Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe. Max Hastings
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are energetic and versatile. One must never underestimate the Americans’ fighting ability.’ Eighteen-year-old Sasaki Hachiro mused to his diary: ‘How many really die “tragic deaths” in this war? I am sure there are more comical deaths under the disguise of tragic deaths…Comical deaths involve no joy of life, but are filled with agony without any meaning or value.’ Hachiro at an early stage resigned himself to his own extinction, and volunteered as a pilot with an almost explicit determination to satisfy fate, as indeed he did – shikata ga nai. His disdain for Japan’s militarists never faded: he persuaded his younger brother to become a science student with immunity from conscription, so that he, at least, might survive.
Hachiro’s contemporary Hayashi Tadao was another fatalist, strongly opposed to the war. His diary repeatedly expressed disgust towards his own country. He asked himself: ‘Japan, why don’t I love and respect you?…I feel that I have to accept the fate of my generation to fight in the war and die…We have to go to the battlefield without being able to express our opinions, criticise and argue pros and cons of issues…it is a great tragedy.’ Japan’s 1941–42 successes against feeble Western resistance caused both sides to overrate the power of Hirohito’s nation. Just as Germany was not strong enough to defeat the Soviet Union, Japan was too weak to sustain its Asian conquests unless the West chose to acquiesce in early defeats. But this, like so much else, is more readily apparent today than it was seventy years ago, in the midst of Japanese triumphs.
Until December 1941, the sluggish, humid, pampered rhythm of colonial life in Asia was scarcely interrupted by events in Europe. In America’s Philippines dependency, army nurse Lt. Earlyn Black was one of thousands of expatriates who revelled in a life of comfort and elegance, cushioned by submissive servants: ‘Each evening we dressed for dinner in long dresses, the men in tuxedos, dinner jackets with cummerbunds. It was very formal-type living. Even to go to the movies, we’d put on a long dress.’ Another nurse, twenty-five-year-old Lt. Hattie Brantly from Jefferson, Texas, found the notion of war with Japan inconceivable: ‘It was a joke and our Chief Nurse would say in the mess, “Have another biscuit, girls. You’re going to need this when the Japs get us”…We just sort of rocked along and were happy, and didn’t give it too much thought.’
Likewise in British Singapore, a Czech engineer, Val Kabouky, described the white residents as ‘modern Pompeians’. Even after more than two years of war, 31,000 Europeans among a population of five million Malays and Chinese kept up a parody of imperial privilege. New Western arrivals wishing to learn as much as was necessary of the local language could purchase a phrasebook entitled Malay for Mems – short for ‘Memsahibs’. It was couched in the language of command: ‘Put up the tennis net,’ ‘You must follow the Mem,’ ‘Shoot that man.’ In 1941 arriving troops, especially Australians, were disgusted to find themselves excluded from the colonists’ social bastions. Indians were not permitted to ride in the same rail carriages as the British, nor to enter their clubs. There was a mutiny in the Hyderabad Regiment when an Indian officer was ordered home for having sexual relations with a white woman; he was reinstated and the affair hushed up, but bitterness persisted. Lady Diana, wife of British minister Duff Cooper, wrote with aristocratic scorn for the pretensions of the British expatriates, ‘most frail, tarty and peasant-pompous’. Her own enthusiasm for Singapore’s tourist charms struck a bizarre note as catastrophe unfolded further north: ‘There is the working life of the Chinks going on before your eyes down every street – coffin-making, lantern-painting, and a tremendous lot of shaving. I never tire of strolling and savouring.’
In Malaya, Britain’s military commanders and rulers alike reflected paucity of talent. The Empire seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of unwarlike warrior chieftains. Air Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, Commander-in-Chief Far East until the end of 1941, was a sixty-three-year-old former governor of Kenya. Lt. Gen. Arthur Percival, the army commander, was a long-serving staff officer whose meagre operational experience had been gained against the Sinn Féin insurgency in Ireland. Sir Shenton Thomas, the colony’s governor, said to the generals as the Japanese began to land in the north early on 8 December: ‘I suppose you’ll shove the little men off.’ His contempt might have been enhanced by reading the orders issued to Japan’s soldiers committed to the assault on Malaya, which included homely injunctions to avoid constipation and heartburn, and to employ deep-breathing exercises to escape sea-sickness: ‘Remember that in the dark and steaming lowest decks of the ship, with no murmur of complaint of their treatment, the Army horses are suffering patiently.’ Men were urged: ‘When you encounter the enemy after landing, regard yourself as an avenger come at last face to face with your father’s murderer.’
Although British and imperial troops were deployed in northern Malaya in expectation of a Japanese amphibious assault from Siam, the onset of war inflicted as devastating a cultural shock as it did upon Pearl Harbor. Each society around the world which found itself overtaken by the contagion of violence responded with initial disbelief, even if logic had been proclaiming its inevitability from the rooftops. When the first Japanese bombs fell on Singapore in the early hours of 8 December, Australian engine-room artificer Bill Reeve was asleep in his bunk in the harbour aboard the destroyer Vendetta, fresh from months of heavy action in the Mediterranean. On hearing explosions, Reeve thought he was having a bad dream of battles past: ‘I said to myself, “You silly bastard, roll over.”’ A heavy concussion close at hand caused him to acknowledge reality, yet even as successive sticks of bombs fell, the city’s street lights blazed on.
Churchill had made a brutal and probably inescapable decision to concentrate the best of the Empire’s forces in the Middle East. The air defence of Malaya mustered just 145 aircraft, of which sixty-six were Buffaloes, fifty-seven Blenheims and twenty-two Hudsons. The obsolescence of most of these aircraft was less significant than the overwhelming superiority of Japanese pilots in experience and proficiency to those of the Allies. When the Japanese began to land at Kota Baharu, the defenders’ response was pitifully limp. It was some hours before local RAF commanders bestirred themselves to launch strikes against the invasion fleet. When they did so, British and Australian planes, along with the shoreline defenders, inflicted over a thousand casualties. Not all the invading troops showed themselves heroes: a Japanese officer described how ‘one section of non-commissioned officers of the Independent Engineers had…become panic-stricken at the enemy’s bombing. Without orders from the troop leader, they boarded the large motor boats…and retreated to the open sea off Saigon.’
Yet by the end of the first day, British air strength in northern Malaya had been halved, to around fifty serviceable planes. Many senior officers and ground crews failed to act effectively: the pilots of a section of Buffalo fighters which took off to intercept attacking Japanese were disgusted to discover that armourers had failed to load their guns. At Kuantan airfield, hundreds of ground personnel fled in panic. ‘How is this possible? They are all sahibs,’ a bemused Indian driver of the Royal Garwhal Rifles asked his officer as the two contemplated a chaos of equipment, personal baggage, tennis rackets and debris strewn around airfield buildings. The young lieutenant snapped back crossly: ‘They are not sahibs, they’re Australians.’ But British soldiers and airmen were also fleeing. Some Indian units collapsed in panic; the British CO of a Sikh battalion was believed to have been shot by his own men before they bolted. ‘We now understood the capacity of the enemy,’ wrote a Japanese officer contemptuously. ‘The only things we had to fear were the quantity of munitions he had and the thoroughness of his demolitions.’
The first of countless atrocities took place. Three British airmen who crash-landed in Siam were arrested by its gendarmerie, who handed them over to the Japanese. Tokyo’s local vice-consul told a Siamese judge that they were ‘guilty of taking Japanese lives and destroying Japanese property’, and the men were beheaded on a nearby beach. Historically, and especially in the 1905 Russo–Japanese war, the Japanese army’s conduct towards defeated enemies had been characterised by mercy. The ruling