CHAPTER 3
Chinese civilians flee for their lives during a Japanese bombing raid on Canton in 1938.
Japan’s rapid victories in the first half of 1942 established a new empire that stretched for thousands of miles (kilometers), from mainland China to far-flung Pacific islands. It affected the lives of millions of ordinary citizens. Japan proclaimed the creation of a Greater East Asia Coprosperity Scheme that would liberate Asians from white colonial rule. At first, many people in the occupied countries welcomed this idea and saw the Japanese as liberators. In Sumatra, local people rose in rebellion against their Dutch rulers and arrested those who tried to flee before the Japanese arrived. Later, peasants were forced into slave labor by the Japanese, and an estimated four million people died as a result of the Japanese occupation of the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia).
Japan, having conquered a vast area, faced the problem of keeping it under Japanese control during the Pacific War.
While the Japanese were fighting in China, they suspected Chinese who were living overseas of supporting their enemy. In Singapore, many thousands of Chinese were driven to beaches and machine-gunned by Japanese soldiers. It was not only the Chinese who were harshly treated. An estimated 200,000 women, mostly Korean but also Filipinos and some Dutch, were drafted into camps where they became “comfort women,” forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers.
Neither the Japanese nor the Allies respected the culture of Pacific Islanders and the Islanders suffered terribly as a result. Many were forced to work and fight for the opposing armies, meaning they could end up killing one another. Their traditional way of life came under severe stress as they struggled to cope: “All the clans … who were once brave, courageous, and strong seemed to become like babies in their first day out of their mother’s wombs. The landings of the Japanese, gun noises, and the actual sight of the ships … They could not run … It was a unique disaster beyond anybody’s memory,” recorded a New Guinean man. New Guineans died in tens of thousands as their land was bombed.
Japanese victories between December 1941 and April 1942 led to huge numbers of soldiers and European civilians being taken prisoner. About 70,000 troops surrendered in Singapore, as well as 10,000 U.S. soldiers and 62,000 Filipinos on the Bataan peninsula. Most of the quarter of a million Dutch nationals in the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia), the 3,000 British in Hong Kong, and the 4,500 British in Singapore, including about three hundred children, were interned. Many did not survive the harsh conditions, poor diet, and lack of medical facilities in the prison camps.
NOWHERE TO RUN
Pacific Islanders had no choice but to endure the battles that erupted on their islands. One man describes how they tried to survive: “All of us were in holes … We were hungry and thirsty, but no one could go out. If you traveled outside you would disappear … Then in their coming the [American] warriors were not straight in their working. They came to the shelter of ours, guns ready, and looked toward us inside. So great was our fear that we were all in a corner, like kittens. And then they yelled and threw in a hand grenade… When it burst, the whole shelter was torn apart … Earth fragments struck us, but the others in the other half, they died.”
—From The Second World War: A People’s History, Joanna Bourke
Pacific Islanders, like these on Guadalcanal helping U.S. troops build an airfield runway, became involved in the conflict in various ways.
The Japanese built the Burma-Siam Railway so that they did not have to send supplies to Burma by sea routes under enemy attack. The railroad is marked on the map by black/white lines.
FORCED INTO SLAVE LABOR
Forced to work on railroads, coal mines, roads, docks, and factories, prisoners’ food rations kept them barely alive. Millions of peasants were forced into slave labor on Java, and in Siam (now Thailand) the Japanese used prisoners of war (POWs) and civilians to dig a railway line to Burma (now Myanmar) through 260 miles (420 km) of mountainous jungle. About 300,000 Asians from Malaya (now Malaysia), Burma, and the Netherlands East Indies were brought to work on the railway line, having no idea of the starvation diet and brutal conditions awaiting them. In addition, 60,000 Australian, British, and Dutch POWs were transported to Siam to work on the railway.
Many POWs in Japanese camps, kept alive with the barest minimum of food but still expected to work hard, never survived their ordeal.
Conditions were awful for everyone, but Asians, including many women and children, suffered the worst. As many as one in three died, compared to one in five Allied prisoners of war. Dr. Hardie, a POW working on the Burma-Siam Railway, kept a secret diary about Asian prisoners: “People who have been near these camps speak with bated breath of the state of affairs––corpses rotting unburied in the jungle, almost complete lack of sanitation, a frightful stench, overcrowding, swarms of flies.”
“I DO NOT WANT TO KNOW HOW MY FATHER DIED”
Greta Kwik from Holland was a 16-year-old girl living in Java when the Japanese invaded the island. She recorded her memories fifty years later: “I may still have the piece of paper on which Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands wrote that she was sorry about what happened. I never looked for it because everything still hurts. When we received it, much, much later, it finally dawned on me that my father was dead. I remember crying and banging my head against a wall in utter sorrow. I do not want to know how my father died. Was he standing, blindfolded, and shot? Did he have to kneel, hands bound behind his back, and have his head chopped off, to topple in a grave of his own digging? … I have waited for my father all my life … For most of the past 50 years, I have shed a tear every January 29, his execution date.”
—From The Second World War: A People’s History, Joanna Bourke
The Pacific War was an especially vicious conflict and part of the reason for this lies in a deep-rooted racism and nationalism that marked the attitudes of the countries fighting one another. Many Japanese believed (with some historical reasons) that Europe and the U.S. wanted to make colonies out of all of Asia. Westerners were seen as enemies in racial terms, hypocrites who would not admit to their own greed in wanting to control Asia. Racist and nationalistic attitudes took hold as Japan’s own ambitions in Asia were blocked by the U.S. The views of military leaders who accused the United States and Britain of imperialism gained influence in Japan. Many Japanese also felt that those in the U.S. and Britain wanted to humiliate the Japanese people by not accepting them as equals.
Allied prisoners of war during the Bataan Death March; of those who survived the march, another 16,000 died in the first few weeks at their destination camp.
BATAAN DEATH MARCH
William Dyess survived the death march but realized how people become used to brutality:
“Their ferocity grew as we marched on into the afternoon … I stumbled over a man writhing in the hot dust of the road. He was a Filipino soldier who had been bayoneted through his stomach. Within a quarter of a mile I walked past another. This soldier prisoner had been rolled into the path of the trucks and crushed beneath the heavy wheels. The huddled and smashed figures beside the road eventually became commonplace to us. The human mind has an amazing faculty of adjusting to shock.”
–From How It Happened: World War II, Jon E. Lewis. editor
ATTITUDES AND THE BRUTALITY OF WAR The Japanese military code of conduct did not accept honorable surrender. Japanese soldiers were encouraged to see themselves as noble warriors fighting a corrupt enemy, and an enemy who surrendered was next to worthless. Evidence of this brutal attitude came after the surrender of U.S. and Philippine forces on the Bataan peninsula in 1942. Forced to march around sixty-five miles (105 km) to a prison camp, the prisoners were clubbed and bayoneted along the way. Five to ten thousand Filipinos and over six hundred Americans died on the trek, many from exhaustion and starvation.
The Bataan Death March forced prisoners of war up the Bataan peninsula and well inland to the former Philippine Army Camp O’Donnell, about 65 miles (105 km) to the north.
A belief in their own racial superiority was shared by many U.S., European, and Australian forces. Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, commander of British forces in southeast Asia, described how in 1940: “I had a good closeup, across the barbed wire, of various subhuman specimens dressed in dirty grey uniform, which I was informed were Japanese soldiers.” Similarly, a U.S. general congratulated his troops: “The sincere admiration of the entire Third Fleet is yours for the hill-blasting, cave-smashing extermination of 11,000 slant-eyed gophers.” Many Pacific War soldiers had no previous experience of battle. They were young men who had volunteered or were conscripted for service, and the reality of combat was a terrible experience. The death of friends and fellow soldiers was awful and it hardened attitudes towards the enemy. One U.S. soldier, George Peto, remembered how, after the death of a friend, “ … that sure put a different perspective on my part in the war.” Peto went on to say that it changed and hardened his attitude towards the enemy and, in a similar kind of way, after the surrender on the Bataan peninsula, one group of prisoners were told by a Japanese officer that “ … we’re going to kill you because you killed many of our soldiers.” For soldiers on both sides, the war became personal and vengeful.
A Japanese soldier, bayonet at the ready, guards Allied prisoners during their forced march up the Bataan peninsula.
Atrocities against soldiers and civilians were committed by both sides. It was not unusual for captured soldiers to be killed rather than taken prisoner. The capture of the Japanese-controlled island of Saipan in the Marianas involved ferocious fighting that illustrates just how vicious the Pacific war became. U.S. troops landed on the island—which was 14 miles long (22 km)—in mid-June 1944. They had planned three days for the island’s capture, but fierce Japanese resistance stretched this into three weeks. Some four thousand Americans were killed or injured on the beaches in the first two days. The Japanese then withdrew to a rocky area around Mount Tapotchau.
“A KILLING MACHINE”
Nelson Perry, an American soldier, remembers how the Pacific war turned ordinary individuals into something else when in battle: “Men in combat … cease being individuals; they become part of a machine that kills and that bayonets people, that sets fire to people, that laughs at people when they’re running down the trail screaming in agony and you laugh at them. It’s because you’re no longer an individual, you’re part of a machine, a killing machine.”
Yamauchi Taeko, who surrendered on Saipan, made a similar observation: “The American soldiers had been demons on the battlefield, ready to kill me in an instant. Now here they were, right in front of my eyes. Relaxed. Sprawled on top of jeeps, shouting, ‘Hey!’ Joking with each other.”
—From Hell in the Pacific, Jonathan Lewis and Ben Steele, and Japan At War, Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook
An American medic on Saipan; wounded soldiers were evacuated to hospital ships waiting offshore.
U.S. soldiers remember and mourn their fallen comrades on Saipan.
Japanese resistance on Saipan was fierce, despite intense bombardment by U.S. battleships for two days before the landings.
One night early in July, Japanese infantry troops launched a desperate all-out attack, known as a banzai. Advancing regardless of the enemy’s answering fire, the banzai soon turned into a suicidal attack. As many as four thousand Japanese may have lost their lives in this one action. A few days later, thousands of Japanese civilians living on the island jumped off the cliffs in defiance of a U.S. victory. Nearly 8,000 civilians died on Saipan, bringing total Japanese losses to more than 30,000; U.S. dead totaled 3,426.
Determined Japanese forces dug out defensive positions on Saipan that U.S. troops had to destroy one by one.