Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  For decades, the navy had designated the United States as its “hypothetical enemy” for planning purposes—not because it really wanted or expected to fight the Americans, but because that scenario provided leverage in budget negotiations. The navy’s war planning envisioned a “southern advance” to the East Indies, chiefly because such a plan justified a large fleet buildup. As the crisis approached in 1940 and 1941, the Tokyo admirals did not really want to fight in the Pacific, but they were unwilling to say so outright for fear that the army would win the contest for control of funding and materials. In any case, the admirals were not necessarily the most important players in the navy. Events and decisions were increasingly driven by elite middle-echelon officers on the general staff or at the navy ministry, who were recklessly committed to take Japan to war. These younger war hawks, commanders and captains, fabricated estimates and statistics to buttress the case for war, and pressured their superiors to accept them at face value. Well-reasoned objections were shouted down, literally. When the rear admiral in charge of war mobilization warned that Japan’s shipbuilding capacity was too limited to support a war with the United States, a captain cried: “Such an estimate makes it impossible to go to war!”82 The navy brass was somehow unable to withstand “pressures bordering on intimidation” from unruly firebrands down the ranks.83 The admirals were swept along in a riptide of fatalism, magical thinking, and hot-blooded belligerence. “Many people knew at the very beginning it was very unwise to make war against Anglo-Saxons,” said Admiral Nomura, the last prewar ambassador to the United States, “but the situation being as it was, they were very compelled to go to war.”84 Admiral Shigeru Fukudome later mused that the entire process of deciding for war was “very strange.” He recalled: “When we were discussing tete-a-tete, we [navy leaders] were all for avoiding war, but when we held a conference the conclusion always moved step by step in the direction of war.”85

  In arguing against the Pacific War, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had repeatedly pressed this point upon his colleagues. There was no foreseeable scenario in which Japan could conquer and subjugate the United States, he warned—but it was at least possible that the United States could conquer and subjugate Japan. As a gambler, Yamamoto grasped that the risk-reward tradeoff was lopsided. Before 1941, the Japanese had achieved a singular feat among Asian nations—they had safeguarded their independence and political autonomy against the encroachments of Western imperialism. In choosing war against the United States, the Japanese placed their most cherished asset on the block—their independence and autonomy—to be wagered against the doubtful future rewards of conquest and empire in China, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific islands.

  The war had opened with a Japanese sea-air-amphibious Blitzkrieg that blindsided the U.S. battle fleet in Pearl Harbor, wiped out American airpower in the Philippines, wiped out British airpower in Malaya, sank two British battleships operating at sea in full combat readiness, overran the U.S. territories of Wake Island and Guam, obliterated an Allied fleet in the Java Sea, drove the British out of Hong Kong and Burma, trapped MacArthur’s forces in a doomed siege on Bataan, captured 75,000 British troops in Singapore, and laid waste to the Australian town of Darwin. This series of spectacular victories appeared to vindicate the assumptions that had led the Japanese to war, silencing the skeptics and undercutting the case for an early bid to end the war through diplomacy. The Japanese had proved a far more formidable enemy than the West had supposed, but the astonishing success of this initial offensive owed as much to the local weakness of the Allies as to the prowess of Japanese arms. In Japan, the early victories were lavishly feted and publicized, but the subsequent reversals at Coral Sea and Midway were carefully concealed from the public, and indeed from all but an inner circle of military leaders. In the Solomons campaign of 1942, Japanese naval airpower suffered badly and never really recovered; its shipping losses were severe and irreplaceable, and the Japanese army lost almost 30,000 troops on Guadalcanal. Japanese naval operations were often inflexible and predictable, exposing a lack of adaptability that the Americans moved to exploit. It was a problem that many line officers had recognized and tried to address, but the rigid command culture of the Imperial Navy was deeply entrenched. Three centuries earlier, the venerated samurai philosopher Miyamoto Musashi had extolled the virtues of adaptability, which he called “mountain and sea changing.”

  “Mountain and sea” means that it is bad to do the same thing over and over again. You may have to repeat something once, but it shouldn’t be done a third time. When you try something on an adversary, if it doesn’t work the first time, you won’t get any benefit out of rushing to do it again. Change your tactics abruptly, doing something completely different. If that still doesn’t work, then try something else.

  Thus the science of the art of war involves the presence of mind to “act as the sea when the enemy is like a mountain, and act as a mountain when the enemy is like a sea.” This requires careful reflection.86

  By the end of 1942, the industrial-military might of the U.S. economy was beginning to bear on the conflict. The South Pacific counteroffensive, beginning in the Solomons and continuing up the chain of islands to the northwest, bypassed the strongest Japanese positions and leapt past Rabaul in February 1944. According to one Japanese intelligence officer’s estimate, the Allied offensive bypassed seventeen Japanese-held islands, leaving 160,000 troops to their rear. None of the bypassed garrisons could be fully evacuated, so they were simply left suspended in limbo, with no further role in the war, and about one-fourth subsequently died of starvation or tropical diseases.87 The Japanese had no good answer for this bypassing strategy, which they hated but understood and respected. A second, parallel offensive to the north, driving west through the Micronesian archipelagoes of the central Pacific, was more decisive. The U.S. naval victory at the Battle of the Philippine Sea (June 19–20, 1944) led to the final and irreversible defeat of Japan’s carrier airpower, and the conquest of Saipan and Guam provided airfields from which the newly deployed B-29 Superfortress could hit Tokyo and the Kanto Plain. These events, in June and July 1944, ensured Japan’s eventual strategic defeat no matter what the outcome of successive battles.

  If the Pacific War had been a game of chess, played between grandmasters, there would have been no endgame. With the outcome no longer in doubt, neither grandmaster would have felt the need to play to the end. Foreseeing that his king was soon to be checkmated, the Japanese player would have laid it down on the board and shaken hands with his opponent. But this was war, not a board game, and conditions in Japan did not allow for the possibility of a negotiated truce until long after defeat had become inevitable. Another 1.5 million Japanese servicemen and civilians were to be sacrificed, like so many pawns, before the checkmate in August 1945. Those 1.5 million deaths, in the final year of the conflict, represented nearly one-half of the total Japanese killed in the wars of Asia and the Pacific from 1937 to 1945.88

  Even in this final year of the war, however, Japanese military forces showed great valor and audacity, with occasional flashes of brilliance. The army largely abandoned its costly practice of launching massed bayonet charges against disciplined, well-armed, and entrenched Allied troops. On Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, especially, the Japanese army revealed its proficiency in the use of ingenious subterranean or “honeycomb” defensive fortifications, largely vitiating U.S. advantages in artillery and airpower. The Japanese navy managed to produce a few new fighter plane models that were capable of contending with the American Hellcat, Corsair, and Lightning, when handled by their remaining elite veteran aces—just not in sufficient numbers to reverse the overall tide of the war. When in a magnanimous mood, Allied aviation experts were willing to concede that the Japanese firm Kawanishi had designed and built the best reconnaissance seaplanes in the world. The kamikazes were a singularly Japanese phenomenon, arising in a unique cultural context. But in tactical terms, the suicide plane was like a weapon from the future, allowing the Japanese
to deploy guided missiles at a time when no other combatant possessed such weapons, or effective measures to counter them.

  In defeat, the Japanese were exhausted, weary of war, apprehensive of the future, and still largely preoccupied with survival. The obvious threat of political repression was gone, but otherwise, life after the war was largely similar to life during the war. None could foresee the “economic miracle” that would lift Japan to prosperity and economic power in the 1970s and 1980s. Corruption was endemic, as officers of the army and navy purloined surplus military assets and sold them on the black market. As returning servicemen poured into Japan through the seaports, a great reverse tide of civilian refugees who had left the cities in 1944 and 1945—an estimated 10 million people, or one in every seven Japanese—was flowing back into the stricken cities. “Our everyday life too is filled with difficulty and unforeseen events,” wrote Michio Takeyama in his diary, in the fall of 1945. “We can’t establish a routine. A day-to-day, hand-to-mouth existence has to be the fundamental style of life.”89

  Memories of the war faded, and a culture of silence and forgetting took root in postwar Japan. In 1947, a Japanese journalist wrote that the year 1942 seemed as if it were thirty years in the past.90 In the cities, the rubble was carted away and new buildings rose from the ashes, and many younger people never learned that their entire neighborhoods had once been burned off the map. Little rooms or alcoves in houses served as private shrines where families remembered their dead husbands, fathers, or sons. A small altar was topped with photographs, letters from overseas, burning incense, and—for those who received cremated remains—a wooden ossuary box. But those were strictly private rituals. Hitoshi Inoue undoubtedly spoke for many of his fellow Pacific War veterans when he wrote that he did not want to dredge up the hateful old memories. When the time came for him to search his soul about it, Inoue would do so alone, in private reflection. He did not believe the reckoning should be public, or collective, and certainly it was not to be discussed openly or taught in schools: “Don’t we all have things, whether many or few, that we don’t want to recall? We don’t want people to pick at our old wounds.”91 In an interview given in the 1980s, an elderly resident of Tokyo said that he had tried to forget the war, but a traumatic memory occasionally resurfaced—as when he was walking in the Ginza, and “suddenly I see a place and think, ‘I clung to this wall and hid myself here during the bombing.’ ”92

  To the extent that they remembered the war at all, many Japanese remembered it as a tragedy that had befallen Japan, rather than as a monstrous evil that their nation had deliberately set in motion. Questions of accountability and self-reflection were largely banished from the public square. Many Japanese considered the issue of war crimes to have been resolved by the International Military Tribunal Far East, which conducted the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, and by the treaties ending the war and reestablishing Japanese sovereignty. With the conviction of the Class A, B, and C war criminals in postwar justice tribunals, the Japanese people would be taught to believe that the perpetrators had been brought to justice, absolving the public of any responsibility for the war. To this day, when assessing the question of responsibility for the war and its tribulations, many Japanese tend toward legalistic responses, dwelling on official acts and statements of governments, or treaty law. A popular view in Japan holds that the nation’s cause was fundamentally just, that war crimes committed by Japanese forces were deplorable but no worse than those committed by other nations, and that Japan’s defeat was a worthy sacrifice because it liberated Asia from Western colonialism. Some on the Japanese right still argue that Japan had no choice but to wage war, as a matter of national survival, in order to break the “encirclement” of Allied powers. In August 1945, when the emperor’s “jeweled voice” went over the airwaves, the national about-face occurred with jarring abruptness. Artists, writers, and scholars who had supported the ideology of the wartime regime buried their past work in file cabinets, or burned it, and started anew. Teachers who had taught ultranationalist and militarist values announced to their classrooms: “From now on it is an age of democracy.”93 Students were instructed to open their textbooks and tear out offending pages, or blot out offending passages with ink. Many children relished the novelty of defacing the textbooks that they had previously been taught to revere.94 The Duralumin that had been used in manufacturing airplanes was bundled off the black market and sold to industrial firms retooling to produce consumer goods. The swords were beaten into ploughshares, but in this case it was Mitsubishi Zeros beaten into dustpans and kitchen crockery.95

  During the postwar occupation, many of MacArthur’s policies reinforced and abetted the collective amnesia of the Japanese. By order of the supreme commander, there was no concerted public effort to preserve the history or memory of the war—no monuments, no references in school textbooks, no national museum. The decision to leave Hirohito on his throne, as a national symbol and object of reverence (if no longer worship), created a sense of continuity. Exonerating the emperor seemed a small price to pay to ease the occupation and to erect a bulwark against communism in Asia. Criticism of the emperor was strictly taboo in postwar Japan—the “chrysanthemum taboo,” as it was called—and polite Japanese opinion accepted that he had been a figurehead manipulated by a conspiracy of militarists. The Showa era, which remained the basis of the Japanese calendar throughout his reign, continued to the emperor’s death in 1989.

  Just ninety-two years had passed since Commodore Matthew Perry’s “Black Ships” had anchored in Tokyo Bay and forced the Japanese people, against their will, to reckon with the outside world. Ninety-two years: less than a century; the span of one long human life. In 1945, the oldest Japanese could still summon early childhood memories of life in the Tokugawa Shogunate, when the nation was ruled by samurai who wore suits of lacquered armor and fought with swords and spears. During that span of time the Japanese people had experienced a wrenching acceleration of historical change. They had modernized and industrialized at a headlong pace, rising to become one of the most formidable naval and military powers in the world, and inflicted humiliating defeats on several of the leading nations of the West. Falling under the sway of fanatical militarists, they had poured their armies and fleets out across Asia and the Pacific, spreading misery across the region and making themselves infamous in the eyes of their neighbors. That misadventure had ended in total defeat. What would the future bring? How would Japan fare, while tucked under the eagle’s wing? No one could know in 1945, and perhaps the answers would not come into focus until another ninety-two years had elapsed.

  FROM THE ALEUTIANS TO NEW GUINEA, from the atolls of Micronesia to the green jungles of the Philippines, in one remote Pacific island group after another—the Solomons, the Gilberts, the Admiralties, the Marshalls, the Bismarcks, the Palaus, the East Indies, the Marianas, the Ryukyus, the Bonins, the Volcanoes—the invasion beaches were pulverized and misshapen. Rusting and bullet-riddled landing craft lay awash in the shallows or half buried in the sand. A few paces inland, at the tree line, palm logs lay broken, blackened, splintered, and scattered across the ground like fallen matchsticks. Gun emplacements and blockhouses lay demolished under broken slabs of concrete, with steel reinforcing rods twisted and splayed. Rats, snakes, and lizards were living in abandoned rifle pits and pillboxes. Infantrymen’s litter was strewn among the underbrush and piled in the bottom of ravines: ration cans, spent casings, blood bottles, ammunition boxes, rucksacks, canteens, stretchers, shovels, every imaginable kind of junk—some of it to be collected by cleanup details, some to be claimed as souvenirs, some to be salvaged by natives, and some to buried by time, like archeological artifacts.

  In the hot, fecund islands of the South Pacific, the jungle would swiftly reassert its hegemony. In a year or less, vines began crawling over the rusting remains of abandoned bulldozers, tanks, and guns. Eventually, fresh vegetation would completely swallow these relics of war. Wrecked and gutted airplanes were scattered around the marg
ins of abandoned airstrips—tilted, upside down, wings and tails torn off and piled in unruly heaps, with paint and tail markings gradually fading in the sun. In lagoons and anchorages one found hundreds of rusting, oil-streaked, salt-caked hulks: transports, oil tankers, auxiliary ships, and mobile drydocks that were not designed for a long life, and were worth little or nothing on secondary markets. Some would be salvaged for their scrap metal value; others would be towed out to the ocean and scuttled; others would simply be abandoned at anchor. Some of those in the Marshall Islands would serve as targets for nuclear weapons tests.

  Military cemeteries were found on many islands—long, symmetrical rows of white crosses, interspersed here and there with a Star of David. Helmets or keepsakes had been left resting on the ground by some of the markers. On the larger battlefields, where casualties had arrived too quickly for the burial details to keep up, the dead had sometimes been committed to communal graves, in long trenches hastily dug by bulldozers, marked by a single placard with the date of interment. Dog tags had been collected and—if possible—the location of each body recorded. Most American soldiers and marines buried on Pacific battlefields would be exhumed and transported to another final resting place, according to the stated wishes of their next of kin: either a permanent military cemetery overseas, a national cemetery in the United States, or a private cemetery in the dead man’s hometown. Of the 279,867 American war dead worldwide, families requested the repatriation to the United States of 171,539 remains.96 Most of the others were also exhumed and transferred, at least once and sometimes twice, to a large permanent cemetery on foreign soil.