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Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45
Sir Max Hastings


A masterly narrative history of the climactic battles of the Second World War, and companion volume to his bestselling ‘Armageddon’, by the pre-eminent military historian Max Hastings.The battle for Japan that ended many months after the battle for Europe involved enormous naval, military and air operations from the borders of India to the most distant regions of China. There is no finer chronicler of these events than the great military historian Max Hastings, whose gripping account explores not just the global strategic objectives of the USA, Japan and Britain but also the first-hand experiences of the airmen, sailors and soldiers of all the countries who participated in the Far East and the war in the Pacific.The big moments in the story are chosen to reflect a wide variety of human experience: the great naval battle of Leyte Gulf; the under-reported war in China; the re-conquest of Burma by the British Army under General Slim; MacArthur's follies in the Philippines; the Marines on Iwojima and Okinawa; LeMay's fire-raising Super-fortress assaults on Japan; the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the kamikaze pilots of Japan; the almost unknown Soviet blitzkrieg in Manchuria in the last days of the war, as Stalin hastened to gather the spoils; and the terrible final acts across Japanese-occupied Asia.This is classic, epic history – both in the content and the manner of telling.









Nemesis

MAX HASTINGS


THE BATTLE FOR JAPAN, 1944-45






















Copyright (#ulink_8e0ffe31-3f6a-5c4c-876a-53c2f69ffa0d)


William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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This ebook edition first published in 2009



First published in Great Britain by HarperPress in 2007

Copyright © Max Hastings 2007



Cover photograph © akg-images/Pictures from History



Max Hastings asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work



A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library



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Source ISBN: 9780007219810

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007344093

Version: 2017-03-23




Praise (#ulink_a926d1be-4965-501e-becb-6926cc31943d)


From the reviews of Nemesis:

‘The shocking, little-known story of the war against Japan. Absolutely excellent’

JOHN SIMPSON, Observer

‘Spectacular. Hastings is excellent, unsparing and compelling. Searingly powerful’

ANDREW ROBERTS, Sunday Telegraph

‘A triumph. Put all these elements together—the ambition, insight, sureness of touch—and you have a book of real quality’

LAURENCE REES, Sunday Times

‘An outstandingly gripping and authoritative account of the battle for Japan, and a monument to human bravery—and savagery’

DOMINIC SANDBROOK, Daily Telegraph


In memory of my son

CHARLES HASTINGS 1973-2000




Epigraph (#ulink_5c0b595b-eb97-53d9-ab1a-e2f48f8aa848)


War is human, it is as something that is lived like a love or a hatred…It might better be described as a pathological condition because it admits of accidents which not even a skilled physician could have foreseen.

MARCEL PROUST

‘Oh, surely they’ll stop now. They’ll be horrified at what they’ve done!’ he thought, aimlessly following on behind crowds of stretchers moving away from the battlefield.

Tolstoy’s Pierre Bezukhov at Borodino, 1812

In 1944, there seemed absolutely no reason to suppose that the war might end in 1945.

CAPTAIN LUO DINGWEN, Chinese Nationalist army


Contents

Cover Page (#u32e81502-6d37-517b-b9d5-05b8fedc79bb)

Title Page (#ue3555f4f-784f-5e81-921b-ebadbef42f03)

Copyright (#ue01a6eee-e0c6-5a12-8a91-3781ea50346f)

Praise (#u66ff1fdb-af9e-5b50-b3f5-45001527baea)

Dedication (#u0d774d5b-7e9c-5c5f-9276-5735de67098e)

Epigraph (#u3014a518-8b48-56a9-9fd0-509bbfabf057)

Introduction (#u2290137a-3461-5f17-a1fc-1ee2534b969b)

1 Dilemmas and Decisions (#udcf5ca40-146a-5a57-93b0-d272bfa0453a)

2 Japan: Defying Gravity (#uc5840d67-739f-5f69-af13-fb141790d887)

3 The British in Burma (#u8405f498-6856-5ccb-ba82-91fdd07c960b)

4 Titans at Sea (#u8b06c13b-2cf2-5b39-9c31-6f885c28cdbf)

5 America’s Return to the Philippines (#u797eb7b8-3cd1-5329-8a56-e3f644a2378f)

6 ‘Flowers of Death’: Leyte Gulf (#ub4f43321-9dc4-526c-ab36-26f4691c90cc)

7 Ashore: Battle for the Mountains (#u290b8fda-c0d9-5432-98b8-39d806dfe26e)

8 China: Dragon by the Tail (#u943d2739-821d-5934-b355-fa64a022c895)

9 MacArthur on Luzon (#ud700021d-f231-5bbb-99a0-ded23225a0c6)

10 Bloody Miniature: Iwo Jima (#u1af98808-424c-5a1f-8409-fe0442f7f2b9)

11 Blockade: War Underwater (#ua8de0e74-fff1-5580-9081-ae2829649fde)

12 Burning a Nation: LeMay (#u83878290-c56e-5b30-8cdf-8b3ffa3216a8)

13 The Road Past Mandalay (#u0c8063cf-a4b2-5443-89e6-e554cd33059a)

14 Australians: ‘Bludging’ and ‘Mopping Up’ (#uebf0e6e0-fd36-5571-8e17-224b26ef8abc)

15 Captivity and Slavery (#ue2e2ba4d-5067-5e96-b3bb-862f510e87f1)

16 Okinawa (#ubdd43182-9d74-5aee-8289-0417ded303b7)

17 Mao’s War (#uc115f174-9d3b-5ca9-86e4-7a27d432114c)

18 Eclipse of Empires (#u4b4b1402-84c7-567e-bbc3-eda8624923f2)

19 The Bombs (#uee852849-c8bf-5d30-acb3-41fb372b9c32)

20 Manchuria: The Bear’s Claws (#uaf5e4530-5412-5800-98f7-1b1c17c976d6)

21 The Last Act (#u79617958-e064-5322-8ff3-1b9da89ae8f4)

22 Legacies (#u309c2c9a-5e9b-53ad-b548-391e74c4ce58)

A Brief Chronology of the Japanese War (#u12eeceb3-b433-5c98-bc86-39f59ba561e6)

Keep Reading (#u48379d2b-0629-5a6d-bc11-f7d6db0fec63)

Acknowledgements (#udb52f4ad-f3f3-5134-9ca8-eb0312e4c32e)

Notes and Sources (#uc41f4fe4-64db-5f9d-98c2-7f14cd3385b6)

Index (#u6375c33b-62c4-5114-ad8f-c879851b989b)

About the Author (#ud948389a-953e-5d24-878e-2a755c49fa4a)

Other Books By (#ua248850b-c2f9-5def-bac0-b5ed88540965)

About the Publisher (#u2f5bfafa-088e-590a-9a4b-53e413c4ffd4)




Introduction (#ulink_9e763161-2237-52fe-ab4f-18f44098e0ee)


Sir Arthur Tedder, Eisenhower’s deputy supreme commander in Europe in 1944-45, suggested that warriors educating themselves for future conflicts should study the early phases of past ones: ‘There are no big battalions or blank cheques then,’ he wrote ruefully. In the first campaigns, nations which are victims rather than initiators of aggression enjoy scanty choices. They strive for survival with inadequate resources, often unsuitable commanders, all the handicaps of fighting on an enemy’s terms. Later, if they are granted time fully to mobilise, they may achieve the luxury of options, of might equal or superior to that of the enemy, of the certainty of final victory tempered only by debate about how to secure this most swiftly and cheaply. Tedder and his Allied comrades experienced all these sensations.

For students of history, however, the manner in which the Second World War ended is even more fascinating than that in which it began. Giants of their respective nations, or rather mortal men cast into giants’ roles, resolved the greatest issues of the twentieth century on battlefields in three dimensions, and in the war rooms of their capitals. Some of the most populous societies on earth teemed in flux. Technology displayed a terrifying maturity. Churchill entitled the closing volume of his war memoirs Triumph and Tragedy. For millions, 1944-45 brought liberation, the banishment of privation, fear and oppression; but air attack during those years killed more people than in the rest of the conflict put together. Posterity knows that the war ended in August 1945. However, it would have provided scant comfort to the men who risked their lives in the Pacific island battles, as well as in the other bloody campaigns of that spring and summer, to be assured that the tumult would soon be stilled. Soldiers may accept a need to be the first to die in a war, but there is often an unseemly scramble to avoid becoming the last.

I have written Nemesis as a counterpart to my earlier book Armageddon, which describes the 1944-45 struggle for Germany. It is hard to exaggerate the differences between the endgames of the Asian and European wars. In the west, American strategy was dominated by a determination to confront the German army in Europe at the first possible moment—which proved much later than the US joint chiefs of staff desired. It was taken for granted that Allied armies must defeat the main forces of the enemy. Uncertainty focused upon how this should be achieved, and where Soviet and Anglo-American armies might meet. The possibility of offering terms to the Nazis was never entertained.

In the Far East, by contrast, there was much less appetite for a ground showdown. Some in the Allied camp argued that the commitment to impose unconditional surrender upon the Japanese should be moderated, if this would avert the necessity for a bloodbath in the home islands. Only in the Philippines and Burma did US and British ground forces encounter, and finally destroy, major Japanese armies—though none was as large as the enemy host deployed in China. The US Navy and Army Air Forces sought to demonstrate that blockade and bombardment could render unnecessary a bloody land campaign in the Japanese home islands. Their hopes were fulfilled in the most momentous and terrible fashion.

The phrase ‘heavy casualties’ recurs in studies of the eastern conflict. It is often used to categorise American losses on Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and in smaller island battles. It deserves more sceptical scrutiny than it usually receives, however, being justified only in relation to the relatively small forces engaged, and to the expectation of the American people that a nation as rich and technologically powerful as their own should be able to gain victory without great loss of blood. The lives of some 103,000 Americans were sacrificed to defeat Japan, along with 30,000 British, Indian, Australian and other Commonwealth servicemen, in addition to those who perished in captivity. The US pro rata casualty rate in the Pacific was three and a half times that in Europe. America’s total loss, however, represented only a small fraction of the toll which war extracted from the Soviets, Germans and Japanese, and only 1 per cent of the total deaths in Japan’s Asian war. Americans came to expect in the Pacific a favourable exchange rate of one US casualty for every six or seven Japanese. They were dismayed when, on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the enemy fared better, losing only in the ratio of 1.25:1 and 1.3:1 respectively, though almost all the Japanese losses were fatal, compared with less than one-third of the American. Pervading US strategy was a cultural conceit about the necessary cost of victory. This proved justified, but should not have been taken for granted in a conflict between major industrial nations.

I agree wholeheartedly with American scholars Richard Frank and Robert Newman, that underpinning most post-war analysis of the eastern war is a delusion that the nuclear climax represented the bloodiest possible outcome. On the contrary, alternative scenarios suggest that if the conflict had continued for even a few weeks longer, more people of all nations—and especially Japanese—would have lost their lives than perished at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The myth that the Japanese were ready to surrender anyway has been so comprehensively discredited by modern research that it is astonishing some writers continue to give it credence. Japanese intransigence does not of itself validate the use of atomic bombs, but it should frame the context of debate.

‘Retributive justice’ is among the dictionary definitions of nemesis. Readers must judge for themselves, whether the fate which befell Japan in 1945 merits that description, as I believe it does. The war in the Far East extended across an even wider canvas than the struggle for Europe: China, Burma, India, the Philippines, together with a vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Its courses were directed by one of the most extraordinary galaxies of leaders, military and political, the world has ever seen: Japan’s emperor, generals and admirals; Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao Zedong; Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman, Stalin; MacArthur and Nimitz; LeMay, Slim, Mountbatten, Stilwell—and the men who built the bomb. My purpose, as in Armageddon, is to portray a massive and terrible human experience, set within a chronological framework, rather than to revisit the detailed narrative of campaigns that have been described by many authors, and which anyway could not be contained within a single volume. This book focuses upon how and why things were done, what it was like to do them, and what manner of men and women did them.

Many of us gained our first, wonderfully romantic notion of the war against Japan by watching the movie of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific. Memories of its scenes pervaded my consciousness as I wrote Nemesis. For all that the film is Hollywood entertainment, it catches a few simple truths about what the struggle was like for Americans. A host of innocent young men and a scattering of young women found themselves transplanted into a wildly exotic setting. The Pacific’s natural beauties provided inadequate compensation, alas, for the discomforts and emotional stresses which they endured amid coral atolls and palm trees. For every fighting soldier, sailor and Marine who suffered the terrors of battle, many more men experienced merely heat and boredom at some godforsaken island base. The phrase ‘the greatest generation’ is sometimes used in the US to describe those who lived through those times. This seems inapt. The people of World War II may have adopted different fashions and danced to different music from us, but human behaviour, aspirations and fears do not alter much. It is more appropriate to call them, without jealousy, ‘the generation to which the greatest things happened’.

I chose my terms of reference partly in order to depict examples from a wide range of land, sea and air battles. Though there were some great men upon the stage, the history of World War II is, for the most part, a story of statesmen and commanders flawed as all of us are, striving to engage with issues and dilemmas larger than their talents. How many people are fitted to grapple with decisions of the magnitude imposed by global war? How many commanders in history’s great conflicts can be deemed to have been competent, far less brilliant?

While most writers address one eastern campaign or another—Burma, strategic bombing, the war at sea, the island assaults—I have attempted to set all these in context, component parts of the struggle to defeat Japan. I have omitted only the experience of indigenous anti-colonial resistance movements, an important subject so large that it would have overwhelmed my pages. Where possible without impairing coherence, I have omitted familiar anecdotes and dialogue. I have explored some aspects of the struggle that have been neglected by Western authors, notably the Chinese experience and the Russian assault on Manchuria. Nehru once said scornfully: ‘The average European concept of Asia is an appendage to Europe and America—a great mass of people fallen low, who are to be lifted by the good works of the West.’ Twenty years ago, that princely historian Ronald Spector puzzled over the fact that Westerners have always been less interested in the war with Japan than in the struggle against Germany. Remoteness, both geographical and cultural, is the obvious explanation, together with our often morbid fascination with the Nazis. Today, however, readers as well as writers seem ready to bridge the chasm with Asia. Its affairs loom huge in our world. An understanding of its recent past is essential to a grasp of its present, especially when Chinese grievances about the 1931-45 era remain a key issue in relations between Beijing and Tokyo.

Some set pieces—Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, Okinawa—are bound to be familiar. I have attempted no primary research on the dropping of the atomic bombs, because the archives have been exhaustively explored and the published literature is vast. Other episodes and experiences may come fresh to readers. I have addressed the issue of why Australia seemed almost to vanish from the war after 1943. Australian soldiers played a notable, sometimes dazzling, part in the North African and New Guinea campaigns. Yet the country’s internal dissensions, together with American dominance of the Pacific theatre, caused the Australian army to be relegated to a frankly humiliating role in 1944-45.

All authors of history books owe debts to earlier chroniclers, and it is important to acknowledge these. I am following a path trodden with special distinction by Ronald Spector in Eagle Against the Sun, Richard Frank in Downfall, and Christopher Thorne in Allies of a Kind. John Dower’s books offer indispensable insights into the Japanese experience. John Toland’s The Rising Sun is not a scholarly work, but it contains significant Japanese anecdotal material. These are only the most notable general studies of a period for which the specialised literature is vast. I should add George Macdonald Fraser’s Quartered Safe Out Here, perhaps the most vivid private soldier’s memoir of the Second World War, describing his 1945 experience with Slim’s Fourteenth Army.

In Britain and the US I have interviewed some veterans, but focused my research chiefly upon the huge manuscript and documentary collections which are available. My splendid Russian researcher, Dr Luba Vinogradovna, conducted interviews with Red Army veterans, and also translated a mass of documents and written narratives. In China and Japan I have sought out eyewitnesses. Most published Chinese and Japanese memoirs reveal more about what people claim to have done than about what they thought. I will not suggest that face-to-face interviews with a Westerner necessarily persuaded Chinese and Japanese witnesses to open their hearts, but I hope that the tales which emerge make some characters seem flesh and blood, rather than mere strangled Asian names speaking tortured English.

In most Western accounts of the war, the Japanese remain stubbornly opaque. It is striking how seldom Japanese historians are quoted in US and British scholarly discussions. This is not, I think, a reflection of American or British nationalistic conceit, but rather of the lack of intellectual rigour which characterises even most modern Japanese accounts. There is a small contributory point, that literal translations from the Japanese language cause statements and dialogue to sound stilted. Where possible here, I have taken the liberty of adjusting quoted Japanese speech and writing into English vernacular. Scholars might suggest that this gives a misleading idea of the Japanese use of language. It may help, however, to make Asian characters more accessible. With the same intention, although the Japanese place surnames before given names, I have reversed this in accordance with Western practice.

I have adopted some other styles for convenience. The Japanese called their Manchurian puppet state ‘Manchukuo’. Modern Chinese never speak of ‘Manchuria’, but of ‘the north-eastern provinces’. Nonetheless, I have here retained the name ‘Manchuria’, save when the Japanese political creation is discussed. Modern Indonesia is referred to as the Dutch East Indies, Malaysia as Malaya, Taiwan as Formosa and so on. After much vacillation, however, I have adopted modern pinyin spellings for Chinese names and places, because these are more familiar to a modern readership. I have, however, accepted the loss of consistency involved in retaining the familiar usages ‘Kuomintang’ and ‘Manchukuo’. Naval and military operations are timed by the twenty-four-hour clock, while the twelve-hour clock is used in describing the doings of civilians.

China is the country which today provides a historical researcher with the greatest revelations. I first visited it in 1971 as a TV film-maker, and again in 1985 when writing a book on the Korean War. On neither assignment was it possible to break through the ironclad culture of propaganda. In 2005, by contrast, I found ordinary Chinese welcoming, relaxed, and remarkably open in conversation. Many, for instance, do not hesitate to assert a respect for Chiang Kai-Shek, and reservations about Mao Zedong, which were unavowable thirty years ago.

Some Chinese bitterly observed to me that they found the Maoist Cultural Revolution a worse personal experience than the Second World War. Almost all those with Nationalist associations suffered the confiscation and destruction of their personal papers and photographs. Several served long terms of imprisonment—one because wartime service as a Soviet-sponsored guerrilla caused him to be denounced twenty years later as a Russian agent. I conducted almost all my own interviews in China and Japan, with the help of interpreters, but four former Chinese ‘comfort women’ of the Japanese army declined to tell their stories to a man and a Westerner, and instead talked to my splendid researcher, Gu Renquan.

In modern China, as in Russia and to some degree Japan, there is no tradition of objective historical research. Absurd claims are thus made even by academics, unsupported by evidence. This is especially true about the China-Japan war, which remains a focus of national passions, fomented by the Chinese government for political purposes. An appropriately sceptical Western researcher, however, can still achieve much more than was possible a decade or two ago. I found it exhilarating to stand on the snowclad border with Russia, where Soviet armies swept across the Ussuri river in August 1945; to clamber through the tunnels of the massive old Japanese fortress at Hutou, some of which have today been reopened as part of the local ‘Fortress Relics Museum of Japanese Aggression against China’; to meet peasants who witnessed the battles. In a café in Hutou, at nine in the morning local people were clustered around the big TV, watching one of the melodramas about the Japanese war which Chinese film-makers produce in industrial quantities. These celluloid epics, echoing with the diabolical laughter of Japanese occupiers as they slaughter heroic Chinese peasants, make such Hollywood war movies as The Sands of Iwo Jima seem models of understatement.

When I asked Jiang Fushun, in 1945 a teenage peasant in Hutou, if there were any happy moments in his childhood, he responded bitterly: ‘How can you ask such a question? Our lives were unspeakable. There was only work, work, work, knowing that if we crossed the Japanese in any way, we would go the way of others who were thrown into the river with their hands tied to a rock.’ In his flat in Harbin, eighty-four-year-old Li Fenggui vividly re-enacted for me the motions of a bayonet fight in which he engaged with a Japanese soldier in 1944.

Likewise, in Japan, at the tiny doll’s house in a Tokyo suburb where he lives, Lt Cmdr Haruki Iki cherishes a plastic model of the torpedo bomber which he once flew, alongside a garish painting of the British battlecruiser Repulse, which he sank in 1941. To meet him is to encounter a legend. At eighty-seven, former navy pilot Kunio Iwashita retains the energy and quick movements of a man thirty years younger. Today he is known in Japan as ‘Mr Zero’. I met him when he had just returned from the premiere of a lurid new Japanese movie epic, Men of the Yamato. Iwashita overflew the vast battleship on the morning she was sunk in April 1945, and has never forgotten the spectacle. He said with a wry smile: ‘I sobbed all the way through the film.’

I asked another navy fighter pilot, Toshio Hijikata, how he and his comrades spent their hours on Kyushu in the early months of 1945, as they prepared to scramble to meet American B-29 formations in the same fashion as RAF pilots waited for the Luftwaffe five years earlier, during the Battle of Britain. ‘We played a lot of bridge,’ said Hijikata. ‘It was part of the whole ethos of the Imperial Japanese Navy, which tried so hard to emulate the Royal Navy.’ The notion of Japanese fliers calling ‘three spades, four clubs’ to each other between sorties seemed irresistibly unexpected and droll.

My daughter once observed in a domestic context: ‘Life is what you are used to, Daddy.’ This seems an important truth in understanding human responses to circumstances. To a remarkable degree the young, especially, adapt to predicaments which might seem unendurable, if these are all that they have known. Across the globe, the generation which grew to maturity during the Second World War learned to accept war’s terrors and privations as a norm. This applies to many people whose stories I seek to record in this book.

Some general observations can be made about evidence, of which the most obvious is that scepticism is in order, even when reading formal contemporary minutes of meetings, unit war diaries or ships’ logs. Few official narratives in any language explicitly acknowledge disaster, panic or failure, or admit that people ran away. Likewise, many splendid lines attributed by historians to participants are probably apocryphal. People find it infinitely easier to imagine afterwards what should have been said in crises, rather than what actually was. Witticisms which survive through the generations retain a certain validity, however, if they seem to catch a spirit of the moment, like ‘Nuts!’, the alleged American response to a German demand for surrender at Bastogne.

Oral evidence collected in the early twenty-first century by interviewing men and women who witnessed events more than sixty years earlier is immensely valuable in illustrating moods and attitudes. But old people have forgotten many things, or can claim to remember too much. Those who survive today were very young in the war years. They held junior ranks and offices, if indeed any at all. They knew nothing worth rehearsing about events beyond their own eyesight and earshot. The reflections of their age group cannot be considered representative of a nation’s mindset and behaviour in 1944-45. It is essential to reinforce their tales with written testimony from those who were at the time more mature and exalted.

It is notable how swiftly historical perceptions change. For instance, in post-war Japan General Douglas MacArthur was a hero, an icon, almost a god, in recognition of his perceived generosity to the Japanese people in defeat. But a modern historian, Kazutoshi Hando, says: ‘In Japan today, MacArthur is almost unknown.’ Similarly, a Chinese historian told me that few of his young compatriots have heard of Stalin. I feel obliged to restate a caveat which I entered in the foreword of Armageddon: statistics given here are the best available, but all large numbers related to the Second World War must be treated warily. Figures detailing American and British activities—though emphatically not their contemporary estimates of losses inflicted on the enemy—are credible, but those of other nations are disputed, or represent guesstimates. For instance, although the rape of Nanjing falls outside the compass of my narrative, I am persuaded that Iris Chang’s well-known book claims a death toll for the city in excess of its actual, rather than previously recorded, 1937 population. This does not invalidate the portrait of horror which she depicts, but it illustrates the difficulty of establishing credible, never mind conclusive, numbers.

The longer I write books about the Second World War, the more conscious I become that a fundamental humility is necessary when offering judgements upon those who conducted it. Harold Macmillan, British minister in the Mediterranean 1943-45 and later prime minister, once told me a story of his last encounter with Field Marshal Earl Alexander, wartime Allied commander-in-chief in Italy: ‘We were going into the theatre together, and I turned to him and said one of those old man’s things: “Alex, wouldn’t it be lovely to have it all to do over again.” Alexander shook his head decisively. “Oh, no,” he said. “We might not do nearly so well.”’ Those of us who have never been obliged to participate in a great war seem wise to count our blessings and incline a bow to all those, mighty and humble, who did so.

MAX HASTINGS

Hungerford, England and Kamogi, Kenya

April 2007





1 Dilemmas and Decisions (#ulink_023964c9-656e-55b3-a79f-d3c67a2757fb)

1 WAR IN THE EAST


Our understanding of the events of 1939-45 might be improved by adding a plural and calling them the Second World Wars. The only common strand in the struggles which Germany and Japan unleashed was that they chose most of the same adversaries. The only important people who sought to conduct the eastern and western conflicts as a unified enterprise were Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and their respective chiefs of staff. After the 7 December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor caused the United States to become a belligerent, Allied warlords addressed the vexed issue of allocating resources to rival theatres. Germany was by far the Allies’ more dangerous enemy, while Japan was the focus of greater American animus. In 1942, at the battles of the Coral Sea in May and Midway a month later, the US Navy won victories which halted the Japanese advance across the Pacific, and removed the danger that Australia might be invaded.

Through the two years which followed, America’s navy grew in strength, while her Marines and soldiers slowly and painfully expelled the Japanese from the island strongholds which they had seized. But President Roosevelt and Gen. George Marshall, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, resisted the demands of Admiral Ernest King, the US Navy’s C-in-C, and of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander in the south-west Pacific, for the eastern theatre to become the principal focus of America’s war effort. In 1943 and 1944, America’s vast industrial mobilisation made it possible to send large forces of warships and planes east as well as west. Most US ground troops, however, were dispatched across the Atlantic, to fight the Germans. Once Japan’s onslaught was checked, the Allies’ eastern commanders were given enough forces progressively to push back the enemy, but insufficient to pursue a swift victory. The second-class status of the Japanese war was a source of resentment to those who had to fight it, but represented strategic wisdom.

The US and Britain dispatched separate companies to Europe and Asia, to perform in different plays. Stalin, meanwhile, was interested in the conflict with Japan only insofar as it might offer opportunities to amass booty. ‘The Russians may be expected to move against the Japanese when it suits their pleasure,’ suggested an American diplomat in an October 1943 memorandum to the State Department, ‘which may not be until the final phases of the war—and then only in order to be able to participate in dictating terms to the Japanese and to establish new strategic frontiers.’ Until 8 August 1945, Soviet neutrality in the east was so scrupulously preserved that American B-29s which forced-landed on Russian territory had to stay there, not least to enable their hosts to copy the design.

To soldiers, sailors and airmen, any battlefield beyond their own compass seemed remote. ‘What was happening in Europe really didn’t matter to us,’ said Lt John Cameron-Hayes of 23rd Indian Mountain Artillery, fighting in Burma. More surprising was the failure of Germany and Japan to coordinate their war efforts, even to the limited extent that geographical separation might have permitted. These two nominal allies, whose fortunes became conjoined in December 1941, conducted operations in almost absolute isolation from each other. Hitler had no wish for Asians to meddle in his Aryan war. Indeed, despite Himmler’s best efforts to prove that Japanese possessed some Aryan blood, he remained embarrassed by the association of the Nazi cause with Untermenschen. He received the Japanese ambassador in Berlin twice after Pearl Harbor, then not for a year. When Tokyo in 1942 proposed an assault on Madagascar, the German navy opposed any infringement of the two allies’ agreed spheres of operations, divided at 70 degrees of longitude.

A Japanese assault on the Soviet Union in 1941-42, taking the Russians in the rear as they struggled to stem Hitler’s invasion, might have yielded important rewards for the Axis. Stalin was terrified of such an eventuality. The July 1941 oil embargo and asset freeze imposed by the US on Japan—Roosevelt’s clumsiest diplomatic act in the months before Pearl Harbor—was partly designed to deter Tokyo from joining Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa. Japan’s bellicose foreign minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, resigned in the same month because his government rejected his urgings to do so.

Only in January 1943, towards the end of the disaster of Stalingrad, did Hitler made a belated and unsuccessful attempt to persuade Japan to join his Russian war. By then, the moment had passed at which such an intervention might have altered history. Germany’s Asian ally was far too heavily committed in the Pacific, South-East Asia and China, gratuitously to engage a new adversary. So perfunctory was Berlin’s relationship with Tokyo that when Hitler gifted to his ally two state-of-the-art U-boats for reproduction, German manufacturers complained about breaches of their patent rights. One of Japan’s most serious deficiencies in 1944-45 was lack of a portable anti-tank weapon, but no attempt was made to copy the cheap and excellent German Panzerfaust.

Japan and Germany were alike fascistic states. Michael Howard has written: ‘Both [nations’] programmes were fuelled by a militarist ideology that rejected the bourgeois liberalism of the capitalist West and glorified war as the inevitable and necessary destiny of mankind.’ The common German and Japanese commitment to making war for its own sake provides the best reason for rejecting pleas in mitigation of either nation’s conduct. The two Axis partners, however, pursued unrelated ambitions. The only obvious manifestation of shared interest was that Japanese planning was rooted in an assumption of German victory. Like Italy in June 1940, Japan in December 1941 decided that the old colonial powers’ difficulties in Europe exposed their remoter properties to rapine. Japan sought to seize access to vital oil and raw materials, together with space for mass migration from the home islands.

A US historian has written of Japan’s Daitoa Senso, Greater East Asian War: ‘Japan did not invade independent countries in southern Asia. It invaded colonial outposts which Westerners had dominated for generations, taking absolutely for granted their racial and cultural superiority over their Asian subjects.’ This is true as far as it goes. Yet Japan’s seizures of British, Dutch, French and American possessions must surely be seen in the context of its earlier aggression in China, where for a decade its armies had flaunted their ruthlessness towards fellow Asians. After seizing Manchuria in 1931, the Japanese in 1937 began their piecemeal pillage of China, which continued until 1945.

Inaugurating its ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’, Japan perceived itself merely as a latecomer to the contests for empire in which other great nations had engaged for centuries. It saw only hypocrisy and racism in the objections of Western imperial powers to its bid to match their own generous interpretations of what constituted legitimate overseas interests. Such a view was not completely baseless. Japan’s pre-war economic difficulties and pretensions to a policy of ‘Asia for Asians’ inspired some sympathy among subject peoples of the European empires. This vanished, however, in the face of the occupiers’ behaviour in China and elsewhere. Japanese pogroms of Chinese in South-East Asia were designed partly to win favour with indigenous peoples, but these in turn soon found themselves suffering appallingly. The new rulers were inhibited from treating their conquests humanely, even had they wished to do so, by the fact that the purpose of seizure was to strip them of food and raw materials for the benefit of Japan’s people. Western audiences have been told much since 1945 about Japanese wartime inhumanity to British, Americans and Australians who fell into their hands. This pales into absolute insignificance beside the scale of their mistreatment of Asians.

It is a fascinating speculation, how events might have evolved if the US and its Philippines dependency had been excluded from Japanese war plans in December 1941; had Tokyo confined itself to occupying British Malaya and Burma, along with the Dutch East Indies. Roosevelt would certainly have wished to confront Japanese aggression and enter the war—the oil embargo imposed by the US following Japan’s advance into Indochina was the tipping factor in deciding Tokyo to fight the Western powers. It remains a moot point, however, whether Congress and public sentiment would have allowed the president to declare war in the absence of a direct assault on American national interests or the subsequent German declaration of war on the US.

There was once a popular delusion that Japan’s attack smashed the American Pacific Fleet. In truth, however, the six old battleships disabled at Pearl Harbor—all but one were subsequently restored for war service by brilliantly ingenious repair techniques—mattered much less to the balance of forces than the four American aircraft carriers, oil stocks and dockyard facilities which escaped. Japan paid a wholly disproportionate moral price for a modest, if spectacular, tactical success. The ‘Day of Infamy’ roused the American people as no lesser provocation could have done. The operation must thus be judged a failure, rendering hollow the exultation of the Imperial Navy’s fliers as they landed back on their carriers on 7 December 1941. Thereafter, Americans were united in determination to avenge themselves on the treacherous Asians who had assaulted a peace-loving people.

The only important strategic judgement which the Japanese got right was that their fate hinged upon that of Hitler. German victory was the sole eventuality which might have saved Japan from the consequences of assaulting powers vastly superior to itself in military and industrial potential. Col. Masanobu Tsuji, architect of the Japanese army’s capture of Singapore and a fanatical advocate of national expansion, said: ‘We honestly believed that America, a nation of storekeepers, would not persist with a loss-making war, whereas Japan could sustain a protracted campaign against the Anglo-Saxons.’ Tokyo’s greatest misjudgement of all was to perceive its assault as an act of policy which might be reviewed in the light of events. In December 1941 Japan gambled on a short war, swift victory, and acceptance of terms by the vanquished. Even in August 1945, many Japanese leaders refused to acknowledge that the terms of reference for the struggle ceased to be theirs to determine on the day of Pearl Harbor. It was wildly fanciful to suppose that the consequences of military failure might be mitigated through diplomatic parley. By choosing to participate in a total war, the nation exposed itself to total defeat.

Although the loss of Hong Kong, Malaya and Burma in 1941-42 inflicted on Britain humiliations to match those suffered at Japanese hands by the US, its people cared relatively little about the Far Eastern war, a source of dismay to British soldiers obliged to fight in it. Winston Churchill was tormented by a desire to redeem the defeat in February 1942 of some 70,000 combat troops under British command by a force of 35,000 Japanese. ‘The shame of our disaster at Singapore could…only be wiped out by our recapture of that fortress,’ he told the British chiefs of staff as late as 6 July 1944, in one of his many—fortunately frustrated—attempts to allow this objective to determine eastern strategy.

To the British public, however, the Asian war seemed remote. The Japanese character in the BBC’s legendary ITMA radio comedy show was Hari Kari, a gabbling clown. In June 1943 the Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, proposed forming a committee to rouse the British public against its Asian enemies. The Minister of Information, Brendan Bracken, strongly dissented:

It is all very well to say ‘We must educate the British public to regard the Japanese as if they were Germans, and war in the Pacific as if it were war in Europe.’ But, while the Japanese remain many thousands of miles away, the Germans have for three years been only twenty miles distant from our shore and, too often, vertically overhead. Interest and feeling follow where friends and loved ones are fighting…Europe is very much a home concern, whereas knowledge of or interest in the Far East is sparsely distributed in this country…I do not think that any committee could do much to alter ‘the state of morale’…The people have been left under no misapprehension by the PM that it is their duty to turn and tackle Japan when the time comes…

Those Britons who did think about the Japanese shared American revulsion towards them. When reports were broadcast in early 1944 of the maltreatment of prisoners, an editorial in the Daily Mail proclaimed: ‘The Japanese have proved a sub-human race…Let us resolve to outlaw them. When they are beaten back to their own savage land, let them live there in complete isolation from the rest of the world, as in a leper compound, unclean.’ The American historian John Dower explains Western attitudes in racist terms. US Admiral William Halsey set the tone after Pearl Harbor, asserting that when the war was over, ‘Japanese will be spoken only in hell.’ A US War Department film promoting bond sales employed the slogan: ‘Every War Bond Kills a Jap’. An American sub-machine gun manufacturer advertised its products as ‘blasting big red holes in little yellow men’. There was no counterpart on the European fronts to the commonplace Pacific practices of drying and preserving Japanese skulls as souvenirs, and sending home to loved ones polished bones of enemy dead. A British brigade commander in Burma once declined to accept a report from the 4/1st Gurkhas about the proximity of ‘Nips’. Their colonel, Derek Horsford, dispatched a patrol to gather evidence. Next day, Horsford left three Japanese heads, hung for convenience on a string, beside his commander’s desk. The brigadier said: ‘Never do that again. Next time, I’ll take your word for it.’

But those who argue that the alien appearance and culture of the Japanese generated unique hatred and savagery seem to give insufficient weight to the fact that the Japanese initiated and institutionalised barbarism towards both civilians and prisoners. True, the Allies later responded in kind. But in an imperfect world, it seems unrealistic to expect that any combatant in a war will grant adversaries conspicuously better treatment than his own people receive at their hands. Years ahead of Pearl Harbor Japanese massacres of Chinese civilians were receiving worldwide publicity. Tokyo’s forces committed systemic brutalities against Allied prisoners and civilians in the Philippines, East Indies, Hong Kong and Malaya—for instance, the slaughter of Chinese outside Singapore in February 1942—long before the first Allied atrocity against any Japanese is recorded.

The consequence of so-called Japanese fanaticism on the battlefield, of which much more later, was that Allied commanders favoured the use of extreme methods to defeat them. As an example, the Japanese rejected the convention customary in Western wars, whereby if a military position became untenable, its defenders gave up. In August 1944, when German prisoners were arriving in the United States at the rate of 50,000 a month, after three years of the war only 1,990 Japanese prisoners reposed in American hands. Why, demanded Allied commanders, should their men be obliged to risk their own lives in order to indulge the enemy’s inhuman doctrine of mutual immolation?

The Anglo-American Lethbridge Mission, which toured theatres of war assessing tactics, urged in a March 1944 report that mustard and phosgene gases should be employed against Japanese underground defensive positions. The report’s conclusion was endorsed by Marshall, US air chief Gen. ‘Hap’ Arnold and MacArthur, even though the latter abhorred the area bombing of Japanese cities. ‘We are of the opinion,’ wrote the Lethbridge team, ‘that the Japanese forces in the field will not be able to survive chemical warfare attack…upon a vast scale…[This] is the quickest method of bringing the war to a successful conclusion.’ Despite the weight of opinion which favoured gas, it was vetoed by President Roosevelt.

The Allies certainly perceived victory over Japan as the reversal of a painful cultural humiliation, the defeats of 1941-42. But it seems mistaken to argue that they behaved ruthlessly towards the Japanese, once the tide of war turned, because they were Asians. The US pursued a historic love affair with other Asians, the people of China, a nation which it sought to make a great power. A leading British statesman told an audience in February 1933: ‘I hope we shall try in England to understand a little the position of Japan, an ancient state with the highest sense of national honour and patriotism and with a teeming population of remarkable energy. On the one side they see the dark menace of Soviet Russia; on the other, the chaos of China, four or five provinces of which are actually now being tortured, under Communist rule.’ Remarkable as it may seem to posterity, the speaker was Winston Churchill, addressing the Anti-Socialist and Anti-Communist Union. Allied hatred of, contempt for, and finally savagery towards their Pacific foes were surely inspired less by racial alienation than by their wartime conduct.

It may be true that Japanese physiognomy lent itself to Anglo-Saxon caricature. But it seems mistaken to argue that—for instance—Americans felt free to incinerate Japanese, and finally to drop atomic bombs upon them, only because they were Asians. Rather, these were Asians who forged a reputation for uncivilised behaviour not merely towards their Western enemies, but on a vastly greater scale towards their fellow Asian subject peoples. If the Allies treated the Japanese barbarously in the last months of the war, it seems wrong thus to perceive a moral equivalence between the two sides.

At its zenith in 1942, the Japanese empire extended over twenty million square miles. Most were water, but even Tokyo’s land conquests were a third greater than Berlin’s. Japanese forces were deployed from the north-eastern extremities of India to the northern border of China, from the myriad islands of the Dutch East Indies to the jungle wildernesses of New Guinea. Few Allied servicemen were aware that, throughout the war, more than a million enemy soldiers—approximately half Tokyo’s fighting formations—were deployed to garrison Manchuria and sustain the occupation of eastern China. By the summer of 1944, while some Japanese formations still held out on New Guinea and Bougainville, American forces had driven eastwards across the Pacific, dispossessing the enemy island by island of air and naval bases. Some nineteen divisions, about a quarter of the Imperial Army’s strength, were deployed against the British and Chinese in Burma, and garrisoned Malaya. A further twenty-three divisions, some reduced to fragments and amounting in all to a further quarter of Japanese combat capability, confronted US soldiers and Marines on their oceanic line of advance.

‘Americans ought to like the Pacific,’ asserted a jocular passage of the 1944 official US Forces’ Guide to their theatre of war. ‘They like things big, and the Pacific is big enough to satisfy the most demanding…Quonset huts and tents are the most profuse growth on the main islands we occupy. In arguments with trees, bulldozers always win. Americans who eat out a lot in the Carolines will have trouble with girth control. The basic food the natives eat is starchy vegetables—breadfruit, taro, yams, sweet potatoes and arrowroot. Gonorrhea is found in at least one-third of the natives, and there is some syphilis.’

Almost 400,000 British servicemen served in the Far East, together with more than two million soldiers of Britain’s Indian Army. In other words, though the US absolutely dominated the conduct of the war against Japan, the British mobilised far more people to do their modest share. One and a quarter million Americans served in the Pacific and Asia, a zone of operations embracing a third of the globe. Of these, 40 per cent of officers and 33 per cent of men spent some time in combat, by the most generous interpretation of that word. Over 40 per cent saw no action at all, working in the vast support organisations necessary to maintain armies, fleets and air forces thousands of miles from home.

There was a chronic shortage of manpower to shift supplies in the wake of the advancing spearheads. All strategy is powerfully influenced by logistics, but the Pacific war was especially so. Marshall and MacArthur once discussed a proposal to ship 50,000 coolies a month from China to boost the labour force in their rear areas, dismissing it only because the practicalities were too complex. Waste was a constant issue. Americans fighting for their lives were understandably negligent about the care of food, weapons, equipment, vehicles. The cumulative cost was enormous, when every ration pack and truck tyre had to be shipped halfway across the world to the battlefield. Up to 19 per cent of some categories of food were spoilt in transit by climate, poor packing or careless handling.

Many of those who did the fighting of 1944-45 had been mere children in September 1939, or indeed December 1941. Philip True was a sixteen-year-old Michigan high school student at the time of Pearl Harbor—‘I didn’t think I’d be in World War II.’ By 1945, however, he was navigating a B-29. The merest chance dictated whether a man called to his country’s service finished up in a foxhole in Okinawa, in the cockpit of a Spitfire, or pushing paper at a headquarters in Delhi. For millions of people of every nationality, the wartime experience was defined by the need to make journeys far from home, sometimes of an epic nature, across oceans and continents, at risk of their lives.

Many British and American teenagers, without previous knowledge of life outside their own communities, found uniformed service a unifying and educating force. They learned that the only redemptive feature of war is the brotherhood which it forges. ‘The people are what I really remember,’ said USAAF pilot Jack Lee DeTour, who bombed South-East Asia from India. If men got home on leave, many felt alienated from civilians who had not shared their perils and sacrifices. ‘Only shipmates were important to me,’ wrote US naval rating Emory Jernigan. Eugene Hardy, a bosun’s mate, came from a farm family so dirt-poor that he had never set foot in a restaurant until he joined the navy in 1940. Men learned to live with others from utterly different backgrounds, often possessing quite different outlooks. For instance, a million messroom or foxhole arguments between American northerners and southerners featured the line: ‘You want a nigger to marry your sister?’ Somehow, out of it all, most men learned a lot about viewpoints other than their own, and about mutual tolerance.

A British soldier expressed in his journal reflections about wartime conscript experience which have almost universal validity: ‘Men live conscious all the time that their hearts, roots, origins lie elsewhere in some other life…They measure the hardships, privations, weariness here against the memory of a past that they hope to continue in the future…Since their hearts reside elsewhere, they face the present with an armoured countenance.’ The author meant that most warriors seek to preserve their sanity by shielding some corner of themselves from proximate reality, so often unpleasant. US naval officers protested at the assertively unseamanlike outlook of cryptanalysts working at the Pacific Fleet’s superb ‘Magic’ code-breaking centre in Honolulu, which played such a critical part in Allied victory. Their commander dismissed their complaints: ‘Relax, we have always won our wars with a bunch of damned civilians in uniform anxious to get back to their own affairs, and we will win this one the same way.’

Winston Churchill often asserted his conviction that the proper conduct of war demanded that ‘the enemy should be made to bleed and burn every day’. The Pacific and Burma campaigns, by contrast, were characterised by periods of intense fighting interspersed with long intervals of inaction and preparation. Whereas on the Russian front opposing forces were in permanent contact, and likewise in north-west Europe from June 1944, in the east Japanese and Allied troops were often separated by hundreds, even thousands, of miles of sea or jungle. Few Westerners who served in the war against Japan enjoyed the experience. It was widely agreed by veterans that the North African desert was the most congenial, or rather least terrible, theatre. Thereafter in ascending intensity of grief came north-west Europe, Italy, and finally the Far East. Few soldiers, sailors or airmen felt entirely healthy during Asian or Pacific service. The stifling heat below decks in a warship made daily routine enervating, even before the enemy took a hand. The only interruptions to months at sea were provided by brief spasms in an overcrowded rest camp on some featureless atoll. For those fighting the land campaigns, disease and privation were constants, vying as threats to a man’s welfare with a boundlessly ingenious and merciless enemy. ‘All the officers at home want to go to other theatres because there is more publicity there,’ wrote one of MacArthur’s corps commanders, Lt-Gen. Robert Eichelberger, in a gloomy letter to his wife.

Eichelberger was a career soldier, one of those whom war provided with dramatic scope for fulfilment and advancement. Civilians in uniform, however, were vulnerable to the misery identified by British novelist Anthony Powell, ‘that terrible, recurrent army dejection, the sensation that no one cares a halfpenny whether you live or die’. ‘Hello, suckers,’ ‘Tokyo Rose’ taunted millions of Allied servicemen from Radio Japan. ‘I got mine last night, your wives and sweethearts probably got theirs—did you get yours?’ Corporal Ray Haskel of the US Army wrote from the South Pacific to a Hollywood starlet named Myrtle Ristenhart, whose picture he had glimpsed in Life magazine. Rodgers and Hammerstein would have appreciated his sentiments: ‘My dear Myrtle, guess you are wondering who this strange person could be writing to you. We are here in the Pacific and got kind of lonesome and so thought we would drop you a few lines…There isn’t any girls here at all but a few natives and a few nurses and we can’t get within ten miles of them…When you can find time please answer this letter and if you have a small picture we would appreciate it, Sincerely your RAY. PS I am an Indian, fullblooded and very handsome.’

‘Here it is a Burma moon with not a girl in sight and a few dead Japs trying to stink you out,’ Sgt Harry Hunt of the British Fourteenth Army wrote miserably to a relative in England. ‘…It must be lovely to soldier back home, just to get away from this heat and sweat, from these natives, to get together with white men…There it comes, the rain again, rain rain that’s all we get, then the damp, it slowly eats into your bones, you wake up like nothing on earth, you always feel sleepy. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going, better close now before I use bad words, remember me to dad, mum and all.’

One of Hunt’s senior officers, Maj.-Gen. Douglas Gracey, took as bleak a view from a loftier perspective: ‘Nearly every Jap fights to the last or runs away to fight another day. Until morale cracks, it must be accepted that the capture of a Japanese position is not ended until the last Jap in it (generally several feet underground) is killed. Even in the most desperate circumstances, 99 per cent of the Japs prefer death or suicide to capture. The fight is more total than in Europe. The Jap can be compared to the most fanatical Nazi Youth, and must be dealt with accordingly.’

‘Dear Mother and Dad,’ Lt Richard Kennard wrote from one of the Pacific island battles in which he was serving as an artillery forward observer with the US 1st Marine Division. ‘War is just terrible, just awful, awful, awful. You have no idea how it hurts to see American boys all shot up, wounded, suffering from pain and exhaustion and those that fall down never to move again. After this war is all over I shall cherish and respect more than anything else all that is sweet, tender and gentle. Our platoon leaders and company commanders are more afraid of what their men will think of them if they don’t face the enemy fire and danger along with them than of getting shot by the Jap. I have my fingers crossed every minute I am up there in the front lines and pray each night that I won’t get hit.’

China’s people paid a vastly more terrible price than any other belligerent nation, at least fifteen million dead, for its part in the struggle against the Japanese. The country had been at war since 1937. Few Chinese dared to anticipate any end to their miseries, least of all victory. ‘In 1944,’ said Captain Luo Dingwen of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist army, ‘there seemed absolutely no reason to suppose that the war might end in 1945. We had no idea how long we might have to keep fighting.’ One of Luo’s comrades, Captain Ying Yunping, described a characteristic 1944 battle which, after two hours’ fighting, swung dramatically against the Chinese:

We got the order to retreat. A mass of men, horses, carts, was streaming back. It was a shambles. I suddenly saw Huang Qixiang, our general, hurrying past us on a horse, wearing pyjamas and only one boot. It seemed so shockingly undignified. If generals were running away, why should ordinary soldiers stay and fight? The Japanese were sending in tanks, and we had nothing to fight tanks with. But I felt we couldn’t just let the Japanese walk all over us. I called to my 8th Section, whose commander was the bravest man in the regiment, and told him to take up a blocking position. He held out for hours—the Japanese were completely thrown by meeting resistance just when everything was going their way. We lost the battle—but it seemed something to win even one small part of it. I met our general a little while later. I said that it was quite safe for him to ride back and fetch his uniform.

A vast host of Chinese civilians served merely as victims. Chen Jinyu was a sixteen-year-old peasant girl, planting rice for the Japanese occupiers of Jiamao, her village. One day, she was informed by the Japanese that she was being transferred to a ‘battlefront rear-service group’. She said: ‘Because I was young, I had no idea what this meant, but I thought any duty must be easier than working in the field.’ A week later, she discovered the nature of her new role when she was gang-raped by Japanese soldiers. She ran away home, but an interpreter arrived to say that her family would suffer grievously if she did not return to her duties. She remained a ‘comfort woman’ for the local Japanese garrison until June 1945 when, weary of beatings, she fled to the mountains and hid there until she heard that the war was over.

Tan Yadong, a nineteen-year-old Chinese who served the Japanese in the same capacity, was accused by a Japanese officer of failing to be an ‘obedient person’. After two five-day spells of solitary confinement, ‘I became an obedient person.’ She was vividly reminded of the consequences of displeasing the Japanese when one of her comrades failed to take contraceptive medicine, and became pregnant. ‘They didn’t want this baby to be born so they hung this poor girl from a tree. They killed her by cutting her open with a knife in front of all the people of our village. I was quite close, only six or seven metres away. I could see the baby moving.’

At least a million Vietnamese died in their country’s great famine of 1944-45, which was directly attributable to Japanese insistence that rice paddies should be replanted with fibre crops for the occupiers’ use. Much Vietnamese grain was shipped to Japan, and rice commandeered to make fuel alcohol. The people of the Philippines and Dutch East Indies also suffered appallingly. In all, some five million South-East Asians died as a result of Japanese invasion and occupation, including 75,000 slave labourers on the Burma Railway. If the British could take little pride in their wartime stewardship of the Indian subcontinent, where white guests of Calcutta’s clubs could order unlimited eggs and bacon while Bengalis starved in the streets, never did they match the systemic barbarism of Japanese hegemony.

US forces fought their way across the Pacific supported by an awesome array of wealth and technology. American observers on the Asian mainland were appalled by the contrasting destitution which they everywhere perceived, and impressed by the political forces stirring. ‘There are over a billion people who are tired of the world as it is; they live literally in such terrible bondage that they have nothing to lose but their chains,’ wrote Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby in 1944. They noted the twenty-seven-year life expectancy in India, jewel in Britain’s imperial crown; a China where half the population died before attaining thirty. They described the lifeless bodies of child workers collected each morning outside factory gates in Shanghai; the beatings, whippings, torture, disease and starvation that were commonplace across the continent.

During China’s famines, vastly worsened by the Japanese war, people hunted ants, devoured tree roots, ate mud. The North China Herald deplored the prevalence of kidnapping and extortion: ‘In some districts, it has been customary to roast the victims in big kettles, without water, until the flesh falls from the bone.’ White and Jacoby wrote: ‘Everywhere in Asia life is infused with a few terrible certainties—hunger, indignity, and violence.’ This was the world Americans perceived themselves advancing to save, not merely from the Japanese, but from imperialists of every hue—including their closest allies, the British. Churchill nursed the ill-founded delusion that victory over Japan would enable Britain to sustain its rule in India, and reassert command of Burma and Malaya. The US cherished a parallel fantasy, equally massive and misguided, about what it could make of China. Frank Capra’s China film in the famous US War Department Why We Fight documentary series portrayed the country as a liberal society, and made no mention of Communists.

The Japanese, meanwhile, cherished their own illusions. As late as the summer of 1944, much of their empire still seemed secure, at least in the eyes of humbler members of its ruling race. Midshipman Toshiharu Konada loved his ‘runs ashore’ on Java from the heavy cruiser Ashigara. ‘Everything was so new and exotic to us young men,’ he said. Once a chorus of local children serenaded a leave party from the fleet with Japanese songs. Konada and a cluster of other men from his ship dined at a local Italian restaurant, ogling the proprietor’s daughter, one of the first European girls they had ever seen. ‘I thought: I am seeing the bright future of Asia here. The whole area seemed so peaceful. Many of the Chinese in Singapore were friendly to us.’

Twenty-year-old Konada was the son of a naval officer commanding a Pacific base. He himself had wanted to be a doctor, but relinquished that ambition when he was drafted in 1943. ‘I knew Japan must be defended, and I wanted to “do my bit”.’ The following year, when Ashigara and its consorts were redeployed to northern Japan to guard against an American threat from the Aleutians, ‘we started to feel a mounting sense of peril’. In the gunroom with his fellow midshipmen, ‘we never talked about what might happen after the war, because it seemed so remote’. He knew nothing of his father’s fate, because there was no mail from the Pacific islands. The midshipmen simply concentrated on their immediate tasks—studying hard for promotion exams and maintaining journals which were rigorously examined by their divisional officers.

Diversions were few in the long wait for a fleet action: every night, Konada or some other junior officer commanded a picket boat which patrolled the waters round the ship. Their biggest excitements were spotting the head of an apparent frogman in the darkness, which proved to be a giant turtle, and detecting torpedo tracks which translated into a shoal of tuna. They recognised the power of the American and British navies. However, when they gazed around their anchorages at the serried ranks of battleships, cruisers, destroyers which Japan still possessed, there seemed no grounds for despair. ‘We understood that this would be a long, hard war. But it seemed worth it, to achieve peace and security for Asia.’

Lt Cmdr Haruki Iki had been flying in combat since 1938, when he bombed retreating Chinese on the banks of the Yangtse. Iki, now thirty-two, was a famous man in the Japanese navy, the pilot who sank Repulse off Malaya. By the summer of 1944 he commanded a squadron flying long-range reconnaissance from Truk. They were bombed almost daily by high-altitude US Liberators. Most of the bombs fell into the sea, but raids caused the Japanese airmen to spend many hours in the caves which served as shelters. In the air, the planes under Iki’s command suffered relentless attrition. Replacement crews arrived scarcely trained. He found himself teaching signals procedures to radio operators who knew the principles of Morse code, but had never touched a transmitter. By high summer, the strength of his force had fallen from thirty-six aircraft to twelve. He was recalled to Japan to command a unit of Ginga bombers.

Masashiko Ando, twenty-three, was the son of a Japanese governor of Korea. None of this grandee’s three boys had wanted to pursue military careers, but all were obliged to do so. The eldest died fighting on Saipan, the second perished as an army doctor in New Guinea. By July 1944 this left Masashiko the only survivor, just graduating from the Navy Academy’s flight school. He had chosen to serve at sea, because an admired uncle was a naval officer. He was lucky enough to be in one of the last classes of cadets to receive thorough training, before fuel and aircraft became scarce. When postings were apportioned, he was the only cadet to apply for seaplane duty. Within a month, he was flying anti-submarine patrols in a single-engined, three-seater Judy dive-bomber.

He and his crew’s routine missions lasted two or three hours, covering convoys pursuing their sluggish courses towards Japan from Malaya or the Dutch Indies. Their aircraft were primitive by Allied standards. Lacking radar, they carried only a magnetic ship-detection device, together with a single 120-pound depth-charge, for the unlikely eventuality that they found an American submarine. Conducting box searches twice a day, month after month, might seem a dreary task, but it was not so to Ando, who loved to fly. His conscientious crewmen, Kato and Kikuchi, were younger than himself in years, but not in naval experience. They scanned the sea intently, searching for a telltale periscope wake.

After a while, they drank coffee from thermoses and ate their flight rations. These had improved somewhat since a disgusted pilot complained to their messing officer: ‘Every day might be our last! Is this muck the best you can do for our final meals?’ If they needed to urinate while they were in the air, a complex procedure was invoked. Each crew carried a folded oiled paper container which, once filled and sealed with a knot, was handed over the pilot’s shoulder to the magnetic search operator in the rear seat, to be thrown out of a window. Carelessness would cause the container to burst open in their faces. Even in the last year of the war, at Japanese bases in Indochina and the Dutch islands, there was enough to eat and plenty of fuel. Only aircrew replacements were in short supply. ‘We realised that Japan was in a tough spot,’ Ando said, ‘but not that we were in danger of losing the war. We young men believed that, whatever was happening, we could turn the tide.’

Staff officer Maj. Shigeru Funaki felt almost embarrassed that his life at China Army headquarters in Nanjing was so safe and comfortable—good food and no enemy bombing. ‘In Japan, one felt very conscious of what a mess we were in. But in China, our lives seemed so normal that we lulled ourselves into thinking that somehow, our country would come through OK. I was always proud of the fact that, whatever happened in other theatres, in China we remained victorious. For that reason, it seemed a good place to serve.’

Many young Japanese, however, discovered by experience the growing vulnerability of their nation’s empire. In October 1944 Lt Masaichi Kikuchi was posted to the Celebes, south of the Philippines. Having taken off by air from Japan, he and his draft were forced to land on Formosa by engine failure. They remained marooned there for the next two months, among several hundred others in similar plight, enduring a rain of American bombs. When they finally escaped, it was not to the Celebes, now cut off by the Americans, but to Saigon. A sea voyage which normally took a day lasted a week, as their convoy of empty oil tankers lay close inshore by day, then progressed southwards in a series of nocturnal dashes. The military passengers were kept on almost permanent anti-submarine watch, and the convoy was bombed four times.

Huddled wounded in a cave on a Pacific island, Sgt Hiroshi Funasaka looked down on an American camp, brightly lit in the darkness: ‘I imagined the Americans sound asleep in their tents. They might well be easing their weariness by losing themselves in a novel. In the morning they would rise at leisure, shave, eat a hearty breakfast, then come after us as usual. That sea of glowing electric lights was a powerful mute testimonial to their “assault by abundance”…I had a vision of the island divided into adjoining heaven and hell, only a few hundred metres apart.’

None yearned more desperately for Allied victory than prisoners-of-war in Japanese hands, of whom many thousands had already died. Those who survived were stricken by disease, malnutrition and the experience of slave labour. British soldier Fred Thompson wrote on Java: ‘We have just started a new ten-hour shift. How long the chaps will be able to cope remains to be seen. All of us have given up guessing when we will be out—we have had so many disappointments. We are all louse-ridden, but it is one diversion anyway—big-game hunting. Keep smiling through.’

In the summer of 1944, only a few hundred thousand Japanese confronting the Allies in New Guinea, the Pacific islands or Burma, at sea or in the air, had seen for themselves the overwhelming firepower now deployed against their country. Every Japanese was conscious of the privations imposed by American blockade, but the home islands had suffered only desultory bombing. The prospect of abject defeat, which air attack and massive casualties on the Eastern Front obliged Germans to confront long before the end, was still remote from Japan. By late 1944 Hitler’s people had suffered over half their total wartime losses, more than three million dead.

By contrast, a year before capitulation Hirohito’s nation had suffered only a small fraction of its eventual combat and civilian casualties. Japan’s human catastrophes were crowded into the last months of war, when its fate was sealed, during the futile struggle to avert the inevitable. Japan’s commanders and political leaders were privy to the desperate nature of their nation’s predicament, but most remained implacably unwilling to acknowledge its logic. In the last phase, around two million Japanese people paid the price for their rulers’ blindness, a sacrifice which availed their country nothing. After years in which Japan’s armies had roamed Asia at will, killing on a Homeric scale, retribution was at hand.




2 SUMMIT ON OAHU


Japan’s advance across the Pacific and South-East Asia attained its zenith in the spring of 1942, when Australia seemed threatened with invasion, and the British Army was forced back through Burma into India. Long ground campaigns proved necessary to recover from the Japanese Guadalcanal, Papua-New Guinea and other Pacific bases which they had seized. Desultory British attempts to return to Burma were frustrated. The US build-up was slow, in conformity with Washington’s commitment to ‘Germany First’—priority for the western war. America’s Pacific Fleet wrested mastery of the seas from the Japanese only after a long succession of clashes, great and small, which cost many ships, planes and lives. The Allied counter-offensive was hampered by the contest for mastery between the US Army and Navy. The two services conducted separate and rival campaigns against the Japanese, spuriously dignified as ‘the twin-track strategy’.

Despite all these difficulties, by the summer of 1944 the material strength of the US was becoming overwhelming, the Japanese comet was plunging steeply. The trauma inflicted on the Americans and their allies by Pearl Harbor, the loss of Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, and scores of Pacific islands, had faded. The challenge confronting the leaders of the Grand Alliance was no longer that of frustrating Japan’s advance, but instead that of encompassing its destruction. Strategic choice had become the privilege of the Allies. In the eastern war, this meant that the political, military and naval leadership of the US determined courses, then informed the British.

Early in the afternoon of 26 July 1944, the cruiser Baltimore passed Hawaii’s Diamond Head inbound for Pearl Harbor. Insecure gossip had prompted a crowd of soldiers and sailors to gather at the navy yard. Off Fort Kamehaha, as the big warship lost way a tug nosed alongside, carrying Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet. Then Baltimore moored at Pier 22B, enabling more flag officers and generals to ascend the gangway and form up to salute the cruiser’s exalted passenger, the President of the United States. Franklin Roosevelt, in the last nine months of his life and in the midst of his fourth presidential election campaign, looked about for Douglas MacArthur, the man he had come to meet. He was told that the general’s plane had just landed. MacArthur was on his way from Fort Shafter, and would arrive shortly. Sure enough, cheers and whistles along the Honolulu road heralded America’s most famous soldier since Ulysses S. Grant. MacArthur’s car swept up to the dockside. The great man emerged in khaki trousers, a brown leather air force jacket, Chief of the Army’s cap and insignia. As bosuns’ pipes screeched, he mounted the gangway, saluted the quarterdeck and went below to meet Roosevelt.

This was an encounter MacArthur had not sought, did in fact scorn. George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, together with every other American, British, Soviet, German and Japanese commander of the Second World War, acknowledged subordination to their respective national leaderships. MacArthur, by contrast, seemed to reject accountability to any earthly power. His formal title was Allied Supreme Commander, South-West Pacific Area—SWPA. He seldom commanded more than ten divisions committed to combat operations, a fraction of Eisenhower’s army in north-west Europe. Indeed, in 1944 he controlled fewer than half the number of ground troops deployed in Italy, itself a secondary commitment. It was a source of bitter chagrin that he was denied overall theatre authority, and obliged to acknowledge Admiral Chester Nimitz, commanding US forces in the central Pacific, as his equal and rival. MacArthur had always opposed the ‘twin-track strategy’, whereby his elements approached Japan from the south-west, while the navy and Marines conducted their own thrusts further north. He believed that he alone was the appropriate arbiter of America’s eastern war, and fumed at the waste of resources caused by fighting two parallel campaigns, while never deigning to address the possibility that his own was the obvious candidate for redundancy.

Throughout his tenure of high command MacArthur, sixty-four in July 1944, bore controversy in his wake. From the day he graduated first of his West Point class, his intellect and inspirational leadership were recognised. As US Army chief of staff, however, he earned notoriety for his ruthless suppression of the 1932 World War I veterans’ ‘bonus march’ on Washington. His policy reflected perfervidly right-wing political convictions. Following his retirement in 1935 he returned to the Philippines, the American dependency where he had served in his youth, accepting the appointment of military adviser to its government and commander of its armed forces. As the Japanese threat grew, in July 1941 Roosevelt named MacArthur commander-in-chief of the American garrison as well as of the Filipino troops in the islands. In this capacity the general directed the defence of the islands from their invasion by the Japanese in December 1941 until March 1942. He was then ordered by the White House to escape by PT-boat before the surrender of his starving soldiers, trapped on the Bataan peninsula.

Army insiders held MacArthur personally culpable for the Philippines débâcle, by failures both of commission and omission. This was unjust. Though his generalship was poor, no commander could have defeated the Japanese onslaught with the weak forces at his disposal. More than a few American senior officers, however, would have been happy to see this elderly autocrat play no further role in the war. Eisenhower, who had served under MacArthur, expressed in his diary during the Bataan siege a belief that it would be a mistake to evacuate him: ‘If brought out, public opinion will force him into a position where his love of the limelight may ruin him.’ MacArthur displayed a taste for fantasy quite unsuited to a field commander, together with ambition close to megalomania and consistently poor judgement as a picker of subordinates. Fortunately for his public image, only Roosevelt and a handful of others were aware of the general’s acceptance in March 1942 of $500,000 from the Philippines Treasury, as a personal gift from President Manuel Quezon. This was an extraordinarily improper transaction on the part of both donor and recipient.

The British always acknowledged that their own forces and commanders performed poorly in the 1941-42 Burma and Malaya campaigns. Operations in the Philippines were equally mismanaged, but in those dark days Americans yearned for heroes. President and people colluded to make one of MacArthur, to forge a heroic myth around the defender of Bataan. Americans found it unthinkable that the US army which slowly assembled in Australia through 1942 and 1943 should be led into battle by anyone else.

MacArthur presided over campaigns to regain dominance of New Guinea and the islands of the south-west Pacific which proved protracted and bitter, and at first yielded little glory. Yet so formidable was the general’s publicity machine, so impressive his personality, that he held his job until the victories began to come. There were demands from the US political right that he should be made the nation’s global supreme commander, or accept nomination as a presidential candidate, neither of which notions he seemed eager to dismiss. Foremost among proponents of the ‘man of destiny’ view of history, he was bent upon becoming the lone star of America’s Pacific war. Everything within his compass was subordinated to that purpose. A blizzard of personal publicity accompanied his every movement, readily supported by US newspaper moguls—Hearst, McCormick, Patterson—who loved the general. Twelve full-length biographies were published in the course of the war, their flavour conveyed by a sample title, MacArthur the Magnificent, which did nothing to check his egomania.

The senior Allied commander who afterwards spoke most warmly of MacArthur was Gen. Sir Alan Brooke, the dour, clever Northern Irishman who was Britain’s principal wartime chief of staff. Brooke’s assessment was astonishingly effusive: ‘From everything I saw of him, he was the greatest general of the last war. He certainly showed a far greater strategic grasp than Marshall.’ Such a testimonial should not be altogether ignored, but Brooke knew little of either MacArthur or the Japanese war. Top Americans obliged to work with the ‘hero of Bataan’ adopted a much more sceptical view. His fitness for high command was disputed by many senior officers, foremost among them the Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest King, another Olympian autocrat. King’s daughter described her father as an entirely even-tempered man: ‘He was always angry.’ Such was the admiral’s personal animus against the general that, at a joint chiefs of staff meeting, Marshall—himself no admirer of MacArthur—felt obliged to thump the table and silence a tirade from King: ‘I will not have any meeting carried on with this hatred.’

MacArthur’s critics believed that an advance across the south-west Pacific was irrelevant to America’s strategic requirements, and was promoted only by the general’s ambition to liberate the Philippines. He shamelessly manipulated communiqués about his forces’ achievements, personally selected photographs of himself for press release, deprived subordinates of credit for successes, shrugged off his own responsibility for failures. He was a man of fierce passions, whom ‘joy or sorrow would set…off on lusty zooms or steep dives’, in the words of a subordinate. ‘At the risk of being naive and just plain dumb,’ wrote Maj.-Gen. St Clair Streett, later commander of the Thirteenth Air Force, assessing Pacific command in October 1942, ‘the major obstacle for a sane military solution of the problem [is] General MacArthur…even the President himself might find his hands tied in dealing with the general.’ The sooner MacArthur was out of the Pacific, thought Streett, the sooner would it be possible to establish a rational command structure for the theatre.

A senior British airman, no stranger to tensions in his own nation’s high command, was nonetheless awed by those between America’s armed forces: ‘The violence of inter-service rivalry…in those days had to be seen to be believed, and was an appreciable handicap to their war effort.’ Even where armed services dislike each other institutionally, successful cooperation can be achieved if individual commanders forge working relationships. MacArthur, however, was interested in achieving harmony only in pursuit of his own objectives. Admiral King likewise placed the long-term interests of the US Navy far above any tactical conveniences related to fighting the Japanese. No overall Pacific supreme commander was ever appointed, because neither army nor navy could stomach the explicit triumph of the other service. And even if the resultant division of authority impeded the defeat of Japan, so prodigious were US resources that the nation felt able to indulge it.

MacArthur was never ill. When there was nowhere more distant to go, he paced his office to assuage his chronic restlessness. He made no jokes and possessed no small talk, though he would occasionally talk baseball to enlisted men, in attempts to deceive them that he was human. Marshall observed that MacArthur had a court, not a staff. Intimates of the ‘Bataan gang’, the handful of officers to whom he granted passages alongside his own family on the PT-boats escaping from the Philippines, remained privileged acolytes to the war’s end. SWPA chief of staff Lt-Gen. Richard Sutherland felt able to commission his Australian mistress in the American Women’s Army Corps, shipping her in his entourage until the scandal was exposed.

MacArthur’s belief that his critics were not merely wrong, but evil, verged on derangement. He claimed to perceive a ‘crooked streak’ in both Marshall and Eisenhower, two of the most honourable men in American public service. When the Office of War Information wished to alter for national consumption his legendary remark on quitting the Philippines from ‘I shall return’ to ‘We shall return,’ MacArthur demurred. Early in 1944, the general wrote to Stimson: ‘These frontal attacks by the Navy…are tragic and unnecessary massacres of American lives…The Navy fails to understand the strategy…Give me central direction of the war in the Pacific, and I will be in the Philippines in ten months…don’t let the Navy’s pride of position and ignorance continue this great tragedy to our country.’ MacArthur’s personal behaviour was no worse than that of Patton and Montgomery, but he exercised command under far less restraint than either.

Perhaps most distasteful of all his wartime actions was a flirtation with a 1944 presidential election run against Roosevelt, whose liberalism affronted his own rabidly conservative convictions. MacArthur’s staff corresponded with potential campaign backers in the US, which they could not have done without his knowledge. Lt-Gen. Robert Eichelberger asserted: ‘If it were not for his hatred, or rather the extent to which he despises FDR, he would not want [the presidency].’ The influential New York Times columnist Arthur Krock wrote in April 1944: ‘It is generally believed…that General MacArthur is dissatisfied with the military strategy of the war as approved by the President and Prime Minister Churchill.’ This was indeed so. Only when it became apparent that MacArthur could not defeat Thomas Dewey to secure the Republican presidential nomination did he finally exclude himself from candidacy.

He also possessed virtues, however. His air chief, George Kenney, observed shrewdly that ‘As a salesman, MacArthur has no superiors and few equals.’ The USAAF responded to the general’s enthusiasm for air power by offering its passionate support to his causes. Though MacArthur’s hostility towards Britain was well-known, British Brigadier Jack Profumo, attached to his staff, praised his private courtesy and warmth. The supreme commander’s senior British liaison officer described him to Churchill as ‘ruthless, vain, unscrupulous and self-conscious…but…a man of real calibre with a vivid imagination, a capacity to learn rapidly from the past, a leader of men…[with] a considerable understanding of personalities and political development’. MacArthur’s serene assurance, natural authority and charisma, lent some substance to his claims to rank. If he was not among history’s outstanding commanders, he acted the part of one with unshakeable conviction.

In late summer 1944, MacArthur’s credit as a strategist stood higher than it ever had before, or would again. In two months he had conducted a dramatic advance 1,200 miles up Papua-New Guinea, bypassing rather than lingering to destroy Japanese garrisons, staging a series of surprise amphibious assaults, of which the most recent and successful took place at Hollandia, where his headquarters was now being transferred. These achievements, however, won headlines without removing fundamental doubts about the usefulness of the army’s operations in the south-west Pacific, now that the threat to Australia was lifted. Geographical imperatives made the US Navy lead service in the Japanese war, to which the Army was obliged to defer. Soldiers could nowhere engage the Japanese without being transported to objectives in ships, and supported in action by fleets. MacArthur could bend strategy and sustain his own status as the most famous American participating in the struggle. But try as he might, he could not contrive absolute personal mastery.

This, then, was the background against which the supreme commander of SWPA arrived on Oahu, Hawaii, in July 1944, to meet Roosevelt and Nimitz. MacArthur’s tardy arrival reflected his distaste for the encounter. If he chafed at the need to parley by signal with the joint chiefs of staff in Washington, he found it intolerable to be obliged to fly several thousand miles to confer with a civilian politician, albeit the greatest in the land. MacArthur believed that Roosevelt had summoned the Hawaii meeting for political purposes, to further his re-election campaign by showcasing himself before the American people as their commander-in-chief. ‘The humiliation of forcing me to leave my command to fly to Honolulu for a picture-taking junket!’ the general exclaimed furiously during the twenty-six-hour flight from Australia. For once, his paranoia was probably justified. His scepticism about the Hawaii meeting was shared by Admiral King. Roosevelt was always party to the big decisions, and on several important occasions—for instance, when he insisted upon the November 1942 North African landings despite the deep reluctance of his chiefs of staff—he dictated them. Nonetheless, US strategy in the Second World War was dominated by compromises between rival service chiefs. This explains the curled lips of King and MacArthur when, in July 1944, Roosevelt sought to be seen to play the part of supreme warlord as he offered himself to the American people for an unprecedented fourth term.

The struggle with Japan had moved many thousands of miles since the Hawaiian islands fell victim to the 7 December 1941 air assault, but they remained America’s principal rear base and staging area for the Pacific campaign. ‘Pearl was mostly brass and hookers,’ in the laconic words of cruiser bosun’s mate Eugene Hardy. Combat officers who visited the islands’ headquarters complexes were irked by the sybaritic comfort in which staffs did their business. Regular Saturday-night dances were held at Schofield Barracks. ‘There were dinner parties, beach parties and cocktail parties,’ wrote a Marine general, O.P. Smith. ‘At some of the parties the women guests wore evening gowns. You had the feeling that you were half in the war and half out of it.’ Personnel based on Hawaii shrugged that it would give no help to the men at the sharp end to impose a spurious austerity. After protests by visitors from the combat zone, however, officers’ clubs abandoned the practice of serving steak twice a day.

Roosevelt’s most important meetings on Hawaii took place at the Kalaukau Avenue mansion of a prominent Waikiki citizen, Chris Holmes. Naval aviators had been billeted there for some time, and for a week before the grandees’ arrival, working parties from the submarine base laboured overtime to repair the fliers’ depredations. The house then became the setting for performances by two remarkable thespians, the president and the general of the army, together with a supreme professional, the Pacific Fleet’s C-in-C. The only issue which interested MacArthur was resolution of the Pacific route by which the US should continue its advance upon Japan. Even as Roosevelt, Nimitz and MacArthur conferred, the US Navy and Marines were completing the capture of the Mariana island group. On 19 and 20 June 1944, in the ‘great Marianas Turkey Shoot’, carrier planes of Admiral Raymond Spruance’s Fifth Fleet had inflicted devastating defeat, indeed near annihilation, upon Japan’s naval air force. Around 475 enemy aircraft were destroyed, by comparison with the sixty Luftwaffe planes shot down by the RAF on 15 September 1940, biggest day of the Battle of Britain. The island chain, a mere 1,400 miles south-east of Japan, represented a vital link in the American advance. Its capture made possible the construction of air bases from which B-29 bombers could reach Tokyo. Its loss was by far the most important Japanese defeat of 1944, a decisive moment of the war.

Because no minutes were taken of Roosevelt’s meetings with his commanders, uncertainty has persisted about exactly what was said. The historical narrative relies on fragmentary and highly partial accounts by the participants. ‘Douglas, where do we go from here?’ Roosevelt asked. This form of address must have irked MacArthur, who signed even letters to his wife Jean with his surname. ‘Leyte, Mr President, and then Luzon!’ was the recorded response, naming two of the foremost Philippine islands. These exact words are implausible, for at that stage US plans called for an initial landing further south, on Mindanao. The thrust of MacArthur’s argument is not in doubt, however. He asserted, as he had done since 1942, that strategic wisdom and national honour alike demanded the liberation of the Filipino people, whose territory would then become the principal stepping stone for the invasion of Japan.

In October 1943, the joint chiefs had allocated the US Navy its own route across the central Pacific via the Marshall, Caroline and Mariana islands, assaulted principally by Marine divisions, while MacArthur’s soldiers advanced by way of the Solomons, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the hills and jungles of Papua-New Guinea. All these objectives were now achieved. The names of their torrid conquests had become written in blood into American history: Guadalcanal and Kwajalein, Tarawa, Saipan and Guam. Each had been the scene of a contest for a few square miles of rock or coral on which to create airstrips and anchorages to support the greatest fleets the world had ever seen. The Pacific war was fought almost entirely within gunshot of the sea. Amid the vast, empty expanses of the world’s largest ocean, men flung themselves upon outcrops of land, painted livid green by vegetation, with a passion mocked by their coarse beauty. In the first eighteen months of the conflict, though Japan’s supply lines were grossly over-extended, her armed forces engaged the Americans on not unequal terms. Until late 1943, for instance, the US Pacific Fleet never possessed more than four aircraft carriers. Thereafter, however, American strength soared, while that of Japan shrank.

A host of ships, planes, men and guns flooded west from the US to the battlefields. At peak production in March 1944, an aircraft rolled out of an American factory every 295 seconds. By the end of that year, almost one hundred US aircraft carriers were at sea. American planes and submarines were strangling Japanese supply routes. It had become unnecessary systematically to destroy Japan’s Pacific air bases, because the enemy possessed pitifully few planes to use them. Between 26 December 1943 and 24 October 1944, Japanese aircraft failed to sink a single significant American ship. Similarly, surviving Japanese army garrisons presented no threat, for Tokyo no longer had means to move or supply them. But even when the Japanese strategic predicament was hopeless, when resistance became—by Western lights—futile, their soldiers fought to the last. These desperate battles reflected, in some degree, the warrior ethic of bushido. Overlaid upon this, however, was a rational calculation by Tokyo. The superiority of American resources was manifest. If Japan pursued the war within the limits of conventional military behaviour, its defeat was inevitable. Its leaders’ chosen course was to impose such a ghastly blood price for each American gain that this ‘nation of storekeepers’ would find it preferable to negotiate, rather than accept the human cost of invading Japan’s main islands. If such a strategy was paper-thin, and woefully underestimated American resolution, it determined Japanese conduct by land, sea and air until August 1945.

‘No matter how a war starts, it ends in mud,’ wrote Gen. ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell. ‘It has to be slugged out—there are no trick solutions or cheap shortcuts.’ There was, and remains, no doubt that this was true of the war against Germany. But did it also apply to the war against Japan? The enemy was an island nation. If the US Navy could secure sufficient Pacific footholds to provide air and naval basing facilities on the route to Japan, was it also necessary to fight a major ground campaign? It had been America’s historic intention to conduct any war with Japan at sea and in the air, rather than by land battle. Whatever the achievements of US ground forces since Pearl Harbor, the decisive victories had been secured by the navy—Midway and the progressive attrition of Japan’s air and naval forces. While American strategic planning assumed eventual amphibious landings in the Japanese home islands, it remained the fervent hope of most commanders that blockade and air bombardment would render these unnecessary.

There was only one messianic advocate of a major campaign to retake the Philippines: MacArthur. While others varied their opinions in the face of changing circumstances, the general never did. It is possible that beyond ego, a worm of guilt gnawed, about his own conduct in 1941-42. Albeit under presidential orders, he had abandoned his Philippines command to barbarous captivity, to flee with his personal staff, family, nanny and dubiously-acquired fortune to safety in Australia. Now, when other commanders’ eyes flitted between alternative objectives in the western Pacific, his own never wavered. King, an officer as imperious as MacArthur, favoured bypassing the Philippines, approaching Japan by way of its offshore island possessions, Formosa and Okinawa. Formosa presented a much smaller target than the mass of the Philippines, with the additional attraction of opening a gateway to the Chinese mainland.

The US Army’s War Plans Department concluded as far back as 1923 that, if America’s Philippines bases were lost in the early stages of a conflict, their recapture would be ‘a long and costly undertaking’. King complained that MacArthur was drawn to the islands solely by sentiment. Marshall likewise warned the general in June 1944: ‘We must be careful not to allow our personal feelings and Philippine political considerations to override our great objective, which is the early conclusion of the war with Japan…bypassing [is not] synonymous with abandonment.’

On Hawaii, when Roosevelt expressed concern about the human cost of retaking the Philippines, MacArthur said: ‘Mr President, my losses would not be heavy, any more than they have been in the past. The days of the frontal attack are over. Modern infantry weapons are too deadly, and direct assault is no longer feasible. Only mediocre commanders still use it. Your good commanders do not turn in heavy losses.’ This was self-serving bluster. It reflected MacArthur’s disdain for the navy’s conduct of the central Pacific thrust, and ignored the fact that Nimitz’s forces met far stronger Japanese defences than his own had been obliged to face; in the course of the Pacific war, MacArthur’s casualties in reality exceeded those of Nimitz.

But no significant opposition to MacArthur’s Philippines ambitions was expressed. Six hours of meetings were dominated by Roosevelt and MacArthur. Nimitz merely outlined plans for an amphibious landing to establish bases on Peleliu, east of the Philippines, and described the progress of fleet operations. The main dish at the big formal lunch which punctuated discussion was the famous Hawaiian fish mahimahi, examined and approved as fit for presidential consumption by Vice-Admiral Ross McIntire, FDR’s personal physician. MacArthur was able to say of his relations with the naval C-in-C: ‘We see eye to eye, Mr President, we understand each other perfectly.’

Robert Sherrod wrote of Nimitz, one of the greatest naval officers America has produced, that he ‘conceived of war as something to be accomplished as efficiently and smoothly as possible, without too much fanfare’. The admiral was wholly without interest in personal publicity, and his Hawaiian headquarters was characterised by a cool, understated authority. When Marine general O.P. Smith went to report to Nimitz, he found him at his favourite relaxation facility, the pistol range. An aide ‘warned me that it was well to keep out of sight until the Admiral finished or otherwise he might challenge one to a match, the results of which might be embarrassing as he was a very good shot’.

Born in 1885 into a German family who became successful hotelkeepers in Texas, Nimitz had intended an army career until offered a midshipman’s place at the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. A former submariner who was among the pioneers of refuelling at sea, he was well-known for his skilful management of committees, and meticulous personal habits—he was irked by the unpunctuality of politicians. The admiral invariably travelled with his schnauzer Mak, a mean little dog which growled. His staff, like most wartime service personnel, worked a seven-day week, but were encouraged to take an afternoon tennis break. They inhabited a sternly masculine world, for Nimitz insisted that there should be no women on the team. There was just one female intruder—a mine warfare intelligence officer named Lt Harriet Borland, who for administrative purposes was deemed not to be a member of Cincpac’s headquarters. The admiral and his wife Catherine entertained generously in their home at Pearl, often serving fruit delicacies flown from the Pacific islands.

A natural diplomat, sober and controlled, Nimitz strove to defuse tensions with MacArthur, even when—as sometimes happened—the general flatly refused to surrender control of shipping temporarily diverted to him from navy resources. In March 1944 the two men and their senior staffs met in Brisbane, for what promised to be a stormy encounter. ‘Nee-mitz’, as MacArthur called the admiral sourly, opened the conference by telling a story of two frantically worried men, pacing a hotel corridor. One finally asked the other what was troubling him. ‘I am a doctor,’ came the answer, ‘and I have a patient in my room with a wooden leg, and I have that leg apart and can’t get it back together again.’ The other man said: ‘Great guns, I wish that was all I have to worry about. I have a good-looking gal in my room with both legs apart, and I can’t remember the room number.’ Even MacArthur laughed, though it was unthinkable that he himself would have stooped to such perceived vulgarity. Carrier admiral ‘Jocko’ Clark asserted reverently that Nimitz was ‘the one great leader in the Pacific who had no blemish on his shield or dent in his armour’. This seems not much overstated.

Why, on Hawaii, did Nimitz not voice the navy’s strong reservations about the Philippines plan? First, he found himself in a weak diplomatic position. Whatever MacArthur’s private contempt for Roosevelt, at their meeting the general deployed the full force of his personality to charm the president, whom he had known since serving under him as army chief of staff. The undemonstrative Nimitz found himself perforce playing a subordinate role beside two showmen. More than this, naval commanders were themselves divided about future strategy. Admiral Raymond Spruance, commanding Fifth Fleet, favoured an advance on Okinawa by way of Iwo Jima, rather than taking Formosa. Despite King’s order to plan for Formosa, Spruance instructed his staff not to waste time on it.

Nimitz himself, meanwhile, was more sympathetic to the Philippines plan than was King, his boss. Six months earlier, the Pacific C-in-C had been furiously rebuked by the Chief of Naval Operations for advocating a landing on Mindanao rather than in the Marianas. While the navy certainly saw no virtue in protracted operations to recover the entire archipelago, Nimitz and his staff deemed it useful, indeed probably indispensable, to secure Philippines ground and air bases before advancing closer to Japan. Logistics would permit Mindanao-Leyte landings before the end of 1944, while no assault on Formosa was feasible before the spring of 1945. Furthermore, Japanese captures of US air bases in China, and general disenchantment with Chiang Kai-Shek’s nation as an ally, made Formosa seem far less useful as a door into China than it had done a few months earlier. Nimitz almost certainly considered that the Hawaii meeting was symbolic and political, rather than decisive. The joint chiefs would arbitrate. There was no purpose in attempting to translate a political showcase occasion into a strategic showdown.

Yet MacArthur, the man of destiny, believed that he had exploited the occasion to good effect. When he climbed back on his plane to return to Australia, barely twenty-four hours after landing on Hawaii, he declared triumphantly to his staff: ‘We’ve sold it!’ He was justified in this assertion insofar as Roosevelt sailed home on 29 July, after a further two days visiting bases and hospitals, believing that the US must retake the Philippines. Electoral considerations undoubtedly played a part in the presidential endorsement of MacArthur’s wishes. Roosevelt knew that the general’s political friends would raise a storm among American voters if they could claim that the suffering millions of the Philippines—America’s dependants or colonial subjects, according to taste—were being wantonly abandoned to continuing Japanese oppression.

Even after Hawaii, however, for several weeks the US joint chiefs of staff havered. Marshall had once described the MacArthur plan for the Philippines as ‘the slow way…We would have to fight our way through them, and it would take a very much longer time than to make the cut across.’ In north-west Europe, Eisenhower staunchly resisted pleas to liberate the starving Dutch people in the winter of 1944, arguing—surely rightly—that the welfare of all the occupied peoples of Europe was best served by concentrating forces without diversion upon the defeat of Nazi Germany. Yet so great was the prestige of MacArthur, so effective was his emotional crusade for the Philippines’ liberation, that to gainsay him would have required a vastly different supreme command in Washington.

From the late summer of 1944 onwards, America’s difficulties in the Pacific related principally to the logistic challenges of supporting large forces at the limits of an oceanic supply chain. Moreover, in the early autumn, after MacArthur’s cheap successes in Papua-New Guinea, there was no anticipation of the intensity of resistance the Japanese would offer on Leyte and Luzon. US air and sea power had lately overwhelmed the enemy’s puny efforts wherever he accepted battle. Desperate courage and superior fieldcraft enabled Japanese soldiers often to inflict pain on American forces, but never to alter outcomes. For instance, a belated offensive at Aitape in New Guinea in July 1944 cost the Japanese 18th Army 10,000 dead, in exchange for killing some 440 Americans. US forces paid with the lives of almost 7,000 men for the capture of the Marianas and later Peleliu—but the Japanese counted 46,000 dead. Such a dramatic balance in favour of the victors was small comfort to a Marine in a foxhole under mortar and machine-gun fire from an invisible enemy, with comrades bleeding around him. But it represented a reality which promoted optimism among American commanders in the autumn of 1944.

It was almost certainly the correct decision to undertake limited operations to straddle the Philippines with naval and air power, seizing bases, destroying Japanese aircraft and interdicting enemy shipping routes. MacArthur’s plans, however, were vastly more ambitious. He was bent upon a campaign of progressive liberation which could contribute little to expediting America’s advance upon the Japanese home islands. His first landing would be made in the south, on Mindanao. US forces would then advance progressively via Leyte to the capture of the largest island, Luzon, which MacArthur assured the Chiefs could be taken in a month. Nimitz, meanwhile, would prepare to capture the central Pacific island of Iwo Jima, and thereafter assault Okinawa.

Just as in Europe Eisenhower committed his armies to a broad-front advance, rather than favouring any one of his subordinate commanders’ operations above those of others, so in the war against Japan the US sustained the twin-track strategy, sustaining both MacArthur’s invasion of the Philippines and the navy’s drive across the central Pacific. This represented a broadcasting of resources acceptable only to a nation of America’s fantastic wealth, but it was the compromise adopted by the chiefs of staff, with the belated acquiescence of Admiral King. So assured could be America’s commanders of forthcoming victory, that it was hard for them to regard the Philippines as an issue of decisive importance—and indeed, it was not. It was in no one’s interest to bet the ranch against MacArthur about rival routes to a final outcome which was not in doubt. In the late summer of 1944, the general began to gather land, sea and air forces for a November assault on his ‘second homeland’.




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