The menace of Japan

Foreword

Many historical facts are common property but owe their preservation and value to writers who never received their reward. In living sixteen years with events and dates underlying this book, I have lost the respective identities of some of their recorders. But I am glad that I remember them in their anonymous being, with gratitude.

Many things contained herein, so far as I know, have had no other chronicler than I. They cannot be publicly ascribed to their sources, many of which are official and confidential : they touch too closely living issues animating and breeding war. Many are simply extracts from my own journals and private records. All are confidently submitted to the public in the day's work in connection with America in the Pacific — " the greatest problem in the world."

In saying farewell to the following pages ere they are beyond recall in the printed book, I take pleasure in thanking American editors and in particular those of Century, Scribner's, Outlook, the New York Times, and the Forum, for the intense interest they have taken vi FOREWORD

in the phases of the theme, as I have seen it, that "will be finally determined by war", and their courteous permission to reproduce certain passages herein.

FREDERICK McCORMICK.

Santa Monica,

December 1, 1916.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Foreword v

I "Predatory Packs" 1

CHAPTER I "Predatory Packs"

Sufficient time has elapsed since Japan's plans for leadership in East Asia and the Pacific were uncovered, and enough water has run under the bridge, to allow of a glance at the back of the stage, a look at the levers and cogs, the cranks, pulleys, rods, and wires of the mechanism called the problem of the Pacific.

That problem for America is rising from old battlegrounds, and is covered with the debris of our vivid and bitterly remembered first conflict with Japan — that following Japan's reckoning with Russia.

Our attempt to set up our rights of the Open Door, 1908-1910, was of greater consequence in the Pacific than Japan's war upon Germany which succeeded it there in 1914. In duration its struggle was longer than was Russia's pass at arms which preceded it; and though confined to diplomacy its revelations and consequences make it the most important event to us since we hung the ermine curtain of the Portsmouth Treaty across the battlefields of two empires and the China Sea. For out of that first conflict emerged the trunk and limbs of a second, which in less than three years paralyzed the political and diplomatic service of the United States in East Asia and showed in its lineaments a resemblance which can be likened only to that of Mars.

Owing to the collapse of our Government and political institutions in Pacific affairs, the diplomatic post at Tokio which McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, and many others found to be the most important to us in the world, has been vacant, so far as diplomacy and constructive relations are concerned, since 1906. The post at Peking, since it was filled by Rockhill, has been one of fruitless humiliation and trial to successors under the insults applied to us there by nations who discount our national policies and resent our diplomatic practices, while Congress, sensibly breaking down under the Philippines question, in 1915 reached a state of collapse, showing we had practically thrown up the sponge throughout the Pacific.

The diplomatic missions to Japan and China therefore became a menace as they were a weakness in our Pacific front. The situation of the United States in foreign affairs was shameful. The Government, in the Pacific, flung away its merchant marine which begged among rivals for a buyer, finding a billet at last only in the Atlantic by chance through the providential ( ! ) existence of a war trade. The wrenching and deadening power of that blow, delivered through a single shipping bill, — the LaFollette-Furuseth Seaman's Act, — may be understood from this fact : that the Pacific Mail Steamship Company which was our only America-to-Asia line, first tried to save its worldwide organization and trade by transfer to Vancouver, — a plan abandoned by the owners through fear that the Government would persecute them afterward for seeking protection from a foreign flag, — and then in Wall Street hawked its fleet of Pacific liners, which in one month in the munitions trade paid for their purchase, first for six and one half millions, then six, then five and one half, then five and one quarter — "and sold."

The Pacific was not only at a blow cleared of merchant marine transports and of shipping communications with our Pacific outposts and the Asiatic seaboard, but the war drained it of war vessels, the Panama Canal filled up at Culebra, and we had only a mosquito squadron in the Pacific as a military side show of the San Diego Exposition. At the instant we had to pay four times the normal freight rates to get our latest coast defense guns to Honolulu, and had no bottoms for munitions beyond Honolulu to supplement the navy and succor the outlying possessions of Guam and the Philippines.

The administration at Washington was then struck by the European war-storm as with its hurricane legislation it had come down upon our merchant marine. And it is conjuring up but a tame simile to say that the American ship of state trembled and reeled under its working.

The Government which was to deal with the greatest foreign questions and ulterior dangers in history, or perhaps since the ravages of the Mongols, was found out to be one of the most provincial we ever had : cut to fit its narrow congressional habit of domestic politics, whose parish tailors had taken no account of necessary international movement and diplomatic expansion, to say nothing of the heroic action of government, indispensable to honor and national safety which it never was able to essay. Although the outrages to American rights in this crisis were admittedly unparalleled in all the relations of friendly or hostile nations, the Government, like the nation, limped on with its domestic squabbles while being periodically stunned from the direction of our left flank on the alien Pacific, by the mysterious chaos of guerilla revolution in Mexico, and seemingly dazed by a hundred incomprehensible events hostile to our rights and interests in the Pacific area.

The very first act of the Government in its new policy, as I will show, was to erase the Pacific from its administrative map. Its attitude toward the world without, which like a volcano or a tidal wave was ready to envelop all nations with sulphur and suffocation, and its concept of national interests beyond the three-mile limit, was disclosed. The plans of the party leaders of the administration in charge of the government, for a four years' program exclusively of home issues and home politics, on which to stand or fall at the next election, could not be concealed. On the contrary it was shortly confirmed by the conduct of the affairs of the Atlantic which were of too dangerous a nature to be cleared from the council table, or erased from the administration blackboard by figures of rhetoric such as I have quoted, and which it was found the administration had made no provisions to handle. As the sinister cloud of world complications, unprepared for, uncomprehended, and unimagined, rolled in upon the Capital, the Cabinet began to dissolve. It had not contemplated the world. It had not thought of sanguinary things. The Secretaryship of State — the office of offices — was abandoned. John Bassett Moore, best known in the world of our authorities on international relations, resigned. William J. Bryan resigned. After eighteen months, Hell had flamed out in the Atlantic, long to dazzle the volunteer political firemen of the cabinet-room in the AVI lite House, and in the committee-rooms on Capitol Hill, to the complete screening away and exclusion of the Pacific.

It requires no imagination to see with what terror such a government, under these circumstances, was struck at the spectacle of Japan, better armed, again abroad on the Pacific warpath. Speaking through the State Department it demanded :

"What would you have us do? Do you want us humiliated by what will happen to us if we protest in China and the Pacific?"

Our failure in foreign affairs was complete. Everybody seemed to be for himself. Sauve qui pent defined our diplomatic situation : the administration for itself ; trade, ships, and even national defense, for themselves. One of our ablest admirals, Fiske, resigned and then the strongest member of the Cabinet, Garrison, the Secretary of War, resigned. The American sponge seemed to hit the ceiling of the world's international habitation when one chamber of Congress passed a bill for abandoning the Philippines. The debacle seemed ready to complete itself when, fortunately, the approach of the presidential campaign, combined with the lurid lessons of the World War as exemplified by Germany in the Atlantic, and by Japan in East Asia and the Pacific, seemed to restore, to the nation a degree of sanity that had been absent since 1910.

The prevailing administration was disillusioned, but cowed by the effect of the European War upon the Atlantic and Pacific alike, by Japan's rearrangement of East Asia to broader foundations for her Pacific policy, and by the shift which she was making. The Pacific, dreaded and tabooed in Washington, reached the status of the next great world issue. Events there that had moved farther since the Portsmouth Treaty than for twenty centuries before, made China one of the great issues of the World War. She was slated, along with the United States, as one of the two greatest storehouses of natural resources and treasuries of wealth, to pay the war debts of Europe.

When the pressure for armament and defense came, the questions of the Pacific, unobserved, had gathered like the wolves of the Russian steppes and were licking the heels of truce in the Atlantic. They were waiting upon the shores of the whole Pacific for their sponsors, the Asiatic and European nations of the World War, to follow them, and help them to their quarry.

Now came the presidential campaign. It was a confirmation of the lurking danger of our collective stupefaction and national self-gratification over our place in a world of fire and brimstone. And it turned out to be a relapse from our belated awakening, and a revelation of the state of thought with which we must meet the question of the Pacific. Among great issues existing to inspire hope and fear for the future of the United States, as authoritatively expressed for the people by their leaders in carrying on the succession to the presidency, those of the Pacific were excluded. From the opening of the campaign by Elihu Root early in the year, the Pacific, as a prospect before the Great Republic, ever turning westward, was ignored as by common consent. Limned from the Pacific Slope, where is the acutest and most formidable race problem in the world, and where our country on one entire front endures a perpetual outlook upon the theater of the future greatest world and national affairs, the wide horizon of party discussion nowhere touched the Pacific Ocean. Though heard within sound of its surf, a great address by Charles E. Hughes at Los Angeles, August 22, 1916, in opposition to the Government, by only two references derogatory of China indicated the slightest suspicion of consciousness among the opponents of the Government, of Asia at our door, or of the Pacific eighteen miles away : one when he said that after the World War we would have no friends among nations save China, and one when, in a passing phrase, he reckoned China negligible in the scale of large civilized nations. "There will emerge from that war," said he, "a new Europe which must be met by a new America" — and there stopped. Yet it is worth noting that in the Pacific, Mr. Hughes found the only friend in all the world which we would have after the World War — China.

Very nearly that time, behind closed doors in Congress, the senators from the Pacific Coast States were urging the necessity of dealing with the Japanese question so as to settle it for all time. A new Europe must be met, but it is not more inevitable than a new Asia. And our first meeting is with Asia. Any Congress which elects to settle the Japanese question is undertaking every kind of known and unknown problem of empire possible to six thousand miles of American frontier on alien peoples and civilizations and hostile nations, to say nothing of foreign parts. Though no question of our times, in importance, could vie with that of the contact of alien races and systems on the Pacific Slope and in the whole Pacific area, the ostensible spokesmen of awakened America could not once mention Japan, Asia, or the unmatched Pacific. The opponent of the Government also dare not whistle, in the Pacific, dogs that sleeplessly rove and scour the lands and waters of the Pacific area in the interests of Asia and the Allied Powers.

These lights are not only beacons of current national life and sense, in the United States. They define what obviously will be the national policy at least until 1921, and what will be the thought generally of the people of the United States for a considerable time to come; when attention shall have to be directed by foreign force to the country's international situation in the region of its great frontier on an alien and hostile world, the Pacific, and at a time when the greatest international and diplomatic questions ever faced must be met by the United States. "Predatory nations, like predatory animals," said Senator Chamberlain, "travel in packs." The marine and the submarine motor testify that they travel far. They have reached the Pacific, in packs, and the same enginery with which they remold Europe and the Atlantic will be exerted in the recasting of East Asia and the Pacific. And it will follow the work already begun by Japan. The question for us is whether the predatory packs of Europe and Asia are not already upon our backs.

Predatory nations reached East Asia a long time ago. But they came "traveling in packs" only in 1900, when Germany reached China to be their leader, to "assume command of the punitive and clearing operations" of the allied powers. Then the Prussian war machine came, with Emperor William's command, to make the German name a terror to the Chinese for ages to come. China was made the scene of Europe's retaliation upon Asia, as Europe had been the scene of the scourging which Asia gave Europe in the Mongol overflow. In other words, Europe was to thrust Asia in upon itself, throw it back from the West, drive it into the eastward sea, over against the Pacific.

The 1900 pick of the Prussian military machine, — ten thousand men, the hurled vengeance of the Kaiser, with Marshal Count Von Waldersee at their head, — arrived at Tientsin from Europe in September. The interregnum between the raising of the Siege of the Legations, August 14, and Von Waldersee's arrival, was described by the historians of the great German East Asiatic Expedition as one of supreme doubt and chaos among the foreign military forces and residents, some of whom recommended going into winter quarters behind barricades "in the Forbidden City." The modern German Army that is mainly fighting the World War then had its great opportunity, its first and only military try-out, before beginning the assault on Europe.

Von Waldersee established headquarters in Peking, in the Hsi Yuan or Western Park, in the Empress Grand Dowager's "Winter Palace" — the spot where, in a subsequent modern building, Yuan Shih-k'ai, the President of China, died. Here an agreement was drawn up with Li Hung-chang, the refugee Chinese Court's vice-regent, that Chihli province lying within the Great Wall on the north, the sea on the east, Shantung on the south, and Shansi on the west, should be given over to the control and policing of the allied powers. With their cooperation or acquiescence this region was apportioned to the various foreign military contingents, "but owing to the withdrawal, in October, of most of the Russian forces, half the Japanese, and all the American, combined with the decision of the British to assume a passive role in the subsequent operations, it fell chiefly to the French and Germans to put this arrangement into effect."

The French in rapid movements relieved four important centers in South Chihli where foreigners and Christians were besieged and harassed by Boxers. Their work was highly important in its pacificatory results, the work of the Germans in its destructive effects. The appearance of the German forces, clothed in bulky gray-brown winter overcoats and seen in swiftly moving masses on the plains of Chihli, powerfully suggested the roving goat and sheepskin clad contingents of Genghis Khan which they were under orders to imitate.

From Peking, Von Waldersee sent an expedition northward under Count Yorck, assisted by Italians and small detachments of British Indian and Austrian troops. Going to Kalgan by the route of the present Chinese railway, it returned, bringing the body of Count Yorck, who had died at night from charcoal fumes emitted by a Chinese coal-ball stove. And in a fire which destroyed the "Winter Palace", in which Von Waldersee had his headquarters, the latter's Chief of Staff, General Schwartzhoff , one of the most promising officers of the Prussian Army, lost his life.

From "the angle of the Great Wall" north of Peking, southward, the Prussian punitive army of ten thousand, in ten principal drives upon Chinese camps, cleared Western Chihli of Chinese troops. It had made a secondary headquarters at the provincial capitol, Paoting-fu, after the withdrawal of the British and Italians, and in an agreement divided Western and Southern Chihli between themselves and the French. It made no distinction between Boxers and regular Chinese troops, against whom it executed a uniform plan of campaign to make Germany remembered with terror, and so inflicted as much loss as possible upon all armed men alike.

The last drive of the great Prussian punitive expedition to East Asia was planned in cooperation with the French, in the latter 's sphere in Chihli, where the French had come in conflict with bodies of Chinese troops. And there, thirteen years before Germany assaulted Europe, along a spur of the Great Wall, was enacted not only a destructive blow against the principal defense army of the Chinese throne, about forty thousand men under Liu Kuan-ts'ai, but a little dash on Paris, that set Frenchmen by the ears.

April, 1901, while the Congress of Peking sat in council on these things and waited, Stephen Pichon, later French Minister of Foreign Affairs, etc., etc., and much quoted by the world's press, having been a journalist, went back up Legation Street to his study, wrote out and handed to me a necessary and useful authorization to proceed to the French forces under General Bailloud, which were cooperating with the Germans.

We had a march of a hundred miles ; transportation means were scarce, and I found myself afoot, first with the blue, then with the drab. Bailloud took the lower, ancient, Peking-Turkestan road, to occupy Kukuan Pass, while General Von Ketteler, with the German column, turned sharp west to take the nearer five small passes. The purpose of the expedition was simply to drive the remaining Chinese troops over the Chihli boundary into Shansi, with contributory German retribution.

At Ping-shan Von Ketteler learned that Bailloud had already reached Kukuan but that he would not n THE MENACE OF JAPAN

precipitate an attack before the Germans reached the passes farther north. But the Germans distrusted the French who had previously anticipated Von Waldersee and the German troops in getting to the provincial capital.

Seeing Von Ketteler was going to do something, and not being regularly attached to Bailloud, I joined the former. He had almost no transport, his column moved at a snail's pace, until close enough to Shansi to dash for the refugee Chinese Imperial Court's rearguard forces.

The German forces split into five separate columns and dashed. Clearing the summits of the passes, after sharp fighting, the Germans marched over the debris of the Chinese defense on to the Shansi tableland.

At the last moment, in Peking, Pichon had secured sanction from Paris for cessation of French initiative in hostile action against the Chinese, and General Bailloud, on receipt of these orders, sent messengers to the Chinese at Kukuan asking them to withdraw. The Chinese returned insulting defiances, and the French were in a position to advance, when Von Ketteler's left, under Lieutenant-Colonel Von Wallmenich, leaving some scores of Chinese dead, its own dead and wounded, at Niang-tse-kuan, took Kukuan in the rear, and marching through on the other side, to Jukuan, Von Wallmenich appeared like an apparition, offering his troops to General Bailloud, whom he had not allowed time to come up ! Bailloud thanked Von Wallmenich with a face which the Chinese said was "disgust-black!" It was opera bouffe, but it was bouffe in which Paris fell.

This affair marked the culmination of a heated international military discussion and rivalry during the foreign occupation of North China and military domination of East Asia. It was the largest of the punitive expeditions in Chihli. The discussion of the relative merits of the international troops had as its chief contention the spirit of aggression, the endurance, and the mobility of the German military, which had come to East Asia without bringing means to transport itself on land. The British military, and the Russian and French, were as keen to German audacity and pretension as if the World War alliance had already been made. So were the Japanese. Their own and the British troops were as alert to the military points of the Russian cavalry as though the Russian-Japanese War and the campaign in Mesopotamia were mapped out. All the powers of the world were represented at Peking in a military conclave that influenced in a powerful way the events of the world since then. Only the Americans refused to cooperate under Prussian direction in this scourging of East Asia, and escaped the mesh of World War when it came.

Three years later the journalists and military attaches of 1900 met on the battlefields of Manchuria. The lessons of the Russian-Japanese War were discussed exclusively with reference to Europe. The "next war" was a proximate reality.

The Austrian was then, on our battlefields in Manchuria, called the most highly developed military organization in the world. The German was not discredited, only what respected it "went without saying." The Bulgars were ranked with the highest. Only Turkey was slighted — and merely by silence. France was at the pinnacle of efficiency but declining numerically. England couldn't gain.

It was a confirmation of the prophetic gathering of the nations around the Pacific that the fate of Europe had its first full military discussion there, and because of it, in the war bureaus of Europe and the world. In the plain along the Chihli Gulf and the Sea of Japan the World War was proximately realized. Those countries that were to engage in it had their foremost General Staff experts with the Japanese and Russian armies. The Russian cavalry was a subject of the greatest German- Austrian interest. The ability of the Japanese to handle East Asia in future was not a keener question than the weight of Russia on the Austrian-German frontier in the decade to come.

At that time France had concluded the last details of her plan of defense against Germany — down to the question of the correspondents, and the press, which was to have no existence once war broke, as it had not, except as sanctioned by the censor and endowed with an ex-French life from the English allied armies sharing its soil.

No wonder Germany was so fiercely against England in the World War. France had made all final arrangements, as for the execution ground. The reason, often voiced, as Ludovic Neaudeau, Redacteur du Journal (Paris), told me in Manchuria, 1904, was that, so far as France was concerned, there would be but "this war." The unerring apprehension of the French and their temper was shown by the declaration that France must win or die ; she could have no future if she lost : France was a country advanced in civilization and opposed by savages.

Pichon of Peking came later to Paris, and in a letter to a London newspaper told the English that the World War was "all the outcome of long and premeditated preparation. . . . The plan that is now being carried out before our eyes was conceived long ago ... it was understood we were to be overwhelmed under the weight of Germany's land army, equipped with artillery against which resistance would be impossible. It was equally arranged that our towns and villages should be blackmailed, looted, razed to the ground, and their inhabitants treated like noxious animals. It was understood that in no war, not even the Thirty Years' War, were human laws and conventions to be so completely set aside." That was exactly as in China. And the determining factors were drawn from the open military book of East Asia — the first time and the first occasion of the opening of the book of modern warfare.

One of the sequels to us of the events of this period in East Asia, and of the international affiliations which were the result of its affairs, and which directed the alliance that not only controlled the development of China but resisted the central powers, was that Pichon proposed to us an alliance with France and England to save free government, and the freedom of the world, from destruction.

Chapter II

I give these reminiscences of the powers of Europe as they were manifest in East Asia the first five years of the modern military age, to show the importance of the affairs on our west to the largest and most powerful nations of the world, and those of to-day and to-morrow.

Frenchmen knew, as early as the first Franco- Russian Alliance and when President Loubet went to Russia, as attaches who accompanied him have told me, the fate held out to them — that when war broke out it would bring France's last chance, that she would be in the balance with the little countries. And they hurried to Manchuria and the Pacific in those years of revelation, to decipher the laws of fate.

East Asia under the code of arms, 1900-1905, furnished lessons to German military science which gave confidence to Germany's rulers and led them to divide the world between themselves and their friends.

The results brought about by the Prussian military system, as practiced by the Japanese Army, were hardly expressed in the form finally given them by the Portsmouth Treaty, when Germany's world politicians made a re-allotment of the territories of Europe and parts of Asia, Africa, and other regions of the earth. To this my German colleagues in Manchuria testified, on the western shores of the Pacific, and in other parts of the world while its battles were being fought, or when their lessons were having their effect in Europe.

There have been numbers of informed Germans who have told the naked Prussian truth regarding Prussian designs upon civilization — Count Reventlow for instance, generally gagged in recent years, when crisis threatened. He was one of the most fruitful sources of the naked truth of which Germans showed themselves fearless, if not reckless. But to make free generally with the names of informed Prussian and German gentlemen, whose personal situations it is not possible to know and judge from the outside, would not be discreet or valorous. Those whom I quote were highly placed on earth at the time; some have gone down, and some have risen since. The years since 1905, not to say since August 1, 1914, have made a change in their world as well as that of the allies, and some of them are among those myriad wraiths who float between the worlds and find no rest. One now living or dead, who need not be named here, said :

"To dictate the future of Europe we must reach to Paris within thirty days from the moment of crossing the French border. This preparation is the difficulty ; there will not be a moment's rest for us until the button is pressed for war, and the machinery set in motion. As we say in Germany : it is not until the button is pressed that we can relax. When it is, we can lie down and rest. The machinery will run itself once it starts."

There was the lesson of China and Manchuria, learned. I believe the same thing could be had from Austria, certainly from Russia, who adopted the Prussian military system which had proved so successful among the Japanese immediately after her war with Japan.

Such international incidents as Captain DuMaurier's play, "An Englishman's Home", and the spy scares in England and Germany, show how fast "the war" was being hurried on after that. In 1905, by wintertime, the lessons of Manchuria were pretty well digested in Germany. And Germany had but one provision unsettled ; it was the question of war correspondents. And the lesson of the Russian-Japanese War settled that. Germany's war correspondents in Manchuria, — all of them army men, naturally, — when consulted by the General Staff at Berlin, deprecated war correspondence in Germany when "the war" came. Thus, 1905. And the German General Staff followed closely the action of the French. Whereupon all was in readiness at Berlin, as well as at Paris. No, not all, for the preparation and the secrecy had to go on. But as much of the all was ready as ever can be got ready for any crisis.