A FEW WEEKS before the Japanese capitulation, Gen. George Kenney’s chief air planner warned: “Considering the suicidal tactics915 and peculiar psychology of the Japs in comparison with the Hun…stress the possibility of continued air action regardless of surrender.” The Allies anticipated that many Japanese would reject the emperor’s call to lay down their arms; that American and British soldiers, sailors and airmen would have to continue to die, suppressing guerrilla resistance or even fighting conventional battles against the four million Japanese troops in the home islands, and three million more scattered across their overseas empire.
In late August 1945 there were indeed difficulties in reconciling some units to defeat, and dramatic suicides by individuals. When Vice-Admiral Matome Ugaki learned of the emperor’s broadcast, he ordered planes prepared, drank a farewell sake with staff at 5th Air Fleet, then drove to Oita airfield on north-east Kyushu carrying a sword presented to him by Yamamoto, whom he had served as chief of staff. Eleven Suisei dive-bombers stood ready. “Are you with me?” he demanded of the pilots. “Yes, sir!” they cried. Ugaki shook hands with them. A warrant officer whom he dispossessed of his cockpit seat insisted upon squeezing in beside him. During their subsequent flight, Ugaki made a voice transmission: “Despite the courage of every unit916 under my command over the past six months, we have failed to destroy the arrogant enemy and protect our divine empire, a failure which must be considered my own.” He left behind his diaries, together with a farewell note: “I shall vanish into the sky along with my vision.” His final flight accomplished nothing save his own extinction, aged fifty-five. All the planes save three, which sensibly turned back with “engine failure,” were shot down by American fighters. Ugaki made his death as contemptible as his life, by taking with him so many hapless young men.
In the days that followed, some thousands of Japanese chose immolation rather than acknowledge defeat. Among these were Gen. Shizuichi Tanaka, the Oxford-educated commander of Eastern Army who had suppressed the coup against the palace; Prince Konoe; Vice-Admiral Onishi, prime sponsor of the kamikazes; Marshal Sugiyama and his wife; ten young men who killed themselves on Tokyo’s Atago Hill, followed by two of their wives; eleven transport officers who chose to die in front of the Imperial Palace; and fourteen students who killed themselves on the Yoyogi parade ground. Hysteria seized some army officers. Tears fell in torrents across the nation. On a Philippine island, Lt. Hiroo Onoda and his little band of destitute Japanese soldiers found a message left by the Americans: “The war ended on August 15917. Come down from the mountains!” Neither he nor the others believed it: “There was no doubt in my mind this was an enemy trick.” Onoda remained in hiding for twenty-eight years.
What is remarkable, however, is not how many Japanese rejected surrender, but how many embraced it gratefully, whatever protestations they made to the contrary. This outcome once more highlights the gulf between the private acknowledgement of reality and the public embrace of fantasy which had been the bane of the Japanese nation, and of Asia. Lt. Masaichi Kikuchi and other officers of the Singapore garrison heard rumours of the impending surrender from local Chinese a week before the news became official. Whatever paroxysms of grief these inspired among his career professional comrades, for Kikuchi they represented “a reprieve from918 a death sentence. For so long, we had all been asking ourselves: when would it be our turn to face the enemy? And to lose our lives?”
On the morning of the fifteenth, in Burma Lt. Hayashi Inoue was preparing to lead a local raid against British troops when he learned that the war was over. “I was overwhelmed with relief,” he said. “It was so obvious we were beaten. Each day for months, it had seemed unlikely that one would survive to see the next.” High in the hills of Luzon, Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita still presided at his headquarters. When the surrender was announced, an officer urged the chief of staff to sit with his commander through the night, to prevent him from killing himself. Yamashita reassured them: “Don’t worry, I won’t go to heaven alone—it would help no one. My duty is to get our soldiers home. Relax and go to bed.” A few days later, he assembled the staff of his headquarters, shook hands with each one, gave a final salute, then walked through the trees to give himself up to the Americans. He penned a last poem:
My soldiers have been gathered from the mountains
like wild flowers.
Now it is my turn to go,
and I do so gladly.
Likewise Lt.-Gen. Masaki Honda, who had fought Slim in Burma. At his headquarters in a village named Nangala he told his staff: “We must accept the emperor’s announcement. This is the end of the war. I ask you to continue to obey orders and to refrain from any violent action.” One of his officers, Maj. Mitsuo Abe, burst out passionately: “The Allies will destroy919 our heritage and wipe out the Japanese race. The Americans will occupy our country forever. You are our commander. You should commit seppuku—and if you dare not, I will show you how!” Honda, who was seated on the floor in Japanese fashion, calmly invited Abe to sit beside him. “You are a staff officer and thus supposed to be intelligent. Can’t you understand the emperor’s mind? We must bear our misfortunes with courage. Neither the old nor the young must kill themselves; that is not the way to save the nation. We must live on, and build the foundations of the new Japan.”
“The men all cried920 about the surrender,” said twenty-four-year-old Yoshiko Hashimoto, who had lost half her family in the March firebombing of Tokyo. “I too cried—but with relief.” Ryoichi Sekine, a Tokyo sixteen-year-old, experienced a sense of shame which his father did not share. Mr. Sekine senior said pragmatically: “Now we’re going to live in a new world921 in which the Americans will call the shots.” Yoichi Watanuki remembered hearing the triumphal blast of martial music which accompanied Tokyo Radio’s announcement of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, as an eight-year-old child on 8 December 1941. At school assembly later that morning, the headmaster made three hundred children each in turn mount his rostrum and declaim: “China, America and Britain are the enemies of Japan.”
Almost four years later, in the rural village to which the school had been evacuated, on 16 August 1945 Yoichi found himself summoned to assembly along with every other child, even though it was the holiday season. The same headmaster mustered his charges in the playground, then delivered a stern harangue. He said that the shame of defeat fell upon Japan’s people, who had failed its warriors. He ordered the children to kneel. Yoichi winced at the pain of the gravel beneath his bare knees. The children had to bow towards Tokyo and recite in chorus: “We apologise to the Emperor because we of the Home Front are responsible for the loss of the war.” Yoichi felt angry and resentful. He was sure that he and his kind had done their utmost. Had the headmaster forgotten all those hours they spent digging out pine roots from which pitiful quantities of oil were extracted for aviation fuel? He went home and said to his mother: “Surely, we have lost the war922 because our soldiers were not good enough. They told us a Divine Wind would come, and it didn’t. They lied to us, didn’t they?”
Lt. Cmdr. Haruki Iki flew a little communications plane to navy headquarters the night before the surrender, for a conference about his wing’s invasion suicide mission. On landing, he met two staff officers whom he knew well from navy academy days. They greeted him and said: “Forget about the meeting. An important announcement’s due which could change everything. Let’s go and have a drink.” They got their drinks, then spent the hours which followed in shelters, evading the attentions of American bombers. Then they listened to the emperor’s broadcast. Like so many others, Iki dissolved into helpless tears. He flew alone back to his base, to find that most of his aircrew had decamped towards their homes. Iki, furious, dispatched demands for their return, with which most sheepishly complied. He put the disconsolate fliers to work smartening up their planes: “I thought the Americans923 would be taking them for reparations.” Then a terse order arrived from headquarters: all aircraft were to be destroyed. So indeed they were.
Another pilot, Toshio Hijikata, was in a naval hospital, having lost weight and developed chronic fever during the summer months. The doctors diagnosed lung trouble precipitated by combat flying. Other men in his ward seemed vastly relieved to hear the war was over, but Hijikata threw himself out of bed and hitched a ride on a vehicle back to his squadron’s base at Kagoshima. “I was sure there would be924 one last great air battle,” he said, “and I wanted to be in it.” He was crestfallen to discover that his unit had accepted the surrender.
Maj. Shoji Takahashi, a general staff intelligence officer, had spent a week in Hiroshima as a member of the army’s investigating team after the atomic explosion. Takahashi became ill, suffering from what he afterwards assumed was radiation sickness. He learned of Japan’s surrender at the airfield on their return to Tokyo. “All the way back to general staff headquarters925,” he said later, “I was trying to decide how I would kill myself, because I assumed that we would all be expected to do this.” It came as a surprise to discover that most officers were content to survive. Amid the profound sense of humiliation which engulfed the army, Takahashi refused an order that he should join the Japanese delegation flying to Manila to receive detailed instructions from the Americans: “I could not bear the idea of being one of those who abased ourselves before MacArthur.”
At 1000 on 15 August, twelve kamikaze aircraft were as usual prepared for take-off at Hyakuri air base north of Tokyo. One proved unserviceable, but the remainder left as scheduled to attack the American fleet. Ground crews began to prepare the next wave of thirty for launch soon after noon. The imperial broadcast intervened. Interference was so bad that the crews working under Petty Officer Hachiro Miyashita could not understand a word the emperor said. They assumed that he was simply inciting them to greater effort, and returned to work. Suddenly, a man bicycled up to their dispersal and said: “Didn’t you hear?926 The war’s over.” The most bewildered men on the airfield were the pilots, who had expected to be dead within two hours. “I watched them walk away to their quarters,” said Miyashita. “Their shoulders were hunched, they looked sunk in misery. They were so keyed up for what they were going to do.” The ground crews were expected in the mess hall, but even after flying was cancelled, Miyashita and his companions had no appetites. It was only some hours later that a new thought burst upon his consciousness: “I’ve made it! I’ve survived the war!” he exulted. That night, when for the first time he saw lights showing in buildings which had been blacked out for years, he began to perceive the merits of peace.
On 17 August there was an attempted mutiny at Atsugi air base, following which a Zero took off and flew to Hyakuri. Its pilot set about single-handedly inciting airmen to resume the struggle. “Don’t give up!” he begged them. His appeal met little support. Next day the base commander assembled all officers and NCOs, and delivered a stern harangue about the importance of accepting the surrender terms: “The price for any act of defiance will fall upon the Japanese people,” he said sternly. “It is the duty of each of you to keep the men of your commands under strict discipline.” The ground crews emptied aircraft fuel tanks and removed bombs. Next day, they also unbolted propellers to disable the planes.
Lt. Masashiko Ando landed a floatplane at his squadron’s base on the Dutch East Indies island of Surabaya, and strolled nonchalantly into the mess. He found other pilots plunged in silent gloom. “What’s up?927” he demanded. Somebody said: “The war’s over.” Ando asked flippantly: “Who’s won?” The notion that his own nation might acknowledge defeat was beyond his comprehension. “We young officers were like boxers in a ring,” he said later. “We had thought only of our own fight. We knew nothing about what was happening to the rest of the war. Now, we simply wondered what would happen to us.”
BALWANT SINGH BAHIA, an Indian Army engineer, was sitting with two sergeants in a signal lorry at Tharrawaddy on the main road north of Rangoon, when an NCO called: “Oh, war finish!928 War finish! They have dropped atom bomb on Japan.” I said: “What’s that one?” He said: “I come back one minute,” and swiftly returned with two small celebratory bottles of beer. Japanese survivors hiding on Okinawa saw the sky illuminated by a brilliant, thunderous firework display of naval tracer, and guessed its significance. Most emerged in the days that followed, to hear recordings of the imperial broadcast played to them by their American captors.
John Sandle’s regiment in Burma indulged a brief feu de joie on VJ-Day, but “the euphoria of the occasion soon evaporated, to be replaced by a feeling of melancholy at the utter futility of war in which our battalion had lost hundreds of men just to finish up where we had started four years earlier.” He was one of only two officers in his unit to have survived the entire campaign. They set Japanese prisoners to work rolling a cricket pitch for their mess.
At Aomi barracks in Japan, senior prisoner Stephen Abbott paraded the inmates in uniform and said: “Today is the greatest day in the history of our time. We must remember, however, that to obtain it millions of all nationalities have died. It is a day, not only for rejoicing, but also for sober thought. You are no longer prisoners of war, but you are soldiers of your countries and upon you rests a great responsibility for good behaviour and dignified example. Remember above all things that you are citizens of the free democracies of the United States and Great Britain. Be true to the ideals which during six hard years we have battled to maintain.” After dismissing the parade, Abbott and his fellow POWs waited three weeks for liberation. In the interim, at several other locations in Japan guards murdered captives. Sixteen U.S. B-29 aircrew at Fukuoka were hacked to death with swords.
“What reaction? Absolutely nil929,” British gunner Fred Thompson wrote at his prison camp on Java. “Perhaps it’s because we have been told nothing by the Japs…except today ‘no work’…maybe the reaction will set in later, when we realise what it means—the end of this existence of misery, hunger, humiliation. I thank God that I have survived and my friends here with me.” Next day, 17 August, exhilaration at last broke through: “Last night, 339 hearts in this camp missed a beat.”
Rod Wells, in Singapore’s Changi jail, recoiled in disgust from the fashion in which Japanese began to salute British and Australian inmates, offering them water and cigarettes. A British medical team landed by parachute—big, strapping men whose rude health inspired in the POWs a perverse sense of shame at their own debility. When they saw the pistol on a paratrooper’s belt, so institutionalised were the hapless prisoners that they said in alarm: “The Japs won’t like that930.” The British officer responded: “Cheer up. You can tell them what you like, hit them over the head with a hammer, anything. Don’t mess around—just give them orders. Treat them like scum, that’s all they are.” Not all the liberating forces behaved sensitively to prisoners. A repatriation officer931 who arrived at Lt. Cmdr. George Cooper’s camp on Batavia admonished the inmates to realise that they were infinitely better off than concentration camp prisoners he had seen at Belsen and Buchenwald. Several of his hearers walked away in disgust.
Six American paratroopers landed a plane at a prison camp outside Mukden, where senior British and American officers had been held since 1942. “It seemed like talking to men from Mars932,” wrote Brig. Sam Pearson to his wife. “They had flown from central China with orders to locate us…the 1st plane has arrived this morning and been seized by the Nips because the Russians coming in from the north have ordered all movement to stop…Those six chaps were very brave men as they nearly met their end at the hands of the local Nips. They were stripped naked and stood up against the wall. How they got out of that fix I don’t know, but I agree with the anthem ‘God Bless America.’”
When the first parachute food drop landed at the camp on Japan’s Shikoku Island where RAF Squadron Leader David Grant was held, “I felt a lump933 the size of a cricket ball crawling up to my throat. I turned to hide myself. I said to the man next to me: ‘Will you let me pass, please. I think I am going to cry.’ ‘That’s OK, old boy,’ he said in a broken voice, ‘half the bloody camp is crying already.’” At Alf Evans’s camp, the Japanese commandant “Charlie Chan” got up on a box and said “‘the wicked Americanos had dropped934 two terrible deathray bombs and the Japanese people of two towns had been killed and burnt and the Japanese had surrendered.’ This was it, this bloody war was over at last. Some of us had made it…We all went mad, singing and jumping about, praying to God and thinking of those of our comrades who had died in the three and a half years of suffering.” When the Americans arrived, hysterical prisoners fell on them, kissing and hugging their deliverers.
Three American doctor POWs took the extraordinary risk of leaving their camp at Kobe, then travelling across Japan to check in at the Imperial Hotel in downtown Tokyo. Bewildered hotel staff eventually acceded to their importuning. In the restaurant they were served breaded veal cutlets, rice, a vegetable salad and tea off real china on clean linen. When a Kempeitai officer arrived and began fiercely questioning them about their presence, Lt. Murray Glusman jabbed a finger at him and said: “Listen, you goddamned son of a bitch935. We won the war. And if you don’t treat us with the respect that is our due as officers of the United States Navy, I’ll see to it that your ass is strung up from the highest lamp post in Tokyo!”
British POW Andrew Cunningham’s brother Stuart, an officer of the Fleet Air Arm, flew into Singapore a few days after the surrender, immaculate in tropical whites. Andrew, a skeleton, looked at him and said: “My God, Stuart, you look fat936.” Like most prisoners, he was overwhelmed by the experience of freedom: “We came out into a world that seemed wonderful, where people asked ‘What would you like for supper?’” Cunningham even found compassion to spare for his former jailers: “I loathed the Japanese, yet at the end I felt desperately sorry for them. We had sacrificed everything, but we’d won. They had sacrificed everything—and lost.”
IN THE STREETS of Chongqing, Chinese and Americans embraced each other in the streets. “Mei kuo ting hao, mei kuo ting hao!” they cried, “America is wonderful!” Firecrackers exploded, people shouted and cheered sporadically at first, “but growing to a volcano of sound and happiness within an hour.” Some shouted in English: “Thank you, thank you!” Captain Luo Dingwen was among many Chinese who cried, “because this meant938 that for the first time since 1937, I could go home.” Captain Yan Qizhi’s first thought was: “Who else is alive?939” It was weeks before somebody from his Nationalist regiment passed by his village and told his family that he had survived. Eventually he received a letter containing news that they were among the fortunate. Only one of his relations had been killed, an uncle murdered by the Japanese at the school where he taught. Wu Yinyan’s Beijing school class was not dismissed to join the celebrating crowds thronging the streets, “and even if we had been, I doubt940 that we should have chosen to go. After years of subjection, the news was too sudden to be immediately believable. I could not imagine that the war had really ended.” For days, fears persisted in occupied regions of China that violent retribution would fall upon those who celebrated the Japanese downfall.
At Unit 731, the Japanese biological warfare research centre in Manchuria, there was a rush to destroy evidence. Lethal injections were given to all surviving Chinese human guinea pigs and site labourers. No Japanese was ever held to account or tried for the monstrous crimes committed there. Though the Americans quickly became privy to the hideous nature of Unit 731’s operations, they concluded that it was more profitable to secrete its files and shield its commanders and scientists, for the possible military advantage of the United States.
Within days of the surrender, local Communists arrived at the gates of the Japanese air base outside Beijing where Lance Corporal Iwao Ajiro was stationed, demanding his unit’s weapons. “We had to tell them941, ‘Sorry, we haven’t been fighting you. We’ve surrendered to Chiang Kai-shek, so the guns belong to him.’” The Communists persisted with personal advances to Ajiro, who was a signaller. “They said: ‘Come and work for us—we need your skills, we’ll give you a good life and find you a wife.’ I said: ‘You’re crazy! I’m young. I want to go home and see my mum.’”
ON THE SOVIET fronts alone, the war continued almost unabated. Stalin had no desire for peace until his armies physically possessed the prizes which they had been promised. MacArthur, absurdly, professed to believe that, as SCAP, Soviet troops were subject to his authority. He sent a signal via Moscow ordering them to “discontinue further offensive action against Japanese forces.” The Russians curtly responded that such a matter would be decided solely at the discretion of “the Supreme Commander of the forces of the Soviet Union.” In several places in Manchuria, Japanese emissaries seeking to surrender to Vasilevsky’s forces were shot out of hand. In others Japanese fought on, neither knowing nor caring that their country had surrendered. On and on swept the Russians, east and southwards.
There was characteristic confusion at Girin airfield on the afternoon of 19 August. Russian troops landed in transport aircraft and deployed. In response to a summons from their commander, Major Belyaev, a Japanese delegation appeared wearing white armbands, unarmed save for swords. There was a parley. The Soviet officer wrote sourly later: “The samurais were942 playing for time. Eventually one of their officers took from his pocket a white handkerchief, and waved it. Japanese machine guns immediately opened fire on us.” The Russians dived for cover, but four men were wounded, and Belyaev’s face was cut open by fragments. He shouted at the Japanese officers to stop the shooting, but nothing happened. After a short, sharp firefight the Russians captured four officers and forty men, killing many others. “To be honest, we were so angry that we weren’t keen on taking prisoners,” said Belyaev. “We’d agreed a ceasefire, and there they were, shooting at us!” The incident was more likely the product of contradictory sentiments in the Japanese ranks than of a “samurai” ruse, but the Russians were disinclined to generosity. In subsequent skirmishes in the nearby town they found some Japanese troops struggling to escape in civilian clothes, others still offering resistance. By the morning of the twenty-first, however, most of the Japanese had surrendered. Belyaev’s company was guarding 12,000 prisoners. He observed wryly that these seemed too fearful of falling into Chinese hands to attempt escape.
Souhei Nakamura, son of a teacher of Japanese music who had lived in Manchuria since 1941, was inducted into the Japanese army only a week before the Russians attacked. On 12 August, every man of the five hundred at his depot, all either raw recruits or elderly reservists, was issued with a weapon and a stocking full of rice to tie on his pack, then crammed onto a train south, towards the front. During their march to the station, a Japanese bank manager astonished them by rushing into the street with armfuls of paper money. He broadcast banknotes among the soldiers as they passed, rather than leave them for the Russians.
After days of faltering progress, the recruits disembarked at a halt where they were supposed to join a regiment. They found the place already abandoned by the retreating army, the rail bridge ahead cut by Russian bombing. They had no officers, and milled about uncertainly for hours before glimpsing two figures walking down the track carrying white flags. At first these looked like children. As they came closer, however, the Japanese perceived that they were Russian soldiers, who told them the war was over. Without much concern, indeed with relief, the young recruits surrendered their weapons. Some emotional older men drove their swords into the earth and bent them until they broke, rather than present them to the Soviets. Then they lingered, expecting a train to take them to Korea, and thence home to Japan. “I was nineteen943,” said Nakamura. “The whole thing of defeat didn’t mean much to me. I just felt grateful that because there were five hundred of us all together there, it seemed unlikely the Russians would shoot us.”
There was no train to Korea; instead a long, gruelling march under Russian guard. Exhausted soldiers began to throw away packs, personal effects, even boots. It was a time of rains, and they were often trudging through thick mud. They passed a village of Japanese immigrants, where they saw an elderly grandmother beseeching impassive local Chinese to relieve her of a baby which she clutched. A gaggle of Japanese orphans killed a bullock, and distributed slabs of its raw meat to the thankful men. Nakamura noticed that no young women were visible, and guessed that they had been carried off by the Russians. After a few hours, the prisoners were herded on down the road. “I always wondered afterwards what happened to those kids, and all those immigrants.” The likely answer was that they starved.
Russian brutality towards their prisoners was cultural rather than personal. Few Red Army men harboured much animus towards the Japanese, only puzzlement about people beyond their experience in appearance and character. “We felt nothing944 like the hatred we held towards the Germans,” said Sgt. Anatoly Fillipov. In Manchuria’s “liberated” towns and cities, the victors revelled in rickshaw rides and brothels. Lieutenant Chervyakov acquired a kimono for his mother, as did Boris Ratner on Sakhalin. The pilot was bewildered to see a column of Japanese prisoners struggling past, the men encumbered with packs, their officers even in captivity using soldiers to lug their baggage. As Ratner watched, one Japanese fell down and died. A Japanese prisoner who spoke a little Russian said bitterly to Anatoly Fillipov: “Well, you’ve got your prize, but it is an unlawful one. Stalin deceived us. He always promised that he would not attack us.” Thousands of Japanese soldiers and civilians in Manchuria killed themselves.
For Manchurian women, rejoicing at the defeat of the Japanese soon gave way to horror at the conduct of the Russians, as they found themselves facing wholesale rape: “We didn’t like them at all,” said Liu Yunxiu, who was twenty-one and living in Changchun. “They stole food, they raped women in the streets. Every woman tried to make herself look as ugly as she could, to escape their attentions. My parents hid me for weeks, in which I was never allowed out of the house.” Some Soviet soldiers afterwards claimed that their army’s excesses were chiefly committed by veterans of Rokossovsky’s front, notorious for its conduct in Europe. “They did not behave very well,” said Sgt. Anatoly Fillipov. “They were always showing off, saying ‘We’re Rokossovsky’s boys!’” Souhei Nakamura’s thirty-one-year-old aunt, a married woman, offered herself to the conquerors in the absurd hope, she claimed, of sparing some virgin from rape. Her reward was syphilis, which she sought to conceal from her husband when he eventually returned from Soviet captivity, and thus infected him. Communist guerrilla Zuo Yong was among those appalled by the behaviour of the Red Army: “The Russians were our allies945—we were all in the same boat. We thought of their soldiers as our brothers. The problem, however, as we discovered, was they had no respect for our people. Their behaviour in Manchuria was appalling.” Jiang De, another guerrilla, shrugged: “The Russians simply behaved946 in the same way they did everywhere else.”
EVEN AS SOVIET armies completed the occupation of Manchuria after the Japanese surrender, amphibious units were assaulting the Pacific islands promised to Stalin at Yalta. Eight thousand men were dispatched across five hundred miles of sea to the Kuriles, a chain of some fifty islands situated north-east of Japan. The northern Kuriles were defended by 25,000 imperial troops, of which 8,480 were deployed on the northernmost, Shannshir, eighteen miles in length by six wide. Their morale was not high. This was, by common consent, one of the most godforsaken postings in the Japanese empire.
On the night of 14 August, Shannshir’s senior officer, Maj.-Gen. Fusaka Tsutsumi, was alerted by 5th Area Army to listen with his most senior staff to the emperor’s broadcast next day. Having done so, Tsutsumi awaited the arrival of an American occupation force, whom he had no intention of fighting. Instead, however, at 0422 on 18 August, without warning or parley a Russian division assaulted Shannshir—and met resistance. For all the Red Army’s experience of continental warfare, it knew pitifully little about the difficulties of opposed landings from the sea. From the outset, the Shannshir operation was a shambles, perfunctorily planned and chaotically executed. The landing force was drawn from garrison troops without combat experience.
At 0530 Japanese shore batteries began to hit Soviet ships as they approached. Some assault craft were sunk, others set on fire. Those who abandoned foundering boats found themselves swept away by the currents. The invaders’ communications collapsed, as radios were lost or immersed when their operators struggled ashore. Sailors laboured under Japanese fire to improvise rafts to land guns and tanks—the Russians possessed none of the Western Allies’ inventory of specialised amphibious equipment. A counter-attack by twenty Japanese tanks gained some ground. What was almost certainly the last kamikaze air attack of the war hit a destroyer escort. Early on the morning of the nineteenth, the Soviet commander on Shannshir received orders to hasten the island’s capture. Soon afterwards, a Japanese delegation arrived at Russian headquarters to arrange a surrender. Yet next morning, some coastal batteries still fired on Soviet ships in the Second Kuril Strait, and were heavily bombed for their pains. Tsutsumi’s men finally quit on the night of 21 August, having lost 614 dead.
SAKHALIN REPRESENTED a less serious challenge, for its nearest point lay only six miles off the Asian coast, and its northern part was Soviet territory. But the island was vastly bigger—560 miles long and between 19 and 62 miles wide. Japan had held the southern half since 1905, a source of bitter Russian resentment, now to be assuaged. Sakhalin’s terrain was inhospitable—swamp-ridden, mountainous, densely forested. For reasons of prestige, the Japanese had lavished precious resources on fortifying the place. The consequence was that when Soviet troops began an assault on 11 August, their advance made little headway. Only after bitter fighting did they capture the key Honda strongpoint, whose defenders fought to the last man. The weather was poor for air support, and many tanks became bogged. Russian infantry were obliged to struggle through on foot, to outflank Japanese positions. Early on 16 August, however, after the imperial broadcast the Japanese obligingly launched “human wave” counter-attacks, which enabled the Russians to inflict much slaughter. Next day, yard by yard, Soviet troops forced passages through the forests, battering the defenders with air attacks and artillery. On the evening of 17 August, the local Japanese commander in the frontier defensive zone surrendered.
Elsewhere on Sakhalin, however, garrisons continued to resist. When the Soviets’ Northern Pacific Flotilla landed a storming force at the port of Maoka on 20 August, they mowed down civilians at the shoreside. Japanese troops opened fire. Thick fog hampered gunfire observation. Defenders had to be painstakingly cleared from the quays and then the city centre. “Japanese propaganda had successfully imbued947 the city’s inhabitants with fears of ‘Russian brutality,’” declared a Soviet account disingenuously. “The result was that much of the population fled into the forests, and some people were evacuated to Hokkaido. Women were especially influenced by propaganda, which convinced them that the arriving Russian troops would shoot them and strangle their children.” The Soviets claimed to have killed three hundred Japanese in Maoka and taken a further six hundred prisoners. The rest of the garrison fled inland. Sakhalin was finally secured on 26 August, four days behind the Soviet schedule.
Stalin harboured more far-reaching designs on Japanese territory. Before the Manchurian assault was launched, Soviet troops were earmarked to land on the Japanese home island of Hokkaido, and to occupy its northern half as soon as north Korea was secure. On the evening of 18 August, Vasilevsky signalled the Stavka in Moscow, asking permission to proceed with a Hokkaido attack scheduled to last from 19 August to 1 September. For forty-eight hours Moscow was silent, brooding. On 20 August Vasilevsky signalled again, asking for orders. Continue preparations, said Stalin: the assault force should be ready to attack by midnight on 23 August.
Meanwhile the Americans also dallied with possible landings in the Kuriles and at the mainland port of Dalian, to secure bases—in breach of the Yalta agreement—before the Soviets could reach them. Both sides, however, finally backed off. Washington recognised that any attempt to pre-empt the Soviets from occupying their agreed territories would precipitate a crisis. Likewise Truman cabled Moscow, summarily rejecting Stalin’s proposal that the Russians should receive the surrender of Japanese forces on north Hokkaido. At midday on the twenty-second the Stavka dispatched new orders to Far East Command, cancelling the Hokkaido landings. The Americans confined themselves to hastening U.S. Marines to key points on and near the coast of mainland China, to hold these until Chiang Kai-shek’s forces could assume control. A huge American commitment of men and transport aircraft alone enabled the Nationalists to reestablish themselves in the east during the autumn of 1945.
THE LAST BATTLE of the Second World War was fought at a place few Westerners have ever heard of. Hutou means “tiger’s head.” In 1945 there were still some tigers in the Wanda Mountains, where the town stands beside the great Ussuri River, eastern frontier of Manchuria. On the Russian shore, forests stretch for miles across flat country. On the Manchurian side, however, steep bluffs rise from the swamps and railway yard at the waterside. Here, beginning in 1933, the Guandong Army created the most elaborate defensive system in Asia: its commanders were rash enough to call it their “Maginot Line.” Hutou was centred upon five forts built on neighbouring hills which rise up to four hundred feet above the riverbank. The concrete roofs and walls were nine feet thick, with generators, storerooms and living quarters sunk deep underground, linked by tunnels. The whole system was almost five miles wide and four deep, supported by some of the heaviest artillery in Asia, including 240mm Krupp guns and a 410mm howitzer. The Chinese assert that the 30,000 slave labourers who built the fortress were killed when their work was complete, and indeed many bodies were exhumed after 1945.
To the Japanese, Hutou was an unpopular posting, remote from any pleasures or amenities. For those who occupied its echoing caverns, it was also chronically unhealthy—moisture dripped off the concrete walls, rusted weapons, spoilt food. In winter the bunkers were icy cold, in summer stiflingly hot. Anyone familiar with the 1916 casemates of Verdun would readily have recognised 1945 Hutou. Through the years of war, veteran units had been removed from the fortress garrison and replaced by less impressive human material. Despite evidence of Soviet patrolling and the discovery of pontoons drifting on the Ussuri, Hutou’s commander was absent at a briefing on the night of the initial attack, and was never able to return to his post. The defence was therefore directed by the local artillery commander, Captain Masao Oki.
The initial Soviet barrage cut road links and spread terror among the few hundred hapless civilians living behind the fortress. On 9 August, the Chinese inhabitants of Hutou township, a wattle-and-wooden settlement, were awakened in the early-morning darkness by the roar of aircraft overhead, the whistle of falling bombs and thud of shells. Some fell on the Japanese defences, others among the houses, killing five Chinese. Jiang Fushun and his family huddled terrified beside a brick bed, the most substantial object in their flimsy hut. After two hours the shelling stopped, and hundreds of villagers ran out into the street. They saw the horizon rippling with gun flashes from the Russian shore of the Ussuri River, and at once understood that the Soviets were coming. Japanese soldiers ran into the town. Though some buildings were already blazing after being hit by bombs and shells, they merely claimed that an air-raid practice was taking place. All civilians must move immediately into the nearby woods. There was no time to gather food or possessions. Jiang’s father cried: “Go-go-go! I’ll stay and look after the house948.” The family fled, along with hundreds of others.
The defenders exploited a lull in Russian artillery fire to move all the garrison’s family members and nearby immigrant Japanese farmers into the tunnel system. As well as six hundred regular troops, there were then sheltering underground a thousand civilians, some with militia training and weapons. An hour later, shelling resumed, and at 0800 Soviet infantry started crossing the Ussuri. The Japanese responded with mortar fire. This inflicted some casualties, but within three hours the attackers had secured a bridgehead. Amazingly, Hutou’s biggest artillery pieces did not fire. They were short of gunners, and Captain Oki was preoccupied with directing the infantry defence. All that day and the next, Soviet troops continued to shuttle across the river. The local Japanese army commander, Lt.-Gen. Noritsune Shimuzu, telephoned Hutou on the evening of the ninth to deliver a wordy injunction to Oki to hold fast: “In view of the current war situation949 and the circumstances of the garrison, you are all requested to fight to the last breath and meet your fate, when it comes, as courageously as flowers, so that you may become pillars of our nation.” After this heady torrent of mixed metaphors, all contact was lost between the defenders and the outside world.
By nightfall on 10 August the surrounding area was securely in the hands of the invaders. When darkness came the Russians began attacks on the bunker system. All failed. It became plain that, against such strong defences, subtler tactics would be necessary. Through the days that followed, artillery was used to keep Japanese heads down, while infantry and engineer groups inched forward among the trenches. Soon they had isolated the individual forts, and destroyed Japanese artillery observation posts. The condition of the defenders became grim. “After the first [Russian] salvo950, we knew the battle could have only one outcome,” wrote one of the few Japanese survivors, gunner Gamii Zhefu. “In the tunnels beneath the fort, it was incredibly hot. We were desperate for water. The women were terrified. Then one soldier produced a canteen and gave everyone a sip, which did wonders for our morale. We were also very hungry, however, and started looking for food. We found some cans, ate—and started feeling thirsty again. Soon, for all of us, water became an obsession. It overcame even our fears about the battle and the threat of death. We were reduced to animal needs and desires.”
On 13 August, adopting a technique familiar in the Pacific island battles, Russians poured petrol down ventilation inlets and ignited it. Hundreds of defenders and their families perished in the conflagrations that followed. Yet the Japanese continued to surprise Russian troops with sallies, sometimes dislodging the attackers from newly occupied positions. One Japanese rush was led by a twenty-two-year-old probationary officer brandishing a sword, who fell to a Russian grenade. Hutou’s gunners, unable to use their huge weapons, destroyed them with demolition charges and formed suicide squads. A Japanese artillery piece was destroyed by a round from its neighbour, firing at point-blank range. The central heights of the fortress changed hands nine times.
The wretched defenders of Hutou knew nothing of the emperor’s broadcast on 15 August, nor of their country’s surrender. They rejected all Russian calls to lay down their arms. On the seventeenth, a five-man party of local Chinese and captured Japanese carrying a white flag was dispatched from the Soviet lines to tell the garrison that the war was over. The officer who received them dismissed such a notion with contempt. He drew his sword and beheaded the elderly Chinese bearing the Soviet proposals. “We have nothing to say to the Red Army,” he declared, before retiring into his bunker. The Soviet barrage resumed. Conditions underground became unendurable. Many of those in the tunnels and casemates suffered carbon monoxide poisoning. “There were plenty of951 bodies down there,” wrote Gamii Zhefu. “I heard a wounded man crying repeatedly ‘Water, water,’ but no one took any notice of him. I was momentarily excited by seeing a trickle of fluid running across the floor, until I realised that it was leaking from a corpse. I drank it. Another man said: ‘That stuff will kill you.’ I didn’t care. I was dying of thirst anyway.”
For hundreds of peasants sheltering in the woods, in the first days there was nothing to eat save a few berries and wild plants. They drank water from the river, and listened to the appalling cacophony of battle on the Hutou hills. A few Japanese immigrants huddled among them, but most had sought the shelter of the fortress. On the fourth day, while fighting still raged, Red soldiers appeared and herded the civilians down to the riverbank, which was now secure. The Russians smashed open a big Japanese food store, and invited the Chinese to help themselves. They were able to make rice soup to sustain them through another ten days of uncertainty and gunfire on the hills above.
On 19 August, a large party of Japanese from the fortress attempted a break for freedom. They were cut down by Russian machine guns. By the twenty-second, almost all the underground bunkers had become untenable. Soviet troops probing cautiously down the steps met a ghastly stench of humanity, cordite and death. In one bunker, the bodies of men, women and eighty children aged between one and twelve were heaped together. In a cavern beneath Strongpoint “Sharp” lay another pile of women’s corpses. There was also the detritus of the dead—cooking pots, wire-rimmed spectacles, gramophones, a few bicycles, pin-up pictures of surprisingly smartly dressed “comfort women.” The Soviets declared the Hutou Fortified Region secure. Yet for four days more, one isolated Japanese company continued its resistance. Only on 26 August was this remnant snuffed out. Thus, today, a huge Soviet war memorial on the site declares Hutou to be the scene of the final battle of the Second World War. Almost 2,000 Japanese men, women and children perished in and around the fortress, days after the rest of the world celebrated peace.
Russians told the Chinese fugitives in the woods behind Hutou that it was now safe to come out. In a curious introduction to their new lives, these bewildered peasants were shown a propaganda film about the Russian Revolution. A commissar addressed them through an interpreter: “Red soldiers have made great sacrifices in this battle to bring you liberty, and now it is yours.” The Japanese were all dead, he said. The villagers could go home. Home? They drifted uneasily back to their huts, to find only ruins and blackened earth. In the ashes of Jiang Fushun’s family home lay the body of his father, a bullet through his head, the price of his rashness in staying behind. Every Chinese who ventured into the village during the battle had met the same fate. Those who had relatives elsewhere began long treks in search of sanctuary, but Jiang’s family had no one to go to. They lingered among the ruins, scrabbling to build themselves a shelter, scavenging for food. The task was made no easier by the fact that Russian soldiers began to remove everything edible or of value. The Chinese were appalled to see the liberators drive off the horses on which their tiny farms depended. Women were raped in the usual fashion.
Soviet soldiers warned peasants not to approach the forts, which were still littered with mines and munitions. After a few days, however, Jiang and a few others wandered up to the blackened casemates, gazing in revulsion at the unburied corpses of Japanese soldiers and their women. When the Russians finally departed, taking with them even the tracks of the local railway, the thousand or so desolate people left in Hutou found themselves existing in a limbo. The village headman was dead. For more than two years thereafter, no one attempted to exercise authority over them, nor to provide aid of any kind. When the Communists eventually assumed control of their lives, “things became a little better.”
Only forty-six Japanese are known to have escaped from the fortress with their lives. “The defence was extraordinarily brave952,” says Chinese historian Wang Hongbin, “which usually demands respect. But it was also completely futile. It is hard to admire blind loyalty to the emperor at that stage. They all died for nothing.”
Lt. Stanislav Chervyakov’s rocket battery entered Shenyang having scarcely fired a salvo, and without meeting serious resistance. The soldiers were amazed to meet Russian émigrés, who welcomed them warmly. Chervyakov found himself billeted on one such family. In this city where Russian influence had always been strong, some local people spoke a few words of the language. Chinese stood outside little cafés, urging the soldiers: “Come in, have a drink or a meal!” “Kapitana, shango! shango!”—“Good! good!” Sgt. Anatoly Fillipov was delighted to be handed a mess tin of pelmeni—ravioli—but became less enthusiastic when he discovered that it was made with donkey meat. “Most of the local people953 welcomed us with open arms,” said tank officer Alexander Fadin. “They were threadbare, in rags, but they gave us masses of flowers, fruit and Chinese food. We could eat all we wanted in the Chinese restaurants for free. We really felt like liberators.”
Stalin had promised the Allies that he recognised Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists as the sole legitimate government of China. This did not prevent Soviet forces in Manchuria from seeking to give Mao’s people a head start in the civil war that was now imminent. “I shall never forget my first sight of the People’s Army,” said Russian gunner Georgy Sergeev. “I saw some men coming down954 from the mountains. They were in rags, many barefoot. They had no weapons, but each carried a stick with a bundle on its end. So this was the heroic 8th Route Army.” Crowds of vengeful Chinese gathered around headquarters and POW cages, shouting at the Russians to surrender the prisoners to them. On 23 August, Soviet front HQ ordered the handover of captured Japanese weapons to nearby Chinese Communist units. To satisfy the letter of Stalin’s agreement with the Nationalists, Soviet officers were to have no personal dealings with Mao’s people, instead merely to withdraw guards from arms dumps. The first Communist unit arrived in darkness, and laboured by torchlight in complete silence, manhandling crates of weapons and ammunition with furious energy. “When I came back to the depots955 with my men,” said a Soviet officer, Major Belyaev, “they were completely empty, literally cleaned out. The Chinese had even swept the floor and taken away the shelving.”
THE EMPEROR PU YI heard news of the Japanese surrender at Dalizikou, where the final drama of his pitiful reign was acted out. For the third and final time in his life, on 15 August he signed an “Abdication Rescript,” surrounded by unhappy ministers and privy councillors. His Japanese custodian announced that he was to be evacuated to Japan. He should decide who should accompany him. The emperor chose his brother, two brothers-in-law, three nephews, his doctor and valet. His sole remaining concubine asked through sobs what she was supposed to do. The emperor blandly responded that she could not accompany him: “The plane is too small, so you will have to go by train.”
“Will the train get to Japan?”
“Of course it will. In three days at most you and the empress will see me again.”
“What will happen if the train doesn’t come for me? I haven’t got a single relation here.”
“You’ll be all right.”
The inglorious imperial plane landed at Shenyang to transfer its passengers to a larger aircraft for the flight to Japan. Yet even as they waited upon this, Soviet transport planes arrived, disgorging scores of Red soldiers brandishing tommy-guns. A few minutes later Pu Yi became a Russian captive. This was a relief, for more than anything he feared falling into the hands of Nationalist or Communist Chinese. The emperor’s Soviet guards were fascinated by their prize, and at first a little awed by the responsibility. Lt. Alexander Zhelvakov, a political officer with 6th Guards Tank Army, was warned by his commander that he would answer with his life for the emperor’s security, and believed it. The Soviets shared Pu Yi’s perception that if he fell into the hands of Chinese, they would tear him asunder.
“I didn’t get a wink of sleep956 during the night of 20 August,” Zhelvakov said later, “and the emperor didn’t sleep either—didn’t even take off his clothes. He was skinny, quite tall, wearing horn-rimmed spectacles, a dark suit and white shirt. He looked rather ordinary, a little pale, depressed, lost. One could see how nervous he was. His brother never left his side. The two of them looked, to be honest, pretty forlorn and unworthy of their rank. There was absolutely no royal grandeur. Pu Yi kept asking: ‘Am I going to be killed? Am I going to be shot?’ He seemed shy, indeed pretty scared. Once he understood that no one was going to kill him, he gradually calmed down, cheered up, even began to smile.”
Zhelvakov escorted the imperial party and their heaps of expensive luggage onto a transport plane to the Soviet city of Chita, where they were removed to incarceration in a procession of limousines. After Pu Yi departed, one of Zhelvakov’s soldiers, a doughty Communist, said sourly: “Comrade Lieutenant957, we should have put a bullet in him.” The emperor cherished brief hopes of being permitted to go into exile in Britain or the United States. Instead, he spent the next five years958 in Soviet confinement, for the first of these employed as a compliant witness at successive show trials of Japanese. Returned to Mao’s mercy in 1950, Pu Yi ended his days as a gardener in Beijing’s Botanical Gardens, dying in 1967.
Soviet transport aircraft flew many Chinese guerrillas back from Russia into Manchuria. On the landing strip at Bei An, Li Min and her party were amazed to see Japanese soldiers, albeit disarmed, talking to their Russian conquerors. The Chinese were even more astonished by the arrogance of some of their vanquished foes. One Japanese officer told them defiantly: “Give us ten years959 and we’ll be back!” An affronted guerrilla, Chen Ming, unholstered his pistol and shot the man dead. The Russians sternly ordered Chen to control himself.
Guerrilla Zhou Shuling returned to Manchuria from Russia in some style, in a car with her husband. His intelligence work finished, he boasted a chestful of Russian medals. Zhou said: “I was so excited, to see my own country again.” But that country was ruined by war, and now by Soviet pillage. Soon the Russians began to dismantle and remove wholesale Manchuria’s industrial plant. They asserted that this was Japanese property, and therefore represented legitimate reparations for the Soviet Union. Li Fenggui marched into Manchuria with Mao’s New 4th Army in October 1945, to find that “the Russians had stripped the peasants960 of everything—including the women’s virtue.” When Zhou reached her old village, she met desolation. The sole memorials of her family’s residence were four water tanks which had once belonged on the roofs of their houses, and now stood derelict on the blackened earth. Two of her four young children died amid the terrible cold and hunger of their first winter back in China. Her husband became a town chief of police, with herself as a precinct chief.
Zhuan Fengxian knew that the woman who returned to Manchuria from Russia, in the uniform of the Soviet army, was not the illiterate girl “frightened even of spiders” who had gone away to join the guerrillas five years earlier. She had achieved a fulfilment through her wartime experience quite unattainable by a woman, especially a peasant woman, in mid-twentieth-century Chinese society. She and her group flew home in Soviet transport aircraft, and wandered in bewildered horror through the Japanese prison in Shenyang where so many political prisoners had died. “We looked at the gallows, and even the device they had for crushing bodies so that no traces remained. What sort of people could they have been?!” In the chaos of the civil war that now began to overtake China, she had no time to go in search of her family. It was only long afterwards that she discovered that disease had killed her parents, hopelessly weakened by hunger, during the occupation. “They were sick—and they had no money961 to do anything about it.” Her father was fifty, her mother forty. She was reunited with her sisters only in 1949.
“An image of Manchuria962 after the surrender remains imprinted in my memory,” said Red Army radio operator Victor Kosopalov: “A lonely Japanese infantry soldier is limping along the road with a rifle upon his shoulder. One of our tank gunners jumps down from a T-34 beside the road, and gestures to the Japanese to surrender his weapon. The Japanese resists, shaking his head, but the tank man wrests the rifle from him. The Japanese shrinks back, expecting retribution. The tank man gestures him to move on. He limps away…”
In Manchuria and the island operations, the Soviets claimed to have killed, wounded or captured 674,000 Japanese troops at a cost to the Red Army of 12,031 dead, 24,425 sick and wounded. Stalin’s Far Eastern conquests thus incurred about the same human cost as the American seizure of Okinawa, though characteristically the Russians were far less troubled by their losses. First Far Eastern Front bore the heaviest casualties—6,324 dead; 2nd Far Eastern lost 2,449 killed; Trans-Baikal 2,228; the Soviet Pacific Fleet lost 998 naval infantry. Japan identified 21,000 of its own men killed, but the true figure is probably closer to 80,000.
MACARTHUR, in his new role as supreme commander Allied powers, ordered all subordinate commanders to postpone reoccupation of Japanese-held territory until after the formal surrender was signed. Seven million Japanese troops remained under arms, in the home islands and across Hirohito’s empire. A British official wrote: “They do not consider that they have been defeated and say so quite openly. They have simply laid down arms on the Emperor’s orders. We are thus in a position that, in a few days’ time, we shall be setting out to disarm an undefeated army.” It was also plainly a matter of urgency to prevent a vacuum of authority across a huge area where local nationalists were poised to challenge the Allies for control. At SEAC, Mountbatten told his staff he was “at a loss to understand why General MacArthur should wish to impose such a dangerous delay.” MacArthur said loftily to his British liaison officer: “Tell Lord Louis to keep his pants on or he will get us all into trouble.” Mountbatten responded: “Tell him I will keep my pants on if he will take Hirohito’s off.” SEAC’s commander defied MacArthur’s orders and rushed help to Allied prisoners in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. Without prompt succour, these men would have continued to die, as the U.S. general might have paused to consider. It was widely believed that MacArthur’s policy was promoted by vanity, a determination to tolerate no distractions from his own great final performance.
The Japanese surrender brought the beginnings of a new round of misery to Indochina. The vanquished occupiers exerted themselves to aid Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist Vietminh and inflict further humiliations on the French. In Hanoi, 5,000 French prisoners remained confined for weeks in the citadel, even as the Vietminh hastened to occupy the city. While the Hôtel Metropole continued to serve six-course meals, and shops were stocked with silks, the bodies of Vietnamese who had died of starvation lay in the streets. Even after the surrender, the Japanese dealt brutally with French officers whom they captured. While awaiting Chinese and British occupation forces, they transferred large quantities of money and arms to the Vietminh. Some Japanese deserters joined Ho Chi Minh’s ranks. The first British troops found themselves obliged to participate in a bitter struggle for power, indeed an open war, until French units arrived to relieve them. In Saigon, the Americans abruptly withdrew from participation in the Vietnam Control Commission, removing the designated U.S. Army signals team from the Allied occupying force. Brig.-Gen. Timberman, commanding U.S. troops in South-East Asia, asserted that reoccupation of Indochina “had nothing to do with the French.”
In the Dutch East Indies, local nationalists swiftly seized control from the Japanese. A bitter and bloody struggle began, which cost thousands of lives in the months that followed, to resist the restoration of Dutch hegemony. “The Japanese,” concluded963 a French observer who had been in Batavia since 1941, “though defeated in a general sense, have ‘won the war’ in this corner of Asia.” They had rendered it impossible for the former European colonial powers convincingly to reassert their authority where they had left off more than three years earlier.
THOUSANDS OF British and Indian Soldiers had been preparing for the amphibious assault on Malaya, Operation Zipper. For them, as for American soldiers slated to land in Japan, it was an overwhelming relief that they could now land unopposed. Cecil Daniels’s battalion of the Buffs had lost ten officers and 205 men in Burma. Looking back on his personal contribution to the war, the infantryman wrote with touching gaucheness: “I felt I had acquitted myself964 reasonably well, but…could and would have done more (in other words, stuck my head out more) if my parents had not already lost one son in the war. I wanted to spare them the grief of the possibility of losing another son if possible.”
From a housing estate in Dagenham, Essex, a cook’s mother wrote to the captain of the British cruiser Nigeria, serving in the Pacific: “Dear Sir, we send our greatest thanks & congratulations to you, all the crew & my son Jimmy Underwood, mess 42B. It really seems almost unbelievable that peace with Japan has now been proclaimed & so many of our loved ones will now be spared. You have all done so well and we at home owe you so much. To say ‘thanks’ is such a small word to show the appreciation we feel in our inner souls. To be parted from our loved ones…has seemed an eternity. No more weeping and sleepless nights & wet pillows. The ‘blitz’ all finished and now to make ready for a new home to rest our boys. God speed your return, thanks a million to you, I am faithfully, yours sincerely Mrs. Alice Underwood. PS Let us think for a while of those who have ‘passed on for this good cause.’ They will NEVER be forgotten.”
CAPTAIN KOUICHI ITO of the Japanese 32nd Regiment was one of several hundred Japanese who escaped captivity on Okinawa, hiding in the island’s multitude of caves, scavenging for food with some little aid from local people, digging up potatoes in the fields under cover of darkness. On 22 August, a Japanese prisoner under American escort appeared at the mouth of the cave being occupied by Ito and his handful of companions, and told them the war was over. They hesitated, but finally decided to believe him. They had seen the offshore firework display a week earlier, as U.S. ships celebrated the announcement of victory. “It did not seem likely that the Americans were making this up,” said Ito. He emerged, and was taken to hear a recording of the emperor’s broadcast. Ito had been officially posted missing, along with the rest of the doomed garrison of Okinawa.
When finally he came home to his parents, he found that while his father had remained convinced that he was alive, his mother had for months been praying for his shade at the shrine for the dead. He found himself collapsing into tears, which he was unable either to check or explain to himself. “I marvelled at my own survival, and could not understand it. I kept thinking of the 90 percent of my men who had died.” He felt embittered and frustrated by the collapse of his own hopes for a career as a warrior, as well for his country’s defeat. Instead of finding glory in military prowess, he settled down to a humdrum life in his father’s transport contracting business. When he married, his wife said sternly: “In the army, you have grown accustomed to having lots of people to boss about, and orderlies to do everything for you. I do not intend to become a replacement for them.” It was many years before the ghosts of defeat on Okinawa were laid in Ito’s mind, his furious emotions calmed.
THERE WAS MUCH American debate about whether the formal surrender should be signed on Japanese soil, or at sea. Truman, the most famous Missourian, made the decision. The battleship bearing his state’s name was at sea south of Japan, and the men were opening a new mail delivery. The chief yeoman dashed up to Captain Murray, her commanding officer, and said: “Captain, Missouri is going to be the surrender ship—here’s a clipping from the Santa Barbara paper.” Murray, a forty-seven-year-old Texan who had only commanded the great vessel since May, found that his own wife had sent him the same cutting. The ship had been at sea for eighteen months, and showed it. An appeal for paint was signalled round the task group. Only a slender supply could be found, because paint stores had been such a fire hazard aboard ships in combat. Men began holystoning decks that had been camouflage-tinted, cleaning every visible part of Missouri. The Royal Navy’s Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser offered a table for the ceremony, which Murray wanted to accept “because it gave the British a chance to say: ‘We contributed something.’” In the end, however, this well-meaning condescension was frustrated. A wardroom table was set up on deck, simply because it was bigger.
On the afternoon of 1 September, the huge battleship eased its way cautiously into Tokyo Bay, wary of mines and kamikazes. A party of Japanese naval officers boarded from a destroyer to offer the keys of the city of Yokosuka, near the ship’s intended anchorage. Advancing further, the battleship passed more Japanese destroyers, their guns plugged and depressed, and at last stopped engines some six miles off Yokohama. By nightfall, 260 Allied warships filled the bay.
Mustering the great crowd of dignitaries and onlookers next morning, Sunday, 2 September 1945, proved a challenge. There were 225 correspondents and seventy-five photographers, two of these Japanese, together with representatives of every Allied power. Captain Murray took pains to ensure that the respective flag hoists of MacArthur and Nimitz were exactly level. Two Marines hustled an errant Russian photographer into his proper place, while the Americans scrutinised the Japanese cameramen nervously. Soon after 0800, destroyers delivered MacArthur and Nimitz to the ship.
In Tokyo, there was bitter dispute about who should sign the detested peace documents on behalf of the government. “The feeling of Japan’s leaders965, now that the war was ended so suddenly, was characteristic,” wrote Mamoru Shigemitsu. “They abhorred, as an unclean thing, the act of shouldering responsibility for the deed of surrender, and they did their best to avoid it.” He himself was finally appointed, as minister plenipotentiary. At dawn Shigemitsu and a small group, most prominent among whom was Umezu, the army chief, assembled at the prime minister’s official residence. They bowed formally towards the Imperial Palace, then drove through miles of empty streets and bombed-out desolation to Yokohama. There, an American destroyer awaited them for the hour-long passage to Halsey’s flagship.
The Japanese party came alongside Missouri at 0855. Silence fell over the throng as the defeated enemy’s representatives, in formal dress and top hats, mounted the gangway and approached the serried ranks of Allied brass. Shigemitsu, who had lost a leg to an unsuccessful assassin’s bomb a few years earlier, made every step in visible pain, embarrassing the more sensitive Americans. When the Japanese were in their places, MacArthur, Nimitz and Halsey—the last scowling, as usual—emerged from a hatchway and strode to the mess table, covered with a green cloth. MacArthur delivered a short speech, which even his sternest critics have been unable to fault: “The issues, involving divergent ideals and ideologies, have been determined on the battlefields of the world and hence are not for our discussion or debate,” he said. “Nor is it for us here to meet, representing as we do a majority of the people of the earth, in a spirit of distrust, malice or hatred. But rather it is for us, both victors and vanquished, to rise to that higher dignity which alone befits the sacred purposes we are about to serve, committing all our people unreservedly to faithful compliance.”
His hands trembled as he read. Even MacArthur seemed a little overwhelmed by the magnitude of the occasion. The Japanese were deeply impressed by the generosity of the sentiments expressed by the supreme commander. For the first time, they felt a gleam of hope for the future. Then they all signed. At 9:25, the silence was broken by a distant drone, then a great roar overhead, as four hundred B-29s and 1,500 carrier planes staged the greatest fly-past in history. The Japanese bowed, retreated, and descended the gangway. MacArthur walked to a microphone, and delivered another slow, majestic speech. “Today the guns are silent,” he began. “A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won.” After rehearsing memories of the long journey from Bataan to Tokyo Bay, he concluded with an appeal entirely worthy of the moment, for mankind to pursue a new spirit of peace: “These proceedings are now closed,” he said. Nothing so became MacArthur’s tenure of combat command as the manner in which he ended it. The general departed ashore, to begin at the age of sixty-five the most impressive phase of his life, as architect of Japan’s resurrection and redemption—also, indeed, of his own.
Aboard Missouri, Captain Murray found that no one had thought of locking up the American copy of the surrender document, and hastily did so himself. He frustrated an attempt by the ship’s cooks to abstract the table used for the surrender ceremony. Huge and bloody domestic struggles were commencing for the future of Asia, but the war against Japan was ended.