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

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СКАЧАТЬ people of high birth, possessed of cultural and educational advantages which made the conduct of their wartime offices seem all the more deplorable, both practically and morally. At the lonely pinnacle stood the emperor, forty-three years old in 1944, denied by his throne the comfort of intimates, and by his choice any personal indulgences. A light sleeper, Hirohito rose at seven each morning in the Imperial Palace, breakfasted off black bread and oatmeal, then worked until a lunch of cooked vegetables and dumpling soup. He neither smoked nor drank. To an extraordinary degree, Hirohito’s role in the origins and course of Japan’s war remains shrouded in dispute, just as his precise powers in Japan’s constitutional system mystified most of his own subjects during his reign. Historians lament the fact that MacArthur in 1945 made no attempt to exploit circumstances to have the emperor interrogated. Tojo’s predecessor as Japanese prime minister, Prince Konoe, complained to an aide after his own fall from power in 1941: ‘When I told the emperor that it would be a mistake to go to war, he would agree with me, but then he would listen to others and afterwards say that I shouldn’t worry so much. He was slightly in favour of war and later on became more war-inclined…As prime minister I had no authority over the army and could appeal [only] to the emperor. But the emperor became so much influenced by the military that I couldn’t do anything about it.’

      For several decades after World War II, a legend was sedulously promoted, chiefly by the Japanese, of Hirohito’s long-standing pacifism. This view is now discredited. The emperor shared many of the army’s ambitions for his country, even if instinctive caution rendered him nervous of the huge risks which his generals embraced. Never until August 1945 did he speak or act with conviction against the excesses of ‘his’ army. Hirohito indulged spasms of activism in vetoing appointments and initiatives. For the most part, however, he remained mute while successive governments pursued policies which not only brought his nation to disaster, but also earned it a reputation for barbarism quite at odds with the emperor’s own mild personality.

      In a century of revolutions and falling monarchies, he was acutely sensitive to the vulnerability of his throne. During the interwar years the palace frequently trembled as military fanatics attempted coups, murdered ministers and promoted ever more strident nationalism. The army and navy were nominally subordinate to the emperor. But if Hirohito had attempted to defy the hard-liners during the years before and after Pearl Harbor, it is likely that the palace would have been physically attacked, as indeed it was in August 1945. He himself might well have been overthrown. Like most surviving monarchs of his time, Hirohito perceived the preservation of the imperial house as his foremost duty. A belief in the precariousness of his own position, in a society dominated by unyielding samurai, does much to explain his passivity.

      If this merits some sympathy from posterity, however, it cannot command admiration. While he deeply desired to be a conscientious monarch, Hirohito proved a fatally weak one, who cannot be absolved from the crimes of both commission and omission carried out in his name. He allowed others to wield executive authority in a fashion which wrought untold death and suffering, and he cannot have been unaware of the military’s bloody excesses. Two of his brothers, for instance, attended screenings of an army film depicting Japan’s biological warfare experiments on human subjects at Unit 731 in Manchuria. By the summer of 1944 the emperor yearned for a path out of the war, if only because he realised that his country was losing it. He did nothing effective, however, to advance this purpose. Until June 1945 he continued to believe that negotiation with the Allies should be deferred until Japan’s hand was strengthened by battlefield success.

      Most Japanese are reluctant to articulate unwelcome thoughts. Gen. Renya Mutaguchi described the difficulty which he suffered when discussing with his commander-in-chief an untenable battlefield situation in Burma: ‘The sentence “The time has come to give up the operation as soon as possible” got as far as my throat,’ he said, ‘but I could not force it out in words. I wanted him to understand it from my expression.’ Faced with embarrassment, Japanese often resort to silence—mokusatsu. Such habits of culture and convention represented a barrier to effective decision-making, which grew ever harder to overcome as the war situation deteriorated. Power was dissipated within the ranks of Japan’s officer corps, in a fashion which crippled effective executive action unless it was of an aggressive nature. Logical assessment of the nation’s predicament demanded that peace should be made on any terms. Since such a course was unacceptable to the Japanese army, the nation continued to march towards catastrophe.

      It may be argued, however, that such a policy in the face of adversity was not unique to Hirohito’s people. Japan’s options in late 1944, a Japanese might say, were not dissimilar to those of Britain in 1940. Winston Churchill’s commitment to resist Nazi Germany after the fall of France was neither more nor less rational than that of Japan after losing the Marianas. Without allies, Britain possessed no better prospect of encompassing the defeat of Nazi Germany than did Japan of defeating the Americans. Britain’s salvation was achieved overwhelmingly through the actions of her enemies in forcing the Soviet Union and the US into the war, not by any military achievement of her own save that of defiance in the face of hopeless odds.

      The leaders of Japan told their own people little less about the apparent hopelessness of their predicament in 1944 than Britain’s prime minister had told his own nation after the fall of France. Churchill, indeed, had something of the samurai about him—a belief that will alone could achieve great things. In April 1940 he tried to insist that British units cut off by the Germans in Norway fight to the death or take to the mountains as guerrillas, rather than withdraw or surrender. ‘Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops,’ he urged passionately in February 1942, as Singapore stood on the brink of collapse. ‘The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake.’ Unlike some other prominent Conservatives, when Britain stood alone he judged it better to accept the likelihood of her defeat than to make terms with Hitler. Japan’s leaders likewise believed that unconditional surrender would precipitate the loss of all they held dear. If the cause of Japanese militarism seems to posterity immeasurably less admirable than that of British democracy, it engaged its adherents with equal devotion.

      Japan’s leaders, like Churchill in 1940, perceived themselves as ‘buggering on’, and their people seemed willing to accept the requirements of such a policy. Japanese captured in the Pacific in September 1944 asserted to US interrogators that morale back home remained high, that civilians were ‘tightening their belts in preparation for a hundred years’ war’. Two officer prisoners claimed that America’s public pronouncements caused Japanese people to believe that their society was doomed to extinction in the event of defeat. Only a few older captives admitted doubts about the civilian will to fight on.

      In the last year of the war, some thoughtful and informed Japanese senior officers recognised that the defence of their country against economic blockade could not be sustained. In May 1944, for instance, Rear Admiral Sokichi Tagaki of the navy’s general staff reported: ‘Analysis of air, warship and merchant shipping losses, together with Japan’s inability to import raw materials essential to industrial production and the prospect of air attack on the home islands, show that Japan cannot achieve victory and should seek a compromise peace.’ In 1944, Japan consumed 19.4 million barrels of oil, yet was able to import only five million. This shortfall would worsen in 1945. The Japan Planning Board estimated a requirement of five million tons of shipping for essential movement of supplies, but the merchant fleet had shrunk to 2.1 million, only half of this tonnage serviceable. Tanker capacity, especially, was much depleted. In June 1944, the army general staff’s Conduct of War Section reported that there was ‘now no hope for Japan to reverse the unfavourable war situation…It is time for us to end the war.’

      However, the phrase ‘end the war’ was fraught with equivocation. In the minds of almost every senior Japanese, it meant the pursuit of acceptable terms. At the very least, Japan must be permitted to retain hegemony over Manchuria, Korea and Formosa. Allied occupation of the home islands and war crimes trials of Japanese leaders were unacceptable, as was any Allied meddling with Japan’s system of governance. Many Japanese in the summer and autumn of 1944 were discussing the possibility of ending hostilities. СКАЧАТЬ