Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings
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and fears do not alter much. It is more appropriate to call them, without jealousy, ‘the generation to which the greatest things happened’.
I chose my terms of reference partly in order to depict examples from a wide range of land, sea and air battles. Though there were some great men upon the stage, the history of World War II is, for the most part, a story of statesmen and commanders flawed as all of us are, striving to engage with issues and dilemmas larger than their talents. How many people are fitted to grapple with decisions of the magnitude imposed by global war? How many commanders in history’s great conflicts can be deemed to have been competent, far less brilliant?
While most writers address one eastern campaign or another—Burma, strategic bombing, the war at sea, the island assaults—I have attempted to set all these in context, component parts of the struggle to defeat Japan. I have omitted only the experience of indigenous anti-colonial resistance movements, an important subject so large that it would have overwhelmed my pages. Where possible without impairing coherence, I have omitted familiar anecdotes and dialogue. I have explored some aspects of the struggle that have been neglected by Western authors, notably the Chinese experience and the Russian assault on Manchuria. Nehru once said scornfully: ‘The average European concept of Asia is an appendage to Europe and America—a great mass of people fallen low, who are to be lifted by the good works of the West.’ Twenty years ago, that princely historian Ronald Spector puzzled over the fact that Westerners have always been less interested in the war with Japan than in the struggle against Germany. Remoteness, both geographical and cultural, is the obvious explanation, together with our often morbid fascination with the Nazis. Today, however, readers as well as writers seem ready to bridge the chasm with Asia. Its affairs loom huge in our world. An understanding of its recent past is essential to a grasp of its present, especially when Chinese grievances about the 1931-45 era remain a key issue in relations between Beijing and Tokyo.
Some set pieces—Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, Okinawa—are bound to be familiar. I have attempted no primary research on the dropping of the atomic bombs, because the archives have been exhaustively explored and the published literature is vast. Other episodes and experiences may come fresh to readers. I have addressed the issue of why Australia seemed almost to vanish from the war after 1943. Australian soldiers played a notable, sometimes dazzling, part in the North African and New Guinea campaigns. Yet the country’s internal dissensions, together with American dominance of the Pacific theatre, caused the Australian army to be relegated to a frankly humiliating role in 1944-45.
All authors of history books owe debts to earlier chroniclers, and it is important to acknowledge these. I am following a path trodden with special distinction by Ronald Spector in Eagle Against the Sun, Richard Frank in Downfall, and Christopher Thorne in Allies of a Kind. John Dower’s books offer indispensable insights into the Japanese experience. John Toland’s The Rising Sun is not a scholarly work, but it contains significant Japanese anecdotal material. These are only the most notable general studies of a period for which the specialised literature is vast. I should add George Macdonald Fraser’s Quartered Safe Out Here, perhaps the most vivid private soldier’s memoir of the Second World War, describing his 1945 experience with Slim’s Fourteenth Army.
In Britain and the US I have interviewed some veterans, but focused my research chiefly upon the huge manuscript and documentary collections which are available. My splendid Russian researcher, Dr Luba Vinogradovna, conducted interviews with Red Army veterans, and also translated a mass of documents and written narratives. In China and Japan I have sought out eyewitnesses. Most published Chinese and Japanese memoirs reveal more about what people claim to have done than about what they thought. I will not suggest that face-to-face interviews with a Westerner necessarily persuaded Chinese and Japanese witnesses to open their hearts, but I hope that the tales which emerge make some characters seem flesh and blood, rather than mere strangled Asian names speaking tortured English.
In most Western accounts of the war, the Japanese remain stubbornly opaque. It is striking how seldom Japanese historians are quoted in US and British scholarly discussions. This is not, I think, a reflection of American or British nationalistic conceit, but rather of the lack of intellectual rigour which characterises even most modern Japanese accounts. There is a small contributory point, that literal translations from the Japanese language cause statements and dialogue to sound stilted. Where possible here, I have taken the liberty of adjusting quoted Japanese speech and writing into English vernacular. Scholars might suggest that this gives a misleading idea of the Japanese use of language. It may help, however, to make Asian characters more accessible. With the same intention, although the Japanese place surnames before given names, I have reversed this in accordance with Western practice.
I have adopted some other styles for convenience. The Japanese called their Manchurian puppet state ‘Manchukuo’. Modern Chinese never speak of ‘Manchuria’, but of ‘the north-eastern provinces’. Nonetheless, I have here retained the name ‘Manchuria’, save when the Japanese political creation is discussed. Modern Indonesia is referred to as the Dutch East Indies, Malaysia as Malaya, Taiwan as Formosa and so on. After much vacillation, however, I have adopted modern pinyin spellings for Chinese names and places, because these are more familiar to a modern readership. I have, however, accepted the loss of consistency involved in retaining the familiar usages ‘Kuomintang’ and ‘Manchukuo’. Naval and military operations are timed by the twenty-four-hour clock, while the twelve-hour clock is used in describing the doings of civilians.
China is the country which today provides a historical researcher with the greatest revelations. I first visited it in 1971 as a TV film-maker, and again in 1985 when writing a book on the Korean War. On neither assignment was it possible to break through the ironclad culture of propaganda. In 2005, by contrast, I found ordinary Chinese welcoming, relaxed, and remarkably open in conversation. Many, for instance, do not hesitate to assert a respect for Chiang Kai-Shek, and reservations about Mao Zedong, which were unavowable thirty years ago.
Some Chinese bitterly observed to me that they found the Maoist Cultural Revolution a worse personal experience than the Second World War. Almost all those with Nationalist associations suffered the confiscation and destruction of their personal papers and photographs. Several served long terms of imprisonment—one because wartime service as a Soviet-sponsored guerrilla caused him to be denounced twenty years later as a Russian agent. I conducted almost all my own interviews in China and Japan, with the help of interpreters, but four former Chinese ‘comfort women’ of the Japanese army declined to tell their stories to a man and a Westerner, and instead talked to my splendid researcher, Gu Renquan.
In modern China, as in Russia and to some degree Japan, there is no tradition of objective historical research. Absurd claims are thus made even by academics, unsupported by evidence. This is especially true about the China-Japan war, which remains a focus of national passions, fomented by the Chinese government for political purposes. An appropriately sceptical Western researcher, however, can still achieve much more than was possible a decade or two ago. I found it exhilarating to stand on the snowclad border with Russia, where Soviet armies swept across the Ussuri river in August 1945; to clamber through the tunnels of the massive old Japanese fortress at Hutou, some of which have today been reopened as part of the local ‘Fortress Relics Museum of Japanese Aggression against China’; to meet peasants who witnessed the battles. In a café in Hutou, at nine in the morning local people were clustered around the big TV, watching one of the melodramas about the Japanese war which Chinese film-makers produce in industrial quantities. These celluloid epics, echoing with the diabolical laughter of Japanese occupiers as they slaughter heroic Chinese peasants, make such Hollywood war movies as The Sands of Iwo Jima seem models of understatement.
When I asked Jiang Fushun, in 1945 a teenage peasant in Hutou, if there were any happy moments in his childhood, he responded bitterly: ‘How can you ask such a question? Our lives were unspeakable. There was only work, work, work, knowing that if we crossed the Japanese in any way, we would go the way of others who were thrown into the river with their hands tied to a rock.’ In his flat in Harbin, eighty-four-year-old Li Fenggui vividly re-enacted for me the motions of a bayonet fight in which he engaged with a Japanese soldier in 1944.
Likewise, in Japan, at the tiny doll’s house in a Tokyo suburb where