Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings
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strength of the Axis, it served to ensure Hitler’s doom by making America his enemy. So dismayed were the Western Allies by their defeats in 1941-42 that they chose to perceive these as manifestations of their conquerors’ prowess. They were correct, insofar as the Japanese displayed an energy and effectiveness then lacking among the British and Americans. Japan’s early triumphs, however, reflected the local weakness of the vanquished, rather than the real might of the victors.
The Japanese people were far more enthusiastic about going to war in December 1941 than had been the Germans in 1939. Japan’s mission to expand territorially into Asia, and to defy any nation which objected, had enjoyed popular support since the beginning of the century. After their country’s 1941 intervention in French Indochina, many Japanese were bewildered, as well as embittered, by America’s imposition of a trade embargo. The US had swallowed Japanese colonisation of Formosa, Korea, Manchuria and eastern China. Washington acquiesced, albeit with distaste, in the huge British, French and Dutch empires in Asia. Why should Japanese imperialism be any less acceptable to American sensibilities? Although Japan’s experience of war in China was painful, it also seemed successful. Few Japanese knew that military victories on the mainland had not been matched by economic gains of anything like the necessary magnitude. They possessed no national memory of slaughter in the trenches, such as many Germans retained from World War I, to check their rejoicing at Pearl Harbor.
Cultural contempt for the West was widespread. ‘Money-making is the one aim in life [of Americans],’ asserted a Japanese army propaganda document. ‘The men make money to live luxuriously and over-educate their wives and daughters who are allowed to talk too much. Their lack of real culture is betrayed by their love of jazz music…Americans are still untamed since the wild pioneer days. Hold-ups, assassinations, kidnappings, gangs, bribery, corruption and lynching of Negroes are still practised. Graft in politics and commerce, labour and athletics is rampant. Sex relations have deteriorated with the development of motor cars; divorce is rife…America has its strong points, such as science, invention and other creative activities…[But while] outwardly civilized it is inwardly corrupt and decadent.’ If such descents into caricature of the enemy were often matched by Allied propaganda about the Japanese, they were unhelpful in assisting Tokyo’s commanders realistically to appraise their enemy.
To an extraordinary degree for a nation which chose to launch a war, Japan failed to equip itself for the struggle. Its leaders allowed relative economic success woefully to delude them about their ability to sustain a conflict with the US. Pre-war Japan was the world’s fourth largest exporter, and owned its third largest merchant fleet. The nation’s industrial production rose strongly through the thirties, when the rest of the world was striving to escape from the Depression, and amounted to double that of all the rest of Asia, excluding the Soviet Union. Japan’s consumption index for 1937 was 264 per cent of the 1930 figure. The country was still predominantly rural, with 40 per cent of the population working on the land, but the industrial labour force grew from 5.8 million in 1930 to 9.5 million by 1944, much of this increase achieved by a hesitant mobilisation of women and the exploitation of a million imported Koreans.
Between 1937 and 1944, Japan achieved a 24 per cent increase in manufacturing, and 46 per cent in steel production. But these achievements, which seemed substantial when viewed through a national prism, shrank into insignificance alongside those of the United States. Between 1942 and 1945, the US produced 2,154 million metric tons of coal, Japan 189.8; the US 6,661 million barrels of oil, Japan 29.6; the US 257,390 artillery pieces, Japan 7,000; the US 279,813 aircraft, Japan 64,800. Overall Japanese industrial capacity was around 10 per cent of that of the US. Though Japan possessed some of the trappings, and could boast some of the achievements, of a modern industrial society, in mindset and fundamental circumstances it was nothing of the kind. In an Asian context it seemed mighty, but from a global perspective it remained relatively primitive, as the Japanese army discovered when worsted by the Russians during the Mongolian border clash of August 1939 at Nomonhan.
Japan was a military dictatorship, insofar as the army dominated decision-making. Popular dissent was suppressed as the country entered its kurai tanima—‘dark valley’—from 1931 onwards, when the power of the nominally civilian elected government was progressively eclipsed by that of the military. The war minister, always a serving soldier, was the most influential cabinet member. Yet the direction of the Japanese war machine was feeble, fractious and inept. Rivalry between the army and navy, ‘star and anchor’, was arguably no more bitter than that which prevailed in the US armed forces. America, however, was rich enough to be able to afford this. Japan was not. Moreover, in the US the president and in Britain the prime minister arbitrated on matters of prime strategic importance—for instance, to impose the doctrine of ‘Germany First’. In Japan, no one could dictate effectively to either army or navy. To an extraordinary degree, the two services—each with its own air force—pursued independent war policies, though the soldiers wielded much greater clout. The foremost characteristic of the army general staff, and especially of its dominant operations department, the First Bureau, was absolute indifference to the diplomatic or economic consequences of any military action.
Mamoru Shigemitsu, successively Japan’s wartime foreign minister and ambassador in China, was scornful of the army’s faith both in German victory and in Japan’s ability to induce Russia to remain neutral. Industry was never subject to the effective central control which prevailed in Britain, never mind the Soviet Union. In his analysis of Japanese and Western wartime attitudes to each other, John Dower has observed: ‘Whereas racism in the West was markedly characterized by denigration of others, the Japanese were preoccupied far more exclusively with elevating themselves.’ In the early stages of the eastern war, many Asians were attracted by Japanese claims that they were liberating subject peoples from white imperial dominance. It soon became plain, however, that far from the conquerors purposing an Asian brotherhood, they simply envisaged a new world in which the hegemony of Westerners was replaced by that of another superior people—the Japanese. Japan had ambitious plans for colonising her newly-won and prospective possessions. By 1950, according to the projections of Tokyo’s Ministry of Health and Welfare, 14 per cent of the nation’s population would be living abroad as settlers: 2.7 million in Korea, 400,000 in Formosa, 3.1 million in Manchuria, 1.5 million in China, 2.38 million in other Asian satellites, and two million in Australia and New Zealand.
None of these immigrants would be permitted to intermarry with local people, to avoid dilution of the superior Yamato race. The British, French and Dutch had much to be ashamed of in their behaviour to their own Asian subject peoples. Nothing they had done, however, remotely matched the extremes, or the murderous cruelty, of Japan’s imperialists. Rigid segregation was sustained from all local people except ‘comfort women’. Stationed at Indochina’s great port of Haiphong, army engineer Captain Renichi Sugano ‘didn’t really feel that I was in a foreign country, because I lived entirely among Japanese people. Even when we left the port to go into the city, we ate at Japanese restaurants and cafés, or in the officers’ club.’ The nation’s leaders urged Japanese to think of themselves as ‘shido minzoku’—‘the world’s foremost people’. In 1940, Professor Chikao Fukisawa of Kyoto University wrote a booklet in which he asserted that the emperor embodied a cosmic life force, and that Japan was the true ancient cradle of civilisation. The government caused this thesis to be translated and distributed, for the enlightenment of Englishspeakers.
Here was a mirror image, no less ugly, of the Nazi vision for Hitler’s empire. Its worst implication for the Japanese themselves was that many were taught to believe that their own inherent superiority would ensure victory, dismissing objective assessment of economic factors. They allowed themselves to be deluded, as at first were the Allies, by the significance of their 1941-42 victories. Japan’s existence was dependent upon imported fuel and raw materials, most of which had to be transported thousands of miles by sea from South-East Asia. The country needed at least six million tons of petroleum a year, and produced only 250,000 in its home islands. The balance came from British Borneo, Burma and the Dutch East Indies. The navy, however, addressed neither mass-construction of escort vessels nor mastery of anti-submarine techniques, both indispensable to frustrating American blockade.
The convoy system was introduced late in 1943, and became universal only in March 1944. So desperate was the shortage