The Battle of the Atlantic by Jonathan Dimbleby

Author:Jonathan Dimbleby
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241972113
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

12. Beating the Drum

In January 1942 the neon signs along the eastern seaboard from thousands of restaurants, bars and casinos from Miami to New York sent a spiral of multi-coloured lights into the darkness. On the 1,200 miles of freeway between these two hubs of American civilization the headlamps from scores of thousands of cars and trucks pierced the darkness to create an ever-flowing ribbon of movement which could be seen from several miles out at sea, a linear streak of peacetime reassurance which clearly illuminated the shoreline. To assist the mariner’s task, lighthouses beamed ritual warnings and buoys flashed along safe channels. The tramp steamers, freighters and tankers which plied these busy sea lanes were similarly illuminated, their slow-moving bulk etched clearly against the night sky.

An innocent observer of this scene would have been unaware that less than a month earlier, on 7 December 1941, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor and Germany and the United States were now at war. The attack on Pearl Harbor, which destroyed a large proportion of the US Navy, came as a shock to the American people. But many months of worsening tension between Washington and Tokyo had made military conflict between the two Pacific powers – whose competing vital interests were at stake – virtually inevitable. As the Japanese armies pressed forward to occupy and threaten ever greater swathes of the Far East and Indo-China, so the United States tightened the political and economic screws on Emperor Hirohito’s regime. Japanese assets had been frozen, trade sanctions imposed and in the autumn of 1941 Washington imposed an oil embargo which, ‘if fully implemented and joined in by the British and Dutch, would have [had] an immediate and growing impact and carry beyond deterrence to coercion’.1 Diplomats in Washington were well aware of this, which is why they had wrangled between themselves over the use of such an overtly hostile initiative that would assuredly goad Japan towards a military confrontation.

As relations with Tokyo deteriorated towards the point of no return, Roosevelt had temporized, anxious to avoid all-out war in the Pacific when the position in Europe was looking ever more precarious. By late November the Wehrmacht had advanced to within thirty miles of Moscow and the Russian capital appeared to be on the verge of collapse. Although still reluctant to wage war simultaneously in the Pacific and the Atlantic when America’s armed forces were ill-equipped for a large-scale confrontation on either front, Roosevelt knew by December that the question was not if but only when and where the Japanese would strike. Pearl Harbor was the answer.

Soon after daybreak on 7 December, more than 350 Japanese warplanes took off from six aircraft carriers to sink or seriously damage eighteen US warships, including eight of the Pacific Fleet’s nine battleships, three cruisers, three destroyers, and 347 aircraft. More than 2,400 military personnel were killed and a further 1,178 were wounded. The ‘surprise’ attack cost Japan only twenty-nine planes (with a further seventy-four damaged), five midget submarines and sixty-four lives.

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