Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45

Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45 Max Hastings A masterly narrative history of the climactic battles of the Second World War, and companion volume to his bestselling ‘Armageddon’, by the pre-eminent military historian Max Hastings.The battle for Japan that ended many months after the battle for Europe involved enormous naval, military and air operations from the borders of India to the most distant regions of China. There is no finer chronicler of these events than the great military historian Max Hastings, whose gripping account explores not just the global strategic objectives of the USA, Japan and Britain but also the first-hand experiences of the airmen, sailors and soldiers of all the countries who participated in the Far East and the war in the Pacific.The big moments in the story are chosen to reflect a wide variety of human experience: the great naval battle of Leyte Gulf; the under-reported war in China; the re-conquest of Burma by the British Army under General Slim; MacArthur's follies in the Philippines; the Marines on Iwojima and Okinawa; LeMay's fire-raising Super-fortress assaults on Japan; the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the kamikaze pilots of Japan; the almost unknown Soviet blitzkrieg in Manchuria in the last days of the war, as Stalin hastened to gather the spoils; and the terrible final acts across Japanese-occupied Asia.This is classic, epic history – both in the content and the manner of telling. Nemesis MAX HASTINGS THE BATTLE FOR JAPAN, 1944-45 Copyright (#ulink_8e0ffe31-3f6a-5c4c-876a-53c2f69ffa0d) William Collins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/) This ebook edition first published in 2009 First published in Great Britain by HarperPress in 2007 Copyright © Max Hastings 2007 Cover photograph © akg-images/Pictures from History Max Hastings asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operatin at the time of publication Source ISBN: 9780007219810 Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007344093 Version: 2017-03-23 Praise (#ulink_a926d1be-4965-501e-becb-6926cc31943d) From the reviews of Nemesis: ‘The shocking, little-known story of the war against Japan. Absolutely excellent’ JOHN SIMPSON, Observer ‘Spectacular. Hastings is excellent, unsparing and compelling. Searingly powerful’ ANDREW ROBERTS, Sunday Telegraph ‘A triumph. Put all these elements together—the ambition, insight, sureness of touch—and you have a book of real quality’ LAURENCE REES, Sunday Times ‘An outstandingly gripping and authoritative account of the battle for Japan, and a monument to human bravery—and savagery’ DOMINIC SANDBROOK, Daily Telegraph In memory of my son CHARLES HASTINGS 1973-2000 Epigraph (#ulink_5c0b595b-eb97-53d9-ab1a-e2f48f8aa848) War is human, it is as something that is lived like a love or a hatred…It might better be described as a pathological condition because it admits of accidents which not even a skilled physician could have foreseen. MARCEL PROUST ‘Oh, surely they’ll stop now. They’ll be horrified at what they’ve done!’ he thought, aimlessly following on behind crowds of stretchers moving away from the battlefield. Tolstoy’s Pierre Bezukhov at Borodino, 1812 In 1944, there seemed absolutely no reason to suppose that the war might end in 1945. CAPTAIN LUO DINGWEN, Chinese Nationalist army Contents Cover Page (#u32e81502-6d37-517b-b9d5-05b8fedc79bb) Title Page (#ue3555f4f-784f-5e81-921b-ebadbef42f03) Copyright (#ue01a6eee-e0c6-5a12-8a91-3781ea50346f) Praise (#u66ff1fdb-af9e-5b50-b3f5-45001527baea) Dedication (#u0d774d5b-7e9c-5c5f-9276-5735de67098e) Epigraph (#u3014a518-8b48-56a9-9fd0-509bbfabf057) Introduction (#u2290137a-3461-5f17-a1fc-1ee2534b969b) 1 Dilemmas and Decisions (#udcf5ca40-146a-5a57-93b0-d272bfa0453a) 2 Japan: Defying Gravity (#uc5840d67-739f-5f69-af13-fb141790d887) 3 The British in Burma (#u8405f498-6856-5ccb-ba82-91fdd07c960b) 4 Titans at Sea (#u8b06c13b-2cf2-5b39-9c31-6f885c28cdbf) 5 America’s Return to the Philippines (#u797eb7b8-3cd1-5329-8a56-e3f644a2378f) 6 ‘Flowers of Death’: Leyte Gulf (#ub4f43321-9dc4-526c-ab36-26f4691c90cc) 7 Ashore: Battle for the Mountains (#litres_trial_promo) 8 China: Dragon by the Tail (#litres_trial_promo) 9 MacArthur on Luzon (#litres_trial_promo) 10 Bloody Miniature: Iwo Jima (#litres_trial_promo) 11 Blockade: War Underwater (#litres_trial_promo) 12 Burning a Nation: LeMay (#litres_trial_promo) 13 The Road Past Mandalay (#litres_trial_promo) 14 Australians: ‘Bludging’ and ‘Mopping Up’ (#litres_trial_promo) 15 Captivity and Slavery (#litres_trial_promo) 16 Okinawa (#litres_trial_promo) 17 Mao’s War (#litres_trial_promo) 18 Eclipse of Empires (#litres_trial_promo) 19 The Bombs (#litres_trial_promo) 20 Manchuria: The Bear’s Claws (#litres_trial_promo) 21 The Last Act (#litres_trial_promo) 22 Legacies (#litres_trial_promo) A Brief Chronology of the Japanese War (#litres_trial_promo) Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) Notes and Sources (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Other Books By (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Introduction (#ulink_9e763161-2237-52fe-ab4f-18f44098e0ee) Sir Arthur Tedder, Eisenhower’s deputy supreme commander in Europe in 1944-45, suggested that warriors educating themselves for future conflicts should study the early phases of past ones: ‘There are no big battalions or blank cheques then,’ he wrote ruefully. In the first campaigns, nations which are victims rather than initiators of aggression enjoy scanty choices. They strive for survival with inadequate resources, often unsuitable commanders, all the handicaps of fighting on an enemy’s terms. Later, if they are granted time fully to mobilise, they may achieve the luxury of options, of might equal or superior to that of the enemy, of the certainty of final victory tempered only by debate about how to secure this most swiftly and cheaply. Tedder and his Allied comrades experienced all these sensations. For students of history, however, the manner in which the Second World War ended is even more fascinating than that in which it began. Giants of their respective nations, or rather mortal men cast into giants’ roles, resolved the greatest issues of the twentieth century on battlefields in three dimensions, and in the war rooms of their capitals. Some of the most populous societies on earth teemed in flux. Technology displayed a terrifying maturity. Churchill entitled the closing volume of his war memoirs Triumph and Tragedy. For millions, 1944-45 brought liberation, the banishment of privation, fear and oppression; but air attack during those years killed more people than in the rest of the conflict put together. Posterity knows that the war ended in August 1945. However, it would have provided scant comfort to the men who risked their lives in the Pacific island battles, as well as in the other bloody campaigns of that spring and summer, to be assured that the tumult would soon be stilled. Soldiers may accept a need to be the first to die in a war, but there is often an unseemly scramble to avoid becoming the last. I have written Nemesis as a counterpart to my earlier book Armageddon, which describes the 1944-45 struggle for Germany. It is hard to exaggerate the differences between the endgames of the Asian and European wars. In the west, American strategy was dominated by a determination to confront the German army in Europe at the first possible moment—which proved much later than the US joint chiefs of staff desired. It was taken for granted that Allied armies must defeat the main forces of the enemy. Uncertainty focused upon how this should be achieved, and where Soviet and Anglo-American armies might meet. The possibility of offering terms to the Nazis was never entertained. In the Far East, by contrast, there was much less appetite for a ground showdown. Some in the Allied camp argued that the commitment to impose unconditional surrender upon the Japanese should be moderated, if this would avert the necessity for a bloodbath in the home islands. Only in the Philippines and Burma did US and British ground forces encounter, and finally destroy, major Japanese armies—though none was as large as the enemy host deployed in China. The US Navy and Army Air Forces sought to demonstrate that blockade and bombardment could render unnecessary a bloody land campaign in the Japanese home islands. Their hopes were fulfilled in the most momentous and terrible fashion. The phrase ‘heavy casualties’ recurs in studies of the eastern conflict. It is often used to categorise American losses on Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and in smaller island battles. It deserves more sceptical scrutiny than it usually receives, however, being justified only in relation to the relatively small forces engaged, and to the expectation of the American people that a nation as rich and technologically powerful as their own should be able to gain victory without great loss of blood. The lives of some 103,000 Americans were sacrificed to defeat Japan, along with 30,000 British, Indian, Australian and other Commonwealth servicemen, in addition to those who perished in captivity. The US pro rata casualty rate in the Pacific was three and a half times that in Europe. America’s total loss, however, represented only a small fraction of the toll which war extracted from the Soviets, Germans and Japanese, and only 1 per cent of the total deaths in Japan’s Asian war. Americans came to expect in the Pacific a favourable exchange rate of one US casualty for every six or seven Japanese. They were dismayed when, on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the enemy fared better, losing only in the ratio of 1.25:1 and 1.3:1 respectively, though almost all the Japanese losses were fatal, compared with less than one-third of the American. Pervading US strategy was a cultural conceit about the necessary cost of victory. This proved justified, but should not have been taken for granted in a conflict between major industrial nations. I agree wholeheartedly with American scholars Richard Frank and Robert Newman, that underpinning most post-war analysis of the eastern war is a delusion that the nuclear climax represented the bloodiest possible outcome. On the contrary, alternative scenarios suggest that if the conflict had continued for even a few weeks longer, more people of all nations—and especially Japanese—would have lost their lives than perished at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The myth that the Japanese were ready to surrender anyway has been so comprehensively discredited by modern research that it is astonishing some writers continue to give it credence. Japanese intransigence does not of itself validate the use of atomic bombs, but it should frame the context of debate. ‘Retributive justice’ is among the dictionary definitions of nemesis. Readers must judge for themselves, whether the fate which befell Japan in 1945 merits that description, as I believe it does. The war in the Far East extended across an even wider canvas than the struggle for Europe: China, Burma, India, the Philippines, together with a vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Its courses were directed by one of the most extraordinary galaxies of leaders, military and political, the world has ever seen: Japan’s emperor, generals and admirals; Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao Zedong; Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman, Stalin; MacArthur and Nimitz; LeMay, Slim, Mountbatten, Stilwell—and the men who built the bomb. My purpose, as in Armageddon, is to portray a massive and terrible human experience, set within a chronological framework, rather than to revisit the detailed narrative of campaigns that have been described by many authors, and which anyway could not be contained within a single volume. This book focuses upon how and why things were done, what it was like to do them, and what manner of men and women did them. Many of us gained our first, wonderfully romantic notion of the war against Japan by watching the movie of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific. Memories of its scenes pervaded my consciousness as I wrote Nemesis. For all that the film is Hollywood entertainment, it catches a few simple truths about what the struggle was like for Americans. A host of innocent young men and a scattering of young women found themselves transplanted into a wildly exotic setting. The Pacific’s natural beauties provided inadequate compensation, alas, for the discomforts and emotional stresses which they endured amid coral atolls and palm trees. For every fighting soldier, sailor and Marine who suffered the terrors of battle, many more men experienced merely heat and boredom at some godforsaken island base. The phrase ‘the greatest generation’ is sometimes used in the US to describe those who lived through those times. This seems inapt. The people of World War II may have adopted different fashions and danced to different music from us, but human behaviour, aspirations and fears do not alter much. It is more appropriate to call them, without jealousy, ‘the generation to which the greatest things happened’. I chose my terms of reference partly in order to depict examples from a wide range of land, sea and air battles. Though there were some great men upon the stage, the history of World War II is, for the most part, a story of statesmen and commanders flawed as all of us are, striving to engage with issues and dilemmas larger than their talents. How many people are fitted to grapple with decisions of the magnitude imposed by global war? How many commanders in history’s great conflicts can be deemed to have been competent, far less brilliant? While most writers address one eastern campaign or another—Burma, strategic bombing, the war at sea, the island assaults—I have attempted to set all these in context, component parts of the struggle to defeat Japan. I have omitted only the experience of indigenous anti-colonial resistance movements, an important subject so large that it would have overwhelmed my pages. Where possible without impairing coherence, I have omitted familiar anecdotes and dialogue. I have explored some aspects of the struggle that have been neglected by Western authors, notably the Chinese experience and the Russian assault on Manchuria. Nehru once said scornfully: ‘The average European concept of Asia is an appendage to Europe and America—a great mass of people fallen low, who are to be lifted by the good works of the West.’ Twenty years ago, that princely historian Ronald Spector puzzled over the fact that Westerners have always been less interested in the war with Japan than in the struggle against Germany. Remoteness, both geographical and cultural, is the obvious explanation, together with our often morbid fascination with the Nazis. Today, however, readers as well as writers seem ready to bridge the chasm with Asia. Its affairs loom huge in our world. An understanding of its recent past is essential to a grasp of its present, especially when Chinese grievances about the 1931-45 era remain a key issue in relations between Beijing and Tokyo. Some set pieces—Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, Okinawa—are bound to be familiar. I have attempted no primary research on the dropping of the atomic bombs, because the archives have been exhaustively explored and the published literature is vast. Other episodes and experiences may come fresh to readers. I have addressed the issue of why Australia seemed almost to vanish from the war after 1943. Australian soldiers played a notable, sometimes dazzling, part in the North African and New Guinea campaigns. Yet the country’s internal dissensions, together with American dominance of the Pacific theatre, caused the Australian army to be relegated to a frankly humiliating role in 1944-45. All authors of history books owe debts to earlier chroniclers, and it is important to acknowledge these. I am following a path trodden with special distinction by Ronald Spector in Eagle Against the Sun, Richard Frank in Downfall, and Christopher Thorne in Allies of a Kind. John Dower’s books offer indispensable insights into the Japanese experience. John Toland’s The Rising Sun is not a scholarly work, but it contains significant Japanese anecdotal material. These are only the most notable general studies of a period for which the specialised literature is vast. I should add George Macdonald Fraser’s Quartered Safe Out Here, perhaps the most vivid private soldier’s memoir of the Second World War, describing his 1945 experience with Slim’s Fourteenth Army. In Britain and the US I have interviewed some veterans, but focused my research chiefly upon the huge manuscript and documentary collections which are available. My splendid Russian researcher, Dr Luba Vinogradovna, conducted interviews with Red Army veterans, and also translated a mass of documents and written narratives. In China and Japan I have sought out eyewitnesses. Most published Chinese and Japanese memoirs reveal more about what people claim to have done than about what they thought. I will not suggest that face-to-face interviews with a Westerner necessarily persuaded Chinese and Japanese witnesses to open their hearts, but I hope that the tales which emerge make some characters seem flesh and blood, rather than mere strangled Asian names speaking tortured English. In most Western accounts of the war, the Japanese remain stubbornly opaque. It is striking how seldom Japanese historians are quoted in US and British scholarly discussions. This is not, I think, a reflection of American or British nationalistic conceit, but rather of the lack of intellectual rigour which characterises even most modern Japanese accounts. There is a small contributory point, that literal translations from the Japanese language cause statements and dialogue to sound stilted. Where possible here, I have taken the liberty of adjusting quoted Japanese speech and writing into English vernacular. Scholars might suggest that this gives a misleading idea of the Japanese use of language. It may help, however, to make Asian characters more accessible. With the same intention, although the Japanese place surnames before given names, I have reversed this in accordance with Western practice. I have adopted some other styles for convenience. The Japanese called their Manchurian puppet state ‘Manchukuo’. Modern Chinese never speak of ‘Manchuria’, but of ‘the north-eastern provinces’. Nonetheless, I have here retained the name ‘Manchuria’, save when the Japanese political creation is discussed. Modern Indonesia is referred to as the Dutch East Indies, Malaysia as Malaya, Taiwan as Formosa and so on. After much vacillation, however, I have adopted modern pinyin spellings for Chinese names and places, because these are more familiar to a modern readership. I have, however, accepted the loss of consistency involved in retaining the familiar usages ‘Kuomintang’ and ‘Manchukuo’. Naval and military operations are timed by the twenty-four-hour clock, while the twelve-hour clock is used in describing the doings of civilians. China is the country which today provides a historical researcher with the greatest revelations. I first visited it in 1971 as a TV film-maker, and again in 1985 when writing a book on the Korean War. On neither assignment was it possible to break through the ironclad culture of propaganda. In 2005, by contrast, I found ordinary Chinese welcoming, relaxed, and remarkably open in conversation. Many, for instance, do not hesitate to assert a respect for Chiang Kai-Shek, and reservations about Mao Zedong, which were unavowable thirty years ago. Some Chinese bitterly observed to me that they found the Maoist Cultural Revolution a worse personal experience than the Second World War. Almost all those with Nationalist associations suffered the confiscation and destruction of their personal papers and photographs. Several served long terms of imprisonment—one because wartime service as a Soviet-sponsored guerrilla caused him to be denounced twenty years later as a Russian agent. I conducted almost all my own interviews in China and Japan, with the help of interpreters, but four former Chinese ‘comfort women’ of the Japanese army declined to tell their stories to a man and a Westerner, and instead talked to my splendid researcher, Gu Renquan. In modern China, as in Russia and to some degree Japan, there is no tradition of objective historical research. Absurd claims are thus made even by academics, unsupported by evidence. This is especially true about the China-Japan war, which remains a focus of national passions, fomented by the Chinese government for political purposes. An appropriately sceptical Western researcher, however, can still achieve much more than was possible a decade or two ago. I found it exhilarating to stand on the snowclad border with Russia, where Soviet armies swept across the Ussuri river in August 1945; to clamber through the tunnels of the massive old Japanese fortress at Hutou, some of which have today been reopened as part of the local ‘Fortress Relics Museum of Japanese Aggression against China’; to meet peasants who witnessed the battles. In a caf? in Hutou, at nine in the morning local people were clustered around the big TV, watching one of the melodramas about the Japanese war which Chinese film-makers produce in industrial quantities. These celluloid epics, echoing with the diabolical laughter of Japanese occupiers as they slaughter heroic Chinese peasants, make such Hollywood war movies as The Sands of Iwo Jima seem models of understatement. When I asked Jiang Fushun, in 1945 a teenage peasant in Hutou, if there were any happy moments in his childhood, he responded bitterly: ‘How can you ask such a question? Our lives were unspeakable. There was only work, work, work, knowing that if we crossed the Japanese in any way, we would go the way of others who were thrown into the river with their hands tied to a rock.’ In his flat in Harbin, eighty-four-year-old Li Fenggui vividly re-enacted for me the motions of a bayonet fight in which he engaged with a Japanese soldier in 1944. Likewise, in Japan, at the tiny doll’s house in a Tokyo suburb where he lives, Lt Cmdr Haruki Iki cherishes a plastic model of the torpedo bomber which he once flew, alongside a garish painting of the British battlecruiser Repulse, which he sank in 1941. To meet him is to encounter a legend. At eighty-seven, former navy pilot Kunio Iwashita retains the energy and quick movements of a man thirty years younger. Today he is known in Japan as ‘Mr Zero’. I met him when he had just returned from the premiere of a lurid new Japanese movie epic, Men of the Yamato. Iwashita overflew the vast battleship on the morning she was sunk in April 1945, and has never forgotten the spectacle. He said with a wry smile: ‘I sobbed all the way through the film.’ I asked another navy fighter pilot, Toshio Hijikata, how he and his comrades spent their hours on Kyushu in the early months of 1945, as they prepared to scramble to meet American B-29 formations in the same fashion as RAF pilots waited for the Luftwaffe five years earlier, during the Battle of Britain. ‘We played a lot of bridge,’ said Hijikata. ‘It was part of the whole ethos of the Imperial Japanese Navy, which tried so hard to emulate the Royal Navy.’ The notion of Japanese fliers calling ‘three spades, four clubs’ to each other between sorties seemed irresistibly unexpected and droll. My daughter once observed in a domestic context: ‘Life is what you are used to, Daddy.’ This seems an important truth in understanding human responses to circumstances. To a remarkable degree the young, especially, adapt to predicaments which might seem unendurable, if these are all that they have known. Across the globe, the generation which grew to maturity during the Second World War learned to accept war’s terrors and privations as a norm. This applies to many people whose stories I seek to record in this book. Some general observations can be made about evidence, of which the most obvious is that scepticism is in order, even when reading formal contemporary minutes of meetings, unit war diaries or ships’ logs. Few official narratives in any language explicitly acknowledge disaster, panic or failure, or admit that people ran away. Likewise, many splendid lines attributed by historians to participants are probably apocryphal. People find it infinitely easier to imagine afterwards what should have been said in crises, rather than what actually was. Witticisms which survive through the generations retain a certain validity, however, if they seem to catch a spirit of the moment, like ‘Nuts!’, the alleged American response to a German demand for surrender at Bastogne. Oral evidence collected in the early twenty-first century by interviewing men and women who witnessed events more than sixty years earlier is immensely valuable in illustrating moods and attitudes. But old people have forgotten many things, or can claim to remember too much. Those who survive today were very young in the war years. They held junior ranks and offices, if indeed any at all. They knew nothing worth rehearsing about events beyond their own eyesight and earshot. The reflections of their age group cannot be considered representative of a nation’s mindset and behaviour in 1944-45. It is essential to reinforce their tales with written testimony from those who were at the time more mature and exalted. It is notable how swiftly historical perceptions change. For instance, in post-war Japan General Douglas MacArthur was a hero, an icon, almost a god, in recognition of his perceived generosity to the Japanese people in defeat. But a modern historian, Kazutoshi Hando, says: ‘In Japan today, MacArthur is almost unknown.’ Similarly, a Chinese historian told me that few of his young compatriots have heard of Stalin. I feel obliged to restate a caveat which I entered in the foreword of Armageddon: statistics given here are the best available, but all large numbers related to the Second World War must be treated warily. Figures detailing American and British activities—though emphatically not their contemporary estimates of losses inflicted on the enemy—are credible, but those of other nations are disputed, or represent guesstimates. For instance, although the rape of Nanjing falls outside the compass of my narrative, I am persuaded that Iris Chang’s well-known book claims a death toll for the city in excess of its actual, rather than previously recorded, 1937 population. This does not invalidate the portrait of horror which she depicts, but it illustrates the difficulty of establishing credible, never mind conclusive, numbers. The longer I write books about the Second World War, the more conscious I become that a fundamental humility is necessary when offering judgements upon those who conducted it. Harold Macmillan, British minister in the Mediterranean 1943-45 and later prime minister, once told me a story of his last encounter with Field Marshal Earl Alexander, wartime Allied commander-in-chief in Italy: ‘We were going into the theatre together, and I turned to him and said one of those old man’s things: “Alex, wouldn’t it be lovely to have it all to do over again.” Alexander shook his head decisively. “Oh, no,” he said. “We might not do nearly so well.”’ Those of us who have never been obliged to participate in a great war seem wise to count our blessings and incline a bow to all those, mighty and humble, who did so. MAX HASTINGS Hungerford, England and Kamogi, Kenya April 2007 1 Dilemmas and Decisions (#ulink_023964c9-656e-55b3-a79f-d3c67a2757fb) 1 WAR IN THE EAST Our understanding of the events of 1939-45 might be improved by adding a plural and calling them the Second World Wars. The only common strand in the struggles which Germany and Japan unleashed was that they chose most of the same adversaries. The only important people who sought to conduct the eastern and western conflicts as a unified enterprise were Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and their respective chiefs of staff. After the 7 December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor caused the United States to become a belligerent, Allied warlords addressed the vexed issue of allocating resources to rival theatres. Germany was by far the Allies’ more dangerous enemy, while Japan was the focus of greater American animus. In 1942, at the battles of the Coral Sea in May and Midway a month later, the US Navy won victories which halted the Japanese advance across the Pacific, and removed the danger that Australia might be invaded. Through the two years which followed, America’s navy grew in strength, while her Marines and soldiers slowly and painfully expelled the Japanese from the island strongholds which they had seized. But President Roosevelt and Gen. George Marshall, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, resisted the demands of Admiral Ernest King, the US Navy’s C-in-C, and of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander in the south-west Pacific, for the eastern theatre to become the principal focus of America’s war effort. In 1943 and 1944, America’s vast industrial mobilisation made it possible to send large forces of warships and planes east as well as west. Most US ground troops, however, were dispatched across the Atlantic, to fight the Germans. Once Japan’s onslaught was checked, the Allies’ eastern commanders were given enough forces progressively to push back the enemy, but insufficient to pursue a swift victory. The second-class status of the Japanese war was a source of resentment to those who had to fight it, but represented strategic wisdom. The US and Britain dispatched separate companies to Europe and Asia, to perform in different plays. Stalin, meanwhile, was interested in the conflict with Japan only insofar as it might offer opportunities to amass booty. ‘The Russians may be expected to move against the Japanese when it suits their pleasure,’ suggested an American diplomat in an October 1943 memorandum to the State Department, ‘which may not be until the final phases of the war—and then only in order to be able to participate in dictating terms to the Japanese and to establish new strategic frontiers.’ Until 8 August 1945, Soviet neutrality in the east was so scrupulously preserved that American B-29s which forced-landed on Russian territory had to stay there, not least to enable their hosts to copy the design. To soldiers, sailors and airmen, any battlefield beyond their own compass seemed remote. ‘What was happening in Europe really didn’t matter to us,’ said Lt John Cameron-Hayes of 23rd Indian Mountain Artillery, fighting in Burma. More surprising was the failure of Germany and Japan to coordinate their war efforts, even to the limited extent that geographical separation might have permitted. These two nominal allies, whose fortunes became conjoined in December 1941, conducted operations in almost absolute isolation from each other. Hitler had no wish for Asians to meddle in his Aryan war. Indeed, despite Himmler’s best efforts to prove that Japanese possessed some Aryan blood, he remained embarrassed by the association of the Nazi cause with Untermenschen. He received the Japanese ambassador in Berlin twice after Pearl Harbor, then not for a year. When Tokyo in 1942 proposed an assault on Madagascar, the German navy opposed any infringement of the two allies’ agreed spheres of operations, divided at 70 degrees of longitude. A Japanese assault on the Soviet Union in 1941-42, taking the Russians in the rear as they struggled to stem Hitler’s invasion, might have yielded important rewards for the Axis. Stalin was terrified of such an eventuality. The July 1941 oil embargo and asset freeze imposed by the US on Japan—Roosevelt’s clumsiest diplomatic act in the months before Pearl Harbor—was partly designed to deter Tokyo from joining Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa. Japan’s bellicose foreign minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, resigned in the same month because his government rejected his urgings to do so. Only in January 1943, towards the end of the disaster of Stalingrad, did Hitler made a belated and unsuccessful attempt to persuade Japan to join his Russian war. By then, the moment had passed at which such an intervention might have altered history. Germany’s Asian ally was far too heavily committed in the Pacific, South-East Asia and China, gratuitously to engage a new adversary. So perfunctory was Berlin’s relationship with Tokyo that when Hitler gifted to his ally two state-of-the-art U-boats for reproduction, German manufacturers complained about breaches of their patent rights. One of Japan’s most serious deficiencies in 1944-45 was lack of a portable anti-tank weapon, but no attempt was made to copy the cheap and excellent German Panzerfaust. Japan and Germany were alike fascistic states. Michael Howard has written: ‘Both [nations’] programmes were fuelled by a militarist ideology that rejected the bourgeois liberalism of the capitalist West and glorified war as the inevitable and necessary destiny of mankind.’ The common German and Japanese commitment to making war for its own sake provides the best reason for rejecting pleas in mitigation of either nation’s conduct. The two Axis partners, however, pursued unrelated ambitions. The only obvious manifestation of shared interest was that Japanese planning was rooted in an assumption of German victory. Like Italy in June 1940, Japan in December 1941 decided that the old colonial powers’ difficulties in Europe exposed their remoter properties to rapine. Japan sought to seize access to vital oil and raw materials, together with space for mass migration from the home islands. A US historian has written of Japan’s Daitoa Senso, Greater East Asian War: ‘Japan did not invade independent countries in southern Asia. It invaded colonial outposts which Westerners had dominated for generations, taking absolutely for granted their racial and cultural superiority over their Asian subjects.’ This is true as far as it goes. Yet Japan’s seizures of British, Dutch, French and American possessions must surely be seen in the context of its earlier aggression in China, where for a decade its armies had flaunted their ruthlessness towards fellow Asians. After seizing Manchuria in 1931, the Japanese in 1937 began their piecemeal pillage of China, which continued until 1945. Inaugurating its ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’, Japan perceived itself merely as a latecomer to the contests for empire in which other great nations had engaged for centuries. It saw only hypocrisy and racism in the objections of Western imperial powers to its bid to match their own generous interpretations of what constituted legitimate overseas interests. Such a view was not completely baseless. Japan’s pre-war economic difficulties and pretensions to a policy of ‘Asia for Asians’ inspired some sympathy among subject peoples of the European empires. This vanished, however, in the face of the occupiers’ behaviour in China and elsewhere. Japanese pogroms of Chinese in South-East Asia were designed partly to win favour with indigenous peoples, but these in turn soon found themselves suffering appallingly. The new rulers were inhibited from treating their conquests humanely, even had they wished to do so, by the fact that the purpose of seizure was to strip them of food and raw materials for the benefit of Japan’s people. Western audiences have been told much since 1945 about Japanese wartime inhumanity to British, Americans and Australians who fell into their hands. This pales into absolute insignificance beside the scale of their mistreatment of Asians. It is a fascinating speculation, how events might have evolved if the US and its Philippines dependency had been excluded from Japanese war plans in December 1941; had Tokyo confined itself to occupying British Malaya and Burma, along with the Dutch East Indies. Roosevelt would certainly have wished to confront Japanese aggression and enter the war—the oil embargo imposed by the US following Japan’s advance into Indochina was the tipping factor in deciding Tokyo to fight the Western powers. It remains a moot point, however, whether Congress and public sentiment would have allowed the president to declare war in the absence of a direct assault on American national interests or the subsequent German declaration of war on the US. There was once a popular delusion that Japan’s attack smashed the American Pacific Fleet. In truth, however, the six old battleships disabled at Pearl Harbor—all but one were subsequently restored for war service by brilliantly ingenious repair techniques—mattered much less to the balance of forces than the four American aircraft carriers, oil stocks and dockyard facilities which escaped. Japan paid a wholly disproportionate moral price for a modest, if spectacular, tactical success. The ‘Day of Infamy’ roused the American people as no lesser provocation could have done. The operation must thus be judged a failure, rendering hollow the exultation of the Imperial Navy’s fliers as they landed back on their carriers on 7 December 1941. Thereafter, Americans were united in determination to avenge themselves on the treacherous Asians who had assaulted a peace-loving people. The only important strategic judgement which the Japanese got right was that their fate hinged upon that of Hitler. German victory was the sole eventuality which might have saved Japan from the consequences of assaulting powers vastly superior to itself in military and industrial potential. Col. Masanobu Tsuji, architect of the Japanese army’s capture of Singapore and a fanatical advocate of national expansion, said: ‘We honestly believed that America, a nation of storekeepers, would not persist with a loss-making war, whereas Japan could sustain a protracted campaign against the Anglo-Saxons.’ Tokyo’s greatest misjudgement of all was to perceive its assault as an act of policy which might be reviewed in the light of events. In December 1941 Japan gambled on a short war, swift victory, and acceptance of terms by the vanquished. Even in August 1945, many Japanese leaders refused to acknowledge that the terms of reference for the struggle ceased to be theirs to determine on the day of Pearl Harbor. It was wildly fanciful to suppose that the consequences of military failure might be mitigated through diplomatic parley. By choosing to participate in a total war, the nation exposed itself to total defeat. Although the loss of Hong Kong, Malaya and Burma in 1941-42 inflicted on Britain humiliations to match those suffered at Japanese hands by the US, its people cared relatively little about the Far Eastern war, a source of dismay to British soldiers obliged to fight in it. Winston Churchill was tormented by a desire to redeem the defeat in February 1942 of some 70,000 combat troops under British command by a force of 35,000 Japanese. ‘The shame of our disaster at Singapore could…only be wiped out by our recapture of that fortress,’ he told the British chiefs of staff as late as 6 July 1944, in one of his many—fortunately frustrated—attempts to allow this objective to determine eastern strategy. To the British public, however, the Asian war seemed remote. The Japanese character in the BBC’s legendary ITMA radio comedy show was Hari Kari, a gabbling clown. In June 1943 the Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, proposed forming a committee to rouse the British public against its Asian enemies. The Minister of Information, Brendan Bracken, strongly dissented: It is all very well to say ‘We must educate the British public to regard the Japanese as if they were Germans, and war in the Pacific as if it were war in Europe.’ But, while the Japanese remain many thousands of miles away, the Germans have for three years been only twenty miles distant from our shore and, too often, vertically overhead. Interest and feeling follow where friends and loved ones are fighting…Europe is very much a home concern, whereas knowledge of or interest in the Far East is sparsely distributed in this country…I do not think that any committee could do much to alter ‘the state of morale’…The people have been left under no misapprehension by the PM that it is their duty to turn and tackle Japan when the time comes… Those Britons who did think about the Japanese shared American revulsion towards them. When reports were broadcast in early 1944 of the maltreatment of prisoners, an editorial in the Daily Mail proclaimed: ‘The Japanese have proved a sub-human race…Let us resolve to outlaw them. When they are beaten back to their own savage land, let them live there in complete isolation from the rest of the world, as in a leper compound, unclean.’ The American historian John Dower explains Western attitudes in racist terms. US Admiral William Halsey set the tone after Pearl Harbor, asserting that when the war was over, ‘Japanese will be spoken only in hell.’ A US War Department film promoting bond sales employed the slogan: ‘Every War Bond Kills a Jap’. An American sub-machine gun manufacturer advertised its products as ‘blasting big red holes in little yellow men’. There was no counterpart on the European fronts to the commonplace Pacific practices of drying and preserving Japanese skulls as souvenirs, and sending home to loved ones polished bones of enemy dead. A British brigade commander in Burma once declined to accept a report from the 4/1st Gurkhas about the proximity of ‘Nips’. Their colonel, Derek Horsford, dispatched a patrol to gather evidence. Next day, Horsford left three Japanese heads, hung for convenience on a string, beside his commander’s desk. The brigadier said: ‘Never do that again. Next time, I’ll take your word for it.’ But those who argue that the alien appearance and culture of the Japanese generated unique hatred and savagery seem to give insufficient weight to the fact that the Japanese initiated and institutionalised barbarism towards both civilians and prisoners. True, the Allies later responded in kind. But in an imperfect world, it seems unrealistic to expect that any combatant in a war will grant adversaries conspicuously better treatment than his own people receive at their hands. Years ahead of Pearl Harbor Japanese massacres of Chinese civilians were receiving worldwide publicity. Tokyo’s forces committed systemic brutalities against Allied prisoners and civilians in the Philippines, East Indies, Hong Kong and Malaya—for instance, the slaughter of Chinese outside Singapore in February 1942—long before the first Allied atrocity against any Japanese is recorded. The consequence of so-called Japanese fanaticism on the battlefield, of which much more later, was that Allied commanders favoured the use of extreme methods to defeat them. As an example, the Japanese rejected the convention customary in Western wars, whereby if a military position became untenable, its defenders gave up. In August 1944, when German prisoners were arriving in the United States at the rate of 50,000 a month, after three years of the war only 1,990 Japanese prisoners reposed in American hands. Why, demanded Allied commanders, should their men be obliged to risk their own lives in order to indulge the enemy’s inhuman doctrine of mutual immolation? The Anglo-American Lethbridge Mission, which toured theatres of war assessing tactics, urged in a March 1944 report that mustard and phosgene gases should be employed against Japanese underground defensive positions. The report’s conclusion was endorsed by Marshall, US air chief Gen. ‘Hap’ Arnold and MacArthur, even though the latter abhorred the area bombing of Japanese cities. ‘We are of the opinion,’ wrote the Lethbridge team, ‘that the Japanese forces in the field will not be able to survive chemical warfare attack…upon a vast scale…[This] is the quickest method of bringing the war to a successful conclusion.’ Despite the weight of opinion which favoured gas, it was vetoed by President Roosevelt. The Allies certainly perceived victory over Japan as the reversal of a painful cultural humiliation, the defeats of 1941-42. But it seems mistaken to argue that they behaved ruthlessly towards the Japanese, once the tide of war turned, because they were Asians. The US pursued a historic love affair with other Asians, the people of China, a nation which it sought to make a great power. A leading British statesman told an audience in February 1933: ‘I hope we shall try in England to understand a little the position of Japan, an ancient state with the highest sense of national honour and patriotism and with a teeming population of remarkable energy. On the one side they see the dark menace of Soviet Russia; on the other, the chaos of China, four or five provinces of which are actually now being tortured, under Communist rule.’ Remarkable as it may seem to posterity, the speaker was Winston Churchill, addressing the Anti-Socialist and Anti-Communist Union. Allied hatred of, contempt for, and finally savagery towards their Pacific foes were surely inspired less by racial alienation than by their wartime conduct. It may be true that Japanese physiognomy lent itself to Anglo-Saxon caricature. But it seems mistaken to argue that—for instance—Americans felt free to incinerate Japanese, and finally to drop atomic bombs upon them, only because they were Asians. Rather, these were Asians who forged a reputation for uncivilised behaviour not merely towards their Western enemies, but on a vastly greater scale towards their fellow Asian subject peoples. If the Allies treated the Japanese barbarously in the last months of the war, it seems wrong thus to perceive a moral equivalence between the two sides. At its zenith in 1942, the Japanese empire extended over twenty million square miles. Most were water, but even Tokyo’s land conquests were a third greater than Berlin’s. Japanese forces were deployed from the north-eastern extremities of India to the northern border of China, from the myriad islands of the Dutch East Indies to the jungle wildernesses of New Guinea. Few Allied servicemen were aware that, throughout the war, more than a million enemy soldiers—approximately half Tokyo’s fighting formations—were deployed to garrison Manchuria and sustain the occupation of eastern China. By the summer of 1944, while some Japanese formations still held out on New Guinea and Bougainville, American forces had driven eastwards across the Pacific, dispossessing the enemy island by island of air and naval bases. Some nineteen divisions, about a quarter of the Imperial Army’s strength, were deployed against the British and Chinese in Burma, and garrisoned Malaya. A further twenty-three divisions, some reduced to fragments and amounting in all to a further quarter of Japanese combat capability, confronted US soldiers and Marines on their oceanic line of advance. ‘Americans ought to like the Pacific,’ asserted a jocular passage of the 1944 official US Forces’ Guide to their theatre of war. ‘They like things big, and the Pacific is big enough to satisfy the most demanding…Quonset huts and tents are the most profuse growth on the main islands we occupy. In arguments with trees, bulldozers always win. Americans who eat out a lot in the Carolines will have trouble with girth control. The basic food the natives eat is starchy vegetables—breadfruit, taro, yams, sweet potatoes and arrowroot. Gonorrhea is found in at least one-third of the natives, and there is some syphilis.’ Almost 400,000 British servicemen served in the Far East, together with more than two million soldiers of Britain’s Indian Army. In other words, though the US absolutely dominated the conduct of the war against Japan, the British mobilised far more people to do their modest share. One and a quarter million Americans served in the Pacific and Asia, a zone of operations embracing a third of the globe. Of these, 40 per cent of officers and 33 per cent of men spent some time in combat, by the most generous interpretation of that word. Over 40 per cent saw no action at all, working in the vast support organisations necessary to maintain armies, fleets and air forces thousands of miles from home. There was a chronic shortage of manpower to shift supplies in the wake of the advancing spearheads. All strategy is powerfully influenced by logistics, but the Pacific war was especially so. Marshall and MacArthur once discussed a proposal to ship 50,000 coolies a month from China to boost the labour force in their rear areas, dismissing it only because the practicalities were too complex. Waste was a constant issue. Americans fighting for their lives were understandably negligent about the care of food, weapons, equipment, vehicles. The cumulative cost was enormous, when every ration pack and truck tyre had to be shipped halfway across the world to the battlefield. Up to 19 per cent of some categories of food were spoilt in transit by climate, poor packing or careless handling. Many of those who did the fighting of 1944-45 had been mere children in September 1939, or indeed December 1941. Philip True was a sixteen-year-old Michigan high school student at the time of Pearl Harbor—‘I didn’t think I’d be in World War II.’ By 1945, however, he was navigating a B-29. The merest chance dictated whether a man called to his country’s service finished up in a foxhole in Okinawa, in the cockpit of a Spitfire, or pushing paper at a headquarters in Delhi. For millions of people of every nationality, the wartime experience was defined by the need to make journeys far from home, sometimes of an epic nature, across oceans and continents, at risk of their lives. Many British and American teenagers, without previous knowledge of life outside their own communities, found uniformed service a unifying and educating force. They learned that the only redemptive feature of war is the brotherhood which it forges. ‘The people are what I really remember,’ said USAAF pilot Jack Lee DeTour, who bombed South-East Asia from India. If men got home on leave, many felt alienated from civilians who had not shared their perils and sacrifices. ‘Only shipmates were important to me,’ wrote US naval rating Emory Jernigan. Eugene Hardy, a bosun’s mate, came from a farm family so dirt-poor that he had never set foot in a restaurant until he joined the navy in 1940. Men learned to live with others from utterly different backgrounds, often possessing quite different outlooks. For instance, a million messroom or foxhole arguments between American northerners and southerners featured the line: ‘You want a nigger to marry your sister?’ Somehow, out of it all, most men learned a lot about viewpoints other than their own, and about mutual tolerance. A British soldier expressed in his journal reflections about wartime conscript experience which have almost universal validity: ‘Men live conscious all the time that their hearts, roots, origins lie elsewhere in some other life…They measure the hardships, privations, weariness here against the memory of a past that they hope to continue in the future…Since their hearts reside elsewhere, they face the present with an armoured countenance.’ The author meant that most warriors seek to preserve their sanity by shielding some corner of themselves from proximate reality, so often unpleasant. US naval officers protested at the assertively unseamanlike outlook of cryptanalysts working at the Pacific Fleet’s superb ‘Magic’ code-breaking centre in Honolulu, which played such a critical part in Allied victory. Their commander dismissed their complaints: ‘Relax, we have always won our wars with a bunch of damned civilians in uniform anxious to get back to their own affairs, and we will win this one the same way.’ Winston Churchill often asserted his conviction that the proper conduct of war demanded that ‘the enemy should be made to bleed and burn every day’. The Pacific and Burma campaigns, by contrast, were characterised by periods of intense fighting interspersed with long intervals of inaction and preparation. Whereas on the Russian front opposing forces were in permanent contact, and likewise in north-west Europe from June 1944, in the east Japanese and Allied troops were often separated by hundreds, even thousands, of miles of sea or jungle. Few Westerners who served in the war against Japan enjoyed the experience. It was widely agreed by veterans that the North African desert was the most congenial, or rather least terrible, theatre. Thereafter in ascending intensity of grief came north-west Europe, Italy, and finally the Far East. Few soldiers, sailors or airmen felt entirely healthy during Asian or Pacific service. The stifling heat below decks in a warship made daily routine enervating, even before the enemy took a hand. The only interruptions to months at sea were provided by brief spasms in an overcrowded rest camp on some featureless atoll. For those fighting the land campaigns, disease and privation were constants, vying as threats to a man’s welfare with a boundlessly ingenious and merciless enemy. ‘All the officers at home want to go to other theatres because there is more publicity there,’ wrote one of MacArthur’s corps commanders, Lt-Gen. Robert Eichelberger, in a gloomy letter to his wife. Eichelberger was a career soldier, one of those whom war provided with dramatic scope for fulfilment and advancement. Civilians in uniform, however, were vulnerable to the misery identified by British novelist Anthony Powell, ‘that terrible, recurrent army dejection, the sensation that no one cares a halfpenny whether you live or die’. ‘Hello, suckers,’ ‘Tokyo Rose’ taunted millions of Allied servicemen from Radio Japan. ‘I got mine last night, your wives and sweethearts probably got theirs—did you get yours?’ Corporal Ray Haskel of the US Army wrote from the South Pacific to a Hollywood starlet named Myrtle Ristenhart, whose picture he had glimpsed in Life magazine. Rodgers and Hammerstein would have appreciated his sentiments: ‘My dear Myrtle, guess you are wondering who this strange person could be writing to you. We are here in the Pacific and got kind of lonesome and so thought we would drop you a few lines…There isn’t any girls here at all but a few natives and a few nurses and we can’t get within ten miles of them…When you can find time please answer this letter and if you have a small picture we would appreciate it, Sincerely your RAY. PS I am an Indian, fullblooded and very handsome.’ ‘Here it is a Burma moon with not a girl in sight and a few dead Japs trying to stink you out,’ Sgt Harry Hunt of the British Fourteenth Army wrote miserably to a relative in England. ‘…It must be lovely to soldier back home, just to get away from this heat and sweat, from these natives, to get together with white men…There it comes, the rain again, rain rain that’s all we get, then the damp, it slowly eats into your bones, you wake up like nothing on earth, you always feel sleepy. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going, better close now before I use bad words, remember me to dad, mum and all.’ One of Hunt’s senior officers, Maj.-Gen. Douglas Gracey, took as bleak a view from a loftier perspective: ‘Nearly every Jap fights to the last or runs away to fight another day. Until morale cracks, it must be accepted that the capture of a Japanese position is not ended until the last Jap in it (generally several feet underground) is killed. Even in the most desperate circumstances, 99 per cent of the Japs prefer death or suicide to capture. The fight is more total than in Europe. The Jap can be compared to the most fanatical Nazi Youth, and must be dealt with accordingly.’ ‘Dear Mother and Dad,’ Lt Richard Kennard wrote from one of the Pacific island battles in which he was serving as an artillery forward observer with the US 1st Marine Division. ‘War is just terrible, just awful, awful, awful. You have no idea how it hurts to see American boys all shot up, wounded, suffering from pain and exhaustion and those that fall down never to move again. After this war is all over I shall cherish and respect more than anything else all that is sweet, tender and gentle. Our platoon leaders and company commanders are more afraid of what their men will think of them if they don’t face the enemy fire and danger along with them than of getting shot by the Jap. I have my fingers crossed every minute I am up there in the front lines and pray each night that I won’t get hit.’ China’s people paid a vastly more terrible price than any other belligerent nation, at least fifteen million dead, for its part in the struggle against the Japanese. The country had been at war since 1937. Few Chinese dared to anticipate any end to their miseries, least of all victory. ‘In 1944,’ said Captain Luo Dingwen of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist army, ‘there seemed absolutely no reason to suppose that the war might end in 1945. We had no idea how long we might have to keep fighting.’ One of Luo’s comrades, Captain Ying Yunping, described a characteristic 1944 battle which, after two hours’ fighting, swung dramatically against the Chinese: We got the order to retreat. A mass of men, horses, carts, was streaming back. It was a shambles. I suddenly saw Huang Qixiang, our general, hurrying past us on a horse, wearing pyjamas and only one boot. It seemed so shockingly undignified. If generals were running away, why should ordinary soldiers stay and fight? The Japanese were sending in tanks, and we had nothing to fight tanks with. But I felt we couldn’t just let the Japanese walk all over us. I called to my 8th Section, whose commander was the bravest man in the regiment, and told him to take up a blocking position. He held out for hours—the Japanese were completely thrown by meeting resistance just when everything was going their way. We lost the battle—but it seemed something to win even one small part of it. I met our general a little while later. I said that it was quite safe for him to ride back and fetch his uniform. A vast host of Chinese civilians served merely as victims. Chen Jinyu was a sixteen-year-old peasant girl, planting rice for the Japanese occupiers of Jiamao, her village. One day, she was informed by the Japanese that she was being transferred to a ‘battlefront rear-service group’. She said: ‘Because I was young, I had no idea what this meant, but I thought any duty must be easier than working in the field.’ A week later, she discovered the nature of her new role when she was gang-raped by Japanese soldiers. She ran away home, but an interpreter arrived to say that her family would suffer grievously if she did not return to her duties. She remained a ‘comfort woman’ for the local Japanese garrison until June 1945 when, weary of beatings, she fled to the mountains and hid there until she heard that the war was over. Tan Yadong, a nineteen-year-old Chinese who served the Japanese in the same capacity, was accused by a Japanese officer of failing to be an ‘obedient person’. After two five-day spells of solitary confinement, ‘I became an obedient person.’ She was vividly reminded of the consequences of displeasing the Japanese when one of her comrades failed to take contraceptive medicine, and became pregnant. ‘They didn’t want this baby to be born so they hung this poor girl from a tree. They killed her by cutting her open with a knife in front of all the people of our village. I was quite close, only six or seven metres away. I could see the baby moving.’ At least a million Vietnamese died in their country’s great famine of 1944-45, which was directly attributable to Japanese insistence that rice paddies should be replanted with fibre crops for the occupiers’ use. Much Vietnamese grain was shipped to Japan, and rice commandeered to make fuel alcohol. The people of the Philippines and Dutch East Indies also suffered appallingly. In all, some five million South-East Asians died as a result of Japanese invasion and occupation, including 75,000 slave labourers on the Burma Railway. If the British could take little pride in their wartime stewardship of the Indian subcontinent, where white guests of Calcutta’s clubs could order unlimited eggs and bacon while Bengalis starved in the streets, never did they match the systemic barbarism of Japanese hegemony. US forces fought their way across the Pacific supported by an awesome array of wealth and technology. American observers on the Asian mainland were appalled by the contrasting destitution which they everywhere perceived, and impressed by the political forces stirring. ‘There are over a billion people who are tired of the world as it is; they live literally in such terrible bondage that they have nothing to lose but their chains,’ wrote Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby in 1944. They noted the twenty-seven-year life expectancy in India, jewel in Britain’s imperial crown; a China where half the population died before attaining thirty. They described the lifeless bodies of child workers collected each morning outside factory gates in Shanghai; the beatings, whippings, torture, disease and starvation that were commonplace across the continent. During China’s famines, vastly worsened by the Japanese war, people hunted ants, devoured tree roots, ate mud. The North China Herald deplored the prevalence of kidnapping and extortion: ‘In some districts, it has been customary to roast the victims in big kettles, without water, until the flesh falls from the bone.’ White and Jacoby wrote: ‘Everywhere in Asia life is infused with a few terrible certainties—hunger, indignity, and violence.’ This was the world Americans perceived themselves advancing to save, not merely from the Japanese, but from imperialists of every hue—including their closest allies, the British. Churchill nursed the ill-founded delusion that victory over Japan would enable Britain to sustain its rule in India, and reassert command of Burma and Malaya. The US cherished a parallel fantasy, equally massive and misguided, about what it could make of China. Frank Capra’s China film in the famous US War Department Why We Fight documentary series portrayed the country as a liberal society, and made no mention of Communists. The Japanese, meanwhile, cherished their own illusions. As late as the summer of 1944, much of their empire still seemed secure, at least in the eyes of humbler members of its ruling race. Midshipman Toshiharu Konada loved his ‘runs ashore’ on Java from the heavy cruiser Ashigara. ‘Everything was so new and exotic to us young men,’ he said. Once a chorus of local children serenaded a leave party from the fleet with Japanese songs. Konada and a cluster of other men from his ship dined at a local Italian restaurant, ogling the proprietor’s daughter, one of the first European girls they had ever seen. ‘I thought: I am seeing the bright future of Asia here. The whole area seemed so peaceful. Many of the Chinese in Singapore were friendly to us.’ Twenty-year-old Konada was the son of a naval officer commanding a Pacific base. He himself had wanted to be a doctor, but relinquished that ambition when he was drafted in 1943. ‘I knew Japan must be defended, and I wanted to “do my bit”.’ The following year, when Ashigara and its consorts were redeployed to northern Japan to guard against an American threat from the Aleutians, ‘we started to feel a mounting sense of peril’. In the gunroom with his fellow midshipmen, ‘we never talked about what might happen after the war, because it seemed so remote’. He knew nothing of his father’s fate, because there was no mail from the Pacific islands. The midshipmen simply concentrated on their immediate tasks—studying hard for promotion exams and maintaining journals which were rigorously examined by their divisional officers. Diversions were few in the long wait for a fleet action: every night, Konada or some other junior officer commanded a picket boat which patrolled the waters round the ship. Their biggest excitements were spotting the head of an apparent frogman in the darkness, which proved to be a giant turtle, and detecting torpedo tracks which translated into a shoal of tuna. They recognised the power of the American and British navies. However, when they gazed around their anchorages at the serried ranks of battleships, cruisers, destroyers which Japan still possessed, there seemed no grounds for despair. ‘We understood that this would be a long, hard war. But it seemed worth it, to achieve peace and security for Asia.’ Lt Cmdr Haruki Iki had been flying in combat since 1938, when he bombed retreating Chinese on the banks of the Yangtse. Iki, now thirty-two, was a famous man in the Japanese navy, the pilot who sank Repulse off Malaya. By the summer of 1944 he commanded a squadron flying long-range reconnaissance from Truk. They were bombed almost daily by high-altitude US Liberators. Most of the bombs fell into the sea, but raids caused the Japanese airmen to spend many hours in the caves which served as shelters. In the air, the planes under Iki’s command suffered relentless attrition. Replacement crews arrived scarcely trained. He found himself teaching signals procedures to radio operators who knew the principles of Morse code, but had never touched a transmitter. By high summer, the strength of his force had fallen from thirty-six aircraft to twelve. He was recalled to Japan to command a unit of Ginga bombers. Masashiko Ando, twenty-three, was the son of a Japanese governor of Korea. None of this grandee’s three boys had wanted to pursue military careers, but all were obliged to do so. The eldest died fighting on Saipan, the second perished as an army doctor in New Guinea. By July 1944 this left Masashiko the only survivor, just graduating from the Navy Academy’s flight school. He had chosen to serve at sea, because an admired uncle was a naval officer. He was lucky enough to be in one of the last classes of cadets to receive thorough training, before fuel and aircraft became scarce. When postings were apportioned, he was the only cadet to apply for seaplane duty. Within a month, he was flying anti-submarine patrols in a single-engined, three-seater Judy dive-bomber. He and his crew’s routine missions lasted two or three hours, covering convoys pursuing their sluggish courses towards Japan from Malaya or the Dutch Indies. Their aircraft were primitive by Allied standards. Lacking radar, they carried only a magnetic ship-detection device, together with a single 120-pound depth-charge, for the unlikely eventuality that they found an American submarine. Conducting box searches twice a day, month after month, might seem a dreary task, but it was not so to Ando, who loved to fly. His conscientious crewmen, Kato and Kikuchi, were younger than himself in years, but not in naval experience. They scanned the sea intently, searching for a telltale periscope wake. After a while, they drank coffee from thermoses and ate their flight rations. These had improved somewhat since a disgusted pilot complained to their messing officer: ‘Every day might be our last! Is this muck the best you can do for our final meals?’ If they needed to urinate while they were in the air, a complex procedure was invoked. Each crew carried a folded oiled paper container which, once filled and sealed with a knot, was handed over the pilot’s shoulder to the magnetic search operator in the rear seat, to be thrown out of a window. Carelessness would cause the container to burst open in their faces. Even in the last year of the war, at Japanese bases in Indochina and the Dutch islands, there was enough to eat and plenty of fuel. Only aircrew replacements were in short supply. ‘We realised that Japan was in a tough spot,’ Ando said, ‘but not that we were in danger of losing the war. We young men believed that, whatever was happening, we could turn the tide.’ Staff officer Maj. Shigeru Funaki felt almost embarrassed that his life at China Army headquarters in Nanjing was so safe and comfortable—good food and no enemy bombing. ‘In Japan, one felt very conscious of what a mess we were in. But in China, our lives seemed so normal that we lulled ourselves into thinking that somehow, our country would come through OK. I was always proud of the fact that, whatever happened in other theatres, in China we remained victorious. For that reason, it seemed a good place to serve.’ Many young Japanese, however, discovered by experience the growing vulnerability of their nation’s empire. In October 1944 Lt Masaichi Kikuchi was posted to the Celebes, south of the Philippines. Having taken off by air from Japan, he and his draft were forced to land on Formosa by engine failure. They remained marooned there for the next two months, among several hundred others in similar plight, enduring a rain of American bombs. When they finally escaped, it was not to the Celebes, now cut off by the Americans, but to Saigon. A sea voyage which normally took a day lasted a week, as their convoy of empty oil tankers lay close inshore by day, then progressed southwards in a series of nocturnal dashes. The military passengers were kept on almost permanent anti-submarine watch, and the convoy was bombed four times. Huddled wounded in a cave on a Pacific island, Sgt Hiroshi Funasaka looked down on an American camp, brightly lit in the darkness: ‘I imagined the Americans sound asleep in their tents. They might well be easing their weariness by losing themselves in a novel. In the morning they would rise at leisure, shave, eat a hearty breakfast, then come after us as usual. That sea of glowing electric lights was a powerful mute testimonial to their “assault by abundance”…I had a vision of the island divided into adjoining heaven and hell, only a few hundred metres apart.’ None yearned more desperately for Allied victory than prisoners-of-war in Japanese hands, of whom many thousands had already died. Those who survived were stricken by disease, malnutrition and the experience of slave labour. British soldier Fred Thompson wrote on Java: ‘We have just started a new ten-hour shift. How long the chaps will be able to cope remains to be seen. All of us have given up guessing when we will be out—we have had so many disappointments. We are all louse-ridden, but it is one diversion anyway—big-game hunting. Keep smiling through.’ In the summer of 1944, only a few hundred thousand Japanese confronting the Allies in New Guinea, the Pacific islands or Burma, at sea or in the air, had seen for themselves the overwhelming firepower now deployed against their country. Every Japanese was conscious of the privations imposed by American blockade, but the home islands had suffered only desultory bombing. The prospect of abject defeat, which air attack and massive casualties on the Eastern Front obliged Germans to confront long before the end, was still remote from Japan. By late 1944 Hitler’s people had suffered over half their total wartime losses, more than three million dead. By contrast, a year before capitulation Hirohito’s nation had suffered only a small fraction of its eventual combat and civilian casualties. Japan’s human catastrophes were crowded into the last months of war, when its fate was sealed, during the futile struggle to avert the inevitable. Japan’s commanders and political leaders were privy to the desperate nature of their nation’s predicament, but most remained implacably unwilling to acknowledge its logic. In the last phase, around two million Japanese people paid the price for their rulers’ blindness, a sacrifice which availed their country nothing. After years in which Japan’s armies had roamed Asia at will, killing on a Homeric scale, retribution was at hand. 2 SUMMIT ON OAHU Japan’s advance across the Pacific and South-East Asia attained its zenith in the spring of 1942, when Australia seemed threatened with invasion, and the British Army was forced back through Burma into India. Long ground campaigns proved necessary to recover from the Japanese Guadalcanal, Papua-New Guinea and other Pacific bases which they had seized. Desultory British attempts to return to Burma were frustrated. The US build-up was slow, in conformity with Washington’s commitment to ‘Germany First’—priority for the western war. America’s Pacific Fleet wrested mastery of the seas from the Japanese only after a long succession of clashes, great and small, which cost many ships, planes and lives. The Allied counter-offensive was hampered by the contest for mastery between the US Army and Navy. The two services conducted separate and rival campaigns against the Japanese, spuriously dignified as ‘the twin-track strategy’. Despite all these difficulties, by the summer of 1944 the material strength of the US was becoming overwhelming, the Japanese comet was plunging steeply. The trauma inflicted on the Americans and their allies by Pearl Harbor, the loss of Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, and scores of Pacific islands, had faded. The challenge confronting the leaders of the Grand Alliance was no longer that of frustrating Japan’s advance, but instead that of encompassing its destruction. Strategic choice had become the privilege of the Allies. In the eastern war, this meant that the political, military and naval leadership of the US determined courses, then informed the British. Early in the afternoon of 26 July 1944, the cruiser Baltimore passed Hawaii’s Diamond Head inbound for Pearl Harbor. Insecure gossip had prompted a crowd of soldiers and sailors to gather at the navy yard. Off Fort Kamehaha, as the big warship lost way a tug nosed alongside, carrying Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet. Then Baltimore moored at Pier 22B, enabling more flag officers and generals to ascend the gangway and form up to salute the cruiser’s exalted passenger, the President of the United States. Franklin Roosevelt, in the last nine months of his life and in the midst of his fourth presidential election campaign, looked about for Douglas MacArthur, the man he had come to meet. He was told that the general’s plane had just landed. MacArthur was on his way from Fort Shafter, and would arrive shortly. Sure enough, cheers and whistles along the Honolulu road heralded America’s most famous soldier since Ulysses S. Grant. MacArthur’s car swept up to the dockside. The great man emerged in khaki trousers, a brown leather air force jacket, Chief of the Army’s cap and insignia. As bosuns’ pipes screeched, he mounted the gangway, saluted the quarterdeck and went below to meet Roosevelt. This was an encounter MacArthur had not sought, did in fact scorn. George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, together with every other American, British, Soviet, German and Japanese commander of the Second World War, acknowledged subordination to their respective national leaderships. MacArthur, by contrast, seemed to reject accountability to any earthly power. His formal title was Allied Supreme Commander, South-West Pacific Area—SWPA. He seldom commanded more than ten divisions committed to combat operations, a fraction of Eisenhower’s army in north-west Europe. Indeed, in 1944 he controlled fewer than half the number of ground troops deployed in Italy, itself a secondary commitment. It was a source of bitter chagrin that he was denied overall theatre authority, and obliged to acknowledge Admiral Chester Nimitz, commanding US forces in the central Pacific, as his equal and rival. MacArthur had always opposed the ‘twin-track strategy’, whereby his elements approached Japan from the south-west, while the navy and Marines conducted their own thrusts further north. He believed that he alone was the appropriate arbiter of America’s eastern war, and fumed at the waste of resources caused by fighting two parallel campaigns, while never deigning to address the possibility that his own was the obvious candidate for redundancy. Throughout his tenure of high command MacArthur, sixty-four in July 1944, bore controversy in his wake. From the day he graduated first of his West Point class, his intellect and inspirational leadership were recognised. As US Army chief of staff, however, he earned notoriety for his ruthless suppression of the 1932 World War I veterans’ ‘bonus march’ on Washington. His policy reflected perfervidly right-wing political convictions. Following his retirement in 1935 he returned to the Philippines, the American dependency where he had served in his youth, accepting the appointment of military adviser to its government and commander of its armed forces. As the Japanese threat grew, in July 1941 Roosevelt named MacArthur commander-in-chief of the American garrison as well as of the Filipino troops in the islands. In this capacity the general directed the defence of the islands from their invasion by the Japanese in December 1941 until March 1942. He was then ordered by the White House to escape by PT-boat before the surrender of his starving soldiers, trapped on the Bataan peninsula. Army insiders held MacArthur personally culpable for the Philippines d?b?cle, by failures both of commission and omission. This was unjust. Though his generalship was poor, no commander could have defeated the Japanese onslaught with the weak forces at his disposal. More than a few American senior officers, however, would have been happy to see this elderly autocrat play no further role in the war. Eisenhower, who had served under MacArthur, expressed in his diary during the Bataan siege a belief that it would be a mistake to evacuate him: ‘If brought out, public opinion will force him into a position where his love of the limelight may ruin him.’ MacArthur displayed a taste for fantasy quite unsuited to a field commander, together with ambition close to megalomania and consistently poor judgement as a picker of subordinates. Fortunately for his public image, only Roosevelt and a handful of others were aware of the general’s acceptance in March 1942 of $500,000 from the Philippines Treasury, as a personal gift from President Manuel Quezon. This was an extraordinarily improper transaction on the part of both donor and recipient. The British always acknowledged that their own forces and commanders performed poorly in the 1941-42 Burma and Malaya campaigns. Operations in the Philippines were equally mismanaged, but in those dark days Americans yearned for heroes. President and people colluded to make one of MacArthur, to forge a heroic myth around the defender of Bataan. Americans found it unthinkable that the US army which slowly assembled in Australia through 1942 and 1943 should be led into battle by anyone else. MacArthur presided over campaigns to regain dominance of New Guinea and the islands of the south-west Pacific which proved protracted and bitter, and at first yielded little glory. Yet so formidable was the general’s publicity machine, so impressive his personality, that he held his job until the victories began to come. There were demands from the US political right that he should be made the nation’s global supreme commander, or accept nomination as a presidential candidate, neither of which notions he seemed eager to dismiss. Foremost among proponents of the ‘man of destiny’ view of history, he was bent upon becoming the lone star of America’s Pacific war. Everything within his compass was subordinated to that purpose. A blizzard of personal publicity accompanied his every movement, readily supported by US newspaper moguls—Hearst, McCormick, Patterson—who loved the general. Twelve full-length biographies were published in the course of the war, their flavour conveyed by a sample title, MacArthur the Magnificent, which did nothing to check his egomania. The senior Allied commander who afterwards spoke most warmly of MacArthur was Gen. Sir Alan Brooke, the dour, clever Northern Irishman who was Britain’s principal wartime chief of staff. Brooke’s assessment was astonishingly effusive: ‘From everything I saw of him, he was the greatest general of the last war. He certainly showed a far greater strategic grasp than Marshall.’ Such a testimonial should not be altogether ignored, but Brooke knew little of either MacArthur or the Japanese war. Top Americans obliged to work with the ‘hero of Bataan’ adopted a much more sceptical view. His fitness for high command was disputed by many senior officers, foremost among them the Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest King, another Olympian autocrat. King’s daughter described her father as an entirely even-tempered man: ‘He was always angry.’ Such was the admiral’s personal animus against the general that, at a joint chiefs of staff meeting, Marshall—himself no admirer of MacArthur—felt obliged to thump the table and silence a tirade from King: ‘I will not have any meeting carried on with this hatred.’ MacArthur’s critics believed that an advance across the south-west Pacific was irrelevant to America’s strategic requirements, and was promoted only by the general’s ambition to liberate the Philippines. He shamelessly manipulated communiqu?s about his forces’ achievements, personally selected photographs of himself for press release, deprived subordinates of credit for successes, shrugged off his own responsibility for failures. He was a man of fierce passions, whom ‘joy or sorrow would set…off on lusty zooms or steep dives’, in the words of a subordinate. ‘At the risk of being naive and just plain dumb,’ wrote Maj.-Gen. St Clair Streett, later commander of the Thirteenth Air Force, assessing Pacific command in October 1942, ‘the major obstacle for a sane military solution of the problem [is] General MacArthur…even the President himself might find his hands tied in dealing with the general.’ The sooner MacArthur was out of the Pacific, thought Streett, the sooner would it be possible to establish a rational command structure for the theatre. A senior British airman, no stranger to tensions in his own nation’s high command, was nonetheless awed by those between America’s armed forces: ‘The violence of inter-service rivalry…in those days had to be seen to be believed, and was an appreciable handicap to their war effort.’ Even where armed services dislike each other institutionally, successful cooperation can be achieved if individual commanders forge working relationships. MacArthur, however, was interested in achieving harmony only in pursuit of his own objectives. Admiral King likewise placed the long-term interests of the US Navy far above any tactical conveniences related to fighting the Japanese. No overall Pacific supreme commander was ever appointed, because neither army nor navy could stomach the explicit triumph of the other service. And even if the resultant division of authority impeded the defeat of Japan, so prodigious were US resources that the nation felt able to indulge it. MacArthur was never ill. When there was nowhere more distant to go, he paced his office to assuage his chronic restlessness. He made no jokes and possessed no small talk, though he would occasionally talk baseball to enlisted men, in attempts to deceive them that he was human. Marshall observed that MacArthur had a court, not a staff. Intimates of the ‘Bataan gang’, the handful of officers to whom he granted passages alongside his own family on the PT-boats escaping from the Philippines, remained privileged acolytes to the war’s end. SWPA chief of staff Lt-Gen. Richard Sutherland felt able to commission his Australian mistress in the American Women’s Army Corps, shipping her in his entourage until the scandal was exposed. MacArthur’s belief that his critics were not merely wrong, but evil, verged on derangement. He claimed to perceive a ‘crooked streak’ in both Marshall and Eisenhower, two of the most honourable men in American public service. When the Office of War Information wished to alter for national consumption his legendary remark on quitting the Philippines from ‘I shall return’ to ‘We shall return,’ MacArthur demurred. Early in 1944, the general wrote to Stimson: ‘These frontal attacks by the Navy…are tragic and unnecessary massacres of American lives…The Navy fails to understand the strategy…Give me central direction of the war in the Pacific, and I will be in the Philippines in ten months…don’t let the Navy’s pride of position and ignorance continue this great tragedy to our country.’ MacArthur’s personal behaviour was no worse than that of Patton and Montgomery, but he exercised command under far less restraint than either. Perhaps most distasteful of all his wartime actions was a flirtation with a 1944 presidential election run against Roosevelt, whose liberalism affronted his own rabidly conservative convictions. MacArthur’s staff corresponded with potential campaign backers in the US, which they could not have done without his knowledge. Lt-Gen. Robert Eichelberger asserted: ‘If it were not for his hatred, or rather the extent to which he despises FDR, he would not want [the presidency].’ The influential New York Times columnist Arthur Krock wrote in April 1944: ‘It is generally believed…that General MacArthur is dissatisfied with the military strategy of the war as approved by the President and Prime Minister Churchill.’ This was indeed so. Only when it became apparent that MacArthur could not defeat Thomas Dewey to secure the Republican presidential nomination did he finally exclude himself from candidacy. He also possessed virtues, however. His air chief, George Kenney, observed shrewdly that ‘As a salesman, MacArthur has no superiors and few equals.’ The USAAF responded to the general’s enthusiasm for air power by offering its passionate support to his causes. Though MacArthur’s hostility towards Britain was well-known, British Brigadier Jack Profumo, attached to his staff, praised his private courtesy and warmth. The supreme commander’s senior British liaison officer described him to Churchill as ‘ruthless, vain, unscrupulous and self-conscious…but…a man of real calibre with a vivid imagination, a capacity to learn rapidly from the past, a leader of men…[with] a considerable understanding of personalities and political development’. MacArthur’s serene assurance, natural authority and charisma, lent some substance to his claims to rank. If he was not among history’s outstanding commanders, he acted the part of one with unshakeable conviction. In late summer 1944, MacArthur’s credit as a strategist stood higher than it ever had before, or would again. In two months he had conducted a dramatic advance 1,200 miles up Papua-New Guinea, bypassing rather than lingering to destroy Japanese garrisons, staging a series of surprise amphibious assaults, of which the most recent and successful took place at Hollandia, where his headquarters was now being transferred. These achievements, however, won headlines without removing fundamental doubts about the usefulness of the army’s operations in the south-west Pacific, now that the threat to Australia was lifted. Geographical imperatives made the US Navy lead service in the Japanese war, to which the Army was obliged to defer. Soldiers could nowhere engage the Japanese without being transported to objectives in ships, and supported in action by fleets. MacArthur could bend strategy and sustain his own status as the most famous American participating in the struggle. But try as he might, he could not contrive absolute personal mastery. This, then, was the background against which the supreme commander of SWPA arrived on Oahu, Hawaii, in July 1944, to meet Roosevelt and Nimitz. MacArthur’s tardy arrival reflected his distaste for the encounter. If he chafed at the need to parley by signal with the joint chiefs of staff in Washington, he found it intolerable to be obliged to fly several thousand miles to confer with a civilian politician, albeit the greatest in the land. MacArthur believed that Roosevelt had summoned the Hawaii meeting for political purposes, to further his re-election campaign by showcasing himself before the American people as their commander-in-chief. ‘The humiliation of forcing me to leave my command to fly to Honolulu for a picture-taking junket!’ the general exclaimed furiously during the twenty-six-hour flight from Australia. For once, his paranoia was probably justified. His scepticism about the Hawaii meeting was shared by Admiral King. Roosevelt was always party to the big decisions, and on several important occasions—for instance, when he insisted upon the November 1942 North African landings despite the deep reluctance of his chiefs of staff—he dictated them. Nonetheless, US strategy in the Second World War was dominated by compromises between rival service chiefs. This explains the curled lips of King and MacArthur when, in July 1944, Roosevelt sought to be seen to play the part of supreme warlord as he offered himself to the American people for an unprecedented fourth term. The struggle with Japan had moved many thousands of miles since the Hawaiian islands fell victim to the 7 December 1941 air assault, but they remained America’s principal rear base and staging area for the Pacific campaign. ‘Pearl was mostly brass and hookers,’ in the laconic words of cruiser bosun’s mate Eugene Hardy. Combat officers who visited the islands’ headquarters complexes were irked by the sybaritic comfort in which staffs did their business. Regular Saturday-night dances were held at Schofield Barracks. ‘There were dinner parties, beach parties and cocktail parties,’ wrote a Marine general, O.P. Smith. ‘At some of the parties the women guests wore evening gowns. You had the feeling that you were half in the war and half out of it.’ Personnel based on Hawaii shrugged that it would give no help to the men at the sharp end to impose a spurious austerity. After protests by visitors from the combat zone, however, officers’ clubs abandoned the practice of serving steak twice a day. Roosevelt’s most important meetings on Hawaii took place at the Kalaukau Avenue mansion of a prominent Waikiki citizen, Chris Holmes. Naval aviators had been billeted there for some time, and for a week before the grandees’ arrival, working parties from the submarine base laboured overtime to repair the fliers’ depredations. The house then became the setting for performances by two remarkable thespians, the president and the general of the army, together with a supreme professional, the Pacific Fleet’s C-in-C. The only issue which interested MacArthur was resolution of the Pacific route by which the US should continue its advance upon Japan. Even as Roosevelt, Nimitz and MacArthur conferred, the US Navy and Marines were completing the capture of the Mariana island group. On 19 and 20 June 1944, in the ‘great Marianas Turkey Shoot’, carrier planes of Admiral Raymond Spruance’s Fifth Fleet had inflicted devastating defeat, indeed near annihilation, upon Japan’s naval air force. Around 475 enemy aircraft were destroyed, by comparison with the sixty Luftwaffe planes shot down by the RAF on 15 September 1940, biggest day of the Battle of Britain. The island chain, a mere 1,400 miles south-east of Japan, represented a vital link in the American advance. Its capture made possible the construction of air bases from which B-29 bombers could reach Tokyo. Its loss was by far the most important Japanese defeat of 1944, a decisive moment of the war. Because no minutes were taken of Roosevelt’s meetings with his commanders, uncertainty has persisted about exactly what was said. The historical narrative relies on fragmentary and highly partial accounts by the participants. ‘Douglas, where do we go from here?’ Roosevelt asked. This form of address must have irked MacArthur, who signed even letters to his wife Jean with his surname. ‘Leyte, Mr President, and then Luzon!’ was the recorded response, naming two of the foremost Philippine islands. These exact words are implausible, for at that stage US plans called for an initial landing further south, on Mindanao. The thrust of MacArthur’s argument is not in doubt, however. He asserted, as he had done since 1942, that strategic wisdom and national honour alike demanded the liberation of the Filipino people, whose territory would then become the principal stepping stone for the invasion of Japan. In October 1943, the joint chiefs had allocated the US Navy its own route across the central Pacific via the Marshall, Caroline and Mariana islands, assaulted principally by Marine divisions, while MacArthur’s soldiers advanced by way of the Solomons, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the hills and jungles of Papua-New Guinea. All these objectives were now achieved. The names of their torrid conquests had become written in blood into American history: Guadalcanal and Kwajalein, Tarawa, Saipan and Guam. Each had been the scene of a contest for a few square miles of rock or coral on which to create airstrips and anchorages to support the greatest fleets the world had ever seen. The Pacific war was fought almost entirely within gunshot of the sea. Amid the vast, empty expanses of the world’s largest ocean, men flung themselves upon outcrops of land, painted livid green by vegetation, with a passion mocked by their coarse beauty. In the first eighteen months of the conflict, though Japan’s supply lines were grossly over-extended, her armed forces engaged the Americans on not unequal terms. Until late 1943, for instance, the US Pacific Fleet never possessed more than four aircraft carriers. Thereafter, however, American strength soared, while that of Japan shrank. A host of ships, planes, men and guns flooded west from the US to the battlefields. At peak production in March 1944, an aircraft rolled out of an American factory every 295 seconds. By the end of that year, almost one hundred US aircraft carriers were at sea. American planes and submarines were strangling Japanese supply routes. It had become unnecessary systematically to destroy Japan’s Pacific air bases, because the enemy possessed pitifully few planes to use them. Between 26 December 1943 and 24 October 1944, Japanese aircraft failed to sink a single significant American ship. Similarly, surviving Japanese army garrisons presented no threat, for Tokyo no longer had means to move or supply them. But even when the Japanese strategic predicament was hopeless, when resistance became—by Western lights—futile, their soldiers fought to the last. These desperate battles reflected, in some degree, the warrior ethic of bushido. Overlaid upon this, however, was a rational calculation by Tokyo. The superiority of American resources was manifest. If Japan pursued the war within the limits of conventional military behaviour, its defeat was inevitable. Its leaders’ chosen course was to impose such a ghastly blood price for each American gain that this ‘nation of storekeepers’ would find it preferable to negotiate, rather than accept the human cost of invading Japan’s main islands. If such a strategy was paper-thin, and woefully underestimated American resolution, it determined Japanese conduct by land, sea and air until August 1945. ‘No matter how a war starts, it ends in mud,’ wrote Gen. ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell. ‘It has to be slugged out—there are no trick solutions or cheap shortcuts.’ There was, and remains, no doubt that this was true of the war against Germany. But did it also apply to the war against Japan? The enemy was an island nation. If the US Navy could secure sufficient Pacific footholds to provide air and naval basing facilities on the route to Japan, was it also necessary to fight a major ground campaign? It had been America’s historic intention to conduct any war with Japan at sea and in the air, rather than by land battle. Whatever the achievements of US ground forces since Pearl Harbor, the decisive victories had been secured by the navy—Midway and the progressive attrition of Japan’s air and naval forces. While American strategic planning assumed eventual amphibious landings in the Japanese home islands, it remained the fervent hope of most commanders that blockade and air bombardment would render these unnecessary. There was only one messianic advocate of a major campaign to retake the Philippines: MacArthur. While others varied their opinions in the face of changing circumstances, the general never did. It is possible that beyond ego, a worm of guilt gnawed, about his own conduct in 1941-42. Albeit under presidential orders, he had abandoned his Philippines command to barbarous captivity, to flee with his personal staff, family, nanny and dubiously-acquired fortune to safety in Australia. Now, when other commanders’ eyes flitted between alternative objectives in the western Pacific, his own never wavered. King, an officer as imperious as MacArthur, favoured bypassing the Philippines, approaching Japan by way of its offshore island possessions, Formosa and Okinawa. Formosa presented a much smaller target than the mass of the Philippines, with the additional attraction of opening a gateway to the Chinese mainland. The US Army’s War Plans Department concluded as far back as 1923 that, if America’s Philippines bases were lost in the early stages of a conflict, their recapture would be ‘a long and costly undertaking’. King complained that MacArthur was drawn to the islands solely by sentiment. Marshall likewise warned the general in June 1944: ‘We must be careful not to allow our personal feelings and Philippine political considerations to override our great objective, which is the early conclusion of the war with Japan…bypassing [is not] synonymous with abandonment.’ On Hawaii, when Roosevelt expressed concern about the human cost of retaking the Philippines, MacArthur said: ‘Mr President, my losses would not be heavy, any more than they have been in the past. The days of the frontal attack are over. Modern infantry weapons are too deadly, and direct assault is no longer feasible. Only mediocre commanders still use it. Your good commanders do not turn in heavy losses.’ This was self-serving bluster. It reflected MacArthur’s disdain for the navy’s conduct of the central Pacific thrust, and ignored the fact that Nimitz’s forces met far stronger Japanese defences than his own had been obliged to face; in the course of the Pacific war, MacArthur’s casualties in reality exceeded those of Nimitz. But no significant opposition to MacArthur’s Philippines ambitions was expressed. Six hours of meetings were dominated by Roosevelt and MacArthur. Nimitz merely outlined plans for an amphibious landing to establish bases on Peleliu, east of the Philippines, and described the progress of fleet operations. The main dish at the big formal lunch which punctuated discussion was the famous Hawaiian fish mahimahi, examined and approved as fit for presidential consumption by Vice-Admiral Ross McIntire, FDR’s personal physician. MacArthur was able to say of his relations with the naval C-in-C: ‘We see eye to eye, Mr President, we understand each other perfectly.’ Robert Sherrod wrote of Nimitz, one of the greatest naval officers America has produced, that he ‘conceived of war as something to be accomplished as efficiently and smoothly as possible, without too much fanfare’. The admiral was wholly without interest in personal publicity, and his Hawaiian headquarters was characterised by a cool, understated authority. When Marine general O.P. Smith went to report to Nimitz, he found him at his favourite relaxation facility, the pistol range. An aide ‘warned me that it was well to keep out of sight until the Admiral finished or otherwise he might challenge one to a match, the results of which might be embarrassing as he was a very good shot’. Born in 1885 into a German family who became successful hotelkeepers in Texas, Nimitz had intended an army career until offered a midshipman’s place at the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. A former submariner who was among the pioneers of refuelling at sea, he was well-known for his skilful management of committees, and meticulous personal habits—he was irked by the unpunctuality of politicians. The admiral invariably travelled with his schnauzer Mak, a mean little dog which growled. His staff, like most wartime service personnel, worked a seven-day week, but were encouraged to take an afternoon tennis break. They inhabited a sternly masculine world, for Nimitz insisted that there should be no women on the team. There was just one female intruder—a mine warfare intelligence officer named Lt Harriet Borland, who for administrative purposes was deemed not to be a member of Cincpac’s headquarters. The admiral and his wife Catherine entertained generously in their home at Pearl, often serving fruit delicacies flown from the Pacific islands. A natural diplomat, sober and controlled, Nimitz strove to defuse tensions with MacArthur, even when—as sometimes happened—the general flatly refused to surrender control of shipping temporarily diverted to him from navy resources. In March 1944 the two men and their senior staffs met in Brisbane, for what promised to be a stormy encounter. ‘Nee-mitz’, as MacArthur called the admiral sourly, opened the conference by telling a story of two frantically worried men, pacing a hotel corridor. One finally asked the other what was troubling him. ‘I am a doctor,’ came the answer, ‘and I have a patient in my room with a wooden leg, and I have that leg apart and can’t get it back together again.’ The other man said: ‘Great guns, I wish that was all I have to worry about. I have a good-looking gal in my room with both legs apart, and I can’t remember the room number.’ Even MacArthur laughed, though it was unthinkable that he himself would have stooped to such perceived vulgarity. Carrier admiral ‘Jocko’ Clark asserted reverently that Nimitz was ‘the one great leader in the Pacific who had no blemish on his shield or dent in his armour’. This seems not much overstated. Why, on Hawaii, did Nimitz not voice the navy’s strong reservations about the Philippines plan? First, he found himself in a weak diplomatic position. Whatever MacArthur’s private contempt for Roosevelt, at their meeting the general deployed the full force of his personality to charm the president, whom he had known since serving under him as army chief of staff. The undemonstrative Nimitz found himself perforce playing a subordinate role beside two showmen. More than this, naval commanders were themselves divided about future strategy. Admiral Raymond Spruance, commanding Fifth Fleet, favoured an advance on Okinawa by way of Iwo Jima, rather than taking Formosa. Despite King’s order to plan for Formosa, Spruance instructed his staff not to waste time on it. Nimitz himself, meanwhile, was more sympathetic to the Philippines plan than was King, his boss. Six months earlier, the Pacific C-in-C had been furiously rebuked by the Chief of Naval Operations for advocating a landing on Mindanao rather than in the Marianas. While the navy certainly saw no virtue in protracted operations to recover the entire archipelago, Nimitz and his staff deemed it useful, indeed probably indispensable, to secure Philippines ground and air bases before advancing closer to Japan. Logistics would permit Mindanao-Leyte landings before the end of 1944, while no assault on Formosa was feasible before the spring of 1945. Furthermore, Japanese captures of US air bases in China, and general disenchantment with Chiang Kai-Shek’s nation as an ally, made Formosa seem far less useful as a door into China than it had done a few months earlier. Nimitz almost certainly considered that the Hawaii meeting was symbolic and political, rather than decisive. The joint chiefs would arbitrate. There was no purpose in attempting to translate a political showcase occasion into a strategic showdown. Yet MacArthur, the man of destiny, believed that he had exploited the occasion to good effect. When he climbed back on his plane to return to Australia, barely twenty-four hours after landing on Hawaii, he declared triumphantly to his staff: ‘We’ve sold it!’ He was justified in this assertion insofar as Roosevelt sailed home on 29 July, after a further two days visiting bases and hospitals, believing that the US must retake the Philippines. Electoral considerations undoubtedly played a part in the presidential endorsement of MacArthur’s wishes. Roosevelt knew that the general’s political friends would raise a storm among American voters if they could claim that the suffering millions of the Philippines—America’s dependants or colonial subjects, according to taste—were being wantonly abandoned to continuing Japanese oppression. Even after Hawaii, however, for several weeks the US joint chiefs of staff havered. Marshall had once described the MacArthur plan for the Philippines as ‘the slow way…We would have to fight our way through them, and it would take a very much longer time than to make the cut across.’ In north-west Europe, Eisenhower staunchly resisted pleas to liberate the starving Dutch people in the winter of 1944, arguing—surely rightly—that the welfare of all the occupied peoples of Europe was best served by concentrating forces without diversion upon the defeat of Nazi Germany. Yet so great was the prestige of MacArthur, so effective was his emotional crusade for the Philippines’ liberation, that to gainsay him would have required a vastly different supreme command in Washington. From the late summer of 1944 onwards, America’s difficulties in the Pacific related principally to the logistic challenges of supporting large forces at the limits of an oceanic supply chain. Moreover, in the early autumn, after MacArthur’s cheap successes in Papua-New Guinea, there was no anticipation of the intensity of resistance the Japanese would offer on Leyte and Luzon. US air and sea power had lately overwhelmed the enemy’s puny efforts wherever he accepted battle. Desperate courage and superior fieldcraft enabled Japanese soldiers often to inflict pain on American forces, but never to alter outcomes. For instance, a belated offensive at Aitape in New Guinea in July 1944 cost the Japanese 18th Army 10,000 dead, in exchange for killing some 440 Americans. US forces paid with the lives of almost 7,000 men for the capture of the Marianas and later Peleliu—but the Japanese counted 46,000 dead. Such a dramatic balance in favour of the victors was small comfort to a Marine in a foxhole under mortar and machine-gun fire from an invisible enemy, with comrades bleeding around him. But it represented a reality which promoted optimism among American commanders in the autumn of 1944. It was almost certainly the correct decision to undertake limited operations to straddle the Philippines with naval and air power, seizing bases, destroying Japanese aircraft and interdicting enemy shipping routes. MacArthur’s plans, however, were vastly more ambitious. He was bent upon a campaign of progressive liberation which could contribute little to expediting America’s advance upon the Japanese home islands. His first landing would be made in the south, on Mindanao. US forces would then advance progressively via Leyte to the capture of the largest island, Luzon, which MacArthur assured the Chiefs could be taken in a month. Nimitz, meanwhile, would prepare to capture the central Pacific island of Iwo Jima, and thereafter assault Okinawa. Just as in Europe Eisenhower committed his armies to a broad-front advance, rather than favouring any one of his subordinate commanders’ operations above those of others, so in the war against Japan the US sustained the twin-track strategy, sustaining both MacArthur’s invasion of the Philippines and the navy’s drive across the central Pacific. This represented a broadcasting of resources acceptable only to a nation of America’s fantastic wealth, but it was the compromise adopted by the chiefs of staff, with the belated acquiescence of Admiral King. So assured could be America’s commanders of forthcoming victory, that it was hard for them to regard the Philippines as an issue of decisive importance—and indeed, it was not. It was in no one’s interest to bet the ranch against MacArthur about rival routes to a final outcome which was not in doubt. In the late summer of 1944, the general began to gather land, sea and air forces for a November assault on his ‘second homeland’. 2 Japan: Defying Gravity (#ulink_26d71353-23f4-5199-b787-94690a9b1057) 1 YAMATO SPIRIT Thoughtful Japanese understood that the fall of the Marianas in the summer of 1944 represented a decisive step towards their country’s undoing. It brought the home islands within range of vastly more effective bombing. American submarines were already strangling the country’s supply lines. US ground forces would soon be assaulting Japan’s inner perimeter. Yet the Japanese people had been at war for seven years, since their invasion of China. Domestic life became harsh long before Pearl Harbor. To most, outright defeat was still unthinkable. When twenty-one-year-old Masaichi Kikuchi graduated from army officer school in the summer of 1944, he went home to his tiny village north of Tokyo bursting with pride to show off his new uniform. In a community where everyone inhabited thatched cottages shared with their plough horses, chickens and silkworms, he was the only one of five brothers in his family, and indeed in the whole village, to secure a commission. ‘We grew up in a world where everyone who was not Japanese was perceived as an enemy,’ said Kikuchi, ‘Chinese, British, American. We were schooled to regard them all as evil, devilish, animalistic. Conflict was a commonplace for our generation, from Manchuria onwards. Everyone took it for granted. Even in 1944 when we knew things were not going well, that Guadalcanal and Guam and other places had gone, it never occurred to any of us that the whole war might be lost.’ By contrast with the austerities of the home islands, throughout Japan’s mainland empire from Manchuria to Siam, the privileged status of millions of Japanese as occupiers and overlords remained apparently secure, their routines deceptively tranquil. Kikuchi was posted to an airfield defence unit in Malaya, where he found life extraordinarily pleasant. There was he, a peasant’s son, occupying a large British colonial house on Singapore’s Caton Road, attended by two servants, with a beach a few hundred yards away ‘where on clear evenings I could look out upon the most beautiful moon I had ever seen’. At the officers’ club, though movies were no longer available and they were forbidden to play mahjong, there were billiards, plenty of beer and sake, food and cheap Malacca cigarettes. ‘Even at that stage of the war, the life of an officer in the Japanese army in a place like that was incredibly privileged. I must confess that, when we knew so many others were out there fighting and dying in Burma and the Pacific, I often felt guilty about my own circumstances.’ Petty Officer Hachiro Miyashita had seen too much action with the fleet to feel embarrassment about his ‘cushy’ posting at Tenga airfield, also in Malaya, where his unit taught deck landing to trainee carrier pilots, because no fuel was available nearer home for such purposes. Miyashita revelled in the big bath with hot water at his billet in the old British officers’ quarters, the golf course (though none of them knew how to play), and the absence of enemy activity: ‘It seemed like heaven.’ Miyashita was the twenty-six-year-old son of the owner of a Tokyo fruit shop, now defunct because there was no more fruit to sell. He had volunteered for the navy back in 1941, and experienced its glory days. He and the rest of the flight crews stood cheering on the deck of the carrier Shokaku as their aircraft took off for Pearl Harbor, and joined the rapturous reception on their return: ‘What passions that day fired!’ Through the years which followed, however, their lives became incomparably more sober. After the 1942 Coral Sea battle, in which the ship was hit three times and 107 men died, each body was placed in a coffin weighted with a shell, and solemnly committed to the deep. The coffins broke open, however, and sprang to the surface again. The ship’s wake became strewn with bobbing corpses, a spectacle which upset the crew. Thereafter, they tipped their dead overboard with a shell carefully lashed to each man’s legs. Miyashita lived through hours of frenzied fire-fighting when American bomb strikes tore open the flightdeck, and endured the harrowing experience of clearing casualties and body parts. He never shrugged off the memory of picking up a boot bearing the name ‘Ohara’, with a foot still inside it. In the Marianas battle of June 1944, aboard the carrier Zuikaku, he watched a pall of black smoke rise above the sea, marking the end of his old ship Shokaku, and of most of the shipmates he knew so well. He thought of close friends from the petty officers’ mess like Ino and Miyajima, now among the fishes, and muttered to himself: ‘My turn next.’ Zuikaku lost almost all its aircraft. ‘As long as we were fighting, there was no time to think. Afterwards, however, as we sailed home, seeing the hangar decks almost empty, sorting out the effects of all the crews who were gone, gave us a terrible feeling. From that stage of the war, my memories are only tragic ones.’ Hitherto, Miyashita had prided himself on his steadiness in action. After three years of Pacific combat, however, ‘I found that I jumped when a hatch cover clanged shut. My nerves were in a bad way.’ So were those of more exalted people than Petty Officer Miyashita, and it influenced them in strange ways. Thousands of Japanese civilians on Saipan chose to kill themselves, most by leaping from seashore cliffs, rather than submit to the American conquerors. Vice-Admiral Matome Ugaki, later commander of the navy’s kamikaze units, wrote in his diary: ‘It’s only to be expected that fighting men should be killed, but for women, children and old men in such large numbers on a helpless, lonely island to prefer death to captivity…What a tragedy! None but the people of the Yamato nation could do such a thing…If one hundred million Japanese people could display the same resolution…it wouldn’t be difficult to find a way to victory.’ Here was a vivid example of the spirit prevalent among Japan’s leadership in 1944-45. Many shared a delusion that human sacrifice, the nation’s historic ‘Yamato spirit’, could compensate for a huge shortfall in military capability. In modern parlance, they committed themselves to asymmetric warfare. This was unconvincing in a death struggle between nations. In December 1941, Japan had launched a war against enemies vastly superior in resources and potential. Its leaders gambled on two assumptions: first, that the US would lack stomach for a long contest; second, that Germany would triumph in Europe. Both were confounded. Indeed, far from Japanese accession increasing the strength of the Axis, it served to ensure Hitler’s doom by making America his enemy. So dismayed were the Western Allies by their defeats in 1941-42 that they chose to perceive these as manifestations of their conquerors’ prowess. They were correct, insofar as the Japanese displayed an energy and effectiveness then lacking among the British and Americans. Japan’s early triumphs, however, reflected the local weakness of the vanquished, rather than the real might of the victors. The Japanese people were far more enthusiastic about going to war in December 1941 than had been the Germans in 1939. Japan’s mission to expand territorially into Asia, and to defy any nation which objected, had enjoyed popular support since the beginning of the century. After their country’s 1941 intervention in French Indochina, many Japanese were bewildered, as well as embittered, by America’s imposition of a trade embargo. The US had swallowed Japanese colonisation of Formosa, Korea, Manchuria and eastern China. Washington acquiesced, albeit with distaste, in the huge British, French and Dutch empires in Asia. Why should Japanese imperialism be any less acceptable to American sensibilities? Although Japan’s experience of war in China was painful, it also seemed successful. Few Japanese knew that military victories on the mainland had not been matched by economic gains of anything like the necessary magnitude. They possessed no national memory of slaughter in the trenches, such as many Germans retained from World War I, to check their rejoicing at Pearl Harbor. Cultural contempt for the West was widespread. ‘Money-making is the one aim in life [of Americans],’ asserted a Japanese army propaganda document. ‘The men make money to live luxuriously and over-educate their wives and daughters who are allowed to talk too much. Their lack of real culture is betrayed by their love of jazz music…Americans are still untamed since the wild pioneer days. Hold-ups, assassinations, kidnappings, gangs, bribery, corruption and lynching of Negroes are still practised. Graft in politics and commerce, labour and athletics is rampant. Sex relations have deteriorated with the development of motor cars; divorce is rife…America has its strong points, such as science, invention and other creative activities…[But while] outwardly civilized it is inwardly corrupt and decadent.’ If such descents into caricature of the enemy were often matched by Allied propaganda about the Japanese, they were unhelpful in assisting Tokyo’s commanders realistically to appraise their enemy. To an extraordinary degree for a nation which chose to launch a war, Japan failed to equip itself for the struggle. Its leaders allowed relative economic success woefully to delude them about their ability to sustain a conflict with the US. Pre-war Japan was the world’s fourth largest exporter, and owned its third largest merchant fleet. The nation’s industrial production rose strongly through the thirties, when the rest of the world was striving to escape from the Depression, and amounted to double that of all the rest of Asia, excluding the Soviet Union. Japan’s consumption index for 1937 was 264 per cent of the 1930 figure. The country was still predominantly rural, with 40 per cent of the population working on the land, but the industrial labour force grew from 5.8 million in 1930 to 9.5 million by 1944, much of this increase achieved by a hesitant mobilisation of women and the exploitation of a million imported Koreans. Between 1937 and 1944, Japan achieved a 24 per cent increase in manufacturing, and 46 per cent in steel production. But these achievements, which seemed substantial when viewed through a national prism, shrank into insignificance alongside those of the United States. Between 1942 and 1945, the US produced 2,154 million metric tons of coal, Japan 189.8; the US 6,661 million barrels of oil, Japan 29.6; the US 257,390 artillery pieces, Japan 7,000; the US 279,813 aircraft, Japan 64,800. Overall Japanese industrial capacity was around 10 per cent of that of the US. Though Japan possessed some of the trappings, and could boast some of the achievements, of a modern industrial society, in mindset and fundamental circumstances it was nothing of the kind. In an Asian context it seemed mighty, but from a global perspective it remained relatively primitive, as the Japanese army discovered when worsted by the Russians during the Mongolian border clash of August 1939 at Nomonhan. Japan was a military dictatorship, insofar as the army dominated decision-making. Popular dissent was suppressed as the country entered its kurai tanima—‘dark valley’—from 1931 onwards, when the power of the nominally civilian elected government was progressively eclipsed by that of the military. The war minister, always a serving soldier, was the most influential cabinet member. Yet the direction of the Japanese war machine was feeble, fractious and inept. Rivalry between the army and navy, ‘star and anchor’, was arguably no more bitter than that which prevailed in the US armed forces. America, however, was rich enough to be able to afford this. Japan was not. Moreover, in the US the president and in Britain the prime minister arbitrated on matters of prime strategic importance—for instance, to impose the doctrine of ‘Germany First’. In Japan, no one could dictate effectively to either army or navy. To an extraordinary degree, the two services—each with its own air force—pursued independent war policies, though the soldiers wielded much greater clout. The foremost characteristic of the army general staff, and especially of its dominant operations department, the First Bureau, was absolute indifference to the diplomatic or economic consequences of any military action. Mamoru Shigemitsu, successively Japan’s wartime foreign minister and ambassador in China, was scornful of the army’s faith both in German victory and in Japan’s ability to induce Russia to remain neutral. Industry was never subject to the effective central control which prevailed in Britain, never mind the Soviet Union. In his analysis of Japanese and Western wartime attitudes to each other, John Dower has observed: ‘Whereas racism in the West was markedly characterized by denigration of others, the Japanese were preoccupied far more exclusively with elevating themselves.’ In the early stages of the eastern war, many Asians were attracted by Japanese claims that they were liberating subject peoples from white imperial dominance. It soon became plain, however, that far from the conquerors purposing an Asian brotherhood, they simply envisaged a new world in which the hegemony of Westerners was replaced by that of another superior people—the Japanese. Japan had ambitious plans for colonising her newly-won and prospective possessions. By 1950, according to the projections of Tokyo’s Ministry of Health and Welfare, 14 per cent of the nation’s population would be living abroad as settlers: 2.7 million in Korea, 400,000 in Formosa, 3.1 million in Manchuria, 1.5 million in China, 2.38 million in other Asian satellites, and two million in Australia and New Zealand. None of these immigrants would be permitted to intermarry with local people, to avoid dilution of the superior Yamato race. The British, French and Dutch had much to be ashamed of in their behaviour to their own Asian subject peoples. Nothing they had done, however, remotely matched the extremes, or the murderous cruelty, of Japan’s imperialists. Rigid segregation was sustained from all local people except ‘comfort women’. Stationed at Indochina’s great port of Haiphong, army engineer Captain Renichi Sugano ‘didn’t really feel that I was in a foreign country, because I lived entirely among Japanese people. Even when we left the port to go into the city, we ate at Japanese restaurants and caf?s, or in the officers’ club.’ The nation’s leaders urged Japanese to think of themselves as ‘shido minzoku’—‘the world’s foremost people’. In 1940, Professor Chikao Fukisawa of Kyoto University wrote a booklet in which he asserted that the emperor embodied a cosmic life force, and that Japan was the true ancient cradle of civilisation. The government caused this thesis to be translated and distributed, for the enlightenment of Englishspeakers. Here was a mirror image, no less ugly, of the Nazi vision for Hitler’s empire. Its worst implication for the Japanese themselves was that many were taught to believe that their own inherent superiority would ensure victory, dismissing objective assessment of economic factors. They allowed themselves to be deluded, as at first were the Allies, by the significance of their 1941-42 victories. Japan’s existence was dependent upon imported fuel and raw materials, most of which had to be transported thousands of miles by sea from South-East Asia. The country needed at least six million tons of petroleum a year, and produced only 250,000 in its home islands. The balance came from British Borneo, Burma and the Dutch East Indies. The navy, however, addressed neither mass-construction of escort vessels nor mastery of anti-submarine techniques, both indispensable to frustrating American blockade. The convoy system was introduced late in 1943, and became universal only in March 1944. So desperate was the shortage of anti-submarine vessels that thirty-two ships once waited ninety-five days in Palau harbour for lack of a single escort, and this was not untypical. Winston Churchill recognised the Battle of the Atlantic, the maintenance of Britain’s supply lines, as vital to averting defeat, even if it could not secure victory. Japan’s senior naval officers, by contrast, were obsessed with confronting the US surface fleet. They treated the maintenance of their country’s merchant shipping routes as unworthy of the attention of samurai until it was far, far too late, and no higher authority gainsaid them. The training of pilots and ground crew, the development of new combat aircraft, languished disastrously. No attempt was made to organise an effective air-sea rescue service to retrieve ditched airmen. Even if Japanese admirals scorned humanitarian considerations, their fliers should have been valued for their skills. Instead, hundreds were simply left to perish in the Pacific. Japan’s rival centres of power, army, navy, and great industrial combines—the zaibatsu—conducted separate wars in their own fashion, concealing the most basic information from each other as jealously as from the enemy. ‘To our distress, it became evident that our military and government leaders had never really understood the meaning of total war,’ wrote Masatake Okumiya, one of the foremost Japanese air aces. Allocation of materials was clumsy and arbitrary. Scientists and engineers addressing vital defence projects found themselves obliged to scavenge wherever they could get commodities, in the face of cumbersome and unsympathetic bureaucracies. When the group working on Japan’s primitive nuclear programme wanted the wherewithal for a heating experiment, their request was deemed unconvincing: ‘We would like to obtain an extra ration of sugar to build an atomic bomb.’ Even when the scientists did obtain a little sugar, the stock was constantly depleted by the sticky fingers of passers-by. Japan’s war effort was crippled by the amateurishness and inefficiency of its industrial and scientific direction. In his post-war prison cell Gen. Hideki Tojo, prime minister until July 1944, identified a principal cause of defeat: ‘Basically, it was lack of coordination. When the prime minister, to whom is entrusted the destiny of the country, lacks the authority to participate in supreme decisions, it is not likely that the country will win a war.’ This was, of course, a self-serving half-truth. But it was indeed hard for a nation’s chief executive to control its destinies when, for instance, he was told nothing of the navy’s 1942 defeat at Midway until weeks after the event. Sixty years old in 1944, a short man even by Japanese standards, Tojo was the son of a famous general under the Meiji emperor. His notoriously sloppy personal appearance was at odds with his meticulous reputation as an administrator, which caused him to be nicknamed ‘Razor’. He made his reputation running the military police in Manchuria, then became commander of Japan’s mechanised forces in China. He served as deputy war minister in Prince Konoe’s 1938 cabinet, and thereafter as air force chief. A psychopathic personality, Tojo had supposed that a mere forceful military demonstration in China would persuade Chiang Kai-Shek to acquiesce in Japanese ambitions. In October 1941, Tojo formed the government which led Japan to war with the West. He afterwards learned from painful experience how defective was his own country’s machinery of government. As prime minister he accurately identified many of Japan’s critical needs, but failed to induce colleagues to act effectively to meet them. Tojo, a supposed dictator, possessed far less authority in militarist Japan than did Winston Churchill in democratic Britain. When he sought to concentrate more power in his own hands, colleagues protested that many of Germany’s difficulties derived from Hitler’s relentless meddling in military detail. ‘F?hrer Hitler was an enlisted man,’ said Tojo dismissively. ‘I am a general.’ His superior qualifications proved insufficient, however, to reverse the tide of war. The loss of Saipan in July 1944 precipitated his fall from office, which was accomplished without much domestic upheaval. He was succeeded by Lt-Gen. Kuniaki Koiso, a former governor of Korea and chief of staff of the Guandong Army in Manchuria. Koiso lacked Tojo’s administrative abilities, and was notorious for his refusal to confront unpalatable realities. His only policy was to persevere, pursuing a fantasy of making terms for Japan through a bilateral deal with China. If successive prime ministers were unable to wield effective authority, who could? The leaders of Nazi Germany existed in a gangster ethos. Most of the rulers of Japan, by contrast, were people of high birth, possessed of cultural and educational advantages which made the conduct of their wartime offices seem all the more deplorable, both practically and morally. At the lonely pinnacle stood the emperor, forty-three years old in 1944, denied by his throne the comfort of intimates, and by his choice any personal indulgences. A light sleeper, Hirohito rose at seven each morning in the Imperial Palace, breakfasted off black bread and oatmeal, then worked until a lunch of cooked vegetables and dumpling soup. He neither smoked nor drank. To an extraordinary degree, Hirohito’s role in the origins and course of Japan’s war remains shrouded in dispute, just as his precise powers in Japan’s constitutional system mystified most of his own subjects during his reign. Historians lament the fact that MacArthur in 1945 made no attempt to exploit circumstances to have the emperor interrogated. Tojo’s predecessor as Japanese prime minister, Prince Konoe, complained to an aide after his own fall from power in 1941: ‘When I told the emperor that it would be a mistake to go to war, he would agree with me, but then he would listen to others and afterwards say that I shouldn’t worry so much. He was slightly in favour of war and later on became more war-inclined…As prime minister I had no authority over the army and could appeal [only] to the emperor. But the emperor became so much influenced by the military that I couldn’t do anything about it.’ For several decades after World War II, a legend was sedulously promoted, chiefly by the Japanese, of Hirohito’s long-standing pacifism. This view is now discredited. The emperor shared many of the army’s ambitions for his country, even if instinctive caution rendered him nervous of the huge risks which his generals embraced. Never until August 1945 did he speak or act with conviction against the excesses of ‘his’ army. Hirohito indulged spasms of activism in vetoing appointments and initiatives. For the most part, however, he remained mute while successive governments pursued policies which not only brought his nation to disaster, but also earned it a reputation for barbarism quite at odds with the emperor’s own mild personality. In a century of revolutions and falling monarchies, he was acutely sensitive to the vulnerability of his throne. During the interwar years the palace frequently trembled as military fanatics attempted coups, murdered ministers and promoted ever more strident nationalism. The army and navy were nominally subordinate to the emperor. But if Hirohito had attempted to defy the hard-liners during the years before and after Pearl Harbor, it is likely that the palace would have been physically attacked, as indeed it was in August 1945. He himself might well have been overthrown. Like most surviving monarchs of his time, Hirohito perceived the preservation of the imperial house as his foremost duty. A belief in the precariousness of his own position, in a society dominated by unyielding samurai, does much to explain his passivity. If this merits some sympathy from posterity, however, it cannot command admiration. While he deeply desired to be a conscientious monarch, Hirohito proved a fatally weak one, who cannot be absolved from the crimes of both commission and omission carried out in his name. He allowed others to wield executive authority in a fashion which wrought untold death and suffering, and he cannot have been unaware of the military’s bloody excesses. Two of his brothers, for instance, attended screenings of an army film depicting Japan’s biological warfare experiments on human subjects at Unit 731 in Manchuria. By the summer of 1944 the emperor yearned for a path out of the war, if only because he realised that his country was losing it. He did nothing effective, however, to advance this purpose. Until June 1945 he continued to believe that negotiation with the Allies should be deferred until Japan’s hand was strengthened by battlefield success. Most Japanese are reluctant to articulate unwelcome thoughts. Gen. Renya Mutaguchi described the difficulty which he suffered when discussing with his commander-in-chief an untenable battlefield situation in Burma: ‘The sentence “The time has come to give up the operation as soon as possible” got as far as my throat,’ he said, ‘but I could not force it out in words. I wanted him to understand it from my expression.’ Faced with embarrassment, Japanese often resort to silence—mokusatsu. Such habits of culture and convention represented a barrier to effective decision-making, which grew ever harder to overcome as the war situation deteriorated. Power was dissipated within the ranks of Japan’s officer corps, in a fashion which crippled effective executive action unless it was of an aggressive nature. Logical assessment of the nation’s predicament demanded that peace should be made on any terms. Since such a course was unacceptable to the Japanese army, the nation continued to march towards catastrophe. It may be argued, however, that such a policy in the face of adversity was not unique to Hirohito’s people. Japan’s options in late 1944, a Japanese might say, were not dissimilar to those of Britain in 1940. Winston Churchill’s commitment to resist Nazi Germany after the fall of France was neither more nor less rational than that of Japan after losing the Marianas. Without allies, Britain possessed no better prospect of encompassing the defeat of Nazi Germany than did Japan of defeating the Americans. Britain’s salvation was achieved overwhelmingly through the actions of her enemies in forcing the Soviet Union and the US into the war, not by any military achievement of her own save that of defiance in the face of hopeless odds. The leaders of Japan told their own people little less about the apparent hopelessness of their predicament in 1944 than Britain’s prime minister had told his own nation after the fall of France. Churchill, indeed, had something of the samurai about him—a belief that will alone could achieve great things. In April 1940 he tried to insist that British units cut off by the Germans in Norway fight to the death or take to the mountains as guerrillas, rather than withdraw or surrender. ‘Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops,’ he urged passionately in February 1942, as Singapore stood on the brink of collapse. ‘The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake.’ Unlike some other prominent Conservatives, when Britain stood alone he judged it better to accept the likelihood of her defeat than to make terms with Hitler. Japan’s leaders likewise believed that unconditional surrender would precipitate the loss of all they held dear. If the cause of Japanese militarism seems to posterity immeasurably less admirable than that of British democracy, it engaged its adherents with equal devotion. Japan’s leaders, like Churchill in 1940, perceived themselves as ‘buggering on’, and their people seemed willing to accept the requirements of such a policy. Japanese captured in the Pacific in September 1944 asserted to US interrogators that morale back home remained high, that civilians were ‘tightening their belts in preparation for a hundred years’ war’. Two officer prisoners claimed that America’s public pronouncements caused Japanese people to believe that their society was doomed to extinction in the event of defeat. Only a few older captives admitted doubts about the civilian will to fight on. In the last year of the war, some thoughtful and informed Japanese senior officers recognised that the defence of their country against economic blockade could not be sustained. In May 1944, for instance, Rear Admiral Sokichi Tagaki of the navy’s general staff reported: ‘Analysis of air, warship and merchant shipping losses, together with Japan’s inability to import raw materials essential to industrial production and the prospect of air attack on the home islands, show that Japan cannot achieve victory and should seek a compromise peace.’ In 1944, Japan consumed 19.4 million barrels of oil, yet was able to import only five million. This shortfall would worsen in 1945. The Japan Planning Board estimated a requirement of five million tons of shipping for essential movement of supplies, but the merchant fleet had shrunk to 2.1 million, only half of this tonnage serviceable. Tanker capacity, especially, was much depleted. In June 1944, the army general staff’s Conduct of War Section reported that there was ‘now no hope for Japan to reverse the unfavourable war situation…It is time for us to end the war.’ However, the phrase ‘end the war’ was fraught with equivocation. In the minds of almost every senior Japanese, it meant the pursuit of acceptable terms. At the very least, Japan must be permitted to retain hegemony over Manchuria, Korea and Formosa. Allied occupation of the home islands and war crimes trials of Japanese leaders were unacceptable, as was any Allied meddling with Japan’s system of governance. Many Japanese in the summer and autumn of 1944 were discussing the possibility of ending hostilities. Virtually none contemplated accepting the Allied demand for unconditional surrender. So sclerotic was the national decision-making process that nothing effective was done to act upon the knowledge available to the nation’s leaders. There is little doubt that the death of Hitler before April 1945 would have precipitated a German military collapse. By contrast, it is hard to believe that the removal of any prominent Japanese, including Hirohito or his successive prime ministers, would have hastened his nation’s capitulation. The Japanese fought on, because no consensus could be mobilised to do anything else. A dramatic political initiative to offer surrender, even one supported by the emperor, would almost certainly have failed. Japanese strategy in the last phase of the war rested not upon seeking victory, but upon making each Allied advance so costly that America’s people, as well as her leadership, would deem it preferable to offer Japan acceptable terms rather than to endure a bloody struggle for the home islands. If this assessment was fanciful, and founded upon ignorance of the possibility that a weapon might be deployed which rendered void all conventional military calculations, it offered a germ of hope to desperate men. By late 1944, many Japanese civilians had become desperate to see an end to the war, which was ruining their lives and threatened to destroy their society. Even before Pearl Harbor, Japan was divided by widespread poverty, and by tensions between city and countryside, peasants and landlords, soldiers and civilians. For all the government’s strident nationalist propaganda campaigns, conflict had deepened rather than healed domestic divisions. There was bitterness that the rich and the armed forces still ate heartily, while no one else did. The government’s Home Ministry was dismayed by the incidence of what in the West would be called defeatism, ‘statements, letters and wall-writing that are disrespectful, anti-war, anti-military or in other ways inflammatory’. There were reports of people making contemptuous references to the emperor as a baka, bakayaro or bocchan, ‘fool’, ‘stupid fool’ or ‘spoiled child’. There was substantial support for Communism, reflected in graffiti and street talk. Police reports cited cases of alleged industrial sabotage, of drunken workers shouting ‘Stalin banzai!’ Industrial disputes and stoppages remained rare, but Japan’s leaders were always fearful of revolution, as privations increased. A story enjoyed wide circulation in Tokyo’s military and political circles of a Soviet attach? declaring jovially that when his country entered the eastern war and occupied Japan, the Red Army would need to undertake a serious anti-Communist propaganda campaign. Japan, however, never found it necessary to imprison dissenters in anything like the numbers detained in Germany or the Soviet Union. Arrests for ‘peace preservation law violations’—most of the accused being left-wingers, with a handful of religious zealots—peaked at 14,822 in 1933, then declined to 1,212 in 1941; 698 in 1942; 159 in 1943—of whom only fifty-two were prosecuted. While many Japanese were profoundly unhappy with their lot, they perceived no means of doing anything about it, save to maintain their personal struggles for existence. For years, austerity had been a familiar companion. Inessential driving was banned eighteen months ahead of Pearl Harbor. Oil and iron ore were stockpiled, even plumbing fixtures were stripped from homes. Production of rubber-soled tabi shoes was halted to save raw material. There was no coffee. Neon lighting in Tokyo’s Ginza district was extinguished, and a monthly family fast day introduced. It was no longer permissible to polish rice, which diminished its bulk. From 1940 this was rationed, along with sugar, salt, matches and suchlike, to enable the government to build up stocks in anticipation of siege. Women were forbidden to style their hair or wear smart clothes. Food was a preoccupation of every urban Japanese, which soon became an obsession. In August 1944, one factory reported that 30 per cent of women and boys in its workforce were suffering from beriberi, brought on by malnutrition. ‘Observing a slice of funny little fish and two vegetable leaves which constitute a ration allowance,’ wrote Admiral Ugaki, ‘I contemplated the hardships of those who prepare a daily meal instead of the complaints of those who eat it.’ Absenteeism mounted, as factory workers spent more and more time searching for food for their families. Daily Japanese calorie intake, only 2,000 before Pearl Harbor, fell to 1,900 in 1944, and would descend to 1,680 in 1945. British calorie intake never fell below 2,800, even in the darkest days of 1940-41. An American GI in the Pacific received 4,758 calories. Twenty-three-year-old Yoshiko Hashimoto was the eldest daughter of a businessman living in the Sumida district on the eastern side of Tokyo. Her father owned a small textile firm employing fifteen people, struggling to survive because he had lost access to raw material imports and depended on synthetics. Mr Hashimoto had no son, so Yoshiko would inherit the business. To ensure that there would be a man around to run it, her father arranged her marriage to thirty-one-year-old Bunsaku Yazawa, whose family owned a shop opposite their house. ‘It would be nice to say that it was a love match,’ said Yoshiko, ‘but it wasn’t. It was my father’s choice.’ Yazawa had already spent much of his twenties as an unwilling draftee in Manchuria. Three months after his 1941 wedding to Yoshiko, he was shipped abroad again. On demobilisation from the army in 1944, he was posted to air-raid duties in Tokyo, based at a primary school not far from the Hashimoto home, where his squad was responsible for demolishing houses to make fire breaks. ‘He hated the war,’ said his wife tersely. In addition to Yoshiko, three other daughters were living at home: Chieko, nineteen; Etsuko, seventeen; and Hisae, fourteen. In 1944 Yoshiko gave birth to a son, Hiroshi, who was now the apple of his grandfather’s as well as his mother’s eye. It was a hard time to rear a baby. Food was so short that Yoshiko, undernourished, found herself unable to breastfeed. In order to get a small ration of tinned milk, it was necessary to secure a certificate signed not only by a doctor, but by the neighbourhood committee. ‘It was always coupons, coupons, coupons and queues, queues, queues. Anyone who could afford extra food bought it on the black market. Everything hinged on who knew who.’ As in Germany, there was intense bitterness between town- and countrydwellers. City folk trekked to rural areas, to persuade farmers illegally to barter food for household possessions. Yoshiko’s mother was reduced to surrendering her most cherished kimono in exchange for rice. Such bargains also demanded a struggle for a place on a train to a farming district. The most dreaded government communication which most young people received was either a ‘red paper’, consigning a man to the armed forces, or a ‘white paper’, which committed every male and many females over seventeen to industrial labour. However, Chieko Hashimoto thought herself lucky to have a job in an armaments factory, because this entitled her to a ration of otherwise unobtainable noodles. ‘By that time, we were thinking merely of survival, of how to find the next meal,’ said Yoshiko. ‘A baby could only cry about its hunger, but mothers like me had to try to do something about it. It’s really hard to bear your child’s sobs, when you have nothing to give him.’ In the Hashimoto household, as in most Japanese families, only men smoked. The women claimed to do so, however, in order to collect a cigarette ration. This was eked out by drying itadori weed, which was then rolled in scraps of dictionary paper. Gas and electricity were available only for a few hours a day. Soap and clothing were desperately short—an unwelcome consequence was that headlice became endemic. The local cinema near the Hashimoto home kept going, but since December 1941 its patrons had been deprived of Hollywood favourites like Shirley Temple. A few little music halls stayed open, featuring performances by local comedians. The young cherished irreplaceable jazz and tango records. Those wishing to amuse themselves of an evening were reduced to singing songs in the bosom of the family. ‘We never talked about the war at home, and we knew very little about what was happening,’ said Yoshiko Hashimoto. ‘Even in 1944, the papers and radio still said that we were winning.’ Desultory efforts had been made to evacuate children and their mothers from cities, but these largely foundered, for the same reason as in Britain. Town and country children, thrown together by circumstances, disliked each other. Yoshiko spent several months with her baby son at the home of a rural uncle in the Chiba district outside Tokyo. But she hated the lack of privacy in the home of near-strangers whose every word was audible through paper walls, and returned to the city. Sixteen-year-old Ryoichi Sekine and his father lived together in the Edogawa district of eastern Tokyo, with a young rustic cousin named Takako Ohki helping with the housework. Ryoichi’s mother and one sister had died some time earlier. A younger sister had been sent to live with relatives in the country. The teenaged Ryoichi found little to enjoy about the war. First, his ambitions to train as an engineer were stifled as schools devoted diminishing attention to learning, ever more to military training. By late 1944 his class spent most of their days working on an anti-aircraft-gun production line at the Seiko factory. Study of the English language was banned, except for technical terms. Young Ryoichi, like so many of his generation, felt that he ‘missed a chance of the fling which every teenager wants to enjoy’. His father was an optical engineer who worked for Minolta and Fujifilm. Association with military technology caused Mr Sekine to be well-informed about the war, and very gloomy about it. The food shortage caused the family to spend hours haggling for beans and sweet potatoes with crusty farmers outside the city. Lacking soap, they scoured their dishes with ashes. One day, a large black object fell from an American plane overhead. They were frightened that it was a bomb, but it proved instead to be a drop tank jettisoned by a US fighter. When Ryoichi strolled curiously over to examine it, he found himself savouring the stench of aviation spirit as if it was perfume, for petrol had become rare and precious. The war progressively penetrated every corner of the lives even of children. Schools emphasised the destiny of young Japanese to become warriors. Ten-year-old Yoichi Watanuki, son of a Tokyo small businessman, suffered an embarrassing tendency to feel airsick when lofted on a swing in the playground. A teacher said to him scornfully: ‘You won’t make much of a fighter pilot, will you?’ Pupils were shown caricatures of their American and British enemies, whose defining characteristics appeared to be that they were tall, ugly and noisy. There were shortages of the most commonplace commodities. Celluloid covers for exercise books vanished; rubber-covered balls were replaced by baked-flour ones, which melted when it rained. Everything metal was requisitioned by the armaments factories: even spinning tops were now made in ceramic. Art classes drew military aircraft, music classes played military music—Yoichi did his part on an accordion. School outings stopped. Every community in Japan was organised into neighbourhood groups, each mustering perhaps fifteen families. Yoichi Watanuki’s father had always supported the war. His playmate Osamu Sato’s father, a former naval officer, belonged to the same neighbourhood group. Mr Sato was bold enough to declare from the outset: ‘Japan should not have started this war, because it is going to lose it.’ Now, Yoichi heard his own father say gravely: ‘Sato was right. Everything is turning out exactly as he predicted.’ In the summer of 1944, as the threat of large-scale American bombing became apparent, evacuations of city children were renewed. One morning at Yoichi’s school assembly, the headmaster demanded a show of hands from all those who lacked relatives in the country to offer them shelter. More than half fell into this category. They were informed that their education would thenceforward continue at a new school in Shizuoka Prefecture, south of Mount Fuji. A few days later, a bewildered and mostly sobbing crowd of children gathered at the station, while behind them on the platform stood their parents, likewise tearful, to bid farewell. Flags were waved, the train whistle blew, mothers cried ‘Banzai! Banzai!’ in circumstances utterly different from those in which Allied soldiers were accustomed to hear the word. The children departed for a new life. It was not a happy one. They were billeted in a temple in densely wooded mountains, bitterly cold in winter. Water had to be carried from a nearby river, and the children were obliged to wash themselves and their clothes in the icy flow. Lice became endemic. Their teachers, all women or old men, were as unhappy as their charges. Yoichi and his companions discovered one day that a delivery of sweet cakes—by now a rare delicacy—had somehow reached the school. To the children’s disgust, teachers ate them all. They were constantly hungry, reduced to stealing corn or sweet potatoes from the fields. If they ventured into the nearby village, farmers’ children broke their schoolbags and mocked them with cries of ‘Sokai! Sokai!’ ‘Evacuees! Evacuees!’ When Yoichi took a hand helping with the rice harvest, he felt shamed by his clumsiness in wielding a sickle, his own uncut row of plants lagging many yards behind those of deft rural companions. His father made occasional visits, sometimes bringing food. When Yoichi’s mother gave birth to a new baby, Mr Watanuki bought a cottage near the temple in which his elder son’s school was housed, where the family might be safer. This proved a sensible precaution. Soon afterwards their Tokyo house was burned out in an air raid, and the whole family adopted rural life. They were safe in the mountains, though shortages of food and fuel relentlessly worsened. For the people of Japan, apprehension represented wisdom. Worse, much worse, lay ahead. 2 WARRIORS Japan’s career soldiers and sailors professed astonishment at the ‘amateurishness’ of other armies and navies, but themselves displayed reckless insouciance towards the technological development of warfare. The Japanese army was principally composed of infantry, poorly supported by armour and artillery. Japan built only light tanks. Soldiers carried a 1905 model rifle. In 1941-42 the navy and air arms were adequately equipped, but thereafter Allied weapons decisively outclassed Japanese ones. By late 1944, for instance, the legendary Zero fighter was at the mercy of the American Hellcat. As a young student at the Naval Technical Institute before the war, Haruki Iki gained a personal insight into his nation’s resistance to innovation. Senior officers flaunted their contempt for the radar development programme. They said: ‘Why do we need this? Men’s eyes see perfectly well.’ Japanese radar lagged far behind that of the Allies. ‘Before World War II, Japan’s experience of war had been gained entirely against the Chinese, who possessed scarcely any artillery or other heavy weapons,’ observes Japanese historian Professor Akira Nakamura. ‘Japan had not participated in a land campaign during World War I. The Japanese army entered World War II quite unequipped to fight a modern enemy. From 1941 onwards, front-line soldiers urged the importance of developing more advanced weapons. Unfortunately, their voices were not heeded at the top.’ Likewise staff officer Maj. Shigeru Funaki: ‘We were far too influenced by our experience in China. There, we had no need of modern equipment and tactics. Because we kept beating the Chinese, we became over-confident.’ Societies run by civilians proved vastly better able to organise themselves to fight the Second World War than those dominated by military men, of which Japan offered the most notable example. It is hard to overstate the extent to which Anglo-American wartime achievements were made possible by the talents of amateurs in uniform, fulfilling almost every responsible function save that of higher military command. Intelligence, for instance, was dominated by academics, many of startling brilliance. Montgomery’s intelligence chief in north-west Europe was an Oxford don masquerading in a brigadier’s uniform. In Japan, by contrast, authority and influence remained almost exclusively in the hands of career officers, who were reluctant to grant scope to outsiders even in such fields as scientific research. The Japanese army and navy never mobilised clever civilians in the fashion of the Western Allies. Intelligence was poor, because the Japanese mindset mitigated against energetic inquiry, frank analysis and expression. By 1944, said Shigeru Funaki, ‘people understood that we were poorly prepared and equipped for a long war. I saw how important fuel was going to be to us. Because I had always enjoyed American movies, I knew what an advanced society America was. Yet we told each other that Americans were too democratic to be able to organise themselves for war. Many military men supposed that victory could be gained by fighting spirit alone. Our intelligence was never good, because few officers acknowledged its importance. Commanders understood the need for battlefield information, but not for strategic intelligence about the big picture.’ Maj. Shoji Takahashi was a staff officer in the intelligence department of South Asia Army HQ. ‘Only in 1944 did the war situation really begin to alarm us,’ he said. ‘The Japanese army did not take intelligence nearly seriously enough. At South Asia Army HQ, we had no proper system, no analytical section, no resources—that’s how bad it was. Perhaps our attitude reflected Japan’s historic isolation from the rest of the world. We had no tradition of being interested in other societies and what they were doing. It came as a shock to realise how powerful the Allies were becoming, and how much they knew about our actions and intentions.’ ‘Intelligence became a backwater for officers who were perceived as unfit for more responsible postings,’ in the words of Japanese historian Kazutoshi Hando. ‘Strategic decision-making was concentrated in the hands of perhaps twenty people, military and naval. Even if our intelligence services had gained access to important information, it would have remained unexploited if it ran against the convictions of the decision-makers. They would not have wanted to know.’ MacArthur was sometimes accused of displaying a cavalier contempt for strategic deception, of the kind widely and often successfully practised by the Allies in Europe. Yet such was the reluctance of Japanese commanders to heed evidence which did not fit their own convictions that the most tempting morsels of false intelligence would almost certainly have been wasted on them. The British launched some Byzantine schemes in Burma, such as planting dummy plans where the enemy must find them. The Japanese seemed not even to notice. The gravest weakness of bushido, Captain Kouichi Ito believed, was that ‘no one was allowed to say what he really thought, so that we could not explore better ways to do things’. The Western Allies possessed advantages not only of better direction and resources, but also of language. English, properly used, is a clear and powerful medium of expression. Japanese, by contrast, is fraught with equivocation. Tokyo’s forces suffered chronic communications difficulties because signals were so vulnerable to misinterpretation. The men who fought for Japan displayed a courage and capacity for suffering which bewildered and sometimes terrified their opponents. The British general Sir William Slim called the Japanese soldier ‘the most formidable fighting insect in history’, a phrase characteristic of the mood of his period. A British officer who thought better of Japanese rankers than of their commanders called them ‘first-class soldiers in a third-class army’, which seems fair. Their virtues owed something to national culture, and even more to an ethos ruthlessly promoted from the top. Like the Waffen SS, many Japanese army officers were recruited from lower-middle-class backgrounds. They achieved in uniform a social status denied to them in civilian life, and paraded this in similar fashion. From the day that a man joined the Japanese army or navy, he was subjected to conditioning more brutal even than that of the Russians. Physical punishment was fundamental. When Souhei Nakamura set off to report to his recruit depot in Manchuria, he carried a big flask of sake which his girlfriend had given him as a parting present. In a train otherwise crowded with Chinese, he fell into conversation with two Japanese soldiers. He told them about his sake. ‘You’d better not turn up at the barracks with that,’ they said knowingly, ‘or you’ll be in real trouble.’ The three of them drained the flask. The soldiers slumped into happy unconsciousness, the boy stumbled out to seek fresh air at a window. He returned to find his baggage stolen by Chinese passengers. Reporting to his barracks, he was foolish enough to relate his experience to an NCO, who thrashed him on the spot. From that day, Nakamura hated military life. His view is a useful corrective for those who suppose that every Japanese recruit was eager to die for the emperor. ‘I thought of joining the army simply as a one-way ticket to the Yasukuni Shrine,’ he said laconically. Yasukuni is dedicated to those who fall in the service of the emperor. The first year of military service was notoriously dreadful. ‘Personality ceased to exist, there was only rank,’ said Masaichi Kikuchi. ‘You became the lowest of the low, condemned to cook, clean, drill and run from dawn to dusk. You could be beaten for anything—being too short or too tall, even because somebody didn’t like the way you drank coffee. This was done to make each man respond instantly to orders, and it produced results. If you want soldiers who fight hard, they must train hard. This was the system which made the Japanese army so formidable—each man was schooled to accept unquestioningly the orders of his group leader—and then took over a new recruit intake to boss around himself. Isn’t that the way it is in every army?’ Lt Hayashi Inoue said: ‘The first year as a recruit was a terrible time for everyone. It was just something you had to get through, and accept. Most of our men were very simple, innocent, poorly-educated fishermen, peasants and suchlike. They had to be taught the meaning of discipline.’ On border duty in Manchuria, Private Shintaro Hiratsuka was hit in the face by a sergeant for losing his overcoat. This caused him to become disaffected, and to embark on a career of petty theft. Caught and beaten again, he deserted, was arrested and executed. The NCO commanding Iwao Ajiro’s recruit detail disliked bruising his hand by beating offenders himself, and thus ordered them to beat each other. At first they did so without enthusiasm, causing the sergeant to shout in fury: ‘You are soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army! When you hit a man, do it as if you mean it!’ Once, after Ajiro missed a meal because he was running round the parade ground to atone for some crime, he crept into the cookhouse to claw a few mouthfuls of rice by hand from the pan—and was caught by his NCO. ‘You’re a pig!’ the man roared. ‘Get down on your knees and behave like one!’ Ajiro was obliged to crawl across the messroom floor, snorting and snuffling. On another occasion, clearing his rifle in darkness in the midst of a Manchurian winter wilderness, he dropped a bullet. When he reported to the guardroom, his sergeant screamed: ‘You have lost valuable army property! You will stay out there until you find that bullet!’ If such behaviour reflected a psyche common to most armies, the Japanese carried it to extremes unknown elsewhere. During Japan’s war in China, the practices of conducting bayonet training on live prisoners, and of beheading them, became institutionalised. Such experiences were designed to harden men’s hearts, and they achieved their purpose. A South African prisoner of the Japanese on Java wrote: ‘I saw innumerable ways of killing people, but, most significantly, never by just shooting them. I say “significantly” because this for me was the most striking evidence of the remote and archaic nature of the forces which had invaded the Japanese spirit, blocking out completely the light of the twentieth-century day.’ Naval discipline was little less brutal. On the seaplane carrier Akitsushima, Leading Seaman Kisao Ebisawa was a senior rating charged with administering punishment at the weekly disciplinary muster. He beat the backsides of green seamen with a heavy stave employed throughout the service for this purpose, ‘to sharpen them up’. Five strokes were customary. ‘After dealing with a score or two of men,’ said Ebisawa ruefully, ‘one’s wrist got pretty stiff.’ When a destroyer’s cutter rescuing survivors from a sunken battleship threatened to be swamped by struggling figures seeking to clamber aboard, those in the boat simply drew their swords and hacked off the hands of would-be intruders, Japanese like themselves. Twenty-three-year-old Lt Kunio Iwashita hailed from the mountain area of Nagano, where his father rather implausibly kept a French restaurant. To become naval officers, he and his brother had to overcome official doubts about whether scions of such a trade were socially eligible. The Iwashitas defeated prejudice by passing out top of their courses, including flight school. Kunio’s adored sibling died in 1942 at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, shot down after bombing the American carrier Hornet. His own entry into combat was delayed by a long stint as an instructor, which probably contributed much to his survival. Iwashita had flown over four hundred hours before he was posted to Iwo Jima, where he experienced a savage initiation. The first nine Zeroes of his unit, 301 Squadron, flew the 750 miles from their mainland base at the beginning of July 1944. By the time Iwashita arrived next day, three pilots including the squadron commander had already been shot down. Next day, though suffering acute stomach pains which were afterwards diagnosed as appendicitis, he was scrambled with his squadron to meet a new American strike, from which bombs were already cascading down on the airstrip. Airborne, Iwashita found himself behind a flight of four Hellcats, and poured fire into the rear plane. Its wing broke off. The Japanese saw the American pilot, wearing a white scarf, meet his own glance for an instant before the Hellcat plunged towards Mount Suribachi. The other Americans swung in pursuit of the Zero. Iwashita’s plane was badly hit before he escaped. After killing his first enemy, his reactions were those of novice warriors of every nationality. He found himself speculating about the American’s girlfriend, mother, last thoughts. Just as the army possessed many reluctant soldiers, the air force had its share of pilots who flinched from combat. Iwashita acknowledged that every squadron was familiar with the odd man whose aircraft suffered chronic technical problems, or who found reasons to turn back before completing sorties. One such pilot on Iwo Jima was summarily transferred to an anti-aircraft battery, with which he was killed by American strafing. Awareness swiftly dawned of the shortcomings of their own weapons and technology. Iwashita said: ‘When I became a pilot, I didn’t think anything could be better than the Zero. I was confident that I was flying the best fighter in the world. In combat, however, I came to understand that it was not as simple as that. American pilots were very good, and had a lot of kit we didn’t, like radio intercommunication.’ On one sortie over Iwo Jima, thirty-one Zeroes took off and only seventeen came back. Four such battles reduced Iwashita’s Zero wing from thirtyeight pilots to ten. Soon afterwards, with no planes left for them to fly, the survivors returned to Japan in a transport aircraft. The life of a Japanese soldier was wretched enough before he entered combat. Many officers were shameless in allocating food to themselves even when their men were starving. A British historian has observed that the Imperial Army’s frequent resort to rape reflected the fact that the status of women in Japan was low, while those of subject peoples possessed no status at all: ‘Right was what a soldier was ordered to do; to disobey was to do wrong. There was no moral absolute to set this against…For the ordinary soldier, rape was one of the few pleasures in a comfortless and deprived life in which he could expect to reap very few of the spoils of war.’ Hayashi Inoue’s closest friend was a fellow company commander in the 55th Regiment named Kazue Nakamura. When Nakamura was killed in northern Burma, his second-in-command withdrew without having retrieved the body, a grievous offence against the military code. Instead of facing court martial, however, the delinquent was simply assigned missions on which he could expect to die. Inoue afterwards laughed at the memory: ‘It took ages for that man to get killed. Again and again, he was sent out—and came back. He got his deserts in the end, though.’ Inoue was a colonial administrator’s son, drafted into the army in 1938 and commissioned in 1941. He accepted obedience without question: ‘If we were told to defend this position or that one, we did it. To fall back without orders was a crime. It was as simple as that. We were trained to fight to the end, and nobody ever discussed doing anything else. Looking back later, we could see that the military code was unreasonable. But at that time, we regarded dying for our country as our duty. If men had been allowed to surrender honourably, everybody would have been doing it.’ If obedience was fundamental to the samurai spirit, the conduct of the Japanese high command was confused by the power and influence wielded by some younger staff officers of violently aggressive enthusiasms, empowered by political links to the top of the military hierarchy. These promoted the doctrine of ‘gekokujo’—initiative from below. The most notorious exponent was Col. Masanobu Tsuji, a fanatic repeatedly wounded in action and repeatedly transferred by generals exasperated by his insubordination. Tsuji once burned down a geisha house to highlight his disgust at the moral frailty of the officers inside it. His excesses were responsible for some of the worst Japanese blunders on Guadalcanal. He was directly responsible for brutalities to prisoners and civilians in every part of the Japanese empire in which he served. In northern Burma, he dined off the liver of a dead Allied pilot, castigating as cowards those who refused to share his meal: ‘The more we eat, the brighter will burn the fire of our hatred for the enemy.’ Gen. Sosaku Suzuki, who commanded the defence of Leyte, wrote bitterly: ‘It is the Ishiwara-Tsuji clique—the personification of gekokujo—that has brought the Japanese army to its present deplorable situation…I tell you, so long as they exert influence…it can only lead to ruin.’ Paradoxically, in a culture dominated by obedience, some militant junior army officers exercised political influence out of all proportion to their ranks. It was unacceptable for subordinates to display intelligent scepticism. They were constantly indulged, however, in excesses of aggression. For every four tons of supplies the United States shipped to its ground forces in the Pacific, Japan was able to transport to its own men just two pounds. A Japanese infantryman carried barely half the load of his American counterpart, because he lacked all but the most basic equipment. It is extraordinary to contemplate what Japanese troops achieved with so little. It became normal for them to fight in a condition of semi-starvation. Their wounded were chronically vulnerable to gangrene, because they possessed no anti-tetanus drugs. Signals equipment was never adequate, making it hard for units to communicate. Whereas US and British armies were organised in balanced formations, composed of purpose-trained specialists—infantry, gunners, engineers and so on—in 1944-45 many Japanese positions were defended by improvised battlegroups made up of whatever men could be provided with rifles and grenades. Service units, cooks, clerks were alike thrust into the line. In the circumstances, no great tactical skills were demanded of them. They were simply expected to fire their weapons, and die where they stood. The achievements of these patchwork Japanese forces matched or even surpassed those of Germany’s battlegroups in Europe. There were human similarities between Allied warriors and Hirohito’s men which should not be neglected. A desperately wounded Japanese was as likely to cry out for his mother as any Marine or GI. It was a commonplace for Japanese soldiers starting an assault to say to each other: ‘See you at the Yasukuni Shrine.’ If this reflected genuine fatalism, most were no more enthusiastic than their Allied counterparts about meeting death. They had simply been conditioned to accept a different norm of sacrifice. Above all, a chasm existed between the two sides’ attitudes to captivity. American and British soldiers, sailors and airmen belonged to a culture in which it was considered natural and proper to surrender when armed resistance was no longer rationally sustainable. By contrast, it was driven into the psyche not only of every Japanese soldier, but of every citizen, that death must always be preferred. Gen. Hideki Tojo’s Instructions for Servicemen proclaimed: ‘The man who would not disgrace himself must be strong. He must remember always the honour of his family and community, and strive to justify their faith in him. Do not survive in shame as a prisoner. Die, to ensure that you do not leave ignominy behind you!’ Among Tojo’s people, surrender was deemed the most shameful act a man could commit, even if he was struggling in the sea after his ship had been sunk. Staff officer Maj. Shigeru Funaki asserted that this culture was rooted in the experience of the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War. ‘A lot of our men in that conflict surrendered when their positions seemed hopeless. The army became determined that such things should never happen again. If it was acknowledged as honourable to be taken prisoner, then many men would make that choice.’ A Japanese PoW named Shiniki Saiki told his American captors in the Pacific in September 1944, weeks before the word kamikaze was first heard: ‘All units are now considered to be suicide units.’ When American and British troops became familiar with the Japanese preference for self-immolation, by means often designed to encompass Allied deaths also, they grew unwilling to accept risk or trouble to take an enemy alive. ‘The understandable reluctance of our troops to trust any Jap no doubt contributes to the difficulty of inducing the enemy to surrender,’ wrote an Australian officer on New Guinea. It is sometimes alleged that Western barbarism thus matched that of their foes. Yet it is hard to see why an Allied soldier should have risked a grenade from a Japanese soldier who, even when he made gestures of surrender, rejected the Western code whereby a prisoner contracted to receive humane treatment in return for forswearing further homicidal intent. After episodes in which Japanese taken aboard American submarines sought to sabotage their captors’ highly vulnerable craft, such rescues were abandoned. This was prudent. Until Japanese began to give themselves up in substantial numbers in the summer of 1945, their surrenders were likely to be accepted only by units which needed sample prisoners for intelligence purposes. Those who reached PoW camps, by choosing survival, showed themselves unrepresentative. They were nonetheless the Allies’ best sources of information about the mood in the ranks of the enemy. ‘We poor soldiers have to sacrifice our lives and fight with Type-38 rifles against Boeings, Consolidated B24s, North Americans and Lightning P38s,’ said an embittered private soldier who surrendered to the Americans. In the safety of a PoW camp in Australia, he described himself as a Christian and a Communist, and offered to assist his captors by writing ‘a Formal Examination of Myself as a Japanese…I wish to sound the alarm to awaken the Japanese people.’ Private Sanemori Saito, taken on Bougainville, asserted that his commanding officer had gone mad, forcing the sick to report for duty, and sometimes calling parades at midnight. A construction unit officer captured while delirious with fever told his interrogators that ‘the Japanese possessed a blind faith in their leaders. Even though the military clique started war, the people were wholeheartedly behind it…PW thought the nearer hostilities came to Japan, the harder the people would fight.’ One strange figure whom Americans plucked from the sea proved to be a mixed-race soldier, only a quarter Japanese, christened Andrew Robb by his parents, Shigeru Sakai by the army into which he found himself conscripted. Robb hailed from Kobe, where he had been educated at the English mission school. When captured, he was on passage to garrison duty as a sergeant interpreter in the Philippines. As an ‘impure Japanese’ he claimed to have been victimised during recruit training, and was thus heartily grateful to be posted overseas. ‘His own reaction to Japan’s chances had varied. Originally he had not thought her capable of overcoming the industrial power of the British and Americans combined, but Japan’s earlier successes had led him to think that the Allies might be too involved in Europe to handle the situation in the Pacific.’ Robb said that he would like to inform his mother of his survival, but was fearful of ‘adverse public opinion’ at home if his captivity became known. This was a familiar sentiment among Japanese PoWs. One suggested to his captors that the best means of encouraging defections would be first, to avoid mention in Allied propaganda of the dreadful word ‘surrender’; and second, to offer those who quit post-war resettlement in Australia or Brazil. An aircrew lieutenant captured while foraging in New Guinea in July 1944 found himself the only officer prisoner among five hundred other ranks. Aboard the ship taking them to a camp in Australia, he told interrogators, some of his fellow captives proclaimed that they had a duty to kill themselves. The lieutenant, who disagreed, responded contemptuously that anyone who wanted to jump overboard was free to do so. He would promise to deliver farewell messages to their families. No one jumped. But the stigma of captivity hung over every Japanese who succumbed, often long after eventual return to their own country. In this respect, the military code served Japan’s rulers well. Without bushido’s terrible sanction of dishonour, in 1944-45 a host of Japanese would otherwise have given themselves up, rather than perish to prolong futile resistance. Refusal to face the logic of surrender was perhaps the most potent weapon Japanese forces possessed. Japan’s military commanders varied as widely in character and competence as their Allied counterparts. Gen. Tokutaro Sakurai, for instance, conformed to every caricature of Allied imagination. He was a China veteran notorious for ruthlessness and brutality. As an accessory to his uniform, he affected around his neck a string of pearls. His off-duty party piece was to perform a Chinese dance naked, with lighted cigarettes flaring from his nostrils. Some other officers, however, were both rational and humane. Masaki Honda, who commanded 33rd Army against Stilwell in Burma, was a passionate fisherman who often carried his rods in the field. A conscientious rather than gifted officer, he was among the few to show interest in the welfare of his men. He was fond of telling dirty stories to soldiers of all ranks. ‘Have you heard this one?’ he would demand, already chuckling. He resisted assignment to Burma on the grounds that supplies of his beloved sake would be precarious. The Allies sometimes supposed that Japanese readily embraced jungle warfare. In truth most hated it, none more so than Honda. Like many of Tokyo’s generals, he was personally brave and tactically competent, but displayed little imagination. He once bewildered the Chinese and Americans by dispatching a personal message to Chiang Kai-Shek, expressing regret that their two countries were at war, and commiserating on China’s casualties: ‘I have witnessed with admiration for six months the conduct of your brave soldiers in north Burma, and am very gratified to feel that they, like us, are Orientals. I would like to congratulate you on their loyalty and commitment.’ Gen. Kiyotake Kawaguchi had managed a prison camp holding Germans in the First World War, and prided himself on its civilised standards. In May 1942 he formally protested at the executions of senior Philippine officials. Once on Guadalcanal, where his forces were starving, he had to dispatch a man on a dangerous reconnaissance mission. Kawaguchi pressed into the soldier’s hand the only pathetic consolation he could offer, a tin of sardines which he himself had brought from Japan. He was subsequently relieved of command, for denouncing the futility of sacrificing lives in impossible operations. Dismissal was a common fate for senior officers who had either opposed starting the war against the Western Allies, or grown sceptical about the value of protracting it. Many thoughtful soldiers opposed Japan’s long, debilitating campaign in China. ‘We felt that it was a mistake to be there at all, that Japanese strategy was ill-considered,’ said Maj. Kouichi Ito, ‘but senior officers who expressed this view were overruled.’ Maj.-Gen. Masafumi Yamauchi commanded 15th Division in Burma, without disguising a predilection for Western life acquired during a posting in Washington. Yamauchi was a frail, gentle soul. A tuberculosis sufferer, he subsisted on a diet of milk, oatmeal and newlybaked bread until dismissed shortly before his death. His last recorded pronouncement about the war was ‘The whole thing’s so silly…’ Masaharu Homma, son of a wealthy landowner, was recognised as a brilliant soldier, notable for his eccentricities. A romantic, impulsive, passionate man, in his off-duty hours he composed military songs and poems and was a familiar figure at Tokyo’s smartest parties. As a young officer he made a disastrous marriage to a geisha’s daughter named Toshiko, with whom he had two children. In 1919, while on an attachment in England, he received a cable from his mother announcing that his wife had become a professional courtesan. Consumed with misery, Homma invited a comrade, Hitoshi Imamura, to discuss his plight at the Sunrise restaurant high above London’s West End. Inspired by liberal injections of whisky, Homma suddenly said: ‘I don’t want to go on living,’ and attempted to throw himself out of a window. Imamura restrained him. The story of two future Japanese army commanders wrestling in a London restaurant passed into legend. Imamura told Homma he must get a divorce, but instead the general wrote to Toshiko pleading for a reconciliation. A senior officer wrote scathingly to the heartsick young man: ‘What a sorry spectacle you are making of yourself! Are you really a Japanese officer? If you take back your wife, everyone will laugh at you.’ Homma replied miserably: ‘I don’t mind being laughed at. I just want her with me again.’ It was at Toshiko’s insistence that the couple parted. The general subsequently married a much younger woman, Fujiko, whom he also came to adore. Homma led the 1942 assault on the Philippines. Despite Japan’s victory, he was deemed to have bungled the campaign. Most significant, and reflecting a chronic weakness of the Japanese army, he was castigated for exercising excessive initiative, and disobeying orders which he considered unrealistic. In consequence, he never received another field command, and in 1944-45 his considerable abilities were denied to his country. The 1942 conqueror of Malaya, Tomoyuki Yamashita, likewise languished in Manchuria until October 1944, because his free-thinking found no favour with successive governments. Less able men, willing to obey without question even the most absurd instructions, held key postings. The indispensable qualification for high command was a willingness to fight heedless of circumstances, and to avow absolute faith in victory. The result was that by the summer of 1944, many of those charged with saving Japan by their military endeavours possessed the hearts of lions, but the brains of sheep. 3 The British in Burma (#ulink_ab53aabc-94aa-5260-8067-7a4baaeb4d3e) 1 IMPHAL AND KOHIMA The British and Japanese fought each other on the Burman front for forty-six months. Burma thus became the longest single campaign of the Second World War. It cost the Japanese only 2,000 lives to seize this British possession in 1942, but a further 48,662 dead to stay there until 1945. The largest country on the South-East Asian mainland, rich in oil, teak and rubber, Burma had been ruled by a British governor, with only token democratic institutions. Its population of eighteen million included a million Indians, who played a prominent part in commerce and administration. A host of Indian fugitives died in ghastly circumstances during the 1942 British retreat. Burmans had always been hostile to colonial rule. Many acquiesced willingly in occupation by fellow Asians, until they discovered that their new masters were far more brutal than their former ones. By 1944, they had learned to hate the Japanese. They craved independence and, ironically, now looked to the British to secure it for them. Yet Winston Churchill’s government, and its servants in Asia, were confused about political purposes as well as military means. The poems of Kipling, the glories of the Indian Raj, the wealth and prestige which her eastern possessions had brought to Britain, imbued old imperialists, the prime minister notable among them, with passionate sentiment. They yearned to restore the old dispensation. Some younger men recognised that the changes wrought by the war, and especially by Japanese triumphs in 1941-42, were irreversible. They perceived that most Indians were indifferent, or worse, to Britain’s war. The enlightened, however, were not in charge. The situation was rendered more complex by the involvement of the US. The war with Japan exposed differences between London and Washington more profound than any which afflicted policy in Europe. Americans, from their president to soldiers and airmen who served in the China-Burma-India theatre, were almost universally antipathetic to the British Empire, and resented committing their country’s resources to its resurrection. Where the British regarded Siam as an enemy, ally of the Japanese, from 1942 the US chose to see it merely as an occupied, victim country. This was partly because Washington harboured a conviction, which persisted through 1945, that London cherished imperialistic designs there. Americans shared with the British a commitment to undoing Japanese aggression, but would greatly have preferred not to restore the European powers’ lost possessions to their former owners. So strong was this sentiment that most Americans, including the nation’s leaders, would happily have forsworn British aid to defeat the Japanese, if they could thus have distanced themselves from the cause of imperialism. Only the most compelling global political imperatives persuaded the US to cooperate with the British in the Japanese war. It is hard to overstate the mutual suspicion and indeed antagonism which prevailed between the Western Allies in Asia in 1944-45. ‘I have noted a regrettable lack of any spirit of camaraderie between British and American sections,’ wrote a US diplomat in India, ‘or any evidence of mutual frankness and trust.’ A British diplomat likewise reported: ‘The majority of American officers in this theatre…are pessimistic about the chance of any real Allied cooperation being achieved here, suspicious of British intentions, bitter over many real or fancied grievances, and convinced of the essential bad will and hopeless inefficiency of the Indian administration.’ If the British government was less troubled than it should have been by the deaths of three million Indians in the 1943 Bengal famine, precipitated by the loss of Burma’s rice, those Americans aware of it were appalled. A growing proportion of British signal traffic on Asian matters was marked ‘GUARD’—not to be shown to allies. ‘The Americans [in India]…have rather behaved as an Army of Occupation,’ wrote a senior British officer in December 1943, ‘or if that is too strong, much as we comport ourselves in Egypt vis ? vis the Egyptian Army and Government.’ A young British officer of the Indian Army wrote of the distaste for Roosevelt’s people which pervaded his mess: ‘Our anti-Americanism probably stemmed from their reluctance to enter the war against Germany until 1941, their scornful attitude to any other Allied nations’ efforts, and their ability to create huge material and massive air support for their war in the Pacific, while almost grudgingly offering us similar backing. Stories of men losing their wives and girlfriends to American forces in Britain, and films of gum-chewing, jiving, laconic groups of American soldiers and airmen, no doubt led us to the wrong message…We should have understood these things better, but we were young and often intolerant.’ Such feelings were reciprocated. A sheaf of contemporary War Office reports complained of the reluctance of British and US personnel to salute each other. Pollsters put a proposition to Americans at home: ‘The English have often been called oppressors because of the unfair advantage some people think they have taken of their colonial possessions. Do you think there is any truth in this charge?’ Fifty-six per cent of respondents answered: ‘Yes.’ The Office of Strategic Services, the American covert operations organisation whose missions operated out of India into South-East Asia, was rabidly anti-colonialist. OSS officers reported to Washington, entirely accurately, that many Indians thought well of Subhas Chandra Bose, the Nationalist leader assisting the Japanese to raise an ‘Indian National Army’ from the ranks of PoWs to fight against the British. Even the governor of Bengal, Richard Casey, wrote in 1944 that he perceived no enthusiasm for the war among its people: ‘It would be a brave man who would say that the majority of Indians want to remain within the British Commonwealth.’ Some 23,000 young Chinese Nationalists were ‘back-hauled’ by air to India over the Himalayas for American training. They too were bemused and dismayed by their encounters with imperialism. Wen Shan, for instance, walked into Annie’s Bar in Calcutta with a group of comrades, looking for a drink. British soldiers shouted: ‘Out! Out!’ Wen remembered later: ‘We tried to say, “We’re just soldiers like you,” but they would not listen. Once, I saw a British soldier on a Hooghly bridge beating an Indian. This was the way I had seen Japanese soldiers treat Chinese people.’ Wu Guoqing, a twenty-one-year-old interpreter from Chongqing, was thrilled to find that in India he had enough to eat, as he had never done in China. Indeed, he was translated overnight from a poor student into a privileged person with Indian ‘bearers’ to clean his shoes and make his bed, like all Americans in the theatre. Wu recoiled from the poverty, however, which seemed to him worse than that of China, and from British behaviour towards Indians: ‘Some British people even hit them,’ he said wonderingly. ‘They treated them like animals.’ A British tank crewman from London’s east end, John Leyin, was disgusted by the spectacle of two tommies dangling strips of bacon fat from a train window, to taunt starving Indian passers-by. If such behaviour did not represent the entire reality of the Raj, it reflected the impression which it made upon many outsiders, especially American and Chinese, who saw India for the first time in those days. For months following the expulsion of British forces from Burma in May 1942, they were merely deployed in north-east India to meet the threat of a Japanese invasion. As this peril receded, however, it was replaced by a dilemma about future strategy. Winston Churchill admitted to the British cabinet in April 1943: ‘It could not be said that the [re]conquest of Burma [is] an essential step in the defeat of Japan.’ Yet if this was acknowledged, what were British and Indian forces to do for the rest of the war? After the humiliations inflicted on them in 1941-42, the London government was stubbornly determined to restore by force of arms the prestige of white men in general, and of themselves in particular. If the Asian empire was not to be restored to its former glory, why should British soldiers sacrifice their lives to regain it? Herein lay uncertainties which afflicted strategy throughout the second half of the war, once the initial Japanese tide began to recede. What was Britain’s Far East campaign for? And what would follow victory? No more convincingly than the French or Dutch—the other major colonial powers in Asia, though they contributed nothing significant to the war effort—did the British answer these questions. In the latter part of 1942 and throughout 1943, Britain’s operations against the Japanese were desultory, even pathetic. Led by feeble commanders against an unflaggingly effective enemy, and with scant support from the government at home, troops failed in a thrust into the Burman coastal region of the Arakan, and were obliged merely to hold their ground in north-east India. Embarrassingly, in the winter of 1943 the operations of six and a half British and Indian divisions were frustrated by just one Japanese formation. Americans like Lt-Gen. Joseph Stilwell, senior US officer in China, became persuaded that the British were no more willing energetically to grapple with the Japanese than were the Chinese armies of Chiang Kai-Shek. The only marginal success that year owed more to propaganda than substance: Orde Wingate’s ‘Chindit’ guerrilla columns, operating behind the Japanese lines and supplied by air, caught the imagination of the British public and especially of the prime minister, at the cost of losing a third of their number. At one rash moment, Churchill considered making the messianic, unbalanced Wingate C-in-C of Britain’s entire eastern army. Deflected from this notion, instead he promoted the Chindit leader to major-general and authorised resources for him to mount large-scale operations behind the Japanese front in north Burma. Wingate was killed in a crash during the March 1944 fly-in. The Chindits’ subsequent operations, like those of so many World War II special forces, cost much blood and produced notable feats of heroism, but achieved little. Wingate’s death came as a relief to many senior officers, not least Slim, commander of the British Fourteenth Army, who regarded the Chindits as a distraction. Beyond such theatricals, more than two years were allowed to elapse between the ejection of the British from Burma in 1942, and their return across the Chindwin river. Stilwell’s scorn for British pusillanimity was justified, insofar as Churchill opposed an overland campaign to regain Burma. The prime minister had seen British and Indian forces worsted in jungle fighting in 1942. He dreaded another torrid slogging match on terrain that seemed unfavourable to Western armies. Against the implacable opposition of his chiefs of staff, who were prepared to resign on the issue, Churchill pressed for an amphibious assault on the great Dutch island of Sumatra, a concept which he rashly compared with his disastrous 1915 Dardanelles campaign ‘in its promise of decisive consequences’. As late as March 1944 he revived the Sumatran scheme, causing the exasperated Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial general staff, to write: ‘I began to wonder whether I was in Alice in Wonderland.’ If a Sumatran operation was not feasible, the prime minister urged landing troops from the sea below Rangoon. Churchill’s lobbying for a grand South-East Asian amphibious adventure was futile, because Americans owned all the relevant shipping. They would commit their assets only to objectives favoured in Washington, which emphatically did not include Sumatra or Rangoon. Churchill fumed, on 5 May 1944: ‘The American method of trying to force particular policies, of the withholding or giving of certain weapons, such as carrying airplanes or LSTs [Landing Ships, Tank], in theatres where the command belongs by right of overwhelming numbers to us, must be…strongly protested against.’ By this stage of the war, however, Washington’s control of Western Allied strategy had become almost absolute. ‘The hard fact is that the Americans have got us by the short hairs,’ wrote a senior British officer. ‘We can’t do anything in this theatre, amphibious or otherwise, without material assistance from them…So if they don’t approve, they don’t provide.’ Washington dismissed a British request for two US divisions to join operations in Burma. The Canberra government likewise rejected a proposal that two Australian divisions in New Guinea should be transferred to British command in South-East Asia. If the British wanted to recapture Burma, they must do so with their own resources. ‘If our operations formed merely a part of the great American advance,’ cabinet minister Oliver Lyttelton warned the British chiefs of staff in March 1944, ‘we should be swamped. It [is] essential that we should be able to say to our own possessions in the Far East that we had liberated them by our own efforts.’ Thus, the British government knew that a campaign to retake Burma would be difficult, and would not bring the defeat of Japan a day closer. But an army must march, British and Indian soldiers must die, so that Churchill’s people were seen to pay their share of the price for victory in the Far East. Burma would be attacked overland from the north, because only the north interested Washington. Through its jungles and mountains ran a long, tenuous thread, the only land route by which American supplies could be shipped to China from India. Japanese troops occupied a vital section of this ‘Burma Road’. If they could be dispossessed, northern Burma liberated, then the US could pursue its fantastically ambitious plans to provide Chiang Kai-Shek’s armies with the means to become major participants in the war. At huge cost and despite chronic British scepticism, the road was being driven seven hundred miles north from India and south from China by 17,000 American engineers led by the brilliant US Maj.-Gen. Lewis Pike. From Churchill downwards, the British rejected the notion that China could ever play a part in the war remotely commensurate with the resources which the US lavished upon her. When Roosevelt urged that a nation of 425 million people could not be ignored, the prime minister snorted famously and contemptuously: ‘Four hundred and twenty-five million pigtails!’ Slim, commanding Britain’s Fourteenth Army deployed in north-east India, had some respect for Stilwell, but never shared the American’s belief that the Chinese could decisively influence the war against Japan. ‘I did not hold two articles of his faith,’ the British general wrote later. ‘I doubted the overwhelming war-winning value of this road and…I believed the American amphibious strategy in the Pacific…would bring much quicker results than an overland advance across Asia with a Chinese army yet to be formed.’ If Britain could withhold respect for China, however, it could not deny this to the US. Some 240,000 American engineer and air force personnel were labouring in northern India and southern China to create and sustain the air and land links to which the US government attached such importance. Washington indulged Britain’s commitment to retake Burma only in pursuit of its own China ambitions. A million Indian labourers were deployed to create road, rail and airfield facilities to support a full-scale British offensive. Churchill still railed against what he perceived as the waste of it all. How could India, with more than two million soldiers, deploy as few as ten divisions against nine Japanese on the Burma frontier? ‘It is indeed a disgrace, that so feeble an army is the most that can be produced from the enormous expense entailed.’ In truth, an embarrassing number of Indian Army units were deployed on internal security duties. Churchill wanted Britain’s eastern army to be profitably employed, but deplored the fact that ‘we are about to plunge about in the jungles of Burma, engaging the Japanese under conditions…still unfavourable to us, with the objective of building a pipeline or increasing the discharge over the “hump” [the Himalayan route to China]’. Allied operations in South-East Asia were nominally subordinate to the supreme commander of South-East Asia Command (SEAC), Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten. ‘The interests in this theatre are overwhelmingly British,’ growled Churchill to the combined chiefs of staff when he imposed his prot?g?’s appointment in September 1943. Mountbatten’s meteoric elevation, from destroyer flotilla commander in 1941 to British Chief of Combined Operations and then to SEAC at the age of forty-two, reflected the prime minister’s enthusiasm for officers who looked the part of heroes. ‘A remarkable and complex character,’ Gen. Henry Pownall, Mountbatten’s chief of staff, wrote of his boss. ‘There are so many paradoxes…his charm of manner…is one of his greatest assets; many is the time that I have gone in to him to have a really good showdown…he would apologise, promise to mend his ways—and then soon afterwards go and do the same thing again! [He] has great drive and initiative…He is however apt to leap before he looks…His meetings are overlong because he likes talking…And he likes a good big audience to hear what he has to say.’ Mountbatten’s many critics, who included Britain’s service chiefs, regarded him as a poseur with a streak of vulgarity, promoted far beyond his talents on the strength of fluency, film-star good looks, and his relationship to the royal family. He was King George VI’s cousin, and never for long allowed anyone to be unaware of it. Famously thickskinned save where his own interests were at stake, of boundless ambition and limited intellect, his grand title as supreme commander meant little, for he was denied executive direction of either armies or fleets. The extravagant staffing of his headquarters in the sublime setting of the botanical gardens at Kandy, Ceylon, promoted derision. Mountbatten was prone to follies. There was a 1943 episode in Quebec, where he fired a revolver at a chiefs of staffs’ meeting to demonstrate the strength of ‘pycrete’ as a material for a fanciful plan to build artificial iceberg aircraft carriers. The bullet ricocheted, narrowly missing the top brass of the Grand Alliance. Brooke fumed when Mountbatten solicited each of the commanders present for a souvenir tunic button: ‘I only quote this story, as an example of the trivial matters…that were apt to occupy Dicky’s thoughts at times when the heart of the problem facing him should have absorbed him entirely.’ Mountbatten, however, endured endless disappointments and changes of strategy without losing heart. Once, when a scheme which he favoured was briefly approved, though it was evident to his staff that it would never be executed, Pownall wrote pityingly: ‘Mountbatten is in the seventh heaven of delight. He is so very simple-minded.’ ‘Dicky’ was not a great man, but like many prominent actors in the dramas of the Second World War, he strove manfully to do his part in great events. He possessed two virtues which justified his appointment. First, he was a considerable diplomat. He liked Americans, as so many British officers did not, and had a sincere respect for Asians and their aspirations. And the glamour of his presence, in a theatre where so many British soldiers felt neglected by their own nation, did wonders for morale. Almost every man who saw Mountbatten descend from a plane to visit them, in dazzling naval whites or jungle greens, was cheered by the experience. As supreme commander, Mountbatten floundered when he sought to exercise authority, but distinguished himself as an ambassador and figurehead. Both he and his wife Edwina had a gift for regal informality. Peter d’Cunha of the Royal Indian Navy was once at his post in the wireless office of a patrol boat anchored in a creek off the Arakan, immersed in music from Radio Ceylon. Suddenly a pair of hands removed his headset. He turned in astonishment to perceive Mountbatten, who held it to his own ears for a moment. He then asked the operator’s name, and said: ‘You seem to be very fond of English music.’ The supreme commander replaced the phones on d’Cunha’s head and departed, saying: ‘Enjoy yourself; but just be a little bit alert. You never know who’s coming!’ The young man loved it, of course. Yet Mountbatten could do nothing to undo his Command’s absolute dependence upon an American vision. Pownall wrote bitterly in his diary in February 1944: ‘If…we are relegated to mucking about in Burma, they may as well wind up this unlucky SE Asia Command, leave here if you like a few figureheads, a good deception staff and plenty of press men to write it up.’ If we recall Slim’s scepticism about Stilwell’s hopes for the Chinese—the British general’s declared belief that the American advance across the Pacific would defeat Japan without an Asian land campaign—these strictures applied with equal force to anything which a British army might do in South-East Asia. Britain’s field commander understood as clearly as her prime minister that the new Burma campaign would be launched to restore imperial prestige and to indulge American fantasies about China, not because British action could contribute substantially to victory over Japan. In 1944, however, before the British could launch their grand offensive, the Japanese had one more throw to make. With extraordinary boldness, Tokyo’s commanders embarked on an operation to seize the positions of Imphal and Kohima in north-east India. Even the Japanese at their most optimistic did not at this juncture suppose that they could conquer the country. Rather, they sought to frustrate the British advance into Burma. More fancifully, they hoped to precipitate a popular revolt against the Raj by showcasing during their advance units of the so-called Indian National Army, recruited from prisoners-of-war. The Japanese high command’s approach to the Imphal assault was recklessly insouciant. Gen. Renya Mutaguchi of 15th Army, whose concept it was, sacked his chief of staff for suggesting that the operation was impossible, mainly because of the difficulties of moving men and supplies in Assam, the wettest place on earth, with an annual rainfall that sometimes attained eight hundred inches. Mutaguchi, fifty-six years old, was a scion of an old but now somewhat diminished southern family. Like many Japanese generals self-consciously virile, he never wearied of proclaiming his enthusiasm for women and combat. He was an ambitious political soldier, prominent among those who had precipitated war in China. Belligerence, together with connections in high places, won him promotion to army command. Mutaguchi found himself largely dependent on bullocks to move stores and munitions across some of the worst terrain in the world. Experiment showed that a laden beast could travel just eight miles a day. The Japanese army’s supply line into Assam would be extraordinarily tenuous. A staff colonel was dispatched to Tokyo to secure endorsement for the operation from prime minister Tojo. A preposterous discussion took place while Tojo splashed in his bath. ‘Imphal…yes,’ said the prime minister, who had never displayed much interest in Mutaguchi’s front. Japanese generals had a droll saying: ‘I’ve upset Tojo—it’s probably Burma for me.’ They called the place ‘jigoku’—‘hell’. Now, the prime minister demanded: ‘How about communications? Have they been properly thought out? Eh? Eh? It’s difficult country towards India, you know. What about air cover? We can’t help him much. Does he realise that? Are you sure it will make things better rather than worse? What’ll happen if the Allies land on the Arakan coast? Has anyone thought of that? Eh? Eh?’ Mutaguchi’s staff colonel outlined the plan while Tojo stood naked before him. At last, the prime minister said: ‘Tell Kawabe’—commander of the Burma Area Army and Mutaguchi’s superior—‘not to be too ambitious.’ Then he signed the Imphal operation order. The battle which ensued became one of the British and Indian armies’ proudest memories of the war, and decided the fate of Japanese arms in South-East Asia. Slim had expected an attack, but was caught off-balance by its speed and energy. Japanese forces first hit the British in the Arakan coastal belt in February 1944, then moved the following month against Imphal and Kohima. The early weeks of the struggle were touch and go. ‘The whole time I had been in the theatre,’ wrote a cynical British officer, ‘the campaign had been conducted in an extremely leisurely manner by both sides. The only time I [saw] either protagonist hurry [was] when the Japs were heading for Imphal.’ Mutaguchi risked everything to move men fast through heavy country to gain surprise, and almost cut off an Indian division. The Japanese were successful in breaking land links to the British positions. However, though the British faced Japanese troops on every side, the besiegers were in far more precarious condition than the besieged. Through the months of desperate fighting which followed, Slim’s men held almost all the cards. Their numbers were much superior—albeit not locally at Kohima—and supported by tanks and artillery such as the Japanese were unable to deploy. They possessed command of the skies, and sufficient transport planes to achieve a feat unthinkable earlier in the campaign—the air supply of Imphal and Kohima. British and Indian troops were notably better trained and equipped for jungle warfare than in the past. They defeated the Japanese Arakan thrust so quickly that Slim, with the help of American aircraft secured by Mountbatten’s intercession, was able to shift two divisions from that front to reinforce Imphal and Kohima. Finally, the British were led by their ablest field commander of the war. Bill Slim—no one called him William—was born in Bristol in 1888, younger son of a hardware wholesaler whose business failed. The boy grew up in difficult circumstances. He always wanted to be a soldier, but spent the years before the First World War first as a pupil teacher, then as a clerk in a steel business. He wangled his way into Birmingham University Officers’ Training Corps, and thence to a commission in 1914. He survived the bloodbath of Gallipoli, which killed or wounded more than half his battalion. Slim transferred to the Gurkhas and was serving with them when hit in the lung. In Mesopotamia he was wounded again by shrapnel and won a Military Cross. He finished the war as an Indian Army major. Broad and burly, with a heavy jaw and much solid common sense, between the wars he advanced steadily in rank, assuaging financial embarrassment by the somewhat unexpected means of writing magazine stories under the pseudonym of Anthony Mills. It was Slim’s misfortune to command Burcorps, the British force in Burma, during the disastrous retreat of 1942. It was generally acknowledged that he bore no personal responsibility for that defeat, but he himself liked to tell a story of his later return to Burma. One night he slipped unnoticed into Fourteenth Army’s operations room, to perceive two staff officers standing before the map, one pointing confidently and proclaiming: ‘Uncle Bill will fight a battle there.’ The other figure demanded why. ‘Because he always fights a battle going in where he took a licking coming out!’ In contrast to almost every other outstanding commander of the war, Slim was a disarmingly normal human being, possessed of notable self-knowledge. He was without pretension, devoted to his wife Aileen, their family and the Indian Army. His calm, robust style of leadership and concern for the interests of his men won the admiration of all who served under him. ‘Slim is a grand man to work for—he has the makings of a really great commander,’ enthused his chief of staff, Brig. John Lethbridge, in a 1944 letter to his wife. A soldier wrote of Slim: ‘His appearance was plain enough: large, heavily built, grim-faced with that hard mouth and bulldog chin; the rakish Gurkha hat was at odds with the slung carbine and untidy trouser bottoms; he might have been a yard foreman who had become managing director, or a prosperous farmer who’d boxed in his youth.’ An Indian artillery officer told a typical ‘Uncle Bill’ story. Suddenly summoned to order a full regimental shoot, the gunner dashed into his command post, knocking aside a big stranger who impeded his passage. Emerging shortly afterwards, he recognised his army commander, and began to stammer an apology for treating him so brusquely. ‘Don’t bother about that, my boy!’ said Slim cheerfully. ‘If everybody worked like you, we’d get to Rangoon a lot sooner!’ The only people who seemed doubtful of Slim’s merits were his superiors. Churchill never warmed to this bluff, understated officer, fighting a campaign with which the prime minister had no sympathy. Throughout Slim’s career as commander of Fourteenth Army there were attempts to ‘unstick’ him, even in his final glory days. His blunt honesty, lack of bombast and unwillingness to play courtier did him few favours in the corridors of power. Only his soldiers never wavered in their devotion. In a lecture to the officers of 10th Indian Division, which he led earlier in the war, Slim voiced some of his thoughts about command: ‘We make the best plans we can, gentlemen, and train our wills to hold steadfastly to them in the face of adversity, and yet to be flexible enough to change them when events show them to be unsound, or to take advantage of an opportunity that unfolds during the battle itself. But in the end every important battle develops to a point where there is no real control by senior commanders. Each soldier feels himself to be alone…The dominant feeling of the battlefield is loneliness, gentlemen.’ So it was through the bloody spring and early summer of 1944. On the plain at Imphal, and in the soaring Naga Hills where Kohima stood, British, Indian and Japanese troops struggled for mastery. ‘The scenery was superb,’ wrote one of the defenders, ‘the Highlands without heather, the Yorkshire fells without their stone villages, all on a colossal scale which made our trucks look very puny…On such an immense landscape, it felt like defending the Alps with a platoon.’ Ammunition consumption was prodigious. One battalion, 3/10th Gurkhas, expended 3,700 grenades in a single day’s clashes. The Japanese, short of artillery support, likewise used showers of grenades to cover their attacks. Three British brigadiers died at Kohima. The tennis court of the former district officer’s bungalow became the scene of some of the most brutal fighting of the war. Slowly, steadily, superior firepower told. Allied aircraft pounded the overstretched Japanese supply line. As well as losing ground, Mutaguchi’s soldiers began to starve. To the fury of the Japanese general, on 19 June, after eighty-five days, Kotuku Sato, his subordinate divisional commander at Kohima, abandoned the assault and began to fall back. The monsoon, which struck with exceptional force, reduced the tracks behind the Japanese front to mudbaths. ‘Despair became rife,’ said Iwaichi Fujiwara, a staff intelligence colonel. ‘The food situation was desperate. Officers and men had almost exhausted their strength after continuous and heavy fighting for weeks in the rain, poorly fed…The road dissolved into mud, the rivers flooded, and it was hard to move on foot, never mind in a vehicle…Almost every officer and man was suffering from malaria, while amoebic dysentery and beriberi were commonplace.’ Still the Japanese army commander would not abandon Imphal. When Sato, back from Kohima, reported to Mutaguchi’s headquarters on 12 July, a senior staff officer coldly offered him a short sword covered with a white cloth. Sato, however, felt more disposed to kill his superior than himself. He declared contemptuously: ‘15th Army’s staff possess less tactical understanding than cadets.’ He recognised, as Mutaguchi would not, that the Japanese forces should have acknowledged failure and fallen back before the monsoon broke. Japanese often spoke scornfully of the long and cumbersome British logistic ‘tail’. Now they discovered the cost of themselves having no ‘tail’ at all. Mutaguchi’s hapless soldiers fought on at Imphal, being driven back yard by yard with crippling losses. Their commander’s behaviour became increasingly eccentric. Having ordered a clearing made beside his headquarters in the jungle, he implanted decorated bamboos at the four points of the compass, and each morning approached these, calling on the eight hundred myriad gods of Japan for aid. His supplications were in vain. On 18 July the general bowed to the inevitable, and ordered a retreat. His ruined army began to fall back towards the Chindwin river, into Burma, Slim’s vanguards pressing on their rear. ‘One battle is much like another to those who fight them,’ observed Captain Raymond Cooper of the Border Regiment, who was wounded at Imphal. This is indeed true. But the consequences of Imphal and Kohima far transcended any British achievement in the Far East since December 1941. The campaign was a catastrophe for the Japanese. Of 85,000 fighting soldiers committed, 53,000 became casualties, five divisions were destroyed, two more badly mauled. At least 30,000 men died, along with 17,000 mules, bullocks and pack ponies, both sides’ indispensable beasts of burden. The Indian National Army, in British eyes traitors, collapsed when exposed to action, and surrendered wherever Slim’s soldiers would indulge them. Fourteenth Army suffered 17,000 casualties, but its spirits soared. ‘We knew we had won a great victory,’ said Derek Horsford, commanding a Gurkha battalion at the age of twenty-seven. ‘We were chasing Japanese up and down thousand-foot hills, finding everywhere their dead and abandoned weapons and equipment.’ An eyewitness with Fourteenth Army, advancing in the enemy’s wake, wrote: The air was thick with the smell of their dead. The sick and wounded were left behind in hundreds…We saw dead Japs all along the road, some in their stockinged feet, and where the hills were highest and most exhausting, they lay huddled in groups. They carried only a mess-tin, steel helmet and rifle. Some lay as though asleep, while others were twisted and broken by the bombs which had rained down on them. Five hundred dead lay in the ruins of Tamu. The pagoda was choked with wounded and dying. They had crawled here, in front of the four tall and golden images, to die. Hand grenades littered the altar. In the centre of the temple was a dais, and carved into this was a perfectly symmetrical pattern on the foot of Buddha. It was littered with blood-soaked bandages and Japanese field-postcards. No men in this war can have been reduced to such a terrible condition. I saw two prisoners who were revived with hot tea. They were tiny men with matted hair which stood up like a golliwog’s. One of them put his head in his hands and cried like a child. It was a disgrace for him to be alive. [Some Japanese] killed themselves where they stood with their own grenades…lousy, half-mad from hunger and explosions, and deserted by their officers. This is a picture of a shattered army…These small men with the savage hearts and the hands that can paint exquisite water-colours in the diaries which they leave lying in the red mud. Lethbridge, Slim’s chief of staff, wrote home: The Jap retreat must have been worse than Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. The whole jungle stinks of corruption. I counted twenty-five dead Japs on the side of the road, between two successive milestones. There must have been hundreds more who had crawled away into the jungle to die. In some places there are Jap lorries, with skeletons sitting in the drivers’ seats, and a staff car with four skeletons in it. All these Japs had simply died of exhaustion, starvation and disease. I have never seen troops in such good heart as our people…I’m so delighted that the British Army has at last come into its own again, and shown the world how we can wage war. I really don’t see how the old Hun can last much longer. Once we’ve finished him, we’ll simply knock the hide off these little yellow swine. On the Japanese line of retreat, correspondent Masanori Ito approached Renya Mutaguchi, architect of his army’s disaster. ‘He seemed tired out,’ wrote Ito, who noticed that the general was shamelessly sipping rice gruel, even as starving survivors of his army stumbled past. ‘You want a statement?’ Mutaguchi growled. ‘I have killed thousands of my men. I should not go back across the Chindwin alive.’ Mutaguchi did not kill himself, however, and lived to be sacked a few months later. Of all the Imperial Army’s commanders, he had become the most detested and scorned by his own officers and men. ‘Sometimes it is impossible to carry out very difficult orders, but even though the command recognise this, they will not admit their mistake until every man has died trying to carry them out,’ a Japanese officer prisoner told his British captors. ‘The unreasoning obedience of men in carrying out idiotic orders is pitiful to behold. It was often impossible for me to give the actual orders—sometimes I only passed on half of them. “We get all the fighting but none of the food—why?” No one dared say this, but everybody thought it.’ In the autumn of 1944, as Fourteenth Army began its own advance towards the Chindwin river and Burma, at first the Japanese could deploy only four very weak divisions, totalling some 20,000 men, against Slim’s six, plus two independent brigades—a British ration strength of 260,000 men. In the north, Chinese divisions under Stilwell were making sluggish progress towards the clearance of the Burma Road between India and China. The only significant achievement of the second Chindit expedition was to assist the capture of Myitkyina, a vital link on the route, which finally fell on 3 August. It required the efforts of three Chinese divisions, aided by the American ‘Merrill’s Marauders’, together with several thousand Chindits, to achieve this success against the weak, poorly-equipped Japanese 18th Division. But the prospect now beckoned of opening the China passage. Slim’s invaders were supported by forty-eight fighter and bomber squadrons and a total of 4,600 aircraft in the theatre, many of them American transports. The Japanese had just sixty-six planes. Though they were able to reinforce their ground forces before spring, the scene was set for Fourteenth Army to commence its recapture of Burma. Mountbatten’s chief of staff, Gen. Henry Pownall, perceived an urgency about this task. Like others of his time, place and nation, he saw Britain engaged in a race between the recapture of her Asian colonies and American victory in the Pacific. If the British lost the contest, if they failed to secure physical possession before the Japanese flag came down, the Union flag might never again fly over this great region: ‘There’s not much time to lose. The Yanks are going to have Japan beat by Xmas 1945. We have got a lot of cleaning-up to do by then. The Yanks are not going to wait for us (no reason why they should) but we really don’t want our Far Eastern Empire…handed back to us entirely by American single-handed victory. So we aim at all Burma by next summer and Malaya not too long afterwards.’ The twin battles of Imphal and Kohima had been essential, to halt the Japanese advance westwards. British victory had crippled the fighting power of the enemy on the Burman front, where Japan no longer possessed resources to frustrate any significant Allied purpose. Slim’s chief foes were now terrain, disease, weather, logistics. Mountbatten supported an important decision: to keep fighting through the monsoon, when in the past all significant operations were halted. Thereafter, Slim was called upon to move a modern Western army across hundreds of miles of the most inhospitable country in the world, devoid of road communications, to redeem the humiliations which Britain had suffered in 1941-42, and to keep alive a dream of empire which thoughtful men knew to be doomed. Churchill badly wanted to retrieve Burma and Malaya, but was determined, he told the chiefs of staff in September 1944, ‘that the minimum of effort should be employed in this disease-ridden country’. Here was a prospect rich in pathos, tragedy or absurdity according to viewpoint. As so often in wars, brave men were to do fine and hard things in pursuit of a national illusion. 2 ‘THE FORGOTTEN ARMY’ A British officer returning from home leave recorded gloomily: ‘In the UK…I found everywhere a dreadful ignorance about Fourteenth Army and also generally about Burma.’ But Slim’s men had learned to take a defiant pride in their status as ‘the forgotten army’. In the autumn of 1944 they advanced with spirits infinitely buoyed by victory at Imphal and Kohima. Some of the men who now began hacking a path towards the Chindwin river, sweating up the soaring hills and scrambling down the steep valleys towards its bank, had been fighting thereabouts since 1942. A young British signaller who joined 2nd Division was awed by the veterans with whom he found himself: ‘I was a pale white thing; they were tanned the colour of a mule’s backside. I knew nothing; they knew everything and could say nothing.’ The same soldier, Brian Aldiss, wrote home as the advance to the Chindwin began: ‘The grand scenery here produces a great calm, and seems to reduce war to the useless squabble it really is.’ He was as moved as many other participants by the spectacle of Fourteenth Army negotiating the hills of Assam: When our lorry was labouring to the top of a crest, we could see the thread of vehicles far away behind us, below clouds; conversely, when we were in a valley, we could look up through clouds and see that thread continuing far ahead of us, climbing the next series of heights…To be part of this inset of war was most thrilling after dark. Dim headlights scarcely penetrated the muck we threw up. We could scarcely see the tail lights of the vehicle ahead. Speed was almost down to walking pace. The impression of an animal bent on traversing a strange planet was at its strongest. On either side, unknowable, thrilling, fearsome, stood the jungle, pale as a ghost jungle in its layers of dust. The 1944-45 battle for Burma was the last great adventure of Britain’s imperial army. It brought together under Slim’s command British soldiers and Gurkhas, East and West Africans, above all Indians: Sikhs and Baluchis, Madrassis, Dogras and Rajputs, pride of the Raj. Only a fraction of those who fought for the Allied cause in Burma were British—two divisions—and just one in thirteen of all ground troops under Mountbatten’s command in South-East Asia. To a man, Britain’s Indian troops were volunteers, many from the north, where soldiering was a traditional career. The dramatic expansion of the Indian Army between 1939 and 1945—from 189,000 to 2.5 million men—caused a dilution of quality, and especially a shortage of suitable leaders, which significantly affected its performance. Yet the exotic traditions, the romance and prowess of great regiments, still thrilled British officers who felt privileged to serve with them, usually on a scale of around twelve per battalion. ‘Gurkhas were wonderful chaps to command,’ said Derek Horsford, who made his military career with the little Nepalese soldiers. ‘They had a lovely sense of humour. You had to prove yourself, but once they liked you they would do anything for you.’ Gurkha riflemen ate goat and rice, their British officers sardines and bully beef. Slim enjoyed telling a story of encountering 17th Indian Division’s famously feisty and colourful little commander, Pete Rees, leading a group of Assamese soldiers in the singing of a Welsh missionary hymn. ‘The fact that he sung in Welsh and they in Khasi only added to the harmony.’ British officers were often much moved by the loyalty and courage of soldiers who were, to put the matter bluntly, mercenaries. A man of the 1/3rd Gurkhas said to his company commander one morning: ‘Today I shall win the Victoria Cross, or die.’ That Nepalese died sure enough, but his shade had to be content with the Indian Order of Merit. Such was the rivalry between two Indian officers of John Cameron-Hayes’s gun battery that each declined to take cover on the battlefield within sight of the other. Personal honour—‘izzat’—meant much. Captain John Randle was moved when his subadar Moghal Baz suddenly said as they ate one night: ‘I would like you to know, sahib, that with you I have served with great “izzat”.’ Every man in Slim’s army heard stories such as that of a Dogra jemadar badly wounded and taken to a dressing station. The NCO insisted on crawling back to his position, and fighting on until wounded three times more. As he lay dying, he repeated again and again the war cry ‘Mai kali ki Jai!’ His British captain crawled to where he lay. The jemadar said: ‘Go back and command the company, sahib, don’t worry about me.’ Slim’s chief of staff wrote to his wife: ‘One can’t help feeling very humble when one deals with men like that. This army is truly invincible given a fair chance.’ Of twenty Victoria Crosses won in Burma, fourteen went to men of the Indian Army, three to a single unit, 2/5th Gurkhas. When a British officer met a Sikh colonel whose battalion he was relieving, he noted his immaculate turban, beard glistening in the monsoon rain: ‘I saw something in him that was new to me: relish for war. The Sikhs gave every impression of enjoying themselves.’ It never occurred to the British government to consult Indian political leaders about the conduct of the war, any more than they sought the views of Burman exiles. Reports of dissension among the Allies about Asian policy, freely aired in the British and American media, were shamelessly censored from the Indian press. The subcontinent was treated merely as a huge reservoir of manpower. An army psychiatrist’s report on Indian troops asserted that on the battlefield, most were ‘welladjusted’, as long as they were able to serve alongside men of their own racial group. ‘The sepoy,’ observed the report with imperialistic condescension, ‘accepts the army, its discipline, its customs and leaders uncritically. He is not greatly interested in the ideologies of the war, because he has a job which gives him a higher standard of living than before, an interest is taken in his welfare, and he gets leave fairly regularly. He does not ask a great deal more.’ Few British officers in Indian regiments perceived that the day of the Raj was done, or heeded the alienation of most Indian civilians from Britain’s war. ‘We took it for granted that Burma and Malaya would remain parts of the British Empire. We never thought India might go,’ said Captain Ronnie McAllister of 1/3rd Gurkhas, whose stepfather was a senior officer of the Indian Police. ‘I remember dinner parties at my stepfather’s house where there were police, Indian Civil Service people, Indians. Nobody even mentioned the possibility. We were cocooned against reality, you see, because the Indian Army was so staunch.’ That army’s cultural complexities aroused some bewilderment among newcomers. Pathans in John Cameron-Hayes’s gunner unit not infrequently used their leaves to pursue tribal vendettas at home, before returning to the British war. John Randle, a company commander in the Baluchis at the age of twenty-two, was informed by his colonel of two taboos essential to maintaining respect for sahibs: an officer must never let himself be seen naked before his men, and should ensure that excretion was carried out in privacy on a ‘thunderbox’, even in action. The officers’ mess sweeper, a little man named Kantu whose broad grin never failed, thus sometimes found himself excusing the colonel’s temporary absence from a battle, saying as he saluted: ‘Command officer sahib, pot par hai’—‘The CO’s on the pot.’ Randle was so impressed by the spectacle of Kantu crawling out under fire to deposit the hallowed contents of the thunderbox in a latrine pit that he successfully submitted the sweeper’s name for a Mention in Dispatches. Less happily, Randle was informed that a homosexual British officer had been making advances to sepoys. His soldiers, mostly Pathans, were plotting to kill him. Randle saved the man’s life by having him removed for court martial. Once, an attached platoon of British troops arrived triumphant in the Baluchis’ lines with the carcass of a wild pig they had trapped. Randle’s subadar-major said firmly: ‘Sir, that thing is not coming into our position to defile us.’ The British sergeant said: ‘Sir, you know what the rations are like—we’re all hungry and browned off to hell with bully and biscuits.’ Randle told the sergeant to remove the pig, dismember it and come back with the meat discreetly concealed in the men’s haversacks, for transfer to their own cookhouse. The subadar-major acquiesced. Likewise when tins of mutton were delivered to the 4/1st Gurkhas, bearing labels which showed images of female sheep. The men declined to eat them. The battalion CO instructed his quartermaster to find a crayon and draw testicles on the beasts. The amended mutton was found acceptable. There was rivalry between British and Indian units, with some disdain on both sides. Derek Horsford of the Gurkhas said: ‘We thought nothing of the British Army. They seemed to us terribly inefficient.’ War in Burma produced wild incongruities, such as the spectacle of the gunners of 119 Field Regiment singing ‘Sussex by the Sea’ in honour of their native county as they heaved twenty-five-pounders across a jungle clearing. The culture and language of the Raj seeped into the veins of every man who served under Slim. Whether you were a Borderer or a Dragoon, tea was ‘char’, the washerman a ‘dhobi-wallah’, a mug a ‘piyala’, food ‘khana’, and so on. They smoked Indian ‘Victory V’ cigarettes, packed in brown paper packets for European consumption, green for Indian and African. Soldiers found both ‘unspeakably vile’. The foremost tactical reality for both British and Americans fighting the Japanese was that when the enemy moved, he became vulnerable to their firepower, but while dug into his brilliantly concealed and meticulously protected bunkers, he was hard to see and harder still to kill. One of the more ridiculous documents produced by the wartime British Army, marked ‘Most Secret’, was an August 1944 report from the Directorate of Tactical Investigation, summarising tests on bombarding simulated Japanese bunkers with infantry weapons. Researchers garrisoned a position with two cockerels, two goats and two white rabbits, ‘one somewhat dull in behaviour and suffering from mange’. After a two-inch mortar barrage, reported the study, the animals were covered in dust, but otherwise little affected. ‘They appeared mildly surprised but in other respects were apparently normal. The goat was coughing slightly.’ PIAT anti-tank bombs caused the goat’s pulse to slow and blood pressure to fall. On the battlefield, no doubt with scant help from the above study, ‘beehive’ charges, tank gunfire, or an infantryman tossing a grenade into a bunker with one hand while firing a tommy gun through the slit with the other, were found most efficacious. But first it was necessary to find the enemy. A British officer noted that when his soldiers dug a foxhole, a pile of earth rose around it: ‘With the Japanese, you could never see that soil had been moved.’ A Borderer in Raymond Cooper’s company was astonished to hear a ‘woodpecker’—a slow-firing Japanese light machine gun—chattering under his feet. Without noticing, he had stepped onto an enemy bunker. Cecil Daniels’s platoon of the Buffs, advancing warily through the jungle, received their first intimation of the enemy ‘when there was a sudden bang and the sergeant who had been walking by the side of and slightly in front of me went down like a log. Firing seemed to break out all around. A shout of “Stretcher-bearer” went out, but I shouted “No need” as I could see that he was already dead, twitching in the throes of involuntary muscle convulsion. He wasn’t breathing.’ The company runner, ‘Deuce’ Adams, shouted: ‘Look out, there’s a bloody Jap.’ Somebody shouted ‘Take him prisoner.’ Someone else shouted: ‘Balls.’ Adams emptied a tommy-gun magazine apparently into empty ground, at point-blank range. The other men could see nothing. When they closed in on Adams, they found him peering into a foxhole containing a dead Japanese soldier. ‘He smelt pretty much, a sickly spicy smell such as all Japs seemed to have.’ The suddenness and savagery of such encounters made a profound impression on every man who experienced them, especially at night. The 25th Dragoons, an armoured unit, never forgot a moonless moment in the Arakan when the Japanese broke into their main dressing station: ‘The screams of the patients, doctors and medical staff as they were shot and bayoneted, the blood-curdling yells of the attacking Japs through the night, was for all of us a nightmarish experience…This brutality and inhuman behaviour…affected us profoundly.’ Some British commanders favoured fighting whenever possible in daylight, because they acknowledged Japanese mastery of darkness. Maj. John Hill’s men of the Berkshires were disgusted to find human body parts in the haversacks of dead enemy soldiers. They knew nothing of the cultural importance to every Japanese of returning some portion of a dead comrade’s body to his homeland. ‘The war in Burma was fought with a savagery that did not happen in the Western desert, Italy or north-west Europe,’ wrote John Randle of the Baluchis. ‘I never once recall burying Jap dead. If there were sappers about, they were simply bulldozed into pits. Otherwise we shoved them into nullahs for the jackals and vultures to dispose of.’ By the autumn of 1944, courage, ruthlessness and fieldcraft were the principal assets remaining to the forces of Nippon. The Allies were overwhelmingly superior by every other measure of strength. Yet a War Office report based on prisoner interrogation noted that ‘The Japanese still considers himself a better soldier than his opposite number on the British side…because [we] avoid close combat, never attack by night and are “afraid to die”.’ The author of this document recorded with some dismay that the Japanese thought less of British soldiers than of Indians or Gurkhas, and considered Fourteenth Army ponderous and slow-moving. They respected British tank, artillery and air support, but criticised their camouflage, fieldcraft and noisiness. Since 1941, however, the British and Indian armies had learned a lot about jungle fighting. First, dense cover and chronically limited views made conventional European tactics redundant: ‘All experience…has demonstrated the utter futility of a formal infantry attack supported by artillery concentrations and barrages against Jap organised jungle positions,’ wrote Frank Messervy, commanding 7th Indian Division. ‘The dominating assets are good junior leaders and skilful infantry. The right answers…are infiltration and encirclement.’ In early encounters with the Japanese, the British repeatedly allowed themselves to be outflanked, and assumed a battle lost if the enemy reached their rear. By 1944, men understood that in jungle war there were no such comfortable places as ‘rear areas’, nor such privileged people as non-combatants. Every man of the support arms must be trained to fight, and all-round defence was essential. Units had to be untroubled by encirclement. At night, anywhere within enemy artillery or mortar range, each man dug a ‘keyhole’, a slit thirty inches deep and six feet long, sufficient to protect him from anything but a direct hit. The British had a healthy respect for the enemy’s skills: ‘The Jap selects the most unlikely line of approach…irrespective of the steepness of the slope or difficulties of terrain,’ noted Gen. Gracey in tactical instructions to his division. ‘He hopes to overrun the forward edge of a position by surprise. To this end, he crawls up very quietly and patiently to our wire. His fieldcraft is excellent.’ Movement was hampered by limited vision and poor maps. So much landscape looked alike. Patrols found themselves lost for hours, even days. Captain Joe Jack of 3/1st Gurkhas wandered fifteen miles at the head of his company before finding himself back where he started. In thick jungle, a mile an hour could represent good progress. Squads ‘froze’ to verify the significance of every sound. In an advancing file, the first man was trained to look forward, the second right, the third left, the fourth to the rear. Rest was a luxury. Five hours’ sleep in twenty-four, day after day, was not an unusual quota. The two commonest adjectives among British soldiers were ‘smashing’ and ‘deadly’, the latter often applied to their rations—soya sausages, baked beans, bully beef and Spam, ‘compo’ biscuits, jam, tea and porridge, heated on meths blocks. Even if men seldom suffered serious hunger, food was always short. A rum ration was sometimes parachuted in, but in that climate beer would have been more popular. South African-made boots and Australian socks proved best suited to cope with jungle conditions. Light artillery, often the only available fire support for Slim’s infantry, was useful for keeping the enemy’s heads down, but unlikely to kill. Short-range weapons such as tommy guns and grenades were most valued. Whereas in Europe artillery and automatic fire dominated the battlefield, in Burma marksmanship mattered. An unaimed bullet was likely to damage only vegetation. Communication was problematic, because portable radios seldom worked. It was hard to see hand signals from officers or NCOs. Intensive training was essential, to make men respond instinctively to emergencies. ‘It seemed a terribly old-fashioned kind of war,’ wrote one of Slim’s soldiers, ‘far closer to the campaign my great-uncle fought when he went with Roberts to Kandahar than to what was happening in Europe.’ Douglas Gracey, commanding 20th Indian Division, summarised differences between operations in Burma and Europe: lack of good road and rail communications, endless water, jungles and swamps which limited movement, ‘but NOT to such an extent as inexperienced commanders and troops think’. Visibility was drastically reduced, and vehicles wore out fast. ‘Every Japanese in a defensive position must be dealt with. He will fight to the death even when severely wounded.’ Gracey concluded, however, with a fierce homily against allowing these considerations to induce defeatism: ‘EXPLODE THE JAP BOGEY AND THE JUNGLE BOGEY. WE ARE ALL ROUND BETTER THAN THE JAP.’ By the winter of 1944 this was true, chiefly because Slim’s men had more of everything. Even when Fourteenth Army was winning battles, it never entirely conquered its other great enemy, disease. Many men disliked the marble-sized mepacrine tablets of which a daily dosage prevented malaria, at the cost of turning their skins yellow. In 1942-43, tablets were often discarded—not least by men who preferred malaria to combat—and perhaps also by a few who believed Japanese propaganda that they rendered a man impotent. By 1944, most units held parades to ensure that mepacrine was ingested as well as issued. Men were ordered never to expose more flesh than necessary after nightfall. In the conditions of the Burmese jungle, however, chronically inimical to human health, sickness caused more losses than gunfire. A six-month breakdown of 20th Indian Division’s losses showed 2,345 battle casualties, and a further 5,605 non-battle hospital admissions. The latter included 100 accidents, 321 minor injuries, 210 skin diseases, 205 venereal, 170 psychiatric, 1,118 malaria and typhus, 697 dysentery. Insects laid their curse upon man and mule. Fires were lit in bivouacs whenever security allowed, to keep mosquitoes at bay. A British surgeon described the difficulty of addressing patients: ‘One orderly was deputed to deal with the flies. He chased them off the instruments, the sterile dressing, the blood-soaked blanket, clothing and stretcher of the patient, the very wound itself, and swatted them as they tickled the defenceless, half-naked operator.’ Chronic skin and foot infections, hepatitis, water rendered distasteful by purifying tablets, clothing never dry or clean, were the lot of every infantryman. Nor were tank crews more comfortable. In a steel box, sweat poured down men’s torsos into the sodden waistbands of their shorts. Often it was impossible to clamber on the hot hull without using rags to protect skin, and especially knees. Crews were coated in dust, and breathed through handkerchiefs tied over mouths and noses. When a tank’s main armament fired, the stink of cordite lingered in the turret. There was noise, perpetual noise. John Leyin’s crew sang ‘The bells are ringing, for me and my gal’ as their Lee lumbered into action, knowing that neither friend nor foe could hear the chorus above the roar of its engine. Another tankman, Tom Grounds, described the aftermath of battle: ‘Back in harbour we faced the bleak task of getting the dead men out…I shall not forget the burned and wizened, half-crushed head of the loader. In shocked silence they were passed through the side-hatch and lowered to the ground. We dug two graves near the side of the hill…Padre Wallace Cox conducted a short service, and rough wooden crosses were put up. White ants would soon have eaten the crosses and the jungle grown over the graves.’ Like every battlefield, Burma demanded instant decisions about life and death. One day Col. Derek Horsford of 4/1st Gurkhas found his medical officer bent over a casualty with half his intestines trailing out of his abdomen. In his agony, the man was clawing mud from the ground and stuffing it into the wound. ‘Has he got a chance?’ Horsford demanded. The medical officer shook his head. ‘Give him an overdose of morphine.’ A year later, the man amazed them all by writing from Nepal not only to report his survival, but to thank his officers for saving him. In attacks, junior leaders learned to be ruthless about leaving wounded where they lay, to await designated stretcher-bearers: otherwise there were far too many volunteers eager to escape carnage by carrying casualties to the rear. Discipline was summarily enforced. A saddler with an Indian Army mountain artillery unit asked for some grenades, to protect himself in the event of a Japanese night attack. Instead, however, he deposited one in the bunk of a sergeant-major, killing him, and threw a second which wounded a British officer. It emerged that the man had a grievance about pay. After a swift trial, he was shot by firing squad. When John Hill’s company of the Berkshires was approached by Japanese who got alarmingly close before being challenged, it emerged that two sentries had been asleep. On waking and seeing the Japanese, they simply abandoned their position and fled. Hill had one man court-martialled and sentenced to two years’ detention, because it seemed essential to drive home the message that such lapses cost lives. Burma offered no ch?teaux or champagne to senior officers. Slim’s chief of staff, Brig. John Lethbridge, described to his wife rats eating the soap in his ‘basha’ and running over his bed at night; his sense of loneliness and remoteness; gnawing uncertainty about how long the campaign might continue. He begged for news of his garden in western England. ‘This place is vile in October. The sun is sucking up all the vile humours out of the stinking ground, and one sweats and sweats. I have ten GSO1s under me, and five are in hospital with malaria or dysentery, some with both!’ Slim, paying a night visit to the headquarters map room, found himself almost stepping on a deadly krait. Thereafter, in that snake-ridden country, he used a torch fastidiously. If such things were so for red-tabbed staff officers, conditions were infinitely harsher for men living, eating and sleeping within shot of the enemy. ‘Perhaps the reason why the old soldier is reputed to dramatise his story,’ wrote Raymond Cooper, ‘is because he cannot create for those who do not know “the tiny stuffless voices of the dark”, nor can he fully explain the change in the vital values of the ordinary things of life. The contrast is too great.’ Victory at Imphal and Kohima had done much for the morale of Slim’s army, but remoteness from home was a corrosive force. Private Cecil Daniels, a twenty-three-year-old former Kent shop-worker, began his military service as an Aldershot mess waiter in 1939, became an officer’s batman, served in the Western Desert and Persia. By the winter of 1944 he had become an infantryman with the 2nd Buffs in Burma. Like so many others, this simple young man found himself bemused by the extraordinary experiences which befell him, so far from home. One night in his foxhole beside a pagoda, he lay awake gazing at the moon. ‘The thought went through my head that this same moon had been shining over the home of my family not so very many hours before, and I wondered what they were doing at this same moment, and what thoughts they were having of me.’ Though the army’s morale was high, said a War Office report dated 31 June 1944, ‘infidelity of soldiers’ wives is still a grave problem’. A company commander of 9th Borderers described an encounter a few minutes before an attack: ‘Waiting in the dark for reports to reach me that all were ready, I was approached by a man who blurted out in a hurried whisper that by that morning’s mail his wife had asked for a divorce. “I’ll talk to you about it in the morning” seemed an inept reply to a man in his frame of mind, with five hundred Japs between him and the sunrise.’ The regular morale report on British forces overseas, compiled for the War Office by Brig. John Sparrow, asserted in November 1944: ‘Anxiety about domestic affairs is rife among the troops, particularly long-serving men. Nine times out of ten it is caused by selfish women. Few officers or men feel completely secure. In one unit both the CO and RSM asked privately for my advice about their matrimonial troubles.’ Mountbatten told the army’s Morale Committee that the average British soldier ‘does not like India or Burma, and never will. The country, the climate and people are alike repugnant to him.’ Sparrow’s report noted continuing concern among British commanders overseas about ‘deliberate’ desertions by some of their men—as distinct from drunken leave overstays and suchlike. ‘All seemed agreed,’ wrote Sparrow to the adjutant-general, ‘that re-introduction of the death penalty would be the only satisfactory deterrent…It was generally realised, however, at any rate by staffs and senior officers, that [this] is not practical politics.’ After a few months in Burma, John Hill of the Berkshires concluded that about 25 per cent of his men were potentially brave, about 5 per cent potential cowards, and the remainder neither. This seems a fair, indeed generous, valuation of most Allied units in the Second World War. The strangest elements of Slim’s army—in the eyes of posterity, if not of those who grew up amid the exotic panoply of Empire—were three divisions, 17 per cent of the entire strength, recruited from Britain’s African colonies. What can have been the thought processes of such men, some from the remotest bush country, who found themselves shipped halfway across the world, albeit as volunteers, to serve in a white man’s war for less than half the pay a white man received, against an enemy with whom a Nigerian, Kenyan or Tanganyikan could have no conceivable quarrel? Non-Christians among them had sworn an oath of loyalty on cold steel, usually a bayonet, rather than upon the Bible. One West African divisional commander, Hugh Stockwell, circulated an angry memorandum when he heard that some white officers had spoken scornfully of the men they commanded: ‘I get reports that certain officers and British ORs…have, in idle conversation, been considerably indiscreet in their remarks about the capability of the African soldier in battle…Any who talk in such a way merely “foul their own nest”. I myself consider that it takes a great deal of moral courage to set the African the example he deserves or give him the leadership which is so necessary. I hope that you have the guts that your breeding as a Britisher should give you to overcome your difficulties.’ Stockwell warned that he would court martial any officer deemed guilty of ‘defeatism’. In correspondence with higher commanders, however, he admitted that some of his units had performed poorly, especially when subjected to Japanese night attacks. The African, he wrote, ‘has not a fighting history, and as a rule therefore battle does not come naturally’. Some men had proved very good soldiers, ‘but others are very, very “bush”…[The African] moves stealthily when on patrol, but cannot react quickly to any sudden emergency, again due to an inherent dislike of the unknown and lack of intelligence which precludes quick thinking. He has a doglike devotion to his leaders he can trust and admire, and who respect him…The whole fighting potential of the Division is in the hands of the European officers and NCOs.’ Stockwell deplored the poor quality of many of these. Some units were officered by Polish exiles, who had been encouraged by Churchill to emigrate to West Africa. Most of these Poles spoke the same pidgin English as their men. Stockwell was obliged to report to 11 Army Group on 4 August 1944 that ‘a small outbreak of desertion or absenteeism among native West African troops has been found to be due…to a belief…that if they can get to Calcutta they will be able to join units of the USAAF as labourers or servants. Steps are being taken to refute this idea.’ Col. Derek Horsford observed that though his Gurkhas had little regard for the unfortunate Africans as fighting soldiers—‘they would go out on patrol if you held their hands’—they were impressed by other attributes. ‘During the advance into the Kabaw valley, I found some of our chaps crouching behind a bush, watching a party of East African soldiers bathing. The Gurkhas were gazing fascinated, uttering exclamations of unwilling awe, at what they perceived as the extravagant dimensions of their black comrades’ private parts.’ There was much bitterness after the war that in Slim’s expressions of gratitude to his soldiers, he never mentioned the Africans. Some British officers evinced deep admiration for them. They cited examples such as that of Private Kewku Pong, a Gold Coaster wounded and left for dead when his unit was overrun by the Japanese. Pong found an abandoned bren gun and kept firing until overcome by loss of blood. The British discovered him next day, just alive, still clutching the butt of his gun. He was awarded the Military Medal. A British chronicler wrote of Pong: ‘On his own, in the dark of the night, quite badly wounded, with…Japanese rampaging behind him. No Britisher to tell him what to do, no African NCO, no other African; he ought to have been hopeless and helpless, and no one probably would have blamed him if he had discreetly gone to ground until all was quiet…Did Slim ever hear of Kewku Pong?’ In November 1944, Sierra Leonean troops had to carry fifty stretcher cases over the Pidaung hill range. A British officer wrote: ‘Bamboo ladders were built to get the stretchers up the rock face…Nothing…will ever compare with the perilous descent from the 2,300-foot escarpment…The European and senior African NCOs went out with torches and guided the column in…By the light of bamboo flares the stretchers were passed hand over hand down the cliff faces, some Africans going on hands and knees to form a human bridge over the worst places. The last stretcher case was safely in the advanced dressing station by 9.30 that night, after fifteen hours on the march.’ Radio Tokyo denounced the African divisions as ‘cannibals led by European fanatics’. Yet perhaps the most convincing and passionate testimonial to their contribution is that of one of their officers, Maj. Denis Cookson: ‘Without a murmur of complaint they defended a country whose inhabitants they despised, in a quarrel whose implications they did not understand. They had volunteered to fight for the British, and if the British brought them to a wilderness, that was a sufficient reason. They squatted down in their trenches, polished the leather charms they wore next to the skin, prayed to Allah for his protection, and good-humouredly got on with the job.’ They deserved more gratitude from their imperial masters than they received, and perhaps contributed more to the campaign than their critics allowed. Behind the infantry of both sides toiled one of the most extraordinary gatherings of pack animals ever mustered with a modern army. Only beasts could cover mountainous ground, especially during and after the monsoon. White bullocks were dyed green, to render them less conspicuous targets. British soldiers found themselves receiving special training as mule handlers, and many grew fond of their charges. All ranks had to be carefully instructed in packing saddles, for overloading caused girth sores, or worse. The four mules designated for an infantry rifle company headquarters, for instance, could carry 158 pounds apiece. A typical load was expressed in regulations as one signal pistol; two x two-inch mortars plus eighteen bombs; five hundred rounds of .303 ammunition and a thousand rounds of 9mm sten. The Indian Army’s mountain batteries’ light guns were dismantled for mule portage. Their British officers were also issued with chargers, which rather than riding most used to carry personal effects—blanket, mosquito net, rifle in a saddle bucket. When supplies were air-dropped, these included corn in vast quantities for the pack train. Beyond mules, Japanese and British alike exploited elephants. The animals and their local riders—‘oozies’, as they were known—had been employed before the war in Burma’s teak forests. Slim’s tusker supremo was Lt Col. Bill Williams, a First World War Camel Corps veteran who had been handling elephants for the Burma-Bombay Trading Corporation since 1920. ‘Elephant Bill’ adored his charges, and worked devotedly not only to make them serviceable to the British cause, but also to protect the animals’ interests. In the winter of 1944 he led a force of 147 elephants across the Chindwin, reinforcing his herd with abandoned Japanese beasts as the army advanced. Although, surprisingly, each elephant could carry little more than a mule’s load, their bridge-building skills were much in demand. It was an awesome sight, to see an elephant lift in its trunk a log weighing a quarter of a ton. The great animals built 270 crossings for Fourteenth Army. Men sometimes glimpsed, for instance, a broken-down amphibious DUKW being towed by a tusker. John Randle’s unit was impressed by the elephants provided to carry its heavy mortars, but dismayed to find them eating their camouflage foliage. The best ‘oozies’ were what Williams called ‘real Burmans, the Irishmen of the East’, inveterate gamblers who cared as much as he did for their animals. Some were careless, however, causing terrible suffering by allowing battery acid to leak from loads onto elephants’ backs. Williams established a field veterinary hospital to care for the injured, but nothing could be done on the night when a horrified sapper officer drove into his camp to report that one of their favourite beasts, Okethapyah—Pagoda Stone—had trodden on a landmine. ‘I gave Alex a good tot of rum, told him I could not amputate an elephant’s legs, and we could only do our best to prevent such accidents in future.’ Williams scoured parachute dropping zones for broken bags of salt, which his animals adored, and strove constantly to prevent the casual cruelty of soldiers. Once, an Indian Army Service Corps driver, enraged by an elephant blocking his road, simply shot it in the leg. In October 1944 Williams’s favourite elephant, Bandoola, forty-eight years old, got loose in a pineapple grove and contracted acute colic after eating nine hundred fruits. Bandoola recovered from this experience only to be found dead a few months later with one tusk removed, and a wound inflicted by a British bullet. Romantic though the elephants were, they suffered grievously for their role in a struggle of which they knew nothing. Many used by the Japanese were wounded or killed by RAF strafing. Most of those recaptured had had their tusks sawn off for ivory. Some 4,000 elephants are estimated to have died in Burma between 1942 and 1945. It was a strange world, that of Fourteenth Army, divorced from anything its soldiers had known in past life. ‘We had entered an enchanted zone—a place of evil enchantment, if you like,’ wrote Brian Aldiss. ‘You could not buy a ticket to get where we were…No women were allowed, or hairdressers, or any kind of extraneous occupation. Lawyers, entertainers, politicians—all were forbidden…To attend this show, you had to be young and part of the British Empire.’ There was no loot to be scavenged from the battlefield, such as the armies fighting in Europe enjoyed. There were only the enemy’s swords and pathetic banners, though Aldiss was once bemused to see a man marching with an old Japanese typewriter lashed to his sixty-pound pack. There were few illusions about the loyalties of Burmans, in whose country this bitter struggle was fought out. A 20th Division report described 10 per cent of the locals—often tribesmen from minority communities, persecuted by the Burman majority—as pro-British, 10 per cent as diehard anti-British, and 80 per cent as ‘lukewarm, assisting whichever superior forces they are forced or persuaded to’. John Randle once entered a village to find a badly wounded Japanese, obviously dying, ‘with his left leg shattered, bloated and gangrenous’. A group of Burmans surrounded him, one of whom was driving a stick up his anus. Randle shot dead both the Japanese and his Burman torturer. Men learned to beware mist on the hills, which often persisted until mid-morning, screening enemy movements. They were respectful of Japanese 90mm mortars. At night, two green verey lights from the enemy lines usually signalled an attack. Officers found it prudent to dress indistinguishably from their men, to avoid attracting the attention of snipers. The first of 114 Field Regiment to be killed in action was John Robbins, a newly-arrived young forward observation officer who went into action alongside the infantry wearing badges of rank, binoculars, and a map case prominently slung round his neck. One burst from a Japanese light machine gun removed Robbins. In Indian and African units some British officers grew beards, to make their white skins less conspicuous. When Captain Ronnie McAllister joined 1/3rd Gurkhas at the beginning of 1945, he was warned to avoid exposing himself unnecessarily. One Gurkha colonel was notorious for making his white officers lead from the front, with the consequence that some twenty were killed within months. There had been a legendary 1/3rd incident in 1943, when in battle the CO himself started firing at the Japanese with a bren gun. Afterwards, the subadarmajor reproved him fiercely, saying: ‘This must never happen again. It is our job to fight, sahib, and yours to command.’ McAllister said: ‘The people who lived through 1944 had no illusions. They told us not to rush about too much, to stay alive.’ Some of those who marched into Burma in the winter of 1944, including McAllister, had been waiting years to see action. Maj. John Hill was a pre-war regular soldier, now a company commander in the 2nd Berkshires, who had spent forty months on garrison duties in India: ‘The war took a long time to reach us.’ The Berkshires were shocked by their first sights of battle: ‘Jeep ambulances came slowly past us with the groaning, bloody, bandaged forms of three men. I remember saying to myself: “So this is it,” and others must have thought the same. The ambulances passed the whole battalion slowly, as if to emphasise the moment. It seemed odd that, after five years of war, this was our first sight of casualties…To most of us, the next few short months would seem as long as years. To a few, they would be positive enjoyment; to most, a time when a job had to be done; to others, positive purgatory.’ Men’s battle careers were often brutally abbreviated. Charles Besly of the Berkshires was a twenty-six-year-old BSc, who before the war had worked in a circus and as assistant stage manager of a London theatre company. In Denmark when war broke out, he hitch-hiked home to join the army. By January 1945 he had served for a year with his battalion as a platoon commander, without seeing action. Within days of his first contact with the enemy he won a Military Cross in a clash with the Japanese. He was severely wounded, however, almost losing a leg. Besly disappeared from the regiment, never to fight again. Thousands of soldiers followed behind Slim’s infantry, performing the myriad support functions of an army. Some maintained themselves in tiny cocoons of Britishness, upon which the war and foreign places scarcely impinged. Joe Welch was a south London joiner’s son, working in a power station, who joined the army in 1939 and became a linesman in a signals company. He and a little cluster of comrades served successively in Iraq, Greece, Libya, India and Burma, without any of these campaigns leaving much mark upon them. They were awed by the scale of India, but Burma was simply ‘lots of trees…I once saw an elephant…There were all these monkeys and spiders that came up when we were eating. I never saw a Burman.’ The campaign, to chirpy little Joe Welch, was simply ‘rain, rain, rain and bully, bully, bully’. He and his mates—a fellow Londoner named Joy, Garner from Manchester, Vince from Sheffield—carried their own little British world across the Chindwin in their Chevrolet truck with its wooden Indian-made body as composedly as they had rattled through Greece and the Western Desert. They laid their telephone lines from division to corps to army in the hills of Assam, then on the path to the Irrawaddy. What did the war mean to Joe Welch? ‘I didn’t worry about it—just one of those things, innit?’ That is how the 1939-45 experience was for millions of uniformed men, no poets they, yet all warriors of a kind. Every man, whatever his rank or specialisation, was expected to turn a hand to anything. At the end of November 1944, the Berkshires found themselves roadbuilding just inside the Burma border. ‘Even the miners among us found it tough going,’ wrote Maj. John Hill, who wielded a pick with his men, ‘but it was all part of Fourteenth Army’s philosophy of self-help and DIY, in modern jargon…blasting trees, bamboo roots, rocks and eternally digging and shovelling, digging and shovelling until we longed for knocking-off time at 1600.’ During the advance from Imphal to the Chindwin, Slim’s men met only sporadic Japanese resistance, for the enemy was in no condition to fight a serious battle. In consequence, beyond the strains of the march, among many units there was almost a holiday atmosphere. The long files marched each night for eight or nine hours, each man following a wooden tag dipped in phosphorus tied to his predecessor’s backpack. Then, when morning came, they bivouacked. ‘Very soon companies would have settled down in their allotted areas on perimeters,’ recorded the History of the 3/1st Gurkhas. ‘Cookhouses and latrines would be built; the men, after consuming quantities of sweet tea, would make “sun shades” for themselves and the sahibs, and everyone would settle down for a very pleasant day, which everyone could spend pretty much how he liked.’ When they reached the Chindwin one officer, John Murray, spent hours fishing vainly with rod and line. He was chagrined to hear a loud explosion, then to meet a triumphant party of his men clutching a large fish, secured by judicious use of a grenade. The Gurkhas enjoyed the spectacle of African soldiers potting monkeys with rifles, until stray bullets started to fly about their own heads. Yet even when organised Japanese resistance was slight, almost every yard of the Burma war provided unwelcome surprises. John Cameron-Hayes was disturbed in the night by a weight descending on his mosquito net, which proved to be a cobra. When one of his men shot a boa constrictor, its falling corpse knocked him into a stream. During the hours of darkness, both sides employed ‘jitter parties’, patrols whose function was to disrupt their opponents’ repose. Beyond these, there were plenty of unscheduled encounters. One night a Gurkha NCO awoke from sleep to see seven figures standing together on the road just beside him, huddled over a map. He rose, challenged them, and was met by startled Japanese grunts. He smote one enemy soldier with a spade, while the others scattered and ran. A British officer, awakened by the racket, found two figures struggling hand-to-hand in the darkness beside him. Joining the fray, it was some seconds before he realised that he was fighting a fellow officer. There was a desultory exchange of fire, then silence fell. The camp returned to sleep, only to be wakened once more by a thunderous explosion. A Japanese officer had blown himself up on an anti-tank mine. The Gurkhas slept again. At dawn, but for the presence of four dead Japanese in their positions, they would have been tempted to dismiss the alarums of the night as mere fantasies. Beyond casualties inflicted by the enemy, there was a steady trickle of accidents, inseparable from all military operations. The air-dropping of supplies became a dominant feature of Fourteenth Army’s advance, and soldiers and pack animals were sometimes killed by loads falling upon them from the sky. As columns threaded up precipitous mountain tracks, at intervals a mule slipped, plunging into the valley below. A report noted wearily that the animal lost was invariably carrying a vital radio set—it was essential to ensure that some wirelesses were manpacked. A private of the Buffs performed a notable little feat of heroism, wiping out a Japanese machine-gun post with his bren gun. Yet as he ran on forward, he tripped and fell. The spade protruding from his pack caught and broke his neck. In action shortly afterwards, a Buffs sergeant called to his runner, Cecil Daniels, for a bag of grenades. The NCO was infuriated when Daniels told him they were not primed. ‘I’m not carrying a haversack full of primed grenades,’ said Daniels firmly. He had been rendered cautious by seeing so many comrades fall victim to accidents with munitions. ‘We seem condemned to wallow at half-speed through these jungles,’ Winston Churchill complained bitterly in October 1944, describing the progress of Fourteenth Army. Yet for those at the sharp end, every yard of movement meant pain and difficulty. Conventional fieldcraft demanded that men should avoid the few tracks, which were likely to be covered by enemy fire. Yet movement through thick cover was so desperately slow that only tracks and chaungs—riverbeds—offered any prospect of advancing at tolerable speed. Distances measured on the map were meaningless—what mattered was how far men had to march. They learned not to smoke or talk at night anywhere within reach of the enemy, for scent and sound alike carried far. They cursed the relentless damp, which misted the optics of gunsights and binoculars, rusted weapons overnight. Newly-joined replacements often buckled under the weight of their packs. Training had not prepared them for the burdens men must carry in a country where vehicles were few and mules precious. Air-dropped artillery had to be manhandled into firing positions by sweating gunners. If a man was lucky, every few months he was granted a brief leave in India. Soldiers resting from Burma were entitled to ‘convalescent scale’ rations. A transport aircraft carried them to rear base, from which an Indian soldier still needed days of travel to reach his home. Wartime trains in the subcontinent were notoriously congested and slow. When a Tokyo propaganda broadcast on Christmas Eve 1943 asserted that Japanese forces would reach Delhi in ten days, a chorus of listening Punjabi soldiers, just returned from an irksome leave journey, chorused: ‘Not if they go by train, they won’t!’ Yet many of Slim’s soldiers had no homes in India. On leave, they sought what pleasures they could discover. Sgt Kofi Genfi of the Gold Coast Regiment described a touching experience: ‘Oh, the Indians were very kind to me. In Madras I went to dance—I am a ballroom champion dancer. I sat down, but I couldn’t get a partner. I was shy. I didn’t know how to engage a lady. A man came and said: “Do you want to dance?”…He said “Come, come.” He gave me his wife…We started to dance, and they all stopped and looked at me as if I was giving a demonstration. At the end, there was applause. Then every lady wants to dance with me!’ For the white as well as black soldiers of Fourteenth Army, there was a shameful divide between the luxuries offered to officers on leave in clubs and messes, and the pitiful delights available to other ranks. These focused upon bars and brothels of notable squalor. When John Leyin’s tank gunner heard that he was to be repatriated to England, his joy was tempered by the misery of finding himself impotent, after repeated treatments for venereal disease. The British class system shaped the lives of the nation’s soldiers overseas, even more in Asia than in Europe. Signaller Brian Aldiss wrote cynically: ‘Most rankers expected little from life, had been brought up to expect little. And received little.’ Few men returned content from leave. But the experience granted at least a brief reprieve from toil, sweat and fear. Throughout the Burma campaign, American transport aircraft, fighters and bombers provided vital support to Slim’s operations. Chuck Linamen, a twenty-year-old steelworker’s son from Ohio, flew fifty-two B-24 Liberator missions from India to targets in Burma and Siam. The first that he and his crew knew of their posting to the Far East was when they opened sealed orders over the Atlantic, en route to the Azores in August 1944: ‘I couldn’t even pronounce the names of the places we were going.’ But from the moment he joined the 436th Squadron at Madagan, 130 miles north-east of Calcutta, he found himself one of the relatively small number of men who relished the task which war had imposed upon him: ‘I enjoyed every minute of it.’ He loved his crew, a characteristic all-American mix: Ray Hanson, ‘the best navigator in the world’, from Minneapolis; Will Henderson, the co-pilot, from Montana; a Texan bombardier; Kentuckian radio-operator; gunners from New York, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and Ohio. They mined Bangkok harbour, dropped bombs on railyards, bridges, Japanese positions. By the standards of Europe, all their missions were long-haul, cruising at 165 knots for a minimum of ten hours, a maximum of eighteen. By way of compensation, however, opposition from flak and fighters was slight. On some low-level missions they strafed Japanese positions like excited schoolboys from three hundred feet, gunners whose turrets would not bear shouting over the intercom: ‘Give me a shot! Give me a shot!’ This did not, however, make the assignment risk-free. Beyond the hazards of mechanical failure, the Japanese could spring unwelcome surprises. Over Bangkok, Allied aircraft weaved to avoid barrage balloons. At 6,000 feet above Karneburi on 3 April 1945, Linamen’s Liberator was hit by enemy anti-aircraft fire which inflicted punishing damage on its systems, severed an aileron cable and removed the starboard wingtip. They fell 4,000 feet before the pilot regained control, and then he had to nurse the plane every mile of the way back, for seven and a half hours, to the RAF emergency strip at Cox’s Bazaar. Over the base, he invited the crew to jump. A gunner asked: ‘What you doing, Curly?’ ‘I’m going to ride her down,’ responded the pilot. The gunner said: ‘What are we waiting for, then?’ The other nine men took up crash positions. Unable to slow the plane for landing without losing control, Linamen settled for a high-speed skid onto the beach, touching at 150mph, frantically shutting down fuel, power, systems until they shuddered to a halt. The crew, terrified of fire, bolted out of the hatches. One man found himself lying on the sand inches from a propeller that was still windmilling, and could have removed his head. ‘You laugh about these things afterwards, but any of them can cost a life.’ Another day, over a target, the co-pilot suddenly shouted ‘Yowie!’ Linamen turned in bewilderment, demanding: ‘What’s your problem?’ A 20mm cannon shell had clipped off part of the man’s leg, mercifully without damaging the aircraft systems. They hastened home, to deliver their casualty to the medics. If Linamen loved to fly, others did not: ‘A hell of a lot of people were pretty despondent. They didn’t like India, they didn’t like the job.’ One day, ‘The colonel leading the mission screwed up. The wing found the target fogged in, but farted around waiting for visibility to clear, and got a few shot down.’ Among the pilots lost was a Californian named J.C. Osborne, one of Linamen’s closest friends. During the monsoon, when the weather was unfit for bombing, the Liberators were transferred to transport duty, carting fuel over the Hump into China. One night on the ground at a Chinese airstrip, they found themselves in the midst of a Japanese air raid. The airmen crowded onto the roof of a revetment to watch the fireworks, until a stick of bombs landed a few yards away, driving the Americans hastily into cover. Linamen exclaimed: ‘My daddy always taught me that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and he sure was right!’ Yet he felt no great animosity towards the Japanese: ‘They were just there, they were the enemy. I had volunteered to fly, I was doing a job.’ Linamen achieved some fame, as one of the airmen who attacked the bridge over the river Kwai, built by prisoners on the ghastly Burma-Siam railway. Yet they felt little emotion even about this mission. They knew that Allied prisoners were on the ground, but had heard nothing of their unspeakable sufferings. Bombing the bridge was just another mission. Tactical air support was a critical force in the British advance, rendered even more formidable by the fact that Japanese fighters had almost disappeared from the sky. Day after day, Fourteenth Army situation reports—‘sitreps’—recorded: ‘Enemy air activity: NIL.’ Hurribombers—Hurricanes adapted for ground attack—mounted over 150 sorties a day, aided by American Thunderbolts. Strafing was always hazardous. Even when enemy resistance was slight, the perils of the jungle and mechanical failure persisted. A Beaufighter crew of 211 Squadron once jumped from a damaged aircraft over their base in the Arakan, rather than risk a landing. Their parachutes drifted into a rainforest of 150-foot trees. Though within a mile of their airfield, the airmen were never seen again. Beaufighters—big, tough, twin-engined aircraft which weighed ten tons and carried a two-man crew—flew long ‘intruder missions’ of up to seven hours, usually against Japanese rear areas. They tried to time their attacks for dawn or dusk, racing in at fifty to a hundred feet, weaving to confuse the ground gunners. They carried a formidable armament—aimed by a reflector sight on the canopy, a red ring with a blade to direct rockets, a dot for the guns. The whole aircraft shook violently when the 20mm nose battery fired. Exploding cannon shells raised a dustcloud around a target, or sometimes prompted more dramatic effects when they hit river sampans loaded with fuel. ‘For an instant,’ twenty-one-year-old Anthony Montague Browne of 211 Squadron wrote lyrically of such a moment, ‘the flight of shells caught the sunlight, shimmering like a swarm of silver bees.’ His unit’s ‘Beaus’ usually attacked in flights of three or four, preferring to do so without their squadron commander, a devout Catholic who could be seen crossing himself before making a dive. Other pilots begged him to desist from this practice: ‘It looked doom-laden and distinctly disconcerting.’ Once, over the Irrawaddy, Montague Brown saw a string of boats carrying a brilliantly-clad wedding party. Hapless guests sprang into the water as soon as they glimpsed the Beaufighter. On the ground, at their airstrip, there were few comforts or diversions. Food was poor, the chief consolations a monthly ration of one bottle of whisky and four cans of Australian beer. When these were exhausted the pilots—a typical RAF mix of British, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand—had recourse to a local palm toddy arak, known as Rum, Bum and Broken Glass. Between operations every two or three days, they played a lot of poker. One squadron commander, with an implausible past as a ballet instructor, sought to raise the cultural tone by playing Les Sylphides on the mess gramophone before take-off. Beyond the airstrip, there was nowhere even to go for walks, amid unbroken swamps and jungle. The fliers had no contact with local people, except once when some aviation spirit was stolen. The British drove around the area in Jeeps, pleading with rice farmers not to use the high-octane fuel as a substitute for paraffin in their lamps. The Burmans took no heed. ‘That night, the sky was red with flames from burning huts, and pathetic little queues formed outside the medical units for treatment,’ wrote Montague Brown. The area was notorious for extremes of weather. Once, a tornado blew down all their huts. In the air, they met violent thermal currents and thunderstorms. A hailstorm could strip the camouflage paint from wing leading edges, leaving the aluminium shining like silver. When a crew was lost, the squadron usually had no notion of its fate. An aircraft literally went missing. It was an unglamorous existence, detached from the rest of mankind and the war, though by a quirk of communications they received airmail editions of the London Times only five days after publication. Montague Brown—who became Winston Churchill’s private secretary a decade afterwards—wondered if the campaign would ever end. ‘Our progress to the liberation of Burma was extraordinarily lengthy,’ he wrote. ‘We had superiority in every arm, and after the early toe-to-toe slogging at Imphal…the terrain progressively improved for armour and transport…Why were we so dilatory?…Surely, we could have moved faster. I was later intrigued to find that Churchill shared this view.’ Hall Romney, a British PoW on Japan’s infamous Burma railway, wrote in his diary on 19 November 1944: ‘When one considers what the Americans have done in the Pacific, one cannot help thinking people have moved slowly in Western Asia.’ This was a widely-held view, even among those with less cause than Romney to yearn for haste. The Japanese army in Burma was crippled at Imphal and Kohima before Slim’s army even left Assam. From that point onward, the British invaders were overwhelmingly superior to their enemies. It would have been shameful indeed had Slim’s forces been unable to crush a Japanese army which lacked tanks or effective anti-tank guns, possessed negligible air support and little artillery, was starved of supplies and ammunition, and heavily outnumbered. Logistics, climate and terrain, much more than the Japanese, determined the snail’s pace of the Burma campaign until its last weeks. Scarcely any of the advanced technology used by the Allies in Europe for movement or bridging was available to Slim’s army. His was a ‘make-and-mend’ campaign, unloved by Churchill, barely tolerated by the Americans, woefully underacknowledged at home in Britain. ‘This army is like Cinderella,’ Slim’s chief of staff ‘Tubby’ Lethbridge wrote ruefully, ‘and until the German war is over one can only wait patiently for all the things we want. One gets an awful feeling of frustration when every request, whether it be for equipment or individuals, is turned down.’ Fourteenth Army deserved more credit for its advance into Burma than sceptics such as young Flying Officer Montague Brown were minded to offer. In the early months of 1945, notable deeds and spectacular successes lay ahead for Slim’s soldiers. What is remarkable, however, is not that the British prevailed, but that their Japanese foes sustained resistance for as long as they did. Victory in Burma was painfully long delayed. 4 Titans at Sea (#ulink_f64cabac-78a7-5444-a853-067870a5f3f4) 1 MEN AND SHIPS As Slim always perceived, though his campaign engaged more men than MacArthur’s, it was a sideshow. The critical struggles to defeat Japan were taking place far to the east, in conditions very different from those of the Kabaw Valley and Chindwin approaches. Most Americans in the Pacific theatre learned to regard saltwater as their natural element. To be sure, scattered across the ocean there were pimples of rock and coral adorned with brilliant vegetation, barely visible on a hemispheric map. The value of these as unsinkable aircraft platforms caused their possession to be contested with terrible ferocity. Until the last months of the war, however, ground forces were relatively small. Navies dominated. From 1942 to 1945, hundreds of thousands of sailors grew accustomed to waking each morning to horizons of sky and sea interrupted only by ships and aircraft. The greatest fleets in history sailed the Pacific, yet shrank to nothingness in its immensity. When the American cruiser Indianapolis was sunk, it was four days before anyone noticed that she was missing, far less located her survivors. Many American, Japanese, Australian and—in the last phase—British sailors lived afloat for years on end. The US carrier Essex once steamed continuously for seventy-nine days, during which she flew off her flightdeck 6,460 planes, which dropped 1,041 tons of bombs, fired over a million rounds of .5 machinegun ammunition and consumed 1.36 million gallons of avgas. The wartime expansion of the US Navy was an extraordinary achievement, which should never be taken for granted. Between 1941 and 1945, its tonnage swelled from three million to almost thirty. Of the service’s total war spend of $100 billion, more than a third went to ship construction. The pre-Pearl navy mustered 8,000 officers. Each war year thereafter, an additional 95,000 were granted reserve commissions, becoming ‘feather merchants’ or ‘ninety-day wonders’ at the end of their three months’ training. The precipitous quality decline of the Imperial Navy contrasts starkly with the proficiency achieved by the Americans. As the Japanese lost experienced seamen and aircrew, those replacing them proved ever less competent. Suicide pilots might be brave enough, but in the battles of 1944-45 many of Tokyo’s aviators and warship captains displayed astonishing diffidence. The US Navy, meanwhile, grew better and better, in seamanship, gunnery, replenishment, submarine warfare, aircraft handling. This prowess was achieved mostly by men who, before the war, knew the sea only as a place to swim in. The fighter direction staff of the carrier Langley, for instance, included an advertising executive, a lawyer, a college teacher, and an Atlanta architect who specialised in designing Methodist churches. America’s shipbuilding programme almost defies belief. President Roosevelt was always a committed supporter of a strong fleet. Following the 1940 ‘Two Ocean Navy’ Act, Congress granted the navy the most generous open cheque in history. Admiral Ernest King, its profane, intemperate, womanising overlord, seized his opportunity and never let go. He set about creating an armada whose size owed little to rational assessment of the resources needed to defeat Japan, and almost everything to his own grandiose vision. By late 1943, the US was building seven battleships, twenty-eight carriers, seventy-two escort carriers, seventy-three cruisers, 251 destroyers, 541 destroyer escorts and 257 submarines. These new hulls were destined to join 713 ships already in service. ‘The inescapable conclusion,’ an American historian has written, ‘…is that navy expansion goals had become completely divorced from strategic planning and were influenced more by political possibilities than any thorough reassessment of the fleet’s long-term requirements.’ King’s programme prompted staggering growth in America’s shipbuilding industry. Mare Island Navy Yard expanded from 6,000 employees in 1939 to 40,000 in 1944, Boston Yard from 8,700 in June 1940 to 50,000 three years later. Forty-two cruisers were ordered from a single private builder in New Jersey. By 1944 more than a million workers were building and repairing ships, 55 per cent of them on the Atlantic coast, 27 per cent on the Pacific, while a further two million served supporting industries. Most were working forty-eight-hour weeks on multiple shifts. Extraordinary ingenuity was deployed to maximise production. Many smaller vessels, submarines and escorts, were built in sections at plants as far inland as Denver, then transported to the coasts for completion. Thousands of landing ships were constructed on the Great Lakes and sailed to the sea—one imperfectly navigated LST approached within a hundred feet of Niagara Falls before being saved by grounding. Productivity increased dramatically, so that the man-hours required to build a destroyer halved from pre-war levels to 677,262; those for a light cruiser fell from 7.7 to 5.5 million. The consequence of this immense activity was that by late 1944 the American Pacific Fleet outnumbered the Japanese by four to one in ships, and overwhelmingly more in combat power. The USN was larger than the combined strengths of all the other navies in the world. The navy made no attempt to consult with the army about the two services’ respective needs. King merely declared magisterially that since the war cost his country $200 million a day, building ships saved money by hastening victory. He projected USN losses—and thus necessary replacements—for the period 1 May 1944 to 30 September 1945 (actual sinkings are given in parentheses): four battleships (0), nine carriers (one), twelve escort carriers (five), fourteen cruisers (one), forty-three destroyers (twenty-seven), ninety-seven destroyer escorts (eleven), twenty-nine submarines (twenty-two). By late 1944 the navy could call upon 3,000 carrier-based planes. Warships were coming off the slips faster than crews could be mustered and trained to man them. The navy never assessed its manpower needs, it simply enlisted every sailor it could get. In 1944, 8,000 new naval aviators entered training. On 2 July that year, King asked the joint chiefs for extra manpower to increase naval strength by June 1945 to 3.4 million men, a million of these at sea. Yet, to crew all the ships he had ordered, 4.1 million would have been needed. All this reflected the fact that, with Pearl Harbor to be avenged, there was no political will to challenge the ambitions of the US Navy. Americans had a historic, visceral scepticism about big armies, but since the late nineteenth century they had shown no such inhibitions about seapower. King served his country well by creating the greatest fleet the world would ever see, crewed by men who showed themselves worthy of it. But only a nation so absurdly rich could have built two hundred battleships, carriers and cruisers in the war years, as well as a thousand smaller ships. It may be argued that King’s megalomania was no greater than that of Arnold and the air force, which also imposed a disproportionate drain on manpower. But the US Army, always the Cinderella service, paid the price for both, with its chronic shortage of fighting infantrymen. Only late in the war did it dawn upon America’s leaders that their monumental industrial mobilisation was generating far more ships and planes than it had conscripted men to serve them. By the autumn of 1944, the principal American naval forces committed to the Pacific were submarine flotillas operating out of Pearl Harbor and Brisbane; Seventh Fleet, commanded by Vice-Admiral Thomas Kinkaid—a motley gathering of cruisers, escort carriers and old battleships which operated under MacArthur’s orders in support of his land operations; and Nimitz’s heavy units, dominated by fast battleships and carriers. These were led alternately by William ‘Bull’ Halsey, whose belligerence had made him a popular legend, and Raymond Spruance, the cooler and cleverer hero of Midway. The rationale for this odd arrangement was that it was difficult to plan operations in the cramped conditions of a warship. Each admiral therefore took it in turns to work ashore at Pearl, preparing for the next phase, or to direct the task groups at sea. To increase confusion—not least among the Japanese—Halsey’s command was known as Third Fleet; when Spruance took over, the same ships became Fifth Fleet. Under either designation, this represented the greatest concentration of naval power in the history of the world. For those who served at sea, spasms of intense action served only to emphasise the dreariness of life between. ‘The thrills were brief and far apart,’ wrote a crewman of the carrier Belleau Wood. Except for its flight crews, day in and day out life at sea was pure monotony…Boilers, engines, bulkheads, decks, mess halls, offices and shops always look the same, no matter what goes on above. Every day was a duplicate of its predecessor and model for its successor: reveille in the dark to sit around battle stations for an hour until sunrise; launch aircraft for routine patrols which 90 per cent of the time saw nothing save air, clouds and water; land aircraft; launch aircraft; land aircraft; three meals a day; scrub bulkheads; swab decks; run boilers and engines; then fade out with another hour after sunset at battle stations. ‘Relieve the watch. On deck section three. Relieve the wheel and lookouts.’ Relieve the watch, relieve the watch, day after day, week after week. The sea and sky rolled endlessly by from one port period to the next; our eyes became ‘waterlogged’. Many men chafed at their ignorance of the purposes of their ships’ activities, beyond the obvious ones of bombardment and defence against air attack. ‘You never know where you’re going from one island to the next,’ said Louis Irwin, a turret gunner on the cruiser Indianapolis. ‘My lasting regret was that I didn’t know what the hell was going on, where we fitted into the big picture,’ said Lt Ben Bradlee, a destroyer officer. Eugene Hardy served on the cruiser Astoria at Midway, but was unaware that he had taken part in a great battle until somebody told him afterwards. ‘Dear Mom and Dad,’ wrote a twenty-year-old to his family in New Jersey from the Pacific, ‘I really feel like writing a long letter because I have some time, but there isn’t much to write about.’ If routine often became oppressive, in many respects a naval rating’s life was preferable to that of a combat infantryman. Death at sea was horrible, but actuarially much less likely than for a man in a ‘sharp end’ role on land. Daily existence was softened by comforts unavailable to most ground troops. Yet in the Pacific, every seaman was prey to the unyielding heat. Temperatures above a hundred degrees were routinely recorded below decks. Ventilation was relatively crude and always inadequate. Senior ratings competed for prized bunk space near an air outlet. In rough weather, conditions grew much worse, for the blowers could not run. Heat rash was almost universal. Many men slept on deck, so that warships at night were strewn with slumbering forms on gun positions and galleries, beneath the boats and in hammocks slung between rails on every corner of the superstructure. Prostrate figures crowded under the folded wings of aircraft on carrier flightdecks. Lifejackets served as pillows. Locked into the unchanging routine of four hours on, eight hours off, overlaid with dawn and dusk calls to ‘general quarters’, men learned to sleep in the most unpromising circumstances. James Fahey, a New Englander who served on the cruiser Montpelier, seldom occupied his bunk, instead lying down on the steel deck with his shoes for a pillow. If it rained, ‘you stand back under cover and hope it does not last very long’. Some sought space as far as possible from explosives or fuel, but on a warship almost any refuge was illusory. Naval forces often kept station in a given area for days on end, steaming circular courses rather than dropping anchor. Machinery was never silent, never still. There were always watches to be kept and duties to be filled; echoing broadcast announcements; hurrying feet on ladders; eyes and ears watching and listening at dials, screens, headphones. Everybody was tired almost all the time, yet so effective had this navy become that ‘there weren’t many fuck-ups’, in the words of a young reservist. ‘It was an exhausting life that discouraged reflection, introspection, or anything more intellectual than reading.’ A destroyer officer observed pityingly that two of his comrades, junior-grade lieutenants, were geriatrics of twenty-seven, ‘too old for the duty they had…The hours were too long and the physical demands too great. That’s when I learned that war is for kids.’ Louis Irwin, a beer salesman’s son from Tennessee, had joined the navy at seventeen in 1942, ‘for lack of anything better to do. I wanted a bunk to sleep in and not a foxhole.’ Irwin found himself most apprehensive not in combat, but on refuelling duty in heavy seas, facing the peril of being washed overboard. During bombardment missions in the island battles, the big ships’ guns fired hour upon hour, day after day, as long as forward observers pointed targets and ammunition held out. A novice sailor on the battleship Pennsylvania fell asleep under one of its vast gun turrets, then remained oblivious through general quarters and a piped warning that the main batteries were about to fire. Concussion almost killed him. A shipmate recorded: ‘Everyone had a new respect for the fourteen-inch guns after that.’ All 45,000 tons of a battleship shook when its main armament fired. Recoil thrust the vessel aside. Far below in the engine spaces, ‘it felt like being taken apart in the boiler rooms of hell. You could see motor mounts jump and steam lines move.’ Consequences became even more dramatic aboard smaller ships. Repeated concussions from the destroyer Howorth’s five-inch guns caused all the urinals in the heads to break free from their bulkheads. Off-duty, in quiet times there might be a movie show, but mostly there was nothing to do save sleep and play cards. Machinist’s mate Emory Jernigan saw $20,000 on the table in a messroom poker game. Men played high, because they had nothing else to spend money on. Jernigan reckoned that 20 per cent of the ship’s gamblers ended up with 80 per cent of the players’ money. Ben Bradlee’s commanding officer learned that the torpedo officer on their destroyer owed him $4,000 in card money. The captain ordered Bradlee to play his debtor double or quits until he lost. Whereas ashore a combat officer’s life was little better than that of an enlisted man, afloat those with commissions were privileged. Few ordinary sailors enjoyed war service, but some officers like Bradlee did, especially if they were fortunate enough to be able to use their brains, serving in small ships, less vulnerable to ‘brass and bullshit’ than battleships and carriers. ‘I had such a wonderful time in the war,’ wrote Bradlee later. ‘I just plain loved it. Loved the excitement, even loved being a little bit scared. Loved the sense of achievement, even if it was only getting from Point A to Point B, loved the camaraderie…I found that I liked making decisions.’ Emory Jernigan, by contrast, with none of the privileges of rank, wrote that ‘time and distance, plus loneliness, make a tasteless soup, hard to stomach for long periods of time, and ours was a long, long time’. James Fahey wrote in his diary: ‘You want to be free again and do what you want to do and go where you want to go, without someone always ordering you around.’ It was a sore point in the navy, that officers received a disproportionate share of medals—they accounted for less than 10 per cent of personnel, but received almost two-thirds of all decorations. They were the ones in the spotlight if a ship was deemed to have done something good, while their men remained ‘bit players’. On the destroyer Schroeder, for instance, seaman Robert Schwartz dived into heavy seas one day to save a comrade who had fallen overboard—and received no recognition. Emory Jernigan hated seeing fried eggs being carried to the officers’ quarters, while he and his messmates breakfasted off the powdered variety, always watery, together with powdered lemonade: ‘It was a constant, nagging reminder that we were first-class citizens caught in a third-class situation.’ One of the ship’s black mess stewards revenged himself on a bullying captain by spitting or urinating in the wardroom coffee before serving it. Some men, however, found the experience of naval service deeply rewarding. Carlos Oliveira was the immigrant son of Portuguese parents. He had never been to school and spoke no English. In 1941 the navy rejected him as a volunteer, but in the panic after Pearl Harbor he was enlisted direct into the fire room of the battleship Wisconsin and served three years before being released to attend boot camp. It was there that a young officer, a Southerner named Betts, made a remark that impressed him: ‘Carlos, a lack of formal education is not an impediment if a man can read and will read. Books can take you anywhere you want to go.’ Oliveira said later that the war turned people like himself into real Americans. Through his years at sea Emory Jernigan, a twenty-one-year-old farmboy from a desperately poor home in Florida, missed more than anything the chance of a walk in the woods. He ate better as a sailor than as a child, but missed grits. At his battle station in a destroyer’s forward engine room, as Jernigan and his comrades heard the concussions of battle overhead, they never forgot that if steam lines fractured, they would cook in seconds. At high speed, propeller shafts shrieked in protest, ‘a warping sound as if they wanted to leave the mounts. The rudders and hydraulic lines would moan in their labors, and underwater explosions would hit the hull just outside.’ After months of combat, nerves became frayed to the limits, ‘so that when a big pipe wrench fell very noisily on a grating behind me, it scared me half to death’. They emerged after hours of such ordeals covered in stinking salt sweat. One of Jernigan’s comrades, after experience of action below, jammed into an ammunition-handling room, successfully begged a station topside. Some men found small-ship life intolerably uncomfortable and sought transfers, especially after experience of typhoons—three US destroyers foundered with heavy loss of life in the great Pacific blow of December 1944. Conversely, however, life aboard escorts and submarines possessed an intimacy impossible to achieve on a big ship with a crew of up to 3,000, where no one man ever visited every compartment. ‘Each ship is like a city, large or small,’ wrote Emory Jernigan. ‘Even a tugboat is a little town all of its own.’ Personal relationships fluctuated dramatically among men living month upon month in enforced proximity: ‘You’d be playing checkers with a friend one day, and the next you couldn’t stand him.’ The quality and quantity of seamen’s rations seemed to army personnel infinitely enviable. The official Navy Cookbook of the period included such gems as: ‘The following words…are defined for the benefit of those who may not be familiar with some of the terms used in cooking: CANAPE (KA-NA-PA) a slice of bread fried in butter, on which anchovies or mushrooms are served. CAVIAR (KAV-I-AR) prepared or salted roe of the sturgeon or other large fish, used as a relish.’ Everything in big ships’ galleys was on a heroic scale. The recipe for canned codfish cakes began: ‘Take 40 pounds of potatoes and 15 pounds of codfish…’ And for beef chop suey: ‘30 pounds of beef, 30 pounds of cabbage, one pint Worcestershire sauce…’ A sample menu in the 1945 USN Cookbook ran: ‘Breakfast—grapefruit juice, cornflakes, grilled sausages, french toast, maple syrup, butter, milk, coffee. Lunch: cream of vegetable soup, roast beef, brown gravy, buttered potatoes, harvard beets, carrot and celery salad, ice cream, rolls, butter, coffee. Supper: lamb fricassee, mashed potatoes, tossed green salad, french dressing, coconut jelly doughnuts, bread, butter, tea.’ ‘Tin can’ sailors in destroyers never fed in such a fashion, but larger vessels offered astonishing fare save in combat, heavy weather or when operations delayed rendezvous with ‘reefers’—refrigerated ships. Messdeck menus then became reduced to Spam and beans. Almost every human and mechanical need had to be met by shipment across thousands of miles of ocean. The south-west Pacific was known as the ‘goat and cabbage circuit’, because so much unwelcome food came from Australia. The scale of logistics was staggering. In the five months from 1 September 1944, for instance, fleet tankers delivered to the fast carrier force alone 81/4 million barrels of fuel oil, 121/4 million gallons of aviation gas. In addition, they shifted thousands of drums of lubricating oil in fourteen grades, compressed gases, oxygen, spare belly tanks, mail, personnel and food. Fresh water was a constant issue. The heat caused tanks to become contaminated with bacteria, which necessitated draining them for cleaning. So desperate were some seamen for a serious drink that they built stills or drained alcohol from torpedo propulsion systems. The latter practice may have raised morale, but drastically shortened the torpedoes’ range. The mood of every ship was different, and strongly influenced by the personality of its captain. Some were admired, ever thoughtful for the welfare of their men. Others were not. The captain of Franklin once bawled out his stewards over the carrier’s broadcast system: ‘You black messmen are the sloppiest bunch of mess attendants I have ever seen.’ A disgusted crewman said: ‘He…sounded just like a Georgia redneck—in front of 3,000 men. It was not right.’ Another carrier captain was described as ‘one of the most irascible and unstable officers ever to earn a fourth stripe, but a man with a slide-rule brain’. Yet another was judged by a fellow officer ‘emotionally unstable, evil-tempered…He drank too much too often; had a capacity for insulting behavior, especially when drunk.’ A destroyer officer’s diary recorded dismay about his skipper: ‘The old man is getting nastier all the time. There is something wrong with that guy mentally. The poor, pitiable old fool told us last night that none of us were any good and that professionally we stink.’ Doctrinal procedures standardised throughout the fleet did something, but not enough, to iron out unhappinesses created by mad or bad captains. Big ships were invariably commanded by regular officers. To run a cruiser or carrier, it was thought essential to possess at least six years’ sea time. Many smaller vessels, however, were committed to the hands of reservists. Ben Bradlee suggests that some reserve officers, civilians in uniform, performed better than their career counterparts: ‘We hadn’t spent years learning all the stuff about how things worked, we simply knew what they did.’ One of Bradlee’s own captains, a professional navy man, was notoriously inept at mooring ship, often causing lines to snap. Once he turned in disgust to a reservist lieutenant on the bridge and said: ‘Goddamn it, I can’t stop this son-of-a-bitch. You do it.’ Because amateur sailors knew so little, navy manuals detailed the minutest aspects of each man’s duties. The November 1944 Organisation and Regulations for US Pacific Fleet decreed, for instance: ‘Messmen shall keep themselves meticulously clean…cooks, bakers and butchers on duty shall wear the “chef’s cap”. Naked personnel will not be permitted in galleys or messing spaces…The use of profane and obscene language is prohibited.’ Morale was much influenced by the frequency of letters from home. Cheers and whistles rang through a ship when mail call was piped. Emory Jernigan was ashamed to be summoned by his captain and rebuked for failing to write to his mother, who had complained. Rumour, scuttlebutt, was the breath of life: the Japs were ready to quit; the ship was headed for refit; the next target was Okinawa, or Leyte, or Peleliu. Good commanding officers broadcast frequently, telling their crews everything they knew about what the ship and the fleet were doing. This was especially important in action, to hundreds of men imprisoned in steel compartments far below decks. For their very sanity, they needed to know what a huge, unseen detonation meant; whether their team seemed to be winning; sometimes, whether damage to their own ship was as grievous as concussions, screams, smoke pulsing through ventilators made it seem. By late 1944, even the biggest ships were overcrowded: with gunners for additional batteries of anti-aircraft guns, crammed onto upper decks; up to 10 per cent surplus personnel to compensate for those who habitually ‘missed ship’ on sailing for the combat zone; and staff officers. Experts on one new specialisation or another—flak or human torpedoes or mine counter-measures—were shoehorned into messdecks, to the chagrin of those who had to make space. Commodore Arleigh Burke observed wryly that visitors left an aircraft carrier with an impression that ‘the most important thing was the battle for food and living room’. Nor was overcrowding confined to men. Far more technology was now available than ships could readily carry. ‘Top hamper’, excess weight on superstructures, threatened stability. A staff officer said ruefully: ‘Every time we bring out something new they [ships’ captains] will not give up what they have on board, they want the new item also. We have got to saturation point now, so you can’t put the stuff on.’ Men yearned for a chance to stretch legs ashore, but this meant only a glimpse of some thankless strip of coral and palms. On Mongong atoll, for instance—‘Mog Mog island’, as sailors knew it—the genial Commodore ‘Scrappy’ Kessing, an elderly officer who had escaped from hospital to join the war, provided R-and-R facilities which were once utilised by 20,000 sailors in a single day. In March 1945, before Okinawa, 617 ships were anchored there. James Hutchinson of the battleship Colorado joined his ship’s boxing team simply for the excuse to get ashore on Ulithi to train. Ulithi, repair base for the fleets, was a miracle of logistics organisation, but offered few joys to tired sailors. Enlisted men queued for hours for places in a boat to the shore, where they might be allocated four cans of beer apiece. Their commissioned counterparts forced a passage into the most overcrowded officers’ club in the western Pacific for a spasm of noisy drinking before recall to their ships. Manus was reckoned to have much better facilities, but crews saw the island only when bombs and ammunition needed replenishment. Even this requirement was often fulfilled at sea. Sanctimonious post-war tributes were paid to the partnership between warships and civilian-crewed supply ships. In truth, however, the latter were often slothful and ill-disciplined, flaunting their higher pay in the faces of navy men. A cruiser captain off Leyte was disgusted to hear a supply ship crewman cry contemptuously across the water to his men: ‘Suckers! Suckers! I get twenty bucks a day, whadda youse guys get?’ Aboard a carrier, flight operations and aircraft maintenance demanded almost incessant activity. On other ships, however, weeks or months of monotony were only occasionally interrupted. There was seldom a sight of the enemy, only of the deadly projectiles which he launched. Lt Ben Bradlee saw two Japanese in the whole war. Once he glimpsed a pilot whose frozen features were visible before he crashed into the sea a few yards off the ship’s bow. The second time, from Bradlee’s destroyer off Corregidor a solitary figure was spotted swimming, wearing what appeared to be a torn nightgown. Bradlee was dispatched in a boat to pick him up, while a raucous chorus of sailors lined the rail, jeering ‘Throw him back.’ Naval war imposed abrupt, drastic transitions from routine to mortal terror and back again, which contrasted with an even tenor of discomfort and fear for infantrymen in combat ashore. At any hour of day or night, a ship might be electrified by a broadcast call. ‘Of all the announcements none packs quite the wallop of “GENERAL QUARTERS…GENERAL QUARTERS…ALL HANDS MAN YOUR BATTLE STATIONS!”’ wrote an officer. ‘Though you may have heard it fifty times before, the fifty-first still has the freshness of the first.’ A carrier officer, Ensign Dick Saunders, said: ‘When the action does come, it happens so quickly you are never quite ready for it. It’s all over within a matter of seconds and then you wait, wait, wait again for some more.’ 2 FLYBOYS For all the majesty of the big ships, the thrill of racing destroyers and PT-boats dancing over the waves, by 1944 every sailor in the Pacific knew that the fleet’s airborne firepower was what counted: Avenger torpedo-bombers; Helldiver dive-bombers; Hellcat and Corsair fighters. The fast fleet carriers operated in task groups of four, accompanied by appropriate escorts. Concentrating ‘flat-tops’ economised on standing fighter patrols—CAPs, which covered their operations against Japanese air attack. The big ships sought to operate in open seas, offering maximum scope for manoeuvre, minimum exposure to surprise. They were screened by destroyer radar pickets, posted many miles out to provide early warning. A few years earlier, carrier-borne aircraft had been thought a poor substitute for land-based air support. In 1944-45, it remained true that heavy bombers could not operate from flightdecks, but so vast was the US Navy’s aerial armada that it could deliver a devastating punch against any target afloat or ashore. Each fleet carrier carried a mix of around fifty fighters, thirty dive-bombers, a dozen torpedo-bombers. The chief limitations on the ability of Nimitz’s fleets to support land operations were weather and the admirals’ yearning to pursue their own strategic purposes, unencumbered by responsibilities to soldiers or Marines. The men of the air groups wore uniforms which implied that they belonged to the same service as seamen, but the ‘flyboys’ of the ‘brown shoe navy’ thought of themselves as a separate breed. Their lives were almost entirely divorced from those of parent ships’ crews. Until the last stage of the war, around one-third of carrier airmen could expect to die, in combat or one of the accidents inseparable from high-pressure flight operations. A catapult failure, careless landing, flak damage which injured hydraulics or undercarriage—all these things could, and did, kill a crew or two most days—10 per cent aircraft losses a month were factored into the planning of carrier operations. Airmen were roused from their bunks two hours before take-off, to dress and eat—they were usually briefed for a dawn sortie the previous night. They received the order ‘Pilots, man your planes!’ through bullhorns and the broadcast system, then ran through the hatches along catwalks to the flightdeck, to be strapped into their seats by plane captains waiting on the wings. If it was dark or twilight, deck crews with illuminated batons pointed the way to the port side, where catapult rings and rigs were attached to the heavier torpedo-bombers—fighters usually took off unassisted—while pilots ran through their checklists. Then, on signal, at intervals of a few seconds, one by one they gunned their engines and were hurled forward into the air. Men took off from relative calm and comfort, flew into the heat of combat, experienced thrills and fears such as few seamen knew, then bounced back onto a heaving deck, to be violently checked by an arrester hook. They pulled themselves stiffly out of their cockpits after anything up to seven hours sitting on an unfriendly dinghy pack, went below for debriefing—and probably a shot of bourbon. Aircrew were the despair of many regular navy officers. Most cared nothing for the honour and traditions of the service, nor for ship’s discipline. They reckoned that if they flew and fought, nothing else was anybody’s business. The rest of the US Navy might be dry, but few air groups were. On the carrier Makassar Strait, for instance, commanding officer Herbert Riley—one of just two regulars aboard, a former naval aide to Franklin Roosevelt—wrote: ‘There was medicinal liquor aboard all the carriers to be used under supervision of flight surgeons. Their supply was generous…Liquor had its uses, believe me.’ After one of his air groups’ first missions, he found flight surgeons ‘dispensing liquor in water glasses…the pilots were high as kites’. Thereafter, Riley introduced rules. He ordered the vacant admiral’s cabin to be converted into an aircrew club, complete with Esquire pin-ups and cocktail tables. Inside, any aviator was eligible for two drinks a night, provided he was not scheduled to fly. Cmdr Bill Widhelm, operations officer of TF58, complained bitterly about discrimination between officers and men in the allocation of alcohol: ‘There are men out there on those ships that haven’t had a foot on shore for a year. I don’t see why we can’t do like the British, give those enlisted men a grog. Pilots get it. I had it. But those enlisted men never get it.’ Cmdr Jim Lamade of Hancock sought discretion to fine aviators for misdemeanours, because traditional navy punishments held no meaning for them: ‘These young pilots…are not naval officers as we know a naval officer. They’re just flying because it’s their job…Discipline…means nothing to them. If you say, “We’ll ground this pilot,” well…they don’t want to go to combat anyhow, so they’d just as soon be grounded…they will lay around the bunk room all day and read…But if you take some money away from them, they will feel that.’ Likewise Cmdr Jim Mini of Essex: ‘The boys in a squadron these days don’t have the navy as a career. There’s a problem of leadership; you have to have the boys like you. You can’t lean on being a commander and saying, “You’ll do this or else.” You have to present it to the boys in an attractive fashion…I can safely say that if [the tour] had been much longer, we would have had trouble, and the boys would have broken down more than they did.’ A high proportion of aviators caused disciplinary problems, declared a navy report: ‘The very exacting nature of flight duties has combined with the youth and frequent irresponsibility of flying officers to create difficulties which a special board was created to police.’ Fliers’ letters home displayed carelessness about security; they broke the rules by keeping diaries; and ‘drink is often an issue’. Flying combat planes from carriers was one of the most thrilling, yet also most stressful, assignments of the war. Ted Winters remarked of some of their long, long sorties: ‘It isn’t a question of how much gasoline, it’s how long you can keep your fanny on that seat.’ It was an inherently hazardous activity to operate a plane from a cramped and perpetually shifting ocean platform, even before the enemy became involved. ‘We learned to listen for the slightest change in the sound of the engine which might reveal a loss of power,’ wrote a pilot. ‘We always welcomed a moderate wind which increased the air flow over the flightdeck. Five to ten knots made the difference between a comfortable take-off and “sweating it out”.’ Beyond combat casualties, the log of a Marine Corsair squadron on Essex showed that during a typical fortnight, one plane ‘splashed’ taking off on each of two successive days; on the second of these, another plane crashed on landing. Three days later, one Corsair was lost at sea. Thereafter, three more went into the sea at two-day intervals. Hard deck landings damaged airframes. Sherwin Goodman, an Avenger gunner, suffered a typical mishap one morning when the flightdeck hydraulic catapult failed in mid-launch. His plane slumped into the sea. Seconds later, the huge ship passed close enough to strike the sinking Avenger a glancing blow. A destroyer retrieved the crew intact, however, collecting the usual six gallons of ice-cream ransom for returning them to their carrier, and to operations. ‘Oh I’d rather be a bellhop than a flyer on a flat-top,’ the pilots sang, ‘with my hand around a bottle not around the goddamn throttle.’ Unpredicted violent weather could write off whole squadrons of aircraft, because it made navigation problematic. Error meant a descent into the sea when gas ran out. As on shore, almost every aviator wanted to be a ‘fighter jock’, with the thrill of engaging enemy aircraft in the war’s best carrier fighter, the Grumman Hellcat. It is intoxicating to go into battle knowing that your own side possesses much better-trained, and thus more proficient, pilots than the enemy. By late 1944, the average Japanese flier had just forty flying hours’ experience before entering combat. His American counterpart had at least 525 hours, and it showed. In the last phase of the war, US carrier fighters were inflicting amazingly disproportionate losses on their failing foes. Cmdr Winters: ‘Most of our kills were from the rear end. [The Japanese] are scared to death of the Grummans. Only when they outnumber you terrifically will they even stay near you. They will make passes, but stay far away and scram when you turn on them.’ Such cautious enemy behaviour seemed a long march from the kamikaze spirit, of which so much would be heard in 1945. Flying became more hazardous, however, when planes were committed to ground strafing or ship attacks. Low-level dive-bomber and torpedo-carrier missions remained gruelling to the end. Lamade of Hancock was shocked by the intensity of the Japanese barrage as he and his men dive-bombed targets around Hong Kong. With unusual sophistication, enemy anti-aircraft gunners followed the American planes down almost to ground level, from 15,000 feet to 8,000, then 3,000. ‘From pull-out, I looked back and saw five planes of my group going down in flames. We’re going to have to figure out some way to combat that AA,’ Lamade told navy debriefers. ‘After that attack, Admiral McCain said he was very sorry we had lost so many pilots. I told him we…can’t go on fighting Japs continually without suffering some losses.’ To beat flak, pilots learned to dive faster and more steeply than they had ever trained for. Cockpit glass fogged with the dramatic change of atmosphere as they pulled out of a descent and soared upwards after releasing bombs. As ever in combat, the men who survived were those who were determined but careful: ‘We had four or five pilots who were over-eager,’ Fred Bakutis of Enterprise told debriefers. ‘They were excellent boys, very energetic and hard to hold down. It is these people who generally don’t come back, because they are so anxious to do damage to the Japs that they take risks beyond reason.’ Yet there were also shy pilots, content to release their bombs and swing away towards safety with a carelessness of aim that exasperated their commanders. And because these were very young, sometimes wild young men, they were sometimes reckless in the use of their lethal weapons. Senior officers were irked by the frequency with which American planes misidentified as Japanese were shot down by ‘friendly fire’ from combat air patrols. A pair of bored young pilots unable to identify an enemy target might work off their frustration on a Filipino fishing boat or lumbering cart ashore. The job nobody wanted was night operations. Take-offs and landings in darkness were more hazardous, the monotony of patrols usually unrelieved by action. If a pilot made a poor deck approach in daylight, he was ‘waved off’ to try again, but in darkness he had to land and take the consequences, rather than hazard the ship by having it switch its landing lights on again. ‘What the boys want to do,’ said a night-fighter squadron commander, Turner Caldwell of Independence, ‘is to get into a day fighter squadron or a day torpedo squadron and get to be aces and sink Jap carriers and that sort of thing. And so we have to give them inducements of various kinds because they are kids and they don’t understand enough about the military life to know that this stuff has to be done. All they know is that they don’t want to do it.’ While the carrier crews might remain at sea for years on end, the men of the air groups knew that they were only passing visitors. If injury or death spared them, they were rotated ashore after six months’ duty. After two combat tours, asserted a navy report, pilots ‘lose their daring…feel they have done their parts and other pilots who have not fought should take over the burden’. One pool of replacement pilots was held ashore on Guam. A second group waited on fleet supply ships, condemned to weeks of crucifying boredom before being abruptly informed one morning that their turn had come, and trans-shipped by breeches buoy to join an air group. Some replacements idled at sea for months before reaching a carrier. ‘Upon arrival,’ complained a squadron CO, ‘they were practically worthless, because they had forgotten everything they had been taught.’ It was tough for a man to be pitchforked among strangers, beside whom within hours he was expected to fly and die. ‘All of a sudden,’ said Jim Lamade of Hancock, ‘they’re expected to go ahead and hit the ball right smack on with a combat fighting squadron…those boys get discouraged and you can’t blame them.’ Some such men reported sick. Flight surgeons felt obliged to be harsh. ‘Combat fatigue is a word we use continuously,’ said Lamade, ‘and nobody knows what it means. It covers a multitude of sins. I think it ought to be thrown out of our language.’ Squadron commanders found that the strain of leading their men in combat left them little patience or energy for routine duties back on the ship. They complained about bureaucracy and paperwork. A CO was exasperated to find that after some of his men hit the airfield of neutral Portuguese Macao by mistake, a court of inquiry was summoned. Planes, by contrast, were casually expendable. Salt corroded paintwork, yet the remedy was always in short supply, because nobody cared to store large quantities of notoriously flammable paint aboard a carrier. If an airframe was badly damaged, or a plane completed eight months’ service, it was most often tipped overboard. With American factories producing new aircraft by the thousand, a worn one seemed worth little. There were accidents, always accidents. When tired young men were pushing themselves and their equipment to the limits, mistakes were inevitable. The guns of aircraft parked on flightdecks were triggered, injuring neighbouring planes and people. Badly battle-damaged planes were discouraged from landing on their carriers, to avoid messing up flightdecks. Ditching in the sea was an almost routine occupational hazard. Destroyers shadowed carriers during flight operations, to retrieve sodden fliers. As long as pilots were lucky, and ensured that their cockpit hoods were locked open to avoid plunging to the bottom with their planes, they could expect to survive an ocean landing. Ninety-nine men in Jim Lamade’s air group endured the experience, most with an insouciance conceivable only at such a time and place. Fred Bakutis of Enterprise spent a week on a raft in the Sulu Sea after coming down in the Surigao Strait. Comrades dropped him a two-man liferaft. ‘That plus my own one-man raft made my seven-day tour of duty out there pretty pleasant,’ he told his debriefers with studied nonchalance. ‘The weather was pretty good except at night when it rained pretty hard. I had lots of water, using my one-man raft as a water wagon. My food consisted of minnows, seaweed, candy rations. My main problem in the raft was to stay comfortable. The hands became very sore—and also my rear end.’ On Bakutis’s seventh night adrift, he was wakened from a doze by the sound of diesels, and for a few heart-stopping moments feared that a Japanese vessel was approaching. Instead, however, to his infinite relief an American submarine loomed out of the darkness. The submarine rescue service, often operating close inshore amid treacherous shoals or under Japanese fire, received the gratitude of every American flier. Together with ‘dumbo’ amphibians and patrolling destroyers, the submarines achieved miracles in saving hundreds of precious aircrew from sea, sharks and the enemy. Cmdr Ernie Snowden of Lexington’s AG16 paid warm tribute to the submariners: ‘If they had wheels I think they would climb right up over the beach and pick us up. We have nothing but praise for them.’ On 10 October 1944, for instance, twenty-one aircraft were shot down attacking the Ryukyu islands. Yet only eleven pilots and crewmen were lost, the remainder being rescued, six of them off Okinawa by a single submarine, Sterlet. When Lt Robert Nelson crashed in Kagoshima Bay off Kyushu, his dinghy began to drift inshore. A tiny cruiser-based Kingfisher seaplane landed alongside him, and Nelson clung to its float while it taxied several miles across the water to rendezvous with a submarine—adding a torpedo-bomber crew to its burden on the way. During an air battle off Iwo Jima, Japanese Zero pilot Kunio Iwashita was astonished when the surface of the sea was suddenly broken by a long black shape, as an American submarine surfaced to pick up a ditched pilot. An American flying boat, apparently bent on the same mission, was shot down by Japanese fighters. Iwashita said: ‘We were amazed to see the Americans taking so much trouble about their people. Nobody provided that sort of service for us.’ An extreme example of ‘force protection’ was displayed on 16 September 1944, when Ensign Harold Thompson ditched three hundred yards off Waisile, while strafing Japanese barges in his Hellcat. A Catalina dropped a liferaft which Thompson boarded, only to find himself drifting relentlessly towards a pier. Two other Hellcats were shot down trying to protect him by strafing the shoreline—one pilot was killed, the second rescued by ‘dumbo’. Thompson moored his raft to a chain of Japanese barges, and two American PT-boats raced in to rescue him. Their first attempt was frustrated by coastal gunfire, but after Avengers dropped smoke floats to mask their approach, a boat snatched Thompson just as the Japanese closed in on him. More than fifty aircraft were involved in the rescue, ‘which sure was a wonderful show to watch’, said Thompson, back on his carrier Santee. Destroyers traditionally extracted ‘ransom’ for every flier they sent back. ‘Rescued pilots were prized possessions,’ wrote a destroyer officer. ‘Before returning them, we would strip them of all their fancy clothes—silk scarf maps, survival kits with great knives, compasses and magnifying glasses, and their pistol. Then we would ask the carrier to send over all the geedunk—ice cream—they had, plus a minimum of two movies our crew hadn’t seen.’ At sea in the Pacific, by the fall of 1944 the might of the US Navy was unchallengeable. That is to say, no rational adversary would have precipitated a headlong confrontation with such forces as Nimitz now deployed. The summer clashes, the ‘great Marianas Turkey Shoot’, had fatally crippled Japanese air power. Only the Japanese navy, in the mood of fatalism and desperation which afflicted its upper ranks, could still have sought a ‘decisive encounter’ against such odds. The struggle for the Philippines was to provide the setting not only for America’s major land campaign of the Pacific war, but also for the largest sea battle the world would ever know. 5 America’s Return to the Philippines (#ulink_bac27126-012a-5369-a157-3fa7facb0323) 1 PELELIU MacArthur left Hawaii on 27 July 1944 confident that he had secured endorsement of his commitment to retake the Philippines. Nonetheless, when the American and British chiefs of staff met at Quebec on 11 September to open the Octagon strategic conference, plans were still on the table not only for landings in November on Mindanao, thereafter on Leyte and Luzon, but alternatively for seizing Formosa and the port of Amoy on the Chinese mainland. In the days that followed, however, the assembled US leaders—for the British were not consulted about this exclusively American issue—found themselves confronted by new circumstances. During planning for Third Fleet’s autumn operations, Halsey and his staff had agreed that in future, instead of merely addressing predetermined objectives, they would search for opportunities. In pursuit of this policy the fast carriers were now roaming the western Pacific, launching massive assaults on Japan’s surviving air forces. Off the southern Philippines on 12 September, 2,400 American sorties accounted for some two hundred Japanese aircraft in the sky and on the ground. At noon on the thirteenth the admiral signalled a report to Nimitz, who speedily forwarded it to Quebec, that Japanese resistance was feeble. Halsey, unaware that the enemy was deliberately husbanding resources for a ‘decisive battle’ on the Philippines, urged fast-forwarding the strategic programme. He proposed cancelling all preliminary island landings, and staging a speedy assault on Leyte. This was Halsey’s most influential intervention of the war. Such a change of plans was complex, but perfectly feasible in a theatre where every man and ton of supplies earmarked for shipment to one objective could be redirected to beaches elsewhere, by a nation which now possessed mastery of the ocean and the sky above. MacArthur was at sea and observing wireless silence, but his staff immediately accepted Halsey’s proposal as a means of foreclosing the Formosa-Philippines debate. The general, once back in communication, hastened to add his endorsement. He said nothing of his intelligence staff’s well-justified belief that the Japanese defenders of Leyte were stronger than Halsey recognised. Much more serious, he made no mention of his engineers’ opinion that it would be hard to build good airfields on the island, and almost impossible in the imminent monsoon months. Over the thirty months since he himself had escaped from Bataan, MacArthur’s personal interrogations of every American who escaped from the Philippines ‘revealed the concern of a man whose yearning to get back to his beloved “second homeland” had become virtually an obsession’, in the words of a biographer. The general had no intention of advertising any impediment to its fulfilment. In Quebec, after hasty consultation the American chiefs of staff set a target date of 20 October for a landing on Leyte. Admiral King’s persistent arguments against following this with a move to Luzon, the main Philippine island, were overruled. The navy withdrew its support for attacking Formosa when it became plain that a landing there was logistically impossible before March 1945, and would require much larger ground forces than were available. The Philippines, by contrast, were immediately accessible. Planning for Leyte began at MacArthur’s new headquarters on the banks of Lake Sentani, in the Cyclops Mountains above Hollandia, New Guinea. Once the decision was made to retake the Philippines, there was neither logic in nor resources for an early assault on Formosa. Since the seizure of Formosa was essential to any landing on the China coast that too was now ruled out. As the US Navy’s great historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote, ‘The two rival roads were…converging on Leyte.’ All intervening operations were cancelled, save two. First, on 15 September almost 20,000 men landed on the island of Morotai, south-east of the Philippines, and secured its airfield against negligible opposition. By late October, Morotai was crowded with US aircraft waiting to rebase on Leyte. Second, Nimitz and MacArthur shared a conviction that it was important to seize the tiny Palau Islands, of which Peleliu was the key, and to secure their airfields, before assaulting Leyte. The Palau invasion convoys were already several days at sea, carrying Maj.-Gen. William Rupertus’s 1st Marine Division 2,100 miles from Guadalcanal. The lumbering landing ships averaged a speed of only 7.7 knots, even slower than the 12.1 knots of the transports. Brig.-Gen. O.P. Smith, assistant commander of the division, passed the voyage reading a couple of novels from his ship’s library: A Yankee From Mount Olympus and The Late George Apley. Tranquillity aboard was marred by the skipper’s insistence on issuing orders and admonishments by loudhailer from the bridge. Smith failed to make friends with the ship’s dog, ‘an aloof cocker spaniel who refused to notice anyone except the captain’. Approaching the Palaus, even veterans of Pacific landings were awed by the size of the force assembled—some 868 ships, 129 in the assault element. Submarine chasers guided the fleet, destroyers guarded it, sweepers cleared mines in its path. Behind these came a great flock of command, survey, repair and hospital ships, anti-submarine net-layers, oilers, salvage vessels, tugs, floating dry docks, a dredger, PT-boats, a floating derrick, LSTs, DUKWs, LSDs, cargo ships and 770 small landing craft for 1st Marine Division, together with as many again for the army’s 81st Division, joining the Marines from Pearl Harbor. Such was the scale on which the United States launched even a modest Pacific amphibious landing in the autumn of 1944. On the morning of 15 September, amid a calm sea, a glittering array of brass watched from the command ship Mount McKinley as shoals of landing craft headed for the shore. Peleliu had received three days of intensive gunfire from five battleships, five heavy cruisers and seventeen other vessels, which periodically ceased fire only to make space for air attacks. Vice-Admiral Jesse Oldendorf, the bombardment commander, declared: ‘We have run out of targets.’ Nine miles offshore the cocky naval skipper of Col. ‘Chesty’ Puller’s transport enquired, as Puller’s men clambered into their landing craft, whether the Marine would be returning on board for his dinner. The colonel responded testily that he expected to be fighting for several days. Surely not, said the sailor. The navy’s bombardment would ‘allow the regiment to walk to its objective unmolested’. If that proved so, said Puller, the captain should come ashore that afternoon, join the Marines for a meal, and collect some souvenirs. Rupertus, the operational commander, had no experience of a heavily opposed landing, and was himself blithely confident. Four days, he said, should suffice to clear the island. As the Americans approached Peleliu, smoke from the bombardment shrouded the higher ground inland. Rocket ships fired ripples of projectiles ahead of the infantry pitching in their landing craft, then turned aside to open the passage for the assault waves. AA guns on the ships fired airburst shells at rocks behind the landing places. ‘Chesty’ Puller told his men with characteristic theatricality: ‘You will take no prisoners, you will kill every yellow son-of-a-bitch, and that’s it.’ The Marines hit the beaches at 0832. There were no Japanese in their immediate vicinity. Within minutes, however, the invaders found themselves under heavy shellfire, which wrecked dozens of amphibious vehicles, and made the men reluctant to forsake cover and advance beyond the beach. Medical corpsman Bill Jenkins’s unit suffered its first casualty seconds after disembarking. It was ‘Pop’ Lujack, the oldest man in the company, ‘a guy I thought a lot of, and it hurt me badly when I saw he was hit. I didn’t know any better but he was hit in the head and practically the whole back of his head was shot off, and I was laying down there trying to fix him up. One of the guys came up and said, “Doc, get out of there, he’s dead.”’ More than 10,000 Japanese were defending the island. Rather than attempt to hold the coast under American bombardment, Col. Kunio Nakagawa had deployed his men inland, on a series of coral ridges which offered commanding views of the shore. The beach at Peleliu, flailed by enemy fire, became one of the Marines’ most shocking memories of the Pacific war, and cost them over two hundred dead on the first day. Though the beach had been reconnoitred, Rupertus and his staff knew nothing of the terrain inland, which was ideally suited to defence. Peleliu had been a mining site. Each ridge was honeycombed with tunnels, in which the Japanese had installed electricity and living quarters, impervious to shells and bombs. Marine communications proved so poor that commanders were left struggling to discover their own men’s whereabouts, and were thus hesitant about calling in close artillery support. Of the eighteen tanks landed with 1st Marines, three were knocked out before they reached the beach, and all but one were hit by shells thereafter. In the chaos, a senior officer landed to investigate why so many vehicles were blazing. He could discover little. Most of 1st Marines’ headquarters had been wiped out, and 5th Marines’ HQ was also badly depleted. A shell blast concussed a Louisiana-born staff officer so badly that he began to murmur in the French of his childhood. A Japanese counterattack in the afternoon, supported by light tanks, was easily repulsed, the enemy shot to pieces. When feeble little Japanese ‘tankettes’ surrounded an American medium tank, it destroyed eleven in a circle, ‘like Indians round a wagon train’, as O.P. Smith put it. Here was a pattern which would become familiar in all the late Pacific battles: when the Japanese moved, they were slaughtered; when they held their ground, however, they were extraordinarily hard to kill. Smith was sitting at his forward command post when a mortar bomb landed just short of its protecting bank. A Marine fell back onto the general, a small fragment lodged in the back of his head. Smith’s aide bandaged him: ‘The boy was not badly hurt and was talkative. He was married and had been out of the States for two years. To him, the wound was a ticket home.’ American guns were getting ashore only slowly, because so many amphibious vehicles had been destroyed. Snipers provoked wild retaliatory fusillades, as dangerous to Americans as to Japanese. When Smith wanted to visit regimental command posts, he could find them only by tracking phone wires. Nightfall brought no respite. There were 12,000 Americans onshore, crowded into a beachhead which granted each man a few square feet of coral, sand and insects. The Marines held no clearly defined perimeter, merely scrapes and holes between four and seven hundred yards inland, along more than a mile of coast. Most of the men were utterly bemused, conscious only of incoming fire. Japanese infiltrators crept into American forward positions, grenading and testing nerves. A man who found himself under friendly fire even after shouting the password resorted to singing a verse of the Marine Corps hymn. Some 7th Marines landed amid the shambles, and found themselves unable to locate their objectives. After being harried from place to place, out of radio contact with higher command, under heavy mortaring their amphibious tractors returned to the assault ship, Leedstown. Alongside in darkness, the navy refused to let the men board, supposing that they had run away. Their colonel was reluctantly permitted to climb the side alone, to radio divisional headquarters for new orders. Eventually his men were grudgingly authorised to re-embark, but many boats’ occupants spent the whole night lost at sea. It took 1st Marine Division a week and 3,946 casualties to secure the key airfield sites, mocking Rupertus’s four-day estimate. Even then the Japanese overlooked them from the Umurbrogol Ridge, and could sustain observed fire. After the Japanese shot down medics recovering wounded, heavy mortars laid smokescreens to protect stretcher-bearers. The whole island occupied only seven square miles. In O.P. Smith’s words, ‘For the first few days, real estate was at a premium.’ The beach area was crowded with makeshift bivouacs. There was little scope for outflanking enemy strongpoints. These could only be assaulted headlong, each yard of progress costing blood. ‘The thousands of rounds of artillery shells, the mortar barrages, the napalm strikes and the bombs poured in…[These] undoubtedly killed many Japanese in exposed positions, but those in caves were untouched and there were always new relays of snipers and machine-gunners to replace those who had fallen on the peaks…For the concentrated fury of the fighting it was only exceeded by Tarawa and Iwo Jima,’ wrote a senior Marine. Reinforced concrete blast walls protected each tunnel mouth. When the Americans finally secured the largest cave system on 27 September, it proved to have housed a thousand defenders. No place on the island was safe. Bill Atkinson watched a BAR gunner take up position behind a tank and start firing. To Atkinson’s horror, the Sherman suddenly lurched backwards, crushing the man to pulp. 5th Marine Virgle Nelson, hit in the buttock, hollered with glee: ‘Oh my God, I guess I get to go back now!’ Bill Jenkins, a medical corpsman from Canton, Missouri, was awed by a tough machine-gunner named Wayley, who was hit four times. Told that he was to be evacuated, Wayley said: ‘No way.’ Jenkins asked his buddy Jack Henry to get a litter. The moment Henry moved, machine-gun fire caught his arms, and he came running back into the tank trap where they lay. ‘One arm [was] 99.9 per cent off and the other almost as bad. I could have taken a scissors and clipped both arms off and buried them. I wasn’t trained to try and set the cut-up, broken-up arms…all I did was just kind of put them together, both of them, and I wrapped them up the best I could with T-shirts and used tourniquets. I put his arms over his head to keep him from bleeding to death.’ Against the odds, Henry survived. Another man begged Jenkins for medicinal brandy. The corpsman said sheepishly: ‘Gosh, I had some, but I got so damn scared I drank it myself.’ Seventeen-year-old Tom Evans landed as a replacement rifleman, but was immediately detailed as a litter-bearer. ‘I am carrying this guy on the stretcher and he’s been dead maybe a day and a half but already his body is kind of oily and covered with flies and maggots. I slipped and fell as I was going downhill and naturally he comes sliding down and straddled my neck, and I had maggots on me—Ohh.’ Marines learned to race clouds of accursed blowflies to every meal, sliding a hand across a can top the instant it was opened. Men’s lips and ear tops blistered in the sun. Commanders dispatched from the ships offshore fresh bread—‘a great morale-builder’—and occasionally ice cream in milk cans. ‘Chesty’ Puller asked his Marines if there was anything he could get them. Predictably, they asked for a drink stronger than water. Puller issued medicinal alcohol mixed with powdered lemonade. Others found a cache of Japanese sake and beer, and were briefly heard singing on line. ‘Our troops should understand,’ a command report admonished waverers, ‘that the Japanese is no better able to go without food than we are, his stamina is no greater, the Jap gets just as wet when it rains and he suffers as much or more from tropical ills.’ All this, however, was often hard for Americans on Peleliu to believe. Seventeen-year-old medic Frank Corry had three platoon commanders killed. The last was hit when he rashly stuck up his head to view a Japanese position. Corry watched wide-eyed as his platoon sergeant, big, tough Bob Canfield, cradled the dead man’s head in his arms and burst into tears, saying: ‘Why did you do it?’ Snipers behind the lines caused chronic jumpiness, intensified by undisciplined rear-area troops firing weapons for the fun of it. After O.P. Smith investigated one panic, he found that it had been provoked by black stevedores on the shore shooting at an abandoned tractor: ‘They claimed no one had ever told them they were not to fire their rifles, which was probably correct.’ Nor was every panic unjustified. When the exasperated divisional HQ commandant set off with a shotgun to suppress an outbreak of apparently needless firing near his headquarters, he found two dead Marines beside the corpses of three Japanese who had killed them. Until a well could be sunk, every American was desperately short of water. Emergency supplies were landed in oildrums, which sickened those who sampled them. Temperatures sometimes reached 115 degrees. Scores of men succumbed to heat exhaustion, for which salt tablets proved an essential prophylactic. The jagged coral caused boots to wear out within days. A thousand new pairs and 5,000 sets of socks were flown in from Guam. The army’s 81st Division landed on neighbouring Angaur on 17 September. After an easy disembarkation, inland the invaders met thick, matted, almost impenetrable rainforest. The beaches were clogged with traffic. The soldiers, fresh to combat, readily panicked in encounters with even small numbers of Japanese. Angaur was only two miles long, and by 20 September it was secure, but the conquerors had not enjoyed their experience. They were still less happy to find themselves loaded back onto ships and transferred to Peleliu. Marines and soldiers were seldom comfortable fighting together. O.P. Smith wrote sceptically: ‘It is hard to put your finger on it, but there is quite a different atmosphere in an army command post as compared to the CP of a Marine outfit. Orders are given like the book says you should give them, but you have the impression they are not carried out.’ Rupertus was reluctant to enlist army aid. After a week of fighting and alarming casualties, however, he perceived no choice. Long-range flame-throwers proved the most effective weapons against Peleliu’s cave mouths, but each assault was painfully slow and costly. In October, gales and torrential rain added to the invaders’ miseries. Marine Corsairs at last began to use the island’s airstrip on 21 October, but organised resistance persisted for weeks more. Lt Ilo Scatena of the 2/5th Marines kept a platoon roster. Of forty-two men with whom he landed, fourteen were killed and fourteen wounded. In all, the island’s capture cost 1,950 American lives, and gave the invaders one of the most unwelcome surprises of the Pacific war. Almost all the defenders chose to perish rather than quit. A month after Peleliu’s commander, Col. Kunio Nakagawa, committed suicide on 24 November, his surviving soldiers killed a group of souvenir-hunting American soldiers. The last five known Japanese surrendered on 1 February 1945. Statisticians afterwards calculated that it had taken 1,500 rounds of artillery ammunition to kill each member of the garrison. To capture this tiny outpost, Marine and army infantrymen also used 13.32 million .30 calibre rounds, 1.52 million of .45 calibre, 693,657 rounds of .50 calibre, over 150,000 mortar bombs and 118,262 grenades. As so often in the Pacific, a marginal objective inflicted worse than marginal casualties. It is widely agreed today—as indeed it was in the winter of 1944—that the decision to occupy the Palaus was one of Nimitz’s few bad calls of the war. The Japanese lacked means to exploit their remote island airfields. The defenders of Peleliu could not interfere on Leyte, or anywhere else. Its garrison could have been left to rot. American aircraft could use Morotai’s strips as easily as those on the Palaus. Once the Peleliu operation was launched onto implacably hostile terrain, there was no shortcut by which firepower or technology could overcome resistance. Although the Marines had fought terrible battles on the Pacific islands, at Tarawa and Saipan they attacked before the defenders had completed the construction of their positions. Now, however, as Japan’s Pacific perimeter narrowed, the enemy knew where to expect the Americans, and had been granted ample time to prepare to receive them. In the Pacific there were no great battles resembling Normandy, the Bulge, the Vistula and Oder crossings, exploiting mass and manoeuvre. Instead, there was a series of violently intense miniatures, rendered all the more vivid in the minds of participants because they were so concentrated in space. Such contests as that for Peleliu were decided by the endeavours of footsoldiers and direct support weapons, notably tanks. This was a battle fought on Japanese terms. Like others that would follow in the months ahead, it suited their temperament, skills and meagre resources. The defenders of Peleliu possessed no means of withdrawing, even had they wished to do so. Their extinction therefore required a commitment of flesh against flesh, the sacrifice of significant numbers of American lives. The US, whose power seemed so awesome when viewed across the canvas of global war, found itself unable effectively to leverage this in battles of bloody handkerchief proportions, such as that for Peleliu. 2 LEYTE: THE LANDING The struggle to regain the Philippines became by far the US Army’s largest commitment of the Asian war. MacArthur’s long campaign on New Guinea had never caught the imagination of the American public as did the Marines’ battles for the Pacific atolls. The general’s grandeur was more imposing than his forces—until late 1944 he seldom controlled more than four divisions in the field, in Europe a mere corps command. His next campaign, however, would become the main event of America’s conflict with Japan. More than 400,000 Japanese awaited the invaders. The Philippines represented a critical link on the sea route between Hirohito’s South-East Asian empire and the home islands. Tokyo believed that a confrontation there would offer its best chance to bloody the Americans, if not to throw them back into the sea, before the ‘decisive battle’- a chorus reprised in all Japan’s war plans—for Kyushu and Honshu. The Japanese difficulty was that their scattered forces lacked mobility in the face of American air and naval superiority. MacArthur could choose where to make his landings. It would be hard for the defenders swiftly to shift large bodies of troops in response. On a map, the Philippine islands resemble a dense scatter of jigsaw pieces. Their combined mass is almost as large as Japan, rich in luxuriant vegetation and extravagant weather cycles. After the 1898 Spanish- American War, which ended European hegemony, US Senator Albert Beveridge spoke for many Americans when Washington decided against granting independence to the Filipinos. He cited ‘the divine law of human society which makes of us our brother’s keeper. God has been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples to bring order out of chaos…He has made us adepts in government so that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples.’ Filipinos resisted US dominance, in the early days by violent insurgency, and never ceased to crave independence. Socially, the islands were dominated by a rich landlord class. The mass of peasants remained poor and bitterly alienated from the plantocracy. Two-thirds of Filipinos between twenty and thirty-nine were uneducated. Yet many Americans retained a romantic conviction that the virtue of their intentions made US rule over the Philippines somehow more honourable than that of, say, the British in India. US soldiers who served on the islands before 1942 regarded them as a leisure resort offering cheap comforts, servants and amenities of a kind they never knew back home, amidst a lazy Spanish culture. The 1944 US armed forces’ Guide to the Pacific noted: ‘For Isaac Waltons: The Philippines are a fisherman’s paradise…Recommended for deep sea trolling is a split bamboo rod, a drag reel capable of holding 400 yards of 12 thread line, and a good gaff hook.’ Japan’s thirty-month-old occupation had been patchy in its impact: oppressive and brutal in some places—the most strategically important, naturally including the capital, Manila—while scarcely felt in remote areas. In 1943 the Japanese granted the Philippines, along with most of their other occupied territories, notional self-government under a local puppet regime. Yet such was the mindless cruelty of Tokyo’s soldiers that this gesture inspired little gratitude among Filipinos. Imperial General HQ reported in March 1944: ‘Even after their independence, there remains among all classes a strong undercurrent of pro-American sentiment…Guerrilla activities are gradually increasing.’ The Japanese fully controlled only twelve of the country’s eighteen provinces. Elsewhere, guerrilla bands roamed widely, American-armed and sometimes American-led. Several US officers, such as the legendary Col. Russell Volckmann, had survived in the hills of Luzon since the spring of 1942, and now directed forces thousands strong. The more idealistically inclined guerrillas inflicted four hundred casualties on Japanese occupation forces in 1944, a modest enough achievement. Others merely pursued lives of banditry. The Japanese South Asia Army moved its headquarters to Manila in April, when uncertainty persisted in Tokyo about whether the Americans would land in the Philippines at all. Its commander, Field Marshal Count Hisaichi Terauchi, had no such doubts. ‘If I was MacArthur, I would come here,’ he growled at a staff conference in the summer of 1944. ‘He must know how weak are our defences.’ Terauchi, once a candidate to replace Tojo as prime minister, was not held in high esteem either by the Americans or by most of his peers. His staff, however, respected the fact that, although a rich man, he succumbed to few personal indulgences. ‘He could have filled his headquarters with geishas if he wanted,’ said one officer admiringly, ‘but he never did. He was a really clean-living soldier.’ Terauchi was exasperated by the need to refer every detail of his deployments to Tokyo. The general staff only gave final endorsement to his defensive plan for Leyte two days before the Americans landed there. Until the autumn of 1944, Terauchi’s principal subordinate was the Philippines’ occupation commander, Lt-Gen. Shigenori Kuroda, a mildmannered little man devoted to women and golf. Kuroda said cheerfully: ‘Why bother about defence plans? The Philippines are obviously indefensible.’ Such remarks caused Tokyo to conclude that he was a trifle illsuited to confront an American amphibious assault. Two weeks before MacArthur’s invasion, Kuroda was supplanted by Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, who assumed command of 14th Army under Terauchi. The newcomer summoned his staff and addressed them at his headquarters in Manila: ‘The battle we are going to fight will be decisive for Japan’s fate. Each of us bears a heavy responsibility for our part in it. We cannot win this war unless we work closely and harmoniously together. We must do our utmost, setting aside futile recriminations about the past. I intend to fight a ground battle, regardless of what the navy and air force do. I must ask for your absolute loyalty, for only thus can we achieve victory.’ In truth, there was no more chance of the rival services working harmoniously together in the Philippines than anywhere else in the Japanese empire. One day in September, a naval officer convinced himself that he saw American ships offloading troops on Mindanao. A standing order of South Asia Army decreed that all signals on an issue of such gravity must be dispatched jointly by responsible naval and military officers. Ignoring this, the navy sent a flash message to Tokyo announcing an American invasion. Every Japanese formation in the field and at sea was alerted. Hours of alarm and confusion followed. Soldiers in Manila remained disbelieving, and of course their scepticism was justified. The army regarded the false alarm as further evidence of the navy’s proclivity for fantasy, displayed daily in its wildly exaggerated claims of US ships sunk and planes destroyed. Yamashita himself, fifty-nine in 1944, had acquired three reputations: first, as an intensely nationalistic political soldier; second, as an outstanding commander; third, as possessing the loudest snore in the Imperial Army, a vice which made his staff reluctant to sleep anywhere near him. The general had been sidelined from high command in 1936, following an equivocal role in an attempted coup against the Tokyo government, but his abilities and popularity among junior officers earned his recall in 1941. As commander of 25th Army in Malaya he achieved his greatest triumph, securing the surrender of a superior British force at Singapore. Yet the government, nervous of his new status as a national hero, once more sidelined Yamashita. Japan’s ablest commander was serving in Manchuria when the summons to the Philippines arrived. He said quietly to his chief of staff: ‘So it’s come at last, has it? Well, my going won’t change anything. It’s my turn to die, isn’t it?’ When his wife suggested that she should stay in Manchuria, the general said: ‘You’d better go home and die with your parents.’ The Manchurian puppet emperor Pu Yi claimed that Yamashita covered his face and wept at his official leave-taking before embarking for the Philippines. ‘This is our final parting,’ said the Japanese. ‘I shall never come back.’ In Tokyo en route to Manila, at a series of meetings with the nation’s leaders, ‘Hobun’ Yamashita strove in vain to persuade them to share his own brutally realistic appraisal of the strategic situation. A clever and good-natured man who had travelled widely in Europe, he knew the war was lost. Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai, the navy minister, already privately committed to negotiating a way out of the war, merely shook his head sorrowfully in the face of the general’s blunt words and said: ‘Do your best, Hobun, do your best.’ Yamashita attended a formal farewell ceremony with Hirohito, which he seemed to enjoy. He told an aide as he left the Imperial Palace that he felt as happy as he ever had in his life. Having saluted his emperor, he was ready to die. In Manila, the general was unimpressed by the staff which he inherited, and even more dismayed by the quality of the troops he inspected, most of them rendered slothful by long occupation duty. Subordinates shared his misgivings. Lt Suteo Inoue of the 77th Infantry Regiment, for instance, recorded in his Philippines diary: ‘Soldiers here lack comradely spirit. I have never seen such an undisciplined outfit as this one. To be strong, units need a sense of shared identity. This regiment is the worst in the Japanese army…It took a hundred men almost seven hours to cross a river 150 metres wide…due to lack of barges. I presume this reflects Japan’s general lack of resources. We have underestimated the importance of material strength, and are now suffering the consequences. If this state of affairs continues for another year, Japan will be in trouble, and our withdrawal from Greater East Asia will become inevitable.’ Yamashita ordered a supply officer to transfer service troops to combat duty, and to draft Filipino labour to shift stores in their stead. To his chagrin, he was told that local people could not be trusted in such a role. The commander of 14th Army now had only days in which to prepare for the coming of the Americans. He knew that months would not have sufficed. Luzon, in the north, is the Philippines’ principal landmass, seconded by Mindanao in the south. Between lies a jumble of densely populated lesser islands, of which Leyte is among the easternmost. In October 1944 this was MacArthur’s choice for a first lodgement. Some 115 miles long and forty-five miles broad at its widest point, it was inhabited by 915,000 of the Philippines’ seventeen million people, in modest towns of sun-bleached stucco and villages of straw-thatched huts. Leyte Gulf lies open to the ocean, and thus to an invasion fleet. The immediate American objective after securing the beaches was the rice and corn belt of Leyte Valley. There MacArthur planned to build airfields to relieve his dependence on carrier air support. He would then dispossess the Japanese of the mountainous regions beyond the plain. When the island was secure he would address Luzon, and thereafter liberate the rest of the archipelago. Once American forces had secured a firm foothold in the Philippines and achieved command of local skies and seas, piecemeal ground operations could contribute nothing towards the defeat of Japan. But the islands had been the general’s home. He viewed their people with a paternalistic warmth as great as any British sahib felt towards Indians. Liberating them from Japanese rule was the most compelling objective of MacArthur’s war. Around three-quarters of a million Filipinos, Japanese and Americans would pay with their lives for its accomplishment. In the weeks preceding the landing at Leyte, American carrier aircraft struck again and again at Japanese airfields and shipping. On 10 October, 1,396 sorties were launched at the Ryukyu islands south of Japan, which destroyed significant shipping and a hundred enemy aircraft, for the loss of twenty-one American planes. Two days later, Halsey’s flat-tops dispatched 1,378 sorties to Formosa. Japan’s Vice-Admiral Shigeru Fukudome, commanding 6th Base Air Force, described later how he watched the air battles, applauding as planes fell, until he perceived that most were Japanese. The struggle was not entirely one-sided—forty-eight American planes were downed on the twelfth. But next day the Japanese lost forty-one in futile attacks on Third Fleet. Over five hundred Japanese aircraft were destroyed between the twelfth and the fourteenth, an intensity of attrition dwarfing the 1940 Battle of Britain, and indeed all air combat in the European theatre. Even Japanese aircrew being trained on Kyushu for carrier operations were thrown recklessly into the battles with Halsey’s squadrons. Most were lost, and with them Japan’s last chance of sustaining a seaborne air capability. On 14 October, Admiral Soemu Toyoda reported to Fukudome that the US Third Fleet was retiring defeated. A Japanese communiqu? of 16 October announced American losses of eleven aircraft carriers, two battleships, three cruisers and one destroyer, besides eight carriers, two battleships and four cruisers damaged. The nation was urged to celebrate the ‘glorious victory of Taiwan’. In truth, of course, Halsey had achieved overwhelming success. He departed to wreak havoc elsewhere. All the Japanese had to show for their efforts was severe damage to two US cruisers. American carriers had demonstrated that they could range at will, inflicting overwhelmingly disproportionate injury upon any Japanese force they met at sea or in the sky. Yamashita received his first indication of MacArthur’s Philippines armada in a fatuous signal from his divisional commander on Leyte: ‘Enemy fleet approaching, uncertain whether they are sheltering from weather or fleeing from Formosa battle.’ At dawn on 20 October, the seven hundred ships of MacArthur’s central Philippines attack force began offloading seven miles off the shore of Leyte Gulf. Almost 200,000 men of Sixth Army were mustered in the transports, commanded by Lt-Gen. Walter Krueger. Krueger was born in Prussia in 1881. When his father died, in 1889 his mother emigrated to the US. Her son began his military career ten years later, as a volunteer infantryman on Cuba. He rose to the rank of sergeant, then elected to seek a commission as a regular soldier. In the Pacific, to the mystification of officers who thought him a dull dog, slow and cautious, Krueger became MacArthur’s favoured field commander, his primacy rewarded by the key role on Leyte. American warnings had been broadcast to the local population to move inland to avoid the bombardment. Filipino guerrillas were alerted by radio flashes the day before the landing. It was widely believed at SWPA headquarters that the campaign would be easy. But MacArthur’s staff intelligence estimates seriously underestimated Japanese strength, even if the Leyte garrison was not reinforced. Gen. George Kenney, MacArthur’s air chief, predicted on 24 September: ‘The objective is relatively undefended the Japanese will not offer strong resistance.’ He wrote likewise: ‘If my hunch is right…the Japs are about through.’ Kenney was an able air commander, but like all those who worked with MacArthur, his judgement was impaired by wishful thinking. So practised had become the art of amphibious operations that since 1942 the delay between a US fleet’s arrival offshore and its first landings had been cut from four hours to two. The Leyte bombardment force carried heavier metal than that which supported the 6 June D-Day landings in Normandy. For soldiers aboard transports, almost any peril seemed worth enduring to escape the crippling heat below decks. Some units, formerly earmarked to land on the island of Yap, had been at sea since 27 August. Now they clambered clumsily down the scrambling nets into their landing craft, which circled until signal flags gave the order to head for the shore. Men of four divisions began to land in two main bodies: one at the north end of the gulf near the capital, Tacloban; the second fourteen miles southwards. Conditions were perfect. There were no mines, no surf. Fires blazed along the shoreline in the wake of the naval bombardment. Desultory Japanese artillery, mortar and machine-gun fire began to harass the invaders only after the first waves had landed, for coastal defensive positions were weakly held. American casualties were concentrated in a few unlucky units, such as two companies of the 3/32nd Infantry which lost eight killed and nineteen wounded to machine-gun fire in a matter of seconds. Several American tanks were knocked out by a nearby 70mm gun. It was mid-afternoon before tanks and infantry demolished the strongpoint and passed on westward. In most places, however, resistance was negligible. Only 20,000 of Yamashita’s 400,000 men were deployed on Leyte. They were deemed low-grade soldiers, mostly recruited from the commercial workers of Osaka and Kyoto. Terauchi decreed: ‘The navy and air force will attempt to annihilate the enemy on X-Day…The Area Army will at the same time annihilate the enemy on Leyte.’ Yet despite these grandiose phrases, Yamashita planned to make his principal stand on Luzon. On Leyte, the Japanese intention was to inflict pain and buy time, rather than to defeat Sixth Army. Thus, as landing craft shuttled to and fro, Krueger’s four divisions were easily able to stake out positions inland. A few hundred yards behind the beach, in the deserted village of San Jos?, men of the 7th Cavalry found several abandoned Japanese cars and crates of Japanese beer bottled in Manila. ‘Leyte, like most of the other islands we had landed on during the last three years, was better seen at a distance,’ wrote Private Bill McLaughlin. ‘Lying offshore the perfume of the land was exotic, but on close inspection about all that could be seen was mud and rotting vegetation. The only inhabitants lived in squalid huts of grass and thatch, and looked half-starved.’ The first Filipino the Americans met was wheeling a bicycle between the tall palm trees, frantically waving his broad-brimmed hat. ‘As he approached, his face appeared to be composed entirely of smile,’ wrote correspondent Robert Shaplen. ‘It was impossible to understand what he was saying, but it was easy to see that he was filled with an almost hysterical happiness. He grabbed the hand of every soldier he could reach and shook it ecstatically.’ This ‘first liberated Filipino’, as he was dubbed, proved to be Isaios Budlong, a former Tacloban telegraph operator. Soon hundreds of local people were milling around the Americans, exuding holiday exuberance. One man presented a box of Japanese biscuits to the 7th Cavalry’s colonel. An elderly villager kept fingering soldiers ‘as a woman would fondle a piece of silk’. The colonel commanding the 2/34th Infantry directed the attention of a 75mm tank gun onto a cluster of farm shacks which he feared might harbour Japanese. ‘The smaller building erupted in a flash of fire—lumber, chicken feathers, chickens and debris filling the area,’ wrote Captain Paul Austin, a Texan. ‘We waded the rice paddy waist-deep, and I walked past the farmhouse. A Filipino man and woman had appeared and were standing near the rear of their house. They smiled and bowed as we went past. They seemed so glad to see us that they did not mind that we had just blown their chicken house to smithereens.’ All morning, from the cruiser Nashville MacArthur watched his men move ashore. Then, after an early lunch, the great man set forth to join them. This was his first visit to Leyte for over forty years, since he was a young army engineer, and he devoted intensive attention to its stage management. ‘Regard publicity set-up as excellent,’ he signalled to his large public-relations staff shortly before the landings. ‘I desire to broad cast from beach as soon as apparatus can be set up. After I have done so you can use records made to broad cast to the US and to the Philippines at such times and in such ways as you deem best.’ Now he stepped down the ramp of a landing craft a few yards off the beach, and waded serenely through knee-deep water and a cluster of photographers who immortalised this great symbolic moment of the Pacific war. He said to Richard Sutherland, his chief of staff: ‘Well, believe it or not, we’re here.’ Once on Philippine sand, he ignored distant small-arms fire and greeted a few soldiers. Then, standing beside the islands’ new president Sergio Osmena—who scarcely disguised the fact that he would have preferred to stay in America until the battle for his country was won MacArthur broadcast a resounding proclamation: ‘People of the Philippines, I have returned! By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand again on Philippine soil.’ His words fell on unsympathetic ears among some American soldiers and seamen who later heard them. More than a few recoiled from the fashion in which MacArthur treated this vast commitment of US power and hazard of American lives as a personal affair. Yet what else save theatre might have been expected from a great actor? Yamashita, when told of the beach photographs of ‘Maggada’, as Japanese pronounced his name, assumed them to be faked. Yet they were no more the product of stage direction than everything else about Douglas MacArthur. That first day, the Americans lost just fifty-five men killed and missing, 192 wounded. Most of the invaders’ difficulties were created not by the enemy, but by nature. Along the landing frontage it was hard to move even a few hundred yards inland through dense cover and swamps, where heavily-laden soldiers could plunge up to their necks. The landing of stores proved a nightmare. Many ships had been poorly loaded, so that the wrong equipment came off first. Far too few men had been allocated to handling parties. Terrain impeded transfer of rations, ammunition, medical supplies forward to combat units. Some 1.5 million tons of equipment, 235,000 tons of combat vehicles, 200,000 tons of ammunition and the same weight of medical supplies were scheduled for offload in the first days, with 332,000 tons being added each month thereafter. Within hours the beaches became crowded with stores, vehicles, weapons, fuel drums, debris, piled anywhere and going nowhere in a hurry. Logistics, on an island almost bereft of metalled roads, would become a dominant issue of the campaign. For ten days following the landings, most invaders found themselves advancing across swamp-ridden flatlands, meeting limited resistance. They gazed apprehensively at the steep, densely-covered mountains in the distance. ‘The simple truth about war,’ a soldier who fought the Japanese has written, ‘is that if you are on the attack, you can’t do a damned thing until you find your enemy, and the only way to do that is to push on, at whatever speed seems prudent, until you see or hear him, or he makes his presence known by letting fly at you.’ On the second day, ‘long before noon, the rate of the regiment’s advance was measured by the ability of the infantry to overcome the terrain’, wrote a historian of the 32nd Infantry. By the following evening, five miles inland, some men were succumbing to heat exhaustion, and all were drenched in sweat: ‘The cogon grass was so high that men smothered in its growth. Everywhere swamps and rice paddies had to be crossed.’ Sometimes the Japanese were rash enough to launch charges, which the Americans repulsed with much slaughter. One such suicidal rush against a company of the 32nd cost the Japanese seventy-five killed for one American wounded. Much more often, however, the enemy exploited local conditions to inflict surprises as the invaders struggled through cover. A US infantry platoon was emerging from a banana grove when a single machine-gun burst wounded eleven men. Japanese soldiers sprang out and bayoneted casualties, until driven back by automatic fire. Even in allegedly secure areas, infiltration by small groups of enemy, assisted by the dense vegetation, remained a hazard: one Japanese soldier crawled up to an American artillery piece and laid a satchel charge against its breech before being killed by a grenade. Advancing infantry suffered long waits, sometimes under mortar or artillery fire, while engineers repaired bridges for tanks and checked for mines. There were never enough engineers. Private Jack Norman was a twenty-one-year-old from Chester, Nebraska, who had dropped out of college to become a hotel bellhop, ‘which made good money, but it wasn’t all legal’, as he observed wryly. Drafted at nineteen, he experienced a not unusual odyssey through the US military system. He served in a dozen Stateside camps, first being exhaustively trained as a gunner, then as an engineer, finally becoming a most reluctant infantryman in the 96th Division. He and his comrades landed on Leyte in complete bewilderment about what was going on around them, and learned slowly through the days that followed: ‘You were wet all the time…There were spiders this big.’ He counted eagerly the Japanese whom he thought he killed with his BAR, and got to twenty-five. Once he found an empty gun emplacement, wandered over to it and suddenly saw two Japanese soldiers on the other side. Before bolting, they threw a grenade, fragments of which lodged in Norman’s leg. These removed him from the line for a few days, until they were extracted. Private Norman did not like Leyte. The Japanese too were scarcely enjoying their own experience. As soon as word reached Manila of the landings, Maj. Shoji Takahashi of South Asia Army’s intelligence staff decided to discover for himself what was happening, though explicitly ordered to remain at headquarters. Takahashi, a thirty-one-year-old farmer’s son and career soldier, with some difficulty begged a lift on an aircraft landing on Leyte, then hitchhiked to the forward area, under constant American shellfire. He spent his first night not uncomfortably, in a civilian house with two other staff officers. Next morning, however, they emerged to find themselves in the path of an American air strike. A bomb buried Takahashi in four feet of earth, killed one roommate and badly wounded the other. After digging himself out, he toured the perimeter under a storm of American shells and bombs. He reflected gloomily that if he was killed while acting in defiance of superior orders, his soul would be denied a resting place at the Yasukuni Shrine, and offered his services to the local regimental commander. ‘Forget it,’ said the colonel. ‘You’ll be much more useful if you get back to Manila and tell them just how rough it is down here.’ Takahashi escaped on a minesweeper to Area Army headquarters. On 23 October, at a little ceremony in Tacloban, MacArthur and Osmena celebrated the restoration of civil government to the Philippines. Sixth Army struggled to grapple with the administrative problems of meeting the needs of local Filipino people, many of whom expected to be fed. Unruly bands of guerrillas and bandits—the two were indistinguishable milled around the American columns, offering aid that was sometimes useful, often not. Most local people were in rags, and the Americans learned to mistrust those who looked more presentable. A grand figure in lavender trousers, yellow shirt and yellow hat introduced himself to the liberators as Bernardo Torres, former governor of Leyte province. He said that he hated the Japanese, but proved to have served them as director of food production. A crowd at a town meeting in Tacloban shouted: ‘Long live Americans, lovely Americans!’ Filipino assistance in humping supplies and casualties soon became indispensable to MacArthur’s units. Senior officers were exasperated by the generosity of soldiers who gave rations to local people, because this made food a less tempting inducement for them to risk their lives as battlefield porters. ‘Filipino labour…performed manual labour with lassitude,’ an American official historian observed sourly. Each day the invaders were killing substantial numbers of enemy, and gaining ground. Yet the Americans were dismayed to discover that on the northern and western coasts beyond the mountains, the Japanese were reinforcing strongly. Units from Luzon were being ferried to Ormoc and several lesser ports. Few ground-based US aircraft could operate from Leyte, and it was weeks before carrier planes effectively interdicted supply routes. Meanwhile, thousands of enemy troops got through. On the plains, American infantry were strafed by Japanese aircraft, an experience that grew distressingly familiar: ‘Empty casings jingled down upon us like sleighbells,’ in the fanciful image of one soldier. Though Japanese squadrons flying against Leyte from Luzon were much mauled by US fighters, their attacks on American airfields seriously hampered deployment of the air support MacArthur needed. To his chagrin, the general was obliged to demand continuing cover from the carrier aircraft of Halsey’s Third Fleet. Movement on Leyte was tough. An army report observed acidly: ‘It is foolish to land large numbers of vehicles if there are insufficient engineers to maintain the roads.’ Tanks and trucks chewed tracks into quagmires. There was dismay about service troops’ lack of enthusiasm for deploying close to the front, or performing their duties when gunfire was audible: ‘It is essential that all units…be imbued with the spirit that when necessary they shall take the same chances as the infantry. Artillery may have to be placed close up to the front line, or to provide its own local defensive protection at night; engineers must often build bridges under fire; MPs, especially in the pursuit phase, must direct traffic under fire. Service units…must take their places in the defensive positions when troops are limited.’ On 24 October a local Japanese regimental commander, Lt Col. Takayoshi Sumitani, issued a defiant handwritten order to his men of the 24th Infantry: ‘The fate of the Empire depends on this decisive battle of the Philippines. This force will fight the decisive battle around Tacloban, and will smash the barbaric enemy. There is no greater glory and honour than this…Now, the rigorous training you have received will be put to the test…Every officer and man will unite to fight courageously in a spirit of self-sacrifice. Annihilate the enemy as his Majesty the Emperor expects, and show your respect for Imperial benevolence.’ This was vain bombast. The Americans were now far too strongly established to be evicted from Leyte. What Sumitani and his kind could and did achieve, however, was to engage Sixth Army in much harder fighting than MacArthur and his staff had anticipated. And even as the invaders advanced across the island, offshore there now unfolded one of the most spectacular dramas of the Philippines campaign, indeed of the Second World War. 6 ‘Flowers of Death’: Leyte Gulf (#ulink_c04b0de3-0579-5676-a538-530a1c362423) 1 SHOGO The largest naval clash in history took place at a time when its outcome could exercise negligible influence upon Japan’s collapse. It was inspired by a decision of Japan’s admirals to vent their frustrations in a gesture of stunning futility. In October 1944 they found themselves stripped of air cover, and facing overwhelmingly superior American forces. They wished to concentrate their fleet in the home islands. Instead, however, most big ships were obliged to operate from anchorages where fuel oil was available, off Borneo and Malaya. The Imperial Navy still disposed a force which, a few years past, had awed the world. Of ten battleships in commission at the start of the war, nine remained. It seemed to Japan’s admirals intolerable—worse, dishonourable—that capital units swung idle at their moorings while on shore the army fought desperate battles. The navy thus sought to precipitate an engagement, even though every projection of its outcome promised defeat. The Americans were unprepared for such an initiative. As so often in north-west Europe, they credited their enemies with excessive rationality. MacArthur’s headquarters thought a Japanese dash through the San Bernardino or Surigao Strait approaches to Leyte Gulf unlikely. The enemy’s ships would lack searoom, and would confront both Halsey’s Third Fleet and Kinkaid’s Seventh. Ever since the summer, however, Japan’s commanders had intended to commit most of their surviving surface units to what they called Shogo—‘Operation Victory’. When Vice-Admiral Ugaki of the battleship squadron was shown a draft, he wrote: ‘Whether the plan is adequate or not needs further study, but at a time when we have been driven into the last ditch we have no other choice…It is essential still to hope for victory…and endeavour to attain it.’ In other words, it was preferable to do anything than to do nothing. Shogo would be a thrust comparable in its desperation with Hitler’s Ardennes offensive three months later. Even as Japan’s commanders and staffs pored over charts through September and early October, their vital air squadrons were vanishing into the ocean. Day after day off Formosa, Halsey’s planes inflicted devastating losses. ‘Our fighters were but so many eggs thrown at the stone wall of the invincible enemy formations,’ Vice-Admiral Fukudome wrote wretchedly. US radar picket destroyers enabled the Americans to mass aircraft in holding patterns a hundred miles out from Third Fleet whenever Japanese attacks threatened. Fighter direction had become a superbly sophisticated art. So too had massed attacks on Japan’s air bases and floating assets. On 10 October, 1,396 American sorties against Okinawa and the Ryukyus ravaged shipping and destroyed a hundred enemy aircraft for the loss of twenty-one. Between the twelfth and the fourteenth, the Japanese lost more than five hundred aircraft. Their combat casualties were matched by a steep decline in aircraft serviceability—to 50 per cent, even 20 per cent, compared with the Americans’ 80 per cent. Many Japanese ground crew had been lost in the Pacific atoll battles, and no trained replacements were available. These setbacks were matched by extraordinary Japanese self-deceit about what had taken place. Vice-Admiral Ugaki rejoiced about a destroyer squadron’s ‘tremendous feat’ of sinking three aircraft carriers, a cruiser and four destroyers. In truth, in the action cited the Americans had lost one destroyer. Here was a high command forsaking that indispensable practice, honest analysis. Instead, in drafting the Shogo plan, Japan’s commanders embraced a tissue of illusions. Most of the 116 planes left to the Japanese fleet were winched rather than flown aboard carriers in their Kyushu anchorage on 17 October, because the pilots were deemed too inexperienced to make deck landings. The fleet now relied upon on land-based air cover. Japan’s forty surviving aircraft in the Philippines were reinforced tenfold by 23 October, but remained subject to relentless attrition on the ground and in the air. At sea, the Japanese assembled forces of nine battleships, four carriers, fifteen heavy and light cruisers and twenty-nine destroyers. This seemed impressive, until measured against the US Navy’s strength: nineteen task groups around the Philippines comprised nine fleet, eight light and twenty-nine escort carriers; twelve battleships, twelve heavy and sixteen light cruisers, 178 destroyers, forty destroyer escorts and ten frigates. The US now deployed more destroyers than the Japanese navy owned carrier aircraft. Third Fleet’s two hundred ships occupied an area of ocean nine miles by forty. The objective of Shogo, complex as most Japanese operational plans, was to enable three squadrons, two sailing from Borneo and one from Kyushu, to rendezvous off Leyte Gulf, where the Combined Fleet would fall upon MacArthur’s amphibious armada and its covering naval force, Seventh Fleet. Though the Japanese believed that their air attacks had already crippled Halsey’s Third Fleet, operating north-east of the Philippines, they sought to decoy his carriers and battleships out of range of Leyte. For this purpose, Japan’s four surviving carriers and skeletal complement of aircraft were to feint southward, making a demonstration the Americans could not fail to notice. The carriers’ inevitable loss was considered worth accepting, to remove Halsey from the path of the main striking force. Shogo was scheduled for the earliest possible date after the expected American landing. Most senior officers and staffs opposed the plan. They perceived its slender prospects of success, and its likely calamitous losses. They saw that, by waiting until the Americans were ashore, they would have missed the decisive moment in the Philippines. Shogo reflected the Japanese navy’s chronic weakness for dividing its forces. Even the bellicose Ugaki wrote on 21 September that it seemed rash ‘to engage the full might of the enemy with our inferior force…committing ourselves to a decisive battle…There was little chance of achieving victory. Watching a Sumo wrestler taking on five men in succession, it was plain that he could not prevail if he expended too much effort grappling with each opponent in turn.’ Some officers said: ‘We do not mind death, but if the final effort of our great navy is to be an attack on a cluster of empty freighters, surely admirals Togo and Yamamoto would weep in their graves.’ Critics challenged a scheme which demanded daylight engagement. Only darkness, they believed, might offer a chance of success, of exploiting the Imperial Navy’s legendary night-fighting skills. Even the army, itself so often imprudent, thought Shogo reckless. Vice-Admiral Takeo Kurita, designated as operational commander, made the best case he could for the operation. ‘Would it not be shameful,’ he demanded at his captains’final briefing, ‘for the fleet to remain intact while our nation perishes? There are such things as miracles.’ Yet Kurita himself, though a veteran destroyer and cruiser leader who had seen plenty of action, was notoriously cautious. He had gained his flag by virtue of seniority, not performance. He was to execute a plan entirely devised by Combined Fleet headquarters, which demanded extraordinary boldness. On the eve of sailing, only Kurita’s rhetoric matched the demands of his mission. The fleet, he told his officers, was being granted ‘the chance to bloom as flowers of death’. His audience responded as custom demanded, leaping to their feet to cry ‘Banzai!’, but there was no eagerness in their hearts. Kurita and his captains then embarked upon one of the most reckless and ill-managed operations in naval history. The series of actions which became known as the Battle of Leyte Gulf was fought over an area the size of Britain or Nevada. Following a Japanese naval code change, American intelligence gained no hint of the enemy’s plan, but both of Kurita’s southern squadrons were detected long ahead of reaching Leyte. Before dawn on 23 October, Halsey received one of the most momentous sighting reports of the war from the submarine Darter, patrolling the Palawan Passage with its sister ship Dace: ‘MANY SHIPS INCLUDING 3 PROBABLE BBS 08-28N 116-30E COURSE 040 SPEED 18 X CHASING.’ This was Kurita’s 1st Striking Force, en route from Brunei Bay. What a spectacle it must have been. No one has bettered Winston Churchill’s imagery of twentieth-century dreadnoughts at sea: ‘gigantic castles of steel’, prows dipping as they advanced in stately procession, ‘like giants bowed in anxious thought’. Five battleships and ten heavy cruisers steamed in three columns at sixteen knots, without an anti-submarine screen. This was all the more astonishing since the Japanese intercepted the American radio transmission, and thus knew submarines were at hand. At 0632, Darter fired six torpedoes at the cruiser Atago, Kurita’s flagship, from point-blank range—980 yards—then loosed her stern tubes at the cruiser Takao from 1,550 yards. Atago was hit four times, Takao twice. Dace’s skipper, Bladen Claggett, whipped up his periscope to see ‘the sight of a lifetime’: Atago billowing black smoke and orange flame, sinking fast by the bow. Takao, though hit hard in the stern, remained afloat. Claggett heard two huge explosions. ‘I have never heard anything like it,’ wrote the submarine skipper. ‘The soundmen reported that it sounded as if the bottom of the ocean was blowing up…Heard tremendous breaking-up noises. This was the most gruesome sound I have ever heard.’ The diving officer said: ‘We’d better get the hell out of here.’ Admiral Kurita and his staff swam from the stricken Atago to the destroyer Kishinami, and thence transferred to the great battleship Yamato. Some 360 of Atago’s crew drowned, including almost all the admiral’s communications staff. If Kurita’s conduct thereafter was clumsy, no fifty-five-year-old could have found it easy to exercise command after suffering such a personal trauma. Darter’s sister boat Dace launched four torpedoes at the cruiser Maya and heard huge explosions, signalling her end. Belated Japanese destroyer attacks prevented either submarine from firing again. Kurita’s ships increased speed to twenty-four knots to escape the killing ground. The first action of Leyte Gulf had inflicted substantial damage on the Japanese before they fired a shot. Some officers of ‘Centre Force’, as Kurita’s squadron was designated, expressed rueful admiration for the American submarines’ achievement: ‘Why can’t our people pull off a stunt like that?’ Why not, indeed? This first American success was made possible by a tactical carelessness amounting to recklessness, which would characterise almost every Japanese action in those days. However gloomy were Kurita and his officers about the operation they had undertaken, it is extraordinary that they spurned elementary precautions. Japanese behaviour suggested a resignation to death much stronger than the will to fight. In this titanic clash, a once-great navy was to conduct itself in a fashion that would have invited ridicule, were not such great issues and so many lives at stake. It was now plain to the Americans that Kurita’s ships were headed for the San Bernardino Strait, at the north end of Samar island. On reaching its eastern exit, they intended to turn south for the seven-hour run to Leyte Gulf, and MacArthur’s invasion anchorage. The second Japanese squadron under Admiral Shoji Nishimura had also been spotted, steaming towards the same objective from the south, past Mindanao. Halsey dared not lead his own battleships into San Bernardino, which had been heavily mined by the Japanese. Instead, he ordered three fast carrier groups to close the range and launch air strikes. The Japanese, however, moved first. Three groups of fifty aircraft apiece, flying from Luzon, attacked the carriers of Sherman’s Task Group 3. A long, bitter battle ensued. One Hellcat pilot, the famous Cmdr David McCampbell, shot down nine Japanese planes, his wingman six, five other pilots claimed two each. McCampbell had initially been rejected for flight training back in 1933, because of poor eyesight. Yet the aggression indispensable to all successful fighter pilots made him one of the most successful of the navy’s war. ‘It’s competitive all the way through,’ he said wryly. On 24 October 1944, nearly all the prizes were won by the Americans. The Japanese attacking force was almost wiped out. Just one Judy dive-bomber penetrated the American screen and landed a 550-pound bomb on the light carrier Princeton, crowded with planes preparing for take-off. Fuel caught fire, torpedoes exploded, hundreds of desperate men crowded the flightdeck. At 1010, half an hour after the initial explosion, all crewmen save damage-control parties abandoned ship. The cruiser Birmingham steamed close alongside to help fight Princeton’s fires, sending thirty-eight volunteers aboard the stricken carrier. A Jeep and a tractor slid from Princeton’s lofty deck onto the destroyer Morrison, which was taking off men while using machine guns to ward off sharks from survivors in the water. Princeton’s agony continued for 21/2 hours, until a new Japanese air raid was signalled. Birmingham temporarily stood off. After Lexington’s Hellcats broke up the attackers, however, the heroic cruiser closed in once more, and tried to take Princeton in tow. A huge explosion in the carrier’s torpedo stowage put an end to the salvage attempt, and inflicted shocking damage on Birmingham. The ship’s war diary recorded: ‘Dead, dying and wounded, many of them bloody and horrible, covered the decks…Blood ran freely down the waterways.’ The hulk of Princeton was sunk by American torpedoes. Birmingham retired from the fleet, ‘a dockyard case’. Amazingly, thanks to the courage and skill displayed aboard all the ships involved, only 108 men died and 190 were wounded. If this was a bitter morning for Halsey’s TG3, it was also a time for pride. Third Fleet’s first air strike fell upon Kurita’s ships at 1026, followed by a second wave at 1245, another at 1550. Aboard a nearby American submarine, sailors eavesdropped on the airmen’s radio chatter. One pilot interrupted his controller’s instructions impatiently: ‘Let’s get this over with.’ Then there was a clamour of yells: ‘Yippee! I’ve got a battleship!’ followed by: ‘All right, let the battleship alone. Line up on the cruiser.’ Kurita was now flying his flag in Yamato, in uneasy concourse with Ugaki, who commanded the battleship element from the same ship, and despised his superior. The admiral pleaded in vain with shore command for air support. This was refused, on the absurd grounds that fighters were more profitably engaged in attacking US carriers. Here, once again, was the Japanese obsession with the inherent virtue of offensive action, matched by impatience with the humdrum requirements of defence. Kurita was obliged to watch, almost impotent, as American aircraft struck his ships again and again. Avenger gunner Sherwin Goodman was quietly contemplating the sky amidst a huge formation of American aircraft when his thoughts were interrupted: ‘It was a beautiful day…My goodness, what have we got here?’ It was the Yamato group, far below them. The torpedo-carriers dropped and circled, to reach firing positions. Goodman rotated his turret forward, and could see only gunflashes from the enemy ships: ‘It looked like a tunnel of fire.’ At a thousand yards, they released their torpedo, the plane lifted, and Goodman cried at his pilot, ‘Break left! Break left!’ Gazing down as they swung away, he exclaimed triumphantly: ‘We hit him!’ Their victim was the light cruiser Noshiro, which sank almost immediately. Two American bombs caused slight damage to Yamato, giving Kurita another bad fright. His chief of staff was wounded by splinters. Every gun in the Japanese fleet fired on the incoming Americans, yet achieved small success. Since 1942, US ships had made great strides in countering air attack by radio fighter direction, radar-controlled gunnery and radio-guided proximity shell fuses. The Japanese had not begun to match such advances. Their anti-aircraft defences were woefully inadequate. ‘Our captain was a great gunnery enthusiast,’ said Petty Officer Kisao Ebisawa, who served on a warship through many US air attacks. ‘He was always telling us that we could shoot the Americans out of the sky. After innumerable raids in which our guns did not even scratch their wings, he was left looking pretty silly. When air attacks came in, there was nothing much we could do but pray.’ On 24 October, huge ‘beehive’ shells from the battleships’ main armament did more damage to their own gunbarrels than to American planes, but pilots were shaken by the spectacle. ‘It’s nerve-racking,’ said one, ‘because you see the guns on the ships go off. And then you wonder what in hell you are going to do for the next ten or fifteen seconds while the shell gets there.’ Amid the erupting black puffballs in the sky, again and again American torpedo-and bomb-carrying aircraft got through unscathed. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/max-hastings/nemesis-the-battle-for-japan-1944-45/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.