Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
The ‘master stroke’ that sunk Japan’s war hopes
16 Some key events from this week in history are reflected in the following reports taken from the archives of the Argus’s 160-year-old titles
IF EVER there was a week in December that could be said to have changed the world, it was the first week of the last month of the year in 1941.
It was on Sunday, December 7 in that year, out of the blue in every sense, that squadrons of fighters, bombers and torpedo planes from Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s stealthy seaborne battle group scourged the mighty Pacific fleet of the United States as it lay at anchor in splendid innocence at Pearl Harbor.
The attack dramatically widened the scale of conflict in World War II, dragged America into the fighting and, within less than four years, swept the world into the nightmare future of nuclear warfare which, in the decades that followed, invested the Cold War stand-off between East and West with a chilling menace, and lurks still in human consciousness as the imagined prelude of Armageddon.
Japan’s act of aggression – strategically brilliant, or treacherous, depending on which side you were on – had the ancillary consequence of placing the almost incalculable resources of the West’s richest state at the service of the Allies.
Just a day after Pearl Harbor, embattled Britain’s premier Winston Churchill wrote in his diary, as if it really were a fact: “I knew the United States was in the War now up to the neck, so we had won after all.” And he was right, of course – even if the bloodiest fighting was yet to come.
But the other consequence, even though it is one that is not, perhaps, so plainly attributable to Pearl Harbor alone, is that, after World War II, a notoriously isolationist United States emerged as the Big Brother of the late 20th century world, dwarfing Britain and its dwindling empire and shifting the West’s axis of influence from London to Washington, where, by and large, it remains.
One of the lesser reports in the Argus of Monday, December 8 – “A United Front in America” – describes how even the “Isolationists” (and the likes of the America First Committee) endorsed war against Japan. Overnight, America was plunged into the global conflict.
Almost the entire front page that day was devoted to what was described as the “lightning treachery” of the Japanese – whose diplomats were actually in the State Department in Washington in talks ( over mounting tensions in the wider Pacific region) when Admiral Yamamoto’s forces struck.
Cape Town readers learned that football scores were being read over the radio in New York “when the first flash broke in: ‘Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor’.”
In simultaneous advances on American and Allied territories and interests, the Japanese moved swiftly to invade Thailand and land forces in Malaya, bomb Hong Kong and occupy the waterfront in Shanghai.
But it was Pearl Harbor that earned most of the attention – even if the news that Monday imperfectly captured the scale of the disaster, the main report of December 8 saying that “one American battleship is said to have been set on fire in Pearl Harbor and two transports sunk in the Pacific”.
In fact, four of eight US battleships in the harbour were sunk, the other four severely damaged. (All but the USS Arizona were later raised, and six were returned to service and went on to fight in the war.)
The Japanese also sank or damaged three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship and a mine-layer.
Some 188 US aircraft were destroyed. In all, 2 403 Americans were killed and 1 178 wounded. Pearl Harbor was undoubtedly a turning point, the precursor of brutal war across a vast expanse of the globe, but one that almost certainly assured the ultimate doom of the aggressors.
A perceptive assessment from London in the newspaper of December 9 noted: “Japan is, like Germany, pitting a war machine which is large but mainly limited against powers whose resources are less highly developed but which are mainly unlimited.
“Her leaders calculate, as the Germans calculated, upon victory before the free nations can gather their full strength.”
Japan’s first blow was a strategic master stroke. A naval correspondent pointed out on December 9: “The main Japanese bases in the Japanese islands are some 4 000 sea miles from the Hawaiian islands, 2 500 miles from Borneo and nearly 2 000 miles from Cavao.
“To reach a striking position, aircraft carriers must have steamed over 1 000 miles, and, throughout their withdrawal, must always have full speed available.”
Fierce air, land and naval duels lay ahead, but, as readers were assured, the Allies’ “resources and spirit must ultimately give them a decisive advantage”. Even so, there was “no cheap triumph to be won”, the London Times cautioned. “The strain will be severe and the cost heavy.”
It would be particularly costly for Japan, whose total war deaths numbered between 2.5 and 3.1 million. America’s (in the Pacific and elsewhere) totalled some 419 400.