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

by Niall Ferguson

  We had been trained to [re]act instinctively, immediately to commands like ‘Attention’, ‘At ease’, ‘About face’, ‘Man your battle stations’ and ‘Fire when ready’, but the word ‘Surrender’ was foreign. It had not been programmed into our minds and therefore brought no response.

  He and hiscomradescould only weep, swear and try to convince themselves that ‘we had done our very best’.

  The Americans vainly attempted to achieve swift retaliation by bolstering the Chinese war effort, sending Lieutenant-General Joseph Stilwell to oversee American aid to Chiang. Unfortunately, the two got on badly from the outset. ‘The trouble in China is simple,’ Stilwell told one journalist. ‘We are allied to an ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, peasant son of a bitch.’ Stilwell wanted to rationalize and centralize the Chinese command structure; he resented the conspicuous consumption of Chiang’s court, referring to him privately as ‘Peanut’ or ‘the rattle snake’. He himself had earned the soubriquet ‘Vinegar Joe’ for his acerbic candour. Hiseffortsto take command of the relief operation in Burma were frustrated by the refusal of the commander of the Chinese 5th Army, Du Yuming, to obey hisorders. The Japanese riposte was to launch a series of offensives which routed Chinese forces in Zhejiang province, bringing the region’s principal railway under Japanese control.

  Small wonder, then, that the new authorities in South-East Asia felt entitled to crow. What Japan’smilitary leaders lacked in hubris was amply compensated for by ‘educational announcements’ like this:

  Nippon is the sun: protector of the land and provider of light to all beings on earth. The Nippon Empire will increase in power and importance, like the sun rising higher in the sky – this is eternal and is also the meaning of the name Nippon.

  In the creation of the world, land was the first. And the first land was Nippon, Land of the Rising Sun. No one can challenge the sun – to do so is like the snow melting in the heat of the sun. This is the iron-clad law on earth… Those opposing Nippon will undergo the same experience as the snow.

  PRISONERS AND COLLABORATORS

  Many of the less exalted traits that had already manifested themselves during the China campaign were also features of the Japanese army’s conduct in South-East Asia. The difference was that those on the receiving end now included ‘those white fellows’. The notorious maltreatment of Allied prisoners of war was partly a consequence of the stigmatizing of surrender per se mentioned above. Physical assaults – most commonly slaps in the face and beatings – were a daily occurrence in some camps. Executions without due process were frequent. Official policy encouraged such brutality by applying the Geneva Convention only ‘mutatis mutandis’, which the Japanese chose to translate as ‘with any necessary amendments’. Thousands of American prisonersdied during the infamous Bataan ‘Death March’ in 1942.* Elsewhere, PoWs were used as slave labour, most infamously on the Burma–Siam (Thailand) railway line. Some prisoners were made to wear armbands bearing the inscription: ‘One who has been captured in battle and isto be be headed or castrated at the will of the Emperor.’ Attempting to escape – which Western powers regarded as a prisoner’s duty – was treated by the Japanese as a capital offence, though the majority of Allied prisoners who died (see Table 14.1) were in fact victims of malnutrition and disease exacerbated by physical overwork and abuse.

  Yet it is important to emphasize that Japanese maltreatment was not confined to European prisoners. They murdered, enslaved and otherwise abused far larger numbers of the indigenous populations of the territories they occupied, giving the lie to their speciousclaimsto be the liberators of Asia. Between 5,000 and 50,000 Chinese were massacred in Singapore in a series of ‘purification-by-elimination’ (sook ching) operations. The majority of those who died on the Bataan Death March were in fact Filipinos, just as ten or even twenty times as many Asians as Europeans died building the Death Railway. Of the 78,204 slave workers sent there from Malaya, for example, no fewer than 29,638 died.

  Table 14.1: Prisoners of the Japanese Southern offensive and their fates, 1941–45

  Prisoners

  Died

  % died

  British, Australian & Indian

  130,000

  8,100

  6.2

  American

  25,600

  10,650

  41.6

  Dutch

  37,000

  8,500

  23.0

  Indonesian forced labourers

  300,000

  230,000

  77.0

  Undocumented Asian prisoners

  300,000

  60,000

  20.0

  Civiliansinterned

  130,895

  14,657

  11.2

  TOTAL

  923,000

  332,000

  36.0

  * * *

  * * *

  * * *

  No less enslaved and little more likely to survive were the tens of thousands of Korean girls who were abducted to serve as ‘comfort women’ – ianfu, colloquially known as ‘Ps’, from the Chinese p’i (cunt) – to Japanese troops all over ‘Greater East Asia’, often to front-line areas. Victims of what amounted to institutionalized gang rape, their recollections make harrowing reading. Kim Busŏn was just fifteen when she was lured away from her village in Gyeongbuk province with the promise of employment in a rubber factory. She was then taken to Taiwan where she was incarcerated in a military brothel:

  Weekdays and weekends from 10 in the morning to 11 at night, soldiers came to do it. Sometimes they would come through the night. During the weekdays, less soldiers came, but mostly the place was always crowded with them. Countless soldiers came, grouped in tens and twenties. I can never forget the torturing experience I had during those times… Officers always came late at night. They would come at 11 pm or even at midnight. They would sometimes go to sleep and leave in the next morning. We would sit on the entrance till it got very late at night. When we were called by an officer, we would go with him into a room to do it… Nobody would behave well before us. They acted brutally. Even now when I see a soldier, he looks like an animal to me… We often contracted gonorrhoea. We were not hospitalized, but treated with medication or sometimes given injections. When we had disease, we wrote ‘vacation’ on the door.

  During the war she was moved to the Philippines, where she ‘received thirty to forty soldiers every day’. The imperialism of sexual domination is seldom more starkly exposed than in these accounts. Kim Yongsuk, who was just twelve when she was recruited by the Japanese, was brutally abused by a Japanese officer in Mukden:

  [He] came in and asked me what my name was. And he called me Okada. He gave me a Japanese suit and told me to get changed. It was a cheep gaudy cloth you could take off easily with flip of a finger. In a couple of days, that guy came in again, and said, ‘I am Nakamura! This Korean girl looks quite cute. Let me play with you!’ I wasonly twelve at the time. He showed me his penis. I ran away, but nobody helped me. He held me fast with his rough handsand cut my vagina. In a couple of days, he came in one more time. He said, ‘I will eat your liver! You don’t even recognize what benevolence you receive from the Heavenly Emperor of the Japanese Empire.’ Then he twisted my legswith hisfoot with bootson, and cut my belly with a knife, and scratched my breast.

  Kim Busŏn recalled how she was forced by her pimp and some soldiers to recite the Imperial Citizen’s Charter, which began: ‘I wish to be a citizen of the Empire’ (kokoku shimmin nari). It clearly struck them as funny to hear a sex slave ask for citizenship.

  George Orwell, in his capacity as wartime propagandist, was quite right to ask: ‘Why… do the Japanese constantly make war against other races who are Asiatics no less than themselves?’ He might equally well have asked why the ‘liberation’ of Singapore necessitated the imposition of the Japanese language, calendar and even Tokyo time on its inhabitants. The experience of the renamed ‘Syonan’ exemplified the Japanese determination t
o create a culturally homogeneous empire on the basis of Nippon Seishin, the Japanese spirit. Similar things were attempted in occupied Java.

  Nevertheless, none of this could wholly detract from the powerful symbolism of the Japanese subjugation of their European captives. As one wartime British report put it, there seemed to be ‘an official policy of humiliating white prisoners of war in order to diminish their prestige in native eyes’. Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Dunlop, one of the survivors of the Death Railway, early on formed the impression that the Japanese were ‘just breaking men on this job’. ‘It must be rather amusing’, he reflected in his secretly kept diary, ‘for a Japanese to see the “white lords” trudging the road with basket and pole while they roll by on their lorries!’ Such surmises were correct. As Itagaki Seishiro, Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Army in Korea told Tōjō, ‘It is our purpose by interning American and British prisoners of war… to make the Koreans realize positively the true might of our Empire as well asto contribute to the psychological propaganda work for stamping out any ideas of worship of Europe and America.’

  We should not overlook the extent to which this policy worked, at least initially, in legitimizing the Japanese claim to be liberators of Asia. When Japanese spokesmen referred to ‘the shared ideals of all Asian peoples’ and declared that ‘the Great East Asia project’ was ‘based entirely on justice, and is opposed to the exploitative, aggressive, exclusionary egotism of Britain and America’, they were able to elicit enthusiastic responses. Resentment of European rule ran deep among the educated inhabitants of Asian cities; Orwell, who had served as a sub-divisional police officer in pre-war Burma, was not the only one who had noticed it – and not the only one to have hisfaith in British rule shaken by the disquieting experience of being hated.* Nationalists from the former Dutch colonieshailed Japan as ‘the Leader of Asia, the Protector of Asia and the Light of Asia’. For Sukarno, Indonesia’s future president, Japan’s war was indeed a war for national independence. Ba Maw, the Burmese nationalist leader whom the British had imprisoned in 1940, told delegates at the Tokyo conference of the Greater East Asiatic Nations in November 1943: ‘This is not the time to think with our minds, this is the time to think with our blood.’ The pre-war Filipino ministers José Laurel and Jorge Vargas declared that the Japanese victories ‘vindicated the prestige of all Asiatic nations’. Nor were Japanese promises of liberation entirely empty. On August 1, 1943, Burma wasdeclared to be independent; for the Philippines independence came on October 14. India and Indonesia were also promised independence.

  Even Asians who had never experienced European rule were capable of impressive enthusiasm for the Japanese cause. Between 1939 and 1943 more than 700,000 Koreans volunteered to serve in the Japanese army – many writing their applications in their own blood to prove the depth of their commitment to be ‘more Japanese than the Japanese’ – though the Japanese accepted fewer than 18,000. In 1942 more than 425,000 Taiwanese, around 14 per cent of the male population, put themselves forward when 1,000 volunteers were sought. In all, more than 200,000 Taiwanese ended up serving as soldiers or as civilians working for the Japanese military.

  The Japanese encountered resistance from some indigenous peoples, to be sure, and not only from those ethnic groups and elites that had done relatively well under Western colonial rule. The overwhelming majority of Indians showed no interest in the kind of liberation the Japanese had in mind for them. In the Philippines the peasant Hukbal-ahap movement waged a guerrilla war against them; in Burma the Karen and Kachin hill tribes also resisted Japanese rule. Nevertheless, the Japanese had no difficulty in finding collaborators among both anti-European nationalists and opportunists. Indian nationalists had not forgotten the 1919 Amritsar Massacre; it was in March 1940 that Udham Singh assassinated Sir Michael O’Dwyer, who had been Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab at that time. Though the majority of Congress leaders eschewed collaboration with the Japanese – in practice, ‘Quit India’ meant neutrality, albeit with a great deal of circumlocution – Subhas Chandra Bose enthusiastically hailed ‘the end of the British Empire’ and called on Indians to join the Axisside. Around 3,500 answered the initial call from Berlin of the self-proclaimed Netaji (‘leader’) to form an Indian Army of Liberation, most of them Indians who had been taken prisoner by the Germans in North Africa. When he reached Asia – having travelled by U-boat from Kiel to Sumatra – Bose was able to recruit a further 45,000 men (again mostly prisoners from Singapore and elsewhere) to his Indian National Army and the Axis cause. More than the somewhat ambivalent Hitler, Tojo seemed sincere in his declarations of support for India’s ‘desperate struggle for independence’. ‘Without the liberation of India,’ he told the Japanese Diet in early 1942, ‘there can be no real mutual prosperity in Greater East Asia.’ Ba Maw and Aung San’s Burma Independence Army also enjoyed Japanese backing, though at the price of being reduced in size and renamed the Burma Defence Army until the Japanese had made up their minds to grant Burmese independence. In Java and Bali volunteer armies known as Peta (Army Defendersof the Homeland) were also formed. In Malaya, Sumatra, Indo-China and Borneo there were volunteer defence forces too, known as Giyūgun.

  To be sure, the numbers of these forces were not large – at most 153,000 trained men. However, they could certainly have been much larger. The original Burma Independence Army had mustered 200,000 recruits, but was reduced by the Japanese to just 4,000, rising to 55,000 by the end of the war. Moreover, although the Japanese-trained armies in South-East Asia were small in relation to the total number of men mobilized by Japan during the war, they were quite large compared with the number of Japanese soldiers who actually served in the Southern theatre – around 300,000. In other words, roughly a third of the soldiers available to the Japanese there were members of the supposedly liberated Asian peoples. Only gradually did disillusionment set in with what Ba Maw later called ‘the brutality, arrogance, and racial pretensions of the Japanese militarists’ – and it was not unrelated to the decline in Japan’s military fortunes after 1942 and the deepening crisis of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, which had become something more like a Co-Poverty Sphere by 1944.

  Most military histories of the Second World War in Asia take it for granted that Japan was doomed to lose. This may underestimate the strengths of the Japanese position in mid-1942. Further attacks at Pearl Harbor might have significantly slowed down the US recovery at sea. Conceivably, it has been suggested, the Americans might have made the mistake of committing themselves prematurely to a costly reconquest of the Philippines; indeed, prior to 1939 it had been their intention to try to hold the islands in the event of a war. More plausibly, the Japanese navy’s proposal to seize Ceylon, if it had been acted upon, could have seriously disrupted British communications to the Persian Gulf and Egypt, with dire implications for the build-up of British strength prior to El Alame in in October 1942. Japan might also have launched attacks on India from Burma, an option that was certainly contemplated (and of course belatedly executed in 1944). The Japanese had 700,000 troops in Manchuria and around one million in China; these could have been redeployed earlier to meet the inevitable Anglo-American counter-offensives. Even without them, there was nothing preordained about the Japanese reverses at the battles of the Coral Sea, Midway and Guadalcanal.

  The Axis powers were not bent on their own self-destruction, as historians have sometimes been tempted to assume. On the contrary, they drew real strength from the territory they conquered, from the collaborators they recruited, even from the internecine violence they fomented. So powerful were these evil empires, and so ruthlessly did they impose their ideological visions on vast tracts of Eurasia, that we are forced to consider seriously one of the most deceptively difficult questions of the twentieth century: how on earth did the Axisend up losing a war they seemed, by the middle of 1942, to have all but won?

  PART IV

  A Tainted Triumph

  15

  The Osmosis of War

  Something quite wort
hless, a poor parody of civilization, had been driven out; he and his fellows had moved in, bringing the new world with them; the world that was taking firm shape everywhere all about him, bounded by barbed wire and reeking of carbolic… He was engaged in a war in which courage and a just cause were quite irrelevant to the issue.

  Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour

  ‘When we look one another in the face, we’re neither of us looking at a face we hate – no, we’re gazing into a mirror… You may think you hate us, but what you really hate is yourselves – yourselves in us… When we strike a blow against your arms, it’s ourselves that we hit. Our tanks didn’t only break through your defences – they broke through our own defences at the same time. The tracks of our [own] tanks are crushing German National Socialism… But our victory will be your victory… And if you should conquer, then we shall perish only to live in your victory. Through losing the war we shall win the war – and continue our development in a different form.’