The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice. John Bourne

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СКАЧАТЬ directed against Japanese cities by American B-29s was savage but effective. Learning that Japanese industry, like that found in German cities, was not concentrated, the Americans abandoned their ‘pin-point bombing’ tactics employed in Germany in favour of area attacks against Japan’s densely populated urban areas. Knowing Japanese cities were made of wood and would burn furiously, the B-29s launched low-level night attacks, dropping thousands of small incendiary bombs. The result was a nightmare that overwhelmed Japanese attempts to protect its populace from immolation or asphyxiation in the inevitable firestorm. On 10 March 1945 journalist Masuo Kato witnessed one of the first and largest incendiary raids launched against Tokyo. On that occasion fortune conspired against the citizens of Tokyo as a fierce wind was blowing before the bombs dropped, which, as Kato recalled:

      ‘…whipped hundreds of small fires into great walls of flame, which began leaping streets, firebreaks and canals at dazzling speed. The flames roared on, gulping great drafts of oxygen, and thousands of human beings died in shelters, in the streets, in the canals and even in large open areas, like so many fish left gasping on the bottom of a lake that has been drained… On some broad streets, as far as one could see, there were rows of bodies where men, women and children had tried to escape the flames by lying down in the centre of the pavement. There were heaps of bodies in schoolyards, in parks, in vacant lots and huddled under railway viaducts.’¹⁷

      We shall never know if further violence was required to goad the Emperor into forcing his military to cease the conflict. In the event, the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in early August provided a justification for capitulation, a justification used by Hirohito. Although the military chiefs pleaded for a last battle, even after the atomic bombs, the Emperor demanded an end to hostilities. After a brief flurry of diplomacy, Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945.

      When the Emperor addressed the Japanese people to announce surrender he urged them to ‘endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable’. The exhausted population was glad to comply. Apprehensive American troops began almost immediately to occupy key points in Japan. To their delight and amazement they encountered almost no violence and met with almost universal co-operation. For their part the Japanese civilian population soon recognised that the American occupation would be benign and temporary. It is such an irony that the Japanese and Americans, implacable foes during one of the most terrible wars of modern times, soon developed mutual respect and political friendship that has endured to this day.

      Notes on contributors

      Dr Eric M. Bergerud, Lincoln University, San Francisco, USA

      Eric Bergerud received a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 1981. He is now Professor of History at Lincoln University, California. His works include Dynamics of Defeat: The Vietnam War in Hau Nghia Province (Boulder, CO. and Oxford: Westview Press, 1991); Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning: The World of a Combat Division in Vietnam (Boulder, CO. and Oxford: Westview Press, 1993); and, most recently, Fire in the Sky: The Air War in the South Pacific (Boulder, CO. and Oxford: Westview Press, 2000).

      Recommended reading

      Bergerud, Eric, Fire in the Sky: Air War in the South Pacific (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000) Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific (New York: Viking Press, 1996)

      Dower, John W., War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986)

      Dull, Paul S., A Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy (1941–1945) (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1978)

      Gailey, Harry, The War in the Pacific: From Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay (Novato, California: Presidio Press, 1995)

      Goldstein, Donald and Dillon, Katherine V. (eds), Fading Victory: The Diary of Admiral Matome Ugaki, 1941–1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991)

      Harries, Meririon and Susie, Soldiers of the Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army (New York: Random House, 1991)

      Sledge, Eugene B., With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)

      Spector, Ronald H., The Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: Vintage Books, 1985)

Chapter 9

       War in the Tropics: East Africa and Burma

      Phillip Parotti

      If war is complicated, war conducted in the tropics seems doubly so; this is a fact to which even cursory studies of the First World War in East Africa and the Second World War in Burma abundantly attest. Physically distant from the main venues in which the ultimate defeats of Germany in the First World War and Japan in the Second were being decided, East Africa and Burma seemed to lodge in contemporary Western consciousness as military backwaters, so much so that combatants in those out-of-the-way theatres of war often came to think ironically of themselves as fighting on or as having fought on ‘secret’¹ or ‘forgotten’² fronts. Invalided home after two years of combat in the East African bush, W. E. Wynn recalls this incident:

      ‘The majority of people in England knew nothing about the war in East Africa, and even if they did have a vague idea that something might have been happening down there, they were not in the least interested. There was plenty to think about nearer home. Of course, the average man, or woman, in the street had never even heard of East Africa.

      A very stern and leathery faced female once stopped and seized me by the arm. With an accusing ring in her harsh voice she began to ask me searching questions. First, she demanded to know why I was loafing about England, instead of fighting for my country.

      I feebly remarked I had just come home from East Africa.

      “Young man,” she angrily declared, “you’ve no right to be here. You should be at the front.’”³

      To the men fighting in these distant geographical regions, their fronts, of course, were really neither secret nor forgotten. Rather, they were vicious fields where life was played out against death in never-ending battles with an elusive and implacable enemy. To make matters worse, nearly every element of climate, geography, health, diet, logistics, and the unexpected, seemed to conspire in multiplying the degree of difficulty with which tropical campaigns were conducted while compounding the stress and intensity with which they were fought. If war is trial, war in the tropics has proved twice so.

      Given the particular nastiness of bush and jungle warfare, one might well ask why men would ever fight in such environments. Obviously, men fight where wars find them or send them, and not on the fields that they might choose. More to the point – and this was as true of Burma as it was of East Africa – motives of duty, honour, country, and comradeship defined the dominant considerations in each man’s commitment right down to moments of final sacrifice. Placing these important issues aside, one notices at once an outlook, an illusion, held by men going to war in East Africa that was greatly toned down or utterly missing among the men who fought in Burma. Recalling his departure for East Africa in February 1916, Deneys Reitz says:

      ‘Before Smith-Dorrien could take over he fell ill, whereupon General Smuts assumed command of the campaign, and he left South Africa in December 1915. I decided to go too. I had no animus against the German people, but I thought then, as I think now, СКАЧАТЬ