Centrifugal Offensive

The military historians of West Point have given the name "Centrifugal Offensive" to the opening Japanese offensive of the Pacific War, which was centered in southeast Asia but also included the Pearl Harbor strike and subsidiary operations intended to secure the flanks of the main advance. The roughly synonymous Japanese term for this offensive was "Strike South." The Japanese objective was the capture of the resource-rich Western colonial possessions in Southeast Asia (the Nampū Yōiki or "Southern Important Territories") and the establishment of an impenetrable defensive perimeter to ward off any Allied counteroffensive. Once these objectives were secured, the Japanese government intended to seek a negotiated settlement on favorable terms.

Japanese Strategy

The Japanese planned to advance simultaneously on two fronts. The first was directed primarily against Malaya, Sumatra and western Java, but also seized important points along the west coast of Borneo. The second front began at the Philippines and advanced through Makassar Strait to eastern Java. The western flank was covered by occupying Thailand while the eastern flank was protected by seizing strategic points in the eastern Netherlands East Indies, particularly in the lesser Sunda Islands and western New Guinea. The remainder of the Japanese defensive perimeter in the Pacific was extended by seizing Rabaul, the Gilbert Islands, Wake, and Guam.

Each advance proceeded by leaps, with each leap directed against a strategic point having an airfield that could be rapidly converted to Japanese use. Each leap was short enough to be easily covered by land-based aircraft. Air units would then move forward to the newly captured airfield to cover the next leap. The Japanese carefully planned the offensive on a strict timetable to keep the Allies off-balance and unable to redeploy in time to meet each new threat. This strategy was successful largely because of Japanese supremacy in the air and superiority at sea.

Most of the landings were unopposed, which was possible because the Allies did not have nearly enough troops to cover all the possible landing beaches.

Allied Defenses

The Allied defensive strategy was hampered by air and naval inferiority and by the difficulties of coordinating between four different nationalities (American, British, Dutch, and Australian.)  The ABDA command organized to coordinate the defense was plagued by conflicting national priorities and goals and never operated smoothly. The sheer weight and speed of the Japanese offensive meant that ABDA was never able to gain the initiative, and even its reactions to Japanese thrusts were sluggish. With the fall of Manila and Singapore, there was not a single port in southeast Asia where the Allies could base ships larger than heavy cruisers, and the logistical infrastructure was lacking to bring in heavy reinforcements, even had they been available. During the Pearl Harbor inquiry, Admiral Kimmel testified that

... I did not think they would attack at Pearl Harbor because I did not think it was necessary for them to do so, from my point of view. We could not have materially affected their control of the waters that they wanted to control, whether or not the battleships were sunk at Pearl Harbor. In other words, I did not believe that we could move the United States Fleet to the Western Pacific until such time as auxiliaries were available, as the material condition of the ships were improved, especially with regard to anti-aircraft, and until such time as the Pacific Fleet was materially re-enforced. I thought it would be suicide for us to attempt with an inferior fleet, to move into the western Pacific.

By contrast, the Japanese had excellent facilities in French Indochina, Palau, and Formosa in close proximity to the target area.

Outcome

The Centrifugal Offensive came to a successful conclusion with the surrender of Java on 8 March 1942. The Japanese achieved all their initial war objectives ahead of schedule and with astonishingly slight losses. Instead of the 20% to 30% naval losses anticipated in prewar planning, the Japanese had lost only 23 warships of destroyer size or smaller (for a total of 26,441 displacement tons) and 67 transports and cargo ships totalling 314,805 tons, along with a few hundred aircraft and a few thousand personnel. This astonishing success was misread by Japanese planners, who failed to recognize that the Allies would learn from hard experience and that American mobilization was certain to eliminate Japan's military superiority. Rather than consolidate their conquests and build their defense perimeter, as originally planned, the Japanese began looking for new worlds to conquer. Postwar, Hara characterized this unrealistic attitude as "Victory Disease", and there is wide consensus among historians that this attitude led to the Japanese setback at Coral Sea and the disaster at Midway.

Order of Battle

We present here the order of battle of both the Allies and Japanese on 8:00 AM on 7 December 1941, the moment of the attack on Pearl Harbor, as completely as we have been able to ascertain it. A completely reliable order of battle is impossible to assemble, since Allied records of the period reflect the confusion into which the Allies were thrown by the Japanese onslaught, while many Japanese records were destroyed at the time of the surrender. However, the deployments of warships and land formations are reasonably reliable, except in China, where Japanese dispositions are somewhat uncertain and Chinese dispositions are very uncertain. Deployments of air units are also unreliable, in part because of their inherent flexibility and mobility.

We show only those Allied units that were located in the Pacific Theater, which for our purposes is the region between 70 degrees east longitude and 110 degrees west longitude. This takes in the area from modern-day Pakistan through the Indian and Pacific Oceans to the westernmost part of the United States. The 70 degrees east longitude boundary also corresponded to the dividing line between the German and Japanese spheres of influence as negotiated by the Axis.

Japanese order of battle, 7 December 1941:

U.S. order of battle:

British order of battle:

Australian order of battle:

Canadian order of battle

Dutch order of battle

Chinese (Kuomintang) order of battle

Chinese Communist order of battle

New Zealand order of battle

References

Boyd and Yoshida (1995)

Bradley et al. (1992)

CombinedFleet.com (accessed 2007-11-24)

Goldstein and Dillon (1993)

Morton (1953)

Morison (1948, 1949)

Prados (1995)

Willmott (1982)

http://www.freeport-tech.com/WWII (accessed 2002; now defunct)

The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia (c) 2007-2008 by Kent G. Budge. Index

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