemies are treated no more objectively than the old, but former enemies then have the opportunity to receive less biased treatment. In due course these influences will lead to a reinterpretation of Japanese-American relations even in the officially sponsored histories. The shifts in international alignments are already in process. China and the Soviet Union are rapidly replacing Japan as the foci of American antagonism in Asia. Japan, by contrast, is almost attaining the status of an ally by the leasing of territory for American air and ground bases. Although the reorientation of the historiography of Japanese-American relations may lag behind these events, the influences of the new alignments cannot be long escaped. The historian may soon be in a position to view the course of American relations with Japan free from nationalistic preconceptions.2 Already it is possible to outline the misconceptions of American policy makers and to see in what respects they were blinded to basic facts and key relationships in Far Eastern international policies. No consideration was given to the historic ambitions of Russia in Asia nor to the expansionist element in Stalinist Communism. As a result there was a complete disregard for the role which a strong Japan played in the Far Eastern balance of power.

Gross errors were also made in calculating that Japan could be coerced by economic pressure and naval force to follow American bidding in its relations with China. The political and economic importance of China for Japan was not grasped, despite the fact that Japanese leaders spoke of it as a national interest to be defended regardless of costs. This blindness to the importance of China for Japan contrasts with the gross overrating of the importance of a Japan-free China for the United States. It was assumed by some key figures in the Roosevelt administration that this objective was worth the blood and toil which a costly trans-Pacific conflict would entail. Behind this premise was another, equally 236 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE invalid. This was the assumption that the power relationships of Asia of the 1920's could be maintained—or, after 1931, restored— despite the rising power of Japan and the Soviet Union and the internal political disintegration of the Chinese Nationalist government. The instrument of maintenance or restoration was not to be forces within Asia itself but the pronouncements and threats of American power with its center thousands of miles from Asia's shores. Faith in the growth of American naval power under the Roosevelt administration disregarded the strength by which the Japanese navy sought to counter American building.

The history of American policy in the Far East from 1931 onward is largely a story of these blunders and fallacies in the interpretation and implementation of American interests. It was Henry L. Stimson, twice Secretary of War, who, as President Hoover's Secretary of State, first set the course of American opposition to Japanese expansion. When Japan established in Manchuria a puppet government to protect its economic interests in that area, Stimson announced to the world that the United States would not accept the legality of the new government established by force. Japan was charged with a violation of the KelloggBriand Pact of 1928 as a result of its undeclared war with China. In taking this step Stimson set the direction of American diplomacy for the next decade. The influence and, finally, the force of the United States was to be employed in the hopeless task of maintaining the disintegrating status quo of Asia.

Stimson recalls informing the Hoover cabinet in 1931 that the Western-made treaties no more fitted the situation in the Orient than "a stovepipe hat would fit an African savage."3 The KelloggBriand Pact had already been violated by the Soviet Union in 1929 when an undeclared war had been launched against China along the Manchurian-Siberian border. The clash demonstrated that the pact was in Asia "essentially as meaningless as an agreement not to raise umbrellas except in rainy weather."4 Not only in Asia but in Europe as well the powers which signed the antiwar pact made enough reservations to indicate that they accepted the pact as a statement of principle rather than a commitment to action. Stimson's nonrecognition doctrine differed little from the earlier HOW AMERICAN POLICY CONTRIBUTED TO PACIFIC WAR 237 effort of the Woodrow Wilson administration to enforce stability and to preserve the status quo in Latin America by refusing to recognize governments established by force. That effort had been a painful failure and Stimson himself criticized what he called the "misplaced morality of Woodrow Wilson" and Wilson's efforts to reform the world according to his own views.5 According to Stimson the true line of American recognition policy was that enunciated by Thomas Jefferson who, in 1792, had warned against any effort to differentiate between de facto governments on grounds of illegality. Yet the de facto government established by Japan in Manchuria was to go unrecognized because of its illicit origins.

Although Stimson's nonrecognition doctrine is thus attacked by his own statements, Hoover's Secretary of State was able to overlook the inconsistency of his position in an effort to play Marquis of Queensberry to the warring nations of Asia. In justifying his policy Stimson agreed that if the SinoJapanese conflict had occurred two generations earlier it would have had little meaning for the United States. But in 1931, he said, American economic and political interests in the Far East were "considerable." The United States did have, in 1931, an important and profitable trade with Asia. The chief source of that profit was not China, however, but Japan, where large quantities of American cotton were purchased and paid for by Japanese silk exports to the United States. The total value of American exports and imports to and from Japan in the 1930's was three to four times the value of exports and imports from China. In the peak years, 1927-30, American exports to China never exceeded 4 per cent of the total American exports while imports from China were less than 5 per cent of the total.

Even as late as 1938 American sales to Japan reached over $230,000,000 while China, in the same year, purchased only some $56,000,000 worth of American goods. American investments in China itself were also relatively small and never reached 2 per cent of the total American foreign investment. In 1935 the value of Chinese private securities held by Americans reached only $16,700,000 while Americans held over $323,000,000 worth of Japanese private securities. Of $2,600,000,000 238 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE in foreign investments in China, Japan claimed the larger amount, while most of the remainder was held by Great Britain. As late as 1943 a census of American-owned assets in China totalled only $122,000,000. It was for this small economic stake in China that the profitable trade relationship with Japan was to be endangered and finally destroyed by the Stimson and Roosevelt policies.

American interests in China were often discussed in future terms rather than in present realities. To some extent this dream was a projection of the past, of the early New England trade with Canton and of the great fortunes made by a few score families from the trade in teas and silks. Roosevelt himself showed signs of this type of thinking. After Stimson, in January, 1933, had won the President-elect's support for his nonrecognition policy, two of Roosevelt's advisers, Raymond Moley and Rexford Tugwell, tried to dissuade him from committing his administration to a policy they considered futile and dangerous. To their plea Roosevelt answered with the remark that his ancestors had traded with China and for this reason he had the deepest sympathy for the Chinese.6 The President's mother had lived in China as a small girl and the President repeatedly told the story of the business dealings of his family in the China trade of the early nineteenth century.7 A less romantic argument for the future economic importance of China and for American prosperity was developed in Marxian terms. Expressed most forcefully by Nathaniel Peffer's Must We Fight in Asia?, this line of argument stressed the inevitable collapse of American capitalism if it failed to capture new markets. China with its more than four hundred million potential customers was thus essential to the continuation of the American economic system. War with Japan over China was necessary to preserve a capitalism which could no longer live on its domestic markets.

Short of turning the United States into a socialist state and sharing the surplus with the American worker, a war of imperialist powers for China was said to be inevitable—so the argument ran.8 Whether the argument was made in present or future terms, phrased in romantic aspirations or Marxian dialectic, the assumption was made by the makers of American policy that this country's economic stake in China, along with the political stake, conHOW AMERICAN POLICY CONTRIBUTED TO PACIFIC WAR 239 stituted a vital national interest. Yet six years after the end of the war against Japan, American trade with China had practically disappeared and American investments in China were largely liquidated. Similarly, American political influence within China itself had reached a twentieth-century low. No noticeable damage had been done to the American economy and few would argue that a war to replace the Communist rulers of China by a pro-American regime was essential to American security. Historical developments have thus illustrated the falsity of the Stimson-Roosevelt assumptions.

Arguments were also presented in behalf of American intervention in the SinoJapanese conflict which went beyond the traditional political and economic concepts of national interest. World peace, in which the United States was said to have a vital stake, was also to be preserved by the Stimson-Roosevelt Far Eastern policy, according to its supporters. Stimson believed that American sponsorship of the KelloggBriand antiwar pact called for active steps to maintain peace by opposing Japanese expansionism. Secretary Hull thought along similar lines. In January, 1938, the Secretary was asked for statistics by the Senate on American economic interests in China. The Secretary replied that there was in China "a broader and much more fundamental interest—which is that orderly processes in international relationships must be maintained." Spokesmen for the Roosevelt administration frequently made similar claims for their policy's peace-spreading characteristics.

Two assumptions were made in these arguments. The first was that peace between two Asiatic powers was a matter of direct concern for the United States and an important enough national interest to justify the risk of spreading the war. The second assumption was again the optimistic one that a third power, far from the seat of conflict, could adjust the differences of the warring powers by supporting the weaker against the stronger. For over a century the American policy of neutrality had been based on the assumption that peace was divisible and that it was to the interest of this country to avoid wars in which national security and national prosperity were not endangered. That policy, dating back to the precepts of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, was now 24O PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE discarded on the assumption that neutrality was no longer a workable policy and that the use of American political, economic, and military strength could effectively check wars on other continents by exerting pressure on one of the contestants. The validity of these assumptions can most objectively be tested by their results.

Initially Stimson thought of this program—refusing to recognize Japanese success in Manchuria—as a moral weapon. It was originally aimed, he said, more at assuring China of American sympathy than at bringing Japan into line and restoring the pre-1931 status quo. But when Japan consolidated its conquest of Manchuria, Stimson decided that the United States should go a step farther and impose economic sanctions on Japan. President Hoover, however, realized that to place an embargo on supplies to one fighting nation while sending aid to the other was a dangerous breach of neutrality. It implied, if it did not explicitly suggest, that the United States was willing to move farther and, if necessary, go to war with Japan. Hoover saw this—as did Stimson—and with the support of other members of his cabinet he adhered to what Stimson called "the tradition of American foreign policy" which had always insisted that American interests in the Orient were not worth a war.9 On this ground Hoover refused Stimson's repeated pleas for sanctions and an embargo.

When Stimson found himself unable to win the support of the President to the use of American economic power against Japan, he turned to what he called "a bluff of force." Here Stimson was turning to an American tradition which dated back as far as Commodore Perry in 1853. In writing his instructions for that famous naval expedition which opened up the ports of Japan to the Western world, Perry said: "It is manifest, from past experience, that arguments or persuasion addressed to this people, unless they are seconded by some imposing manifestation of power, will be utterly unavailing." This concept of naval diplomacy was frequently applied to Japan by the United States and by European powers in the nineteenth century. Even in the twentieth century naval diplomacy had been given a vigorous trial by Theodore Roosevelt who, in 1908, sent the United States fleet to the shores of Japan itself. Stimson revived a HOW AMERICAN POLICY CONTRIBUTED TO PACIFIC WAR 241 tradition which was to see its fullest application under the Franklin Roosevelt administration.

Stimson's use of the navy was limited to his last year as Secretary of State. He suggested and carried out an arrangement with the British Foreign Office whereby the ships of the United States Asiatic Fleet, usually based at Manila, were concentrated with British vessels at Shanghai when hostilities broke out at that city between the Japanese and Chinese forces. More significant was his success in convincing the Secretary of the Navy that the main body of the Pacific Fleet should remain at its Hawaiian base some weeks after it had completed its annual maneuvers. Stimson later suggested that this had a deterrent effect on Japan. More competent evaluations, taking into consideration the state of the fleet and its limited range of operation west of Hawaii, conclude that Stimson's view of his naval diplomacy was naive.10 In Japan, however, the chauvinistic press seized upon the American naval operation as proof that the United States was preparing for a trans-Pacific war.

II. THE AMERICAN NAVAL THREAT TO JAPAN When the Hoover administration was replaced in March, 1933, the direction which Stimson had tried to give to American policy in the Far East was at last accepted and greatly expanded. Not only was there to be political and economic pressure on Japan but the United States Navy was to be greatly increased in strength and the building program pointed directly at Japan. The position taken by the Roosevelt administration in its relations with Japan was in large part determined by the President himself. The naval program in particular was his personal interest. It was the product of the President's previous convictions about Japan and his strong admiration for the ideas of that great exponent of naval imperialism, Admiral Alfred T. Mahan. From Mahan, 242 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE Roosevelt not only received guidance in the use of the navy as an instrument of diplomacy but also confirmation of his belief that Japan was one of America's major enemies.

When Franklin Roosevelt was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy by Woodrow Wilson in 1913, he came to Washington at a time of public tension between Japan and the United States. Although Theodore Roosevelt had seemingly quieted the anti-Japanese agitation of the Pacific Coast States by his "gentleman's agreement" in 1907, severely restricting Japanese immigration, new difficulties developed in 1913. The state of California, under the pressure of powerful interest groups, passed legislation forbidding the sale or long-term lease of land to Japanese residents. The Japanese government protested this legislation to Washington and the irresponsible press magnified this protest into a threat of war. Although Secretary of State Bryan remained calm, an attempt was made by the Joint Army-Navy Board to force a mobilization of American forces in the Pacific. President Wilson forbade such a step and rebuked the Joint Board for its swordrattling by forbidding it to meet again without his permission.11 A group of naval officers, led by Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske, took the lead in the anti-Japanese agitation. Although Secretary of the Navy Daniels refused to give his support to the plans of this clique, they found a more sympathetic ear in the person of Assistant Secretary Roosevelt. With a background of sentimental attachments to China, young Roosevelt was more prone to be drawn into an anti-Japanese position. For Roosevelt and Daniels, Fiske prepared a memorandum in May, 1913, giving a number of reasons why Japan would be likely to go to war with the United States to secure the Philippines and the Hawaiian Islands. Roosevelt also secured naval intelligence reports for 1911 and 1912 giving accounts of alleged Japanese activity in Mexico in preparation for war with the United States. So moved was he by this agitation that he personally sketched some rough plans for naval operations against the Japanese forces.12 Roosevelt later wrote to Mahan that during the war scare he had also tried to get the American warships in the Far East concentrated at their base in the Philippines.13 Wilson and Bryan, howHOW AMERICAN POLICY CONTRIBUTED TO PACIFIC WAR 243 ever, felt that any move of the American naval forces might add to the tension of the situation and orders were sent out to the Far Eastern commander to that effect, over the Assistant Secretary's protest. In his correspondence with Mahan, Roosevelt found additional support for his feeling about the imminence of war with Japan. In June, 1914, Mahan wrote the Assistant Secretary that he felt that "our danger in the Pacific much exceeds that in the Atlantic." Roosevelt wrote in reply: "I wish it were possible to speak quite frankly and in public, about the excess of our danger in the Pacific over that in the Atlantic. I agree with you most heartily that the European powers are not disposed to interfere with us. . . ." Even after the outbreak of war in Europe in August, 1914, Mahan continued to warn Roosevelt about the dangers of war with Japan. Although the Navy Department soon found its attention drawn to the Atlantic and to the problems of submarine warfare, the end of the war in 1918 was once more followed by Japanese-American tension. And again the Assistant Secretary was supplied with lengthy intelligence reports showing the dangers of sudden attack by Japan.

In the 1920^ Mr. Roosevelt modified and revised some of his views on Japan. By 1923 he could write a letter to the Baltimore Sun in which he said: "Japan and the United States have not a single valid reason, and won't have as far as we can look ahead, for fighting each other/' That same year he even rejected some of the tenets of Mahanism and in a private letter he said in regard to Japan: "To enter into a new competition by the building of new fortifications and new navies will be a step backward which will do harm not only to the governments immediately concerned, but to the general future peace of the world." As late as 1928 Mr. Roosevelt complained about the extravagant naval building plans of the Coolidge administration, but this was at least in part a political criticism which may have lacked conviction.14 The man who took office in 1933, from all indications, was a reversion to the Roosevelt of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy days in his attitude toward Japan and naval power. Within a year in office the President was to launch the largest naval building program in the history of the United States. Two months before 244 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE he took office the President-elect announced that he would give his support to the Stimson doctrine of nonrecognition of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. When this announcement was made the New York Daily News editorialized: ". . . he had better begin building up the Navy the moment he becomes President.

You cannot make a war-provoking policy stick unless you have warlike weapons and plenty of them. . . ." The logic of the editorial writer's assumption seems to have been fully accepted by Roosevelt in his first years in office. As his Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt selected Claude A. Swanson, who was known in Congress for his faithful support of increased naval appropriations.15 There were two requirements, according to Raymond Moley, for Roosevelt's Secretary of the Navy: one was an interest in a big navy and the other was a high degree of susceptibility to Roosevelt's suggestions. Swanson seemed to combine both and, as delegate to the Geneva Disarmament Conference in 1932, he had spoken in behalf of an American navy second to none. In his first press conference on March 7, 1933, the new Secretary of the Navy stated that his building policy was to expand the fleet "as quickly as possible" to the London Treaty limits. During the historic first "Hundred Days" of the New Deal the President was too busy with more pressing economic matters to back up his Secretary's plan. But on June 16 Roosevelt issued an executive order allotting $238,000,000 of the National Recovery Administration's funds to increasing the size of the Navy. The President's critics were quick to question the value of spending these funds in shipyards when there were areas of more pressing needs. But such complaints from the supporters of the President's economic program went unanswered. Before the first year of his administration was over, liberal critics were suggesting that the New Deal was "Drifting into Militarism."16 Although the new ships to be built with N.R.A. funds would not bring American strength beyond the 1930 treaty limits, Tokyo and many European capitals viewed the American program as again starting the world on a naval race. Naval building had been declining in all countries as national budgets were cut under the stress of HOW AMERICAN POLICY CONTRIBUTED TO PACIFIC WAR 245 the world depression. Japanese appropriations for new naval construction declined from $40,900,000 in 1930-31 to $33,500,000 in 1931-32, and were further cut to $26,900,000 in 1932-33.17 The Roosevelt administration, by beginning the largest single program of naval construction undertaken by any nation since the end of World War I, was taking the initiative in reversing the trend.

In January, 1934, the Roosevelt administration presented new evidence that assumptions about the use of naval power in dealing with Japan played an important part in its thinking. Congressman Vinson at that time introduced a bill authorizing a building program over the next five years to bring the navy up to the maximum tonnage permitted by the Washington and London treaties in all categories. As finally passed, the Vinson-Trammell Act authorized the construction of over a hundred new vessels at an estimated annual cost of $76,000,000. No battleships were contemplated; the 1935 program began with an aircraft carrier, two light cruisers, fourteen destroyers, and six submarines. When he signed this bill, Roosevelt assured Americans that it was not a law "for the construction of a single additional United States warship." Its purpose, he said, was only to give general congressional approval to a future program. His administration still favored the limitation of naval armaments, Roosevelt argued, despite appearances to the contrary.

As seen from Japan, the American building program of 1933-34 had radically different implications than those offered by its sponsors. Admiral Osumi, Minister of the Navy, declared that the American program left Japan no alternative but to build more ships if national security was to be maintained. The new American ships thus provided the basis for a campaign by the naval expansionists of Japan. Despite pressure for cuts in the national budget, the Japanese naval estimates were the only ones to survive the Diet's economy slashes virtually intact. Some Japanese also assumed that the American effort at naval intimidation meant eventual war. Admiral Suetsugo, Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet, told Japanese reporters early in 1934 that his country must now be ready for an attack from a large air force carried across the Pacific by the American fleet.18 246 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE In October, 1934, preliminary conversations opened between the United States and Japan with regard to the 1935 naval conference.

For weeks the exchange of views continued without progress in reaching any agreement. Japan was unwilling to accept a continuation of the $-5-3 ratio system laid down in 1922, which set its capital-ship strength at 60 per cent of that of the United States and Britain. The increase in the cruising range of battleships as well as the great advances in naval aviation so favored the attacking fleet that the Japanese felt that their forces had to be more nearly equal to those of their potential enemies. As an alternative to increasing naval strength, Japan called for the abandonment of "offensive" naval strength and the establishment of top tonnage limits for "defensive" fleets. Aircraft carriers, battleships, and cruisers with eightinch guns were all listed as "offensive" vessels while submarines and destroyers were considered to be defensive. Japan aimed at the maintenance of clear defensive advantage in the western Pacific while leaving the United States unchallenged supremacy within the American defensive triangle in the eastern Pacific.

Although this arrangement would have provided security for both nations, it would have nullified the power of the American fleet as an instrument of diplomacy in Japanese-American relations. The Perry-Stimson-Roosevelt assumption about the achievement of American objectives in Asia by threats of force would have had to be discarded. Since it would have no longer have been possible for the United States to intervene in behalf of China, the assumption in regard to vital American economic and political interests in the SinoJapanese dispute would also have had to be pushed aside. The American refusal to alter substantially the 5-5-3 ratio had implications for the future of the Philippines as well. With a Japanese navy that was not considerably weaker than the American fleet, defense of these islands would have been obviously impossible. Many American strategists, official and unofficial, had already written off the Philippines as indefensible.19 The long and vulnerable supply lines and the lack of good natural bases in the islands had forced that decision on American war planners.

Without rejecting these assumptions, the United States could HOW AMERICAN POLICY CONTRIBUTED TO PACIFIC WAR 247 not change its position on maintaining a strong offensive naval superiority to Japan. The Japanese, seeing no hope of securing their ends by conference, announced late in 1934 that their country would no longer be bound by the Washington agreements after the two years' warning stipulated by the treaty. Shortly after the Japanese announcements, the Secretary of the Navy stated that American naval maneuvers for 1935 would be conducted in Far Eastern waters. The timing of the American announcement suggested a new attempt at intimidation although the relationship of the two events was denied by official American spokesmen.20 In Japan, however, the American action contributed to the rising chauvinistic spirit. Many American organizations protested the location of the war games as an uncalled-for provocation, but appeals to President Roosevelt to halt the maneuvers were without avail.

In his annual message to Congress in January, 1935, the President was optimistic. He said that: There is no ground for apprehension that our relations with any nation will be otherwise than peaceful. Nor is there ground for doubt that the people of most nations seek relief from the threat and burden attaching to the false theory that extravagant armament cannot be reduced and limited by international accord. But immediately after this statement Roosevelt sent to Congress a budget message calling for the largest military appropriations in the peacetime history of the United States—$485,000,000 for the Navy alone—a rise of $180,000,000 over the previous year. Counting the sums spent by P.W.A. on shipbuilding in 1934, this was an increase of almost 40 per cent for the fiscal year of 1936 over that of 1934. Such expenditures, liberal critics pointed out, could only be aimed at Japan and would stir the people of that nation to arm with corresponding speed.21 In view of the background of events and the uncompromising positions taken by the Japanese and American governments prior to the opening of the London Naval Conference in December, 248 PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE 1935, there was small possibility on reaching a new limitation agreement. Two months earlier, Secretary Hull told the Japanese ambassador that the United States had not changed its attitude since the 1934 conversations and did not recognize any significant developments since that date.22 It would be, said Hull, 'Very difficult if not impossible" to reach a comprehensive naval treaty. The only hope expressed by the Secretary of State was for a limited agreement to tide over the situation until circumstances were more favorable.