The previous post ended by comparing the current and flows of the events of 1941 as an “external and internal dynamics [that make] the path to diplomatic resolution akin to walking a moonless night in the wilderness with but only a lighted candle to show the way. There is light but its glow only reveals so much of the dark night. And as we will see in the next post, there are lots of things that “go bump in the night.” In the final months before Pearl Harbor we find one of those “bumps.” 

In 1941 U.S.–Japanese diplomacy operated on two parallel planes. One was the formal, authorized negotiation between Japan’s Foreign Ministry and the U.S. State Department. The other was a private, unauthorized, and deeply fragile backchannel, involving two Maryknoll priests who sought out of moral urgency, without any official mandate, to open a path toward dialogue and de-escalation. The existence of this unofficial channel illuminates not only the desperation of late 1941, but also the fragmentation of authority, trust, and purpose within both governments. Examining the ebb and flow of this effort alongside the official negotiations reveals how diplomacy failed not for lack of contact, but because no shared political or moral common ground would be found. It either simply did not exist or was completely obfuscated by the many voices and channels working at cross purposes.

One way to describe the official diplomatic track is a system of increasing formalism and decreasing flexibility and imagination. By early 1941, official U.S.–Japanese diplomacy was already strained by mutual suspicion.  Negotiations between Ambassador Kichisaburō Nomura (Ambassador to the U.S. and an acquaintance of President Roosevelt) and Secretary of State Cordell Hull were formal, cautious, and increasingly rigid. Nomura was not a diplomat; he was a retired admiral who had served as naval attache in Washington when Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the 1920s. Hull was a career diplomat and a graduate of Yale and Havard Law who was connected in U.S. and international circles. While Japanese ambassadors came and went, Hull remained and consistently insisted on a principles-based approach—non-aggression, respect for sovereignty, and equality of trade—while Japanese negotiators often changed, were given differing instructions but often sought pragmatic accommodations that would preserve their position in China and Southeast Asia while asking immediate actions from the U.S. with delayed or vague actions on their part. Nomura arrives in Washington at the start of 1941 with no instructions at all.

As Japan moved into southern French Indochina in July 1941, the atmosphere hardened decisively. The U.S. freezing of Japanese assets and effective oil embargo transformed negotiations into a race against time, particularly for Tokyo. Within the U.S. government, confidence grew that Japan was negotiating in bad faith, using diplomacy to buy time for military preparations. Within Japan, civilian leaders feared economic collapse, while the military saw compromise as tantamount to surrender. This context is essential. By autumn 1941, official diplomacy would become procedural rather than exploratory. Notes were exchanged, positions clarified but over time imagination, trust, and risk-taking disappeared.

Maryknoll and John Doe

Against this bleak backdrop, two Maryknoll priests, Bishop James Walsh and Father James Drought became involved in a private initiative to foster dialogue. Maryknoll, as an American Catholic missionary order with deep experience in East Asia, occupied a unique moral and cultural position. Its members were neither diplomats nor intelligence officers, yet they were trusted by some Japanese interlocutors and respected within certain American circles, especially Irish Catholic Americans. The priests’ motivation was fundamentally pastoral and moral. They had already seen the devastation of combat in the Sino-Japanese war since 1937 in terms of 7 million Chinese deaths, devastation of major cities, and millions of millions of Chinese as refugees within their own country. They feared an expansion of the war if the U.S. were drawn into the war. They believed they could still find accommodation. Their effort was unauthorized, informal, and explicitly separate from official diplomatic channels, yet it unfolded in parallel with them, sometimes intersecting with individuals close to power.

As the Maryknoll effort developed in mid-winter and into the summer of 1941, it drew in a widening circle of intermediaries: Japanese civilians and former diplomats sympathetic to peace, American Catholic figures and lay intermediaries, and individuals connected indirectly to political leaders, including those who later were aware of Konoe’s last attempts to avoid war. All of these people shared a belief, already fading within governments, that personal trust and moral appeal might succeed where formal diplomacy had failed. 

The Maryknoll contingent first proposed an outline of proposals to leaders in the Japanese government via Todao Ikawa, a senior banker and financier, thought to have a friendship with Prime Minister Konoe. In addition, the proposal was presented to Col. Hideo Iwakura, Chief of Military Affairs in the Ministry of the Army (War) said to be an important leader of the young officers and confidant of Army Minister Tojo. When the Maryknoll contingent left Japan in January 1941 they brought a concept of a Konoe-FDR summit, a clear message of Japan’s regional “Monroe Doctrine” aspirations, and a plan…that was not the same as they had presented in Japan (for reasons why, not clear). 

Arriving in Washington DC, they bypassed the State Department and were able to secure a private meeting with FDR that lasted several hours. They assured the President that they had access to the moderates, the young conservative Army officers, and the Prime Minister. Soon after FDR pulled Ambassador Nomura into the conversation – but not Hull and the State Department.

Nomura found his naval attache, Capt. Yokoyoma, shared his perspective that a way to peace was necessary as Japan would ultimately lose in a war with the U.S.  Nomura, Yokoyoma and two other staffers in the Washington DC embassy (unnamed and called “John Doe”) were then drawn into this parallel diplomacy effort.

The Maryknoll father’s Tokyo connections were in fact not that well connected, and did not represent either the moderates or the conservatives. But by March 1941, FDR had drawn Hull into the dialog. Long story short, in the end the stream of off-the-books diplomacy went nowhere. However it had three deleterious effects. 

Nomura and Hull negotiated secretly. When the modified-Maryknoll proposal was presented to Tokyo and the Foreign Ministry, Nomura presented it as an American proposal without revealing the Maryknoll connection, sending inconsistent signals to Tokyo leading them to assume America’s resolve was weakening and that more concessions could be extracted. 

In the end, Hull slowly morphed the draft to be the same as his four fundamental principles which asked for a permanent solution tied to concepts and lacking specificity. But it was understood that the U.S. wanted Japan to immediately withdraw from China – which was a not-starter for China.

It absorbed Secretary Hull’s time and energy from March to June when he realized this path was leading nowhere. In June he started an extended vacation and time away from Washington DC. Thus, he was not present in DC when Japan moved into Southern French Indochina (South Vietnam), the financial freeze was set, Dean Acheson slow-rolled the license approval in the FFCC, and the “oil embargo” began.

As we move into the summer of 1941 there are many dialogues and many distractions.

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives. | Original timeline by G. Corrigan

Between 1939 and 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt confronted a central strategic dilemma: how to oppose Nazi Germany and keep Britain in the war while U.S. public opinion overwhelmingly opposed entering another European conflict. Roosevelt’s response was a policy of incremental engagement on economic, military, and political level, all designed to shift the balance of power without formally declaring war. This strategy succeeded in sustaining Britain and positioning the United States as the decisive future belligerent in Europe, but it also produced ambiguity and mixed signals both within his own administration and abroad, particularly affecting Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Japanese perceptions of U.S. priorities.

The Core Concerns

Roosevelt’s overriding concern after 1939 was that a German-dominated Europe would fundamentally threaten long-term American security. He believed that Britain’s survival was essential to prevent Nazi hegemony over the Atlantic world for reasons of democracy and international trade as well. He was convinced that a German victory would eventually force the United States into a far more dangerous war under worse conditions or would leave the U.S. isolated with fascist nations on the other side of two oceans. 

Importantly, the U.S. needed time to build industrial and military capacity both of which were the nation’s most valuable strategic asset. In 1936 the Washington Naval Treaty, which had sharply limited the future growth of the U.S. Navy in the name of arms control, expired. Roosevelt let it lapse. He then ordered the Navy to launch its first major shipbuilding program in more than twelve years (one of the ships to come. In 1938 the Army Air Corps got the biggest authorization for buying planes in its history. From the fourth-biggest military force in the world in 1918, the United States Army shrank to number eighteen, just ahead of tiny Holland. By 1939 the Army Air Corps consisted of some seventeen hundred planes, all fighters and trainers, and fewer than 20,000 officers and enlisted men. Arthur Herman’s Freedom’s Forge  is a fascinating account of the plan FDR put in place so by December 1941, the industrial capacity of the U.S. was well underway to achieving a war footing from an industrial base.

At the same time, Roosevelt faced a public with deep and recent memories of the costs of World War I resulting in a wide-spread suspicion of foreign entanglements. As a result there was a strong isolationist sentiment in Congress and among the public. This led Congress to pass the 1935 Neutrality Acts which stated the U.S. could trade with belligerents in foreign wars.

Escalation short of war

From 1939 to 1941, Roosevelt pursued a steady escalation of U.S. involvement short of becoming involved in the European war. Key elements of that escalation included:

• Cash-and-carry (1939) allowed Britain and France to purchase arms.
• Destroyers-for-bases (1940) provided Britain with vital naval assets.
• Lend-Lease (1941) transformed the U.S. into the “arsenal of democracy.”
• Naval patrols and Atlantic convoy escorts increasingly blurred the line between neutrality and belligerency.
• The Atlantic Charter (August 1941) publicly aligned U.S. war aims with Britain.

Roosevelt understood that these actions made eventual conflict with Germany likely, but he judged that preserving Britain and buying time outweighed the risks. Importantly, he often moved faster than public opinion but slower than his own private convictions, using executive authority and rhetorical framing to narrow the gap.

Strategic Ambiguity

Roosevelt’s diplomacy depended on strategic ambiguity. He avoided explicit war commitments while steadily expanding U.S. involvement. This ambiguity was essential domestically but costly diplomatically. Publicly, Roosevelt repeatedly promised not to send American troops into foreign wars but framed the actions he took, often by executive authority, as defensive or humanitarian. At the same time, privately, he anticipated war with Germany as increasingly likely and prepared the military and economy accordingly. This dual-track approach was politically effective but institutionally destabilizing, especially for the State Department.

Secretary of State Cordell Hull favored clear, principle-based diplomacy rooted in international law, multilateralism, and formal commitments. He believed that clarity strengthened deterrence and credibility. Roosevelt, by contrast, preferred personal diplomacy, trial balloons, and backchannels. FDR accepted ambiguity as a tool. In discussion with Hull and others he sometimes explored hypothetical compromises without formal follow-through. This created confusion about presidential priorities and led to some elements taking a “wait and see” approach while others believed they had just been given the “go ahead.”

Hull worried that Roosevelt’s improvisational style undercut the coherence of U.S. foreign policy, sent mixed signals to adversaries, and encouraged tactical maneuvering rather than genuine compliance. Nowhere was this tension more visible than in Japan policy, where Roosevelt’s willingness to entertain personal diplomacy (such as a potential Konoe summit) clashed with Hull’s insistence on firm principles. While Hull was razor focused on Japan and the Far East, Roosevelt’s primary strategic focus remained Europe, even as tensions with Japan escalated. He viewed Japan largely through the prism of the wider global struggle. FDR was concerned that a Japan aligned with Germany threatened the Atlantic strategy. Above all, he wanted to avoid a two-ocean war and yet he was not willing to abandon Britain or China in the Asia-Pacific theatre. The President believed that diplomatic pressure on Japan had little success given their internal factions and fractures. He believed economic pressure on Japan could deter further expansion without immediate war. However, Roosevelt’s strategic ambiguities sent mixed signals to Japan.

From Japan’s point of view the U.S. Navy remained concentrated in the Pacific and was meant to be a deterrent to Japan. Yet Roosevelt’s rhetoric and actions increasingly emphasized Germany as the principal enemy. Japan concluded that U.S. restraint in Europe (no declaration of war) and inferred American caution or division. In addition, it was noted that Roosevelt was impatient with prolonged negotiations which suggested to some in Tokyo that the U.S. sought delay rather than confrontation. Some historians believe Japan mimicked that style; others held it suited their own style of delay and ambiguity. In any case, Japan’s response strengthened Hull’s already held belief that Japan was exploiting negotiations to buy time, much as Germany had exploited diplomacy in the 1930s. Roosevelt’s continued openness to dialogue even as U.S. policy hardened deepened Hull’s fear that ambiguity was now enabling aggression rather than restraining it.

1941- Crises Converge

By mid-1941, Roosevelt’s balancing act became increasingly unstable as Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Japan moved into southern French Indochina., the U.S. froze Japanese assets and imposed an oil embargo, and Atlantic naval incidents with Germany intensified. Roosevelt now faced two converging paths to war, but still lacked public authorization for either. The result was a tragic irony: a strategy designed to prevent premature war may have contributed to miscalculation, especially in Tokyo, even as it prepared the United States to fight and ultimately win the war Roosevelt believed was unavoidable.  

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives.

In the flow of this series we have worked our way into 1941 as we covered several key events/periods on the way. There is a lot going on – probably best to “drop a pin” to locate us in this flow of history.

• The period of the “moral embargo” (1938 to July 1940) in which U.S. companies were asked to voluntarily limit exports and sales to Japan because of their aggressive behavior in China. 
• The Export Control Act of July 1940 which stopped the sale of high grade aviation fuel (but not all aviation fuel), scrap iron, raw steel, and other materials. The argument was that these were needed for U.S. stocks – and they were – but it was also intended to stop the sale of these items to Japan. It did not stop bulk oil sales.
• In September of 1940 Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, aligning itself with the fascist nations of Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy.  In June 1941, Germany invaded Russia.
• In April 1941, Japan and the Soviet Union signed a neutrality pact. For the Soviets, free of worry about Japanese invasion in Mongolia or Siberia (as in the 1939 Nomohan Incident) they could move troops and equipment to their western front against Germany. For Japan, it removed concerns over their northern and northwestern flanks, freeing the movement south to resource and oil rich areas to the south.
• In the summer of 1941 the Japanese moved into Southern Indochina. The U.S. response was the Financial Freeze implemented in August 1941. Between the freeze and “slow roll” to approve exports, the net effect was a total oil embargo.

Another recent post discussed the unintended consequences of the financial freeze action, not only in Japan’s response, but in the less-than-unified action/reaction with the U.S. Departments of State and Treasury as there were too many “cooks in the kitchen”  – Hull, Morgenthau, Hornbeck, Acheson, Grew and the list goes on. We also introduced a lot more background information on Japan’s Prince Konoe who served as Prime Minister for a long swath of time from late 1937 until late 1941. The background is necessary to understand how he will be perceived when the concept of a  one-on-one summit with President Roosevelt is floated.

It’s a lot of information to keep straight and if you find it vague, disordered and confusing, so did the real time participants and 1940 and 1941. Presumptions, assumptions, misunderstandings, and more simply left the two nations at cross purposes. 

There is a basic concept in communications: instantiation. “Instantiated” and “uninstantiated” communication refers to the difference between a specific, active, and concrete interaction (instantiated) and an abstract, potential, or theoretical idea (uninstantiated). Instead of talking about “a car” in general (abstract), you are talking about “my red Honda Civic” (instantiated) comparable to talking about the general idea of “bravery” without pointing to a specific, real-world example. Which is all just a fancy way of describing U.S. and Japanese diplomatic communications and negotiations. A simple way to describe it is to borrow the iconic words of the Prison Captain speaking to Luke (Paul Newman) in Cool Hand Luke: “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”  The U.S. would offer general fundamental concepts (Hull’s Four Points) without detailing specific required actions. But then in another round, the actions were very concrete (“withdraw from China”) and did not take into considerations either military ability, public reaction in Japan, and the political liability to a Japanese figure who might support the idea – even as the start of negotiations. The U.S. was well aware of the very recent history of assassinations and even the ill-fated 1936 coup attempt by a radical element of the military.

On the other hand, Japan would ignore the four principles and then offer a response but it was uninstantiated in that the response was always open ended, contingent on some future state of things, e.g., the French Indochina government asks us to leave after they have had free and fair elections (… as we continue to occupy their nation). The U.S. reaction was mostly, “they’re stalling and not to be trusted.”  The Japanese reaction was leaving things open ended in order to explore what new concessions would be wrangled. An example was:

• U.S. – respect recognized national boundaries and do not interfere in the internal dynamics of another nation. If that sounds like the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 (for all you history buffs) you’d be correct. It was Hull’s basic approach. From those fundamental principles, Japan “had” to understand that meant withdrawing from China and not interfering.
• The Japanese response: we will withdraw from China two years after they settle their own internal struggles between the Nationalists and Communist Chinese factions and if the new government asks us to leave… and since we have agreed to your terms, please send oil now…. and by the way, Manchuria is not part of China. It is the nation of Manchukuo (that no foreign government recognized) and a friend to Japan.

That wasn’t exactly the diplomatic conversation, but it was exactly the dynamic between the principal diplomats. The backroom chatter from within the various U.S. and Japanese factions, ministries and departments only added to the cacophony of misunderstanding.

The purpose of this post was to “drop a pin” so that we could locate ourselves in the series. We are moving from 1940 into 1941. The above style of diplomatic exchange is becoming de facto. Factions within each government are hardening their positions.  And cast over all of this are the presumptions, assumptions, misunderstandings that left the two nations at cross purposes only exacerbating the communications. 

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives.

In previous posts, we have tried to trace the Japanese strategic commitment to the southern strategy focused on the resource rich Southeast Asia mainland and Pacific Islands. The movements into Indochina brought about increasingly more stringent export controls and licensing for Japanese concerns, ratcheted up and hardened positions inside and outside government – especially within Japan where when the “military coughed, the Japanese cabinet developed pneumonia and collapsed.” With each cycle, the military was increasingly dominant in Japanese policy and strategy. There was a lot going on…

The “roadmap” above is nowhere as complex as the underlying reality and labyrinth pathways. Over the next several posts, the conversation will advance along threads that move from January 1941 until Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Those posts are meant to be part of the buildup of background to understand organizations, factions within organizations, government departments, key persons and personalities, and more – all to set the context as we move ahead.

Back in one of the first posts, I asserted that the August 1941 “oil” (full) embargo did not start the war. The war in the Asia-Pacific region was already underway. One only needed to ask the Chinese, Vietnamese and Mongolians, as well as the Koreans. The full embargo of late July 1941 was a calculated political action by the U.S. in reaction to the Japanese occupation/invasion of French Indochina. It was a political action whose hope was to deter Japan from further expansion even further south to Hong Kong, Malay, Java, Borneo and the rest of the Dutch East Indies. Consider the map below (Sep 1939) and then add Indochina (Vietnam) and one can see Japan’s dagger is clearly aiming south.

To focus on only the oil embargo because Japan’s “economy” needed it, one has to remember it was a wartime economy that had already led to the deaths of 7 million Chinese by July 1941. Even if one chooses to only focus exclusively on the full embargo, one can ask: 

• Was the embargo the decisive reason why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor or just more proximate than a collection of other reasons that was denying Japan unfettered access to war resources? 
• The U.S. understood the goals for Japan southwest incursion, but did the U.S. truly understand the underlying motivations? I would suggest the U.S. perfectly understood Japan’s motivations and disagreed on moral and political grounds. Japan was fascism in the Asia-Pacific region – aligned to the fascist nations of Europe via the Tripartite Act.
• Did the U.S. have a clear understanding of the internal Japanese dynamic that increasingly marginalized any peace/negotiation faction as the military grew in stature and power? This was the shift that was transforming a potential Asia-Pacific trading partner into a deadly rival fixated on status, honor, and establishing its equivalent of the Asia-Pacific Monroe Doctrine.
• Was the embargo a virtual declaration of war hoping to draw Japan to military action so that the U.S. could enter the war in Europe? If so, then why was the U.S. so unprepared to fight any war, much less a two-ocean war?
• Clearly the December 1941 and early 1942 “blitzkrieg” across Southeast Asia, the Southwest Pacific, and Central Pacific regions accomplished the mission of (a) capturing the resource rich nations and (b) setting a “line of defense” west of Hawaii. Was the attack on Pearl Harbor necessary for the plan to access the resource rich lands to the southwest of Japan? Couldn’t they just have moved south and left a “blocking force” against the Philippines and prevented U.S. resupply?
• How did Japan so misjudge the U.S. public’s reaction to Pearl Harbor? Thanks to the movie “Tora!, Tora!, Tora!” we have Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, iconically uttering, “We have awoken the sleeping giant.” He never said that, but he should have because he clearly understood Japan could not win a protracted war.

Most, if not all, of the questions are not simply military moves and political reactions – but they form the milieu in which diplomatic dialogue swims. The external and internal dynamics make the path to diplomatic resolution akin to walking a moonless night in the wilderness with but only a lighted candle to show the way. There is light but its glow only reveals so much of the dark night. And as we will see in a later post, there are lots of things that “go bump in the night.”

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archive. | Mapworks | Original timeline by G. Corrigan