CHAPTER 25
THE war had entered its final stage. Japan still battled on, but its position was hopeless. The United States, still arming, poured out its fleet and aircraft across the Pacific, and was preparing the great offensive against the sacred Japanese homeland. The expectation was that the American war machine, which had swallowed up so many Pacific islands, would in the long run devour Japan Proper. The economic might of the United States must finally prevail. The war machine moved on, and the only uncertainty was the length of time it would take to complete the process. Japan, as Germany before it, was given no time to summon up its resources and to organize them for the optimum defence of its own country.
Japan, in its final phase, was like Macbeth cooped up in Dunsinane, without any rational hope of a happy issue from his adversities, mechanically wound up to continue to shout defiance at the armies investing him.
Some say he’s mad: others that lesser hate him
Do call it valiant fury: but, for certain,
He cannot buckle his distemper’d cause
Within the belt of rule.
ANGUS: Now does he feel
His secret murders sticking on his hands;…
Those he commands move only in command,
Nothing in love; now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.
One hope alone sustained Japan. The Soviet Union had not renounced the Non-Aggression Treaty which Matsuoka Yōsuke, Japan’s Foreign Minister, had been able to negotiate with it in 1941. In spite of the bad blood between them five years earlier, this treaty, to the surprise of onlookers, had kept the peace between the apparently predestined enemies, though war had raged universally elsewhere. Japan could reckon that peace in Europe would bring to a head the issues between Russia and the United States. Was it too much to expect that Russia, threatened and thwarted by the United States, might see that its true interest lay in accepting the partnership of Japan? Japan could claim that it had already shown, by refraining from striking at Russia when Hitler was at the doors of Moscow in 1941, that no insuperable cause of conflict lay between it and the Soviet Union. It could represent that, in spite of the severe destruction which it had suffered, it still possessed an army which was one of the key pieces on the board internationally. The Japanese Army still had fighting spirit, still had ammunition, and could hope to take an immense toll from a threatened invasion. It boasted that to overrun Japan, when all its natural advantages of defence were taken into review, the United States would need a force of 10 million men, a force which it could not hope to transport. If the United States came to be at loggerheads with Russia, it was unlikely that it would willingly force through the attack on Japan to its conclusion, which would be frightful carnage.
In 1945, as the Japanese position grew evidently more desperate, Russia began to unmask its intentions. At the Yalta Conference in February, Roosevelt offered Russia a larger bait to enter the war against Japan. He unilaterally raised the stakes. Confident of Churchill’s support, he promised their recognition of the Russian protectorate in Outer Mongolia and, much more importantly, their support for the reversion to the Soviet Union of ‘the former rights of Russia violated by the treacherous attack of Japan in 1904’. By this formula the Treaty of Portsmouth, a treaty for which another American President had been happy to accept responsibility, would be set aside. Southern Sakhalin (Karafuto) would be returned to the Soviet Union, the ‘pre-eminent interests of the Soviet Union’ in the commercial port of Dairen would be ‘safeguarded’, the Russian leasehold over ice-free Port Arthur would be restored, Russia’s claims to the Kurile Island chain would be upheld, and the Russians would once again assume the same rights and interests over the South Manchurian Railway and the Chinese Eastern Railway that Japan had enjoyed at the height of its power. In exchange Stalin promised Churchill and Roosevelt that he would enter the war against Japan within two or three months after the surrender of Germany. It was an ominous, although secret, bargain, one which was scarcely affected by the agreement between the three leaders that Chinese concurrence would be sought in matters affecting their historic suzerainty over the whole of Manchuria and Mongolia. Roosevelt, by negotiating on these lines, had taken upon himself to remake history. With Churchill’s acquiescence, he had behaved in a very cavalier fashion in disposing of huge ‘Chinese’ assets and settling vast issues in disregard of wholly legitimate Chinese claims. To be perfectly plain, the Yalta trade-off was no more legitimate and no less aggressive than the offensive behaviour of the Japanese against which the world had complained for half a century.
In April, at the time of the attack on Okinawa, the Soviet Government announced that it would not renew the Russo-Japanese Non-Aggression Pact, which was due to expire one year hence. When the Japanese made proposals about the possibility of a new agreement (and offered terms that were very much like those conceded by Britain and America at Yalta), the Russian Ambassador was ominously evasive. Russia gave every sign that it was preparing for war with Japan. Thus its final hope was nearly extinguished. ‘Despair thy charm’ seemed to cry out the omens for Japan.
In the light of what is now known, it seems probable that Japanese Intelligence had heard of Stalin’s information to Churchill and Roosevelt at the Teheran Conference: Russia was preparing for war with Japan as soon as Germany was defeated. Confirmation of this should have come easily to Japanese spies, although there seem to have been no figures in Japan’s employment comparable to Richard Sorge, the Russian agent, who, in the critical phase before Pearl Harbor, had spied on Japan for the USSR. He had been able to reassure Russia that Japan had decided not to hasten to the aid of Germany, and refused to attack Russia as Germany wished.
It is a canard that there is no record of Japan having been well-served by Intelligence. On the contrary, the Japanese networks learned a great deal. Unfortunately for Japan, there was no effective mechanism for ensuring that information acquired by the Intelligence apparatus would affect the Government’s basic strategy or perceptions. Throughout these years of Total War, the Japanese were handicapped by having by far the most cumbersome policy-making and policy-review machinery of any belligerent in the conflict, worse even than that of Germany and not a patch on the brilliant system for strategical coordination that the British pioneered and which the Americans copied.
Japan was of course under the handicap that, if it employed men of its own nation as agents, they were more conspicuous than others. Japanese could hardly wear the appearance of blank anonymity which is essential to espionage. The same is broadly true of western spies in an eastern country. They may succeed, by exceptional audacity, in exceptional circumstances, as Sorge was able to do, or as the West’s and China’s Korean agents did at lower levels in Japanese-occupied territories. But in a war between East and West, where racialism and jingoism are harnessed together, espionage is likely to play less part than in a war in which the contestants share a similar racial background. As it happens, the Japanese did cultivate White Russian émigrés and European Jewish refugees with an eye on their utility in espionage: the results of this collaboration remain obscure, although the size of the networks involved tens of thousands of people directly or indirectly. In any event, the Japanese Government’s Russian experts warned that the Soviet Union was girding itself for war, and they were mocked for their pains by the same adventurers whose singularly misconceived optimism had carried havoc into every other corner of East Asia.
Espionage, likewise, paid the British and Americans only very mean dividends. British SOE operations in South-East Asia do not appear to have affected the outcome of the war in any significant way, but the quality of Intelligence produced at great personal risks and sacrifices by the agents involved deserves our respect and appreciation. In Japan Proper, however, the situation was otherwise, and it would appear that little information of value was gained by the use of secret agents. In pre-war days, British and American language officers were seconded on a regular basis to Japanese regiments, training establishments and manoeuvres. The military, naval and air attachés of the western democracies were restricted in their freedom of movement, but they nevertheless displayed a marvellous capacity to mislead their Governments about the quality of Japanese weaponry and technological sophistication. It is worthwhile recollecting that the Japanese Zero, which made its first appearance in the China theatre on April Fool’s Day 1939, made no significant impression upon those whose job it was to keep up to date on the capabilities of potential enemies. In a word, the quality of Allied military Intelligence about Japan prior to Pearl Harbor was abysmal. It was a commonplace assumption almost everywhere in the West during the years leading up to the Pacific War that the Japanese were master copycats who possessed little native ingenuity. There was, for instance, a British air attaché who reported that the Japanese held 2:1 reserves of spare engines for their frontline aircraft, from which he deduced that the Japanese, with their well-known mechanical incompetence, were obliged to throw away faulty or damaged engines rather than repair them! This is about on a par with the other hoary chestnut that most Japanese made poor pilots because they nearly all wore glasses and suffered from vertigo. The patent absurdity of such things is self-evident, but the magnitude of the miscalculations was not. Even to this day, many people who lived through the war still believe that the Japanese never displayed any originality in their weapons development. In fact, as we now know, the Japanese were technologically superior to the western armed forces in most classes of weaponry. Contrary to all expectation, the Japanese were masters of technical improvisation. What defeated them in the end of course was the scale of America’s mobilization, her industrial capacity and the pace at which the Allies were able to evolve and produce new generations of weapons during the war.
On the other hand, at the beginning of the war and during the years beforehand, the perceptiveness of British political Intelligence about Japan was exceptionally high, and it stood in marked contrast to the inadequacy of the information that filtered through the political Intelligence about Japan gathered by the United States. During the war, there was a dramatic improvement in the quantity and quality of Allied and especially of American Intelligence, and this had a crucial role in the conduct of military operations. But the misperceptions which had led to the outbreak of hostilities in the first place stemmed largely from the ignorance of American policy-makers and their unwillingness to understand the limits within which Japanese Governments had to operate. It is remarkable how little was the knowledge which reached them in this way from Tokyo. Japanese counter-espionage was very capable, but the United States had succeeded in developing the eyes and ears which pried on Japanese moves, though this tended to be done at a distance by code-breaking, and not by means of spies. Its advantages and limitations in this have already been noted, for example at the time of the negotiations before Pearl Harbor, and in naval battles; it had continued to read the Japanese codes throughout the war, and never betrayed to the Japanese that it was in fact doing so. It required great restraint by the Americans and their British Allies to take no step by which it should become obvious to the Japanese that they possessed the secret. It is, in fact, recorded in Japan that a few men doubted from time to time the degree of security of Japanese communications, but they were not attended to.
Meanwhile the American air raids on Japan went on relentlessly. Until 1944 American aircraft, except those in Lieutenant-Colonel Doolittle’s adventure in 1942, had not been over Japan. Thereafter the Japanese homeland was subjected to a bombardment which was utterly destructive. Even before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States had begun the long process of developing an aircraft known as the B29 Superfortress which from the beginning was conceived as a weapon of mass destruction for use against Japan in time of war. In peacetime it was not unusual for bomber aircraft to take ten years to advance from draw board to full production, and the B29 was perhaps the most complicated and sophisticated bomber aircraft of its generation. Not surprisingly, it experienced teething problems. Gradually, however, everything moved into place. To utilize this special weapon, General ‘Hap’ Arnold, Commanding General of the United States Army Air Force, took over executive control of a unique B29 bomber command, responsible only to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the President. President Roosevelt, after considering the advantages of deploying the B29s from bases in Ceylon, India and Australia, chose to use them in support of China.
Before leaving India to establish themselves at the new Chinese air bases, the B29 crews carried out the first of a series of raids on relatively soft targets to gain experience. On 5 June 1944 ninety-eight B29s set off to bomb Bangkok. The raid was thoroughly bungled. Ten days later, ninety-two of the aircraft left for Chengtu, in Szechuan, on their way to attack the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata on Kyushu, their first attack against a Japanese city. Only one bomb hit the plant, but the Japanese, as we have seen, received the message. In the months that followed, four other raids on Kyushu and others against targets in Manchuria and Sumatra were scarcely more successful. The Japanese, in their Ichi-Gō campaign, fared rather better.
Driven out of China, the B29s gradually established themselves in the Marianas. Progress, if it is right to use such a word, was slow. On 12 October 1944 the first B29 raid on Tokyo took off from Tinian. It achieved nothing. A raid by a hundred massed aircraft attacked the Okayama aircraft assembly plant on Taiwan in November 1944. It, too, was ineffective. The US Army Air Force found its exalted expectations regarding the performance of the Superfortresses plunging as rapidly as their pay-loads towards the ground. No less than eight attempts were made between late November 1944 and early March 1945 in an extended effort to destroy the Nakajima factory on the outskirts of Tokyo by high-level bombing runs. All of these raids were unavailing, even humiliating. The failure of the strategic bombing campaign stood out in marked contrast to the successes which rival services were clocking up against the Japanese at sea and in the Philippines.
Thirty-eight-year-old General Curtis H. Le May was brought in to direct the United States strategic bombing operations against Japan. He was a skilled technician, with experience of the air war against Germany. Fresh from his ‘successful’ destruction of Hamburg, he soon chafed with frustration. His superiors wanted results, certainly, but many felt qualms of conscience about resorting to the indiscriminate use of fire bombs. In December 1944, however, a number of B29s had attacked Japanese occupied Hankow with incendiaries, reducing much of that city to ashes. On 23 February 1945 Le May ordered a daylight attack upon Tokyo by 130 aircraft loaded with incendiaries. It produced only 640 casualties but destroyed 25,000 buildings. This whetted the appetite of the Americans. Arnold authorized Le May to conduct a series of large-scale fire-bomb attacks upon Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe, targeted upon selected blocks of twelve square miles in which there was a population density calculated at the time as in excess of 128,000 per square mile.
What followed was sheer, unadulterated murder. It was also the greatest air offensive in history. No one believed that the horrors about to be inflicted upon Japanese civilians would suddenly melt Japanese resistance or produce a wave of popular rebellion against the Japanese Government. But it was nonetheless an effort designed to undermine Japanese morale and came as the Japanese were emerging from a particularly hard winter exacerbated by acute food and fuel shortages. The United States Army Air Force generals hoped to inflict such great punishment that the Japanese would learn respect for the power and relentless determination of the United States in a manner reminiscent of the determination of Kaiser Wilhelm’s men to ‘educate’ the Chinese by inflicting upon them punitive demonstrations of German savagery after the Boxer Rebellion: as the creatures of the observant American humorist Finley Peter Dunne had commented then:
‘’Twill civilize th’ Chinnymen,’ said Mr Hennessy,
‘Twill civilize thim stiff,’ said Mr Dooley.∗
On the night of 9–10 March 1945 General Le May launched his first full-scale incendiary attack against Tokyo. A huge force of 334 big four-engined B29 Superfortresses rose up from the new American runways on Guam, Tinian and Saipan in a strike at the heart of the Japanese Empire. It took two and a half hours for the planes to assemble in their formations. Desirous of increasing their bomb payloads, and confident of encountering little resistance, the American aircraft had been stripped of all their ammunition and defensive armament except what they carried in their tail-turrets. Le May’s bombers flew abnormally low that night: this was a protection against anti-aircraft guns, which were abundant in Tokyo. The Japanese, even as late as this, did not have their guns adjusted to radar: they were operated manually, and they were made largely ineffective by Le May’s strategy. There was no attempt to single out military targets, nor was this raid in reprisal for any specific Japanese breaches of international law. It was deliberate, indiscriminate mass murder, centred upon the shitamachi (downtown) district of southern Tokyo, the most heavily populated urban quarter on earth, where actually upwards of a million people were packed in an area four miles by three to a density of 103,000 per square mile. The Japanese in their flimsy wooden buildings and narrow back streets had no advance warning before the bombs began to fall at a quarter past midnight. The raid lasted two and a half hours. There was very little flak and negligible fighter opposition. The fires spread well beyond the target zone. Somewhere between 70,000 and 140,000 people died. The injuries suffered by many of the survivors were nightmarish. Nearly a million people were left homeless: 267,000 buildings were destroyed. All of this cost the United States Army Air Force a mere 2,000 tons of incendiaries and the loss of fifteen B29 aircraft. It was to be only the first of such raids, but its effects were by far the most catastrophic of all the Allied ‘conventional’ air strikes against the Japanese in terms of human mortality.
Individual instances of courage or resourcefulness counted for very little in the firestorm that began fifteen minutes after the first bombs fell. The intensity of the flames within the conflagration exceeded 1800°F. They generated a holocaust which surpassed even the horrors of Dresden and Hamburg: much more damage could be done to Japanese cities by fire bombs because of the light structure of most buildings; the same weight of explosives led to much more destruction. It was the most destructive man-made fire in recorded history, and the loss in terms of human lives was of a similar order of magnitude to the toll which was to be exacted by the atomic bomb blasts at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Japanese not immediately caught by the flames are said to have stood musing at the terrible hypnotic beauty of the spectacle. This was Total War at its most awful. With unspeakable grief, the Emperor, accompanied by his Lord Privy Seal and Grand Chamberlain, went on foot to tour the smoking remains of the worst-hit areas of the shitamachi. The ordeal cannot fail to have made a huge impression upon them. It would take twenty days to bury the dead, many of whom were committed to mass graves.
Meanwhile, less than thirty hours after the first great Tokyo firestorm, three square miles of Nagoya were subjected to a concentrated attack by 317 B29s. Eight square miles of the industrial heartland of Osaka were laid waste in a three-hour raid on 13 March. Kobe suffered the same fate on 16 March. Then Nagoya was hit again. Assessing the results at the end of this ten-day experiment, the United States Army Air Force examined its balance sheet. It had expended 10,000 tons of bombs in a total of 1,600 sorties and sustained a loss of less than 1 per cent of its striking force. In the months that followed, the campaign of destruction spread out in all directions. Le May’s strike force grew until it reached nearly 600 aircraft. Nearly every conurbation in Japan came under brutal attack. At the peak of the bombing campaign, Le May’s B29s dropped 40,000 tons of bombs on Japan in a single month.
In the B29 campaign, Total War nurtured one of the most revolting monsters ever conceived by modern technology. These grim tactics, operated with the thoroughness of General Le May, were new, and marked a change in air warfare. In the aftermath of such a development, it is appropiate to feel an abiding revulsion. Yet it must be said that there is no evidence to suggest that the Japanese would have shirked from utilizing such fearful weaponry had they themselves been able to do so. The overwhelming consensus among Americans was that the mass murders being carried out in their name were justified. They felt that the havoc wrought by the B29s would bring a rapid end to the war. After the war, Prince Konoye recalled that the B29 raids were responsible for hardening the determination of the Japanese Government to make peace. More than that, however, the American people regarded the bombings as a fitting punishment to inflict upon the Japanese people. Here was no fine distinction between an enemy Government and its people. Both were to be execrated. Americans reminded each other that in the aerial bombardment of Chinese cities, beginning in August 1937, Japan had been the first nation since the First World War to adopt a programme of systematic terror and mass destruction against densely populated conurbations. And so the Americans rededicated themselves to their grim task and felt little remorse. Indeed, few foreigners at the time were inclined to share in the grief of the Emperor for the wretched sufferings of his subjects.
The Japanese authorities tried to rise to the occasion, and ambitious schemes were put forward to counter or at least to mitigate any repetition of such horrors. Japanese schools had already closed throughout the capital. By March 1945 1.7 million people had been evacuated from Tokyo, but 6 million still remained huddled in the city. Now the mass evacuation of Tokyo became uncontrollable. Like much of the Japanese civil defence effort, chaos and confusion prevailed. The air-raid shelters, fire precautions, provisions for medical services and preparations for the maintenance of public order were hopelessly inadequate, primitive and anyway came far too late to cope with dangers for which the Japanese authorities had ample forewarning. The evacuation had always lacked that systematic planning and administrative coordination which had characterized the precautions taken by the British in the early days of the war and during the perils of the Blitz. Now as many Japanese fled their great cities in blind panic and descended upon ill-prepared and starving surrounding country districts like locusts, many of those left behind went into an almost catatonic state of shock. The uncharacteristic despair of the Japanese people was nowhere more clearly exemplified than by the fact that after the raids Japanese civil defence training was all but abandoned. Japanese medical and fire services for a time simply disintegrated. These terrible months had their counterparts in the European War, but running throughout the whole of the Second World War was a curious inability of either hemisphere to learn from what was happening on the opposite side of the globe.
The economic consequences were devastating. At first the destruction, as was the case in Germany, had less effect on industrial production than might have been supposed, but, as it became more wholesale, and surpassed the war damage in Europe, so its effects became harder to circumvent. The Japanese Government took more sweeping powers to direct the economy of the country; but where was the economy left to direct? The food supplies began to fall dangerously, and could not be distributed because of the destruction of the railways and the breakdown of commercial organization. The description of the life of the Japanese worker at this stage of the war, underfed, harried to inhuman extremes by the Government, lacking the elementary comforts of a safe home, must touch even the reader who knows something of the terrors endured by the German population. A great flight began from the towns to the countryside.
For the first time the civilian part of the nation began to turn against the military. In parts of the country it became positively dangerous to wear uniform. Such aberrant behaviour shook deeply the Army General Staff.
Japanese experts at the time said that the Japanese standard of nutrition in the towns in the last year was below that of Germans in the fateful winter of hunger after the end of the first European War. Even the Army, which filtered through to private hands. Some observers believed that civilian and military morale remained astonishingly high: perhaps such contrary perceptions merely demonstrate the illusions and confusions of the period, which are well attested to. Certainly there were no food riots in Japanese towns, such as those which had caused great concern in Germany in the First World War as early as 1916. It may be that some Japanese were less shocked by this adversity than were European populations, because they had experienced such privations before in recent memory. Twenty years before, the people of Tokyo had experienced similar devasatation in their capital city; that time from the horrors of the Tokyo earthquake.
In April 1945 the Prime Minister, Koiso Kuniaki, fell from office. He had engaged in negotiations with questionable Chinese emissaries, by which-he had intended to split the Chinese and the Western Allies. They were of course secret, but when they failed, they leaked out and he was dismissed. His years of intrigue and adventurism had come full circle. Mistrusting the services and skills of diplomats, he held himself out as an astute judge of men, expert in negotiations. Koiso believed the assurances of his Chinese contacts that he could detach China from the war by signing a truce agreeing to the abandonment of the puppet régime of Wang Ching-wei and the withdrawal of all Japanese forces from China. In exchange, or so Koiso believed, Chiang Kai-shek would guarantee to prevent American forces from landing in China. The Supreme War Council regarded the whole idea as fatuous. There were, however, other factors, equally important. Koiso had shown himself unable to hold himself apart from the myopic propaganda issued for public consumption by the Army. He took so little trouble to establish the truth that he succeeded in embarrassing the Supreme Command as well as appalling those who knew that the time had come to seek peace on whatever terms the Allied Powers would accept. The Palace and Government bureaucrats had expected Koiso to work closely with Admiral Yonai Mitsumasa, a perceptive and highly personable former Prime Minister, a man known to be committed to the search for peace, who was entrusted by the Emperor to act as Koiso’s Deputy Premier and served concurrently as Navy Minister. Yonai did not lack bravery, and his personal views were unequivocal: in May 1945, indeed, he went as far as declaring, ‘If we can just protect the Imperial family, that will be sufficient. Even if it means the Empire is reduced to the four home islands, we’ll have to do it.’∗ Unfortunately, as a Japanese diplomat with some knowledge of the facts wrote afterwards with uncharacteristic bluntness:
Koiso was utterly ignorant of the realities of the military situation. It was thus impossible to get him to work for a termination of the war. Yonai told me he was surprised to discover that Koiso had come from Korea with a ready-made list of cabinet members, mostly names of his old henchmen and cronies in Korea. These men were entirely unacquainted with the difficulties then confronting the country. They were popularly dubbed the ‘Korean Cabinet’ in contrast with Tōjō’s ‘Manchurian Cabinet’. Yonai gave what advice he decently could under the circumstances but it remained for the most part unheeded. The Koiso Cabinet was clearly a severe disillusionment to him and his friends. There was little opportunity left for Yonai to work for peace.
While the Emperor desired to see the new Cabinet operated on the basis of a close working partnership of Koiso and Yonai, actually Yonai thought, or preferred to think, that his responsibility as Koiso’s partner ended with the formation of the Cabinet. After that, he was a mere Navy Minister and, as such, he did not like to interfere with what Koiso did as Prime Minister.∗
Long before the failure of the Chinese negotiations, therefore, the Jushin had come to recognize the country’s urgent need for a change of premier. Within the Daihon’ei he was regarded with derision as ‘a snobbish, senile general on the reserve list without any influence whatever in the Army’.† The public, dismayed by what news filtered through to them about the disasters in the field, also seemed to appreciate that the Prime Minister was out of touch with reality. As American forces stormed ashore on Okinawa, Koiso conceived the fantastic idea that he might ride out the crisis and consolidate his authority by returning to active military service and taking on additional responsibilities as Minister for War in addition to his responsibilities as Premier. The Army refused. Only then did Koiso accept his humiliation, bow to the inevitable and resign.
Baron Suzuki Kantarō, a retired admiral, succeeded him. It was remarked that he was sworn in on the day after the loss of Japan’s prize battleship, the Yamato: it seemed as though Japan had turned to the Navy for its Prime Minister just at the time that it had lost its fleet. He had a good record, having been a target of the military conspirators of February 1936, by whom he was badly wounded. He was an aged hero of the Russo-Japanese War. He had a likeable, rather enigmatic, personality, and was almost universally popular – a rare thing in Japan. From experience, he believed that the scope for personal intervention in public affairs was limited, and he was apt to preside benignly over them, and, like many Japanese, to acquiesce philosophically in what came to pass. In fact there was, in Suzuki, a touch of Tolstoy’s Kutuzov: the much respected figure, clothed with glory from the past, who is wise enough to collaborate with events, rather than to withstand them – or even to attempt to understand them.
But he was eighty years old: too venerable to be effective, even by roundabout means. Having the virtue of open-mindedness, he lacked the decisiveness, the singlemindedness, which were essential qualities in a Prime Minister in such a crisis. The choice of Suzuki, however, was a sign that the peace party was gradually prevailing. He was not a born leader, did not aspire to the office thrust upon him, and did not incarnate the fabled Japanese desire to go down fighting. Intellectually, he needed no convincing that Japan had lost the war; he was himself more than ready for peace. But he moved too slowly to be able to save Japan. The peace party, backed by the Imperial Court and by responsible members of that solid corps of professional bureaucrats that is the repository of common sense in most countries, was looking for a totem, was ready to be rallied, and to assert itself, but it was beyond Suzuki to provide this.
In the next month, May, Japan lost its ally, Germany. The Supreme War Council met and approved the decision to carry on the war notwithstanding. It declared, however, that Japan was released from the provisions of the Tripartite Pact (which was somewhat overdue and rather went without saying). Japan had now to face the switch of the Allied forces engaged in the European War, and their addition to the force already employed against Japan in the East; it had also to meet the possible use against it of the Russian Army, now disengaged.
In the summer of 1945, Prime Minister Suzuki, his Foreign Minister and the two Service Ministers decided to send Prince Konoye Fumimaro to Moscow as head of a peace delegation, provided he proved acceptable to the Soviets. This decision may have reached the Moscow Embassy only after Molotov had departed for the Potsdam Conference. Konoye, thrice Prime Minister, remained in favour as a man behind whom the whole country could feel a sense of unity in adversity. In any event, the Soviet Union made no reply. Then came news of the Potsdam Declaration, which fell upon the Japanese leadership like a thunderclap. Obviously something had to be done. Several Cabinet meetings were held to decide how to proceed: these broke up in confusion and despair.
An outside chance for Japan lay in the complications set up by the death of Roosevelt on 12 April, and his succession by Vice-President Harry Truman. But to have used these to advantage, to have extricated Japan from the net which was closing in, would have required a very flexible diplomacy. Flexibility was never a strong point with the Japanese and the number of neutral centres where Japan could operate, and from which it could obtain its Intelligence, had, to the advantage of the United States, become very small.
In spite of their Yalta agreement with the Russians, which had been so dearly purchased, the Americans, and to a large extent the British, continued to be profoundly distressed by the memory of the savage Japanese defence of the coral islands. The ferocity of the resistance in the homeland was expected to be as formidable. Nothing like the same internal collapse was foreseen as followed the death of Hitler in Germany. The war might continue for as much as a year, and with what was foreseen as the mounting strain of tension with Russia, in spite of the glitter of the terms of Yalta, the upshot was not clear.
In the meanwhile it became known that the Japanese General Staff was pressing on with plans for a fanatical defence of the Japanese islands. Rightly it was supposed that the principal American blow would be directed at Honshu. To deal with this it could assemble two and a half million troops in the home islands. Tales arrived to the effect that a vast underground headquarters was being dug out at Tokyo. The Japanese Army was said to be gambling on the blind determination which would halt the Americans on landing. Clearly the Americans had still much effort before them.
But very shortly after, a great change came over the situation. It was brought about by the completion of the atom bomb. Partly this was the result of German-Jewish genius, which, barred from Germany by racial madness, had been mobilized in the invention of this device of war, which had been meant in the first place for the overthow of the Nazi system. Part of the early work was done in England: and, when it was concentrated in the United States, British scientists participated. The war against Germany had come to an end in May 1945, with the bomb still a project, and not realized in fact: but by June it was clear that it was about to become operational. The news that it was to be so, and would be available for use against Japan, had already been grasped by the very small circle in which, at this stage of the war, had been concentrated the making of American policy. Its immense, hardly credible, destructive power could quench the continuing flame of Japanese fanaticism. With its finality there could be no discussion.
By this trick of fate, the need to cajole and coax Russia, the need for Russian complicity and Russian power, were all removed.
By the summer of 1945 it was stated that American policy would be revised: Russian aid was now no longer so necessary for bringing to an end the war with Japan. The United States had initially perceived that through the possible intervention of Russia it could go ahead without perpetually needing to keep China contented, and now it saw that it would be able to discard Russia in its turn.
In fact America was by this time as zealous to deter Russia from entering the war as before it had been to bring Russia in. Truman had succeeded Roosevelt; his period was from the start different from the period of Roosevelt. Other considerations apart, Truman was less inclined to exert himself to maintain good relations with Russia. He was less of a historian. He was less inclined, especially at this point of his career, to look into the future, and to adjust his actions accordingly. Instinctively, Truman was thinking in terms of the containment of Russia, and he was anxious that in East Asia as elsewhere, Russia should make as little headway as possible. If Russia once went to war and invaded Manchuria, there would be little chance of keeping it out of Port Arthur and Dairen (which it had already been promised at Yalta). Even though Truman, who was new to these issues of foreign policy, did not himself stress all these points, he was more available than Roosevelt had been to advisers who suggested a frankly anti-Russian policy. None of the advisers knew, but Truman did, that the atom bomb would be available for putting Japan out of the war. For the time being he was satisfied that Russian demands would not be extravagant. If the effects of the bomb were to be as he was advised, a Power without the bomb could not argue aggressively with the Power which possessed it.
The condition of Japan continued to deteriorate. It was uncertain that the bomb would ever be required. General Le May was claiming that his air bombardment had totally paralysed life in sixty major cities. He claimed that Japan was being driven back to the stone age. The Joint Chiefs of Staff reported at the beginning of July: ‘Japan will become a nation without cities, with her transportation disrupted, and will have tremendous difficulty in holding her people together for continued resistance.’ By March 1945 Japan had lost 88 per cent of the merchant fleet tonnage with which it had begun the war, and it had become almost impossible to import any goods, even the most essential. The armed services of the Japanese Government cried out for the punishment of those engaged in the economic administration; but this could do no good. American Intelligence was, however, rather less optimistic. It gave due allowance to the putting out of action of much of Japanese heavy industry by the blockade and through air bombardment. But it reported that the Japanese output of combat aircraft was still between 1,200 and 1,500 a month (as compared with a peak production of 2,300 reached late in 1944). The greatest shortage was of fuel oil, which was bringing orthodox air operations to a standstill. On the other hand Japan had little to worry about in its stock of ammunition. The Anglo-American Combined Intelligence Committee still thought that the highly trained Japanese Army, the greater part of which had as yet never been in action, was a formidable fighting force. It reckoned that it would probably take another twelve months to subdue it. It made its report, it must be noticed, without knowledge of the bomb.
At the Potsdam Conference in July, when the three masters of the world met face to face, Truman, with careful premeditation and calculated misdirection, told Stalin, apparently in passing, that the Allies had in their hands a more powerful bomb than any previously used. No word was said about the bomb being nuclear, or about the transformation of the war by its invention. Churchill, who knew the true facts, and who watched Stalin carefully, agreed that he had not suspected the truth behind Truman’s apparently routine information. He took it as an announcement that the United States had been able to charge its bomb with a heavier load of dynamite. There is drama in the spectacle of these two men, the pillars of the western world, systematically observing the demeanour of a man whom they both regarded as their potential enemy, while in public they played on him something which resembled a confidence trick. The drama is heightened because Stalin had in his pocket, in the communist offensive which everyone knew Stalin could release in Europe, something like an atom bomb in politics.
A race, in which one of the partners, Stalin, was in darkness about the true facts and about their urgency, then took place between the Americans, who were about to explode the bomb, and the Russians, who were in the last stages of the preparation to attack in Manchuria. Russia had become aware of the change of attitude by the United States, of the desire that it should not participate, though it may have been partly puzzled about the reason. The United States rushed the preparations. At one time the bomb was to have been used on 1 August. Last-minute delays in completing its manufacture put this back a few days. Further delay came because the weather made it almost impossible to raid Japan accurately.
During the Potsdam Conference it was learnt that Japan had requested Swedish mediation in working out surrender terms. It was plain that peace could not be far off. The United States, however, showed surprisingly little zeal in developing this initiative.
The United States made at this time the decision to exclude Russians as members of an occupation force in Japan. The plans for occupying Japan were made surprisingly late. Their details were all improvised. For example, the decision to divide the occupation of Korea and to fix the boundary between the American zone and the Russian zone at the thirty-eighth parallel, was made between an American captain and a Russian major. Thus, casually, there came into being a frontier problem which subsequently divided the world. The Americans and the British were informed by Molotov about the repeated, almost frenzied attempts by Japan to enlist the support of Russia as a mediator. They were being rebuffed by Russia. It was clear that Russia was not going to back Japan as a move in the war that had already begun between it and its Allies.
At Potsdam, on 26 July 1945, the Allies had issued a final and solemn summons to Japan to surrender. Its terms were broadcast over the wireless. They were that those Japanese who had been responsible for the policies which had led to war were to be forever eliminated; that Japan must renounce all its overseas empire; that war criminals must be punished; that Japan should be occupied. As had become the habit of the United States with beaten adversaries, Japan was required to surrender unconditionally. These demands, though exceedingly radical, were not entirely rejected by Japan, so desperate had its position become.
An answer was understood to have been given in a press conference on 28 July by the Japanese Prime Minister, Admiral Suzuki, at which he spoke in Japanese. It was, as might have been expected from an old man, doubtful, temporizing and ambiguous. Apparently he had meant to say that he withheld comment. The Allies interpreted the Japanese word he used as meaning that Japan not only would not comment, but would treat the summons with contempt, that his reactions were ‘unprintable’ in a pejorative sense. This was taken by the handful of Americans who knew what was intended as the signal for dropping the bomb. Actually it has been suggested since that a word was mistranslated, and meant much less than was supposed, signifying merely that Japan’s first reaction to the summons was not being published. The subsequent controversy about what really happened has been inconclusive. That the confusion in fact occurred, is typical of the Japanese language, one of the most involved and ambiguous languages of the world, and the reader must not be astonished that it should have betrayed Japan towards its disaster.
The bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the chosen target, on 6 August 1945. The attack was made from Tinian, not far from Guam, which had been taken in the previous year. The plane, a B29 bomber, had been blessed for its mission by a Roman Catholic priest. The havoc made was as great as was forecast. It was clear that the war could not be pursued when America could drop bombs of this kind. Within three days a second bomb, of a different and even more deadly type, was dropped on the civilian port of Nagasaki. It did slightly less damage, because Nagasaki had better air-raid precautions and because the bomb did not set off a fire-storm; but its blast was greater than that at Hiroshima. This time, to signalize the joint responsibility of the United States and Britain, the death plane was accompanied by a plane carrying British observers, Dr W. Penney, the physicist, and Wing Commander L. Cheshire, who, by one of the ironies of these events, was later to win celebrity in Britain as the leader of one of the most inspired missions of the day, that of bringing comfort and the opportunity of decent existence to the incurably disabled. With the bomb at Nagasaki, there was released a manifesto to a top Japanese physicist, addressed to him by his American colleagues and explaining some of the details of the bomb. It urged him to enlighten the Japanese Government.
Ironically, Nagasaki was one of the parts of Japan which had the connections of longest duration with the West. It was founded in the sixteenth century by a feudal lord who was a Christian, and who wanted the trade between Japan and the Christian world to be based on it. For a time the port was actually ceded to the Jesuit missionaries, who organized its administration. It was subsequently the centre of persecution of Japanese Christians when the Japanese Government become alarmed by their number.
The dropping of the atom bomb was so dramatic, the awed shock it provoked throughout the world was so final, and the sense that it was, in President Truman’s phrase, ‘the greatest thing in history’, seemed so incontestable that there was a general instinct to think that it had brought to an end one phase of human affairs. From then onwards everything would be dwarfed by events. But the appalling news of the disaster produced by atomic radiation, the vaporizing and burning of human beings, the whole vast panorama of unutterable suffering, somehow failed to register with most people who lived through those days. Even the horrible details, published some months afterwards and set out with all the technical skill of American publicity, were too terrible for belief. The mind set up impediments to taking in such information. There was born at that time an uneasiness which has affected a whole age.
The Americans had thus won the race. They had set themselves against Russia; but it was virtually a dead heat because on the next day, before Japan had had time to surrender, the Russians crossed the frontier of Manchuria. By a four-pronged offensive, Russia overran the country as neatly as Germany had picked off countries earlier in the war. Though the fate of Hiroshima has stuck in the world’s memory and though it has been regarded as the final cause of Japan’s capitulation, the Russian invasion shares in the distinction of having tilted the Japanese over to put an end to the war.
The effects of the atom bomb and the grim finality of its consequences were not immediately clear. Among most people outside Hiroshima itself, even among those in Tokyo, there was doubt about what had really happened. A great bomb had fallen; terrible destruction had been wrought; but Japan had become thoroughly used to such calamities. Actually the loss of life in the atomic phase, though it was rendered peculiarly horrible by atomic radiation, was less than that in the great B29 raids, to which Japan had been subjected since March 1945. Prince Konoye afterwards told American investigators that Japan’s greatest fear of the Soviet Union in the closing stages of the war had been this psychological fear, especially after the Soviet Union’s renunciation of the Russo-Japanese Non-Aggression Pact. But all Japan knew the significance of the dreaded invasion of Manchuria, the advent of the Russian hordes, the coming into reality of that threat which had, as long as man could remember, been the governing fact in Japan’s foreign policy. Japan could not face war with another Great Power. It was this which made it ‘despair its charm’, and accept the facts.
The history of the way Japan surrendered is dramatic, and even today, has probably been only partly told. At least, new accounts are constantly appearing in Japan with new details, which, true or false, require the narrative of events to be considered afresh.
A new personality in Japan played a large part at the conclusion. This was the most august person in the land. Hitherto he had been content to be a spectator of the great events, but now he entered the arena. This was the Japanese Emperor.
He was a virtuous prince. The irony is that such dark proceedings had been allowed to happen under his aegis. In the whole range of personalities who held positions of distinction in the war, whether of actual power or of decorativeness, he, and the English monarch, George VI, were the only ones without serious blemish. Like George VI he had a stammer; like him, he held in reality very little political power. It must have been discouraging for this young man, entering on his life’s career, that he succeeded his father, who had been deranged during almost the whole of his reign. Yet that fact had not compromised the monarchy, and this speaks highly of the reserves of credit which the institution enjoyed. In one respect the Emperor was ahead of George VI. He had strong intellectual interests, though these were concentrated on a single subject, marine biology. The corollary of the secure eminence of the Japanese Emperor was that ordinarily public opinion severely restricted the range of his activities; he was expected to do almost nothing because his role was almost deified. And Hirohito could not be said to have contributed anything remarkable to the political debates of his time. From the day he ascended his throne in 1926, to the day when he nearly lost it at the time of Japan’s defeat, he did what was expected of him. He was reliable; he was thoroughly constitutional; he gave no trouble to the politicians by threatening to use the stored-up prestige of the Japanese monarchy to embarrass them. The inner circle of Japanese with knowledge of what went on behind the façade of public life knew that the course of Japan’s affairs – the autonomy of the military, and a foreign policy which brought it into collision with the United States and Britain – was profoundly antipathetic to him. But beyond asking the occasional awkward question at imperial conferences, or confiding his anxieties to those few who had audiences with him on rare occasions, he gave no sign of his continual vexation.
However, at the crisis of Japan, he acted with much common sense. He borrowed from the Confucian philosophy of China the maxim by which he governed his actions. The Confucian wisdom was not to stand up like an oak tree before a raging tempest: in a storm, the oak tree is uprooted and perishes. The willow tree has the better chance of survival; it bends before the wind, but, when the hurricane is over, its root is unsnapped, and it stands up once again by its own resilience. Thus, before the storm of the Japanese military, which was to blow away many persons in its time, the Emperor bowed, and was inconspicuous. Now the storm was nearly blown out, and the opportunity came for the reassertion of the powers of the monarchy, which were real and legitimate even if they had been so long unused. He was guided, in the crucial days when he felt that his personal intervention was timely, that in fact the spirit of the Japanese constitution called for it, by a suave and subtle sense of correct timing. He was capable of choosing the right men to collaborate with – or he was very lucky in these being available, and in offering their services. His conduct at the time suggests that this marine biologist had developed a political instinct during the years of inoffensive constitutional practice.
Throughout July the conviction of defeat had been gripping one person after another and one institution after another. In the past year the fortunes of the civilian elements of government in their control of the military had begun to revive. In the complex balance of forces which made up Japanese politics, the centre of authority began to pass a little away from the soldiers and towards the civilians.
But the services, both the Army and Navy, were obdurate for continuing war: and the senior officers, even if compelled by reason to admit the hopelessness of their case, could point out that they were powerless to assent to peace. They would have been assassinated. The spirit of the nation had passed into the custody of the patriotic societies which would have employed the sanction of murder against anyone who dared to speak of surrender. Both the Jushin, and the more reasonable service officers, had to mask their intention, to carry on their intrigue behind walls of extreme secrecy, and had to say one thing while in fact strenuously doing another. As a result, Japan’s resolution to fight on appeared undented. It had become as good as impossible for it to capitulate. Japan, having made a cult of the principle that no Japanese ever surrendered to the enemy, now found it impossible to accept the findings of common sense.
Behind the scenes, however, and with every secrecy, Japan had been sounding the possibilities of an honourable peace; and peace, with honour that would satisfy Japan meant, in effect, a peace on the simple condition that Japan was allowed to keep its Emperor. In every other respect Japan was ready, except for the irreconcilables in the Army, to surrender unconditionally; with the Emperor’s position guaranteed, the Japanese would sigh with relief and cease their hopeless resistance. There is undeniable pathos about these last days of Japanese agony. Japan was willing to trade the entire substance of capitulation for this one concession to a principle which, to its western conquerors, appeared perverted and of no worth. To the West, attachment to an Emperor was sentimental; a defeated Japan must eventually have a chief executive, and the title he would use of himself was no matter. But to the Japanese it was beyond price. Even so, some of the Jūshin were frankly disposed to sacrifice the Emperor, if peace could be gained by this.
President Truman had to take account of the fact that feeling against the monarchy was strong in the United States. Those in favour of tolerating it were accused of being appeasers. Truman himself, backed by Henry L. Stimson, the Secretary for War, was in favour of accepting the Japanese terms on this point. They were influenced by the argument that the American occupying force would find it much simpler to do its work if it had the Japanese Emperor on its side. His prestige was so immense that he would, as it were, legitimize the occupation in Japan’s eyes. Also, an American commander, able to speak through him, would be able to gain control of the surrendering Japanese armies; which, otherwise, would have presented a problem. Truman did not directly meet the Japanese condition. But he drafted the American reply in terms that, while avoiding all mention of the Emperor problem, conveyed the general sense that the Emperor would be kept.
These exchanges came between two vital meetings in Tokyo, the first on 13 August, between the Japanese Emperor and the Supreme Command, the committee of which directed the war; the second on the next day, a conference of the Emperor with the Japanese Cabinet. The meetings were held in a dug-out in the imperial palace. In spite of the belligerent circumstances, a certain formality was observed. All those taking part wore full dress uniform, or morning dress; the long table at which they sat was covered with a precious gold brocade. But the Emperor himself, appearing unshaven, increased the general sense of gloom. At the first meeting, no decision was reached: the case for further resistance, the case for immediate capitulation, were fully argued. But the Prime Minister, Admiral Suzuki, succeeded in getting agreement that the Emperor should be asked to decide personally what should be done. To follow such a procedure was revolutionary in Japan: the convention was that he should never be embarrassed by having to give instructions to his Ministers. At the second meeting, after those present had again expressed their views, and the American attitude towards the Emperor had been weighed up, the decision was taken by the Emperor. ‘The unendurable must be endured’, was the imperial pronouncement which terminated the war. It was a conscious echo of Hirohito’s grandfather’s remarks at the end of another great humiliation of Japan, and it therefore was understood to contain elements of continuity and regeneration as well as of despair and resolution.
With the last military hope gone, with the Red Army pouring into Manchuria, and with further air attacks expected, which nobody had the remotest idea of how to resist, the Japanese Emperor, in form using the procedure with which he had committed Japan to the calamity of Pearl Harbor, but in fact having taken on himself the personal responsibility for what was now done, gave instructions that hostilities were to cease and, on 14 August Japan replied, accepting the Potsdam declaration.
Until the last moment, it continued to be uncertain if even the intervention of the Emperor would succeed. The military, which had made the war, would not lightly abdicate. It was one thing for the Emperor to forbid further war; it was another for him, great though the Imperial prestige was, to be obeyed. Moreover the United States, in refusing all bargaining, had not satisfied the Army that it stood to gain nothing by forcing American troops to fight their way ashore in Japan. Action was precipitated because a fairly accurate account of the peace negotiations had leaked to the Army. On the night after the decision to end the war was taken, a melodrama took place in Tokyo which was equal to any of the sensational passages in the history of conspiracy. It recalls Hitler’s night of the long knives, in which there culminated the feud between him and the SA leaders; St Bartholomew’s Eve in Paris four centuries earlier; the fight, again at Paris, on the night of Robespierre’s fall, between the moderate politicians and those who wanted the Terror to continue. A group of young, well-connected, passionately unappeasable officers tried to halt the negotiations, make a coup, and seize the sacred person of the Emperor.
To succeed, they needed the support of three or four generals, who were in key positions in Tokyo. Their plot began in the office of the general commanding the First Imperial Guards Division, which was garrisoning the imperial palace. For hours they pleaded with him: then, their tempers breaking, and pressed for time, they abruptly murdered him. In these bloody proceedings, there is an odd atmosphere of a family quarrel which had passed out of control and become terribly serious. Many of the officers were related to the generals with whom they were pleading. One of them was the son-in-law of General Tōjō Hideki, the former Prime Minister. Another was the brother-in-law of General Anami Korechika, the War Minister.
The officers went to the part of the palace where the Emperor was. Comedy then took over. On the evening before, the Emperor was known to have recorded a wireless address, which would be broadcast to the people of Japan on the next morning, 15 August, and in which he had declared the Japanese decision to surrender. When it was once played on the air, the act would be irrevocable; it was therefore vital to the officers to seize the record and destroy it. It was known to be present in the palace until it was needed for broadcasting, and the soldiers in the plot spent some hours searching for it in vain. Some of those taking part, with the curious detached Japanese aestheticism, remarked on the great beauty of the night, the uncanny and eerie moonlight which provided a backcloth of deep peace for these disordered events. The Emperor, the occasion of this wild conspiracy, was sleeping peacefully, a few yards away, and when it came to the point nobody would commit the impiety of waking him. In a cellar, directly underneath, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Marquis Kido Kōichi, who was deeply committed to the peace negotiations, was quaking for his life, for, if the officers had discovered him, they would certainly have slaughtered him. Some radio officials, who had played a part in manufacturing the record, were rounded up and kept prisoner for a while. Their lives were also in danger.
The conspiracy ended because, with the passage of time, the officers began to ask themselves whether they were not going too far. Sake flowed; but this did not avail to stifle doubt. The failure to find the gramophone record put a lesion on the unfolding of the plot. Resolution drained away, and the band dispersed. Fake orders, which they had issued to the Guards division to rise and seize the place, were intercepted. They did not dispose of a sufficient body of rank and file troops.
As a result of this sacrilege of Army officers in seizing the imperial palace, the War Minister committed seppaku. He had been on the verge of this supreme act as a gesture of atonement for the behaviour of the Japanese Army in losing the war; the night’s doings probably overcame his natural hesitancy, and made death the way out of a situation which had become unbearable to him. In the ministerial debates of the previous days he was one of those whose opinion was most consulted, and had been the most vacillating. He had readily agreed that the military situation was hopeless; but he had been withheld from advising surrender as the only rational course by doubts over what the Americans intended to do about the Emperor. Now he was for capitulation, now he veered towards those who suggested that Japan should try again to save itself by force. His attitude, even towards those who attempted the military coup, was ambiguous. He was not taken by surprise; for days he had known that something was afoot. He had said to those around him that a coup would be impious and impossible; but, at the same time, he had shown marked favour to the more irresponsible officers. He summed up in himself the weakness that was general in the higher ranks of Japanese officer considered from the point of view of their reliability to the state. He took it as axiomatic that a general need not in all cases obey instructions which reached him, but should be free to connive at gangsterism when the situation required. It was clear that his heart yearned for a coup: and his head only partially restrained him from siding with the young officers. Very distressingly, and rather characteristically, he bungled his suicide, and lived in great agony until the following day.
In the anti-climax which followed these exciting events, the rumours of which began to get about, Hirohito’s speech was played over to the Japanese people. It was still touch and go how the speech would be received. In fact, the speech was not generally or at least clearly understood, and that for a very curious reason. The Japanese Emperor spoke the language of the court, very flowery, with a strange lilt, which it was hard for modern Japanese to grasp, at least auditorily. This, and the uncharacteristically high pitch of his voice which came from his nervousness on this occasion, combined with sentiments so unexpected – to the uninformed – coming from such a source, produced at first a general bewilderment.
Meetings of colonels and majors were taking place the whole time in all parts of Japan. The plan for a final national effort by Air Force pilots who had sworn themselves to act as suicide squads was nearly put into effect. The proposal was to bomb the United States warship, the Missouri, which was steaming into Tokyo Bay, to accept the Japanese surrender. This was narrowly averted. Hirohito’s speech contained a notable sentence, probably inserted on the Emperor’s own responsibility, which may have irritated American and British listeners, but which represented the Emperor’s own, perhaps naïve, views. He said:
We declared war on America and Britain out of our sincere desire to ensure Japan’s self-preservation and the stabilization of South-East Asia, it being far from our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement.
He continued with a statement of the incontrovertible fact of Japan’s utter helplessness, and the lunacy of continuing the war. He was aware of the danger of seeming to break faith with those who had been killed, but the plight of those still alive required peace absolutely.
The Japanese people wept tears of disbelief and shame, but also of relief, when the imperial message at last sank home. The long nightmare of hypnosis under which they had been held by the military at last was shaken off. With the disciplined self-control of their race, which usually succeeded in clamping down upon their very volcanic emotion – which always so surprised the onlookers – they switched their behaviour overnight, and became the welcoming hosts to the advancing wave of American occupiers. By one of the psychological swings, irrational and extraordinary, which are evident among people under severe strain, the Japanese passed abruptly from regarding the Americans as barbarians, who were contemptible and to be treated with unappeasable hostility, to accepting them as a people who had incontestably proved their superiority by victory, and who had earned their consequent respect. Peace had come partly because of the effort, at the risk of their lives, of the peace party, and, when they had succeeded, it was plain that it had the support of the majority of the people. But this mass had, to the very end, remained completely unorganized. Peace was brought about with the Japanese public still as spectators of the event. They contributed nothing to it.
Everywhere the Japanese Empire surrendered, or crashed. In Burma it was already a memory, and the Japanese were gone. In Indonesia they had delayed too long to proclaim independence under Japanese auspices. This move, which was calculated to earn them plaudits in defeat, had been sabotaged by the Japanese Army, which had no confidence in the return which could be gained by apparently serving the Asian cause. On 17 August 1945, the impatient leaders of the Indonesian National Party declared independence for themselves, thus forestalling the return of the Dutch. They persuaded Sukarno, the apparently fiery but in reality circumspect principal leader of the revolution, to read out the document which, in Indonesia ever since, has been famous. Sukarno’s courage had failed him at the last moment, but his confederates held him to his task, and induced him, at pistol point, to go through with his broadcast statement. Thus a national leader was compelled to go through a historic act for which he must have been very grateful ever afterwards. Soon British troops would arrive to supervise the Japanese surrender, and soon their relation with the Indonesian nationalists would deteriorate. Within a matter of days an action would take place between the Indonesians and the Japanese, who were fighting under the command of British officers. To such a topsy-turvy condition had affairs been brought in that country.
In Manchukuo the Russians streamed in. Under the direction of Marshal Vassilievsky, the Russians attacked in a four-pronged offensive. One huge Army of Soviet troops commanded by General Meretskov had assembled in the region of Vladivostok. On 9 August it advanced swiftly across the Ussuri River into northern Korea and eastern Manchukuo, crushing all opposition in its path. At the same time, a second Army under General Purkayev rolled forward, crossed the Amur River and spread across northern Manchukuo. A third Russian Army, largest of the three and led by Marshal Malinovsky, struck the north-west sector of Manchukuo. On his southern flank, the Army of the (Outer) Mongolian People’s Republic sliced through Chahar and Jehol. Stalin afterwards boasted that the combined strength of these forces amounted to seventy divisions. The Japanese, who may have had forty, stood no chance. It was an awful invasion, one of terrible massacre, incredible speed, confusion and panic. The way in which the Soviets sacked Manchuria, their revenge upon the White Russians and small colonies of East European refugees, the plight of defenceless Japanese, Korean and Manchurian non-combatants and local militia caught up in the destruction, the disintegration of the Kwantung and Korean Armies (shells of their former selves, long ago stripped of seasoned warriors to stiffen the far-flung Japanese forces where mettle might prevail), the fate of those taken as prisoners of war – slave labour – by the Red Army and its political commissars, all of these things should be remembered and unforgiven, but here the details must be left to the imagination.
The administrative structure erected by the Japanese in Manchukuo vanished in a flash. Their puppet Manchu Emperor, Pu-Yi, has recorded the final scene which took place in his capital at Changchun:
My brother, sisters, brothers-in-law and nephews were already at the railway station, and, of my entire family, only I and two of my wives were left in the palace. Yoshioka addressed me and the servants who were still with me in a peremptory tone:
‘Whether we walk or go in automobiles, the sacred objects to be carried by Hashimoto Toranosuke will go in front. If anyone passes the sacred vessels they must make a ninety-degree bow.’
I stood respectfully and watched Hashimoto, the President of the Bureau of Worship, carry the bundle containing the sacred Shinto objects to the first car. I got into the second and, as we left the palace, I looked around and saw flames rising above the National Foundation Shrine.∗
Pu-Yi set off to make his way to Japan. He was informed that the American Government had left Hirohito on his throne. He sank to his knees, and kowtowed to him, expressing his relief at the news. He hoped to find safety under his wing. But at Mukden he was arrested by the Russians.
The airfield reverberated to the sound of aircraft engines as Soviet planes landed. Soviet troops holding sub-machine guns poured out of the planes and immediately disarmed all the Japanese soldiers on the airfield, which was soon covered with Soviet troops.†
Pu-Yi remained for five years the captive of the Russians. He was then handed over to the Chinese communists for ‘brainwashing’. It took time, but eventually the Chinese were satisfied that he was in a desirable state of mind. From 1959, until his death in 1967, he was in Peking, employed as a gardener in the former imperial gardens of the city and was a striking national monument. Mao Tse-tung seems to have regarded him with a curious affection mixed with respect and looked after him with some benevolence. Thereafter he was forgotten by the human race until Bernardo Bertolucci brought to our screens the tragical history of this curious ‘Last Emperor’.
In the defeat of Japan lay some of the seeds of the Cold War in Asia. Nowhere is this more evident than in the controversies surrounding the possession and use of the atomic bomb. The horrific consequences of the atomic explosions on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have killed fewer people than conventional bombs had done but nevertheless created an entirely new arms race and balance of terror. At the same time, but covertly, the efforts made by the United States, Britain, China and the Soviet Union to acquire what the Japanese had learned from its practice of biological warfare and human experimentation undoubtedly contributed to the poisoning of relations between the ‘Great Powers’ (a phrase rather out of fashion after 1945) in the post-war era. There were other ways, too, in which the very collapse of Japan hastened the breakdown of the wartime Alliance.
It is abundantly clear that the Japanese themselves often took a more important part in this than is generally appreciated. Late in the war, Japanese administrators in Indonesia, Indo-China, Burma and elsewhere helped to nurture militant nationalist movements which often had a communist taint. With the defeat of Japan in prospect, the Japanese hoped that they could produce conditions which would poison the European imperial administrations about to return. At some time in the future, so these Japanese dreamt, their actions might create favourable opportunities for Japan to rise again and lead independent Asian nations in a crusade for a second Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. These were not merely spoiling operations. They were consistent with the sense of guardianship that so many Japanese truly believed they would exercise towards their Asian brethren. In the end, Pan-Asianism failed to have the impact its adherents devoutly wished. It was vitiated not by the efforts of the Allied Powers but rather by the nationalist passions unloosed during the war within each of the countries occupied by the Japanese. This is scarcely to be wondered at: European, South American and more recently African and Arabic regional solidarity have foundered upon the same rock.
Individual Japanese took other employment which had a subsequent bearing on the development of the Cold War in Asia. Many took positions as valued military advisers to the contending forces in the Chinese Civil War, chiefly on the side of the Kuomintang. Others, particularly former Intelligence officers, helped General MacArthur and his Occupationaires to fathom the complex military and political conditions of areas such as Manchuria and Korea which had lain under the exclusive control of Japan, or adjacent areas under communist control which had been more closely and systematically observed for many years by the Japanese than by the Western Powers. The Japanese Research Division, established under the wing of Military Intelligence within MacArthur’s Far East Command, commissioned former Japanese military and naval officers to prepare nearly two hundred monographs on their observations and experiences for information and guidance. With time, it was discovered that many of these monographs were unreliable. Intensive research was conducted to make them more accurate and comprehensive: the unit, having accomplished its work, was disbanded only in 1960. Meanwhile, as late as the early fifties, Japanese airmen were flying covert reconnaissance missions over North Korea, North China, Manchuria and as far away as the Soviet Union. Japanese minesweepers secretly helped to clear the way for United Nations landings on the North Korean coasts: their availability and undoubted familiarity with these waters outweighed the risk of political repercussions. Japanese factories were used to repair damaged American tanks sent back into action in Korea. All of these instances suggest that at least some Japanese know-how was used with effect by the Americans and Japanese preconceptions gained during the years of Total War slowly percolated into the American military establishment in Japan during the years which followed the termination of hostilities. Although there are indications that the Soviets were no less eager to make use of their former enemies, it would appear that the exclusion of the Soviet Union from the occupation of Hokkaido, or indeed from the administration of any Japanese territory not overrun by Red Army troops, was of more consequence in the refrigeration of politics in East Asia (and in the national salvation of post-war Japan).
Power was everywhere passing away from those who had held it, and a new world was being created. It was the same in those parts of Asia which were, at least formally, on the victors’ side. In India the negotiations were beginning which resulted in its complete emancipation within two years.
The war was at an end, and no further attempt will be made to trace the history of the countries, or to examine the effects of the rewards and penalties which they incurred. It is arbitrary to mark a divide anywhere in history, and the new age in Asia which began in 1945 is really the pendant of Asia at war, and is inseparably connected with that. It would take decades to work out the consequences of the great struggle. But the history of the world must be chopped into comprehensible lengths. For the purpose of this book the dropping of the bomb is the terminus.
By dropping the atom bomb the British and Americans had done much more than put an end to the war with Japan. They had put an end to a chapter of human history, and had transformed the nature of war. In the future neither governments nor people would enter on a war as lightly as the Japanese had done. The interest of the historian lies in the question of what induced the British and Americans to take the responsibility of dropping it.
Why did the two great Allies, who had it in their power to terminate the war by simply notifying Japan of the terrible effectiveness of the new weapon which had come into their hands, go to the lengths of actually dropping it? Why did they not content themselves with one bomb, but in a matter of hours, and without waiting to see the consequences of Hiroshima, drop the second bomb on Nagasaki?
The answer to these questions is, and is likely to remain, the greatest single matter of controversy of the war. The documents do not clarify the reasons. Churchill, for instance, is hardly enlightening. In his memoirs, he says, quite simply:
The historic fact remained, and must be judged in the after time, that the decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb to compel the surrender of Japan was never even an issue. There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioning agreement around our [Council] table.
The Allies were nearly as well aware as Japan of the desperation of the Japanese.
American cryptographers had continued to listen in on exchanges of information between the Japanese Government, its outposts, and its agents and diplomats abroad. The Americans, who had been quick to appreciate the fact that they were overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of Intelligence they had been receiving from deciphered Japanese Purple code transmissions since 1940, had taken steps to put this information into an appropriate context shortly after the lessons of Pearl Harbor had been studied. Thereafter, daily summaries were prepared from these exchanges, known as Magic. These were remarkable in their clarity of analysis and were valued by those privileged enough to receive them.
Magic circulated among the highest echelons of Allied policy-makers and field commanders. In contrast with the British Ultra code-breaking operation, the Magic Summaries, prepared by the Special Branch of the US Army’s Military Intelligence Branch, were circulated with background notes and a sophisticated commentary on the strategical implications of the information contained within the intercepted Japanese code transmissions. As time passed, other agencies, British as well as American, had fed Special Branch with additional information that became interwoven into the summaries. Now, as the war was drawing to a close, Magic took on a new significance. The horror of the B29 raids was unmistakable. The upheaval in Europe made its mark, and the disintegration of Germany took place in full view of the Japanese. Soviet interference with Japanese diplomatic pouches now seemed dangerous, not simply irksome. The Japanese said farewell to Germany and stood alone against the might of the western democracies. Soviet reinforcements sped to the East: the Japanese watched them go. Reports came through from Berne on talks with Allen Dulles of the prospects for peace negotiations. Other transmissions between Stockholm and Tokyo expressed the same desire for peace. The evacuation of Japanese families from China began in earnest. Food shortages grew worse. Fuel was unobtainable. There were strikes at currency printing plants in Shanghai. Civil unrest grew in North China and Inner Mongolia. The despondency of Tokyo and of Japanese diplomats and espionage agents abroad became increasingly clear and rapidly translated into straightforward defeatism. The reports filed from Tokyo left the recipients in no doubt about the frantic efforts of the Japanese to seek an early peace. There was no determination to fight the war to the last Japanese. On the contrary, the importance which the Japanese attached to the good offices of the Soviet Union was unmistakable. As the summer of 1945 drew on, the Japanese missions in foreign countries gradually closed down, and their agents, one by one, twinkled out like little stars. Reading the Magic Summaries today is a strangely moving experience, for together with our relief at the imminent termination of hostilities, it involves us in a strong sense of tragedy as well. The Summaries continued throughout the days and the weeks that followed Hiroshima, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and Korea, Nagasaki, the death of Bose, the disintegration of Ba Maw’s Government, the end of the Nanking Government, the possible abdication of Hirohito, exchanges on the treatment of Wainwright, and on to the end of radio communications in early November 1945, a full two months after the Japanese surrender. The Summaries, trusted by those fortunate few who read them day by day, must have given their readers much pause for thought. And through it all the question persists: Why the Bomb? Why twice?
In Japanese prisoner-of-war and civilian internment camps they had answers to those questions. So did those who worked in the secret chambers of Anglo-American technical Intelligence. There were reports of a Japanese atomic bomb, and there was an abundance of information about the mad, super-scientific world of Japanese chemical and biological warfare.
Orders had already been issued instructing the prison camp commanders to annihilate all prisoners in certain eventualities. Many of the prisoners had seen the elaborate preparations that had been made. Some were told by horror-struck guards or outside Intelligence agents. The orders themselves survived and were introduced in evidence at post-war trials of Japanese war criminals. The Allied Powers prepared plans to take the camps by storm. The Bomb, it is said, saved the lives of these prisoners. But it is more accurate to suggest that luck, the Emperor’s broadcast, and the arrival of Allied relief teams at a time when prison camp guards were still in a state of shock at the end of the war, all played contributory parts. The peaceful liberation of the camps, in scenes repeated all over East Asia, resulted from the fact that The War Had Ended. It is quite illogical to suppose that the lives of these hostages to fortune were saved through any fine appreciation by the Japanese authorities that, a fortnight ago, their barbarous enemies had compounded the offences perpetrated by the B29 incendiary raids and had rejoiced in two further massacres of hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese non-combatants in contravention of every recognized conventional law of war or principle of humanity.
The Japanese also possessed their own weapons of mass destruction, and they were not averse to using them where it seemed profitable to do so. Japanese employment of chemical and biological warfare (and Japanese research involving the vivisection of thousands of prisoners of war in C B W experiments) has become a matter of great public concern in Japan today. Western text-books have been mute on the issue, doubtless accepting British and American official denials of accusations dismissed as blatant and groundless communist propaganda in the late 1940s and early 1950s. More than forty years after the end of hostilities, however, fresh documentary evidence from British and American official sources, amounting to thousands of pages concerning this highly sensitive area, has come to light. Disclosure of this information has been somewhat piecemeal until recently, but those examining the totality of what is now known on the subject are bound to question the probity and integrity of their wartime Governments to a degree matched only by the controversy surrounding the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Briefly, the story of Japanese biological warfare implicates more than half the persons tried by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, and more than 5,000 others who worked on the B W programme in some capacity. It involved a genuine conspiracy of silence that began soon after the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and spread its tentacles throughout all Japanese occupied territories during the Greater East Asian War. Thousands of people were butchered in the name of science and for the sake of war technology in experiments conducted by a secret network of research establishments. The first of these was established in 1932 in Manchuria, where others followed. A detachment spirited off victims for experimentation on the outskirts of Nanking in 1937. That detachment became a major research institute in its own right. University medical faculties on the Japanese mainland were headhunted for the brightest and best biochemists and physiologists the Japanese Army could buy or conscript, and university medical laboratories in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and a number of other places were utilized in the research and experimentation. Delivery systems were refined, vast quantities of bacteria were produced. Thousands of cultivators grew so much bacteria that at full capacity the monthly output of germ-laden froth could be measured in tonnes.
Field trials of Army biological munitions were conducted, first in Manchuria and then in China Proper. Attacks were made at Ningpo in 1940, at Changteh in 1941, in the Chekiang offensive of 1942 (in the revenge attacks that followed the Doolittle raid), and elsewhere. Early (and as it happens exceptionally accurate) Chinese medical and Intelligence reports were brought to the personal attention of President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill: their experts found them unconvincing. Later the mad Japanese medical scientists operated in Burma, Malaya, French Indo-China, Thailand, the Netherlands East Indies and New Guinea. They applied their skills at Nomonhan against the Russians and sent saboteurs across the Soviet Union itself in a succession of secret missions carried out over a number of years, allegedly in response to questionable reports of Russian biological warfare attacks carried out against the Japanese in China and Manchuria. A ship carrying a biological warfare assault team was dispatched to Saipan to slow down the American advance: it was sunk en route by an American submarine. Funds amounting to a ten million yen annual budget were allocated for offensive BW research as the B29 raids on Japan intensified. The money, as always, was channelled through the Kwantung Army. Production facilities increased more or less continuously: three million rats were to be ready for use by September 1945; storage of the food to sustain them required a four-storey building. A proposal to employ B W following the defeat of Japanese forces on Iwojima was only turned down on the grounds that it would have no effect on the outcome of the Pacific War.∗
Allied prosecutors from half a dozen countries affected by the issue remained silent at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial about what they knew. The scientists and technicians who were involved in these, the most ghastly atrocities of the Eastern War, were granted immunity from prosecution by General MacArthur with the blessing of the United States Government, with at least the tacit consent if not complicity of the British Government and the acquiescence of the Chinese. The British and Americans pooled what they knew. This was a standing measure of their technical collaboration, but there were practical benefits to both sides. Porton Down’s scientists were regarded as a cut above their American counterparts; the Americans had systematically assembled a vast amount of information from their Intelligence during the latter stages of the war and during their early days in Japan. Meanwhile, in Singapore, the Central Pathology Laboratory of Lord Mountbatten’s forces had occupied the only Japanese BW laboratory now known to have remained operational following the surrender of Japan: records concerning what happened next are unavailable. The Chinese, whose own knowledge about the Japanese use of BW was quite extensive (as appears not only from the quality of their wartime reports but also from information which they shared with Allied prosecutors on the eve of the Tokyo Trial), must have lived in hope of gaining some kind of a quid pro quo for their silence during the Court proceedings. The Russian authorities, who sought to raise the matter at Tokyo, allowed themselves to be silenced. The French and the Dutch Governments, on whose territories in Indo-China and the East Indies human experimentation also took place, were kept in the dark by the British and Americans but may have learned of what had happened by other means.
What seems quite incredible is that the cover-up conspiracy – for it is by no means a demonological exaggeration to speak of it as a conspiracy – was maintained throughout the three years which elapsed between the Japanese defeat and the conclusion of the Tokyo Trial and that, apart from mischief-making communist mudslinging, ‘this conspiracy was sustained for so long afterwards. The conspiracy extended into the post-war period of Anglo-American weapons research, surfaced again during the Korean War, and is rumoured to have carried on beyond. Much more research needs to be done to complete our understanding of this astonishing story, but what is already known makes chilling reading.
The decision to use the atomic bomb to terminate the war involved no fine calculations, however, and it seems to have been taken without any special regard for the dangers of a last-minute BW offensive. Japan virtually had conceded defeat at the end of July, and had put out peace feelers, first asking the Russians to act as mediators, and, on finding them unobliging, had approached the Swedish Government. Anyone with experience of diplomacy could perceive that the upshot, after a few days’ natural hesitation, must be the surrender so much desired. In the days of decision during the Potsdam Conference anything like a sustained Japanese defence, from strong defensive positions, had clearly become impossible. By ending the war in a ghastly and fearful massacre, the British and Americans cast over their triumph a dark shadow, and one which may, as is the way in great historical transactions, return to haunt the doers in the future.
After the bomb had been exploded, Russian policy became, for the time being, very conciliatory. It was in this period that Truman announced his recent decision that the Occupation of Japan should fall exclusively to the Americans. The details of the Occupation of Germany had been discussed inexhaustibly, and continued to be a major issue among the Allies: by contrast, the Occupation of Japan seemed to have been arranged at very short notice, and by the United States alone. Great Britain made no demur at the American decision. Russia limited its protests to a proposal that the surrender on the battleship USS Missouri, should have its counterpart on Hokkaido with a ceremony of the surrender of the Kwantung Army to Russia. This was rejected. Probably the existence of the bomb frustrated Russian plans for insisting on a joint occupation of Japan, and the consequences of this were incalculable. It avoided endless intrigue, and conflict of puppet parties: probably it saved Japan from a great deal of hardship and made the return to normal life in Japan much quicker. By taking out Japan as a major question of dispute, it probably made the relations of Russia and the United States by that much easier to handle. It may even have kept them from war. It was perhaps the only good thing which came out of the dropping of the bomb.
The fateful decision to drop the bomb was made within a matter of days. Most of the men who were responsible for Japan’s policy had not known a fortnight before that the atom bomb was in existence. Even General MacArthur, who, more than any other man, was responsible for the overthrow of Japan, was given the information only a very brief time before the bomb was due. He had said that he deplored it, but he had no time to make his protest effective. Admiral William D. Leahy, the Chief of Staff of the President, was consulted in advance and said, bluntly, that he thought that the use of the bomb was brutal, and served no rational end. It is possible that President Truman, whose subsequent decisions about the bomb were on the whole sober and responsible as, for example, during the later Korean War, may have acted in these days very much in the dark; and it is at least charitable to suppose that he did so. Churchill remarked that, as soon as the news of successful tests arrived, the President seemed to be determined to use it. Churchill judged it useless to press for discussion. All these statesmen suddenly found the bomb at their disposal, and they had no reasonable opportunity to think out the implications of atomic warfare, nor, it seemed, was the phenomenon of fall-out clear in their minds. The real essential difference between an atom bomb and a larger conventional weapon had not been grasped. Most Americans supposed, like Stalin, that it was simply a bigger and more lethal weapon. The discovery of atomic power required that men of exceptional vision and judgement should have been in power, who could see the consequences of the action they took then upon the politics of the next half century or longer. Those men were hardly likely to have been thrown up by the circumstances of directing the war.
There is a misperception, finally, that commonly surrounds Japan’s ‘unconditional surrender’, and it serves no purpose today to ignore it. The fact is that the Japanese surrender was not unconditional (although at the time it was regarded as such by most Japanese themselves). Under the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, the Imperial Rescript ending the war, the Instrument of Surrender, etc., the Japanese armed forces surrendered unconditionally. But the Japanese Government retained its civil powers. Indeed, under the terms of the surrender, the Japanese Government was obliged to exert those powers in order to ensure compliance with the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. Accordingly, many of the steps taken by General Douglas MacArthur and his forces to impose their will upon the civil Government of Japan amounted to a usurpation of authority which breached the terms of the surrender. In no places were this more evident than in the establishment of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and in the great purges and blacklists imposed upon 210,288 individual Japanese by MacArthurian Diktat. In short, the differences between the Allied Occupation of Germany and that of Japan deserve attention: the former occurred as a result of the Allied conquest of German territory and its sub-division by the occupying Powers. But the war against Japan ended as a result of a contract between the two sides, and while the Japanese civil power was clearly in no position to contest the issue, the fact remains that the Occupationaires grossly exceeded the terms of that contract. American defence attorneys challenged the International Military Tribunal on this basis (and on other grounds), and they were ruled out of order. Nevertheless, the truth of the matter is perfectly clear and is a subject of some controversy in Japan in our own day. Unfortunately, it has the effect of diminishing still further the gulf which was once believed to exist between the capricious and arrogant abuse of power by the Japanese armed forces in Occupied East Asia and the self-righteous morality of the Allied Powers who brought them down.