Flyboys

by James Bradley

  But to the West, that was exactly the problem. The imperialist club was white. Now Japan had turned the natural order upside down. Less than one month after its victory, Tokyo received a surprise message from Russia that “advised” Japan to forgo its territorial gains on the mainland and return the Liaodong Peninsula to China. The Russians stated further that Germany and France concurred with that “friendly counsel.”

  Japanese leaders could hardly believe it. They had played the imperialist game fair and square. Japan had picked a fight with an uncivilized country, proven its superiority on the battlefield, and received concessions that were its due. Tokyo appealed to the British and the Americans. Surely they would see the unfairness of the Russian demand. But the Anglo-Americans sided with their western counterparts and told Japan not to rock the boat.

  It was as if the Japanese had won soccer’s World Cup only to have it taken away by a biased referee because of the color of their skin. Japan mourned this stab in the back as the “Shame of Liaodong.” And when Russia cynically grabbed the Liaodong Peninsula for itself and none of the western powers complained, shame turned to fury.

  Proud Japan redoubled its efforts to become a civilized, rich country. Greater taxes were levied to build a stronger military. And to gain the world’s respect, Japan’s next target would be a western country. The patient rulers of the ancient land where the sun originated would bide their time. Japan would wait until the next century to flex its muscle. Then it would surprise a certain western navy found sleeping in a harbor on an infamous and bloody morning.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Spirit War

  True combat power is arms multiplied by fighting spirit. If one of them is infinitely strong, you will succeed.

  — Asahi Shimbun newspaper, quoted in Japan at War: An Oral History

  THE unsuspecting navy ships lay peaceably in their Pacific harbor that winter morning. A world away, the drowsy sailors’ commander in chief had been negotiating with Japanese diplomats. But then, with no advance warning, Japan launched the infamous sneak attack. Deadly torpedoes and bombs came out of nowhere, and soon the harbor was a flaming mess of sunken ships. Screaming sailors swam for their lives through fiery oil-blackened waters.

  President Roosevelt admired the sneak attack. “I was thoroughly well pleased with the Japanese victory,” the president wrote his son.

  Maybe Teddy would have felt differently if the sailors had been Americans. But it was the Russians who were taken by surprise that morning at Port Arthur on February 8, 1904.

  Just fifty years earlier, Commodore Perry had forced open a small, pre-industrial hermit island nation with few obvious resources. Now Japan mounted a sophisticated war against a stronger western military power. The Russo-Japanese War became the largest conflict the world had ever seen. The massive land battles with their hundreds of thousands of troops in single clashes dwarfed Gettysburg.

  Russia had enormous military resources and was clearly the stronger of the two combatants. But Russia had to move its land and sea forces halfway across the world over a single-track railroad and around the cape of Africa. And the Bear had never faced a stubborn opponent like this before. Japan fought furiously, sacrificing tens of thousands of dead just to capture a hill here, a castle there.

  The war’s astounding climax was the Battle of Tsushima on May 27, 1905, the largest sea clash in world history. Only two generations earlier, the buttons on the tunics of Perry’s soldiers had fascinated the Japanese. Now Japan pounded a shocked western enemy with Japanese-made shells as high-tech Japanese battleships blew them out of the water.

  Little Japan’s victory over Mother Russia at the Battle of Tsushima shocked people around the world, including the Japanese. It was as if a skinny underdog had whipped the brawny heavyweight champion. But as the jubilant shinmin celebrated the improbable victory, the leaders of Japan were conflicted. The Land of the Rising Sun was winning battles, but ultimately it could not win the war. Russia had endless resources and could just keep on coming. And Japan had stretched itself to the limit. By the spring of 1905, more than a hundred thousand Japanese had died. The Japanese army was wobbling, low on supplies, bleeding men, and unable to replenish troops as fast as Russia. The Japanese now lacked the ability to deliver the coup de grâce to the Russians.

  The controllers of the Japanese state were canny poker players who knew when it was time to fold their hand. One of them was good friends with President Theodore Roosevelt, who mediated the Portsmouth treaty of August 23, 1905. Russia had to cede the strategic Kwantung Peninsula, Port Arthur, and the southern part of Sakhalin Island to Japan.

  With the Portsmouth treaty, the land of the gods was officially on the world map as a civilized nation. In just two generations, Japan had moved from supplicant to victor. Internally, the Russo-Japanese War became to Japan what football is to the University of Notre Dame. Monuments rose throughout the country enshrining the country’s boundless pride. The veterans of the war were feted as national heroes. Japan had become the only nonwhite, non-Christian nation to beat a white western Christian country.

  Teddy Roosevelt stood in admiration. At Mukden in February and March, Japanese forces had killed 97,000 Russians in the biggest land battle in the history of modern warfare. At Tsushima, the Japanese navy had lost only 600 sailors, compared to the 6,000 Russian dead. “Neither Trafalgar nor the defeat of the Spanish Armada was as complete and overwhelming,” Roosevelt wrote about Tsushima. He considered Japan “the great civilizing force of the entire East.” He believed that “all the great masterful races have been fighting races,” and Japan had won the fight. “I was pro-Japanese before,” Roosevelt wrote, “but . . . I am far stronger pro-Japanese than ever.”

  To Teddy, Japan had the all-important “race capacity for self-rule” and could now take on the responsibility of a civilized race—to dominate its neighbors. The president told his Japanese friends that he expected them to take their place among the great nations, “with, of course, a paramount interest in what surrounds the Yellow Sea, just as the United States has a paramount interest in what surrounds the Caribbean.”

  In a White House meeting, Teddy told diplomat Baron Suyematsu that Japan should have a position with Korea “just like we have with Cuba.” Four months later, Teddy lunched with two other Japanese diplomats at the White House and reiterated that “Korea should be entirely within Japan’s sphere of interest.” To Roosevelt, Korea was weak, Japan’s Darwinian “natural prey.” In January 1905, he told his secretary of state that America would allow Japan to swallow up her frail neighbor. Sensing what was coming, the king of Korea looked to the United States for protection. Instead, Roosevelt ordered the withdrawal of the American legation from Seoul to pave the way for his Japanese friends. Within days, the other western powers also withdrew their ambassadors. “It is like the stampede of rats from a sinking ship,” observed an American diplomat. The Japanese army quickly deposed the king and took over Korea in 1905. Soon thousands of Korean nationalists swung from gallows.

  Japan marveled at its good fortune. In just two short years, it had defeated a Christian country and become a bona fide member of the imperialist club, with its very own enslaved country to dominate. Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War took on mythic proportions in Japanese minds as a key turning point in its history.

  But like the brilliant entrepreneur who leaves his business to an untalented son who proceeds to lose the family fortune, Meiji was succeeded by less capable men. Meiji’s son, the emperor Taisho, was physically frail and mentally unbalanced. He lingered ineffectually for ten years until his son, twenty-year-old Emperor Hirohito, became regent in his place. (Taisho died in 1926, and Hirohito became emperor at the age of twenty-four.) And no farsighted leaders emerged to guide the Japanese state. Meiji’s constitution spiritually intertwined the emperor and the military on a cloud high above civilian control. Now lesser military minds exploited this constitutional weakness and gained control over the government and the institu
tion of the emperor.

  In the early years of the twentieth century, Japan’s first-generation army underwent a shift to the second generation, which had its own ideas about leadership, strategy, and tactics. Japan’s new military leaders were not former samurai. They were commoners who had fought in the front lines of the Russo-Japanese War. These simple men were not strategists and valued the old-style tactics that had brought them glory on the front lines of premodern battles with China and Russia. They quickly forgot that Japan had actually not had the strength to press home victory against Russia. And they did not appreciate the strategic wisdom with which their predecessors had sought Roosevelt’s timely mediation.

  These new military leaders believed it was Yamato damashii (Japanese spirit) that had emboldened Japan to challenge the militarily superior Russian state in the first place and that had led to Japan’s victory. They convinced themselves that Japanese spirit was a new secret weapon that would protect Japan, like the kamikaze of centuries past. Yamato damashii became the mantra of these self-congratulatory “Spirit Warriors” who felt their blood-and-guts style embodied the historic greatness of Japan. Among the many things lost in this formula was the fact that in Russia, Japan had been fighting a brutish, nonmechanized foe. Bravery in hand-to-hand fighting had been important in that war. But combat was changing. While other countries were mechanizing their forces for future technological war, the Spirit Warriors stayed focused on their past, smug that Yamato damashii, the spirit of Japan, would always triumph.

  The Spirit Warriors rammed through a law that required the navy and army members of the prime minister’s cabinet to be active-duty officers. Unable to appoint independent retired officers, the prime minister was forced to choose only from among those controlled by the Spirit Warriors. Whenever the Spirit boys disapproved of a prime minister or his policies, they would simply withdraw the minister, refuse to recommend a new one, and the prime minister’s cabinet would collapse. Already above civil authority, the military thus consolidated its control of the civilian sector of the government as well. And because of Emperor Taisho’s mental illness, the Spirit Warriors had the opportunity to mold his son.

  Hirohito entered the world at the dawn of the new era of Japan’s military obsession. He was seventy days old when he was taken from his parents to be raised at the home of an elderly retired admiral to inculcate the proper military values in the emperor-to-be. The Russo-Japanese War was the signature event of Hirohito’s childhood. From his youngest years, he saw his grandfather, stately in his military uniform, basking in Japan’s new status as a first-rate power. Hirohito was surrounded by military men and socialized to believe that military might was key to Japan’s maintaining its place in the world. Like a young Ford heir growing up in Detroit who knows his future will be cars, Hirohito believed he and Japan’s military would play a special role in Japan’s continuing greatness.

  Japanese emperors traditionally grew up isolated and powerless in splendid surroundings in Kyoto, studying ancient Chinese and Japanese texts, composing poetry, and remaining distant from political and military affairs. But Hirohito’s education was strictly and narrowly militarized. This was not by choice but by Imperial decree. Emperor Meiji’s Imperial Household Regulation Number 17 mandated military training for all members of the Imperial family, even though Meiji himself had not received a military education. Hirohito was enrolled at the age of seven in a school whose principal, appointed by Meiji, was a heroic infantry general of the Russo-Japanese War. The young prince was even made a second lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army and an ensign in the Imperial Japanese Navy—at the age of eleven.

  Hirohito attended middle school with five other children chosen by the school’s principal—a former navy captain. The other students stood at their desks and bowed when the emperor-to-be entered the classroom. Liberal arts were given short shrift, with the emphasis on military subjects. His teachers included an army general, two navy rear admirals, and four active-duty lieutenant generals, all of whom owed their status to the victory over Russia. The gangly teenage Hirohito buckled down to a curriculum of “map exercises, military history; the principles of military leadership, tactics . . . strategy and chess.” Outdoor activities consisted of “training in horsemanship and military drills by junior army officers.” At noon, the young prince took his classmates’ bows and departed to eat separately, accompanied by a military aide. At home, the army “had a trench dug inside the crown prince’s compound so that Hirohito could practice firing machine guns.” In the evenings, military tutors “played war-strategy games with him.”

  Summers offered the Boy Soldier little relief. He toured the army and navy academies and General Staff Headquarters, and observed maneuvers at army camps and naval bases across the land. Constantly in the company of older military men who encouraged him to act in a military manner, Hirohito was totally isolated from normal Japanese life. He was not even allowed free access to newspapers until he was seventeen.

  “Hirohito was brought up to believe that the entire history of modern Japan centered on his grandfather and the small group of talented officials who had assisted him.” Questions regarding the wisdom of challenging a superior power, of what might have happened if Russia hadn’t been required to exhaust its fleet by sailing around the world before meeting the Japanese in battle, of possible negative outcomes if bloodied but unconquered Russia had not agreed to negotiations—these were left unasked. Hirohito’s instructors instead taught him what they were teaching a new generation of Spirit Warriors in the military academies: the overarching importance of Japanese spirit and the minutia of tactics at the expense of overall strategy. The future emperor’s navy teachers taught that battles were won on the high seas by hurling the entire battleship fleet into a “decisive battle” like Tsushima. Japanese army instructors, completely oblivious to the lessons of World War I, taught the future emperor that artillery, tanks, and aircraft were all secondary to brave bayonet charges by the infantry. The future commander in chief learned that “hand-to-hand combat rather than firepower determined victory or defeat in battle.”

  The future emperor was far from alone in having a martial curriculum. For decades, the army had seen to it that “physical culture, military training in the public schools and ‘military spirit education’ in general should be encouraged” to produce “good and faithful subjects,” willing, as Meiji’s “Imperial Rescript on Education” had put it, to “offer yourselves courageously to the State.” The military-influenced educational order soon morphed into a chain of mini boot camps that served as a feeder system for the army. In 1923, a great earthquake leveled much of Tokyo and Yokohama. The government, needing to divert funds for rebuilding, temporarily cut back on some army personnel. In a scheme to provide state employment for military personnel, the army insisted that a system of military training in all schools be established and thousands of active-duty army officers be placed in the schools to inculcate “right thinking.” “Every facet of the curriculum was permeated with emperor worship and militarism.” When first graders opened their Japanese Reader to “the first double-page spread, there was a picture of three toy soldiers with the caption ‘Advance! Advance! Soldiers move forward!’”

  As historian Saburo Ienaga has noted:

  War and patriotism were to be stressed in every subject. In ethics the teachers were to discuss “the meaning of the imperial edict declaring war, the imperial edict on the course of the war, the exploits of valiant Japan and our valiant military men, the special behavior expected of children during the war, and the duty of military service.” Japanese language classes were to study “the imperial edicts related to the war, articles about the war situation, letters to and from soldiers at the front.” Teachers were to show war-related pictures provided by the government to spark discussion. Arithmetic classes were to do “calculations about military matters.” The topics for science were “general information about searchlights, wireless communication, land mines and torpedoes, s
ubmarines, military dirigibles, Shimose explosives, military carrier pigeons, heavy cannon, mortars, machine guns, the Arisaka cannon, and military sanitation.” Physical education would include “character training and war games.” Music classes were to reverberate with war songs.

  “The emperor was regarded as a god, and therefore we had to obey whatever the emperor said,” remembered Masayo Enomoto, a typical 1930s farm-boy student. “We had been taught such things since we were very young. I did believe that he was a god. I was prepared to serve the emperor in any way possible.”

  The military-minded teachers made it clear to their students what kind of future service they would render to the emperor. One child burst out crying while dissecting frogs at a school in Yamagata prefecture. He got two hard knocks on the side of his head as his teacher shouted, “Why are you crying about one lousy frog? When you grow up you’ll have to kill a hundred, two hundred Chinks.”

  The boot camp atmosphere permeated young students’ days. “When you were called into the teachers’ room,” Hideo Sato recalled, “you had to announce, ‘Sixth-grade pupil, third class Sato Hideo has business for Teacher Yamada. May I enter?’ The teacher would respond, ‘Enter!’ It was just like in the army. If we encountered our teacher on our way to school, or on our way home, we had to stand at attention and salute.” The army officer-custodians of young Japanese minds had long endured rough corporal punishment in their barracks, and they transplanted the brutal treatment to the schools. “If you averted your face, they declared that you were rebelling against the teachers,” Sato remembered. “You got an extra two blows, rather than the just the one you expected. You simply bore up under it, your teeth clenched.”