Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II (9 page)

On 22 September, just days before the treaty of alliance was formally signed with Germany and Italy, the Japanese took advantage of their friendship with the Nazis by moving their troops into northern Indochina (today’s Vietnam).
The United States, which had already threatened the Japanese government that it would cut off oil supplies if the aggression in Asia did not cease, now announced that iron and steel scrap would no longer be exported to Japan.
But the Japanese ignored the American threat.
An editorial in the newspaper
Mainichi Shimbun
proclaimed: ‘The time has at last arrived when Japan’s aspiration and efforts to establish East Asia for East Asiatics, free from the Anglo-Saxon yoke, coincides exactly with the German — Italian aspiration to build a New Order in Europe and to seek a future appropriate to their strength by liberating themselves from Anglo-Saxon clutches.’
¹¹

The Japanese then followed the Nazi example and concluded a neutrality agreement with their ideological enemy — the communists of the Soviet Union.
In March 1941 foreign minister Matsuoka visited Moscow and reached an agreement with Stalin that guaranteed neither country would attack the other.
‘We are both Asiatic,’ said Stalin after the treaty was signed, ‘now Japan can move south.’
¹²

Four months later the Soviet Union was under attack from the other nation with which it had recently signed a non-aggression treaty — Nazi Germany.
Hitler once again dictated events when he launched Operation Barbarossa, his gigantic Blitzkrieg assault on Soviet territory, on 22 June 1941.
Once more the Japanese gazed in wonder at the actions of the German dictator.
There seemed little doubt to the Japanese elite that the Germans would soon conquer the Soviet Union just as they had crushed mainland Europe.
And the Japanese were not alone in thinking Stalin’s regime was doomed.
‘The best opinion I can get’, wrote the US secretary of the navy to President Roosevelt on 23 June, ‘is that it will take anywhere from six weeks to two months for Hitler to clean up on Russia.’
Hugh Dalton, the British Labour politician, recorded in his diary on 22 June: ‘I am mentally preparing myself for the headlong collapse of the Red Army and Air Force.’The British War Office told the BBC that it should not give out the impression that Russian armed resistance would last more than six weeks.
¹³

The impact on the Japanese of the news of the German invasion of the Soviet Union can scarcely be overestimated.
At a stroke the political map of the world was changed as Hitler demonstrated once more how boldness on a grand scale could change a country’s fortunes.
One immediate consequence was that the Japanese no longer faced any threat from the Soviet Union.
Equally, the Japanese noted that Germany — short of raw materials and forced until that moment passively to buy oil and steel from the Soviet Union — had moved in one dramatic moment to snatch and steal what it required instead.
What could be a clearer example of a possible way forward for Japan than this?

On 2 July 1941 the Japanese government, against the background of phenomenal early German gains in the Soviet Union, formally adopted the policy of creating a ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’, and, as a first step, decided that the Imperial Army should occupy all of French Indochina.
The Americans, having broken Japanese diplomatic codes, were able to read messages sent between Tokyo and the Japanese embassy in Washington, and responded swiftly to this new act of Japanese aggression.
On 25 July the Americans announced that all Japanese assets in the USA would be frozen and that there would be an embargo on oil shipments to Japan.
Days later the British and Dutch followed the American lead and declared similar sanctions against the Japanese.

The Japanese government now faced a profound dilemma.
As they saw it the price of getting the oil ban removed was too high for any truly ‘honourable’ Japanese to accept — the Americans were demanding that Japan give up hard-won territory in Asia and abandon the cherished ideal of a ‘New Order’ based on Japanese supremacy.
But in order to find new supplies of oil and free themselves from this dependence on the United States, the Japanese Imperial Navy would have to venture out and conquer the Dutch East Indies and
en route
there was the risk of encountering ships of the powerful American Pacific fleet.
Admiral Yamamoto, the most brilliant strategist in the Imperial Navy, believed there was one possible solution to the problem.
The course of action he advocated was risky, but simple — strike hard against the American Pacific fleet at its base in Hawaii in a daring surprise attack, and then propose a compromise peace that would leave Japan a free hand in Asia.

An Imperial Conference was held on 6 September 1941 in Tokyo to discuss the best way forward.
Hirohito was clearly anxious about the consequences of any proposed war with the USA.
As he reminded his minister of war at the meeting, he had been promised that the war in China which had begun with the Marco Polo bridge incident in 1937 would be finished within a month — and now four years had passed.
How long would any war against America last, he demanded to know.
’Three months,’ General Sugiyama replied.
¹⁴
The meeting broke up with agreement that discussions with the US government should be continued, but that if an acceptable agreement could not be reached Japan must be prepared to go to war.
Hirohito ended the conference by reading a poem composed by his grandfather, the mighty Emperor Meiji:

All the seas in every quarter
Are as brothers to one another
Why, then do the winds and waves of strife
Rage so turbulently throughout the world?
¹⁵

Just what Hirohito meant by this poem has since been hotly debated, with many believing he was expressing his displeasure at the proposed conflict with America.
Others point to it as a defining moment which demonstrates Hirohito’s lack of moral courage in not commanding that war be avoided at all costs.
But there is another way of seeing his decision to read the poem, one that casts his actions not as those of an ineffectual ruler, but as those of a cynically effective one.
Hirohito knew that Japan was backed into a corner.
No matter which course of action his government took, there was both potential damage to Japan and potential gain.
Hirohito had already demonstrated that he lacked all moral scruple by the way he acquiesced in his army’s brutal actions in China, and he was clearly of the view that his generals could seize whatever territory in Asia they liked — but only so long as the Imperial Army did not become overstretched.
In effect the emperor had only one demand — that his armed forces succeed in whatever course of action they planned.
The poem he read is less a wistful hope that war and conflict be eliminated from the world, and more an expression of his continuing belief that his imperial forces should not enter wars they were not going to win.

The two nations thus entered the last few months of peace unforgiving and intransigent on both sides.
The Americans now declined prime minister Konoe’s request for a face-to-face meeting with President Roosevelt, believing from the intelligence gained from breaking the Japanese diplomatic code that there was little chance that Japan would make real concessions.
On 16 October, Konoe resigned once more as prime minister and was replaced by the minister of war, General Tojo.
Fruitless negotiations began in Washington between US secretary of state Hull and ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura.
The Americans still insisted that the Japanese must relinquish gains made in China — an impossibility for the emperor and his Imperial Army.
For the Americans, major Japanese concessions over China were an essential part of protecting what had become known to the Japanese as the ABCD encirclement (America, Britain, China and the Dutch).

As November 1941 began the Japanese government realized that they were moving inexorably towards war, and were torn between excitement at finally trying to resolve their complex dilemma by force and the knowledge that they were a small country about to provoke the most powerful nation on earth.
With hindsight the subsequent Japanese decision to bomb Pearl Harbor seems almost an act of insanity.
But at the time the Japanese government made certain assumptions about how events outside their control were likely to develop, and these assumptions, they thought, made the attack seem a pragmatic, rather than a foolhardy, act.
The Germans were at the gates of Moscow and it still seemed likely that Hitler would win against Stalin — and even if he did not win immediately, the Red Army would clearly be held on the we stern borders of the Soviet Union for the foreseeable future.
As for the United States, the argument was less about suddenly going to war against the Americans than about converting into an armed conflict the economic war that had effectively already been declared.
There was no guarantee (unless the Japanese capitulated and abandoned all of the imperial ambitions that had driven their foreign policy aspirations for the last ten years) that the Americans would not in a matter of months move militarily against Japan themselves, especially if the Imperial Navy ventured out into the Pacific.

Of course, a major part of the reason, with hindsight, that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor seems so reckless in terms of scale and resources is that Japan could never hope to defeat the United States.
But that was fully recognized at the time.
Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of the attack, always maintained that Japan could not hope to win a long drawn-out war.
Equally, the Japanese leadership realized that the notion of the Imperial Army marching through the streets of Washington after a successful invasion of mainland America was nonsensical.
The entire basis of the Japanese plan rested on the assumption that the Americans would soon grow tired of the war and want to make a compromise peace.
Given what actually happened — that the bombing of Pearl Harbor created in the Americans a powerful desire for revenge against the Japanese — that assumption seems impossibly naive.
But in more recent history there has been at least one clear example of a small country in Asia taking on the might of the Americans and winning just such a negotiated peace — Vietnam.
The Japanese notion that the Americans would eventually find a conflict thousands of miles away across the Pacific wearisome enough to want to find an honourable way out of it was not, therefore, inherently a ludicrous strategy.
‘America is a big country and we knew that we wouldn’t be able to win against them once the war was prolonged,’ says Masatake Okumiya, who was in the Imperial Navy as the Pearl Harbor operation was launched.
‘But at the time the fleet was the mainstay of military power, be it American, British or Japanese.
The fleet represented a nation’s military power.
So if you destroyed the fleet the damage would be huge.
It would ruin President Roosevelt’s reputation as a commander-in-chief and he might then be put in a difficult situation.’

So on 7 December, the Imperial Navy attacked the American battleships at their naval base at Pearl Harbor on the American islands of Hawaii, having sailed two-thirds of the way across the Pacific.
‘We were so surprised, amazed!’
says Gene La Roque, then an officer aboard the USS
MacDonough
.
’I personally thought that it was the United States Army Air Corps who’d mistakenly dropped their bombs on us, until we saw the red circles on the Japanese planes as they flew over.’
La Roque and his shipmates were particularly astonished because ‘there was nothing about the Japanese that we knew, even on the briefings from our intelligence people, that would cause us to be concerned about the capability of the Japanese.
We hadn’t seen any of their armaments, their warships — we didn’t think they could make good aeroplanes.
We thought the Japanese couldn’t see well, particularly at night, because in all the pictures we’d seen of Japanese over the years they were wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses.’

If initially the American sailors at Pearl Harbor were dumbfounded by the Japanese attack, their emotions quickly changed.
‘We thought, this is a dirty trick,’ says La Roque.
‘Those stinkers, they attacked us by surprise in our own base, they weren’t fair, they weren’t honest, they didn’t do battle with us at sea — those sneaky Japanese outsmarted us.
After all, it was Sunday morning.
Many people had gone, or were preparing to go, to church services, and that was another thing that angered us about the Japanese — they attacked us during our church services.
We thought they would have better sense than to do that.
It wasn’t fair.’
The ‘unfairness’ of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was to become a major theme constantly voiced by Americans throughout the war — from the characterization by President Roosevelt in his speech following Pearl Harbor that this was a ‘day of infamy’ to the US marine rallying cry: ‘Remember Pearl Harbor!
Keep ‘em dying!’

Much of the subsequent historical debate about the attack has focused on the fact that the Japanese did not deliver their declaration of war to the Americans until their planes had already begun their bombing runs at Pearl Harbor — something the Japanese say was a ‘mistake’ made by their embassy in Washington.
But arguably it would have made no difference to American anger even if the declaration of war had arrived minutes before the Pearl Harbor attack rather than hours later.
The whole Japanese war-plan had been predicated on the assumption that the imperial forces would catch the Americans completely by surprise.
In acting this way the Japanese military were following an ancient tradition last seen in modern times in 1904, when Admiral Togo had led the Japanese fleet in a surprise attack on the Russians at Port Arthur.
Indeed, it is hard not to see in the belligerent reaction of the Americans to the manner of the Pearl Harbor attack an attempt to conceal their own shame-facedness at being so complacent and ill-prepared.