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Bankrupting the Enemy: The U.S. Financial Siege of Japan Before Pearl Harbor Hardcover – September 10, 2007

4.3 out of 5 stars 34

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Award-winning author Edward S. Miller contends in this new work that the United States forced Japan into international bankruptcy to deter its aggression. While researching newly declassified records of the Treasury and Federal Reserve, Miller, a retired chief financial executive of a Fortune 500 resources corporation, uncovered just how much money mattered. Washington experts confidently predicted that the war in China would bankrupt Japan, not knowing that the Japanese government had a huge cache of dollars fraudulently hidden in New York. Once discovered, Japan scrambled to extract the money. But, Miller explains, in July 1941 President Roosevelt invoked a long-forgotten clause of the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 to freeze Japan s dollars and forbade it to sell its hoard of gold to the U.S. Treasury, the only open gold market after 1939. Roosevelt s temporary gambit to bring Japan to its senses, not its knees, was thwarted, however, by opportunistic bureaucrats. Dean Acheson, his handpicked administrator, slyly maneuvered to deny Japan the dollars needed to buy oil and other resources for war and for economic survival. Miller's lucid writing and thorough understanding of the complexities of international finance enable readers unfamiliar with financial concepts and terminology to grasp his explanation of the impact of U.S. economic policies on Japan. His review of thirty-seven studies of Japan's resource deficiencies begs the question of why no U.S. agency calculated the impact of the freeze on Japan's overall economy. His analysis of a massive OSS-State Department study of prewar Japan clearly demonstrates that the deprivations facing the Japanese people were the country to remain in financial limbo buttressed its choice of war at Pearl Harbor. Such a well-documented study is certain to be recognized for its significant contributions to the historiography of the origins of the Pacific War.

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About the Author

Edward S. Miller, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate in economics at Syracuse University and the Harvard Advanced Management Program, served as chief financial officer of a major international mining corporation and the U.S. Synthetic Fuels Corporation.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Naval Institute Press; First Edition (September 10, 2007)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1591145201
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1591145202
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.3 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1.25 x 9.25 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 out of 5 stars 34

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4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
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Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2009
Ed Miller is a retired top financial and foreign trade executive turned historian. It would be hard to imagine a better background for an exploration of U.S. economic steps against Japan in the years before Pearl Harbor (and 1941 especially), and it would be equally hard to imagine anyone doing a better job. He has cast a very clear and bright spotlight beam on an important part of the story of the process by which the Pacific War came to be initiated in 1941, a part never nearly so adequately illuminated before this.

The story is complex and technical, and Miller does a masterful job of following multiple interwoven strands and clarifying their relationships, while explaining the technicalities in accessible terms. He explains the rather scattered and uncoordinated process by which the Roosevelt Administration came to impose a pervasive financial freeze and a total embargo of oil shipments within days of one another in July 1941. He shows how and why it was the freeze that was in fact the more fatal blow -- a fact appreciated at the time by the Japanese themselves. The freeze meant that in practice the Japanese were shut out not only from oil purchases but from virtually all purchases of any kind, not only in America but throughout the world. And he explains clearly how the mechanisms of the freeze and the various stages of embargoes worked, making it clear why some of the earlier stages were in fact largely ineffective or symbolic.

Miller explores in detail -- for the first time anywhere, to my knowledge -- the extent of American knowledge and ignorance regarding Japan's actual financial and physical resources. The United States had very little in the way of formal intelligence gathering and analysis on the eve of Pearl Harbor -- certainly nothing resembling the CIA. Nevertheless, in certain respects U.S. officials did not do so badly in their estimates, allowing for active Japanese efforts to deceive and mislead them. Yet he also shows that there was no real effort to assess the impacts of embargoes or a freeze on the life of Japan. It would have been a big undertaking in those distant, pre-computer days, and the government of that era simply did not have the resources to conduct such analyses. In addition, of course, much more attention was focused on Germany, a greater threat than Japan.

If Miller's spotlight beam is exceptionally clear and bright it also quite narrow. It could scarcely be otherwise -- the book would be impossibly long and complex if it covered all aspects of the story in comparable depth. But the reader must bear its limitations in mind, especially as Miller does little to point them out.

First, although Miller concentrates almost exclusively on the Washington story, he does not really cover all of it. He probes the workings of the Executive Branch and its internal politics in what I feel confident will prove to be definitive detail, but largely neglects the outside influences that bore on it. Polls of the period -- which he does not mention -- clearly show a public growing more and more hostile to Japan and its aggressions in Asia, and restive about their government's response. Prominent and influential newspapers and commentators, also largely ignored, stridently urged action and berated the administration for its perceived failings. On Capitol Hill, powerful figures increasingly threatened to act if the administration failed to. The book would have benefited from a much more thorough analysis of these forces and their effects, or at very minimum, more acknowledgement of their presence.

Nor does Miller speak more than very passingly of the considerations of geo-strategy and military operations, nor of the issues of allied relationships and solidarity. Yet the record is clear that President Roosevelt and his chief advisors focused far more on these than on those of economics and trade -- and that the Japanese leaders did too.

Miller's bibliography cites the volume on "The Final Confrontation," (ISBN 0231080247) from the massive series of translations from and informed commentaries on the Japanese series on "Japan's Road to the Pacific War" (Taiheiyo senso e no michi) edited by James William Morley. But it is not clear what use he made of it, or a few other works he cites relating to the Japanese end of the game, for the picture he gives of Tokyo and its workings is not only narrow but one-dimensional. There were at least as many plots and counter-plots in Tokyo as in Washington, and no equivalent of a Franklin Roosevelt to even partly referee them.

In particular, there is no real analysis of the role that the embargoes and freeze played in Japanese decisions. Right from the beginning, Japanese conservative historians have consistently sought to make the United States the driver of events in 1941, with Japan following the rule that, "He must needs go that the devil drives." A certain segment of American historians advance similar views, and Miller in effect joins them. There is no question that some influential Japanese cited the trade cutoffs of the end of July as part of their rationale for war. Yet as the Morely volume makes clear, there were powerful voices urging war with the United States before the freeze and oil embargo, and some who indeed made it clear that they were actually courting such moves in order to solidify their case for war.

It is certainly possible that the United States could have appeased Japan as late as September or perhaps even October in 1941, and the price of appeasement would have included allowing free trade, as Miller says. But the price would most surely have included a very great deal more, and he says nothing of that. In any event, to imagine that Roosevelt's failure to do his utmost to appease Japan at whatever price makes him guilty of causing the war is surely unbalanced. Miller does not say this, and I doubt very much that he intends it, but it is the impression that his book is very liable to leave, if read in isolation.

This is not the first book one should read in seeking to understand the causes of the Pacific War and the process by which it came about, and certainly not the only one. But it most certainly is one that should be read. Ed Miller has done a great service in writing it.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 25, 2018
Edward Miller, the author of the highly-acclaimed War Plan Orange, which detailed the U.S. planning for war with Japan prior to Pearl Harbor, returns to the historical field with his examination of the economic warfare -- in particular, the freezing of financial assets in July of 1941 -- conducted by the United States against Japan prior to the surprise attack on the fleet in Hawaii.

The best part of the book is the attention given to the details of the actions of the U.S. government (setting aside the author's invidious judgements of personal motives): a clear pattern emerges of lower-level bureaucrats ratcheting up the administrative measures, from actions intended to conserve U.S. options in case of war, to securing resources, to depriving Japan of war materials, to out-and-out economic warfare engaged against a national enemy, despite the lack of any state of war. All of these escalations are depicted in an extensive, lucid narrative. Miller states his conclusions at the very beginning and displays more than sufficient evidence of implementation of hostile action at the same time as the announcement of nuanced, flexible, and reluctant measures by principal actors of the Executive, such as the Secretary of State or the President.

In contrast to War Plan Orange, however, Miller's account of the economic war launched by the U.S. has specific set of bad guys whom Miller dislikes. The future Secretary of State Dean Acheson, among others, is an "opportunist" who is a "lawyer" -- as opposed to an administrator or a diplomat -- employing emergency administrative measures against Japan. Granted the validity of Miller's detailed depiction of U.S. deliberations and actions, the refusal of Japan to accept the limitations of their limited national resources in confronting the opposition of the more powerful United States to their project of an extensive empire in East Asia is, quite notably, missing from Miller's consideration. Only in a single paragraph in the Epilogue does the question arise, despite Miller's promise to examine Japanese sources for the epochal confrontation.
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