The leaders of the Grand Alliance depicted the war as a struggle for freedom against oppression, good against evil. In the twenty-first century, few informed people even in former colonial possessions doubt the merit of the Allied cause, the advantage that accrued to mankind from defeat of the Axis. But it seems essential to recognise that in many societies contemporary loyalties were confused and equivocal. Millions of people around the world who had no love for the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini or Hirohito felt little more enthusiasm for Allied powers whose vision of liberty vanished, it seemed to their colonial subjects, at their own front doors.
Asian Fronts
1 CHINA
As early as 1936, American correspondent Edgar Snow, a passionate admirer and friend of Mao Zhedong, wrote: ‘In her great effort to master the markets and inland wealth of China, Japan is destined to break her imperial neck. This catastrophe will occur not because of automatic economic collapse in Japan. It will come because the conditions of suzerainty which Japan must impose on China will prove humanly intolerable and will shortly provoke an effort of resistance that will astound the world.’ Snow was right about the outcome of Japanese imperialism, though not about the military effectiveness of Chinese resistance. Wartime Allied strategy in the Far East was powerfully influenced by America’s desire to make China not only a major belligerent, but a great power. Enormous resources were lavished upon flying supplies from India to Americans, notably airmen, supporting the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek ‘over the Hump’ of the Himalayas, after Japan’s conquest of Burma severed the land link in 1942, and the US built airfields in China from which to deploy its bombers.
All these efforts proved vain. China remained a chaotic, impoverished, deeply divided society. Chiang boasted an enormous paper army, but his regime and commanders were too corrupt and incompetent, his soldiers too scantily equipped and motivated, to make significant headway against the Japanese. Logistical and operational difficulties crippled USAAF missions out of China. In the north, in Yennan province, Mao Zhedong’s communists held sway, and professed antagonism to the Japanese. But Mao’s strategy was dominated by the desire to build his strength for a post-war showdown with Chiang. Between 1937 and 1942, both Nationalists and communists inflicted substantial casualties on the invaders – 181,647 dead. But thereafter they acknowledged their inability to challenge them in headlong confrontations which drained their thread-bare resources to little purpose. Chinese historian Zhijia Shen has written in a study of Shandong province: ‘Local people were much more influenced by pragmatic calculation than by the idea of nationalism … When national and local interests clashed, they did not hesitate to compromise national interests.’
Though Mao deluded some Americans into supposing that his guerrillas were making war effectively, for much of the conflict he maintained a tacit truce with the Japanese, and indeed became secret partners with them in the opium trade. While the Nationalists recorded 3.2 million military casualties during the Japanese occupation, the communists acknowledged only 580,000. Latterly, Chiang devoted as much military energy to holding his ground against Mao as to fighting the Japanese. He was unembarrassed by his own equivocations, saying: ‘The Japanese are a disease of the skin; the communists are a disease of the heart.’
Nonetheless, the occupation of half of China constituted a massive drain upon Tokyo’s resources, and cost Japan 202,958 dead between 1941 and 1945, compared with 208,000 men killed fighting the British, and 485,717 army and 414,879 naval personnel lost in combat with the United States. The country was vast: even if organised opposition was weak, large forces were indispensable to make good Tokyo’s claims on territory, and to control a hostile and often starving population. In the north, Japan’s Kwantung Army held Manchuria, the puppet state of Manchukuo; its North China Area Army was based in Beijing; the headquarters of the Central China Expeditionary Forces was in Shanghai. All estimates are unreliable, but it seems reasonable to accept the figure of fifteen million Chinese wartime dead as a direct consequence of Japanese military action, starvation or plagues, some of these deliberately fostered by biological warfare specialists of the Japanese army’s Unit 731.
The Japanese were the only large-scale wartime users of biological weapons. Unit 731 in Manchuria operated under the supremely cynical cover name of the Kwantung Army Epidemic Protection and Water Supply Unit. Thousands of captive Chinese were murdered in the course of tests at 731’s base near Harbin, many being subjected to vivisection without benefit of anaesthetics. Some victims were tied to stakes before anthrax bombs were detonated around them. Women were laboratory-infected with syphilis; local civilians were abducted and injected with fatal viruses. In the course of Japan’s war in China, cholera, dysentery, plague and typhus germs were broadcast, most often from the air, sometimes with porcelain bombs used to deliver plague fleas. An unsuccessful attempt was made to employ such means against American forces on Saipan, but the ship carrying the putative insect warriors was sunk en route.
That the Japanese attempted to kill millions of people with biological weapons is undisputed; it is less certain, however, how successful were their efforts. Vast numbers of Chinese died in epidemics between 1936 and 1945, and modern China attributes most of these losses to Japanese action. In a broad sense this is just, since privation and starvation were consequences of Japanese aggression. But it remains unproven that Unit 731’s operations were directly responsible. For instance, over 200,000 people died during the 1942 cholera epidemic in Yunnan. The Japanese released cholera bacteria in the province, but many such epidemics took place even where they did not do so. It was difficult, with available technology, to spread disease on demand with air-dropped biological weapons. Yet even if Japan’s genocidal accomplishments fell short of their sponsors’ hopes, the nation’s moral responsibility is manifest.
Between 1942 and 1944 big battlefield encounters in China were rare, but Japanese forces conducted frequent punitive expeditions to suppress dissent or gather food. One of the most ferocious of these took place in May 1942, designated by the Japanese high command as an act of vengeance for the USAAF Doolittle raid on Tokyo. More than 100,000 troops were dispatched into Chekiang and Kiangsi provinces, with support from the biological warfare unit. By September, when their mission was deemed fulfilled and the columns withdrew, a quarter of a million people had been killed. Throughout the war, Chiang’s capital of Chonqing was routinely bombed by Japanese aircraft, and raids inflicted heavy civilian casualties in several other cities.
The files of the medical branch of the Tokyo War Ministry show that in September 1942, enslaved ‘comfort women’ were servicing Japanese soldiers at a hundred stations in north China, 140 in central China, forty in the south, a hundred in South-East Asia, ten in the south-west Pacific and ten on south Sakhalin. Women were deployed in proportions of one to every forty soldiers. Around 100,000 were centrally conscripted, in addition to many others recruited locally; Hirohito’s warriors were issued with condoms branded ‘Assault No. 1’, though many disdained to use them. Chinese peasants called their Japanese occupiers ‘the YaKe’, meaning dumb, because few Japanese condescended to learn or speak Chinese. ‘The YaKe treatment’ described the piercing of a man’s or woman’s legs with a sharpened bamboo, the customary punishment for supposed Chinese disobedience.
One of its victims was a nineteen-year-old girl Lin Yajin, who like many of her contemporaries bore YaKe scars for the rest of her life. She was a peasant’s daughter in Hainan province, one of six children, when she was seized by Japanese soldiers in October 1943. They took her to their base camp and questioned her perfunctorily about local guerrilla activity. She sobbed in terror through her first night of captivity; during the second, four men filed into the hut where she was held.
One of them was an interpreter who told me the others were officers and then left. All three raped me. As I was a virgin, it felt very painful so I screamed very loudly. When they heard me cry they said nothing, just continued to fuck me like a
nimals. For ten days, every evening three, four or five men did the same. Usually, while one of them raped me the others watched and laughed.
I tried to escape but it was very difficult. Even when you went to the lavatory, you were guarded by a soldier – a Bengali who didn’t rape us. Then I was moved to another village, called Qingxun, only one and a half kilometres from my home. Here also several soldiers came every day. Even when I had my period they still wanted to fuck me. After one month I was sick. My face was yellow and my whole body was dropsical. When the Japanese soldiers realised what had happened – I had caught a venereal disease – in the end they let me go home. I found my father was also seriously ill, and a month later he died – my family was so poor we had no money for a doctor. My mother treated me with herbs from the fields. It took quite a long time for my sickness to be cured. By then it was the summer of 1944. Four other girls were taken to the Japanese camp with me, and in 1946 I learned that all of them had died of venereal disease. Later, when the villagers learned that I’d been raped by Japanese, they too mocked and beat me. I have been alone ever since.
Deng Yumin, from Xiangshui in Baoting county, suffered a similar fate. Like many of her people, members of the Miao ethnic minority, she was conscripted for forced labour in 1940, living in a work camp first planting tobacco, then road-building. One day, the overseer told her she had been chosen for special work. She was taken to meet a Japanese officer, who she thought was about forty years old. Through an interpreter,
he told me I was a pretty girl, and he wanted me to be his friend. I didn’t have a choice, so I nodded to tell him I agreed. A few days after, late in the evening the interpreter took me to meet that officer again, and left me alone with him. His name was Songmu. He immediately took me in his arms, then groped my body. I struggled instinctively, but there was nothing I could do. He did what he liked. When I went back where I worked, I was very ashamed to tell the other girls what had happened. After that he raped me every day. I was a virgin, fourteen years old. I hadn’t started my periods. I didn’t feel very much. It just felt very painful.
It was like that for more than two months. One day the interpreter took me to Songmu’s place. He was not there. I saw another two officers whom I had never met. I wanted to leave and call Mr Songmu but one of the officers stopped me and closed the door. They said they wanted to marry me. When I resisted, they slapped my face – one was about twenty years old, the other about fifty. Both of them raped me that day. I told Mr Songmu what happened. He just grinned and said it was a little thing. I was so angry. I had a good feeling about him until then, but from that day I started to hate him very much. A week later the interpreter asked me again to see Mr Songmu, but I said I didn’t want to see him any more. He said that if I refused, the soldiers would kill me and my family and all the villagers. So I had to see Mr Songmu again, and after that not only he but also other officers raped me very often. Once three officers came, and one held my arms and another my legs while the third raped me, and they all laughed wildly. It was like that until the end of the war.
If Japanese conduct in victory had been barbaric, amid defeats it became progressively more murderous. The principal victims of their Asian rampages were not the British, Australians or Americans, whose pride and prestige were more vulnerable than their citizens, but the native inhabitants of the societies over which Tokyo assumed hegemony, China foremost among them. ‘Terrible things were done by Japan in China,’ says modern Japanese writer Kazutoshi Hando, but many of his compatriots still decline to acknowledge this.
Not only Japanese nationalists, but also some modern Western historians, argue that the United States provoked Japan into war in 1941. They suggest that conflict between the two nations was avoidable, and propound a theory of moral equivalence, whereby Japanese wartime conduct was no worse than that of the Allies. But the Japanese waged an expansionist war in China, massacring countless civilians, for years before President Roosevelt imposed economic sanctions. A contemporary Japanese nationalist later sought to justify his nation’s policies by asserting: ‘America and Britain had been colonising China for many years. China was a backward nation … we felt Japan should go there and use Japanese technology and leadership to make China a better country.’ The record shows that Japanese conduct in China was both wholly self-interested and shamelessly barbaric. But sufficient Japanese remained convinced of their nation’s ‘civilising mission’ and of the legitimacy of their claims upon an overseas empire to render their government implacably opposed to withdrawal from China, even when Japan began to lose the war and to ponder negotiating positions. If European imperialism was indisputably exploitative, the Japanese claimed rights to pillage Asian societies on a scale and in a fashion no colonial regime had matched.
American enthusiasm for the Nationalist regime, and for China’s potential as an ally, persisted until 1944, when the Japanese launched their last major conventional offensive of the war, Operation Ichigo. This was designed to eliminate American bomber airfields in China, and open an overland route to Indochina. It conclusively exposed the impotence of Chiang Kai-shek’s army, whose formations melted away in its path. Vast new areas of central and southern China were overrun – almost bloodlessly for the Japanese, though emphatically not for the Chinese. Once more, they died in their thousands and hundreds of thousands, as the warring armies swept over them. It is remarkable that Japan embarked on Ichigo at a moment in the war when such an ambitious operation had become strategically futile; its only significant achievement, beyond slaughter, was to disabuse Washington of its illusions about China. By 1945 the US chiefs of staff had abandoned notions of seizing Taiwan and using it as a stepping-stone to create a perimeter on the mainland. They recognised that the country was incapable of participating effectively in the war. China was merely a great victim, second only to Russia in the scale of its sufferings and losses, while denied the consolation of any redemptive military achievement.
2 JUNGLE-BASHING AND ISLAND-HOPPING
At the January 1943 Casablanca summit conference, the Western Allied leaderships reasserted the priority of defeating Germany, but agreed to devote sufficient resources to the war against Japan to maintain the initiative – the Americans committed themselves to a target figure of 30 per cent of their war effort. This compromised the doctrine of Germany First more than the chiefs of staff cared to admit, but reflected the imperative created by American domestic opinion, so much more strongly committed to Japan’s defeat than to that of Germany. US commanders thereafter decided that resource limitations ruled out an early assault on Rabaul. The USAAF was unwilling even to allocate long-range bombers to conduct a major air offensive against Japan’s key base in the south-west Pacific before 1944. The chiefs of staff thus agreed that in 1943 Allied forces would pursue modest objectives: advancing up the Solomons to Bougainville, while MacArthur’s forces addressed the north coast of New Guinea. The latter was an exclusively US Army and Australian operation, though dependent on naval support.
The US Navy and Marine Corps were unfailingly sceptical about southwest Pacific operations, directed towards ultimate recapture of the Philippines. They saw them as a sop to MacArthur’s ego rather than a path to victory. The admirals preferred instead to exploit naval and air power to thrust across the central Pacific through the Marshall, Caroline and Mariana islands, the shortest route to Japan. It was a measure of the United States’s vast wealth that, instead of making a choice between these strategies, a decision was taken to undertake both simultaneously. Thereafter, Nimitz and MacArthur conducted parallel but separate and implicitly competitive campaigns.
The British, meanwhile, addressed themselves once more to Burma. Their retreat had ended in May 1942. In December that year, after the usual seasonal paralysis imposed by the monsoon, Wavell made a first tentative attempt to strike back, committing an Indian division against the port of Akyab, in the Arakan region of Burma facing the Bay of Bengal. Two attempted assaults failed, as did another thrust towards Donba
ik in March 1943. The British field commander, Lt. Gen. Noel Irwin, held a reckless press conference at which he sought to explain Allied setbacks by asserting that ‘in Japan the infantryman is the corps d’élite’, while the British ‘put our worst men into the infantry’. It would take years, he said, to train Indian troops to the necessary standard to beat the Japanese. Allied censors smothered publication of his remarks, but they reflected the defeatism, incompetence and incoherence prevailing among British commanders in the East. Churchill minuted the chiefs of staff: ‘I am far from satisfied with the way the Indian campaign is being conducted. The fatal lassitude of the Orient steals over all these commanders.’
Although four million Indian soldiers eventually bore arms for the Allies and substantial British resources were deployed in the subcontinent, the generals were slow to renew effective operations. Churchill fumed about the large forces deployed in north-east India, achieving wretchedly little; he once described the Indian Army as ‘a gigantic system of outdoor relief’ because of the small number of fighting divisions it provided. Some 450,000 mainly Indian troops, along with some British units, confronted 300,000 Japanese holding Burma, but little useful was done to prepare this army for battle. Lt. Dominic Neill of the Gurkhas – Britain’s beloved Nepalese mercenaries – who arrived in India in 1943, said: ‘Neither I nor my Gurkha soldiers received any tactical training whatsoever until we came face to face with the Japanese.’
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