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

by Niall Ferguson

  The Japanese did not content themselves with murder, however. There was also a systematic campaign of arson and other destruction. John Rabe, the German Chairman of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, described the state of the city on January 17:

  Taiping Lu, the pride of Nanking, which was the main business street before and whose lights at night were equal to those on Nanking Road in Shanghai, is totally ruined, everything burned down. There is not one building left intact, just fields of rubble, left and right. Fu Tze-Miao, the former amusement district, with its teahouses and big market, is likewise totally destroyed. As far as the eye can see – nothing but rubble!

  But the most striking feature of the attack on Nanking were the rapes. Although the International Committee’s meticulous investigation did not specify how many of the ‘injured females’ it recorded had been raped, modern estimates put the total at some where between 8,000 and 20,000. The American missionary James Mc Callum estimated that there had been ‘at least 1,000 cases a night’. The diaries of Dr Robert Wilson, a surgeon born and raised in Nanking but educated at Princeton and Harvard Medical School, provide a contemporaneous account of what happened. It was, he wrote on December 18,

  the modern Dante’s Inferno, written in huge letters with blood and rape. Murder by the wholesale and rape by the thousands of cases. There seems to be no stop to the ferocity, lust and atavism of the brutes… Last night the house of one of the Chinese staff members of the university was broken into and two of the women, his relatives, were raped. Two girls about 16 were raped to death in one of the refugee camps. In the University Middle School where there are 8,000 people the Japs came in ten times last night, over the wall, stole food, clothing, and raped until they were satisfied.

  On December 17 a gang of Japanese soldiers broke into the grounds of Ginling College, where missionaries had offered shelter to ten thousand women and children. They abducted eleven young women. The nine who returned had all been ‘horribly raped and abused’. One young woman, Li Xouying, ended up with no fewer than thirty-seven bayonet wounds when she attempted to resist three Japanese soldiers who found her hiding in the basement of an elementary school. Seven months pregnant at the time, she lost her baby but was saved by doctors at the Nanking Hospital. Many other victims were not so fortunate; post-war depositions indicate that a high proportion of those raped were also killed. Chang Kia Sze saw her own sister-in-law raped and murdered in full view of her husband and two young children, who were also killed. Other victims were mutilated by having sticks, bayonets or other objects stuck into their vaginas. Some survivors later proved to have been infected with venereal disease.

  Harrowing testimony like Chang Kia Sze’s was subsequently borne out in interviews with surviving Japanese soldiers. One of them, Tadokoro Kozo, confessed to his own involvement:

  Women suffered most. No matter how young or old, they all could not escape the fate of being raped. We sent out coal trucks… to the city streets and villages to seize a lot of women. And then each of them was allocated to 15 to 20 soldiers for sexual inter course and abuse.

  Azuma Shiro, another former Japanese soldier, described the part he played:

  At first we used some kinky words like ‘Pikankan’… ‘Pikankan’ means, ‘Let’s see a woman open up her legs.’ Chinese women didn’t wear underpants. Instead, they wore trousers tied with a string. There was no belt. As we pulled the string, the buttocks were exposed. We ‘pikankan’. We looked. After a while we would say something like, ‘It’s my day to take a path,’ and we took turnsraping them. It would [have been] all right if we [had] only raped them. I shouldn’t say all right. But we always stabbed them and killed them. Because dead bodies don’t talk.

  How is what became known as the Rape of Nanking to be understood? As a breakdown of military discipline, fuelled by alcohol and battle-fatigue? As a deliberate imperial policy? As the hideous off-spring of what one writer called a ‘militarist monster, forged in late Meiji from a mixture of late Edo [pre-Meiji] nativism and borrowed German racial theories’?

  Three impulses were consciously unleashed by those in command. The first was the contempt felt for those who surrendered. Japanese troops were trained to regard surrender as dishonourable. It was preferable to commit suicide rather than capitulate. Trainees were also encouraged to believe the corollary: that an enemy who did surrender was essentially worthless. This contempt went hand in hand with a culture of extreme physical brutality. If a Japanese colonel felt displeased with one of his majors, it was not unusual for him to strike the offending officer a blow across the face. The major chastised in this way would then lose no time in striking the first junior officer to incur his displeasure, and so it would continue on down the chain. Right at the bottom came enemy captives, so that any aggrieved Japanese NCO or private had one obvious and defenceless target on which to vent his frustrations.

  The second impulse was not peculiar to the Japanese army. As the Turks had treated the Armenians, as Stalin’shenchmen were treating the kulaks, Poles and other ‘enemies of the people’, as the Nazis were soon to start treating Jews, Gypsies and the mentally ill, so the Japanese now thought of and treated the Chinese: as sub-humans. This capacity to treat other human beings as members of an inferior and indeed malignant species – as mere vermin – was one of the crucial reasons why twentieth-century conflict was so violent. Only make this mental leap, and warfare ceases to be a formalized encounter between uniformed armies. It becomes a war of annihilation, in which everyone on the other side – men, women, children, the elderly – can legitimately be killed.

  The third impulse, to rape, is the hardest to interpret. Is it possible for men simultaneously to despise people as vermin and yet to feel lust towards them? Were Japanese troops giving in to a primitive urge to impregnate the womenfolk of their enemy? Or was rape just bayoneting by other means? Perhaps the best answer is that all of these impulses were at work, reinforced by some element of peer-group pressure, since many of the as saults reported were gang rapes. As Hino As hihei put it in his book War and Soldiers, ‘We would be friendly with Chinese individuals and indeed came to love them. But how could we help despising them as a nation?… To us soldiers, they were pitiful, spineless people.’ After the war, General Matsui told the International Military Tribunal, which would sentence him to hang for his role at Nanking:

  The struggle between Japan and China was always a fight between brothers with in the ‘Asian family’… It has been my belief during all these years that we must regard this struggle as a method of making the Chinese undergo self-reflection. We do not do this because we hate them, but on the contrary because we love them too much.

  This seemed then and still seems preposterous. Yet it captures the vile ambivalence that lay behind the phenomenon of mass rape.

  The Rape of Nanking has become the most notorious of Japanese atrocities in China. It was, however, not an isolated incident. Other towns experienced similar treatment, not just in China but elsewhere in Asia too. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that such atrocities condemned the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere to ultimate failure. On the contrary; what the Japanese were demonstrating was that brutality was by no means in compatible with the creation of a new world order based on racial subjugation – and fear.

  PUPPETS

  Japanese atrocities may have played some part in the refusal of Chiang’s government to contemplate a negotiated peace after 1937, despite German efforts to broker a truce. Of more importance was probably the manifest inability of the Japanese to inflict a decisive defeat on Guomindang forces, despite the poor leadership, low morale and appalling under-equipment that afflicted the latter.* Although the Japanese armies continued to advance steadily westwards in the course of 1938, capturing Canton, Wuhan and Xuzhou, they suffered increasingly heavy casualties as their lines of communication became over-extended. At Taierhchuang in March 1938, for example, the 10th Division found itself all but surrounded and ended up losing 16,000
men in days of intense house-to-house fighting. Eighteen months later the 11th Army was heavily defeated at Changsha (Hunan). The invasion of Guangxi at the end of 1939 was short-lived; by the end of the following year the Japanese had been forced to abandon Chinhsien, Nanning and Pinyang. By 1940 they had more or less reached their limits in China and the location of the front line did not significantly change again until 1944. The effect of all this was to strengthen the hand of the more extreme elements with in the Japanese military, the so-called ‘Control Faction’, who advocated ignoring the existing Chinese authorities and dealing with puppet regimes, as they had done in Manchuria.

  Here, it might be thought, the Japanese had miscalculated. Who in China would want to lend his support to invaders capable of such terrible atrocities? Asin other theatres of war, however, the key to securing collaboration turned out to have little, if anything, to do with the cruelty or kindness of the invading forces. The decisive factor was the extent to which the invaded people were divided among themselves. The Japanese invasion did not elicit national unity, as some Chinese Nationalists had hoped it might. It boosted support for the Communist Party, which under Mao Zedong’s leadership now committed itself to a campaign of protracted guerrilla warfare. At the same time, Japanese incursions tended to widen divisions within the Guomindang. The more recruits the Communists were able to find among impoverished and disillusioned peasants, the more tempted some Nationalists were to compromise with the Japanese. The further Chiang retreated to the west – and he did not stop until he reached Chongqing in the province of Sichuan, 800 miles from his starting point, Nanking – the greater the incentive for those left behind to make their peace with the Japanese.

  Already by 1937 the Japanese had established three puppet regimes in Chinese territory: the ‘Empire of Manchukuo’, the supposedly autonomous Mongolian regime of Prine Te and the East Hebei Autonomous Anti-Communist Council. By the middle of the following year, two more had been added: the Provisional Government of the Republic of China set up in Peiping by the North China Area Army, and the Reorganized Government of the Republic of China established in Nanking by the Central China Area Army. In March 1940 the Japanese pulled off a major diplomatic coup when they succeeded in persuading the former Nationalist leader Wang Jingwei to become the figurehead in charge of the latter. After renewed attempts to negotiate some kind of peace with Chiang had foundered, Wang’s regime was officially recognized as the legitimate government of China. Wang himself had been duped; he had been led to expect concessions like a definite date for Japanese troop with drawals and a unification of the variouspuppet regimes under his authority. He ended up having to recognize the independence of Manchukuo, to allow the indefinite stationing of Japanese troops in China and to accept joint control of the maritime customs and other tax agencies. This meant that by 1940 the Japanese and their puppets controlled virtually the entire Chinese coast and a large proportion of the country’s eastern provinces. These were by far China’s most prosperous regions. Wang alone was nominally in charge of half a million square miles of territory and around 200 million people. Many Chinese agreed with the economist T’ao His-sheng, a leading collaborator in Wang’s regime: ‘China is a weak nation. In adopting a policy of being “friendly to distant countries and hostile to neighbours” [she] will inevitably bring about a situation which is summed up in the proverb: “Water from afar cannot extinguish a fire nearby.”’ Collaborationist slogans such as Tong Sheng Ghong Si (‘Live or Die Together’) were not wholly empty of meaning.

  The Japanese had sought living space in China. Now they had it. All that remained was to stamp out the Communist guerrillas behind their own lines– ironically, the chief beneficiaries of Japanese victories over the Nationalists – and to finish off the apparently isolated Chiang. This, however, was easier said than done. The Japanese responded to Communist attacks with the brutal ‘three all’ policy: ‘Take all, kill all, burn all.’ They reacted to Chiang’sretreat into Sichuan with air raids on Chongqing. In one important respect, this strategy bore fruit: in January 1941 the Second United Front between the Guomindang and the Communists fell apart when Nationalist troops attacked Ye Ting’s New 4th Army at Maolin in Anhui. Yet still victory seemed to elude the Japanese commanders. And the more bogged down their operations in China became – a metaphor that Chiang’s destruction of the Yellow River dykesturned into muddy reality – the more tempting it became to seek some kind of strategic breakthrough elsewhere.

  JAPAN TURNS SOUTHWARDS

  Already in 1940 there were those in Tokyo who argued that it was Western aid that was keeping Chinese resistance going, despite the very limited amount of material that was reaching Chiang’s forcesin Hunnan from British-ruled Burma* and French Hanoi. In the words of General Nishio Toshizō in 1940:

  The true cause of the current conflict derives from the forgetfulness of the Japanese and Chinese peoples of the fact they are East Asians. They have succumbed to the maddening influence of the individualistic materialism of Europe and America… Britain, the United States, France, and other powers are providing aid to Chongqing in order to perpetuate China’s dependent status.

  In late 1938, the new Deputy Minister for War, Tōjō Hideki, denounced not only Britain for assisting the Chinese, but also the Soviet Union and the United States. The difficulty with this diagnosis was that it was unclear which of these external threats should be confronted first. The Kwantung Army had a historic predilection for confrontation with Russia. But by mid-1938 forces in the North had been so depleted by the war in China that the odds were heavily in the Red Army’s favour. Two ‘incidents’ in 1938 and 1939 – border clashes at Changkufeng Hill on the eastern Manchurian-Soviet border and at Nomonhan on the border with Outer Mongolia – exposed the limitations of Japanese arms. Although the former clash could be regarded as a minor Japanese victory (though for no territorial gain), the latter was a disaster. The Japanese 6th Army was all but obliterated by the tanks, artillery and aircraft of the First Soviet Mongolian Army Group, under the command of Lieutenant-General (later Marshal) Georgi Zhukov. One reason the Japanese elected not to wage war against the Soviet Union – an option that would have been far superior from the point of view of combined Axis strategy in 1941 – was their realization that they might actually lose out in such a contest, so clear was their inferiority in terms of both tanks and planes. This, combined with the vain hopes of Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yō suke that the Soviet Union might somehow be brought into the Tripartite Pact, helps to explain the Japanese readiness to sign a non-aggression pact with Stalin in April 1941. The Japanese never quite believed in this arrangement, keeping between thirteen and fifteen divisions along their northern borders throughout the war for fear of a Soviet surprise attack, but it did more or less rule out a Japanese offensive in the North. When Matsuoka argued for such an attack in support of Hitler’s invasion just two months later, he was overruled and ousted from office.

  The preference of the Navy Staff was to launch assaults on Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaya, while at the same time overrunning Dutch Sumatra, Borneo and Java. Their assumption, which proved entirely correct, was that the European empires in Asia had been dealt a lethal blow at home by the German occupation of the Netherlands and France and the continuing German threat to the British Isles. The Dutch colonies, in particular, looked like easy quarry; they had the added allure of being oil-rich. Malaya, meanwhile, was the world’s biggest producer of rubber. Living space for Japanese settlers was all very well, but the Japanese Empire needed strategic raw materials far more urgently. In 1940 army planners had argued for an invasion of Indo-China, to provide new bases from which to attack the Chinese Nationalists in Sichuan. As War Minister in the new Cabinet formed by Prince Konoe in July 1940, Tōjō had insisted that unless Japan struck soon, she risked being too late. By 1941, it is true, some senior generals had become less enthusiastic about this idea. But by now the proponents of the Southern strategy had the upper hand.

  So much better know
n is the war in South-East Asia and the Pacific that it is easy to forget that these theatres were always subordinate to China in terms of the resources committed by the Japanese. China was to Japan what the Soviet Union was to Germany, absorbing the greater part of its military manpower – up to a million men at the peak. In all, 52 per cent of Japanese military personnel deployed overseas served in China, compared with 33 per cent in the Pacific theatre and 14 per cent in South-East Asia. These figures also provide some indication of the relative ease with which the Japanese were able to oust the European empires. By any standards, these were low-hanging fruit. The Dutch colonies were defended by a fleet of 5 cruisers, 8 destroyers and 24 submarines, an air force of 50 obsolescent planes and an army of just 35,000 regulars with 25,000 reservists. Singapore, the supposedly impregnable British fortress, was woefully short of anti-aircraft guns and had virtually no armour. So certain were British planners that the base would face only a naval challenge that itsrear was virtually undefended. Even a naval as sault might have succeeded, since there was never any serious intention of sending the British fleet east in the event of a war in Asia. Malaya at least had men, altogether around 80,000 Australian, British, Indian and Malay troops. But its air defences were feeble. With good reason the forces of the European empires in Asia have been called ‘Forgotten Armies’; in some respects they had been forgotten even before the war began.

  The first Japanese move was against French Indo-China. In early 1939 the islands of Hainan and the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea were seized. In June the following year – by which time France had succumbed to the German blitzkrieg – the Japanese demanded that the French authorities admit a forty-man military mission whose role would be to prevent the shipment of war supplies to Chongqing. The French Governor-General acquiesced, but bid for a mutual defence pact in the hope of preserving the colony’s integrity. Matsuoka dismissed this, demanding instead rights of transit for Japanese forces through Indo-China and the construction and use of airfields, as well as the stationing of Japanese troops to guard them. Realizing that they stood no chance if it came to a fight, the Vichy authorities agreed to this, leaving it to the Governor-General to handle the practicalities. However, the Japanese government grew impatient and on September 20 delivered an ultimatum to Hanoi, stating that Japanese troops would cross the border in two days’ time with or without the consent of the French authorities. Once again the French capitulated. By September 23 northern Indo-China was in Japanese hands. Six months later the Japanese intervened to end clashes that had broken out between French forces and neighbouring Thailand. The effect of the resulting compromise was to bring Thailand too into the Japanese orbit. At the end of July 1941 Japanese troops completed the takeover by occupying southern Indo-China.