9. Review of Paul W. Schroeder, The Axis Alliance and Japanese-American Relations, 1941

9. Review of Paul W. Schroeder, The Axis Alliance and Japanese-American Relations, 1941

April 6, 1959

Mr. Kenneth S. Templeton

William Volker Fund

Dear Ken:

Paul W. Schroeder’s The Axis Alliance and Japanese-American Relations, 1941 is remarkable as a measure of the extent to which the American Historical Association—which gave its official imprimatur to this work—has traveled in the tolerance for revisionism since the end of World War II.²⁵ A decade ago, this book would undoubtedly have been branded as “profascist” and a “follower of the Goebbels line” by the same people who are endorsing it today.

Schroeder’s is a highly interesting, scholarly, well-written essay on American-Japanese negotiations during 1941, with the particular reference to the Tripartite Pact. It is a highly useful contribution to revisionist literature, all the more remarkable, as I have said, for bearing an official seal, as it were. Schroeder tells the facts of the case, showing that Japan, far from being an irrational, hell-bent aggressor, was actually pushed into war by the United States, which insisted on forcibly cutting off Japanese access to oil and other important goods, freezing Japanese assets in America, while delivering insufferable, virtual ultimatums to Japan to get out of China, which it had been occupying for several years.

The sincere desire for peace on the part of all Japanese—including the “war party”—the almost minuscule tie-up with the Nazis in the Tripartite Pact, the making of concession after concession by the Japanese to the United States only to find the U.S. always increasing its demands are depicted very well in this book. Schroeder is particularly bitter, and deservedly so, about the extremist unrealism and fanatical aggressiveness of Cordell Hull and such advisers as Stanley Hornbeck. It is also refreshing to see Schroeder couple his attacks on Hull’s moralizing with the recognition that a propeace policy toward Japan in 1941 would not only have been the wisest and only realistic course, but would also have been a more moral one.

The chief weakness of the Schroeder volume is that the author shrinks from the clear interpretations of the excellent data that he has organized and presented. For example, he shows that the United States, before mid-1941, took an anti-Japanese posture, to be sure, but one that was essentially “defensive”—really aggressive, as far as I am concerned, but more a policy of “containment” than “liberation,” to use fashionably current phrases. Then, suddenly, in July 1941, just as the Japanese became significantly more conciliatory and anxious for peace, the Americans suddenly increased their belligerence to almost fanatical lengths, practically calling for war. Why the change? Schroeder has no answer; he mentions the overwhelming anti-Japanese state of public opinion in the United States, and has a very good, if brief, section on the fanatical anti-Japanese opinion molding of American liberals, but he still does not explain the shift, except in terms of sudden irrationality.

There are two important strands of interpretation that are spurned by Schroeder, one in direct attack, another by sheer omission. For one basic explanation of the shift was that earlier, the main emphasis was to keep Japan from further aggression and to concentrate on fighting Nazi Germany. But by summer of 1941, it became clear to FDR and his advisors that Germany would not fight the Americans, despite the extreme provocations in the Atlantic, so the United States turned to the aggressive provocation of Japan as the “back door to war.” Schroeder simply scoffs at this Tansill-Morgenstern ur-revisionist thesis as being absurd, looking for bogeys, etc., and simply claims honest mistakes or irrationalities. And yet this thesis is the only one that explains the shift, on other grounds so absurd. Schroeder only scoffs at the thesis without refuting it; indeed his data tend to lend support, as I have said, to the theory.

The second point, which Schroeder unaccountably omits altogether, is the influence of domestic Communists on U.S. foreign policy, as well as of the [Richard] Sorge spy ring on Japanese foreign policy. My contention is that much of the almost fantastic devotion to China was due not only to missionary sentimentality but to Communist policy advisors who wished to see the United States kill off Japan—Russia’s and Communist China’s great foe in the Far East. Communist policy was therefore to embroil the United States in a war with Japan—although not of course Russia, which would move in at the end of the war for the spoils. Schroeder does not even mention the fact that Germany attacked Russia in July 1941, and that this accounts for the sudden increase in American belligerency after that date. For, with Russia endangered, it became imperative to divert Japan from any possible foray into Russia by going southward and bringing the United States in at the “back door” to war—a double objective.

This thesis of Communist influence in America is also the only one that accounts for a fact that Schroeder puzzles over but cannot explain: after months of bellowing about how fighting for China was practically the highest absolute value an American could achieve, when we finally were in a war in Asia, America promptly forgot about China, and gave it much lower priority than the German conflict. Again, once the United States was in the war, the Communists were interested primarily in killing off Germany—the prime threat to Soviet Russia.

It is probably that Schroeder understands this, for in his citations from liberal anti-Japanese fanaticism in 1941, he quotes liberally from [Thomas A.] Bisson, [Nathaniel] Peffer, and other leftist writers in Amerasia and mentions the advice of Owen Lattimore and even Alger Hiss at one point (all anti-Japanese) without pointing out to the reader that Amerasia was a center for Soviet party-line and even espionage. (All the articles he cites from Amerasia and similar sources were after July 1941.)

All this is to say that Schroeder has not written the definitive book on this period and has not been bold enough in his conclusions. And yet, with that caveat, this is an important addition to revisionist literature. Japan is considered sympathetically; Hull is put in his true perspective; and the author ends with a good, hard-hitting attack on the Tokyo “war crimes” trials of the Japanese leaders.