His own advisors were unsure how to proceed. He hoped that embargoes on arms (1937), scrap iron (1938), and eventually oil (1941) would wound the Japanese economy sufficiently to halt Japan’s war in China. Determined to help China and to halt Japanese aggression on the Asian mainland, FDR waged economic warfare against Japan. Still, China fought on under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist Army, along with their allies, the Communist forces of Mao Tse-tung. The policy of the “three alls” was the order of the day: “kill all, burn all, loot all.” Cities who resisted, like Nanjing in 1937, suffered the consequences, with Japanese troops slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. Its response was terror against Chinese civilians, hoping to cow them into submission. It could neither protect its supply lines to the rear, nor effectively control the territories it occupied. The Japanese army was badly overstretched, however. It had overrun much of north China, as well as most of the port cities along China’s long coastline. Japan had been embroiled in a brutal war of conquest in China since 1937. The Fate of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harborįrom mid-1940, when FDR moved the US Pacific Fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor, long-simmering tensions between the United States and Japan reached a new state of intensity. It was a fateful decision for all parties concerned: the United States, Japan, and Hawaii itself. Roosevelt ordered the US Pacific Fleet to transfer from its homeport in San Diego, CA to Pearl Harbor, HI. As tensions built between the United States and Japan, President Franklin D. Hawaii also saw an increasingly strong US naval presence. The economy was robust, based on the islands’ numerous sugar cane plantations. Since then, a new society had grown up of native islanders, Americans, and Japanese immigrants. Declaring a Republic of Hawaii, the rebels then requested annexation by the United States, which took place in 1898. An independent kingdom with a long and proud history of its own, then “discovered” by the West and dubbed the Sandwich Islands, Hawaii had only become a US possession in the 1890s, when a rebellion by the Anglo population of the islands rose up in revolt against the rule of Queen Liliuokalani.
Sitting in the Japanese crosshairs that fateful Sunday morning was not only the US Pacific Fleet, but the Hawaiian Islands. That was the “long fuse” of the Great Pacific War (1941-45), the long-term background to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. The very success Japan enjoyed, however, placed the island empire squarely in the sights of the other Great Powers, and generated an increasingly tense strategic rivalry with the United States for domination of the Pacific.
Again and again, Japan struck quickly to win wars over larger and theoretically more powerful opponents. Japan’s rise to Great Power status was rapid, with victorious wars over China (1894-95) and Russia (1904-5), as well as successful, if subsidiary role on the side of the Allies in World War I (1914-1918). Japan’s sudden exposure to the outside world, after centuries of isolation, generated a helt-er-skelter period of transformation, a revolutionary era in which Japan threw overboard many of its oldest traditions and built itself into a technologically advanced industrial state, with modern systems of administration and government-and a powerful military. The tangled relationship between the United States and Japan began with the forced opening of Japan in the nineteenth century, courtesy of Commodore Matthew Perry and this “black ships” of his squadron. Japan, the United States, and the Hawaiian Islands
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