ABSTRACT
American histories generally reduce Japan’s simultaneous attacks on Hawaii, Thailand, Malaya, the Philippines, Wake Island, Guam, Hong Kong, and the international settlement in Shanghai to one infamous day at Pearl Harbor. In fact Japanese leaders had embarked on an indirect strategy to win in China by pressuring not only the United States but also Britain to cut further aid to Chiang Kai-shek, while securing the necessary oil supplies from the Dutch East Indies. On the basis of deeply held, but inadequately examined, assumptions, Japanese leaders saw no alternative to this high-risk strategy. On 7-8 December 1941, Japan expanded its war zone from China to Southeast Asia and the Central Pacific, and increased the number of active belligerents in Asia from two-China and Japan-to six with the addition of the United States, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. Japanese strategy transformed Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist government, from an isolated adversary into a member of a virulently anti-Japanese, Great-Power coalition. Although Americans considered the ensuing war in the Pacific to be the main theatre for the Japanese, in fact, Hawaii, the Philippines, and the rest were all secondary or “peripheral” theatres in a war of attrition against China. For the Japanese, China remained the main theatre until 1944, when the home islands came under continuous air attack and their troop deployments shifted accordingly.2 Contrary to American perceptions, the Japanese developed their Pearl Harbor-Malaya-Philippine strategy not primarily in response to the United States’ failed strategy of deterrence; rather, the December 1941 attacks were the second phase of a peripheral strategy designed to change the balance of resources between China and Japan by using naval expeditionary forces to open many new secondary theatres.
