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

Чтение книги онлайн.

       Introduction

      Sir Arthur Tedder, Eisenhower’s deputy supreme commander in Europe in 1944-45, suggested that warriors educating themselves for future conflicts should study the early phases of past ones: ‘There are no big battalions or blank cheques then,’ he wrote ruefully. In the first campaigns, nations which are victims rather than initiators of aggression enjoy scanty choices. They strive for survival with inadequate resources, often unsuitable commanders, all the handicaps of fighting on an enemy’s terms. Later, if they are granted time fully to mobilise, they may achieve the luxury of options, of might equal or superior to that of the enemy, of the certainty of final victory tempered only by debate about how to secure this most swiftly and cheaply. Tedder and his Allied comrades experienced all these sensations.

      For students of history, however, the manner in which the Second World War ended is even more fascinating than that in which it began. Giants of their respective nations, or rather mortal men cast into giants’ roles, resolved the greatest issues of the twentieth century on battlefields in three dimensions, and in the war rooms of their capitals. Some of the most populous societies on earth teemed in flux. Technology displayed a terrifying maturity. Churchill entitled the closing volume of his war memoirs Triumph and Tragedy. For millions, 1944-45 brought liberation, the banishment of privation, fear and oppression; but air attack during those years killed more people than in the rest of the conflict put together. Posterity knows that the war ended in August 1945. However, it would have provided scant comfort to the men who risked their lives in the Pacific island battles, as well as in the other bloody campaigns of that spring and summer, to be assured that the tumult would soon be stilled. Soldiers may accept a need to be the first to die in a war, but there is often an unseemly scramble to avoid becoming the last.

      I have written Nemesis as a counterpart to my earlier book Armageddon, which describes the 1944-45 struggle for Germany. It is hard to exaggerate the differences between the endgames of the Asian and European wars. In the west, American strategy was dominated by a determination to confront the German army in Europe at the first possible moment—which proved much later than the US joint chiefs of staff desired. It was taken for granted that Allied armies must defeat the main forces of the enemy. Uncertainty focused upon how this should be achieved, and where Soviet and Anglo-American armies might meet. The possibility of offering terms to the Nazis was never entertained.

      In the Far East, by contrast, there was much less appetite for a ground showdown. Some in the Allied camp argued that the commitment to impose unconditional surrender upon the Japanese should be moderated, if this would avert the necessity for a bloodbath in the home islands. Only in the Philippines and Burma did US and British ground forces encounter, and finally destroy, major Japanese armies—though none was as large as the enemy host deployed in China. The US Navy and Army Air Forces sought to demonstrate that blockade and bombardment could render unnecessary a bloody land campaign in the Japanese home islands. Their hopes were fulfilled in the most momentous and terrible fashion.

      The phrase ‘heavy casualties’ recurs in studies of the eastern conflict. It is often used to categorise American losses on Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and in smaller island battles. It deserves more sceptical scrutiny than it usually receives, however, being justified only in relation to the relatively small forces engaged, and to the expectation of the American people that a nation as rich and technologically powerful as their own should be able to gain victory without great loss of blood. The lives of some 103,000 Americans were sacrificed to defeat Japan, along with 30,000 British, Indian, Australian and other Commonwealth servicemen, in addition to those who perished in captivity. The US pro rata casualty rate in the Pacific was three and a half times that in Europe. America’s total loss, however, represented only a small fraction of the toll which war extracted from the Soviets, Germans and Japanese, and only 1 per cent of the total deaths in Japan’s Asian war. Americans came to expect in the Pacific a favourable exchange rate of one US casualty for every six or seven Japanese. They were dismayed when, on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the enemy fared better, losing only in the ratio of 1.25:1 and 1.3:1 respectively, though almost all the Japanese losses were fatal, compared with less than one-third of the American. Pervading US strategy was a cultural conceit about the necessary cost of victory. This proved justified, but should not have been taken for granted in a conflict between major industrial nations.

      I agree wholeheartedly with American scholars Richard Frank and Robert Newman, that underpinning most post-war analysis of the eastern war is a delusion that the nuclear climax represented the bloodiest possible outcome. On the contrary, alternative scenarios suggest that if the conflict had continued for even a few weeks longer, more people of all nations—and especially Japanese—would have lost their lives than perished at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The myth that the Japanese were ready to surrender anyway has been so comprehensively discredited by modern research that it is astonishing some writers continue to give it credence. Japanese intransigence does not of itself validate the use of atomic bombs, but it should frame the context of debate.

      ‘Retributive justice’ is among the dictionary definitions of nemesis. Readers must judge for themselves, whether the fate which befell Japan in 1945 merits that description, as I believe it does. The war in the Far East extended across an even wider canvas than the struggle for Europe: China, Burma, India, the Philippines, together with a vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Its courses were directed by СКАЧАТЬ