In his youth, William R. Braisted followed his father's naval assignments to a life in China, Japan, and the Philippines. Those experiences were the foundation of a distinguished career as a historian of the U.S. Navy's role in the Far East in the decades before World War II. His three books-The United States Navy in the Pacific, 1897-1909 (1958), The United States Navy in the Pacific, 1909-1922 (1971), and Diplomats in Blue: U.S. Naval Officers in China, 1922-1933 (2009)-trace America's path toward engagement with the Far East and war with Japan.
Shortly after coming to the University of Texas at Austin to teach history in 1942, Braisted enrolled in the Navy's Japanese language program as a "naval agent" at the University of Colorado. He then served in military intelligence in Washington, where he was assigned to the Japan Political Desk, analyzing the enemy's radio broadcasts for clues to Japanese morale as the end of the war neared.
Returning to Austin in 1947, he spent the next 41 years, until his retirement in 1988, teaching East Asian history and naval history at the University of Texas, where his efforts encouraged the university to create a Department of East Asian Studies. His works include a complete translation of a Japanese magazine that published many leading Japanese intellectuals in the late 19th century, Meiroku Zasshi: Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment (1976). Now 92, Braisted continues to be active in his community's intellectual life.
Hornfischer: What led you to an interest in the history of the Navy in the Pacific?
Braisted: I was born into the Navy in 1918. My father, Frank A. Braisted, served twice with the Asiatic Fleet. Ever since my mother took me to the Far East in 1922, East Asia was a part of my life. I spent four of my first 16 years, '22-'24 and '32-'34, in the Far East. The second time was when I got interested in studying Chinese history.
Hornfischer: What assignments did your father have?
Braisted: He was class of 1909 at Annapolis. During his first tour in Asia, he was captain of the destroyer USS Hulbert (DD-342). The main part of the Asiatic Fleet-it was called a fleet but it was more a decoration-was made up of destroyers, and the flagship was a cruiser. When he went back in 1932 he was executive officer of USS Rochester (CA-2), an ancient cruiser; she was christened in 1893.They sent it there because after hostilities broke out between China and Japan they figured if they would lose a ship, they would lose the Rochester.
Hornfischer: As opposed to either of the successive Asiatic Fleet flagships USS Houston (CA-30) or Augusta (CA-31).
Braisted: It was sort of boring duty. She was the station ship in Shanghai, just sitting there. He had a chance to transfer to a seagoing gunboat, the USS Sacramento (PG-19), which moved up the river, went up and down the China coast, and served sometimes as station ship at Shanghai and Tientsin. In the case of Shanghai, the Chinese and Japanese were fighting there. The ship would be there with units on board. If there was danger to the foreign settlements, they would land forces to reinforce the 4th Marines.
My father spent a good deal of the fall in Chefoo, on Shantung Peninsula, where the fleet assembled in summer. Then the Sacramento went up to Tientsin and spent the winter and spring there. When that was over, he went down to the Philippines. The naval yard at Olongapo had a dry dock. He went down there in 1933 when the Sacramento was in the dry dock and put her into shape again. My mother and I followed him down.
There was a beautiful Army camp way up in the mountains of Baguio, in northern Luzon. Getting up there was very difficult. The road going up was single track. Camp John Hay was up there. My mother remembered it from winters, when it was lovely. She decided we'd spent the summer of 1933 there. When we got up there it was rainy season. The food at the camp was miserable. We had a cottage with a kitchenette, so in order to make up for the miserable food we were able to buy wonderful spinach in the central market in Baguio. Spinach and butter. We would prepare spinach with butter for tea every afternoon.
Hornfischer: What age were you?
Braisted: I was 15, I guess, wasn't I? This was 1933.
Hornfischer: You were in school with the Nimitz family, is that right?
Braisted: Yes, with a Nimitz daughter. She was one year younger than I was. Then-Captain Nimitz was commander of the Asiatic Fleet flagship Augusta. Apparently Mrs. Nimitz decided, just as my mother decided, to put up in Shanghai, where there was a fine American school, the Shanghai American School. Both families put up in the French concession in the Blackstone Apartments on Rue Lafayette. That was about three blocks from the school on Avenue Petain.
In the summer of '34 we went back up and stayed at Tsingtao, the port in the German leasehold on Shantung Peninsula. We stayed at a beautiful inn on the beach.
The one thing I remember about Captain Nimitz was one time when he had supper with us at Tsingtao. He had just come from attending the funeral of Admiral Togo, who was commander of the Japanese fleet at Tsushima, where the Japanese defeated the Russians. Captain Nimitz was so impressed. He thought the Japanese were such wonderful people. None us had any idea that we were going to be fighting them in 1941. This was summer of '34.
Hornfischer: What was your perception of the Japanese Navy at that point? You must have picked up a lot from your father.
Braisted: I don't remember I had any feeling with regard to the Japanese Navy. I think we thought the navy was a little more civilized than the army. It didn't embark on the invasion of China. That was more of an army enterprise. I don't remember having any particular impression. I remember when I was in Tsingtao, there was a Shinto shrine and we all had bicycles and one day, all by myself, I went to the Shinto shrine and walked around and wondered if a spook would jump out and slay me for invading the sacred precincts of the Shinto shrine.
Hornfischer: What was America's national interest in China in the 1920s and '30s?
Braisted: Well, trading and missionaries. We'd had merchant ships from shortly after independence sailing all the way to China, just as the British and the French did. As that developed, we had naval ships there for protection. As you will remember, it was Commodore Perry who, with a small fleet, opened Japan to the outside world. Thereafter the Navy continued to have responsibility for protecting Americans in the Far East. Of course, that responsibility became even more serious after we acquired the Philippines in 1898.
We shared control of the international concession at Shanghai, and we had gunboats going up the Yangtze River and the river to Canton. There were certain ports that were open to trade. It started in 1842 with the British Treaty of Nanking. Five ports were open from Canton up to Shanghai. And then after that they opened more ports so that eventually they got up to Tientsin. I think Dairen [Dalian] in South Manchuria was a treaty port, though it was pretty much dominated by the Japanese. Then up the river, Hankow was certainly in mid river, on the Yangtze and farther up the top part was Chungking, which was the capital of the Nationalist Chinese during World War II, a pretty primitive place.
Hornfischer: Did you feel like you were living on the frontier there? It must have been exotic, thrilling even.
Braisted: That's why we had 4th Marines in Shanghai, the Army in Tientsin, and the Marines in Peking. They were protecting the frontier. It was a lot of fun. A lot more fun than living in Long Beach or San Diego, where my father would be during sea duty, if not in the Far East.
Hornfischer: Your grandfather, William C. Braisted, was surgeon general of the Navy, appointed to that position in 1914. I saw articles in The New York Times about his effort to recruit nurses into the Navy. What were his contributions as surgeon general?
Braisted: He retired in 1921. I think in the Theodore Roosevelt period, he was the assistant White House physician. During the Russo-Japanese War, he was sent to Japan to observe Japanese naval medicine. He was a charming fellow. Most of his time he spent ashore. He was considered by his contemporaries to be a brilliant man. He was later president of the American Medical Association.
Hornfischer: The theme of your last book is that a great deal of diplomacy was driven by naval officers instead of diplomats. How did this role come about for the Navy?
Braisted: When the Navy sent ships to the Asiatic Station, they had responsibilities all along the coast of China. There was a good deal of interchange. The commander-in-chief of the Asiatic Fleet would call on the minister in Peking and talk about the situation. Gunboats would go up the Yangtze as far as Chungking. Gunboat commanders would exchange views with the consuls up there about the area. Down the rapids from Chungking, there was another port, Wuhan. There was no consul there, so I think the diplomatic responsibilities there were rather more important for naval officers than in a port like Shanghai.
Hornfischer: Where in your mind does the story of the war in the Pacific begin?
Braisted: It would officially begin at Pearl Harbor in 1941. If I were examining the roots, I would have to go back to 1931, when the Japanese invaded and occupied Manchuria. And then it became more intense in 1937 when they moved south and started the war with China. Some people might look at World War I as a root.
Hornfischer: The Japanese were clever about carving an empire out of the remains of Germany's colonies after World War I, weren't they?
Braisted: The League of Nations handed them the mandate islands, and the United States was supposed to have approval over whether transfer was permanent. Japan just kept them. The Allies wouldn't claim that this was imperial conquest, because they got mandates, too, in Africa and the Middle East.
Hornfischer: Was war with Japan inevitable, as some would say? Were we doomed to a war with a foreign militancy that we didn't understand?
Braisted: War with Japan was a way of getting us into a war with Germany. If we hadn't gone to war with Japan, we wouldn't have had such a good excuse to go to war with Germany. We declared war on Japan but then left it up to the Germans, and they did what we would have liked them to do, and they declared war on us. I have wondered-and unfortunately I will never read their papers-whether the Japanese would have gone to war had we not frozen their assets, which meant they couldn't trade. Most importantly, they couldn't pick up oil in Indonesia. This brought the crisis on. Nobody has answered this question for me. I think the Japanese would have just been content to continue to fight China. Whether they would have succeeded I don't know. They were at a stalemate in China.
Hornfischer: So once the embargo was placed, they felt they had no recourse but to strike.
Braisted: That's my theory. The Japanese were negotiating. Shortly before the outbreak of war, the Japanese sent a special ambassador whose purpose I think was to avoid war. But then it became inevitable and those ambassadors didn't even know the attack was coming.
Hornfischer: Many historians characterize the Pearl Harbor attack as a supreme miscalculation. Just as likely, you could say Japan had no choice.
Braisted: Well, I sort of think so.
Hornfischer: How did you settle on history as your calling-or how did history choose you?
Braisted: I decided I wanted to major in history when I entered graduate school at the University of Chicago. My professor was Harley Farnsworth MacNair. He knew I was a Navy junior. In those days to teach Far Eastern history you didn't have to learn Chinese and Japanese. He suggested that I write about the Navy in the Far East, so my dissertation became "The U.S. Navy in the Far East, 1897-1909." That was the title, but then when we made it into a book the press decided that "Navy in the Pacific" would sound better. So it became The United States Navy in the Pacific. It would be a little broader and more interesting to the reader.
Hornfischer: Which naval battles interest you most?
Braisted: I don't think any in particular. Manila Bay of course was the opening of my first book on the Navy. But I'm not a battle historian.
Hornfischer: During the war you were on the Japan Political Desk of the Far East Branch of the Military Intelligence Division. Can you tell me about that?
Braisted: When I came to Austin in '42 to teach history, I learned about the Navy's Japanese language program at Boulder, Colorado. They had been teaching Japanese at the University of California at Berkeley, but when the ruling came down that all Japanese Americans had to be evacuated from the West Coast, they moved this school to Boulder. I studied there from May to December 1943. When I registered at Boulder, I had a medical 4F [not acceptable for military service]. The recruiter at the language school said that didn't matter. So I registered as a "naval agent." That was a rank that existed in the early years of the Navy. I had six months of studying Japanese, after which I was expelled because of my 4F classification. I returned to Chicago, and my professor had a letter from Washington reporting that there was an opening in the Japan Branch of Military Intelligence.
I volunteered and reported April or May. I was on the Japan Political Desk of G-2, military intelligence. We tried to follow events in Japan. We had a wonderful service at the Federal Communications Commission to monitor radio broadcasts. That was my most important source. I could read them, judging from the tone how things were going. Until the surrender, our principal task was to determine, from the tone of the radio programs, what Japanese morale was like and how close they might be to making peace.
I was there from '44 to '46. It became even more interesting after we captured the Marianas. Prime Minister Tojo resigned, and the Japanese appointed an admiral to take his place. It was symbolic that Japan was changing its estimate of the situation. The crucial point came in July of 1945, when the Allies drew up the Potsdam Declaration, the terms of surrender. We claimed they were unconditional, but it was only unconditional military surrender. The other terms were important. They ultimately assured the Japanese they would not lose their independence. In my estimates of the Japanese response, I claimed that they were trying to find ways to get out of the war. They were not going to turn down the Potsdam Declaration. I think the people who were further up the line in the American government thought the Japanese had refused to surrender. My estimate is that it wasn't necessary to drop the atomic bombs. That the Japanese would have surrendered in due course without the bombs.
Hornfischer: Based on intercepts of . . . ?
Braisted: The radio messages they would send out. They had a domestic service and a foreign service. Some were directed at America.
Hornfischer: These were propaganda broadcasts?
Braisted: They wouldn't have called them that. They were Japanese news broadcasts. I'm sure we did the same thing.
Hornfischer: So you feel the decision to drop the bomb was unnecessary?
Braisted: I think everybody would tell me I'm wrong. If we'd waited the Russians would have gotten more into the war. If there'd been an invasion, the Russians would have occupied Hokkaido and maybe northern Japan. As it was, the Russians got halfway into Korea. And between the other half there was a line, the DMZ. As a consequence, Korea remains divided today. I don't know whether that was worth two bombs.
Hornfischer: If you were 40 years younger, what projects would you be pursuing right now? Have you fulfilled all your literary ambitions?
Braisted: I probably would be continuing on with naval history. My original plan was to bring my naval history up to 1941, and then I got to be so old I decided I'd better cut it off.
Hornfischer: Your second book, The United States Navy in the Pacific, 1909-1922, is more than twice the length of the first.
Braisted: The first volume was essentially the dissertation, covering 1897 to 1909. The second volume had much more diplomacy. That period was much more complicated.
Hornfischer: Should the Navy have done things differently during that period? Taken a harder line with Japan, or fought harder at home to secure funding for bases?
Braisted: We wanted peace. I still think we could have had peace. We agreed that we wouldn't establish bases in the western Pacific. We wouldn't build new bases. We could keep what we had-which was inconsequential. If we really thought that the Japanese were going to be our enemies, I think we might have done better to avoid agreeing not to fortify positions west of Hawaii.
Hornfischer: That left two-thirds of the Pacific to the Japanese.
Braisted: It put them in a much stronger position. That would have been an alternative. We had Guam, essentially under Navy administration. We had Olongapo, a naval yard on Subic Bay, north of Manila, where we had a dry dock. Down on Manila Bay we had a naval station called Cavite. None of them were of any consequence. I think when World War II came, we destroyed the drydock at Olongapo.
Dad came down in 1937-1938 on the USS Trenton (CL-11) and the other cruisers, to visit Australia. This was a declaration of friendship for Australia and New Zealand and a warning for the Japanese. They called at different ports and ended up at Singapore. My father's ship went to Singapore to help open the dry dock there. The Japanese were upset. This was sort of a declaration of position.
Hornfischer: Did your dad ever meet President Roosevelt? He was on the Houston in '34 and '38. Did he ever talk about that?
Braisted: I don't know. When he was stationed in Washington from 1934 to 1937, it was a more open place then. Naval officers were instructed to leave cards at the White House as registration to be invited to social occasions. So we'd drive up to front door and leave cards. At least once I went with my family to one of those social occasions and Mrs. Roosevelt was the hostess. President Roosevelt had been assistant secretary of the Navy when my grandfather was surgeon general. Mrs. Roosevelt and my grandmother were pretty good friends. My mother tried to strike up conversations with Mrs. Roosevelt, but I don't think she got much recognition. Mrs. Roosevelt was really a very impressive lady. She was fine, and she had wonderful principles. Maybe if not president, she could be secretary of state today.