1942 by Robert Conroy
Reviewed by Douglas W. Texter
28 October 2009
Ultimately, Robert Conroy's alternate history of the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor—like the account presented by Harry Turtledove in Days of Infamy and End of the Beginning—serves as a morality play about good guys and bad guys. Despite their bravery, the Japanese are the dastardly villains of Conroy's novel. They attacked Pearl Harbor because, according to both the logic of the novel and the logic of the standard American tale of the event, they were militaristic curs, who needed to be taught that the twentieth century belonged to the United States with its economic might, and that the dream of Asia for the Asiatics simply would not do in a world in which Europe and the U.S. needed markets and raw materials.
The novel begins immediately after the initial waves of air attacks against Pearl Harbor. Two brilliant Japanese Young Turks in the Imperial Navy, Commander Minoru Genda and Lieutenant Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, remind Admiral Nagumo that the mission of strike force Kido Butai was threefold. The six carriers and two battleships of the force were to decimate the American battlewagons at Pearl, take out the two American aircraft carriers under the command of Admiral William "Bull" Halsey, and destroy Pearl's fuel storage tanks and maintenance facilities, thereby rendering the base useless. Because, as was the case in our world, the American carriers sailed in the Pacific during the attack, only the first of the three missions was accomplished. Allowing himself to be swayed by the arguments of his brilliant subordinates, Admiral Nagumo decides to launch an additional attack against the as-yet untouched fuel tanks. This mission succeeds, wiping out the fuel supplies for surviving U.S. warships and rendering the Hawaiian Islands very vulnerable.
After the oil tanks explode in flames, Admiral Yamamoto flies to Tokyo from his base in Hiroshima, pays a visit to Prime Minister Tojo, and argues for changing strategies and launching an invasion of the Hawaiian Islands. Tojo agrees, and Japanese troops wade ashore on Oahu. Given that the American ground forces are ill prepared, the Japanese overwhelm the U.S. military. Roosevelt, who has committed to a Germany-first policy, has no choice but to allow Hawaii to be taken. The plotting and character work here are very nice.
The occupation is, as one might expect given the way that Japanese soldiers actually did behave in places like Bataan, nasty and brutish. Fortunately for the Americans and Hawaiians, as the case turns out, it is also fairly short. Preparing to both pacify and annex Hawaii, the Japanese send a Gestapo-like secret police to the islands. The usual atrocities occur: the use of females as comfort women, beheadings, and rapes. As occurred in places like the Philippines, small groups of American soldiers evade capture at the formal cessation of hostilities and form guerilla groups harassing Japanese troops. Eventually, Yamamoto falls prey to over-confidence (and misleading intelligence), and he brings the entire fleet into Pearl, where the Americans surprise the Japanese.
One of the most interesting and entertaining features of the novel (as is so in most alternate history) involves characters who play roles slightly different than those they did in our own world. For example, in Conroy's novel, the pioneering aviator Jimmy Doolittle, who in the real world led a B-25 bombing raid on Tokyo from an aircraft carrier, now flies lead float plane in an attack against Japanese-occupied Pearl Harbor.
Equipment fiends will find a technological problem to their liking. In a very nice move, Conroy imports wholesale into 1942 from the real world the seemingly benign but incredibly important controversy of the Mark 14 torpedo. These torpedoes, designed during the inter-war years of shoestring R&D budgets, amazingly, had never been live fired because the warheads were too expensive to use. Instead, during test firings a piece of concrete sat in the tip of the torpedo—the "fish"—to simulate the weight of the explosives. Unfortunately, the concrete was lighter than the actual explosive charge used in combat situations. Thus, when skippers on patrol fired the Mark 14, the fish ran ten feet deeper than they thought it would, with the result that the torpedoes often glided under the target rather than into it and didn't explode. U.S. submarine commanders would a fire a fish and begin their count until the explosion. Not hearing any big bang, they would rise to periscope depth only to view what they had thought would be a destroyed warship closing on them and preparing to launch a depth-charge attack. Details like that of the Mark 14 torpedo problem make readers really trust Conroy's command of military history.
Unfortunately, although the novel is a great deal of fun, Conroy sutures up the fascinating historical rupture he creates almost as completely as Phillip Roth does a Lindbergh presidency in his The Plot Against America. While Conroy's characters don't wake up in their beds on the morning of December 8, 1941, rubbing their eyes and saying, "What a strange dream this all was," the author does manipulate events and actions on both sides so that this change in history ultimately has little effect on the overall direction of the war. Part of this refusal to let the historical rupture continue to blossom into a full scale fissure may have to do with Conroy's background as an expert in economic history. Indeed, many of the historical characters, including Yamamoto, mouth what by now is the common wisdom about the war in the Pacific: that the Japanese were doomed from the beginning because of U.S. industrial might.
But there's another mechanism, I think, that prevents Conroy's novel from creating a truly divergent historical timeline. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor has become an Ur story in American popular history: a rags to riches tale. The poor innocent United States, caught napping in the Pacific, wakes up one fine Sunday morning before church to see white planes with meatballs on the wings laying waste to Battleship Row and Hickham Field. Appalled by the treachery of an enemy that doesn't look very much like itself, the United States rolls up its sleeves, produces aircraft carriers rather than just ice boxes and razor blades, and kicks Japan in the rump. The morality play ends four years later with Tokyo a smoldering ash heap and a new sun blossoming over Hiroshima. Justice has been served. Hard work and industry have triumphed. American battleships sit in Tokyo Bay and American fingers rest on the trigger of the most powerful weapon the world has ever seen. The U.S. bows to the audience and assumes its rightful place as the ruler of the world.
That's the standard popular line about U.S. involvement in the war in the Pacific, and this novel, although quite fun and meticulous in terms of its research, buys completely into this story. We're almost seventy years out now from that day that will live in infamy. Living memory of the attack mostly dwells in nursing homes. I think it's time to start taking a a more realistic look at the attack on Pearl Harbor and the war in the Pacific, especially in light of facts like the U.S. oil embargo leading up to the Japanese attack and European control of Asian natural resources such as oil and rubber in British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies.
Perhaps it's also time for alternate history to start looking at the several very different mid century military conflicts around the world (collectively placed under the rubric of World War II) in terms of wider issues like European and U.S. colonialism in Asia, and the quest for markets for U.S. goods. How different, really, were the ideas of the Asia for the Asiatics and the Japanese Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere from parallel U.S. notions like Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine? From the Mexican War on, the U.S. worked hard to secure continental dominance. Once the frontier closed in the eighteen nineties, U.S. power put Manifest Destiny into its briefcase and took a steamer into the Pacific, looking for new lands to conquer, or in the case of Hawaii, to annex. From a distance of seventy years, Japanese claims to dominion over Asia and a desire to boot the U.S. and European powers out of the Pacific don't seem that much different from, say, American reaction to Soviet missiles in Cuba in the 1960s.
While Conroy's historical work and plotting in the novel are brilliant and very entertaining, 1942 thus stands as a missed chance to deliver a truly alternate history of the war in the Pacific. Conroy certainly does, though, present a very fun slug-fest morality play.
Comments
A) "How different, really, were the ideas of the Asia for the Asiatics and the Japanese Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere from parallel U.S. notions like Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine?"
Mr. Texter, go ask a Chinese or a Korean or a Vietnamese or virtually anyone else in the area about the "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere".
You will get an earful. At very high volume.
There's a reason all the other Asian powers go ballistic at the slightest sign of Japanese forgetfulness about the period, or if a Japanese premier goes to the war-dead shrine.
Or just Google "Rape of Nanking".
What's next, the legitimate complaints of Germany after Versailles?
WWII is presented as a Good vs. Evil contest because it -actually was- a Good vs. Evil contest, to anyone who has those concepts on their hard-drive. Not that the Allies were angels, but the Axis were most certainly as close to devils as imperfect human beings can get.
B) "Indeed, many of the historical characters, including Yamamoto, mouth what by now is the common wisdom about the war in the Pacific: that the Japanese were doomed from the beginning because of U.S. industrial might."
Yamamoto actually did say that, and more than once; he knew the US well (he'd lived there for years) and didn't think that "Yamato spirit" could trump numbers. He expected initial Japanese victories followed by inevitable defeat, and was precisely right.
That's what actually happened. The US wasn't particulary skillful; it just bludgeoned the Japanese into the dirt.
The results of the Pacific War -were- overdetermined by the economics; that's cold hard fact and there are no grounds for any revisionism.
Given that both sides were about equally determined to prevail and both were prepared to slug it out until only one was left standing, the disparity in population and production of steel, machine tools, aircraft, petroleum and so forth was so great that no amount of Japanese skill or ingenuity was going to do more than delay matters.
It didn't matter how many battles they won or how many American carriers they sank. The Americans would build more and come again; it was like trying to sweep back the ocean with a broom.
As the Confederate States had found out, the battle isn't always to the strong but it's generally the way to bet.
Germany was in a somewhat better position than Japan because they had a bigger industrial base and seized more contiguous territory early in the war; they might have won if they had made no major mistakes at all and their opponents had made all the major mistakes conceivable, enabling them to end the war in Europe before American resources (and Soviet manpower) could be fully deployed against them.
Which is unlikely but not impossible.
Japan was going to lose even if they made no mistakes and the US made plenty.
That's how both the World Wars turned out; the side with the greater weight of men and metal won, not the side with the best troops or generals. Wars, particulary conventional wars between nation-states, are usually won by attrition.
Quantity has a quality all its own, as Stalin put it.
C) "and that the dream of Asia for the Asiatics simply would not do in a world in which Europe and the U.S. needed markets and raw materials."
Oh, please, does -anyone- really still take this sort of Vulgar Marxism for Infants stuff seriously?
Well, perhaps in the English departments of American universities.
"Oh, please, does -anyone- really still take this sort of Vulgar Marxism for Infants stuff seriously?"
Nobody, apart from...
* Noam Chomsky.
* The dozens of International Relations theorists who work in Marxist-inspired traditions such as Immanuel Wallerstein's World-Systems Approach or Neo-Gramscianism?
* Anyone left of centre who works in the burgeoning field of International Political Economy?
Mr. Stirling: Good to hear from you.
I'd like to address your concerns about my review. First, I have no doubt that the Japanese were incredibly brutal when they occupied other nations. I said as much in the review. No argument from me on this. The trouble is that the Americans and their allies weren't much better in their conduct during the war. "Not angelic" doesn't come to close to describing some of the things that the Americans, the British, and the Soviets did to win the war. I'm not trying to be gauche, but unfortunately World War II was so bloody on both sides that I can see you the rape of Nanking and raise you the firebombing of Dresden. Who wants to win that kind of game?
Much of what the Americans, the Soviets, and the British did--including wholesale bombings of civilian targets with the aim of (in the words of Winston Churchill) "de-housing" entire populations --violated almost every ethical principle of warfare I can think of, including Augustinian Just War Theory. Certainly, too, while the Soviets were our allies for about three years, they slaughtered their own people and Germans at rates that stagger the imagination. They were better than the Germans or the Japanese? I don't think so. In Asia, the Chinese battled both the Japanese and each other. I have no idea what the final death toll was in the Chinese Civil War and Revolution, but it's probably over twenty million, not counting those killed twenty years later during the Cultural Revolution. With these kinds of numbers, it's very difficult for me to see a straight dividing line between good and evil here. Not with a hundred million dead in four years or so.
In terms of the economics of the war, you are correct that Yamamoto did indeed say what Conroy has him say. The admiral did visit the US and was impressed by Detroit. However, I believe the Japanese could have in the year following the attack on Pearl Harbor defeated the Americans, if by "defeat" one means to drive the Americans to the negotiating table and get them out of the Pacific. How? Unfortunately, what the Japanese did do was to find the biggest enemy they could have possibly taken on and slap him in the face, instead of gouging his eyes out. That was a recipe for disaster. Pearl Harbor wasn't followed up with brutal and decisive force. Hawaii should have been taken. The next step would have been to have landed significant ground forces on the US West Coast and created incredible chaos. If I would have been Tojo, I would have landed say 100,000 Japanese Marines in Northern California or Oregon, grouped them into "search and destroy" parties and had them attack and destroy cities up and down the coast very quickly. At the same time, I would have tried to get the Americans to the bargaining table immediately. If there had been Japanese troops on US soil and increased German U-Boat pressure on the East Coast, the Americans might have agreed to a negotiated settlement to save US lives and deal with the Germans. But all of this would have had to have been done very quickly. It wasn't, and so, American industrial might did triumph.
Finally, while I do look at conflicts in terms of economics and think that most conflicts (including interpersonal ones) basically are economic at their roots, I am not a Marxist. There is a difference between looking at events and history through an economic lens and being a Marxist. To my mind, Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History hits the nail on the head when he says that beneath the surface of Marxism is a weak messianic impulse, one more akin to religion than political philosophy.
In any event, thanks for your comments. I hope that addresses some of them.
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