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

by Laurence Rees

  In addition, the Geneva Convention was also utterly at odds with the whole atmosphere of brutality in which the Imperial Army itself functioned. As the survivors of Sandakan testify, the guards would often brutalize each other. As for the Taiwanese guards, at the bottom of the racial and hierarchical chain in the camp, they were so abused that on at least one occasion a Taiwanese guard at Sandakan committed suicide sooner than endure mistreatment any longer.

  Once the Japanese had embarked on a policy of treating their prisoners as dishonourable, of working them like beasts of burden and denying them adequate food, clothing and accommodation, a crime like Sandakan was always possible. At Sandakan, only six out of 2500 POWs survived, but this was an unusually high death rate. Overall, roughly 27 per cent of the 350,000 Allied POWs taken by the Japanese died in captivity. In contrast, only 4 per cent of the Allied POWs held by the Germans or Italians perished.5 There are those who use such statistics to fuel the argument that the Japanese possess some kind of unique ‘oriental’ cruelty. But that is not the case.

  What is less well known is the death rate of Soviet prisoners held in German camps on the Eastern Front during the Second World War. Of the 5.7 million Soviet soldiers taken prisoner by the Germans between June 1941 and February 1945 a staggering 3.3 million died — a death rate more than twice as high as that for Allied POWs in Japanese hands. Moreover, this horrific level of mortality was expected and planned for by the Germans before the war against the Soviet Union began. A planning document from the Wehrmacht’s central economic agency, dated 2 May 1941 (six weeks before the war against Stalin began), states baldly: ‘Tens of millions of men will undoubtedly starve if we take away all we need from the country.’6

  The pre-condition for the appallingly high death rate of Soviet prisoners in German hands was the Nazi belief that their enemy was ‘subhuman’ (just as the similar pre-condition for the criminal mistreatment of the Chinese by the Japanese was the view of the Imperial Army that their enemy were ‘below bugs’). But that thought was not uppermost in the minds of the Japanese and their allies as they guarded the Western POWs. The crucial pre-condition in this context was both the knowledge beaten into Japanese soldiers that there were no circumstances under which they could surrender, and the lack of respect they now had for Westerners in Asia (though that lack of respect never extended to thinking Allied POWs were ‘subhuman’). As soon as it became clear that the war was lost, it was easy for that contempt to turn to hatred — why, thought the individual Japanese fighting man, should the dishonourable soldier who has surrendered survive this war when I must kill myself instead?

  An insight into the depths to which the Imperial Army could sink as a result of their inability to surrender, and the further terrible potential consequences for their POWs, is given by the history of the Japanese army in New Guinea. As early as the end of 1943 it was clear that their situation was desperate. They had landed on the north of this huge island in March 1942 when optimism about the early end of the war was at its height. But a mere twenty months later the Japanese invaders faced a desperate situation as the American fleet destroyed most of the convoys that attempted to reach them. As a result of lack of supplies they began to starve. Forbidden to surrender they found one desperate solution to their predicament — cannibalism. The true story of just what happened in New Guinea was not to emerge until the end of the twentieth century. In 1983 one Japanese veteran of the New Guinea campaign, Shoji Ogawa, wrote of how, at the end of 1943 or the beginning of 1944, he and one of his comrades found the mutilated body of a soldier in the jungle. It was clear that a part of the thigh had been chopped off. Shortly afterwards he describes how ‘we were called by a group of four or five soldiers who were not in our troop. They had just finished a meal and there were mess tins nearby. They said that they had a large cut of snake meat and invited us to join in.’7 Shoji and his friend hurried away, with his friend remarking: ‘It’s very strange. What do you think they were doing? If that had been snake meat they would never have given any to us. Don’t you think they were trying to drag us into the crime they had committed?’

  But it was not until the 1990s that a Japanese scholar working in Australia, Professor Yuki Tanaka, managed to get the investigations of the Australian army into cannibalism in New Guinea declassified. After he had studied the documents, a fuller picture of just what had occurred emerged. ‘The practice of cannibalism was much more widely practised than previously thought,’ Professor Tanaka says. ‘Before my research it was a common belief that cannibalism was occasionally practised by individual soldiers. However, I found that cannibalism was an organized group activity.’ The widespread practice of cannibalism uncovered by Professor Tanaka extended to instances where Japanese forces had eaten their own dead, the local population, Asian POWs held in New Guinea, and the enemy dead — chiefly Australian soldiers who were engaged in a fierce struggle against the Japanese in an attempt to retake the island.

  One of the most horrific cases contained in the newly declassified documents is that of Hatam Ali, an Indian soldier fighting in the British army, who had been taken prisoner by the Japanese in early 1942. At his POW camp ‘there was no medical treatment and all prisoners who fell ill were immediately killed by the Japanese. Later, due to Allied attacks and activity, the Japs also ran out of rations. At this stage the Japanese started selecting prisoners, and every day one prisoner was taken out and killed and eaten by the Japanese.’8 As they became still more desperate Hatam Ali records how the Japanese would hack the flesh from the POWs as they were still alive, before throwing them into a ditch. He knew his turn had come when two Japanese soldiers began taking him towards the hut where the cutting of the bodies took place. He was lucky — he managed to run away from his guards and spent the next two weeks wandering in the jungle before coming across Australian soldiers.

  Hatam Ali’s story is exceptional. In the vast majority of cases it appears that the Japanese ate those who had already died — particularly the bodies of Australian soldiers killed in battle, obviously preferring to consume this flesh rather than that of POWs or Japanese soldiers who had died of some tropical disease. The Australian documents reveal a litany of gruesome cases — dead Allied soldiers might have their thighs cut off, their buttocks stripped, the heart, liver and entrails removed, their genitals severed and so on. That senior Japanese officers were aware of the problem of cannibalism is clear from an order given by Major General Aozu which says that any Japanese soldier who has eaten human flesh is to be sentenced to death but, significantly, excludes from that punishment those who have eaten ‘enemy flesh’ .9

  The stories uncovered by Professor Tanaka are horrific, and seemingly justify the stereotypical belief held by many who fought against the Japanese that they were an ‘inhuman’ enemy whose actions were ‘inscrutable’. But the reason the vast majority of Japanese resorted to cannibalism was simple and understandable. As servants of the emperor they had given their word that they would never surrender. Now, as the war went on and they received no supplies whatsoever, they had to eat whatever they could or they would starve. ‘The purpose of this group cannibalism was, of course, survival,’ says Professor Tanaka. ‘Because about 160,000 Japanese forces were sent to New Guinea in 1942, but 93 per cent of the Japanese forces died.’ For Professor Tanaka it is clear where the chief blame for these terrible crimes lies: ‘I feel angry towards the Japanese officers who made this decision to send such large numbers of Japanese soldiers to New Guinea without sufficient preparation. And when the situation changed they simply decided to abandon those soldiers.’ In addition, Professor Tanaka is at pains to contextualize the actions of Japanese soldiers by pointing out the nature of the jungle warfare they faced. Unlike the Australians, who, he says, ‘had the luxury every day after the battle of food and coffee, the Japanese never had this sort of psychological luxury. Day after day and night after night they have to feel surrounded by their enemies, not knowing when they would be attacked. And you don’t know what wi
ll happen to your psyche after thirty or forty days of this.’

  Whilst it is true that in the vast majority of cases of cannibalism in New Guinea the Japanese were driven to commit the crime out of sheer hunger, there are a handful of other, still more disturbing, examples where the motivation is less clear. Bill Hedges was a witness to one such case. As a corporal in the Australian army, he was part of the force which fought the Japanese back across the Owen Stanley mountain range after their failed advance towards Port Moresby. ‘The Japanese were the most ferocious enemy you could have wished for,’ he says, ‘because they didn’t value their own lives at all.’ He led a patrol of forty men into an encounter with the Japanese at Templeson’s Crossing; after a fierce fire-fight he and his soldiers were forced to retreat, leaving behind six Australian dead and four wounded. The next day, once reinforcements had arrived, they managed to retake the position and were astonished at what they found. ‘The Japanese had cannibalized our wounded and dead soldiers,’ says Hedges. ‘We found them with meat stripped off their legs and half-cooked meat in the Japanese dishes. And we were very shocked and surprised to think that our enemy was that dirty.’ One of his closest comrades had fallen victim to the Japanese in this way. ‘I was heartily disgusted and disappointed to see my good friend lying there, with the flesh stripped off his arms and legs, his uniform torn off him. It’s one terrible feeling for anyone, that is. He was a happy country boy, same as 90 per cent of the battalion was.’Thus far Bill Hedges’ story is typical of those cases of cannibalism that occurred as a result of Japanese hunger. But then came the discovery that fundamentally changes this perception. ‘We found dumps with rice and a lot of tinned food. So they weren’t starving and having to eat flesh because they were hungry. So it wasn’t for the want of tucker at all.’

  The certainty that, in a case like the cannibalism of Bill Hedges’ comrades, the Japanese had adequate food supplies when they committed the crime, leads to the disturbing question: why were the Japanese acting in this way? Hedges finds it hard to speculate: ‘Some said it gave them more fighting spirit over the enemy and so forth. But I wouldn’t know — you’d have to ask someone with more brains than me.’When Professor Tanaka discovered the occasional case of cannibalism committed when the Japanese still appeared to have sufficient supplies, he formed the view that ‘this was practised in order to consolidate solidarity amongst members of the unit. If you break the taboo together then you feel you are part of the crime — part of the ritual. If you do not participate in this group ritual then you’ll be ostracized.’ In addition, he feels ‘it was an act which helped the Japanese soldiers to numb the fear of jungle fighting’.

  The notion that the Japanese were eating dead Australians out of group solidarity even though they were not starving is an intriguing one. In China, as seen earlier, soldiers could be put under pressure to take part in group rape in order to be accepted as members of the group. Hierarchy was all. If you failed to follow the lead of those above you — even if that meant you committed a crime — then you faced the worst punishment of all, exclusion from the group.

  Professor Tanaka is at pains to point out that cannibalism has occurred in other desperate wartime situations — not least on the Eastern Front, where starving Soviet prisoners resorted to eating flesh from their comrades who had died in the camps. But he admits that he cannot find a parallel in modern history for the situation Bill Hedges encountered, where the desire to escape starvation was not the prime motivation.

  However, the context in which the crime was committed does offer an additional clue as to why it occurred. These Japanese soldiers had been fighting in arduous jungle conditions for many months and may have already had to eat human flesh in order to survive — they would almost certainly know that their starving comrades elsewhere had resorted to the crime. Now, even in the presence of basic supplies like rice, they chose to eat the flesh of their enemy in the knowledge that cannibalism was an accepted mode of behaviour within the group. Crucially, these Japanese soldiers knew that their country was losing the war and that they must die rather than surrender — it must have seemed unlikely in the extreme that they would ever be punished for such a crime. The combination of this situation and this knowledge led to these bizarre and criminal circumstances in which Japanese soldiers decided to eat human ‘meat’ with their rice.

  Japan had never lost a war before. The systems, values and beliefs of Japanese society were consequently put under a strain never before experienced. And, as Chapter 4 demonstrates, as the war turned further against them, Japanese behaviour was to become stranger still.

  Above A Japanese officer brandishing a sword (right) leads his soldiers in an attack on the Chinese in November 1941. This bloody, racist war against the Chinese would continue in parallel with the better-known war against the West, launched days later at Pearl Harbor.

  Left Jan Ruff, the young Dutch woman forced to work in a Japanese military brothel.

  Opposite Masayo Enomoto, on the right, takes a pause from his war in China — a war in which he committed rape and murder.

  Previous page Japanese soldiers after capturing a Chinese village in the summer of 1938. The world knew of the Rape of Nanking six months before — much less publicized were the atrocities committed by the Imperial Army in the campaign that followed.

  Above British soldiers captured after the fall of Singapore in February 1942. Seventy thousand British and Allied soldiers became prisoners of the Japanese in the largest surrender in British military history.

  Below Allied prisoners of war en route to a Japanese prison camp.

  Above left German prisoners of war held by the Japanese during the First World War.

  These soldiers, humanely treated by their Japanese captors, are dressed for gymnastics.

  Below left An Allied soldier after years of captivity during the Second World War.

  Right A civilian internee in Stanley Camp, Hong Kong, displays the daily rations for five people, her own emaciated body further proof of the dearth of food in the camp.

  Above An allied air reconnaissance picture of Sandakan prisoner of war camp in northern Borneo.

  Below The graves of some of the 2500 Allied POWs who perished at Sandakan, either dying on the forced march through the jungle, at the camp itself, or after they finished the trek.

  Opposite Bill Hedges (left), a corporal in the Australian Army. He fought the Japanese in New Guinea, and found dear evidence of the cannibalism practised by the Imperial Army.

  Above The aftermath of the Japanese attack on the American naval air station at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.

  Below More destruction after what Roosevelt called ‘the day of infamy’ — American warships lie wrecked at Pearl Harbor.

  LURCHING TOWARDS DEFEAT

  The war turned quickly for the Japanese. Just four months into the conflict, the Japanese High Command witnessed disturbing signs that they had fundamentally misjudged the power and resourcefulness of their enemy.

  In the early hours of 18 April 1942 Colonel James Doolittle of the United States air force led sixteen B-25 bombers on raids on Tokyo and several other Japanese cities. Launched from an aircraft carrier in the Pacific the planes had to fly over Japan, drop their bombs and then land at airfields in China controlled by the Chinese Nationalists. The bombing was a symbolic morale-boosting gesture by the Americans — and it caused consternation in Japan. How was it possible that their proud capital city, the home of the divine emperor himself, could be subjected to an American air raid? Never in Japanese history had an enemy struck the homeland in such a provocative way. The response of the Japanese government to this humiliation was hugely significant. Eight of the American pilots were captured when their B-25s were shot down over Japanese-controlled regions of China. They were immediately sentenced to be executed because, it was deemed, they had committed a war crime. (The Imperial Army appear not to have appreciated their own double standard in this regard — the Japanese had, of course, been bombing civil
ians in China for many years.) Even though prime minister Tojo was against the executions at first, he was swayed by the views of his senior military commanders, all of whom wanted the fliers killed. Hirohito stepped in and personally commuted five of the death sentences. Eventually, three of the Americans were executed.