June 1942
The two diplomats were hatching plans to sow discord among the American people. More than five thousand miles away from each other, working on different continents, the men strategized by long distance, pinpointing vulnerabilities in the enemy’s social fabric that could be inflamed through propaganda. Japanese foreign minister Shigenori Togo, writing from Tokyo in June 1942, asked Baron Oshima, the ambassador to Berlin, to share “material and background” suggesting ideas for propaganda that could be directed at the United States. Togo cited such possibilities as inflation and the “treatment of negroes.” Writing back on July 12, Oshima ventured that Japan should target isolationists and make every effort to further unsettle U.S. citizens chafing at the hardship and deprivation of war. The unity America displayed after Pearl Harbor had now dissipated, Oshima opined from his perch in Berlin, and the national mood was vulnerable and sour.
“The successive retreats of the American and Allied forces since the thunderbolt at Pearl Harbor have completely upset the moral equilibrium of the American people who had been taught to believe that Japan could be completely whipped in six months and that the American Navy had no peer,” Oshima ventured smugly. The missive was enciphered and sent on. The men had no idea that their high-level musings were being read by the enemy, much less by young enemy women.
It was true that the first six months of 1942 were a dark and disheartened time for the United States, especially for the U.S. Navy. In retrospect it is easy to underestimate how fragile that period felt. The Japanese were a formidable naval foe. At the outset of the war, the Japanese Navy controlled one-quarter of the Pacific Ocean and had not lost a naval battle in more than fifty years. Japan had a brilliant top commander in Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who masterminded the Pearl Harbor attack. But Yamamoto—who had initially opposed going to war—was not foolhardy. He had spent time in the United States, studying economics at Harvard, and well knew America’s industrial might. He understood that Japan had a limited window before U.S. factories could unleash their full power, producing ships and planes in overwhelming numbers. Yamamoto warned his superiors that he could “run wild” in the Pacific for six months or even a year, but needed a knockout blow—what the Japanese called a “decisive sea battle”—so that the war would be over before the Americans could augment their fleet.
The point of Pearl Harbor had been to deliver that blow. The attack didn’t succeed on that level—U.S. aircraft carriers were safely out of the harbor, and some stricken battleships could be recovered and repaired—but attacks elsewhere in the Pacific followed so quickly as to feel simultaneous.
Just hours after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese launched air attacks on the Philippines. They captured Guam, in the Marianas, two days later, and took Wake Island before Christmas. Meanwhile the Japanese Army was stabbing westward and southward, capturing British and Dutch colonial holdings. Hong Kong fell on Christmas Day 1941, Singapore two months later, Burma in May. The Japanese cut a merciless swath through the Dutch East Indies (whose defending troops could not expect reinforcements from their Nazi-occupied home country), taking island after island along the Malay Peninsula—Java, Borneo, Celebes, Sumatra—which stretched through the lower Pacific down toward Australia.
February 1942 brought the worst blow to the American forces. After months of fighting, Roosevelt ordered General Douglas MacArthur to leave the Philippines. The U.S. Navy had a small cryptanalytic team holed up in the Philippine island fortress of Corregidor. The men were smuggled out by submarine and taken to Australia before Corregidor too fell, marking a breathtaking series of victories for Japan. The juggernaut of attacks also devastated the British, who lost their warships Repulse and Prince of Wales. “As I turned over and twisted in bed the full horror of the news sank in upon me,” British prime minister Winston Churchill wrote in his memoirs. “Over all this vast expanse of waters Japan was supreme, and we everywhere were weak and naked.”
In the Atlantic, things were going equally badly, if not worse. The late spring of 1942 marked the low point for Allied powers in both of the world’s great oceans. The United States now was an active partner in the Battle of the Atlantic, the deadly six-year contest between German U-boats and Allied convoys. The Battle of the Atlantic began on the first day of the war and did not end until the last. Winston Churchill described it as the thing that worried him most. Whoever won the Battle of the Atlantic, it was believed, would win the European war. Beginning in the spring of 1941, President Roosevelt authorized that supplies could be sent to England, and U.S. Navy ships could escort merchant vessels in the North Atlantic. This meant American sailors were put in harm’s way even before America was a formal combatant.
In 1942 the United States had begun to feel the U-boat peril in a much more violent and intimate way. After Pearl Harbor brought America into the war in earnest, German Admiral Karl D?nitz saw a ripe opportunity: the vast and unprotected Atlantic coast of the United States, from Maine to Florida. The U-boat commander dispatched his submarines to cruise the East Coast, where they roamed startlingly near shore—the Germans called this the “Happy Time”—sinking freighters, tankers, trawlers, and barges. The goal was to destroy supplies being produced to feed the Allied war effort. The U.S. Navy was slow to organize an escort system for coastal shipping, and ships were sunk in full sight of horrified American citizens, who could stand on beaches and watch freighters burning. The Outer Banks of North Carolina became known as “torpedo junction” because of the number of ships destroyed there. The men on the U-boat crews clambered on top of their subs and took keepsake photos of the wreckage.