Today marks the 77th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, one of history’s most famous events. On the morning of December 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a surprise attack on the American naval and air facilities at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Striking without warning (and before Tokyo’s issuance of a formal declaration of war), the Japanese military caught the U.S. Army and Navy completely off guard. In a span of less than two hours, Japanese fighters, bombers and submarines killed 2,400 American service members (as well as 49 civilians) and sank or severely damaged a dozen American warships, including the battleships Arizona, Utah, and Oklahoma.
Without question, the Pearl Harbor attack was one of the most brilliant and sophisticated tactical operations in military history. To achieve surprise, the Japanese Navy had secretly moved six carrier battle groups across 4,000 miles of ocean in heavy winter seas to reach the waters off Hawaii. During the long dangerous voyage across the Pacific, the Japanese warships never broke radio silence. After the attack the Japanese fleet left Hawaii almost unscathed, having lost only 100 pilots and submariners. Few navies in history could have pulled off such a skillful feat as the Pearl Harbor operation.
But Pearl Harbor ultimately proved to be a strategic disaster of truly epic proportions for Japan. In the years that followed the attack the United States went on a war footing that vastly exceeded Japan’s ability to match. Even before the Japanese planes returned to their carriers, Tokyo’s unconditional surrender became America’s central war aim in the Pacific theater. As Professor Gerhard Weinberg observed in his classic work, A World At Arms: A Global History of World War II, the unprovoked nature of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor “was guaranteed to unite the American people for war until Japan surrendered. . . . The attainment of surprise guaranteed defeat, not victory, for Japan.”
When Japan finally surrendered in August 1945, it had sustained one of the most crushing defeats in the history of modern warfare. American firebombing (including two atomic bomb attacks) had destroyed most of Japan’s major cities, Japan’s military was shattered, and over 2 million Japanese were dead. The war also devastated Japan’s reputation with its neighbors as the brutal Japanese military occupation of China, Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines created bitterness that lasted decades. For the rest of the twentieth century, the United States stood as the dominant power in the Pacific.
Pearl Harbor’s enormous historical significance is self-evident. But there is a remarkable aspect of the Pearl Harbor story that even many students of World War II do not know. A few hours after the Pearl Harbor attack, the United States Navy issued an extraordinary order to its surface and submarine fleets, one that violated international law and probably the Constitution of the United States as well.
Unrestricted Warfare
At 5:52 p.m. Eastern Standard Time—less than 3 hours after the Pearl Harbor attack ended—the Chief of Naval Operations commanded all U.S. Navy submarines and aircraft carriers to “execute against Japan unrestricted air and submarine warfare.”
“Unrestricted” warfare meant that the American fleets would target Japanese civilian ships just like military vessels, a method of war expressly banned by international law. The Navy’s goal was to paralyze the Japanese economy and cut off food supplies to the Japanese civilian population. What’s more, the historical record strongly suggests that the Navy made the decision to target Japan’s civilian population without consulting President Franklin Roosevelt or any other civilian leaders.
The whole story is told in Joel Ira Holwitt’s outstanding book, Execute Against Japan: The U.S. Decision to Conduct Unrestricted Submarine Warfare. As he explains:
“With the orders to conduct unrestricted warfare, all Japanese shipping, from fishing trawlers to freighters to tankers, became valid targets. Because civilian crews manned most of these ships, unrestricted warfare meant that these civilian sailors would be treated like combatants, not innocent noncombatants whose lives were to be spared at all costs. Unrestricted warfare not only directly targeted civilians at sea, it also indirectly targeted millions of civilians in Japan, who suffered starvation and privation. The later U.S. strategic bombing campaign, which would kill numerous Japanese noncombatants, came toward the end of hostilities. The unrestricted war against all maritime shipping, however, started at the very beginning of the war and did not end until Japan’s surrender. Thus, well before the United States accepted civilian casualties as collateral damage in the strategic bombing campaigns, U.S. unrestricted warfare struck at Japanese civilians both at sea and on shore.”
The Laws of War
Although Holwitt emphasizes that his book is a military history and not a legal history, both international and constitutional law factor prominently in the story he tells.
Then as now, international law clearly prohibited unrestricted submarine warfare. In the 1930s the United States joined both the London Naval Treaty and the London Submarine Protocol, which banned unprovoked submarine attacks on civilian vessels.
But long before the 1930s, the United States was the world’s foremost proponent of the idea that unrestricted submarine warfare violated customary international law. Ironically, America entered World War I for the express purpose of upholding the international law principle of freedom of the seas. When Berlin declared unrestricted submarine warfare in January 1917—and German U-boats began sinking American merchant ships in the Atlantic—the United States responded by declaring war on Germany. In his April 1917 war message, President Woodrow Wilson specifically based his request for a Congressional declaration of war on Germany’s “reckless and lawless submarine warfare” which the president described as criminal “warfare against mankind.”
It is one of history’s great ironies, therefore, that a quarter-century later the United States unleashed the most massive and devastating submarine campaign of all time. By the summer of 1945 American submarines (and carrier-launched naval aircraft) had essentially sunk the entire Japanese merchant marine fleet. When combined with the U.S. Army Air Force’s aerial bombing of Japan’s cities, the Navy’s fierce tactics brought the Japanese economy to its knees. Moreover, by isolating the heavily mountainous Japanese archipelago, which was woefully short of natural resources, the U.S. naval blockade triggered widespread starvation among the Japanese civilian population. The situation became so dire that in the absence of Emperor Hirohito’s decision to capitulate in August 1945, millions of Japanese would likely have starved to death in the winter of 1945-46.
As Holwitt makes quite clear, the illegal nature of unrestricted submarine warfare was not lost on the U.S. Navy’s senior most commanders. The Pentagon feared that individual American submarine commanders might be treated as pirates if captured and summarily executed for engaging in patently unlawful warfare. That concern, Holwitt writes, “caused the Pacific Fleet’s naval leaders to issue written authorization to their submarine commanders to conduct unrestricted submarine warfare before sending them out on patrol. It was hoped that if they were captured, the signed orders would exculpate the submarine commander from the charge of piracy.”
To be sure, the Japanese also waged unrestricted submarine warfare (albeit with far less success than the U.S. Navy). The Japanese began attacking American merchant ships in the western Pacific on the first day of the war.
From a legal and moral perspective, neither side occupied the high ground when it came to naval tactics. But the fact that the United States had held itself out as the foremost defender of international law during World War I made all the more striking the alacrity with which it embraced unrestricted submarine warfare in World War II.
An Unconstitutional Order?
The most surprising discovery of Holwitt’s book is that there is no contemporaneous evidence that the U.S. Navy sought President Roosevelt’s permission for the submarine campaign. As American military commanders fully understood, unrestricted submarine warfare directly contradicted the administration’s public policy. The record indicates the Navy acted without even informing, let alone consulting, the White House or State Department.
As Holwitt persuasively argues, the Navy’s decision to act unilaterally was not impulsive. It was entirely premeditated. In the 12 months before Pearl Harbor, as tensions with Japan worsened, the Navy’s top commanders concluded that unrestricted submarine warfare was an absolute military necessity in the event of war in the Pacific. As an island nation, Japan was extremely vulnerable to naval blockades, a fact plainly apparent to the U.S. Navy. “Well before Pearl Harbor,” Holwitt explains, “with no documented approval from the civilian chain of command, the senior naval leadership of the United States decided to commence unrestricted warfare almost immediately upon the outbreak of hostilities.”
Historians have long assumed that President Roosevelt authorized the unrestricted submarine warfare campaign during a December 7 phone call with Admiral Harold Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations. During the call, which occurred at 2:30 p.m. eastern time, Stark confirmed for the president the news of the Pearl Harbor attack.
But in a meticulous review of the historical timeline and the archival records, Holwitt reveals that there is no documented evidence of FDR authorizing the unrestricted warfare campaign during the phone call. Not until a 1961 interview with the director of naval history would Admiral Stark finally claim to have gotten FDR’s permission to issue the “execute against Japan” order. And there is compelling reason to doubt Stark’s 1961 account. In September 1941, just three months before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt publicly condemned the Axis Powers for engaging in unrestricted submarine warfare. A former assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt felt a genuine personal commitment to freedom of the seas for merchant shipping.
In light of Roosevelt’s long-standing opposition to unlimited naval warfare, the Navy had no reason to assume that the president would support its secret war plan. The best evidence is the American naval commanders simply decided to cut the civilian leadership entirely out of the decision-making process, including the president.
The actions of naval commanders in the Pacific further underscore that conclusion. Holwitt makes a compelling case that Admiral Thomas Hart—the commander of U.S. naval forces in the Philippines—ordered the Pacific Submarine Fleet to engage in unrestricted warfare before Stark even spoke to FDR. If Admiral Stark did in fact get oral authorization from Roosevelt in the hours after the Pearl Harbor attack, the U.S. Navy had in any case already committed itself to fighting the Japanese without any legal restraints whatsoever. As Holwitt concludes, “the events from December 1940 to December 1941 showed that the U.S. Navy had planned to conduct unrestricted warfare no matter what the Japanese did.”
LCDR Holwitt
As interesting as the book is, the author has a remarkable backstory of his own. Joel Ira Holwitt is a U.S. Navy submarine officer and Naval Academy graduate. Lieutenant Commander Holwitt received his Ph.D. in history from Ohio State University, where his doctoral dissertation became the basis for Execute Against Japan.
Holwitt remains on active duty and recently served as the executive officer (i.e. second-in-command) of the U.S.S. North Dakota, a Virginia class nuclear-powered fast attack submarine. He is also still writing historical works: last year he won the U.S. Naval Institute’s Chief of Naval Operations history essay contest for an article about the interwar U.S. Navy. I certainly hope he has more books in him; that is, when he is not commanding nuclear-powered submarines.
If you are looking to buy a holiday gift for any history buffs on your list, you cannot go wrong with Lieutenant Commander Holwitt’s outstanding book. It demonstrates that even a historical topic as exhaustively studied as World War II still has many secrets to reveal.
Shhh, keep this to ourselves. Our Great Leader might get wind that Imperial Japan once attacked us and he might impose sanctions and tell them he has a big button on his desk...
Posted by: The Law Offcies of Kavanaugh Thomas, LLC, PC, LTD, Chartered, AV Rated | December 07, 2018 at 06:28 PM
Oh, academics.
Posted by: Anymouse | December 08, 2018 at 01:23 PM
Funny how things worked out....What if DJT had been our Leader after WWII rather than Truman or IKE? Would Japan have been one of our strongest allies today? I shudder to even go there.
Posted by: The Law Offcies of Kavanaugh Thomas, LLC, PC, LTD, Chartered, AV Rated | December 08, 2018 at 05:44 PM
Thank you for this article - an important bit of history that I certainly did not know.
In reply to The Law Offcies of Kavanaugh Thomas, LLC, PC, LTD, Chartered, AV Rated:
WTF does Trump have to do with this? Are you so obsessed that you see his shadow even in WWII stories? And, pray tell, what would he have done that would be worse than dropping two atomic bombs on Japan (our entire atomic arsenal)? Japan might not be allied with the U.S. today if a hypothetically historic Trump had insulted the Emperor?
Posted by: r | December 10, 2018 at 10:51 AM
r
His asinine comments are left on every post, just like a dog piddles on every post.
Posted by: anon | December 11, 2018 at 01:40 AM
The Law Offcies of Kavanaugh Thomas, LLC, PC, LTD, Chartered, AV Rated,
I agree with you that Japan and the United States have been great allies in the years since 1945. It is a paradoxical but quite welcome fact that the bloodshed of 1941-45 gave way to such a close relationship between the two countries, an alliance that continues to the present day.
Posted by: Anthony Gaughan | December 11, 2018 at 10:48 PM
r,
I didn't know about this chapter of WW2 either until a good friend of mine who is a US Navy officer told me about Lieutenant Commander Holwitt's book. Execute Against Japan has become standard reading for mid-career as well as senior naval officers. I think it is also assigned in the various Air Force professional military education programs. It really is striking (and admirable) how much attention the military pays to history.
Posted by: Anthony Gaughan | December 11, 2018 at 11:00 PM
Does “the military” teach the kind of history found in Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn B. Young, eds., Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History (New Press, 2009)? Or history along the lines of Gar Alperovitz’s The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995)? Or Joseph Gerson’s Empire and the Bomb: How the U.S. Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World (Pluto Press, in association with The American Friends Service Committee, 2007? Or Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (Penguin Press, 2013)?
Or the kind of histories represented by the following: Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Fred Branfman, ed. (with essays and drawings by Laotian villagers), Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life under an Air War (University of Wisconsin Press, 2nd ed., 2013); Karen J. Coates (photos by Jerry Redfern), Eternal Harvest: The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos (ThingsAsianPress, 2013); John Duffett, ed., Against The Crime of Silence: Proceedings of The Russell International War Crimes Tribunal (O’Hare Books, New York, 1968); H. Bruce Franklin, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America (Rutgers University Press, 1993) and Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000); J.B. Neilands, et al., Harvest of Death: Chemical Warfare in Vietnam and Cambodia (The Free Press, 1972); William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia (Simon and Schuster, 1979; revised ed., Copper Square Press, 2002); Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (Metropolitan Books, 2013); Vietnam Veterans Against the War, The Winter Soldier Investigation: An Inquiry into American War Crimes (Beacon Press, 1972); Roger Warner, Roger, Back Fire: The CIA’s Secret War in Laos and Its Link to the War in Vietnam (Simon & Schuster, 1995; slightly different later version: Shooting at the Moon: The Story of America’s Clandestine War in Laos (Steerforth Press, 1996); Fred A. Wilcox, Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam (Seven Stories Press, 2011) and Waiting for an Army to Die: The Tragedy of Agent Orange (Seven Stories Press, 2nd ed., 2011)
Does it teach the recent history of international criminal law (including military tribunals)? The history of torture? Or of colonialism and imperialism? Or anti-war and peace movements?
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | December 12, 2018 at 09:17 AM
Does “the military” teach the kind of history found in Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn B. Young, eds., Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History (New Press, 2009)? Or history along the lines of Gar Alperovitz’s The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995)? Or Joseph Gerson’s Empire and the Bomb: How the U.S. Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World (Pluto Press, in association with The American Friends Service Committee, 2007? Or Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (Penguin Press, 2013)?
Or the kind of histories represented by the following: Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Fred Branfman, ed. (with essays and drawings by Laotian villagers), Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life under an Air War (University of Wisconsin Press, 2nd ed., 2013); Karen J. Coates (photos by Jerry Redfern), Eternal Harvest: The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos (ThingsAsianPress, 2013); John Duffett, ed., Against The Crime of Silence: Proceedings of The Russell International War Crimes Tribunal (O’Hare Books, New York, 1968); H. Bruce Franklin, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America (Rutgers University Press, 1993) and Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000); J.B. Neilands, et al., Harvest of Death: Chemical Warfare in Vietnam and Cambodia (The Free Press, 1972); William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia (Simon and Schuster, 1979; revised ed., Copper Square Press, 2002); Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (Metropolitan Books, 2013); Vietnam Veterans Against the War, The Winter Soldier Investigation: An Inquiry into American War Crimes (Beacon Press, 1972); Roger Warner, Roger, Back Fire: The CIA’s Secret War in Laos and Its Link to the War in Vietnam (Simon & Schuster, 1995; slightly different later version: Shooting at the Moon: The Story of America’s Clandestine War in Laos (Steerforth Press, 1996); Fred A. Wilcox, Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam (Seven Stories Press, 2011) and Waiting for an Army to Die: The Tragedy of Agent Orange (Seven Stories Press, 2nd ed., 2011)
Does it teach the recent history of international criminal law (including military tribunals)? The history of torture? Or of colonialism and imperialism? Or anti-war and peace movements?
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | December 12, 2018 at 09:19 AM