Unpleasant Months

THE RISING SUN IN THE PACIFIC (411 pp.)--Samuel Eliot Morison--Atlantic-Little, Brown ($6).

Six boards or courts of inquiry have produced 40 volumes of printed matter on the Pearl Harbor disaster of Dec. 7, 1941. For a crisp account of the event, its causes and consequences, laymen may put their trust in frosty Captain Morison, U.S.N.R. (on inactive duty). The Rising Sun in the Pacific is a clear record of a complex of failures.

Rising Sun is the third volume in Morison's naval history of the war, and the first of eight on the war against Japan. Pulitzer Prizewinning biographer of Columbus and professor of history at Harvard, Morison got his big job from his friend Franklin Roosevelt in 1942 and has had all the Navy's help in carrying it out. He uses official facts (including Japanese naval records) and his own judgment.*

Militarists Made Desperate. Japan, says Captain Morison, might never have made war on the U.S. if U.S. diplomacy had been wiser. Two cardinal errors were the Immigration Act of 1924, excluding Japanese, and the insistence on naval limitation. The first discredited the liberal policy that had been making headway in Japan; the second "rendered the militarists desperate." Among the results were assassinations of liberal statesmen in Tokyo and deliberate attacks on Americans in China, including the sinking of the river gunboat Panay in 1937. That was also the year that the Japanese navy laid down, in secret, the hulls of the Yamato and Musashi, 63,700-ton battleships. By 1941 the Japanese navy was "more powerful than the combined Allied Fleets in the Pacific." It was superior to the U.S. fleet, says Morison, in destroyers and torpedo design, and its carrier planes "Zeke" and "Kate" were to prove superior in the early months of war.

This great navy had, however, two weaknesses: the supporting industrial bases, never geared to rapid replacements or mass production, and the strategy of the Japanese high command.

Surprising Departure. "The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor," says Captain Morison, "far from being a 'strategic necessity' as the Japanese claimed even after the war, was a strategic imbecility." Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was a brilliant tactician, but when he cooked up Pearl Harbor he departed from the sound basic plan of Japanese strategy. This was to complete the conquest of the Western Pacific and wait there for the U.S. fleet, cutting it down by island attacks and then overwhelming it in Philippine waters. In Morison's opinion, one good reason for Admiral Kimmel's failure at Pearl Harbor was that he and his staff thought the enemy would stick to what the Americans regarded as so sound a strategic plan.

At the same time, they underestimated his capacity. Reports of large Japanese ship movements southward against Indo-China and Malaya convinced them that the Hawaiian Islands were safe for the time being. But they had many warnings to the contrary. Lay readers may be fascinated by such details as the CINCPAC intelligence officer's report of Dec. 1, in which it was noted that the call letters of four Japanese carriers had vanished from Japanese radio "traffic." The inference is that those carriers were at sea under radio silence, on their way to strike somewhere --as indeed they were.

For Japan, says Morison, the war was not a "necessity," provoked by U.S. policy. The chief point advanced in support of that theory is that Japan had to have oil, and the U.S. finally, in July 1941, shut off her oil supplies. Historian Morison refutes this by simply referring to the memoirs of the Japanese Premier, Prince Konoye, who was assured by Japan's No.11 national planner that domestic needs could be met by synthetic oil production. As Konoye knew, war was a necessity only to the military clique, who counted on it, Morison says, to "rivet their control on Japan."

Readers of Morison's history may well feel that the poorest showing made by the U.S. Navy in the war was not at Pearl Harbor, but in the three or four weeks of confusion and unsettled command that followed. Neither the U.S. public nor the services at large were told, during the war, the full story of the Navy's miserable failure to relieve Wake Island with two task forces expressly sent out for that purpose. Neither got within radar range of the Japanese, and one meandered all over the ocean in a refueling operation during the two critical days that Major Devereux's marines were making their last-ditch stand on the island.

Highly creditable by contrast were the desperate actions fought around the Philippines and Borneo by Admiral Hart's lightweight Asiatic Fleet--and Admiral Hart's picture deservedly appears as the frontispiece to this volume. Morison's descriptions of some of these sea fights would yield a manual of the underdog tactics possible to surface craft without air cover when attacked by air and sea. Gallantry in the Western Pacific, the appointment of the astute Admiral Nimitz as CINCPAC, the emergence of Admiral Halsey as a fighting task force commander, and the Doolittle raid on Tokyo were slight reassurances in the face of Japan's mighty victories. As Historian Morison says:

"These first five months of the war in the Pacific are neither pleasant to investigate nor inspiring to read about, except possibly for our late enemies and present wards . . ."

* The Navy carefully makes it plain that it is not official history. It is simply history.

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