Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings
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The achievements of these patchwork Japanese forces matched or even surpassed those of Germany’s battlegroups in Europe.
There were human similarities between Allied warriors and Hirohito’s men which should not be neglected. A desperately wounded Japanese was as likely to cry out for his mother as any Marine or GI. It was a commonplace for Japanese soldiers starting an assault to say to each other: ‘See you at the Yasukuni Shrine.’ If this reflected genuine fatalism, most were no more enthusiastic than their Allied counterparts about meeting death. They had simply been conditioned to accept a different norm of sacrifice. Above all, a chasm existed between the two sides’ attitudes to captivity. American and British soldiers, sailors and airmen belonged to a culture in which it was considered natural and proper to surrender when armed resistance was no longer rationally sustainable. By contrast, it was driven into the psyche not only of every Japanese soldier, but of every citizen, that death must always be preferred. Gen. Hideki Tojo’s Instructions for Servicemen proclaimed: ‘The man who would not disgrace himself must be strong. He must remember always the honour of his family and community, and strive to justify their faith in him. Do not survive in shame as a prisoner. Die, to ensure that you do not leave ignominy behind you!’
Among Tojo’s people, surrender was deemed the most shameful act a man could commit, even if he was struggling in the sea after his ship had been sunk. Staff officer Maj. Shigeru Funaki asserted that this culture was rooted in the experience of the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War. ‘A lot of our men in that conflict surrendered when their positions seemed hopeless. The army became determined that such things should never happen again. If it was acknowledged as honourable to be taken prisoner, then many men would make that choice.’ A Japanese PoW named Shiniki Saiki told his American captors in the Pacific in September 1944, weeks before the word kamikaze was first heard: ‘All units are now considered to be suicide units.’
When American and British troops became familiar with the Japanese preference for self-immolation, by means often designed to encompass Allied deaths also, they grew unwilling to accept risk or trouble to take an enemy alive. ‘The understandable reluctance of our troops to trust any Jap no doubt contributes to the difficulty of inducing the enemy to surrender,’ wrote an Australian officer on New Guinea. It is sometimes alleged that Western barbarism thus matched that of their foes. Yet it is hard to see why an Allied soldier should have risked a grenade from a Japanese soldier who, even when he made gestures of surrender, rejected the Western code whereby a prisoner contracted to receive humane treatment in return for forswearing further homicidal intent. After episodes in which Japanese taken aboard American submarines sought to sabotage their captors’ highly vulnerable craft, such rescues were abandoned. This was prudent.
Until Japanese began to give themselves up in substantial numbers in the summer of 1945, their surrenders were likely to be accepted only by units which needed sample prisoners for intelligence purposes. Those who reached PoW camps, by choosing survival, showed themselves unrepresentative. They were nonetheless the Allies’ best sources of information about the mood in the ranks of the enemy. ‘We poor soldiers have to sacrifice our lives and fight with Type-38 rifles against Boeings, Consolidated B24s, North Americans and Lightning P38s,’ said an embittered private soldier who surrendered to the Americans. In the safety of a PoW camp in Australia, he described himself as a Christian and a Communist, and offered to assist his captors by writing ‘a Formal Examination of Myself as a Japanese…I wish to sound the alarm to awaken the Japanese people.’ Private Sanemori Saito, taken on Bougainville, asserted that his commanding officer had gone mad, forcing the sick to report for duty, and sometimes calling parades at midnight. A construction unit officer captured while delirious with fever told his interrogators that ‘the Japanese possessed a blind faith in their leaders. Even though the military clique started war, the people were wholeheartedly behind it…PW thought the nearer hostilities came to Japan, the harder the people would fight.’
One strange figure whom Americans plucked from the sea proved to be a mixed-race soldier, only a quarter Japanese, christened Andrew Robb by his parents, Shigeru Sakai by the army into which he found himself conscripted. Robb hailed from Kobe, where he had been educated at the English mission school. When captured, he was on passage to garrison duty as a sergeant interpreter in the Philippines. As an ‘impure Japanese’ he claimed to have been victimised during recruit training, and was thus heartily grateful to be posted overseas. ‘His own reaction to Japan’s chances had varied. Originally he had not thought her capable of overcoming the industrial power of the British and Americans combined, but Japan’s earlier successes had led him to think that the Allies might be too involved in Europe to handle the situation in the Pacific.’ Robb said that he would like to inform his mother of his survival, but was fearful of ‘adverse public opinion’ at home if his captivity became known.
This was a familiar sentiment among Japanese PoWs. One suggested to his captors that the best means of encouraging defections would be first, to avoid mention in Allied propaganda of the dreadful word ‘surrender’; and second, to offer those who quit post-war resettlement in Australia or Brazil. An aircrew lieutenant captured while foraging in New Guinea in July 1944 found himself the only officer prisoner among five hundred other ranks. Aboard the ship taking them to a camp in Australia, he told interrogators, some of his fellow captives proclaimed that they had a duty to kill themselves. The lieutenant, who disagreed, responded contemptuously that anyone who wanted to jump overboard was free to do so. He would promise to deliver farewell messages to their families. No one jumped. But the stigma of captivity hung over every Japanese who succumbed, often long after eventual return to their own country. In this respect, the military code served Japan’s rulers well. Without bushido’s terrible sanction of dishonour, in 1944-45 a host of Japanese would otherwise have given themselves up, rather than perish to prolong futile resistance. Refusal to face the logic of surrender was perhaps the most potent weapon Japanese forces possessed.
Japan’s military commanders varied as widely in character and competence as their Allied counterparts. Gen. Tokutaro Sakurai, for instance, conformed to every caricature of Allied imagination. He was a China veteran notorious for ruthlessness and brutality. As an accessory to his uniform, he affected around his neck a string of pearls. His off-duty party piece was to perform a Chinese dance naked, with lighted cigarettes flaring from his nostrils. Some other officers, however, were both rational and humane. Masaki Honda, who commanded 33rd Army against Stilwell in Burma, was a passionate fisherman who often carried his rods in the field. A conscientious rather than gifted officer, he was among the few to show interest in the welfare of his men. He was fond of telling dirty stories to soldiers of all ranks. ‘Have you heard this one?’ he would demand, already chuckling. He resisted assignment to Burma on the grounds that supplies of his beloved sake would be precarious.
The Allies sometimes supposed that Japanese readily embraced jungle warfare. In truth most hated it, none more so than Honda. Like many of Tokyo’s generals, he was personally brave and tactically competent, but displayed little imagination. He once bewildered the Chinese and Americans by dispatching a personal message to Chiang Kai-Shek, expressing regret that their two countries were at war, and commiserating on China’s casualties: ‘I have witnessed with admiration for six months the conduct of your brave soldiers in north Burma, and am very gratified to feel that they, like us, are Orientals. I would like to congratulate you on their loyalty and commitment.’
Gen. Kiyotake Kawaguchi had managed a prison camp holding Germans in the First World War, and prided himself on its civilised standards. In May 1942 he formally protested at the executions of senior Philippine officials. Once on Guadalcanal, where his forces were starving, he had to dispatch a man on a dangerous reconnaissance mission. Kawaguchi pressed into the soldier’s hand the only pathetic consolation he could offer, a tin of sardines which he himself had brought from Japan. He was subsequently relieved of command, for denouncing the futility of sacrificing lives in impossible operations.
Dismissal was a common fate for senior officers who had either opposed starting the war against the Western Allies, or grown sceptical about the value of protracting it. Many thoughtful soldiers opposed Japan’s long, debilitating campaign in China. ‘We felt that it was a mistake to be there at all, that Japanese strategy was ill-considered,’ said Maj. Kouichi Ito, ‘but senior officers who expressed this view were overruled.’