IT may have been useful to tell the facts of this conflict. There can seldom have been fought a war which engaged so much of the attention of so many Powers, the details of which have so rapidly been allowed to become vague. Within a generation the dramatic events of Japan’s surrender, the particulars of the relations between Japan and China, the great struggle at Imphal, the island-hopping across the Pacific by the United States, the great naval battles, have all begun to be touched by the waters of Lethe. Even Pearl Harbor, which has naturally entered into the folklore of the USA, today appears far-off, and what happened there is only vaguely understood.
The Eastern War was inevitably overshadowed by Hitler’s War in Europe. It was interdependent with it, and its events criss-crossed with those of the western conflict. But, in retrospect, they have seemed to some to assume a subordinate part. The events of the European War stand out clearly; they are remembered sharply; the events of the war in the East are, by contrast, hazy in the public memory, and are heaped together in a certain confusion. Ask any young man born at or after the dropping of the bomb at Hiroshima, be he of Asian or European origin, to outline the events which led up to the fearsome drama, and you will be surprised to find what lacunae lie in his narrative.
And yet the events which had to be settled by arms, and by the atom bomb, were as great as the issues in Europe, the suffering was as widespread, the events spread over as many continents, involved more civilizations, and left as large a dent in the history of world culture. For this reason, it has seemed to be worthwhile seeking to protest a little at the progress of the waters sweeping away the recollection of those years – even if the waters are fundamentally healthful, doing the saving work of washing away the memories of brutality and the hatred of nations for one another, and other things which are best forgotten. The famous feats of endurance of the peoples, the daring projects of the national leaders, may, with justice, be offered up as alms to oblivion; yet no people can afford to neglect the history which has made them what they are.
The war, for all the damage it had done, was not, by the standards of past wars, a particularly long one. Three series of wars, which were needed to settle the opposition of deeply conflicting forces, and which turned upside down the affairs of all the participants, took somewhat longer. One was the Thirty Years War between Protestant and Catholic Europe: its historians are quick to point out that its protagonists and allegiances changed as it progressed through a succession of phases linked only by opportunism, cause and effect, rather than by a single national will. Another, the Peloponnesian Wars, which checked finally the Athenian attempt at imperialism, lasted nineteen years: it had the same elements of fundamentalist irrationality, hysteria and total commitment that we have traced throughout the conflict that subsumed East Asia and the Pacific. The wars which rose out of the French Revolution ran a course which ended at the Battle of Waterloo, and covered twenty-three years: like the Japanese war(s) of the twentieth century, they brought together unlikely coalitions of Allies, all with different aims and mutual mistrust, linked only in their abiding determination to rid the world of a peculiarly bloodthirsty Empire. The present war, from the time that the fighting commenced in earnest on the Asiatic mainland in 1931, and excluding the opening skirmishes between China, Korea and Japan, was over in fifteen years.
The War in the East can be addressed by many names. The Japanese wartime censor regarded it as ‘The Greater East Asia War’. His successors in the (mainly American) Allied Occupation Forces banned that phrase and substituted ‘The Pacific War’. Can it really be regarded as ‘The Second World War in the Pacific’, bearing in mind that the China Incident preceded the outbreak of the European War by two years and only ended with the Japanese surrender to the Allied Powers in 1945? Surely the Japanese experience of Total War really began with the Manchurian Incident in 1931, and what of the mental and physical resources expended on the inevitable clash over the preceding decades? The trend in Japan today is to call it ‘The Fifteen-Year War’, a somewhat unsatisfying and curiously anonymous sobriquet if ever there was one: it does not seem likely to find favour in the United States or in British countries. ‘The Far East War’ offends some people not only because it is Eurocentric in its geographical conception but because that conception involves an ineluctable sense of isolation and irrelevance. ‘The War against Japan’ is revealing but one-sided: the war also involved the positive aspirations of dozens of racial and national groups. In the end, we have to come to terms with the war’s ambivalence, its complexity and, above all, its size. If it must be known and remembered in a single evocative phrase, let us simply call it ‘The East Asian and Pacific Conflict’.
The great modern wars have reflected the deadly nature of modern armaments, and international efforts to control their spread and influence. The causes nevertheless have been weighty and complex. Economic issues contributed to the struggle but did not, perhaps, outweigh the conceits and misperceptions of individual men acting collectively. The issue of the strife in Asia settled a number of conflicts which, but for the war, might have dragged on for years, causing constant unrest, and keeping the region in continual uncertainty. It settled which of various trends were to continue, and which, among those which had seemed strong and flourishing a few years before, were either to stop abruptly or else to fade away.
The decision was sharpest for Japan. The attempt to maintain Japan’s unnatural pre-eminence in East Asia, and to spread it over the lands to the south and west, had failed. Japan’s Empire was dissolved. A relatively small country in relation to its dependencies and enemies (although larger than Britain, metropolitan France or Germany), its principal assets were the ardent will of its citizens and their regimentation. It had had the temerity to challenge three quarters of the world to come against it in arms; and had shaken the established order of the earth more than many had thought possible. Yet the war did not spring from a foolish intent by the Japanese to conquer the globe, to bring, as the ancient Japanese phrase has it, ‘all the eight corners of the world under one roof. The American Ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, distinguished Bostonian though he was, found illumination in comparing Japan to the Uncle Remus story of Brer Rabbit, who attacked a tar baby for spite, and other fatuous reasons, and then found himself stuck to it ever more thoroughly as he struggled to break free from his ill-advised entanglement. The image works well, and is worth remembering.
It is also important to bear in mind that the history of the ‘East Asian and Pacific Conflict’ is not a sequence of events between the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the surrender aboard the battleship Missouri which can properly be isolated from the previous half-century of conflict on the Asiatic continent. The titanic and enduring contest between Russia and Japan for domination of North-East Asia changed the political map of the world early in the twentieth century as it did again in August 1945: the latter-day changes were not merely echoes but the extension of the former. The tug-of-war between the Japanese, local upstart bullies as they were, and the imperialists of faraway Europe, took place over the recumbent body of China. Japan emerged from that a monster, conscious of its feats of strength and daring, aware of past humiliations and foreign contempt, determined to establish an area of peace and security, governing by means of what it chose to name ‘cooperation’, hoping for what it called ‘co-prosperity’ in regions and markets that suited it. The Manchurian Incident and the transformation of Manchukuo into a dependency of the Japanese Empire form an inseparable part of the Greater East Asian War and therefore of the ‘East Asian and Pacific Conflict’ as a whole: it was a hinge, a fulcrum around which turned the histories of China, Japan and the West.
The Japanese of that generation had passed through a strange phase of their national history. In the past, there had been little to single them out for particular reprobation. They were always very vigorous, usually artistic, often somewhat muddled intellectually, which was apparently due to the imprecision of their language. They were also perhaps outstanding for an exaggerated conformism, though they expressed this in an unusual manner by extending the pale of conformism to include those whose vision of the national future was grander, and who dared to call for radical change. Traditionally also the Japanese relaxed the tyranny of society over the older members of the community, and gave them a licence to do and say what they pleased. All of this gave colour to a land where the vigilance of thought police was well developed. And always, as with any generalization about an entire people, one is conscious at once of many eccentric members of the community for whom the general rule did not apply.
The main fact in the twentieth century is the acute military phase that the Japanese lived through. It was an aberration. It was not really traditional. It may be that Japanese society has a Samurai streak, and a prolonged feudal period had left it too ready to respond to the call of arms. Many of its ways of thought were military in origin. But, if one looks back on Japanese history, the Japanese do not appear to have been an unduly military people. At one period they were predominantly artists, and would not allow matters of soldierly concern to interfere with the artistic life. In the great Heian period, which is perhaps the outstanding example in history of a leisured class giving up all its time to artistic living, there was once a complaint that the imperial bodyguard could not be properly maintained. The soldiers could not ride horses: they constantly fell off them. The detailed history of the society of this time is full of anecdotes of the extreme lengths to which Japanese aestheticism would go. The men of the Heian period are strange ancestors of the Japanese who took Singapore.
The Japanese of recent generations were conditioned by the institutions of their society to offer themselves in the bid to establish a Japanese imperialism. These institutions, most of them borrowed from the West though given a peculiar slant in their development, are the monument of the Meiji Restoration. Gradually they induced in the mass of the people the willingness to support a more and more aggressive national policy. The institutions took on a life of their own. In the end, they carried the Japanese people into a great war, and brought down half a continent.
The prime evil of Japan was certainly the ascendancy of the military. This led, in time of war, to the Supreme Command conducting the war as a state secret from the civilian parts of the Japanese administration. Whatever else may be said of such a system, it proved to be most incompetent militarily. Thus Japanese militarism held within it the seeds of its own defeat. It was unable to organize Japanese society so that in modern warfare it could compete with the Powers which were organized to be more flexible.
The same militarism, as far as it was able to prevail in making Japanese foreign policy, was responsible for the basic error which brought about Japan’s downfall. This was to found Japan’s policy on fear of the outside world, and to meet this by seeking to spread a counter-fear of Japan. Because Japan was in a difficult position internationally, because it was vulnerable, because its economic position required that it should have unimpeded access to imports and a constantly growing market overseas for its exports, and because it feared that these might be interrupted by force by an unfriendly Power, it counted that prudence required it to be ever on its guard, to arm and show its teeth in a way that would fend off dangerous intentions in its rivals. There were Japanese voices which protested at such a policy, and pointed, rightly, to the inevitable end; but they were not attended to. The result was a long period of tension, culminating in a war in which Japan lost everything, a war which could not possibly have safeguarded the things which Japan had armed itself to save.
The contradictions of Japan’s foreign policy are stated compendiously by the Foreign Ministry official, Kase Toshikazu, who played such a useful part as intermediary of the court circles in bringing the war to an end. ‘For a poor country like Japan,’ he said,
the construction of costly warships meant a crushing burden upon the national treasury. And yet we built a good number of them. We also maintained a vast Army and an ever expanding Air Force. In the end we became like the mammoth whose tusk, growing ever bigger, finally unbalanced its bodily structure. As everything went to support the huge tusks, very little was left to sustain the rest of the body. The mammoth finally became extinct.
Why did the mammoth arm itself with weapons such as ultimately to bring about its own destruction? Because it was apprehensive. In its desire to defend itself against external enemies the poor creature forgot the very fact that its tusks were its own mortal enemy! Why did Japan arm herself to the teeth? Because she was apprehensive. Why was she apprehensive? Because she had enemies. Why were there enemies? Because her aggressive policy excited suspicion in others. Rather than abandon the objectionable policy she augmented her armaments. But armaments are a relative affair. There is no end to an armament race.∗
The men who served ruthless, imperialist Japan were not by nature particularly ruthless or imperialist. They bore no signs of predestination, and there was nothing about them which marked them as enemies of the human race. The Japanese generals, though superficially they might seem to conform to a rather brutal and disgusting pattern, were often men of singular eccentricity. In other circumstances, they might have appeared as rather engaging. Many of them had a vivid and vigorous interior life, and the most varied traits of personality. Some of them practised Japanese archery and fencing each day, not for athletic reasons but for the self-control which these disciplines induced, and for greater proficiency in the art of meditation. They were an interesting contrast to the British Army, much more emotional, much more given to adjusting their philosophy and their actions. The contrast between them and the commanders of the Anglo-Saxon forces was often richly comical. Rigid behaviour patterns in their native environment made them what they were and, uprooted from this environment, their behaviour was unpredictable. It could, of course, be terrible; occasionally, however, it was the reverse.
The behaviour of the Japanese soldiers, and their cult of non-surrender, may have seemed to those fighting them to mark them out as an especially desperate, unreformable species of military man. This, too, is only an example of the lengths to which institutions may go in marking their victims. Biologically similar young men, transported to another society and brought up under other institutions, turned out to be enthusiastic liberals or democrats, and found reprehensible the Japanese cult of military national aggrandizement and the pursuit of death.
The Japanese, in the last war, were shocked at finding a most rigid refusal to respond to the call of their country and race on the part of the Nisei, the children of the Japanese emigrants to America, who had most of them continued to marry with Japanese. In this they were much disappointed: they had counted on being able to convert this class, and if they had succeeded, would have disposed a valuable ally for their war-making. The Nisei had some reason to attend to their call, for the United States was less than generous in its treatment of them, and did not hide its suspicion. The deportation or preventive confinement of the large masses of Americans of Japanese origin, who had given no reason for doubting their loyalty, was one of the blots on wartime American government. But the Nisei, almost without exception, refused the appeal of their blood relations, and were almost fanatical in their devotion to the new institutions among which they had been brought up.
The Nisei show that there is no such thing as a militarist through and through, made such by his physical make-up, and a stranger to civilization because of the military activities of his ancestors.
Most significant of all, the Japanese, since their surrender, have undergone a thorough change of heart. In no country in the world is militarism so thoroughly reprobated. All Japan’s energies are now concentrated on remaining a friendly civilian state. Possibly the very completeness of the emotional swing is suspicious. What is today so violently renounced may tomorrow be once more violently espoused. But all the signs are that the world has, as the result of the war, gained a new Japan.
At the end of the war an international tribunal was set up by the Allies in order to put on trial a representative group of those who had allegedly been responsible for crimes against peace and other war crimes. The Japanese had wished to reserve a trial of war prisoners to themselves as a condition of Japanese surrender, but that had been denied to them by the Allied Powers. At the major War Crimes Tribunal in Tokyo, twenty-five Japanese leaders were sentenced, seven of them to death, others to life imprisonment: among these were General Tōjō Hideki, the Prime Minister; General Koiso Kuniaki, his successor; the wily court chamberlain, Marquis Kido Kōichi, who played so large a part in bringing about Japan’s surrender; Tōgō Shigenori, the Foreign Minister who had showed a most un-Japanese independence of judgement; and Hirota Kōki, another former Prime Minister. The conveners even proposed trying Prince Konoye Fumimaro, but he evaded arrest by poisoning himself. These doubtful proceedings went like a swath through many of those who had been in any way prominent in Japanese politics of the period. The biographical footnotes of a book on Japanese history at this time make heavy reading because of the end of many of the characters. The major good that came out of these proceedings at Tokyo was that they are the most complete exhaustive account of Japanese politics in the militarist period.
Other war crimes trials were held in Hong Kong, Singapore, Borneo and elsewhere in the recent Japanese Empire. Detainees were arraigned for cruelty towards local populations and prisoners of war, and over 900 were executed. Thoughts of these melancholy figures, and the deeds which in many cases preceded this toll of life, lead to the reflection that had the war had a different result, the subsequent years might have been the age of Japanese Imperialism. Asia has been spared that. The war, with all its horrors, had achieved this positive good. A reluctant admiration for Japan’s military feats must not block out the consciousness of the sinister shadow which for a time hung over the eastern world.
Search the record how one will, it is almost impossible to find anything good to say of the Japanese Empire. Its liquidation was an unqualified benefit to the world. In the years before the conflict, Japan had had its opportunity to develop its Empire in miniature – in Korea, in Formosa, and in the parts of China which it came to dominate – and in this exhibition of the Japanese spirit it failed to show many virtues. An empire, which by its definition is a political structure housing peoples of different cultures and languages, is different from the nation-state, which is the most approved political form in the twentieth century. Nations object to being included in an empire. Empires are out-of-fashion. But some empires are more tolerable than others. They may have qualities which actively catch the imagination of their people. In the case of a very few, their peoples will actually be willing to die in their defence, though instances of this have become increasingly rare. The classic case, in comparison with which other empires may be judged, was the Rome of antiquity. That Empire seems to have offered a wider life, richer opportunities, a larger destiny, than could be looked for within the confines of small states.
The Japanese Empire, if it is judged from its beginnings, was not at all likely to develop into one of these rarer structures. In its origin it was essentially primitive and of petty conception. It was put together by conquest, and its prime aim was to plunder the subjected peoples for the benefit of the Japanese. The Empire offered hardly anything to its citizens which led them to take pride in membership of it beyond a pride in being Asian. This should not be neglected. The Japanese made considerable play of Pan-Asianism. The contemporary writing is all about the joy of being Asian. It was the outstanding fact of the time. But it was not long before the contrast between Japanese idealism and Japanese practice took away this enthusiasm.
The Japanese system was founded on no great code of law. In its organization it embodied no exhilarating concepts such as have led men elsewhere into giving their loyalty, even if divided – concepts such as liberty, equality and fraternity; the career open to talents; the greatest good for the greatest number or restraint of the evil of exploitation. The Japanese Empire signified no large cult of reason, a defective vision, few distinctive habits of thought or behaviour, a strange corpus of books by which to set the tone of people’s thought, a pattern of individual behaviour which gave few people a liberating vision. It was the starting place of no system of philosophy which was likely to appeal to men of all races and different cultures: in other words, it lacked the universalist appeal. The most to which it invited its citizens was to the enjoyment of Japanese culture, and there the difficulty was that, though this culture is not inferior, it is one which most Asians find uncongenial and it is at best provincial and not a universal civilization. In particular, the Japanese language was unsuited as a medium of communication for holding the political machinery together. It seemed scarcely imaginable that anyone talked Japanese as a form of intellectual pleasure, as the subjects of the French Empire often spoke French: the language was thought to be muzzy and imprecise.
Japanese culture is especially strong in the inculcation of the correct attitudes for aesthetic appreciation: but aesthetics has never been strong enough to hold an empire together. Besides, this quality of mind was often considered out-of-date or parochial in Japan itself.
Calling on the people of its Empire to share Japanese culture was summoning them to a Barmecide feast. Responding to the call, the Chinese felt themselves (not for the first or last time) sitting with more primitive people than themselves. They found that Japanese culture was a tiresome and constricting limitation on their minds.
A peculiarly evil feature of the system was that it would endure only as long as Japanese military power lasted: it was sustained by that and by that alone. It invited head-on collision with all the emerging forces of Asia, and if it had not been destroyed in war, it would sooner or later have led to bloody wars of liberation.
When the war was over, when Japan had given up the pretence at founding a new political order, and gave free play to its natural talents, the Japanese surprised the world, and themselves, by solving their problems by simple hard work, and without any use of force or creation of grandiose political structures. With western help (and spared most of the expense of defence), they recovered economically in the minimum of time; they rapidly became a beacon-light in Asia; they proved – as to be fair they had always promised – that an Asian people could save itself by its own exertions. And all this without even the dream of empire. Energy, skill in planning, imagination in enterprise, ability in the application of techniques to the economic processes proved enough to get Japan over all its obstacles; and Japan has discovered the political advantages in having a foreign policy which is audacious by reason of its modesty. Socially, too, the war and its aftermath helped to emancipate many underprivileged elements in Japanese society. One thinks of the story of a young naval officer – now a distinguished professor of economics but then a Kamikaze pilot awaiting his turn to die – who sat in his bath, facing the setting sun, when news was brought to him of the surrender of Japan. As he arose, his batman reached forward to dry his back. The young officer, his eyes blazing with intensity turned on him and said, ‘The war is over: don’t you ever wash another man’s back again.’ It was the end of an era.
The war – or more precisely Japan – also precipitated everywhere the demise of western power in Asia. The Western Powers withdrew from China. The Treaty Port system was at an end: also the rights of extra-territoriality. Within two years Britain withdrew from India. This was a change which plainly doomed the French Empire in Indo-China, and the Dutch in Indonesia. Within ten years, they had each of them passed away. They did not go voluntarily, or reluctantly, as did the British Empire in India; they attempted to stay, and they were willing to go to war against the national parties which rose up to extrude them. But they were too weak to prevail. Moreover they were too much concerned with their problems in Europe to be able to give the war their wholehearted attention.
The Japanese Empire having been destroyed and the Western empires put down, a power vacuum existed which only the nationalist organizations could fill. These were left to organize most of Asia in the pattern they desired. The West, including the United States, tried to influence them in one way or another, using their economic power to make their will effective, and in the case of Britain and the United States their armaments when the situation did not respond to economic manipulation. By indirect means they hoped to prevail as effectively as in the days when they sat with political power in Delhi and in the eastern capitals. This was the phase of neo-colonialism, and the emancipated countries of Asia have been on their guard against it and have sought to render themselves really free even at the expense of neighbouring territories.
China, released from the incubus of an Imperial Japan, has been free to develop as the inward forces in the country directed. Within four years of the ending of the war China became communist. The excessive corruption, the paralysis of will and venal incompetence of the later years of the Kuomintang were increased by its unnatural isolation from the rest of the country. Once this was removed its downfall was inevitable.
The prolonged agony which had been suffered by the Chinese people as the twentieth century wore on, opened the way to a violent remedy. The chief leaders of the Kuomintang escaped the vengeance of the opposing party by retiring, with vast fortunes, to the island of Formosa whence they kept up, under an American umbrella, a somewhat ludicrous show of still exercising an influence in world affairs. In the first flood of revenge, many of the landlords, who had lived for so long in the sun of prosperity in China, were violently put down, with sufferings as cruel as any which they had, by past insensibility and negligence, occasioned among the poor. Later, ‘re-education’ was the term used to describe the method by which the bourgeoisie were broken in. The mass of the people were liberated into a new life of undreamed-of sufficiency in living standards and educational opportunity: as against this, freedom for the individual – of thought or self-direction – was largely absent. In foreign relations, communist China’s extreme isolationism, and the mutual suspicions between it and the United States, have kept the world on edge, but from time to time have shown signs of relaxing. There is no doubt of the greatly recovered prestige of China since the war or its eventual re-emergence as a major Power in Asia.
What had been the effects in India? Great though the upheaval had been in India’s domestic life, the war affected the pace of the development of its history, and accelerated the divorce of India and Britain: it did not necessarily give events an essentially new turn. Many who looked with the eye of history on India from 1930 onwards foresaw that the end of the British Raj was approaching. Others looked forward to India’s elevation to full status as a self-governing Dominion at some faraway, indeterminate time. Even perceptive young revolutionaries elsewhere in the British Empire, like Jomo Kenyatta in East Africa, scarcely dreamt that they would ever see the independence of India within their lifetimes, much less the decolonization of Africa and beyond. They, at least, credit Japan with having shown the fragility of far-flung imperial bonds – and with having been the direct cause of the disintegration of the British, Dutch, French and Portuguese Empires east and south of Gibraltar.
Yet in one fateful respect the war gave an unexpected twist to the long process of the freedom struggle by the Indian Congress. In the circumstances of wartime politics, a sudden and accelerated growth took place in the Moslem League. It had been provoked by the Congress success; it was already apparent before the war; but the war acted like a hot-house in compressing into a few years the development which might otherwise have been spread over decades. The Moslem League, which increased in strength so radically, was emboldened to press for the creation of the Moslem state of Pakistan.
After the Greater East Asia War, that state came into being and eventually led to the creation of a second independent nation, Bangladesh. These were, when still united, an exceptional creation which reminds us of the continuing force of religion in politics. Religion was the driving force in making for the existence of this state. As such, the creation of Pakistan seems to be a digression from the ideas of the Enlightenment, and a return to the Middle Ages. Its establishment was accompanied by forebodings and very great reluctance on the part of the British Government. If independence had come in 1937, instead of 1947, it would undoubtedly have been given to a united India. The intensity of the great religious divide between Hindu and Moslem did not appear until later: they only manifested themselves in their full significance during the war years. But an undivided India would not have held together. The Hindu-Moslem cleavage would have declared itself under the strain of self-government. Sooner or later, unified government would have been made impossible: communal tension, and eventually communal civil war, would have brought it to a standstill.
It is easy to forget how at the end of the war the decision to partition the sub-continent was on a knife edge. Without the war, the British would hardly have considered the creation of Pakistan as a necessary act. The state of Pakistan is therefore one of the monuments to the war with Japan. It is an unlikely one: few today see any special connection between its history and that of Japan, yet the two are causally linked as is the eventual emergence of Bangladesh, and the vituperation that continues to exist between all three nations of the Indian sub-continent.
For the United States the war was an incident in its rise to be one of the two greatest Powers in the world. It received its baptism of fire. For many years before 1941, America had distorted the natural play of international affairs by utterly refusing to act the part of a Great Power. Its people, in general and except at certain conjunctures, appeared to be without the political instincts of the citizens of a major state. Because of their unique behaviour, and of the influence of this upon the official conduct of the American Government, the United States, at a time when fate and its economic power called upon it to exert tremendous influence, limited its voice in world affairs to be hardly of more account than that of a third-class European state. Doubtless the reasons for this lay far back in American history, and touch on George Washington, the fear of ‘entangling Alliances’ and the belief that foreign governments were very wily and would inevitably bamboozle an American Government which was rash enough to negotiate with them. But the United States had been in the First World War; its reaction to this experience and withdrawal into isolation had been a setback to normal growth. When Pearl Harbor happened, the United States, in a world at war, still had an army of about the same size as Sweden’s; it still made the gestures, to which it had accustomed itself before its entry in 1917 into the First World War, of being ‘too proud to fight’. It is true that American ideas and American business influence were very prevalent, as also was the uncontrollable propulsive power of American culture. But the American state did not set itself to propagate them.
In the course of the war, the United States developed amazingly. It grew with the alarming speed of Alice when she ate a small cake marked ‘Eat me’. It began the war with organs and ministries for taking part in foreign affairs which seem like toys. But, with the creative wind of improvisation which swept through America, the institutions developed rapidly. Simultaneously its public opinion, and the institutions by which this was made effective, grew in self-confidence. By the end of the war, the United States was moving in international affairs with professionalism and boldness.
American democracy was to show that while it was surprisingly persevering as long as the war lasted, it was, once peace was restored, capable of a rapid, revolutionary change of mood. The fires died as swiftly as they had blazed fiercely. Within seven years America had come to feel towards Japan as towards its protégé: and had transferred to Japan some of the abnormally cordial feeling which it had held towards China, until China became communist.
Finally, this was probably the last major war which Great Britain took part in as a world Power, certainly an Asian Power. For the last time Britain manoeuvred as a government with interest and concern in every part of the world, especially in Asia. It ended its Asian history with panache. It was nevertheless an end, and the speed with which it was accomplished left men to ponder whether Britain’s departure represented a policy of grace or scuttle. Either way, it was certainly an inevitable consequence of the economic exhaustion brought about by Total War and by the failure of Appeasement. Within two years of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, Britain ended its responsibility for India. Although it took some time to work out the details, by this one act it terminated its Empire everywhere in Asia; for a British Empire in Asia which excluded India was not really a possibility.
Great Britain, at that time, was more than a small country, with a restricted part to play, as seemed to befit one of a cluster of West European islands. By the accident of history, by the energy of its peoples it had, for the previous two centuries, been shot out of its natural sphere. It had risen to a height of power and prestige which obviously it could not retain but to which people in Britain had become accustomed. The leaders of institutional life had risen to their opportunity, and for some decades this had been reflected in politics. These seemed to have an influence totally out of the proportion which would naturally be expected of such a numerically small people. Living in Britain at this time had a magnifying effect, so that what was done seemed to be done with a deep sense of responsibility. The proceedings of the Parliament at Westminster were gazed at by so many people that those who took part in it had the uneasy sense of acting on a great stage of the world, and being the cynosure of the world’s eyes. This sense was often embarrassing. It often invested relatively trivial affairs with a false glamour. It would have been healthier if they had been dealt with without these overtones. Even so, thought in Britian was still apt to be large; small conceptions were still at a discount. It was this quality which perhaps most separates the Britain of those days from what it has become.
Within ten years of Indian Independence, Britain had liquidated practically all that was left of its Asian Empire. Ceylon, Malaya, Burma: it let them all go. It was not a matter of no longer discouraging their instinct to break away from the Empire which had once been thought of as a supra-national organization, a house where all the rising nationalisms of the Empire might, of their own free will, find asylum. They were positively conducted to the door. They were given a golden handshake – financially a rather mean one – and were sped into independence with expressions of goodwill.
Britain, which had enjoyed in Asia the great romantic period of its history, turned back, as a result of the war, and after an interval for readjustment, to the more sober task of discovering the contrast between being a world Power and being a small country off the north-west corner coast of continental Europe. It became preoccupied with the total revolution which should adapt Britain for its new role; with anxious debate as to whether it should think once more to become a European Power as it had been under its Angevin monarchs, or whether it could exist as a small island alone.
It is irony that, at the end, Britain finds itself in very similar circumstances to those which worried Japan at the start of this history. Transpose the islands off the north coast of Asia to the islands off the north-west of Europe, and the parallel, often remarked, is strangely apt. Its history, as Dean Acheson rightly diagnosed – only to be the object of bitter vituperation by people in Britain – was that it had lost an empire and not found a new part to play. The British may count themselves fortunate that the public opinion of the world has moved on, and it is unlikely that Britain will be tempted to try and solve its problems in a similar way to Japan.
∗
And the human side? What of the war of the Little Peterkins of Asia?
The conflict had a recognizable pattern, though there were so many confusing cross-currents. One purpose of this book has been to trace it out. It settled the influences which were to be dominant in the lives of people for the next generation or so – until new pressures meet new obstacles, and all is again in the melting pot, the issue having again to be settled by conflict. For this last great cataclysm, the price paid in human life and suffering was truly prodigious. The numbers of those killed in the war on all fronts have been analysed. Of two of the great Asian families of people engaged, the Chinese casualties, difficult to estimate, have been given by Chiang Kai-shek in his book, A Summing-Up at Seventy, as over 3 million. ‘These figures,’ he says, ‘do not include the heavy losses in life and property sustained by the people in general.’∗ Japanese losses in battle and air-attack have been estimated at around 2.3 million. Of the people elsewhere in Asia, by far the largest proportion had no wish to take part in the quarrel. They neither understood, nor cared for, nor were consulted about, the objects of conflict. From first to last they viewed the war as a fact of destructive nature, which everyone in his senses sought to evade, but which was fated to make enormous waves. Those who voluntarily went to war, or felt passionately about the issues to the extent of being genuinely willing to die for them, were very few. Submitting to the economic inducements because of poverty and destitution was the nearest that most combatants came to acting by a reasonable decision. The only Asian people of whom this was not really true were the fatally indoctrinated Japanese.
It is, however, economic pressure alone which interests nine tenths of the population of Asia. It is idle to think that people living in conditions of Asian poverty, and with so much mass illiteracy, can be capable of acting in any other way. Any system of government which offers them the prospects of seeing a barely tolerable life, barely tolerable though it be, for six months ahead, will be more than welcome. Frills of government, freedom, choice, are suspect to them. Those combatants who came from a society in which the compulsion of hunger was less present were swept together by conscription, and had even less say in their destiny.
The war was probably the last major conflict which will be fought in Asia in which all the Asian antagonists except Japan were predominantly agrarian. This gave the war its peculiar, and rather antiquarian flavour. Time will ensure that, before another great contest can happen there, larger segments of society will have become heavily industrialized, and, with industrialization, will have come the special type of social organization which renders society so different in behaviour from that which was traditional.
Even the very few of the educated classes – the Chinese university professors, the Japanese, the Indian leisured upper classes – who had the inclination and the ability to trace out the pattern of events behind the confusion, to understand the whys and wherefores, derived little consolation, when they were compelled to live among a collapsing economy and the dangers of loot and arson, from the fact that to them was vouchsafed some understanding of what the war was all about.
It is clear that, to the many millions who fought and suffered unvocally, to the ignorant armies clashing by night, unselfconsciously, those who survived owe an inexpiable debt. It seems at some points in history, that only through a convulsion involving millions is understanding painfully acquired. ‘The cut worm forgives the plough’, said the poet Blake. By invoking this kind of charity, there can perhaps be forgiveness for the ungovernable fury of the instruments by which history is made.
Afterword
We are left, as we began, lingering over thoughts collected by Sun Tzu twenty-three and a half centuries ago:
While an angered man may again be happy, and a resentful man again be pleased, a state that has perished cannot be restored, nor can the dead be brought back to life. Therefore, the enlightened ruler is prudent and the good general is warned against rash action. Thus the state is kept secure and the army preserved.