Ever since 1931, the U.S. had been pressuring Japan to withdraw the army it had sent to conquer Manchuria and, eventually, all of China. America had tried exerting diplomatic pressure, but to no avail. The Japanese Imperial Government’s primary goal was to become the conquering ruler of Asia.

When diplomacy didn’t work, President Roosevelt reduced, then ended American export of machinery to Japan. When that didn’t work, he stopped all sales of American oil. Even though its operations in China were running out of gas, Japan persisted. Finally the government froze Japanese assets in the U.S. Roosevelt knew how the Japanese would respond when he signed the order locking Japan’s wealth in American banks. “This means war,” he told his chief adviser.

Washington expected a declaration of war from Tokyo, to be quickly followed by an attack on a distant base. In late November, 1941, the Defense Department ordered every military base in the Pacific to remain at high alert because “hostile action” with Japan was possible at any moment.

No one anticipated that, within a week, Japan would launch a massive, long-planned attack on our fleet before it even declared war.

However, readers of the Post knew that Japan was desperate and audacious enough to try something like it. Since 1939, they’d read articles by the Asian correspondent Hallett Abend, which chronicled the rising militancy in Japan. In the Post of March 4, 1939, he wrote about Japan’s vast security and espionage networks and the growing recklessness of its military. In August, he told readers how much Japan was willing to gamble on conquering China:

Japan’s foreign gold reserve, which in 1925 totaled about 2,000,000,000 yen, is now entirely exhausted…the yen is so shaky that Americans, British, French, and Dutch banks in Shanghai will not accept Japanese currency.

If Japan can succeed in carrying out her plans for grab in China, she may become one of the richest nations in the world within a decade. But there will be only very small profits, or no profits at all, so long as the Chinese continue their military resistance.

In April of 1941, he exploded the comforting myth that the Japanese would never have an effective air force because they simply couldn’t fly.

Japanese mothers all carry their babies on their backs, you know. Heads wobble around so much in infancy that adult Japanese have no sense of balance.

Very interesting—but nonsense, of course. The story is typical of the dozens of old wives’ tales going the rounds about the congenital unfitness of the Japanese as aviators.

It is believed that the Air Military Academy trained more than 700 new pilots during 1940, with the probability of a much larger class this year.

The present strength of the army’s air force…[and] the navy’s…gives Japan around 6000 pilots.

In September of last year, [Japan] had upward of 4000 efficient war planes. Since then she has been turning out about 250 planes a month, so that by the end of February of this year, allowing deductions for losses in China, Nippon’s war air fleet topped 5,000 planes.

In contrast, Abend admitted, there were no more than 7,000 military aircraft—and 40% of these were sluggish trainer planes.

Japan had planned on building several thousand more planes in 1941. However—

the shortage of alloy steels and the growing difficulty of importing machine tools has prevented this peak from being reached. The United States will sell Japan none.

Just two weeks before the Pearl attack, Abend gave a surprisingly accurate picture of Japan’s current position toward the U.S.

This untitled cartoon by Herbert Johnson appeared alongside Hallett Abend's April 19, 1941 article, "Yes, The Japanese Can Fly"

Japan is exasperated… She finds herself baffled and checked by the two things she fears most—the might of the American Navy in the Pacific, and the possibility of losing her vital trade with the United States. She must retain that trade at all costs. And she must not risk a collision with the American Navy. Yet, if she goes ahead and grabs everything she wants in the Far East, she will almost certainly risk trouble with our Navy.

Japan has jockeyed herself into a position where it is almost necessary to have all or nothing. If she decides that the United States is the barrier to the coveted all, Japan is quite capable of provoking a war with us, just as an individual Japanese commits hara-kiri rather than confess to failure.

America has studiously remained scrupulously neutral during more than two years of the China Japanese hostilities, even though American sympathies have been overwhelmingly on the side of the Chinese. This neutrality has been carried to the extent of continuing a trade in war materials and supplies with Japan. There is only one thing that would drive America to a reluctant abandonment of the neutral attitude. This would be deliberate and intolerable provocation on the part of Japan herself.

That “deliberate and intolerable” provocation arrived two weeks after this article appeared, and left 2,402 Americans dead.

The next time an enemy struck at America, the fatalities—all civilians—reached 2,996. This new enemy, though, hid his intentions even better than did Imperial Japan.

What We Knew Before Pearl Harbor The Saturday Evening Post

During the battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, ships of America’s 7th fleet surprised a large taskforce of the Japanese fleet at Suriago Bay. Late in the ensuring gun battle between battleships, the Mississippi fired a salvo at the retreating Japanese ships. No one could have known at the time, but that twelve-gun volley was the last salvo fired by one battleship at another. The era of the decisive naval battle was ending.

For over 300 years, battleships had been one of the most important weapons a nation possessed.  By dominating sea lanes, battleships could decide the outcome of wars and the fates of nations.But after this last salvo, battleships stopped engaging each other in direct, decisive battle, and naval warfare came to rely on air and underwater forces.

Just as the age of the battleship ended, the age of the suicide bomber began. This is how William L. Worden, writing for the Post in 1945, described the appearance of kamikazes in Leyte Gulf.

A kamikaze pilot attacks the USS Columbia.

A lone aircraft comes out of a cloud with a strange deliberation. It reaches a spot over the outer rim of ships, and then, seeming more deliberate than ever, the plane tips over into a steep nosedive. It is not a smooth dive. Tracers cut holes in the plane before it is well started down. Bigger shells take off pieces of the wings and crash into the cockpit. But the plane is traveling on a near-vertical course and does not veer.

The plane crashes head-on into the rigging of a ship. A cargo boom swings wildly, wreathed in fire from the plane’s gasoline tanks. The plane [crashes] through radio aerials and cargo lines, and into the sea a hundred feet beyond the target vessel. There it burns awhile, then sinks.

Conservatively, there have been well over 1,000 such dives against shipping all the way from the Philippines to the sea 100 miles off the mouth of Tokyo Bay. ["Kamikaze: Aerial Banzai Charge," William L. Worden, June 23, 1945]

Suicide dives were not new, as Worden pointed out, nor were they unknown among American fliers.

Individual airmen of most of the world’s flying forces [have], at one time or another, used it as a desperate last-minute attack when they knew they were going to crash anyhow.

You may remember that Maj. Lofton Henderson, of the Marine Corps—for whom Henderson Field at Guadalcanal is named— was last seen diving his flaming, bomb-laden plane into the deck of a Jap carrier that was trying to flee from Midway.

It was also during the battle of Midway that fifteen pilots from a Navy Torpedo Squadron flew directly into the fire of Japanese ships knowing they had almost no chance of survival. (Just one pilot survived.)

The difference between a true suicide dive and the attacks Torpedo Squadron 8 made is an almost indistinguishable hair line.

A kamikaze pilot steers his plane toward a collision with the USS White Plains, October 25, 1944.

The important difference, Worden said, was the official nature of these suicide tactics. The Japanese military had purposely ordered the strategic suicide, making it a part of official government strategy.

Did it work? Official military reports at war’s end concluded that kamikazes had sunk 34 and damaged 368 ships. They had also killed 300 and wounded over 4,000 American servicemen.

The Japanese military might have thought kamikaze attacks would ensure victory. But by the end of the battle for Leyte Gulf, even they realized it was hopeless. Still they ordered their men to continue flying into U.S. ships. And they assured their men that vast numbers of kamikazes were held in reserve to halt any American invasion of Japan. In another Post article, a captured Japanese air commander told his American interrogator that—

“we had a plan to send out our entire kamikaze strength—more than two thousand planes—in wave after wave.”

What damage did be estimate this would have inflicted?

” Fifty to seventy-five per cent of your force,” he said. “All the carriers. Many other ships as well.” He added that they would have saved some six hundred of their best new fighter planes for a last-ditch aerial defense of the homeland. ["A Japanese Officer Explains Nippon Mistakes," Lt. S.P. Walker, USNR, Nov. 11, 1945]

The Japanese military hadn’t expected that their kamikazes would motivate the Navy to be more vigilant and to fight smarter. They hadn’t considered losing and answering for their barbarities. They couldn’t have dreamed that their suicide bombers would be a factor in America’s decision to use a nuclear weapon on them.

A government that employs suicide attacks ignores the historic failure of terrorism, the inevitable day of earthly reckoning with an outraged enemy, and the fact that America can’t always be relied on to forgive and forget. By stiffening the resolve of its enemies, terrorists forge the weapon that will destroy themselves.

Broadsides and Suicides: How War Changed During Three Days The Saturday Evening Post

The earliest estimate put the cost near $35 billion, but that figure proved premature. Damage from aftershocks and the nuclear-plant explosion is continuing to add to the total costs for reconstruction.

A second estimate of damages, released a few days ago, has raised the estimate to $170 billion. To put that cost in perspective, imagine twice the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina ($80 billion.)

The U.S. has rarely experienced earthquakes on the scale seen by Japan. Our one, truly disastrous quake in a modern city came in 1906. On April 18, a force 8.0 quake (one-tenth the size of the Japanese quake) hit San Francisco, leveling most of the city and starting fires from ruptured gas lines. Roughly 80% of the city was destroyed and half the city’s residents left homeless. Yet many San Franciscans responded to this adversity with determination and ingenuity.

I came across a good illustration of this spirit in a 1947 Post article about A. P. Giannini, founder of the Bank of America. In that April morning in 1906, the 36-year-old president of the city’s “Bank of Italy”—

found himself flung out of bed, and the whole house, the floor and the earth underneath heaving and shaking. He calmed his excited family, dressed quickly and hurried off by the commuters’ train to San Francisco, sixteen miles up the peninsula. The train finally halted several miles south of the city, over which a great pall of smoke already hung, and A. P. loped along the last few miles, passing processions of panic-stricken refugees. But when he arrived at his bank a little after eight A.M., he found it open for business as usual. The cashier, by habit, had drawn the bank’s $300,000 in gold, and notes and securities worth over $1,000,000 more, from the vaults of the Crocker Bank, where they were stored every night.

“The fire that was spreading all over the downtown section,” Giannini relates, “was only three blocks away, I figured we had about an hour to get out.” At once he commandeered two produce wagons from his old commission house and ordered his clerks to load them up with the bank’s pouches of gold, its valuable papers, records, and its one type-writer. These were covered over with the contents of a dozen crates of oranges and vegetables that served as camouflage.

All that night the little Bank of Italy convoy plodded southward, on the alert for bandits. It was dawn when they reached the Giannini home in San Mateo and buried the bank’s treasure in its garden. Without sleeping, A.P. hurried back to San Francisco, to find most of the downtown business and residential quarter, some 25,000 buildings, leveled, and the fire still spreading.

The morning after the quake, the leading businessmen of San Francisco met outside town. Many were in despair. Several bankers suggested they declare a six-month moratorium, Giannini spoke up:

Large swaths of San Francisco were laid in ruin. At least 3,000 people were killed in the quake.Library of Congress

“If you keep your banks closed until November, you might as well never open them, for there will be no city left. The time for doing business is right now. We must help. I propose, when I leave this meeting, to start business immediately.”

That day he had a desk set out on the pier in his old commission-house district, all in ruins, and had a clerk there accepting deposits and honoring checks for their customers, the people who were shipping in vitally needed foodstuffs as always. A cardboard sign on a stick showed the Bank of Italy was open for business, though its till carried a quota of only $10,000 cash, dug up each morning from the garden in San Mateo.

Giannini offered credit liberally to people who wanted to rebuild homes or business properties.He opened a Calamity Day Book for the customers who borrowed money in that time of disaster. All of them, he says, repaid him; many flourished again, and formed a loyal regiment of depositors and stockholders that soon grew into legions.

No doubt, in the months ahead, we will read similar stories about the endurance and sacrifice of the Japanese people who are facing these incredibly hard times.

If it’s hard to imagine the power that could destroy a city so thoroughly, try imagining the power of the human spirit that will overcome and rebuild the land.

Earthquakes and the Human Will: Trying to Imagine the Incredible The Saturday Evening Post

Americans—both soldiers and civilians—were expecting a long, bloody campaign. A Post editorial from August observed—

“If you ask the average American how long he thinks the war in the Pacific will last, he is likely to reply, “If you’re asking me, my opinion is that we’d better get ready for a long war out there. All of us pay lip service to the idea that the country faces at least a year, and maybe more, of fighting before Japan accepts unconditional surrender.”

Our soldiers hadn’t been told that military planners were predicting the price of a successful invasion could be as high as a million casualties. However, they had all heard of what happened at Okinawa. There, between April and June, over 250,000 soldiers and civilians had died in a fierce, unrelenting firefight.

In his article, “What Japan Has Waiting For Us” [July 28, 1945], William McGaffin reported on the new tactics the Japanese army had developed.*

Because of its implications for the coming big show on the mainland of Japan, this duel of ours with disappearing cannon was closely watched by military strategists on our side and theirs too.

We did not ever have an easy time of it … It was a much tougher problem when the enemy opened up with several dozen [cannons] at once—mass firing. This is an American specialty. The Jap was not supposed to know how to do it. He never had done it before. He does not do it now as well as we, but too well, at that. The effect of two dozen shells exploding almost simultaneously in a single area—mass firing—is exceedingly more disastrous than two dozen shells arriving one by one over a period of time.

He kept his guns alive to harass us in spite of our overwhelming strength. He kept them alive by taking them into thousands of caves prepared against the day of invasion—caves like those presumably ready in the rugged regions of China und Japan.

The Japs are good at camouflage. Many a cave had a deceptively painted trap door. Sometimes it was impossible to detect such a gun position unless you had your glasses right on it when the trap door flopped open and the gun was rolled out.

Groupment Henderson, a mixed Marine and Army outfit specializing in counterbattery fire, made a rich haul one afternoon by accident. The air observer spotted a group of camouflaged light antiaircraft guns. Marine Lt. Col. F. P. Henderson, who commands the groupment, began giving the enemy pieces the treatment he had found most effective. Before going for “destruction,” with the 200-pound shells of his 8-inch howitzers, he ordered his Long Toms to ‘walk’ volleys of their 100-pounders around in the area.

This knocks off camouflage, opens up a target and gains a by-product of personnel casualties. The results, however, never were so astonishing as on this day. For when the camouflage was knocked off, seven more guns were laid bare—seven formidable 150-mms. The light anti-aircraft guns, insignificant game in comparison, were there to protect the precious 150′s. The colonel’s 8-inchers proceeded to knock off the seven big guns.

Each night new positions would be fixed. They were not always new guns. Often they were old ones moved to new places. Moving around was the only way the Jap could keep his guns alive.In the end, upward of an estimated 500 Japanese guns were knocked out on Okinawa. It took weeks to get them all.

The strain on troop morale was another new factor we had not encountered before. Our divisions on Okinawa never had been under shelling by heavy artillery. They stood up well, considering their greenness to this type of ordeal, but a percentage of battle neuroses—‘shell shocks’ we called them in the last war—inevitably developed. Many had to be evacuated.

On Okinawa, these now-you-see-’em-now-you-don’t guns proved to be a definite new threat to an American invading force. It was defeated eventually. But thoughtful strategists are wondering: If he could do what he did on Okinawa, what must he have waiting for us in Japan or China?

He has tipped his hand now, showing us that he has large-caliber guns, that he knows how to mass-fire them and how to keep them alive indefinitely in caves.

And, though his air force and his fleet have been whittled down from their dangerous proportions, his big guns have hardly suffered at all. For he did not bring them out until Okinawa. It would seem a logical deduction that he has plenty waiting for us when we come into his homeland for the big show.

Military chroniclers of the future, perhaps, will see in Okinawa a sort of final testing ground of the Pacific, where new weapons and new ways of using them were tried and perfected for the great battles ahead. We shall need every bit of the experience we have gained here.

Okinawa proved to be a different sort of testing ground. We tested how well their defenses held up in the home islands and found them more deadly than we had expected.

Thankfully, we can only imagine how much more intense the fighting would have been had we invaded mainland Japan. On August 6 and 9 we dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and the war, and the Japanese government surrendered. Because the invasion was cancelled, hundreds of thousands of GIs would return home. The cost to Japan was over 200,000 civilian deaths—a number that would probably have been small compared to the carnage of a lengthy invasion.

* Note: McGaffin uses the diminutive title “Japs” to indicate the soldiers of Imperial Japan. It was a term that was widely and thoughtlessly used in America before the war. It would have been hard, I suppose, for a reporter to write of the Pacific war without using a hateful term for the enemy. So I’ve decided to retain the term in historical context.

Read “What Japan Has Waiting for Us”, published July 28, 1945.

How The Future Looked Without The Bomb The Saturday Evening Post