[PEN-L:1667] Re: Re: Re: Very Strange Argument

[Brad De Long <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>     Well, the usual story that I have heard about the US
>and Japan and oil in WW II is not that the US needed it
>because we had it then.  We were the Saudi Arabia of the
>world at that time, the great Saudi fields only having just
>begun to be developed in 1936.  It was the 1950s when we
>became a net importer.
>     Rather the story was that FDR wanted to get into the
>war but knew that he could only do so if it involved a
>conflict with Japan.  Cutting off oil exports to Japan
>would force the Japanese to attack the then-Dutch East
>Indies, now Indonesia, the only source of oil in the
>vicinity of any significance at that time.  FDR figured
>that this would involve an initial attack on the then-US
>colony of the Philippines and that that would trigger US
>entry into the war.

Well, the U.S. had been slowly turning up the pressure for a while--telling
Japan to stop trying to conquer China or the U.S. would feel that it had to
take further steps to put more pressure on Japan. Prohibiting the export of
iron and steel scrap was one stage. Prohibiting the export of oil from the
U.S. to Japan--and leaning on the Dutch government-in-exile to prohibit the
export of oil from Indonesia to Japan--was another step, taken in the
summer of 1941.

It is not clear--even today--whether Roosevelt wanted to prohibit or just
reduce the export of oil to Japan. It is clear that Roosevelt's directive,
as implemented by Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson, amounted to an
export ban.

U.S. military and diplomatic planners thought that the Japanese might
respond to the export prohibition in one of three ways: (Y1) first, sign a
face-saving treaty with China, begin pulling back their army, and then
appeal for the lifting of sanctions; (Y2) second, hunker down by greatly
restricting civilian (and military) consumption of oil while still pressing
for a decision in China; (Y3) third, attack south to conquer what is now
Indonesia (and probably attack the Philippines along the way) thus
providing the U.S. with a casus belli for entering World War II against
Japan (and, Roosevelt would have hoped, Germany).

It's false to the history to assume that people knew in advance that move X
would call forth response Y. From Roosevelt's perspective (and from the
Chinese perspective, and from my perspective) the genocidal course (maybe 5
million Chinese civilians dead? Maybe 10 million? We really don't know) of
the Japanese invasion of China was a bad thing, and the mid-1941 oil
embargo promised to do some good no matter which of the three likely
responses the Japanese military decided upon.

Of course, the Japanese did not respond to X with Y1, Y2, or Y3, but with
Z--a full-scale offensive not just south to Indonesia but one east to Pearl
Harbor that came very close to crippling the U.S. Pacific fleet.

And we know now--or, at least, Akira Iriye thinks--that the U.S. embargo of
oil to Japan did a great deal more good for the world than Roosevelt had
intended. For the move that the Japanese military was planning in the
summer of 1941 was a strike north from Manchuria to conquer Russia's
Maritime province. This strike--that would have kept Siberian reserves out
of the Battle of Moscow--was cancelled once the fact of the oil embargo
became clear.

So it is very possible that the Battle of Moscow--one of the key turning
points of World War II--was one with a stroke of Dean Acheson's pen in the
State, War, and Navy Building at 1700 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W., Washington,
D.C.


Brad DeLong