Britain asks Japan for naval help

The British chronology of the war records under 8 February 1916 that the British government framed a request for the help of the Japanese navy. It was not a single note but a whole exchange of letters that lasted for most of February. Foreign Office documents show that the Admiralty wrote to the Foreign Office on the matter at the beginning of the month, again on 8 February and once more on 22 February, and the Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, sent successive instructions to the ambassador in Tokyo, Sir Conyngham Greene, among others on 4 and 9 February. Greene cabled Japan’s reply to London on 16 February.

The missing destroyers

Since the autumn of 1914 Tokyo had consistently refused to send warships to Europe, although the Japanese navy had helped to hunt down German cruisers, escorted convoys from Australia and New Zealand, and in February 1915 its sailors had helped to put down the mutiny in Singapore. At the beginning of 1916, however, what the Royal Navy lacked above all was destroyers. They were needed to escort transports to Salonika and Egypt, to fight German and Austro-Hungarian submarines in the Mediterranean, where in recent months the Ancona and the Persia, among others, had been sunk with loss of life, and also for service in British waters. The Admiralty wrote that the presence of a flotilla of Japanese destroyers would be “extremely valuable” and that it was not even necessary to specify the Mediterranean as their destination: the Japanese could operate in British waters and so release British ships for the Mediterranean. It admitted that for political reasons the request might be awkward, but the needs of the fleet required it to be made.

According to the British historian Ian Nish, Grey asked Tokyo to send ships to the Mediterranean “on a scale commensurate with her naval power”, promising access to British arsenals and dockyards and financial help. The second part of the request concerned eastern waters. German raids on the trade routes, such as the cruise of the auxiliary cruiser Möwe, raised fears that another raider would appear in the Indian Ocean. The British therefore asked for a small force of destroyers in the Strait of Malacca and for a cruiser squadron to patrol the route between Australia and Aden.

Tokyo’s answer

The cabinet of Shigenobu Ōkuma, in which foreign affairs were directed by Kikujirō Ishii and the navy by Admiral Katō Tomosaburō, replied, according to Nish, “sympathetically but vaguely”. It did not agree to send destroyers to Europe. The Hungarian historian Levente Gábor Szabó points out that the Admiralty changed the proposed area of operations for the Japanese ships several times, from the Mediterranean to British waters and the North Atlantic, which only made it easier for the Japanese to procrastinate. In Tokyo no benefits were yet seen that would justify sending the fleet to the other side of the world.

It was different with the waters closer to Japan. According to Nish, Tokyo agreed to patrols in the Indian Ocean, but in return wanted the British to relax the regulations restricting the practice of Japanese doctors in the Straits Settlements. The American historian Timothy Saxon writes that the Japanese sent a destroyer flotilla to Singapore to protect the Strait of Malacca and a cruiser force to the Indian Ocean. In 1916 Japanese cruisers, among them Tsushima and Niitaka, patrolled the waters from the South China Sea and the Dutch East Indies to the Indian Ocean.

The request for ships for Europe came back in December 1916, when Field Marshal Terauchi Masatake had been at the head of the government in Tokyo since October. This time the Japanese set a condition: Britain was to support their claims to the German possessions in Shantung and to the islands north of the equator. In February 1917, after Germany announced unrestricted submarine warfare, the two sides reached agreement and Japanese destroyers sailed for the Mediterranean.