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

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СКАЧАТЬ Lightning P38s,’ said an embittered private soldier who surrendered to the Americans. In the safety of a PoW camp in Australia, he described himself as a Christian and a Communist, and offered to assist his captors by writing ‘a Formal Examination of Myself as a Japanese…I wish to sound the alarm to awaken the Japanese people.’ Private Sanemori Saito, taken on Bougainville, asserted that his commanding officer had gone mad, forcing the sick to report for duty, and sometimes calling parades at midnight. A construction unit officer captured while delirious with fever told his interrogators that ‘the Japanese possessed a blind faith in their leaders. Even though the military clique started war, the people were wholeheartedly behind it…PW thought the nearer hostilities came to Japan, the harder the people would fight.’

      One strange figure whom Americans plucked from the sea proved to be a mixed-race soldier, only a quarter Japanese, christened Andrew Robb by his parents, Shigeru Sakai by the army into which he found himself conscripted. Robb hailed from Kobe, where he had been educated at the English mission school. When captured, he was on passage to garrison duty as a sergeant interpreter in the Philippines. As an ‘impure Japanese’ he claimed to have been victimised during recruit training, and was thus heartily grateful to be posted overseas. ‘His own reaction to Japan’s chances had varied. Originally he had not thought her capable of overcoming the industrial power of the British and Americans combined, but Japan’s earlier successes had led him to think that the Allies might be too involved in Europe to handle the situation in the Pacific.’ Robb said that he would like to inform his mother of his survival, but was fearful of ‘adverse public opinion’ at home if his captivity became known.

      This was a familiar sentiment among Japanese PoWs. One suggested to his captors that the best means of encouraging defections would be first, to avoid mention in Allied propaganda of the dreadful word ‘surrender’; and second, to offer those who quit post-war resettlement in Australia or Brazil. An aircrew lieutenant captured while foraging in New Guinea in July 1944 found himself the only officer prisoner among five hundred other ranks. Aboard the ship taking them to a camp in Australia, he told interrogators, some of his fellow captives proclaimed that they had a duty to kill themselves. The lieutenant, who disagreed, responded contemptuously that anyone who wanted to jump overboard was free to do so. He would promise to deliver farewell messages to their families. No one jumped. But the stigma of captivity hung over every Japanese who succumbed, often long after eventual return to their own country. In this respect, the military code served Japan’s rulers well. Without bushido’s terrible sanction of dishonour, in 1944-45 a host of Japanese would otherwise have given themselves up, rather than perish to prolong futile resistance. Refusal to face the logic of surrender was perhaps the most potent weapon Japanese forces possessed.

      Japan’s military commanders varied as widely in character and competence as their Allied counterparts. Gen. Tokutaro Sakurai, for instance, conformed to every caricature of Allied imagination. He was a China veteran notorious for ruthlessness and brutality. As an accessory to his uniform, he affected around his neck a string of pearls. His off-duty party piece was to perform a Chinese dance naked, with lighted cigarettes flaring from his nostrils. Some other officers, however, were both rational and humane. Masaki Honda, who commanded 33rd Army against Stilwell in Burma, was a passionate fisherman who often carried his rods in the field. A conscientious rather than gifted officer, he was among the few to show interest in the welfare of his men. He was fond of telling dirty stories to soldiers of all ranks. ‘Have you heard this one?’ he would demand, already chuckling. He resisted assignment to Burma on the grounds that supplies of his beloved sake would be precarious.

      The Allies sometimes supposed that Japanese readily embraced jungle warfare. In truth most hated it, none more so than Honda. Like many of Tokyo’s generals, he was personally brave and tactically competent, but displayed little imagination. He once bewildered the Chinese and Americans by dispatching a personal message to Chiang Kai-Shek, expressing regret that their two countries were at war, and commiserating on China’s casualties: ‘I have witnessed with admiration for six months the conduct of your brave soldiers in north Burma, and am very gratified to feel that they, like us, are Orientals. I would like to congratulate you on their loyalty and commitment.’

      Gen. Kiyotake Kawaguchi had managed a prison camp holding Germans in the First World War, and prided himself on its civilised standards. In May 1942 he formally protested at the executions of senior Philippine officials. Once on Guadalcanal, where his forces were starving, he had to dispatch a man on a dangerous reconnaissance mission. Kawaguchi pressed into the soldier’s hand the only pathetic consolation he could offer, a tin of sardines which he himself had brought from Japan. He was subsequently relieved of command, for denouncing the futility of sacrificing lives in impossible operations.

      Dismissal was a common fate for senior officers who had either opposed starting the war against the Western Allies, or grown sceptical about the value of protracting it. Many thoughtful soldiers opposed Japan’s long, debilitating campaign in China. ‘We felt that it was a mistake to be there at all, that Japanese strategy was ill-considered,’ said Maj. Kouichi Ito, ‘but senior officers who expressed this view were overruled.’ Maj.-Gen. Masafumi Yamauchi commanded 15th Division in Burma, without disguising a predilection for Western life acquired during a posting in Washington. Yamauchi was a frail, gentle soul. A tuberculosis sufferer, he subsisted on a diet of milk, oatmeal and newlybaked bread until dismissed shortly before his death. His last recorded pronouncement about the war was ‘The whole thing’s so silly…’

      Masaharu Homma, son of a wealthy landowner, was recognised as a brilliant soldier, notable for his eccentricities. A romantic, impulsive, passionate man, in his off-duty hours he composed military songs and poems and was a familiar figure at Tokyo’s smartest parties. As a young officer he made a disastrous marriage to a geisha’s daughter named Toshiko, with whom he had two children. In 1919, while on an attachment in England, he received a cable from his mother announcing that his wife had become a professional courtesan. Consumed with misery, Homma invited a comrade, Hitoshi Imamura, to discuss his plight at the Sunrise restaurant high above London’s West End. Inspired by liberal injections of whisky, Homma suddenly said: ‘I don’t want to go on living,’ and attempted to throw himself out of a window. Imamura restrained him. The story of two future Japanese army commanders wrestling in a London restaurant passed into legend. Imamura told Homma he must get a divorce, but instead the general wrote to Toshiko pleading for a reconciliation. A senior officer wrote scathingly to the heartsick young man: ‘What a sorry spectacle you are making of yourself! Are you really a Japanese officer? If you take back your wife, everyone will laugh at you.’ Homma replied miserably: ‘I don’t mind being laughed at. I just want her with me again.’ It was at Toshiko’s insistence that the couple parted. The general subsequently married a much younger woman, Fujiko, whom he also came to adore.

      Homma led the 1942 assault on the Philippines. Despite Japan’s victory, he was deemed to have bungled the campaign. Most significant, and reflecting a chronic weakness of the Japanese army, he was castigated for exercising excessive initiative, and disobeying orders which he considered unrealistic. In consequence, he never received another field command, and in 1944-45 his considerable abilities were denied to his country. The 1942 conqueror of Malaya, Tomoyuki Yamashita, likewise languished in Manchuria until October 1944, because his free-thinking found no favour with successive governments. Less able men, willing to obey without question even the most absurd instructions, held key postings. The indispensable qualification for high command was a willingness to fight heedless of circumstances, and to avow absolute faith in victory. The result was that by the summer of 1944, many of those charged with saving Japan by their military endeavours possessed the hearts of lions, but the brains of sheep.

       3 The British in Burma

      1 IMPHAL AND KOHIMA

      The British and Japanese fought each other on the Burman front for forty-six СКАЧАТЬ