Summary: In the first ten chapters of this series we remembered the 1916 April Revolution that toppled Japan’s centuries-old monarchy and created the Japanese People’s Republic; the new regime’s post-revolution crushing of all potential domestic opponents; its 1932 border war with Russia and involvement in the 1933 Singapore terror bombing; its improbable alliance with Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy; and its invasion of Russia’s Siberian territories in 1941. In this segment, we’ll recall the chain of events which plunged the Japanese People’s Republic into war with Britain and the United States and the military reverses that would thrust the war plans of the Yamagida regime into near-total disarray.

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After experiencing stunning successes in the initial phases of Operation Barbarossa, the Wehrmacht would experience equally stunning setbacks during the late summer and early fall of 1941 as the Russian Federal Army recovered from the first shock of the invasion; despite having much of its reserve force tied down in the Far East because of the Japanese invasion of Siberia, the Federal Army organized a highly effective counterattack in mid-August and stopped Hitler’s legions in their tracks with the Russo-Polish border still 25 miles away. It was a bitter pill for Hitler to swallow-- and for the Yamagida government in Japan, who feared that a successful Russian repulse of the German offensive in eastern Europe might stiffen the spines of the troops who were opposing the Japanese People’s Army’s attempt to conquer Siberia. Yamagida convened an emergency session of his war cabinet on September 18th and bluntly told them Japan could no longer afford to wait for the Germans to finish off Livitnov’s armies in Poland before attending to the business of neutralizing U.S. and British sea power in the Pacific region. Action would have to be taken immediately, he said, in order to secure the future of the Japanese People’s Republic against those two military and industrial titans.

     Within minutes after that meeting adjourned, the admiralty of the Japanese People’s Navy went into overdrive refining its rough draft of its battle plans for taking out the British fortresses at Singapore as well as American air and naval bases in Hawaii and the Philippines. Of particular concern to the admirals was the huge U.S. surface fleet at Pearl Harbor, a striking force that had the potential to crush Japan’s hopes for further expansion in Asia before those hopes could be fully realized. The U.S. fleet’s battleships possessed a firepower equal to, and in some cases superior to, that of any of the battlewagons then in service with the Japanese People’s Navy; its submarine force, for all of its technical problems with its existing torpedoes, had a wide edge over its Japanese counterpart; and its aircraft carrier force, despite Tokyo’s best efforts to close the gap on that front, still enjoyed an advantage in terms of both number and quality of planes and pilots. The U.S. carriers in particular were viewed by the JPN admiralty as a gun aimed right at Japan’s head, and they aimed to strike that gun out of Washington’s hand before Roosevelt could pull the trigger.

   Theoretically the plans for attacking Hawaii and the Philippines, collectively code-named Operation Thundering Wave, were sound ones; had just one or two things gone differently the Japanese People’s Navy might have succeeded in annihilating the U.S. Pacific Fleet, or at the very least crippled it long enough for the People’s Army to go running riot throughout southeast Asia. But a seemingly minor security leak in the ranks of the operations planning staff at the JPN admiralty would enable a Chinese undercover agent to obtain critical information about the timing and intended target of Thundering Wave’s first attacks and relay that information to the U.S. Pacific Fleet headquarters at Pearl Harbor; the headquarters staff in turn used that information to begin laying a trap for the unsuspecting JPN carrier force. In keeping with existing intelligence-sharing agreements with the British and Russian governments, U.S. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox duly contacted his counterparts in London and Moscow to notify them of further data which the Chinese agent had uncovered regarding Japanese plans to strike at Singapore and the Russian Pacific Fleet headquarters in Vladivostok. A chain of events had been set into motion putting Japan on a collision course with the Allied powers, and when the collision finally happened the whole world would feel the impact...

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     On November 25th, 1941 a Japanese People’s Navy task force left the port of Hiroshima on a trek which would ultimately take it more than 3500 nautical miles across the northern Pacific to a rendezvous with destiny-- and its own annihilation. The heart of this task force was composed of six Kashimagu-class main aircraft carriers; on their mission’s success or failure hung the future of the Japanese People’s Republic. If it were able to destroy or even seriously damage the U.S Pacific Fleet’s main battle force the Japanese People’s Army would be able to run nearly unchecked throughout southeast Asia and strengthen the Liberation Society’s claim to dominant power status in the Pacific region. But if the attackers were defeated, it would mean disaster for the Yamagida regime’s expansionist ambitions; there was even a danger the regime itself might eventually collapse.

     For a while everything seemed to be going to plan as the carrier task force wound its way through thousands of miles of ocean without being detected by Allied patrols or even civilian ships. But late on the afternoon of December 5th, Operation Thundering Wave began to fall apart when a U.S. Navy search plane on a routine sweep of the waters off Hawaii sighted the lead vessel in the JPN task force approaching the island from the northwest. The information was duly passed on to Pacific Fleet headquarters, and when fleet commander-in-chief Admiral Husband E. Kimmel had finished reading the search plane’s report about the approaching JPN task force he ordered his ships to begin moving at once to spring the trap his staff had spent weeks setting. While the planes from the Japanese carrier task force were getting ready to hit Pearl Harbor, an American carrier flotilla was getting ready to strike the Japanese.

      It was 7:55 AM Honolulu time when a pilot in the first wave of Japanese attack aircraft radioed his commander that he had sighted a pair of unknown contacts off his 3 o’clock position. The commander, in a fit of pique, started chiding him for breaking radio silence only to discover a bogey closing with his own plane on an intercept course. He turned to dodge the bogey only to have it turn with him, then fire two machine gun bursts from its wings. Seconds later his plane caught fire and went plunging into the icy waters of the North Pacific, an ominous portent of things to come for the Japanese strike force.

      As the rest of the first wave was struggling to absorb the shock of what had just happened, U.S. Navy Wildcats and Army Air Corps P-40s descended on the Japanese planes like avenging angels taking up swords to confront the powers of Hell. The dive bombers and torpedo planes in the first wave had to release their ordnance prematurely and their own fighter escorts were stretched to the limit trying to keep up with the constantly maneuvering American aircraft. On the ground, anti-aircraft batteries unleashed a furious volley against the Japanese planes, thus making an already terrible situation that much worse for the JPN.

      By 10:00 AM two JPN carriers had been sunk outright by the U.S. Pacific Fleet and a third was so seriously damaged her own crew chose to scuttle her rather than risk having her become (as one JPN admiral later put it)”a museum piece on Diamond Head”. The Americans would not by any means emerge from this titanic clash unscathed; at the height of its ferocious no-holds-barred struggle against the JPN strike force the U.S. Pacific Fleet would lose its proudest vessel, the battleship USS Arizona, when two 1000-lb. bombs scored direct hits on her forward magazine and set off a series of explosions that blew her apart. Many smaller ships also fell victim to the Japanese attack force, including the destroyer USS Ward.

      But it was the JPN that would by far emerge the worse for wear from the Battle of Pearl Harbor. In one fell swoop the People’s Navy had lost half its front-line carrier capability-- and adding insult to injury, the midget submarines the JPN had been counting on to make the carrier force’s job easier by staging diversionary attacks inside the harbor proved to be absolutely useless. More than a third of the subs never even reached the Hawaiian coastline, either being forced to turn back because of mechanical troubles or getting sunk by American anti- submarine patrols. The larger submarines from which the midgets were launched hardly fared much better; three of them, in fact, were sunk by American dive bombers in the space of less than fifteen minutes and two others fell prey to U.S. Navy depth charges.

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     Thousands of miles across the Pacific, a People’s Naval Infantry landing force sent to establish a Japanese beachhead on the Philippine island of Luzon was encountering problems of its own. Their main task had been to act as the vanguard for a larger Japanese invasion of the Philippines, but instead of the easy victory they’d been expecting the PNI landing forces found themselves confronted with fierce resistance from U.S. and Filipino troops defending the island. As if that weren't enough of an obstacle for the PNI to cope with, Filipino civilians had hastily organized partisan squads to harass the invaders along the more vulnerable sectors of their flanks. The amphibious landing that Yamagida had been certain would pave the way for a full Japanese conquest of the Philippines was instead turning into an unmitigated disaster; thousands of PNI troops along with the JPA contingent assigned to support them in their assault were trapped on what one American war correspondent aptly described as “the thin lip of the mouth of Hell”.

     With most of the JPN's naval aviation strength committed to backing the attack on Pearl Harbor, there was little hope of the invasion forces getting anything close to the air support they needed to advance beyond the narrow strip of coastline where they were pinned down by an unending torrent of Allied bombs and artillery fire. By noon on December 8th, just over 24 hours after the remnants of the JPN carrier group sent to attack Pearl Harbor began limping back to the Japanese home island, over half of the troops sent to occupy Luzon were dead or dying and the rest trapped in an increasingly hazardous and untenable position surrounded on all sides by Allied forces. Desperate to save his remaining troops from what now looked like an inevitable annihilation at the hands of Luzon’s defenders, radioed Tokyo with an urgent request for permission to withdraw from the beachhead. Yamagida wouldn’t hear of it, insisting that retreat would be “a horrid and unspeakable betrayal” of the Japanese people. In so doing, he sentenced the remnants of the invasion forces to death.

     In Manchuria and many other parts of the Chinese mainland, the JPA’s battle to crush the anti-Liberation Society resistance there was taking a sharp turn for the worse as Mao Zedong’s guerrilla forces and Chiang Kai- Shek’s Nationalist army fought the Japanese and their Korean auxiliaries to a standstill. Despite the Yamagida regime’s constant bombastic bragging that victory for Japan was just around the corner, the exact opposite was proving to be the case: the Japanese occupation forces in mainland China were in fact losing the guerrilla war and losing it badly. Transport ships returned to the Japanese home islands carrying the bodies of thousands of Japanese military personnel killed in action in China and Japanese combat aircraft were getting shot out of the sky almost as fast as the factories back in Japan could manufacture them.

     Only in French Indochina-- present-day Vietnam --was the Japanese People’s Army enjoying any kind of success on the ground. And even there the JPA found itself under attack: a Vietnamese nationalist leader named Ho Chi Minh, determined not to let his country become another victim of the Yamagida regime’s brutality and expansionism, had organized a massive underground resistance movement to mount guerrilla attacks against the JPA invasion forces. Calling themselves the Viet Minh, these insurgents went after the Japanese ground forces with a single-minded ruthlessness; modern Japanese Self-Defense Ministry records indicate that one out of every five JPA soldiers killed between December 1941 and March 1942 was a casualty of Viet Minh attacks. The Chinese anti-Yamagida insurgents watched this course of events with great interest and resolved to learn from Ho’s example. Also taking great interest in the Viet Minh’s guerrilla war against the JPA were the American OSS and the British SOE, who both viewed Ho’s rebel army as a potential ally in their struggle to thwart the Yamagida regime’s hopes for conquest in southern Asia. The British in particular thought the Viet Minh could throw a wrench into Tokyo’s plans to seize Singapore.

   As it happened, the Liberation Society’s plans for seizing Malaya were running into trouble anyway. The 1933 Singapore terror bombing had made the British acutely cognizant of the Japanese threat to London’s interests on the Malayan peninsula and the region’s defenses had been bolstered to meet that threat accordingly. In particular Malaya’s coastal gun batteries had been modified so that they could fired at targets on land as well as those at sea; as prime minister Winston Churchill himself put it later, leaving them in their prewar state of being only able to fire towards the sea would have been “like launching a battleship without a bottom”. They would prove to be an insurmountable barrier to Yamagida’s dream of extending Liberation Society rule throughout southeast Asia....

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   ...and so would the U.S. Pacific carrier fleet, which was preparing to inflict further blows on an already heavily battered People’s Navy. During the first months of 1942 the fleet admiralty went to great lengths to make sure their carrier forces would be ready to battle the JPN head-on the next time it reared its head. Through the use of disinformation tactics Pacific Fleet headquarters learned the JPN was gearing to send its remaining front- line carriers to attack the American naval outpost at Midway Island; armed with this data the Americans accordingly repositioned their own carriers to intercept the Japanese strike force and finish the job the U.S. Navy began at Pearl Harbor.

   On June 4th a scout plane from the JPN strike force radioed to its home carrier that it had sighted a large group of American warships off Midway. The strike force commander immediately launched his torpedo planes and dive bombers to attack the American flotilla, little realizing as he did so that he was sending his aircraft right into the teeth of an ambush by U.S. Navy and Marine Corps fighter squadrons. Simultaneously the American naval force was readying its own torpedo and dive bombers to hit the JPN ships. The JPN was about to be handed its worst defeat in nearly forty years.

   At 10:30 AM the American fighters descended on the JPN dive bombers and torpedo planes like swarms of angry hornets. The JPN attack squadrons’ own fighters tried valiantly to keep the Americans at bay, but their efforts in this regard were like trying to mop up Tokyo Bay with a dishrag. One by one Japanese planes dropped like fiery meteorites into the Pacific; by 11:00 AM fully half the JPN strike force had already been wiped out. At 11:45 AM the American task force’s own dive bombers and torpedo planes started launching from the decks of their respective home carriers to do to the JPN flotilla what the Japanese planes had intended to do to the American task force.

   The American dive bombers and torpedo planes reached their intended targets around 12:20 PM-- and at that moment, as one U.S. Navy pilot was to recall twenty years later, “all hell broke loose”. Anti-aircraft guns from the ships surrounding the Japanese carriers opened up on the American planes, but for every one they managed to hit four planes managed to get through to strike at their assigned targets. The first casualty of their attack was the venerable Kashimagu, which succumbed to a direct hit on her boiler room at 12:47 PM. Her sister ships Yuzimara and Akagi were put out of action simultaneously less than forty minutes later, casting a deep pall over the morale of the men in the JPN task force’s remaining ships. By 2:00 PM it was all too clear the Japanese could not hope to win the day, and the JPN task force commander reluctantly ordered his vessels to begin retiring eastward toward the Japanese home islands.

    But even then their troubles weren’t over; a flotilla of American subs stalked the remaining JPN carriers and torpedoed two of them, sinking one outright and damaging the other so badly her own crew chose to scuttle her rather than risk it falling into American hands. The battered fragments of what had been the most powerful JPN task force in the Pacific Ocean finally returned to Japan on June 10th, six days after making contact with the U.S. Pacific Fleet; the men who’d survived the Battle of Midway were then taken off their badly damaged ships and virtually smuggled to a naval hospital as the Yamagida regime bent over backwards to try and keep its own people from learning the truth about the devastating loss their navy had just suffered.

     The truth leaked out anyway, aided in considerable part by the BBC’s Japanese-language service and the U.S.-sponsored broadcast network Radio Free Japan. Allied propaganda planes also played a part in spreading the news, showering Japanese cities with leaflets that gave a concise summary of the events at Midway. In public Yamagida put on a brave face and mocked Allied attempts to undermine his people’s morale, but behind closed doors he was in a panic; covert inquiries by his regime’s secret police had found alarming evidence the Allies’ propaganda campaign was beginning to work on the hearts and minds of the Japanese civilian population. One example which particularly disturbed Yamagida’s top security officials was the transcript of a conversation overheard by two People’s Committee for Internal Security agents at an Osaka railway station in mid-August of 1942-- in that dialogue one of the men speaking openly expressed doubt regarding Japan’s prospects for winning the war in the Pacific.

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     The scope of the JPN’s defeat at Midway had barely begun to set in among Yamagida’s war cabinet when the People’s Army was handed an equally stunning setback in Malaya. Within two weeks after the remnants of the JPN Midway task force returned to the Japanese home islands, the British Army joined with Indian, Australian, and New Zealander troops as well as Malay resistance fighters to mount a devastating frontal assault against the JPA battlefront in Malaya. At first the JPA managed to hold off the British and Commonwealth forces with iron-hard determination, but after 48 hours the Japanese battlefront started to crack under the relentless assault of the Allied ground troops; by the fourth day of the offensive, the JPA was in retreat and its last hopes of reaching Singapore were fading into oblivion. By July 7th a full-scale evacuation of Japanese troops was underway and the JPA general staff in Tokyo was beginning to fear their strategic position in French Indochina might be in jeopardy. Their fears were well justified: under the combined pressure of Allied ground forces and Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh insurgents the JPA’s position in the region steadily deteriorated; by the first week of August more than half of its original troop strength had been lost in the Inodchinese jungles.

     Throughout the rest of August and much of the early part of September the JPA remained on the defensive; by September 13th Japanese troopships had started crossing the Gulf of Thailand in a desperate effort to evacuate the remnants of the Malayan invasion force from the peninsula before they were trapped by the British and Commonwealth armies. This already highly arduous mission was made that much tougher by Viet Minh raids on the home ports of the troopships and Allied air strikes on the staging areas where the troops waited to be picked up.

     To eliminate the risk of the JPA moving northward in its attempts to escape encirclement by the Allied armies and the Malay resistance, Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek dispatched three of his army’s finest divisions to Malaya as a roadblock against any attempts by Japanese forces to retreat into Chinese territory. Chiang’s move worked brilliantly: within three days after the Chinese divisions made contact with the JPA, the last remaining avenues of escape for Japanese forces had been cut off. Once this was accomplished what remained of the JPA front in Malaya crumbled, and on the morning of October 6th, 1942 the last pockets of Japanese resistance in the peninsula surrendered to the Australian army.

     Chancellor Mitsuharu Yamagida was shell-shocked when he learned of the Allied victory in Malaya. His strategic plans for expanding Japan’s control over the Pacific had depended to a significant degree on conquering Malaya and wresting Singapore from the British, and in the end all he had achieved for his troubles was the destruction of one of the finest Japanese military forces every assembled. And it wasn’t just Yamagida who was alarmed by the JPA’s failure to seize control of the Malayan Peninsula-- Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, whose own geopolitical ambitions were coming to grief in Russia and North Africa, suspected the Japanese defeat in Malaya might well mark the beginning of the end for their Axis partner’s participation in the Second World War.

     And their suspicions would be proven right...

To Be Continued