Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings
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of a single escort, and this was not untypical. Winston Churchill recognised the Battle of the Atlantic, the maintenance of Britain’s supply lines, as vital to averting defeat, even if it could not secure victory. Japan’s senior naval officers, by contrast, were obsessed with confronting the US surface fleet. They treated the maintenance of their country’s merchant shipping routes as unworthy of the attention of samurai until it was far, far too late, and no higher authority gainsaid them. The training of pilots and ground crew, the development of new combat aircraft, languished disastrously. No attempt was made to organise an effective air-sea rescue service to retrieve ditched airmen. Even if Japanese admirals scorned humanitarian considerations, their fliers should have been valued for their skills. Instead, hundreds were simply left to perish in the Pacific.
Japan’s rival centres of power, army, navy, and great industrial combines—the zaibatsu—conducted separate wars in their own fashion, concealing the most basic information from each other as jealously as from the enemy. ‘To our distress, it became evident that our military and government leaders had never really understood the meaning of total war,’ wrote Masatake Okumiya, one of the foremost Japanese air aces. Allocation of materials was clumsy and arbitrary. Scientists and engineers addressing vital defence projects found themselves obliged to scavenge wherever they could get commodities, in the face of cumbersome and unsympathetic bureaucracies. When the group working on Japan’s primitive nuclear programme wanted the wherewithal for a heating experiment, their request was deemed unconvincing: ‘We would like to obtain an extra ration of sugar to build an atomic bomb.’ Even when the scientists did obtain a little sugar, the stock was constantly depleted by the sticky fingers of passers-by. Japan’s war effort was crippled by the amateurishness and inefficiency of its industrial and scientific direction.
In his post-war prison cell Gen. Hideki Tojo, prime minister until July 1944, identified a principal cause of defeat: ‘Basically, it was lack of coordination. When the prime minister, to whom is entrusted the destiny of the country, lacks the authority to participate in supreme decisions, it is not likely that the country will win a war.’ This was, of course, a self-serving half-truth. But it was indeed hard for a nation’s chief executive to control its destinies when, for instance, he was told nothing of the navy’s 1942 defeat at Midway until weeks after the event. Sixty years old in 1944, a short man even by Japanese standards, Tojo was the son of a famous general under the Meiji emperor. His notoriously sloppy personal appearance was at odds with his meticulous reputation as an administrator, which caused him to be nicknamed ‘Razor’. He made his reputation running the military police in Manchuria, then became commander of Japan’s mechanised forces in China. He served as deputy war minister in Prince Konoe’s 1938 cabinet, and thereafter as air force chief. A psychopathic personality, Tojo had supposed that a mere forceful military demonstration in China would persuade Chiang Kai-Shek to acquiesce in Japanese ambitions.
In October 1941, Tojo formed the government which led Japan to war with the West. He afterwards learned from painful experience how defective was his own country’s machinery of government. As prime minister he accurately identified many of Japan’s critical needs, but failed to induce colleagues to act effectively to meet them. Tojo, a supposed dictator, possessed far less authority in militarist Japan than did Winston Churchill in democratic Britain. When he sought to concentrate more power in his own hands, colleagues protested that many of Germany’s difficulties derived from Hitler’s relentless meddling in military detail. ‘Führer Hitler was an enlisted man,’ said Tojo dismissively. ‘I am a general.’ His superior qualifications proved insufficient, however, to reverse the tide of war. The loss of Saipan in July 1944 precipitated his fall from office, which was accomplished without much domestic upheaval. He was succeeded by Lt-Gen. Kuniaki Koiso, a former governor of Korea and chief of staff of the Guandong Army in Manchuria. Koiso lacked Tojo’s administrative abilities, and was notorious for his refusal to confront unpalatable realities. His only policy was to persevere, pursuing a fantasy of making terms for Japan through a bilateral deal with China.
If successive prime ministers were unable to wield effective authority, who could? The leaders of Nazi Germany existed in a gangster ethos. Most of the rulers of Japan, by contrast, were people of high birth, possessed of cultural and educational advantages which made the conduct of their wartime offices seem all the more deplorable, both practically and morally. At the lonely pinnacle stood the emperor, forty-three years old in 1944, denied by his throne the comfort of intimates, and by his choice any personal indulgences. A light sleeper, Hirohito rose at seven each morning in the Imperial Palace, breakfasted off black bread and oatmeal, then worked until a lunch of cooked vegetables and dumpling soup. He neither smoked nor drank. To an extraordinary degree, Hirohito’s role in the origins and course of Japan’s war remains shrouded in dispute, just as his precise powers in Japan’s constitutional system mystified most of his own subjects during his reign. Historians lament the fact that MacArthur in 1945 made no attempt to exploit circumstances to have the emperor interrogated. Tojo’s predecessor as Japanese prime minister, Prince Konoe, complained to an aide after his own fall from power in 1941: ‘When I told the emperor that it would be a mistake to go to war, he would agree with me, but then he would listen to others and afterwards say that I shouldn’t worry so much. He was slightly in favour of war and later on became more war-inclined…As prime minister I had no authority over the army and could appeal [only] to the emperor. But the emperor became so much influenced by the military that I couldn’t do anything about it.’
For several decades after World War II, a legend was sedulously promoted, chiefly by the Japanese, of Hirohito’s long-standing pacifism. This view is now discredited. The emperor shared many of the army’s ambitions for his country, even if instinctive caution rendered him nervous of the huge risks which his generals embraced. Never until August 1945 did he speak or act with conviction against the excesses of ‘his’ army. Hirohito indulged spasms of activism in vetoing appointments and initiatives. For the most part, however, he remained mute while successive governments pursued policies which not only brought his nation to disaster, but also earned it a reputation for barbarism quite at odds with the emperor’s own mild personality.
In a century of revolutions and falling monarchies, he was acutely sensitive to the vulnerability of his throne. During the interwar years the palace frequently trembled as military fanatics attempted coups, murdered ministers and promoted ever more strident nationalism. The army and navy were nominally subordinate to the emperor. But if Hirohito had attempted to defy the hard-liners during the years before and after Pearl Harbor, it is likely that the palace would have been physically attacked, as indeed it was in August 1945. He himself might well have been overthrown. Like most surviving monarchs of his time, Hirohito perceived the preservation of the imperial house as his foremost duty. A belief in the precariousness of his own position, in a society dominated by unyielding samurai, does much to explain his passivity.
If this merits some sympathy from posterity, however, it cannot command admiration. While he deeply desired to be a conscientious monarch, Hirohito proved a fatally weak one, who cannot be absolved from the crimes of both commission and omission carried out in his name. He allowed others to wield executive authority in a fashion which wrought untold death and suffering, and he cannot have been unaware of the military’s bloody excesses. Two of his brothers, for instance, attended screenings of an army film depicting Japan’s biological warfare experiments on human subjects at Unit 731 in Manchuria. By the summer of 1944 the emperor yearned for a path out of the war, if only because he realised that his country was losing it. He did nothing effective, however, to advance this purpose. Until June 1945 he continued to believe that negotiation with the Allies should be deferred until Japan’s hand was strengthened by battlefield success.
Most Japanese are reluctant to articulate unwelcome thoughts. Gen. Renya Mutaguchi described the difficulty which he suffered when discussing with his commander-in-chief an untenable battlefield situation in Burma: ‘The sentence “The time has come to give up the operation as soon as possible” got as far as my throat,’ he said, ‘but I could not force it out in words. I wanted him to understand it from my expression.’ Faced with embarrassment, Japanese often resort to silence—mokusatsu. Such habits of culture and convention represented a barrier to effective decision-making, which grew ever harder to overcome as the war situation deteriorated. Power was dissipated within the ranks of