Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings

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СКАЧАТЬ Yet the direction of the Japanese war machine was feeble, fractious and inept. Rivalry between the army and navy, ‘star and anchor’, was arguably no more bitter than that which prevailed in the US armed forces. America, however, was rich enough to be able to afford this. Japan was not. Moreover, in the US the president and in Britain the prime minister arbitrated on matters of prime strategic importance—for instance, to impose the doctrine of ‘Germany First’. In Japan, no one could dictate effectively to either army or navy. To an extraordinary degree, the two services—each with its own air force—pursued independent war policies, though the soldiers wielded much greater clout. The foremost characteristic of the army general staff, and especially of its dominant operations department, the First Bureau, was absolute indifference to the diplomatic or economic consequences of any military action.

      Mamoru Shigemitsu, successively Japan’s wartime foreign minister and ambassador in China, was scornful of the army’s faith both in German victory and in Japan’s ability to induce Russia to remain neutral. Industry was never subject to the effective central control which prevailed in Britain, never mind the Soviet Union. In his analysis of Japanese and Western wartime attitudes to each other, John Dower has observed: ‘Whereas racism in the West was markedly characterized by denigration of others, the Japanese were preoccupied far more exclusively with elevating themselves.’ In the early stages of the eastern war, many Asians were attracted by Japanese claims that they were liberating subject peoples from white imperial dominance. It soon became plain, however, that far from the conquerors purposing an Asian brotherhood, they simply envisaged a new world in which the hegemony of Westerners was replaced by that of another superior people—the Japanese. Japan had ambitious plans for colonising her newly-won and prospective possessions. By 1950, according to the projections of Tokyo’s Ministry of Health and Welfare, 14 per cent of the nation’s population would be living abroad as settlers: 2.7 million in Korea, 400,000 in Formosa, 3.1 million in Manchuria, 1.5 million in China, 2.38 million in other Asian satellites, and two million in Australia and New Zealand.

      None of these immigrants would be permitted to intermarry with local people, to avoid dilution of the superior Yamato race. The British, French and Dutch had much to be ashamed of in their behaviour to their own Asian subject peoples. Nothing they had done, however, remotely matched the extremes, or the murderous cruelty, of Japan’s imperialists. Rigid segregation was sustained from all local people except ‘comfort women’. Stationed at Indochina’s great port of Haiphong, army engineer Captain Renichi Sugano ‘didn’t really feel that I was in a foreign country, because I lived entirely among Japanese people. Even when we left the port to go into the city, we ate at Japanese restaurants and cafés, or in the officers’ club.’ The nation’s leaders urged Japanese to think of themselves as ‘shido minzoku’—‘the world’s foremost people’. In 1940, Professor Chikao Fukisawa of Kyoto University wrote a booklet in which he asserted that the emperor embodied a cosmic life force, and that Japan was the true ancient cradle of civilisation. The government caused this thesis to be translated and distributed, for the enlightenment of Englishspeakers.

      Here was a mirror image, no less ugly, of the Nazi vision for Hitler’s empire. Its worst implication for the Japanese themselves was that many were taught to believe that their own inherent superiority would ensure victory, dismissing objective assessment of economic factors. They allowed themselves to be deluded, as at first were the Allies, by the significance of their 1941-42 victories. Japan’s existence was dependent upon imported fuel and raw materials, most of which had to be transported thousands of miles by sea from South-East Asia. The country needed at least six million tons of petroleum a year, and produced only 250,000 in its home islands. The balance came from British Borneo, Burma and the Dutch East Indies. The navy, however, addressed neither mass-construction of escort vessels nor mastery of anti-submarine techniques, both indispensable to frustrating American blockade.

      The convoy system was introduced late in 1943, and became universal only in March 1944. So desperate was the shortage of anti-submarine vessels that thirty-two ships once waited ninety-five days in Palau harbour for lack of a single escort, and this was not untypical. Winston Churchill recognised the Battle of the Atlantic, the maintenance of Britain’s supply lines, as vital to averting defeat, even if it could not secure victory. Japan’s senior naval officers, by contrast, were obsessed with confronting the US surface fleet. They treated the maintenance of their country’s merchant shipping routes as unworthy of the attention of samurai until it was far, far too late, and no higher authority gainsaid them. The training of pilots and ground crew, the development of new combat aircraft, languished disastrously. No attempt was made to organise an effective air-sea rescue service to retrieve ditched airmen. Even if Japanese admirals scorned humanitarian considerations, their fliers should have been valued for their skills. Instead, hundreds were simply left to perish in the Pacific.

      Japan’s rival centres of power, army, navy, and great industrial combines—the zaibatsu—conducted separate wars in their own fashion, concealing the most basic information from each other as jealously as from the enemy. ‘To our distress, it became evident that our military and government leaders had never really understood the meaning of total war,’ wrote Masatake Okumiya, one of the foremost Japanese air aces. Allocation of materials was clumsy and arbitrary. Scientists and engineers addressing vital defence projects found themselves obliged to scavenge wherever they could get commodities, in the face of cumbersome and unsympathetic bureaucracies. When the group working on Japan’s primitive nuclear programme wanted the wherewithal for a heating experiment, their request was deemed unconvincing: ‘We would like to obtain an extra ration of sugar to build an atomic bomb.’ Even when the scientists did obtain a little sugar, the stock was constantly depleted by the sticky fingers of passers-by. Japan’s war effort was crippled by the amateurishness and inefficiency of its industrial and scientific direction.

      In his post-war prison cell Gen. Hideki Tojo, prime minister until July 1944, identified a principal cause of defeat: ‘Basically, it was lack of coordination. When the prime minister, to whom is entrusted the destiny of the country, lacks the authority to participate in supreme decisions, it is not likely that the country will win a war.’ This was, of course, a self-serving half-truth. But it was indeed hard for a nation’s chief executive to control its destinies when, for instance, he was told nothing of the navy’s 1942 defeat at Midway until weeks after the event. Sixty years old in 1944, a short man even by Japanese standards, Tojo was the son of a famous general under the Meiji emperor. His notoriously sloppy personal appearance was at odds with his meticulous reputation as an administrator, which caused him to be nicknamed ‘Razor’. He made his reputation running the military police in Manchuria, then became commander of Japan’s mechanised forces in China. He served as deputy war minister in Prince Konoe’s 1938 cabinet, and thereafter as air force chief. A psychopathic personality, Tojo had supposed that a mere forceful military demonstration in China would persuade Chiang Kai-Shek to acquiesce in Japanese ambitions.

      In October 1941, Tojo formed the government which led Japan to war with the West. He afterwards learned from painful experience how defective was his own country’s machinery of government. As prime minister he accurately identified many of Japan’s critical needs, but failed to induce colleagues to act effectively to meet them. Tojo, a supposed dictator, possessed far less authority in militarist Japan than did Winston Churchill in democratic Britain. When he sought to concentrate more power in his own hands, colleagues protested that many of Germany’s difficulties derived from Hitler’s relentless meddling in military detail. ‘Führer Hitler was an enlisted man,’ said Tojo dismissively. ‘I am a general.’ His superior qualifications proved insufficient, however, to reverse the tide of war. The loss of Saipan in July 1944 precipitated his fall from office, which was accomplished without much domestic upheaval. He was succeeded by Lt-Gen. Kuniaki Koiso, a former governor of Korea and chief of staff of the Guandong Army in Manchuria. Koiso lacked Tojo’s administrative abilities, and was notorious for his refusal to confront unpalatable realities. His only policy was to persevere, pursuing a fantasy of making terms for Japan through a bilateral deal with China.

      If successive prime ministers were unable to wield effective authority, who СКАЧАТЬ