All Hell Let Loose

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All Hell Let Loose Page 28

by Hastings, Max


  For many months, Winston Churchill had been haunted by apprehension that Japan might attack only the European empires in Asia, so that Britain would confront a new enemy without gaining the US as an ally. Hitler meanwhile contemplated a mirror image of this spectre, fearing that America might enter the war against Germany, while Japan stayed neutral. He had always expected to fight Roosevelt’s people once he had completed the destruction of Russia. In December 1941 he considered it a matter of course to follow Japan’s lead, and entertained extravagant hopes that Hirohito’s fleet would crush the US Navy. Four days after Pearl Harbor, he made the folly of the strike comprehensive by declaring war on the United States, relieving Roosevelt from a serious uncertainty about whether Congress would agree to fight Germany. John Steinbeck wrote to a friend: ‘The attack, whatever it may have gained from a tactical point of view, was a failure in that it solidified the country. But we’ll lose lots of ships for a while.’

  In the course of 1941, the Ladies’ Home Journal had published a fascinating series of domestic profiles of Americans of all social classes, under the heading ‘How America Lives’. Until December, the threat of war scarcely impinged on the existences of those depicted. Some struggled financially, and a few acknowledged poverty, but most asserted a real satisfaction with their lot which explains their dismay, following Pearl Harbor, at beholding familiar patterns broken, dreams confounded, families sundered. LHJ editor Mary Carson Cookman wrote a postscript, reflecting on the profiles published earlier in the year, and the new circumstances of Americans: ‘War is changing the condition of life everywhere. But … the people of the United States are good people; they are almost surprisingly modest in their demands upon life. What they have is precious to them … What they hope to achieve, they are willing to work for – they don’t want or expect it to be given them … What we have now will do. But it ought to be better, it must be better, and it will be better.’

  If this was a trite assertion of the American Dream as the nation joined hostilities, it seems nonetheless to reflect its dominant mood. The struggle would cost the United States less than any other combatant – indeed, it generated an economic boom which enabled Americans to emerge from the war much richer than they started it. But many suffered a lasting sense of unfairness, that the wickedness of others had invaded and ravaged their decent lives. Like hundreds of millions of Europeans before them, they began to discover the sorrow of seeing their nearest and dearest leave home to face mortal risk. Mrs Elizabeth Schlesinger wrote about the departure of her son Tom for the army: ‘I knew after Pearl Harbor that his going was inevitable. I won’t let myself think personally about it. I am only one of millions of mothers who love their sons and see them go off to war and my feelings are universal and not mine alone. I have accepted what I must face and live with for many future months and perhaps years. Tom said, “Why, I thought you would be much more upset by my going.” Little does he know the depths of what it means to me and the countless anxieties that clamor for my thoughts.’

  In the absence of Pearl Harbor, it remains highly speculative when, if ever, the United States would have fought. In John Morton Blum’s words, ‘The war was neither a threat nor a crusade. It seemed, as Fortune put it, “only a painful necessity” … Within the United States, Americans never saw the enemy. The nation did not share or want to share in the disasters that visited Europe and Asia.’ For all the exuberant declarations of patriotism that followed the ‘Day of Infamy’, many Americans remained resentful about the need to accept even a modest share of the privations thrust upon most of the world’s peoples. Early in 1942, Arthur Schlesinger visited the mid-west on a tour of army bases for the Office of War Information: ‘We arrived in the midst of the whining about gas rationing, and it was pretty depressing. The anti-administration feeling is strong and open.’

  Fortunately for the Allied cause, however, the leadership of the United States showed itself in this supreme crisis both strong and wise. At Roosevelt’s Washington summit with Churchill at the end of December 1941, the US confirmed its provisional commitment, made during earlier staff talks, to prioritise war with Germany. Since 1939, American military and naval preparations – notably Plan Orange, eventually translated into Rainbow 5 – had assumed the likelihood of a two-front struggle. The army correctly judged that this could not be won ‘primarily by naval action’; that the creation and deployment overseas of large land forces would be indispensable. Admiral Harold Stark wrote to the secretary of the navy on 12 November 1940: ‘Alone, the British Empire lacks the manpower and the material means to master Germany. Assistance by powerful allies is necessary both with respect to men and with respect to munitions and supplies.’ Stark anticipated the likelihood that, if the Japanese struck, the British would lose Malaya. He proposed a blockade of Japan, to which its absolute dependence on imports rendered it exceptionally vulnerable; then envisaged fighting a limited war in the east, while sending large land and air forces to Europe.

  The US chiefs of staff recognised that Germany represented by far the more dangerous menace. The Japanese, for all their impressive front-line military and naval capability, could not threaten the American or British homelands. Of the white Anglo-Saxon nations, only Australia lay within plausible reach of Tokyo’s forces, which prompted intense bitterness among Australian politicians about Britain’s unwillingness to dispatch substantial forces to its defence. In the event, while the broad principles established by Stark were sustained, the dominance of Russia in defeating the Wehrmacht – wholly unanticipated in December 1941 – somewhat altered the balance of America’s wartime commitments. While the army the United States eventually dispatched to Europe was large, it was nothing like as powerful as would have been necessary had the Western Allies been obliged to fulfil the principal role in defeating Germany. As a corollary of this, once Russia’s survival and fighting power became plain in 1943, the American chiefs of staff felt able to divert significant strength to the Pacific sooner than expected. Popular sentiment, so much more hostile to Japan than to Germany, made this politically expedient as well as strategically acceptable.

  Geoffrey Perrett has observed that the United States was not ready for Pearl Harbor, but was ready for war. This was true only insofar as large naval building was in progress: in the week following the attack, American yards launched thirteen new warships and nine merchantmen, harbingers of a vast armada that was already on the stocks, and would be launched during the next two years. The nation had under construction fifteen battleships, eleven carriers, fifty-four cruisers, 193 destroyers and seventy-three submarines. Nonetheless, it was plain to the governments of Britain and America, if not to their peoples, that a long delay was in prospect before Western land forces could engage Germany on the Continent. For years to come, Russia must bear the chief burden of fighting the Wehrmacht. Even if, as the US chiefs of staff wished, the Western Allies launched an early diversionary landing in France, their armies would remain relatively small until 1944.

  Roosevelt and Churchill consequently accepted, as some of their commanders did not, the necessity to undertake secondary operations, plausible only in the Mediterranean theatre, to maintain a sense of momentum in the minds of their peoples. The bomber offensive against Germany would grow as fast as the necessary aircraft could be built. But as long as the Eastern Front remained the decisive ground theatre, aid to Russia was a priority. Even if quantities of material available for shipment remained relatively small until 1943, both Washington and London acknowledged the importance of making every possible gesture to deter Stalin from negotiating a separate peace. Anglo-American fears that the Russians would be beaten, or at least driven to parley with Hitler, remained a constant spectre in Alliance relations until the end of 1942.

  Meanwhile in the east, Japan held the initiative, and deployed formidable forces on land, at sea and in the air. ‘We Japanese,’ asserted the field manual distributed to all Hirohito’s soldiers as they embarked for their assault on the Western empires, ‘hei
rs to 2,600 years of a glorious past, have now, in response to the trust placed in us by His Majesty the Commander-in-Chief, risen in the cause of the peoples of Asia, and embarked upon a noble and solemn undertaking which will change the course of world history … The Task of the Shwa Restoration, which is to realise his Imperial Majesty’s desire for peace in the Far East, and to set Asia free, rests squarely on our shoulders.’ Having devastated the battleships of the US Pacific Fleet, the Japanese now fulfilled their longstanding ambition to seize the American dependency of the Philippines, together with the vast natural resources of the Dutch East Indies – modern Indonesia – British Hong Kong, Malaya and Burma. Within the space of five months, against feeble resistance, they created an empire. Even though this would prove the most short-lived in history, for a season Japan gained dominance over vast expanses of the Asian landmass and Pacific seascape.

  Japan’s Season of Triumph

  1 ‘I SUPPOSE YOU’LL SHOVE THE LITTLE MEN OFF’

  Many Japanese welcomed the war, which they believed offered their country its only honourable escape from beleaguerment. Novelist Dazai Osamu, for instance, was ‘itching to beat the bestial, insensitive Americans to a pulp’. But it would be mistaken to imagine Osamu’s society as a monolith. Lt. Gen. Kuribayashi Tadimichi, who had spent two years in the United States, wrote to his wife asserting his strong opposition to challenging so mighty a foe on the battlefield: ‘Its industrial potential is huge, and its people are energetic and versatile. One must never underestimate the Americans’ fighting ability.’ Eighteen-year-old Sasaki Hachiro mused to his diary: ‘How many really die “tragic deaths” in this war? I am sure there are more comical deaths under the disguise of tragic deaths … Comical deaths involve no joy of life, but are filled with agony without any meaning or value.’ Hachiro at an early stage resigned himself to his own extinction, and volunteered as a pilot with an almost explicit determination to satisfy fate, as indeed he did – shikata ga nai. His disdain for Japan’s militarists never faded: he persuaded his younger brother to become a science student with immunity from conscription, so that he, at least, might survive.

  Hachiro’s contemporary Hayashi Tadao was another fatalist, strongly opposed to the war. His diary repeatedly expressed disgust towards his own country. He asked himself: ‘Japan, why don’t I love and respect you? … I feel that I have to accept the fate of my generation to fight in the war and die … We have to go to the battlefield without being able to express our opinions, criticise and argue pros and cons of issues … it is a great tragedy.’ Japan’s 1941–42 successes against feeble Western resistance caused both sides to overrate the power of Hirohito’s nation. Just as Germany was not strong enough to defeat the Soviet Union, Japan was too weak to sustain its Asian conquests unless the West chose to acquiesce in early defeats. But this, like so much else, is more readily apparent today than it was seventy years ago, in the midst of Japanese triumphs.

  Until December 1941, the sluggish, humid, pampered rhythm of colonial life in Asia was scarcely interrupted by events in Europe. In America’s Philippines dependency, army nurse Lt. Earlyn Black was one of thousands of expatriates who revelled in a life of comfort and elegance, cushioned by submissive servants: ‘Each evening we dressed for dinner in long dresses, the men in tuxedos, dinner jackets with cummerbunds. It was very formal-type living. Even to go to the movies, we’d put on a long dress.’ Another nurse, twenty-five-year-old Lt. Hattie Brantly from Jefferson, Texas, found the notion of war with Japan inconceivable: ‘It was a joke and our Chief Nurse would say in the mess, “Have another biscuit, girls. You’re going to need this when the Japs get us” … We just sort of rocked along and were happy, and didn’t give it too much thought.’

  Likewise in British Singapore, a Czech engineer, Val Kabouky, described the white residents as ‘modern Pompeians’. Even after more than two years of war, 31,000 Europeans among a population of five million Malays and Chinese kept up a parody of imperial privilege. New Western arrivals wishing to learn as much as was necessary of the local language could purchase a phrasebook entitled Malay for Mems – short for ‘Memsahibs’. It was couched in the language of command: ‘Put up the tennis net,’ ‘You must follow the Mem,’ ‘Shoot that man.’ In 1941 arriving troops, especially Australians, were disgusted to find themselves excluded from the colonists’ social bastions. Indians were not permitted to ride in the same rail carriages as the British, nor to enter their clubs. There was a mutiny in the Hyderabad Regiment when an Indian officer was ordered home for having sexual relations with a white woman; he was reinstated and the affair hushed up, but bitterness persisted. Lady Diana, wife of British minister Duff Cooper, wrote with aristocratic scorn for the pretensions of the British expatriates, ‘most frail, tarty and peasant-pompous’. Her own enthusiasm for Singapore’s tourist charms struck a bizarre note as catastrophe unfolded further north: ‘There is the working life of the Chinks going on before your eyes down every street – coffin-making, lantern-painting, and a tremendous lot of shaving. I never tire of strolling and savouring.’

  In Malaya, Britain’s military commanders and rulers alike reflected paucity of talent. The Empire seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of unwarlike warrior chieftains. Air Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, Commander-in-Chief Far East until the end of 1941, was a sixty-three-year-old former governor of Kenya. Lt. Gen. Arthur Percival, the army commander, was a long-serving staff officer whose meagre operational experience had been gained against the Sinn Féin insurgency in Ireland. Sir Shenton Thomas, the colony’s governor, said to the generals as the Japanese began to land in the north early on 8 December: ‘I suppose you’ll shove the little men off.’ His contempt might have been enhanced by reading the orders issued to Japan’s soldiers committed to the assault on Malaya, which included homely injunctions to avoid constipation and heartburn, and to employ deep-breathing exercises to escape sea-sickness: ‘Remember that in the dark and steaming lowest decks of the ship, with no murmur of complaint of their treatment, the Army horses are suffering patiently.’ Men were urged: ‘When you encounter the enemy after landing, regard yourself as an avenger come at last face to face with your father’s murderer.’

  Although British and imperial troops were deployed in northern Malaya in expectation of a Japanese amphibious assault from Siam, the onset of war inflicted as devastating a cultural shock as it did upon Pearl Harbor. Each society around the world which found itself overtaken by the contagion of violence responded with initial disbelief, even if logic had been proclaiming its inevitability from the rooftops. When the first Japanese bombs fell on Singapore in the early hours of 8 December, Australian engine-room artificer Bill Reeve was asleep in his bunk in the harbour aboard the destroyer Vendetta, fresh from months of heavy action in the Mediterranean. On hearing explosions, Reeve thought he was having a bad dream of battles past: ‘I said to myself, “You silly bastard, roll over.”’ A heavy concussion close at hand caused him to acknowledge reality, yet even as successive sticks of bombs fell, the city’s street lights blazed on.

  Churchill had made a brutal and probably inescapable decision to concentrate the best of the Empire’s forces in the Middle East. The air defence of Malaya mustered just 145 aircraft, of which sixty-six were Buffaloes, fifty-seven Blenheims and twenty-two Hudsons. The obsolescence of most of these aircraft was less significant than the overwhelming superiority of Japanese pilots in experience and proficiency to those of the Allies. When the Japanese began to land at Kota Baharu, the defenders’ response was pitifully limp. It was some hours before local RAF commanders bestirred themselves to launch strikes against the invasion fleet. When they did so, British and Australian planes, along with the shoreline defenders, inflicted over a thousand casualties. Not all the invading troops showed themselves heroes: a Japanese officer described how ‘one section of non-commissioned officers of the Independent Engineers had … become panic-stricken at the enemy’s bombing. Without orders from the troop leader, they boarded the large motor b
oats … and retreated to the open sea off Saigon.’

  The Pacific Theatre

  Yet by the end of the first day, British air strength in northern Malaya had been halved, to around fifty serviceable planes. Many senior officers and ground crews failed to act effectively: the pilots of a section of Buffalo fighters which took off to intercept attacking Japanese were disgusted to discover that armourers had failed to load their guns. At Kuantan airfield, hundreds of ground personnel fled in panic. ‘How is this possible? They are all sahibs,’ a bemused Indian driver of the Royal Garwhal Rifles asked his officer as the two contemplated a chaos of equipment, personal baggage, tennis rackets and debris strewn around airfield buildings. The young lieutenant snapped back crossly: ‘They are not sahibs, they’re Australians.’ But British soldiers and airmen were also fleeing. Some Indian units collapsed in panic; the British CO of a Sikh battalion was believed to have been shot by his own men before they bolted. ‘We now understood the capacity of the enemy,’ wrote a Japanese officer contemptuously. ‘The only things we had to fear were the quantity of munitions he had and the thoroughness of his demolitions.’

  The first of countless atrocities took place. Three British airmen who crash-landed in Siam were arrested by its gendarmerie, who handed them over to the Japanese. Tokyo’s local vice-consul told a Siamese judge that they were ‘guilty of taking Japanese lives and destroying Japanese property’, and the men were beheaded on a nearby beach. Historically, and especially in the 1905 Russo–Japanese war, the Japanese army’s conduct towards defeated enemies had been characterised by mercy. The ruling Tokyo ‘control group’ changed all that, instilling a culture of ruthlessness indistinguishable from barbarism into its armed forces; in 1934 the Ministry of War published a pamphlet which ennobled conflict as ‘the father of creation and mother of culture. Rivalry for supremacy does for the state what struggle against adversity does for the individual.’ The Allies now began to discover the significance of this merciless vision for those who fell into enemy hands.

 

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