As a matter of a strategic geography, the Japanese Empire in the early 1940s was, in
theory, at risk from four directions. The menace from the east posed by the US Navy in
the Central Pacific would be eliminated by direct military action. The threat from the
north, which is to say the Soviet Union, had been dispelled temporarily by a combination
of prudent Japanese diplomacy and German war-making. From the south, it was just
possible that an enemy coalition might be able to base itself in Australia and New
Zealand, and then slowly crawl up the extensive island chains of Papua New Guinea
and the erstwhile Dutch East Indies, on the way to Singapore, Malaya and points north.
From the west, the Japanese were obliged to take seriously the danger that a militarily
revived China could serve as a launch pad for a land, sea and air threat to the Home
Islands themselves.
Japan’s answers to these unpleasant possibilities were to seek to foreclose at least on
the threats from the south and the west. By controlling all of Indo-China, persuading
Thailand to be cooperative, ejecting British imperial forces from much of Burma, and
waging warfare ever more ferociously in China, the Japanese sought to close down the
China option as a base and threat vector for their enemies. Despite President Roosevelt’s
ambition to the contrary, such unforgiving realities of geography as sheer distance,
terrain and weather were to render China a hopeless candidate for the direction from
which Japan would be brought to book. As for potential peril from the south, in practice
Japan needed to prevent Australia and New Zealand serving as advanced bases for
American military power. To that end, it was essential to sever America’s maritime lines
of communication across the South Pacific and, to be doubly sure, to conquer Australia
and New Zealand. But Japan suffered its first notable strategic setback when its geo-
graphically final move before reaching Australia itself was frustrated by the US Navy in
the Battle of the Coral Sea (7–8 May 1942). The outcome of the battle was indecisive,
but strategically it was an American victory, because a Japanese troop convoy heading
for Port Moresby in New Guinea was obliged to abandon its intended invasion.
It may be helpful at this point to note that of the four geostrategic threat vectors –
from Hawaii and the Central Pacific; from Australia and the south; from China in the
west; and from the Soviet Union in the north – that from the Central Pacific was by far
the most menacing. The Soviet Union was not in this war until 8 August 1945. China was
never sufficiently secure as a base for ambitious Allied operations, and it was logistically
impracticable save at disproportionate cost. And the advance up the Dutch East Indies
towards Singapore and the Philippines promised to be a protracted venture, one that
would not yield high strategic returns for a long time.
But what was the Japanese theory of victory? It is true that the Japanese and the
Americans lacked mutual cultural empathy, a fact which had political, strategic and
tactical consequences. However, ethnocentric and deeply prejudiced though each side
certainly was, neither Washington nor Tokyo was deaf to strategic analysis, notwith-
standing the wishful thinking that coloured some of that analysis. The Japanese knew
that alone they could not protect their new empire by force of arms over the long term.
Their strategic challenge was to present the Americans with a strategic context in
Asia–Pacific that they would choose to accept, no matter how reluctantly. The Japanese
theory of victory, therefore, amounted to the hope – one hesitates to say calculation –
that the United States would judge the cost of defeating Japan to be too heavy, too
disproportionate to the worth of the US interests at stake. If Germany were to beat the
170 War, peace and international relations