Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings
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the only redemptive feature of war is the brotherhood which it forges. ‘The people are what I really remember,’ said USAAF pilot Jack Lee DeTour, who bombed South-East Asia from India. If men got home on leave, many felt alienated from civilians who had not shared their perils and sacrifices. ‘Only shipmates were important to me,’ wrote US naval rating Emory Jernigan. Eugene Hardy, a bosun’s mate, came from a farm family so dirt-poor that he had never set foot in a restaurant until he joined the navy in 1940. Men learned to live with others from utterly different backgrounds, often possessing quite different outlooks. For instance, a million messroom or foxhole arguments between American northerners and southerners featured the line: ‘You want a nigger to marry your sister?’ Somehow, out of it all, most men learned a lot about viewpoints other than their own, and about mutual tolerance.
A British soldier expressed in his journal reflections about wartime conscript experience which have almost universal validity: ‘Men live conscious all the time that their hearts, roots, origins lie elsewhere in some other life…They measure the hardships, privations, weariness here against the memory of a past that they hope to continue in the future…Since their hearts reside elsewhere, they face the present with an armoured countenance.’ The author meant that most warriors seek to preserve their sanity by shielding some corner of themselves from proximate reality, so often unpleasant. US naval officers protested at the assertively unseamanlike outlook of cryptanalysts working at the Pacific Fleet’s superb ‘Magic’ code-breaking centre in Honolulu, which played such a critical part in Allied victory. Their commander dismissed their complaints: ‘Relax, we have always won our wars with a bunch of damned civilians in uniform anxious to get back to their own affairs, and we will win this one the same way.’
Winston Churchill often asserted his conviction that the proper conduct of war demanded that ‘the enemy should be made to bleed and burn every day’. The Pacific and Burma campaigns, by contrast, were characterised by periods of intense fighting interspersed with long intervals of inaction and preparation. Whereas on the Russian front opposing forces were in permanent contact, and likewise in north-west Europe from June 1944, in the east Japanese and Allied troops were often separated by hundreds, even thousands, of miles of sea or jungle. Few Westerners who served in the war against Japan enjoyed the experience. It was widely agreed by veterans that the North African desert was the most congenial, or rather least terrible, theatre. Thereafter in ascending intensity of grief came north-west Europe, Italy, and finally the Far East. Few soldiers, sailors or airmen felt entirely healthy during Asian or Pacific service. The stifling heat below decks in a warship made daily routine enervating, even before the enemy took a hand. The only interruptions to months at sea were provided by brief spasms in an overcrowded rest camp on some featureless atoll. For those fighting the land campaigns, disease and privation were constants, vying as threats to a man’s welfare with a boundlessly ingenious and merciless enemy. ‘All the officers at home want to go to other theatres because there is more publicity there,’ wrote one of MacArthur’s corps commanders, Lt-Gen. Robert Eichelberger, in a gloomy letter to his wife.
Eichelberger was a career soldier, one of those whom war provided with dramatic scope for fulfilment and advancement. Civilians in uniform, however, were vulnerable to the misery identified by British novelist Anthony Powell, ‘that terrible, recurrent army dejection, the sensation that no one cares a halfpenny whether you live or die’. ‘Hello, suckers,’ ‘Tokyo Rose’ taunted millions of Allied servicemen from Radio Japan. ‘I got mine last night, your wives and sweethearts probably got theirs—did you get yours?’ Corporal Ray Haskel of the US Army wrote from the South Pacific to a Hollywood starlet named Myrtle Ristenhart, whose picture he had glimpsed in Life magazine. Rodgers and Hammerstein would have appreciated his sentiments: ‘My dear Myrtle, guess you are wondering who this strange person could be writing to you. We are here in the Pacific and got kind of lonesome and so thought we would drop you a few lines…There isn’t any girls here at all but a few natives and a few nurses and we can’t get within ten miles of them…When you can find time please answer this letter and if you have a small picture we would appreciate it, Sincerely your RAY. PS I am an Indian, fullblooded and very handsome.’
‘Here it is a Burma moon with not a girl in sight and a few dead Japs trying to stink you out,’ Sgt Harry Hunt of the British Fourteenth Army wrote miserably to a relative in England. ‘…It must be lovely to soldier back home, just to get away from this heat and sweat, from these natives, to get together with white men…There it comes, the rain again, rain rain that’s all we get, then the damp, it slowly eats into your bones, you wake up like nothing on earth, you always feel sleepy. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going, better close now before I use bad words, remember me to dad, mum and all.’
One of Hunt’s senior officers, Maj.-Gen. Douglas Gracey, took as bleak a view from a loftier perspective: ‘Nearly every Jap fights to the last or runs away to fight another day. Until morale cracks, it must be accepted that the capture of a Japanese position is not ended until the last Jap in it (generally several feet underground) is killed. Even in the most desperate circumstances, 99 per cent of the Japs prefer death or suicide to capture. The fight is more total than in Europe. The Jap can be compared to the most fanatical Nazi Youth, and must be dealt with accordingly.’
‘Dear Mother and Dad,’ Lt Richard Kennard wrote from one of the Pacific island battles in which he was serving as an artillery forward observer with the US 1st Marine Division. ‘War is just terrible, just awful, awful, awful. You have no idea how it hurts to see American boys all shot up, wounded, suffering from pain and exhaustion and those that fall down never to move again. After this war is all over I shall cherish and respect more than anything else all that is sweet, tender and gentle. Our platoon leaders and company commanders are more afraid of what their men will think of them if they don’t face the enemy fire and danger along with them than of getting shot by the Jap. I have my fingers crossed every minute I am up there in the front lines and pray each night that I won’t get hit.’
China’s people paid a vastly more terrible price than any other belligerent nation, at least fifteen million dead, for its part in the struggle against the Japanese. The country had been at war since 1937. Few Chinese dared to anticipate any end to their miseries, least of all victory. ‘In 1944,’ said Captain Luo Dingwen of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist army, ‘there seemed absolutely no reason to suppose that the war might end in 1945. We had no idea how long we might have to keep fighting.’ One of Luo’s comrades, Captain Ying Yunping, described a characteristic 1944 battle which, after two hours’ fighting, swung dramatically against the Chinese:
We got the order to retreat. A mass of men, horses, carts, was streaming back. It was a shambles. I suddenly saw Huang Qixiang, our general, hurrying past us on a horse, wearing pyjamas and only one boot. It seemed so shockingly undignified. If generals were running away, why should ordinary soldiers stay and fight? The Japanese were sending in tanks, and we had nothing to fight tanks with. But I felt we couldn’t just let the Japanese walk all over us. I called to my 8th Section, whose commander was the bravest man in the regiment, and told him to take up a blocking position. He held out for hours—the Japanese were completely thrown by meeting resistance just when everything was going their way. We lost the battle—but it seemed something to win even one small part of it. I met our general a little while later. I said that it was quite safe for him to ride back and fetch his uniform.
A vast host of Chinese civilians served merely as victims. Chen Jinyu was a sixteen-year-old peasant girl, planting rice for the Japanese occupiers of Jiamao, her village. One day, she was informed by the Japanese that she was being transferred to a ‘battlefront rear-service group’. She said: ‘Because I was young, I had no idea what this meant, but I thought any duty must be easier than working in the field.’ A week later, she discovered the nature of her new role when she was gang-raped by Japanese soldiers. She ran away home, but an interpreter arrived to say that her family would suffer grievously if she did not return to her duties. She remained a ‘comfort woman’ for the local Japanese garrison until June 1945 when, weary of beatings, she fled to the mountains and hid there until she heard that the war was over.
Tan Yadong, a nineteen-year-old Chinese who served the Japanese in the same capacity, was accused by a Japanese officer of failing to be an ‘obedient person’. After two five-day