CHAPTER 24
THE attention now turns to the American offensive, far across the Pacific, and it turns away from all the other theatres of the Asian War. Fighting still continued in these, but it became obvious that it was irrelevant. The turmoil in the Pacific dwarfed all other, and this became increasingly so until the end.
In the middle of June 1944, the Americans invaded Saipan in the Mariana Islands. This island, 1,350 miles from Tokyo, was the most vital point in the outer defences of Japan. It had become strongly fortified, so strongly that even the naval experts believed it to be impregnable. Its strategic importance was appreciated; from Saipan, the Americans would be able to bomb Tokyo; they could also disrupt the communications of the remaining forward posts in the Pacific with Japan. Its loss would breach what was called in Japanese ‘the absolute zone of national defences’.
The Americans had assembled huge forces. They had an escort fleet, for the troop transports for the invasion, of 7 battleships, 12 escort carriers, 11 cruisers and 91 destroyers. It took only half an hour for the assault forces to get ashore at Saipan, but it still remained to be captured. At once the Japanese assembled their still very formidable fleet, and sought a decisive battle. They had foreseen the American moves and were not taken by surprise; they had ample strength in Guam and in the islands of the Philippines. The battle which resulted was the fourth large-scale naval combat of the war. The sense of occasion was in the message of the Japanese admiral to the fleet before the action began: ‘The fate of the Empire rests on this one battle.’
The result was entirely disastrous to Japan. The successive strikes by Japanese aircraft were beaten off, and in the whole battle Japan lost nearly four hundred aircraft. The destruction of these, and the repelling of the Japanese attacks, were more spectacular than the loss of ships, though the operation cost the Japanese two battleships and an aircraft-carrier; two other carriers were disabled. This was far beyond the capacity of the Japanese shipyards, at this stage of the war, to make good. The American damage was very slight.
As was usual, the Japanese Navy silenced the news of the defeat. Even high officials of the Foreign Office remained without knowledge of what had been happening. They were especially confused because, after the defeat, they were invited by naval officers to banquets to celebrate a great Japanese triumph.
Admiral Toyoda Soemu, die-hard Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet from May 1944 to May 1945 and Chief of the Naval General Staff during the last five months of the war, told investigators of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey that retrospectively he believed that, at the beginning of the Pacific Conflict, American submarines had posed a greater danger to Japan than any other enemy weapon system. Nevertheless, he stressed, the principal threat to Japan throughout virtually the whole Greater East Asia War had come from the depredations of US Navy surface forces. The other forces of the United States and their Allies were of far less importance. The critical factor was oil. Japanese fuel shortages had become serious as early as Midway, when fleet oil usage had far exceeded expectation. This had a knock-on effect felt in all subsequent operations. The real turning-point, however, was the loss of Japanese control in the Philippines, for thereafter American air and naval control over South China was secure and Japanese shipping lanes to the south were completely cut off: ‘By the time of the Saipan operations, the greatest hindrance to the drafting of the operations plans was the fact that we did not have sufficient tankers to support it.’
The fall of Saipan could not, however, be hidden. The news began to circulate in the middle of July 1944. To most people it came as an entire shock, and for the first time the average Japanese, without any such information as had been weighing on the experts, began to surmise that Japan was in fact losing the war. Saipan had fallen with such ease; the Americans were ahead of their timetable. An evident frisson went through the nation, well disciplined though it continued to be.
A result was the resignation of General Tōjō, who had remained not only the Prime Minister but Minister of War, Minister of Munitions and Chief of the Army General Staff. He fell, now, after a complicated intrigue of the politicians. This was the first sign of serious political malaise which had come from Japan during the war; and it was received with relief by those watching among its enemies. The actual procedures by which government changes were brought about in Japan were as a rule more convoluted and dynamic than the dry official processes engraved on the marble cornerstone of the Japanese Constitution. In this instance, a group of high civilian and Army officers, especially those who had formerly held official positions, began to agitate more strongly for what they had long wanted in their hearts: that General Tōjō’s Cabinet should resign. Saipan had caused them to open their eyes, and to press their arguments as a matter of life or death. Their dissensions were heard at high level, and they arranged that they should be transmitted to the throne.
A great agitation was set afoot among a large circle of those holding the various offices of importance. Tōjō, who, a week earlier had apparently been completely safe, suddenly found the ground trembling under his feet. He sought to appease his critics by yielding to one of their demands, and proposed that he should no longer combine the posts of Prime Minister, War Minister and Chief of the Army Staff. The arrangements were made for General Umezu Yoshijirō to become Chief of the Army General Staff. But by this time, the opinion of the inner circle had moved on, and it could be satisfied with nothing less than the resignation of Tōjō as Prime Minister. He demurred, and argued in vain. On the day of the announcement of the loss of Saipan, on 18 July 1944, his resignation from all his duties was in the hands of the Emperor.
The choice of a successor to the premiership fell to a formal group of seven elder statesmen, the Jūshin, all former prime ministers themselves. This body was unknown to the written constitution; it had in consequence no rights, such as access to government papers; it came, however, to exercise great power. It had an influence like that of the Genrō, or elder statesmen, though the power of the Genrō had been openly recognized. The re-entry to Japanese politics of such an influence was important. It was the more so at this period because the Jūshin had tended, with some exceptions, to work for peace. Most of them thought that the war was irrevocably lost, that the leaders knew this well, but that, floundering and indecisive, they saw no means of terminating it.
Their deliberations about Tōjō’s replacement appear to have been unsubtle. All they could do was to agree on the nomination of General Koiso Kuniaki, an Army officer who had a bad reputation from the days of terrorism in the thirties when the Army was promoting a series of crises with the civilian Ministers in order to advance its claims of controlling the Government.
At the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident, Koiso had been Chief of the powerful Military Affairs Bureau in the War Ministry, one of the big ‘Three Chiefs’. When the Japanese Army’s conquest of Manchuria was secure, he was promoted to Vice-Minister of War. Shortly after the establishment of Manchukuo, he was then sent to serve as Chief of Staff of the Kwantung Army and as head of the Japanese Army’s secret service there in the critical period between August 1932 and March 1934. A year and a half later, he became Commander-in-Chief of the Korean Army and held that position until he temporarily fell from grace at the outbreak of the Changkufeng Incident in July 1938. From then on, he was to make his mark as a reliable manager in Japan’s exploitation of its occupied territories: he served two terms as Minister of Overseas (Colonial) Affairs, firstly in the six months which led up to the outbreak of the European War, and then during the first six months of 1940. When the China War spilled out into the Pacific, Koiso was on the sidelines. So long as General Tōjō was in power, Koiso was kept well away from duties which might undermine Tōjō’s influence. At the time of General Koiso’s recall to Tokyo to take up the premiership of Japan, he had been Governor-General of Korea since the middle of 1942. He had a track record as a competent administrator, someone who could make sense of civil/military relations. The Emperor, however, appointed him as Prime Minister simply beause he had been recommended by the Jushin: it was the established way. The thing was done properly.
It was a choice which was apparently made under the compulsion of avoiding events such as those which had happened a year earlier in Italy. The elder statesmen judged it necessary to avoid nominating a man who might play in Japan the same part as General Badoglio. The extent to which Badoglio had captured the mind of Japan is curious. It showed perhaps how much the Japanese desired a Badoglio, and for how long they found it imperative not to disclose this.
Kase Toshikazu, a senior Foreign Ministry official, has described these confused and rather dark transactions. He himself belonged to the ‘pro-British, pro-American’ circles. His book, Eclipse of the Rising Sun, is useful in showing how many of these men had continued thoughout the war to hold high position in the Foreign Office, in certain Ministries, at the imperial court. They had been inactive from prudence: from the fall of Saipan, however, they began to work for peace. They still had to be very cautious, for they would have been rendered helpless if it had become known how specific, and actively specific, were their intentions. By their sympathies becoming known they would at best have made themselves ineffective: at the worst they would have been assassinated. And there were of course many who, when the war was over, claimed to have been pro-Ally, but whose memory may have exaggerated its degree.
At the start of 1944, Kase Toshikazu wrote in his diary the following:
Defeat now stares us stark in the face. There is only one question left: how can we avert the chaos attendant upon a disastrous defeat? The preservation of my fatherland, that is a paramount task assigned to me by fate. The hostile attack is developing so surprisingly swiftly that it may be that diplomacy cannot intervene before it is too late. I must redouble my efforts to expedite the restoration of peace. For that purpose I shall secure friends in the army who will collaborate with me secretly, and enlighten public opinion through wider exchanges of view with politicians, publicists and press representatives. The chances are that the re-orientation of our policy is yet feasible. If so the nation will escape annihilation. Even so, it will probably be accompanied by civil disturbances. Much blood will flow – and who knows that mine, too, will not be spilt?… This, in short, is my New Year’s Day prayer.∗
This sums up very well the feeling of the small class of clear-sighted, non-fanatical men. But a difficult task lay ahead for them. Rase Toshikazu and his friends had to convert a sufficient number of patriotic Japanese to enable them to shift the vital balance against the fanatical, the deluded and the ignorant. They had to do this with the certain knowledge that charges of treason might well be brought against them, and would be paid for either with execution or else by the familiar old Japanese resort to private violence.
The American drive from the Pacific continued. After Saipan, the strongly fortified positions of Tinian and Guam were captured in August 1944. These were also considerable victories, made possible only by mobilization of resources, and their concentration upon tiny islands, which were possibly unique in military history. A feature of all these operations was the disparity of the losses. The Americans should in theory, being attackers, have suffered at least three to one more heavily than the Japanese. But, in all three operations, the American dead numbered just over 5,000, while the Japanese lost 42,000. On Guam, for the first time, there had been a dent in Japanese morale: over 12,000 prisoners were taken. Usually these island defences ended in a great banzai charge of the remaining garrison, who plunged to death, rather like the death charge of the chivalry among the Rajputs of medieval India, who vowed themselves thus to self-destruction. The generals on both Saipan and Guam committed ceremonial seppaku.
In October, General MacArthur, in the South-West Pacific, made his expected attack on the Philippines. He was still under the disadvantage of the somewhat complicated command arrangements which shared between him and Admiral Nimitz the control of operations in his area. He could count upon a powerful fleet detached from the Central Pacific. Japan chose to regard his attack as a crisis of the war. Its generals recognized that, if the Philippines were occupied by the Americans, the supply lines of the Japanese Empire would be fatally obstructed. Therefore Japan stated that, on its ability to defend the Philippines, the issue of the war would depend.
Such repeated pronouncements were foolish, and, in making them, the Japanese generals should have had in mind their grave embarrassment if their defence proved ineffective. They would be in the position of carrying on the war even while admitting that the war was a lost cause. That they permitted themselves so talk so rashly was the best proof that the morale of the Japanese General Staff was beginning to fail even though the Japanese soldiers fought as tenaciously as before.
The Japanese lived up to the words of their military leaders. They gathered their Navy, which was still very powerful in surface ships – only in the loss of the aircraft-carriers had it been gravely weakened – and sought, by putting all their effort into a single decisive blow, to turn their great danger into a decisive victory. And circumstances played into their hands. It had been calculated that the local airfields would be operational for the landings, but the rainy season broke, and they were flooded. The Japanese had a period of air superiority, flying in from Samar. For a few days it was touch and go whether the American advance would be disastrously defeated.
MacArthur’s invasion force, which landed on 20 October 1944 on the shores of the Gulf of Leyte which is a central island of the Philippines, had the protection of very powerful warships. The Japanese sought to lure this naval force away by sending a decoy fleet, and then, with a much larger fleet, aimed to sink the American transports, and to destroy MacArthur’s Army, which was to be taken at a disadvantage while they were still engaged in disembarkation. The Japanese placed their confidence in the battle upon the greater fire power of the Japanese Navy; the days of attacking by waves of aircraft from carriers was over, since the Japanese naval air force had been virtually eliminated. The Navy was back to reliance upon its battleship fleet, and among this it included the battleship, Yamato, which had been built free of the former limitations on the size of battleships. It was the most formidable ship in the world, well-protected and mounting eighteen-inch guns which fired 3,220 lb (1460 kg) projectiles to a range of up to twenty-six miles (41.4 km).
If they had succeeded in their plan, the Japanese would have achieved a second Pearl Harbor, this time destroying the American Army in Asia as formerly they had annihilated the American Pacific Fleet. Even so, the United States, with its economic might only just beginning to operate at its full strength, could, in all reasonable probability, have regarded a defeat as a temporary setback, and the inevitable conclusion of the war would have been merely postponed by a year or so. But, though this possibility must have been clear to the Japanese admirals, an interruption of the continuous American advance would have been dear to them. They rejoiced in the likelihood of a pause in the war: Japanese optimism would have taken on new life: victory would have set alive again Japanese hopes that their staying power might outlast America’s. Nobody can foresee all the unexpected circumstances which might happen in war. Given time, Japan could begin to hope that the germs of a negotiated peace might sprout.
MacArthur’s moves had therefore created a situation more fraught with consequence than even he, with his flair for reading the Japanese mind, at first realized. His landing had created a profound stir, alike in America and throughout Asia. He had chosen the elements of drama. He was not far from the point from which he had made his take-off in his direct contact with the Japanese in 1942, and, as he had promised to do, he had returned. But at once the Japanese Navy pounced, and dreamed of plucking from this nettle, danger, the flower, which might be the checking of the American guillotine as it was about to fall, the dismantling of the instrument, and the creation of the necessity to rebuild it if the war were to continue. Its ships, some from Borneo, some from Formosa and Japan itself, converged upon the Gulf of Leyte.
The officer in command of the Japanese fleet was Admiral Toyoda Soemu. There is no doubt of the merit of his overall plan, which he directed at long range from Tokyo. The ships from Japan he formed into a decoy force, with which he aimed at dividing the Americans from their protective force of battleships and aircraft-carriers, which were commanded by Admiral W. F. Halsey. This force included what remained of Japan’s once formidable fleet of aircraft-carriers; it was less strong than it seemed for, as was discovered afterwards, the Japanese carriers sailed empty of planes. Japan had used up its planes and pilots, many of the last batch of these at the futile battle of Guam, and oil was running desperately short. Nevertheless, the manoeuvre was successful. Admiral Halsey went in pursuit, and left MacArthur dangerously exposed.
With two forces of battleships which were held in readiness in Borneo, Toyoda planned to attack the American transport fleet as soon as it was deprived of much of its protective escort. The first of these forces was exceptionally powerful; it contained five battleships, all of them larger and faster than any which they were still liable to meet. Toyoda gambled on these making unimpeded contact with the enemy, free from the diversion of air attack – which was reasonably certain, as the American transport fleet was beyond the range of land-based aeroplanes – and, by superior fire power, sinking it.
Against reasonable expectation, however, both the Japanese fleets failed in their objects. The lesser of the two was ambushed by what had been left behind of the American fleet, which was rather larger than was foreseen by Japanese Intelligence, and was completely annihilated except for one destroyer. The Japanese had the mortification of seeing their ships sunk by ships which were technically inferior to their own. Ironically, in this action, the Americans employed battleships which were obsolete, had already been once sunk by the Japanese – at Pearl Harbor – and which had been dredged up from the mud of the sea bed. The larger Japanese fleet, though it was engaged and disorganized earlier on, got through the American defences, and for a time, if it had but known this, had the American transports at its mercy, but because of muddle, of being let down by other ships, and because of deep misunderstanding of what was being done by the American ships, the Japanese Admiral did not bombard but sailed away inexplicably. His losses had been heavy; his actual gains were very slight; his potential gains, those which he had unaccountably let slip through his fingers, made this, their final battle of the war, very poignant to the Japanese Navy.
Among the warships employed, the Japanese decoy force from the north alone avoided heavy losses. It retired in good order. Similarly Admiral Halsey’s powerful battleships, which had been the main concern of the Japanese, were never in serious action throughout. They steamed 300 miles to the north, and when, as was afterwards discovered, they were within forty miles of the decoy force, they steamed 300 miles south. Upon their arrival, they found that the battle of Leyte was over. Admiral Halsey was much criticized for having made so powerful a fleet ineffective in the action, but, given the system of communication prevailing among warships, he could hardly have done other than he did.
For the Japanese defeat, the same forces seemed to operate as before in the melancholy history of this Navy. Bad Intelligence work, bad coordination between commanders, the scarcely trained generation of naval fliers, and an inability of the Japanese commanders to retrieve disaster and to provide a new plan: these, which had dogged the Navy since the battle of Midway, continued to do so until the death of the Navy at Leyte.
The principal defect was in the quality of the command. The Japanese admirals and captains had been too old for their work. They were too fearful of risking their ships; they were certainly brave, and reasonably competent, but they creaked in manoeuvring a modern fleet, which was beyond their capacity. No common doctrine of strategy or tactics united them, and they were handicapped by the failure of Japanese engineers to provide for the Navy some of the devices which had become common among other belligerents. Above all, it had turned out that, where the Japanese had been forced to make an innovation in the arts of naval warfare – in combining naval and air power – this advantage had not been sustained. Yamamoto, whose ideas had first prevailed, had not succeeded in training up a younger section of the Navy with ideas similar to his own, and Yamamoto’s death at Bougainville on 18 April 1943 ended the innovation. The pilots, who should have become principal commanders, and who had had battle experience, had all of them met their premature death in the Pacific Ocean, and the direction of new recruits was left to men who had never been converts to Yamamoto’s ideas, and had seen his successes with a certain amount of envy and scepticism. Especially, the tactics of Yamamoto required an expert and highly trained personnel; he had begun the war with an inadequate supply; it had continued lacking; nobody had come to prominence as a gifted air trainer. The dash, the precision, and the brilliance of his fliers at Pearl Harbor lingered in the memory and were gone.
In January 1945 General MacArthur, thus surviving his most perilous passage in the history of the war, overcame the Japanese resistance on Luzon. From there he moved to Mindanao, the main island of the southern Philippines, and carried through land operations, which followed the same pattern and had the same results as the events in New Guinea. It turned out that the Japanese Army, in spite of its emphasizing that the fighting would be decisive, had been unable to assemble a land force strong enough to make the resistance as tenacious as that of the Pacific Islands.
This ended the war for MacArthur. He did no more fighting, though after the war’s end, another great historic role fell to him as Supreme Commander for Allied Powers, with chief responsibility for the occupation of Japan. For the present, MacArthur wore the laurels of having been the most spectacular commander of the Allied side, in both the Pacific and the European theatres of war. His victories, usually gained with forces which were in the minority, were due to remarkable imagination; and they were made possible by an extreme cult of efficiency by his staff. For the time, MacArthur busied himself with the preparation for the projected Allied offensive against Japan itself, which was to have begun with a landing on Kyushu Island; not expected, however, before 1 December. For this projected operation, the command arrangements were changed. MacArthur was given command of all the Army throughout the Pacific (with important exceptions); but the American Navy was still strong enough to oppose a unified command of all the sea forces.
For the first assault, 5 million men would have been employed. It is notable that they would for the most part have been American; though American Allies begged a place in the operation, room was found for only a token force of three divisions from the Commonwealth. The war was coming to an end in a very different way from the war in Europe. The invasion of Normandy and the campaigns in France and Germany had been genuinely joint enterprises: there was not even the pretence of such in Japan.
As the end of the European War approached, the British Chiefs of Staff were keen to restore Britain to a position of genuine partnership alongside the United States in the Pacific. The difficulty was in finding a credible way to do that. Somewhat diffidently Prime Minister Churchill approached President Roosevelt with an offer of help in the summer of 1944. By the end of that year, a new British Pacific Fleet was more or less in being, although it was not pitted against serious opposition at the time. As a prelude, elements of the new force sailed away under Rear Admiral Sir Philip Vian to attack the oilfields of Sumatra. They struck at Belawan Deli and Palembang and overcame intense ground-based defences. At Palembang the Japanese had the two largest oil refineries in South-East Asia: it was estimated that together they could meet three-quarters of the aviation fuel requirements of the Japanese Empire. The raids succeeded beyond the hopes of the Royal Navy. One of the refineries was all but destroyed and the other one was so seriously damaged that three months afterwards the combined facilities were producing no more than a third of their previous output. Vian’s force retired without much loss and linked up with other units to complete the formation of the new fleet. The command of the British Pacific Fleet was placed in the hands of Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, who previously had been engaged in shepherding arctic convoys that carried supplies to the Soviet Union. He now had the delicate task of reconciling his responsibilities to the British Admiralty for the safety and handling of his fleet and its supplies, not only with the demands pressed upon him by the Australian and New Zealand authorities (although they were difficult to appease) but also with the subordination of his force to operational orders given to him by the Americans.
At first General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz argued over who should be placed in overall operational command of the British Pacific Fleet. MacArthur wanted to use it in the reconquest of the Philippines which was still underway, and Nimitz wanted to use it in support of the planned invasion of Okinawa. Nimitz won and, in the closing months of the war, first he and then Admiral ‘Bull’ Halsey, the two successive Commanders-in-Chief of the United States Pacific Fleet, employed the British as a flexible, self-contained reserve. It was from the British Pacific Fleet’s subordination to CINCPAC that its fleet train became known as Task Force 112 and its main force of 4 aircraft carriers, 2 battleships, 5 cruisers and 14 destroyers was named Task Force 113. Together they soon became known as Task Force 57. In fact, when the BPF sailed off to fight the Japanese, under the tactical comand of Vice-Admiral Sir Bernard Rawlings, his force consisted of nearly the whole of the frontline strength of the Royal Navy. It was more powerful and larger than any other assemblage of British and Commonwealth fighting ships brought together in the Second World War. However, the expansion of the United States Navy after the Pearl Harbor attack had been so huge that the British Pacific Fleet was only equivalent in strength to a ‘task force’ within the United States Fifth Fleet. The Americans cordially welcomed ‘the British Carrier Task Force and attachéd units’, respected its efficiency and gave it considerable tactical independence. But naturally from fleet admirals down to swabbies, the men of the United States Navy made it their business to put the sailors of the Royal Navy in their proper place. The days of naval parity were long since over. In the war in the Pacific in the later stages America had become very conscious that the United States was first, the Allies nowhere. In the conquest of Japan the fact was to be rubbed in. The United States welcomed this sign that European imperialism had little part to play in the new Asia.
The way to final assault had been opened by the success of the United States’ other campaign which advanced from the Central Pacific to the entrances of Tokyo Bay. The fall of Saipan had been an important stage in this advance; it marked a change in Japanese defensive tactics. Hitherto the Japanese had sought to repel American invaders by making mass charges on them as they landed. But at Iwojima, the next island to be attacked after Saipan, the Japanese fought in prepared positions, inflicting great damage on the Americans before they were overwhelmed in March 1945. The island had to be wrenched from them, trench by trench. The Japanese losses were 20,000: the American Marines lost 26,000 killed, and the US Navy nearly 900 killed or missing and about 2,000 wounded.
From Iwojima, Nimitz had first intended to make his main target Formosa. He changed his plan, and launched his attack on Okinawa, a heavily fortified island, forty miles long, in the Ryūkyu Islands, 500 miles from Japan Proper. On 1 April 1945 the Americans landed, and at first met with almost no opposition. But they were in an enormous ambush: they realized suddenly that the northern part of the island was alive with troops, all of them skilfully hidden. A feature of the resistance was their use of light artillery, among the most effective of the war. While the Americans were meeting deadly resistance from the north, their plans were disordered by the Japanese use of Kamikaze aircraft. These were manned by volunteer squads of suicide pilots, who flew their planes to crash on the decks of ships and there explode. The Kamikaze, who were first used by the Japanese in the Battle of Leyte, had by now been incorporated in the general plan for the defence of Japan. The Kamikaze were genuinely volunteers; the Americans were unwilling to believe that such a corps could be formed on a free-will basis, but their efforts to find that they had been conscripted were in vain. By the ferocity of their action, by the unreason of their suicidal intentions, they struck the Americans with peculiar horror. The Kamikaze fought with a peculiar exaltation, they appeared insanely exhilarated, and they went to their death as though to a fascinating ceremony. It was the eschatology of war. In the battle for Iwojima they did very great damage. On one day they sank twenty-four ships. But they could not alter the fact that the number of aeroplanes, as also the number of pilots, was shrinking fast, and would presently be used up.
The battle for Okinawa changed rapidly into nightmare. It progressed like a surrealist film. On the sixth day, 6 April, the Japanese dispatched from the Inland Sea their huge battleship, the Yamato. It was a huge Kamikaze. Its mission was to wreak as much havoc as possible: it carried only enough oil for a one-way trip, and was meant for destruction. In fact it was engaged by American aircraft, and was sunk before it could do much damage. But the madness of the sacrifice in such a way of the world’s largest battleship convinced Japan’s antagonist that the Japanese staff was near the end of its judgement.
The battle lasted until 21 June. It ended in scenes of horror. The Japanese commander and his deputy both committed ceremonial seppaku. Over a hundred thousand Japanese were dead. A very small number survived as prisoners.
The Americans were satisfied that a weighty section of the Japanese command, both in the Navy and the Army, now saw no chance of success in war, and no opportunity of gaining even a temporary respite, and would be glad to make peace. The war might have ended then. But how were these high officers to terminate it? They were afraid of being assassinated if they made any move: the mass of the Army and Navy was still able to fight, and there was still a minority of the more senior officers who were willing to fight on to the end. No mutinies or outbreaks of any kind took place among the forces.
The difficulty for the United States was that it lacked the means of making contact with the politically reasonable sections in Japanese life. The attempt to signal to the East that the United States would respond favourably to any bid for surrender was made again and again, usually by cryptic speech on the American broadcasting stations; but they met with no reply from any who could speak responsibly in Japan. Still the war went on, and no peace was yet possible, though the majority of all classes of Japan desired it greatly. The civil servants, the industrialists and bankers, the trade union leaders, the considerable classes of the intelligentsia – all despaired of war, and regarded with frenzy the piece by piece destruction worked on them by the American aircraft. But the intransigent section of the military, who had gained control of the direction of Japan ten years before, could not be set aside. The Americans persuaded themselves and the British that a dramatic and novel development in the art of war was necessary for this.
A picture of the Japanese Empire in twilight, and approaching dissolution, is given by the puppet Prime Minister, Ba Maw. Ba Maw, as has been seen, had had his quarrels with the Japanese, and, though he had made his position tolerable, he had hardly cause to love them. The more remarkable is his sober account of the way in which they faced defeat and international disgrace. He was invited to Japan in November 1944, just as the systematic bombing of Japan’s home islands was beginning, in an endeavour to organize Asian support for the tottering Japanese imperial structure. Ba Maw owed his eminence to the Japanese, and knew that he must fall with them. This is the general impression which he describes:
Tokyo and its people had changed since I had seen them a year ago, visibly subdued and disillusioned by events, but most of them as determined and defiant as ever. They were now a people in the grip of the biggest crisis in all their history and grimly waiting for the worst. But they were facing the situation wonderfully and revealing their latent racial qualities, their almost inexhaustible capacity to take whatever should come, to endure and survive and wait and even hope. They were more or less the same outwardly, but in the course of a long quiet talk they could not help but betray their true thoughts and fears. Unlike before, they now spoke mainly of the Kamikazes, thus showing that they were placing most of their hopes on something which was really an act of desperation. The people were living with a new terror, the threat of American mass air bombing; they knew that they had no real way to protect their millions of paper and bamboo houses; not even, as it turned out, the Imperial Palace.∗
The topic of chief concern was the air bombardment, and the damage which that was able to do, especially on the morale of the population. This is what Ba Maw says of this:
One of the worst incendiary bombings of Tokyo occurred when I was there near the end of November 1944. The result was quite literally a holocaust, a mass burning of one of the densest areas of the city. I saw the ghastly devastation the next morning. But there was no panic or self-pity or even audible complaint among the huge mass of victims. In fact some of them were able to express their happiness that the Imperial Palace had escaped. It was a heart-breaking sight but it also lifted one’s heart immensely to see so much human endurance and strength of character displayed in so dark an hour.∗
Ba Maw was taken round the headquarters of the Japanese Army. The Kamikaze were exhibited to him as a kind of Japanese secret weapon. He met Koiso, the Japanese Prime Minister, and General Sugiyama, the War Minister, who was soon to play a decisive part. He took every opportunity of discussing with the Japanese commanders their defence tactics, and represented that a scorched earth policy would be intolerable to the Burmese as was also the plan of using the Burmese forces to fight the rear-guard action against the British. Ba Maw had the satisfaction of saving the Shwe Dagon Pagoda from being incorporated in the Japanese defence perimeter. At least he gives himself the credit of having achieved it by the negotiations of his visit.