With the emperor, the government, and the civilian populace now under firm control, the Spirit Warriors began to beat the war drums. Soon the cry of Hakko Ichiu—“eight corners of the world under one roof”—became the call for further expansion beyond Japan’s shores. An editorial in a Yokohama newspaper proclaimed: “Today’s Japan should indeed not confine itself to its own small sphere. Neither should it remain in its position in the Orient or continue to occupy the place it holds in the world. This is an age in which Japan bears a global mission. It has become the center, the principal, and the commander and is advancing with the times to lead the entire world.”
One Japanese army general wrote, “A tree must have roots, so too must a nation. Britain had such roots. They stretched into Africa, India, Australia, and Canada, giving strength and wealth and power to the mother country. The United States had such roots—nurtured in her own vast territory and in the rich soil of Central and South America. Unless Japan was permitted to extend her roots to the Asian continent and thus escape her ‘potted-plant’ existence, she would shrivel up and die.”
Military service fell upon the most impoverished farm boys. First-born sons, persons of property, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and others received a deferment. Draftees were referred to by their officers as “issen gorin.” Issen gorin meant “one yen, five rin,” the cost of mailing a draft-notice postcard—less than a penny.
When the issen gorin arrived at boot camp, they entered a brutal gulag of horrors. Far from a meritocracy, the Japanese army more closely represented a feudal slave system, with two distinct strata. On top were the officers, who demanded to be treated like privileged imperial officials. “The officer class in general had the status and authority of feudal lords. The privates, especially the new recruits, were at the miserable bottom of the pyramid. They had no human rights. They were non-persons.”
The officers who ran the gulag styled themselves as samurai in the great Japanese tradition. But these Spirit Warriors were not samurai. They were products of a blinkered training regimen “narrowly focused on military subjects. The result was an officer corps of rigid mentality and limited experience.” They assumed the mantle of samurai past only to corrupt Japan’s proud Bushido (Way of the Warrior) tradition.
Samurai values represented the best in a man. If a samurai did not live up to his code of honor and brought shame upon himself, his family, or his lord, he would kill himself to atone for his failure. This ceremonial killing was called seppuku, known in the West as hara-kiri. Samurai who lived by such a strict code of honor were seen as trustworthy, selfless, and fearless in battle. But samurai were a very small slice of the general population and the number that actually committed seppuku was tinier still.
Samurai were shrewd strategists and tacticians. Samurai fought to win, to protect their lives and the lives of their compatriots. There was no concept that death in battle was a sound strategy. Mass suicide was never part of Bushido. A true samurai would agree with U.S. Army general George Patton that “no one ever won a war by dying for their country. They won by making the other son-of-a-bitch die for his.”
In an effort to make warriors out of the entire male populace, the Spirit Warriors distorted the essence of Bushido and began to peddle a bastardized version that taught a cult of death. This twisted version focused not on the sublime personal standards of honor among samurai, but on the base blood and guts of death.
The Japanese army field regulations of 1912 systematically stated the Spirit Warriors’ strategic doctrine for the first time. This document revealed that the pseudo samurai understood and cared little for strategy, instead placing an excessive emphasis on Yamato damashii. “The literature is full of phrases about ‘the attack spirit,’ ‘confidence in certain victory,’ ‘loyalty to the emperor,’ ‘love of country,’ ‘absolute sincerity,’ and ‘sacrifice one’s life to the country, absolute obedience to superiors.’”
Fear of death is the most powerful disabler of warriors, so the Spirit boys turned this weakness into a strength by removing the possibility of death from their issen gorin’s minds. Instead, they taught a cult of death guaranteeing soldiers they would die for the emperor, figuring that a soldier who was ready to die transcended fear. This willingness, even eagerness, to die for the emperor would, it was believed, provide a magic multiplier effect that would squash all enemies. Recruits were constantly told their lives were worth nothing compared to the glorious contribution they could make to their country by dying in battle for the emperor.
In the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, many Japanese troops had surrendered, served as POWs, and later been welcomed back to Japan with open arms. But as the Meiji leaders passed, the new crop of Yamato damashii boys decreed that it was absolutely forbidden to withdraw, surrender, or become a prisoner of war. The 1908 army criminal code contained the following provision: “A commander who allows his unit to surrender to the enemy without fighting to the last man or who concedes a strategic area to the enemy shall be punishable by death.” The field service code contained an additional injunction: “Do not be taken prisoner alive.” To drive the point home, the army helpfully told the story of a Major Kuga, who was captured by the Chinese. Major Kuga had been wounded and was captured while he was unconscious. When he was released, he committed suicide. The commentary instructed the reader, “This act typifies the glorious spirit of the Imperial Army.”
The Japanese navy was slightly less brutal than the army, with less need for close-up fighting, but it too glorified death, as can be seen in the words of the mournful Japanese navy anthem, the “Umi Yukaba”:
Across the sea, corpses floating in the water.
Across the mountains, corpses heaped upon the grass.
We shall die by the side of our lord.
We shall never look back.
The second component of Japanese spirit valued by the Spirit Warriors was brutality. War is cold and by definition makes killers of those who practice it. But no army in history so systematically instilled hatred in its troops as this version of the Imperial Japanese Army. “Brutality and cruelty were the rule rather than the exception in the Japanese army. It was the last primitive infantry army of modern times.” The new army recruit entered a violent asylum where he was pummeled, slapped, kicked, and beaten daily. Shinji Ito remembered his first swimming lesson: “A rope was tied around my body, and . . . I was thrown into the river from a boat. When I lost consciousness from swallowing too much water, I was pulled up. Once I caught my breath, I would be thrown back into the water. My uniform froze.”
All militaries have incidents of corporal abuse by officers. But only the IJA actively encouraged regular and vicious abuse of its charges. “For forty-some years I’ve suffered from ringing in my ears,” remembered Katsumi Watanabe. “This is the aftereffect of severe beatings by higher-ranking privates when I was a draftee. It was the norm in the military that new recruits and draftees were beaten for no reason. The members of the military were ignorant and had lost their humanity. They thought that beatings were a form of education.”
“Before inflicting punishment,” Tsuyoshi Saka recalled, “they always said they were indoctrinating us with the military man’s spirit. We were made to form a single line and stand at attention and then ordered to clench our teeth. Then they hit us with their fists. This was better than the occasions when they struck us with the leather straps of their swords or with their leather indoor shoes. At the limit of the human body’s endurance, greasy sweat pouring from my forehead, I nearly fainted in agony.”
Recruit Shinji Ito’s mother and father had sent their son off to the benevolent emperor’s army. “During my first year,” he recalled, “my head was beaten with green bamboo poles and my face slapped with leather slippers. This changed the shape of my face. I wonder what my parents would have felt had they seen me in this state.”
Enomoto-san, the sixth son of a poor rice farmer, remembered that his superiors beat him up every night. “It was like I couldn�
��t sleep without being beaten up at least once,” he says. “Once they got tired of slapping you with their hands they used their shoes, which had nails on the soles. They hit you with these hard shoes until your face was all swollen up.”
The final component of Yamato damashii was absolute, unhesitating, unthinking, blind obedience to orders. The very first article in Meiji’s “Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors” had proclaimed that “loyalty” was the “essential duty” of the soldier and sailor. But young Japanese soldiers were not just being asked to obey orders merely from men of authority, as in other militaries. Japanese officers, with their direct connect to the throne, spoke with divine authority. Recruits were taught “to regard the orders of their superiors as issuing directly from the emperor. This meant that orders were infallible and obedience to them had to be absolute and unconditional.” There was no concept of “legal” or “illegal” orders.
“We were educated again and again,” Enomoto-san recalled, “that the emperor was a living god. In those days, I totally believed that. During the morning when we lined up we would face toward the east, in the direction of the emperor, and salute. We would pledge that we would do our best that day. We did this every morning.” And as the emperor’s chosen elite, army officers were also owed unquestioning obedience. “We learned that the senior soldiers were gods,” is how Tsuyoshi Saka put it. “When training ended for the day, the recruits fought for the privilege of untying the squad leader’s puttees. In the bath they held the soap for the NCOs and washed their backs.”
“No one could resist,” said Enomoto-san. “Not a single person could resist. Once the officers got tired of beating you, they had the young soldiers face each other for twenty minutes and slap the soldier across from you. So we, the teammates, would slap each other instead of being slapped by an instructor. That was the hardest, because you don’t want to hit your teammate too hard, but if you took it easy then your superior would scold you for not being serious. Punishment is something that we took for granted.”
“Some forms of punishment degrade human nature,” Tsuyoshi Saka reflected. “The senior soldiers looked on, laughing. They justified it by saying we should consider it an act of kindness. This method of inflicting brutal punishment without any cause and destroying our power to think was a way of transforming us into men who would carry out our superiors’ orders as a reflex action.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The Third Dimension
Japan never declares war before attacking.
— Billy Mitchell, 1932, quoted in Mitchell: Pioneer of Air Power
IN the early days of the airplane, few predicted it would ever play a part in warfare. After all, the early models were fragile machines—canvas and wood held together with clothesline and powered by small put-put engines. “At the dawn of World War I, planes were still manufactured from flimsy wood and easily ripped canvas (aviation giant Boeing, in fact, began life as a timber company). The pilot and passenger sat, with goggles, leather helmet, and seat belt, out in the open air, and flew with engines about as powerful as a lawnmower’s. The controls were basic and simple: a stabilizer, a stick, a rudder, a throttle, and a spark control. You just got in and flew.” Navy admirals with their enormous battleships and army generals with their rows and rows of cannon saw little merit in these frail flying machines.
But one visionary saw the future. Billy Mitchell was handsome and articulate, the son of a wealthy United States senator from Milwaukee. In World War I, Mitchell had been a thirty-eight-year-old army colonel in charge of America’s air support. In France, he had witnessed the hellish stalemate of trench warfare—enormous armies dug in, unable to advance, murdering one another in the mud. He was the first American to fly over an enemy in battle, and his airmen—French, English, and American—provided behind-the-lines intelligence and led key assaults. Billy had led the largest winged armada in history—unmatched until the outbreak of World War II.
Billy had discovered his planes could leap over enemy lines and attack the opponent’s “vital centers”—the industries that produced the beans and bullets necessary for modern warfare. “Strategic bombing”—targeting the enemy’s manufacturing base to choke off its continuing ability to fight—meant that there was no longer a front line, that the trenches mapped only a subset of a greater battlefield. Extending war to civilian areas where factories were based was not only a radical idea; to many, it was an immoral one. During World War I, warriors had fought warriors on the front lines, while mom back home was not considered a target. But Billy reasoned that once the enemy’s industrial capacity was sufficiently reduced, that enemy could not continue to fight. The airplane, Billy believed, would shorten wars and make them more humane. True, bombing plants, rail yards, factories, and communications grids increased the chance of civilian deaths, but Mitchell reasoned that this would actually save lives in comparison to the mindless static warfare that killed millions of soldiers in the trenches. And this would not be a momentary tactical shift. At a time when young sailors were absorbing battleship doctrine at Annapolis and cadets were studying horse charges at West Point, Billy was convinced that airpower had radically changed warfare forever. Warriors accustomed to thinking in two dimensions—land and sea—now had to understand a “Third Dimension”—the air.
Billy’s ideas were seen by most as farfetched. Few people had ever driven a car, much less flown. Airplanes were famous for their fragility—just nicking a telegraph wire in flight could mean a flaming death, while on the ground a single lit match or a child with an ax could destroy an entire plane. To the generals and admirals in the early decades of the twentieth century, warfare was about massing the brawny iron might of the industrial revolution. The idea that a fluttering canvas and wood contraption could threaten nations was like believing that sparrows threatened castles. Real men believed in battleships and artillery.
But Billy knew better. After WWI, he returned to the United States preaching his vision of the airplane-dominated future of warfare with the fervor of the converted. A swashbuckling general now, with a chest full of shiny medals, he had glimpsed the future and thought everyone should shift their strategic thinking. Billy wanted everyone to believe his Third-Dimension gospel.
Before World War II, there was no Pentagon, no secretary of defense, no unified voice regarding the American military. Instead, there was a secretary of war, representing the army, and a secretary of the navy, an arrangement reflecting a two-dimensional view of warfare—land and sea—with no overlap. Billy wanted to overhaul the entire American defense structure. First, he lectured, establish a separate Department of the Air Force, coequal with the army and the navy. Second, these three services had to be united under a single command, a Department of Defense.
Billy’s suggestions, in light of history, not only made sense but were inevitable. But in Billy’s time, this was heresy. He proclaimed, “Just as today we record battles on land and sea, so tomorrow we shall write of battles in the skies.” But like all prophets, Billy threatened the status quo and was considered dangerous to entrenched interests.
After all, the dogma of the day held that the navy’s battleships guaranteed the nation’s defense. Battleships were the product of hundreds of years of evolution, floating behemoths bristling with the strength and power of the industrial revolution. Battleships were the most expensive weapons in the American arsenal, and powerful financial, manufacturing, and political interests had much invested in maintaining their primacy. But articulate and dashing Billy told all that airpower made the battleship just outmoded floating scrap metal. For the cost of one battleship, Billy preached, the nation could purchase a fleet of airplanes that could sink an armada foolish enough to approach our shores. No sea or land power could threaten America if it had control of the Third Dimension.
Not surprisingly, this was heresy to the traditionalists. Mitchell was a convincing speaker with a growing number of acolytes, but he was also an officer in the United States Army, subject to discipl
ine. His superiors ordered him to tone it down. But when opposed, Billy only fought harder to convey his vision of the future. He took his case to the American people, because, as he often said, “Changes in military systems come about only through the pressure of public opinion or disaster in war.” He also convinced the navy to put his ideas to a very public test.
The captured German battleship Ostfriesland was considered a solid Rock of Gibraltar by the old-line American admirals. She had struck a mine after seeing action in the WWI Battle of Jutland and made it to port despite serious injury. As one officer declared to the Washington Star: “She was a wonderful ship, built [to be] as nearly unsinkable as possible. She had four skins to protect her against mines and torpedoes and heavy projectiles. She was also divided into many watertight compartments by bulkheads, so that, no matter how many big holes were made in her hulls, she would still be able to get home.”
On July 21, 1921, some three hundred notables, including “Cabinet officers, Senators and Representatives, military attachés of foreign powers, aeronautical and naval experts, and half a hundred newspapermen,” waited aboard an observation ship out on the Atlantic Ocean. Most were confident that they were about to witness the defeat of Billy Mitchell and his harebrained ideas about a “Third Dimension.” Former Secretary of the Navy Joe Daniels had stated publicly that he would be happy to stand bareheaded on the deck of any ship while Billy tried to sink it from the air. On the eve of the bombing trial, the New York Times reported that “naval officers are insisting that the flyers will never sink the Ostfriesland,” and one navy officer who was present at the tests said, “General Mitchell was ridiculed, derided and made fun of by the secretary of the navy and by officers of the navy department in high authority.”
Flyboys Page 5