by Paul Hynes
The rations had had to be further tightened, down to less than 50% of the average requirement as food stocks began to dwindle thanks to the meticulous destruction of the Japanese road and rail networks as well as the loss of Hokkaido. In the cold of winter the ache of hunger was becoming too painful to stand. The Japanese people, relied upon for their acquiescent obedience since the early Twenties, now began to complain and protest as to why the military was fed but they were not. The Japanese secret police, the infamous Kempetai reacted as they had planned for these ‘Red’ activities, with beatings, repression, and torture but as they themselves began to feel the need to tighten their belts to avoid the protests of their stomachs they also began to question whether they could survive to see the victory that the Decisive Battle was proclaimed to soon bring.
This was not a concern for the man drawing up plans in his frost bitten office in Sapporo, for as the hunger in the south grew, he knew all the more what Marx and Hegel before him had spoken of when they talked of the dialectic. He had all the time in the world.
As the Soviets had rolled over the last remnants of organised resistance in Hokkaido, many had fled blindly into the mountains, refusing to surrender to the enemy but also refusing to fight a doomed struggle against overwhelming odds, they had disappeared into the rough terrain of Hokkaido’s various hills, mountains and volcanoes in the hope had liberation would soon come in the form of the Imperial Japanese Navy, misled by the propaganda of the Japanese state which had vaguely assured the young recruits that it remained a mighty force.
Their hopes had been in vain, the Anami government saw the Soviet occupation of Hokkaido as a terrible humiliation but one that little could be done about. The Japanese navy was now little more than a collection of submarines and damaged destroyers, who along with the majority of Japanese forces and ammunition, had been directed towards Kyushu. If the war could be won there, it could only be hoped that in a resulting peace settlement that the United States might agree to force the Soviets off of the island themselves, based upon what the Soviets had begun to do to eastern Europe.
Those left waiting had little ammunition to fight the Soviet occupation of the island, and with food production coming Soviet control, most of their actions had been in securing food for themselves, as the weather grew ever colder. By December the rivers had begun to freeze and heavy snowfall in the north left most of those with little shelter dead, the Soviets took little action to stop these partisans groups, the forces that they could supply there were already stretch in governing the islands population of 3 million. Already thousands of new recruits from the Japanese People’s Emancipation League were bolstering their forces, many of whom were local, and willing to point out were exactly the frozen remnants of Japanese resistance might be hiding. As survival became harder, the limited numbers of radios the resistance had taken with them became their greatest weapon. In October communication with Japanese forces on Honshu had been chaotic, as different wavelengths were attempted to try and reach radio stations in northern Honshu but eventually threadbare contact became established, and the Anami government could finally attain an insight into what was going on in Soviet Japan…
To the frustration of Anami and his peers, the Soviet occupation appeared to be proceeding with an irritating enthusiasm. Food and fuel was not a problem, as the islands vast supplies of timber and rive were put to good use. Indeed, civilians on the island who had dreaded a Soviet occupation based on the horror stories the Japanese media had told them of raping and pillaging Bolsheviks, were pleasantly surprised as they found their rations actively increasing. The Soviets could not export the surplus fuel and food they had acquired in these conditions, and instead put it to good use in adding substance to the proclamations of the Japanese People’s Emancipation League that life was indeed far better without the uncaring government of Tokyo. Acts of rape and murder were thoroughly punished, though as had been the case in the European theatre, frontline Soviet troops were far less likely to commit these atrocities. Robbery was also forbidden, though after years of war there was little to be pillaged from the impoverished population who had been abandoned for the needs of the war effort. Most saw the Soviets as at least amicable as the Kempetai, and though they were rather alien with their odd alphabet and their dialectics, there were many impoverished, disenchanted, Liberals, Socialists, Anarchists, Ainu, and , of course, Communists, who welcomed the revolutionary change Sanzo Nosaka promised to bring.
Nosaka himself was greatly encouraged by the progress he had seen, in the nineteen thirties he had been forced to acknowledge that reformism would be necessary on Japan’s road to Socialism, but that need to slowly seep power to the proletariat without rocking the Imperialist boat had now been rendered rendundant. Now he had been granted the ability to ignore the thesis that had forced him to flee and had seen many of his comrades jailed or even killed. Now it was the turn of the Japanese imperial hierarchy to run and hide and die, beaten at their own game. Now he had the power, and with it he would not repeat the mistakes that they had made, his enemies would not be allowed to live. Nonetheless there was only so much of Japan’s imperial system that he could purge at this given time. His role was currently administrative, and though the Soviets were happy to remove any official deemed unnecessary or harmful to their own progress, powerful or popular local figures were often not only left alone, but encouraged to cooperate. He recognised that such acts of mercy were necessary at the present time, best not to upset the boat too much whilst there remained an alternative Japan to the south. During the Russian Civil War the Soviets themselves had had to make unpalatable alliances temporarily to ensure their own survival, before removing those elements when they were no longer useful, and as the war went on he had begun to realise more and more the large number of comparisons between the last days of Tsarist Russia and the current state of Imperial Japan. Soon military catastrophe and starvation would become too much for a populace sick of seeing their rulers thrive on their misery, they would revolt, and the whole rotten edifice would come crashing down. Then, like Lenin before him, he would emerge from exile to lead the Japanese people towards their destiny.
As the winter began to set in, the drift ice from the Sea of Okhotsk, and the increasingly harsh Siberian tundra, had complicated Soviet supply to their forces in Hokkaido. Alongside the American delays in fulfilling their commitments to the transfer of ships to the Soviets that had enabled them to invade Hokkaido in the first place, this had made on invasion of northern Honshu impossible by the end of 1945, though in the course of the war their sworn enemies had shown that in their age, invasions no longer had to involve crossing a sea.
The Red Army, who had boasted the largest Airborne Forces before the war, could always pursue other options.
The Collapse of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere
Clement Attlee may have seemed to many an unusual choice to lead the British government to the final victory in the Second World War. Emerging from a liberal middle class background, he differed greatly from his predecessor’s glorious Imperial past and though he had gained a reputation as a capable leader, an effective administrator who could hold the various factions of his beloved Labour party together as he dragged his Comrades through the long recovery of their virtual wipe-out in 1931. Unlike Churchill, Attlee preferred substance over speeches, practical applications rather than grand sweeping gestures, a reputation that would cause some to question whether he was a leader of men. “A modest man with much to be modest about” Churchill was reported to have said, although he denied it vigorously.
For behind the plain suit and wise smirk lay a veteran, a man who had been through the cauldron’s of the First World War, fighting on the frontlines in both Mesopotamia and Gallipoli. He had been wounded twice, and had also contracted dysentery, but whilst some would see such hindrances as a way out from the nightmarish conflict, Attlee demanded to be sent back each time, gaining a reputation for volunteering for any dangerous task forced upon his men
, and for threatening to shoot other officers who did not show theirs the same regard. When he first ran for Parliament in 1922, there was no doubting the patriotism of “Major Attlee”.
To the surprise of the entire establishment he had swept to victory in the July 1945 General Election. The people had not only voted in reaction to the ‘Guilty Men’ of the Conservative Party and their legacy of economic failure and appeasement, but also in the promises of the new society Attlee had pledged to introduce, a Britain not just free from the threat of Nazism, but also from those of unemployment, poverty, and ill-health. ‘Win the Peace!’ had been Labour’s slogan, filled with the promise of the new age that the British people had went through such tribulations to get to. However, there remained the problem of the War. Though a passionate Socialist, Attlee remained a patriot and he realised the damage that would be done to British prestige if they were seen to be doing nothing whilst the Americans and Soviets defeated Japan for them. They had to be shown to be putting in their own effort, and where better to start than in the region where the British had suffered their most calamitous defeat on all time? On September 9th, thousands of British troops began to land around the areas of Port Dickson and Port Swettenham to avenge the disaster of 1942, the British liberation of Singapore had begun.
Opposing them was the Japanese Seventh Area Army led by General Seishirō Itagaki, a man also driven by the need to right former wrongs. His humiliation at the hands of the Soviets during the border clashes around Inner Mongolia in 1939 had led to his exile to Korea where he sat overseeing an Army of Garrisson troops as the real wars raged to his south and to his west. Moved once again to take command of the occupation forces in Malaya and Singapore, he had watched as the war turned fundamentally against Japan, destroying her fleet and slicing her recently acquired empire in half. Whilst he and his troops were only a few thousand miles from the Home Islands, the American and British fleets ensured that he and his men may as well have been on the Moon. Itagaki was alone, cut-off, and doomed. To the exiled General, these conditions were perfect for his final stand.
Despite a meticulous counter-intelligence program, that Japanese were aware of the British strategy and were in the midst of boosting their defences on Malaya's west coast when the British forces, led by Louis Mountbatten, launched their attack. Though the Japanese forces were numerically superior in theory, they could not match the artillery and air power provided by the British Royal Navy and Air Force. They did however have on trick up their sleeve. Since the “betrayal” of Japan’s German ally in May 1945, the Japanese had interned two German U-Boats, U-181, and U-862. Since then they had been refitted to launch Japanese torpedoes, and were rechristened I-501 and I-502 to represent their new allegiance. Whilst they had been planned for use as transport Submarines, the arrival of the British fleet had prompted them to be thrown into action, dwelling in the surrounding waters as the British secured the ports that they had previously been held in. As British naval presence dissipated they began to strike against the ships bringing the vital supplies needed to push the British advance forward into Singapore. With a mixed German-Japanese crew, they flew both the Swastika Banner and the rising Sun to the confusion of Allied vessels, who made several references to German “Pirates” operating in the area. By late October both had been sunk and the last ghost of the Third Reich had been laid to rest, doomed not by the glorious defeats of the European Theatre, but by a lack of reliable spare parts.
They had done their job however, as the Japanese retreated east to more defensible positions the British struggled to follow, as their enemy made great use of the Jungle as he had done in 1942 to outmanoeuvre them despite their inferior equipment, often grinding the advance to a halt with the need to clear out the area of Japanese units who had remained behind, lest they be surprised in the future. Little did they know, a far greater surprise awaited them as they approached Singapore’s eastern coast in early November.
Throughout the war, over 50,000 Allied Prisoners had languished in the Changi Prison Camps, used as slave labour in the construction of the Burma Railroad, and subject to random execution by the neighbouring Kempetai headquarters. As Japan’s military situation worsened so had that of supply, and by March 1945 the Prisoners found themselves living on a starvation diet of 8 ounces of rice and 4-6 ounces of vegetables. The vegetable gardens the prisoners had nurtured to supplement their diet were now taken over by the Japanese, troops increasingly malnourished themselves. However as news of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had spread throughout the camp, there grew a hope that soon the war would be over, and that they would soon be in the hands of their comrades.
The piles of bodies of Australian, British, and Dutch troops that greeted the British advance induced a rage in the average British troops that had been unseen even by those who had seen the horrors of Bergen Belsen. From Day One of the invasion the Japanese had been working to kill the tens of thousands of civilian and military prisoners held in the area under direct orders from Itagaki. First burying the corpses in mass graves, then burning them, and then as the British advance grew closer, simply leaving them to rot in the heat. The sight was too much for many, as were the stories had spread back behind the line. Whilst the Seventh Area Army Command chose to commit suicide rather than surrender to the British, their individual troops, complicit or not, found themselves on the receiving end of the retribution. Thousands of Japanese attempting to surrender were shot out of hand, civilians found their homes burned to the ground after being looted, others beaten to death, with some being the victims of even worse crimes whilst attempting to surrender as the British completed their operation in November, a bitter retribution for what had been promised to be a glorious victory.
Massacre and counter-massacre only blending into the melancholy collapse of the Japanese empire, it was a time for score settling. For four years Japan's war policy for Southeast Asia had to meet two contradictory requirements. On the one hand Japan had to emphasize the cause of the "liberation of Asian peoples" in order to justify its operations in alien territories and to gain the support of their nationalist elements for the war effort. Less often noticed is the fact that this justification of the war was also necessary to secure the cooperation of the Japanese people with their own government. This campaign for the "liberation of Asia" succeeded in overcoming domestic suspicions about the prolonged war with China and a reluctance to fight against the technologically superior Allies.
The ideology of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere developed into an indispensable tool for inspiring the Japanese population to fight and endure wartime difficulties. As the vast majority of the Japanese people accepted this ideology, so did many local peoples yet to experience the dubious benefits of Japanese “brotherhood”.
Throughout the war the Japanese relationship with Southeast Asia had thus been a puzzling quagmire of negotiation and coercion. The acquiescence of the Vichy French government to defensive ‘pact’ with the Japanese had led to the effective Japanese occupation of Indochina. This had allowed them not only to undercut Chiang Kai Sek’s Kuomintang in Southern China, but also to transit forces against the American and European colonies should the need have arisen, a prophecy which had become self-fulfilling as western embargoes drove the Japanese into even further desperation as their war with China drained with little resources and money they had left. Throughout the war the Vichy Government had remain in nominal control however, a situation which had survived such events as the end of Vichy sovereignty in late 1942, and the liberation of essentially all of France by the Allies in late 1944.
However by the spring of 1945 the writing was now on the wall, the ‘Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere’ was not long for this Earth and the French government of the region had begun to show resistance to the increasingly harsh Japanese demands for rice and resources, fearing that to enthusiastically continue the ‘Pact’ would lead to themselves being tried as collaborators by revanchist French courts in the wake of the Japane
se collapse. Increasingly frustrated with this attitude, the Japanese moved to finally oust the French, encouraging the individual nations of Indochina to rise up against European colonialism. Whilst the French Army was caught by surprise and successfully arrested en masse by early April, the Japanese could find no major public figures willing to act as their puppets, and despite their continued calls for independence, the region now found itself effectively under military rule.
The situation in Thailand was even more complex, the Japanese invasion in late 1941 was not met with resistance, but instead the government of Field Marshal Plaek Phibun allied themselves with the Japanese and allowed Japanese troops to pass through unhindered. Phibun’s logic was that an alliance with the Japanese would be preferable to an occupation, a choice that seemed justified as the Japanese repeatedly humiliated American and Commonwealth forces in early 1942.
However the Thai took great pride in their nations status as the lone independent state in Southeast Asia, and most resented the increasing number of Japanese troops on the island, which only exacerbated fears that should Japan lose the war, Thailand would be dragged down with her. A fear that was only exacerbated by the increasing numbers of Japanese troops in Thailand, and the slowly increasing pressure on Thai sovereignty. Whilst Phibun’s government had fallen in 1944 it had been replaced largely by Conservatives who did not want to provoke a full Japanese occupation, a stance they were preparing to renounce in line with Japan’s supposed surrender on August 14th, until the Anami coup had led to the Government adopting a ‘wait and see’ approach.