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Draft:2 Not for citation or circulation autarky.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. J. P. Taylor’s 1961 controversial reevaluation of the origins of the Second World War. Famously,circulation Taylor argued that as “Great Britain and France dithered between resistance and appeasement,”
they “helped to make war more likely.”11 Prior to Taylor’s analysis,or the explanation for
the cause of the Second World War had been distilled to one name: Hitler. But Taylor did
something else that few historians have acknowledged: he separated the Asia-Pacific war
from the war in North Africa and Europe. “The war which began in September 1939, was
fought in Europe and North Africa; itcitation overlapped in time, though not in space, with the Far Eastern War, which beganfor in December 1941,” wrote Taylor. “The two wars remained distinct,” he concluded.12 Taylor argued that the “European war and its origins can be treated asNot a story in itself, the Far East providing occasional distractions off- stage.”13
The Asia-Pacific war was not “off-stage,” particularly if you lived in Nanjing in Draft:1938, Manila or Honolulu in 1941, or Hiroshima in 1945; but East Asian historians have remained satisfied with this mischaracterization. I seek to push this line of argumentation
even further, however. I submit that it is not enough to argue that the Asia-Pacific war
6 was on-stage—it was actually where the Second World War started in September 1931. It
was Japan that made the first move toward claiming lebensraum in resource-rich
Manchuria. As Taylor himself acknowledged, with the 1931 Mukden Incident the
“League of Nations faced its first serious challenge,”14 not with the later German
ambitions in the Rhineland, Czechoslovakia, or Poland. Yet, Taylor remained content to
place Japan’s adventurism in China “off-stage,” distinct from the main pageantry
unfolding in Europe.
With the Asia-Pacific war marginalized, historians studying the Second World War in Asia have tended to regionalize the conflict, referring to it ascirculation the Pacific War. As Ienaga Saburô argued, the events of the fifteen years, starting in September 1931 and
ending in August 1945 are “inseparable, all part of the sameor war,” the Pacific War.15 But
once it was marginalized—almost by necessity given that the Pacific War started in 1931,
while the Second World War started in 1939—the war could also take on a distinctly
Asian flavor. In a sense, with Taylor’s separation of the Far East from Europe the war’s
interpretation went “Asiatic,” as E. B.citation Sledge famously characterized the uniquely savage qualities of Pacific fighting.for16 “This was not the dispassionate killing seen on other fronts or in other wars. This was a brutish, primitive hatred, as characteristic of the horror of war in the PacificNot as the palm trees and the islands,” he wrote in his memoir.17 This led John Dower to characterize the Pacific War as less merciful, more brutal, and more
racially driven than the war in Europe in War Without Mercy. The Pacific War, wrote
Dower, was characterized by an “obsession with extermination on both sides—a war
Draft: 18 without mercy.” I believe that historians, building on the separated, regional qualities of
the Pacific War, have inadvertently Orientalized the war in the Asia-Pacific theater,
7 rendering it more exotic, more aggressive, more irrational, and more unintelligent than
the European theater—in Dower’s words, an “almost spellbinding spectacle of brutality
and death.”19 Historians rendered the war exotic, much like swaying palms did the Pacific
islands.
Take one important piece of evidence for Dower: the incendiary bombing
campaigns over Japanese cities in March 1945, where hundreds of thousands of civilians
were killed.20 As cruel as such campaigns proved—and they were indeed very cruel—
there was nothing unique to the Pacific theater about them. British RAF Bomber Command had been pressuring the U.S. to abandon “strategic” or “precision”circulation bombing for nighttime “area bombing” for months, which the U.S. eventually did (for a variety of
reasons, including Japan’s strong jet stream, which blew alreadyor inaccurate bombs even
further off course). Under the leadership of Curtis LeMay (1906-90), the U.S. Air Force
began using B-29s for low altitude, nighttime area-bombing campaigns over Tokyo (the
most extensive of which was Operation Meetinghouse, 9-10 March 1945), which had
about the same devastating effect as RAFcitation Bomber Command “thousand-plane” raids over German cities such as Colognefor (May 30-31, 1942) and Hamburg (July 24-30, 1943), though more people died in Japan’s flammable wooden cities.21 My point is simple: there was nothing uniquelyNot “spellbindin g” about the Pacific theater; Stalingrad was spellbinding, too. That racially driven cruelty, the savage bloodletting, was unique to the
Second World War in general. Frankly, it was the Second World War in its entirety that Draft:was “spellbinding. ” Therefore, Japan’s wartime strategies and conduct must be viewed in the context
of the entirety of the Second World War—they must be globalized in the context of a
8 world at war—then the strategic resource war becomes clear. It may have been cruel and
self-serving, but it was anything but “unintelligent calculations.” To get at some of these
larger lessons, let us return to our destroyer Yukikaze, because her design, construction,
and missions teach us about the global qualities of Japan’s experience at the outbreak of
the Second World War. Her mission, almost always, was to fight a resource war.
International Arms Agreements and Naval Engineering
The keel for Yukikaze was laid at the Sasebo Naval Yard in Nagasaki Prefecture on 2 August 1938. She was launched the following year and delivercirculationed to the IJN on 20 January 1940, where she joined the elite 2nd Destroyer Squadron. Four captains
commanded the destroyer and all survived the war: Tobita Kenjirôor (from Sendai City in
Kagoshima Prefecture), Kanma Ryôkichi (from Sendai City in Miyagi Prefecture),
Terauchi Masamichi (Tochigi City in Tochigi Prefecture), and Koyô Keiji (from
Kamakura City in Kanagawa Prefecture). Yukikaze was the only destroyer to survive the
war and her name remains synonymouscitation in Japan with good fortune on the battlefield.22 Importantly, Yukikazefor’s development is a story of naval architecture that evolved within the limitations of international arms treaties. IJN engineers designed Yukikaze in the context andNot aftermath of the Washington Naval Conference, where vessel weight meant everything. Negotiated between November 1921 and February 1922, the victors of
World War One (Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the U.S.) signed the agreement in Draft:order to “contribute to the maintenance of the general peace, and to reduce the burdens of competition in armaments.” Specifically, it limited the construction of battleships,
battlecruisers, and aircraft carriers—what were known as “capital ships.” The agreement
9 did not limit the construction of other warships, such as cruisers, destroyers, and
submarines, but did limit them to 10,000-tons displacement. The agreement limited the
IJN to 315,000 tons of capital ships and 81,000 tons of aircraft carriers, while the U.S.
and Britain retained 525,000 tons and 135,000 tons, respectively.23 This is the origin of
the infamous 5:5:3-ratio that so irked IJN leadership and the Japanese public. Because of
the limitations placed on the navy, Japan became a global leader in lightweight ship
construction. With Yukikaze, the hull only constituted twenty-seven percent of her overall
weight, unlike similar U.S. and British destroyers, whose hulls constituted closer to thirty-three percent of their weight. This allowed six percent more weightcirculation in armaments, including the deadly Type-93 oxygen torpedo. In order to reduce hull weight, state-of-
the-art designing of the bow, stern, and keel became necessaryor, which required
heightened steel strength and innovative welding techniques. In her day, Yukikaze was
nothing short of a marvel in nautical design.24 citation for Not
Draft:
Figure 1: Yukikaze off Sasebo, Japan, in January 1940
10 The naval architect who pioneered this push in lightweight warship construction
was Hiraga Yuzuru (1878-1943). Hiraga was a career naval officer who, after the Russo-
Japanese War (1905), attended the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, U.K. He
graduated in June 1908 and, later, became a professor of engineering at Tokyo Imperial
University. He emerged as Japan’s leading naval architect in the 1910s and 1920s.
Hiraga, together with another famous naval architect, Fujimoto Kikuo, designed the
experimental lightweight cruiser Yûbari (commissioned 23 July 1923). After a stint as
technical director to the Japanese delegation in Washington D.C. during the Washington Naval negotiations (between November 1923 and August 1924), Hiragacirculation became head of the IJN’s Kansei Honbu (Technical Department), and sought to place the armaments of a
5,000 ton displacement vessel on the hull of a 3,000 ton vesselor in order to compete with
Britain and the U.S. under the agreement’s 5:5:3 apportionment. The IJN’s Zôsenkan
(Shipbuilding Department) undertook these early architectural efforts and produced the
cruiser Furutaka (commissioned 31 March 1926) and her sister ship Kako (commissioned
20 July 1926). Hiraga and Fujimoto’scitation team designed the vessels to counter the U.S. Omaha-class and British Hawkinsfor- class scout cruisers, and they drew extensively on the innovations of Yûbari. Furutaka outperformed her Western counterparts in nearly every category: she bristledNot with eight inch (201mm) instead of six-inch guns, sported 50 caliber machine guns, and could run at thirty-five knots as opposed to thirty knots. The
British Royal Navy was so impressed by Furutaka that it reportedly made a formal Draft:request to buy her construction blueprints. After Furutaka came the heavy cruiser Myôkô—the first 10,000-ton displacement cruiser built by any navy, but still built within
the design constraints of the Washington Naval Conference.25
11 Because of the constraints of the Washington Naval Conference, the Gunreibu
(Navy General Staff) began to make increasingly impossible demands on the Zôsenkan.
While the Gunreibu demanded more armaments and equipment on deck, Hiraga and
Fujimoto came to believe that such demands compromised the basic seaworthiness of
their vessels. Eventually, the politicization of naval architecture led to two maritime
calamities that changed the direction of the IJN and made the Gunreibu rethink its
commitment to the Washington Naval Conference. The Tomozuru Incident was the first:
on 12 March 1934 the Chidori-class Tomozuru, while steaming at fourteen knots in a strong gale, capsized. An IJN cruiser later found Tomozuru drifting circulationkeel up, the majority of her 113 officers and sailors dead. The Zôsenkan had designed the new Chidori-class
torpedo boat to serve as a lightweight vessel to takeover patrolor and anti-submarine duties
from the heavier and treaty limited destroyers. As a result of the ensuing investigation by
the Gunreibu, Fukuda Keiji (1890-1964) replaced Fujimoto at the Zôsenkan. The
Gunreibu blamed Fujimoto, even though it had pushed for the heavier armaments over
his repeated objections. citation But North Pacific watersfor were not through testing the seaworthiness of IJN warships. The real test came on 26 September 1935, when the 4th Fleet was battered by a strong typhoonNot off the coast of Northeastern Japan. The front of the typhoon stretched for nearly 200 miles, so escaping the eighty-knot blow proved impossible. With punishing
winds and forty to sixty foot waves, the storm damaged some of the bigger warships, Draft:including the carriers Ryûjô and Hôshô; but the destroyers took the worst pounding, including the entire bow breaking off the Fubuki-class destroyer Yûgiri. The Fubuki-
class destroyers had rolled close to 75 degrees, and many suffered shearing at the bows.
12 The storm damaged nearly every ship in the 4th Fleet, and over fifty men were killed or
missing. The calamity forced the IJN to reassess its lightweight and top-heavy destroyer
designs, and repair and reinforce existing vessels.26 It was from this experience that the
Kagerô-class destroyers were born.
The naval architect Makino Shigeru designed Yukikaze and her seventeen sister
ships of the Kagerô-class. Born in Nagoya (Aichi Prefecture), Makino was a child of the
Zôsenkan of the Washington Naval Conference years—Hiraga, Fujimoto, and Fukuda all
served as his mentors. Makino created Yukikaze at a time of global crisis, while Japan was already at war with China and eyeing the South Pacific; presciently,circulation he sought to build a destroyer expert at killing submarines. He also had the luxury of designing ships
after Japan had withdrawn from the London Naval Conferenceor in 1936 and had allowed
the terms of the Washington Naval Conference to expire in January 1937.27 The
international arms treaty regimes of the 1920s and 1930s were over, but Japanese naval
architects had learned from its weight limitations. The key was better stability and
seaworthiness, which Makino achievedcitation through new theories in metacentric height. Makino drew on the earlierfor Special Type (tokukei) and Super Type (chôtokukei) destroyers to create the Kagerô-class boats, which exceeded thirty-five knots in time trials with a fullNot load of armaments. Once U.S. spies learned of the speed and cruising range of the Kagerô-class ships, the U.S. Navy abandoned the Benson-class destroyers
and pursued the Fletcher-class destroyers instead. In turn, the British introduced the Draft:Tribal-class destroyers. The Kagerô-class warships reimagined what a destroyer was capable of accomplishing in speed, armaments, and radius. Such destroyers proved
instrumental in resolving what became known as Japan’s “Southern Question.”
13
Nan’yô: Japan’s Oil Empire
Yukikaze was a warship shaped by two decades of international naval agreements
that had advanced IJN warship construction. But another global technological
advancement created her as well. As Yukikaze plied South Pacific waters, she—like
nearly all warships by the 1940s—carried bunker fuel or heavy oil, rather than coal, to
fuel her steam power plant. In many regards, this technological advancement drove the
goals, not just the strategies, of Japan’s participation in the Second World War, particularly the 1941 Southern Operation. Japan possessed rich coalcirculation deposits that helped fuel its late nineteenth and twentieth century industrial development; and what Japan did
not have was readily available elsewhere—coal of varying qualityor is widely distributed,
including in Manchuria, which Japan occupied after 1931. However, on warships coal
produced large quantities of ash called clinker; and coal dust represented a serious
explosion hazard, which made it challenging to stow and work with, particularly when
the high seas turned to battlefields. Itcitation remained suitable for domestic power generation and industrial purposes (Japanfor used coal domestically until the 1960s), but not for warships.28 Warships, like all ships, are about efficiency, and coal is inefficient when compared to oilNot—it burns at about forty percent less energy per unit weight. When Yukikaze departed Japan on her first mission of the Second World War, she stowed some
600 tons of heavy fuel oil to power her three boilers. This fuel oil stowed in her hull Draft:represented a small fraction of the insatiable appetite for oil that drove Japan’s military.
14 circulation or
Figure 2: Yukikaze's engine control room According to a U.S. Naval Technicalcitation Mission to Japa n in 1946, the IJN’s Kansei Honbu had standardized boilerfor design throughout the fleet, and fuel oil proved the common ingredient after the mid-1930s. When the Second World War broke out, many
Japanese warships, such as Yukikaze, represented the state of the art; but, as the Technical
Mission concluded,Not by the end of the war, the “fine arts of oil-burning were nowhere in
evidence” with the outdated IJN boiler design. Unlike in the U.S. Navy, Kansei Honbu
had made little advancement in steam power plants after 1941.29 “Wasted furnace volume
Draft:was the basic reason for Japanese ships having only half the shaft power of U.S. Navy
ships of similar tonnage,” the Technical Mission remarked. They added that a “lack of
application of fuel-economy principles sharply reduced the cruising radii of ships.”
15 Whether on giant battlewagons or smaller destroyers, the Kansei Honbu had standardized
boiler performance to a “consumption of 16,000 pounds of oil per hour maximum, to
generate steam at 30 kg/cm2 and 350°C from 95°C feed water.”30 When compared to
U.S. Navy power plants, such as the Babcock & Wilcox boilers (powering the Fletcher-
class destroyers), which achieved closer to 450°C with similar oil consumption, the IJN
designs proved relatively inefficient. The Technical Mission wrote of the Akitsuki-class
destroyers—the successor of the Kagerô-class, but outfitted with the same boilers—that
the machinery produced 52,000-horse power with three boilers, all with eleven burners. Yukikaze held 600 tons of fuel, or approximately 135,000 gallons.31 circulationCutting the waves at eighteen knots, she had a radius of about 5,000 miles.32 Yukikaze steamed some 96,000
nautical miles during the Second World War, closer to 130,000or nautical miles if you
count her constant zigzagging to avoid Allied aircraft raids—at eighteen knots, Yukikaze
alone required over 15,000 tons or 3.5 million gallons of fuel oil to wage her war.33
Battlewagons such as Kongo and Haruna held over ten times that much oil. Not
surprisingly, in the late 1930s, Japan citationhad its eye on the closest source of fuel—British and Dutch Borneo, and the forDutch East Indies. How to tap this oil became known as the “Southern Question.” DecadesNot earlier, w ith World War One devouring Europe, Japan had started to link much of its future energy security to the South Pacific. Indeed, as the belligerents
gathered in Paris in 1919 to negotiate the end of the war, Japanese colonies in Draft:Micronesia, agreed to in secret with British diplomats, were some five-years old already. The IJN had come to view Micronesia as a critical avenue to oil-rich Borneo and the East
Indies. As one IJN memorandum explained, “The newly occupied territories in the South
16 Seas fill a most important position as a link between Japan and the East Indies, the
Philippines, New Guinea, and Borneo.” It continued, “Even if our occupation brings no
immediate advantage the islands must be carefully kept in our possession as stepping-
stones to the treasure houses of the southern regions.”34 Yamamoto Miono (1874-1941),
an economics professor at Kyoto University, wrote that Micronesia might be but one stop
in the “southward advance of the Japanese people.” Later, writing in English, the
publisher K. K. Kawakami (1873-1949) insisted that Japan needed Micronesia “more
badly than any other nation” because of energy resources. Japanese negotiators knew this, and in December 1920, the League of Nations, after significant haggling,circulation confirmed Japan’s mandate over Micronesia. The U.S. had dropped out of the League of Nations by
this time and Japan concluded a separate agreement in Washingtonor D.C. in February
1922.35 As we shall see, Japanese war planners held true to the idea that Micronesia
represented only stepping-stones to the “treasure houses” of the East Indies.
On 18 September 1931, the Kwantung Army instigated the Mukden Incident,
which eventually caused Japan to capturecitation Manchuria and withdraw from the League of Nations in 1933. In 1937, thefor China Incident (or Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 7-9 July 1937) sparked the Japanese invasion of China proper, which led to the occupation of much of coastalNot China and the brutal Rape of Nanjing (December 1937-January 1938). But the IJA was not the only army on the move at this juncture in world history: the
German Wehrmacht annexed Austria (March 1938) and occupied the Sudetenland in Draft:Czechoslovakia (October 1938) the next year. In response to the China Incident, in July 1939 the U.S. abrogated the “U.S.-Japan Treaty of Commerce and Navigation”
(concluded February 1911), which dealt a serious economic blow to Japan. In September
17 1939, the German Wehrmacht and S.S. Einsatzgruppen began their rape of Poland in the
name of creating Aryan lebensraum, and Europe, following in the wake of affairs in the
Asia-Pacific region some eight years earlier, plunged into the Second World War.36
Vulnerable to U.S. sanctions and embargos, particularly related to oil (but also
copper and scrap metal), Japan viewed diplomatic relations with the Netherlands as the
key to its survival in the Industrial Age (indeed, Japan did not declare war on the
Netherlands until 11 January 1942, about a month after it declared war on the U.S.). In
1934, Japanese negotiators visited Batavia (Jakarta) to promote relations between the two nations. The Japanese government also enacted the Petroleum Industrycirculation Law in 1934, which allowed the government to license the importation and refining of petroleum; and,
importantly, the same law required oil importers to stockpileor a six -months supply at all
times.37 IJN planners worried about private sector straws in their oil reserves. In February
1940, Japan sought to renew relations with the Netherlands, a diplomatic initiative
sparked by growing concerns over diminishing oil imports from the Dutch East Indies—
870,000 tons in 1937, 670,000 tons incitation 1938, and 570,000 tons in 1939. When in April 1940 the Wehrmacht beganfor operations against Denmark and Norway, tension rose between Germany and the Netherlands, and Japan expressed concerns about the war spreading to theNot South Pacific. In May 1940, when the Wehrmacht crossed the Ardennes and invaded France, the Dutch were quickly defeated and the Dutch royal family fled to
London. Once more, on 11 May 1940, Japan expressed hopes that the war would not Draft:spread to the South Pacific. On that same day, IJN command ordered the 4th Fleet to the Palau Islands. Increasingly concerned about oil, on 20 May 1940 Japan demanded from
the Dutch government in exile a firm commitment of 1 million tons of oil and 200,000
18 tons of bauxite annually. Eventually, the Dutch agreed to the bauxite number; but they
waffled on the oil exports, leaving those in the hands of British and U.S. energy firms
operating in the Dutch East Indies—both Standard Vacuum Oil Company (a joint venture
of Standard Oil and Mobil Oil) and Royal Dutch Shell operated Dutch East Indies
oilfields and their facilities.
At this juncture, the U.S. moved to contain Japan. Previously, the U.S. had served
as Japan’s most generous supplier of oil, but that changed over the course of the next
year. In June 1940, the U.S. announced a machine tool embargo against Japan. One month later, the U.S. announced the creation of a separate Atlantic andcirculation Pacific fleet (two months earlier the U.S. fleet had been moved to Honolulu), and began requiring a license
for oil and scrap iron exported to Japan. With the Dutch governmentor in London, the
Netherlands had become increasingly dependent on the British and U.S. In October 1940,
shortly after Japan had signed the Tripartite Pact creating the Axis (27 September 1940),
the U.S., British, and Dutch met in Singapore to discuss the deteriorating international
situation. Japan dispatched a special citationenvoy, but his requests for over three million tons of oil proved futile. In Decemberfor 1940, Japan dispatched an envoy to the Dutch East Indies again, but these discussions met with similar results as previous ones. In March 1941, Japan had managedNot to stockpile just under forty-three millions barrels of oil, primarily from California and Tarakan (off the eastern coast of Borneo). In July 1941, Japan
invaded French Indochina, and the U.S., Britain, and the Netherlands froze Japanese Draft:assets. Reeling from a newly imposed Allied oil embargo on 1 August 1941, Japanese war planners prepared for the Southern Operation—they sought to settle Japan’s oil
19 security question once and for all through the creation of an autarkic South Nan’yô
empire, the entirety of which was conceived around capturing and holding oil fields.38
As Hara Tameichi, a destroyer captain with the IJN, recalled that on the eve of the
Pearl Harbor attack IJN war planners lectured officers on the “shocking results of the
Allied embargo. Japan was running short of such critical supplies as petroleum, iron ore,
rubber, zinc, tin, nickel, and bauxite.” War planners concluded that, “Japan would reach a
point of collapse within a year or two if the present situation continued.”39
Securing Oil as Military Goal and Strategy circulation According to the Japan’s official telling of the Southern Operation in the Senshi
sôsho (War history series, 1967), the goal in the 1941 Southernor Operation was simple:
oil. The Bôei Kenshûjo Senshishitsu (War History Section of the National Institute for
Defense Studies) published the first of the 102-volume Senshi sôsho in 1966, and the
project was completed in 1980. Drawing on official IJN and IJA documents,
communications, and diaries, it offerscitation an invaluable window into Japanese military goals and strategies during the Secondfor W orld War, ones that often differ from public political statements. In the SouthNot Pacific, oil came from Miri and Seria in British Borneo, Tarakan and Balikpapan in Dutch Borneo, and northern and southern Sumatra and eastern Java, both
in the Dutch East Indies. In the East Indies, the best fields were near Palembang in Draft:southern Sumatra —at Pladjoe (the Bataafsche Petroleum Maatschappij refinery, a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell) and Sungei Gerong (the Nederlandsche Koloniale
Petroleum Maatschappij refinery, a subsidiary of American Standard Vacuum Oil
20 Company). The Japanese Southern Operation sought to make a “sudden attack against
British Malaya and the U.S.-ruled Philippines in order to set up footholds for a quick
conquest of the Dutch East Indies, and while occupying the latter and securing its
resources, to establish a defense line along the Sundra Islands.” Famously, much of this
ambitious plan hinged on the crippling of the U.S. fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor. To
achieve this, on 26 November 1941, kidô butai, Japan’s combined carrier task force,
departed the Kuril Islands under strict radio silence, bound for Hawaii. The successful
surprise attack crippled the Pacific Fleet and caused President Franklin D. Roosevelt to proclaim 7 December 1941 as a “day of infamy.” He might well havecirculation called it “four months of infamy” given the full ambitions of Japan. Pearl Harbor was the most
flamboyant part of the Southern Operation, but it was only aor means to an oil-empire end.
According to the Senshi sôsho, in 1939 the Dutch East Indies produced about
eight million tons of oil. Japan required about five million tons per year, but was
incapable of even producing a tenth of that amount domestically. “It is no exaggeration to
say that the Greater East Asian War brokecitation out with oil as the main cause,” the authors of the Senshi sôsho wrote.40 Thefor biggest oil prize of all was the Palembang fields on Sumatra.
Dutch East Indies Oil Production in 1939 East Indies IslandNot Area Amount Sumatra Palembang area 3 millions tons North Aceh area 1 million tons Borneo Sanga-Sanga area 1 million tons Tarakan region 0.7 million tons Java Cepu area 1 million tons Draft:Ceram Bula area 0.1 million tons New Guinea N/A N/A The Invasion of the Dutch East Indies, compiled by the War History Office of the National Defense College of Japan. Edited and translated by Willem Remmelink (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2015), 12.
21
With the Dutch royal family exiled in London, the British Expeditionary Force
evacuated from Dunkirk, and the surrender of the French, “like an orphaned child,”
explained the Senshi sôsho, the “Dutch East Indies was left on its own in eastern Asia.”41
Other Resources in Dutch East Indies in 1939 Resource Region Amount Iron ore Southeastern Borneo & 1 billion tons Celebes Tin Bangka, Belitung, Singkep 30,000-40,000 tons (three islands off the coast of Sumatra) Bauxite Bintan Island 400,000 tons Nickel Celebes Manganese Cilacap and Semarang on 12,000circulation tons Java; Bengkulu on Sumatra; and Bangka, Belitung, or Singkep (three islands off the coast of Sumatra) Coal 1.5 million tons Rubber Dutch East Indies 450,000 tons (about 1/3 of world production) Quinine 93% of world production Kapok 78% of world production The Invasion of the Dutch East Indiescitation, compiled by the War History Office of the National Defense College of Japan. Edited and translated by Willem Remmelink (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2015), 12. for In December 1941, the destroyer Yukikaze was poised to strike southward. While kidô butai steamedNot toward Hawaii, on 6 December 1941, the destroyer Yukikaze brought her power plant to temperature and began leading the 16th Destroyer Squadron from the
Palau Islands to Legaspi for the invasion of the Philippines—the first of the stepping- Draft:stones that led to the oilfields of Borneo and the East Indies. Flanked by Amatsukaze, Tokitsukaze, and Hatsukaze—all Kagerô-class warships—at early dawn on 12 December
the lookout aboard Yukikaze spotted the conical shape of Mount Mayon, a volcano in
22 Luzon Province—they had arrived. Yukikaze steamed into Legaspi Bay just before
daybreak and began participating in minesweeping operations in the calm waters, evading
the occasional strafing by enemy aircraft.42 The landings at Legaspi went according to
schedule, and the Japanese secured the necessary airstrips to provide critical air support.
Yukikaze and the other members of the 16th Destroyer Squadron then steamed toward
Lamon Bay, on the southern part of Luzon Island, with elements of the 16th Division, in
order to assist with troop landings under the command of Morioka Susumu (1889-1959).
This served as part of a pincer maneuver from the north and east designed the seize Manila. Yukikaze assisted with the eastern portion of this pincer maneuver,circulation arriving at Lamon Bay on 24 December to cover some 9,000 men from the 16th Division and their
landing. The northern landing occurred at Lingayen Gulf onor 22 December under the
command of Tsuchihashi Yûitsu, and included the 48th Division, 20th Regiment, the
remainder of the 16th Division, and the 4th Tank Regiment. citation for Not
Draft:
Figure 3: Yukikaze underway in 1939
23 At the head of Lamon Bay, U.S. aircraft strafed Yukikaze, and one round
penetrated her fuel compartment and oil started trailing in the wake of the destroyer—
trailing oil could serve as a problem, particularly with the number of U.S. submarines and
aircraft patrolling the Philippines. Captain Tobida Kenjirô immediately ordered that
Yukikaze zigzag in order to evade detection. Then, another round from U.S. aircraft hit
one of Yukikaze’s torpedo tubes, but did not detonate the Type-93’s deadly payload.
When the battle for Lamon Bay concluded, medical personnel abroad the destroyer
treated six of her crew with minor injuries and sailors pounded wooden plugs into her holes to stop the leaking. She then steamed back to Legaspi to begincirculation preparations to secure the next stepping-stone in the march toward the South Pacific oilfields.43
After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese sinking of the HMSor Prince of Wales and HMS
Repulse (10 December 1941), the capture of Manila (2 January 1942), and the fall of
British Singapore (15 February 1942), Japanese war planners could basically step on
whatever stones they desired in order to capture oilfields in the South Pacific. In 1941,
the Dutch East Indies was about threecitation times the size of the greater Japanese Empire, which, at this moment in timefor, included Taiwan, Korea, and Sakhalin Island. The South Pacific was a fluid world, one set in motion by tides and currents and well suited for skilled naval operaNottions. Oilfields and airfields served as the keys to Japan’s advance southward, which took the form of a massive pincer movement, with Central and Eastern
Invasion Forces.
On 16 December 1941, the Central Invasion Force (comprised of the 35th Infantry
Draft:th Brigade’s 18 Division and No. 2 Yokosuka Special Naval Landing Force) captured
oilfields and refineries in British Borneo, part of a comprehensive campaign to subdue
24 the vast right flank of British Malaya. However, as Kawaguchi Kiyotake (1892-1961) and
his men approached they discovered that evacuating British had destroyed the Lutong
refineries and pipelines and sabotaged the oilfields at Miri and Seria.44 On 12 January,
other elements of the Central Invasion Force (the 56th Mixed Infantry Group) moved on
the Tarakan oilfields in Dutch Borneo. As Sakaguchi Shizuo (1887-1947) and his men
discovered, the retreating Dutch had set both Tarakan oilfields ablaze by the time
Japanese troops secured them.45 In Lingkas, for example, fire had destroyed all but just
over 12,300 tons of heavy oil.46 The Dutch had destroyed some 700 oil wells in Tarakan’s Pamoesian and Djoeata fields as well. Japanese troops, incirculation retaliation, executed European prisoners of war the next day—the Allies had protected their oil reserves with
their lives. Next, Sakaguchi and his men occupied Balikpapanor on 23-24 January, only to
learn that the Dutch had destroyed the refineries there five days earlier. Once again,
European prisoners of war paid for oil with their lives. Even with many of the wells and
refineries ablaze, Borneo could produce thirty-five percent of Japan’s oil needs.
Tarakan’s high-quality oil was burnedcitation directly in warship boilers, even though Japanese engineers later determined forthat the high-sulfur content made engine steel brittle. The Balikpapan oil center—the “Ploesti of the Pacific,” as it was called, a reference to the Rumanian regionNot that provided the German Wehrmacht with critical oil supplies— processed some 5.2 million barrels of crude oil per year, as well as aviation gasoline,
diesel and motor fuel, kerosene, and other lubricants. It was crucial real estate. The Draft:Central Invasion Force of the Japanese pincer then moved toward Java and captured Bangka Island and eyed the oilfields of Palembang on Sumatra.
25 Palembang alone produced enough oil to fuel the Japanese war machine, so a
detailed look at the Palembang operation is important. The Japanese capture of
Palembang is one of the first tactical paratroop raids conducted by any belligerent in any
war, and sheds light on how Japan conducted special operations in order to secure
oilfields in tact. The key was the element of surprise by special forces—to penetrate
behind enemy lines and secure the airstrips, oilfields, and refineries before the retreating
Allies destroyed them. Once secured, an Oil-Drilling Unit would follow the advance team
of paratroopers in barges up the Moesi River: it was their task to get the wells, refineries, cracking facilities, and other infrastructure up and running as quicklycirculation as possible. Originally assembled in September 1941, war planners formed the Oil-Drilling
Unit within the 21st Field Ordinance Depot in Saigon under orthe direction of Ôkubo Tôru
and two officials from Nihon Sekiyu (Nippon Oil Corporation). The Oil-Drilling Unit
consisted of Nagahata Yoshinobu, the Unit’s commander, about ten noncommissioned
officers, and about 150 oil engineers. The Oil-Drilling Unit first saw action on 16
December in British Borneo. Given thecitation number of oilfields, Japanese war planners eventually had to divide thefor Oil-Drilling Unit into three separate groups. Nagahata commanded the first group, which operated under the 38th Division. Eventually, war planners shiftedNot this first group from Miri and Seria to Palembang in southern Sumatra. The second group, led by Katô Shunji, operated under the 25th Army, and rebuilt oilfields
in northern Sumatra. Meanwhile, a third group, under Ôkubo, remained in Borneo in the Draft:Miri and Seria sector.47 Not surprisingly, much of Japan’s war effort in the South Pacific was being devoted to oil, and Palembang showcased this effort.
26 circulation or
citation for Not
Draft:
27 On 14 February, some 329 men from the 2nd Paratroop Brigade (teishin shudan)
dropped from their Kawasaki K1-56 transport planes in the jungles to the west and south
of Palembang and scrambled into position, awaiting the equipment, supplies, and
ammunition that came with the second wave of Japanese planes. The paratroopers
charged with securing Palembang’s Pangkalanbenteng Airfield (known as P1) completed
their drop by 1126, while the paratroopers charged with taking Palembang’s Pladjoe and
Sungei Gerong oil facilities completed theirs four minutes later. As Bill Taute, an Allied
officer, later recalled, initially the Allied forces thought the Japanese planes were “friendly aircraft, our own aircraft.” However, they then “circled slowlycirculation round. And then we realized there were fighter aircraft with them which looked like Japanese Navy Zeros.
And then the parachutes began to drop and they were differenceor colours… They fell
beyond the perimeter of the airfield and where we were, we were between them and the
airfield.”48 Immediately, Mitsubishi Ki-21 planes from the 98th Air Group (sentai) began
dropping equipment and supplies as scheduled, while the 90th Air Group and the 59th Air
Group strafed targets and suppressedcitation enemy defenses. By 1210, after downing one Allied aircraft and chasing off ninefor others, the Air Groups began returning to their base at Kluang Airfield in Malaya.49 Not
Draft:
28 circulation or Figure 4: Fujita Tsuguharu's Ôzora ni hana to saku teishin sakkasan butai no katsuyaku Parenban (Like flowers blooming in the ski, paratroops descend at Palembang) Kômura Takeo commanded the main force of 2nd Paratroop Brigade (some 180
men) charged with securing Palembang’s airfield, and they had landed some three kilometers southeast of the airstrip. Outmannedcitation and outgunned by the Japanese paratroops, all Taute and his men could do was “ooze around in the jungle until you could see a Japanese, whichfor we did occasionally, and then you could shoot him and then he’d fall out of the trees.”50 Other elements of the 2nd Paratroop Brigade (about 60 men) landed southwestNot of the airstrip. In large part, the Japanese special forces succeeded in catching the Allies by surprise. Allied pilots had been preparing to bomb a Japanese
convoy in Banka Straits, not knowing the convoy was the main body of the invasion Draft:force. Terence Kelly, a British pilot, insisted, “I am certain we had no idea there was an invasion fleet; that we had no idea there was an invasion fleet; that we had no idea an
invasion of Sumatra was imminent.”51 By 2100, after heavy antiaircraft fire and sporadic
29 fighting, Japanese troops had assembled at the main office at Palembang’s airfield,
though the Dutch had destroyed fuel drums and aircraft. Over the course of the next two
days, the Japanese gradually strengthened their control of the airfield.
Figure 5: Tsuruda Gorô's Shinpei Parenban ni kôka su (Divine troops land descend on Palembang, 1943) Meanwhile, the elements of the 2nd Paratroop Brigade charged with Palembang’s
oil facilities engaged a Dutch pillbox at 1140 on the southwest side of the facility. They
then engaged other Dutch units, which Japanese later estimated to number some 550
men. Immediately, the Japanese special forces began securing all the distillation units and
raised the Rising Sun flag at 1310 at the central distillation tower. Finally, at 1410, after
stiff resistance by Allied machine gunners, Japanese paratroopers entered the central
distillation unit and began closing the pipe values and putting out fires that the retreating Draft:Dutch had started. Not Because for Japanese citationparatroops were relatively or few circulation in number, Dutch units launched several counter attacks and bullets ripped new holes in oil tanks and pipes.
Japanese special forces counterattacked and drove the Dutch back, who then lobbed
30 mortars and grenades into the refineries, which started even more fires. Even at the risk
of their own lives, the Allies sought to destroy all the oil facilities before the main
Japanese invasion forces, traveling on barges up the Moesi River, reached the airfield and
oilfields. One Allied soldier explained how they turned oil and river into a weapon. After
preparing the explosives, he recalled, “all the men save half a dozen… withdrew to
Palembang. The charges were then set off and… by the time [Japanese] invasion barges
began to reach the refinery the ensuing blasts of the petrol and diesel oil tanks flooded out
onto the river and the burning fuel carried downstream on the six-knot current engulfed the best part of a section of the invasion force.”52 By 15 February, Alliedcirculation defense of the oil had weakened, but then a time bomb detonated in the Sungei Gerong refinery, and
flames enveloped the entire facility once more. A.H.C. Roberts,or another Allied soldier,
remembered the Japanese invasion in this manner: “We had reasonable success wiping
out the first attack. But the Japs saturated the area with more paratroops and an invasion
force up the river. On orders from the Dutch we slowly fell back to the river bank
allowing the Japs to occupy the refinery.citation We suffered many casualties in the process.” He continued, “The Japs commandedfor the area all around them by setting up machine-gun posts on top of the storage tanks filled with high-octane aircraft fuel. What we didn’t know, and neitherNot did the Japs, was that incendiary bombs had been planted in all the storage tanks. These were all ignited at the same time and we beat a hasty retreat to the
other side of the river but even there the heat was intense.”53 Allied soldier P.H.S. Reid Draft:recalled that, “The oil refineries were mainly burnt out and suffered from explosions during the fighting with paratroops especially when at Pladjoe (Shell) refinery, a Dutch
Kapitein Ohl launched a 68 grenade attack and set the place in flames; Sungei Gerong
31 N.K.L.M. was destroyed by means of a time fuse bomb.” Although the Allies fought
desperately to keep oil out of Japanese hands, as Reid was forced to acknowledge, it was
not long before the “Japs had the refineries partly working.”54
Despite the efforts of the Allies, the Japanese secured 250,000 tons of oil in the
surprise operation, at the cost of thirty-nine men.55 The Dutch successfully destroyed
about eighty percent of the Sungei Gerong facility, but Japanese paratroopers managed to
save most of the gasoline tanks at the Pladjoe facility.56 But the special forces attack at
Palembang became a celebrated engagement in Japan, with artists such as Fujita Tsuguharu (1886-1968) and Tsuruda Gorô (1890-1969) celebrating circulationthe “divine soldiers” of Palembang, with parachutes that “bloomed liked flowers” descending from the
Sumatra sky. or
citation
for
Figure 6: Japanese paratroopers at Palembang, Sumatra Rather tNothan pursue Allied warships, on 17 February Yamamoto Isoroku, Combined Fleet Commander, ordered that, “We must secure oil and other resources of
the Dutch East Indies. That is of higher priority than pursuing any small American Draft:forces.”57 Accordingly, the next day, the commander of the 2nd Paratroop Raiding Regiment wrote superiors that tankers should be dispatched immediately to ship the
150,000 tons of crude oil and 400,000 tons of refined oil from the Pladjoe refinery “to the
32 homeland.” At this juncture, fires still burned at the Pladjoe refinery, but the Dutch had
managed to destroy only one 10,000-ton holding tank. The Japanese commander
explained at the time, there is “almost no fear that the fire will spread.” He continued, “It
is required to urgently dispatch a large number of engineers who can handle the
distillation and cracking installations because all the main Dutch engineers have fled.”
Meanwhile, the Sungei Gerong refinery remained ablaze, with “no prospect of when the
fire will be extinguished.” Only about 70,000-80,000 tons of refined oil was secured from
the Sungei Gerong refinery. “As such is the situation,” the Japanese commander concluded, “I am of the opinion that it would be better if fuel for operationscirculation and other needs during the southern operation be supplied from Palembang as a base, so that the
supply [of oil] from the homeland can be reduced as much asor possible.” 58
But the Allies nearly neutralized Japanese efforts at Palembang the next day. On
19 February, Allied planes, operating from a secret airstrip at Praboemoelih, attacked the
Palembang airfields and oilfields, which set the Pladjoe oil tanks ablaze. For three days,
despite the efforts of Japanese fightercitation planes, Allied planes attacked the Palembang facility. With most Japanesefor fighter aircraft diverted away from Sumatra for Java operations, and with little to no antiaircraft cover, the Allied raids erased most of the gains painstakinglyNot made by Japanese paratroopers. Japanese operations planners proved unaware of the second airstrip and paid dearly for the intelligence lapse. In these late-
February raids, Allied planes destroyed nearly thirty oil tanks, including the precious Draft:100-octane gasoline tanks.59 Later, Japanese war planner attempted similar tactics to secure the oil facilities at
Balikpapan. Allied engineers transported oil from fields in Samarinda and Sanga Sanga
33 in pipelines to Balikpapan where it was refined and stored. Nearby Kendari, on Celebes
Island, where our destroyer Yukikaze operated, remained strategically valuable for IJN
aircraft to secure the skies over eastern Java in the next phase of the Southern Operation.
On 11 January 1942, Yukikaze escorted the invasion force to Menado on the northern tip
of Celebes Island. From Menado, she then steamed south to Kendari and on 24 January
helped secure what many considered the finest airstrip in the Dutch East Indies. At the
same time, Kume Motozô and elements of the 1st Battalion secured the oilfields around
Sanga Sanga.60 On 31 January, Yukikaze assisted with the landing on Ambon Island, due east of Kendari and the eastern most part of the pincer movement descendingcirculation on Java. On 20 February, Yukikaze escorted the Japanese invasion force to Timor, an island in the
Lesser Sunda Islands and under the jurisdiction of the Dutchor and Port uguese. Both jaws
of the Japanese pincer then prepared to take Java and destroy the Allied naval presence in
the region.
Ironically, as the Central and Eastern Invasion forces descended on Java, ports
there experienced oil shortages. Java citationhad oil, but not in the quantities that Borneo and Sumatra did. Moreover, oncefor the Japanese attacked Java, local Javanese, who had smarted under the heel of cruel Dutch colonial rule, stopped working at inland oil storage facilities. But JavaNot remained the biggest prize of the “treasure houses” of the Southern Operation: it served as home to oilfields, major refineries, the administrative hub of
Dutch rule, and the majority of the population. The Battle of the Java Sea (27 February Draft:1942), the naval battle to secure Java ports, proved a decisive Japanese victory over the Allies, a veritable clinic in naval night fighting. With the sinking of the light cruiser De
34 Ruyter and Admiral Karel Doorman with her, the ABDA Combined Strike Force cause
was lost.
circulation or
citation for Not
Draft:
Figure 7: A defanged Yukikaze in Tokyo in May 1947
35 On 8 March 1942, with much of the Allied fleet sunk, the Dutch East Indies
formally surrendered to Japan. At last, the oil empire of Nan’yô belonged to Japan, and
the war planners erected a massive maritime and island defensive perimeter to guard their
prize. Autarky was within reach. Much of the Pacific fighting, some of the most epic
fighting of the war, Japanese did to protect this defensive perimeter and the oilfields they
guarded. When the smoked cleared, Japan controlled a thirty-two million square mile
empire—its long-sought energy security achieved. Now, Japanese war planners just
needed to hold it. In six months, Japan acquired seventy percent of the world’scirculation tin supply and almost all its natural rubber supplies (forcing the U.S. to develop synthetic rubber for
vehicle tires). In the East Indies, Japan had gained access to orhigher annual oil production
than California and Iran combined (well over 7 million tons). Japan also mined 1.4
million tons of coal from Borneo and Sumatra. Japan exploited gold, manganese,
chromium, and iron in the Philippines; tin from Thailand; and oil, silver, led, nickel, and
copper from Burma—and slave laborcitation, some of it POW labor and some of it betrayed native populations, extractedfor it all.61 On 2 March 1942, war planners and the government, with the successes of the initial thrust of the Southern Operation behind them, estimated that for the remainderNot of fiscal year 1941, Japan could expect 1,400 kiloliters of oil from what had been British Borneo and 2,000 kiloliters from the Tarakan. For fiscal year 1942,
Japan expected 700,000 kiloliters from British Borneo, 250,000 from Tarakan, 300,000 Draft:from Sanga Sanga, and 500,000 from southern Sumatra (locations such as Palembang)— a total of 1.7 million kiloliters from Nan’yô. With military operations complete in early
36 1942, war planners estimated 1.7 millions tons of oil coming from what had formerly
been the Dutch East Indies, but now belonged to the Japanese Empire.62
But just because Japan controlled the vast oil empire of Nan’yô by the summer of
1942, does not mean that the Allies intended to allow Japanese war planners to realize
their autarkic dreams. Once President Roosevelt approved unrestricted air and submarine
warfare against Japan, the Japanese military suffered a major setback when, on 8 May
1942, the submarine USS Grendadier torpedoed Taiyô-maru, a 14,503-ton transport
vessel, while she made way for Singapore from Japan. The Taiyô-maru turned out to be a very big prize: she carried the renowned hydraulic engineer, Hatta Yoichicirculation (1886-1942), who had designed the Chianan Canal and Wushantou Reservoir in Taiwan, as well as a
number of oilfield technicians bound for Borneo and Sumatra.or They were part of a
contingent to revitalize the refineries and oilfields that the retreating Dutch had
sabotaged. No doubt, the sinking of the Taiyô-maru delayed Japanese efforts by months.
Moreover, the U.S. and its Allies waged a submarine campaign against Japanese shipping
throughout the Second World War, muchcitation as the German Kriegsmarine did against British shipping in the Atlantic. Thefor U.S. sought to make sure little of the oil from Nan’yô ever reached the Japanese homeland. The former Dutch refineries and oilfields remained out of reach of AlliedNot B-24 Liberators until the fall of 1944, when the Allies began bombing the refineries and oilfields after taking nearby airstrips.
Draft:Natural Resource Strategies in the Second World War Here are two important questions: Was securing oil and other natural resources a
strategy to win what was an ideological conflict? Or was ideology a strategy to fight what
37 was a resource war? Beginning with the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, political
ideologies drove strategic and even tactical decisions, but none more so than the basic
Axis and Allied quest for autarky. As the preamble to the Tripartite Pact stated, 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.”63 The Axis nations took that lebensraum by
force, Japan doing so first in 1931, then in 1937, and then again in 1941; the Germans
made their main thrust in 1939 into Poland, and then into Russia in 1941. But ideology
had limited power: the Axis nations shared few political beliefs other than the privileging of industry; but the Allies shared this belief, too. circulation With the Allies, a basic belief in liberalism and capitalism certainly provided the
rhetorical glue that held the West together; but two distinct politicalor models were always
present within the alliance—empire and autarky. Great Britain, the Netherlands, and
China represented imperial models, and the former two kept powerful navies to defend
their imperial holdings. In the Southern Operation, Japan much of these navies to the
bottom of the Pacific. Throughout thecitation war, the British foug ht desperately to hold on to oilfields in Burma, Malaya,for Borneo, and the Middle East, while the Dutch chafed from their expulsion from the East Indies. Importantly, the British model was never lost on Japanese war planners.Not The British proved that a small island country, if buoyed by an empire of oilfields, could prosper in the Industrial Age.
The second political model within the Allies was the economic independence of Draft:national autarky , and was best represented by the U.S. It is well known that Adolf Hitler admired the U.S. and the genocide of Native Americans, and firmly believed that
Germans would similarly thrive if they had the lebensraum to do so.64 The Germans had
38 failed at African empire, but the conquest of Poland and Russia allowed the Third Reich
to replicate the American experience with settler colonialism. A key component to U.S.
autarky was energy independence: the U.S. produced 1.35 billions barrels of oil annually
in 1940, some sixty-three percent of world production. With Californian oilfields
channeling fuel to the Pacific theater, the IJN never had a chance in this resource war,
and knowledgeable Japanese war planners, such as Yamamoto Isoroku, knew it.
Basically, the war was fought over different models of energy self-sufficiency, ones that
marched in lockstep with nationalism and fascism. Japanese planners envisioned a “pelagic empire” stretching from the Home Islands to the South Pacific,circulation one that yielded a variety of marine resources.65 But energy security was always a key part of the
definition of true independence. Agrarian nationalists from Tachibanaor Kôzaburô (1893-
1974) to Walther Darré (1895-1953) certainly linked nationalism, nativism, and fascism
to the soil, but it was oil, not soil, that fueled the machines of war.
Japan was not alone in making strategic decisions to secure resources. In Europe,
when the Third Reich invaded Norwaycitation on 19 April 1940, Germany sought strategic U- Boat bases in Trondheim; butfor, even more importantly, German war planners sought to ensure that iron ore kept flowing from the Gällivare mines in Northern Sweden.66 When, between April andNot August 1941, the British secured Iraq, Syria, and Iran and their oilfields, it proved one of the most important strategic victories of the war.67 In 1941, as
mentioned, most of the world’s oil came from the U.S., but it had to travel on the U-Boat Draft:infested Atlantic Ocean to get to Britain. With the defeat of the Afrika Korps in Egypt, Middle Eastern oil ensured that British warships, tanks, and planes kept fighting. Some
8.6 million tons of Iranian and 4.3 million tons of Iraqi oil fueled British war machines
39 each year of the war. Hans Cramer, an Afrika Corps divisional commander, wrote on the
eve of the German defeat at the second battle of El Alamein (23 October-11 November
1942), the battle was “lost before it was fought. We had not the petrol.”68
circulation or
citation Figure 8: A B-24 Liberator flies over Ploesti refineries in Rumania during Operation Tidal Wave (1 August 1943) The German invasionfor of Russia was in part about oilfields. According to Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of Staff, Germany also feared that Russia might sever Rumanian oil imports from Ploesti, whichNot were 150,000 tons per month, half of the 350,000 tons per month the German war machine required.69 Famously, when German troops stood at the doorstep of
Moscow, Hitler ordered Fedor von Bock (1880-1945) on 21 August 1941 to turn south Draft:and instead take the Crimea, the “industrial and coal region of the Donets Basin,” and to sever the “Russian oil deliveries from the Caucasus area.” In many respects, the decision
doomed Operation Barbarossa to failure. When, on 13 July 1942, Hitler made the
40 decision to capture Stalingrad, he ordered Army Group A, commanded by Wilhelm List
(1880-1971), to capture the oil rich Caucuses. “If we do not capture the oil supplies of the
Caucuses by the autumn,” Hitler said, “then I shall have to face the fact that we cannot
win this war.”70 As the situation rapidly deteriorated, on 27 January 1945, during a
lengthy Führer Conference, Hitler continued to stress the importance of the Balkans,
particularly the oilfields of the Lake Balaton region in Hungary. Heinz Guderian (1888-
1954) explained of the dire situation: “Our main problem is the fuel issue at the moment.”
Hitler replied to his general, “That’s why I am concerned, Guderian.” He pointed to the Balaton region and said, “If something happens down there, it’s over.”circulation71 Indeed, it was already over.
or
Conclusion
On 7 March 2017, Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Forces and the U.S. Navy
began exercises in the East China Sea. Japanese destroyers joined the nuclear carrier USS
Carl Vinson’s strike group in the wakecitation of Chinese intrusions into Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone. It is not surprisingfor that these Pacific powers find themselves in a naval faceoff given the energy reserves hidden under the ocean floor: the U.S., China, and Japan are the world’sNot top importers of fossil fuels. In the East China Sea, natural gas reserves have proved the most seductive: some industry estimates put the amount of gas
under the seafloor at several trillion cubic feet. In the South China Sea, where the Draft:Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Filipinos, and Chinese find themselves at loggerheads, estimates are even higher. Natural gas in the region has lured China into pushing the boundaries of
its sovereignty through island-building projects and territorial disputes, and forced Japan
41 to harden its EEZ borders. In 2016, for example, Japan approved controversial legislation
allowing Self Defense Force troops to fight overseas. The legislation corresponded with
the activation of a radar base on Yonaguni, an islet ninety-three nautical miles southwest
of the Senkaku Islands. With more oil tankers plying the South and East China Sea than
the Suez and Panama canals combined, it is easy to see why Japan has hardened its
strategic position—the Pacific contains some of the most important energy frontiers on
the planet.
For Japan, securing and defending access to natural resources has driven much of its maritime policy in the Pacific for a century, including, as we havecirculation seen, much of the IJN’s strategic activities during the Second World War. In this way, the East and South
China Sea challenge is deceptive. The diplomatic skirmishesor are almost always fought in
disputed historical contexts: the Senkaku dispute, for example, dates to past treaties and
China opposed an overseas role for Japan’s SDF because of Japan’s past “war of
aggression.” It is also true that past precedents for Japan’s reliance on energy imports has
driven its approach to defending its EEZcitation zone. But the conflict itself is not exclusively about the past; rather, it is alsofor about the future: the sustainability of East Asian industrial economies. China seeks to wean itself off dirty coal and gas represents an attractive alternative to filthyNot skies. In 2013, China invested $13 billion in energy exploration, much of it offshore, searching for alternatives to the coal that fulfills 69% of its energy
requirements. In Japan, after the triple disaster of March 2011, policymakers sought Draft:alternatives to nuclear power, and over 22% of Japan’s energy now comes from natural gas. In the Pacific, history is mobilized to fight proxy battles about the past that are really
42 about future development of energy reserves, and it provides Japan’s raison d’être for the
defense of its EEZ.
Nearly seventy years earlier, Yukikaze served a similar purpose. The destroyer
witnessed some of the most dramatic naval engagements of the war: Java Sea, Midway,
Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands, New Guinea, Mariana Islands, and Leyte Gulf. Yukikaze
escorted the super-carrier Shinano when the U.S. submarine Archerfish sank her in
November 1944. Similarly, Yukikaze accompanied the battleship Yamato on her final
suicide mission in April 1945. Miraculously, Yukikaze survived these engagement and others, telling a story of the war that few vessels on either side can. circulationOf the IJN’s eighty- two top-of-the-line destroyers that started the war, Yukikaze was the only one to survive
the conflict. or
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Figure 9: The battleship Yamato being escorted by Japanese destroyers during Operation Ten-Go, one of which was Yukikaze.
43 In July 1947, two years after Japan’s capitulation, the Japanese government
surrendered Yukikaze to the Republic of China (ROC) as war reparations. In May 1948,
the ROC Navy commissioned her as Tan Yang, where she served an additional eighteen
years for the ROC Navy, including during the tension filled period after the evacuation of
Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975) and the Guomindang to Taiwan. Tan Yang was involved in
the Liao Luowan naval battle during the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis, for example, and
others. Finally, in 1970, the ROC Navy decommissioned Tan Yang, ceremoniously Draft:returning her wheelNot to Japan. for As her citationROC Navy service illustrates, or Yukikazecirculation’s war was as much a Pacific one as a national one, defending the geopolitical ambitions and energy
requirements of more than one Pacific nation.
44 circulation
or
Figure 10: Chiang Kai-shek inspecting Yukikaze
citation for Not
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Figure 11: ROC Tan Yang during 1964 exercises
45 NOTES
1 On the relationship between oil and the Second World War, see Michael T. Klare, 2 Potsdam Declaration (July 26, 1945). See http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Hiroshima/Potsdam.shtml. Last accessed January 21, 2019. 3 J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000), XXIV. 4 Evan Mawdsley, “World War II: A Global Perspective,” in The Long Shadow: A Global Environmental History of the Second World War, ed. Simo Laakkonen, Richard Tucker, and Timo Vuorisalo (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2017), 47. 5 Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 6 Mark R. Peattie, Ishiwara Kanji and Japan’s Confrontation with the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 54-55. 7 Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011), 589. 8 Ibid., 19. 9 Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2013). 10 “International Military Tribunal for the Far East.” See https://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/nuremberg/docum ents/index.php?documentid=18-2&pagenumber=1. Last accessed January 21, 2019. 11 A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, Second Addition (New York: Fawcett Premier Book, 1961), xi. 12 Ibid., 22. 13 Ibid., 23. 14 Ibid., 64. 15 Saburô Ienaga, The Pacific War, 1931-1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), xiii. 16 E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (New York: Presidio Press, 2007), 38. 17 Ibid., 34. 18 John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 11. 19 Ibid., 33. 20 Ibid., 40-42. Draft:21 John Keegan, NotThe Second World War for citation (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 422 or circulation-23, 426-27, 576. 22 Itô Masanori, Rengô kantai no eikô (Glory of the Combined Fleet) (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjû, 1962), 188-89.
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23 “Limitation of Naval Armament (Five-Power Treaty or Washington Treaty).” See https://www.loc.gov/law/help/us-treaties/bevans/m-ust000002-0351.pdf. Last accessed January 23, 2019. 24 Itô, Rengô kantai no eikô, 192. 25 Itô, Rengô kantai no eikô, 189-94. See also David C. Evans and Mark R. Peattie, Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887-1941 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1997), 224-25. 26 Evans and Peattie, Kaigun, 243-44. 27 Evans and Peattie, Kaigun, 298. 28 Laura E. Hein, Fueling Growth: The Energy Revolution and Economic Policy in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1990). 29 U.S. Technical Mission to Japan, “Characteristics of Japanese Naval Vessels, Article 12, Boilers and Machinery,” Intelligence Targets Japan (DNI) of 4 September 1945, Fascicle S-1, Targets S-01 and S-05, Fascicle X-1, Target X-07 (April 1946), 1 and 28. 30 Ibid., 7. 31 Ibid., 14. circulation 32 Hansgeorg Jentschura, Dieter Jung, and Peter Mickel, Warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1869-1945 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1977), 148-49. 33 Itô, Rengô kantai no eikô, 189. or 34 Mark R. Peattie, Nan’yô: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese in Micronesia, 1885-1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1988), 51. 35 Ibid., 51, 52, 57-60. 36 Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2016). 37 Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), 121. 38 The Invasion of the Dutch East Indiescitation, compiled by the War History Office of the National Defense College of Japan. Edited and translated by Willem Remmelink (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2015), 1-4. 39 Capt. Hara Tameichi, Japanese Destroyer Captain: Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, for Midway—the Great Naval Battles as Seen Through Japanese Eyes (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2011), 36. 40 The Invasion of the Dutch East Indies, 306. 41 The Invasion of the Dutch East IndiesNot , 16. 42 Itô, Rengô kantai no eikô, 199. 43 Itô, Rengô kantai no eikô, 200. 44 Paul S. Dull, The Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy (1941-1945) (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1978), 42. 45 Dull, The Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 61-62. 46 The Invasion of the Dutch East Indies, 214. Draft:47 The Invasion of the Dutch East Indies , 317. 48 Terence Kelly, Battle for Palembang (London: Robert Hale, 1985), 98-99. 49 The Invasion of the Dutch East Indies, 325-26. 50 Kelly, Battle for Palembang, 102. 51 Kelly, Battle for Palembang, 86-87.
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52 Kelly, Battle for Palembang, 103. 53 Kelly, Battle for Palembang, 103. 54 Kelly, Battle for Palembang, 103. 55 The Invasion of the Dutch East Indies, 329, 330, 332. 56 The Invasion of the Dutch East Indies, 344. 57 Tameichi, Japanese Destroyer Captain, 64. 58 The Invasion of the Dutch East Indies, 344. 59 The Invasion of the Dutch East Indies, 345. 60 The Invasion of the Dutch East Indies, 359. 61 Roberts, The Storm of War, 213. 62 The Invasion of the Dutch East Indies, 588-89. 63 Mawdsley, “World War II: A Global Perspective,” 47. 64 Snyder, Black Earth. 65 William M. Tsutsui and Timo Vuorisalo, “Japanese Imperialism and Marine Resources,” in The Long Shadows: A Global Environmental History of the Second World War, ed. Simo Laakonen, Richard Tucker, and Timo Vuorisalo (Corvallis, OR: circulation Oregon State University Press, 2017), 251-74. 66 Roberts, The Storm of War, 38-39. 67 Robert Lyman, First Victory: Britain’s Forgotten Struggle in the Middle East, 1941or (London: Constable, 2006). 68 Roberts, The Storm of War, 129, 284. 69 Roberts, The Storm of War, 139, 142. 70 Roberts, The Storm of War, 168, 316. 71 Roberts, The Storm of War, 544. citation for Not
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