Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II

by Laurence Rees

  There were officials in the State Department in Washington who favoured a similar rapprochement with Japan over Manchuria, but they were outnumbered by those who either thought that such a policy would only encourage greater Japanese aggression in Asia or (and this group included the new President, Franklin Roosevelt) did not wish to be overly ‘distracted’ by events in China from the urgent task of rebuilding the economy and dragging the United States from the Depression. This unwillingness to engage with the problems caused by Japan’s isolation from the League of Nations is symbolized by US behaviour at the naval disarmament conference which opened in London in 193S — no agreement of any sort was reached with Japan and it was assumed that the early raft of naval treaties, outlining the extent to which each country’s navy could grow relative to the other, had simply lapsed.

  In 1936 the attitude of the Japanese government and military hardened in the wake of the rebellion of February of that year. In August two documents, The Fundamentals of National Volicy and Foreign Volicy Guidelines3 for the first time named the United States and Britain as possible enemies, along with the Soviet Union and China. The basic assumption of both these documents, discussed and approved by the Japanese cabinet, was that Japan must maintain its position on the Asian mainland, defend itself from any possible threat from the Soviet Union to the north, and, at some uncertain point in the future, try to obtain more territory in the Pacific. At first sight this list of priorities represents confidence verging on hubris within the Japanese ruling class. How could one small nation hope to defy both of its giant neighbours, China and the Soviet Union, whilst also stating as a foreign policy goal further expansion to the east and south? The truth is that these foreign policy documents were an attempt to paper over differences that were still not resolved within the Japanese military. One faction thought that the greatest threat to Japan was posed by the Soviet Union; another, predominantly the Imperial Navy, believed that the lapsing of the naval treaties (which had restricted the expansion of the fleet) meant that the priority should be to solve Japan’s problems by moving out into the Pacific.

  Although these fundamental questions about Japan’s potential enemies remained unresolved, there was consensus within the Japanese government and military as to which country was their greatest potential friend — Nazi Germany. Both countries had in the early 1930s turned their back on democracy; both felt cheated by those older Western nations that had seized colonies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and now, hypocritically as they saw it, denied newer nations the chance to do the same; both countries were rearming at a frantic pace; both countries felt threatened by the Soviet Union and by the creed of communism, and crucially, whilst both dreamt of expansion their territorial ambitions did not clash. It was natural, then, that Japan joined an ‘anti-Comintern Pact’ (an alliance against the spread of communism) with Germany in November 1936, thus demonstrating to the world that her strongest friends in the West were the new fascist nations of Germany and Italy.

  By June 1937, with the fall of prime minister Hayashi and the appointment of Prince Fumimaro Konoe in his place, the fissure that divided Japan from the Western democracies grew all but unbridgeable. Liberated, as he saw it, from the shackles of the League of Nations, and having already flouted with relative impunity the non-aggression treaties signed by his more liberal countrymen, Konoe had openly been calling for Japan to ape the aggressive expansionist policies of sympathetic states in Europe. ‘Italian officials preach with great boldness and frankness why Italy must expand,’ said Konoe in a speech in November 193S. ‘German politicians openly proclaim in the Nazi program why Germany requires new territory. Only Japan lacks this frankness.’4

  One month after Konoe’s appointment, war broke out in China in the wake of the Marco Polo bridge incident. The full force of modern Western technology was unleashed by Japan on the Chinese population. Towns and cities were indiscriminately bombed, and countless women and children died. The photographs of the carnage caused by the bombs and shells that fell on Shanghai railway station became iconic representations of the cruelty of the Japanese. In September 1937, in the wake of the Shanghai bombing, the American government condemned the Japanese action (in a statement that now has a hypocritical ring to it, given that eight years later the Americans were to bomb Japan on a far greater scale): ‘The American government holds the view that any general bombing of an extensive area, wherein there resides a large population engaged in peaceable pursuits, is unwarranted and contrary to principles of law and humanity.’5

  The Japanese antagonized the Americans still further when, three months later during the attack on Nanking, over-excited pilots sank the US gunboat Panay and three American tankers that lay on a nearby river. Two American sailors died in the attack. The Japanese government and military were uncharacteristically quick to apologise for the incident — conscious, no doubt, of Japan’s continued dependence on American oil. But there was to be no apology to the world for the war crimes that the Imperial Army committed in Nanking. Britain and the USA, angry at Japan’s actions, discussed amongst themselves what should be their best response. Furious at the sinking of the USS Panay, Roosevelt even contemplated a naval blockade of Japan using American and British warships. But the plan was never put into effect — the British were not prepared to antagonize the Japanese to that extent.

  Whilst at a high political level the Western democracies did little to prevent Japanese aggression in China, Western public opinion was certainly changed by knowledge of what became popularly known as the ‘Rape of Nanking’. In one of the first examples of film reporting influencing world opinion, newsreels brought pictures of the suffering inside Nanking to cinema screens all over Britain and America. A typical scene from one newsreel shows a weeping father hugging the corpse of his young child while the commentary intones, ‘That man carries the body of his child, clinging dumbly to the forlorn hope that life still inhabits its shattered little body.’ Not surprisingly, this emotional reporting had an enormous impact on the sensibilities of the audience. ‘We found the Japanese doing things in the world that we didn’t think were correct,’ says Gene La Rocque, then a student at the University of Illinois. ‘For one, the Japanese were raping Nanking, and that was shown in a dramatic way on the movie screen.’ All of this confirmed the prejudices about the Japanese held by Americans like La Rocque: ‘The Japanese kind of looked like monkeys to us. They were not a very friendly, but also not a very intelligent group of people. In Illinois, where I grew up, in the mid-West of the United States, the Japanese were looked down upon. First of all they were of smaller stature. They were not as big as we were and they looked very funny in caricature. Our concept of the Japanese prior to Pearl Harbor was that they were a weak, not very sophisticated people — so foreign to us. After all, the head of the country was supposed to have been a descendant of God and we thought how primitive that situation was....We were racist, of course we were racist, but that again comes from the fact that they didn’t want to become part of our community in any way. They were foreigners to us, a culture we didn’t understand, a language we couldn’t understand. They were inscrutable.’

  The prevalence of racist views such as these was to have a major impact on how Western nations chose to deal with Japan during the 1930s, and would later influence the way the war itself was conducted. It is often hard for people born long after the war fully to grasp just how pervasive these kind of racist ideas were in the Western world. But in the 1930s there were still men and women alive in the United States who had participated in the brutal, virtually genocidal wars against the Native Americans. Less than sixty years before, in 1879, the state constitution of California had withheld the vote from ‘all natives of China, idiots, and insane persons’6 and racism against black Americans was still endemic. Racism was not merely the prejudice of the uneducated, it was official and — as the Nazis were attempting to prove — scientific. (It is instructive to note that, such was Hitler’s racism, he never fully explor
ed the potential of the alliance with Japan. He did not consider it a partnership of equals, though he fully understood its political necessity. His preferred ideal was always a partnership with the British — fellow Aryans — rather than the Japanese.)

  The British took their racial beliefs one stage further, with many believing not just that the Japanese were inferior to them, but that they themselves were inherently better than anyone else in the world. ‘The British had an inborn feeling of superiority,’ says Anthony Hewitt, who was a British officer serving in Hong Kong in the 1930s. ‘It didn’t matter where you came from, whether you were a dustman or you were a lord, you still thought you were superior to any other nation. A great deal of this was because of the strength and power of the British Empire and because we considered that we were superior to people like the Japanese or the Chinese.’ Despite the fact that the British colony of Hong Kong was within sight of the Japanese in China, many British soldiers believed that the Imperial Army did not represent much of a threat. ‘The British were superior to everyone and it was ridiculous for anyone to say that the Japanese were so good — some little nation like Japan couldn’t possibly be better,’ says Anthony Hewitt speaking of the prevailing feeling at the time. ‘When they were told that the Japanese Zero fighter was a far better aircraft than the Spitfire, people laughed. They said, “Oh, no, of course that couldn’t be true.” I think they thought that they [the Japanese] loved flowers and they liked geisha girls all dressed up in lovely clothes prancing around. They were really a sort of fragile race in some ways.’

  The view that the Japanese were both ‘different’ and ‘inferior’ appears to have been rife amongst the British at the time. In 193S the British naval attache in Tokyo wrote a report claiming that his research had shown that the Japanese had ‘peculiarly slow brains’ as a result of the ‘strain put on the child’s brain in learning some 6000 Chinese characters before any real education can start.’7 The commander-in-chief of British forces in the Far East, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, was similarly prejudiced. ‘I had a good close up, across the barbed wire,’ he wrote in a letter to the Chief of the Imperial Defence Staff in 1940, ‘of various sub-human specimens dressed in dirty grey uniform, which I was informed were Japanese soldiers. If these represent the average of the Japanese army, the problems of their food and accommodation would be simple, but I cannot believe they would form an intelligent fighting force.’8 On a visit to Hong Kong, Brooke-Popham was just as frank in the views he expressed to Anthony Hewitt and his comrades: ‘Sir Robert Brooke-Popham told us that the Japanese couldn’t fly at night time because they couldn’t see at night and that they couldn’t fire machine guns because they were very bad shots. Everything you can think of — all silly little things! Remarks which were totally untrue.’

  Hewitt knew that Brooke-Popham was speaking nonsense, because he had first-hand knowledge of the seriousness of the threat from the Japanese. He had seen with his own eyes, standing on the border between Hong Kong and China, just how ruthless the Japanese could be. ‘We watched the fighting down below and to my horror I saw them [Japanese soldiers] forming up Chinese soldiers and gunning them to death, which was a horrible thing. It was sickening what went on. But we stood there on that horrible line and saw almost daily some really beastly thing, like a poor Chinese person being robbed and then beaten by rifle butts or even tortured, and sometimes, for no apparent reason, actually shot dead. Straightaway we thought they were very brutal. The mere fact they shot those prisoners made us think that that was what they’d do to us if they attacked.’

  In 1937 Hewitt gained further insight into the Japanese when he become one of the few British officers ever to visit their country. He was amazed at the difference between the Japan of British prejudice and the Japan of reality. ‘I was astonished to travel on the Japanese railway line from Kyoto to Tokyo. You went in a most super train which went very fast and which was frightfully well built and very comfortable and excellently done. The hotels were marvellous too. I stayed in the Tokyo [Imperial] Hotel and it was lovely — one of the best in the world, I think. It was an advanced country. They weren’t like the poor Chinese — it wasn’t a third-rate country at all.’ And Hewitt’s admiration extended to his assessment of the capabilities of the Imperial Army. ‘I saw a Japanese force carrying out an exercise and I realized that, from a military point of view, they were very advanced as well. They had excellent weapons, their soldiers were very highly trained, and they were really outstanding.’ On his return to Hong Kong he submitted a report to his superiors outlining the extent of the threat he thought the Japanese posed, only to be told that he was ‘probably exaggerating the problem’.

  As the 1930s came to an end, Japanese foreign policy shifted even further towards the inevitability of a formal alliance with Nazi Germany. In a speech on 20 February 1938 Hitler lauded Japan for attempting to stem the tide of the worldwide communist threat and announced that soon Germany would formally recognize the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. But by now the eyes of European states like Britain and France were more focused on the German threat than on the distant Japanese one. Pursuing a policy of appeasement, the British government acquiesced as the Germans first seized Austria and then, in an event that precipitated the Munich conference of September 1938, threatened to annexe the Sudetenland (the German-speaking regions of Czechoslovakia). The Japanese looked on in wonder as the Western democracies appeared to buckle in the face of German aggression. Indeed, there are Japanese who still today look at the desire of the Western Allies to reach a compromise agreement with the Nazis, contrast it with the comparative intransigence of Britain and the USA towards Japan during the same period, and see in this distinction another example of racial discrimination. But the cases are not analogous. Much of the British and American political elite believed that the Versailles Treaty negotiated at the end of the First World War had been too harsh on Germany — particularly in terms of territory, given that so much former German land had been redistributed to countries like Czechoslovakia and Poland. The argument that the German aggression of the late 1930s was merely an attempt to ‘right the wrongs of Versailles’ was persuasive to many. Opinion polls in the United States demonstrated that the general public were much more prepared to stand up to Japanese aggression in China than they were to German aggression in Europe.9 The Germans, it appeared, had some justification, however tenuous, for their action, but the Japanese were perceived to be acting out of a straightforward and wholly reprehensible desire to expand their empire.

  In the summer of 1939, as Hitler plotted to annexe portions of Poland, the Japanese skirmished with Soviet forces on the Mongolian border. Ever since the Imperial Army had occupied Manchuria there had been tension between the two nations, with the position of the border always in dispute. The fierceness of the Soviet resistance to these border incursions by the Imperial Army, and Stalin’s disinclination to find a diplomatic solution to the problem, were at first sight surprising to the Japanese, since the Soviet leader faced a huge threat on his Western border. After all, in his autobiography Mein Kampf, published in the 1920s, Hitler had explicitly written of his desire for Germany to expand into Russia in search of Lebensraum. But now the Soviet leader decided that it was better to reach an accommodation with his ideological enemy in Europe than to appease the Japanese in Asia. As a consequence, August 1939 was a devastating month for the Japanese. On the 20th, the Red Army went on the offensive on the borders of Manchuria and began to beat back the Japanese. Three days later came the announcement that shocked the world — the Soviet — German Non-aggression Pact. Hitler astounded the Japanese government by reaching an agreement with Stalin that professed to guarantee that neither country would attack the other. It made nonsense of the Anti-Comintern Pact to which the Japanese had put their name just three years before.

  In response, on 28 August prime minister Hiranuma, who had replaced Konoe in January 1939, resigned as a result of these ‘inexplicable new conditions’.10 T
he new prime minister, General Nobuyuki Abe, sought to rebuild Japanese foreign policy from the debris left in the wake of the Soviet — German Non-aggression Pact. With the US government hardening its position over Japanese aggression in China, the new cabinet believed that even stronger links with Germany represented the only way forward for Japanese foreign policy. Hitler was clearly the one international leader who was successfully dictating his demands to the world. His army had swept first through Poland and then, in the spring of 1940, through France. ‘When World War II started in 1939,’ says Masatake Okumiya, then of the Japanese Imperial Navy, ‘Germany’s swift growth in power impressed not only the political leaders of the Japanese government but also the military ones. They believed that the Germans would win this war. This belief was the foundation for the Japanese thinking at the time.’ The Japanese also realized that, with the German occupation of Europe, colonies like the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina were ripe for the picking. If a formal treaty could not swiftly be made with Nazi Germany, there was a risk that these colonies would be seized by the Germans instead of the Japanese. Thus it was hardly surprising that the Japanese government hurriedly concluded a formal alliance with Germany and Italy, and the Tripartite Pact was signed on 27 September 1940. By now a hard-line triumvirate were shaping Japan’s foreign policy: the hawkish Prince Konoe was prime minister once more, the foreign minister was Yosuke Matsuoka, who had spent years on the west coast of America and experienced at first hand the racist views of Americans towards the Japanese; and the minister of war was the belligerent General Hideki Tojo, one of the architects of the Japanese war in China.

  On 22 September, just days before the treaty of alliance was formally signed with Germany and Italy, the Japanese took advantage of their friendship with the Nazis by moving their troops into northern Indochina (today’s Vietnam). The United States, which had already threatened the Japanese government that it would cut off oil supplies if the aggression in Asia did not cease, now announced that iron and steel scrap would no longer be exported to Japan. But the Japanese ignored the American threat. An editorial in the newspaper Mainichi Shimbun proclaimed: ‘The time has at last arrived when Japan’s aspiration and efforts to establish East Asia for East Asiatics, free from the Anglo-Saxon yoke, coincides exactly with the German — Italian aspiration to build a New Order in Europe and to seek a future appropriate to their strength by liberating themselves from Anglo-Saxon clutches.’11