officers stood up. He was a barrel-chested man with a plump purplish face scarred by plane crashes, a naval aviator dating back to the
Standing before the screen, Warren started in the modest monotone of most Navy instructors, hands on hips, legs slightly apart. He made the conventional deprecatory joke about his ignorance, then went straight at the topic.
Okay. Now, naturally, our concern is the Japanese. In theory, there should be no battle problem here. We’re so much stronger than Japan in military potential that any Jap move to start a war looks suicidal. So you hear civilians say we’ll blow the little yellow bastards off the map in two weeks, and all that poppycock.” Some of the young officers were smiling; their smiles faded. Warren hooked a blue and yellow Hydrographic Office chart over the movie screen, and took up a pointer. “Here’s a chart of the Pacific. People shouldn’t talk about blowing anybody off the map without a map in front of them.” Warren’s pointer circled the French, Dutch, and British possessions in southeast Asia. “Oil, rubber, tin, rice — you name what Japan needs to be a leading world power, and there it sits. With what’s happened to the armed forces of the European empires since 1939, it’s almost up for grabs. And the first thing to notice is that it’s all in the Jap back yard. We have to steam for days, far past Japan, just to get there. The territory in dispute, in any Pacific war, will be ten thousand miles or more from San Francisco, and at some points only eight hundred miles from Tokyo.
“Well, so our government’s been trying to keep the Japs quiet by letting them buy from us all the steel, scrap iron, and oil they want, though of course the stuff goes straight into the stockpile they need to fight a war against us. Now, I have no opinion of that policy -”
“
Quiet ensued as Warren took away the chart. A pallid slide flashed on the screen, a situation map of the Russo-Japanese war.
“Okay, a little ancient history now. Here’s Port Arthur,” Warren pointed, “tucked far into the Yellow Sea, behind Korea. Jap back yard again. Here’s where the Japs beat the Russians in 1905. Without a declaration of war, they made a sneak attack on the Czar’s navy, a night torpedo attack. The Russkis never recovered. The Nips landed and besieged this key ice-free port. When Port Arthur finally fell, that was it. The Czar accepted a negotiated peace with a primitive country, one-sixtieth the size of his own! It was as great a victory for the Japs as the American Revolution was for us.
“Now I personally think our history books don’t give that war enough play. That’s where modern Japanese history starts. Maybe that’s where all modern history starts. Because that’s where the colored man for the first time took on the white man and beat him.”
In one corner, near the serving pantry, the white-coated steward’s mates, all Filipino or Negro, were gathered. When the topic was not secret, they had the privilege of listening to officer lectures. Glances now wandered to them from all over the wardroom, in a sudden stillness. The Filipino faces were blank masks. The Negroes’ expressions were various and enigmatic; some of the younger ones tartly smiled. This awkward moment caught Warren unawares. The presence of the steward’s mates had been a matter of course to him, hardly noticed. He shook off the embarrassment and plowed on.
“Well, this was a hell of a feat, only half a century after Perry opened up the country. The Japs learned fast. They traded silk and art objects to the British for a modern steam navy. They hired the Germans to train them an army. Then they crossed to the mainland and licked Russia.
“But remember, Moscow was a whole continent away from Port Arthur. The only link was a railroad. Long supply lines licked the Czar. Long supply lines licked Cornwallis and long supply lines licked Napoleon in Russia. The further you have to go to fight, the more you thin out your strength just getting there and coming back.
“Incidentally, at the Naval War College, war games often start with a sneak attack by the Japs on us, right here in Pearl Harbor. That derives from the Port Arthur attack. The way the Japanese mind works, why shouldn’t they repeat a trick on the white devils that once paid off so well?
“Well, of course 1941 isn’t 1905. We’ve got search planes and radar. This time the Japs could get themselves royally clobbered. Still, the nature of this enemy is strange. You can’t rule that possibility out.
“But always remember his objective. When the Japs took on the Czar in 1904 they had no intention of marching to Moscow. Their objective was to grab off territory in their own back yard and hold it. That’s what they did, and they still hold it.
“If war breaks out in the Pacific, the Japs are not going to set forth to occupy Washington, D.C., and my guess is they won’t even menace Hawaii. They couldn’t care less. They’ll strike south for the big grab, and then they’ll dare us to come on, across a supply line ten thousand miles long, through their triple chain of fortified island airfields — the Gilberts, the Marshalls, the Marianas — and their surface and submarine fleets, operating close to home under an umbrella of land-based air.
“So I don’t exactly see us blowing them off the map in two weeks.”
Warren looked around at the more than a hundred sombre young faces.
“Peace in the Pacific once rested on a rickety three-legged stool. One leg was American naval power; the second, the European forces in southeast Asia; and the third, the Russian land power in Siberia.
“The European leg of the stool got knocked out in 1940 by the Germans. Yesterday, the Germans knocked out the Russian leg. Stalin’s not going into any Asian war — not now. So it’s all up to us, and with two legs out of the stool, I would say peace in the Pacific has fallen on its ass.”
Warren had been talking along very solemnly, flourishing his pointer. The joke brought surprised chuckles.
“As to Captain Nugent’s question, what does Hitler’s move mean to us, the answer therefore comes out loud and clear, when you look at the map. Der Fuhrer has sounded general quarters for the
Rear Admiral Colton was first on his feet to lead the applause. Clenching the cigar in his teeth, he pumped Warren’s hand.
Gliding across an imaginary line that splits the Pacific Ocean from the north to the south polar caps, the sunrise acquired a new label, June 23. Behind that line, June 22 had just dawned. This murky international convention, amid world chaos, still stood. For the globe still turned as always in the light of the sun, ninety million miles away in black space, and the tiny dwellers on the globe still had to agree, as they went about their mutual butcheries, on a way to tell the time.
The daylight slipped westward over the waters, over charming green island chains, once German colonies, all entrusted to Japan under her pledge not to fortify them — all fortified. Endeavoring to emulate the white man, Japan had studied European history in the matter of keeping such pledges.
Day came to the city of Tokyo, dotted with charming parks and temples and an imperial palace, but otherwise a flat sprawling slum of matchbox shacks and shabby Western buildings. Catching up with the white man in two generations had impoverished the Japanese; four years of the “China Incident” had drained them dry. Obedient to their leaders, they were bending to their tasks, eating prison fare, building war machines by borrowed blueprints with borrowed metals under borrowed technical advisers, desperately trading silk, cameras, and toys for oil to make the machines go. Ninety million of them toiled on four quake-ridden rocky islands full of slumbering volcanoes, an area no larger than California. Their chief natural resource was willpower. The rest of the world knew little more about them than what would be learned from Gilbert and Sullivan’s
They were puzzling people. Their Foreign Minister, a little moustached man named Matsuoka, American- educated and much travelled in Europe, gave the impression of being a lunatic, with his voluble, self-contradictory chatter, and his wild giggling, grinning and hissing, so different from the expected deportment of the Oriental. White diplomats guessed that his strange ways must be part of the Japanese character. Only later did it turn out that the Japanese also thought he was demented. Why the militarist cabinet entrusted him with mortally serious matters at this time remains a historical mystery, like the willingness of the Germans to follow Hitler, who in his writings and speeches always appeared to people of other countries an obvious maniac. It is not clear just how crazy Stalin was
