YUKIKAZE’S WAR The Second World War as the First World’s Resource War Draft: Please do not reproduce Brett L. Walker Regents Professor of History Montana State University, Bozeman [email protected] www.BrettLWalker.net Introduction: Marginalizing the Asia-Pacific Theater This paper examines the unusually long life of an Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) destroyer named Yukikaze. More than a biography of a 388-foot submarine killer and escort vessel, the life of Yukikaze offers fresh insights into Japan’s participation in the Second World War, a story shaped by interwar arms treaties and fueled by the demand for oil. I have burdened Yukikaze and her 2,500 tons displacement with some rather sizable arguments in this paper, some of which will be viewed as revisionist, reductionist, and controversial, but this warship has plied heavier seas. I investigate the missions of Yukikaze through the lens of what is now called “resource wars” because that is the war she fought.1 Rather than view Japan as simply waging a “war of aggression”—or “unintelligent calculations” made by “self-willed militaristic advisers,” as the Potsdam Declaration (26 July 1945) proclaimed—I argue that Japanese war planners sought control over the oceanic empire of Nan’yô, or the South Pacific and its islands, for the entirely intelligent calculations of obtaining energy Draft:2 Not for citation or circulation autarky. Japan’s newly acquired place in the Fossil Fuel Civilization, its history since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, depended on it.3 Insisting that Japan waged a “war of aggression” not only misunderstands Japan’s strategies in the Second World War, but also misconstrues Japan’s entire modern experience. It also risks misidentifying where the next global conflicts will erupt, particularly those that involve Japan. As explained in the preamble to the Tripartite Pact (September 1940), the Axis considered it a “prerequisite of a lasting peace that each nation of the world would receive the space to which it is entitled.” The Axis sought to carve out a “greater East Asia space” for Japan and a “European space” for Germany and Italy and establish within them a “new order of things calculated to promote the mutual prosperity and welfare of the people concerned.” In a word, they sought autarky. Importantly,circulation Axis negotiators viewed space as more than acreage for homes; rather, space meant access to the food, energy, and other natural resources required for “mutual prosperityor and welfare” in the Industrial Age. Indeed, from the outset, lebensraum was viewed as the larder for agricultural and industrial development and was central to the struggle of the Axis nations.4 After all, Japan had sought lebensraum in Manchuria less than a decade earlier with the establishment of the puppet citationstate of Manchukuo— the real first shots of the Second World War when thefor global conflict is viewed through the lens of energy for bodies and machines.5 Unlike Notthe British and U.S., neither Germany nor Japan had ready access to oil on domestic soil or within empires. The Second World War, at least for Japan, was meant to remedy that, though Japanese often couched the reasons for the war in more ideological Draft:terms, such as waging a “final war” against the U.S. in a broader civilizational struggle, as Ishiwara Kanji (1889-1949) of the Kwantung Army called it in his famous Kyoto lecture in May 1940. “Truly,” he insisted, the “Japanese armed forces are the guardian 2 deity of that righteousness—the Japanese kokutai—which shall save the world.”6 Drawing on its national essence, Japan, through the instrument of its imperial armed forces, represented the salvation of the planet. In this paper I argue that, for all the ideological rhetoric, Japan was really after oil in the Southern Operation. The argument that Japan waged a strategic war to secure oil, rather than an ideologically-driven war of aggression, will likely strike scholars of East Asia as apologizing for Japanese militarism by rationalizing Japan’s conduct. Simultaneously, it will strike historians of the Second World War as rather boring because so much of the war was about energy and resource acquisition—aircraft carriers and battleships, Panzer and Sherman tanks, and Hurricanes and B-24 Liberators proved relentlessly thirsty machines of war. As Frederich von Mellenthin, a staff officer of the German Afrika Corps, acknowledged after the defeat at the second battle of El Alamein: a motorized division without fuel is mere scrap iron.7 In 1941, after U.S., British, and Dutch oil embargos of Japan, the IJN faced the very real prospect of commanding a fleet of scrap iron. My reason for revisiting this question of the nature of Japan’s participation in the Second World War is simple: when scholars view Japan as simply waging a “war of aggression,” they risk misinterpreting Japan’s role today in geopolitical hotspots, particularly in the South and East China Sea. Presently, Japan finds itself defending a new maritime empire, the sphere of its Exclusive Economic Zones, where substantial Draft:reserves of natural Not gas remain for untapped. citation Japan does so, however, or againstcirculation the backdrop of the legacies of having previously waged a “war of aggression and a war in violation of international law,” as the Indictments of the Military Tribunal for the Far East ultimately 3 determined. This legacy undermines Japan’s strategic position in the region; but it also misunderstands the underlying reason for Japan’s entering the Second World War in the first place. Consequently, we risk misidentifying flashpoints for future wars, which will most assuredly be fought over the last vestiges of hydrocarbon energy but be couched in the lofty language of a “final war” or “liberation” or “democratization” and so forth. More than any other conflict, historians portray the Second World War as an ideological war. “This was to be the world’s first wholly politically ideological war,” explained Andrew Roberts in The Storm of War. Liberalism, communism, and fascism found themselves pitted against each other in a struggle for survival.8 I disagree that the Second World War was “wholly” about political ideas. Whether liberal, communist, or fascist, the belligerents still required resources to fuel their industrial economies—some theorists, such as Timothy Mitchell, have even speculated that fossil fuels spawned mass liberal democracies, and democracies remain dependent on them to persist.9 Ideas without energy behind them are only musings—or intellectual scrap iron. My assertion is that the need for energy and other natural resources powered, and in some respects shaped, the ideologies that justified a world at war—political ideology marched to the steady drumbeat of the needs of industrial economies. It is a simple point, even a little reductionist, but one that often gets lost in the celebratory Greatest Generation fog of Second World War histories—as much as it was a ideological war, it was also a resource war, much like the wars of today. Draft:The preamble Not to the for Military citationTribunal for the Far East or (convened circulation 29 April 1946) is instructive. The Indictments stated that the “internal and foreign policies of Japan were dominated and directed by a criminal militaristic clique, and such policies were the cause 4 of serious world troubles, aggressive wars, and great damage to peace-loving peoples…” Japan’s parliamentary institutions implemented “widespread aggression,” and an imperial system emerged “similar to those then established by Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany and by the Fascist party in Italy…” Japan joined a conspiracy of “other aggressive countries,” which sought “domination… of the rest of the world.” The Tribunal leveled the Indictments against those defendants who “intended to and did plan, prepare, initiate, or wage aggressive war” against the Allies. With the Tribunal’s Indictments, any legitimate strategies in the South Pacific were relegated to a “plan or conspiracy” of aggression and lawlessness. Basically, the Allies relegated Japan’s experience during the first half of the twentieth century (between April 1928 and September 1945 as the Indictments stated) to a “war of aggression and a war in violation of international law.”10 The Tribunal rendered much of Japan’s modernity as borderline psychotic. East Asian historians also tend to view Japan’s participation in the Second World War through this victor’s lens, but for a different set of reasons. East Asian historians view Japan as waging a “war of aggression” because they often contextualize Japan’s campaign within a conflict called the Pacific War (1931-1945), a nearly fifteen-year regional struggle confined to the Asia-Pacific region and centered on the Second Sino- Japanese War (1937-45). In a sense, the war has become a topic of area studies, rather than viewed as part of a global conflict known as the Second World War. This paper Draft:argues that, by Notplacing IJN foroperations citation in Nan’yô within the orglobal contextcirculation of the Second World War, Japan’s resource acquisition strategies, in particularly the conquest and defense of Nan’yô, resembles those of other belligerents, both Axis and Allied powers. 5 Japan sought to hold territory it had gained in the Paris Peace Conference (1919), and expand into other resource-rich parts of the South Pacific held by Western powers, such as the U.S. in the Philippines, Britain in Malaya and Borneo, and the Netherlands in Borneo and the East Indies. Despite the “liberation of Asia” rhetoric, Japanese colonial rule in these areas was cruel and brutal, as was their military conquest of them, but it hardly constituted “unintelligent calculations” given the amount of oil there. My contention is that the separation of the Pacific War from the Second World War actually started outside of East Asian studies, with A.