Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings
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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’.
1 YAMATO SPIRIT
Thoughtful Japanese understood that the fall of the Marianas in the summer of 1944 represented a decisive step towards their country’s undoing. It brought the home islands within range of vastly more effective bombing. American submarines were already strangling the country’s supply lines. US ground forces would soon be assaulting Japan’s inner perimeter. Yet the Japanese people had been at war for seven years, since their invasion of China. Domestic life became harsh long before Pearl Harbor. To most, outright defeat was still unthinkable. When twenty-one-year-old Masaichi Kikuchi graduated from army officer school in the summer of 1944, he went home to his tiny village north of Tokyo bursting with pride to show off his new uniform. In a community where everyone inhabited thatched cottages shared with their plough horses, chickens and silkworms, he was the only one of five brothers in his family, and indeed in the whole village, to secure a commission. ‘We grew up in a world where everyone who was not Japanese was perceived as an enemy,’ said Kikuchi, ‘Chinese, British, American. We were schooled to regard them all as evil, devilish, animalistic. Conflict was a commonplace for our generation, from Manchuria onwards. Everyone took it for granted. Even in 1944 when we knew things were not going well, that Guadalcanal and Guam and other places had gone, it never occurred to any of us that the whole war might be lost.’
By contrast with the austerities of the home islands, throughout Japan’s mainland empire from Manchuria to Siam, the privileged status of millions of Japanese as occupiers and overlords remained apparently secure, their routines deceptively tranquil. Kikuchi was posted to an airfield defence unit in Malaya, where he found life extraordinarily pleasant. There was he, a peasant’s son, occupying a large British colonial house on Singapore’s Caton Road, attended by two servants, with a beach a few hundred yards away ‘where on clear evenings I could look out upon the most beautiful moon I had ever seen’. At the officers’ club, though movies were no longer available and they were forbidden to play mahjong, there were billiards, plenty of beer and sake, food and cheap Malacca cigarettes. ‘Even at that stage of the war, the life of an officer in the Japanese army in a place like that was incredibly privileged. I must confess that, when we knew so many others were out there fighting and dying in Burma and the Pacific, I often felt guilty about my own circumstances.’
Petty Officer Hachiro Miyashita had seen too much action with the fleet to feel embarrassment about his ‘cushy’ posting at Tenga airfield, also in Malaya, where his unit taught deck landing to trainee carrier pilots, because no fuel was available nearer home for such purposes. Miyashita revelled in the big bath with hot water at his billet in the old British officers’ quarters, the golf course (though none of them knew how to play), and the absence of enemy activity: ‘It seemed like heaven.’ Miyashita was the twenty-six-year-old son of the owner of a Tokyo fruit shop, now defunct because there was no more fruit to sell. He had volunteered for the navy back in 1941, and experienced its glory days. He and the rest of the flight crews stood cheering on the deck of the carrier Shokaku as their aircraft took off for Pearl Harbor, and joined the rapturous reception on their return: ‘What passions that day fired!’ Through the years which followed, however, their lives became incomparably more sober. After the 1942 Coral Sea battle, in which the ship was hit three times and 107 men died, each body was placed in a coffin weighted with a shell, and solemnly committed to the deep. The coffins broke open, however, and sprang to the surface again. The ship’s wake became strewn with bobbing corpses, a spectacle which upset the crew. Thereafter, they tipped their dead overboard with a shell carefully lashed to each man’s legs.
Miyashita lived through hours of frenzied fire-fighting when American bomb strikes tore open the flightdeck, and endured the harrowing experience of clearing casualties and body parts. He never shrugged off the memory of picking up a boot bearing the name ‘Ohara’, with a foot still inside it. In the Marianas battle of June 1944, aboard the carrier Zuikaku, he watched a pall of black smoke rise above the sea, marking the end of his old ship Shokaku, and of most of the shipmates he knew so well. He thought of close friends from the petty officers’ mess like Ino and Miyajima, now among the fishes, and muttered to himself: ‘My turn next.’ Zuikaku lost almost all its aircraft. ‘As long as we were fighting, there was no time to think. Afterwards, however, as we sailed home, seeing the hangar decks almost empty, sorting out the effects of all the crews who were gone, gave us a terrible feeling. From that stage of the war, my memories are only tragic ones.’ Hitherto, Miyashita had prided himself on his steadiness in action. After three years of Pacific combat, however, ‘I found that I jumped when a hatch cover clanged shut. My nerves were in a bad way.’
So were those of more exalted people than Petty Officer Miyashita, and it influenced them in strange ways. Thousands of Japanese civilians on Saipan chose to kill themselves, most by leaping from seashore cliffs, rather than submit to the American conquerors. Vice-Admiral Matome Ugaki, later commander of the navy’s kamikaze units, wrote in his diary: ‘It’s only to be expected that fighting men should be killed, but for women, children and old men in such large numbers on a helpless, lonely island to prefer death to captivity…What a tragedy! None but the people of the Yamato nation could do such a thing…If one hundred million Japanese people could display the same resolution…it wouldn’t be difficult to find a way to victory.’
Here was a vivid example of the spirit prevalent among Japan’s leadership in 1944-45. Many shared a delusion that human sacrifice, the nation’s historic ‘Yamato spirit’, could compensate for a huge shortfall in military capability. In modern parlance, they committed themselves to asymmetric warfare. This was unconvincing in a death struggle between nations. In December 1941, Japan had launched a war against enemies vastly superior in resources and potential. Its leaders gambled on two assumptions: first, that the US would lack stomach for a long contest; second,