Part IV
21 Mid-1943
22 Two Indian Armies
23 China 1942–4
24 Twilight
25 The End
CHAPTER 21
IN the middle of 1943 the war had resolved itself into a defensive struggle by the Japanese to hold the vast territory which they had overrun, for such little loss, in the hectic days early in 1942. With the crippling loss of their Navy at Midway Island, their drive outwards had lost its impetus; it had failed in its purpose of gaining for them a rapid peace. But the Japanese were left in possession of a vast territory, economically very rich; and the operations of MacArthur and of Nimitz had only begun to win this back.
They held, and preparations had hardly begun to expel them from, a line behind which were included Burma, Thailand, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies; and it extended far out across the Pacific. Behind this line they had obtained 80 per cent of the world’s rubber, 54 per cent of its tin, 19 per cent of its tungsten, the oil wells of the Dutch East Indies with a huge reserve, and large supplies of manganese and iron ore. The map and economic Intelligence suggested that Japan, if it showed the administrative competence to organize these assets, could, with some equanimity, face a prolonged war. It need have no panic, at least for the time being, before the very heavy counter-attack which America, now at last fully mobilizing for war, was mounting against it.
By 1943, however, it began to become plain that Japan, as an adversary of the United States, was outdated by two or three generations. In the organization for war, the contest was between the Americans – a nation of businessmen, amateurs in war but bringing to it all the skill learned in a century and a half of fierce capitalist struggle, in which lack of imagination and foresight exacted disaster and retirement – and the Japanese, who still regarded American business as vulgar, and who sought to combat it by an economy held together on a basis of command. Japan still thought of war in strictly military terms. Its eyes were fixed on territory which had to be held, on the battles which were taking place, and on the tactics to be used. The fact that the war was to be won or lost in the nation’s factories and workshops had never clearly established itself in the mind of the Japanese Supreme Command. Japan had, it is true, passed laws long before Pearl Harbor, which gave the Government totalitarian powers to regulate the economy; but the economy, under war conditions, exhibited nothing like the transformation which the United States and Britain underwent in similar circumstances.
Even after it had staked everything on the action at Pearl Harbor, Japan failed to give top economic priority to building aircraft, warships and submarines upon which the defence of the Empire it had won must eventually depend. The Japanese had the initial advantage that they began the war with aircraft which surprised their antagonists by their performance. But the Japanese unaccountably failed to exploit this superiority. Japanese aircraft production in 1943, though it had tripled since 1941, was very much less than it might have been. In 1943 it was in fact only one fifth of the total American output. And, even for the use of its restricted air forces, Japan failed to mobilize anything approaching the manpower which was needed. The skill and audacity of the pilots at Pearl Harbor, and the extreme popularity which the flying service enjoyed, showed that Japan was not wanting in resource to organize its Air Force adequately. Moreover, until the end of the war, Japanese aircraft designers went on improving the standard fighters and bombers. But there was a failure of liaison: the Army and Navy were unwilling to make their wants clear, and to transmit these to the planners of the Japanese war effort. And even more than aircraft, a territory such as the Japanese had to defend, required warships and submarines. Here, also, the Japanese record is hardly comprehensible. In the months when America was turning out a prodigious number of aircraft-carriers – twenty-two were under construction in 1943 – Japan, which by the action of Pearl Harbor had shown itself to be a pioneer of naval air strength, was content to build only three new carriers. The disparity was greater still in cruisers and destroyers. The Japanese Naval Staff had apparently reverted to an older view, recoiled from reading the lessons which they had themselves demonstrated, and put their faith in battleship construction. They did not seem to realize, for example, how fatal it was to be outrun in submarine production. They had begun the war with high-quality submarines, but this arm never played the defensive role which might have been expected in a campaign fought among countless islands.
For Japan to realize the advantages of the economic riches of its Empire, a vast, flexible Merchant Navy was necessary. In scarcely any other department of war was Japanese planning so inefficient. It began the war without a realistic or adequate appreciation of the demands which were likely to be made upon its merchant shipping. In 1941, it possessed 5.3 million tons of shipping; about 35 per cent of Japanese trade had been carried in foreign vessels. The greater part of this fleet was at once requisitioned for service use, 1.2 million tons for the Army and 1.4 million tons for the Navy; and a large part of this was squandered by the wasteful operations in the Solomon Islands. In 1942 the Japanese lost over a million tons of shipping, and by 1943, the shortage had become acute, and the estimates and forecasts of the Japanese Planning Board had been exposed. The losses, by submarine warfare, by mines, and by air attack, were such as to make ridiculous the attempt to weld together the Japanese territories in a single viable Empire. Faced with this challenge, Japan made no adequate response: there were no interesting tactics, no system of convoys, no asdic, no radar. By 1943 they were forced to replace their dwindling merchant fleet with wooden ships, but these boats were terribly slow, and also vulnerable. Worse, they had neglected their shipyards, which were ill equipped and antiquated, and these were clogged, in the middle of 1943, by a fifth of the entire merchant marine undergoing repair.
These weaknesses must in the first place be put down to unimaginative planning by the Japanese Command, and the fact that civilian Ministries were instinctively held in contempt by Service Ministries. At joint conferences the requests of civilians for allocations of manpower and materials tended to be overruled, even though the end product might be one of which the Services were badly in need. For such reasons as these Japan was never able to utilize its huge economic assets. Japan had risked war for the sake of obtaining raw materials under its flag; but, when this was brought about, it could not transport them. It had the intense mortification of being in possession in the South Seas of one of the richest economic units in the world, but of being unable to enjoy its usufruct. The iron, the coal, the bauxite, nickel, tin, manganese, lead, salt, graphite, potash, all the vital materials for war, were all of them technically Japanese, guarded by Japanese troops, but they lay as useless to Japan as though they were in the hands of the enemy, because they could not be transported. They were a kind of fairy gold. Japan’s plight is vividly shown by one figure. In 1940, before the war, it bought and imported three million tons of iron ore from the Philippines and Malaya. By 1942, though its troops had absolute control over the iron mines, it managed to carry just over 100,000 tons of iron ore from these territories to Japan.
The most acute famine was in oil. This had been foreseen, and the need for oil was the basic reason for Japan’s going to war. But the oil had remained elusive. The wells of the Dutch East Indies produced an abundant supply, but it could only be transported in tankers, which were an easy target for the aircraft of the Western Allies and for their submarines. The shutting down of one economic activity after another in Japan was the consequence of this very real blockade. First civilian transportation was hit: then production in one industry after another. Already, by 1943, the oil shortages hampered the operations of the Navy and grounded many of Japan’s aircraft.
The weakness of the Japanese defensive structure was, then, economic. The Japanese waged a war against the most effective economic organization of history, and waged it with totally inadequate resources. In vain did they put their trust in reeking tube and iron shard, when even their ability to manufacture tubes and shards was being limited. But, though the nemesis worked itself out in an economic form, the weakness was not really economic, but one of Intelligence. The Japanese civil service, Japanese planners, the Supreme Command, failed their country. The economic resources had been there, and they could not be used, because the Japanese Empire failed to remain linked together. Given flexibility and foresight, this weakness might have been overcome. A different organization of their supplies, more local initiative, more skilful prevention of submarine warfare, better use of submarines and aircraft in striving to solve the economic problems – any of these might have availed to forestall the end, which already, in mid-1943, was becoming certain to those who possessed the economic Intelligence to see where war was leading Japan.
It is not surprising that Japan did not make more rapid progress with economic planning. In 1942 the Cabinet had established a Greater East Asian Ministry which took upon itself the functions of the ‘Overseas Affairs Ministry’ (more accurately known as the ‘Colonial Affairs Ministry’) and the old ‘Asian Development Board’, the Kéa-in (sometimes called the ‘China Affairs Board’: the Japanese language can be uncomfortably ambivalent to a western mind). The new Ministry was handed the formidable task of reconciling national policy decisions with the dictates of local military administration in areas under Japanese sway. It was a Ministry for coordination, touching every level of government. Such Ministries always walk a tightrope. Their enemies are invariably numerous, powerful and well-entrenched. In this case Prime Minister Tōjō Hideki appointed as his Greater East Asia Minister an able economist, former Minister of Finance and ex-President of the Cabinet Planning Board who until recently had served as Supreme Adviser to the Japanese puppet régime of Wang Ching-wei in Nanking. His name was Aoki Kazuo, and he left his mark on the tightrope before he and the Tōjō Cabinet toppled from power together.
Aoki was not without physical and moral courage. As a senior official in the Finance Ministry in 1933, he had gone to Manchuria and Withstood threats of physical violence from Kwantung Army hotheads; he won his way then and did so again in 1940, after a fight with the Japanese Expeditionary Forces in China to uphold the integrity of the currency system established within Occupied China: that time he even extracted an apology from the then overall Chief of Staff of the Japanese Expeditionary Forces on the mainland, the mercurial Lieutenant-General Itagaki Seishirō. On another occasion, as head of a Cabinet Planning Board sub-committee in 1938, he had reported that even if the Japanese Army and Navy won the war in China and then seized the rich prize of the Southern Regions, they would remain incapable of sustaining a long war due to their reliance upon the resources of the United States and the British Empire; in this instance the Cabinet had accepted that unpalatable truth despite strenuous objections from the Vice-Minister of War. Clearly, then, this man knew how to work with the Army and was no lightweight. If anyone could have succeeded as Greater East Asia Minister, Aoki would have done so.
Aoki’s new remit included the preparation of vast political and economic schemes. But no programme was published, and there were no elaborate accompanying sets of statistics. The Government hoped that the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere would form a regional economic and political bloc. The Greater East Asia Ministry was intended to operate as a counter-weight to the pervasive influences of western capitalism and imperialism on the one hand and the Japanese military machine on the other. Aoki believed that the strength of any self-contained economic sphere was determined by three parameters: its natural resources, scientific knowledge and technical development, and manpower. The job of the Greater East Asia Ministry was to make this cumbersome system work harmoniously. Judged objectively, and notwithstanding Aoki’s considerable skills, the Greater East Asia Ministry was a flop. Nevertheless, it was a very considerable attempt to come to terms both with Total War and with its expected aftermath.
From its very inception there was a good deal of conflict in Tokyo about this Ministry. Some civilians, especially those in the Foreign Ministry, feared that it would be regarded as provocative in South-East Asia: it would unmask a determination of the Government to plan the life of the region, and would be counter to the policy of granting independence. After some initial equivocation, Prime Minister Tōjō Hideki became adamant in its favour. The decision, however, cost him the resignation of his able Foreign Minister, Tōgō Shigenori, in protest at the setting-up of such a Ministry and its diminution of the traditional role of the diplomatic service.
Advocates of the Greater East Asia Ministry intended that ‘pure diplomacy’ (whatever that meant) should remain the exclusive prerogative of the Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs. The fact remained that the creation of the new Ministry effectively separated the conduct of Japan’s diplomatic relations with East Asian countries from that of the rest of the outside world. This had been one of the less attractive and unsuccessful features of the Kōa-in, and Tōgō was not alone in anticipating that an extension of that scheme to the whole region would prove equally unworkable. Tōjō’s own response was that the countries of East Asia should be treated differently: they were Japan’s kith and kin. Most of the other Ministers also positively welcomed the creation of the new Ministry. They anticipated that the new arrangements would give the Army and the Navy greater scope to carry out their wartime responsibilities without having to endure the constant aggravation of interference from Japanese diplomats accredited to local governments. Tōgō, however, was prepared to bring down the entire Cabinet over the issue. It must be remembered that Japanese Cabinet decisions had to be carried unanimously. Failure to reach agreement on a matter of such importance would inevitably lead to the resignation of Tōjō and his Cabinet en masse. The crisis came to a head at a Cabinet meeting on 1 September 1942. Tōgō refused to alter his position. The meeting broke up in disarray. Afterwards, efforts to persuade Tōgō to reconsider his position proved unavailing. The Foreign Ministry itself was united behind him. Then Tōgō learned that the Emperor wanted a compromise: this was no moment for a change in Cabinet. Hours later Tōgō resigned, Tōjō himself temporarily took control of the Foreign Ministry, and the final obstructions to the creation of the Greater East Asia Ministry were overcome at a stroke.
At this point it is relevant to digress for a moment to consider where the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere fits within the general development of Japanese imperialism. Japan, it will be recalled, had emerged in the late nineteenth century from a long period of isolation and had found itself in a quasi-colonial economic and political relationship with the United States and the European Powers. From thence it had moved with remarkable speed to become the dominant Power in East Asia. It had been a late developer on the imperial scene, and it could not replace, resist or reject the Treaty Port system and the trading barriers imposed by ‘most favoured nations’ upon other states. Accordingly, the only course open to Japan was to join the system as it existed at the time (in the 1880s) and as it developed and flowered.
By the 1920s, as Japan’s strength had increased, Japan faced two alternatives if it wished to advance further: it could champion the Treaty Port system and seek to make it work better for Japan than it did for other countries. This, in a nutshell, was the Shidehara Policy. Otherwise, Japan could devise a completely different system more suitable to its own needs. This, in fact, is the line which led to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
The concept of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere emerged from the First World War. Like ‘imperialism’, it was a term that enjoyed a wide currency and, as Professor Beasley has suggested, it had a wide range of connotations rather than denotations, and it developed specifically in relation to China and nowhere else.∗ It depended on an unequal technological relationship, and was characterized by the provision of management skills and trade in finished or semi-finished goods exchanged for raw materials. During the closing years of the First World War, Nishihara had attempted to forge not simply common links between Japanese industry and Chinese raw materials but a new, united common market. This, it must be said, was intended to be nothing less than a form of economic imperialism, established and kept in place by means of loans and other incentives. The scheme failed, largely for political reasons, but it was a purely Japanese idea, and it was quite contrary to the Treaty Port system.
By the 1920s, however, Japan was examining its position from a fresh point of view. It was seeking to optimize the necessary balance between the strategical materials required for war and those required by industry. Two of the figures most closely associated with this idea were Ishiwara Kami and Nagata Tetsuzan, both of whom we have previously encountered. Japan’s foremost problem, as they perceived, was that most well-developed Imperial Powers had large resources of coal, iron ore and other strategical materials at home. Japan, however, had to look abroad for these things, and therefore had to regard them as a legitimate strategical objective. It was this which supplied the driving-force for the creation of a bloc economy. It was a process accomplished by degrees and accompanied by slogans: the New Order in East Asia from as early as 1937, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in 1940.
From 1941 this form of Japanese economic imperialism followed no preconceived political pattern: that was purely ad hoc. Economically, and indeed geographically, however, it was more defined. In the old area of the Japanese Empire (Japan Proper, Korea, Taiwan and Karafuto), there was already a close integration between the four Japanese home islands and its dependencies. To this area was added Japan’s new interests in Manchuria and North China. In time this became a written plan and was therefore identifiably and specifically Japanese. The rest of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, however, was treated on an ad hoc basis, although generally with a greater stress than the Western Powers would have put on strategical materials. Once again, a distinction has to be made between an early version (which was refined in the Cabinet Planning Board during 1939–40 as a contribution towards a national defence strategy, against the background of the European War but prior to the breakdown of Japanese economic relations with the West) and a later version (which was a direct product of the Pacific War).
In the initial phase, the Japanese sought to reach agreements with the Imperial Powers and their local administrators. Their objectives were to negotiate guaranteed export quotas; free access to business investment and trade; special credit terms and rates of exchange; special powers over the supervision of communications, and the secondment of Japanese advisers to local colonial governments. All of this was essentially an extension to South-East Asia of a Japanese version of the old Treaty Port system, and it was very similar to the arrangements that already existed in North China and Manchuria.
In the second phase, a product of the Pacific War itself, many more ad hoc arrangements were envisaged, and even in principle these were not very closely worked out in advance. The objectives remained the same, but there was great uncertainty as to how Japan should achieve those objectives. In reality, the decision-making process devolved upon the military authorities, not the Japanese Foreign Ministry nor even the new Greater East Asia Ministry. What did emerge was direct Japanese control of trade with Japan, direct Japanese financial investment in the countries concerned, and Japanese provision of shipping services. There were specific restrictions on local industries that might compete with Japanese targets and home industries. Resources ‘liberated’ by these measures were redirected into other areas of commercial activity. Specific attempts were made to modify local economies to make them self-sufficient in terms of fuel requirements. These provided the local economies with a relatively wide base: only exceptionally was one geographical area to be dependent for food or transport on another area. It is impossible to know with certainty what success this phase would have enjoyed, given the opportunity, for Japan of course lost the war. Nevertheless, again according to Professor Beasley’s reading of the facts, it would probably have proved too ambitious for Japan’s resources in terms of technology, manpower and finance. In the event, the most interesting aspect of this issue is the clear, racialist distinction that the Japanese made between their treatment of the peoples of North-East Asia and South-East Asia. Their aim in North-East Asia was to provide Japanese leadership in advance of a kind of self-determination and self-sufficiency that would benefit Japan. In the Southern Regions, however, the Japanese inherited the White Man’s Burden and contempt for the native populations. Notwithstanding the efforts of a few individuals to the contrary, there was no general desire by the Japanese Government or its administrators to encourage those countries to progress towards quasi-independence.
A vast reorganization of the Japanese Government was necessary to accommodate this remarkable attempt to rationalize the administration of Japan’s relations with her satellite states in a huge area extending from the frozen waters of the Amur River to the tropics of the south. In the process 170,000 government bureaucrats were transferred from agency to agency. Thirty-one bureaux and twelve departments were abolished or absorbed. That alone may convey a sense of the confusion and dislocations that the creation of this Ministry brought with it. Nevertheless, something had to be done. Thirty thousand technical experts and officials were wanted in the southern areas alone: they would have to come from somewhere and be responsible to someone. In the event, Tōgō’s fears proved amply justified. The Greater East Asia Ministry was rather successful in its sponsorship of cultural exchanges and studentships, but in virtually every other aspect of its function the Ministry had little power to restrain the Japanese military or naval governors of the occupied territories. The devastation and disruption of the war years made much more than that impracticable and unrealistic.
No attempt by a nominally civilian Ministry within a largely military Cabinet in Tokyo could hope to thwart or interfere with the pragmatic military administration of Japanese-occupied territories threatened by counter-invasion and subversion. It is doubtful whether more could have been done than the Japanese succeeded in doing in transporting economic resources, machinery, know-how and finished goods across seas infested with enemy submarines and swarming with Allied aircraft. The plain fact is that the Allied blockades were savagely effective. Once the spoils and stores of pre-war days had dwindled, far too little could be found or made to replace them.
The desperate reality was, however, still unclear to most people. It was to be found only in economic statistics, which were a military secret. One of the undeniable successes of the Japanese military was in concealing the weakness of its Intelligence alike from the enemy, from its colleagues in the Government of Japan, and from its own people. It was the consequence of the rigid drill in security which had been practised at least since 1930. Let nobody decry the effects of such a tight anti-espionage system. The consequence was that, in 1943, Japan, though already toppling on its feet of clay, was able to deny this knowledge to a large part of the world, including the Intelligence services of the Western Allies. They saw the advantages which Japan possessed, its still formidable Army, only a small part of which had so far been engaged in battle, and its tremendous morale. They were impressed by the fact that no rumours of mutiny ever reached them, and that there were no strikes or signs of civilian unrest in Japan. They were conscious too of the very great disadvantages under which they had to carry on the offensive against Japan. Japan held the inner lines, and could transport a stiffening of defence forces wherever these were threatened. The Japanese themselves were conscious of the immense handicap of enormous distance: the handicap that weapons, fuel, ammunition, cement and road materials, were being shot out in an unending flow, and vanishing across the Pacific Ocean. It needed a calm judgement in their adversaries to realize that this would tell against them, and that, sooner or later, the inherent deficiencies of the Japanese would force them to the huge convulsion of surrender.
Many of the lands taken over by the Japanese, and included in their fortress area, were the homes of nationalist movements which had come near erupting against their former white imperialist rulers. Japan, in letting loose its campaign against the Western Powers, had expressed its natural sympathies with Asian aspiration. The pricking of the balloon of western prestige, and the surprising ease with which the West was put to rout, had had a profound effect on everybody’s mind; though Japanese sympathy was largely propagandist, many Japanese themselves were sincerely committed to its aims. The campaigns thus had had the effect of intensifying the nationalist resolve. In some cases, Japanese propaganda had led the people of these South-East Asian countries to believe that Japanese conquests would automatically bring them independence. But time was lost by the Japanese in fulfilling these hopes. Had the peoples of South-East Asia merely exchanged white imperialism to pass under the rule of a Japanese Empire?
The territories occupied by Japan were at different stages of political development. In most of them, the British or American influence was strong. They had accepted the way of parliamentary democracy as holding out the best prospects of obtaining their independence, and since both the United States and Britain could apparently not envisage any other course of progress, they had accepted constitutions of a more or less truncated form of Westminster or Washington democracy. That the Asian nationalists had allowed themselves to be directed along these lines is one of the astonishing facts of the time. It is a sign of the political vitality in Asia of western ideas, which remained very vigorous in spite of the inefficiency which had been revealed by the western systems administratively. Japan, as was natural, was more open-minded about the forms of government which should ultimately prevail; it was inclined to be suspicious of all forms of democracy, as being intrusions by the West into the East, and seemed to favour instead the forms which emerged from fascism (though these were as much of western origin), but it recognized that, in the storm of war, it was in no position to apply itself to political experiment in South-East Asia. It preferred to leave this for the years of peace which it hoped would follow, and for the time being to make do with provisional, makeshift forms of government. The régimes which Japan set up in the areas under its control usually took the form of a committee of the existing political parties, relieved of control by parliaments, which it declared abolished. The Governments themselves used most of the institutions with which they were already familiar. The Japanese, as has been noted here, were fond of regarding their activities as an asiatic adaptation of the Monroe Doctrine, and to a dispassionate observer it must be said that in their applications of that concept they tended to treat the countries of the southern regions like various species of transplanted Latin American banana republics.
In Burma the new Government was set up by a brief decree. In the Philippines, a Philippine Executive Commission, consisting of seven well-known politicians, took over the Government. In Malaya, which was more backward politically, the Japanese were content to preserve the forms of government through the sultanates. It is illuminating to see how, in the more developed countries – Burma and the Philippines – the tracks which they had been following before the war still governed their minds and set the tone of their political life.
The fate of Burma in these years is especially worthy of study. U Ba Maw, a lawyer, a party leader and former Prime Minister under the British, was designated by the Japanese as national leader in 1942. He later published a book, Breakthrough in Burma, which gives a clear picture of Burma under the Japanese. At first there was confusion. Japan raised the Burmese Independence Army, which has already been described, to harry the British, but this, attracting the elements normally associated with banditry, grew out of hand; it was liable, from the first, to turn upon the Japanese. Ba Maw, once appointed by the Japanese, had as his first mission the task of restoring order in Burma, on which he worked closely with the Japanese.
There was a period of euphoria, a festival of feeling Asian. Ba Maw describes in his book how
… on both sides we believed in an ultimate Axis victory, which would wipe out the western empires in Asia for ever. This lasted for several months, during which the leaders of the various political and communal groups went out to the districts in mixed teams on a ‘trust Japan’ campaign. The Japanese on their part reciprocated by giving the Central Government as much independence as their notion of independence would allow, and also by supplying us with most of the essential commodities and services we lacked and needed. This was the Asian relationship between the two sides in the first months of our administration.∗
Ba Maw recognized that tension rose because of the different aims and interests of the Japanese and the Burmese.
The Japanese wanted the Burmese to put victory in the larger world war before their own limited political objectives in Burma, whereas the Burmese wanted to gain those objectives first and at once. Thus a basic contradiction which already existed when our administration was formed now began to harden and divide the two peoples. My view about this matter is that the blame lay with both sides, but more with the Japanese. They were a far more immature people in that they proved to be so devoid of judgement in their dealings with others, so domineering and blinded by delusions of their own racial grandeur and Asian destiny when it was most clearly in their interests to move with history by getting rid of all such racial nonsense. They could have achieved so much more if they could only have shown a spirit of true Asian fellowship and equality with the other peoples in Asia instead of claiming, in defiance of the clear world trends, to be ‘more equal’ than the others. This happened not only in Burma but all over South-East Asia.†
In spite of this, Ba Maw’s personal relations with many Japanese continued to be good. It is true that he had continual difficulty with the more brutal type of officer, and claims that he was constantly in conflict with them for the protection of the Burmese people. He condemns utterly the soldiers brought in from China, who had been hardened by long experience of occupying that country of hostile people. He gives details of the Japanese mania for slapping people, and of their insensitiveness to Burmese custom and convention. But the Japanese at the top make a very different impression. Of Lieutenant-General Iida Shōjirō, the Commander-in-Chief in Burma, he says:
I found him to be the best type of Japanese soldier, human, fatherly, and very understanding, a militarist on the surface, but not altogether so deeper down; at least he always tried to see things your way too, which was what made him different from the other militarists. It gave him a good deal of inner perception, particularly of the fact that a war can be won or lost in many ways and for many reasons, one of the surest ways to lose it being to rouse the hostility and resistance of a whole people.∗
And of Field Marshal Terauchi Hisaichi, who was the Supreme Commander of all the Japanese forces in South-East Asia, he says:
As a person I found him to be really remarkable, a handsome, princely figure, out of a long and mellow feudal past, and yet belonging very much to the present in Japan. I had thought that as the chief of the conquering Japanese army he would most incarnate the dizzy reflexes of the conquest, but I was completely wrong. It may have been because I had least expected to find it in him, but the quality which struck me particularly was his essential humanity. Unlike most other militarists, this consummate war lord was not afraid to show that he was also human, and precisely because of this he understood us better than many around him.†
Even General Tōjō Hideki, the Japanese Prime Minister who had unleashed the Pacific War which had enveloped Burma, gets a good report from Ba Maw.
National relations, as distinct from personal ones, however, continued to be bad. The Japanese Army continued to insist that the Burmese puppet Government was ultimately responsible to it. It continued to make demands on the Burmese civil servants which outraged them; and continued to produce a type of myopic and over-confident officer who angered the Burmese by racial arrogance. They were notorious for seizing the crops and carts of the peasantry; for insisting on forced labour, for intervening everywhere.
Relations became so strained that ultimately the Government in Tokyo felt that it must make a great effort at their improvement. Early in 1943 General Tōjō announced in the Japanese Diet that Burma would be declared to be independent within a year. Japan had grasped that independence was the deep longing in the soul of the peoples of South-East Asia, and that, if this were granted, Japan could continue in fact to direct their policies. There followed some hard bargaining over the exact form of their future relationship, in which the Japanese Army endeavoured to stipulate that it should have the legal right to intervene if the Burmese Government departed from agreed principles. In the face of Burmese opposition, it accepted instead a treaty of alliance between the two countries, in which they simply pledged their cooperation for the self-determined development of all the countries of South-East Asia. These negotiations were completed by August 1943, and the declaration of Burma’s complete freedom was made in conditions of apparent reconciliation and confidence. Japan had certainly made an effort at overcoming hostility. But Ba Maw concludes on a disillusioned note:
On the Japanese side, many militarists went back to their old ways again. They could never remember for long that the Burmese were now a free people. I have already mentioned their charge against me that I took our independence too seriously. The cause of the mischief was that they wanted it both ways; they wanted the Burmese to fight the war as people defending their own independence and yet in other matters they were to behave as if they were not independent. The militarists merely changed their argument; previously they had tried to impose their will upon us in the name of military administration, and now it was in the name of military necessity without bothering to convince us that there was really any necessity at all; and as the pressures increased they refused even to argue about the necessities, but treated them as Japanese imperatives which ruled out all argument. Knowing how critical the situation had become we tried to go along some of the way with them, but they wanted us to go the whole way, which was clearly impossible unless we were convinced of the need for doing so. Thereupon these little war lords accused me of trying to subvert their war effort; and so we drifted further apart.∗
At the end of the same year, 1943, Japan made a further effort at demonstrating that it was really in earnest in seeking, by the gift of independence, to gain the friendship of Asia. It convened a conference in Tokyo between Japan and five Governments, those of Burma, the Philippines, Thailand, Manchukuo, and of the anti-Chiang segments of China. It also invited the Indian refugee leader, Subhas Chandra Bose.
The Dutch East Indies had been omitted from the countries invited to take part, being barred from any prospect of regional independence. The Japanese attitude towards this territory was always peculiar. The nationalist movement there was as strong as, or stronger than, that in Burma; and the national parties had made it plain that they desired the same coveted gift of independence. Japan, however, was not so understanding in their case. The Supreme Command firmly refused to allow Japan to commit itself on its post-war status, either because it was so rich economically that it was unwilling for Japan to forgo the possibility of annexing it and retaining it as a prize of war, or because it wished to keep it as something to bargain over with the Western Allies at the eventual peace settlement. In the meantime, the Dutch East Indies were governed by the Japanese military, tempered by local councils. Some of the Japanese Ministers thought that this was a mistake, and would have been very willing to buy amity at the price of eventual independence; but, at an Imperial Conference in May 1943, the views of the Supreme Command had prevailed. They had not changed by the time of the East Asia Conference in November.
The Conference met for two days at the beginning of November. Opportunity was given for the oratory of several eloquent statesmen; their speeches were widely reported; some of them took the chance of ingratiating themselves with the Japanese. Most of those who took part, and the Japanese, felt that the Conference had been helpful to them. At its end a joint declaration was issued, which pledged everybody concerned to work for Asian independence – which had become the fixed idea of all the lesser countries of Asia – and to support each other in the cause. In many respects it was gloriously visionary and spiritually uplifting.
More than this was hardly to be expected of a political conference which had been called to demonstrate happiness and unity, not to discuss differences. The final resolution spoke, it is true, of economic cooperation. Japan had been pressing the idea of the economic interdependence of the region, and of the benefit, for all the countries of the area, of economic connection with Japan. The concept was a kind of Asian Common Market linked to that old familiar idea of a Japanese Monroe Doctrine.
One purpose of that Conference had apparently been to embarrass the Western Allies and, by demonstrating that total independence had become the political currency in Japanese Asia, to deter them from pressing on with plans for its reconquest. A rather more subtle aim may have been to cause dissension between Great Britain and the United States. Japan was aware of the American criticism of Great Britain for its tardiness in meeting the demands of nationalism, and it counted on causing further disputes between the Allies if it stirred up the nationalist claims still more. The difference in outlook towards nationalism between Britain and America was, in this and many other matters, the chink in their armour which Japan tried to exploit. At the same time Japanese propaganda had attempted to persuade the Australians that the eruptions of American influences in Australia were incompatible with the national independence of the Antipodean Dominions. Japan had attempted to convince the people of South-East Asia that it was the sincere friend of the independence of their national units. At the same time Japan, by its action, demonstrated that it was establishing a new Empire in place of the one which had been overthrown.
Similar experiences to those of Ba Maw with the Japanese were repeated again and again by other peoples of South-East Asia. Everywhere at first their expectations had been favourably aroused; the Japanese arrived to general acclamation; their victories gave them glory; they strode over the vanishing West with pleasure. The mise en scène was admirably contrived for Japanese achievement. Restraint, moderation, modesty would have paid them huge dividends. But instead of even pretending to live up to their propaganda about the new age of Asian brotherliness, with which they flooded the countries taken over, most Japanese, and especially the Army, made no secret of the fact that they considered that they had won an Empire, and were intent on enjoying it. Nearly all instruments of the Japanese state were under the firm control of the Supreme Command, and this was determined not to release any prize which Japanese arms had gained. Those people in South-East Asia with a sophisticated understanding of the ways of government could see the callous, and more or less disguised, ways in which the Japanese economic and political instruments set about exploiting them; those who relied upon their eyes for information saw the Japanese, with a naïve disregard of consequence, humiliating the people, insulting their customs, not bothering to learn their languages, and enjoying the confusion.
There were certainly many Japanese, even many Japanese generals and high officers, who, traditionally civilized, understood the sensibilities of subject peoples. The Japanese Foreign Ministry, some Japanese politicians and some businessmen struggled hard to get official sanction for more generous policies. Many of them genuinely believed that the future of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere depended upon efforts to cultivate mutual respect and amity between its constituent nations. As Tōgō Shigenori foresaw, his dream that ‘Japan, as an advanced nation of East Asia, was to assist in the development of the other nations and the territory of this area, thereby bringing about through peaceful means the prosperity of all’ was a vision of ‘mutual assistance’ which ‘left no room for any thought of control by military force’. Tōgō and others like him were not blind to the writing on the wall in South-East Asia, and understood the strength of national feeling. That Japan was as receptive as it was, and that, at the top level, it was willing to meet Ba Maw and the other nationalists half way, says much for the quiet pertinacity with which they struggled. This (and the worsening position of Japan in the war) brought Independence for the Philippines in September 1943 in the same way that it had come in Burma. But it bore the same sense of sham and unreality as long as the Japanese Army and the much more dreaded military police were there and took the law into their hands. The milder Japanese were terrorized into acquiescence by the general will of the Japanese Army which was to plunder and oppress. In face of the mass descent on to South-East Asia of the military machine, in face of the reality of Japanese extortion, brutality and incompetence, Japanese good intentions were advertised in vain. In a very short time, their Empire had exhausted its credit, and the Japanese uniform had made itself detested.
In mid-1943 the British reorganized their command system in Asia. They recognized that Delhi was no longer the ideal centre for the headquarters of the military. It was too heavy with history, and had too many historic distractions. Essentially it was the base of the Indian Army; and this was not suited for a war such as the present one, involving amphibious operations and regional East Asian diplomacy. The eyes of a General Staff in India were apt to fix on India’s North-West Frontier, and on the Middle East. Only by constant effort could they be prevailed upon to study the Burma frontier, and to give due weight to new Allies and friends, the hard-pressed Chinese and peoples of South-East Asia. It appeared best to wrench the command away from its old associations, and to locate it at some centre where it could achieve a more correct view of the war. New men were to be brought in, to operate from a new centre. It would be one in which more attention was paid to voices which went unheeded in Delhi. The command was in fact divided: Delhi continued to be responsible for the Indian Army in its home organization; the new command was to be responsible for mobilizing and directing all forces involved in the attack against Japan in the East. It would include all three services, Army, Navy and Air Force.
At the Quebec Conference of the Allied Powers in 1944, it was decided that the new command should be located at Colombo. It was to be under Vice-Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten. He was a cousin of King George VI, and it was felt that royal status would give him additional prestige in dealing with Britain’s Allies, and discharging the political duties which it was clear the post would involve. It was to be international; Mountbatten was to be equally responsible to the British Prime Minister and to the American President. Undoubtedly the arrangement was well conceived; it gave a new tone to the British war effort in the Indian Ocean: it created a new race of military planners who were free from traditional concerns.
A further ingenious tie-up of the command was made by appointing General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell as the deputy of the Supreme Commander. He was the American general who was simultaneously acting as a ranking general of the Chinese Nationalist Army. His aims and objects had diverged greatly from those of the British, of whose military achievements he thought meanly. By this provision, he, and the Chinese, secured a share in the command; at the same time it proved easier to control him.
Mountbatten proved a less heavy-weight figure than is sometimes supposed but an ample complement to General MacArthur and to Admiral Nimitz as a member of the triumvirate by which the rest of the war was directed. He was a scientifically minded commander, and many first-rate scientists from England appeared on his staff at Colombo: a happening which in Delhi would have been thought eccentric. He was not the most able of military commanders but he more than made up for that with a gift for public relations which he used, among other ends, for establishing a rapport with the troops, many of whom had been dangerously demoralized when Mountbatten was appointed. He had in fact something of the personal glamour of the filmstar, which the public, as the war progressed, increasingly demanded of troop commanders. In a word, he had style, and he was well loved.
With these developments, there faded out one of the most impressive commanders of the war, Archibald Wavell. It is true that Field Marshal Lord Wavell continued for a time as Commander-in-Chief in India, and that in the summer of 1943 he was made Viceroy of India; as such he enjoyed political power. But as a maker of war strategy his role was finished. He had played an original, if an inadequately appreciated, part. As Commander in the Middle East in the early part of the war he had borne the brunt of the early attacks by the Italians. He had been starved of resources, and, by bluff and intellectual ability, he had won successes against immense odds. At the beginning of the Japanese War, he had been appointed to Supreme Command of the troops in Malaya and in the Dutch East Indies, in addition to India, in the hope that, with his quite inadequate force, he might work the same miracle that he had done in the Middle East. The task was a hopeless one; Wavell, also, was a tired man by this time, and had lost a part of his cunning. By temperament an intellectual who combined reflection, and a strange kind of mysticism, with a life of action, a natural scholar whose career had been among soldiers, he failed to achieve recognition among the politicians who mattered because of an inability – or rather an unwillingness – to instil among his colleagues and subordinates a cult based on nothing more substantial than his own personality.
The creation of the Colombo Command put new energy into the conduct of British propaganda. It began to be classed as one of the major instruments of war.
Propaganda work had begun before Pearl Harbor. It had been centred in Singapore in an office called the Bureau of the British Ministry of Information, and had operated through the information sections of different British missions in the Far East, such as the British consulate in Shanghai. The early network, which thus came into existence, was disrupted when the Japanese captured most of these places, including Singapore. They were especially severe on prisoners who had any connection with this organization. This was not because they realized the latent power of propaganda, but because they assumed – not without reason – that a Bureau of Information must be concerned with espionage, of which they were particularly afraid. Certainly the Bureau of Information had three functions: it collected intelligence, distributed it throughout the information-hungry channels of the Empire, and performed valuable propaganda fuctions too. The officer who was Director General of the Bureau, Robert Scott, formerly in the Consular Service in China, had first-hand experience of the Japanese which encompassed a period of service in Manchuria between October 1931 and February 1932, during the initial Japanese onslaught there. He had also been the Acting Commercial Counsellor at Shanghai in the first three months of the China Incident. Now he had a very grim experience during the years of captivity. The Japanese had a curious respect for legality, and were unwilling to execute their victims unless they had made a confession. Time and again, in an effort to extort this confession, they imposed savage tortures on him. He refused to confess, and therefore survived: but when he came out of prison he weighed only 70 pounds.
With Singapore lost, an organization had to be built afresh. It was centred on Delhi; and soon a staff with a highly international flavour was put together – Chinese, Indonesians, Dutch, Frenchmen, Greeks, Hungarians – all the cosmopolitan elements which had escaped from Shanghai and Hong Kong and had taken refuge in India. Some of them were journalists or writers, some were businessmen, a few had been politicians. Their collective knowledge of the Far East was variegated and extensive. The predominant personality was the gifted and imaginative Director of Broadcasting, John Galvin. He was an Irish Australian who, in a crowded life, seemed to have prepared himself for the role he now had to play. He had a vision of Asia as a force to be reckoned with in the world of the future, when the Japanese should have been thrown back to their own shores. He could appeal to intelligent nationalist sentiment in the occupied territories because of the genuinely democratic quality of his own outlook; upon the organization of propaganda he brought to bear original talents, and extraordinary energy and resourcefulness.
By all the regular methods of propaganda, by broadcasts from a radio station set up by Galvin in New Delhi, by pamphlets and books, by the organization of a news-reporting service which was accurate about defeat and could be trusted in accounts of victory, little by little the British version of the war was radiated out. The propagandists in New Delhi exposed the falseness of the Japanese claim for a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. They stripped Japan of the claim to be anything but an old-fashioned imperialist Power. They gave to the Asian world the lively sense that western power still existed, was preparing for a riposte, and had good hopes of a future in which men could live at liberty and peace. They transformed the image of India from being a country in collapse to being a power house in which returning armies were girding on invincible force.
Of the powerful effect of this invisible arm of the British Army there can be little doubt. Ba Maw speaks in his memoirs of the disquieting effect in Burma of British propaganda and the British agent on the minds of a rather mercurial population. The sense that the British were gone was undermined by the awareness that British eyes were still upon them, and that the slightest and most intimate details of the Burmese districts were being discussed in London and Delhi.
The propaganda had more effect on the peoples who were subordinate, and rather unruly, allies of Japan than on Japan itself. Showers of propaganda burst unavailingly on the granite of Japanese civilian morale, and the Japanese Army was never known to have lost a battle, to have flagged in any way, or to have been at all diverted from its purposes by any of the wiles of psychological warfare.
It was proof against American propaganda no less than against British. A most effective instrument at the United States’ disposal was a broadcasting station at San Francisco beamed at Japan. Propaganda was backed up by the useful research done in numerous centres. On the whole, however, American arms gained little support from the labour of American propagandists against the apparently monolithic Japanese.
On the other side, only perfunctory use of propaganda was made by the Japanese. Indeed, both Japanese and Chinese seemed to pay only a perfunctory regard to the possibilities of propaganda until the very end of the war. No Japanese figure rose to play anything like the same part as Dr Goebbels, Minister of Enlightenment in Nazi Germany. Japanese propaganda was directed chiefly towards the people of the countries that it occupied, or planned to attack. The media which it used were the same as those employed by its adversary, predominantly the wireless and the printed word. But there is little to be said of this side of Japan’s war effort. On the whole it was parched for lack of imagination.
Thus all the eastern world resounded, both with explosives and with the monotonous exchange of propaganda. Inter arma silent leges: but the media of mass communications were busier than ever. Every nation talked with every other; to argue with it, to inform or mislead about the direction of hostilities. America spoke to Japan. Japan spoke to South-East Asia. Britain spoke through numerous languages on the Delhi radio. In this general post there was one notable exception. Britain did not speak to India. The British political warfare executives operated from Indian soil, and used Indian facilities, but in return for this the British Government had given an undertaking that radio propaganda would be directed outwardly, and that it would not use these instruments for arguing with Indian public opinion.
The Indian Government had its own propaganda organization. This, though partly operated by British staff, conceived its task rather differently from the outward-directed political warfare. Its task was limited to explaining to the people of India the motives of the Government of India in fighting the war, and to demonstrating the progress it was making. It was not to debate with Indians the rights and wrongs of their differences with the British. From this use of the radio, the British barred themselves. They accepted the limitation formally; and investigation shows that on the whole they stuck by this agreement. The British never, for example, put over to Indian opinion its own case on Indian constitutional developments, as it stated this in broadcasts to America. The motive was that the British feared to aggravate India the more by supplying its own commentary on events. As was usual, it put its confidence in bland silence; which of course in the end was the more provoking.
The Allies announced, at the Cairo Conference of the United States, Britain and China, in November 1943, the severe peace terms which they proposed to exact from Japan. They were not put forward as opening the way to peace, as a bait to negotiation: the Allies intended them as declaring their programme of action, and as an encouragement to China, and as a persuasion of China to remain in the war. Japan’s overseas Empire was to be forfeit; it must surrender unconditionally. At first, this declaration did not have the deflationary effect on Japanese morale which had been hoped for. Japan, which privately had already begun to envisage the possibility of defeat, was, however, optimistic that it could avoid the worst consequences. It knew the very great defensive strength of its position, due to geography. It was confident that the United States and Britain would not be unmindful of the vast losses in manpower which they would have to incur in the last stages of the war if it came to a struggle to land in Japan itself. The United States and Britain would, it was sure, snatch at the possibility of a reasonable negotiation, in which much of what Japan judged to be indispensable could be preserved.
Therefore Japan interpreted the menacing words from Cairo as being a good deal less than their face value. They were reassured also by the absence of a Russian signature to them. Russia, though it was allied to the US and Britain, was active only in the German War, and had not committed itself to the eastern conflict. The Conference at Cairo had been designed to take place without the Soviet Union being represented, since Soviet Russia was unwilling to compromise its neutrality in the Pacific. Japan saw this and was deeply relieved. If Russia was firmly attached to neutrality in 1943, what might be its position in a year or two, when its experience with its Western Allies had further frayed its nerves? Besides, was it in the real interests of any of the Great Powers to destroy Japan as an organized force, and open the way to another Power to occupy the vacuum? Did the United States or Britain desire to make a ruin there in which Communism could flourish? Japan still had sufficient reason for not regarding the Cairo Declaration as an accurate forecast of history.
Moreover Japan was to nurse, until the very end, false comfort from its long immunity from occupation. Japan, alone of Asian countries, had never known the tramp of invading armies. It had come to believe that it was especially protected by the gods from the hand of war. For a warlike people, the Japanese had been singularly little affected by threats from abroad. Only twice, in the thirteenth century, had Japan itself been in danger from invasion by foreign soldiers. In the time of Kubla Khan, in 1274 and again in 1281, great Mongol armadas had set sail to conquer the small island empire, and annex it as a tributary. They were seemingly irresistible; Japan seemed done for; it quaked with terror, while it began to defend every inch of the way against those troops who had managed to land. But on each occasion great storms scattered and wrecked the mighty fleets, and the invaders stood no chance. These events became a part of the national memory. The kamikaze or ‘divine wind’ which had saved Japan in the thirteenth century was expected, until the very end, to blow again, or the divine protection would manifest itself in some other guise.
The wind was not to blow. Russia entered the war, America put its trust in an army of occupation to avert Communism. The eventual peace was almost identical with the terms of the Cairo Conference. But no American or British life was lost storming the beaches of Honshu.