TWENTY-TWO
THE MOST CREDIBLE statistics suggest that 185,647 Japanese were killed in China between 1937 and 1941. The Imperial Army lost a further 1,140,429 dead between Pearl Harbor and August 1945, while the navy lost 414,879. At least 97,031 civilian dead were listed in Tokyo and a further 86,336 in other cities, but many more bombing casualties were unrecorded. Over 100,000 died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some 150,000 civilians are alleged to have perished on Okinawa, 10,000 on Saipan, though these latter figures are thought by modern Western scholars to have been exaggerated, perhaps as much as tenfold. Anything up to 250,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians died in Manchuria during the icy winter of 1945, after the war ended, along with many more who served as slave labourers for the Soviets in Siberia through the succeeding decade. Japan’s total war dead are estimated at 2.69 million, against 6 million Germans.
Chinese historians today seek to increase figures for their nation’s wartime death toll from 15 to 25 or even 50 million. Some 5 million inhabitants of South-East Asia are thought to have perished under Japanese occupation, most of these in Indochina and the Dutch East Indies. None of these numbers are reliable, but they offer an indication of scale. It can confidently be asserted that Japan’s human losses were vastly surpassed by those of the nations which it attacked and occupied between 1931 and 1945. The U.S. Army, meanwhile, lost some 55,145 killed in the Pacific conflict, including 3,650 in South-East Asia, compared with around 143,000 in Europe and North Africa. The U.S. Navy lost 29,263 dead in the east, the Marines 19,163. About 30,000 British servicemen perished in the war against the Japanese, many of them as prisoners, by comparison with 235,000 who died fighting the Germans.
The outcome of the Pacific conflict persuaded some Americans that they could win wars at relatively small human cost, by the application of their country’s boundless technological ingenuity and industrial resources. The lesson appeared to be that, if the U.S. possessed bases from which its warships and aircraft could strike at the land of an enemy, victories could be gained by the expenditure of mere treasure, and relatively little blood. Only in the course of succeeding decades did it become plain that Japan was a foe uniquely vulnerable to American naval and air power projection. Some modern U.S. historians assert that the pursuit of decisive victory is central to the American way of war. If true, this renders their country chronically vulnerable to disappointment. The 1950–53 Korean conflict proved only the first of many demonstrations that the comprehensive triumph achieved by the U.S. in the Second World War was a freak of history, representing no norm. Modern experience suggests that never again will overwhelming military, naval and air power suffice to fulfil American purposes abroad as effectively as it did in the Pacific war. Limited wars offer notable opportunities to belligerents of limited means. Only total war enabled a liberal democracy to exploit weapons of mass destruction. Even granted such circumstances, posterity has shown itself profoundly equivocal about America’s 1945 bombardment of Japan.
In the light of the events of August 1945, it can be suggested that Japan would have surrendered not one day later had U.S. ground forces never advanced beyond their capture of the Marianas in the summer of 1944. It is superficially arguable, therefore, that Iwo Jima, Okinawa and MacArthur’s Philippines campaign contributed no more than did Slim’s victory in Burma to the final outcome. The Japanese retained large armies with which to defend their home islands. They were induced to quit by fuel starvation, the collapse of industry caused by blockade and in lesser degree aerial bombardment, together with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the atomic bombs.
Yet this represents the knowledge of hindsight, which makes possible a judgement wholly unattainable by Allied warlords in 1944–45. It would have been politically as well as militarily unthinkable for large American and British forces to stand idle in the Pacific and South-East Asia, waiting upon the impact of hypothetical scientific, strategic and economic developments. The loss of the Philippines and Burma played at least a marginal part in persuading Hirohito and those around him that their nation was doomed. Consider the implications if Slim’s army had not crossed the Chindwin, if MacArthur had not established himself in the Philippines. Had large Allied armies merely lingered passive after the fall of the Marianas, waiting for blockade and bombardment to force Japan’s capitulation, the military leadership in Tokyo would certainly have interpreted this as infirmity of will. The material and moral cost to the United States of LeMay’s campaign outweighed its substantive achievement. Yet it would be foolish to doubt that even the most fanatical Japanese were deeply shaken by the destruction of their cities, the loss of between one-quarter and one-third of their national wealth to the B-29s.
At the very least, the 1945 air and land campaigns emphasised the Allies’ implacable resolution. Even the war party in Tokyo could not convincingly argue that American commitment, indeed ruthlessness, was inferior to that of samurai, when they beheld Japan’s ruined cities, the slaughter of its people in hundreds of thousands, the dogged erosion of its armies. Japan’s leaders started the war supposing that their nation’s spirit could compensate for its relative material weakness. By August 1945, this proposition was decisively discredited.
Of the atomic bombs, a modern American historian has written: “If the bombing of Hiroshima966 and Nagasaki was the apogee of the nation-state—for what other political entity could possibly have financed and manned such an undertaking as the Manhattan Project…then that moment was also the birth of the universal vulnerability of the nation-state.” Not only does the use of the atomic bombs seem to have been justified in the circumstances prevailing in August 1945, but I am among those convinced that the demonstration of nuclear horror, and the global revulsion which it provoked, has contributed decisively towards preserving the world since. If the effects of nuclear attack had not been demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is overwhelmingly likely that in the Cold War era, an American or Russian leader would have convinced himself that the use of atomic weapons could be justified. Korea in 1950 offers an obvious example, when some U.S. generals, above all MacArthur, favoured exploiting against China the advantages supposedly conferred by America’s nuclear arsenal. Such a point is irrelevant to the debate about whether the original decision in 1945 was valid, but is surely worthy of consideration more than six decades later.
For all the absurdity of Britain’s hopes of restoring its eastern hegemony in 1945, many of Slim’s soldiers of Fourteenth Army retained sentimental memories of the Japanese war as the last gathering of the British Empire in arms. “Dear Sir,” wrote Garba Yola967, a Nigerian of 82nd West African Division, to his former commander Maj.-Gen. Sir Hugh Stockwell in 1946. “Of course it is a very long time ago since I come back home to my native land, and I hope that these few lines will meet you in an excellent condition. I arrived home safely and found all my people all right, nothing strange to be reported in respect of my present health, only that I always remember you in any circumstances of the day. I have seen the letter you sent me, and I am very glad to see that it comes from you. Give my special compliments to my ‘mother’ your wife. I enclose herewith my portrait, so that she may know me. Warm compliments from my wife, and my friend Jauro. My father and mother ask me to remember them to you. I would like to hear from you as regards your conditions, and your present place of abode, yours obediently.” Slim’s 1945 reconquest was among the most successful British campaigns of the war, reflecting the highest credit on its commander and his soldiers. But it represented a last convulsion of empire, rather than a convincing contribution to the defeat of Japan.
In 1947 the British left India. They quit Burma a year later, and Malaya in 1957. The Dutch were forced to abandon their East Indian possessions in 1949, after four years of bloody guerrilla war. The French suffered futile agonies in Indochina before bowing to the inevitable when they lost the battle of Dien Bien Phu to Ho Chi Minh’s Vietminh nationalists in 1954. Ironically, the European colonial nations found themselves in much more comfortable economic circumstances after shedding their cherished Asian possessions. These had become drains upon their straitened resources, rather than the assets their owners had supposed. The U.S. granted independence to the Philippines in 1946. That year, Manuel Roxas was elected national president. He had been prominent among Filipino politicians who collaborated with the Japanese occupation regime, and indeed declared war on the U.S. in September 1944. The electoral success of Roxas served to highlight the equivocal attitude of the Filipino people to the Second World War and to the United States.
Far from the Soviets fulfilling fears that they would prolong their presence in Manchuria for imperialistic reasons, Chiang Kai-shek was obliged to beg Stalin’s occupying forces to serve overtime, to give the Nationalists time to send their own troops to take possession. The Soviets withdrew between January and May 1946, having systematically pillaged the region of every scrap of industrial plant. They justified this by asserting that their booty was not Chinese property but Japanese-owned, and thus represented legitimate war reparations. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese captives such as Souhei Nakamura found themselves labouring for the Russians in Siberia, enduring cold and starvation. They never knew how many of their number died, because as soon as a man became sick he was removed by the guards, never to be seen again.
Just once in his years behind the wire was young Nakamura allowed to send home a card via the Red Cross in Switzerland, announcing that he was “well and happy,” like so many wretched British and American prisoners of the Japanese a few years earlier. The wheel had turned full circle. “It seemed so unjust,” said Nakamura. “The world was at peace, and yet there were we, living as prisoners in terrible conditions.” They constantly begged of their captors: “When can we go home?” and always received the same reply: “In forty-five days.” When the time was up, they asked again, and received the same stony answer: “In forty-five days.” Some men became sufficiently impressed by ideological indoctrination to profess Communism on their return to Japan. Nakamura himself was repatriated in July 1948.
Chiang Kai-shek’s occupation of Manchuria proved a strategic error. His forces there found themselves cut off as the Chinese civil war developed. Vast quantities of American military aid provided to his armies counted for nothing beside the corruption and incompetence of his regime. In 1949 Mao Zedong became master of China, excluding only the island of Formosa, which became Chiang’s pocket nation-state, modern Taiwan. Thus was confounded the Americans’ great fantasy of the wartime era, their vision for China, as was the matching British one, of redeeming their Asian empire. The Japanese slogan “Asia for Asians” achieved fulfilment in a fashion undreamt of by those who coined it.
And so to MacArthur. Few today suppose that he ranks among the great commanders of history. Yet so prodigious were his theatrical powers, so remarkable was the achievement of his wartime publicity machine, that he remains the most famous figure of the Pacific war. More than forty years after the general accepted the Japanese surrender, Ronald Spector wrote of him: “Despite his undoubted qualities968 of leadership, he was unsuited by temperament, character, and judgment for the positions of high command which he occupied throughout the war.” MacArthur’s megalomania, disloyalty to his own national leadership, pettiness, contempt for intelligence, poor selection of staff and subordinates, refusal to acknowledge error and determination to shape national strategy to conform with his personal ambitions suggest that this verdict errs on the side of generosity. Nonetheless, it is essential also to recognise the charisma, intellect and self-conscious aspiration to nobility which enabled MacArthur at times to scale heights no ordinary commander could achieve, as he did at the Japanese surrender. As post-war ruler of Japan, he displayed a wisdom and magnanimity conspicuously absent from his tenure as supreme commander in the south-west Pacific. It should also be acknowledged that between December 1941 and August 1945, deservedly or no, he became for the American people the embodiment of their national purpose in the east. Nations at war need symbols, and no less so do fighting soldiers: “We thought he was above God,” one veteran said to me of MacArthur. Another asserted: “He was the greatest military commander America has ever produced.” Even though this is quite untrue, it is noteworthy that some of his old soldiers believe it.
It was MacArthur’s good fortune that, after presiding over the initial disaster in the Philippines, he served in a theatre where American material dominance became so overwhelming that his misjudgements and follies were redeemable. The U.S. Navy achieved the decisive victories, but MacArthur was able to reap much of the glory. That dramatic profile in its oversized cap and glinting sunglasses dominated every image of war against Japan. Nimitz, a supremely professional naval officer, neither sought nor received a due share of fame for his stellar performance in the Pacific. The U.S. Navy’s achievement was as brilliant, as decisive, as that of the Royal Navy in frustrating Napoleon’s tyranny almost a century and a half earlier.
BRITISH AND American prisioners in Aomi barracks, Japan, had to wait three weeks after the surrender for the first sight of their deliverers. Then one day nine U.S. fighters flew overhead in perfect formation, spotted the huge “PW” letters laid out by the inmates, and dipped low enough for the pilots to wave. It was the prisoners’ first glimpse of a friendly outside world for 1,302 days. Stephen Abbott went inside and wept. Before the prisoners departed, he visited the local factory, in the quarry of which he and his comrades had laboured and often died. In the boardroom of the Denki Kagaku Kogyo company, its president said to Abbott: “Our country is in ruins969, but you understand Japanese people. We will never lose our pride. Return here in five years and we will be tidy; allow us ten and I know you will find a prospering nation.” Soon afterwards, the British and American prisoners quit “those few square yards of Japanese soil we loathed with all our hearts—but on which a volume of human tragedy and learning had been recorded.” Even as the prisoners departed, the first elements of MacArthur’s army landed in Japan, a force mighty enough to ensure against any belated displays of recalcitrance by the defeated enemy. Officers and men alike gazed in awe at the ruined land before them: “I marvel continually970, from what I see, how Japan did so much with so little,” wrote Lt.-Gen. Oscar Griswold. U.S. military occupation continued until 1952.
In 1945–46, some Japanese were prosecuted for war crimes. To impose retribution on all those guilty of barbarous acts would have required tens of thousands of executions, for which the Allies lacked stomach. Very few Japanese were called to account for their deeds in China and South-East Asia. The U.S., dominant partner in the alliance, focused its vengeance upon those who had committed atrocities against white men and U.S. colonial subjects. The most prominent figure to be charged was Tojo, who was hanged. Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita was indicted for his role as Japan’s commander in the Philippines when so many atrocities were committed against its people.
The proceedings began on 29 October 1945, and at first the general declined to go into the witness box. When persuaded to do so, he presented an impressive image of dignity and fluency. Convicted and sentenced to hang, he removed his belt and presented it to an American colonel as a souvenir, observing jovially: “You’re the only man here fat enough to wear this.” Pinioned before being marched to the gallows, he complained of the tightness of the handcuffs, but then strode courageously to meet death. Gen. Masaharu Homma was shot by firing squad in April 1946, convicted of responsibility for the Bataan death march. Homma said: “I am being executed for the Bataan incident. What I want to know is: who was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? MacArthur or Truman?” He went gaily to execution, raising a beer glass to the chaplain and interpreter, saying in perfect English: “Come on gentlemen, please. Bottoms up!”
Many people, American as well as Japanese, were dismayed by the fashion in which Yamashita and Homma were done to death. Their trials bore an ugly stamp of kangaroo court proceedings, at which evidence of the generals’ opposition to inhumane treatment of civilians and POWs was swept aside. It was widely believed that the sentences represented MacArthur’s personal vengeance upon Japanese commanders who had humiliated him in the field. There is, however, a strong contrary argument. Yamashita and Homma were sympathetic and personally honourable figures. Yet they held the responsible commands when unlawful and indeed unspeakable acts were committed against a host of innocents. How could their subordinates be punished for carrying out such deeds, if commanders went free? Japanese atrocities might not have been directly ordered by Yamashita or Homma, but they reflected a culture of massacre in which the entire Japanese military was complicit, and which it worked assiduously for decades to promote.
Even if the generals’ executions were symbolic rather than legally proper, they were almost certainly necessary. The American decision to leave Hirohito on his throne caused many Japanese afterwards to suppose that their nation could not have behaved so very badly, if their emperor’s reign was permitted to continue. Had Japan’s most senior commanders also been judged unaccountable for the ghastly deeds of the nation’s soldiers, their survival would have appeared a betrayal of millions dead by Japanese hands. It is plainly true that the 1945–46 war crimes trials, in Europe as well as Asia, represented victors’ justice. No attempt was made to impose even token punishment upon Allied personnel who committed unlawful deeds. But it seemed preferable then, as it still does today, to subject to trial some of those responsible for crimes against humanity, rather than to hold none responsible because so many were guilty.
In the wake of Japan’s surrender, Hirohito’s soldiers, sailors and airmen were shocked to find themselves objects of obloquy among their own people. Public animosity embraced the humblest as well as the loftiest warriors. After years of suffering, all the pent-up frustration and misery of the Japanese people was made manifest in the wake of defeat. Servicemen who had mindlessly accepted the code of bushido, and sometimes suffered terribly to fulfil its demands, now faced the contempt of their own nation. Amazingly, the U.S. army of occupation found itself protecting the survivors of the Imperial Japanese Army from the fury of its own people. This was an experience unknown among German veterans who had served in Hitler’s legions. Japan’s early post-war years were characterised by a collapse of hierarchies, a ruthless pursuit of self-interest reflected in looting, crime and wholesale prostitution, unknown at any other period of the nation’s history. Decadence, even depravity, flourished, as the defeated people astonished their conquerors by the fashion in which they abased themselves before all things American. Self-loathing seemed for a time to overtake Japan.
Perhaps this was a necessary part of a cleansing process after the years of military dominance and national self-delusion. From 1950 onwards, stimulated ironically enough by the Korean War, there followed an economic resurrection which awed the world.
YET THE NEW JAPAN proved distressingly reluctant to confront the historic guilt of the old. Its spirit of denial contrasted starkly with the penitence of post-war Germany. Though successive Japanese prime ministers expressed formal regret for Japan’s wartime actions, the country refused to pay reparations to victims, or to acknowledge its record in school history texts. I embarked upon this book with a determination to view Japanese wartime conduct objectively, thrusting aside nationalistic sentiments which have clouded the perspective of many British and American writers since 1945. Japanese veterans whom I met proved warmly sympathetic. It is essential for every historian to keep in view the wartime excesses of Allied forces, which seldom incurred censure, far less judicial sanction. Yet it proved hard to sustain lofty aspirations to detachment, in the face of the evidence of systemic Japanese barbarism, displayed against their fellow Asians on a vastly wider scale than against Americans and Europeans. The knights of bushido, like those of medieval Europe, made mockery of their lofty ideal of honour by behaving so basely towards the great multitudes whom they deemed undeserving of the protection of their code. In modern times, only Hitler’s SS has matched militarist Japan in rationalising and institutionalising atrocity. Stalin’s Soviet Union never sought to dignify its great killings as the acts of gentlemen, as did Hirohito’s nation.
It is easy to perceive why so many Japanese behaved as they did, conditioned as they were. Yet it remains almost impossible to empathise with those who did such things, especially when Japan still rejects its historic legacy. Many Japanese today adopt the view that it is time to bury all old grievances—those of Japan’s former enemies about the treatment of prisoners and subject peoples, along with those of their own nation about fire-bombing, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “In war, both sides do terrible things,” former Lieutenant Hayashi Inoue argued in 2005. “If you win, then that justifies any action you have taken. If you lose, you become the guilty party. Surely after sixty years, the time has come to stop criticising Japan for things done so long ago.” Maj. Shigeru Funaki, a former staff officer at Japanese army HQ in Nanjing, says sternly: “A lot of the stuff about what Japan is supposed to have done in China is simply invented. At the end of the war, I had to negotiate constantly with Nationalist army officers. None of them said a word about, for instance, a massacre in Nanjing. OK, some people died there, because there was a battle and people die in battles. But this idea that 150,000 or 200,000 were killed—who is supposed to have counted them?” Japanese media tycoon Tsuneo Watanabe has sponsored a major project to review more realistically Japan’s record in World War II. Most of his fellow countrymen, however, decisively reject both the concept of self-analysis and his bleak conclusions.
Germany has paid almost $6 billion to 1.5 million victims of the Hitler era. Austria has paid $400 million to 132,000 people. By contrast, modern Japan goes to extraordinary lengths to escape any admission of responsibility, far less of liability for compensation, towards its wartime victims. By an absurd, indeed grotesque, irony, in 1999 the British government chose to make ex-gratia payments to British former captives of the Japanese, having despaired of the perpetrators of their sufferings doing so. Repeated attempts at litigation before Japanese judges, notably by Chinese plaintiffs including former “comfort women,” have so far been unsuccessful. Three cases have only recently been rejected by the Supreme Court. Perhaps the most striking example is that of slave labourers, of whom 38,935 Chinese were shipped to Japan, and 6,830 died. They were employed by thirty-five companies, of which twenty-two continue to trade, including Mitsubishi and Matsui Mining. In a recent lawsuit by former Chinese slaves against Mitsubishi, defence lawyers sought to question whether Japan had invaded China. Mitsubishi explicitly denies that it employed forced labour. A ruling in favour of the plaintiffs, said Mitsubishi’s counsel, would “impose an unjust burden on future generations of our nation, possibly for centuries to come.”
The wartime Japanese minister of commerce and mines was the grandfather of Shinzo Abe, Japan’s recent prime minister. Soon after assuming office in 2007, Mr. Abe publicly asserted that many Chinese and Korean comfort women volunteered for their role. Both the Japanese government and the companies targeted for litigation argue that any possible liability towards Japan’s wartime victims has lapsed with the passage of time and the September 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty signed by Japan and forty-eight Allied nations—though China was a conspicuous absentee, and the USSR declined to append its signature. Tokyo also asserts, less than subtly, that it is grotesque for a country with as deplorable a record of respect for human rights as China to seek redress for any past Japanese shortcomings in this field.
Both the policy of denial and the alternative doctrine of moral equivalence are unconvincing, when Japanese brutality was institutionalised for many years before the Allies commenced their own excesses, if excesses they were. Even LeMay’s campaign was designed to hasten the end of the war. Many Japanese actions, by contrast, including the torture and beheading of prisoners, reflected a gratuitous pride in the infliction of suffering. Wartime Japan was responsible for almost as many deaths in Asia as was Nazi Germany in Europe. Yet only a few modern Japanese acknowledge as much, and incur the disdain or outright hostility of their fellow countrymen for doing so. The nation is guilty of a collective rejection of historical fact. The treatment of subject peoples and prisoners described in this book is wholly unaccepted by most modern Japanese, even where supported by overwhelming evidence. This sustains a chasm between their culture and ours, which cannot be justified or dismissed by mere reference to differences of attitude between East and West.
Much Western criticism has focused upon the custom of modern Japanese prime ministers paying formal annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine to honour the nation’s war dead, including its war criminals. This, I believe, is mistaken. The leaders of all societies which participated in great conflicts are expected to pay homage to those who fell in them, whatever the demerits of their causes. There is no reason why Japan should be excepted. It seems to me that dismay, indeed repugnance, should instead concentrate upon the refusal of the Japanese people, including their political, educational and corporate leaders, honestly to acknowledge their history. They still seek to excuse, and even to ennoble, the actions of their parents and grandparents, so many of whom forsook humanity in favour of a perversion of honour and an aggressive nationalism which should properly be recalled with shame. As long as such denial persists, it will remain impossible for the world to believe that Japan has come to terms with the horrors which it inflicted upon Asia almost two-thirds of a century ago.
“What comes next, then? What am I going to do?” And immediately he knew the answer: “Nothing. I’m just going to live. Oh, it’s marvellous!”
Tolstoy’s Pierre Bezukhov after the
Franco-Russian campaign of 1812