by Ian W. Toll
Insofar as the Japanese people were permitted to know, a truce was unthinkable. Right-wing scholars took to the airwaves to extol the virtues of an ancient suicide cult, embodied in the legend of the 47 Ronin who resolved to take their lives in obeisance to a slain master. For the first time the public heard talk of “body crashing” and “sure hit” weapons—the early euphemisms for suicide tactics to be employed by aircraft, submarines, and speedboats. A new slogan, “One hundred million smashed jewels,” carried the implication that the entire nation was to share the fate of Saipan’s civilians. In the July issue of Daijo Zen, a Buddhist priest authored an article entitled “Be Prepared, One Hundred Million, for Death with Honor!”37 Historians lectured on the quasi-religious kamikaze (“divine wind”) that had defeated a Mongol invasion fleet seven and a half centuries earlier. One of the Koiso government’s early initiatives was to arm and train civilians, including women, in the use of bamboo spears against enemy invaders.
In the mass media, Americans were increasingly depicted as “beasts,” “devils,” or “butchers.” It was categorically reported that they intended to slaughter every last Japanese man, woman, and child. The authorities warned that the enemy had already amassed thousands of canisters of poison gas to be released over the homeland. The newspapers were filled with descriptions of American battlefield atrocities and the mutilation or desecration of Japanese corpses. (Not all such reports were fabrications. A Life magazine photograph depicting an American woman admiring a Japanese skull was seen by millions of Japanese that summer.) When the Diet convened in September, Hirohito issued a rescript: “Today our imperial state is indeed challenged to reach powerfully for a decisive victory. You who are the leaders of our people must now renew your tenacity and, uniting in your resolve, smash our enemies’ evil purposes, thereby furthering forever our imperial destiny.”38
The samurai philosopher Miyamoto Musashi had written about the challenge posed by an adversary who “while appearing to be beaten still inwardly refuses to acknowledge defeat.” In such cases, a swordsman must adopt a tactic called “knocking the heart out.”
This means that you suddenly change your attitude to stop the enemy from entertaining any such ideas, so the main thing is to see enemies feel defeated from the bottom of their hearts.
You can knock the heart out of people with weapons, or with your body, or with your mind. It is not to be understood in just one way. When your enemies have completely lost heart, you don’t have to pay attention to them anymore. Otherwise, you remain mindful. If enemies still have ambitions, they will hardly collapse.39
The Pacific War had entered its endgame. But another 1.5 million Japanese servicemen and civilians would die before the heart was knocked out of the men who ruled Japan.
AS OVERSEAS SHIPPING FELL PREY to American air attacks and submarines, the Japanese economy fell to pieces. Rationing grew more stringent; skyrocketing inflation led to price controls and a burgeoning underground economy; shortages of food and household goods grew critical. Everyone went hungry except farmers, who prospered by selling food on the black market. White rice was the immemorial emblem of Japanese prosperity and bliss, but now urbanites could rarely get any of it, and had to make do with unhulled brown rice or other inferior substitutes such as sweet potatoes and barley. Women bartered their wedding kimonos for food and wore the rustic khaki trousers called monpe. Trees were cut down on streets and public parks; streetlamps and iron railings were removed for scrap metal; bells were taken away from temples and shrines. The public water supply was often interrupted, and the public bathhouses were usually closed. Ordinary Japanese, who had always valued their personal cleanliness, now bathed just two or three times per month. People despaired of getting rid of lice, and tried to ignore it. Outbreaks of tuberculosis claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
People were expected to work harder while eating less. Malnourishment and exhaustion comprised a nationwide syndrome, but the regime’s answer—always the same answer—was that the people must arouse themselves to greater efforts and sacrifices. If tired, people should practice group calisthenics; the exercise would help lift their spirits, and never mind if it burned scarce calories. Military authority insinuated itself into commonplace domestic routines, as when an army colonel delivered a five-part radio lecture entitled “While You Are Eating Breakfast.” Every problem, deficiency, or impasse was put down to an “inadequacy of regulations”—but as new regulations proliferated, they took on an inflexible logic of their own. Kiyosawa, who read widely and kept detailed notes of the drift of official propaganda, detected an increasing tendency to blame civilians for Japan’s production shortfalls: “Gradually there are emerging from the government arguments that attribute war responsibility to the productive inadequacy of the homefront.”40
Open dissent was seldom heard in wartime Japan. But undercurrents of resentment and unrest grew steadily more conspicuous as the conflict wore on. Local officials and representatives of community councils often behaved like petty tyrants, and ordinary citizens suspected that they were diverting extra quantities of rationed food to their own kin. Aiko Takahashi told her diary that she was fed up with the endless mandatory civil defense meetings: “The community council big shots put on their pompous clothes and their pompous faces and strutted about with a pompous number of people.”41 Officers of the Kempeitai, looking for evidence of foreign influences or leftist sympathies, barged into private homes in the dead of night. They pulled books off shelves, upended desk drawers, tore down pictures, and did not even deign to remove their shoes before entering a tatami room. One often-heard wartime rumor referred to an old man who was determined to obey all rules and regulations. He ate only his official rations, refusing all food obtained by his relatives on the black market. For his scruples he starved to death.
Ordinary people were prepared to suffer hardships and deprivations, but they expected their fellow citizens to bear the same load. Many commented bitterly on wealthy families whose domestic servants were engaged in work that did not advance the war effort. Affluent women escaped participation in the despised air-defense drills by sending maids in their place. Class antagonisms were channeled into acts of vandalism. Tires of private automobiles were slashed; rocks were thrown through windows; intruders broke into upscale homes and wantonly destroyed the furniture and housewares. Rumors of official corruption or special privileges for the wealthy and well-connected evoked a cold fury. It was widely known that the military was active behind the scenes in running the black market. Policemen and military authorities penalized ordinary citizens who traded illegally for food and other goods, but protected malefactors in their own ranks. Law courts and prosecutors were intimidated into backing off. Expensive restaurants were shut down by decree, ostensibly because of food shortages, but then reopened as military “clubs” where officers ate and drank heartily while being entertained by geishas. Hiroyo Arakawa, whose family ran a bakery in Tokyo’s Fukagawa district, recalled that soldiers and policemen often helped themselves to goods from the local shops and refused to pay.42 This saying circulated in wartime Japan: “In this society there is nothing but the army, the navy, the big shots, and the black market. It is only fools who stand in line.”43
Anonymous gestures of defiance triggered paroxysms of repression. Sumio Ishida, a local policeman in Shizuoka Prefecture, recalled that someone in his district began mailing unsigned letters to prominent political figures. The letters were filled with sentiments such as “Please stop this war as soon as possible. . . . Japan will lose this war for certain. . . . Aren’t you aware of how difficult the lives of the Japanese people have become?”44 Ishida’s entire precinct was mobilized to catch the perpetrator. Plainclothesmen staked out mailboxes twenty-four hours per day. The police took handwriting samples from hundreds of citizens. A months-long investigation finally led to an arrest. The perpetrator was a fifty-three-year-old woman whose son had died in the South Pacific. The war ended before she was brought to trial.
> To many, the war seemed to tear at the seams of an ancient and sacred social contract. Whatever super-familial bonds had once held Japan together threatened to rupture. The nation had always taken justifiable pride in a low crime rate, but the war brought a sharp increase in petty property theft. Handbags and briefcases were snatched on overcrowded trains. Shoes left in the entrance halls of restaurants or the vestibules of private homes disappeared. Thieves reached in through kitchen windows and took food off the stove as it was cooking. “Foremost Thief Nation of the Whole World,” complained an April 1944 headline in the Mainichi Shinbun.45 Authorities wrung their hands about juvenile delinquency, diminishing respect for elders, and a breakdown in Confucian ideals of filial piety. Farmers, observed Aiko Takahashi in January 1944, seemed to take malicious pleasure in their new power over the city dwellers—they “hold the key to our lives—food—and sit in the kingly position of lords of production. By selling on the black market, they are enjoying extraordinary prosperity.”46 Urban evacuees were treated harshly by rural families. Children from the cities were forced to live in sheds and survive on scraps from the host family’s table. After observing these patterns of behavior, a young girl in Niigata “became disillusioned with the disgraceful qualities in our people. They had become a herd whose humanity had been shorn from them by war.”47
Direct defiance of authority was impossible. Spies were everywhere, and the Kempeitai was quick to arrest anyone suspected of holding left-wing or “anti-kokutai” views. Children were encouraged to inform on their parents and teachers. Libraries were compelled to produce lists of titles loaned to every patron, and the police combed those lists for clues of who might harbor foreign sympathies or unacceptably liberal tendencies. The regime created an atmosphere of omnipresent paranoia. Traitors and infiltrators were said to be everywhere. “During those years everything happened behind heavy doors, out of our sight,” wrote the novelist Michio Takeyama (author of Harp of Burma) after the war. “What’s become clear now was wholly unclear then. Day after day we simply trembled in fear, struck dumb with astonishment at incomprehensible developments.”48 Malnourished and overworked, driven like a herd of beasts, instructed how to act and what to think, deprived of any sound basis for rational judgment, threatened with torture and prison at the first divergence from enforced norms, the Japanese people were powerless to alter the doomed course chosen by their leaders. Having long since surrendered whatever rights and freedoms they had once possessed, they were fated to share in the coming Götterdämmerung of 1945.
* Wartime propaganda often referred to the Japanese people as the “ 100 Million.” The figure was overstated by about 30 million.
NOTES
Prologue
1. Clemens, Alone on Guadalcanal, p. 57.
2. Read, “Report by Lieut. W. J. Read on Coastwatching Activity,” p. 59.
3. Clemens, Alone on Guadalcanal, p. 149.
4. Ibid., p. 32.
5. Rhoades, “Secret Diary,” p. 1.
6. Ibid., p. 4.
7. Clemens, Alone on Guadalcanal, p. 106.
8. Ibid., p. 110.
9. Entry dated May 4, 1942, in Rhoades, “Secret Diary,” p. 4.
10. Clemens, Alone on Guadalcanal, p. 105.
11. Ibid., p. 147.
12. Rhoades, “Secret Diary,” p. 7.
13. Clemens, Alone on Guadalcanal, p. 187.
14. Ibid., p. 188.
Chapter One
1. The phrase may have been Bundy’s. Stimson and Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War, p. 506.
2. Karsten, Naval Aristocracy, p. xiv.
3. See the trenchant comments on this subject by Ruthven E. Libby, in Vice Admiral Ruthven E. Libby, USN (ret.), USNI Oral History Program, 1984, pp. 56–62.
4. Twining and Carey, No Bended Knee, p. 29.
5. MacArthur to Army Chief of Staff, May 23, 1942, in NARA, RG 38, “CNO Zero-Zero Files,” Box 38.
6. Trumbull, “Big Bombers Won.”
7. Mears, Carrier Combat, p. 78.
8. Smith and Finch, Coral and Brass, p. 18.
9. Tom Lea, “Peleliu Landing,” in Reporting World War II, Vol. 2: Part II, p. 500.
10. Churchill to Roosevelt, June 13, 1942, in Loewenheim, Langley, and Jonas, eds., Roosevelt and Churchill, p. 220.
11. “Sacrifice Will Win, Says Admiral King.”
12. Walter Muir Whitehill, “A Note on the Making of This Book,” in King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King, pp. 649–50.
13. Stoler, Allies and Adversaries, p. 69.
14. Ambrose, Eisenhower, p. 141.
15. Entry dated January 20, 1943, in Alanbrooke, War Diaries, p. 364.
16. Admiral Ernest J. King to Joint Chiefs of Staff, “J.C.S.—Defense of Island Bases in the Pacific,” April 6, 1942, FDR Safe Files, Box 4, George C. Marshall file.
17. “Memorandum for the President,” January 18, 1942, Ernest J. King Papers, Box 9, FDR correspondence file.
18. “Situation in South Pacific and Southwest Pacific Areas as of the end of May, 1942,” Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet to Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, memorandum dated May 12, 1942, in NARA, RG 38, “CNO Zero-Zero Files,” Box 60.
19. King, “Memorandum for the President,” March 5, 1942, Ernest J. King Papers, Box 9, FDR correspondence file.
20. COMINCH to CINCPAC 2303-2306, June 24, 1942, in CINCPAC War Diary, Book 1, pp. 602–3.
21. COMINCH to CINCPAC 1840, June 25, 1942, in ibid., p. 603.
22. COMSOPAC to CINCPAC 0015, June 26, 1942, in ibid., p. 604.
23. PESTILENCE Operation Plan, COMSOPAC File No. A 4-3/A16-3, Serial 0017, in NARA, RG 38, “SOPAC Amphibious Force Diary, July 1942,” Box 173; and COMSOPAC dispatches in CINCPAC War Diary, Book 1, pp. 487–596.
24. “Interview of Captain M. B. Gardner, USN, Chief of Staff, ComAirSoPac,” January 13, 1943, Bureau of Aeronautics, pp. 2–3, Samuel Eliot Morison Papers, Coll/606, Box 24.
25. D. J. Vellis, oral history, recorded in Olson, Tales from a Tin Can, p. 89; and Huie, Can Do!, pp. 93–95.
26. “Callaghan’s Report of Conference” on Saratoga, July 28, 1942, Samuel Eliot Morison Papers, Coll/606, Box 24.
27. Vandegrift and Asprey, Once a Marine, p. 105.
28. “Division Commander’s Final Report on Guadalcanal Operations,” May 24, 1943, pp. 2–4, Samuel Eliot Morison Papers, Coll/606, Box 25.
29. Vandegrift and Asprey, Once a Marine, p. 111.
30. COMINCH to CINCPAC 2303-2306, June 24, 1942, in CINCPAC War Diary, Book 1, pp. 602–3.
31. “Joint Directive for Offensive Operations in the Southwest Pacific Area,” July 2, 1942, in, NARA, RG 38, “CNO Zero-Zero Files,” Box 38, folder labeled “Memos to Gen. Marshall, 15 Jan. 42–1 Sept. 44.”
32. “COMSWPACFOR to COMINCH, etc., July 9, 1942,” in COMSOPAC, “Top Secret Incoming and Outgoing Dispatches, 1942–45,” in NARA, RG 38: 0313, Container 1.
33. COMINCH to Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, July 10, 1942, in NARA, RG 38, “CNO Zero-Zero Files,” Box 38, folder labeled “Memos to Gen. Marshall, 15 Jan. 42–1 Sept. 44.”
34. COMINCH to COMSOPAC 2100, July 10, 1942, in CINCPAC War Diary, Book 1, p. 616.
35. Twining and Carey, No Bended Knee, p. 30.
36. Merillat, Guadalcanal Remembered, p. 21.
37. Twining and Carey, No Bended Knee, p. 27.
38. Lt. Chester M. Stearns, interview in November 1943 on board Baltimore, in Morison’s Notebook, Pacific XII 1943, Samuel Eliot Morison Papers, Coll/606, Box 26.
39. Justice Chambers, Major, USMCR, oral history, in NARA, RG 38, “World War II Oral Histories and Interviews, 1942–1946.”
40. Donald Dickson, Major, USMC, oral history, in ibid.
41. Mears, Carrier Combat, p. 100.
42. Vandegrift and Asprey, Once a Marine, p. 120.
43. Twining and Carey, No Bended Knee, p. 45.
44. Details to follow in NARA, RG 38, “SOPAC Amphibious Force Diary, August 1942,” Box 173.
45. Roland N. Smoo
t, USNI Oral History Program, 1972, p. 92.
46. “Annex King to Operation Plan No. A3-42,” p. 3, in NARA, RG 38, “SOPAC Amphibious Force Diary, July 1942,” Box 173; also Rogal, Guadalcanal, Tarawa and Beyond, pp. 51–52.
47. “Vice Admiral Crutchley’s Report on Operation Watchtower,” September 3, 1942, Samuel Eliot Morison Papers, Coll/606, Box 26.
48. Merillat, Island, p. 28.
49. Roland N. Smoot, USNI Oral History Program, 1972, p. 93.
50. Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary, p. 15.
51. Rogal, Guadalcanal, Tarawa and Beyond, p. 52.
52. Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness, p. 162.
53. Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary, p. 31.
54. Twining and Carey, No Bended Knee, p. 63.
55. Justice Chambers, Major, USMCR, oral history, in NARA, RG 38, “World War II Oral Histories and Interviews, 1942–1946”; also Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary, p. 36.
56. Many histories have credited the San Juan’s guns with destroying the Kawanishis. Admiral Crutchley, who commanded the fire support groups, credits the F4Fs’ strafing attack. “Vice Admiral Crutchley’s Report on Operation Watchtower,” September 3, 1942, pp. 9–10, Samuel Eliot Morison Papers, Coll/606, Box 26.
57. Photo negatives taken from the Wasp air group commander’s plane confirmed that VF-71’s claims were accurate. Wasp Action Report, “Capture of the Tulagi–Guadalcanal Area, 7–8 August 1942,” dated August 14, 1942, FDR Map Room Papers, Box 178.
58. Donald Dickson, Major, USMCR, oral history, in NARA, RG 38, “World War II Oral Histories and Interviews, 1942–1946.”
59. Pharmacist Frederick A. Moody, USN, oral history, recorded at the Navy Department, April 21, 1943, in NARA, RG 38, “World War II Oral Histories and Interviews, 1942–1946.”
60. Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary, p. 44.
