Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  The Asian war started on 18 September 1931, when a bomb went off in the railway station in Mukden, the Manchurian capital. It was almost certainly planted by the Japanese army and did very little damage, but it allowed the army to claim that Japanese property was under attack and to embark on a campaign to take control of the whole province. In Tokyo the civilian prime minister was horrified. He had no wish to go to war but he had no control over the army and navy ministers, who while they sat in his cabinet did not report to him but directly to the emperor in the latter’s guise as Commander-in-Chief. Hirohito’s advisers, nervous of upsetting the armed forces and mindful that they risked assassination if they did, advised the emperor not to interfere, and the prime minister resigned. After a six-month campaign, Manchuria was subdued. The army declared it an independent nation and installed the last Qing emperor, Pu Yi, as a puppet ruler. China objected and complained to the League of Nations, which set up a commission to investigate. The commission was chaired by the British representative, Lord Lytton, the son of a viceroy of India and a former governor of Bengal. An unlikely Tory, he was an advocate of temperance and votes for women. Although in Britain there was much sympathy for the Japanese – who were at least clean and orderly, compared to the filth and squalor that was the norm in China – and the French member of the commission was openly pro-Japanese, Lytton’s report was a model of fairness. It accepted that Japan had legitimate grievances in her dealings with China, but found that Manchuria was unquestionably Chinese and should be ruled as an autonomous province of China. The League adopted the report and Japan left the League. Once again the white races were ganging up on Japan.

  The new prime minister tried to scupper the army’s plans to make Manchuria an independent state – in fact a Japanese colony. He complained to the emperor, to no avail, and was duly assassinated, probably by naval officers. In Shanghai, which was not part of Manchuria but housed a Japanese concession, scuffles between Chinese troops and Japanese marines led to intervention by the Japanese Army. It would be only a matter of time before the Japanese Army would take on the rest of China too, and this was accelerated by Manchuria not proving the economic salvation that Japan had hoped for. The conquest of Manchuria was hugely popular in Japan, and huge sums of Japanese money were poured in to build roads and factories in Manchukuo, the land of the Manchus, as Manchuria was now named, but it led to little. Manchukuo could not absorb Japanese exports, and goods manufactured there were not of the quality to replace goods hitherto imported from the West. At home the ultra-nationalist factions were gaining ground. An attempted coup in 1936 by a faction of the army claiming to want to remove the corrupt advisers surrounding the emperor was suppressed, but only at the expense of strengthening the power of the military: henceforth all cabinet posts were to be approved by the army and navy ministers, themselves serving officers. The prime minister was still for the moment a civilian, but entirely at the beck and call of the military. The defence budget was increased and in 1936 Japan signed Hitler’s Anti-Comintern Pact.

  The conservatives around the imperial throne were not yet ready to support an all-out war with China, and, as the current prime minister, Hirota Koki, could not control the army, the bureaucracy appointed one of their own, who they thought could. Prince Konoe Fumimaro was the scion of an old aristocratic family and the emperor’s regular golfing partner. He had Balfour as his political idol, sent his son to Princeton, and was fiercely anti-communist, an extreme believer in Japanese racial purity, with good connections in the military, and, crucially, opposed to war with China. Despite his birth and connections, he too was unable to control the army, which continued to do what it liked. The next phase of the Asian War began with the so-called China Incident of 7 July 1937 when a Japanese private soldier stationed in Peking urinated in the street and went for a walk. He got lost and was posted as missing, and the Japanese demanded that they be allowed to search the area where he had been last seen. That area was supposed to be out of bounds to troops and a suggestion by the Chinese that they should undertake the search, or that it be done jointly, was considered an insult. It was no worse a reason for starting a war than was Captain Jenkins’s ear in 1739, but any excuse would do, and although Japan never declared war on China – preferring to let it remain an ‘incident’ – war was what it was. The Japanese took Shanghai after bombing it and, while casualty figures were hugely inflated (pro-Chinese elements claimed 250,000 Chinese deaths), it was none the less a major battle. Until now, the Japanese had reinforced the Kwantung Army, which had previously been stationed in Manchuria, via Korea, a Japanese colony since 1910, but in November 1937 there was a further Japanese landing in the bay of Hangchow, south of Shanghai, and Japanese forces began to advance on Nanking.

  Nanking – ‘Northern Capital’ in Chinese, Peking being ‘Southern Capital’ – was the headquarters of the Kuo Min Tang forces, led by General Chiang Kai-shek,* who became leader of the party in 1937. The Rape of Nanking is probably the most notorious atrocity in a war of many atrocities. The Japanese army took the city in December when Chiang withdrew across the River Yangtze with the survivors of his army and those citizens with sufficient influence or money to go with him. Around half a million people were left in the city, a mixture of Nanking inhabitants, refugees from the countryside and army deserters in civilian clothes. Having marched into the city, the men of the Japanese Central China Army were told to mop up and their commander, General Iwane Matsui, instructed that no act which would stain the honour of the Japanese Army was to be tolerated, along with much other sanctimonious guff about maintaining discipline and securing the trust of the Chinese people. The army paid absolutely no attention and embarked upon a six-week orgy of plunder, rape and massacre, ignoring the occasional messages from Matsui about obedience to military law and good behaviour. Any Chinese of military age who ventured on to the streets was liable to be shot, and Chinese of any age were used for bayonet practice or shot out of hand. There were recorded instances of groups of Chinese being tethered together, taken to the bank of the Yangtze and machine-gunned. Anything in a skirt was raped, regardless of age, and even the pupils of girls’ schools were not spared. Chinese were murdered and whole streets set on fire for no other reason than it seemed like fun at the time; anything portable was looted and anything liquid was drunk.

  All armies do go off the rails from time to time. Soldiers are aggressive and trained to be so and are a lot less squeamish about blood and slaughter than their civilian counterparts. During the Peninsular War the British Army frequently and regularly misbehaved in captured cities, but this rarely lasted more than a couple of days before exhaustion and the provost restored order. Rape is not uncommon after a period of intense fear and danger. In Nanking, however, what happened was far more than a temporary loss of control. Nobody really knows how many Chinese civilians were killed: the war crimes trials held in Tokyo after the war claimed a quarter of a million, a figure which is almost certainly far too high, but the killings and the rapes went on for far longer than might be excused in an army seeking instant relief from the strains of fighting. In the Russo-Japanese War the Japanese army had been scrupulous in adhering to the laws of war, and it is most unlikely that the Japanese government instructed the barbarity of Nanking to happen – Konoe and his ministers were still sensitive to world opinion, and even the pro-Japanese German embassy described the behaviour of the conquerors as ‘bestial’. The commander, Matsui, was either unable or unwilling to rein his men in, despite his platitudes,* and it is quite possible that junior officers encouraged the soldiers’ excesses in order to teach the Chinese a lesson and discourage future resistance. That could happen with any army but once again it would not be long before hangovers, moral qualms and a realization that what was going on was contrary to law intervened to stop it. British and American, Italian and German soldiers might misbehave – indeed did misbehave – but not for any length of time, not as a corporate body and not with the approval, tacit or otherwise, of their superior
s. The Japanese private soldier was an uneducated peasant or manual worker from a background that was harsh and unforgiving, and served in an army where he was brutalized and brainwashed, with physical beatings by officers and NCOs for minor infractions of the norm. Feelings of racial superiority are found in many societies, and hatred of the foreigner is the more intense the further down the social scale the hater is. Anti-Semitism in Germany was particularly virulent amongst the erstwhile have-nots, and today’s British National Party is largely a lower-working-class movement. There had always been a belief amongst the Japanese that they were a superior race (there still is), and army propaganda had emphasized and reinforced this. The Chinese were subhuman, worthless, treacherous, corrupt and criminal, and the victorious and divine Japanese could treat them as they liked with utter impunity. Prisoners were a nuisance as they had to be fed and guarded, so it was easier not to take any. It was a harbinger of what was to come.

  The only concession the Japanese army made to protests about its behaviour in Nanking was to accept that rapes offended Chinese sensibilities, and henceforth army-run brothels would be provided, staffed by ‘comfort women’, Koreans, Chinese and a few Europeans, some working willingly but many more coerced. The Japanese army continued to ignore the home government and got itself more and more entrammelled in China: it took the ports of Foochoy, Amoy and Swatow, and Fukien and Canton provinces, the latter bordering on the British colony of Hong Kong; it pushed ever inland, forcing Chiang Kai-shek to move his capital to Chungking in the interior, but, while it won all the battles, it was capturing ground, not destroying Chinese armies, which took a beating, withdrew to lick their wounds and then popped up again somewhere else. It was costing Japan a great deal of money and mounting casualties. World opinion, particularly American opinion, which was well informed about Japanese atrocities, began to turn against Japan.

  Within the ranks of the Japanese army, officers were divided. All were in favour of expansion and conquest; the only question was in which direction. Most generals, admirals and politicians favoured heading into South-East Asia, with its rubber, iron ore and oil, while many in the Kwantung Army in Manchukuo belonged to the ‘Strike North’ faction and wanted to attack the Soviet Union and take eastern Siberia. The Japanese had beaten and humiliated imperial Russia; they could surely do the same against the Bolsheviks. Neither the emperor nor his advisers had any wish to go to war with Russia, but, as had happened so often in recent Japanese history, it was the army, often at quite a junior level, that decided what to do and did it, regardless of cautionary strictures from home. In the summer of 1938 skirmishing broke out on Manchukuo’s eastern border with Russia. The Red Army deployed aircraft and tanks, while the Japanese relied on the spirit of bushido. Fighting went on for two weeks with heavy casualties on both sides for no decisive result. Then in May 1939, on Manchukuo’s western border with Mongolia, a republic of the USSR, full-scale fighting broke out, initiated, unwisely as it turned out, by the Japanese. The Russians had fifty-two divisions, or half a million men, with several thousand aircraft and 2,200 tanks in the area, and their forces, commanded by General Georgi Zhukov, who was later to become the Red Army’s Chief of Staff, dealt the Japanese a serious blow. By the time a truce was signed on 15 September, the Japanese had taken around 50,000 casualties, of which around 8,500 were killed. That was the end of the Strike North concept, its demise emphasized by the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, about which the Japanese had no warning from Germany and which threw the government and cabinet (which resigned) into confusion.

  * * *

  Japan, lacking raw materials, had taken Formosa from China in 1895 as a source of sugar; she could obtain iron ore from Manchukuo and coal and timber from China, but she was entirely dependent on imported oil, rubber, nickel and other essential minerals. If Japan were to seek economic self-sufficiency by expanding southwards, then she would need oil from the Dutch East Indies, rubber, nickel and tin from Malaya, and rice and cotton from Burma. Between the Japanese mainland and those tempting riches lay the 7,000 islands of the Philippines, not in themselves attractive to Japanese expansionists but which, if left unoccupied, would act as a Trojan horse right in the centre of their defensive ring. The Philippines had been Spanish for 300 years until ceded to the USA after the Spanish–American War in 1898. She had an American governor general, a small American garrison and some local politicians more interested in the trappings of power than in responsibility but who were well aware that the United States had promised full independence in 1946. The defence of the Philippines against an aggressor – and there could only be one potential aggressor and that was Japan – was covered in Plan Orange, which envisaged the US Army and local forces withdrawing to the Bataan peninsula, west of Manila on the island of Luzon, and holding out for up to six months until reinforcements arrived from Hawaii. When Douglas MacArthur was Chief of Staff of the US Army from 1930 to 1935 he reviewed Plan Orange, declared it unworkable in relation to the Philippines, an area he knew well, and announced that, if war were imminent, his immediate reaction would be to send reinforcements in the form of two American divisions. As the US Army only had three divisions, this was clearly also unworkable, and MacArthur’s suggestion did nothing to enhance his standing amongst his peers.

  In 1935 President Roosevelt offered MacArthur the post of Governor General of the Philippines, which would mean his resigning from the army and would, the president intended, neutralize him politically. At the same time the head of the Philippines government, Manuel Quezon, an old acquaintance of the general’s from his previous service there, asked for MacArthur as the head of the American military mission to his country, which would effectively make MacArthur the commander of the embryo Filipino Army. As Quezon’s offer would allow him to continue as an American general, MacArthur accepted. On arrival in the Philippines, accompanied once more by Major Dwight D. Eisenhower as his assistant military adviser, MacArthur set about trying to produce a realistic defence strategy. He hoped to do this by creating a small regular Filipino Army and a huge part-time popular militia. The regular army plus the American garrison supported by aircraft and PT (motor torpedo) boats would oppose any landing, and, if that failed, the militia would wage a guerrilla war. At this stage, MacArthur (and his American staff) thought the Japanese army a joke and considered that Japan would never go to war against the United States.

  Two years later MacArthur’s view had changed. By then Japan had invaded China and was looking very aggressive indeed. MacArthur bombarded Washington with requests for more aircraft, more ships and more American troops, all of which were refused. His plan for Filipino military expansion was falling apart because the Philippines could not afford the expense and the United States would not. MacArthur, already the subject of some ridicule for accepting the rank of field marshal from Quezon and designing his own uniform to go with it, became increasingly an irritant to Washington and in 1937 he was summoned home. Considering this an insult both to himself and to the government of the Philippines, he resigned from the United States Army on 31 December 1937. He remained in command of the Filipino Army, but this time as a Filipino, not an American, officer, increasingly convinced of Japanese evil intentions towards his adopted land and, as he was no longer an American general, increasingly unable to do very much about it, nor to influence the posting of mediocre American officers to his staff. The ambitious Eisenhower, now promoted to lieutenant-colonel, stuck it out for nine months and then, with war declared in Europe and convinced that the United States would eventually become involved, decided that his career demanded the unhitching of his star from MacArthur and asked for a posting back to the United States. President Quezon, perhaps realizing that Eisenhower was the one stabilizing influence on MacArthur, pleaded with him to stay and asked him to name his own salary, but he insisted on going: ‘I want to be there if what I think is going to happen actually happens.’42

  MacArthur continued to try to cobble some sort of defensive posture together for the Philippines, ha
ving to weave his way through the convoluted maze of local politics and the problems of running a conscript army with no money. Back home, Washington now considered that war with Japan would come, but, as the president had already decided, although not announced, that Japan would take second priority to Germany, and as the Philippines would be independent in 1946 anyway, there was no point in sending substantial reinforcements or in spending US dollars on her defence. In June 1941, with war in Asia seemingly inevitable, General George C. Marshall, since 1939 the army’s Chief of Staff and now at sixty-one the president’s chief military adviser, realized that some gesture must be made to the Philippines. He had served there and in China himself, and considered that for all MacArthur’s character faults he was the only man with the experience and the public profile to command in the Philippines. MacArthur was reinstated in the United States Army with the rank of lieutenant-general and would command all forces, American and Filipino, in that country. He would have little time to prepare.

  * * *

  The Dutch East Indies covered a vast area some 2,350 by 1,200 miles and included the islands of Java and Sumatra, most of southern Borneo, Dutch New Guinea, the Celebes, West Timor and the Moluccas. The population was around 71 million, which included 1 million Chinese and 250,000 Dutch, the latter there as colonial administrators, soldiers and businessmen, and spread around the islands was a garrison of around 100,000 men of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, mainly native troops with Dutch officers. Primarily intended for keeping order internally, they were poorly equipped for modern warfare. Their South-East Asian colony was hugely important to the Dutch, as it generated around 15 per cent of the national income, producing not only oil in large quantities (59 million barrels in 1940) but also rubber, copra, tin and bauxite. When the German army overran Holland in 1940, the East Indies administration pledged its loyalty to Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch government-in-exile in London, rather than to the Reichskommissariat Niederlande set up by the Germans, and, when in January 1941 the Japanese foreign ministry made a reference to the Dutch East Indies as being included in the ‘Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere’, the Japanese term for territories it had grabbed, was grabbing or intended to grab to be exploited in its search for economic self-sufficiency, the colonial administration in Batavia, the People’s Council, protested vigorously. It also refused Japanese demands for fishing rights and unrestricted use of its ports, and, while it did increase its exports to Japan, although not by the amount demanded, in August 1941 it followed the Americans and the British by banning the export of oil to Japan. It was a brave, but in the event futile, display of independence.