Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings
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Logical assessment of the nation’s predicament demanded that peace should be made on any terms. Since such a course was unacceptable to the Japanese army, the nation continued to march towards catastrophe.
It may be argued, however, that such a policy in the face of adversity was not unique to Hirohito’s people. Japan’s options in late 1944, a Japanese might say, were not dissimilar to those of Britain in 1940. Winston Churchill’s commitment to resist Nazi Germany after the fall of France was neither more nor less rational than that of Japan after losing the Marianas. Without allies, Britain possessed no better prospect of encompassing the defeat of Nazi Germany than did Japan of defeating the Americans. Britain’s salvation was achieved overwhelmingly through the actions of her enemies in forcing the Soviet Union and the US into the war, not by any military achievement of her own save that of defiance in the face of hopeless odds.
The leaders of Japan told their own people little less about the apparent hopelessness of their predicament in 1944 than Britain’s prime minister had told his own nation after the fall of France. Churchill, indeed, had something of the samurai about him—a belief that will alone could achieve great things. In April 1940 he tried to insist that British units cut off by the Germans in Norway fight to the death or take to the mountains as guerrillas, rather than withdraw or surrender. ‘Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops,’ he urged passionately in February 1942, as Singapore stood on the brink of collapse. ‘The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake.’ Unlike some other prominent Conservatives, when Britain stood alone he judged it better to accept the likelihood of her defeat than to make terms with Hitler. Japan’s leaders likewise believed that unconditional surrender would precipitate the loss of all they held dear. If the cause of Japanese militarism seems to posterity immeasurably less admirable than that of British democracy, it engaged its adherents with equal devotion.
Japan’s leaders, like Churchill in 1940, perceived themselves as ‘buggering on’, and their people seemed willing to accept the requirements of such a policy. Japanese captured in the Pacific in September 1944 asserted to US interrogators that morale back home remained high, that civilians were ‘tightening their belts in preparation for a hundred years’ war’. Two officer prisoners claimed that America’s public pronouncements caused Japanese people to believe that their society was doomed to extinction in the event of defeat. Only a few older captives admitted doubts about the civilian will to fight on.
In the last year of the war, some thoughtful and informed Japanese senior officers recognised that the defence of their country against economic blockade could not be sustained. In May 1944, for instance, Rear Admiral Sokichi Tagaki of the navy’s general staff reported: ‘Analysis of air, warship and merchant shipping losses, together with Japan’s inability to import raw materials essential to industrial production and the prospect of air attack on the home islands, show that Japan cannot achieve victory and should seek a compromise peace.’ In 1944, Japan consumed 19.4 million barrels of oil, yet was able to import only five million. This shortfall would worsen in 1945. The Japan Planning Board estimated a requirement of five million tons of shipping for essential movement of supplies, but the merchant fleet had shrunk to 2.1 million, only half of this tonnage serviceable. Tanker capacity, especially, was much depleted. In June 1944, the army general staff’s Conduct of War Section reported that there was ‘now no hope for Japan to reverse the unfavourable war situation…It is time for us to end the war.’
However, the phrase ‘end the war’ was fraught with equivocation. In the minds of almost every senior Japanese, it meant the pursuit of acceptable terms. At the very least, Japan must be permitted to retain hegemony over Manchuria, Korea and Formosa. Allied occupation of the home islands and war crimes trials of Japanese leaders were unacceptable, as was any Allied meddling with Japan’s system of governance. Many Japanese in the summer and autumn of 1944 were discussing the possibility of ending hostilities. Virtually none contemplated accepting the Allied demand for unconditional surrender. So sclerotic was the national decision-making process that nothing effective was done to act upon the knowledge available to the nation’s leaders.
There is little doubt that the death of Hitler before April 1945 would have precipitated a German military collapse. By contrast, it is hard to believe that the removal of any prominent Japanese, including Hirohito or his successive prime ministers, would have hastened his nation’s capitulation. The Japanese fought on, because no consensus could be mobilised to do anything else. A dramatic political initiative to offer surrender, even one supported by the emperor, would almost certainly have failed. Japanese strategy in the last phase of the war rested not upon seeking victory, but upon making each Allied advance so costly that America’s people, as well as her leadership, would deem it preferable to offer Japan acceptable terms rather than to endure a bloody struggle for the home islands. If this assessment was fanciful, and founded upon ignorance of the possibility that a weapon might be deployed which rendered void all conventional military calculations, it offered a germ of hope to desperate men.
By late 1944, many Japanese civilians had become desperate to see an end to the war, which was ruining their lives and threatened to destroy their society. Even before Pearl Harbor, Japan was divided by widespread poverty, and by tensions between city and countryside, peasants and landlords, soldiers and civilians. For all the government’s strident nationalist propaganda campaigns, conflict had deepened rather than healed domestic divisions. There was bitterness that the rich and the armed forces still ate heartily, while no one else did. The government’s Home Ministry was dismayed by the incidence of what in the West would be called defeatism, ‘statements, letters and wall-writing that are disrespectful, anti-war, anti-military or in other ways inflammatory’. There were reports of people making contemptuous references to the emperor as a baka, bakayaro or bocchan, ‘fool’, ‘stupid fool’ or ‘spoiled child’.
There was substantial support for Communism, reflected in graffiti and street talk. Police reports cited cases of alleged industrial sabotage, of drunken workers shouting ‘Stalin banzai!’ Industrial disputes and stoppages remained rare, but Japan’s leaders were always fearful of revolution, as privations increased. A story enjoyed wide circulation in Tokyo’s military and political circles of a Soviet attaché declaring jovially that when his country entered the eastern war and occupied Japan, the Red Army would need to undertake a serious anti-Communist propaganda campaign. Japan, however, never found it necessary to imprison dissenters in anything like the numbers detained in Germany or the Soviet Union. Arrests for ‘peace preservation law violations’—most of the accused being left-wingers, with a handful of religious zealots—peaked at 14,822 in 1933, then declined to 1,212 in 1941; 698 in 1942; 159 in 1943—of whom only fifty-two were prosecuted. While many Japanese were profoundly unhappy with their lot, they perceived no means of doing anything about it, save to maintain their personal struggles for existence.
For years, austerity had been a familiar companion. Inessential driving was banned eighteen months ahead of Pearl Harbor. Oil and iron ore were stockpiled, even plumbing fixtures were stripped from homes. Production of rubber-soled tabi shoes was halted to save raw material. There was no coffee. Neon lighting in Tokyo’s Ginza district was extinguished, and a monthly family fast day introduced. It was no longer permissible to polish rice, which diminished its bulk. From 1940 this was rationed, along with sugar, salt, matches and suchlike, to enable the government to build up stocks in anticipation of siege. Women were forbidden to style their hair or wear smart clothes. Food was a preoccupation of every urban Japanese, which soon became an obsession. In August 1944, one factory reported that 30 per cent of women and boys in its workforce were suffering from beriberi, brought on by malnutrition. ‘Observing a slice of funny little fish and two vegetable leaves which constitute a ration allowance,’ wrote Admiral Ugaki, ‘I contemplated the hardships of those who prepare a daily meal instead of the complaints of those who eat it.’ Absenteeism mounted, as factory workers spent more and more time searching for food for their families. Daily Japanese calorie intake, only 2,000 before Pearl Harbor, fell to 1,900 in 1944, and would descend to 1,680 in 1945. British calorie intake never fell below 2,800, even in the darkest days of 1940-41. An American GI in the Pacific received 4,758 calories.
Twenty-three-year-old Yoshiko Hashimoto was the eldest daughter of a businessman living in the Sumida district