Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

by Ian W. Toll

  At the navy’s main anchorage off Hashirajima Island, the Yamato and Musashi dwarfed the other battleships of the Japanese fleet. The Nagato, Mutsu, and Kirishima, traditional battleships with dimensions similar to those of their American and British counterparts, looked like cruisers when anchored alongside their titanic new sisters. As big as the superbattleships were, however, they were beautifully well proportioned, with broad beams tapering to long, sleek, sharp bows. Their decks were covered with polished cypresswood planking, unpainted; fittings were painted judiciously in black, white, yellow, and brown tones; their names stood out in handsome gold kanji across their sterns; and finely detailed chrysanthemum crests were mounted on their bows. Their superstructures were hundreds of feet high, with intricate arrays of decks, balconies, ladders, antiaircraft guns, and cranes of various sizes and functions. From the broad plate glass windows of the bridge, so far above the sea, the officers looked down on a parade ground–sized foredeck, and men stationed there must have looked like street pedestrians viewed from the top of a tall office building. Even the main anchor, weighing 15 tons, must have looked no larger than a cuff link. The “sun and rays” battle flag, raised each morning on the ensign staff at the stern, was nearly 25 feet long.

  Yamato’s first sea trial was on October 20, 1941, six weeks before Pearl Harbor. She performed beautifully in every respect. Her giant engines ran smoothly, and she had no trouble achieving her maximum speed of 27 knots. She carved an easy path through heavy seas, smashing waves right and left off her bows. In the Musashi’s first outing several weeks later, the 18.1-inch guns were tested for the first time. These colossal weapons fired armor-piercing projectiles weighing 1.5 tons each, about 50 percent heavier than the largest shells thrown by American battleships. Their maximum range was 42 kilometers. A shell fired at that extreme range, with the guns elevated to 45 degrees, climbed from sea level to the altitude of Mount Everest and back to sea level in a flight lasting about a minute and a half. Accuracy was poor at that range, but it was at least theoretically possible to strike enemy ships beyond the horizon. A single hit could put any battleship in the world out of action, and any other class of ship would be literally blown out of the water.

  So great was the blast pressure of the 18.1-inch guns that it was not safe for any man to remain in an unbroken sight line to the muzzles. Crewmen on the Musashi, stationed on the bridge or belowdecks, or crouched behind the turrets on the other side of the ship, were instructed to wear earplugs and find a handhold—even so, the blast caused them to feel as if their “guts had suddenly been thrust upwards into their throats.” Guinea pigs left in cages on deck near the guns were “blown apart” by the shock. As the men peered out from behind their shelters, there was an improbably long pause as the shot traveled through the air. At last they saw the distant tower of water, hundreds of feet high but appearing as no more than a white speck on the horizon. After another long wait, the hollow thud of the faraway explosion reached their ears.

  TWICE IN TWO YEARS the army (or rather, factions within the army) had challenged the emperor, while acting in his name. The “Kodo faction” had planned the botched coup attempt in 1936, and the “Control faction” had masterminded the China Incident in 1937. In each case, the emperor’s halfhearted gestures of resistance had only emboldened and empowered the militarists. After 1937, discovering that they would not be checked from above, the army and the ultranationalist right moved swiftly to consolidate their grip on the country. The National Mobilization Law of 1937 enacted labor conscription to support defense and munitions industries. Rationing of food and basic consumer goods was ordered. Farms were required to turn over their rice harvests at a preset price. Parliament, already weakened, was now completely emasculated.

  The Japanese people were instructed how and what to think through autocratic control of every available source of information, including radio, newspapers, newsreels, movies, posters, music, and cartoons. Dissenting views were suppressed as “radical” or “communist,” and those who had voiced liberal opinions in the past were driven from public life and forced to recant on pain of imprisonment or worse. Correct thoughts and beliefs were hammered into the minds of the Japanese through official slogans: “I won’t desire anything until the war is won” . . . “100 million people, one mind” . . . “Support neighborhood associations” . . . “Beware of spies” . . . “We’ll never cease fire till our enemies cease to be!” Lachrymose ballads played day and night on the radio, glorifying the war overseas: “Departing Ship,” “Samurai Japan,” “Tears and the Flight of Migrating Birds.”

  In the cinema, Western films mostly disappeared, to be replaced by Japanese feature films about the campaigns in China and Manchuria. Scenes of Japanese forces overrunning enemy positions were often followed by scenes of soldiers grieving over the bodies of their fallen comrades and breaking into tearful renditions of Kimigayo, Japan’s national anthem. The features were interspersed with newsreels, which opened with martial orchestral music and an animated sequence of the Japanese golden eagle spreading its wings to cover a map of the earth. War news described the latest victories of Japanese troops overseas. A home-front report showed how ordinary Japanese were pitching in to support the war effort. If there was a segment on “Imperial Family News,” a bold order was first spelled out across the screen: “Remove your hats!” The audience was required (on pain of arrest) to stand erect, remove their hats, and face the screen. Film footage of the Imperial Palace walls or the emperor’s motorcade might follow, with voice-over narration in the abstruse, archaic Japanese reserved for imperial occasions—but never did the emperor himself appear on screen.

  Hatred of the West was encouraged as a means of arousing the national spirit. In state-approved surround-sound propaganda, it was often said that the United States and Britain had conspired to deny Japan its sacred right to expand in Asia, and war with both was inevitable: it was only a matter of time. Western cultural influences were denounced as a form of spiritual corruption; it was the goal of the regime to “purify” or “cleanse” Japan of those foreign viruses. A popular slogan was “To hell with Babe Ruth!” and baseball itself was attacked as “a sport of the decadent democracies.” In a popular newsreel, a judo master vanquished an American boxer, and as the audience cheered, the camera suddenly cut to scenes of Japanese army victories in Manchuria. It was no longer safe to play jazz in the nightclubs of Tokyo, and eventually it would no longer be safe to play Western records even at home. As part of a nationwide anti-luxury campaign called the “National Spiritual Mobilization,” women were pressured to do away with jewelry and cosmetics, as well as Western-style clothing and hairstyles: they were urged to wear shapeless work trousers called monpe. Men were pressured to cut their hair short or even to shave their heads. Tokyo’s popular Western-style dance halls were visited by surly officials who declared, “‘You can’t dance this,’ ‘You can’t dance that.’” In October 1940, a government decree required all dance halls to shut their doors for good. On the final night at one of the Tokyo dance halls, Kiyoshi Hara recalled, the band ended its last set with “Auld Lang Syne,” bringing tears to the eyes of the regular patrons.

  Schoolchildren were taught that the emperor had descended from the gods, and that his divine blood ran in the veins of all his subjects. His portrait hung in every school, and was made the object of organized compulsory daily veneration. The Meiji emperor’s Imperial Rescript on Education was often read aloud to the students, and if a teacher or school principal should ever stumble over a phrase in the hallowed document, he was forced to resign. Hideo Sato recalled that one of his teachers had explained that “His Imperial Highness” was descended from Amaterasu-Omikami, goddess of the Sun; the teacher “told the story so convincingly and dramatically that we kids sat there, eyes round with wonder, and felt in our heart of hearts that it must be true.” The children were cautioned never to use old newsprint to wrap food without first confirming that no photograph of His Highness was included in the pa
ges therein, lest grease or food besmirch his image. The progress of the war was followed closely in the classrooms. Students sometimes pasted Japanese flag markers on maps to signify advances and victories. “I was crazy about geography from the time I was young,” recalled Sato. “I really memorized the map of Asia all the way up to India. Places like the ‘Malay Peninsula’ and ‘North Borneo’ rang with hidden meaning. I could draw them all in the air back then.”

  As pathetic as it may seem in retrospect, the imperialist program included a strain of heartfelt, messianic idealism. Conquest overseas was held to be a sacred mission, to be undertaken for the sake of all the benighted and ill-treated peoples of Asia (and perhaps beyond). It was Japan’s purpose and destiny to push out beyond its islands and unite Hakko ichiu—the “eight corners of the world”—under the care of the “emperor’s benevolent heart.” As the only nation in the world that had not separated the spheres of religion, politics, morality, patriotism, and family, Japan’s social and political order (kokutai) was manifestly superior to that of any other civilization. It offered a Confucian order based on harmony, filial piety, reciprocal obligations between superior and inferior, and deep ties connecting the individual into the collective whole. It offered to advance the lot of lesser peoples by bringing them under the care and guidance of the emperor, the only sovereign who was also a god, and the only god who was also a sovereign: “As in the heavens the sun is not double, so on earth there exists but one Tenno.” It offered the last best hope for all of humanity, the salvation of a turbulent and unhappy world. It gave the Japanese people a reason to believe they were fighting for something more than national aggrandizement. “If Japan had declared it was fighting only to add territory,” remarked Koshu Itabashi, a student at the outset of the war, “I don’t believe we ever could have gone as far as Borneo.”

  Moreover, added the charlatans who flogged their theories with the regime’s approval, Japan had once ruled the world in the distant past and was merely seeking to restore that ancient order. “Excavations of ancient relics carried out in various regions of the world testify to the authenticity of the descriptions of the Japanese annals,” wrote Professor Chikao Fujisawa. “They brought to light the wonderful fact that in the prehistoric age, mankind formed a single worldwide family system with the Japanese emperor at its head. Japan was highly respected as the land of parents, while all other lands were called the lands of children, or the branch lands. . . . Eminent scholars are unanimous in concluding that the cradle of mankind was neither the Pamir plateau nor the banks of the Tigris-Euphrates, but the middle mountainous region of the Japanese main island.” The ancient Japanese people had spread over China and the rest of Asia, bringing the fruits of their civilization; they had even reached Europe under the name of “Huns.” But their utopian global order had tragically collapsed after a series of natural disasters, and the world had plunged into a dark age in which “all mankind became estranged geographically and spiritually from the parent-land of Japan, to the detriment of world peace.” With dissenting voices drowned out, no rhetoric was too silly or cartoonish, so long as it supported the program. There was only one ocean, declared Professor T. Komaki of Kyoto Imperial University, and Japan ruled it: “The Pacific, Indian and Atlantic were considered separate Oceans, but were thus considered only by Europeans. There are no seven seas: only one sea exists, and it is connected to Japan, where the sun is rising. All waters are connected to Japan. All the ocean is to be recognized as the great Japanese sea.”

  Japan would drive the white, Christian colonial interlopers out of Asia once and for all, and lead its poor Asian cousins back onto the one true path of Buddhist and Confucian principles. Here the Japanese ultranationalist program found fertile ground, for it could justifiably point to a long history of Western repression, greed, exploitation, and hypocrisy. The West had taken what it wanted from Asia, while giving nothing back, the ultranationalists said—it had kept wages down and prevented industrial development in order to exploit Asia’s markets and steal Asia’s natural resources. The Japanese, by contrast, envisioned a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” which would work for the “mutual existence of nations in which one is not exploited by others or vice versa.” Japanese found a receptive audience in Asia for its message that “the colored races constitute two-thirds of the world’s population but control only one tenth of the earth’s surface,” and that Japan alone, among the non-white races, was strong enough to cast the West out of Asia. The promise of liberation would be betrayed by Japanese behavior in the territories they occupied—too often they left the locals feeling nostalgic for the old boss—but early in the war, Japan’s spectacular victories indubitably raised Asian self-consciousness and aroused a deep yearning for independence.

  If Japan was a fundamentally moral country with a divine mission, it followed that Japan’s wars were nothing less than pure, ennobling, and just. Enemies who stood in the way of the kokutai were “unruly heathens” or bandits, or perhaps even demons with inconceivably evil designs. In any case, they must be slain for the cause of peace. Buddhism taught compassion and pacifism, but the Zen priests who had survived the purges of the past two decades lent their full moral authority to Japan’s wars. When Japan fought, declared the Buddhist scholar Daisetz T. Suzuki, it was an “expression of Buddha’s compassion.” As for the war in China, the cradle of Eastern Buddhism, a book entitled The Buddhist View of War published in 1937 explained that China had brought the war on itself by its “defilements,” and would ultimately benefit by having “its unreasonableness corrected and an opportunity to reflect on its conduct.” Or, if that explanation did not satisfy, perhaps it was enough to grant absolution. Acknowledging that Zen taught “the gospel of love and mercy,” Suzuki asserted that the true practitioner of Zen, drawn into war for reasons unrelated to his own ego, was not responsible for the behavior of the sword he wielded. “For it is really not he but the sword itself that does the killing. He had no desire to do harm to anybody, but the enemy appears and makes himself a victim. It is as though the sword performs automatically its function of justice, which is the function of mercy.”

  Year after year, Japan kept winning battles in China, but could not find a way to win the war. The army seized the coast, the big river valleys, and several of China’s largest cities, including Peking, Shanghai, and Nanking. But the conquerors discovered they could not impose their will even in the territories in which they were strongest: the rural hinterlands always remained lawless and ungovernable. Chinese political and military power had long been impotently parceled out among regional warlords, but nothing aroused nationalist passions like the long-term presence of marauding foreign troops. Mao’s Communist guerrillas turned their guns on the invaders, pledging to put off their revolution until the “eastern devils” had been driven out. In 1939, fighting broke out along the Soviet-Manchurian border at Nomonhan. Local Japanese generals, acting (as usual) without authorization from Tokyo, moved substantial reinforcements into the area, but the Japanese forces were pulverized in a powerful Russian counterattack. The setback came as a great shock, though it remained largely under wraps: neither side had declared war. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, safely withdrawn to Chungking, deep in the interior and beyond the reach of Japanese troops, steadfastly refused to capitulate or negotiate. Eventually, a full thirty-eight Japanese infantry divisions, totaling about 750,000 men or some three quarters of the army’s entire troop strength, were tied down in China and Manchuria.

  Growing rage at China’s obstinacy, stoked by effective guerrilla attacks behind the lines, prompted the Japanese army to commit civilian atrocities on a grand scale. The rural pacification campaign was carried out under the army’s “Three-All” policy—soldiers were ordered to “Burn All, Seize All, and Kill All.” Those were the wretched years of Japan’s chemical and biological warfare attacks; horrific medical experiments practiced on prisoners; the rounding up of women and girls to be funneled into a vast system of sexu
al slavery; the rounding up of men and boys as slave laborers to be worked to death; the mass beheadings and bayoneting of prisoners; the slaughter of perhaps as many as 10 million Chinese civilians all told. “I had already gotten to where I lacked pity,” admitted Yoshiro Tamura, who tested bacteriological agents on Chinese prisoners as a member of the notorious Unit 731. “After all, we were already implanted with a narrow racism, in the form of a belief in the superiority of the so called ‘Yamato Race.’ We disparaged all other races. . . . If we didn’t have a feeling of racial superiority, we couldn’t have done it.” Shozo Tominaga, a young second lieutenant assigned to China in 1941, recalled meeting the infantry veterans he would command. “When I looked at the men of my platoon, I was stunned,” he said. “They had evil eyes. They weren’t human eyes, but the eyes of leopards or tigers. . . . The longer the men had been at the front, the more evil their eyes appeared.” Newly arrived Japanese conscripts were forced to bayonet Chinese prisoners. The victims were blindfolded and tied to stakes. In some cases a circle was drawn around the heart and the soldiers told to avoid striking it, so as to prolong the victim’s agony. Soldiers who flinched from the macabre initiation ritual were kicked, beaten, and prodded by their officers. “Everyone became a demon within three months,” said Tominaga. “Men were able to fight courageously only when their human characteristics were suppressed. So we believed. It was a natural extension of our training back in Japan. This was the Emperor’s army.”

  Western sympathies lay with the Chinese, whose suffering was depicted vividly in newsreel footage. President Roosevelt was personally disgusted, his doctor recalled, and “commented with deep bitterness on the inhumanity of the Japanese.” It was also true that major American business interests in China—some of which were overrun or ordered shut down in occupied areas—were directly threatened by the Japanese invasion. Britain and the United States funneled military aid to the Nationalists via the Burma Road. An American gunboat, the Panay, was sunk by Japanese air attack in the Yangtze River in December 1937. Relations deteriorated and the specter of war loomed. Creative Japanese propagandists, taking a cue from their soon-to-be German allies, declared Roosevelt the stooge of a Jewish capitalist plutocracy. Those same Jews, they said, had arranged for anti-Japanese lies to be spread through the American media. The United States and its European allies feared and resented Japan’s spectacular rise as an Asian power and were conspiring to reverse it. The Japanese press often complained of the “encirclement” of Japan by the Western powers.