Session 4: Decision-Making in the Nationalist and Japanese Armed Forces during Wartime

This panel was intended to focus on the issue of how decisions were made on both sides during the war, specifically by what formal institutions and by what informal processes. In his paper, Professor MA Zhendu (Vice-Director of the China Second Historical Archive) dwelt principally on the substance of the principal strategic decisions made by the Nationalist government during the war. Like most of his colleagues in the Chinese delegation, Professor Ma saw these decisions as overwhelmingly shaped by Chiang Kai-shek. Ma asserted that, in his view, the Nationalist strategy against Japan was based on four elements: 1) protracted war and the need to lure Japan southward into China; 2) trading space for time and transforming an accumulation of small victories into major victories; 3) after the outbreak of the Pacific War, taking a generally passive attitude while waiting for the United States to bring its full strength against Japan; and 4) relying on the unity of all Chinese elements, even those not directly controlled by the Nationalists. This last point raised some scepticism on the part of some western participants, particularly since it seemed to evoke the Chinese insistence, raised in other sessions, that specific Chinese military victories were of critical importance in the defeat of Japan . Other Western participants expressed the wish that the paper had spent somewhat less time on what major decisions were made by the Nationalists and more on how they were made.

The brief remarks by Professor HATANO Sumio (Dean, Graduate School of Political Economy, Tsukuba University) on the nature of Japanese decision-making during the war provoked a lively discussion of the Japanese command and control structure and an intense debate over the extent to which Tokyo controlled the war in China. Hatano described a situation in which, because of the radicalization of politics, institutional problems in the military, and a range of other systemic problems, Tokyo increasingly lost control of China operations to the commanders in the field. Yet recent scholarship has argued that the Emperor was actively interested in military affairs, though, admittedly, more in the Pacific than in China . Many of the Chinese scholars present found it difficult to reconcile traditional Japanese principles of loyalty and obedience with the notion that Japanese field officers in China were acting on their own initiative. Further, they pointed to the prominence of imperial princes on Japanese field army staffs and of the Japanese army's extensive use of the phrase "in the name of the Emperor" in its directives. Professors Cook and Peattie attempted to explain some of these contradictions in terms of the institutional pathologies of the Japanese military. While satisfactory resolution of these debates over Japanese accountability and provocation will continue to be difficult, the airing of these arguments in a rigorous and scholarly fashion was obviously an important step forward in these discussions.