Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  Today, as chief

  Of the sea guardians

  Of the land of the dawn,

  Awed I gaze up

  At the rising sun.

  He wrote the poem on board the battleship Nagato, his flagship as commander in chief Combined Fleet. So the rising sun would have been the ship’s pennant. The land of the dawn, of course, was Japan: the two characters Ni-hon (usually pronounced Nippon) mean Sun Source, or the Land Where the Sun Rises. Yamamoto, if we may translate a subtle thirty-one-syllable Japanese poem into blunt English words, was on top of the heap. It would be foolish to imagine that he did not enjoy his eminence, even as he saw the looming threat of getting into a war with the wrong enemy. He enjoyed a battle as he enjoyed women, and might even have found a losing battle more interesting, just as he obviously found multiple love-trouble more interesting than a single alliance. On that last point, whenever the time came to quit Tokyo to join his ship, he had to set out early so that he could say his goodbyes without undue haste. He had big appetites, and they weren’t just lustful. They were also emotional: a clue to his taste for drama. He might have quite liked the idea of being at the centre of a big story, and what could be a bigger story than working the miracle of saving Japan from the doom he himself had predicted? After all, going ahead with the attack wasn’t his idea. He wasn’t that crazy. He had, however, planned an excellent attack.

  Or it would have been excellent, if it had caught the American aircraft carriers in harbour. When the returning aircraft reported that the American carriers had not been present, Yamamoto, supervising the operation at long range from the Nagato anchored at Hashirajima in the Inland Sea, knew straight away that the Americans had the wherewithal to go on fighting. He was also absorbing the dreadful information that the Japanese declaration of war had been sent too late; that his surprise attack had been transformed into a sneak attack; and that the Americans therefore had redoubled motivation as well as insufficiently depleted means. The deadly combination of the two factors was proved all too soon. In May 1942, only five months after Pearl Harbour, the American carriers fought him to a draw at the battle of the Coral Sea. At Midway, scarcely more than six months after Pearl Harbor, they destroyed him. He had been right about making things tough for the Americans for six months. Six months of supremacy were all that the Japanese enjoyed. After Midway, they had no chance of keeping the initiative. But we make a mistake if we think they were crazy not to admit defeat. There was always the possibility that they could bring their opponents to terms by making it too costly to go on fighting. Because Yamamoto died early, and because the English-speaking gambler is such a sympathetic character, we tend to enrol him in the ranks of those who would have seen reason and sought a sane way out. It is just as likely, however, that he would have gone on fighting to the end, in the manner of his comparably brilliant army equivalent, Yamashita. Though the army’s lack of a victorious future in the land battle did not become apparent to all until much later, Yamashita was just as aware as Yamamoto, and just as early, that Japan’s adventure was over from the day that supremacy on the sea, and therefore over the supply lines, was lost: and that day was the very first day of the war.

  People of a literary bent tend to idealize the poet warriors, of whom, in modern times, Yamamoto must count as the most conspicuous apart from General Patton. But we need to ask ourselves whether a flair for the poetic might not be a limitation to generalship, in which a considered appreciation for the mundane is essential. A poetic flair has an impatient mind of its own: it likes to make an effect, and it has a propensity for two qualities that can easily be inimical to a broad strategic aim. One of those qualities is what A. Alvarez called the shaping spirit, and the other is what Frank Kermode called the sense of an ending. Yamamoto’s plan for deciding the war on the first day was not only the equivalent of a roulette player’s betting his whole bundle on a single number, it was also the equivalent of trying to cram the whole of The Tale of Genji into a single haiku. There was bound to be material that didn’t fit. Even if the American aircraft carriers had been in harbor they would not have sunk far enough in the shallow water to be beyond salvage. One way or another, the American fleet was bound to come back.

  It has been said in Yamamoto’s defence that the six months’ grace he promised was all the Japanese forces needed to consolidate the Strike South. But there were senior officers who didn’t believe it. One of them was Admiral Tomioka, who accurately assessed the risks Yamamoto was taking, and, more importantly, was doubtful about the efficacy of the outcome even if the plan had worked. (Tomioka’s analysis is well outlined in Gordon W. Prange’s At Dawn We Slept, a work by no means unfavourable to Yamamoto, but one from which Tomioka emerges as the voice of reason on the Japanese side.) If the Japanese command structure had been as well organized from the outset as America’s command structure very quickly became, Tomioka would have been in a position to overrule Yamamoto. But the Japanese never did get organized at command level. The drawback of military government was that there was no government to control the military, whose commanders formed a perpetual discussion group from which policy emerged as the highest common factor of contending opinions. The Americans, on the other hand, appointed, as supreme commander in the Pacific, Admiral King, to whom both General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz reported directly. Though MacArthur hogged most of the limelight, Admiral Nimitz was the key man. His unspectacular qualities, coalescing into an authority all the more daunting for being so reasonable, can be assessed from E. B. Potter’s biography, Nimitz. The Japanese continued with Yamamoto, who wrote his Pearl Harbor poem all over again at Midway, except that this time the masterpiece came apart completely. In the Japanese language there is an expression to cover the concept of making an almighty hash of things: to serve the dish with bean paste. At Midway bean paste was the whole dish.

  Spiritually, Yamamoto died at Midway. In the matter of his physical death, however, it seems unlikely that he committed suicide in expiation. Romantic interpreters sometimes favour the appealing notion that Yamamoto invited the American ambush that resulted in his being shot down into the jungle of Bougainville on April 18, 1943. While airborne on an inspection tour of the forward areas, he was caught by a flight of P-38s. In a big sky, they knew exactly where to find him. But it is a long step, even for conspiracy theorists, to argue that he had deliberately tipped off the enemy. At Midway, it was indeed true that Admiral Spruance, armed with signals intelligence, knew where to intercept the Japanese aircraft carriers. But the Japanese, like the Germans, were reluctant to accept that their military codes were being read: reluctant even when there was no other plausible reason for a defeat. When he saw the P-38s forming to attack, Yamamoto might have guessed that they were acting on information received: i.e., that the coded radio messages announcing his route had been read in Hawaii. He might even have guessed that the P-38s had intercepted from below—making it look like an accidental encounter—in order to protect the secret in case anyone escaped from the two aircraft carrying him and his staff, or from the escort of Zeros. But by then the guesswork could avail him nothing, and down he went. When the Japanese search party tracked down his corpse in the jungle, he was still strapped into his seat. His sword was beside him. If he had wanted to commit suicide, he would probably have done so on dry land or on the deck of a ship, included the sword in the ceremony, and written a poem first.

  It is another romantic notion to suppose that Yamamoto would have become a voice for common sense had he survived. He had been ready to fight a war that he had long predicted was bound to be lost, and he would probably have gone on fighting it long after it became obvious that there was no hope even for a truce. That things were as bad as they could be was already evident on the day after Midway: so evident that the military tried to conceal the scale of the disaster from the Emperor. Talking about a Japanese national character might be pointless, but to talk about a Japanese military culture in the modern period is perfectly legitimate—and one mark of that c
ulture was that its senior officers were ready to fight on far beyond the limits that might have been set by military sanity, let alone political reason.

  Imminent defeat was always seen as the climax of the battle. There was even a valid idea behind that view. The idea was to make victory so expensive for the enemy that he would call a halt. The idea was not quite as crazy as it sounds now. In Europe, after the catastrophe of the second Schweinfurt raid in October 1943, the American 8th Air Force had to think twice about continuing with the daylight bombing of German targets. They thought twice and continued, but another massacre of air crew on that scale might have dictated a breathing space for the Luftwaffe to regroup. (It would never have had time to replace its lost fighter pilots, which was the real damage that the Allied air bombardment inflicted on the enemy; but the German fighter aircraft could have been switched to the eastern front, where they were sorely needed.) Similarly, in the Pacific, and very late in the day, Admiral Ohnishi’s kamikaze strategy might well have done more than it did to slow down the American navy. Yamamoto, had he been on the scene, would have had no ships to fight with—a fact partly his fault—but he might have been fertile in ideas for how the kamikaze weapon could have been used to better effect. He was never against the concept: until his flight commander, Genda, came up with a less wasteful scheme, Yamamoto’s plan for the Pearl Harbor attack entailed the expendability of the pilots. He might have flown a suicide mission himself, if he had ever learned to fly. Like General Yamashita, he might have remained dangerous to the end. When Tojo finally overcame his jealousy and brought Yamashita back from purdah to lead the defence of Luzon, Yamashita turned the expected American walkover into a protracted nightmare.

  There is no reason to think that the Japanese home islands would have been defended with less tenacity. Revisionist historians and commentators who deplore the use of nuclear weapons against the two Japanese cities have a humanitarian case, but they weaken it by supposing that they have a military case to back it up. The same pundits who maintain that the bombing campaign against Germany was useless are fond of saying that the conventional bombing by B-29s would have been enough to ensure Japan’s quick surrender. There is also a fond confidence that an invasion by the Russians would have brought the same result, although the consideration is usually ignored that the Red Army, which had no amphibious equipment, might not have been in an ideal condition to fight after its troops had swum to Hokkaido.The awkward truth is that the Japanese generals had correctly guessed which beaches the Americans would have used to invade Kyushu and Honshu.The Japanese had several million troops available to fight the battle. The only objection the Emperor raised to what would surely have been a long and bloody last stand was that the preparations were not going ahead fast enough. The atomic bombs changed his mind and he recorded his surrender speech. Some of the young officers tried to kidnap him before it could be broadcast. Older heads prevailed. The best we can say for Yamamoto is that he would almost certainly have been among them, but mainly because his loyalty to the Emperor was undying—the very factor that led the poetic admiral to write his miniature masterpiece in the first place.

  Z

  Aleksandr Zinoviev

  Carl Zuckmayer

  Stefan Zweig

  ALEKSANDR ZINOVIEV

  Aleksandr Alexandrovich Zinoviev (1922–2006) has suffered a fate predictable only in retrospect. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed, it buried the reputations of those who had tried to point out its flaws from the inside. Today there might seem nothing remarkable about what Zinoviev tried to tell us: but there was, and there still is, because nobody else carried penetrating criticism to quite such a depth. His The Reality of Communism (1984) is one of the key short books of political analysis in the history of its subject. It might stand out more in the memory if some of his other books—especially the satirical novels, of which The Yawning Heights attracted the most attention—had not been so long. But at any length, he was telling the story from the centre of the action, because he was a philosopher and sociologist who actually worked within the system until he figured out that it was broken. Handsome and energetic, a natural leader along Gagarin lines—he looked more cosmonaut than academic—Zinoviev was no rebel when he started off. During World War II he was a pilot, and afterwards a star student at Moscow State University, rising to academic posts both there and at the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. For his increasing anti-Stalinism he was first of all harassed by the KGB and finally expelled from the Soviet Union in 1978, after being stripped of his rank with maximum opprobrium. He settled in Munich, where he continued to write copiously in his native language. His many books were usually published in Russian by Éditions l’Age d’Homme in Lausanne before being translated, first into French and then into English. So his work was plentifully available: some might say too much so for its own good. Rarity value would have given him more impact.

  After 1990 he entered a new, strange phase in which he backtracked on his own discoveries and declared that the Soviet Union had disintegrated not because of the internal stresses he had pointed out, but because of a brilliantly successful concerted attack mounted by the imperialist West. There was little market for this idea even among diehards. But what ensured the eventual fading of his name was that he had been so clamorously proved right when the yawning heights caved in. Suddenly everyone was an expert, and nobody wanted to be reminded of a time when he wasn’t.

  I know of no more pitiable spectacle in human society than the Soviet people’s intimate closeness to one another.

  —ALEKSANDR ZINOVIEV, Kommunism kakh realnost, P. 109

  AFTER ALEKSANDR ZINOVIEV was expelled to the West in 1978, I met him briefly in London. I was reading a lot of Russian at the time—if you were reading only Zinoviev, you were reading a lot of Russian, because he was torrentially productive—but I couldn’t speak enough of the language to sustain a meaningful conversation. His English was in the same transitional stage, so the encounter turned into a smiling competition. I had been reviewing his books as they came out. Some of the books were physically huge. There was a hell of a lot to keep up with. Zinoviev had been told that I was keeping up and he smiled with gratitude. I hope my smile of gratitude was as dazzling as his. I thought he had done mighty things, but I suspected already that his reputation in the West would rapidly plunge now that he had made himself available. An accelerated Solzhenitsyn scenario was easy to predict. The main difference was that Solzhenitsyn’s principal message really was contained in his big book The Gulag Archipelago, rather than in the satellite works. Zinoviev’s principal message was in his smaller books, especially this one, later translated as The Reality of Communism. His big books inflated into comic fiction what was perfectly apprehensible as a factual argument. Nor, indeed, was the comic fiction quite as funny as it might have been if the author had been given a strict word limit. In the not very long run, the big books duly flopped on top of the little ones, and Zinoviev’s literary reputation slowed to a crawl. Today, very little of him is even in print.

  But it should be remembered that the man who could write a sentence like this wrote hundreds more just as acute. Most of the dissident literature understandably stressed how hellish life was for the dissidents and their dependants. Zinoviev’s field was the hellishness of everyday life. He was not an Englishman and had never heard the crack about every Englishman’s dream being to travel alone in a first-class compartment. He was a Russian and had been brought up in conditions of enforced propinquity. His genius was to guess that there was something wrong with it. People were not meant to live on top of each other. He always wrote acutely on the subject of housing. While experts in the West were still arguing that a certain amount of overcrowding was the inevitable price of Russia’s domestic accommodation being provided at low rent, Zinoviev pointed out that there was no question of the rent’s being low: the rent was paid out of stolen wages. The same, he said, applied to the free medical care: not only was it no good, it
cost the patient almost everything he should have been earning. All this was observation: visiting Western observers had done some of it, but Zinoviev had the advantage of being on the spot full-time.

  What made him exceptional, however, was the theoretical structure that he erected on top of his observations. There was nothing abstruse about the structure. It was as carefully built as it was solidly based. He said that the living conditions could never be allowed to improve beyond a certain point because they were a control mechanism. The system packed everyone together but the resulting irritability had the useful consequence of minimizing human contact. People who spent a large part of the day either standing in long queues or pulling wires to dodge them would not only lack free time to conspire, they would never trust each other. As a theorist, Zinoviev overdid it only when he predicted that even dissidence would turn out to be part of the plan: a built-in safety valve. Commendably, he backtracked on that point not long before he packed his bags. He would probably never have said it if he had not been reduced to despair by the thuggishness with which he was stripped of his academic posts and honours. He was drummed out of the country through a shower of abuse. We tend to forget that the people who were bright enough to predict that such things would happen to them still needed a lot of moral courage to remain calm when they did. But Zinoviev didn’t despair for long: not in Russia, at any rate. In the West, he went silent, sharing the fate of several of the prominent émigré dissidents, which was to find out the hard way that they had destroyed the glamour of their special subject by helping to deprive it of its power.

  CARL ZUCKMAYER