The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  In 1939 during the Nomonhan fighting against Marshal Zhukov’s forces, the unit had put typhoid pathogen into rivers near by, but the effect was unrecorded. In 1940 and 1941 cotton and rice husks, contaminated with black plague, were dropped from aircraft over central China. In March 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army planned to use plague-fleas against the American and Filipino defenders of the Bataan Peninsula, but the surrender took place before they were ready. And later that year typhoid, plague and cholera pathogens were sprayed in Chekiang province in retaliation for the first American bombing raid on Japan. Apparently 1,700 Japanese soldiers in the area died as well as hundreds of Chinese.

  A biological warfare battalion was sent to Saipan before the American landings, but most of its members were evacuated beforehand only to be drowned when a US submarine sank their ship. There were also plans captured by marines on Kwajalein to bomb Australia and India with biological weapons, but these attacks never materialized. The Japanese also wanted to contaminate the island of Luzon in the Philippines with cholera before the American invasion, but this too was not carried out.

  The Imperial Japanese Navy at its bases of Truk and Rabaul had experimented on Allied prisoners of war, mainly captured American pilots, by injecting them with the blood of malaria victims. Others were killed during experiments with different lethal injections. As late as April 1945, around a hundred Australian prisoners of war–some sick, some healthy–were also used for experiments with unknown injections. In Manchuria, 1,485 American, Australian, British and New Zealand prisoners of war held at Mukden were used for a variety of experiments with pathogens.

  Perhaps the most shocking element in the whole story of Unit 731 was MacArthur’s agreement, after the Japanese surrender, to provide immunity from prosecution to all involved, including General Ishii. This deal allowed the Americans to obtain all the data they had accumulated from their experiments. Even after MacArthur had learned that Allied prisoners of war had also been killed in the tests, he ordered that all criminal investigations should cease. Soviet requests to prosecute Ishii and his staff at the Tokyo War Crimes tribunal were firmly rejected.

  Only a few doctors who anaesthetized and then dissected captured American bomber crews were prosecuted, but they had nothing to do with Unit 731. Other Japanese military doctors performed vivisection on hundreds of conscious Chinese prisoners in numerous hospitals, but they were never charged. Doctors in the Japanese Medical Corps demonstrated little respect for human life, since they willingly followed orders to dispose of their own ‘incapacitated soldiers, with a good chance of recovery… on the grounds that they are useless to the Emperor’. They also taught Japanese soldiers how to commit suicide to being captured.

  By the time Japanese resistance on Okinawa had ended, American commanders in the Pacific turned to re-examining the next phase, the invasion of the home islands. The kamikaze attacks and the refusal of the Japanese to surrender, combined with the knowledge of their biological warfare capability, made it a sobering task. The plan had been agreed by the joint chiefs of staff as early as 1944. It estimated that Operation Olympic to take the southern island of Kyushu in November would cost 100,000 casualties, and Operation Coronet in March 1946 to invade the main island of Honshu 250,000. Admiral King and General Arnold preferred to bomb and blockade Japan, to starve it into surrender. MacArthur and the US Army complained that that would take years and cause unnecessary suffering. It would also mean the death by starvation of most Allied prisoners of war and forced labourers. And since the bombing of Germany had not achieved victory, the army won the navy round to the idea of an invasion.

  The Imperial Japanese Army was resolved to fight to the end, partly out of an imagined fear of a Communist uprising, and partly out of bushid pride. Its leaders felt that they could never consent to surrender when General Tj’s Instructions for Servicemen had declared: ‘Do not survive in shame as a prisoner. Die, to ensure that you do not leave ignominy behind you.’ Civilian politicians of the ‘peace party’ who wanted to negotiate would have been arrested, or even assassinated, if it had not been for the Emperor’s own indecision over what to do next. The former prime minister Prince Konoe Fumimaro later pointed out that ‘the army had dug themselves caves in the mountains and their idea of fighting on was to fight from every little hole or rock in the mountains’. The Japanese army also intended that civilians should die with them. A Patriotic Citzens Fighting Corps was being formed, many of whose members would be armed with nothing more than bamboo lances. Others were to have bombs strapped to them which they would detonate as they threw themselves against tanks. Even young women were pressured into volunteering to sacrifice themselves.

  Japanese military leaders rejected the idea of unconditional surrender because they also believed that their conquerors intended to depose the Emperor. Although an overwhelming majority of the American public wanted exactly that, the State Department and the joint chiefs of staff had come round to the idea of retaining him as a constitutional monarch and softening the terms. The Potsdam Declaration on Japan, published on 26 July, made no mention of the Emperor to avoid a political backlash in the United States. The Japanese government had already approached the Soviet government, hoping that it would act as mediator, unaware that Stalin was redeploying his armies to the Far East to invade Manchuria.

  The successful test of the first atom bomb in July appeared to offer the Americans a way of shocking the Japanese into surrender, and avoid the greater horrors of an invasion. After many studies and considerable debate, Tokyo and the ancient capital of Kyoto were rejected as targets. Hiroshima, which had not been as badly destroyed as other cities by LeMay’s bombers, was chosen as the first target, and Nagasaki as a follow-up object ive if the Japanese had still not indicated acceptance.

  On the morning of 6 August three B-29 Superfortresses appeared over Hiroshima. Two of them carried cameras and scientific equipment to record the effect. The third, the Enola Gay, opened its bomb doors at 08.15 hours, and less than a minute later most of the city of Hiroshima disinte-grated in a blinding light. Around 100,000 people were killed instantly, and many thousands more died later from radiation poisoning, burns and shock. President Truman’s staff in Washington issued a warning to the Japanese that if they failed to surrender immediately, ‘they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth’.

  Two days later, Red Army forces surged across the Manchurian frontier. Stalin did not intend to miss out on the territorial spoils he had been promised. On 9 August, when nothing had been heard from Tokyo, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki killing 35,000 people. The Emperor was deeply moved by the terrible fate of those who had died, and requested as much information as possible. It is quite clear that without the atomic bombs he would not have mustered the quiet resolve which he showed later to end the war.

  The fire-bombing of Tokyo and the decision to drop the atomic bombs were driven by the Americans’ urge to ‘get this business over with’. But the threat of kamikaze resistance, perhaps even with biological weapons, threatened a far worse battle than that on Okinawa. On the basis that approximately a quarter of Okinawa’s civilians had died in the fighting there, a similar scale of civilian casualties on the home islands would have exceeded many times over the numbers killed by the atomic bombs. Other considerations, most notably the temptation of demonstrating US power to a Soviet Union then ruthlessly imposing its will in central Europe, played an influential, although not decisive, part.

  It is true that several civilian members of the Japanese regime were keen on negotiation, but their fundamental insistence–that Japan be allowed to keep Korea and Manchuria–could never have been acceptable to the Allies. Even this peace faction refused to accept any notion of Japanese guilt for having started the war, or international trials for crimes committed by the Imperial Army dating back to the original invasion of Chinese territory in 1931.

  A few hours before the second atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki,
the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War had met to consider whether it should accept the Potsdam Declaration. Representatives of Imperial General Headquarters were still firmly opposed. On the evening of 9 August just after the Nakasaki bomb had fallen, the Emperor summoned the Supreme Council’s members again. He said that they should accept the terms, providing that the imperial house and its succession was preserved. This proviso was transmitted to Washington the next day. There were mixed feelings during the discussions at the White House. Some, including James Byrnes, argued that no qualifications should be allowed. Stimson, the secretary for war, argued more persuasively that only the Emperor’s authority could persuade the Japanese armed forces to surrender. This would save the Americans countless further battles, and would give the Soviet armies less time to rampage across the region.

  The American reply, which emphasized again that the Japanese would be allowed to choose the form of government which they desired, reached Tokyo via the Japanese embassy in Switzerland. The military leaders still refused to accept defeat. While American bombers continued their campaign, although no more atomic weapons were used on Truman’s orders, the arguments continued for several days. Eventually on 14 August the Emperor stepped in and announced that he had decided that they should accept the Potsdam Declaration. Ministers and military leaders alike began to weep. He also said that he would record a broadcast to the nation, an unprecedented event.

  That night army officers attempted a coup to prevent the broadcast of the Emperor’s announcement. Having persuaded the 2nd Imperial Guard Regiment to join them through trickery, they entered the Imperial Palace to destroy the message recorded by the Emperor announcing the country’s capitulation. The Emperor and Marquis Kido, the court chamberlain, managed to hide. The rebels found nothing, and when loyal troops arrived, Major Hatanaka Kenji, the main leader of the coup, knew that he had no alternative but suicide. Other military leaders took the same course.

  At noon on 15 August Japanese radio stations broadcast the Emperor’s recorded message, calling on all his forces to surrender because the war situation had evolved ‘not necessarily to Japan’s advantage’. Officers and soldiers listened to his words on the radio with tears streaming down their faces. Many were on their knees bowing towards the voice of the divine Mikado, whose voice they had never heard before. Some pilots set out on a final mission of gyokusai or ‘glorious self-annihilation’. Most were intercepted and shot down by American fighters. The self-image of the Yamato race bore a number of similarities to that of the Nazi Herrenvolk. In an attitude reminiscent of the German army after the First World War, many Japanese soldiers continued to persuade themselves that ‘Japan lost the war but we never lost a battle.’

  On 30 August US forces landed at Yokohama to begin the occupation of Japan. Over the next ten days there were 1,336 cases of rape reported in Yokohama and the surrounding region of Kanagawa. Australian troops apparently also committed many rapes in the area of Hiroshima. This had been expected by the Japanese authorities. On 21 August, nine days before the arrival of Allied troops, the Japanese government had summoned a meeting of ministers to establish a Recreation and Amusement Association, to provide comfort women for their conquerors. Local officials and police chiefs were told to organize a nationwide network of military brothels staffed by existing prostitutes, but also by geishas and other young women. The intention was to reduce the incidence of rape. The first opened in a Tokyo suburb on 27 August and hundreds followed. One of the brothels was run by the mistress of General Ishii Shirö, the head of Unit 731. Some 20,000 young women were recruited, with varying degrees of coercion by the end of the year to appease their conquerors.

  The formal surrender of Japan did not take place until 2 September. General MacArthur, accompanied by Admiral Nimitz, took it at a table placed on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay off Yokohama. They were watched by two emaciated figures just released from captivity: General Percival, who had conducted the British surrender at Singapore, and General Wainwright, the American commander on Corregidor.

  Although fighting had ceased throughout the Pacific and south-east Asia on 15 August, the war had carried on in Manchuria until the day before the ceremony in Tokyo Bay. On 9 August, three Soviet fronts, with 1,669,500 men under the overall command of Marshal Vasilevsky, invaded northern China and Manchuria. A Mongolian cavalry corps on the extreme right flank crossed the Gobi Desert and the Great Khingan range of mountains. The timing and the speed of the Red Army’s offensive took the Japanese by surprise. Although a million strong, their forces collapsed rapidly. Many died fighting to the end, and many committed suicide, but 674,000 were taken prisoner.

  Their fate in the labour camps of Siberia and Magadan was harsh. Only half of them survived. Japanese colonist families, who had been abandoned by the army, also suffered. Mothers, carrying small children on their backs, tried to hide in the mountains. Out of 220,000 settlers, some 80,000 died. Some were killed by the Chinese, and around 67,000 starved to death or killed themselves. Only 140,000 survivors made it back to Japan. Their experience was similar in some ways to that of German colonists settled in Poland.

  Red Army troops raped Japanese women at will in the former puppet kingdom of Manchukuo. A large group of women, told by Japanese officers that the war was lost, were advised to stick together. Almost a thousand packed into the hangars at the aerodrome of Beian. ‘From then on it was hell,’ recorded an orphaned girl called Yoshida Reiko. ‘Russian soldiers came and told our leaders that they had to provide women to the Russian troops as the spoils of victory… Every day Russian soldiers would come in and take about ten girls. The women came back in the morning. Some women committed suicide… The Russian soldiers told us that if no women came out, the whole hangar would be burnt to the ground, with all of us inside. So some women–mostly single women–stood up and went. At that time I didn’t understand what was happening to these women, but I clearly remember that women with children offered prayers for the women who did go out, in thanks for their sacrifice.’ As well as civilians, Japanese military nurses in base hospitals suffered. The seventy-five nurses in the Sun Wu military hospital were held as a Soviet version of comfort women.

  Red Army troops faced a much harder task seizing the Kurile Islands and southern Sakhalin. Woefully ill prepared for amphibious landings, they lost many men, both on the approach and on the shore. Stalin also had plans to occupy the northern home island of Hokkaido, but Truman brusquely rejected his proposal.

  The Soviet invasion of Manchuria and northern China was greeted with joy by Mao Tse-tung’s followers. Yet when a Red Army column advanced to Chahar, and was welcomed by guerrillas of the Eighth Route Army, the Soviet troops thought they were bandits because of their ragged clothes and primitive weapons, and disarmed them. This soon changed. Although Stalin officially recognized Chiang Kai-shek’s government, Soviet forces allowed the Chinese Communists to remove the stockpiles of rifles and machine guns taken from the Japanese. Mao’s forces, as Chiang Kai-shek had feared, soon became a formidably equipped army.

  General Wedemeyer, under instructions from Washington to assist the Nationalists in restoring control, provided American transport aircraft to fly some of their units to cities in central and eastern China. Chiang was especially keen to re-establish his capital in Nanking. He knew that he was in a race with the Communists to seize as much territory as he could. But the Nationalists were their own worst enemies when it came to winning over the mass of the population. Their commanders were not interested in the surrounding countryside. They treated cities formerly occupied by the Japanese as conquered territory, looting whatever they wanted. And the Nationalist currency, which was reimposed, introduced uncontrol lable inflation.

  The Communists were far more intelligent. They knew that power lay in the countryside, for those who controlled food supplies in the coming civil war would eventually control everything. Their slightly better treatment of the peasantry enabled them to mobilize th
e masses in their cause, which was not difficult since support for the Nationalists had already dwindled away as the defeat of Japan approached. The young, especially students, flocked to join the Communist Party.

  Chinese Communists, while they continued to hunt down ‘enemies of the people’, had hidden the totalitarian nature of their intended regime most skilfully from foreigners who visited their capital of Yenan. The journalist Agnes Smedley, an admiring fellow traveller and a sometime Com-intern agent, became ‘deeply, irrevocably convinced’ that their principles ‘are the principles that will guide and save China, that will give the greatest of impulses to the liberation of all subjected Asiatic nations, and bring to life a new human society. This conviction in my own mind and heart gives me the greatest peace that I have ever known.’

  Smedley, Theodore White and other influential American writers could not accept for a moment that Mao might turn out to be a far worse tyrant than Chiang Kai-shek. The personality cult, the Great Leap Forward which killed more people than in the whole of the Second World War, the cruel madness of the Cultural Revolution and the seventy million victims of a regime that was in many ways worse than Stalinism proved totally beyond their imagination.

  Because of the US Navy’s supremacy at sea and in the air, large Japanese forces remained trapped in Canton, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Wuchang– Hankow, Peking, Tientsin and smaller towns of eastern China. The British had no intention of abandoning their claims on their colony and handing it over, as they had earlier indicated, to the Chinese Nationalists. The Americans had tried to put pressure on Churchill, but since they had promised Stalin southern Sakhalin, the Kurile Islands and parts of Manchuria, which had been Chinese territory, he saw no reason to compromise. But with American troops on mainland China, and the US Navy controlling the South China Sea, London knew that it would have to move quickly. A very unsympathetic Wedemeyer had refused permission for any SOE operations in the area. The Nationalists had infiltrated a group into Hong Kong to try to take it over when the Japanese withdrew, and the Communists’ East River Column was also active in the area. Without troops on the ground, the British knew that they would never get their colony back.