Churchill’s Imperial War with Japan

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Although Churchill described the Japanese attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, on 7 December 1941, as the ‘felon blow’ which led to the Japanese gaining ‘mastery of the Pacific’, America was now officially in the war.2 The wartime Anglo-American alliance, which Churchill had nurtured for so long, was, at last, formally declared and acknowledged the world over. The road to Pearl Harbor, which stretched back beyond the kurai tanima or ‘dark valley’ to the aftermath of the First World War, had been a long one.3 The momentum which the Japanese gathered as they launched themselves from the Marco Polo Bridge towards Hawaii had been underestimated by almost everyone in the higher echelons of British and American government — not just by Churchill, who acknowledged in his memoir that he could ‘not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan’.4 Like successive British governments since the termination of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1923, Churchill’s wartime national government had no realistic British policy in place for dealing with a rival imperial power in the Far East.5 In the simplest of terms, the policy was for America to attend to Japan. But how could Churchill, especially when he was at the helm, narrate this weakness in British strategy and British imperial power in his memoir without it reflecting poorly on himself or Britain?KeywordsEconomic SanctionPearl HarborBritish PolicyBritish StrategyNaval PowerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.