Empires
in the
Balance
Naval Institute Press
291 Wood Road
Annapolis, MD 21402
1982 by the United States Naval Institute
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Second printing, 1989
First Naval Institute Press paperback edition published in 2008.
ISBN-13 978-1-61251-728-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Willmott, H. P.
Empires in the balance.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. World War, 19391945Japan. 2. World War, 19391945Pacific Ocean. 3. JapanForeign relations19261945. 4. JapanHistory19121945. I. Title.
D767.2.W54940.535282-6475
AACR2
191817161514765432
To and for
Pauline,
Gaynor, and Stephen
Men are seldom at their best in dealing with insoluble problems.
Rear Admiral P. W. Brock, RN (Ret.)
ERRATA
Page 15, line 36: should read cultivation
Page 25, lines 5 and 20: should read Tsushima
Page 86, line 1 of caption: should read heavy
Page 135, line 2 of caption: should read West Virginia and Maryland
Page 363, line 29: should read Cultivation
Page 364, line 4: should read Tsushima
Page 486, column 1, line 37: should read Tsushima
Contents
I N 1941 the two major Western powers in the Far East, in their different ways, sought to deter Japanese aggression. They attempted to do so from positions of military inferiority relative to Japan. Both Britain and the United States realized that, if their policies of deterrence failed, the defense of their interests and possessions in the Far East could be successful only if their ground forces were able to buy the time needed for reinforcements to make their way across the sea to the theater of operations.
Both the British in Malaya and the Americans in the Philippines employed policies of forward defense against an enemy with air superiority and superiority of numbers on the ground at the point of contact. This enemy possessed a sound and carefully developed battle doctrine based on mass, firepower, and armor, the latter being used in both reconnaissance and strike roles. British and American doctrines were based on infantry, and their infantry lacked an effective antitank weapon. The ground on which battles were fought was known to the defense, which had had years in which to conduct proper reconnaissance and prepare proper defensive positions.
In each case the defense was defeated. Chief among the many factors that contributed to their defeat was the fact that British and American ground forces were inadequate to fulfill the strategic tasks assigned to them in accordance with their nations foreign policies. Foreign policy objectives and defense capabilities were out of alignment. The ground forces were outfought strategically and tactically, and the naval forces proved incapable of reinforcing ground forces on the scale needed to stem the tide of enemy conquest. This situation arose because neither the British nor the Americans possessed the margin of superiority that would have enabled them to secure command of the seas. As a result, Japanese doctrines of what would now be termed sea denial prevailed.
On this, the fortieth anniversary of the fall of Corregidor, one wonders how far the Maginot line mentality of 1941 might be applicable to the European and Atlantic theaters of operation today.
6 May 1982
O N MY APPOINTMENT to the staff of the Department of War Studies, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, in December 1969, I was made responsible for a series of lectures, among which was one on the Pacific war, 194145. For some three years I delivered this lecture until departmental and syllabus changes led to its being dropped. It was not until early 1978 that I was forced to renew a professional interest in the Pacific.
In the intervening years, however, my casual interest in Japanese and Pacific matters had been maintained, though my immediate and practical attentions had been directed towards postwar insurgency in East and Southeast Asia. When in 1978 I began to pick up the threads of the Pacific campaign again, I was most forcibly struck by what seemed to me to be certain major omissions in accounts of the Pacific war. It appeared that there was no well-written single-volume account of the campaign that did justice to the subject, and I could not help but note what seemed to be two quite distinct features of most accounts. The first was the seemingly perfunctory manner in which Japan was handled in most works. The second was the way in which both American and British accounts tended to look at events in a rather narrow and nationalistic manner, at the expense of a wider Allied view.
I resolved to try to remedy this situation, but I soon saw that such was the complexity, and, indeed, grandeur, of this struggle that a single volume could never hope to do more than scratch the surface. I began to appreciate the extent of the problems that would face anyone who attempted to tackle the task of giving an account of the Pacific campaign. My attentions focused upon what seemed to me to be the crucial matter of the war, namely precisely why and for what objectives Japan went to war in 1941, and on what basis she could possibly envisage fighting a defensive war against the most powerful industrialized state in the world, the United States; the greatest of the imperialist powers, Britain; and the most populous state on earth, China, in what was the largest ocean of the world, the Pacific, whose size is greater than the total land surface of the planet.
Five years at the university had taught me a healthy skepticism of turning points and critical battles. A wise critic of one paper I wrote commented, For every complicated human problem there is a simple solution: neat, plausible, and wrong. The one matter that seemed to emerge from the Pacific campaign in the light of this comment was the danger in simplifying events and, in particular, in seeing the Battle of Midway, and the American victory then, as both decisive and inevitablea paradoxical view. The more I looked at Midway the more I became convinced of an even deeper paradox. On the one hand was the immediate and tactical consideration pointing to the fact that since the stronger side was defeated in battle, the outcome of the action could hardly be considered inevitable or predestined. On the other hand it was hard to resist the notion that the Japanese would not have encountered a Midway at some time or another somewhere in the Pacific.
The latter view, almost Marxist in its perspective, presupposed that, given the disparity between American and Japanese resources, Japans defeat was unavoidable in the long term. In such a view Midway, for all the element of chance that played so large a part in the outcome of the battle, really marked the point when, perhaps for the first time in the Pacific conflict, the immutable factors of warthe drag of logistics; the demands of space, time, and distance; qualitative and quantitative factors of training, manpower, and materielbegan to impose their imprint on the conduct and outcome of operations. Rightly or wrongly, I became convinced of the correctness of this view and, as a result, of the opinion that all the ingredients of Japans defeat were to be found, if not in the events of the decade of Japanese involvement in China before 1941, then certainly in the period of her greatest triumphs, in Southeast Asia in the period between December 1941 and April 1942. Here, to me, seemed the crux of the Pacific war.
