Conflict in the Pacific 1937–1951

Conflict in the Pacific 1937–1951 is one of six Peace and Conflict options in Section III: one 25-mark extended response (choose one of two alternatives), about 1,000 words. The syllabus key features are imperialism and nationalism in Asia, the aims and strategies of Japan and the Allies, the home fronts, the experience of occupied South-East Asia, the use of the atomic bomb, the defeat of Japan and the Allied occupation.

• Survey: tensions in the Pacific by 1937; Japanese foreign policy 1937–1941; US and British policies in the Pacific.
• Outbreak and course of the war: the reasons for the attack on Pearl Harbor and the US response; Japanese advances 1941–42; turning points (Coral Sea, Midway, Guadalcanal, New Guinea); Allied strategies.
• Civilians: occupied South-East Asia (collaboration, resistance, forced labour); the home fronts in Japan and Australia.
• End of the conflict: the reasons for the atomic bombings and Japan's defeat; war crimes trials and the Emperor's position; the occupation of Japan to 1951.

The war in Europe is a separate option (Conflict in Europe), and Japan before 1937 belongs to the National Study Japan 1904–1937.

• Background: Manchuria seized in 1931–32 (Manchukuo); Japan left the League of Nations in 1933; the military's growing influence on government.
• Marco Polo Bridge Incident (7 July 1937) began full-scale war with China. Japan took Shanghai and Nanjing (December 1937), where Japanese troops massacred civilians and prisoners (the Nanjing Massacre; estimates range widely, the Tokyo tribunal estimated over 200,000 dead). China did not surrender; the war became a stalemate.
• The New Order in East Asia (November 1938) and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (August 1940): Japanese leadership of Asia, presented as liberation from the West, but aimed at securing resources.
• Northern or southern advance? Defeat by Soviet forces at Nomonhan (1939) and the Neutrality Pact with the USSR (April 1941) favoured the navy's southern plan.
• 1940: the fall of France and the Netherlands left their colonies exposed. Japan occupied northern Indochina (September 1940) and signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy.
• 1941: the occupation of southern Indochina (July) → the USA froze Japanese assets and imposed an oil embargo, joined by Britain and the Netherlands → the Hull Note (26 November) demanded withdrawal from China and Indochina → Japan chose war.

US and British policy

The USA supported China and the ‘Open Door’ and gradually restricted trade; the Pacific Fleet moved to Pearl Harbor in 1940. Britain relied on the Singapore strategy — a naval base to which the fleet would be sent — but was stretched by the war in Europe.

Why Japan lost

• US industrial power: far greater production of ships and aircraft; Japan could not replace losses.
• Codebreaking (Magic, and naval codebreaking before Midway).
• The submarine war destroyed most of Japan's merchant fleet, cutting it off from oil and raw materials.
• Japanese weaknesses: overextension, the drain of the China war, army–navy rivalry, reliance on a single ‘decisive battle’.
• The final shocks of August 1945 (see below).

Occupied South-East Asia

• Brutality: the Sook Ching massacres of ethnic Chinese in Singapore and Malaya (1942); the Kempeitai (military police); sexual slavery of ‘comfort women’.
• Forced labour: romusha from Java and elsewhere; the Burma–Thailand Railway (1942–43), where more than 12,000 Allied prisoners (about 2,800 of them Australians) and tens of thousands of Asian labourers died.
• Prisoners of war: about a third of Australian prisoners of the Japanese died; at Sandakan in Borneo only six of about 2,400 prisoners survived.
• Economic collapse: requisitioning, inflation and shortages; famine in northern Vietnam (1944–45), with estimates of 1–2 million deaths.
• Collaboration and nationalism: Sukarno and Hatta in Indonesia (PETA); Aung San's army in Burma (turned against Japan in March 1945); puppet ‘independence’ for Burma and the Philippines (1943).
• Resistance: the Hukbalahap (Philippines), the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army, the Viet Minh.
• Long-term effect: the destruction of European prestige sped up decolonisation (Indonesia proclaimed independence on 17 August 1945; Vietnam on 2 September 1945).

The home fronts

• Australia: Curtin's turn to the USA (December 1941); manpower controls; rationing (from 1942); censorship; women in the services, the Land Army and factories; internment of ‘enemy aliens’; about a million US servicemen passed through; midget submarines in Sydney Harbour (May–June 1942); the Cowra breakout (1944).
• Japan: total mobilisation; neighbourhood associations; propaganda and the Emperor cult; food shortages; students and women in factories; children evacuated from cities; firebombing from 1944–45 destroyed much of urban Japan.

• Potsdam Declaration (26 July 1945): unconditional surrender or ‘prompt and utter destruction’; the Emperor's position not mentioned.
• Hiroshima (6 August), Soviet declaration of war (8 August) and invasion of Manchuria (9 August), Nagasaki (9 August). By the end of 1945 an estimated 140,000 people had died in Hiroshima and about 70,000 in Nagasaki.
• The Supreme War Council was deadlocked; Hirohito intervened (9–10 and 14 August); an attempted coup by officers failed; the surrender broadcast was played on 15 August; the formal surrender was signed on USS Missouri on 2 September 1945.

The decision to use the bomb

Reasons given: to end the war quickly and avoid an invasion (Operation Downfall), after the losses of Iwo Jima and Okinawa; the money and momentum of the Manhattan Project; revenge for Pearl Harbor and the treatment of prisoners; and, according to revisionists, to impress the USSR. Alternatives debated: a demonstration, continued blockade and bombing, waiting for Soviet entry, or assuring Japan that the Emperor could stay.

• SCAP: General Douglas MacArthur. Australia took part through the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF).
• Demilitarisation: forces disbanded; purges; the Tokyo trials (International Military Tribunal for the Far East, 1946–48), with Australian judge Sir William Webb presiding; seven defendants, including Tojo, were executed. Many other trials were held across Asia, including by Australia.
• The Emperor was not tried; MacArthur kept him to help govern, though Australia and others wanted him prosecuted. He renounced his ‘divinity’ in January 1946.
• Democratisation: the 1947 constitution (popular sovereignty, the Emperor as symbol, Article 9); women voted from April 1946; land reform; unions legalised; the zaibatsu partly broken up.
• The ‘reverse course’ (from about 1947–48): Cold War priorities; anti-communist measures; economic recovery; the Korean War boom (1950).
• End: the Treaty of San Francisco and the US–Japan Security Treaty (September 1951), in force April 1952; ANZUS (1951) reassured Australia and New Zealand.

Worked example (not a bank question). _‘To what extent did the Allied occupation transform Japan between 1945 and 1951?’_

1. Thesis: the occupation transformed Japan's political system and its military role, but the Cold War ‘reverse course’ limited economic and social change and preserved continuities such as the Emperor and the bureaucracy.
2. Demilitarisation and war crimes trials.
3. The 1947 constitution and democratisation.
4. Economic and social reforms: land reform, unions, the zaibatsu.
5. The reverse course and continuities.
6. Conclusion with a clear judgement.

• Treating Pearl Harbor as the start of the war in Asia; full-scale war in China began in 1937.
• Confusing Coral Sea (Port Moresby) and Midway (carriers).
• Overstating Japan's plans to invade Australia; its 1942 aim was to isolate Australia.
• Leaving out the Soviet declaration of war in August 1945.
• Ignoring Asian civilians when writing about occupied South-East Asia.
• Stopping in 1945: the option runs to 1951.

• Use precise terms: imperialism, autarky (self-sufficiency), Co-Prosperity Sphere, total war, island-hopping, attrition, unconditional surrender, demilitarisation, reverse course.
• For ‘turning point’ alternatives, set criteria: did the event change the balance of military power, the initiative or morale?
• Show the Australian dimension where relevant (Singapore, Kokoda, the home front, prisoners of war, the occupation).
• Keep key dates straight: 7 July 1937; 7 December 1941; 15 February 1942; 4–7 June 1942; 6, 8, 9 and 15 August 1945; 2 September 1945; 8 September 1951.

• Japan 1904–1937 explains the rise of militarism that led to 1937.
• Australia 1918–1949 covers Curtin and the home front in more depth.
• The Nuclear Age 1945–2011 begins with the decision to use the bomb.
• Conflict in Indochina 1954–1979 and Indonesia 1945–2005 follow the nationalist movements strengthened by the occupation.