The U.S. and the War in the Pacific, 1941–45 (Seminar Studies) [1 ed.] 0367547589, 9780367547585

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The U.S. and the War in the Pacific, 1941–45

The U.S. and the War in the Pacific, 1941–45 analyzes the Pacific War with a focus on America’s participation in the conflict. Fought over a great ocean and vast battlefields using the most sophisticated weapons available, the Pacific War transformed the modern world. Not only did it introduce the atomic bomb to the world, it also reshaped relations among nations and the ways in which governments dealt with their own peoples, changed the balance of power in the Pacific in fundamental ways, and helped to spark nationalist movements throughout Asia. This book examines the strategies, technologies, intelligence capabilities, homefront mobilization, industrial production, and resources that ultimately enabled the United States and its allies to emerge victorious. Major themes include the impact of war, conceptions of race, Japanese perspectives on the conflict, and America’s relations with its allies. Using primary documents, maps, and concise writing, this book provides students with an accessible introduction to an important period in history. Incorporating recent scholarship and conflicting interpretations, the book provides an insightful overview of the topic for students of modern American history, World War II, and the Asia Pacific. Sandra Wilson is a historian of modern Japan and is Academic Chair of History at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. Michael Sturma is an Emeritus Professor at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. Arjun Subrahmanyan is a historian specializing in Thailand and Southeast Asia at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. Dean Aszkielowicz is a lecturer in History and a fellow of the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. J. Charles Schencking is a professor at the University of Hong Kong and a Sir Walter Murdoch Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia.

Introduction to the series

History is the narrative constructed by historians from traces left by the past. Historical enquiry is often driven by contemporary issues and, in consequence, historical narratives are constantly reconsidered, reconstructed and reshaped. The fact that different historians have different perspectives on issues means that there is often controversy and no universally agreed version of past events. Seminar Studies was designed to bridge the gap between current research and debate, and the broad, popular general surveys that often date rapidly. The volumes in the series are written by historians who are not only familiar with the latest research and current debates concerning their topic, but who have themselves contributed to our understanding of the subject. The books are intended to provide the reader with a clear introduction to a major topic in history. They provide both a narrative of events and a critical analysis of contemporary interpretations. They include the kinds of tools generally omitted from specialist monographs: a chronology of events, a glossary of terms and brief biographies of ‘who’s who’. They also include bibliographical essays in order to guide students to the literature on various aspects of the subject. Students and teachers alike will find that the selection of documents will stimulate the discussion and offer insight into the raw materials used by historians in their attempt to understand the past. Clive Emsley and Gordon Martel Series Editors

The U.S. and the War in the Pacific, 1941–45

Sandra Wilson, Michael Sturma, Arjun Subrahmanyan, Dean Aszkielowicz, and J. Charles Schencking

Cover Credit: Pictures from History / Bridgeman Images First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Sandra Wilson, Michael Sturma, Arjun Subrahmanyan, Dean Aszkielowicz, and J. Charles Schencking The right of Sandra Wilson, Michael Sturma, Arjun Subrahmanyan, Dean Aszkielowicz, and J. Charles Schencking to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wilson, Sandra, 1957- author. | Sturma, Michael, 1950- author. | Subrahmanyan, Arjun, author. | Aszkielowicz, Dean, author. | Schencking, J. Charles, 1970- author. Title: The U.S. and the war in the Pacific, 1941–1945 / Sandra Wilson, Michael Sturma, Arjun Subrahmanyan, Dean Aszkielowicz, and J. Charles Schencking. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2022. | Series: Seminar studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns— Pacific Area. | United States. Army—History—World War, 1939–1945. Classification: LCC D767 .W495 2022 (print) | LCC D767 (ebook) | DDC 940.54/26—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021037444 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021037445 ISBN: 978-0-367-54758-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-54756-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-09050-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003090502 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

List of figures List of maps Chronology Who’s who List of abbreviations Preface

vii viii ix xiii xxi xxii

PART I

Analysis

1

1

The collapse into war Japan’s imperial rivalry with the West 5 The aftermath of the First World War 6 War in China 8 Provocations and the collapse into war 10

3

2

Japan on the offensive: 1941–42 Starting with China 16 Japan’s lightning strike across Southeast Asia 18 Japan’s New Order and its Southeast Asian friends 22 Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal 26

16

3

The U.S. home front 1940–41: An end to isolationism 28 Wartime work 29 Wartime mobility 33 Big government, big business, and big science 38

28

4

The tide of war changes: 1943 The Pacific War’s administrative tangle 40 The troubled China–U.S. alliance 41 Burma’s long war 42 Asian nationalism gains momentum 44

40

vi Contents The war’s toll on civilians: The Thailand–Burma railway 46 Japan’s appeal sours: Resistance to Japanese occupation 47 Island hopping and leapfrogging 49 5

The crucible: 1944 Strategy 51 The Marianas and the Battle of the Philippine Sea 53 The savage war for Southeast Asia and China 56 Return to the Philippines and Leyte Gulf 59 Perceptions of Japanese fanaticism 61

51

6

Bombing Japan: 1945 The chimera of high-altitude precision bombing against Japan 66 Burning Japan’s six largest cities 69 Operation Iceberg – assisting the invasion of Okinawa 70 Burning Japan’s remaining cities 72 The strategic bombing of Japan: Legacy 73

64

7

Endgame Developments in Japan 76 Plans for the invasion and defense of the Japanese home islands 78 ‘Unconditional surrender’ 79 Potsdam 80 The Allies decide to use the atomic bombs 81 The USSR joins the war 83 Surrender 85

76

8

After the war: new beginnings The first phase of the occupation of Japan 90 The dismantling of colonial rule in Asia and the escalation of the Cold War 92 The evolution of the occupation of Japan 94 The enduring legacy of the Pacific War 95

89

PART II

Documents Glossary Further reading References Index

97 125 129 136 145

Figures

1.1

The damaged USS West Virginia and USS Tennessee (left) as the USS Arizona (right) sinks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (Library of Congress 2017874753) 15 3.1 Factory worker washing an airplane motor prior to shipment (Universal History Archive / Getty Image 982761442) 31 3.2 Japanese–American internees waiting for registration (Historical / Getty Image 615302130) 36 5.1 Marine Major General Holland M. Smith, Major-General Thomas E. Watson, and Admiral Raymond Spruance discuss the tactical situation on Saipan, 13 July 1944 (US Marine Photo) 55 6.1 American B-29 Superfortress nicknamed ‘Dauntless Dotty’, which led the first B-29 raid on Tokyo, 24 November 1944 (Keystone / Stringer / Getty Image 3333548) 67 7.1 An allied correspondent stands amid the rubble of Hiroshima (Popperfoto / Getty Image 78964772) 83 7.2 Japanese delegation at the surrender ceremony on USS Missouri, 2 September 1945 (De Agostini Picture Library / Getty Image 901513652) 87 9.1 Document 4: U.S. propaganda poster (David Pollack / Getty Image 524435020) 105

Maps

0.1 Pacific Region 0.2 Southeast Asia

xxiii xxiv

Chronology

1937 7 July October December

Japanese patrol and Chinese forces clash at ‘Marco Polo’ bridge near Beijing, commencing Japan’s war in China Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government moves Chinese capital 850 miles up the Yangtze river from Nanjing to Chongqing Japanese army conquers Nanjing, atrocities against civilians begin

1940 September

Japan occupies northern French Indochina

1941 January–May May 25 June July 7/8 December 10 December 11 December 25 December

Thai–French Indochinese border war Anti-colonial, anti-Japanese Vietnamese nationalists form the Viet Minh organization in northern Vietnam President Franklin D. Roosevelt issues Executive Order 8802, prohibiting discrimination in employment in defence industries Japan’s army moves into southern French Indochina Japan attacks Pearl Harbor; U.S. declares war on Japan Japan attacks northern Luzon in the Philippines, British Malaya, and Thailand Germany and Italy declare war on U.S.; U.S. declares war on Germany and Italy Japan takes Hong Kong

x Chronology 1942 January–May

Japan invades and conquers British Burma; China’s land access to Allied supplies cut off by May 2 January Manila falls to the Japanese 25 January Thailand declares war on the Allies 13 February Japan begins attack and conquest of the Dutch East Indies 15 February Singapore falls to the Japanese February and March Sook Ching campaigns in Singapore and Malaya 19 February President Roosevelt issues Executive Order 9066, directing the War Department to exclude people from prescribed military areas; this order is used to evacuate Japanese Americans from the west coast March Joseph Stilwell arrives in Chongqing as Chiang Kai-shek’s chief of staff and attempts to organize Allied resistance in Burma 5 March Dutch East Indies capital of Batavia falls to the Japanese 4–8 May U.S., Australian, and New Zealand navies defeat Japan in the Battle of the Coral Sea 6 May Corregidor Island falls; Japan consolidates control over the Philippines June Manhattan Project launched to build atomic bomb 4–7 June U.S. navy defeats Japan at the Battle of Midway October– August 1943 Thai–Burma railway constructed by Southeast Asians and prisoners of war 1943 January

February February–May March 20–22 June July

Japanese planners divide Southeast Asia into two types of territories, those allowed and denied eventual independence; U.S. and Australian navies push Japanese out of eastern New Guinea islands Japanese evacuate Guadalcanal Orde Wingate’s Chindit guerrillas work behind Japanese lines in Burma Allies defeat the Japanese navy in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea Detroit race riot (34 killed) Burma and the Philippines given independence by the Japanese

Chronology  xi September–January 1944 October–November 22–26 November

Stilwell’s officers accelerate Ledo Road construction project that opens land route to China from India U.S. attacks and captures Japan’s largest Southwest Pacific base at New Britain Allied conference at Cairo, Egypt, reaffirms doctrine of unconditional surrender and applies it to Japan

1944 31 January 17–18 February

U.S. troops invade Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands U.S. carrier planes attack Truk in the Caroline Islands April–February 1945 Japan launches Ichigo offensive in China, stretching 900 miles from central China to the Indochina border; the largest Japanese land offensive of the war 22 April Allies seize Hollandia, isolating much of the Japanese army in New Guinea May–September Allied forces repel Japanese assault on Imphal-Kohima region in India–Burma border and push Japanese out of northern Burma 12 June U.S. begins operations in Mariana Islands 14 June U.S. begins Operation Forager with landing on Saipan 15 June U.S. Marines invade Saipan in the Mariana Islands 18–22 June Battle of the Philippine Sea 19–20 June U.S. and Japanese planes clash in the ‘Marianas Turkey Shoot’ 9 July Americans declare Saipan captured 18 July Japanese Prime Minister General Tōjō Hideki resigns; succeeded by General Koiso Kuniaki 19 July U.S. Marines invade Guam in the Mariana Islands 20 July Thai premier Phibun Songkhram resigns; anti-Japanese Thai bureaucrats form a new government 21 July U.S. landings on Guam 24 July U.S. Marines invade Tinian 26 July President Roosevelt, General Douglas MacArthur, and Admiral Chester Nimitz hold a strategy meeting in Hawaii 11–16 September Anglo–American conference (Octagon) is held at Quebec 15 September U.S. landings on Morotai; Battle of Peleiu

xii Chronology 20 October 21 October 23–26 October 25 October 7 November 11 November 15 December 18 December

MacArthur’s forces land at Leyte in the Philippines the first kamikaze attack takes place against HMAS Australia Battle of Leyte Gulf First kamikaze attacks on U.S. ships take place Franklin Roosevelt is re-elected president of United States U.S. Navy bombards Iwo Jima U.S. troops invade Mindoro in the Philippines A typhoon hits Halsey’s Task Force 38

1945 4–11 February

9–10 March 9 March 7 April 12 April 8 May 17 July–2 August 26 July 16 July 6 August 8 August 9 August 9–20 August 15 August 25 August 1 September 2 September 2 September– 30 November

Allied conference at Yalta, Soviet Union, at which USSR promises the other Allies it will join in the war against Japan after Germany is defeated U.S. Air Force bombs Tokyo (90,000 people killed) Japanese depose French in Indochina and govern directly Japanese Prime Minister Koiso Kuniaki resigns; succeeded by Admiral Suzuki Kantarō Death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt; succeeded by Harry S. Truman Nazi Germany surrenders to the Allies Allied conference at Potsdam, Germany Potsdam Declaration issued, outlining terms for Japanese surrender Atomic bomb successfully tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico U.S. Air Force drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan USSR declares war on Japan, effective 9 August U.S. Air Force drops atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan Soviet attack on Japanese forces in Manchuria (Operation August Storm) Emperor Hirohito makes a radio broadcast announcing Japan’s surrender to the Allies Japanese forces in southern Sakhalin surrender to USSR USSR completes occupation of Kurile islands (Japanese territory) Formal ceremony in Tokyo Bay marking Japan’s surrender Local surrenders of Japanese armies in the field

Who’s who

Anami Korechika, General: (1887–1945) Appointed as Army Minister in April 1945 in the last wartime Japanese cabinet. During the Second World War he had commanded troops in China, New Guinea, and the Netherlands Indies. He was an outspoken opponent of surrender and committed suicide on 15 August 1945 upon Japan’s surrender. Arnold, Henry ‘Hap’, General: (1886–1950) Was a pioneer in the early U.S. Army Air Corps, eventually holding the rank of General of the Army and General of the Air Force. As a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff he was largely responsible for the development of U.S. Army Air Corps plans for all theaters of combat. A strong advocate for the development of the Air Force as an independent service after the war, he was committed to demonstrating the successfulness of strategic bombing and its ability to coerce surrender. He was responsible for the deployment of all B-29s as an independent, strategic asset within the 20th Air Force under his command. Aung San, General: (1915–1947) Burmese nationalist, military leader, and revolutionary. Aung San played a key role in pre-war anti-colonial politics in Burma. During the war he formed an alliance with the Japanese that brought his Burmese Independence Army in to resist the Allies from the end of 1941. In the spring of 1945, Aung San and his forces switched sides and backed the Allies against Japan. Ba Maw: (1893–1977) Burmese nationalist politician and lawyer. Ba Maw became Premier of a British-dominated Burmese colonial state in 1937, resigned in 1939, and was arrested by the British in 1940 for sedition. In 1943 he became the Prime Minister and Head of State of a nominally independent Burmese state under the Japanese, whom he supported. As the war reached its end, Ba Maw fled Burma for Thailand and then travelled to Japan. American authorities arrested him there in 1945 and he was sent to Sugamo prison. Released in 1946, Ba Maw returned to Burma.

xiv  Who’s who Bose, Subhas Chandra: (1897–1945) Indian nationalist and leader of the wartime Indian National Army that allied with Japan and resisted the Allies and British colonialism. Bose travelled in Axis Europe and Japan to make allies who would support India’s independence from Great Britain. Much of Bose’s wartime support came from expatriate Indians in Southeast Asia. Byrnes, James: (1882–1972) A Democrat senator and Supreme Court justice from South Carolina. During the Second World War he headed President Roosevelt’s Office of Economic Stabilization and Office of War Mobilization. After Roosevelt’s death he served as President Truman’s Secretary of State, and in the final stages of the war with Japan he was an advocate of ‘unconditional surrender’. Chennault, Claire: (1893–1958) American military aviator who advised and trained the Chinese air force during the war. Chennault retired from the United States Army Air Corps in 1937 and then worked for Chiang Kai-shek’s regime. Beginning in 1941, he commanded the 1st American Volunteer Group that supported the Chinese nationalists over the ‘Hump’ air supply route, and in 1942 Chennault commanded the United States Army Air Forces that came under the authority of Joseph Stilwell. Chiang Kai-shek, General: (1887–1975) Chinese statesman and army general. President of China 1928–31 and 1943–49, and of Taiwan 1950–75. Leader of the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) from 1925 and major opponent of the Communist leader Mao Zedong. Churchill, Winston: (1874–1965) British Prime Minister, as a Conservative, 1940–45 and 1951–55. Led the British effort in the Second World War. Attended the Potsdam Conference in July–August 1945, which set the terms for Japan’s surrender, but was defeated in an election during the conference by Labour’s Clement Attlee. Hansell, Haywood Shepherd Jr., General: (1903–1988) U.S. Army Air Corp general who was best known for his skills as a planner and administrator. One of the Air Corps earliest advocates of strategic bombing, Hansell enrolled in the U.S. Air Corps Tactical School in 1934 and became a champion of daylight precision bombing theory. He resisted attempts to introduce urban area and incendiary bombing as doctrine within the USAAC. He was the initial commander of the 21st Bomber Command of the 20th Air Force based in the Marianas Islands but was relieved of command in January 1945 owing to the early failures to inflict damage with the B-29. He was replaced by General Curtis LeMay. Hirohito, Emperor: (1901–1989) Reigned as emperor from 1926 to 1989, and is now known as the Shōwa Emperor. Until 1945 he was Commander-in-Chief of Japanese military forces. The extent of his

Who’s who  xv complicity in Japan’s aggression in the Second World War is a matter of debate among historians, but he was instrumental in 1945 in bringing about Japan’s surrender. He became a constitutional monarch under the terms of the 1946 constitution. Ho Chi Minh: (pseudonym, given name Nguyen Sinh Cung) (1890–1969) Founder and, for many years, leader of the Vietnamese and Indochinese communist movements. From 1911 to 1941, Ho lived away from Vietnam and travelled internationally. During this time, he helped co-found the French Communist Party, studied and trained in Moscow, and organized Vietnamese anti-colonial movements from southern China. In 1941 Ho returned to Vietnam to establish the wartime Vietnamese movement that resisted both the French colonialists and the Japanese. Hull, Cordell: (1871–1955) U.S. Secretary of State at the outbreak of the Pacific War. Hull negotiated with his Japanese counterparts in 1941, when the two countries hoped to avoid war. The most famous of these encounters was the Hull Note – the final proposal sent by the U.S. to Japan, just weeks before the strike on Pearl Harbor. He is regarded by some as a measured diplomat but criticized by others for his handling of negotiations with Japan during 1941. As America’s longest serving Secretary of State, Hull was a firm believer in international trade and institutions as key pillars of post-war peace and prosperity. King, Ernest J., Admiral: (1878–1956) Chief of Naval Operations and Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Fleet. In February 1941 he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet. When the United States entered the war in December 1941, President Roosevelt appointed him Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Fleet. In March 1942, the position was combined with that of Chief of Naval Operations. Much of his time was devoted to serving on the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Combined Chiefs of Staff. He was promoted to fleet admiral in December 1944 and retired in December 1945, after having, in large part, shaped the victory over Japan. Kinkaid, Thomas Cassin, Vice Admiral: (1888–1972) As the commander of a cruiser division, Kinkaid participated in the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway. He led Task Force 16 during the Solomon Islands campaign, and commanded Allied forces in the Aleutian Islands campaign in 1943. He became commander of the Seventh Fleet, popularly known as ‘MacArthur’s Navy’ from November 1943. He was promoted to full Admiral in April 1945 and retired from the Navy in May 1950. Koiso Kuniaki, General: (1880–1955) Prime Minister of Japan from July 1944 to April 1945. Had been Governor-General of the Japanese

xvi  Who’s who colonial territory of Korea 1942–44. Convicted as a war criminal at the International Military Tribunal of the Far East in Tokyo and sentenced in November 1948 to life imprisonment. He died of illness in prison in 1950. Konoe Fumimaro, Prince: (1891–1945) Prime Minister of Japan 1937–39 and 1940–41. Worked for an end to the war from an early point. He cooperated with other leading political figures to bring about the collapse of the Tōjō cabinet in 1944, and was a key figure in unsuccessful Japanese attempts to secure the mediation of the USSR in a Japanese surrender. In December 1945 he committed suicide when the Allied Occupation army served him with an arrest warrant on suspicion of being a war criminal. Kurita Takeo, Vice Admiral: (1889–1977) Was a torpedo specialist who commanded ships at many of the crucial engagements of the Pacific War. His cruiser squadron covered the invasion of Malaya in December 1941 and he commanded a force at the Battle of Midway in June 1942. He later commanded the First Striking Force at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944, when he controversially disengaged from battle just as it seemed he might score significant damage against the U.S. forces. Laurel, José P.: (1891–1959) Filipino politician, judge, and President of the Second Philippine Republic established with Japanese control in 1943. After the establishment of the Commonwealth of the Philippines under American power in 1935, Laurel became an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth. When Manuel Quezon, President of the Commonwealth, prepared to flee the Philippines after the Japanese invasion he instructed Laurel to remain and supported Laurel’s arrangement with the Japanese. LeMay, Curtis Emerson, General: (1906–1990) Born in Ohio, he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1929 while studying civil engineering at the University of Ohio. After successfully commanding B-17 and B-24 squadrons in the 8th Air Force in Europe, he was appointed commander of the 20th Bomber Command of the 20th Air Force in August 1944, where he directed bombing campaigns against Japan and Japanese held territory in Asia from bases in China. In January 1945 he replaced General Haywood Hansell as commander of the 21st Bomber Command of the 20th Air Force based in the Marianas Islands. Adopting novel techniques with B-29s, he is credited with directing one of the most deadly and destructive strategic bombing campaigns of the war against Japan. MacArthur, Douglas, General: (1880–1964) Was commander of Allied forces in the Pacific in the Second World War. At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack he had been commander of U.S. forces in the Philippines

Who’s who  xvii but moved his headquarters to Australia when Japanese forces conquered the Philippines. On behalf of the Allies, he accepted the formal Japanese surrender on 2 September 1945, and from 1945 to 1951 held the position of Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in the Allied Occupation of Japan. In 1950 he was also appointed as commander of UN forces in the Korean War. President Truman relieved him of his positions in both Japan and Korea in 1951 after MacArthur had publicly disagreed with Washington’s official policy on how to bring the fighting to an end. Mitscher, Marc A., Rear Admiral: (1887–1947) A pioneer of naval aviation who commanded the Hornet when it launched the Doolittle raid on Tokyo in 1942. Commander of the fast carrier force at the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Mountbatten, Louis, Lord and Admiral: (1900–1979) British naval officer and Supreme Allied Commander of the South East Asia Command from 1943. Mountbatten’s naval background led many people to think that the Allies would launch a seaborne operation to retake British Burma from the Japanese, but Winston Churchill quashed the idea. After the war, Mountbatten became the last Viceroy of India and, in this role, he presided over the end of Britain’s Indian Empire. Mutaguchi Ren, ya, Lieutenant General: (1888–1966) Japanese military commander in Burma, and commander of the Japanese armies during the failed campaigns at Imphal and Kohima in Assam state in 1944. Units under Mutaguchi’s command played a central role in the beginning of the war in China in 1937, and he was wounded at the battle for Singapore in early 1942. After the fall of Singapore, his army division went to the Philippines to assist in the defeat of the American and Filipino forces. Nimitz, Chester W., Fleet Admiral: (1885–1966) Succeeded Husband Kimmel as the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet following the attack on Pearl Harbor. In April 1942 he became Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Ocean Area, with authority over Allied land and air forces as well as naval forces. He played a key role in the American victories at Midway and Guadalcanal and oversaw a series of amphibious landings in the Central Pacific. He became a fleet admiral in December 1944, and Chief of Naval Operations in November 1945. Ōnishi Takijirō, Vice Admiral: (1891–1945) Japanese advocate of naval air power who helped plan the Pearl Harbor attack. Developed the idea of the kamikaze pilots. Became Vice-Chief of Naval General Staff in May 1945. Deeply opposed to surrender and committed suicide when Japan capitulated.

xviii  Who’s who Ozawa Jisaburō, Vice Admiral: (1886–1963) Is known as an early supporter of air power and a skilled tactician. His naval forces covered the invasion of Malaya. He commanded the First Mobile Fleet at the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944. At the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944 he succeeded in luring Admiral Halsey and the Third Fleet away from the U.S. landing site. In May 1945, he succeeded Toyoda as final Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet. Phibun Songkhram, Field Marshal: (1893–1964) Thai wartime leader and ally of Japan. Phibun played a role in the overthrow of the Thai absolute monarchy in 1932, and in 1938 became prime minister. He allied with Japan in 1941 and declared war on the Allies in January 1942. In July 1944, Phibun lost power in a parliamentary vote of no confidence. Randolph, Asa Philip: (1889–1979) African-American union leader and civil rights leader. A socialist, in 1925 he founded the first predominantly black labor union in the U.S., the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. In 1941 Randolph was successful in persuading President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802, which prohibited job discrimination in defense industries, after threatening to organize a mass protest movement of African Americans in Washington DC. Randolph was a major force in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Roosevelt, Franklin Delano: (1882–1945) A Democrat, he was the 32nd President of the U.S. He won the presidential election in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, then immediately launched the New Deal, a suite of policies designed to use the power of the federal government to regulate economic life and provide basic welfare to citizens. In 1936 Roosevelt won a landslide victory to inaugurate his second presidential term, but Republicans made significant gains in subsequent elections. The outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 provided Roosevelt with a justification to break with the tradition that presidents should be restricted to two terms. He won a third term in 1940 and a fourth in 1944. Roosevelt forged a wartime alliance with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet President Josef Stalin. He led the U.S. war effort after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, until his death in office in April 1945, four months into his fourth term and four months before the end of the war. Slim, William, Field Marshal: (1891–1970) British commander of the British and Indian Army forces in Burma. Prior to being sent to Burma in 1942, Slim had commanded armies in North Africa and the Middle East at the beginning of World War II. Slim’s command of the offensive campaigns to retake Burma after Britain’s defeat there marked a high point for Allied land operations in Asia.

Who’s who  xix Smith, Holland, Major General: (1882–1967) Marine Corps leader, nicknamed ‘Howlin’ Mad’, who pioneered amphibious warfare. During the Marianas campaign he controversially replaced an Army general, Ralph Smith, fueling friction between the two services. Spruance, Raymond Ames, Admiral: (1986–1969) After participating in operations in the Marshall Islands and Wake Island, Spruance replaced Admiral Halsey as the commander of Task Force Sixteen at the Battle of Midway. In August 1943 he took command of the Central Pacific Fleet, which became known as the Fifth Fleet while under his command. In this position Spruance presided over the occupation of the Gilbert Islands in November 1943, the invasion of the Marshall Islands in January 1944, and the invasion of the Mariana Islands in June 1944. He was promoted to full admiral in February 1944 and retired from the Navy in July 1948. Stalin, Josef: (1879–1953) Leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 to 1953. Led the Soviet war against Hitler (1941–45) in alliance with Great Britain and the U.S. Signed a Neutrality Pact with Japan in 1941, but attacked Japanese forces in Manchuria (northeast China), southern Sakhalin, and the Kurile islands from August–September 1945. Stilwell, Joseph, General: (1883–1946) American army general. From 1942, Stilwell was chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek, commander of U.S. forces in the ‘China-Burma-India’ theater of operations, and supervisor of the American government’s ‘Lend-lease’ program. Stilwell frequently clashed with Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese government, and, at Chiang’s request, President Roosevelt recalled Stilwell from his position as Chiang’s chief of staff in 1944. Suzuki Kantarō, Admiral: (1868–1948) Last wartime prime minister of Japan, April–August 1945. Attempted unsuccessfully to secure Soviet help in negotiating peace between the U.S. and Japan, and eventually handled the Japanese surrender, after which he immediately resigned. Had been Chief of Naval General Staff from 1925 to 1929 and Grand Chamberlain in Emperor Hirohito’s court from 1929 to 1936. Tōjō Hideki, General: (1884–1948) Prime Minister of Japan, 1941–44; Army Minister, 1940–44; assumed several more administrative positions in the war years. Aggressive advocate of war with the U.S. and its allies and was prime minister at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. Forced to resign July 1944 as the tide of war turned decisively against Japan. Tried as a war criminal at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and sentenced to death; hanged December 1948. Truman, Harry S.: (1884–1972) A Democrat, he was the 33rd President of the U.S. In the 1944 presidential election he was Roosevelt’s running-mate, and as vice-president he took over the presidency on

xx  Who’s who Roosevelt’s death in April 1945. The most controversial act of his presidency was his decision to authorize the use of atomic bombs against Japan in August 1945. Truman won re-election in 1948. In foreign policy he worked to strengthen America’s position in the Cold War, and in 1950 he decided that the U.S. would intervene in the Korean War (1950–53). Domestically, he promoted civil rights for African Americans. Wang Jingwei: (1883–1944) Chinese politician and leader of a Japanese puppet government during the war. Wang was close to Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Kuomintang Nationalist Party, and traveled with Sun in Southeast Asia before the war to gain support for the Nationalists. Upon Sun’s death in 1925, Wang lost to Chiang Kai-shek in a struggle for political and military control of the Kuomintang. He sought a Japanese alliance that would lead to an independent China. Wingate, Orde, Major General: (1903–1944) British army officer who led two bold, long-distance penetrations into Japanese-held Burma from bases in India in 1943 and 1944. Wingate developed his guerrilla war tactics when he served in British-administered Palestine before the war and then in North Africa in 1941. He was killed in a plane crash in the second Burmese operation in March 1944.

Abbreviations

ABDA AVG CBI INA JCS MPAJA OSS SCAP SEAC SOE SWPA USAAF USSBS

American, British, Dutch, Australian command American Volunteer Group China-Burma-India Indian National Army (U.S.) Joint Chiefs of Staff Malay People’s Anti-Japanese Army (U.S.) Office of Strategic Services Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers South East Asia Command (British) Special Operations Executive South West Pacific Area United States Army Air Force United States Strategic Bombing Survey

Preface

This book was jointly written by the five authors. Each chapter was originally drafted by one author, then distributed to the others for comment and additions. The individual chapters therefore reflect the particular interests of the first authors, namely: Chapters 1 and 8 – Aszkielowicz; Chapters 2 and 4 – Subrahmanyan; Chapters 3 and 7 – Wilson; Chapter 5 – Sturma; and Chapter 6 – Schencking. Wilson edited the manuscript and Sturma coordinated the Appendices. Names of Japanese people in the text are given in East Asian order, with surnames first, and using macrons where appropriate. Macrons have been omitted, however, in Japanese place-names. We thank Robert Cribb for drawing the maps.

Map 0.1 Pacific Region Credit: Robert Cribb

Credit: Rober t Cribb

M ap 0 . 2 Southeast Asia

Part I

Analysis

1

The collapse into war

The Pacific War (1941–45) fundamentally changed the course of history. In modern times, no single theater of war has extended across a larger area, nor covered a greater range of ethnicities. Few conflicts have been deadlier: over 30 million soldiers, sailors, and civilians died in the 3 years and 8 months of fighting. The war transformed politics in the Asia-Pacific region. Japan’s advance overturned the longstanding colonial order in the region, and the Western imperial powers found it difficult to reassert their control after Japan surrendered. The imperial age in Asia came to an end, and a new era of American hegemony over regional military, political, and economic affairs began. The war also transformed military technology and strategy. The rise of the aircraft carrier and amphibious fighting forces, and the dominance of strategic bombing, were all features of the conflict that became ubiquitous in later warfare. The war was a race to develop new and deadlier technologies, and the dominance of the United States in this regard was dramatically demonstrated by the atomic bombs it dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The devastation wrought on these two Japanese cities stunned the world and left a lasting shadow of nuclear war under which all subsequent generations have lived. This book is thus a social, military, political, and technological history of one of the major turning points in 20th-century history. The war began on 7 December 1941 with a dramatic Japanese air raid on the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet, stationed at Pearl Harbor, Hawai’i, and the opening moves of a full-scale Japanese offensive against Western colonial territory in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. In 1941, the region was a patchwork of colonial holdings, with few parts of Asia and the Pacific not under some degree of imperial control. Japan had its own overseas empire that included Taiwan, Korea, and colonial interests in China. The U.S. held the Philippines and some Pacific Islands. The United Kingdom had a major presence in the region, including in Malaya (which then encompassed Singapore), Hong Kong, Burma (Myanmar), and India; The Netherlands held the Netherlands Indies (Indonesia). France held Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), though it was substantially under the control of Japanese forces in the lead-up to the war, as we will see later. Thus, while Japan’s

DOI: 10.4324/9781003090502-2

4 Analysis assault on Southeast Asian and Pacific territories was far from Europe and the American mainland, it was a direct attack on the interests of the Western powers. Japan caught onlookers off guard – as war had not been declared – and the world’s press responded with shock and outrage. The shock was especially palpable in the U.S., which had not yet joined in the Second World War and had thus far been watching the conflict unfold from afar. While some U.S. leaders had favored committing forces to the war in Europe before Japan’s attack, many Americans – including influential voices in Congress – were firmly opposed to the U.S. becoming entangled in the war unless it became absolutely necessary. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Americans were immediately gripped by fear, but for many there was also a sense of excitement that a major moment in the country’s history had begun (Rose 2008: 81–83). The day after the strike, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Congress that 7 December was ‘a date which will live in infamy’, asserting that Japan’s aggressive actions had come while America was still committed to peace. Not long after Roosevelt’s speech finished, Congress declared war on Japan. In the days that followed, Germany declared war on the U.S. and vice-versa. America was now a full combatant in the Second World War. For the European powers that had already been at war with Germany and Italy since 1939, Japan was a dangerous new enemy that they were effectively powerless to stop. On 10 December 1941, Japanese aircraft sank the H.M.S. Repulse and the H.M.S. Prince of Wales, two British warships that had been sent to the region to protect British colonies. In only a few months, Japanese forces captured Hong Kong, Malaya, and the Netherlands Indies, and consolidated control of Indochina. These were severe blows to the Western colonial powers, but on the other hand, some Western leaders, including British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, were excited to see that Japan’s assault had drawn the U.S. into the war: a powerful new ally had emerged in the fight against Germany and Italy (Kuehn 2015: 425). Japan’s attack on Western colonies in Asia plunged the Pacific into the Second World War, a conflict that had already killed millions of people. Japan and China had been engaged in full-scale hostilities since 1937, in a conflict that was separate from the European war until December 1941. Fighting in China was fierce, and Japan’s commitment of troops and resources to the campaign was substantial. Germany had invaded Poland and Western Europe in 1939, and Italian forces had been at war with the British Commonwealth and some French forces in Northern Africa since 1940. In June 1941, Germany had invaded the Soviet Union. With Japan’s attack in 1941, most of the world, and all of the great powers, were now swept into the one global conflict. By the time Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945, the war overall had cost over 60 million lives, with around half of those lost in the Asia-Pacific region. The war was costly for all of the major

The collapse into war  5 combatants, but some fared worse than others. About 300,000 American military personnel and civilians were killed, or approximately 0.2% of the population, of whom 100,000 died in the Pacific theater (Dower 1986: 300). While these losses are significant, they are far lower than the losses sustained by the other major combatants. More than 15% of the Soviet population was killed, 3% of the British, about 4% of the Japanese, 8% of the German, and 0.6% of the Australian population (Keegan 1989: 493–94). Beyond the major powers, tens of millions of Asian civilians and Pacific Island peoples were swept into the conflict because they lived in captured Japanese territory. This chapter charts the origins of the devastating conflict in the Pacific. Both long-term and short-term factors are important to an understanding of the outbreak of the war. To some commentators, a long history of Japanese and American competition in the region, particularly over China, placed the two countries on a path to war (LaFeber 1997). In fact, as we will see, there is nothing sufficiently remarkable about their imperial rivalry to suggest war was inevitable. Misconceptions over the short-term factors that led to war are also common. In subsequent years, the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor became the subject of conspiracy theories centered on the idea that some U.S. leaders at the time knew an assault was coming, and saw it as a way for America to enter the Second World War. There is no convincing evidence for these claims. Roosevelt’s ‘date that will live in infamy’ speech, however, dramatically oversimplified the diplomatic situation between the two countries at the time of the outbreak of the conflict – and this oversimplification has left a lasting imprint. A series of failures in diplomacy, and reckless bellicosity on both sides in 1940–41, ultimately led to the collapse of relations between the two countries after decades of peace. The opening tragedy of the Pacific War was that it was not inevitable: it was a mistake.

Japan’s imperial rivalry with the West Japan’s status as a world power in 1941 was a comparatively recent development. After a long period of relative isolation from Western countries, Japan had been forcibly opened to trade by American gunships in the 1850s. Similar overtures from other Western imperial powers followed. The Western powers were a great deal stronger than Japan, and were able to impose a series of ‘unequal treaties’ under which Japan had to accept humiliating restrictions of its national sovereignty and was placed at a major economic disadvantage (Auslin 2004: 1–3). This external pressure contributed to the weakening of the Japanese political regime, which collapsed in 1868. The new political order that followed committed Japan to rapid industrialization and militarization, to secure it from future foreign incursions and to raise its status in international affairs so that the unequal treaties could be overturned.

6 Analysis Japan quickly grew as a military and industrial country. Japanese leaders aspired to acquire overseas territories as part of the path to modernization and international status. Japan acquired its first overseas colony, Taiwan, in 1895, as part of the settlement for defeating China in the first Sino-Japanese war (1894–95). In 1905 Japan defeated Russia in a victory that shocked the world, as it was the first time an Asian power had defeated a European empire in modern times. In 1910 Japan colonized Korea. In 1911 the final effects of the provisions of the unequal treaties signed in the 1850s were removed. In just 50 years, Japan had gone from being bullied by Western countries to being the major power in North Asia, with an empire of its own. The 1905 defeat of Russia, in particular, was a signal moment that drew the attention of world leaders. The U.S. President at the time, Theodore Roosevelt, began to worry that Japan would eventually dominate China, and close America out of its potentially lucrative market there. Japan was certainly an important new competitor in the region, but while there were moments of tension in U.S.–Japan relations over the following decade, the growing rivalry was effectively managed and the leadership of both countries was strongly invested in diplomacy.

The aftermath of the First World War The kind of empire-building that Japan undertook in Asia was a wellestablished form of economic and territorial expansion among the world’s great powers. Imperial expansion created major geopolitical rivalries, as powerful countries jostled for the opportunity to control and exploit the peoples of the colonial world. At the turn of the 20th century, world affairs were not conducted in participatory international forums, but rather were organized according to treaties and alliances across empires. The First World War (1914–18) was a reckoning for this system as imperial rivalries in Europe plunged the world into war (Martel 2007: 3–5). While large European empires still existed after the conflict – and in some cases had grown larger – leaders of the major combatants generally accepted that the international imperial system had, in some part at least, driven the world to war. The major powers now resolved to enter a new era of cooperation where problems were solved without the need to resort to wars. The League of Nations was founded in 1920 as the most important new forum for international diplomacy. Japan was an ally of Britain and France in the First World War, as was the U.S. Nevertheless, both Japan and the U.S. avoided the huge costs of being major combatants for the duration of the conflict. For Japan in particular, the war had been relatively good. It acquired control of former German colonial territory in China and the South Pacific, and received a boost to its economy: European powers could not maintain their trading relations in Asia during the war, and Japan was able to take advantage of the new

The collapse into war  7 opportunities (Dickinson 2013: 20–22). The U.S. emerged from the war as a major economic power that was thriving in comparison with the European powers. Although the American President, Woodrow Wilson, was one of the main architects of the League of Nations, the U.S. never actually became a member, as Congress did not support such a move. Japan was a founding member, and one of only four countries appointed to a permanent seat on the League Council, the body that oversaw the functioning of the institution, while other countries rotated through elected seats on the League Assembly. Though they may have regarded each other as competitors on one level, Japan and the U.S. were generally on the same side in international affairs during this period and both took concrete steps toward international peacebuilding. While the U.S. was not a member of the League, it was less isolated in world affairs than is commonly thought. Throughout the interwar period the specter of global conflict haunted all of the major nations, including the U.S. The best way for Americans to avoid ever being caught up in another European war was to make sure the peace was lasting. Arms restrictions were thought to be a key mechanism to lessen the likelihood of a large-scale war erupting again. In 1921, delegations from the U.S., Japan, Italy, France, and the United Kingdom met in Washington DC to discuss placing limits on the construction of naval fleets. In 1922 they signed the Washington Naval Treaty, setting limits on the construction of capital ships according to a ratio in which the U.S. and the UK could maintain larger fleets than the other signatories. This was a controversial arrangement in Japan. To some, it signified that, as far as Japan had come in the eyes of the West, it was still a second-class citizen in the imperial club. To others, it was a sensible move that curtailed the ability of the U.S. to express its full industrial might, since in reality the U.S. could build ships at a rate much higher than that mandated by the ratio in the treaty (Lenz 2007: 225–37). Despite tension over the naval treaty, Japan and the U.S. continued to cooperate in world affairs. In 1928 they joined other major powers to sign the Kellogg-Briand Pact to renounce the use of war to resolve international disputes. The signatories to the Washington Naval Treaty also signed an updated version in London in 1930. As the Washington Naval Treaty showed, disarmament was politically fraught, and international institutions dedicated to preventing war endured many setbacks in the 1930s. When the League of Nations convened its flagship peacebuilding venture, the World Disarmament Conference, in 1932–33, hopes were high that it would be a major step to preserving peace. The conference, however, was undermined by the inability of participating countries to reconcile international disarmament with their individual national interests (Webster 2019: 337–53). The U.S., though still not a member of the League, sent a delegation to the conference and played a prominent role. As had been the case in 1920, however, U.S. leadership in foreign affairs was not well supported by Congress – meaning that the

8 Analysis domestic lawmaking required for America to join these international institutions or support peacekeeping initiatives never emerged. Other potential key players were missing too. Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany during 1933 and removed Germany from the negotiations. Japan never fully participated in the Disarmament Conference because it was embroiled in the diplomatic aftermath of the September 1931 Manchurian Incident, a military action triggered by Japanese forces, which resulted in Japanese invasion of the whole of Manchuria (northeast China). Throughout the 1930s, U.S. authorities sought to distance the country further from European entanglements. In 1934, Congress passed the Johnson Act, which prevented U.S. firms from financing governments that had defaulted on U.S. loans. The targets of this move were countries that were ostensibly aligned with U.S. interests in a broad sense – for example, the UK – but had defaulted on paying back loans they had drawn during the First World War. The Neutrality Act Amendment of 1936 made it illegal for a U.S. company to supply funds to a country that was at war (Miller 2007: 11–13). Neither of these moves, however, was aimed at, or applied to, Japan.

War in China Japan and China went to war in 1937. Japanese entanglement in China would eventually lead to serious problems between Japan and the U.S., offering a reason to go to war in 1941. In the 1930s, however, the idea that China might become the cause of a devastating conflict between the two countries would have seemed remote to most onlookers. Japanese leaders had long desired to increase their power in China. Japan had held significant rights in Manchuria and elsewhere in China as a result of agreements imposed upon Russia in 1905 and China in 1915. Japan had attracted little international criticism for its imperialist activities in China and, in fact, had taken second place in China to the Western imperialist powers. The U.S. was no exception to imperialist activity in China: it had an unequal treaty with China until 1943 (Wang 2013: 4, 45–59). In pursuing its ambitions in China, Japan thus continued a widespread and accepted practice among empires. Japanese troops stationed in Manchuria to protect Japanese rights there wished to expand their control of the region. In September 1931, they provoked a military incident, which was then used to justify full military occupation of Manchuria. The creation of the puppet government known as Manchukuo followed soon after. The League of Nations carried out a protracted investigation of the Sino-Japanese dispute, which delivered a relatively measured finding that did not represent a major condemnation of Japan. Nevertheless, the report rejected key Japanese claims about the Manchurian Incident (Wilson 2001: 15–26). In response, in February 1933, Japan abandoned the League. In the mid-1930s, the Japanese military worked to expand its presence in northern China. Local

The collapse into war  9 conflicts sometimes erupted but were resolved by the commanders on the ground, generally to Japan’s advantage (Dryburgh 2000). Resistance to Japanese expansionism from within China was patchy. China had endured a long period of instability in the decades prior to the Pacific War. In the 1920s the country was controlled by a congeries of regional warlords. Political and military forces led by the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party alternately vied against and cooperated with each other in a complex series of conflicts and alliances. Through this maze of power, Chiang Kai-shek rose as a leader of the Chinese Nationalist movement, and from the 1930s led a Chinese government that was recognized by the U.S., with its capital in Nanjing in eastern China. Mao Zedong had established the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. The Communists held a base camp in northern China in the 1930s and, until 1937, resisted both the Japanese and the Nationalists. Both the Communist and the Nationalist parties claimed to represent China as a whole (Mitter 2012: 38–70, 229–30). Japan thus pursued its interests in China for most of the 1930s without facing unified international or Chinese opposition. Several controlled, small-scale confrontations broke out between Japanese and Chinese forces in the mid-1930s, and in 1937 hostilities escalated. On 7 July fighting erupted between Japanese soldiers on night patrol and Chinese forces at the ‘Marco Polo’ bridge (Lugouqiao in Chinese) near Beijing. This time, the conflict ultimately could not be controlled and it erupted into a largescale war. In late July, the Japanese quickly conquered Beijing and Tianjin in the north. Chiang Kai-shek opened a new front near Shanghai in August to try to stem the Japanese advance. He was unsuccessful and, in October, he relocated the Nationalist government away from the advancing force. In late 1937 the armies were engaged across a vast battlefront, stretching from Shanghai all the way down to the southern city of Canton in the Pearl River delta (Yang 2011: 143–58; Hattori and Drea 2011: 159–80; Mitter 2012: 87–111). The Japanese entered Nanjing in the second week of December and began large-scale atrocities against civilians and prisoners of war. By the end of 1938 a stalemate existed among the various Chinese forces and the Japanese (Mackinnon 2011: 181–206; Mitter 2012: 151–68). The events of 1937 and 1938 provoked international opposition to Japan’s expansion in China. Among the Western colonial powers, condemnation of Japan was now universal, especially as news of the violent and atrocity-laden Japanese conquest of Nanjing broke in December 1937. A coherent policy response from the Western powers, however, was virtually non-existent. The U.S. was not interested in getting involved in China’s dispute with Japan, even though a U.S. vessel, the U.S.S Panay, was sunk by Japanese forces on 12 December as it tried to evacuate American citizens from China, and despite the emergence of domestic political pressure from powerful Christian lobbies that had strong missionary ties with China.

10 Analysis

Provocations and the collapse into war President Franklin D. Roosevelt faced domestic and international pressure to sanction Japanese aggression in late 1937, but while he called for peaceful nations to turn away from those who threatened peace, he took little direct action (Thorne 1978: 41). In the late 1930s, the U.S. made relatively minor moves to censure Japan by cancelling some trade agreements between the two countries, but generally, business continued more or less as usual. American businessmen were even comfortable trading with Manchukuo, Japan’s puppet state in northern China (Thorne 1978: 142). Tensions between Japan and the U.S. gradually escalated, however, after war broke out in Europe in 1939. In September 1940, Japan seemed to indicate support for Germany and Italy by signing a provocative defense agreement with them – the Tripartite Pact. Japanese leaders signed the pact for a number of reasons, including fears that German imperial interests in Asia might eventually grow to challenge their own (Yellen 2016: 555–76). But joining the Tripartite Pact seemed to indicate that Japan had aligned itself with countries identified by Roosevelt in 1937 as a threat to peace. Also in September 1940, Japan moved military forces into northern parts of French Indochina, by negotiation rather than by force. France had surrendered to Germany in June, and the colonies were now controlled by the Vichy French government, which collaborated with the Germans and was therefore allied with Japan through the Tripartite Pact. Japan had previously made attempts to isolate China from wartime supplies that came through Indochina, and with the French empire now in turmoil saw the opportunity to achieve this by taking control of French Indochina (Dreifort 1982: 279). The colony remained notionally controlled by France after Japanese forces arrived, but in reality, was under Japanese control from September 1940 until the end of the war. The U.S. response to the events of September 1940 was to place embargos on some of the strategic resources it traded with Japan, including scrap iron, a key resource given the lack of iron available in Japan and its importance to a modern military and industrial empire. The embargo was a more serious sanction than the minor moves by the U.S. in the late 1930s. The combination of Japanese aggression and American retaliation raised tensions between the two countries. In late 1940, however, neither side was preparing for war over Indochina. Japan advanced into northern Indochina in order to assist its campaign against China: it was not the opening move of an invasion of Western colonies throughout Southeast Asia. For now, the Japanese presence was not a serious threat to American interests. U.S. leaders, for their part, largely believed they could work with Japan for mutual economic interest – even with some goods under a trade embargo – and that the Japanese in fact needed the U.S. for their own strategic and economic reasons (Iriye 1981: 20). In this tense era of diplomacy, the U.S. response was remarkably measured.

The collapse into war  11 Both sides, nevertheless, recognized that relations between the two countries had deteriorated. Diplomatic negotiations between U.S. and Japanese representatives were conducted in Washington DC from the first half of 1941. The two sides exchanged proposals to de-escalate the tension that had arisen since 1937, and especially from September 1940. The negotiations considered proposals for Japan to pull some of its forces from the Chinese territory it had acquired since 1937, and various proposals to limit Japan’s presence in Southeast Asia. Negotiations continued throughout 1941, entering a dangerous new phase when Japanese forces in northern Indochina advanced further south in July 1941. Japan’s new move in Indochina was designed to isolate China even more from outside supply lines, curtail any potential future Allied expansion into the Vichy-held territory, and secure a strategic military position in Southeast Asia. Japan’s action was provocative but, like the initial move into Indochina in 1940, it was not intended to be the precursor to a broader war with the Western powers. Nor was the move an official Japanese conquest: the French administration remained in Indochina after the Japanese advance, though it was practically subordinate to Japanese forces. In Washington, there had long been calls for the U.S. to take a more active stance in opposing what were considered aggressive regimes in both Asia and Europe, for either economic or idealistic reasons. Many policy-makers, however, also remained fixed on ensuring that America was not drawn into another major conflict. In 1941, the world increasingly appeared to be a hazardous place for American interests: Germany was dominant in Europe and Japan was a major presence in China. Moreover, Japan had made an aggressive move in Indochina that placed its forces in a strategic position among the Western colonies in Southeast Asia. It was difficult for American observers to conclude that Japan’s intentions remained solely focused on China. In this context, senior U.S. leaders, including Roosevelt, became convinced that America needed to take action to protect its interests, and so the balance of views in Washington tipped in favor of those calling for a bolder stance against aggressive regimes. Japan, for its part, had reached a position where it could not back down easily. Its success had created a network of overseas territories that promised wealth but needed a large commitment of resources to maintain. Giving up economic or territorial claims would endanger the decades-long imperial venture. U.S.–Japan competition in Asia, manageable for years, was now suddenly untenable in its current form. With diplomacy stalling, the U.S. deployed its most devastating financial weapons against Japan. In July 1941 the U.S. froze Japanese assets held in banks in U.S. dollars. The effect was to cut Japan off from the currency it needed to resource its modern military and empire. A month later, America placed an embargo on exporting oil to Japan, striking at a key Japanese resource vulnerability. While the oil embargo is considered by many to be the more serious of these moves, given the need for oil in a modern military,

12 Analysis it was the freeze of financial assets that was the heaviest blow to Japan. As Edward S. Miller put it, the move effectively ‘bankrupted Japan’ (Miller 2007: 191–204). For the rest of 1941 until the strike on Pearl Harbor, Japan and America engaged in last-ditch diplomatic efforts to avoid war. While the two countries were in a dangerous phase of negotiations, even at this late stage there were reasons to think hostilities could be avoided. Opinion in the U.S. over what to do with Japan remained divided. In Japan too, there was real disagreement over the need to go to war, and concerted efforts to negotiate with the U.S. over the financial freeze and the oil embargo. In terms of efforts to resolve the dispute over the presence of Japanese military forces in China and Indochina, Japan made several proposals. As the negotiations progressed it appears that the Japanese authorities moved to a position where they were prepared to withdraw from Indochina, though they wished to retain some rights to economic expansion in Southeast Asia. In return, the U.S. would need to agree not to interfere with Japan’s existing gains in China, and to lift economic sanctions. On 20 November 1941 the chief Japanese negotiator, Admiral Nomura Kichisaburō, presented Japan’s overall position to the U.S. in a proposal called Plan B (Miller 2007: 236–40). It turned out that this proposal was the last Japan would make in these negotiations. About a week later, U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull sent a reply, known as the Hull Note, that contained a list of unachievable demands, including full Japanese retreat from China (Marks 1985: 99–112). It was realistically impossible for the Japanese government to meet this demand. Acceding to it would likely have resulted in the government’s collapse domestically, and then in its loss of control of its remaining empire. It was Japan’s intention to bring a formal end to its negotiations with the U.S. shortly before the strike on Pearl Harbor, but the message breaking off talks was received only as bombs began falling on Hawai’i. The U.S. could rightly have considered that it was still negotiating how to avoid the conflict. Realistically, however, the Hull Note had ended negotiations. The U.S.’s refusal to countenance any kind of flexibility on China, and the dramatic moves of the financial freeze and oil embargo, had placed Japan in a position where a short, decisive war seemed to many in the Japanese leadership to be the only hope for survival. Historians disagree about which were the most important issues that led Japan and America to war. During the 1941 negotiations, the American side expressed a desire to see Japan modify its commitment to the Tripartite Pact and to clarify whether it could potentially join the conflict in Europe, but the discussion focused primarily on the Japanese presence in China and Indochina. Most historians agree that it was Japan’s refusal to withdraw from these regions that became the deal-breaker in the weeks before the outbreak of the war. Some scholars believe, however, that Japan’s advance into Southeast Asia was seen by the Americans as a greater threat to U.S.

The collapse into war  13 interests. Japanese control of the important resources and trade in the region would threaten America’s own position in Southeast Asia (Marshall 1995: 13). There are two contrasting views as to why either China or Southeast Asia became important enough to the U.S. to risk going to war over. The first is that American interest was based on a commitment to internationalism, and the second that it was based on self-interest. American foreign policy had a strongly moralizing angle: policy-makers asserted the right of all people to freedom to choose their own government. As such, optimists and idealists about American power insist that the U.S. was strongly opposed to both European and Japanese imperialism in Asia, and sought to defend threatened nations. The Atlantic Charter – a landmark foreign policy statement of August 1941, jointly devised by the Roosevelt administration and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill – voiced this approach. The Charter distinguished between nations such as the U.S., which stood for freedom, and the Axis aggressors, including Japan, which stood for tyranny. To the signatories of the Charter, the world was witnessing a battle between a just and peaceful international order and a lawless free-for-all (Iriye, 1981: 27–30, 37). The Americans used China as the example: in this interpretation the U.S. sought to bring the country into the liberal international order, while the Japanese sought to crush it. The other view interprets America’s interest in Asia in much more material terms. According to this perspective, while America inveighed against all manner of empires, its economic interests led it, in practice, to behave like other imperialists (Thorne 1978). An American officer serving in Southeast Asia recalled after the war that U.S. policy dissociated itself from imperialism while ‘vigorously asserting on occasion our claim to enjoy equally with [the Europeans] the commercial … rewards of colonialism’ (quoted in Thorne 1978: 403). In this interpretation, Japan’s emergence as a power in Southeast Asia meant competition for the U.S. for the riches of the region. America’s concern for China, too, had a strongly material dimension. America asserted that an ‘open door’ to China – that is, equal opportunity for all nations to trade – was mandatory, but to critics, the open door aimed less to preserve Chinese independence than to guarantee America’s own access. The collapse into war was not inevitable. Even as late as 1940, Japan and the U.S. still had many important pillars of a relationship that could have steered the two countries clear of hostilities. They had a strong trading relationship and both countries had taken steps to participate in international institution-building. They were certainly imperial rivals but, given the turbulence of the interwar period in international politics, the durability of their relationship right up until mid-1941 is remarkable. In Europe, imperial rivalry and suspicion had driven the continent to the First World War, and tensions lingered throughout the interwar period, leading ultimately to further conflict. Next to this example, U.S.–Japan relations in the Pacific in

14 Analysis the same period seem mature and stable. But in 1941, both sides gradually lost faith in diplomacy as they failed to reconcile their competing interests. Whether this was due to a divergence of views on the international order or competition for influence in Asia, they were prepared to turn competition into violent struggle. With the aim of paralysing the U.S. Pacific Fleet and preventing it from responding to a major Japanese advance against the Western colonies of Southeast Asia, Japanese leaders formally made the decision on 1 December 1941 to attack the fleet’s headquarters at Pearl Harbor. By the morning of 7 December in the U.S. (the date was 8 December in Japan), Japanese naval forces had reached a point 450kms to the north of Pearl Harbor. The Japanese flotilla included all six of the navy’s large aircraft carriers, and they had arrived at their station undetected by the American navy. At around 8am local time, the first of two waves of Japanese planes attacked U.S. forces at Pearl. The attack was devastating: around 2,400 American servicemen and civilians were killed and 164 planes were destroyed as the Japanese forces targeted airfields, as well as ships in the harbor. The American fleet was badly damaged, with 21 ships sunk, including six battleships, and many others damaged. Crucially for America’s immediate prospects in the war, none of the U.S. aircraft carrier force stationed in the area was in the harbor at the time of the attack. Japanese forces lost only 29 aircraft and six submarines (Smith and Aiken 2012: 171–83). At around the same time as the attack on Pearl, on 8 December local time, Japanese forces began an invasion of Malaya, through Thailand, and then a few hours later they struck the Philippines. Soon after, Japanese troops landed on islands in the Malay Archipelago and by mid-January 1942 a full-scale invasion of the Netherlands Indies was under way. The targets of Japan’s advance south were resource-rich territories, particularly those with oil reserves, and key colonial military and administrative outposts. By the end of March 1942 Japan controlled Hong Kong and much of Southeast Asia, including Singapore, Manila, and the Netherlands Indies (Wood 2007: 20). This book traces the military, technological, social, and political history of the war that erupted from the failed diplomacy of 1941. For the U.S., the Pacific was the war that launched its rise from an economic power that operated at arm’s length in world affairs to a fully actualized military and industrial superpower. Japan lost its overseas empire when it was defeated, and the war ended its imperial ambitions. Japanese society and politics were transformed by the war and its aftermath, and in subsequent decades Japan remerged as a prosperous democracy and ally to the U.S. The book offers different perspectives on America’s war, from the Japanese side and from the people of Southeast Asia and the Pacific who endured much of the bloodshed. Four overarching questions remain important in understanding the course of the war and its legacy: What was the relationship between military strategy and the advent of new technologies, such as the aircraft carrier

The collapse into war  15

Figure 1.1 The damaged USS West Virginia and USS Tennessee (left) as the USS Arizona (right) sinks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Source: Library of Congress 2017874753

and more modern and expensive strategic bombers? What were the key moments in the war that led to America’s victory? What was the war on the ground like for millions of Asian and Pacific civilians, whose stories are often obscured by the grander political and military narrative, and how was it experienced in the U.S.? Why did the war mark the end of an era in the region, and the true dawn of American power? We explore these questions, and others, in the coming chapters.

2

Japan on the offensive 1941–42

From December 1941 Japan conquered vast swathes of the Asia-Pacific region in a short time. Millions of people, from atolls and outposts in the middle of the Pacific to the borders of India, came under Japanese control. This chapter explains the dramatic military expansion of Japanese power in the first years of the war in the key land theaters, China and Southeast Asia, that brought the attention of America to the new Asian empire. It then explains the American reaction and the fraught relations the war produced between the U.S. and its allies. The war’s effect on Asian people and colonial states was profound; the chapter also explores the topic of Asian nationalism and its impact on early wartime Southeast Asian states.

Starting with China When America entered the war after Pearl Harbor, they wanted China to continue to engage Japan’s army and thus prevent the Japanese from threatening America elsewhere. American policy was meant to serve American interests without much regard to China. China had their own needs and the resulting clash of interests and maneuverings consumed much of the wartime relationship between China and the other Allied powers. The day after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, Chiang Kai-shek called American and British representatives in Chongqing, the capital of Chiang’s government, to a meeting. He explained that he needed American air support and a supply lifeline for a country under siege. Chiang demanded the use of the American Volunteer Group (AVG), which was led by retired American air force major general Claire Chennault, for the aerial defense of Chongqing (Tuchman 1971: 246). From July 1937 to December 1940, Chennault had reorganized China’s air force and helped build up the regime’s air defenses at the request of Chiang’s wife, Song Meiling. Prior to the bombing at Pearl Harbor, Chennault had assembled American pilots to defend Chongqing via the AVG. Unfortunately for Chiang, after Pearl Harbor the U.S. reassigned the AVG to air campaigns in Burma, leaving Chongqing exposed. As a result, for Chongqing, Japanese bombing raids became a feature of urban life

DOI: 10.4324/9781003090502-3

Japan on the offensive: 1941–42  17 (Tow 2011: 256–82). Still, Chennault’s work with the Chinese continued, which gave publicity to America’s support of Chongqing and contributed to the provision of American military aid to China in 1941 (Tow 2011: 264–65). In addition to his demands for Chennault’s air defense, in December 1941 Chiang also demanded receipt of the American supplies destined for China that were piling up in Burma’s capital, Rangoon. These supplies comprised part of America’s wartime aid to its Allies through the ‘Lendlease’ program. In March 1941 the U.S. Congress passed the Lend-lease act, officially designated as ‘An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States’, which allowed export of American weapons and war materiel to Allies around the world fighting the Axis. China became a major destination in the program. But Japan’s control of all of the major ports along China’s long coastline made maritime shipments impossible and compelled America and China to find other routes to keep China militarily supplied during the war. A prime avenue was through its southern neighbor, Burma, where U.S. supplies would travel on a rail line from Rangoon port to Lashio in midBurma, and then on a difficult, narrow switchback road into the mountains of southern China. The ‘Burma Road’, as it was known, traversed rugged terrain and transport was underdeveloped, which resulted in a bottleneck of supplies in 1941 that frustrated Chiang and the Allies alike. While the bottleneck was being relieved, a much higher volume of supply would have to reach China by other means: the 700-mile ‘Hump’ air route from Assam in northeastern India over the Himalayan mountains and Tibetan plateau to Kunming; and the Ledo Road, a second land supply route, which ran from Assam through northern Burma to connect with the Burma Road (Stettinius 1944: 116–21). China’s Burma lifeline became a preoccupation of the Americans, and Burma’s link to China commanded the attention of the leading American assigned to Chiang’s government during much of the war. From the end of January 1942 officially, and then on the ground by March, Joseph Stilwell was the chief of staff to the Supreme Commander of the China Theater (Chiang Kai-shek), the commander of U.S. forces in the ‘China-BurmaIndia’ operational theater and the supervisor of the Lend-lease program to China. Stilwell’s nickname, ‘Vinegar Joe’, evokes his personality: harsh and sour, he was often rude to staff and peers alike. Stilwell was scathing about the Chinese elite’s capability and motivations, and viewed them as weak and corrupt. But he was also strongly convinced that common Chinese soldiers would fight well if properly led. Stilwell had two immediate tasks at the end of January 1942, both daunting. First, he had to maintain the air supply of Chiang’s armies and eventually of Chongqing via the Hump air route, an initiative that brought Chennault’s pilots under Stilwell’s authority. Second, he was to open the Chinese-proposed Ledo Road, a route that was even more geographically and technically daunting than the air route. The Hump, a treacherous flight

18 Analysis over the roof of the world, would operate throughout the war, while the Ledo Road – through mountains and jungles – would play a vital part in China’s supply in 1944. The massive logistics project required to build the Ledo Road used thousands of Asian laborers and also brought thousands of American engineers and other personnel to northeastern India in the war years.

Japan’s lightning strike across Southeast Asia When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, war planners had two main goals: to take control of Southeast Asian oilfields that lay in European colonies, and to stem the supply of Chiang Kai-shek’s armies and allies in China via northern Burma and northern French Indochina. On the eve of the war, Britain’s power radiated across a great arc of the expanse between India and China – from India into Burma, south through the Malay peninsula to Singapore, and into the northern half of Borneo. Independent Thailand sat in the middle of mainland Southeast Asia, with French Indochina, comprising Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, to its east. To the south of Britain’s Asian empire lay the Netherlands Indies, a vast archipelago rich in natural resources. The Philippines, another archipelago and an American possession since 1902, lay in the South China Sea at the eastern fringe of Southeast Asia. In the months after the 7 December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese power simultaneously horrified and awed the Allies, as the Japanese military tore across Southeast Asia. The last part of 1941 and early 1942 became, for Asia, what the German blitzkrieg had been for Europe in 1939. From Hainan Island in southern China (occupied by Japan at the beginning of 1940) and from southern Indochina (occupied in July 1941), Japanese troops stormed into British Malaya and struck at points on the eastern seaboard of southern Thailand. General Tsuchihashi Yūichi, who visited French Indochina in 1939, had declaimed that the area was the ‘pivot point of a folding fan’ – the key to any Southeast Asia-wide operation (quoted in Marr 1995: 27). Two days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japanese bombers took off from bases in southern Indochina and sank the Prince of Wales and Repulse, two of the British navy’s storied ships that had seemed to guarantee British maritime power in Asia. Just across from the Thai border, Kota Bahru in British Malaya also fell on 10 December; Japanese troops took the west coast of Malaya around ten days later. From January 1942 Japanese forces attacked a much larger British and Commonwealth force at Singapore, and the city fell in mid-February. The loss of Singapore – the nexus of British-controlled trade throughout the  region – came as a knockout blow for Britain’s prestige. The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, had publicly stated in November 1940 that the island was impregnable, and that Japan would be mad to challenge the British there (Thorne 1978: 56). He later described Singapore’s loss as

Japan on the offensive: 1941–42  19 ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’ (Churchill 1951: 81). The rude awakening Churchill experienced was shared by many white colonials and even more Asian soldiers serving the British Empire. The Japanese imprisoned 130,000 British Empire forces, with Indian Army troops accounting for more than half of these (Allen 1993: 270–71). Japan’s rapid victory in Singapore handed their army an immediate and unanticipated problem in dealing with a huge population of captives without enough space or supplies for them. Moreover, the initial overcrowding of the prisoners, and lack of enough water and food for them, jolted white colonials from their assumption that their status would always afford them special treatment. While Japan’s army was initially unprepared to handle the huge British and Indian Army prisoner population, they acted more purposefully against local Chinese who had fought for the British in the last-ditch defense of the city. Soon after Singapore’s capture, the Japanese began killing Chinese men seen as resistors and also those who might subvert the Japanese occupation of the city (Cheah 2002: 97). The Singapore Chinese massacres – the sook ching or ‘purification by elimination’ campaign – have become a part of wartime lore: they are frequently referenced as evidence of allegedly widespread Japanese barbarism and are often presented with highly inflated and unproven death tolls. The sook ching campaign prompted British investigations after the war into war crimes in the city, which were largely pushed by the Chinese community who demanded accountability of those Japanese responsible (Wilson, Cribb, Trefalt, and Aszkielowicz 2017: 20). Post-war Singaporean Chinese sources give a figure of 50,000, or more, men killed. Allied war crimes trial documents estimated around 5,000 killed, while a Japanese-supplied report for the war crimes gave a figure of around 11,000 Chinese killed in the massacres and the fighting for Singapore before the city fell. Likely estimates of the death toll from the massacres are around 5,000 to 8,000 Chinese men. From the trauma of the Chinese community, the nucleus of an anti-Japanese resistance formed that would play a key role in wartime and post-war Malayan/Malaysian politics. In mid-January 1942 Japanese troops crossed into Burma via mountain passes from Thailand that had been used for centuries by Thai and Burmese kings and their armies in attacking each other. From Moulmein in Burma, the Japanese swept down and took the capital city of Rangoon. British forces reeled under the Japanese offensive. After taking the capital, the Japanese pushed Britain’s remnants, as well as the Americans and Chinese who were in Burma, ever northwards. As they retreated through middle Burma, the British and Allied forces destroyed huge swathes of the countryside to try to impede the Japanese advance. In setting alight the mid-country oilfields near the ancient capital of Pagan, the retreating armies created a hellscape where towering clouds of black smoke enveloped the temple spires and palaces of a once grand Burmese empire (Thant 2006: 227). A mass civilian exodus accompanied the military rout. By the

20 Analysis latter part of 1942, up to 600,000 refugees, mostly from the southern delta around Rangoon, had fled Burma for India, with up to 80,000 dying along the way (Bayly and Harper 2004: 167). Indians who had been resident in Burma accounted for most of these refugees (Leigh 2018: 136–37). Burma was the eastern outpost of the British empire in India, and until 1937 had been administered as an Indian province. The country’s symbolic value as an Indian appendage was precious, and its loss a bitter blow to the British Indian elite. The Americans, who had pledged to back Britain in the war, were less interested in Britain’s injured imperial pride than in Burma’s link to China’s survival. In his first months as Chiang’s chief of staff, Stilwell shuttled between Chongqing and Burma in an effort to maintain China’s lifeline from the Burma Road, and also to command two Chinese armies that Chiang had sent to fight the Japanese in Burma. Neither endeavor went well. In late April, the Japanese took Lashio, the rail terminus that connected to the Burma Road. Later, a Japanese invasion was denied by a desperate Chinese defense across the Salween River, which divides Burma from Yunnan, in China, backed by Chennault’s AVG, but the damage was done. China was isolated. The Chinese and Allied resistance to the Japanese in Burma collapsed by May. Stilwell, who had been established at Maymyo in central Burma, fled to India, a torturous trek across mountains, jungles, and rivers with little food and the constant worry of Japanese attack. The Chinese armies, too, retreated pell-mell, some going to India to regroup and others making it into China. None of the Chinese contingents covered themselves in glory as they retreated, pillaging and looting from villagers in their desperation. But in many cases, in the chaotic retreat from Burma, the Chinese fought well, and Stilwell remained convinced that the leadership, and especially Chiang, betrayed their ability and courage. He also heavily criticized the British for – as Stilwell saw it – their defeatism, and for never really believing that Burma was worth fighting for, despite their romantic attachment to their Empire (Tuchman 1970: 256–300). Meanwhile, the Netherlands Indies island of Sumatra had fallen in February 1942, and then the capital, Batavia, on Java at the beginning of March. Netherlands Indies oil, vital for the Japanese and the primary material motivation for the invasion of Southeast Asia, now belonged to the Asian power (War History Office 2015: 4). From its colony on Taiwan, Japan had attacked the American Philippines in December 1941. Since President Theodore Roosevelt Jr’s administration in the early 20th century, the Americans had had a semblance of a defense plan for the Philippines: War Plan Orange. In the event of any attack, it called for a defense of Manila Bay and the capital until help could arrive from overseas. If forced from Manila, U.S. and colonial troops would retreat south to the Bataan peninsula, and then to Corregidor Island in Manila Bay, and form a defensive stronghold. In the 1930s, the task of defense fell to General Douglas MacArthur, who had been chief of staff of the U.S. Army during the 1930s, and also, from 1935–36, Chief Military

Japan on the offensive: 1941–42  21 Advisor to the Commonwealth Government of the Philippines, and a Field Marshal in the Philippine Army. MacArthur’s family had a long history in the Philippines and the general saw himself as a father to the Filipinos. He declared at one point that America’s future and ‘very existence’ lay ‘irrevocably entwined with Asia and its island outposts … [which are] Western civilization’s last earth frontier’ (quoted in Thorne 1978: 261). In the late 1930s and on the eve of the war, MacArthur gave optimistic press briefings explaining how much progress he had made in organizing a Filipino army to defend the country. In fact, with limited investment and little interest from the U.S., his new army lacked basic supplies and weaponry (Karnow 1989: 264–77). When war came to the islands on 8 December 1941, MacArthur lost his entire Philippines-based air force, and two days later his navy escaped to the Netherlands Indies. To compensate, MacArthur encouraged fake news that the Americans had defeated the Japanese at a major battle in the Lingayen Gulf. From Christmas 1941, MacArthur planned on a defense in the Bataan Peninsula, south of Manila. Overwhelmed and underprepared American and Filipino forces retreated to the peninsula and eventually to Corregidor Island, fighting a series of desperate battles – ‘points and pockets’ – along the way (Agoncillo 1965: 124–62). Manila fell to the Japanese on 2 January 1942, a U.S.–Filipino defeat that brought widespread looting of public and private property by angry and desperate civilians. In March, MacArthur and his family and personal staff evacuated to Australia. In April, many thousands of Americans and Filipinos were captured by the Japanese on the Bataan Peninsula and forced to march up to 75 miles to an American military base that the Japanese converted to a prison camp. The march resulted in around 650 American, and an unknown number of Filipino, deaths. The so-called Bataan Death March led MacArthur, after the war, to pursue a war crimes trial of Lieutenant General Homma Masaharu, the Japanese commander in the Philippines during the invasion (Masuda 2012: 137–47). The final defeat for the Americans in the Philippines came in May 1942 after Corregidor fell to the Japanese. Amid a series of military defeats, the initial Allied response in Southeast Asia fell under the ‘ABDA’ – the American, British, Dutch, Australian command. A British commander, Sir Archibald Wavell, took charge of the ABDA in January 1942 and established his headquarters in Singapore (Churchill to Curtin, 29 December 1941, in United Kingdom Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons Official Report, 27 January 1942). The ABDA command came to a premature end when, first, the Japanese evicted Wavell and his command from Singapore when they captured the city in February 1942, and then, ultimately, when they destroyed much of the Allied naval power in the Battle of the Java Sea in February and March 1942. ABDA disbanded after the Java Sea debacle. When General MacArthur arrived in Australia from the Philippines in March, he became Supreme Commander of a successor command, the ‘South West Pacific Area’, which

22 Analysis included all Japanese-held areas in Southeast Asia, and Australia and New Guinea as well. On the U.S. side, the ease and rapidity with which Japan’s forces conquered much of Asia prompted a sense of urgency for America to stem the tide. On the Japanese side, success increased the operational hubris that permeated the Japanese high command after December 1941. One early American mission, the Doolittle Raid of 18 April 1942, led by LieutenantColonel James Doolittle, gave the Americans a psychological victory they desperately desired. It also challenged, momentarily, the Japanese military’s unbroken string of victories. Sixteen B-25 bombers took off from aircraft carriers that had been brought within range of Japan from California. They dropped ten bombs on Tokyo, two on Yokohama, and one each on the cities of Yokosuka, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe. The Americans planned that the bombers would land at airfields controlled by the Chinese Nationalists in eastern China but most ran out of fuel or faced bad weather before they could reach their landing sites. All but one of the U.S. bombers crashlanded in Zhejiang and other eastern Chinese provinces. The Japanese captured the fliers, executed some and held others prisoner. The damage inflicted by the Doolittle bombers was light, but the raid electrified the American press and public. For the first time since the war began, America controlled the narrative of combat, if only for one day. The daring raid likewise shocked the Japanese military and changed calculations in Tokyo in dramatic fashion. It convinced leaders of the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff to commit to a plan they had resisted for months: the expansion of Imperial Japan’s eastern perimeter with the invasion of Midway Atoll and the Aleutian Islands of Kiska and Attu (Stephan 1984: 114). The Pacific perimeter now mattered to army leaders in a way it had not done before. In China, the Japanese destroyed airfields in the region where the Doolittle raiders had landed, laid waste the surrounding countryside, occupied other airfields to prevent the Americans from using them for any future raids, and conducted a major offensive to firm up their control of the eastern Chinese seaboard (van de Ven 2003: 34; Drea and van de Ven 2011: 42–43).

Japan’s New Order and its Southeast Asian friends Between December 1941 and May 1942 Japan’s military successes not only complicated the relations among the Allies, but also completely upended the power structures in the region. What did Japanese-controlled Southeast Asia look like? Because of Japan’s rapid and often destructive takeover of the region, new administrations were erected on the fly, and were contingent on military men poorly equipped to manage civilian affairs and dependent on local cooperation. Occupation regimes were not based on a long-term plan to colonize Southeast Asia. While Roosevelt explained to the American public that the war was one of freedom versus tyranny, the Japanese

Japan on the offensive: 1941–42  23 expressed the same mission to Southeast Asians, only with the roles reversed. Four days after the war began in December 1941, the Japanese government declared that the war would liberate Southeast Asians from Western imperialism (Iriye 1981: 64). Japanese propagandists exposed the hypocrisy of Western power in Asia: ‘[Westerners] prate of civilization, and rave of justice and brotherly love as though they had a monopoly of them, all the while they exploit and despoil the backward peoples of Asia … for their pleasure and ease’ (quoted in Tarling 2001: 133). In place of European exploitation, the Japanese proclaimed that they would lead all Asian people into a new era of prosperity and freedom. But what shape their planned new order would take had not been decided. Frank internal Japanese discussions conducted before the invasion of Southeast Asia exposed the fuzziness of new arrangements in Southeast Asia. Some important players in Japan did not want to establish occupation regimes at all, but rather negotiate a truce with the Europeans that would allow Japan to get what they wanted without too much destruction or cost. Others in the Cabinet Planning Board and the Army General Staff and Research Office made it clear in hypothetical scenarios – discussed in 1940–41 – that Japan’s primary aim was securing resources for the military, maintaining public order in the region, and allowing the Japanese forces to be economically self-sufficient in Southeast Asia. How much freedom Japan would give Southeast Asians remained unclear in the plans, and on the ground as well throughout the war. In early 1942 the government’s Total War Research Institute argued that whatever independence was offered should not be Western-style liberal democracy but should be conditioned to serve Japan’s wartime needs. The new arrangement was presented as the ‘Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere’, in which the Japanese empire would be the ‘stabilizing power and the leading influence’ (de Bary, Gluck, and Tiedemann 2005: 1011). The plan envisioned that peace and prosperity under Japanese guidance would expand from an ‘inner sphere’ comprising Japan, Manchuria, northern China, and the Russian Pacific, to a ‘Smaller Co-Prosperity Sphere’ that included the inner sphere and eastern Siberia, all of China, Indochina, and the ‘South Seas’. Then, the Japanese empire would enlarge these two divisions into the largest bloc, the ‘Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere’, which would extend through Southeast Asia to Australia, India, and further islands in the Pacific. Two Southeast Asian territories – Thailand and Indochina – exploited the ambiguity in Japan’s co-prosperity rhetoric to forge alliances with the new power even before the attacks on Southeast Asia and Pearl Harbor. Thailand’s response and position reflected its status as an independent country before the war. The only non-colonized Southeast Asian country, from the mid-1930s it had fallen under military government. The military leader – Phibun Songkhram, also prime minister from 1938 to 1944 – and his cohort were enamored of Japanese power and saw the creation of a strong military state on the Japanese model as both a domestic security

24 Analysis imperative and a way to counter foreign aggression against Thailand that went back decades. Confusion on 7/8 December 1941 led Japanese forces to attack Thai police and the army on the southern peninsula, but the two sides soon worked out a compromise that led to their alliance – one founded on Japanese dominance. The Phibun government joined Japan’s side in the war and in January 1942 declared war on the Allies. French Indochina also forged an alliance with the Japanese. A comparable dynamic to the Thai-Japanese fighting and reconciliation of December 1941 had played out in 1940 between Japan and the authorities in French Indochina. In June 1940, while France succumbed to the German onslaught in Europe, Japan asked the French in Indochina for permission to use northern Indochina as a base for their war in China, and also asked the French government to cut off supplies sent from the U.S. to Chiang Kai-shek’s armies via the north Vietnamese port of Haiphong. France was in a weak position, especially as the U.S. had turned down French Indochinese requests for arms and had also told them that the U.S. would not come to France’s aid if Japan attacked there (Fall 1972: 22). Marshal Philippe Pétain – the leader of the Vichy regime in France that was allied with Germany – signed an agreement with Japan that allowed the latter to station troops in Indochina. Japan thereafter treated Indochina like they did Thailand: as a wartime ally with a sovereign government used as a stepping stone to fight the war elsewhere. On 8 December 1941 French Indochina allowed Japan to station 35,000 troops in their territory (Gunn 2018: 235). Elsewhere in Southeast Asia the Japanese takeover dramatically changed politics and society. From 1942, in the Netherlands Indies, the Philippines, Malaya, and Burma, Japan destroyed much of the pre-war political apparatus rather than working through it as in Thailand or French Indochina. Fighting raged with particular ferocity in Burma and the Philippines at the beginning and end of the war, and to these two countries Japan offered the greatest degree of political independence (Tarling 2001: 146). Some Southeast Asian activists chose to collaborate with the Japanese. Aung San was a young Burmese anti-colonial nationalist and former student leader. He was destined to be Burma’s first prime minister after independence, and the first prime minister to be assassinated, and the father of Aung San Suu Kyi, the modern-day icon of Burma’s democracy movement. In 1940 he made his way to China to seek the help of Chinese Communists to overthrow British rule in Burma. In China he fell under the sway of Japanese agents, who took him to Tokyo, where he became a Japanese New Order enthusiast and their collaborator. Returning secretly to Burma, he enlisted his nationalist colleagues who then trained on Hainan Island for war and the establishment of a new political regime under the Japanese. In 1941 they used the protection of Phibun’s pro-Japanese Thailand to establish a headquarters in Bangkok, where they formed the Burma Independence Army, with the intent of fighting on the Japanese side (Thant 2006: 230).

Japan on the offensive: 1941–42  25 In the Philippines, Japan’s invasion brought dramatic change. The Philippines had been a Western colony – first Spanish and then American – for much longer than anywhere else in the region, and it also, alone in the region, had fought off Western powers to establish a short-lived independent republic at the beginning of the 20th century. At the same time, the Philippines had become the most politically Westernized colony in Asia. The Americans, who established a colonial state in 1902 after crushing a bloody war for independence, put the Philippines on the path to self-rule with a series of congressional moves and agreements with the local elite that ‘Filipinized’ the civil service. In 1935, a ‘Commonwealth’ government was created in the Philippines as a transitional administration to prepare for full independence from the U.S., but the independence timetable was interrupted by the outbreak of war. Despite close ties with America, Filipino leaders and people remembered and bitterly resented the bloody and cruel American invasion early in the century. A group of Filipino politicians formed a client government with the Japanese that declared independence from the U.S. in October 1942. The 1942 state linked itself in its independence proclamation with the free state that had flowered briefly in the 1899–1902 republic, between a very long period of Spanish colonialism and a shorter but no less oppressive period under the Americans. The Netherlands Indies, unlike the Philippines and Burma, had made no progress toward self-rule by the 1930s, and remained governed by a dual Dutch-native elite bureaucracy. In its mercantile heyday of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Dutch overseas empire had been an economic powerhouse and its Indies colonies were lucrative links in global commerce. To the Dutch, Japan offered the same deal as that extended to the French on the mainland: remain in power under Japanese control. The Dutch refused, and Japan then had to allot different parts of its forces to subduing and governing different areas of the huge archipelago (Owen 2005: 304). Here Japan dramatically changed the status quo by abolishing the existing state and governing directly through its own military branches, albeit in a diverse arrangement. Sumatra joined Malaya, governed from a Japanese headquarters in Singapore; Java was governed by the Japanese army stationed in Java; Borneo, Makassar, and eastern islands came under the navy’s authority. Hence, one Indies state under the Dutch became three under the Japanese (Tarling 2001: 179; Owen 2005: 304). The Dutch paid for their recalcitrance: thousands of civilians were interned, and Dutch language, schools, books, and newspapers were banned in Indonesian society. The resulting vacuum spurred anti-colonial nationalism, especially among the youth. Japanese authorities initially tried to take advantage of such feelings to mobilize popular support for Japan’s imperial cause, but such attempts were short-lived. By late 1943 Japan’s focus had turned instead to defense of the islands from an Allied reconquest (Benda 1958: 117–18). British Malaya before the war was, in the words of two prominent historians, ‘government by smoke and mirrors’ (Bayly and Harper 2004: 45),

26 Analysis with a tiny European elite presiding over a mixed population of Malays, Chinese, and Indians. To a degree, the British colonizers had sought to protect pre-war Malays from the modern world, preserving what they thought were the timeless ways of the peaceful Malay village or fishing community. Chinese and Indians, together comprising nearly one-half of the total population of Malaya, played the key roles in the agri-business, mining, and export economies that drove the colonial economy. For a time after their takeover the Japanese continued the protective policies toward Malays that Britain had used. From the beginning, however, they were hostile to the immigrant population, especially the Chinese, not surprisingly in view of the ongoing Japan-China war. Japan’s Total War Research Institute, in February 1942, argued that Malaya should remain a colony permanently rather than moving toward independence (Bayly and Harper 2004: 219).

Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal During 1942, Allied strategies in the Pacific mainly reacted to Japanese initiative, but they resulted in some important victories. At the Battle of the Coral Sea (4–8 May), a combined naval force of American, Australian, and New Zealand ships intercepted a Japanese convoy bound for Port Moresby on the southern coast of New Guinea. The naval battle became the first in history fought between aircraft carriers, with none of the combatant ships sighting each other. While the damage inflicted on opposing ships may be judged a draw, the Allies managed to turn the Japanese invasion fleet back for their base at Rabaul on the island of New Britain. Given the proximity of New Guinea to Australia, Douglas MacArthur credited the battle as ‘the real safeguard of Australia’s independence’ (quoted in Layton 2006: 404). The battle also helped to soften up the Japanese fleet before a more decisive battle fought at Midway the following month. Although a tiny atoll, Midway, located some 2,500 miles from Japan and 1,100 miles northwest of Oahu, was of great strategic importance. Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, hoping to score a ‘decisive victory’ comparable to his success at Pearl Harbor, argued that control of Midway was essential to Japan’s defensive perimeter (Budiansky 2000: 2; Howarth 1992: 267). His plan was to stage a diversion in the Aleutian Islands, in the northern Pacific Ocean between Alaska and Russia, while striking at Midway with aircraft carriers, battleships, and an occupation force. Thanks to codebreakers, the U.S. Navy was able to anticipate the attack and inflict its first clear defeat of the Imperial Japanese Navy. In one day, the Japanese lost four carriers, over 300 aircraft, and 3,000 men. The battle stopped the momentum of Japanese expansion. From the time of their defeat at Midway, the Japanese suffered from a dwindling number of experienced pilots. Another consequence, given the vital role played by codebreaking, was to move signals intelligence from the periphery to the heart of U.S. naval operations (Budiansky 2000: 2, 21; Howarth 1992: 267).

Japan on the offensive: 1941–42  27 As early as mid-December 1941, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then stationed in the U.S. and later on the Army General Staff in Washington DC, had recommended that Australia be used as a base to support U.S. operations in the Philippines. In February 1942, Eisenhower proposed the dispatch of 8,000 U.S. troops to Australia, and by August some 90,000 soldiers had arrived (Grey 1999: 170; Day 1992: 37; Long 1973: 136, 161). The same month, the Americans began an amphibious invasion of Guadalcanal, in the chain of the Solomon Islands to the northeast of Australia, in the U.S. Navy’s first major counter-offensive in the Pacific. The months-long battle for Guadalcanal exposed weaknesses in Japanese supply lines that would become increasingly evident as the war progressed. The Japanese military requisitioned huge numbers of ships to support the campaign, straining both civilian transportation and production as a result (Goralski and Freeburg 1987: 159; Harrison 1998: 244). In the face of an Allied blockade of the waters around Guadalcanal, the Japanese later resorted to using destroyers and submarines to supply the island (Hashimoto 1955: 62–63; Murfett 2009: 250; Parillo 1993: 174–75). The eventual success of the Allies at Guadalcanal in early 1943, along with the victories in New Guinea at Milne Bay (August 1942) and the Kokoda Trail (November 1942), ensured Australia’s security against a Japanese incursion (Dean 2013: 24).

3

The U.S. home front

The Second World War had profound effects on the U.S.; not because of deaths in battle or enemy attacks, but as a result of the government’s massive mobilization of American resources to fight the war. Above all, the huge emphasis on increasing industrial and agricultural productivity brought prosperity to Americans after the hardships of the Great Depression. It also increased the size and power of government, including the government’s capacity to restrict the liberties of categories of citizens who were designated as threats to national security, notably Japanese Americans. The war encouraged millions of people to leave their homes, some to join the military but many others to take up manufacturing jobs in industrial areas. National mobilization brought more women into the workforce, some in manufacturing jobs in which women had not previously been employed. In a direct sense, the U.S. was the least affected of the countries that participated in the Second World War. Mainland U.S. territory was untouched by invading armies and untroubled by enemy bombs, and large oceans separated America from both the European and the Pacific theaters of the war. The death rate of American military personnel, while significant, was dwarfed by deaths of other nationalities. Some of the dramatic developments evident in wartime America, moreover, were already in process before the conflict began, and so cannot be considered as purely the result of the war. Nevertheless, the war proved to be a remarkable catalyst for change, and it dominated all aspects of American life from 1942 to 1945. It is impossible to separate out the effects on the U.S. home front of the European and the Asian theaters of the Second World War. Until at least 1943, fighting Nazi Germany remained President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s priority. It was only with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, however, that America entered the war at all.

1940–41: An end to isolationism America’s road to the Second World War was long and complicated. Since the First World War, the U.S. had risen to prominence as a world leader. Isolationist attitudes, however, though far from universal, remained intact:

DOI: 10.4324/9781003090502-4

The U.S. home front  29 many decision-makers were opposed to American participation in distant conflicts, or in binding military alliances or other international agreements. After September 1939, a significant number of individuals and groups were reluctant to be involved in what was initially seen as someone else’s war. American opinion was strongly against both Germany and Japan, but there was still an expectation that France and Britain could deal with Germany and Europe, and that the tensions that had arisen between the U.S. and Japan after the start of Japan’s war with China in 1937 could be resolved without armed hostilities. The fall of France to Germany in June 1940 shattered the hope that Nazi advances in Europe could be contained, and greatly worried President Roosevelt, amongst others. Roosevelt began to aid the British in every way he could without actually joining in the war, and also to strengthen the American military. More than $10 billion was allocated for military build-up in 1940 (Klein 2013: 53–56). In the same year, a conscription law was passed in the U.S.: it was the first peacetime draft in American history, with a target of two million men in the first year. In both 1940 and 1941, the U.S. government imposed trade embargoes in an attempt to restrain Japan, whose forces had moved into French Indochina (present-day Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) through a combination of negotiation and bribery. But it was the Pearl Harbor attack that definitively ended any lingering U.S. isolationism. The American government declared war on Japan the day after the attack, in a move that was virtually unopposed within decision-making circles. To Americans, the Pearl Harbor attack was an insult and a humiliation, and it also reinforced a long-standing strand of anti-Japanese racial hatred in America. The nation went to war with very few doubts, and ‘remember Pearl Harbor’ became a rallying-cry for the next four years. A few days after Pearl Harbor, Americans were also at war with Germany and Italy. Both countries declared war on the U.S. on 11 December, and the American government declared war on them on the same day.

Wartime work Mobilization of American resources called for massive increases in productivity during the war years. Gross National Product grew from $101 billion in 1940 to $214 billion in 1945, and nearly half of it was devoted to war needs (Campbell and Jensen 1995: 923). Increasing the production of armaments, planes, ships, tanks, food, clothing, and many other items was an urgent wartime imperative. Already in December 1940, Roosevelt had proclaimed in a radio speech that, ‘We must be the great arsenal of democracy’ (Klein 2013: 128). After Pearl Harbor the President moved quickly to set ambitious new production targets. To stimulate production, the federal government gave generous tax breaks to industry, lent money to expand

30 Analysis plants, and signed contracts on terms that guaranteed profits to capitalists (Rose 2008: 85). Greater productivity, rather than in increase in the number of employees, was the major reason for increased output. Factories stayed open for second and even third shifts and workers put in long hours of overtime. The average working week increased from 38 hours in 1939 to 47 hours in 1943. The overall productivity of the economy per worker-hour (what one worker can produce in one hour) rose by 21% between 1940 and 1945. Thanks to increased productivity, U.S. steel mills were producing half the world’s total output of steel by 1944 (Campbell and Jensen 1995: 921). Huge quantities of weapons were produced. In America in 1939, ‘building planes was strictly a boutique operation’ (Klein 2013: 67), and fewer than 6,000 military and civilian aircraft were produced that year. Over the course of the war, by contrast, the U.S. manufactured a total of 300,000 military planes, including 95,000 in the single year of 1944 (Clifford 2001: 849). After a spike in production in 1943, America outproduced both its enemies and its allies in key areas. Great Britain manufactured well under one-half the number of America’s military aircraft during the course of the war. Between 1939 and 1945 American factories produced 88,410 tanks, compared with Japan’s 2,515, and nearly 2.68 million machine guns, compared with Japan’s 380,000. By 1944, the U.S. produced 60% of the Allies’ munitions and 40% of the whole world’s weapons. America’s armaments production was six times greater than Britain’s (Klein 2013: 515–16; Kennedy 1999: 654). America’s 6 million farmers had already been mobilized before Pearl Harbor to help meet the food needs of Britain. Production goals were then revised upwards, in ‘the first effort to draft a comprehensive set of blueprints for all agricultural production in the United States’, in the words of the Secretary of Agriculture, Claude Wickard (quoted in Nelson 1943: 87). Total food production was 10% greater in 1942 than in 1941. The government itself was a very significant employer of labor. The population of Washington DC more than doubled between 1941 and 1943, and the number of federal employees grew from 132,000 to 281,000 (Rose 2008: 90). The emphasis on increased productivity meant that work was plentiful, after a decade in which it had been scarce, and the impact was soon evident in people’s lives. The most obvious effect of the war on U.S. society was the restoration of prosperity. Military spending finally ended the Great Depression in America. As always, increases in prosperity were uneven, with not everybody gaining to the same extent, but Americans now had the opportunity to work, and many were able to work as much overtime as they could manage. In 1940, the U.S. still had the highest unemployment rate among major nations in the world, at 15%, with 8 million jobless people. The number of the jobless dropped to 4 million in 1941 and by 1942 there was a labor shortage. In 1944, unemployment was only 1% (Jeffries 2001: 848). Even prison labor was used to build patrol boats and to make military uniforms, as well as items for civilian use.

The U.S. home front  31

Figure 3.1 Factory worker washing an airplane motor prior to shipment Source: Universal History Archive / Getty Image 982761442

Real industrial income (income after adjustment for inflation) increased by 50%. National income more than doubled; consumer spending and personal savings both reached record levels; and there was a general, if uneven, rise in living standards. People’s eating habits improved and many had access to regular medical care. Workers changed jobs often in the search for higher wages (Brown 2001: 246; Jeffries 2001: 848; Rose 2008: 89– 90). Farmers and farm workers also benefited. Prices for farm goods rose steadily, and farmers’ incomes were higher than they had ever been before. Already in 1942, the national gross farm income was estimated to be onethird higher than for 1941. In the end, farm income increased by 200% (Nelson 1943: 85–86; Brown 2001: 246). The labor shortage that was evident by 1942 meant that new workers had to be found. American women were the biggest potential pool of labor and were a major target for recruitment drives. The War Manpower Commission campaigned energetically to persuade women to do work that had previously been the province of men, using films, newspaper advertisements, and radio programs (Rose 2008: 96). The results, however, were not clear-cut. Women’s labor force participation certainly increased, but not dramatically. More than 19 million American women participated in

32 Analysis the wartime labor force, 6 million of them for the first time. Yet, half of the 6 million were school-leavers who would have entered the workforce in peacetime too. The number of wartime working women is estimated to be between 2.7 and 3.5 million higher than the number that would have been produced by normal population increase and maturation. In 1940, women’s labor force participation rate had been 26%. It reached a peak of 36% in 1944, before dropping to 28% in 1947 (Kennedy 1999: 778–80). As had been the case before the war, married women were less likely to be employed. When the war began, three-quarters of all women of working age were ‘at home’ (not working), and the great majority of them were still there when the war ended. Traditional cultural norms about a woman’s place being in the home persisted, especially if she was a mother, and relatively few mothers of young children went to work. Roosevelt’s government built over 3,000 new day-care centers to accommodate the children of working mothers in wartime, but in the event, they operated at one-quarter capacity. This situation differed markedly from what happened in wartime Britain and the Soviet Union, where more than 70% of women worked outside the home during the war, whether by choice or by compulsion, though the American pattern was similar to that in wartime Japan (Kennedy 1999: 777–80; Havens 1975: 919–22). Many American women who did go to work during the war quit their jobs, either voluntarily or not, when the war ended. Many women did new types of work during wartime, and the number and range of blue-collar jobs held by women increased. In manufacturing, women’s employment grew by 140% between 1940 and 1944, with electrical manufacturing and the automotive industry among the most affected (Milkman 1987: 50–51). Almost half a million women worked in the aircraft industry; in some aviation-related factories on the west coast, nearly 50% of the labor force was female. Yet, the change in women’s work was not as dramatic as is sometimes imagined. The famous propaganda image of Rosie the Riveter suggests that large numbers of American women moved into unaccustomed industrial jobs, patriotically taking over the work of men who had gone to the front. In fact, however, there were comparatively few Rosies, and many women did the same kind of work as they would have during peacetime. The proportion of female employees who worked in wartime defense plants was never more than 10% (Kennedy 1999: 778). More women took up clerical and service jobs. The great expansion of the wartime federal bureaucracy, for example, created an urgent need for women with secretarial skills in Washington DC, and there were so many secretaries that Washington suffered a typewriter shortage (Rose 2008: 90). Women also formed a vital part of the agricultural labor force, whose efforts were critical to the war effort. A survey in North Carolina in May 1942 suggested that in the preceding five months, more than 10% of all males aged between 14 and 65 had already left the farms to go to military

The U.S. home front  33 service or other non-agricultural employment. As a result, women and girls made up 20% of farm labor in that state (Nelson 1943: 90). In the U.S. as a whole, women had comprised 1.5% of farm labor in 1941; the following year, the figure rose to 13% (Rose 2008: 89). Other women enrolled in the volunteer Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps or other military bodies for women, or worked as volunteers doing war-related jobs, for the Red Cross, for example, or in entertaining troops (Klein 2013: 352–53; Kennedy 1999: 776).

Wartime mobility There was an enormous amount of movement of people in the U.S. in wartime, in what turned out to be a permanent demographic change. Newsweek described it in 1942 as ‘the greatest shifting of population in the nation’s history’ and ‘the second winning of the West’ (quoted in Rose 2008: 88). According to the Census Bureau, as many as 15 million Americans relocated during the war. One in five made a significant geographic move – one in nine left home for military training camps, but millions more headed to war plants. Reinforcing trends that had begun well before the war, people poured out of the South and into the North, and out of the East to head West, especially to California. About three million people left the South, where there was little industry but there were plenty of workers (Brown 2001: 245; Kennedy 1999: 747; Jeffries 2001: 849). For many African Americans, life changed radically. Black Americans achieved limited formal or political gains during the Second World War, and in the military, they were separated from other soldiers, placed in allblack outfits and assigned almost exclusively to non-combat roles. A huge number, however, took advantage of new opportunities for geographic and social mobility at home. Pressure from black activists was the crucial stimulus in overcoming the political, social, and economic barriers to such mobility. Of greatest importance were the leadership and tactics of the black labor leader A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, an all-black union of railway workers. Determined to secure new employment opportunities for black workers in the industrial economy, in 1941 Randolph planned a mass protest movement of African Americans in Washington DC against discrimination in employment. The march was, Randolph wrote in 1941, ‘the last resort of a desperate people who had failed to get decisive results in the form of jobs in national defense through conference, petitions, and appeals to leaders of government and private industry’ (quoted in Bynum 2010: 168). By the end of May 1941, his March on Washington Movement threatened to bring 100,000 African Americans to the capital on 1 July. President Roosevelt, alarmed at the prospect of such a massive demonstration and its potential to spark racial violence, strongly opposed the march. Roosevelt attempted to negotiate with Randolph, but Randolph stood firm,

34 Analysis insisting that the president issue an executive order prohibiting discrimination in employment in defense plants. Roosevelt resisted the pressure to sign the order until 25 June 1941, when he issued Executive Order 8802, prohibiting such discrimination and establishing a Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce the new policy (Bynum 2010: 164–74; Kennedy 1999: 763–68). Executive Order 8802 did nothing to achieve Randolph’s earlier goal of ending segregation in the military. Pressure from Randolph, however, was one of the forces spurring President Harry S. Truman to issue an executive order for full integration of the military in 1948. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802 prompted a huge exodus from the South as many black workers, some of them liberated from picking cotton for the first time, left in search of comparatively lucrative new jobs. During the war years 700,000 black civilians left the South to settle in urban centers of industrial production. About 65,000 black people moved from the South to the Chicago area, where 320 new factories were built, including four major aircraft plants. In 1943 alone, 10,000 African Americans moved from the South to Los Angeles every month. The proportion of African Americans employed in war industries more than doubled between 1940 and 1945, to reach 8.6% (Kennedy 1999: 765–69; Rose 2008: 88; Klein 2013: 611–12). Overall, urban populations increased remarkably during the war, strengthening a trend that was already well under way by 1941. More than 400,000 people moved to Southern California and nearly 300,000 to Michigan. An estimated 500,000 people poured into Los Angeles, 190,000 into San Diego, 125,000 into San Francisco, 160,000 into Portland and the same number into Seattle. Some southern cities also expanded: 150,000 people moved to Mobile, Alabama (Nash 1985: 56–74; Brown 2001: 245; Rose 2008: 88). The extraordinary demographic mobility brought its own problems. Towns and cities became congested. Housing was in chronically short supply, schools were overcrowded, urban services like transport and policing were seriously strained, and crime rates and incidences of juvenile delinquency went up. In some places families lived in trailer camps or shantytowns, in temporary shelters lacking water and sewage facilities. Some people lived in cars or sheds. Competition for scarce housing and other facilities exacerbated racial tensions in urban areas. Race-based violence broke out in Harlem in New York City, and in Pittsburgh, Washington DC, and Charleston, West Virginia, but the most violent episode was in 1943 in Detroit. More war work was done in Detroit than in any other American city, and the city was already overcrowded before the war began. The overall population increased from 1.6 million in 1940 to 2.5 million in 1943. Detroit’s labor force, numbering 396,000 in 1940, reached a peak of 867,000 in November 1943. Living standards were poor for all ethnic groups but were worst for African Americans. It was reported that one in every seven white families lived in substandard housing, and one in every

The U.S. home front  35 two black families. Interracial conflict erupted in housing projects and high schools. Over two days in June 1943, in the worst race riot in the U.S. in several decades, 25 blacks and nine whites were killed, five by police bullets. Seven hundred people were injured and 1,300 arrested. Property damage amounted to a million dollars, and Detroit’s war production dropped by 40% (Brown 2001: 245–46; Rose 2008: 92, 111–12; Kennedy 1999: 770; Klein 2013: 612–15). One form of population mobility was far from voluntary. In 1942 nearly 120,000 people of Japanese birth or descent, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, were forcibly relocated from their homes on the west coast to internment camps in the interior, on the grounds that they posed a security threat after Pearl Harbor. In 1941, almost 127,000 people of Japanese ancestry or birth were living in the continental USA, with the greatest concentration in California. This number comprised less than one-tenth of one percent of the national population (Daniels 2000: 169); even in California, Japanese Americans represented barely 1% of the population. Another 150,000 people of Japanese origin lived in the territory of Hawai’i, where they made up nearly half the population. After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military was given the power to remove people of Japanese ancestry from the west coast, which was considered the most vulnerable area as it was closest to Japan, and as California was home to a large number of aircraft plants. By contrast, very few Japanese Americans were interned in Hawai’i because of the size and economic importance of the Japanese community there. The small number of Japanese residing in inland areas of the mainland were never subject to detention either (Rose 2008: 153–59). Japanese migration to the USA had occurred from the late 1860s onwards, with the peak period being the early years of the 20th century, 1901–08. From the U.S. side, there was a shortage of cheap labor, and from the Japanese side, the rapid reforms of the late 19th century produced so much economic hardship that some people chose to emigrate. In the earlier periods, most Japanese immigrants were young, single men, agricultural laborers heading for sugar plantations in Hawai’i or agricultural, mining, railway, or timber industry work on the mainland. Later on, women came as so-called ‘picture brides’: that is, as marriage partners for men whom they knew only from photographs. Japanese immigrants to the USA have traditionally been divided into generational cohorts. The Japanese word ‘issei’ means ‘first generation’, and refers to those born in Japan, while ‘nisei’ means ‘second generation’, and refers to the first generation to be born in the USA. Japanese immigrants were subject to racial discrimination in the U.S. through federal, state, and local laws, and in less formal ways. In 1924, the U.S. government passed the Immigration Restriction Act, which excluded further Asian immigration except for Filipinos, who were classed as Americans by that stage because the U.S. had colonized the Philippines.

36 Analysis The 1924 Act also prevented first-generation immigrants, the issei, from gaining American citizenship. Nisei, on the other hand, were automatically granted citizenship because they had been born in the USA. In 1941, the Japanese community on the U.S. mainland consisted of around 40,000 issei, mostly aged over 50, and around 80,000 nisei, mostly aged under 18 (Kennedy 1999: 749). As in other countries participating in the Second World War, people who were citizens of enemy countries, or were descended from citizens of enemy countries, were regarded with suspicion in the U.S., and the federal government took steps to restrict their liberties. Officials were wary of Americans of German and Italian origin, in addition to those of Japanese descent, but treated them much less harshly. The communities of German and Italian descent, numbering in the millions, were many times bigger than those of Japanese origin. They were generally well assimilated, however, and included influential citizens. Only 5,000 people of German or Italian descent were eventually interned in the USA (Kennedy 1999: 749–50; Polenberg 2000: 29). At first things were handled differently. More than 10% of the ItalianAmerican community, or 600,000 people, remained Italian citizens at the beginning of the Second World War, not U.S. citizens, and they were automatically labelled as ‘enemy aliens’ when Mussolini declared war on the U.S. Just before the congressional election in 1942, however, Roosevelt ordered that designation to be cancelled, presumably because of the importance

Figure 3.2 Japanese-American internees waiting for registration Source: Historical / Getty Image 615302130

The U.S. home front  37 of the votes of Italian-Americans. After that the government disregarded Italian-Americans, except for a tiny number of supposed ‘fascists’ among them (Kennedy 1999: 749–50). In the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack there were individual arrests of people of Japanese descent who were suspected spies or saboteurs but no mass detentions. In January 1942, however, a government report on the Pearl Harbor attack was released. Though it produced no evidence, the report alleged that spies based in Hawai’i, including JapaneseAmerican citizens, had assisted the Japanese force. These false allegations had a huge effect on public opinion, and wild rumors circulated even among senior officials (Daniels 2000: 171–74). In February 1942 Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, directing the War Department to ‘prescribe military areas … from which any or all persons may be excluded’. There was no explicit reference to the Japanese. Congress later passed retrospective legislation to support the executive order. There was no dissenting vote in Congress; the press and public opinion also strongly supported the move. The Pacific coastal zone, where much of the mainland Japanese community lived, was designated as a prohibited area. Some Japanese people withdrew from the Pacific coastal area voluntarily, but they were stopped from doing so at the end of March 1942. From then on they were sent to temporary assembly areas, and from June 1942 onwards they were evacuated to ten detention camps in remote areas well away from the coast, in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, and Utah. Each camp held between 7,000 and 18,000 people. President Roosevelt created a new agency, the War Relocation Authority, to run the camps. At the camps themselves, military police controlled the entry and exit of goods and people (Daniels 2000: 174–78; Hayashi 2004: 1). The policy later emerged of separating those considered to be ‘loyal’ to the USA from those considered ‘disloyal’. Slowly, those internees deemed to be ‘loyal’ began to be released; 25,000 had been freed by the middle of 1944 (Kennedy 1999: 755). Meanwhile, several lawsuits challenged the constitutionality of relocation, but in June 1943 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in the government’s favor. The legal and moral ground was shaky, however, and remaining internees began to be allowed to go home from the end of 1944. By that time, not only were many of them traumatized, but they had suffered considerable loss of personal property, savings, and income. Federal government officials and military commanders always insisted that the removal of Japanese people from the west coast was justified by ‘military necessity’ (Hayashi 2004: 78–79). Some officials and many legal scholars, on the other hand, were very concerned even at the time about the constitutionality of restricting the civil rights of a single ethnic group, especially as many of them were U.S. citizens. In 1945, Harper’s Magazine referred to the incarceration of Japanese Americans as ‘America’s worst wartime mistake’ (quoted in Daniels 2000: 295). A 1982 presidential

38 Analysis commission concluded that the incarceration of Japanese Americans had resulted from ‘race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership’. The 1988 Civil Liberties Act awarded compensation and issued apologies to survivors (Daniels 2001: 367–68).

Big government, big business, and big science The Second World War was good for the American government. The 1930s had been a tumultuous decade marked by widespread economic suffering, the dramatic social change associated with Roosevelt’s New Deal, fractured domestic politics, and escalating international tensions. The prosperity brought by the war, however, reduced criticism of the New Deal reforms, while American participation in the global conflict diverted attention to other matters. The demands of war brought new functions to government, legitimated extensions of existing functions, and facilitated major partnerships between government and business. The federal government became a more dominant presence in the lives of all Americans during the war, including those who did not serve in the military. Even after 1945, it remained much larger and more powerful than it had been before. Direct government intrusion into the economy reached new heights. The government set prices, greatly increased individual income taxes, and instituted a rationing program, under which the sale of important commodities was controlled to ensure there was enough of them for both the fighting troops and the civilian population. Shoppers had to have coupons to buy sugar, coffee, meat, dairy products, tires, gasoline, and shoe leather. The federal government created new agencies to supervise production, to discourage strikes and agitation for wage increases, and to direct the relocation and internment of Japanese Americans (Brown 2001: 247–48; Kennedy 1999: 623–24). Big business also expanded greatly. The huge emphasis on increasing productivity generated a business-friendly environment. The largest firms were necessarily the major beneficiaries, as only they had the resources required for the massive undertakings now planned. Most military contracts went to the biggest corporations, including General Electric, Ford, DuPont, and U.S. Steel, though in turn, large firms relied heavily on subcontractors. Half of all military contracts were awarded to the 33 biggest corporations. General Motors, the largest of the large, supplied an astounding 10% of America’s war production and churned out military-related goods worth $10 million per day. At the beginning of the war General Motors had 34 plants. By the end it had 68. Thanks to military contracts, big business became bigger and richer during the war, and ties with government were cemented (Kennedy 1999: 621–22; Klein 2013: 519–20). The federal government also made a huge commitment to large projects in research and technology that would contribute to the war effort. Advanced scientific research, sponsored or monitored by government,

The U.S. home front  39 produced improvements in sonar, radar, amphibious vehicles, and more (Kennedy 1999: 667). All of these initiatives were overshadowed, however, by two massive, expensive, and revolutionary projects: the building of the B-29 ‘Superfortress’ bomber, and the building of the atomic bomb. The B-29 four-engine, high altitude, heavy bomber was larger and more complex than any of its predecessors. It could fly above the range of most anti-aircraft guns, and had a longer range and faster speed than other combat aircraft. In 1940 Boeing had won an Army Air Force competition to design a long-range bomber. The corporation completed the first B-29 in 1943. Producing the B-29 cost $3 billion – more than the project to build the atomic bomb. In all, 3,763 B-29s were produced. Initially developed for the war against Nazi Germany, the aeroplanes were never used in Europe. They made their first bombing raid against a Japanese target – the Yawata ironworks in Kyushu – in June 1944, and from November 1944 raided Japanese cities on a large scale from bases in the Marianas (Klein 2013: 656–61; Kennedy 1999: 654, 846–47). On the night of 9–10 March 1945, 334 Superfortresses dropped their payload on Tokyo, killing about 90,000 people. In August 1945 they would carry the atomic bombs from the Marianas to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The British and U.S. governments had joined forces to investigate the potential of atomic power in late 1940. America’s participation in the Second World War a year later made the project much more urgent. In June 1942 the U.S. government launched a secret military initiative, known as the Manhattan Project, to research and develop an atom bomb, the most destructive weapon ever produced up to that point. While there were laboratories and other facilities in several states, the center of activity was in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the bomb was developed by a large community of scientists, engineers, and military personnel working in great secrecy. From early 1943 to the end of the war, the working population of Los Alamos doubled every nine months (Rhodes 1986: 476). In all, the project cost more than $2 billion and employed 150,000 people (Kennedy 1999: 664–65). Successfully tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945, the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just over three weeks later.

4

The tide of war changes 1943

The middle of the war saw the Allies win major offensives against the Axis powers. In Asia, the Allies first turned the tide against Japan in the maritime war with victory at Midway Island in June 1942. They took their first territory from the Japanese with the successful campaign on Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands, which concluded in February 1943. By contrast, Japan’s mainland empire in Asia remained firmly under Japanese grasp and Allied attempts to retake territory largely failed. The increasing dominance of the Pacific by the U.S. led the Americans to view the land war in Southeast Asia as irrelevant, while simultaneously the U.S. remained committed to the defense of China. Their attitude produced renewed conflict with America’s allies, and especially with Great Britain and China: America’s British allies wanted U.S. support for a reconquest of Britain’s colonial territories in the region, while China wanted its southern borders with Southeast Asia secured from Japanese threats. At the same time, local movements for independence asserted their claims in Southeast Asia, sometimes making the case for an ill-defined independence under Japanese protection and at other times opposing Japan’s plans for continued dominance in the region. While both Japan and the Allies spoke of a future autonomy for Asian peoples, none of the major combatants would allow local movements to jeopardize the major countries’ war aims.

The Pacific War’s administrative tangle The Allied land battle for the Asia-Pacific region fell into five theaters. The South East Asia Command (SEAC) was formed under British leadership in mid-1943, and directed operations in Burma, Ceylon, Malaya, and Sumatra. The India Command, also led by Britain, was responsible for the Middle East and the ‘Far East’, meaning northeast Asia (China, Korea, and Japan), and places where Indian troops fought. China, Chiang Kai-shek’s domain, formed the third geographic zone. An additional sphere, the China-Burma-India (CBI) theater, fell under U.S. control and operated in all three geographic areas (Patti 1980: 11–15). Covering the Philippines and New Guinea was U.S. General Douglas MacArthur’s South West Pacific

DOI: 10.4324/9781003090502-5

The tide of war changes: 1943  41 Area (SWPA). America had a vested interest in the CBI operations and the SWPA, but little interest elsewhere. Allied intelligence services were also active in the Asia-Pacific region. The American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) penetrated behind enemy lines, gathering intelligence and spying on the Japanese, and training local auxiliaries in sabotage, guerrilla warfare, and the like. The OSS had its headquarters in Chongqing under Joseph Stilwell’s authority and operated in Burma, Thailand, Japanese-occupied China, and the ‘Far East’. The SOE, directed from India and Ceylon, operated under General (and then from January 1943 Field Marshal) Archibald Wavell’s command and covered Burma, Thailand, Malaya, and Sumatra. Thailand, one of Japan’s two Southeast Asian allies, thus hosted competing covert operations, while French Indochina, Japan’s other supporter, was regarded as a ‘no-man’s-land [where] either organization might work at will’ (UK National Archives 1943: 288). Within a single theater or operational zone, the admixture of these intelligence operations and their local informants and operatives produced a dizzying array of overt and covert operations that might have involved the British; the Free French (French forces which resisted the pro-Axis Vichy regimes in France and its colonies); the U.S. army, navy, army air force, and secret services; and freelancers who did not report to the theater commander. Considerable confusion resulted from this mish-mash.

The troubled China–U.S. alliance In March 1942, Roosevelt told the Russians that China should be regarded as one of the ‘big four’ Allies, meaning that it should have equal status with the U.S., Britain, and the USSR (Iriye 1981: 53–56). While the Americans thus broadly acted as China’s champion, on occasion they treated their ally as an inferior, second-rate power, and Stilwell and Chiang Kai-shek had an uneasy relationship. To the other Allies, China was a backwater of the war. The six years from 1938 to 1944 featured a series of skirmishes in no-man’s land in central China that did not change the balance of power among the Chiang Kai-shek regime in the southwest, the Japanese in the center and along the coast, and the Chinese Communists in the north, nor dislodge the power of the various Chinese warlords who fought with and against Chiang’s Nationalists and the Japanese. The negative views of China’s role in the war held by the Allies, and indeed many historians, hinge on the seeming military pointlessness and confusion of the war years there. And an image of malaise was compounded by the widespread corruption in the Nationalist regime that led many Allied civilian politicians and military officers to condemn China’s ability to fight. Chiang Kai-shek’s comparative failure to dislodge Japan contrasted with the dramatic U.S. victory at Midway in June 1942, and suggested to the Allies that the Nationalist Chinese were unable or unwilling to fight.

42 Analysis The military impasse in China fed into the fraught political relations between the U.S. and their ally. Chiang was convinced that the Americans did not care what happened to China and that, in its self-interest, the U.S. would abandon China to face any Asian threat, especially from Japan, the USSR, or a revitalized post-war European imperialism, without American help (Mitter 2012: 296). By the middle of 1943, Chiang’s relations with Stilwell, and the Americans more broadly, had sunk to their lowest point. Chiang, moreover, found the Americans unreliable partners in international diplomacy. In November 1943, Chiang attended a summit with President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill in Cairo, Egypt, the first and last time that Chinese delegates sat at the Allied diplomatic table in person. Roosevelt assured Chiang at Cairo that a major Allied push into Asia would be pursued in the coming year, but almost right away, Roosevelt’s promises turned out to be hollow. In a conference at Teheran held immediately after the Cairo conference, Roosevelt and Churchill met with Stalin, who had not attended Cairo. Stalin demanded a Europe-first plan for 1944, whereby the Allies would invade France and Stalin would attack German-held lands in the east. To Chiang’s dismay but not surprise, the entire episode showed how easily promises made to China could be broken (Mitter 2012: 308–11).

Burma’s long war While the war in China had settled into a miserable stalemate, in Burma it continued as a war of movement, daring, and miscalculation. The Burma war would constitute the largest single campaign of the Second World War anywhere in the world, lasting for 46 months of continuous fighting (Hastings 2007: 67). The Allies, following their retreat into India in 1942, planned three main offensives for 1943 and early 1944. The first aimed at the Arakan region in western Burma, the second supported Stilwell’s building of the Ledo Road across northern Burma to the Chinese frontier, and the third comprised a series of commando raids behind Japanese lines led by Orde Wingate, one of Britain’s most colorful and controversial wartime figures. The Arakan offensive of the spring of 1943 failed completely to dislodge the Japanese. Defeat by the Japanese a second time was bad enough for British morale, but the disillusion was compounded by the fact that British numerical superiority in the 1943 Arakan campaign made no difference. Many of the British troops in the Arakan offensive were raw, unmotivated, and underprepared to face a seasoned enemy. The British military commanders complained that their own British and Indian troops were far inferior in quality to the Japanese (Allen 1984: 94–115). The Ledo Road project initially seemed also to be a failure, but changed leadership and renewed commitment turned it into one of the Burma war’s successes. Work on the road began in late 1942 but hardly any progress had been made by September 1943. Stilwell then chose a new commander, General Lewis Pick, whose largely African-American troops from the U.S.

The tide of war changes: 1943  43 Engineer Corps worked at extraordinary pace from late 1943, along with Chinese, Indian, and Burmese labor. The Ledo Road, completed by New Year’s Day 1944, became a major U.S. engineering and political triumph in the CBI. The road also became the avenue for Stilwell’s forces to re-enter Burma in 1944 and eventually to help retake the country from Japan (Bayly and Harper 2004: 280–81). Orde Wingate’s guerrilla war behind Japanese lines from February to May 1943 is one of the most written about and romanticized fights of Britain’s war in Asia. Wingate, who first gained renown for daring guerrilla operations in North Africa and Palestine, was strange and distinctive: ‘An Ancient Mariner in speech, holding his hapless interlocutor with piercing blue eyes and a numbing fund of recondite information, given to harangues, quarrelsome of personality and yet strangely persuasive’. He was also a manic depressive who frequently moved from gloom to euphoria and back again (Allen 1984: 121). Wingate’s ‘Chindits’ – small, long-range penetration groups whose name was a corruption of the Burmese word Chinthe, a reference to lion-headed mythical animals that feature in much Burmese folk religion – passed through western and northern Burma and skirted Japanese bases to sabotage infrastructure deep in Japanese-held territory. Their hardiness was remarkable, especially as they were an unpromising collection of mainly mature-age (over 30 years old) enlistees from British cities who had no military experience. Wingate’s offensive stabs disrupted Japan’s hold on Burmese railways for a time, but otherwise made little difference to Japanese control. Of Wingate’s roughly 3,000 Chindits, nearly one-third did not make it back to India when the campaign was halted before the rainy season in May 1943; those who did survive had marched up to 1,000 miles and were by the end walking, diseased skeletons (Allen 1984: 122–47). Militarily inconclusive and wasteful, Wingate’s campaigns proved to be public relations gold. Churchill was ecstatic at the exciting foray after years of bad news in Europe and Southeast Asia, and Wingate became a celebrity (Allen 1984: 149). Wingate’s example inspired the Japanese to mount their own offensive in Burma. Lieutenant General Mutaguchi Ren’ya, the Japanese commander of the main division in northern Burma, won Prime Minister Tōjō’s approval for a strike to the north and west that would both extend Japanese control in upper Burma and also perhaps prepare for an invasion of India. Mutaguchi had led the attack on Singapore, claimed to have begun the war in China in 1937, and believed his destiny was entwined with an Asian triumph for Japan. In his journal he wrote: I started off the [July 1937] Marco Polo Incident [in China that] turned into the Great East Asia War. If I push into India now [I] can exercise a decisive influence on the [war]. I, who was the remote cause of the outbreak of this great war, will have justified myself in the eyes of our nation. (quoted in Allen 1984: 154)

44 Analysis Mutaguchi’s 1944 offensive became one of the largest land battles of the Asian war. It also motivated Japan’s local partners, especially the Indian National Army (INA). This body had initially been formed in February 1942, two days after the fall of Singapore to the Japanese. It consisted of Indian soldiers who had been captured with other British forces and had then been persuaded to switch sides to support the Japanese war effort. Later, Indians who had been resident in Southeast Asia also joined. The INA’s popularity was largely due to the persuasiveness and prowess of Subhas Chandra Bose, who became its leader in mid-1943. Bose, a Cambridge University graduate, rejected Mahatma Gandhi’s peaceful route to Indian independence and sought allies who would help put a violent end to British rule in India. He was convinced that the Axis offered India the best chance of gaining freedom from colonialism. In the 1930s, he met Hitler and Mussolini, and in January 1941 escaped from prison in India and traveled to the USSR and then Germany, from where he broadcast anti-British propaganda over radio. In early 1943 Bose arrived in Tokyo to liaise with his new ally, and then in mid-1943 he traveled from Tokyo to Japanese-controlled Singapore and was greeted with a hero’s welcome. Bose went wild with excitement when he learned of Japan’s offensive plans, and demanded that the INA be an equal partner of the Japanese in the assault, and an independent army in their own right (Bose 2011: 238–60). In fact, however, the Japanese authorities made little military use of the INA; its value to the Japanese was mostly as propaganda.

Asian nationalism gains momentum Bose’s enthusiasm for Japan notwithstanding, from 1943 it became apparent that Japan’s strategy of winning Asian allegiance through its ideology of Asian liberation from Western colonialism had failed in practical terms. Across Southeast Asia local people realized that the turning of the military tide against Japan meant greater hardship for them. Rhetorically, Japan still proclaimed the goal of Asian freedom, partly out of fealty to its initial pledge to Asians but also to match the rhetoric of liberation that had become a tactic of the Allies. In March 1943, Cordell Hull, Roosevelt’s secretary of state, outlined to his boss a plan for America to back the independence demands of all European colonies at war’s end (Iriye 1981: 131–32). The scheme was combined with a fuzzy notion of trusteeship – that is, Western supervision of decolonizing countries – that would have the effect of prolonging colonialism in some places, but nonetheless, Southeast Asians in particular took notice of America’s position. The U.S., also in 1943, gave up its extraterritorial claims in China, relinquishing the quasi-colonial trading privileges and diplomatic immunity it had enjoyed there since the late 19th century (Thorne 1978: 178). Britain followed the Americans’ lead. The surrender of their privileges by the two big Allied powers lessened the

The tide of war changes: 1943  45 impact of Japan’s similar move just afterwards, when it, too, surrendered its old extraterritorial privileges in China (Iriye 1981: 107). Despite their rhetoric of Asian solidarity, the Japanese disregarded the wishes and needs of their local partners if they clashed with Japanese interests. Back in 1940, in the hope of reaching an agreement with China and thus ending the war that had begun in 1937, the Japanese had established a puppet government in Nanjing, as an alternative to the hostile Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. They worked with Wang Jingwei, a former Nationalist leader and a rival of Chiang Kai-shek. Wang chose to collaborate with the Japanese because he saw no hope of defeating them and because he feared Communist influence in China. He became the president of the new pro-Japanese regime, which was recognized by Japan as the legitimate government of China. In return, Wang’s government gave Japan extensive powers, including permission to station troops in north China. Japan’s 1943 surrender of extraterritorial privileges in China encouraged the Wang regime to declare independence from Japan. Japan stifled Wang’s move, however, since it did not want to extend the scope of the Nanjing government’s power (Mitter 2012: 38–70). By now, Japanese policy was confused. As the war turned against them, the easiest way out of the China quagmire would have been to negotiate a peace agreement. This would have entailed, however, treating Chiang Kaishek’s government as an equal, which the Japanese army refused to do. The dilemma of how to extricate itself from the war plagued Japan not only in China but also in Southeast Asia. Ironically, liberating Asia turned out to mean ignoring the wishes of local people and conducting war against Asians (Iriye 1981: 45; Tarling 2001: 102). In Southeast Asia, the Japanese took steps to offer more freedom to local people while also demanding submission. In January 1943, Japanese military–civilian liaison meetings divided occupied territories into two types. The first were strategically vital, sparsely populated, or politically immature; these territories would not gain independence. Greater autonomy, however, could be gained by the second category. The Philippines and Burma, as the two notable cases, could attain relative freedom under Japan’s guidance (Tarling 2001: 135). In the Philippines, a ceremony in mid-1943 enshrined ‘independence’, and 500,000 people attended the public celebrations. Japan’s wartime collaborator, Jose Laurel, became the president. Laurel, a leading Commonwealth-era figure who had previously cooperated with the U.S., frequently in these years castigated the Americans and their occupation of the Philippines, which he characterized as cruel (Ileto 2017: 171–76). For his part, Roosevelt, via radio, lambasted the Laurel regime as one ‘set up in fraud and deceit … to confuse and mislead the Filipino people’ (quoted in Karnow 1989: 307). The new pro-Japanese, nominally independent regime may have been confusing and unsettling for some, but it also became popular and bolstered a longer-term

46 Analysis anti-Americanism in Filipino politics that went back to America’s war of conquest in the Philippines at the turn of the century. Burma also declared its independence in 1943, and the Japanese-allied nationalist government, under the pro-Japanese premier Ba Maw, declared war on the Allies. Burmese military forces supported Japan’s occupation of the country, and also supported General Mutaguchi’s plans for a land strike into British India. The Burmese forces further profited from Japanese power to consolidate a nationalist regime that attacked its internal enemies. Central Japanese authorities sought to maintain the semblance of Japan’s Southeast Asia alliance. A Greater East Asia Ministry was established in Tokyo in November 1942 to unite the disparate elements and aims of Japan’s political strategy for Asia. The new ministry’s work did not proceed very far, however, since Japan’s military losses in the Pacific from 1942 overrode the diplomatic work and took attention away from the cabinet room and onto the battlefield or maritime war. In November 1943 the government convened a meeting of its allied or puppet states in Tokyo, where it issued a statement of its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere principles and attacked Western imperialism (Tojo in Lebra 1975: 88–93). Representatives of Wang Jingwei’s China regime, Manchukuo, Thailand, the Philippines, and Burma, and an Indian delegation of a provisional government that was independent of Britain and supportive of Japan, led by Subhas Chandra Bose, all attended the conference. Japanese officials informed the delegates of their commitment to Asian freedom and mutual economic benefit. Among the attendees, Bose stole the show and was the most outspokenly pro-Japanese. He declared that, unlike the great conferences of the 19th and early 20th centuries – from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the Locarno Conference of 1925 – which bound defeated nations to the demands of victors, the Tokyo conference was a chance to forge a ‘true international society of nations’. According to the Japanese, Bose’s speech ‘held the entire audience in awe’. After the conference, Bose traveled on a pan-Asian tour, visiting Wang Jingwei in Nanjing and then Jose Laurel in the Philippines (Bose 2011: 260–63). While Bose’s pan-Asianism may have electrified anti-colonial Asian nationalists, the substance of Japan’s proposals at the November conference was unimpressive, and did little to clarify Japan’s war aims. Moreover, Indonesia and Malaya, as well as Taiwan and Korea, were not invited to the conference since the Japanese war-makers regarded all of them as incapable of independence and best suited to colonial subordination and material exploitation.

The war’s toll on civilians: The Thailand–Burma railway Even among its favored allies, like Thailand, Japan’s mid-war policies, and their soldiers’ behavior on the ground, provoked outrage and resentment rather than solidifying loyalty. Among the best-known Allied tales of the war in Asia is the Thailand–Burma railway, which Japan forced prisoners

The tide of war changes: 1943  47 to build in 1942 and 1943; the line holds an iconic status as a site of suffering for Allied prisoners of war. Faced with American dominance of the maritime war in 1942, Japan sought a land link across Southeast Asia that would enable it to extend its control to the west and into India. The railway was the solution. From the beginning of 1943, work on the railway sped up as the Japanese sought to complete it as quickly as possible. Field Marshal Count Terauchi Hisaichi, Commander of the Southern Expeditionary Army Group, which was responsible for Southeast Asia, ordered that the railway should be completed by the end of August 1943, ‘at all costs’ (Kratoska 2006: 9–10). Working conditions, unsurprisingly, sank to their nadir during this so-called ‘speedo’ period. From among the 62,000 Allied prisoners who worked on the railway’s construction between June 1942 and October 1943, about 12,000 died, a death rate of nearly 20% (Kinvig 2005: 198; Hall 1996: 281; Rivett 1991: 312). But Asian laborers recruited to work on the railway – whether willingly or not – suffered even greater losses. Malaria, cholera, overwork, malnutrition, and assault by Japanese military personnel all marked not only Western experiences but those of the Asians who built the railway as well. By some estimates, 250,000 Burmese, Thai, Tamils, Javanese, Malays, and Chinese worked on the railway, with death rates of up to 50% (Frank 2001: 160–61; Vance 2006: 57; Daws 1994: 208, 220). Ba Maw, the leader of the pro-Japanese Burmese government, was shocked to learn of the lack of oversight and slave-like treatment of Burmese workers toiling away deep in the jungle (Yoshikawa 1995: 307–11). Within their own country, Thais balked at renewed Japanese pressure to supply labor for the line. As a result, the number of workers sourced from British Malaya increased dramatically during 1943. A Thai provincial governor reported in August 1943 that daily trains from Singapore brought Chinese and Malays to work at Kanchanaburi, in the west of Thailand, where a railway bridge was to be built. By an Allied estimate, between April and July 1943, an astounding 41% of the 70,000 Malaya-resident workers brought up to the rail line perished (Yoshikawa 1995: 207).

Japan’s appeal sours: Resistance to Japanese occupation By the middle of the war, local anti-Japanese movements had emerged in Southeast Asia. Even though Thailand was allied with Japan, by 1943, much of the Thai government and public opinion had swung against Japan. In August 1943, the Japanese ambassador in Thailand wrote to his government that there was no longer a pro-Japan faction in the Thai government, and that junior army officers were openly hostile to the Japanese (Murashima 2002: 203). The Seri Thai (Free Thai) movement emerged as the Japanese position worsened, seeking military and political support from the Allies to resist the Japanese and curtail pro-Japanese Prime Minister Phibun’s power. The group comprised various military and civilian

48 Analysis factions mainly within the civil service. An American Office of Strategic Services report from 1944 described the movement as more of a government conspiracy against Phibun than a popular resistance movement (Haseman 2002: 98). While the Seri Thai was a relatively small movement, social upheaval in this period of the war was a genuine threat to the Phibun government and to the Japanese also. Anti-Japanese resistance developed in Thailand among the working class, mainly ethnic Chinese population. In addition to strikes over wages and conditions, the Communists encouraged strikes on patriotic grounds: many strikes happened at Japanese armaments and war materiel factories. Labor organizers and strikers faced constant threat. When a labor-oriented Thai Communist party was formed in 1942, mainly from the local Chinese community, the Thai government arrested many Communists and Communist sympathizers. Some gained release soon after arrest, while others were tortured or languished in jail for the rest of the war. In Malaya, Thailand’s southerly neighbor, the Malayan Communists who resisted the Japanese were also overwhelmingly a Chinese force. The Communist front group, the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), was badly underequipped and inexperienced for the first part of the war. From the middle of 1943, however, better food, materiel, and leadership allowed the group to grow markedly in size and readiness. Also from mid1943,  the British began to build their own intelligence operations on the ground, using SOE men who linked up with the MPAJA and began to coordinate an offensive strategy. The work was halting and irregular because of poor communications, but eventually, with Chinese Communist help, the British at last had a few field agents (Bayly and Harper 2004: 345; Chapman 1950). From the middle of 1944, the Malay Communists and the MPAJA worked closely with the Allies through SEAC and obtained money, medicine, food, and arms from the SEAC command in Ceylon (Cheah 1983: 60). In French Indochina, the Communists opposed both the French colonial power and the Japanese. After many years overseas, Ho Chi Minh – who became the leader of the Communist movement that after the war fought first the French and then the Americans – returned to Vietnam and reorganized the movement after its years of losses under French repression. In the mountains of northern Vietnam, Ho and his comrades in early 1941 met and hammered out a Communist-led proposal for the national liberation of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from French colonialism and Japanese occupation. The Vietnamese Communists’ mountain plans would take years to be fulfilled. For most of the war years, no direct organizational link existed between the northern leadership and the rest of the country, and Ho Chi Minh’s attempts to gain regional allies were often stymied: in August 1942, he traveled to China to seek Nationalist and Chinese Communist Party help in his country’s struggle, but Chiang Kai-shek’s secret police

The tide of war changes: 1943  49 arrested him on suspicion of being a French or Japanese spy, and he spent the next two years in various prisons (Marr 1995: 178–96). In the Philippines, the Japanese invasion that culminated in the American surrender of Corregidor Island in May 1942 spawned a number of resistance groups, many of which had American contacts or support, based on the main island of Luzon. In early 1943, several groups consolidated themselves into the United States Forces in the Philippines, which were immediately attacked by the Japanese. From then on, resistance groups formed, fragmented under Japanese assaults, and re-grouped in a constellation of competing and collaborating outfits (Agoncillo 1965: 649–61). Of all of the resistance groups, the most enduring comprised a small Communist movement that broadened into a united front: the People’s Anti-Japanese Army, better known by its shortened Tagalog name, the Hukbalahap. Like the MPAJA in Malaya and the Vietminh in Indochina, the rebels sought Allied help in their cause. By 1943, the Hukbalahap were an established presence in central Luzon. The Hukbalahap had contacts with a residual American anti-Japanese fighting force in the islands but largely worked independently for the rest of the war (Taruc 1953: 50–57). Also like the MPAJA and the Vietminh, the Hukbalahap were strongly anti-colonial, and after 1945 militarily resisted the post-war government.

Island hopping and leapfrogging American naval successes from 1942 present a stark contrast to the continuing Japanese dominance of the land war. Successes at Midway and Guadalcanal in 1942–43 allowed the Allies to plan a more aggressive counter-offensive. The overall Allied strategy in the Pacific was to isolate Japan from its acquired territories and establish bases within striking distance of the Japanese home islands. Despite the Allied commitment to defeat Germany first, by the end of 1943 almost as many U.S. army personnel were deployed in the Pacific as in Europe. From the beginning of the war most of the U.S. navy was concentrated in the Pacific. Division remained among the American command, however, on how these forces should be used. From early 1943, Admiral Ernest King, Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations, urged a drive across the central Pacific toward Japan. This strategy was supported by Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, who advocated advancing through the islands of the central Pacific to Taiwan and China. General Douglas MacArthur on the other hand argued against this plan, fearing it would mean bypassing the Philippines, to which he was committed to return. MacArthur’s rival plan involved moving west along the northern coast of New Guinea, regaining the Philippines, and then striking toward Japan. At the Quadrant conference at Quebec in August 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill authorized both plans to advance.

50 Analysis The Americans combined amphibious assaults and fast carrier task forces to advance across the Pacific. Nimitz employed a strategy of ‘island hopping’, bypassing concentrations of Japanese to acquire valuable ports and airfields further on. MacArthur, meanwhile, carried out his own version of ‘leapfrogging’ in New Guinea. By the end of January 1943, U.S. and Australian forces under MacArthur had captured Buna, Goa, and Sananda in eastern New Guinea, ending the Japanese threat to Port Moresby. The following month, the defeated Japanese completed their evacuation of Guadalcanal. From among the over 30,000 Japanese troops who had occupied the island, about two-thirds had died, mainly from starvation and disease (Auer 2006: 145). In early March the Japanese faced another major setback. With the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, the Allies destroyed a large Japanese convoy ferrying troops and supplies for the reinforcement of the New Guinea port city of Lae. The action demonstrated the Allies’ ability to isolate Japanese strongholds – in this case Lae – using their superior air and sea power. The systematic Allied killing of Japanese survivors in the water, however, also reflected an open disregard for traditional standards of warfare. In the aftermath of the battle, American and Australian aircraft strafed men in lifeboats, on rafts, and clinging to debris, using the justification that Japanese troops reaching shore might fight another day (Gruhl 2007: 103; Spector 1985: 227–28). In mid-1943, MacArthur and Admiral William Halsey implemented Operation Cartwheel, moving up the chain of the Solomon Islands and along the New Guinea coast. During the latter part of 1943, American operations gained pace. In October, the Americans began an all-in offensive against Rabaul on the island of New Britain, Japan’s largest base in the South Pacific. In November 1943, Nimitz began his central Pacific thrust in the Gilbert Islands (Operation Galvanic) with invasions of Makin and Tarawa. Success in this operation, in turn, provided airfields for attacks on the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific (Operation Flintlock) at the beginning of 1944. Japanese authorities recognized Japan’s increasingly defensive position on 15 September 1943 when they adopted an ‘Absolute National Defense Zone’ policy. This policy committed Japan’s forces to holding their existing lines rather than expanding the territory under their control. Much of the Japanese effort associated with the policy focused on stockpiling supplies and reinforcing existing bases in order to mount a decisive counteroffensive in 1944. However, lack of shipping remained a serious impediment to establishing a defensive perimeter (Dean 2016: 52, 55; Dennis 1987: 159, 165). By the end of 1943, Allied attacks on Japan’s supply and communication lines had isolated their main South Pacific base at Rabaul. MacArthur’s forces also controlled the northern coast of New Guinea.

5

The crucible 1944

In 1944 the Pacific became a crucible – a severe test – for both sides of the conflict. The Allies emerged from the test as the winners. Allied land forces under General Douglas MacArthur and U.S. naval forces under Admiral Ernest King made enormous progress in winning back territory occupied by the Japanese. By this stage of the war, the weapons at America’s disposal massively outnumbered those of the Japanese. Although the Japanese Imperial Navy had two opportunities to engage in the ‘decisive battle’ they had so long desired, both proved disastrous for them. The first naval battle occurred when the Americans invaded the Mariana Islands from June 1944 and the second was prompted by the landing of U.S. troops at Leyte in the Philippines in October. As a result of these defeats, the Japanese adopted increasingly desperate tactics, including kamikaze attacks on American ships. Before the end of the year, at a Quebec meeting in September, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, committed the Allies to Japan’s defeat through a combination of naval blockade and aerial bombardment.

Strategy Whereas the invasion of the Philippines was central to MacArthur’s strategy, Admiral King wished to bypass the Philippines altogether and invade Taiwan, which was closer to Japan, so that the Allies could launch air attacks on Japan. In the absence of a unitary command, a two-pronged approach in the Pacific persisted. At the Sextant conference held in Cairo in December 1943, the Allied Combined Chiefs of Staff further endorsed this dual approach, with separate thrusts in the central Pacific under Admiral Chester Nimitz and the southwest Pacific under MacArthur. Nimitz was given permission to move into the Marshall Islands in January 1944 and the Marianas in October, while MacArthur continued to advance along the coast of northern New Guinea (Howarth 1992: 100–1). Admiral King finally gave up the idea of invading Taiwan and conceded to the Philippine option after a conference held in San Francisco from 29 September to 1 October 1944. Several factors contributed to this decision.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003090502-6

52 Analysis First, U.S. carrier raids indicated that the southern Philippines were only lightly defended. Second, MacArthur suggested that Leyte could be invaded as early as 20 October 1944, and Luzon two months later. Third, planners determined that the troops needed to invade Taiwan not only exceeded those needed to invade the Philippines but exceeded the total numbers in the Pacific. King’s own staff insisted there were insufficient troops for an invasion of Taiwan (Ford 2012: 97, 198, 200–1; Spector 1985: 418). From late January 1944, the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s fast carrier force attacked enemy airfields and shipping in the Marshall Islands as a preliminary to amphibious assaults. As part of his island hopping strategy in the Marshall Islands, Nimitz caught the Japanese off balance by disregarding garrisons on the islands of Wotje, Maleolap, Mili, and Jaluit. Instead, he struck at Kwajalein, the world’s largest coral atoll and a key air base in the heart of the Marshalls, on 31 January 1944. In what proved to be one of the most complicated amphibious actions of the war, the Americans took possession of the atoll by 7 February. Naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison (1963: 317) concludes that the Marshalls campaign demonstrated the U.S. Navy’s ‘mastery of the art of amphibious warfare; of combining air, surface, submarine and ground forces to project fighting power irresistibly across the ocean’. In mid-February 1944, American planes from Admiral Marc Mitscher’s fast carrier task force began systematically attacking the Japanese naval stronghold at Truk in the Caroline Islands. The U.S. decision to bypass Truk instead of invading it with ground forces proved to be another key decision. Once isolated, Truk was no longer an effective air or naval base because it could not be supplied. Anticipating an Allied invasion, the Japanese reinforced Truk. When the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, the garrison had some 28,000 men who had never seen action on Truk (Blackton 1946: 403). MacArthur meanwhile continued to bypass some concentrations of Japanese troops while establishing bases to expand the reach of U.S. air power. In March 1944, he moved north of New Guinea to the Admiralty Islands, of which Manus Island is the largest. Manus Island’s expansive Seeadler Harbor became a major fleet base for the American advance. In April 1944, MacArthur’s forces attacked Hollandia in Dutch New Guinea in order to provide a heavy bomber base in support of the move toward the Philippines and Nimitz’s advance to the Mariana and Palau Islands. As it turned out, Hollandia’s soft soil required greater engineering work than originally anticipated, necessitating the use of another bomber base in the meantime. An alternative base was provided at Biak, a small fortified island off New Guinea’s northwest coast, about 300 miles west of Hollandia. The Japanese assembled a fleet to recapture Biak but plans quickly changed once it was realized that the American fleet was advancing on the Mariana Islands. The Japanese headed north for a ‘decisive battle’ with the U.S. Navy.

The crucible: 1944  53

The Marianas and the Battle of the Philippine Sea Admiral King and Admiral Nimitz had long advocated an assault on the Mariana Islands as a capstone of their central Pacific thrust strategy. The capture of the Mariana Islands, located about 1,300 miles south of Tokyo between Japan’s home islands and its newly-acquired empire, became a key Allied objective from early 1944. Preparations for the invasion of the Marianas, Operation Forager, began in February 1944, once the neutralization of Truk and Rabaul had opened the way for the U.S. Navy to enter Marianas waters. The American invasion force of 120,000 men was the largest yet assembled in the Pacific. U.S. Marines began landing on the 14-mile-long island of Saipan on 15 June 1944, in what became the biggest amphibious landing in the Pacific up to that point. In fierce fighting, 3,426 Americans were killed. The invasion force included African American depot and ammunition companies, which took heavy fire supporting the landings. One of the men, Private Kenneth J. Tibbs from Columbus, Ohio, became the first black Marine killed in combat during the Second World War (Miller 2005: 135). Although the Americans captured some 1,800 prisoners, 32,000 Japanese soldiers were either killed in combat or committed suicide. Even more appalling were the deaths of 22,000 civilians on Saipan, which had been administered by Japan since 1920. Many civilians chose to take their own lives rather than fall into the hands of the enemy. Hundreds of Japanese colonists waded into the ocean to drown themselves, while others blew themselves up with grenades or jumped to their deaths from the cliffs at Marpi Point. Many were prompted by Japanese propaganda, which foretold their torture and execution at the hands of the invaders (Sherrod 1944: 75–82; Dower 1986: 246). Allied victory at Saipan held huge significance because Saipan, nicknamed the ‘doorway to Tokyo’ (Tōkyō no genkan) (Shillony 1981: 55), was close enough to allow B-29 bombers to strike against the Japanese home islands. While the battle for Saipan played out on land, the Philippine Sea, lying between the Philippines and the Marianas, became the site of a crucial naval battle. The First Mobile Fleet, commanded by Vice Admiral Ozawa Jisaburō, steamed to the Marianas with the intention of annihilating the U.S. Fifth Fleet, entering the Philippine Sea on 16 June. The Battle of the Philippine Sea was fought between 18 and 22 June. Admiral Raymond Spruance commanded the Fifth Fleet, which, in turn, included the fast carrier task force (Task Force 58) under Rear Admiral Mitscher and the joint expeditionary force (Task Force 51) of over 127,000 Marines and infantry under Admiral Kelly Turner. The American fleet was far stronger than the Japanese: 15 carriers with 900 planes compared with Ozawa’s nine carriers with about 430 planes (Lockwood and Adamson 1967: 13). As the Japanese approached, Admiral Spruance had to decide whether to take his fleet west to meet Ozawa’s forces or stay off Saipan to protect the amphibious

54 Analysis landing force. Spruance elected the latter course, although his caution drew criticism from some quarters. During 19–20 June, carrier planes engaged in fierce aerial combat that became known to Americans as ‘The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot’. The American planes and pilots proved superior to the Japanese, with Ozawa losing 373 planes to the Americans’ 30. Part of the American success can be attributed to their radar capabilities that pinpointed enemy formations (Ford 2012: 104; Spector 1985: 309). Left without air cover, the Japanese fleet headed west. Near sunset on 20 June, U.S. carrier planes caught up with the fleet, sinking the carrier Hiyō and damaging two others. The Americans lost 20 planes in the attacks, but they also faced the serious problem of having flown beyond their fuel capacity. As the U.S. planes headed back to their carriers, many pilots were forced to bail out or ditch in the sea. Most were subsequently rescued by American ships. In the Battle of the Philippine Sea, American submarines as well as aircraft took a toll on the Japanese carriers. Submarines had already provided vital reconnaissance on the movement of Japanese ships leading up to the battle, with some 44 submarines stationed on the approaches to the Marianas. On 19 June, USS Albacore torpedoed Ozawa’s flagship and Japan’s largest carrier, the 31,000-ton Taihō. The same day USS Cavalla sank the 30,000-ton Shōkaku. Together the carriers took down about 3,000 men of the Japanese forces. These actions are a reminder that U.S. submarines reached the peak of their effectiveness in 1944, sinking more ships than the totals for 1942 and 1943 combined. With the capture of the Marianas, two new submarine bases opened at Saipan and Guam, allowing submarines to operate closer to Japan’s sea lanes and thus to prevent supplies from reaching Japan by attacking or warding off approaching vessels. As the naval blockade tightened, Japan’s oil supplies were cut off and its merchant fleet decimated. With diminishing large targets, Allied submarines increasingly used their deck guns to sink smaller craft, including fishing boats (Sturma 2006: 126–31; Sturma 2011: 82–83, 179–80). After the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the U.S. Fifth Fleet continued to support the American invasions of Guam and Tinian in the Marianas chain. The recapture of Guam assumed special symbolic value since it had been a U.S. territory from 1898 up to its capture by the Japanese in December 1941. Major General Holland Smith, commander of the Marines, described the amphibious landing on Tinian as the best in the Pacific War (Zeiler, 2011: 322). Declared secure on 1 August, Tinian proved an especially important asset since it was suitable for the building of a large air base that brought Japan within range of America’s new B-29 ‘Superfortress’ bombers. At the August 1943 Quadrant conference in Quebec, Roosevelt and Churchill had already agreed to intensify ‘large-scale bombing of the Japanese homeland’ during 1944 (U.S. Department of State 1970: 976–77). Initially the plan was to deploy all B-29s to the China-Burma-India theater,

The crucible: 1944  55

Figure 5.1 Marine Major General Holland M. Smith, Major General Thomas E. Watson, and Admiral Raymond Spruance discuss the tactical situation on Saipan, 13 July 1944 Source: U.S. Marine Photo

but the logistical realities of launching the planes from forward bases in Chengdu in China proved nightmarish (Craven and Cate 1983, vol. 5: 81). The Mariana Islands, located about 1,500 miles from Japan’s industrial heartland, afforded a far better base. Within days of securing control over Saipan, Guam, and Tinian, U.S. Navy Seebees (construction battalions) began to repair and construct no less than eight airstrips capable of accommodating B-29s (Arnold 1949: 153). By November 1944 the islands supported runways for B-29s capable of reaching Tokyo and other cities in Japan. The loss of the Marianas had major political as well as military consequences for Japan. The fall of Saipan breached Japan’s so-called ‘Absolute National Defense Zone’, and Saipan also became the first pre-war Japanese territory captured by the enemy. Unlike Midway, the Saipan defeat could not be hidden from the Japanese public, and it toppled the Tōjō Hideki government. In response to the defeat, Japanese authorities also stepped up their propaganda war, portraying the Americans even more adamantly as demons and monsters (Dower 1986: 246; Earhart 2008: 333). The Japanese

56 Analysis home islands began to prepare for what was believed to be an inevitable invasion by the Allies.

The savage war for Southeast Asia and China The Allies’ success in maritime warfare was complemented by changing fortunes in the China-Burma-India theater. Commander Mutaguchi Ren’ya’s dreams of a final victory in Burma and possibly an invasion of India moved onto the battlefield in early 1944. The greatest battles of the Burma war took place around Imphal and Kohima, two strategic towns on the Indian side of the India–Burma border, and lasted for five months from May 1944. If the Japanese could take these towns, the route further into India lay open, and the Allies’ Hump air supply route from India to China would be lost (Slim 2000: 306). Many factors pushed the offensive besides Mutaguchi’s self-regard. The Japanese told their Indian ally Subhas Chandra Bose that Indian forces must support Japan now or never, especially since many of the Burmese forces that had assisted the Japanese were planning to join the Allies as the war turned against Japan. At the same time, Bose and the Japanese assured each other that the Indian armies would be greeted as heroes in Bengal when they arrived with Japanese forces. Japan’s leaders also believed – or convinced themselves – that Germany planned a major offensive against the Allies in Europe and hence the Allies would have their hands full. In February, prior to the Imphal offensives, the British, for the first time in the war, defeated the Japanese on the battlefield. The Arakan frontier in Burma, site of Britain’s embarrassing failure to dislodge the Japanese in 1943, now became the scene of a stirring defensive victory as the British Indian Army (that is, units raised in British India) fought off an attempt to destroy their forces and thus prevent them from supporting other Indian Army troops further north in the pending Imphal and Kohima battles. The morale boost from the Arakan success was short-lived, as Mutaguchi’s forces launched ferocious and unrelenting attacks on the Imphal and Kohima area beginning in March. The subsequent fight ‘swayed back and forth through great stretches of wild country; one day its focal-point was a hill named on no map, the next a miserable … village a hundred miles away’ (Slim 2000: 296). The savage fighting often consisted of direct hand-to-hand engagements as the two sides struggled for control of the roads and paths that linked the main villages and towns of the region. Lieutenant General William Slim, the British commander, described parts of the fighting as looking like a popular striped dessert of the time, ‘a Neapolitan ice of layers of our troops alternating with the Japanese’, in which a single road would feature alternate sections controlled by the British Indian Army or the Japanese (Slim 2000: 301). The British were saved by effective air resupply from India, with the sometimes grudging help of the Americans. Amid the

The crucible: 1944  57 desperate struggle, and when British command’s morale had sunk amid fears that India would be attacked, Lord Louis Mountbatten commandeered U.S. aircraft that were to have been used for the Hump operations into China. Mountbatten redirected the aircraft to fly the Indian Army division, which had beaten back the Japanese in the Arakan region, to the Kohima front. Mountbatten’s action turned the tide, and by the third week of April 1944 the Japanese offensive had been stopped. After a frenzied series of advances, the Japanese were forced to retreat in the face of British armored and air superiority. Punjabi and Gurkha units of the Indian Army played the largest role in pushing the Japanese back into Burma. Tough fighting, often at close quarters, marked the Japanese retreat. At one point, in a destructive microcosm of the entire rise and fall of Britain’s Asian empire, Japanese and British imperial forces lobbed shells and rained fire upon each across the tennis court at the colonial district officer’s bungalow in Kohima. The court and the bungalow were reduced to rubble (Allen 1985: 150–314). Meanwhile U.S. General Joseph Stilwell and his Chinese armies were active in the far north and northeast of Burma, and had gained the support of the British commander Orde Wingate’s British-Indian Chindits in March. Wingate flew men and materiel behind Japanese lines to disrupt their supply and also to assist with Stilwell’s project to build the Ledo Road to carry supplies from India into China. Wingate himself died in a plane crash that same month, but his Chindits, and the British Indian Army as a whole, proved vital to the Americans’ objectives and suffered terribly in the fight: by July 1944 a medical survey of one of their key battalions found that only 19 out of 2,200 men were fit for duty. Stilwell had also commandeered five Chinese divisions sent by Chiang Kai-shek. The Chinese then pushed the Japanese out of one of the key northern valleys. Finally, Stilwell used a contingent of American soldiers, the only U.S. troops engaged in mainland Southeast Asia in the entire war, to pick up where the Chinese had stopped their offensive (Allen 1985: 323). The American ‘Galahad’ cohort took the key airfield near Myitkyina in mid-May, which Stilwell had lost just over two years previously, and it became key to supply via the Hump of Chiang’s soldiers in China. In early June 1944, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington DC prioritized the Hump over all other Southeast Asian operations, and supplies soon began to flow to China. As with the Chindits, however, Stilwell’s unrelenting pressure on the Galahad contingent caused considerable suffering and produced widespread hatred of the commander. Four of five of his troops were casualties by August (Allen 1985: 316–80; Mitter 2012: 332). The Allied turning of the tide in northern Burma had even worse consequences for the Japanese. An estimated 80,000 Japanese were killed in the biggest defeats for Japan in their history (Bayly and Harper 2004: 390). For the Japanese, the defeats resounded widely. While around this time British imperial forces steadily received reinforcements and supplies to aid them in

58 Analysis pushing the Japanese eastwards across Burma, the Japanese armies in the north got no reinforcements, had no tanks or air support, and had limited ammunition for their artillery, as well as hardly any rations. Major General (soon to be Lieutenant General) Tanaka Nobuo, whom Mutaguchi chose as a new commander of one of the three divisions in northern Burma in May 1944, wrote in his diary at the beginning of June: The officers and men look dreadful … More than a hundred days have passed [since the Imphal campaign began] and in all that time there’s been almost nothing to eat and there’s not an ounce of fat left on any them … People at home would not even be able to imagine what they’ve gone through. (Quoted in Allen 1985: 276) From the middle of 1944, the Japanese gave up their dreams of military expansion across northern Burma and focused on defending southern Burma. That plan crumbled under the Allied counter-attack across Burma in the second half of 1944 and into 1945. But it would still be a long, bloody fight before the Japanese were pushed back across Burma. In the last Rangoon battles of early 1945 – which featured some fierce fighting mixed with quick breakdowns and the abandonment of the city by the Japanese by May – 260,000 British imperial forces faced and defeated 20,000 Japanese, a force ratio of 13:1 (Ellis 1990: 521). Much of the rest of the Japanese army regrouped to a hilly, thickly forested, and underpopulated area to the north and east of Rangoon, and planned for a breakout from there across to lower Burma and into Thailand. Constantly targeted by the British, most of the remnants of Japan’s Burma army were still fighting the enemy while attempting to escape across the Thai frontier when Japan surrendered in August 1945 (Allen 1985: 488–534; Thompson 2003: 389–402). While the Allies were painfully breaking Japan’s stranglehold on Burma, in China the Japanese staged the largest operation in their army’s history. Five hundred thousand troops – 80% of Japan’s China army – mobilized across China in an effort to crush Chiang Kai-shek’s resistance, link three key Chinese railways with Southeast Asia to strengthen supply of Japanese troops in China, and destroy enemy, mainly American, airbases located near these three rail lines. America’s offensive air momentum was the key factor driving the Japanese ‘Ichigō’ plans: from the middle of 1943 the Americans had been using territory controlled by their Chinese Nationalist allies to launch bombing raids over Japanese positions in the Pacific. The Ichigō offensive lasted from April 1944 to February 1945, and the front extended 900 miles from the Yellow River in the central province of Henan to the Indochinese frontier (Hara 2011: 392–402). While their fortunes elsewhere were fading, the Japanese army delivered a major blow during this campaign against their Chinese enemy. Many places that had suffered during the dark days of 1938 when Chiang

The crucible: 1944  59 Kai-shek’s armies retreated before Japan’s onslaught were again destroyed in the 1944 campaigns. The fight for Henan turned into a debacle for the Chinese resistors and the province fell to the Japanese after a prolonged campaign. Battles in long-suffering Henan exposed key Chinese military failings and social resistance to the Chinese army: the army’s leadership was poor and corrupt; troops were low quality conscripts; and local people turned against the Chinese armies because troops brutalized villagers and stole from them. Making everything worse was the physical weakness of ordinary Chinese people, who had barely survived a famine in 1942. Chinese armies had commandeered grain during the famine at the expense of ordinary people, thousands of whom paid with their lives for this policy. Chiang Kai-shek despaired at his army’s conduct, and at the fact that the Japanese were much better at gaining the support of Chinese civilians than were Chiang’s own soldiers (Wang 2011: 393–418). The Americans too were to blame for Chinese suffering. To appease the U.S., Chiang had agreed to send some of his best divisions to assist Stilwell in Burma, and the diversion of his forces undermined resistance to the Ichigō offensive at home. In August 1944 Chiang wrote that the Americans, not Japanese, were responsible for China’s disastrous condition (Mitter 2012: 335). While heroic but doomed, Chinese resistance in Wuhan, and elsewhere, in 1938 had won American support for Chiang’s regime, now in 1944, any similar resistance was seen by the U.S. as not nearly enough. In September 1944 Roosevelt demanded that Stilwell be placed in untrammeled command of all Chinese forces, largely because Stilwell had convinced his president that Chiang had resisted sending more of his troops to Burma and that, as a result, the Burma war was unnecessarily prolonged. As part of his new position, Stilwell planned on integrating Chiang’s rivals, the Chinese Communists, into the national army. By October, Chiang had had enough of the American and complained to President Roosevelt, who then recalled Stilwell to the U.S., thus ending the strained relationship between the two (Mitter 2012: 322–50).

Return to the Philippines and Leyte Gulf In September 1944, the U.S. Combined Chiefs of Staff gave MacArthur permission to invade the Philippine island of Mindanao in November and Leyte in December. On 15 September, MacArthur’s troops landed on the island of Morotai in the Moluccas group in the Netherlands Indies, northwest of New Guinea, as a last step toward the Philippines. Morotai provided a forward base for striking at Leyte. MacArthur subsequently decided to bypass Mindanao, and made an amphibious invasion of Leyte on 20 October 1944. The same day that the first troops landed, MacArthur waded ashore with the media to make his famous pronouncement: ‘People of the Philippines, I have returned’. Initially, enemy opposition appeared light, but in fact, the Japanese mainly waited for the Americans to come

60 Analysis to them in the hills and mountains rather than making an all-out stand at the beaches. A massive naval battle, the largest in history, began only days after the American landings on Leyte. Some 500 ships and 200,000 men clashed in a series of engagements spread over five days and over 120,000 square miles. Even more than at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the American forces far outnumbered the Japanese. The U.S. deployed 1,400 aircraft at Leyte while the Japanese were only able to muster about 100 planes (Ford 2012: 84). As in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, submarines played an important role in reporting Japanese fleet movements. In this case, they also fired the opening salvos of the battle. In the early hours of 23 October, USS Darter and USS Dace attacked a formation of Japanese ships off the island of Palawan’s west coast. Moving slowly in order to conserve fuel, the ships presented a tempting target. The submarines also sank the heavy cruisers Atago and Maya, and severely damaged a third cruiser, Takao. Under Nimitz’s direction, command of the central Pacific naval force alternated between Spruance and Halsey, with the force referred to as the Fifth Fleet under Spruance and the Third Fleet under Halsey. At Leyte Gulf, it was Halsey’s turn to protect the invasion fleet along with Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet. The divided command between Halsey and Kinkaid created enough confusion to give the Japanese an opportunity. Once Admiral Halsey received information that Japanese carriers were approaching from the north, he left the Leyte landing area to intercept them. In fact, Admiral Ozawa’s Mobile Fleet deliberately lured Halsey away from San Bernardino Strait. Virtually denuded of planes by previous engagements, Ozawa’s carriers could do little other than act as bait. In pursuing these carriers, Halsey was perhaps partly motivated by the criticism Spruance had received for not aggressively meeting the Japanese fleet in the Marianas (Lockwood and Adamson 1967: 132). Halsey never admitted falling for Ozawa’s deliberate deception when going north and leaving San Bernardino Strait unguarded. Halsey’s choice to pursue Ozawa is one of the two command decisions that continue to dominate much of the debate about the battle. The other was taken by Vice Admiral Kurita Takeo. As commander of the First Striking Force, he decided to withdraw from San Bernardino Strait at a time when he appeared set to inflict serious damage on the American invasion fleet and its supply train. The decision, in naval historian H. P. Wilmott’s words (2005: 182), ‘spelled the end to the last great surface action in history’. Possibly Kurita, like Halsey, was overwhelmed by the size of the battle, with formations deployed over thousands of miles. In an important change in tactics, the Japanese began kamikaze attacks against Allied ships during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. In part, this initiative recognized the falling standards of Japanese pilots and their failure to provide effective opposition to the enemy. The first documented kamikaze attack took place on 21 October 1944, when a pilot slammed his plane into

The crucible: 1944  61 the heavy cruiser HMAS Australia as the ship supported the Leyte invasion along with the U.S. Seventh Fleet. The attack killed 30 crewmen and wounded over 60 others (Long 1973: 360). On 25 October 1944, kamikaze attacks by Japanese land-based aircraft were systematically employed for the first time. Despite the advent of kamikaze, the Battle of Leyte Gulf was a near death-blow to Japan’s naval power. Japan lost a large proportion of its remaining capital ships and aircraft carriers in the battle. Combined with the Battle of the Philippine Sea, Leyte Gulf had cost Japan 350,000 tons (158 shiploads) of precious oil (Parillo 1993: 42). The Japanese Navy could no longer pose a serious threat to U.S. operations in the Philippines. The battle not only cleared the way for the re-conquest of the Philippines but allowed land-based aircraft to join submarines in cutting off Japan’s supply lines, as resistance from Japanese ships and aircraft diminished. Landings launched from Leyte on Mindoro, an island south of the main island of Luzon, took place from 15 to 24 December 1944 to provide a base for the invasion of Luzon. Beginning at Lingayen, the landings on Luzon took place from 30 December 1944 to 25 January 1945. MacArthur’s forces, however, continued to face hard fighting. The Japanese forces of over 400,000 soldiers were headed, from early October, by the formidable General Yamashita Tomoyuki, the ‘Tiger of Malaya’. Manila was not captured until mid February 1945, while fighting in the Philippines continued until May 1945.

Perceptions of Japanese fanaticism While Americans were already predisposed to view Japanese soldiers as fanatics, the battle for Saipan in mid-1944 reinforced this image. During the battle, the Japanese mounted one of the war’s largest ‘banzai charges’, that is, a desperate mass attack with little chance of success. On 7 July, over 3,000 Japanese soldiers attacked American positions, many carrying only clubs or swords. The mass suicides on Saipan, of not only Japanese soldiers but also civilians, were taken as further evidence of Japanese fanaticism. War correspondent Robert Sherrod (1944: 79), describing the battle for Life magazine, wrote that the suicides on Saipan staggered the U.S. soldiers’ imagination: ‘To understand, they had to throw away all their occidental concepts of the human thinking processes’. Many Americans concluded that the war could only be ended by a campaign of extermination, while military planners assumed more than ever that Japan would not stop fighting unless invaded. While Americans could appreciate the idea of individual self-sacrifice, employing certain death as a systematic tactic appeared shocking. One thing that made kamikaze attacks more disturbing than previous suicide tactics was their prolonged existence: the kamikaze campaign was no momentary phenomenon but continued from October 1944 to August 1945.

62 Analysis The Imperial Japanese Navy had begun consideration of ‘special attack’ (kamikaze) tactics against the Allies following their defeat in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Given that Japan was left not only with an inferior number of planes but also with inadequately trained pilots, Wilmott (2005: 206) asserts that ‘the use of kamikaze tactics represented not the best but the only hope of inflicting loss on the American enemy’. As some Japanese veterans point out, by this stage of the war aviators had very little chance of surviving conventional attacks on American ships, so they might as well inflict maximum damage on the enemy for their deaths. Following the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Vice Admiral Ōnishi Takijirō (quoted in Inoguchi and Nakajima 1958: 186) advocated the continued use of kamikaze on similar grounds: ‘These young men with their limited training, outdated equipment, and numerical inferiority are doomed even by conventional fighting methods. It is important to a commander, as it is to his men, that death be not in vain’. Although kamikaze attacks struck Westerners as irrational, they were carried out methodically. The Japanese determined that small groups of five aircraft, with three suicide planes and two escorts, were the optimum number for evading enemy interceptors. In carrying out attacks, kamikaze generally approached their targets from very high altitudes to avoid enemy fighters, or very low altitudes to evade radar detection. In some cases, kamikaze pilots followed behind American aircraft returning to their carriers, a practice that afforded protection by congesting Allied radar screens. An 88-page manual published in May 1945 instructed aviators on the best ways of slamming into enemy ships (Axell and Kase 2002: 77–83). The kamikaze attacks succeeded in creating trepidation among the Americans. According to one war correspondent, ‘the anticipated terror, made vivid from past experience, sent some men into hysteria, insanity, breakdown’ (quoted in Schrijvers 2010: 236). The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, a group of mainly civilian experts that was assembled to assess the impact of the Allied strategic bombing of Germany and Japan, concluded after the war that the use of kamikaze was ‘effective’ and ‘supremely practical under the circumstances’ (quoted in Wood 2007: 91). On the other hand, the tactic greatly diminished the number of qualified Japanese pilots and their limited supply of planes. Later, in preparation for an anticipated invasion of the home islands, the Japanese built an array of suicide craft including boats and midget submarines. Ultimately, some argue, such suicide tactics contributed to American willingness to use atomic bombs on Japan (see Gordin 2007: 62–63). From a Japanese perspective, kamikaze and other suicide attackers were represented as an extension of the traditional warrior code of bushidō, in which men supposedly gave their lives out of duty and to achieve a military objective. Many volunteers saw their deaths as a patriotic act of sacrifice. Letters, such as that by Matsuo Isao, suggest an image of willing self-sacrifice (see Document 7). The attacks, however, were not without

The crucible: 1944  63 controversy among Japanese aviators and the public (Inoguchi and Nakajima 1958: 184). Although ostensibly volunteers, kamikaze pilots faced enormous pressures from both superior officers and their peers. Matsuo’s letter to his parents adopts many of the tropes used by the military to aestheticize death and make it more palatable (Ohnuki-Tierney 2007). As Beatrice Trefalt (2004) suggests, the fanatical Japanese soldier remains one of the most enduring images of the Pacific War, an image perpetuated by wartime Western propaganda. What the West perceived as ‘fanaticism’ resulted largely from Japanese training of soldiers, which included an insistence on devotion to the emperor, reference to a warrior tradition, and an official cult of the fallen soldier. More than anything, the emperor served for the Japanese authorities as a symbol of patriotism and the nation; the notion of death for the emperor in effect meant death to safeguard the nation. A widespread belief that the dead continued an association with the living made death more palatable. The kamikaze pilots’ rationale was, ‘We die for the great cause of our country’ (Inoguchi and Nakajima 1958: xvi).

6

Bombing Japan 1945

In the Pacific theater of operations 1945 was a year of unqualified Allied successes. Following the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944, American naval supremacy became unassailable. Using the newly occupied Mariana Islands as forward bases, American forces advanced progressively closer to Japan, occupying Iwo Jima (March 1945) and Okinawa (June 1945). Through innovative American operations in which mines were dropped from aircraft, and intensive submarine activity, Japan’s home islands became increasingly isolated from shipments of food and other vital war supplies necessary to keep the country’s wartime economy functioning. Yet Japan persevered, convincing most American military planners and the political elites that an invasion of Japan would be necessary to secure the goal of ‘unconditional surrender’. In the end, American forces never did invade Japan. Instead, the U.S. secured Japan’s surrender, in part, through a relentless campaign of catastrophic aerial bombing. In an attempt to bring an end to the war, U.S. military authorities planned an invasion of the Japanese island of Kyushu in late 1945, to be followed by an invasion of Honshu in March 1946. As America began to amass the vast quantities of personnel and materiel that would be necessary for these invasions, a handful of leaders expressed concern over the high human costs for Americans of invading Japan. So far, successive American victories had come at an increasingly high price in terms of deaths and casualties. Nearly 27,000 Americans were killed or wounded in the operation to secure Iwo Jima, rising to nearly 50,000 on Okinawa. Because of these gruesome statistics, and the prospect of facing at least 350,000 well-equipped Japanese soldiers in Kyushu, Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, chief of staff to the Commander-in-Chief, urged President Harry S. Truman to consider modifying the policy of unconditional surrender. The decorated admiral did not think insistence upon unconditional surrender was necessary to end hostilities and he believed that attachment to this policy would result in large and perhaps avoidable American casualties (Merrill 1995, vol. 1: 88–89). Although Truman proved unwilling to compromise on the policy of unconditional surrender, others on the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) questioned whether new military means existed to secure unconditional surrender

DOI: 10.4324/9781003090502-7

Bombing Japan: 1945  65 without a costly invasion. In June 1945 JCS Chairman General George C. Marshall sent a cablegram to fellow JCS member, U.S. Army Air Force (USAAF) General Hap Arnold, informing him that a meeting with the subject ‘Can we win the war by bombing?’ would soon be held in Washington DC. Though he was thousands of miles from Washington inspecting USAAF operations conducted from the island of Guam in the Western Pacific, Arnold replied almost instantly, ‘yes’, writing in his memoirs, ‘I was convinced it could be done’ (Arnold 1949: 566). At least two factors reinforced Arnold’s conviction that the war could be won by bombing rather than invasion. First, under General Curtis E. LeMay’s command, B-29 bombers of the 21st Bomber Command of the 20th Air Force based in the Mariana Islands had already secured successful results in incendiary raids – that is, using bombs designed to start fires – against Japan’s six largest cities: Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Kawasaki, and Yokohama. Second, in June 1945, with Okinawa captured and a new supply of incendiary bombs stockpiled, LeMay had introduced plans to extend urban area firebombing to encompass Japan’s 60 next largest cities. Based on past performance and realistic projections, LeMay informed Arnold that all urban area targets would be destroyed by 1 October 1945. ‘Japan’, Arnold promised, ‘would have few of the things needed to supply her Army, Navy, and Air Force, and couldn’t continue fighting’ (Arnold 1949: 564). U.S. bombing campaigns in Europe, some of which had been commanded by LeMay, had secured poor results up to 1944. Arnold predicted, however, that strategic bombing – that is, bombing to destroy an enemy’s industrial base, cities, or infrastructure – would finally prove itself to be decisive in coercing an enemy into submission. Employing such tactics, he added, would save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans who would otherwise be killed invading Japan. March 1945 proved to be a transformative month for the reputation of the B-29 and that of the 21st Bomber Command’s new commander, LeMay. Through the adoption of unorthodox tactics, LeMay achieved a level of total target destruction per sortie unrivaled in any previous strategic bombing campaign. By the time Japan’s government accepted surrender on 15 August 1945, B-29s under LeMay’s command had incinerated roughly 43% of the total urban area of Japan’s 66 largest cities (USAAF n.d.-a: 2), using only a small proportion of the total tonnage of ordnance that the Allied powers had dropped on Germany. If Arnold needed any convincing as to the sheer might that B-29s could bring to bear against Japan, by June 1945 they were likely dispelled, soon after his arrival on Guam. There, Arnold witnessed one of the largest raids conducted by the USAAF in the war to date, which, no doubt, had been timed for his benefit. On 15 June 1945, 444 B-29s out of 511, launched from airfields on Guam, Saipan, and Tinian, dropped 3,157 tons of incendiary bombs on Osaka (USAAF n.d.-g: 30). Arnold was awed by the huge amount of ordnance that one mission could drop on Japan.

66 Analysis

The chimera of high-altitude precision bombing against Japan Virtually all of General Arnold’s subordinates within the USAAF echoed his faith that strategic bombing would secure Japan’s surrender. As a newly appointed member of the Joint Plans Committee of the JCS in November 1943, LeMay’s predecessor, General Haywood Hansell, had challenged a previously agreed upon Joint War Plan against Japan that was set to be ratified at the Cairo Conference (Sextant) in late 1943. The draft plan asserted that, owing to the failure of strategic bombing in Europe, ‘final victory’ against Japan ‘must come through invasion of the Japanese home islands’ (Hansell 1986: 18–19). Through perseverance and persuasion – backed by predictions of what the B-29 could accomplish against a particularly vulnerable country – Hansell got the Joint Plans Committee, and thereafter the JCS as a whole, to revise their ‘Overall Plan for the Defeat of Japan’. This plan asserted that an invasion ‘may not be necessary’ and that ‘the defeat of Japan may be accomplished by sea and air blockage and intensive air bombardment’ (U.S. Department of State 1970: 765). On 2 December 1943, the Combined Chiefs of Staff agreed to this wording. Much of Hansell’s optimism stemmed from his belief that the B-29 could obtain the most dramatic ‘precision bombing’ results in wartime history, and thereby not only secure the surrender of Japan but also help secure USAAF institutional independence from the army after the conflict. The height from which the B-29 could bomb, together with unrivaled defensive armament, Hansell believed, could lessen the role that enemy air defenses had played in savaging bomber effectiveness and killing trained crews in Europe. The aircraft’s unrivaled payload capacity, moreover, meant that bombardment wings located in the Mariana Islands could launch highintensity raids that would eviscerate the enemy’s ability to rebuild industries in a timely fashion or replace military hardware destroyed through bombing. Large-scale mine-laying operations undertaken by B-29s, moreover, could isolate Japan, cutting its military and civilian population from supplies necessary not just for defense but also for subsistence. A costly invasion of Japan, if bombing and aerial mine-laying proved effective, would not be necessary. Hansell’s early use of America’s most revolutionary bomber, however, did not prove effective. The first high-altitude ‘precision’ B-29 raid, launched on 24 November 1944 from the Mariana Islands against the Nakajima aircraft engine factory in Musashino, Tokyo, was an embarrassment. Only 24 of the 111 B-29s launched reached their primary target, dropping a scant 57 tons of bombs near the target but inflicting no damage (USAAF n.d.-c: 1). A follow-up mission conducted three days later proved even less effective. None of the 81 B-29s launched bombed their primary target (USAAF n.d.-d: 1). Eighty-five percent of B-29s launched on a third mission against the Nakajima factory on 3 December reached their target,

Bombing Japan: 1945  67

Figure 6.1 American B-29 Superfortress nicknamed ‘Dauntless Dotty’, which led the first B-29 raid on Tokyo, 24 November 1944 Source: Keystone / Stringer / Getty Image 3333548

but only 2.5% of bombs dropped hit the factory and the results were declared ‘unsatisfactory’ (USAAF n.d.-e: 1). The area of target destruction, let alone the number of bombers reaching their targets, showed virtually no improvement into early 1945. Hansell remained determined to prove the effectiveness of the B-29 – the result of the single most expensive weapons development and production program of the war. He saw it as the ideal weapon to destroy Japan’s critical industries and their workers through precision bombing raids. Much mythology has developed around Hansell for his apparent disdain of ‘urban area bombing’, especially when compared with his successor, LeMay (Gladwell 2021). Facts, however inconvenient, challenge such myths. B-29s under Hansell’s command regularly bombed Tokyo and other major cities. Using a precision-guided approach, the first four missions carried out against targets on Japan’s home islands from B-29s based in the Marianas dropped more ordinance on secondary targets labeled ‘urban and dock area Tokyo’ or ‘any industrial city’ than on their primary targets (USAAF n.d.-c, n.d.-d, n.d.-e). USAAF officials likewise understood that

68 Analysis radar-assisted ‘precision’ bombing – undertaken at night or during periods of extensive cloud cover – was so inaccurate from high altitude over Japan that it amounted to indiscriminate area bombing in reality: that is, bombing in which no specific military or industrial asset was specifically targeted. Hansell eventually acceded to a directive issued by General Lauris Norstad, chief of staff of the 20th Air Force, to conduct a full-scale incendiary attack against Nagoya as soon as 100 B-29s were available. He had initially resisted this ‘urgent requirement’, but his obstinacy emanated as much from a desire to prove the effectiveness of ‘precision bombing’, which he asserted was ‘beginning to get results’, as it did from any moral objection (Sherry 1987: 257). Norstad was an early and continual advocate of urban area bombing with incendiary weapons. He believed this tactic held out considerable promise for target destruction in Japan. He based his opinions on conclusions reached in 1943 by the Committee of Operations Analysts of the USAAF (See Document 9), which comprised military specialists, technicians, academics, and political and business elites with previous experience in Japan. Arnold directed committee members to research the impact that sustained and heavy strategic bombing could have on Japan’s economy and its ability to wage war (Schaffer 1985: 110–19). Committee members recognized that Japan’s densely populated urban areas were constructed, for the most part, using wood, unlike German cities, and so were acutely vulnerable to firebombing. The Joint Incendiary Committee of the Committee of Operations Analysts went further, predicting that a sustained campaign launched against Japan’s six largest cities in quick succession could kill over 500,000, destroy roughly 70% of housing, and rob Japan of roughly 15% of its total manufacturing output. They asserted, moreover, that incendiary area attacks would prove most effective in increasing and prolonging losses secured through precision attacks on war industries. Hansell’s initial focus on precision bombing thus followed the Committee of Operations Analysts’ script. He ordered a firebombing raid by 97 B-29s against the docks and urban area of Nagoya on 3 January 1945 (USAAF n.d.-f: 1). The results were lackluster. Only 59% of the aircraft that took off bombed the primary target. Because the raid was conducted from altitudes ranging between 28,200 and 31,500 feet, accuracy remained low, and carrying the fuel required to reach altitude and fly the 14-hour round trip resulted in a heavily reduced payload capacity for each plane. Dismayed over the ‘results’ he had secured since the end of November 1944, Arnold relieved Hansell of command and replaced him with LeMay as commander of 21st Bomber Command. In appointing LeMay, Arnold selected an individual who had distinguished himself as an innovative and fearless leader during bombing campaigns led by the Eighth Air Force against Germany. LeMay was well aware that the task he was about to assume was the most significant challenge of his career. ‘Go ahead and get results with the B-29’, Norstad instructed LeMay when he took command; ‘if

Bombing Japan: 1945  69 you don’t get results you’ll be fired’ (LeMay and Kantor 1965: 347). ‘If you don’t get results’, he added, ‘there’ll never be a strategic air force of the Pacific ... and it will mean eventually a mass amphibious invasion of Japan’.

Burning Japan’s six largest cities LeMay got results, but not immediately. His successes in burning Japanese cities, killing Japanese civilians, and rendering homeless those who survived have created many myths about LeMay as revolutionary strategist. He was not the anthesis of Hansell, as Gladwell (2021) has implied, nor was he the first proponent or practitioner of incendiary bombing. America’s first incendiary raid against Japan, in August 1944, had been commanded by General Laverne Saunders – at the urging of General Norstad. Moreover, when LeMay assumed command from Hansell in January 1945, his first missions mirrored Hansell’s: they were precision bombing raids as advocated by the Committee of Operations Analysts. These missions secured only marginally better results than the ones launched under Hansell’s command. Where LeMay excelled, and others had failed, was in his understanding of the B-29, his awareness of the meteorological challenges posed by bombing targets in Japan, and his willingness to improvise and alter conventional practices to secure the desired aim of total target destruction through maximum force deployment. At his best, LeMay was a fearless tactical innovator. The seasoned combat veteran understood that to be effective with incendiary raids, he needed to increase the number of aircraft available to bomb, the number of bombers reaching their primary target, and the sheer quantity of payload delivered. To deal with the first two issues, LeMay created a training program for pilots and implemented new aircraft maintenance regimes. Owing to better flight training of pilots and maintenance of planes, the number of aircraft reaching their primary target increased from less than 50% in December 1944 to 84% in March 1945. The figure climbed to 94% in July 1945 (USAAF n.d.-a: 10). To increase B-29 payload, LeMay implemented unorthodox strategies that seemingly negated two revolutionary aspects of the B-29: its ability to bomb from extremely high altitudes and its defensive firepower. LeMay proposed ‘firebombing’ Tokyo from altitudes ranging between 5,000 and 8,000 feet, which would consume considerably less fuel and cause less stress on the B-29’s temperamental engines. He also ordered all defensive armament and gunners, except for the tail gunner, to be removed from missions to further reduce weight and increase payload. Both tactics enabled B-29s to deliver much heavier bomb loads. The average payload per plane that bombed Nagoya with incendiaries on 3 January 1945 was 2.7 tons, while the average payload carried per plane after the adoption of LeMay’s new tactics rose to 6.5 tons of ordinance. The Tokyo raid, codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, that took place on the evening of 9–10 March 1945 was – by far – the most destructive raid

70 Analysis carried out against Japan in the war to date. Aircraft specifically targeted the densely populated urban areas just east of Tokyo’s Sumida River that were known to have burned extensively immediately following the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. Spaced one minute apart, it took over three hours for the B-29s that participated in Operation Meetinghouse to take off from airfields on Tinian and Saipan (LeMay n.d.: 8). Of the 279 aircraft that reached their target, 81% dropped their bombs within the first two hours of the 2.5-hour raid, providing an effective concentration of ordnance that made it virtually impossible for firefighters to combat fires. More important, the 25-mile-per-hour winds that swept the target area caused fires to spread quickly, turning much of eastern Tokyo into an inferno. Tail gunners on returning planes recorded that they could see the sky ‘aglow’ for 150 miles. General Thomas Power, who spent two hours circling Tokyo photographing the fires, provided a more chilling assessment: ‘True, there is no room for emotion in war’, he reflected nearly 20 years after the raid, ‘but the destruction I witnessed that night over Tokyo was so overwhelming that it left a tremendous and lasting impression on me’ (Schaffer 1985: 131). The results matched his recollection. The USAAF Office of Statistical Research estimated that the raid killed nearly 90,000 persons, injured more than 60,000, and destroyed over 750,000 homes. In total, B-29s turned 15.8 square miles into scorched earth on that night. Following the script proposed by the Incendiary Committee of the Committee of Operations Analysis, LeMay launched equally large incendiary raids against other targets in quick succession. Between 11 and 19 March 1945, LeMay’s B-29s bombed Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, and Nagoya a second time. During the ten-day-long intensive urban area bombing campaign, B-29s dropped approximately 9,500 tons of incendiary bombs, a total amount of ordnance larger than the weight dropped by the 21st Bomber Command on all missions prior to 9 March 1945. The raids on Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe together killed over 110,000 persons, destroyed nearly 1.5 million homes, and turned roughly 32 square miles to rubble and ash (Craven and Cate 1983, vol. 5: 623). LeMay, his superiors, and his subordinates were ecstatic over the results. Though the B-29 had finally proven itself, two factors kept LeMay from continuing his sustained reign of fire throughout April and early May. First, he had used virtually all the incendiary weapons stockpiled in the Marianas during the intensive March raids, as advocated by the Committee of Operations Analysts. Second, the demands of the invasion of Okinawa compelled the USAAF to direct their firepower elsewhere.

Operation Iceberg – assisting the invasion of Okinawa Though the March firebombing campaign had proven far more effective than the JCS had expected, the strategic bombing of Japan remained only one part of the overall plan to defeat Japan. Well before LeMay’s successes,

Bombing Japan: 1945  71 the JCS had already agreed, in 1944, to bypass the island of Taiwan and commence an invasion of Okinawa in the first half of 1945. For the JCS, securing Okinawa was the critical first step in the planned invasion of Kyushu, which was codenamed Operation Olympic. Once under U.S. control, Okinawa would be turned into a huge invasion staging platform. Moreover, it would also house a redeployed USAAF 8th Air Force that, along with LeMay’s 21st Bomber Command, would pummel Japan from above. Given Okinawa’s geographic proximity to Japan’s home islands, the large numbers of well-trained troops stationed there, and an even larger civilian population who were expected to actively resist America’s invasion, U.S. military planners were under no illusion that securing Okinawa would be easy. It proved, however, to be even more challenging and far costlier than anticipated, though the costs were not immediately apparent. As with operations in Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, U.S. forces faced virtually no resistance upon landing. U.S. Marines and Army soldiers under the command of General Simon Bolivar Buckner arrived on the morning of 1 April. Within one hour of the first landing, more than 16,000 troops had crossed Okinawa’s beaches from the west. By nightfall, the number had grown to 60,000. Altogether, just over 180,000 U.S. troops would fight on Okinawa until mid-June 1945 against a Japanese force less than half their strength (Kennedy 1999: 834). It had been agreed at the highest levels that LeMay’s 21st Bomber Command would play an important support role in Operation Iceberg, the code name for the invasion of Okinawa. At the request of Admiral Nimitz, LeMay was to use B-29s to destroy Japanese airfields in Kyushu and to undertake aerial mine-laying (Craven and Cate 1983, vol. 5: 629). The urgent need to bomb airfields in Kyushu as part of the Okinawa operation became apparent on 6 April 1945. Roughly 350 kamikaze planes were launched from Kyushu in suicide attacks against U.S. shipping, sinking two destroyers, two ammunition supply ships, one minesweeper, and one LST (landing ship, tank), and damaging numerous other support craft and warships. At Nimitz’s request, LeMay began a sustained bombing campaign against kamikaze bases in Kyushu and neighboring Shikoku. Between 16 April and 11 May, 21st Bomber Command devoted 29 out of 37 missions to the support of Operation Iceberg, either through attacks against airfields or in mine-laying operations (USAAF n.d.-b: 2–4). Within five days of landing on Okinawa, U.S. forces had occupied a significant portion of the island, including two valuable airfields, Kadena and Yontan. On 6 April, fighting turned savage as General Buckner directed his forces south to occupy Mt. Shuri. Rather than oppose U.S. forces on the beaches, the 77,000 Japanese soldiers under the command of General Ushijima Mitsuru chose to wage a spirited war of attrition from caves and rocky cliff tops, keeping American forces engaged for nearly 81 successive days. Over 71,000 Japanese soldiers died in combat along with nearly 100,000 Okinawan civilians. Though the death toll was far lower for American

72 Analysis forces, with just over 12,500 Marines, Army soldiers, and sailors killed, they sustained the highest casualty rate (deaths and injuries) yet suffered in the war, at nearly 30%. Owing to the ferocity as well as the length of sustained combat on Okinawa, almost half of the injuries suffered by Americans were psychological in nature (‘shell shock’ or combat fatigue), a first in any U.S. operation of the war. What American planners extrapolated from the Okinawan campaign proved even more chilling than the results of the battle itself. Military and political elites – not to mention soldiers who fought on Okinawa and who would be called upon to invade Japan if official plans went ahead – believed that Okinawa provided a realistic preview of the hell to come. On Japan’s westernmost home island of Kyushu, the first place scheduled to be invaded, a force of roughly 545,000 well-supplied Japanese soldiers, seven times the number deployed to defend Okinawa, waited for their American adversaries.

Burning Japan’s remaining cities LeMay remained convinced that the invasion of Japan that had been planned since 1943 might not be necessary. The destruction of Japan’s urban landscape and, by extension, its ability to support a military campaign offered another alternative. While B-29s had proven useful in attacking airfields in Kyushu, LeMay and others within the USAAF believed that their real mission lay in broader strategic bombing to coerce Japan into accepting unconditional surrender without the necessity of an invasion. Following Germany’s surrender to the Allies in May 1945, members of General Arnold’s staff in Washington DC lobbied Arnold to get JCS approval to intensify urban area incendiary raids in order to maximize pressure on Japan. LeMay needed no encouragement or approval to proceed. In fact, while his forces were heavily involved in the Okinawa campaign, LeMay sent a confident request to General Norstad that he be allowed to secure Japan’s surrender through bombing: ‘I feel that the destruction of Japan’s ability to wage war lies within the capability of this command’, he wrote, ‘provided its maximum capacity is exerted unstintingly during the next six months’. He added, ‘For the first time, strategic air bombardment faces a situation in which its strength is proportionate to the magnitude of its task’ (LeMay and Kantor 1965: 373). While they were simultaneously carrying out Kyushu-focused raids in support of General Buckner’s campaign on Okinawa, LeMay pressed his flyers and his maintenance crews to the brink of exhaustion by requiring them to launch large-scale incendiary raids against both broad urban areas and specific military targets in eastern Japan. Between 13 and 15 April, 685 B-29s dropped 3,999 tons of bombs on Tokyo and Kawasaki, burning 18.8 square miles of urban area. LeMay also deployed 237 B-29s in two raids against the Hitachi Aircraft Factory in Tachikawa and the city of

Bombing Japan: 1945  73 Hamamatsu on 24 and 30 April. These were the last large-scale urban area raids until 14 May (USSAF n.d.-b: 3–4). Once freed from a supporting role in Operation Iceberg, which ended in June 1945, LeMay focused his command’s energies on securing total area target destruction in Honshu. With a replenished supply of incendiary weapons, LeMay’s forces launched urban area raids against the large cities of Nagoya, Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, and Kobe. By war’s end, the 21st Bomber Command had destroyed 102 square miles of these cities’ total urban area (Craven and Cate 1983, vol. 5: 643). Thereafter, from 17 June to 14 August, LeMay launched a relentless campaign of firebombing against Japan’s secondary cities. The percent of urban area destroyed in these cities is apparent in Document 9. Strikingly, the B-29s bombing Japan secured these unprecedented results using only a fraction, 10.8%, of the total ­ordnance dropped on Germany during the Second World War. With these urban area attacks, LeMay had removed all pretense that the destruction of specific military targets was the priority of 21st Bomber Command. ‘There is nothing new about the massacre of civilian populations’, he wrote, adding, ‘the whole purpose of strategic warfare is to destroy the enemy’s potential to wage war ... [I]t had to be erased. If we didn’t obliterate it, we would dwell subservient to it’ (LeMay and Kantor 1965: 384). Writing in 1947, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey Morale Division reached a similar conclusion, emphasizing that ‘The air attack on Japan was directed against the nation as a whole, not only against specific military targets .... The American air attack against the “total target” was successful’ (USSBS 1947b: 1). It undoubtedly was successful from the American military’s standpoint, but did it, alone, lead to the surrender of Japan?

The strategic bombing of Japan: Legacy No single factor proved decisive in securing the eventual unconditional surrender of Japan. The sustained strategic bombing campaign, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the increasingly restrictive Allied maritime blockade of Japan, and the Soviet declaration of war against Japan in August 1945 presented Japan’s leaders with an escalatory, complex emergency. Each new development that emerged over July and August of 1945 compounded the severity of crisis and reinforced a sense among Japanese leaders and public of inevitable defeat. But while defeat is a military event, the recognition of defeat and its translation into surrender is a political act, which, in mid-1945, proved painfully slow. The role that strategic bombing played in securing surrender seemed clear to members of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. As early as 1946, Strategic Bombing Survey members echoed an idea first articulated by LeMay that, ‘even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional

74 Analysis surrender and obviate the need for invasion’ (USSBS 1946: 26). This assertion, of course, is impossible to prove. What is easier to quantify is the impact that strategic bombing had on targeted cities and peoples, beyond the obvious measurement of the total area destroyed. Japan’s wartime industrial economy was more highly concentrated in a smaller number of cities than was the case in Germany, making those cities an inviting and particularly vulnerable target. Slightly less than one half of the total production of six key products (combat aircraft and parts, electrical equipment, armament, machinery and parts, merchant ships, and naval ships) was concentrated in Japan’s six largest cities. Those cities, moreover, contained roughly 20% of Japan’s total population (USAAF, n.d.-h: 9). Targeting these cities with repeated raids enabled the USAAF to destroy factories, industrial areas, and workers’ homes, and to kill civilians. It also allowed U.S. forces to reduce production by raising the rates of absenteeism and evacuation. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that the number of evacuees who fled the bombing of the Tokyo-Kawasaki-Yokohama area, which accounted for 11% of Japan’s total population, stood at 4.6 million, or 58% of the pre-air raid population (USSBS 1947a: 5). At war’s end, Nagoya’s population had shrunk to half of its level before the incendiary raids of March 1945. All told, more than 8.5 million people left Japan’s largest cities – roughly one-quarter of the urban population of Japan (USSBS 1947b: 3). America’s strategic bombing campaign, particularly when it extended to encompass Japan’s mid-sized and smaller cities from June 1945, had a significant psychological impact on Japanese civilians that the Strategic Bombing Survey was eager to highlight. When an occupying power asks questions of a defeated populace, a degree of self-justifying, congratulatory back-slapping can be expected, and such attitudes permeated many Strategic Bombing Survey reports. Conclusions reached in some reports, however, also mirrored what many Japanese accounts suggest about the impact of bombing on people’s lives. Bombing was the principal worry of urban residents during 1945. It caused many Japanese citizens to doubt that victory could be secured (USSBS 1947b: 20–22). The impact of the 1945 bombing is not surprising, as the realities of Japan’s war situation had become apparent to most Japanese citizens only in 1944 at the earliest. Japan’s long sequence of military defeats, which began at Midway in 1942, was unknown to most Japanese people. The fall of Saipan in June 1944, however, could not be hidden. The diminution of food supplies, especially rice, moreover, had been gradual throughout the war. More than any other factor, the unrelenting bombing of Japan’s cities from mid-1945 brought slaughter, suffering, and the ravages of war home to the largest numbers of Japanese civilians (Moore 2018: 70–83). The psychological impact of aerial bombing was compounded by the fact that the bodies of the victims littered Japan’s once vibrant cities, often for days afterward. These hellscapes

Bombing Japan: 1945  75 became grim signs of what the USAAF intended to do to all Japanese cities if the war continued. General Joseph Stilwell, commander of forces in the China-Burma-India theater, had expressed skepticism to LeMay in 1944 about the efficacy of strategic bombing. In September 1945, however, Stilwell admitted to LeMay that he now ‘recognized the terrible military virtues of strategic bombing’ (LeMay and Kantor 1965: 390). LeMay himself recognized what bombing had accomplished, though he rarely, if ever, acknowledged it as something ‘terrible’. He admitted that to all intents and purposes the whole of Japan had been a legitimate target because industry had been widely dispersed throughout Japan’s urban centers. Such assertions do nothing to counter the fact that the vast majority of victims who suffered and died under U.S. aerial bombardment were civilians, as LeMay was well aware: ‘We knew we were going to kill a lot of women and kids when we burned that town [Tokyo] down’, LeMay confessed, but it was something that in his mind was justified, something that ‘had to be done’. To ‘worry about the morality of what we were doing – Nuts. A soldier has to fight. We fought’ (LeMay and Kantor 1965: 383–84).

7

Endgame

After the disastrous Japanese defeat at Saipan in July 1944, the section within the Japanese elite that favored peace grew in strength and began actively to seek ways to end the war. From about January–February 1945, when U.S. forces conquered the Philippines, it was evident to most leaders everywhere, with the exception of some hard-line Japanese military men, that Japan had lost the war. The problem was how to end it. From the A llied side, it was a matter of how to bring hostilities to a close as quickly and efficiently as possible, on terms acceptable to the Allies. From the Japanese side, the key concern was how to end the war without obviously surrendering, or at least, without surrendering unconditionally. The last months of the war were dominated on all sides by the search for the best way out. There were several possible methods that could be used and were suggested, either singly or in combination: an Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands; the use of troops from the Soviet Union, which was not yet a participant in the Pacific War, either to inflict a deadly blow on Japan or to scare Japanese leaders into surrender; a negotiated surrender by Japan; or, eventually, dropping the atomic bomb. Political as well as military considerations were crucial at every stage in this final period of the war: both the international politics that governed relations among the Allied nations and the likely balance of power in the post-war world, and also the domestic politics that governed the popularity of war leaders with their own constituencies at home. Domestic considerations, for example, might have made it necessary to appear resolute and determined rather than prepared to compromise with an enemy.

Developments in Japan In early 1945 a group of senior Japanese officials stepped up their efforts to bring an end to the war. From as early as the first half of 1942 some key figures, including former Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro, were anxious that the war should not continue for too long. Their motives varied. Konoe, for example, was afraid that if hostilities were prolonged, the Japanese people might become so dissatisfied that they would stage a Communist revolution

DOI: 10.4324/9781003090502-8

Endgame  77 against the imperial institution. Advocates of peace were in the minority, especially in the beginning when things were going so well for Japan, and they had to contend with powerful figures in the military and elsewhere who had every intention of fighting on. As time passed, however, they gathered strength, especially as Japan’s fortunes in war deteriorated. In the end, the emperor, too, appears to have favored peace (Large 1992: 117; Shillony 1981: 51; Asada 1998: 487–89). Prime Minister Tōjō Hideki, who was determined to fight to the finish without compromise, was a major obstacle to moves toward peace. After Japan’s defeat at Saipan in July 1944, advocates of peace within the elite concluded that it was imperative to replace him. The emperor was at first reluctant to agree. Some members of the elite even suggested that if the emperor would not cooperate, he would have to abdicate in favor of his young son, at the time a child of 11. A regent would then be installed, most likely one of Emperor Hirohito’s brothers, who would agree to get rid of Tōjō and work for peace. The suggestion about the emperor’s abdication was never acted upon. Instead, the peace group managed to persuade the emperor to cooperate with them by withdrawing his support for Tōjō, who resigned as prime minister on 18 July 1944 (Shillony 1981: 50–64; Large 1992: 118–19). Tōjō was replaced by General Koiso Kuniaki, but the end of hostilities came no closer. Koiso resigned in April 1945, by which time Japan had suffered new defeats in the war and had bungled an attempt at negotiating peace with China (Large 1992: 120). Japan had lost the Philippines, the kamikaze pilots had been deployed, Okinawa had been invaded by U.S. troops, and Japanese cities were being bombed incessantly. It was urgently necessary to seek a comprehensive peace settlement covering all theaters of the war, not just China. The peace movement within the court and among former prime ministers and others had grown stronger since the beginning of 1945, though it still had to move carefully so as not to arouse those military officers who were determined to continue fighting. The hardliners included some very senior figures and were still able to place significant obstacles in the way of peace. In the end, the 80-year-old Admiral Suzuki Kantarō was chosen as prime minister in April 1945. Suzuki was not only an admiral but also a former grand chamberlain, that is, a senior court official, and so he was expected to work well with the emperor; but even so, he was not a fully committed member of the peace party (Hata 2007: 52–53; Hasegawa 2005: 48–49; Asada 1998: 478, 489). One of the tactics discussed in this last period of the war was to try to involve the Soviet Union as a mediator in peace arrangements with the Allies. Having signed a Neutrality Pact with Japan in April 1941, the Soviet Union was not yet one of Japan’s adversaries. After Germany’s surrender in May 1945, which freed the Soviets from fighting the Nazis, the Japanese Supreme Council for the Direction of the War (saikō sensō shidō kaigi), or

78 Analysis Supreme War Council, agreed to start discussions with the USSR. Informal talks began in Tokyo the next month. At the same time, military leaders also insisted that comprehensive plans should be made for the final defense of Japan against Allied attack, in the hope that such preparations would force the Allies to offer Japan favorable surrender terms and, in particular, guarantees about the monarchy’s future. Talks with the USSR and preparations for a last defensive stand at home proceeded simultaneously (Hasegawa 2005: 106–10: Large 1992: 122–23). By July 1945 it was clear that the Tokyo talks with the Soviets had failed to pave the way for more formal negotiations between the two countries. The prime minister and his supporters decided that the only way forward was to send a special envoy to Moscow with a letter from the emperor seeking negotiations with Stalin, with a view to reaching a conditional surrender. The emperor requested former prime minister Konoe to do this, and Konoe asked Stalin to allow him to come to Moscow (Hasegawa 2005: 120–26: Large 1992: 123–24). Konoe’s proposed trip to the Soviet Union never took place, however, because Stalin had no intention of helping Japan to end the war. On the contrary, at a conference among the Allies held in February 1945 in Yalta, in the Soviet Union, Stalin had promised that the USSR would renege on the Neutrality Pact and join in the war against Japan. The promise was contained in a secret protocol and depended on certain concessions to the Soviet Union on the part of the other Allies, including a matter concerning jurisdiction over the Kuriles, a chain of islands to the north of Hokkaido. Russia had recognized  Japan’s claim to the four southernmost islands in 1855 and had ceded the remaining islands to Japan in negotiations in 1875. At Yalta, Russia required that all the Kurile islands would be handed over to the USSR after Japan was defeated (Hasegawa 2005: 34–37; Elleman, Nichols, and Ouimet 1998–99: 491–95). The Soviet Union would not enter the war until Germany had been defeated but undertook to join in fighting against Japan within three months after that. The Japanese government, naturally, was unaware of this Soviet commitment.

Plans for the invasion and defense of the Japanese home islands Once Okinawa had been secured, the U.S. planned to make amphibious landings on the southern island of Kyushu on 1 November 1945 and the main island of Honshu on 1 March 1946. This timetable shows that the American authorities expected very heavy fighting, since a gap of some months had been allowed between the two landings. American officials expected a large number of American deaths, especially from attacks by kamikaze pilots, and they also estimated that more than a million Japanese soldiers would be killed (Gilbert 2008: 194).

Endgame  79 An Allied invasion was widely expected in Japan, and those Japanese leaders who refused to consider a peace settlement insisted that all Japanese had to prepare to defend the homeland to the death. In fact, Japan had over two million men in the fighting forces still at home, and several million more in the reserve force, that is, men who were beyond military age but had received military training in the past and so could fight if necessary. More than 5,000 kamikaze aircraft had been reserved for a last defence of Japan against the enemy (Kennedy 1999: 835). The Japanese military had also built a so-called ‘secondary fleet’ of over 3,000 suicide boats, submarines, and one-man human torpedoes by the end of July 1945 (Kirby 5, 1969: 150, 475). Other plans for extreme measures included instructing soldiers to strap explosives to their bodies and crawl underneath invading tanks or blow themselves up against the sides of tanks. As late as the evening of 13 August 1945, the Vice-Chief of the Naval General Staff, Ōnishi Takijirō, called for the sacrifice of 20 million Japanese lives in defense of the homeland (Butow 1965: 205).

‘Unconditional surrender’ Some U.S. military and civilian leaders, including some very senior ones, thought that there were ways of ending the war other than through total reliance on military attacks and landings. One suggestion was to tell the Japanese that they could retain the imperial system, but this idea was never supported at the highest level of decision-making (Hasegawa 2005: 217–24). One factor that made it very difficult to consider such an option was the insistence by the Allies, especially the U.S., on what was called ‘unconditional surrender’. This policy played an important role in the final stages of the conflict, but it meant different things at different times, according to the circumstances of the U.S. in the war. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt first enunciated it in 1943, he intended to express the Allied and American intention to fight on against Germany, Italy, and Japan to the last, with no compromise. At that stage, it was not so much an aggressive declaration of resolve as a brave promise to the USSR at a time when the U.S. was still not fully prepared for war in Europe (Kennedy 1999: 588). Even as the American military became immensely powerful, the doctrine of unconditional surrender remained in place. It was reaffirmed in 1943 at a conference of the Allied powers in Cairo, where it was specifically applied to Japan. President Roosevelt died in office in April 1945, but by this time, the idea and the slogan of ‘unconditional surrender’ had taken on a life of their own. They were now well entrenched and perhaps impossible for Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, to abandon. Commitment to ‘unconditional surrender’ had become a measure of toughness and resolve. When the new president gave his first address to Congress in April 1945, ‘the

80 Analysis packed chamber rose thunderously to its feet when he uttered the words “unconditional surrender”’ (Kennedy 1999: 844). Truman’s Secretary of State, James Byrnes, made the exaggerated claim that a softening of the demand for unconditional surrender at this critical moment would be seen by the American public as appeasement of the enemy and would lead to ‘crucifixion of the president’ (quoted in Hasegawa 2005: 224). On 8 May 1945, very soon after Truman took office, the war in Europe ended with Germany’s surrender, and from then on, ‘unconditional surrender’ applied solely to Japan. Because of this doctrine, it would have been very difficult, if not practically impossible, for Truman to consider the various options for ending the war that were suggested by some of his advisers if they included any kind of obvious compromise with the Japanese.

Potsdam In July and August 1945, President Truman, Prime Minister Churchill, and Josef Stalin held a meeting in Potsdam, outside Berlin. Surrender terms for Japan were one of the principal topics discussed at this meeting, since Germany and Italy were no longer fighting. Stalin told the others that Japan would not submit to an unconditional surrender, which the Americans already knew through intercepted intelligence messages (Hasegawa 2005: 143–45). Stalin also reiterated his promise to Truman that he would enter the war against Japan, telling Truman that the Soviets would join in by 15 August at the latest. On 26 July the conference issued the Potsdam Declaration, which was also signed by the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, though he was not actually at Potsdam. The Potsdam Declaration set out the Allies’ terms for Japan’s surrender, and declared what would happen subsequently. It stated that there would be a military occupation of Japan; that Japanese sovereignty would be confined to the four main islands, meaning that Japan would lose all its colonial possessions; that Japanese forces would be disarmed and allowed to return home; that war criminals would be punished; and that the Japanese government would be required to remove all obstacles to democracy and to establish fundamental human rights. Some American officials had favored inclusion of a statement that the Japanese would be allowed to retain a constitutional monarchy, providing that a future Japanese government foreswore aggression, but this suggestion was ultimately rejected by the drafters of the Potsdam Declaration (Hasegawa 2005: 110–15, 146–48). The final document implied a threat to the structure of the Japanese state, which could be interpreted to include the imperial institution. It also warned that, ‘The alternative for Japan [if it does not accept these terms] is prompt and utter destruction’. In Japan, members of the peace party, including the emperor, wanted to accept the Allies’ terms. But the fact that the Allies had provided no

Endgame  81 assurances about the future of the monarchy prompted intense debate in the Supreme War Council, with powerful military figures arguing that fighting had to continue to save the imperial house. Finally, the hardliners won out, and Prime Minister Suzuki decided to ignore the proclamation completely. It appears that Suzuki himself intended this silence to be interpreted as a non-committal response (Large 1992: 124), but the Allies interpreted it as outright rejection.

The Allies decide to use the atomic bombs Despite enormous technical hurdles, an atomic bomb was successfully tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945, while Truman was still at Potsdam. The bomb gave Truman a stunning new option for ending the war. It was still only one among several alternatives. The A mericans could choose to proceed with the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands, or wait for the Soviet Union to join them in the war against Japan. They could drop the bomb on Japan without warning, or they could warn the Japanese about the bomb in order to persuade them to surrender. They could tell the Japanese that they could keep the emperor and see if that would bring about surrender. All of these options were suggested by American policy-makers in this period. Many in the U.S. elite still thought that the doctrine of ‘unconditional surrender’ should be modified to allow Japanese peace-makers room to move. By this stage, and earlier, the Americans knew that at least some Japanese officials were trying to arrange a cease-fire. Rumors to that effect were even discussed in the U.S. Senate and in the media. But Japanese feelers toward peace seemed ambiguous: Prince Konoe, for example, who was known by the Americans to be trying to go to the Soviet Union to negotiate peace, was not even a member of the cabinet, and so it was not necessarily clear to the Americans what authority he might have. Konoe, moreover, was known to be attempting to negotiate a peace with conditions, whereas the doctrine of ‘unconditional surrender’ had by now been elevated to great heights in the U.S., and Truman was expected to achieve it (Kennedy 1999: 844). Since the end of the Pacific War it has been, and still is, very widely accepted among the general public, military veterans, politicians, and others in the U.S. and elsewhere that the bombs were dropped in order to save the massive number of American lives that would otherwise have been lost if the Japanese home islands had to be invaded. It is evident from the historical record, however, that such a desire to avoid American casualties did not dominate official deliberations at the time when the crucial decision over whether and how to use the bomb was being made (Sherry 2001: 338). The fundamental reason the bomb was dropped on Japan seems to be that despite the number of senior officials who wanted to make some concession to Japan, none of the real inner circle of decision-makers ever seriously considered not dropping the bomb once it was available.

82 Analysis Part of the reason that Truman and his closest advisers could make the decision to drop the atomic bombs lies in the ferocity of the war at this point. By 1945, both Allied and Axis powers had abandoned most restraints on attacking civilians, and in a sense, the atomic bombs seemed only a short step from the firebombing of cities that had been going on for months. The bomb was not necessarily expected to cause any greater loss of life than the firebombing of Tokyo, and in terms of immediate deaths, it did not. Racial hatreds had been strongly stirred up on both sides by this point, and Truman justified the attacks not only in terms of victory but also as revenge on the Japanese (Kennedy 1999: 840; Sherry 2001: 338; Dower 1986). The momentum toward using the bomb had built up and it was allowed to continue. By this stage of the war, not only had military forces on both sides abandoned most normal constraints, but the politics were also out of control. Truman wrote later in his memoirs: ‘Let there be no mistake about it. I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used’. Churchill wrote: ‘the decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb to compel the surrender of Japan was never even an issue. There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement around our table; nor did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise’ (quoted in Kennedy 1999: 841). There was the added attraction, at a time when tensions between the U.S. and the USSR were rising, that use of the bomb would allow the U.S. to end the war without Soviet help. Thus, the USSR would have less claim to be involved in designing and overseeing the post-war order in Asia. An enriched uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Numbers of casualties are hard to estimate because of the general chaos; because of the fluidity of urban populations, especially in Hiroshima, which was a major military supply centre; and because there were so many different ways to die from the bomb, including radiation sickness, which took years in some cases. About 78,000 people died immediately, and a total of between 90,000 and 120,000 died in the first two months after the bombing. On 9 August a plutonium bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing 60,000 to 70,000 people in the two months that followed. Several hours after the explosion at Hiroshima, President Truman told the American people,: With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction, to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. … It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its powers has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East. (Quoted in Brawley, Dixon, and Trefalt 2009: 221) A Japanese newspaper told its readers that there was a ‘cruel new type of bomb’, and warned readers to ‘Be wary of the danger of underestimating

Endgame  83

Figure 7.1 An Allied correspondent stands amid the rubble of Hiroshima Source: Popperfoto / Getty Image 78964772

the enemy from now on, even if an incoming air-raid is heralded by only a small number of planes’ (quoted in Brawley, Dixon, and Trefalt 2009: 222–23). So, the nuclear age was inaugurated, and an arms race that lasted throughout the Cold War began or was intensified. But the Second World War had not ended yet.

The USSR joins the war On 8 August 1945 the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, effective on 9 August. This was the day of the second atomic attack on Japan, on the city of Nagasaki. In recent decades the Soviet–Japanese War has been called ‘Operation August Storm’. Between May, when the Germans surrendered, and August 1945, Stalin had moved one million Soviet troops to the Soviet border with Manchuria, or northeast China, or Manchukuo as the Japanese called it. Japanese military units had been withdrawing from the area to go to the fighting on the Pacific islands, and the Soviet troops were not only more numerous but also better equipped and more experienced than the remaining Japanese forces in this area. There were over a million and a half Soviet troops in Manchuria in total, compared with just over a million Japanese. The Russians had

84 Analysis 5,368 aircraft there compared with the 1,800 the Japanese had, and 3,704 tanks compared with 1,000 Japanese tanks (Gilbert 2008: 198). Soviet forces launched a massive attack against the remaining Japanese forces, and the Japanese Army in Manchukuo was forced into full retreat. Before they left Manchuria in 1946, Soviet forces dismantled a considerable amount of industry there, which had been established by the Japanese over the previous decades, and transferred it to the Soviet Union. In the chaos of the end of the war in Manchuria, thousands of Japanese women and children were left behind or chose to stay. Perhaps 5,000 children were left behind by parents who were in imminent fear of their lives. Expecting to be killed themselves, parents handed over children to Chinese farmers on the way, or ‘abandoned’ them at some prominent place in the hope they would be found and cared for. These children then grew up as Chinese, often with no memory, as they had been so young at the time, of who their original parents were or where they came from (Itoh 2010). Soviet forces also accepted the Japanese surrender in northern Korea. In addition, they seized the Kurile Islands and southern Sakhalin, which were Japanese territories close to the USSR. If the Japanese had not surrendered when they did, the Soviet Union had plans to invade Hokkaido from nearby Sakhalin, well before the scheduled U.S. invasion of the main Japanese islands (Hasegawa 2005: 255–64, 271–74). The war was still deadly, and casualties in the fighting between Russians and Japanese in Manchuria were high. More than 80,000 Japanese died in this last week before Japan’s surrender, as well as over 8,000 Soviets. The entry of the Soviet Union into the war even at this late stage was a very significant event. Some historians believe that it had more effect on the Japanese decision to surrender than did the dropping of the atomic bombs, as it scuttled any remaining hope that a conditional surrender could be reached through Soviet mediation with the U.S. and brought the fear of Soviet influence in a post-war occupation of Japan (Bernstein 1995: 129; Hasegawa 2005: 3, 295–98). War in the Pacific officially ended on 15 August 1945, but the Soviet Union did not stop fighting Japan on that date. Stalin was still very eager to take territory in Asia, and in fact the fighting accelerated after Stalin learned of Japan’s intention to surrender. Stalin ordered new operations after Japan’s acceptance of the Potsdam surrender terms, on the excuse that even though the emperor had declared the war to be over, the Imperial General Headquarters did not actually issue an order to the armed forces to stop fighting until 17 August (Hasegawa 2005: 3, 252). Battles in Manchuria continued until late August. The Russians conquered the Japanese territory of southern Sakhalin in late August, and completed their occupation of the Kurile Islands on 1 September. Immediately after the Japanese surrender, Soviet forces had captured an estimated 1.6–1.7 million Japanese soldiers, officials, and other residents in Manchuria and Korea (Dower 1999: 52). Hundreds of thousands were sent to labor camps in Siberia and were kept there for years. The death rate in the camps was extremely high.

Endgame  85 Throughout the 1950s, the return of Japanese captives in Siberia was a burning issue in Japanese society and politics.

Surrender On 9 August 1945, with the bombing of Nagasaki, there was a political deadlock in Tokyo. Powerful army figures still insisted that surrender was impossible without certain conditions, chiefly the retention of the imperial house. A few, including Army Minister General Anami Korechika, continued to insist that Japan had not definitively lost the war (Asada 1998: 489–94; Large 1992: 125). There were six members of the Supreme War Council. Three wanted to keep fighting and three wanted to surrender. In a very unusual move, the emperor intervened in this deadlock, speaking in favor of surrender. Thus the decision to stop fighting was made. But it was still not final because the war council wanted guarantees about keeping the emperor. The government, therefore, cabled the U.S. secretary of state, accepting the Potsdam Declaration on the understanding that the emperor would remain, and assuring the Americans that the emperor favored peace anyway. The Americans sent an ambiguous reply the next day (Kase 1951: 234; Asada 1998: 494–96). This ambiguity gave further ammunition to the pro-war faction in Japan. Another conference was held in Tokyo on 14 August, resulting in a further stalemate. The emperor again intervened on the side of peace, and stated that he would make an announcement in a radio broadcast to the nation. The speech was not delivered live because of fears that military figures opposing the surrender might try to stop the emperor from speaking. At about midnight on 14 August, the speech was made into a record for broadcast the next day. That night, in an attempted coup, radical elements of the army invaded the palace and imprisoned some palace officials, in an attempt to find and destroy the recording, and ultimately to occupy the palace and establish martial law under General Anami. The plotters, however, were unsuccessful. They failed to gain enough support from army leaders, and they did not find the recording, partly because there was an air-raid alert that night and a blackout, so the lights were off. The recording remained in the imperial safe in an underground vault, guarded by two senior officials. Later, these military rebels occupied various broadcasting stations in an attempt to suppress the emperor’s speech, but they were unsuccessful in this too, and eventually they were persuaded to surrender to the authorities. Right-wing groups set fire to the official residences of the prime minister, the president of the Privy Council, and the Privy Seal, but this violence had no effect. At around the same time, General Anami committed suicide (Asada 1998: 74–77, 82; Hasegawa 2005: 241–48; Kase 1951: 258–60). People were told beforehand to expect an important radio broadcast at noon on 15 August. Japan’s allotment of electricity was increased for

86 Analysis that day to maximize the number of people who could hear the broadcast (Butow 1965: 2). Because many people did not own radios, especially in the country, large numbers gathered in groups to listen to the emperor announce that they had been defeated. It was the first time the emperor had ever addressed the nation directly. His speech used vague and lofty phrases, designed to cushion the blow of defeat. Thus, people were told, ‘we have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure’, and, in a famous phrase, that ‘the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage’. The latter wording was the result of extensive discussion in the cabinet. The original draft had read, ‘the war situation went daily from bad to worse’, but the army minister thought this reflected too badly on the military and so insisted on the more roundabout wording. Later the same day, the government formally notified the Allies of Japan’s surrender. In the U.S., President Truman declared a two-day holiday to celebrate. In the evening in Japan, Prime Minister Suzuki went on the radio again to urge the people to abide by what the emperor had said (Kase 1951: 256–57). There is a lively scholarly debate about just why the Japanese government surrendered. The earlier consensus was that the shock of the atomic bombings was so great that in itself it forced the surrender. Most historians now accept, however, that a combination of factors was responsible: the devastating impact of the atomic bombs, the Soviet invasion, and the general exhaustion of Japan in every sense. Given the speed of events and the huge shocks to Japan between 6 and 9 August 1945, it is very difficult to disentangle their separate impact. In the space of three days, Japan suffered two nuclear attacks and Japanese territory was invaded by a powerful new enemy, the Soviet Union. The 19 days between the emperor’s radio address on 15 August and the formal signing of the surrender instrument on 2 September were potentially volatile. After the surrender announcement on 15 August, some naval aviators dropped leaflets over Tokyo that read, ‘Don’t surrender. Don’t believe the imperial rescript. It is a false document.’ Posters and handbills appeared in the streets denouncing the emperor’s advisers for misleading the emperor and handing the nation over to the Allies. Other air units vowed to make suicide attacks on American ships when they entered Tokyo Bay (Butow 1965: 223; Kase 1951: 261–64). In the end, however, there was no serious bloodshed, an achievement that some writers describe as a ‘miracle’. Compliance with the emperor’s authority may partly explain the orderly transition from war to peace, but the exhaustion and malnutrition of both Japanese soldiers and civilians by this stage of the war was also a major factor. The official surrender instrument was signed on 2 September 1945, in a very formal ceremony held on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. The ceremony was witnessed by numerous spectators and was broadcast throughout the world. The wealth and power of the U.S. in contrast to the weakness and vulnerability of Japan were everywhere evident in the ceremony and its setting. Along with the Missouri, the bay was crowded with

Endgame  87 hundreds of powerful American fighting ships, at a time when the Japanese navy lay in ruins. Four hundred B-29 bombers and 1,500 navy fighter planes flew overhead in the ceremony (Dower 1999: 43). The surrender instrument was signed by General Douglas MacArthur, the Commander of Southwest Pacific Forces who was now to take charge of the Allied occupation of Japan with the title of Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers; by representatives of nine other Allied powers; and by Japanese officials.

Figure 7.2 Japanese delegation at the surrender ceremony on USS Missouri, 2 September 1945 Source: De Agostini Picture Library / Getty Image 901513652

88 Analysis Surrender ceremonies also took place in the field, in places throughout Asia and the Pacific where the battles had been fought. MacArthur had ordered, however, that no surrender documents were to be signed in the field until after the main ceremony on board the USS Missouri. For prisoners of war, this meant an enforced delay before their release, and some prisoners stayed in their camps for up to a month after 15 August, though with much greater freedom than before. Areas under Japanese control surrendered at various times between 2 September and 30 November 1945. Repatriation of surrendered Japanese soldiers to Japan took years to complete. A small number chose not to go home but to stay behind in the Netherlands Indies or Vietnam to fight with local people in independence movements that sought to oust the returning European imperialist powers. Broader Japanese reactions to the emperor’s surrender broadcast of 15 August varied greatly. Some people were deeply shocked and disturbed, but most accepted the defeat as inevitable and felt a sense of relief after such a long and debilitating conflict. The Allies had expected that there might be many suicides. Japanese fighting men had been told by their own side that suicide was far preferable to surrender or defeat, and civilians had also been told to fight to the bitter end. What the Allies saw on Saipan and Okinawa led them to expect mass suicides in the Japanese home islands as well. But the number who did kill themselves was much lower than many people had expected. There appear to have been several hundred suicides, most of them military officers. About the same number of Nazi officers also killed themselves on Germany’s defeat (Dower 1999: 38–39), indicating that the suicide of military officers on defeat is not a particularly Japanese phenomenon.

8

After the war New beginnings

The Potsdam Declaration issued by the Allied leaders in July 1945 was an ultimatum that Japan must surrender unconditionally and submit to occupation by Allied forces, or be destroyed. In September, the U.S. 8th Army, led by General Douglas MacArthur as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), arrived in Japan and commenced the occupation of the country. Japan was at the mercy of the Allies. Its military had been comprehensively defeated, and the terms of its surrender were unconditional. The final 12 months of the war had seen the destruction of significant parts of all major Japanese cities, bloody Japanese military defeats, and the crumbling of Japan’s overseas empire. The occupation was a joint Allied initiative, but in practice was dominated by America. The U.S. had paid its own price, with thousands of servicemen killed as American forces crept closer to Japan. But the difference between the fortunes of the two countries was stark. The industrial and military build-up in the U.S. during the war had transformed it into the most powerful belligerent the world had ever seen. It was also the only country to possess the terrifying new atomic weapon. The new era of American hegemony in the Pacific had arrived, while Japan’s fate was deeply uncertain. The U.S. quickly found that military might alone would not be enough to secure its post-war interests. Regional leadership in the new era meant addressing many complex political and strategic questions, starting with how to deal with Japan. To those who remembered the end of the First World War – and there were many in Washington who did – America needed to be careful in how it wielded its power over a defeated enemy. It was now widely accepted that harsh treatment of Germany by the victors after 1918 had contributed to the rise of Nazism in the 1920s and 1930s. Most policymakers understood that destroying Japan, or enslaving its people, would lead to lingering resentment, desperate politics, and potentially also future conflicts. Though there were other, harder-line, opinions in Washington over what to do with America’s defeated enemy, U.S. policy eventually settled on a plan to export liberal democracy to Japan and reform it into a peaceful country (Dower 1999: 73–84). This emphasis was foreshadowed in the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003090502-9

90 Analysis Potsdam Declaration, in which Allied leaders promised that, after surrender, Japan would not ‘be enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation’ (SCAP Headquarters 1949). But Japan had not surrendered only to America. While the U.S. was by far the dominant player, over 50 countries had a claim to a peace settlement with Japan. They included influential European imperial powers, ambitious new nations, and Communist countries that were rapidly becoming America’s ideological enemies. The reality for the U.S. was that its new role in Asia required negotiation of a maze of issues, as political and ideological forces competed to shape the future of the region. Japan became central to this maze, even in defeat.

The first phase of the occupation of Japan The Allied occupation of Japan, which lasted from 1945 to 1952, was an important historical event in its own right and had a lasting impact on Japanese politics and society. It also became part of a recalibration of the post-war strategic environment in Asia. Allied occupation forces oversaw Japan’s journey from an international pariah in 1945 to a member of the democratic community of nations in 1952. The occupation was, in principle, a multinational undertaking, with some of America’s wartime allies, including the Soviet Union, having a say in its direction through their representatives on two policy-making and administrative bodies: the Far Eastern Commission, which met in Washington DC, and the Allied Council for Japan, which met in Tokyo. Unlike in Germany, moreover, the domestic government did not cease to operate, remaining an active player throughout the occupation. In practice, however, SCAP controlled the vast majority of the Allied military personnel in Japan as well as the day-to-day execution of occupation policy, and thus could rule with almost total authority when it wanted to. The only real challenge to its directives came from the U.S. government in Washington DC (Schaller 1997: 7–30; Takemae 2002: xxviii, 457–62). From early in the occupation, the U.S. made significant efforts to marginalize the Soviet Union, in particular, as Soviet–American rivalry grew. The British Commonwealth representative on the Allied Council, the Australian William Macmahon Ball, later wrote that SCAP was even prepared to undermine the Council in an effort to neutralize Soviet influence (Ball 1988: 268–69). Japan’s eventual recovery from war and emergence as an economic power is well known, but economic rehabilitation was not one of the original objectives of the occupation. When SCAP arrived, its mission was to democratize and demilitarize Japan – not to repair it (Ward 1987: 405–10). The goal was to reform Japan so that its forces could never threaten the Pacific again. SCAP was a large organization and there were internal disagreements over exactly how to execute this goal. Broadly, the occupation centered on programs to disband the military, purge right-wing and militarist figures from public life, arrest suspected war criminals, produce a new constitution,

After the war: new beginnings  91 democratize the Japanese landlord and land ownership system, reform big business and large industries, which were regarded as anti-democratic, and democratize education. SCAP’s plan to develop new and lasting democratic institutions in the country was potentially difficult to implement, given that changes would necessarily be imposed upon Japanese citizens by an occupying force, which is not an ideal way of promoting democracy. The decision to keep a Japanese government in place was partly made in recognition of the need to invest the Japanese people in the democratic process. In practical terms, moreover, there were not enough occupation officials with a sufficient knowledge of the Japanese language and Japanese political and social systems to make it feasible for SCAP to administer the occupation directly. It turned out that the Japanese people participated in grassroots democratization with enthusiasm. The Allied occupation was almost entirely free of violent opposition. This is perhaps surprising given that the economy suffered greatly in the occupation’s first two years, due to the burden of the war years, the devastation of Allied bombing, and the disruption caused by SCAP’s industrial reform program, which sought to dissolve large Japanese corporate conglomerates known as zaibatsu (Hadley 2015:  5). Membership of trade unions grew steadily, as did voter participation in elections (Dower 1999: 239–53; Takemae 2002: 263–65, 310). In 1946 Japan received a new constitution, which was presented as the work of the Japanese government but was, in reality, written by a small group of Americans. It included what proved to be an extremely popular clause that renounced war and the possession of military forces and committed Japan to being a pacifist nation. While Japanese enthusiasm for new institutions was surely welcomed by SCAP, dealing with the remnants of the old political and military order in Japan was still complicated. Inescapably, this task raised questions over who had been responsible for the war. Occupation authorities intended to punish those considered responsible, but they also intended to move on. In their eyes, fault for the war lay primarily with a ‘militarist’ cabal that had controlled the Japanese government during and before the war, rather than with the Japanese people as a whole. Japan’s emperor was controversially also spared from direct blame, as American authorities believed he could be useful in promoting a peaceful occupation (Schonberger 1992: 38–39). Ultimately, the U.S. approach was pragmatic – to a fault, in the eyes of some. Occupation programs and associated measures thus sought to deal with Japanese war guilt in specific and containable ways. War crimes trials played a major role in dealing with Japan’s responsibility for the war. The best-known prosecution was the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, also known as the Tokyo War Crimes Trial (1946–48). The most prominent defendant in this trial was Tōjō Hideki, who had been the Japanese prime minister for much of the war. Tōjō’s appearance in the dock revealed how difficult the question of war guilt

92 Analysis could be. He was accused of having played a major role in leading Japan to an aggressive war. Tōjō was unrepentant: he asserted that in 1941 Japan was in an existential crisis, facing the destruction of its empire if it were to give in to American demands to withdraw from China and Indochina, or risking succumbing more gradually to American economic sanctions. Tōjō and 24 other Japanese leaders were found guilty at Tokyo, and Tōjō and six others were hanged for their crimes in December 1948. Thousands of other Japanese soldiers, sailors, and civilians were found guilty at national military tribunals held by nations that had fought Japan, at venues around the Asia-Pacific region (Wilson, Cribb, Trefalt, and Aszkielowicz 2017: 1–11). Despite the trials, other Allied measures to deal with Japan, and Japanese initiatives to acknowledge war responsibility, Japanese guilt for the war remains a potent issue in North Asian politics. Likewise, the question of American sanctions and their role in the outbreak of the war feature heavily in ongoing debates over responsibility for the conflict.

The dismantling of colonial rule in Asia and the escalation of the Cold War When Japan lost its vast overseas empire, millions of Japanese soldiers and civilians needed to be returned to Japan. A mass repatriation movement returned over five million people to Japan by the end of 1946 (Watt 2009: 1–3). But Japan’s imperial successes had also destabilized decades of Western colonial rule in Southeast Asia. Dramatic political change in Asia after the end of the conflict was prompted, in part, by the experience of Japanese colonialism and war. In August 1945 the Indonesian revolutionary leader Sukarno, who would later become the country’s first president, declared Indonesian independence from the Netherlands. In Vietnam, the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh proclaimed independence from France and forced the Vietnamese emperor to abdicate. In both cases, a violent struggle soon began as the former European overlords attempted to reassert control over their colonies. The initial Japanese victory over the European powers and the years of Japanese occupation, however, had eroded the power bases of European rule in Indonesia and Vietnam. The supremacy of colonial military forces and colonial administrators had been undermined, and revolutionary guerrilla fighters and militia forces had been emboldened. Networks of local elites who had supported or enabled colonial rule were in disarray. Japanese occupation in these countries had sometimes been brutal, and had certainly been intended primarily to serve the Japanese empire. But the Japanese period in Indonesia and Vietnam also turned out to be a catalyst for independence movements, which later seized the moment to liberate much of the region from colonial control (Lingen and Cribb 2016: 8–13). Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, colonial powers tried to be proactive in dealing with calls for decolonization. Before the start of the Second World

After the war: new beginnings  93 War, U.S. authorities had already given the Philippines a timetable for independence, but it had been interrupted by the global conflict. Once Japan was defeated, the U.S. moved to grant independence to its former colony, and the Philippines became independent on 4 July 1946. Also in 1946, Britain reorganized Malaya into a new union, which only lasted two years before it was again reorganized. Malaya, renamed Malaysia, was declared independent in 1957 after negotiation with the British. Singapore separated from Malaysia in 1965 to become an independent state. In 1948 the British granted independence to Burma. At the same time, a global ideological struggle escalated between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Soviet forces had won notable victories in Europe during the Second World War, strengthening the Soviet state and enhancing the reputation of Soviet Communism, which became a powerful ideological counterpoint to U.S. liberal democracy. U.S.–Soviet rivalry in Germany and elsewhere appeared to raise the possibility of a new global conflict. While the two sides never slid into direct armed conflict, they fought what became known as a Cold War between 1945 and 1991 – through competition in international economic and political forums, and in proxy wars where they supported their ideological allies, including the wars in Korea (1950–53) and Vietnam (1959–75). The Cold War came to Asia partly as a result of official U.S. attitudes to independence movements. At the end of the Pacific War, most countries were not liberal democracies but were authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes, or were in various stages of transitioning out of colonial-era control. Right across the region, independence movements and sectarian insurgencies competed with state forces. Where these local struggles included strong left-wing voices, American authorities interpreted them as part of a wider ideological battle between democracy and Communism – even though the links between local forces and a broader multinational Communist movement were, in fact, often tenuous. This trend in American thinking obscured the complexity of local conflicts and swept them beneath the lens of the Cold War. Asia thus became a high stakes environment for foreign policy: episodes of conflict in the region assumed greater significance for the U.S. when they were regarded as components of a global struggle. Two early Asian Cold War battlegrounds were on Japan’s doorstep. In 1949, Mao Zedong led the Chinese Communist forces to victory in a civil war that had begun in 1945, sending Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist government fleeing to Taiwan. On the whole, Mao’s victory amounted to a local insurgency gaining control over a country that had endured decades of political turmoil (Mitter 2005: 182–85). Beneath the cover of the Cold War, however, it resonated to American onlookers as a major Communist triumph and powerful foothold for Communist ideology in the region. American authorities also interpreted Chinese Communism as a branch of the Soviet version. In reality, Mao’s China and the Soviet Union had an ambiguous and often difficult relationship (Luthi 2008: 1–13).

94 Analysis The conflict in China was soon followed by the outbreak of civil war on the Korean peninsula. The former Japanese colony had been divided by the Allies in the years after the war into the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea, which was a Communist regime backed by the Soviet Union, and the Republic of Korea, which was a notionally democratic government aligned to the U.S., in the south of the peninsula. In June 1950, forces from the North attacked the South. The spectre of the Cold War worried U.S. policy-makers, who were afraid that Communist forces in the North, underwritten by Moscow, would triumph over the ostensibly more ideologically palatable regime in the South, and that a victory by the North would see international Communism spread throughout Asia (Stueck 1995: 13–4). The U.S. led a United Nations force to intervene in the conflict in support of the South.

The evolution of the occupation of Japan These dynamic events in Asian politics formed the backdrop for the Allied occupation of Japan. Gradually, U.S. policy-makers began to realize that Japan was potentially much more valuable to American official interests than is usual for a defeated foe. American authorities began to worry that Japan itself would slide into Communism, rather than acting as an outpost of democracy in North Asia. This view was also spurred by events within Japan. Occupation authorities had legalized the Japan Communist Party for the first time in its history, and a vibrant left-wing movement was conspicuous in Japanese politics. By late 1946, Japan had a vigorous labor movement that showed a willingness to take direct action to campaign for better rights for workers. Unions planned a nation-wide general strike for February 1947. SCAP had previously been content to allow strikes, but the economic fallout from a general strike, and its potential to foment social and political unrest, prompted SCAP to issue a ban on the eve of the strike (Dower 1999: 268–70). The strong presence of the Japanese left in domestic politics strengthened broader U.S. fears about Communism in Asia. To U.S. leaders in Washington in 1948, Japan seemed vulnerable. Its economy was still struggling badly under the pressure of occupation reforms. Communism had begun to provide a powerful ideological counterpoint to liberal democracy in Asia as well as Europe. Mao’s 1949 victory in China only heightened these fears. In these circumstances, the emphasis of American policy for Japan changed. The occupation entered a new phase, known later as the Reverse Course. The U.S. abandoned most of its reform programs, allowed right-wing and military figures who had been banned from public office to return to public life, and instead began a new purge of left-wing influence from Japanese institutions (Takemae 2002: 457–515). The mission had changed: America was no longer dealing with an enemy, but was looking for a friend.

After the war: new beginnings  95 A peace treaty that placed Japan under its democratic umbrella became a major strategic priority for the U.S. government. Throughout 1950, special envoy for the U.S. president, John Foster Dulles, negotiated with the governments of Japan and the major contributors to the Allied occupation. The key American policy-makers no longer regarded Japan as the main threat to peace in the Pacific, but some of America’s partners were not convinced (Aszkielowicz 2017: 94–95). Disagreement was clearest over the issue of Japan’s capacity to defend itself. The 1946 Japanese constitution – written by Americans – prevented Japan from having a normal military force, but American thinking had shifted and, in the new Cold War paradigm in which Japan appeared to be surrounded by Communist threats, some form of military seemed necessary. The problem for the Americans was that Japanese enthusiasm for rearmament was muted, at best. There was little appetite among the Japanese leadership for a costly military force, and the constitution’s pacifist provision suited a Japanese public that did not want to be plunged into another major conflict (Miller 2011: 82–108). In order to conclude the peace while guaranteeing regional security, the U.S. had to undertake to provide protection by signing a network of security treaties with Japan, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand. These treaties had the potential to entangle the U.S. in conflicts throughout the Asia-Pacific region. The trade-off was that the U.S. secured a peace with Japan that allowed for a militarized national Japanese police force and the retention of American military bases in Japanese territory while allying Japan firmly with the Western democratic community of nations. On 8 September 1951, 48 nations signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty with Japan, which was to take effect, and to bring the Allied occupation to a close, on 28 April the following year. The peace treaty and network of alliances to which America committed itself are known informally as the San Francisco system, and decades later this system remains the cornerstone of U.S. security policy in Asia.

The enduring legacy of the Pacific War The Pacific War reaffirmed decades-old thinking on the need for powerful international forums to resolve differences among nations. In the years after the conflict had ended, America showed an increased appetite for participation in international institutions. The most significant was the United Nations, founded in 1945 as the United Nations Organization. Other international agreements, treaties, and regional forums followed. While geopolitical rivalries and disputes still exist, the need for a participatory, rules-based international order remains widely accepted by most nations, and is the foundation of international relations today. In many ways, defeating Japan charted a course for U.S. militaryindustrial dominance of the globe in subsequent decades. America was one of very few countries that could afford to maintain some of the key

96 Analysis technologies and forces that had been crucial during the war. At sea, these included large fleets of aircraft carriers and the vessels needed to conduct very large amphibious warfare operations. In the air, the U.S. deployed expensive and modern long-range strategic bombers, which could be armed with nuclear or conventional weapons. These air and naval units were ubiquitous in the Cold War. Military tactics, strategy, and doctrine were also changed by the war in the Pacific, and these changes have endured. Longstanding naval strategy was overturned when the use of ship-based aircraft became more important to the outcome of fleet battles than the ability to deploy large guns on battleships. The co-ordination of land-based and seabased forces to facilitate the capture of territory was also a major, and lasting, feature of the war. The Pacific War was a turning point between the new and the old in both warfare and regional politics. It helped to end the imperial age and set the foundation for the new era of decolonization and Cold War. It drew America into Pacific politics in a major way, so much so that resolving the issues raised by the war was only possible by creating a network of enduring U.S. alliances. Millions of Asian civilians – including the Japanese – lived under new kinds of regimes, based on new ideologies, after 1945. The Pacific conflict changed warfare irreversibly. It was a ferocious and bloody end for the region as it had been, but it was also a dynamic and at times frightening new beginning.

Part II

Documents

Document 1: Address by the U.S. President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 8 December 1941 Document 2: The Greater Asian Sphere of Common Prosperity, January 1941 Document 3: Instructions to all persons of Japanese ancestry, 3 May 1942 Document 4: U.S. propaganda poster: ‘I’m Proud ... my husband wants me to do my part’ Document 5: Proclamation of the independence of the Philippines, by José P. Laurel, President of the Preparatory Commission for Philippine Independence, Manila, 14 October 1943 Document 6: Report on the Philippines by Karl L. Rankin, 25 November 1943 Document 7: Letter written by Petty Officer First Class Isao Matsuo, 28 October 1944 Document 8: Report to Committee of Operations Analysts: Economic effects of successful area attacks on six Japanese cities, 4 September 1944 Document 9: Incendiary bombing missions against Japanese cities, June– August 1945 Document 10: Text of Imperial Rescript announcing Japan’s surrender, 15 August 1945 Document 11: The health and morale of the Japanese civilian population under assault Document 12: The defense of Tōjō Hideki at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, 9–12 April 1948

DOI: 10.4324/9781003090502-10

Document 1 Address by the U.S. President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 8 December 1941 The day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt delivered the following address to the joint meeting of the two Houses of Congress. In his initial draft of the speech, Roosevelt declared December 7, ‘a date which will live in world history.’ He changed this, along with other phrases, to give the speech greater impact. Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy – the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its Government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, 1 hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in Oahu, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to the Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. While this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or armed attack. It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time the Japanese Government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace. The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. Very many American lives have been lost. In addition American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu. Yesterday the Japanese Government also launched an attack on Malaya. Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam. Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands. Last night the Japanese attacked Wake Island. This morning the Japanese attacked Midway Island. Japan has therefore undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our Nation. As Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense. Always will we remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

Documents  99 I believe I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again. Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces – with the unbounded determination of our people – we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God. I ask that the Congress declare that, since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire. Source: Government Publishing Office (1941) Congressional Record – Senate, vol. 87, part 9. 77th Congress, 1st Session, 8 December 1941. Washington, DC, pp. 9504–9505.

Document 2 The Greater Asian Sphere of Common Prosperity, January 1941 From 1940, Japanese officials explained the country’s political and military expansion in Asia as part of the development of a sphere of prosperity and security for all Asians. Arita Hachirō (1884–1965), the author of this document, served as Foreign Minister in several Japanese governments in the 1930s and 1940s. Arita explains here the leading role Japan would play in liberating Asians from their historical domination by Western imperialists and in allowing them to thrive as allies of the Japanese. Considerable misunderstanding seems to have arisen abroad regarding Japan’s project for the creation of a sphere of common prosperity in East Asia. It is generally charged that Japan has suddenly seized upon this plan as a means of establishing her exclusive control over East Asia and that within this sphere Japan alone shall enjoy all benefits by virtue of monopoly. The idea of spheres of common prosperity, however, is not a Japanese invention. Nor is it an expedient by which Japan aspired to monopolize this part of the world to the exclusion of others. ... The proposed East Asian sphere of common prosperity is the outgrowth of a complicated historical process which has been manifested upon a world-wide scale. The present form which this historical process is assuming in East Asia is something devoid of national selfishness, aiming as it does at the universal welfare of East Asia and ultimately at bringing the movement into accord with the spirit of universal brotherhood, which by the way lies at the very foundation of the Japanese nation. ... For many decades the less advanced nations were not permitted to close their doors to the economic influence of Great Britain and the United States, and as a result, their industries were prevented from growing and attaining further development, being held back by advanced countries under political as well as economic pressure despite their will to progress.

100 Documents Subsequently, Great Britain and the United States found that their industrial power could no longer check the industrial progress of the newly-risen countries and discovered that their long-held position of supremacy was tottering. They then promptly abandoned ... the free trade principle, which they had up to then forced upon other nations as the highest doctrine of international commerce, and adopted a protective trade policy, their governments and scholars being apparently oblivious of their former attitude and regardless of their sudden volte face. ... When the doctrines of freedom of communications and trade prevailed the world over, enabling men and goods to move from one country to another with comparative ease, regardless of the status of their countries, it was possible even for small nations ... to maintain a respectable existence side by side with the great Powers. ... Now, however, that such doctrines have all but disappeared with the great Powers’ closing or threatening to close their doors to others, small countries have no other choice left but to strive as best they can to form their own economic blocs or to found powerful states, lest their very existence be jeopardized. There can be no just criticism condemning this choice of the small countries. Accordingly, if Japan is now devoting its efforts toward the formation of an economic sphere, comprising Japan, Manchukuo and China, allowing them at the same time to maintain independence, enjoy freedom and display their strong points ... these are but the natural outcome of the action of the great Powers themselves, which, having both abundant raw materials and thriving markets, have tended to derive these countries to extinction by their exclusion policies, both political and economic. Even if all nations were to revert to the doctrine of free trade, it is hardly likely that the idea of establishing economic spheres or powerful states will die out in view of the prevailing world situation. The reason is that a group of nations has not yet outlived the practice of considering it a right to impose its own will upon countries which it considers have committed wrong by meting out drastic forms of economic pressure. ... Because of the existence of the idea of economic pressure, which does not seem likely to disappear, the countries which are not economically self-dependent will quite naturally try to find ways and means of defending themselves in anticipation of some crisis and in order to escape coercion in the form of economic pressure. They will consider the formation of economic blocs as a measure of economic self-defence, or the establishment of powerful states which can be self-sufficient both in times of peace and war. ... Apart from the question of how many blocs should exist in the world, it can definitely be said that from the standpoint of Japan, a Greater East Asia – including the South Seas region – must constitute one of those regional blocs. The various regions of East Asia are geographically, historically, racially and economically so closely related that they are naturally

Documents  101 destined to aid and minister to one another’s needs and thus attain that co-existence and common prosperity which is essential to the successful practice of a regional bloc. One of the common misunderstandings regarding the establishment of such blocs is that they are exclusive in nature. But it is utterly impossible to build a number of smaller worlds within the world. Even if it were possible to do so, it would only serve to retard greatly the progress of civilization and culture. In fact, the underlying idea of the bloc is quite the opposite; the establishment of blocs is the stage or method through which war is to be done away with and peace maintained, thereby assuring the advancement of world civilization and culture in general. Freed from economic pressure by other nations, the blocs will be able to develop economically, and, as they progress, they will naturally come into closer economic and cultural relationships with other blocs, thus making possible universal advancement in the economic and cultural fields. The bloc system as proposed by Japan for East Asia certainly promises greater security, because it proposes not competition, but co-prosperity and co-existence, as the principle of its establishment and as the objective of its efforts. It is a step forward for world peace, since it is an effort to find a more effective method of guaranteeing peace by abolishing those grave economic disparities which have so often been the source of conflict. Source: Extracted from Contemporary Japan, vol. 10, no. 1, January 1941, reprinted in Joyce C. Lebra (ed.) (1975) Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere in World War II: Selected Readings and Documents. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, pp. 73–77.

Document 3 Instructions to all persons of Japanese ancestry, 3 May 1942 Under Executive Order 9066, signed by President Roosevelt on 19 February 1942, people of Japanese descent, including U.S. citizens, were to be isolated in internment camps for the duration of the war. The order was justified as preventing espionage, particularly in the West coast states of California, Washington, and Oregon, which had significant Japanese-American populations. This is the text of one of many posters informing Japanese Americans that they were to be sent to assembly centers, and giving instructions on how they were to comply with the evacuation orders. WESTERN DEFENSE COMMAND AND FOURTH ARMY WARTIME CIVIL CONTROL ADMINISTRATION Presidio of San Francisco, California May 3, 1942

102 Documents INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY Living in the Following Area: All of that portion of the City of Los Angeles, State of California, within that boundary beginning at the point at which North Figueron Street meets a line following the middle of the Los Angeles River; thence southerly and following the said line to East First Street; thence westerly on East First Street to Alameda Street; thence southerly on Alameda Street to East Third Street; thence northwesterly on East Third Street to Main Street; thence northerly on Main Street to First Street; thence northwesterly on First Street to Figueron Street; thence northeasterly on Figueron Street to the point of beginning. Pursuant to the provisions of Civilian Exclusion Order No. 33, this Headquarters, dated May 3, 1942, all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien, will be evacuated from the above area by 12 o’clock noon, P. W. T., Saturday, May 9, 1942. No Japanese person living in the above area will be permitted to change residence after 12 o’clock noon, P. W. T., Sunday, May 3, 1942, without obtaining special permission from the representative of the Commanding General, Southern California Sector, at the Civil Control Station located at: Japanese Union Church, 120 North San Pedro Street, Los Angeles, California. Such permits will only be granted for the purpose of uniting members of a family, or in cases of grave emergency. The Civil Control Station is equipped to assist the Japanese population affected by this evacuation in the following ways: 1. Give advice and instructions on the evacuation. 2. Provide services with respect to the management, leasing, sale, storage or other disposition of most kinds of property, such as real estate, business and professional equipment, household goods, boats, automobiles and livestock. 3. Provide temporary residence elsewhere for all Japanese in family groups. 4. Transport persons and a limited amount of clothing and equipment to their new residence.

Documents  103 The Following Instructions Must Be Observed: 1. A responsible member of each family, preferably the head of the family, or the person in whose name most of the property is held, and each individual living alone, will report to the Civil Control Station to receive further instructions. This must be done between 8:00 A. M. and 5:00 P. M. on Monday, May 4, 1942, or between 8:00 A. M. and 5:00 P. M. on Tuesday, May 5, 1942. 2. Evacuees must carry with them on departure for the Assembly Center, the following property: (a) (b) (c) (d)

Bedding and linens (no mattress) for each member of the family; Toilet articles for each member of the family; Extra clothing for each member of the family; Sufficient knives, forks, spoons, plates, bowls and cups for each member of the family; (e) Essential personal effects for each member of the family.

All items carried will be securely packaged, tied and plainly marked with the name of the owner and numbered in accordance with instructions obtained at the Civil Control Station. The size and number of packages is limited to that which can be carried by the individual or family group. 3. No pets of any kind will be permitted. 4. No personal items and no household goods will be shipped to the Assembly Center. 5. The United States Government through its agencies will provide for the storage, at the sole risk of the owner, of the more substantial household items, such as iceboxes, washing machines, pianos and other heavy furniture. Cooking utensils and other small items will be accepted for storage if crated, packed and plainly marked with the name and address of the owner. Only one name and address will be used by a given family. 6. Each family, and individual living alone will be furnished transportation to the Assembly Center or will be authorized to travel by private automobile in a supervised group. All instructions pertaining to the movement will be obtained at the Civil Control Station. Go to the Civil Control Station between the hours of 8:00 A. M. and 5:00 P. M., Monday, May 4, 1942, or between the hours of 8:00 A. M. and 5:00 P. M., Tuesday, May 5, 1942, to receive further instructions. J. L. DeWITT Lieutenant General, U. S. Army Commanding

104 Documents SEE CIVILIAN EXCLUSION ORDER NO. 33. Source: Western Defense Command and Fourth Army Wartime Civil Control Administration, 3 May 1942, https://www.digitalhistory. uh.edu/active_learning/explorations/japanese_internment/orders_ may3_1942.cfm (accessed 29 July 2021).

Document 4 U.S. propaganda poster: ‘I’m Proud ... my husband wants me to do my part’ Gendered images featured prominently in U.S. propaganda during the war. With many men serving in the armed forces, women were encouraged to enter the workforce. The poster below suggests that it was not only patriotic for married women to work, but for their husbands to encourage them to do so. It also hints that men may have felt unsettled at the prospect of their wives entering the workforce, and seeks to reassure them. The War Manpower Commission referred to was established by President Roosevelt with Executive Order 9139 in April 1942 to recruit labor for the war effort. The Commission included no female members, but a Women’s Advisory Committee was created on 31 August 1942.

Document 5 Proclamation of the independence of the Philippines, by José P. Laurel, President of the Preparatory Commission for Philippine Independence, Manila, 14 October 1943 The Philippines was offered a provisional independence by Japan in 1943 as part of Japan’s attempt to shore up its support in Southeast Asia at a critical time. José Laurel became the President of the new Republic of the Philippines, announcing in this document the lofty ideals and aims of the newly independent state. Laurel’s address formed part of an independence ceremony attended by 500,000 people. Love of freedom has always been the dominating impulse which has given the historical evolution of the Filipino race a meaning and a purpose. In war and in peace, the Filipinos have ceaselessly fought and labored for their freedom ever since they were brought under foreign yoke, first under Spain for three hundred years or more and later under America for the last forty years. As a consequence of the Greater East Asia War, the great Nipponese Empire, true to its altruistic mission in waging that war, has enabled the Filipino people to realize at last their dream of freedom by allowing them to form a Preparatory Commission for Philippine Independence, to adopt a

Figure 9.1 U.S. propaganda poster Source: David Pollack / Getty Image 524435020: https://www.gettyimages.com.au/detail/ news-photo/m-proud-my-husband-wants-me-to-do-my-part-world-war-ii-news-photo/ 524435020?adppopup=true

106 Documents Constitution for an independent Philippines, and to take all other requisite steps for the establishment of the Republic of the Philippines. The Filipino people value their independence as the blessed fruit of the sacrifices of their heroic forefathers and brothers who fought and die in far-flung battlefields, from Mactan to Bataan, in their persistent struggle for freedom. They glory in it as the fulfillment of the Will of Divine Providence which has given to all nations of the earth the inalienable right to be free and independent. This is the moment they have long awaited. This is the bright morning after the long night of their colonial subjection. With heads erect and brows serene they now stand in the sun even as once, more than four hundred years ago, their forefathers stood as freemen beholden to none. For the ancient honor of their nation is redeemed at last. For the rich and unbounded opportunities that freedom offers are now within their grasp – The opportunity to govern themselves and to run their affairs without intervention of any foreign power; The opportunity to develop their natural resources and thus insure [sic] their economic self-sufficiency under the principle of the Philippines for the Filipinos; The opportunity to discover and develop their individual and national potentialities uninhibited by the force of political subjection or by the blight of racial prejudice; The opportunity to rehabilitate themselves in mind and spirit in accordance with the best that man has thought and said and done through the ages; The opportunity to find themselves anew[,] learn the ways they have forgotten and make themselves into the nation that God and Nature intended they should be; The opportunity to establish a sovereign republic dedicated to the ideal of peace, liberty and moral justice; The opportunity to contribute their share in the common prosperity of the nations of Greater East Asia and of all mankind; and The opportunity to cherish their independence in order that it may endure forever as an inexhaustible fountain of blessing for this and for future generations of their race.

Documents  107 The Filipino people, through the Preparatory Commission for Philippine Independence, invoking the aid of Divine Providence, and the hallowed spirits of Filipino patriots and martyrs who gave their lives for the freedom of their fatherland, hereby proclaim to the world that they are, as of right they ought to be, a free and independent nation; that they no longer owe allegiance to any foreign nation; that henceforth they shall exercise all the powers and enjoy all the privileges to which they are entitled as a free and independent state; and that for the defense of their territorial integrity and the preservation of their independent existence, they pledge their fortune, their lives, and their sacred honor. Source: Office of the Solicitor General Library, Philippines, http:// malacanang.gov.ph/6420-proclamation-of-the-independence-ofthe-philippines-by-jose-p-laurel-president-of-the-preparatorycommission-for-philippine-independence-manila-october14-1943/ (accessed 6 June 2021).

Document 6 Report on the Philippines by Karl L. Rankin, 25 November 1943 The American reaction to the Philippine declaration of independence contrasted strongly to José Laurel’s speech. The following document is extracted from a report prepared by Karl L. Rankin (1898–1991). As an American career diplomat, Rankin served in Manila 1941–1942. He argues that the Japanese encouragement of Filipino independence was shallow, self-serving, and duplicitous. Moreover, Rankin contends that a dictatorship rather than a democracy would form under the envisioned republic for the Philippines. Under Japanese military occupation the Philippine Islands have been governed very largely under the same laws and by much the same men as under the Commonwealth. There were two fundamental changes. The first was symbolized by the immediate conversion of the United States High Commissioner’s residence into the official Headquarters of the Japanese Commander-in-Chief. The second was the abolition, at least temporarily, of the popularly elected legislature. Behind the scenes, of course, Japanese activities and influence affected all phases of Philippine life. But in a governmental sense the outward changes introduced were less striking than the very general continuance of old forms. ... Premier Tojo found it opportune in January, 1943, to issue a formal pledge of independence for the Philippines. In the same speech before the Imperial Diet, independence was promised to Burma “within the year” and to the Philippines “at the earliest possible moment.” This pledge provided a theme for countless political speeches throughout the Philippines, by both

108 Documents Japanese and Filipinos, during the succeeding months. On one hand it was cited as final proof of Japan’s true intentions and the other as implying a threat that independence would not be granted until all guerilla activity had ceased and whole-hearted collaboration had become general. ... On May 5, 1943, Premier Tojo arrived in Manila. He appears to have been satisfied with the attitude of the Filipinos, as voiced by Vargas and others, or at least to have found no reason to further delay in fixing an approximate date for Philippine independence. Greater East Asia Minister Kazuo Aoki visited Manila a few days after his chief and apparently confirmed his findings. On June 16, not long after his return to Japan, Tojo declared before the Diet that the Philippines would be given independence within the course of the year. In the visitor’s gallery at the time was a group of Filipinos, headed by Mayor Guinto, who were enjoying a junket to Japan. Four days later a Preparatory Commission for Philippine Independence, consisting of twenty members headed by José P. Laurel, was set up in Manila. ... As their work progressed, Laurel announced that the Commission had agreed upon a republican form of government as best suited to the Philippines. At a plenary session of the Commission on September 3, 1943, the new constitution was adopted. Laurel is credited with most of the redrafting of the Commonwealth Constitution to meet the new conditions imposed by Japanese conquest. In the preamble the Filipino people “proclaim their independence.” In fact the constitution contains no reference either to Japan or to the Co-Prosperity Sphere. The most striking feature, however, is the virtually dictatorial power given to the President of the Republic. ... The full significance of the presidential appointive powers becomes apparent when it is noted that the approval of the legislature is in no case required, and that one-half of the National Assembly itself is made up of presidential appointees, the provincial governors and mayors of chartered cities being members ex-officio. The remaining half of the Assembly is to be elected in a manner that “shall be prescribed by law, which shall not be subject to change or modification during the Great East Asia War.” ... In its general conception the Japanese plan for winning over the people of the conquered Philippines scarcely could have been improved. It was of the same high order as the strategy of their general staff during the first six months of the war. Yet despite their important initial success in gaining the collaboration of so many Filipino leaders, the plan as a whole has been a failure. The people referred scornfully to independence “made in Japan,” and to the “peace of the carabao” which Japanese military protection

Documents  109 would afford them. Leading Filipino collaborationists were spoken of as “military objectives.” The United States was never more popular among the people of the Philippines than at the moment Japan was giving them independence. What were the causes of Japanese political failure in the Philippines? The first was the impossibility of persuading any important number of Filipinos that the United States could lose the war. ... The second cause of Japan’s political failure in the Philippines may be found in the repetition of the worst mistakes made by Americans. At his best the invader was condescending and patronizing to the Filipino; at his worst he was grasping and brutal. In the beginning Japanese propaganda laid emphasis on the disappearance of the color line which Americans and British had drawn. It was a good point and worth following up. But the Filipinos found that in actual practice the Japanese soon monopolized the best clubs, hotels and apartments to a greater extent than the Americans had ever done. They demanded and got the best of everything. Equally objectionable to many was the Japanese assumption of superiority in medicine and other professions where Filipinos take legitimate pride in their accomplishments. And the Japanese were unnecessarily brutal. It has been mentioned that they were on their good behavior when Manila was occupied, judged by Oriental standards. This was less true in the provinces, where executions and looting are reported to have been much more general. ... Japan has failed to win Filipino support and sympathy. Even the idea of independence, prostituted by the Japanese, has lost its appeal for the time being. Source: Office of the Historian (1963) Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1943, The British Commonwealth, Eastern Europe, the Far East, vol. III. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/ frus1943v03/d984 (accessed 2 May 2021).

Document 7 Letter written by Petty Officer First Class Matsuo Isao, 28 October 1944 This letter by Matsuo Isao, a member of the 701st Air Group, includes many of the tropes used by kamikaze pilots to give meaning to their impending deaths. Many ‘volunteers’ for suicide missions, however, were influenced by pressure from peers and officers.

110 Documents Dear Parents: Please congratulate me. I have been given a splendid opportunity to die. This is my last day. The destiny of our homeland hinges on the decisive battle in the seas to the south where I shall fall like a blossom from a radiant cherry tree. I shall be a shield for His Majesty and die cleanly along with my squadron leader and other friends. I wish that I could be born seven times, each time to smite the enemy. How I appreciate this chance to die like a man! I am grateful from the depths of my heart to the parents who have reared me with their constant prayers and tender love. And I am grateful as well to my squadron leader and superior officers who have looked after me as if I were their own son and given me such careful training. Thank you, my parents, for the 23 years during which you have cared for me and inspired me. I hope that my present deed will in some small way repay what you have done for me. Think well of me and know that your Isao died for our country. This is my last wish, and there is nothing else that I desire. I shall return in spirit and look forward to your visit at the Yasukuni Shrine. Please take good care of yourselves. How glorious is the Special Attack Corps’ Giretsu Unit whose Suisei bombers will attack the enemy. Our goal is to dive against aircraft carriers of the enemy. Movie cameramen have been here to take our pictures. It is possible that you may see us in newsreels at the theater. We are 16 warriors manning the bombers. May our death be as sudden and clean as the shattering of crystal. Written at Manila on the eve of our sortie. Isao Soaring into the sky of the southern seas, it is our glorious mission to die as the shields of His Majesty. Cherry blossoms glisten as they open and fall. Source: Inoguchi, Rikihei and Tadashi Nakajima (1958) The Divine Wind: Japan’s Kamikaze Force in World War II. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, pp. 200–201.

Documents  111

Document 8 Report to Committee of Operations Analysts: Economic effects of successful area attacks on six Japanese cities, 4 September 1944 Although General Curtis LeMay is often described as the architect of firebombing Japan, this document illustrates that U.S. military planners were aware of Japan’s acute vulnerabilities to urban area bombing well before LeMay assumed command of the 21st Bomber Wing of the 20th Air Force. The Report’s recommendations to employ urban area bombing exemplifies the idea that Japan was viewed as an inviting ‘total target’, and that planners drew little, if any, distinction between civilians and combatants. LeMay assumed command of aerial operations against Japan in January 1945, and followed many recommendations made by the Committee of Operations Analysts, including a series of maximum intensity firebombing raids against five of Japan’s six largest target cities in March 1945. Preface: Findings and Conclusions

I. Findings This study attempts to assess the economic effects of incendiary attacks which destroy 70 percent of the housing in six major Japanese cities; Tokyo, Kawasaki, Yokohama, Osaka, Kobe, and Nagoya. These attacks, it is estimated, would result in a loss equal to 15 percent of one year’s total Japanese manufacturing output. In major war industries (munitions, metals, and chemicals), the average loss would be 20 percent of one year’s output. This production loss results from two elements: (a) direct damage to industrial and housing facilities; (b) the diversion of Japanese industry from its normal activities to the repair and replacement of this damage The direct production loss due to incendiary damage would be distributed among a number of industries, among them certain producers of frontline equipment: aircraft components (loss of 20 percent of one year’s output), tanks and trucks (13 percent), radio and radar (11 percent), aircraft engines (8 percent), ordinance (7 percent) ...

II. Conclusion Final judgement on the desirability of incendiary area attacks on Japan cannot be formed until a study of force requirements, now underway, is

112 Documents completed, and studies have been made of alternative target systems. However, one conclusion emerges clearly. Area incendiary attacks should be undertaken only when it is possible to conduct them in force and to complete the planned destruction of all six cities within a period of a few weeks. A lack of concentration in the attacks will substantially diminish their effects. In addition, two tentative conclusions appear warranted. Incendiary attacks on congested urban areas will produce very great economic loss, measured in man months of industrial labor – probably greater loss per ton of bombs dispatched than attacks on any other target system. But because of the wide diffusion of this loss over many industries it is unlikely that output in any one important category will be so deduced as substantially to affect front line strength. Precision attacks, assuming adequate intelligence and operational feasibility, can achieve such effects. Area attacks might, however, significantly increase and prolong losses affected by precision attacks on war industries. The direct loss they impose on war production is not inconsiderable. Their effect in delaying recuperation of vital factories damaged in precision attacks is of greater importance. Summary

II. The Target Cities Population The six cities included in this study – Tokyo, Kawasaki, Yokohama, Osaka, Kobe, and Nagoya – have a combined population (estimated as of July, 1944) of 14,908,000, approximately 20 percent the total population of Japan. They contain more than one-third of all workers in Japanese manufacturing plants and nearly one-half of all workers in priority industries ... Industrial Concentration – Comparison with Germany No other industrial nation is dependent on so small an area for so substantial a portion of its manufactured products as is Japan.

Documents  113 Relative Importance of 6 Japanese and 25 German Cities to War Production in their Respective Countries

% of total population % of total industry % of primary industry % of aircraft % of aero-engines % of metals % of machine tools % of shipbuilding % of chemicals

6 Japanese Cities

25 German Cities

20 35 48 71 66 53 64 25 27

25 24 31 30 48 28 55 20 30

Vulnerability The construction in these cities is largely of wood (over 90 percent of all building in the more congested residential areas of wooden construction), and they are characterized by a very high degree of inflammability ...

III. Damage Inflicted and Resulting Production Loss Damage The attacks assumed in this study would effect a degree of destruction never before equaled. ... From the six cities it is estimated that nearly 3,500,000 people will be evacuated; an additional 7,750,000 will be dehoused; more than 500,000 fatal casualties will be suffered; nearly 50 percent of all identified priority plants will be seriously damaged; and non-priority plants located in more inflammable buildings and more congested districts, will suffer an even greater degree of damage. Total Production Loss The total estimated loss from absenteeism and direct damage to industrial plants (without taking account of replacement costs) amounts to 7,600,000 man-months of labor in the six cities, or an average of ten weeks’ loss for each of the 3,200,000 industrial workers located in the six cities. This loss is equivalent to a little over three weeks’ loss for each of the 3,200,000 industrial workers located in the six cities. This loss is equivalent to a little over three weeks’ production of the whole Japanese economy, or 7 percent of one year’s production. Because of the concentration of priority industries within

114 Documents these cities, loss within these categories is greater. Total losses in priority industries amount to 5,900,000 man months—about five weeks’ production in priority industries in Japan as a whole, or 10 percent of one year’s production.

IV. Absenteeism and Direct Damage Absenteeism The total loss from absenteeism is estimated to be equal to one month’s production of all industrial workers in the cities attacked. Table 2: Contribution of Various Factors to Total Absenteeism Percent of total loss Firefighting, etc. Casualties Dehousing (Relocation, debris clearance, new construction) Transport dislocation Social disorganization Total

12 14 40 17 17 100

Absenteeism from Casualties The ratio of fatal casualties estimated to total population corresponds closely to that experienced in the Tokyo fire which accompanied the earthquake of 1923. Table 3: Casualties Caused by Attacks Cities

Casualties

Worker Casualties

Tokyo Yokohama Kawasaki Nagoya Osaka Kobe Total

260,000 45,000 60,000 60,000 150,000 25,000 560,000

135,000 22,000 10,000 30,000 80,000 13,000 290,000

Absenteeism from Dehousing Even assuming 25 percent evacuation of the total population of the six cities, the destruction of 70 percent of all houses would leave 7,750,000 dehoused people ... Relocating these millions would require time and cause considerable absenteeism ... These three factors [debris clearance, attempts to salvage possessions, and construction of new dwellings], it is estimated, would produce a total loss equal to more than 12 working days of the entire labor forces.

Documents  115 Absenteeism from Social Disorganization It is estimated that this factor would cause a loss equal to 5 working days of the entire labor force, over and above losses from all other causes.

VI. Conclusion Results of the Attack – Comparison with Germany The great concentration of industry in the six Japanese cities studied in this report, together with their high degree of inflammability, makes them peculiarly suited to area incendiary attacks. Attacks of the degree of effectiveness assumed in this report would produce economic losses of far greater magnitude than those experienced in the European Theater. The RAF in 74 full-scale attacks on 25 German cities in 1943 dropped nearly 100,000 tons of bombs to achieve an average level of 25 percent destruction or serious damage to houses in these cities and to render 4,500,000 persons homeless. On the basis of the assumptions employed in this report, a fraction of this effort directed at six Japanese cities would destroy 70 percent of their housing, rendering 7,500,000 people homeless. Germany suffered an estimated direction production loss of 2.2 percent of one year’s industrial output, a total loss of about 7.5 percent. The corresponding figures for Japan are 7 percent and 15 percent; for priority industry total loss rises to 20 percent. Source: United States Army Air Force (n.d.-h) Report to Committee of Operations Analysts: Economic Effects of Successful Area Attacks on Six Japanese Cities, 4 September 1944. Report No. 55a(2), USSBS Index Section 2. Unpublished, held at National Diet Library, Japan.

Document 9 Incendiary bombing missions against Japanese cities, 1945 In addition to launching incendiary raids against Japan’s six largest industrial areas, the USAAF conducted a firebombing campaign against 56 of Japan’s smaller and mid-sized cities. The numbers illustrate the USAAF’s capabilities to devastate Japan through bombing as well as their commitment to securing surrender through sustained urban area bombing. Between 17 June 1945 and 14 August 1945, U.S. B-29s dropped approximately 54,227 tons of incendiary bombs on 56 cities, beyond the 41,324 tons dropped on Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, and Kawasaki. Note, some ‘secondary’ cities, such as Tsu, Omuta, Hamamatsu, Ichinomiya, Imabari, Kagoshima, Kuwana, and Uwajima, were bombed more than once, and sometimes bombed with a combination of incendiaries and general purpose, high-explosive ordnance. Thus, the total percentage of urban area destroyed is listed as cumulative, not the result of one air raid.

116 Documents Incendiary Missions against Japan’s Six Largest Cities Target city

B-29s Tons of bombing ordnance

Tokyo Osaka-Amagasaki Nagoya Kobe Yokohama Kawasaki Total

2,383 1,597 1,598 850 462 246 7,136

Sq. miles destroyed

12,263 56.30 9,423 16.44 9,948 12.37 5,590 8.75 2,580 8.90 1,520 3.70 41,324 (5.8 tons average per plane dropped)

% of built- up area destroyed 51% 25% 31% 56% 44% 33%

Source: United States Army Air Force, Office of Statistical Control, Summary of Twentieth Air Force Operations (unpublished, held at the National Diet Library, Japan); United States Army Air Force, Resume: 20th Air Force Missions (unpublished, held at the National Diet Library, Japan)

Incendiary Missions against Secondary Cities in Japan Date

Target city

Population

B-29s bombing

Tons of bombing

% of City destroyed at war’s conclusion

17/6 17/6 17/6 19/6 19/6 19/6 28/6 28/6 28/6 28/6 1/7 1/7 1/7 1/7 3/7 3/7 3/7 3/7 6/7 6/7 6/7 6/7 9/7 9/7 9/7 9/7 12/7 12/7 12/7 12/7

Kagoshima Hamamatsu Yokkaichi Toyohashi Fukuoka Shizuoka Okayama Sasebo Moji Nobeoka Kure Kumamoto Ube Shimonoseki Takamatsu Kochi Himeji Tokushima Chiba Akashi Shimizu Kofu Sendai Sakai Wakayama Gifu Utsunomiya Ichinomiya Tsurugu Uwajima

190,250 165,000 102,000 142,700 323,200 212,200 163,560 206,000 139,000 79,426 277,000 211,000 106,000 196,000 111,200 106,650 104,250 119,600 92,000 48,000 68,600 102,400 233,630 182,150 195,200 172,340 88,000 70,800 31,350 52,100

117 130 89 136 222 123 138 141 91 117 152 154 100 128 116 125 106 129 124 123 133 131 125 115 108 129 115 123 92 123

976 2,731 567 946 1,525 868 982 1,059 626 829 1,082 1,113 715 833 833 1,061 767 1,051 890 975 1,030 970 926 779 800 899 803 772 679 873

44.1 70 59 52 21.5 66 63 18 29 36 46 20 23 36 78 48 77 74 43 52 50 65 27 44 53 74 34 76 68 52

Documents  117 Date

Target city

Population

B-29s bombing

Tons of bombing

% of City destroyed at war’s conclusion

16/7 16/7 16/7 16/7 19/7 19/7 19/7 19/7 26/7 26/7 26/7 28/7 28/7 28/7 28/7 28/7 28/7 1/8 1/8 1/8 1/8 5/8 5/8 5/8 5/8 8/8 8/8 14/8 14/8 Total

Numazu Oita Kuwana Hiratsuka Fukui Hitachi Choshi Okazaki Matsuyama Tokuyama Omuta Tsu Aomori Ichinomiya Uji-Yamada Ogaki Uwajima Hachioji Toyama Nagaoka Mito Saga Maebashi Nishiomiya Imabari Yawata Fukuyama Kumagaya Isesaki

53,165 77,000 41,850 42,150 98,000 82,700 61,200 84,070 118,300 38,400 177,000 68,625 100,000 70,800 52,555 56,100 52,100 62,280 127,800 67,000 66,300 50,400 87,000 111,800 56,000 244,300 56,653 49,000 40,000

119 124 94 129 127 126 91 126 127 97 124 76 61 122 93 91 29 169 173 125 160 63 92 250 75 221 91 81 86 7,097

1,036 790 693 1,163 953 963 629 850 896 752 964 730 547 869 735 659 205 1,593 1,466 924 1,145 459 724 1,923 584 1,302 556 593 614 54,277

90 25 77 44 85 65 43 68 73 54 37 71 64 76 39 38 52 80 99 66 61 N/A 40 32 76 21 73 45 N/A average of 7.6 tons dropped per plane

Source: United States Army Air Force, Combat Mission Statistics XXI Bomber Command (unpublished, held at the National Diet Library, Japan); United States Army Air Force, Resume: 20 th Air Force Missions (unpublished, held at the National Diet Library, Japan); United States Army Air Force, Office of Statistical Control, Summary of Twentieth Air Force Operations (unpublished, held at the National Diet Library, Japan); Craven and Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II, 5:674–75.

Source: Compiled from United States Army Air Force, Combat Mission Statistics XXI Bomber Command (unpublished, held at the National Diet Library, Japan); United States Army Air Force, Resume: 20th Air Force Missions (unpublished, held at the National Diet Library, Japan); United States Army Air Corps, Office of Statistical Control, Summary of Twentieth Air Force Operations (unpublished, held at the National Diet Library, Japan); Craven, Wesley and James Cate (1953) The Army Air Forces in World War II: The Pacific – Matterhorn to Nagasaki, vol. 5. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 674–75.

118 Documents

Document 10 Text of Imperial Rescript announcing Japan’s surrender, 15 August 1945 This document is a translation into English of the emperor’s broadcast to his people on 15 August 1945 (Japan time) announcing Japan’s surrender. It was translated for the Japanese government by Hirakawa Tadaichi. The emperor’s speech was presented as an ‘Imperial Rescript’, a form of document reserved for the most important official announcements. The ‘joint declaration’ mentioned in the text refers to the Potsdam Declaration. The population figure of one hundred million includes colonial subjects. To our good and loyal subjects: After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in our empire today, we have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure. We have ordered our Government to communicate to the Governments of the United States, Great Britain, China and the Soviet Union that our empire accepts the provisions of their joint declaration. To strive for the common prosperity and happiness of all nations as well as the security and well-being of our subjects is the solemn obligation which has been handed down by our imperial ancestors, and which we lay close to heart. Indeed, we declared war on America and Britain out of our sincere desire to insure Japan’s self-preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement. But now the war has lasted for nearly four years. Despite the best that has been done by everyone – the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of our servants of the State and the devoted service of our 100,000,000 people – the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest. Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.

Documents  119 Such being the case, how are we to save the millions of our subjects, or to atone ourselves before the hallowed spirits of our imperial ancestors? This is the reason we have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the joint declaration of the powers. We cannot but express the deepest sense of regret to our allied nations of East Asia, who have consistently cooperated with the Empire toward the emancipation of East Asia. The thought of those officers and men as well as others who have fallen in the fields of battle, those who died at their posts of duty, or those who met with death [otherwise] and all their bereaved families, pains our heart night and day. The welfare of the wounded and the war-sufferers and of those who have lost their home and livelihood is the object of our profound solicitude. The hardships and sufferings to which our nation is to be subjected hereafter will be certainly great. We are keenly aware of the inmost feelings of all you, our subjects. However, it is according to the dictates of time and fate that we have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is unsufferable. Having been able to safeguard and maintain the structure of the Imperial State, we are always with you, our good and loyal subjects, relying upon your sincerity and integrity. Beware most strictly of any outbursts of emotion that may engender needless complications, of any fraternal contention and strife that may create confusion, lead you astray and cause you to lose the confidence of the world. Let the entire nation continue as one family from generation to generation, ever firm in its faith of the imperishableness of its divine land, and mindful of its heavy burden of responsibilities, and the long road before it. Unite your total strength to be devoted to the construction for the future. Cultivate the ways of rectitude, foster nobility of spirit, and work with resolution so as you may enhance the innate glory of the Imperial State and keep pace with the progress of the world. Source: This version of the Rescript was published in The New York Times on 15 August 1945. The text has been very slightly modified, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Imperial_Rescript_on_the_ Termination_of_the_War.ogg (accessed 6 May 2021).

120 Documents

Document 11 The health and morale of the Japanese civilian population under assault Originally established in November 1944 to study the effects of aerial bombing on Germany, following Japan’s surrender President Truman requested the United States Strategic Bombing Survey conduct a similar study for Japan. Total civilian casualties in Japan, as a result of 9 months of air attack, including those from atomic bombs, were approximately 806,000. Of these, approximately 330,000 were fatalities. These casualties probably exceeded Japan’s combat casualties which the Japanese estimate as having totaled approximately 780,000 during the entire war. The principal cause of civilian death or injury was burns. ... The Japanese instituted a civilian-defense organization prior to the war. It was not until the summer of 1944, however, that effective steps were taken to reduce the vulnerability of Japan’s civilian population to air attacks. By that time, the shortage of steel, concrete and other construction materials was such that adequate air-raid shelters could no longer be built. Each family was given the obligation of providing itself with some kind of an excavation covered with bamboo and a little dirt. In addition, tunnels were dug into the sides of hills wherever the topography permitted. ... The growing food shortage was the principal factor affecting the health and vigor of the Japanese people. Prior to Pearl Harbor the average per capita caloric intake of the Japanese people was about 2,000 calories as against 3,400 in the United States. The acreage of arable land in Japan is only 3 percent of that of the United States to support a population over half as large. ... Despite the rationing of food beginning in April 1941 the food situation became critical. As the war progressed, imports became more and more difficult, the waters available to the fishing fleet and the ships and fuel oil for its use became increasingly restricted. Domestic food production itself was affected by the drafting of the younger males and by an increasing shortage of fertilizers. By 1944, the average per capita caloric intake had declined to approximately 1,900 calories. By the summer of 1945 it was about 1,680 calories per capita. Coal miners and heavy industrial workers received higher-than-average rations, the remaining populace, less. The average diet suffered even more drastically from reductions in fats, vitamins and minerals required for balance and adversely affected rates of recovery and mortality from disease and bomb injuries. Undernourishment produced a major increase in the incidence of beriberi and tuberculosis. It also had an important effect on the efficiency and morale of the people, and contributed to absenteeism among workers.

Documents  121 Survey interrogation of a scientifically designed cross-section sample of the Japanese civilian population revealed a high degree of uniformity as between city and rural sectors of the population and as between various economic and social strata in their psychological reaction to the war. A uniformly high percentage considered Japan’s greatest weaknesses to have been in the material realm, either lack of resources, productive plant or modern weapons, and her greatest strength to have been in the Yamato spirit of the Japanese people, their willingness to make every personal sacrifice, including that of life itself, for the Emperor or Japan. ... By December 1944 air attacks from the Marianas against the home islands had begun, defeats in the Philippines had been suffered, and the food situation had deteriorated; 10 percent of the people believed Japan could not achieve victory. By March 1945, when the night incendiary attacks began and the food ration was reduced, this percentage had risen to 19 percent. In June it was 46 percent, and just prior to surrender, 68 percent. Of those who had come to this belief over one-half attributed the principal cause to air attacks, other than the atomic bombing attacks, and one-third to military defeats. ... Progressively lowered morale was characterized by loss of faith in both military and civilian leaders, loss of confidence in Japan’s military might and increasing distrust of government news releases and propaganda. People became short-tempered and more outspoken in their criticism of the government, the war and affairs in general. Until the end, however, national traditions of obedience and conformity, reinforced by police organization, remained effective in controlling the behavior of the population. The Emperor largely escaped the criticism which was directed at other leaders, and retained people’s faith in him. It is probable that most Japanese would have passively faced death in a continuation of the hopeless struggle, had the Emperor so ordered. When the Emperor announced the unconditional surrender the first reaction of the people was one of regret and surprise, followed shortly by relief. Source: Extract from the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (1946) Summary Report (Pacific War). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office,https://www.anesi.com/ ussbs01.htm (accessed 14 June 2021).

Document 12 The defense of Tōjō Hideki at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, 9–12 April 1948 The legal team representing Tōjō Hideki and the other Japanese leaders who were prosecuted at Tokyo conducted a broad defense that argued against the specific charges laid against the accused, and the validity of the

122 Documents trial overall. In court, Tōjō advanced the argument that Japan had acted in self-defense. He claimed the conflict in China and economic sanctions against Japan threatened the nation’s survival. Even so, Tōjō argued, Japan had been willing to negotiate and preserve peace in the region. He claimed that the perilous situation of Japan and the hard position taken by the United States in negotiations left Japan with no alternative but war. Tōjō’s counsel (Kiyose Ichiro and George Blewett) concluded their defense with the following observations. … we would like to submit two points to the Tribunal for special consideration. The first point is, since each nation is the sole judge of what constitutes its own right of self-defense, any judgment by anyone other than the nation exercising such right would amount to an ex post facto law. Especially where such judgment is given by the party who was attacked by the nation which chose to exercise its right of self-defense, the injustice would become even more serious than an ordinary ex post facto law and be in flat contradiction of any reasonable interpretation of international law. The other party to a war in self-defense is usually a state that fought the war denying the right of self-defense to its opponent. It is quite clear that no fair judgment could be expected from such a state or from those acting on its behalf. ... The negotiations failed and a war broke out on account of the necessity of Japan to assert her privilege of self-defense. To contend after the end of the war that the determination of the existence of the right of self-defense should be decided by parties other than the one who exercised that right not only amounts to ex post facto law but would be utterly unseemly were the parties who made the decision to be the representatives or nominees of the Powers against whom the right was exercised. ... It is clear as day from the Imperial Rescript on the declaration of the war offered in evidence by the Prosecution, that on 8 December 1941 Japan opened the war sincerely of the belief that for the sake of her own self-defense and self-preservation there was no other alternative. No evidence has been offered which negatives this substantial proof. The accused TOJO will not of course evade his responsibility as the Premier of the Japanese Empire for the decision for the opening of the Pacific War. It was, however, because he really believed that war was inevitable for the self-defense and self-preservation of his fatherland that he, together with other leaders, voted for war. This is the whole truth. ... The United States had naturally anticipated that Japan might exercise her right of self-defense, but she had a policy of her own. She waited for an overt act on the part of Japan. As soon as Japan resorted to an overt act, the United States took up arms and, repeatedly accusing Japan of unlawfulness, fought through and through until at last, by means of indiscriminate bombardment and the atomic bomb, she succeeded in defeating her. ...

Documents  123 The second point that counsel for the accused TOJO would like to submit is that the ideal of a Greater East Asia was not of a criminal nature. The aspiration to unify the whole world under one common ideology is very sublime in itself. But as a matter of practical politics, this aspiration is subject to many difficulties and may prove to be a cause of world unrest. This is not only clear in the light of the history of the past but is just what we have learned through our own experience. TOJO and other leaders of Japan at that time believed that it would be in conformity with the will of God, that countries geographically, racially and historically bound together by common ties should assist each other and incorporate themselves into a common sphere of peace and happiness and that the spheres thus formed cooperate in turn with each other for the maintenance of durable world peace. ... No religion would consider as a crime an attempt to improve the relations of friendship and mutual assistance with one’s neighbors. Nothing would be more absurd than to contend that the efforts which Japan made to emancipate the oppressed nations in East Asia, to ensure fraternity among the nations in their region by respecting one another’s sovereignty and independence, to cultivate cordial friendship with the World Powers, to abolish discriminations and to open resources throughout the world constituted a crime! Inasmuch as Japan adopted this policy as a means to render fruitful the results of her war in self-defense, it is true she once planned to retain for herself a part of her occupied area. This, however, by no means renders unlawful Japan’s war objective any more than is illegal the retention by the Allied Powers of a part of the territory of the defeated nations as a measure of future security. In closing, if the Tribunal please, we would like to touch upon one more point. The phrase “World War II” is an expression which is often on the lips of the people. However, this is not an exact expression, still less an accurate term of international law. For Germany’s war had nothing to do with that of Japan. The nations against which these two wars were fought were different. Their causes and objectives were also different. ... In that great war in which millions of troops were mobilized it was inevitable by the very nature of things that some war crimes should take place at the foremost fronts. No Minister of War could have prevented it absolutely. We do not of course contend that the authorities of other Powers are estopped from accusing the Japanese of negligence because they themselves are not entirely free from such faults. The point which we wish to emphasize is, how far can the War Minister or the Premier of a country … be expected to go in checking unhappy incidents which may be caused by millions of his country’s forces. ... There is no proof showing that the attitude taken by the Premier or the War Minister of Japan … was at variance with that taken by the premiers and war ministers of other Powers in modern warfare.

124 Documents In concluding our Summation, we contend that Japan opened the war in the firmest belief that it was necessary to her own self-defense. Japan’s plan to set up a practicable and reasonable system of peace was aimed at rendering fruitful the results of this war. In all these points the war fought by Japan had nothing in common with that of Germany. The Japanese leaders neither ordered nor knowingly connived at the commission of atrocious acts. Inhuman deeds were just what they did their best to prevent. We are convinced that these accused, including TOJO, must be found “not guilty” by the Tribunal. Source: Extract from International Military Tribunal for the Far East, Delaney Tokyo Trial Papers, Creighton University School of Law,https://dspace2.creighton.edu/xmlui/handle/ 10504/74576 (accessed 14 June 2021).

Glossary

ABDA – American, British, Dutch, Australian command, a short-lived Allied command in the first half of 1942 that collapsed with the rapid Japanese advance across Southeast Asia. B-29 – or Superfortress. Heavy bomber developed by Boeing in 1942 and used by the U.S. military in the Second World War and the Korean War. It carried out extensive bombing of major Japanese cities and was used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Banzai charge – a mass Japanese attack on the enemy, usually employed in desperate circumstances as a tactic of last resort. The tactic became more common as Japan’s position in the war deteriorated. Intended to reverse fortune against superior fire power, most charges proved suicidal and contributed to the reputation of Japanese soldiers as fanatical. Burma Independence Army – a force that allied with the Japanese against Britain and the Allies. The core of the BIA were young anti-colonial Burmese nationalists who gained Japanese support after the fall of Burma to the Japanese in early 1942. Burma Road – a supply route from Burma overland to China. When Japan conquered Burma in 1942, the Burma Road was closed and the Allied wartime supply to China overland was cut until the Ledo Road’s completion. China-Burma-India operational theater – a military zone under U.S. control that fielded anti-Japanese operations involving armies in all three countries. Chindits – a long-range penetration force formed by Orde Wingate for British operations in Japanese-occupied Burma. The name is a corruption of the Burmese word ‘chinthe’, a mythical lion, or sometimes partly leonine creature, commonly portrayed in Burmese culture and art. Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) – the peak Allied military committee during the Second World War. First formed in December 1941, the committee included the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and the British Chiefs of Staff Committee. The full CCS convened only for major wartime conferences.

126  Glossary Combined Fleet – combat command of the Imperial Japanese Navy, commanded by Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku until his death in April 1943. Executive Order 8802 – Order issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 25 June 1941 prohibiting job discrimination in defense industries and establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce the new policy. Executive Order 9066 – Order issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 19 February 1942 authorizing the military to exclude people from prescribed military areas; it justified the removal of Japanese Americans from the west coast. Gross National Product – or Gross Domestic Product. The value of all goods and services produced in a particular country in a specified time period, usually a year; a proxy measure of the size of a nation’s economy. Indian National Army – a force that allied with the Japanese against Britain and the Allies. The INA formed largely from prisoners of war taken by the Japanese after their conquest of Southeast Asia in 1942. Issei – The U.S.-born children of Japanese immigrants, who were automatically granted U.S. citizenship. Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) – committee responsible for coordinating America’s military strategy. Chaired by Admiral William Leahy, President Roosevelt’s chief of staff, the members included General George C. Marshall as Army chief of staff, Admiral Ernest J. King as commander of the Navy and General Henry Arnold of the Army Air Force. Kamikaze – literally ‘divine wind’, kamikaze pilots deliberately crashed their planes into Allied ships. The tactic began at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, where the first attack took place against HMAS Australia on 21 October 1944. Kamikaze attacks sank a total of 120 ships. Ledo Road – A wartime land connection from the India–Burma border to the Burma Road in middle Burma that was linked to China. U.S. army engineers and allied Southeast Asian laborers completed the Ledo Road in 1944. Lend-lease act – officially ‘An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States.’ An American law of 1941 that allowed export of American weapons and war materiel to Allies around the world fighting the Axis. Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army – a largely ethnically Chinese army formed in Malaya after the Japanese occupation of the country. Manchukuo – Japanese name for the north-eastern part of China (Manchuria), a territory controlled by the Japanese military after the Manchurian Incident of September 1931. The Japanese military established a puppet state there in 1932, maintaining that it was an independent state created by the free will of the local population. In reality it was an informal colony of Japan from 1932 to 1945. Manhattan Project – code name for the secret American project established in June 1942 to research atomic energy and build an atomic bomb.

Glossary  127 New Deal – extensive package of economic, political, and social measures introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to counter the effects of the Great Depression by regulating economic life and establishing basic living standards for American citizens (1933–c.1940). Nisei – First-generation Japanese immigrants to the U.S. Born in Japan, they were not eligible for U.S. citizenship. Office of Strategic Services – the wartime U.S. counter-intelligence operation. Potsdam Declaration – a document issued on 26 July 1945 from Potsdam, Germany, and signed by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, U.S. President Harry S. Truman, Josef Stalin of the USSR, and the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek. The declaration called for Japan’s surrender and outlined the Allies’ terms for the surrender. The Japanese government eventually accepted the declaration. Seri Thai – The ‘Free Thai’, a pro-Allied movement in Thailand that sought to resist the Japanese in the latter part of the war that comprised largely civil servants. Sook ching – ‘Purification by elimination’, the Japanese campaign in Singapore in February and March 1942 that targeted Chinese men for killing. Estimates of the death toll from the campaign number around 8,000 victims. South East Asia Command (SEAC) – an Allied geographic theater of war organized in 1943. SEAC conducted operations in Burma, Ceylon, Malaya, and Sumatra. South West Pacific Area – an Allied military command formed in 1942 that covered operations in Borneo, most of the Dutch East Indies (excepting Sumatra), Australia, Papua and New Guinea, and the western part of the Solomon Islands. Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact – signed in Moscow in April 1941. The two states promised to maintain peaceful and friendly relations and to remain neutral if either state were attacked by a third party. Both parties intended that the pact would guarantee security in the short term. The Soviet Union renounced the pact in April 1945 and declared war on Japan in August 1945. Special Operations Executive – a wartime British counter-intelligence operation with operations around the world. Supreme Council for the Direction of the War (Supreme War Council) (saikō sensō shidō kaigi), Japan – a body established by Prime Minister Koiso Kuniaki in 1944 as a successor to the military-government Liaison Conference, to determine fundamental policies on the conduct of the war. It had six members – the prime minister, foreign minister, army minister, navy minister, and chiefs of staff of the army and navy. When discussing important questions it met in the presence of the emperor, who normally did not speak at the actual meetings, though his wishes were made known beforehand.

128  Glossary The Hump – the Allied air supply route to nationalist China from north-eastern India. ‘Unconditional surrender’ – a doctrine first articulated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1943 as a reassurance to the Soviet Union that the U.S. would fight the Axis to the end, with no compromise. In 1945, adherence to the idea of unconditional surrender discouraged the search for a compromise with the Japanese government as the end of the war approached. United States Army Air Forces – Established on 20 June 1941, the USAAF served as the primary aerial warfare service of the U.S. military. Originally known as the United States Army Air Corps from its founding in July 1926, its change of name reflected the desire of the U.S. government to give the aerial warfare division of the U.S. Army greater autonomy and to instill an esprit de corps. Throughout the duration of the Pacific War, General Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold served as the Chief of the Army Air Forces. At its largest size in late 1944, the USAAF comprised nearly 2.5 million personnel and roughly 80,000 aircraft. Its successes in the Pacific Theatre of Operations and the rapid growth of air power advocates during and after the conflict helped the USAAF secure complete institutional independence from the U.S. Army in September 1947 with the founding of the United States Air Force. Urban area bombing – a type of aerial strategic bombing that seeks to destroy urban area, as opposed to specific military or industrial targets through ‘precision bombing’. Often, though not always, urban area bombing campaigns were conducted with incendiary bombs in the Pacific War. War Relocation Authority – agency established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in March 1942 to manage the internment of Japanese Americans in camps in the interior of the U.S.

Further reading

Printed primary sources Japanese documents on the 1941 official conferences leading up to Pearl Harbor are contained in Nobutaka Ike (ed. and trans.), Japan’s Decision for War: Records of the 1941 Policy Conferences (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967). Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook provide an excellent collection of Japanese oral histories reflecting on the war in their edited book, Japan at War: An Oral History (New York: The New Press, 1992). On the views of Japanese civilians during the war see Samuel Hideo Yamashita, Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003). The second of the two-volume Sources of Japanese Tradition (William Theodore de Bary, comp., New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), and the older but still valuable collection edited by Joyce C. Lebra, Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere in World War II: Selected Readings and Documents (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1975), both have a range of wartime primary sources that explain Japan’s war aims and policies. Extensive material on the Allied prisoner of war experience on the Thailand–Burma Railway is included in Paul H. Kratoska (ed.), The Thailand–Burma Railway, 1942–1946: Documents and Selected Writings, 6 vols (London: Routledge, 2006). Japanese perspectives on the railway appear in Kazuo Tamayama (ed.), Railwaymen in the War: Tales by Japanese Railway Soldiers in Burma and Thailand, 1941–47 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

Origins of the Pacific War and Japan The literature on the Second World War and its origins is voluminous, though relatively few of the works focus solely on the Pacific War. Ronald H. Spector’s Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: Vintage Books, 1985) is one excellent example. Histories of the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor have proven to have broad appeal in the popular market. Many of these texts focus on an alleged conspiracy

130  Further reading that the U.S. government had forewarning of the attack, but more balanced scholarly works include Takuma Melber’s Pearl Harbor: Japan’s Attack and America’s Entry into World War II (Oxford: Polity Press, 2020) and Eri Hotta’s Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013). Hilary Conroy and Harry Wray provide a useful collection of different perspectives on the causes of the Pearl Harbor attack in their edited book, Pearl Harbor Reexamined (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1990). For documents and explanatory essays see Akira Iriye, Pearl Harbor and the Coming of the Pacific War: A Brief History with Documents and Essays (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999). Readers will find histories of Japan’s rise as a modern imperial power will enhance their understanding of the causes of the Pacific War. Two suggested titles are: W. G. Beasley’s The Rise of Modern Japan (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1995) and Peter Duus, Modern Japan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). More specialist texts on the 1930s – the period of increasing tension with China – are also useful, including Sandra Wilson’s The Manchurian Crisis and Japanese Society, 1931–1933 (London: Routledge, 2001).

The War in China The Rise of Modern China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) by Immanuel C. Y. Hsu is a sprawling introductory history of China. The essays in The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the SinoJapanese War of 1937–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), edited by Mark Peattie, Edward J. Drea, and Hans van de Ven, explain in detail the course of Japan’s war in China and historical perspectives on the conflict. The history of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army is explored by Hans van de Ven in War and Nationalism in China, 1925–1945 (London: Routledge, 2003). China’s Bitter Victory: The War with Japan, 1937–1945 (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1992), edited by James Hsiung and Steven Levine, has a range of essays on politics, the economy, and society in China during the war. Timothy Brook, in Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Chinese Elites in Wartime China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), critically examines the sensitive topic of Chinese collaboration with the occupier. Three volumes by Charles F. Romanus and Riley Sunderland are the foundations for any research into America’s support of China in the war: Stilwell’s Mission to China (Washington DC: Department of the Army, Historical Division, 1953); Stilwell’s Command Problems (Washington DC: Department of the Army, Historical Division, 1956); and Time Runs Out in the CBI (Washington DC: Department of the Army, Historical Division, 1959). There is a range of first-person accounts of the war in China. Claire Chennault and Joseph Stilwell both recorded their experiences working

Further reading  131 with the Chiang Kai-shek regime: Chennault in Way of a Fighter: The Memoirs of Claire Lee Chennault (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1949), which is generally positive about the Nationalist regime, and Stilwell in The Stilwell Papers, edited by Theodore H. White (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1991 reprint), which is scathing about the Chinese government. A U.S. soldier’s vivid wartime account of China is given in Evans Fordyce Carlson’s Twin Stories of China: A Behind-the-Scenes Story of China’s Valiant Struggle for Existence by a U.S. Marine Who Lived and Moved with the People (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1940). First-person accounts of American engagement with the Chinese Communists and the Communist army are Edgar Snow’s positive description of the Communists in The Battle for Asia (New York: World Publishing Company, 1941) and David D. Barrett, Dixie Mission: The United States Army Observer Group in Yenan, 1944 (Berkeley: University of California Center for Chinese Studies, 1970).

Military context of the Pacific War On Allied strategy and tactics see John Ellis, Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War (London: Andre Deutsch, 1990); Carl Boyd, American Command of the Sea: Through Carriers, Codes and the Silent Service: World War II and Beyond (Newport News VA.: The Mariners’ Museum, 1995); William Bruce Johnson, The Pacific Campaign in World War II: From Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal (London: Routledge, 2006); and Douglas Ford, The Pacific War: Clash of Empires in World War II (London: Continuum, 2012). Detailed accounts of the final two years of the war are provided by Max Hastings, Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45 (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2008) and James D. Hornfischer, The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific (New York: Bantam Books, 2016). On the American combat experience see Gerald F. Linderman, The World Within War: American Combat Experience in World War II (New York: The Free Press, 1997) and Peter Schrijvers, Bloody Pacific: American Soldiers at War with Japan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Books that cover covert and guerrilla operations include William B. Breuer, MacArthur’s Undercover War: Spies, Saboteurs, Guerrillas and Secret Missions (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1995) and A. B. Feuer, Commando! The M/Z Units’ Secret War against Japan (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996). For a detailed account of the naval war in the Pacific see Dan van der Vat, The Pacific Campaign: World War II, The U.S.– Japanese Naval War 1941–1945 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006). Clay Blair Jr. provides the most authoritative account of the American submarine offensive with Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War against Japan (1975; Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2001). For a Japanese perspective on the naval war see David C. Evans (ed.), The Japanese Navy in World War II: In the

132  Further reading Words of Former Japanese Naval Officers (1969; Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986). Tsuji Masanobu, one of the planners of Japan’s Malaya campaign, gives his version of ‘Japan’s greatest victory, Britain’s worst defeat’ in Masanobu Tsuji, trans. Margaret E. Lake, Singapore 1941–1942: The Japanese Version of the Malayan Campaign of World War II (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1988). The memoir of a Japanese officer on Iwo Jima has been translated and published as Robert D. Eldridge and Charles W. Tatum (eds), Fighting Spirit: The Memoirs of Major Yoshitaka Horie and the Battle of Iwo Jima (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2011). Primary material on kamikaze pilots appears in Albert Axell and Hideaki Kase, Kamikaze: Japan’s Suicide Gods (London: Longman, 2002). Two Japanese novels give gripping accounts of the Japanese soldier’s wartime experience in Southeast Asia. Shohei Ooka, trans. Ivan Morris, Fires on the Plain (1957; Singapore: Tuttle Publishing, 2001) narrates a story in the Philippines; the war in Burma is fictionalized in Michio Takeyama, trans. Howard Hibbett, Harp of Burma (1959; Singapore: Tuttle Publishing, 1989). Relations among allies are discussed by Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, Allies against the Rising Sun: The United States, the British Nations, and the Defeat of Imperial Japan (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009). Events in the Pacific were tied to those in Europe, and Antony Beevor’s The Second World War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2012) is one of the best overall histories of the Second World War. John Dower’s celebrated War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (London: Faber and Faber, 1986) explores the role of racial hatred on both sides of the conflict.

Southeast Asia The war overall in Southeast Asia is succinctly covered in Nicholas Tarling, A Sudden Rampage: The Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia, 1941– 1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001). Varied perspectives on whether the war marked a real turning point in Southeast Asian history are found in Alfred McCoy (ed.), Southeast Asia under Japanese Occupation (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies, 1980). Paul H. Kratoska (ed.), Southeast Asian Minorities in the Wartime Japanese Empire (Abingdon: Routledge Curzon, 2002) shows the social complexity of the war’s impact in the region. The Thai wartime perspective is given in Direk Jayanama, trans. Jane Keyes, Thailand and World War II (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2006). Burma’s war is explained by participants in Ba Maw, Breakthrough in Burma: Memoirs of a Revolution, 1939–1946 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968) and U Nu, trans. J. S. Furnivall, Burma under the Japanese (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1954), and from a mainly British perspective in Julian Thompson, The Imperial War Museum Book of the

Further reading  133 War in Burma, 1942–1945 (London: Pan Books, 2003). Jack Belden has left a valuable journalist account of Stilwell’s retreat from Burma: Retreat with Stilwell: The Story of the Burma Campaign, 1942–1945 (London: Cassell and Co., 1944). Eric T. Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe and Indochina, 1940–1944 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) explains the impact of fascist ideology in Indochina in a comparative perspective. William Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life (New York: Hyperion, 2000) is a detailed biography of Vietnam’s leader and has much information on the war. Harry Benda’s classic account of the impact of Japanese power in Indonesia is still compelling: see The Crescent and the Rising Sun: Indonesian Islam under the Japanese Occupation, 1942–1945 (The Hague: W. van Hoeve Ltd, 1958), as is Benedict Anderson’s study of the end of the war and the Indonesian revolution in Java in a Time of Revolution, Occupation and Resistance 1944–1946 (1972; Jakarta: Equinox Publishing, 2006). Theodore Friend, Between Two Empires: The Ordeal of the Philippines, 1929–1946 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965) is fairly dated but still valuable.

U.S. and Japanese home fronts On the American home front see John W. Jeffries, Wartime America: The World War II Home Front (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2nd edn, 2018); John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994); Kenneth Paul O’Brien and Lynn Hudson Parsons (eds), Home-Front War: World War II and American Society (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995); Allan M. Winkler, Home Front U.S.A.: America During World War II (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 3rd edn, 2012). Works on women on the U.S. home front include D’Ann Campbell, Women at War with America: Private Lives in a Patriotic Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Emily Yellin, Our Mothers’ War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II (New York: Free Press, 2004); and Julia Brock et al. (eds), Beyond Rosie: A Documentary History of Women and World War II (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2015). Black American experiences of the war as both soldiers and civilians are discussed in Neil A. Wynn, The African American Experience During World War II (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). A. Philip Randolph’s activities are described in David Welky, Marching Across the Color Line: A. Philip Randolph and Civil Rights in the World War II Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Works on the internment of Japanese Americans include Bill Hosokawa, Nisei: The Quiet Americans (Boulder: University Press of Colorado,

134  Further reading revised edn, 2002); Minoru Kiyota, trans. by Linda Klepinger Keenan, Beyond Loyalty: The Story of a Kibei (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997); Yoshiko Uchida, Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982); and Gordon H. Chang (ed.), Morning Glory, Evening Shadow: Yamato Ichihashi and his Internment Writings, 1942–1945, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Primary documents and an annotated bibliography appear in Wendy L. Ng, Japanese American Internment during World War II: A History and Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002). Noriko Kawamura examines the wartime role of the Japanese emperor in Emperor Hirohito and the Pacific War (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015). A classic English-language account of the Japanese home front is Thomas R. H. Havens, Valley of Darkness: The Japanese People and World War Two (New York, W. W. Norton, 1978). A more recent work is Samuel Hideo Yamashita, Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015). The American-educated Japanese intellectual Kiyosawa Kiyoshi left a record of wartime civilian life in Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, trans. Eugene Soviak and Kamiyama Tamie, A Diary of Darkness: The Wartime Diary of Kiyosawa Kiyoshi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). Two accounts by Westerners who remained in Japan during the war are provided respectively by the American wife of a Japanese diplomat and by a French journalist: Gwen Terasaki, Bridge to the Sun (London: Michael Joseph, 1958) and Robert Guillain, trans. by William Byron, I Saw Tokyo Burning: An Eyewitness Narrative from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima (London: John Murray, 1981).

Strategic Bombing Scholarly studies on strategic bombing began in earnest in the 1980s with the publication of Wesley F. Craven and James L. Cate’s seven volume work, The Army Air Forces in World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Other works which followed, and do an excellent job of analyzing the strategic bombing of Japan, include Ronald Schaffer’s Wings of Judgment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Michael Sherry’s The Rise of American Air Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Conrad Crane’s Bombs, Cities, and Civilians: American Airpower Strategy in World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993); and Tami Biddle’s Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Autobiographical works such as Curtis LeMay and Mackinlay Kantor, Mission with LeMay: My Story (New York: Doubleday, 1965) and Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold, Global Mission (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), written in the two decades following the end of the Second World War, provide insight into decision-making associated with the strategic bombing

Further reading  135 of Japan. Mission with LeMay also spends considerable effort justifying the urban area bombing of Japan. Other primary sources, such as numerous studies published by United States Strategic Bombing Survey between 1946 and 1947, offer a wealth of information related to many aspects of the bombing campaigns launched against Japan.

Political and diplomatic moves toward ending the war Marc Gallicchio analyses the U.S. doctrine of unconditional surrender in Unconditional: The Japanese Surrender in World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). The vexed issue of the U.S. decision to drop the atomic bombs is examined in Wilson D. Miscamble, The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and the Defeat of Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) and J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs against Japan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, revised ed., 2004). Michael Kort surveys the debates on the bomb and provides primary documents in The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). The effect of the bombs on Japanese decision-making is assessed by Sadao Asada in The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan’s Decision to Surrender: A Reconsideration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Japan’s Longest Day (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1968), compiled by the Pacific War Research Society, reconstructs the last hours before Japan’s surrender from a Japanese perspective. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s edited work, The End of the Pacific War: Reappraisals (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), discusses the interpretive issues relating to Japan’s surrender, especially the question of whether the atomic bomb or Soviet entry into the war was more important to Japanese decision-makers.

Post-war The Pacific War ended with much of the region on the brink of major political and social change. Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia (London: Allen Lane, 2007), by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, illuminates the dynamic years of decolonization after the war. While America grappled with the new political reality in Asia, Europe was also entering a period of dynamic change. The Cold War: A New History (Penguin Books, 2006), by John Gaddis, and Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Vintage, 2010), by Tony Judt, are two major works on the aftermath of war in Europe and the onset of a new era of political tensions. The U.S.–Japan embrace after the San Francisco Peace Treaty, and its associated security treaty, was controversial in Japan. George Packard’s Protest in Tokyo: The Security Treaty Crisis of 1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966) is an essential text on this issue.

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Index

ABDA 21, 125 Absolute National Defense Zone 50, 55 Admiralty Islands 52 African Americans 33–35, 53 air power 52, 58, 60, 64–75 Albacore 54 Allied Council for Japan 90 Anami, Korechika xiii, 85 Arakan region 42, 56, 57 Arita Hachirō 99–101 Arnold, Henry xiii, 65, 72; relieves Hansell of command 68 Atago 60 Atlantic Charter 13 atomic bombs 39, 81–83, 84, 86, 119, 120, 122 Aung San xiii, 24 Australia 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 50, 90 Australia 61 B-29 bombers 39, 54, 55, 66–75, 125; effectiveness of incendiary raids 69–70, 72–73, 116–118; ineffective early raids 66–68 Ba Maw xiii, 46, 47 banzai charge 61, 125 Bataan Death March 21 Bengal 56 Biak 52 Bismarck Sea, Battle of 50 Blewett, George 122 Bose, Subhas Chandra xiv, 44, 46, 56 Britain 93, 99–100, 118; aircraft production 30; women’s work 32 British Indian Army 56, 57 Burma 19–20, 24, 42–44, 56, 57, 58, 59, 107; see also Rangoon Burma Independence Army 24, 125 Burma Road 17, 20, 125

bushidō 62 Byrnes, James xiv, 80 Caroline Islands 52 Cavalla 54 Chengdu 55 Chennault, Claire xiv, 16–17 Chiang Kai-shek xiv, 9, 16–17, 41, 42, 45, 57, 58, 59, 80 China 3–6, 16–18, 20, 22–24, 29, 40, 55, 57, 58, 77, 83, 92–94, 100, 118, 122; Communists 59; as U.S. ally 41–42, 44–45; war with Japan (1937–1945) 8–13, 16–18, 24, 26, 41–42, 77; see also Chengdu; Manchuria/Manchukuo; Wuhan China-Burma-India theater 40, 54, 56, 75, 125 Chindits 43, 57, 125 Chongqing 16–17, 20, 41 Churchill, Winston xiv, 4, 13, 18–19, 42, 49, 51, 54, 80, 82 Cold War 93–96 Combined Chiefs of Staff 51, 59, 125 Combined Fleet 126 Committee of Operations Analysts 68–70; early studies on vulnerability of Japan 111–115 Coral Sea, Battle of 26 Dace 60 Darter 60 DeWitt, J. L. 103 Doolittle Raid 22 Eisenhower, Dwight 27 Executive Order 8802 126 Executive Order 9066 101, 126 Executive Order 9139 104

146 Index Far Eastern Commission 90 German Americans 36 Germany 56, 62, 112–113, 115, 120, 124 Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere 23, 46, 99–101, 108 Great Marianas Turkey Shoot 54 Guadal canal 26, 27, 40, 49, 50, 71 Guam 54, 55, 65, 98 Halsey, William 60 Hansell, Haywood xiv, 66–70; and early use of B-29s against Japan 66–68 Hawaii 98 Henan 58, 59 Hirohito, Emperor xiv–xv, 77, 78, 80, 85, 86, 91 Hiyō 54 Ho Chi Minh xv, 48–49 Hollandia 52 Hong Kong 3, 4, 14, 98 Hukbalahap 49 Hull, Cordell xv, 12, 44 Hump air route 17, 56, 57, 128

Japanese Americans 35–38, 101–103 Japanese military: attempts by radical elements to prevent surrender 85, 86; hard-line officers reluctant to surrender 76–77, 81, 85; plans to counter Allied invasion 79 Japanese Navy 26, 51, 61, 62, 87 Johnson Act 8 Joint Chiefs of Staff 57, 64, 126 kamikaze 51, 60, 61, 62, 63, 77–79, 86, 109–110, 126 Kawasaki 111, 112, 114, 116 King, Ernest xv, 49, 51, 53 Kinkaid, Thomas xv, 60 Kiyose Ichiro 122 Kobe 22, 65, 70, 73, 111, 112, 114, 116 Kohima 56, 57 Koiso Kuniaki xv–xvi, 77, 78 Konoe Fumimaro xvi, 76, 78, 81 Korean War 93–94 Kurita Takeo xvi, 60 Kwajalein 52

Imphal 56 India 3, 16, 17, 18, 20, 23, 40–44, 46, 47, 54, 56, 57 Indian National Army 44, 126 Indochina 10–11, 18, 24, 41, 48 International Military Tribunal for the Far East 121–24; see also war crimes trials Issei 35, 36, 126 Italian Americans 36–37

Laurel, José xvi, 45, 46, 104, 106–108 League of Nations 6–8 Leahy, William 64 Ledo Road 17, 42–43, 57, 126 LeMay, Curtis xvi, 65–70, 111; role in incendiary campaign against Japan 69–70, 72–73 Lend-lease act 17, 126 Leyte Gulf, Battle of 51, 52, 59–61, 62, 64 Lingayen 61 Luzon 49, 52, 61

Jaluit 52 Japan 6, 99–101; air raids on 39, 82; Allied occupation of 89–91, 94–95; casualties 120; civilians 111, 120– 122; government 98; morale 121; munitions production 30; peace, early moves toward 76–79, 80, 81; and Philippines 104, 107–108, 121; and Southeast Asian nationalism 45–49; surrender 84, 85–90, 118–121, 122; women and children left in Manchuria 84; women’s work on home front 32; see also Southeast Asia; Supreme Council for the Direction of the War; urban area bombing; USSR

MacArthur, Douglas xvi–xvii, 20–21, 26, 49–52, 59, 61, 87, 88, 89 Malaya 25–26, 48 Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army 48, 49, 126 Maleolap 52 Manchuria/Manchukuo 8, 23, 83, 84, 100, 126 Manhattan Project 126; see also atomic bombs Manila 14, 20, 21, 61, 108, 109, 110 Manus Island 52 Mao Zedong 9, 93 Marco Polo Bridge 9 Mariana Islands 51, 52, 54, 55, 60, 121; see also Guam; Saipan; Tinian

Index  147 Marshall Islands 50, 51, 52 Matsuo Isao 62, 63, 109–110 Maya 60 Midway, Battle of 26, 40, 41, 49, 55, 98 Mili 52 Mindanao 59 Mindoro 61 Mitscher, Marc xvii, 52 Morison, Samuel Eliot 52 Morotai 59 Mountbatten, Louis xvii, 57 Mutaguchi Ren’ya xvii, 43–44, 56, 58 Myitkyina 57 Nagoya 22, 65, 68, 69, 70, 73, 111, 112, 114, 116 Nanjing 9, 45, 46 Neutrality Act 8 New Deal xviii, 38, 127 New Guinea 22, 26, 27, 40, 49–50, 52, 59 Netherlands Indies 3, 4, 14, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25, 59, 88 Nimitz, Chester xvii, 49, 50, 53, 60 Nisei 35, 36, 127 Nomura Kichisaburō 12 Norstad, Lauris 68–69 Office of Strategic Services 41, 48, 127 Ōnishi Takijirō xvii, 62 Operation Forager 53 Operation Iceberg 70–72 Operation Meeting house 69–70 Osaka 22, 65, 70, 73, 111, 112, 114, 116 Ozawa Jisaburō xvii–xviii, 53–54, 60 Palau Islands 52 Palawan 60 Pearl Harbor 3, 14, 28, 29, 37, 98, 120 Phibun Songkhram xviii, 23, 47–48 Philippines 20–21, 25, 45–46, 49, 51, 52, 59, 61, 98, 121; independence 93, 104, 106–109; see also Leyte; Lingayen; Luzon; Mindanao; Mindoro; Palawan; Philippine Sea, Battle of; San Bernardino Strait Philippine Sea, Battle of 53, 54, 60, 61, 62 Potsdam Conference and Declaration 80–81, 89–90, 118, 127 prisoners of war 9, 47, 88 propaganda 104–105, 109, 121

Quadrant conference 54 Rabaul 53 Randolph, Asa Philip xviii, 33–34 Rangoon 17, 19, 20, 58 Rankin, Karl 107–9 Roosevelt, Franklin xviii,4, 10, 13, 28, 29, 33–34, 37, 38, 42, 45, 49, 51, 54, 59, 79, 98–99, 101, 104 Saipan 53, 54, 55, 61, 65, 70, 74, 76, 77, 88 San Bernardino Strait 60 San Francisco 34, 51, 95, 98, 101 San Francisco Peace Treaty 95 Seeadler Harbor 52 Seri Thai movement 47–48, 127 Sextant conference 51 Sherrod, Robert 61 Shōkaku 54 Singapore 3, 14, 18–19, 21, 25, 43, 44, 47, 93 Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) see China Slim, William xviii, 56 Smith, Holland xviii–xix, 54, 55 Sook ching 19, 127 Southeast Asia: invasion of 3, 14, 18–22; occupation of 22–26, 92 South East Asia Command 40, 48, 127 South West Pacific Area 40–41, 127 Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact 77, 127 Soviet Union see USSR Special Operations Executive 41, 127 Spruance, Raymond xix, 53, 54, 55, 60 Stalin, Josef xix, 42, 78, 80, 83 Stilwell, Joseph xix, 17, 20, 41, 42, 57, 59, 75 submarines 14, 27, 54, 60, 61, 62, 79 suicide 53, 61, 85, 88; see also kamikaze Supreme Commander for Allied Powers 89–91 Supreme Council for the Direction of the War (Supreme War Council) 77–78, 81, 85, 127 Supreme War Council see Supreme Council for the Direction of the War Suzuki Kantarō xix, 77, 78, 81, 86 Taihō 54 Taiwan 3, 6, 20, 46, 49, 51, 52, 71, 93 Takao 60

148 Index Tanaka Nobuo 58 Thailand 23–24, 41, 46–48, 58; see also Thailand-Burma Railway Thailand-Burma Railway 46–47 Tibbs, Kenneth J. 53 Tinian 54, 55, 65, 70 Tōjō Hideki xix, 55, 77, 91–92, 107–108, 121–124 Tokyo 22, 24, 39, 44, 46, 53, 55, 78, 85, 86, 90, 91, 92; bombing of 65–67, 69, 70, 72–75, 82, 111, 112, 114, 116, 122 Trefalt, Beatrice 63 Tripartite Pact 10, 12 Truk 52, 53 Truman, Harry xix–xx, 34, 64, 79–80, 81, 82, 86, 120 Turner, Kelly 53 unconditional surrender 79–80, 81, 128 United States 99–100, 120; decision to use atomic bombs 81–83; Fifth Fleet 53, 54, 60; government 30, 38–39, 103, 118, 121–123; Marines 53, 54, 71, 72; and Philippines 109; sponsorship of industry 29–30, 38; sponsorship of research and technology 38–39; tensions with USSR 82; see also air power; submarines; United States Army Air Forces; United States home front; United States military; United States Navy United States Army Air Forces 65–68, 70–72, 74, 75, 111, 115, 128 United States home front 28–39; agricultural production 30, 31, 32–33; aircraft production 30, 32, 34, 38–39; big business 38; cities 30, 34–35; demographic mobility 33–38; Detroit race riot 34–35; Executive Orders 34, 37; Gross National Product 29; isolationism 28; March on Washington movement 33; munitions production 30, 32, 33, 38–39; productivity 29–33; prosperity, wartime 30–31; public opinion 29; unemployment rate 30; women 31–33; work 29–34; see

also African Americans; German Americans; Italian Americans; Japanese Americans; New Deal; United States military; War Manpower Commission; War Relocation Authority United States military: contracts 38; death rates 28; draft 29; plans to invade Japan 78–79; spending 29, 30 United States Navy 52, 53, 55; Third Fleet 60; Fifth Fleet 53, 54, 60; Seventh Fleet 60, 61 United States Strategic Bombing Survey 62, 120 Urban area bombing 67–70, 72–73, 111–118, 128 USSR 4, 118; fighting in Manchuria 83–85; joins Pacific War 81, 83–85; keeps Japanese captives in Siberia 84–85; peace talks with Japan 77–78; women’s work in 32; see also Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact; Yalta Conference Vietnam 3, 18, 24, 29, 48–49, 88, 92, 93; see also Indochina Wake Island 98 Wang Jingwei xx, 45, 46 war crimes trials 91–92, 122–124 War Manpower Commission 31, 104–105 War Relocation Authority 37, 38, 128 Washington Naval Treaty 7 Watson, Thomas 55 Wilmott, H. P. 60, 62 Wingate, Orde xx, 42–43, 57 women 28, 31–33, 35, 75, 84, 104, 105 Wotje 52 Wuhan 59 Yalta Conference 78 Yamashita Tomoyuki 61 Yasukuni Shrine 110 Yokohama 22, 65, 73, 74, 111, 112, 114, 116 Zaibatsu 91