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The March to War

‘No End Save Victory’ and ‘Japan 1941’

By MICHAEL BESCHLOSSMAY 15, 2014

In February 1933, President-elect Franklin Roosevelt was nearly murdered in Miami by a gunman whose errant fatal shot struck Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago. Cermak gallantly told Roosevelt, “I’m glad it was me instead of you.” Today’s Americans should not disagree. Had Roosevelt been killed, the 32nd president of the United States would have been his running mate, Speaker John Nance Garner of Texas, a neophyte in foreign and military affairs, isolationist by instinct and deeply rooted in a Congress determined, notwithstanding the growing threats from Hitler and the imperial Japanese, to keep another president from repeating what a majority of its members considered to be Woodrow Wilson’s catastrophic mistake of needlessly dragging the nation into a distant “foreign war.”

Photoshopping Roosevelt out of the history of that epoch shows how lucky we are that he indeed survived to be our president, preparing America to fight and help win World War II. So does “No End Save Victory,” David Kaiser’s judicious, detailed and soundly researched history of Roosevelt’s tortuous process of first preparing America psychologically, politically and militarily, and then nudging the country into that apocalyptic struggle. This story has, of course, been told many times before, but what Kaiser especially brings to the table is his mastery not only of the documents and other primary sources that directly reveal Roosevelt’s behind-the-scenes leadership but also of other archives that are sometimes too little mined by political historians, like Army and Navy war plans (the author taught history at the Naval War College).

Americans are not immune to the temptation to see historical events as inevitable, which, by logic, reduces the credit we grant to individual leaders like Roose­velt. But Kaiser crisply reminds us how dangerous and unpredictable the period really was, noting Roosevelt’s not inconsiderable private dread that Hitler might well put himself in a position to dominate the world. Cogently deciphering the twists and turns of the president’s thinking, Kaiser argues that his famous 1940 deal to trade United States destroyers for British bases was “a logical step based on current U.S. war plans and the ever-present possibility that Britain might fall and force the United States immediately to defend the Western Hemisphere.” Kaiser considers the first half of 1941 to be the most difficult time for those in Washington to figure out how World War II might unfold, making Roosevelt’s “sensitive and discriminating judgment” more valuable than ever. United States Army intelligence was warning him that unless the still-unprepared America entered the war fast, Britain would enjoy at best a one-in-three chance to survive. As Kaiser writes, Roosevelt behind closed doors seemed less worried about “getting the United States into the war” than “about war coming to the United States before it was ready.” In Kaiser’s judgment, it was June 1941, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union, that Roosevelt “evidently decided not only that the United States had to enter the war at a relatively early date, but that it should seek the complete defeat of all its enemies.”

With his respect for the documentary evidence, the author’s literary inclination is to be self-effacing, but while reading this book you might occasionally wish to hear a little more comment from Kaiser. For instance, the author almost offhandedly quotes Roosevelt in November 1941, privately recalling his involvement years before in Harvard’s decision to reduce its share of Jewish students to 15 percent; Kaiser adds no reaction of his own. His book has the effect of refuting the charge that Roosevelt connived for the tragic destruction of American ships at Pearl Harbor in order to shove the nation into a war it would otherwise oppose, but not frontally. If this volume were your only source on the disaster of Dec. 7, 1941, you would not know how many of our fellow citizens (probably a growing number in these times when many people — agitated, in some cases, by talk radio hosts — seek to explain complicated events through malign conspiracies) insist that a warmongering Roosevelt was its eager architect. Nevertheless Kaiser has brought us a careful, nuanced, credible account of the events and complex issues surrounding America’s entry into World War II, which, however historical fashions change, is likely to wear well over the years.

Examining the same period as it looked from the other side of the Pacific, Eri Hotta’s “Japan 1941” seeks to reveal and explain the secret internal mechanics of the Tokyo regime that planned and executed the Pearl Harbor assault. Suffice it to say that Japan’s people were not lucky enough to be led by a Franklin Roosevelt. Instead the Japanese leadership was a sequestered gaggle of blinkered, hallucinatory, buck-passing incompetents, who finally pushed the vacillating Emperor Hirohito into gambling on war against the United States. Hotta, an Oxford-trained Asia specialist, does an effective job of portraying the almost Keystone Kops-style decision-making in Tokyo; the cumulative effect of her narrative is chilling as we watch it march toward global tragedy despite warning after warning.

Hirohito’s navy chief of staff tells him in July 1941 that there might be “no choice but to strike,” although he is “uncertain as to any victory.” The emperor replies, “What a reckless war that would be!” Hirohito complains to his prime minister, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, that he has been “kept in the dark” about advanced military preparations, and ineffectually recites a pacifist poem written by his grandfather: “In all four seas all are brothers and sisters. / Then why, oh why, these rough winds and waves?” Gen. Tojo Hideki, then the Japanese defense minister, is told a potential war is unwinnable, but brazenly scoffs: “This is, after all, a desktop exercise. Actual wars do not go as you fellows imagine.” Hotta acidly remarks: “Was Tojo hoping for the sudden discovery of oil fields in Japan so that his country could forget that the United States had until recently been providing more than 90 percent of its petroleum? . . . Was he anticipating a series of natural disasters to work in the empire’s favor, like the typhoons that had prevented the Moguls from invading Japan in the 13th century?” In September 1941, three months before Pearl Harbor, Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku presents his now well-known caution that “a war with so little chance of success should not be fought.” As Hotta writes, in the end “all the leaders asserted their right to decide Japan’s fate by initiating a war, while paradoxically insinuating that they had no ultimate control over the fate of the country they led.”

Hotta’s argumentation is sound and her message important, but “Japan 1941” falls short of its publisher’s assertion that it is “groundbreaking history, . . . certain to revolutionize how we think of the war in the Pacific.” The volume will no doubt move students of Japan’s machinations before Pearl Harbor to consider modest adjustments in their estimates of certain historical characters and moments. But truly groundbreaking revisionist history requires the kind of major new interpretations and archival discoveries that are scarce in this volume. Furthermore, a book so clearly ambitious to revamp our understanding of a subject so heavily written about as the run-up to the Pacific war would be more persuasive if it had more adequate documentation; this volume offers merely 14 pages of endnotes. However, with those caveats in mind, Hotta’s book remains a useful addition to the vast pre-Pearl Harbor literature. Read at this time of our own dysfunction in Washington, it also constitutes a warning of the literally earth-shattering dangers that can emerge when the political system of a powerful nation fails to work.

NO END SAVE VICTORY

How FDR Led the Nation Into War

By David Kaiser

Illustrated. 408 pp. Basic Books. $27.99.

JAPAN 1941

Countdown to Infamy

By Eri Hotta

Illustrated. 320 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.

Michael Beschloss, a contributor to The Upshot on NYTimes.com, is writing a book about presidential leadership in wartime.

A version of this review appears in print on May 18, 2014, on page BR11 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The March to War.