Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings
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2 WARRIORS
Japan’s career soldiers and sailors professed astonishment at the ‘amateurishness’ of other armies and navies, but themselves displayed reckless insouciance towards the technological development of warfare. The Japanese army was principally composed of infantry, poorly supported by armour and artillery. Japan built only light tanks. Soldiers carried a 1905 model rifle. In 1941-42 the navy and air arms were adequately equipped, but thereafter Allied weapons decisively outclassed Japanese ones. By late 1944, for instance, the legendary Zero fighter was at the mercy of the American Hellcat. As a young student at the Naval Technical Institute before the war, Haruki Iki gained a personal insight into his nation’s resistance to innovation. Senior officers flaunted their contempt for the radar development programme. They said: ‘Why do we need this? Men’s eyes see perfectly well.’ Japanese radar lagged far behind that of the Allies.
‘Before World War II, Japan’s experience of war had been gained entirely against the Chinese, who possessed scarcely any artillery or other heavy weapons,’ observes Japanese historian Professor Akira Nakamura. ‘Japan had not participated in a land campaign during World War I. The Japanese army entered World War II quite unequipped to fight a modern enemy. From 1941 onwards, front-line soldiers urged the importance of developing more advanced weapons. Unfortunately, their voices were not heeded at the top.’ Likewise staff officer Maj. Shigeru Funaki: ‘We were far too influenced by our experience in China. There, we had no need of modern equipment and tactics. Because we kept beating the Chinese, we became over-confident.’
Societies run by civilians proved vastly better able to organise themselves to fight the Second World War than those dominated by military men, of which Japan offered the most notable example. It is hard to overstate the extent to which Anglo-American wartime achievements were made possible by the talents of amateurs in uniform, fulfilling almost every responsible function save that of higher military command. Intelligence, for instance, was dominated by academics, many of startling brilliance. Montgomery’s intelligence chief in north-west Europe was an Oxford don masquerading in a brigadier’s uniform. In Japan, by contrast, authority and influence remained almost exclusively in the hands of career officers, who were reluctant to grant scope to outsiders even in such fields as scientific research. The Japanese army and navy never mobilised clever civilians in the fashion of the Western Allies. Intelligence was poor, because the Japanese mindset mitigated against energetic inquiry, frank analysis and expression.
By 1944, said Shigeru Funaki, ‘people understood that we were poorly prepared and equipped for a long war. I saw how important fuel was going to be to us. Because I had always enjoyed American movies, I knew what an advanced society America was. Yet we told each other that Americans were too democratic to be able to organise themselves for war. Many military men supposed that victory could be gained by fighting spirit alone. Our intelligence was never good, because few officers acknowledged its importance. Commanders understood the need for battlefield information, but not for strategic intelligence about the big picture.’
Maj. Shoji Takahashi was a staff officer in the intelligence department of South Asia Army HQ. ‘Only in 1944 did the war situation really begin to alarm us,’ he said. ‘The Japanese army did not take intelligence nearly seriously enough. At South Asia Army HQ, we had no proper system, no analytical section, no resources—that’s how bad it was. Perhaps our attitude reflected Japan’s historic isolation from the rest of the world. We had no tradition of being interested in other societies and what they were doing. It came as a shock to realise how powerful the Allies were becoming, and how much they knew about our actions and intentions.’
‘Intelligence became a backwater for officers who were perceived as unfit for more responsible postings,’ in the words of Japanese historian Kazutoshi Hando. ‘Strategic decision-making was concentrated in the hands of perhaps twenty people, military and naval. Even if our intelligence services had gained access to important information, it would have remained unexploited if it ran against the convictions of the decision-makers. They would not have wanted to know.’ MacArthur was sometimes accused of displaying a cavalier contempt for strategic deception, of the kind widely and often successfully practised by the Allies in Europe. Yet such was the reluctance of Japanese commanders to heed evidence which did not fit their own convictions that the most tempting morsels of false intelligence would almost certainly have been wasted on them. The British launched some Byzantine schemes in Burma, such as planting dummy plans where the enemy must find them. The Japanese seemed not even to notice.
The gravest weakness of bushido, Captain Kouichi Ito believed, was that ‘no one was allowed to say what he really thought, so that we could not explore better ways to do things’. The Western Allies possessed advantages not only of better direction and resources, but also of language. English, properly used, is a clear and powerful medium of expression. Japanese, by contrast, is fraught with equivocation. Tokyo’s forces suffered chronic communications difficulties because signals were so vulnerable to misinterpretation.
The men who fought for Japan displayed a courage and capacity for suffering which bewildered and sometimes terrified their opponents. The British general Sir William Slim called the Japanese soldier ‘the most formidable fighting insect in history’, a phrase characteristic of the mood of his period. A British officer who thought better of Japanese rankers than of their commanders called them ‘first-class soldiers in a third-class army’, which seems fair. Their virtues owed something to national culture, and even more to an ethos ruthlessly promoted from the top. Like the Waffen SS, many Japanese army officers were recruited from lower-middle-class backgrounds. They achieved in uniform a social status denied to them in civilian life, and paraded this in similar fashion.
From the day that a man joined the Japanese army or navy, he was subjected to conditioning more brutal even than that of the Russians. Physical punishment was fundamental. When Souhei Nakamura set off to report to his recruit depot in Manchuria, he carried a big flask of sake which his girlfriend had given him as a parting present. In a train otherwise crowded with Chinese, he fell into conversation with two Japanese soldiers. He told them about his sake. ‘You’d better not turn up at the barracks with that,’ they said knowingly, ‘or you’ll be in real trouble.’ The three of them drained the flask. The soldiers slumped into happy unconsciousness, the boy stumbled out to seek fresh air at a window. He returned to find his baggage stolen by Chinese passengers. Reporting to his barracks, he was foolish enough to relate his experience to an NCO, who thrashed him on the spot. From that day, Nakamura hated military life. His view is a useful corrective for those who suppose that every Japanese recruit was eager to die for the emperor. ‘I thought of joining the army simply as a one-way ticket to the Yasukuni Shrine,’ he said laconically. Yasukuni is dedicated to those who fall in the service of the emperor.
The first year of military service was notoriously dreadful. ‘Personality ceased to exist, there was only rank,’ said Masaichi Kikuchi. ‘You became the lowest of the low, condemned to cook, clean, drill and run from dawn to dusk. You could be beaten for anything—being too short or too tall, even because somebody didn’t like the way you drank coffee. This was done to make each man respond instantly to orders, and it produced results. If you want soldiers who fight hard, they must train hard. This was the system which made the Japanese army so formidable—each man was schooled to accept unquestioningly the orders of his group leader—and then took over a new recruit intake to boss around himself. Isn’t that the way it is in every army?’ Lt Hayashi Inoue said: ‘The first year as a recruit was a terrible time for everyone. It was just something you had to get through, and accept. Most of our men were very simple, innocent, poorly-educated fishermen, peasants and suchlike. They had to be taught the meaning of discipline.’ On border duty in Manchuria, Private Shintaro Hiratsuka was hit in the face by a sergeant for losing his overcoat. This caused him to become disaffected, and to embark on a career of petty theft. Caught and beaten again, he deserted, was arrested and executed.
The NCO commanding Iwao Ajiro’s recruit detail disliked bruising his hand by beating offenders himself, and thus ordered them to beat each other. At first they did so without enthusiasm, causing the sergeant to shout in fury: ‘You are soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army! When you hit a man, do it as if you mean it!’