The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  to exercise their bureaucracy in occupied territory to the advantage of the local in habitants and the detriment of their own country! They have a genius for keeping others at a distance and in winning and preserving respect. Here, perhaps, we have the worst possible example of our [own] methods – de-lousing infuriates the local inhabitants, as does our fanatical desire to civilize them. The net result is that they say to themselves: ‘These people aren’t really our superiors.’

  By contrast, India had ‘educated the British and gave them their feeling of superiority. The lesson begins in the street itself; anyone who wastes even a moment’s compassion on a beggar is literally torn to pieces by the beggar hordes; anyone who shows a trace of human sentiment is damned forever.’

  Hitler’s grotesque fantasies are, unfortunately, better known today than they were before 1939. When the Queen sent a copy of Mein Kampf to Lord Halifax in 1939, she advised him not to read it, ‘or you might go mad and that would be a great pity. Even a skip through gives one a good idea of his mentality, ignorance and obvious sincerity.’ Today, by contrast, extracts of Mein Kampf are pored over by students in schools and universities, while numerous works of fiction seek to imagine the world as it might have looked had Hitler’s dreams been realized. A few attempts have been made to argue that a Nazi victory over the Soviet Union might not have been wholly disadvantageous to the Western powers, and that therefore a second phase of appeasement after 1941 might have been preferable to continued war. Some British Tories, notably the late Alan Clark, have suggested that the British Empire might have been spared ignominious bankruptcy, decline and fall, had a separate peace been made along the lines Rudolf Hess seems to have envisaged and Hitler repeatedly mused about in his evening monologues; in a similar vein, some American conservatives argue that the Cold War might have been avoided had Roosevelt kept the United States out of the shooting war in Europe. On the whole, however, most writers have tended to take the view that a Nazi victory would have been a worse outcome than that of 1945. Even if a victorious Third Reich had opted for peace with Britain and America – which cannot be regarded as very probable – the price would have been horrendously high for the millions of people left under Nazi rule. All nine million of the Jews of Europe might have been murdered, rather than the nearly six million who actually were,* to say nothing of the vast human suffering that would have been inflicted on other ethnic groups by the implementation of the Generalplan Ost, which envisaged deporting around fifty million East Europeans to Siberia.

  Less familiar, but no less chilling – and in many respects strikingly similar – are the blueprints for a new order drawn up by some Japanese writers in the early 1940s. Japan, it is true, had no Hitler, no single ideologue adumbrating a utopia which all others could ‘work towards’. But it had many little Hitlers. In ‘An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus’, a report completed in July 1943, officials in the Population and Race Section of the Japanese Health and Welfare Ministry’s Research Bureau took as their premise that the Japanese were the ‘leading race’ of Asia, whose mission was to ‘liberate the billion people of Asia’ by planting as much Japanese ‘blood’ as possible in Asian soil. This would be possible, however, only if the right demographic resources existed at home. ‘We should actively improve our physical capacity eugenically by promoting such methods as mental and physical training as well as selective marriages,’ the report urged. Japan’s population needed to rise ‘as rapidly as possible’ from around 70 million in 1938 to 100 million by 1960, with each Japanese couple being encouraged to have around five children. This would provide the surplus of Japanese necessary to colonize and run what had been known since 1940 as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. There were no necessary limits to the extent of that sphere. In 1942 Komaki Tsunekichi, a professor of geography at Tokyo Imperial University, had proposed that both Europe and Africa should henceforth be regarded as part of the Asian continent, while America should be known as ‘Eastern Asia’ and Australia as ‘Southern Asia’. All the world’s oceans, since they were interconnected, should simply be renamed the ‘Great Sea of Japan’. The authors of the ‘Investigation of Global Policy’ were no more modest in their ambitions. Stages One and Two of their planned ‘Enlargement of the Sphere of the East Asia Co-Operative Body’ envisaged the incorporation of the whole of China, as well as nearly all French, British and Dutch possessions in Asia. Stage Three would have added the Philippines, India and all Soviet territory east of Lake Baikal. Finally, in Stage Four, the Co-Prosperity Sphere would have been extended to ‘Assyria, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries, West Asia [and] Southwest Asia’.

  More than the Germans, the Japanese understood the importance of eliciting collaboration by protesting the emancipatory character of their new order. Thus the aim of the war was to vanquish ‘Anglo-American imperialistic democracy’. The new order that would take its place would be based on ‘racial harmony’ and ‘mutual prosperity… of all the peoples concerned’. In the Co-Prosperity Sphere, the kindred nations of Asia would be bound together by reciprocal relationships like those between ‘parent and child, elder and younger brother’. ‘We will obliterate the former European and British superiority complex and American and British world view,’ declared the ‘Plan for the Leadership of Nationalities in Greater East Asia’ issued by the General Staff Head quartersin August 1942. ‘Europe and America don’t want Asia to awaken,’ wrote Ōkawa Shūmei in his book The Establishment of the Greater East Asian Order (1943). ‘Therefore they prevent [Asia] from remembering a common culture and ideology… [But now] the dark night enveloping Asia has begun to break and the light of hope has shone from the East… Now Asia is on the verge of overturning European control every where and is about to destroy corrupt indigenous social traditions and to shed blood in building independent nations.’ Victorious Japanese commanders issued proclamations in the same vein, disavowing any ‘intention of conquering any Asiatic people’ or any ‘thought of establishing [a] regimented sphere of imperialism in East Asia’. The Co-Prosperity Sphere was to be ‘a union of neighbouring states, sharing to a greater or lesser degree common racial and cultural origins and geographical propinquity, founded by their voluntary agreement for the purpose of assuring their common safety and promoting their common happiness and prosperity’. The sole aim was to rid Asia of ‘the poisonous dung of [Western] material civilization’.

  On closer inspection, however, this new order was intended to be a good deal like the old one. The authors of the ‘Investigation of Global Policy’ envisaged that by 1950 there would be no fewer than twelve million Japanese settlers – mostly farmers – living permanently abroad, including two million in Australia and New Zealand. Another official report, entitled ‘Outline of Economic Policies for the Southern Areas’, made it clear that Japanese financial institutions would ‘assume the financial hegemony hitherto held by the enemy institutions’. The development of manufacturing industries in Japanese-occupied territory was to be ‘discouraged’. Other Asians must learn Japanese. They must adopt the Japanese calendar. They must kowtow to the Japanese. In short, Co-Prosperity simply meant a new imperialism, with the Japanese taking the place of the Europeans as the masters. All thatre mained to be seen was whether they would be more cruel or less – though the example of Japanese rule in Korea, where nationalist stirrings had been crushed with unrestrained violence in the 1920sand where linguistic and cultural Japanization was intensified in the 1930s, was not encouraging. The Korean language was banned from schools. Koreans were to attend Shinto services and, after 1939, to adopt Japanese names. Nor was this process of cultural subjugation mitigated by economic progress. Living standards were miserably low in Korea. Per capita income was roughly a quarter of what it was in Japan, while the mortality rate from contagious diseases was more than twice as high.

  Like the Nazis, the more radical theorists of Japanese imperialism saw racial ‘pollution’ as one of the gravest threats
to their own innate superiority. The new generation of Japanese settlers would therefore have to be careful to avoid contaminating their Yamato blood by mingling with the inferior races of the continent, such as the ‘Han race’ (the Chinese). Living space could be developed only on the basis of their expulsion or segregation. The peoples of Asia might, for the purposes of Japanese propaganda, be represented as one happy family. But Japan was to be the stern pater familias, and relationships with ‘child countries’ would not be tolerated. Like the Nazis, too, the Japanese romanticized the business of settling conquered territory. In stories like ‘The New Brides Who Protected the Village’or photographs with captionslike ‘The Joy of Breeding’, colonists in Manchuria were portrayed as both hardy and fecund, tough enough to withstand a bad harvest, fertile enough to bring forth numerous healthy offspring. The obverse of such idylls was a deep contempt for the ‘dirty races’ that were to come under Japanese rule. It is no coincidence that both the Germans and the Japanese spoke of those they conquered as less than human; the term used for bedbugs in Manchuria – ‘Nanking vermin’ – tells its own story. ‘The Chinese people’, wrote General Sakai Ryū, the Chief of Staff of the Japanese forces in North China in 1937, ‘are bacteria infesting world civilization.’ Somewhat more subtly, the General Staff’s ‘Plan for Leadership of Nationalities’ divided Asians into ‘master peoples’ (the Japanese), ‘friendly peoples’ (Koreans) and ‘guest peoples’ (Han Chinese). The ‘anti-Japanese enemy character’ of the last of these groups was to be ‘extirpated’. Those who did not ‘swear loyalty to Japan’ would be ‘driven out of the Southern Area’.

  There was thus more than mere diplomatic convenience underpinning the Tripartite Pact of September 27, 1940, which formalized the German-Italian-Japanese Axis and its members’ shared interest in a ‘new order of things’. For all the differences between them – and it is worth emphasizing that neither the Italians nor the Japanese shared Hitler’s obsessive antipathy to the Jews* – Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan shared certain fundamental assumptions about the character of the world they hoped to forge in the fires of war. It was to be a world ruled by three empire-states, imperial in the extent of their power, but state-like in the centralized nature of that power. It was to be a world shared between three master races: the Aryan, the Roman and the Yamato. As one of the Pact’s Japanese architects put it: ‘World totalitarianism will take the place of Anglo-Saxonism, which is bankrupt and will be wiped out.’

  To be sure, those assumptions are easy to ridicule today. So much of what the Axis powers set out to do seems simply deranged; so little of it was in any case achieved or, if it was achieved, endured for more than a year or two. Yet these plans came much closer to being realized than is generally understood. Between 1937 and 1942 no army seemed able to withstand for long the forces of Germany and Japan. If anything, the impact of the Japanese blitzkrieg of 1941–2 was even more spectacular than that of its German forerunner of 1939–41. The effect was radically to reduce the odds against the Axis in terms of potential output and potential manpower. Everything therefore depended on how far Germany and Japan, to say nothing of their less formidable ally Italy, would be able to harness the resources that conquest had put at their disposal. They certainly did not set out to curry favour with the peoples they vanquished. The Axisarmies were not content merely to defeat their enemies in the field. They treated prisoners of war with murderous contempt, in violation of the traditional and more recently formalized laws of war. Nor did they hesitate to extend the purview of warfare to menace, molest and murder defenceless civilians. Entire cities were laid waste; whole populations wiped out. Their notoriously violent character is, of course, the principal reason why most writers find it so hard to contemplate Nazi Europe and Japanese Asia with anything other than revulsion. Yet this is not necessarily the reason why the Axis empires failed to endure. On the contrary; the remarkable thing is that their ruthless employment of physical force did not prevent the Japanese – any more than it prevented the Germans– from acquiring in large quantities the one vital ingredient upon which all empiresdepend: collaborators.

  For sixty-six million Germans to aspire to rule over more than three hundred million Europeans in a Grossraum stretching from the Channel Islands to the Caucasus was not, in fact, so very preposterous. Nor was it impossible to envisage seventy million Japanese lording it over upwards of four hundred million Asians in a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere extending from Manchuria to Mandalay. In 1939, after all, a mere forty-five million Britons could still claim to stand at the apex of an empire that had a total population ten times that size and a territorial extent so great that the sun was literally always shining on some part of it. To be sure, Hitler the flophouse autodidact failed to understand that the foundation of British power was not coercion or contempt but collaboration with indigenous elites. Nevertheless, as they advanced into new territory, the Axis powers, too, found plentiful supplies of local personnel ready and willing to support their new imperial order.

  The year 1942, then, was the year the twentieth century teetered on a knife edge. It was the year when the entire map of Eurasia appeared to have been redrawn. Huge tranches of land from the Rhine to the Volga and from Manchuria to the Marshall Islands had changed political hands. Now, in the name of ‘living space’, they were to change populations as well. The brutal methods the Axis powers used to build their empires swiftly turned living space into killing space. It still remained to be seen how far those methods were fundamentally inimical to the collaborative relationships without which no empire can expect to endure.

  RAPE

  The Japanese had in fact waged a kind of prototype blitzkrieg in China in the months after full-scale war broke out at the Marco Polo Bridge. But the fighting was harder and a good deal more costly in lives and treasure than Japan’s leaders had anticipated. In December 1937, as Japanese troops neared Chiang Kai-shek’s capital, Nanking, a decision appears to have been taken to make an example of it, in the hope of dealing a fatal blow to Chinese resistance and bringing the war to a swift conclusion. It is not entirely clear who took this decision. After the war, the blame was laid on General Matsui Iwane, Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese forces in central China. It seems more likely that the real culprit was the Emperor’s uncle, Prince Asaka Yasuhiko, who took over command on December 2. It was under his seal that orders were issued three days later – marked ‘Secret, to be destroyed’ – to ‘Kill all Captives’. As they fought their way along the road from Shanghai, two officers gave their men an indication of what was to come. They engaged in a killing competition, which was covered by the Japanese press like a sporting event. On December 7 the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun published this report:

  SUB-LIEUTENANTS IN RACE TO FELL 100 CHINESE RUNNING CLOSE CONTEST

  Sub-Lieutenant Mukai Toshiaki and Sub-Lieutenant Noda Takeshi, both of the Katagiri unit at Kuyang, in a friendly contest to see which of them will first fell 100 Chinese in individual sword combat, are well in the final phase of their race, running almost neck to neck [sic].

  The score was given as Mukai 89, Noda 78. A week later the paper reported that, as the two men could not agree who had reached the one hundred mark first, they had upped their target to 150. By this time, all battalions had been issued with orders to divide their prisonersinto batches of a dozen and shoot them.

  As news of the approaching Japanese army reached the city of Nanking, the Chinese authorities decided to shut all but one of the gates in the wall that encircled the city. Vainly attempting to keep the invaders out, they ended up locking the inhabitants in. The Japanese 10th Army arrived on December 8. The 30,000 battle-weary but still bloodthirsty troops immediately surrounded the city. Chiang Kai-shek had fled weeks earlier, leaving behind him only a poorly equipped force to defend the 500,000 or so people who had not followed his example. They held out for just five days. On December 13 the Japanese breached the city wall at three separate points and marched through. Inside, th
ey found a ready-made slaughterhouse. Tens of thousands of young men were murdered in the weeks that followed, regardless of whether they were in uniform or not. Some were simply lined up in rows and machine-gunned. Otherswere beheaded, bayoneted or buried alive. One group was sprayed with gunfire and then soaked with gasoline and set on fire. A few were hung by their tongues on metal hooks. A horrified journalist working for the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun watched Japanese soldiers line up prisoners on top of the wall near the Chungshan Gate and bayonet them:

  One by one the prisoners fell down to the outside of the wall. Blood spattered everywhere. The chilling atmosphere made one’s hair stand on end and limbs tremble with fear. I stood there at a total loss and did not know what to do.

  Asked by another journalist to justify what was happening, Lieutenant-Colonel Tanaka Ryukichi replied simply:

  Frankly speaking, you and I have diametrically different views of the Chinese. You may be dealing with them as human beings, but I regard them as swine. We can do anything to such creatures.

  General Matsui entered Nanking on December 17, four days after his troops had begun their rampage. Though he subsequently claimed to be dismayed by what he witnessed, he did (or could do) little to stop it. The murderous orgy continued for a further five and a half weeks. It reached its peak in the week from January 28 to February 3, 1938, after civilians had been ordered to return to their homes from the refugee camps outside the city whence they had fled. For days, thousands of unburied bodies littered the streets. The International Military Tribunal of the Far East later estimated that more than 260,000 non-combatants had died at the hands of Japanese soldiers at Nanking – more than four times the number of British civilians killed during the entire war.