Japan Prepares for Total War by Michael A. Barnhart

Author:Michael A. Barnhart
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8014-6845-2
Publisher: Cornell University Press

Initial Anglo-American economic reactions to war in Europe made this dismal picture appear still gloomier, as did estimates of Japan’s own efforts to supply itself with key commodities. By mid-September 1939 the governor of British Malaya had brought all ores under an export licensing system. Soon after, the American president announced his government’s hope that materials important for military use would not be exported. Roosevelt also began to pressure Congress for revision of American neutrality legislation. The Tokyo office study was unsure how far revision would progress, but the effect, it asserted, would be to divert additional materials toward Britain and France and away from other potential purchasers.3

These projections made it a simple matter for the Planning Board to predict substantial economic setbacks, with major consequences for Japan’s foreign policy, especially for the overarching materials mobilization plan for 1939, which had just entered its third quarter. The board flatly stated that shortages of foreign exchange, coupled with higher prices and freight rates (when shipping could be found at all), would reduce Japan’s planned production of steel materials to a quarter-million tons below results achieved in the modest, indeed disappointing, first two quarters of the 1939 plan. Other equally essential commodities would fare no better.4

As the first agency in Japan to predict the effects of the European war, the Planning Board led the way in advocating policies to head them off. Japan could seize the opportunity created by the new war to move into Latin America, South Asia—especially the Netherlands East Indies—and other markets as European suppliers became unable to fulfill their usual functions, much as it had in the 1914-18 period. But during World War I Japan had been effectively at peace and thus easily able to exploit Europe’s difficulties. As the board itself realized, the Japan of 1939 did not possess the capability to fill gaps in demand overseas. Moreover, it was also regarded with suspicion, even fear, in many of the regions it banked on to relieve its dependence on the United States and Britain. And Washington and London, neither of them friendly in 1939, were in strong positions to influence the scope and nature of Japan’s trade ties around the world, as their September steps had shown.

A second possibility was to enact crash programs to import goods, as had been done to meet the rice shortage of the summer of 1939. These, however, would have to be undertaken on a vast scale, especially for those commodities most needed by the military: scrap iron, aluminum, nickel, and alloy metals. The Planning Board did not believe that Japan’s increasingly modest reserves of foreign exchange would be sufficient. Likely to result was a bankrupt empire with stockpiles of strategic materials barely able to last a year—even if Britain and America permitted such massive purchases from their territories in the first place.

Japan could rely more on Manchukuo and occupied China, raising production there as rapidly as possible (as the 1939 materials mobilization plan had initially envisioned). This, however, would require an

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.