Descent into Hell: The fall of Singapore - Pudu and Changi - the Thai Burma railway

by Peter Brune

  The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 created the economic and social and, therefore, the political environment in which the Imperial Japanese Army broke up Japan’s liberal power base and then took control of the nation. In political terms both the extreme right and left questioned the old order: capitalism. The Great Depression caused many to doubt the fundamental basis of free enterprise: had international trade collaboration, which had degenerated into nations and empires falling back on collective trade barriers, not become redundant? Further, could democratic processes solve the problem? That questioning was not unique to Japan, and as the crisis worsened, the fear of communism gripped much of the world. Japan needed a guaranteed supply of raw materials and a resulting secure market for its products. The remedy appeared close at hand and entirely feasible: Japan once again looked to China.

  In November 1930, Prime Minister Hamaguchi was assassinated and numerous secret societies were created by Imperial Army officers. When another prime minister went Hamaguchi’s way in 1932, Japan’s ‘convulsive period’ was in full swing.

  An opportunity for expansion now presented itself. When the local warlord began to hinder Japanese interests in southern Manchuria, after having formally recognised the new Chinese Nationalist Government in Nanking, Japanese officers in the Kwantung Army in Manchuria decided to act. Kirby in The War Against Japan:

  On the 18th of September 1931 the extremists, taking advantage of the fact that Japanese troops were stationed in southern Manchuria as guards for the Southern Manchurian Railway . . . staged an incident in such a way that national feeling in Japan would support their policy. A carefully arranged explosion—ostensibly the work of the Chinese—destroyed a part of the railway track with the consequence that Japanese and Chinese troops came into conflict.5

  The incident gave the Japanese an excuse to occupy Mukden and later the whole of Manchuria. Japan now had possession of an area of land ‘larger than France and Germany combined’.6 China did what it had done before: it appealed to the West, this time through the League of Nations. The Americans joined the protest. On 30 September 1931, the League ordered Japan to withdraw its forces. It was met not only with a refusal to do so, but also with the creation by the Japanese of the puppet state of Manchukuo. The League’s Commission of Enquiry condemned the Japanese aggression. The situation then deteriorated further.

  China’s appeal to the League of Nations formed the first of two reactions to the Japanese state of Manchukuo. The second was a boycott of Japanese goods, which, in the context of the already deepening Great Depression, bit hard on Japan. Japanese living in China were threatened, assaulted and in January 1932 violence broke out. After a riot in Shanghai on the 18th, the Japanese demanded reparations and the assurance that all anti-Japanese groups be disbanded. The Chinese simply ignored the ultimatum. The international city of Shanghai now became the focus of events that further isolated the Japanese in the eyes of the world community.

  After the Japanese had mobilised their considerable local population and their Marines, had bombed a Chinese armoured train and station, and deployed forces within foreign sectors of the city, the situation deteriorated further. Following an artillery engagement in early February, the Japanese decided to send a division and a brigade, which were subsequently reinforced by a further two divisions, to the north of Shanghai. It was only after the Japanese had driven the Chinese about ten miles inland that the Shanghai European community was able to mediate a halt to the fighting.

  The formation of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and the Shanghai incident resulted in the League of Nations censuring the Japanese as an aggressor. But the Japanese were no longer terribly interested in world opinion and gave notice, in February 1931, of their intention to withdraw from the League. Their decision became effective in 1935. Japan then proceeded to move southwards from Manchukuo, occupied the province of Jehol, and then crossed the Great Wall into northern China.

  In May 1933, a truce was signed between Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese. The Great Wall became the basic line of demarcation with a buffer zone further south. Japan had, within a few short years, become the principal foreign player in China.

  At this time, there existed numerous ultra-nationalist groups within Japanese society—and within the Imperial Army—which were determined that Japan should go further along the path of expansion. One such group, the Young Officers, staged an attempted coup on 26 February 1936. Meirion & Susie Harries, Soldiers of the Sun:

  At a stroke, the rebels removed several of the leading proponents of constitutional monarchy in Japan, and provided a display of military brute force vicious enough to guarantee the cooperation of others who might otherwise have challenged the army . . . the army needed partnership with other technocrats, so it was never to assume an absolute dictatorship, but direct and overt opposition ceased after February 1936.7

  The uneasy truce between the Chinese and the Japanese in China came to an abrupt end in July 1936. From Chiang Kai-shek’s perspective a final showdown with the Japanese was inevitable. Groups within his own Nationalist movement had been pushing him to forestall his war with the communists. They argued that the Japanese threat in northern China and the continued Japanese use of the rich resources in Manchuria were far greater political and military issues than the communists or any remaining war lords. It was time, they argued, for all Chinese to combine and defeat the common and hated enemy. To this end, Chiang now had some 30 divisions which had been trained by German advisors, and he could also call on various other Nationalist formations elsewhere in the country.

  On the night of 7 July 1936 elements of a Japanese unit near the Marco Polo Bridge at Peking was fired upon. Fighting ensued between the Japanese and Chinese and although local mediators were in the process of securing a cease-fire, both the Japanese and Chinese Governments were drawn into the fight. Chiang Kai-shek exhorted his people to war and occupied the buffer zone in north China, which forced the Japanese hand. Within two months of the Marco Polo Bridge incident, the Japanese had deployed 200 000 troops in northern China and had made impressive gains in the Peking–Tientsin area; between August and October 1936, the Japanese became embroiled in heavy fighting around Shanghai; and in an attempt to break the deadlock, a further three divisions of the Tenth Army were landed south of that city and one on the Yangtse on 13 November. The three-month fight for Shanghai cost the Japanese around 9000 killed in action and approximately 30 000 wounded.

  After having pursued the retreating Chinese Nationalists from Shanghai some 300 kilometres upriver, the Japanese found themselves at the gates of Nanking, Chiang Kai-shek’s capital. After the infantry had entered the city on 13 December 1937, and their support units had arrived the following day, the Imperial Japanese Army instigated a campaign of premeditated, cold-blooded and systematic murder, rape, looting, and terror that became infamous in both its intensity and scale: the Rape of Nanking.

  At and around the Chinese capital, the Japanese sought to destroy the Chinese ability to wage war by the systematic looting and burning of factories, plant, commercial venues, housing and the confiscation of food and fuel. But it was the elimination of members of the Chinese Army who had gone to ground in the city that interested the Japanese commanders most. During the campaign preceding the fall of Nanking, the Japanese had sustained some 72 000 casualties of which around 18 000 had been killed in action. As would be the case so often through the coming years of the Pacific War, when the Imperial Army took heavy casualties, brutal reprisals against both captured combatants and innocent civilians followed.

  Under officer supervision, the Chinese were rounded up and taken to execution points around the city. The machine gun, rifle and bayonet were worked overtime as these concentration points, and numerous watercourses became additional slaughter sites. As the scale of the murder intensified, so the selection of victims became less disciplined and indiscriminate. Any male, not just suspected former combatants, was put to the sword or bayone
t or was simply shot. And as Christmas passed and the New Year came, alcohol became a chief factor in the behaviour of the Japanese. The rape of the Chinese women in Nanking was rampant and it is difficult to imagine the scale of their suffering. Roaming bands of drunken and largely unsupervised troops engaged not only in pack rape, but subsequent murder. After the streets had been cleared of potential victims, homes, hospital and university quarters were ransacked. The process went on for weeks.

  The Rape of Nanking shocked the western world. European and American missionaries, businessmen and diplomats had witnessed and recorded much of its carnage first hand. The fact is, however, that this incident was not isolated, as it had been both preceded by and would be later followed by further widespread atrocities during the Chinese and Pacific Wars.

  The Japanese soldiers who were to fight against the British, Indians and Australians in Malaya and Singapore—and who became their masters in Pudu and Changi Prisons and on the Thai–Burma Railway—had a moral and martial code that at the time defied western comprehension.

  The conscript who presented himself for Imperial Army service was used to subservience to superiors. He was born into a family where early submissiveness towards his father and elder brothers was instilled and demanded of him, and where this concept of dutiful service was then transferred to the Emperor through the institution of chu. Upon joining the army the conscript became ‘one already dead’.8 The recruit had thus renounced any right or privilege or ambitions for his own life. Ei Yamaguchi, Japanese Imperial Army:

  We were taught that dying was lighter than a bird’s feather. That it was easy to die. That’s how we were trained. So we weren’t scared of dying. Even when a comrade died all we thought was, ‘What a pity for him.’ We just thought he was unlucky. We used to say, ‘I’ll be joining you soon’, because that’s how we saw it.9

  A soldier’s death was thus seen as an inspirational and pure act which was likened to the precise moment of perfection of the fall of the cherry blossom. Sublime death, if it came, brought honour to his emperor, nation and family. Correspondingly, surrender to an enemy brought disgrace and humiliation not only upon the Japanese soldier, but upon his emperor, nation and family. It followed, therefore, that through Japanese eyes, enemy prisoners of war had shamed themselves and deserved contempt and ill-treatment.

  Corporal punishment was an accepted form of discipline throughout the Imperial Army and took many forms. Standing at attention in front of a superior for a misdemeanour might involve a few forceful slaps across the face, a particularly angry officer or NCO might resort to punching or a ‘king hit’,10 and, on occasions in China, soldiers might be lined up for collective failure and be ordered to slap their opposite number’s face.

  The Japanese officer saw himself as a latter-day samurai, and his reverence for his sword held an almost spiritual hold over him. Masao Maeda, Japanese Imperial Army: ‘In those days we naturally accepted the tradition that Japanese samurai in olden times fought with the sword. I believe that by carrying swords ourselves we became samurai.’11 And the sword was often used to ‘blood’ or test a new officer who had just arrived from officer training school. In a remarkable oral history interview with Haruko and Theodore Cook, Second Lieutenant Tominaga Shozo of the Imperial Japanese Army described the ‘blooding’ of Japanese officers and other ranks.

  Shozo reported for duty with the 232nd Regiment of the 39th Division on service in the Yangtze Valley in July 1941. When he was introduced to his men he was struck by their ‘evil eyes’.12 After a guided tour of a recent battlefield, Shozo was informed that the next day he and the other new officer arrivals would be given a trial of courage, a test to see if they ‘were qualified to be platoon leaders’.13

  The next day twenty emaciated Chinese prisoners were brought to an area where a large pit had been dug. Present were the regimental (brigade) commander, the battalion commanders and the company commanders—obviously an important occasion and an equally important test. The officer presiding over the demonstration was a Second Lieutenant Tanaka, who proceeded to unsheath his sword, pour water over both sides of the blade, and then with a shout of ‘Yo!’ removed a prisoner’s head with a clean cut. Shozo’s reaction is illuminating: ‘The scene was so appalling that I felt I couldn’t breathe.’14 Here, surely, was the reaction of a man who did not at that point have ‘evil eyes’. Shozo’s reaction when his turn came is also illuminating: ‘. . . the only thought I had was “Don’t do anything unseemly!” I didn’t want to disgrace myself.’15 He need not have worried. Shozo passed his test by decapitating his victim with one swift slice. He then claimed that something inside him changed—he no longer felt uneasy in his men’s eyes, but now ‘felt I was looking down on them’.16

  Shozo’s experience portrays the obedience of all ranks to their superiors; it depicts the extreme Japanese determination to not lose face, to be loyal and submissive; and it also portrays the spiritual strength of the sword and its empowerment to the individual Japanese officer or NCO. And no less a ritual was used on occasions for the private soldier through the public practice—in front of their peers and superiors—of running at and then bayoneting blindfolded prisoners of war tied to poles. The empowerment was the same and only the tool of execution differed. According to Shozo, any new, ‘unblooded’ arrivals who experienced difficulty with their first execution, who might have ‘stopped on their way’ were kicked and ‘made to do it’.17 Perhaps the difference between the use of a sword and bayonet was a depiction of privileged power and status. But the end result was the same.

  Given the Japanese soldier’s concepts of racial superiority, of death, his attitude to surrender and prisoners of war, and the method of his ‘blooding’, he was consequently indoctrinated to believe that any means justified victory. He was taught that his war was total war. Shiro Azuma, Japanese Imperial Army:

  War was about winning or losing. We didn’t think about humanity at all. We believed we could do anything to win. When we won the war against China, because we’d won all our previous battles, we were very arrogant . . .

  Kick a chink, kick a dog, kick a stone. It was all the same! We were arrogant. Killing a Chinese person was just like killing a dog.18

  This racist Japanese view was to have dire consequences for the entire Asian Chinese population and will touch our story dramatically in Singapore.

  Another Japanese Imperial Army imperative through much of its campaigning in Asia was the edict that its troops should live as much as possible off the land. This practice brought indescribable suffering upon the civilian population in China and throughout South-East Asia. And such a philosophy had an implication for women. Shiro Azuma: ‘When we went searching for food, we found women hiding. We thought, “Ah, they look tasty!” So we raped them. And every single time a woman was raped, the soldiers would kill her.’19

  Such behaviour was embedded in the Japanese male’s psyche. He came from a society where the female was subservient to her husband and sons. The mother and sister’s every waking hour was focused upon being a faithful family servant and a moderate, diplomatic communicator at all times. Given the status of the Japanese woman, those from ‘racially inferior’ countries were at great risk when uncontrolled troops descended upon them to confiscate, loot, pillage and burn. Rape and murder all too often became the final acts of disgrace, and, when alcohol and the psychology of the pack or group of soldiers came into play, as at Nanking, the result was horrific. And in another appalling display of their contempt for women, around 250 000 Korean and numerous numbers of Chinese and Formosan females—and some European—would be press-ganged as ‘comfort women’ into cruel prostitution across the lands of Japan’s conquests.

  The Imperial Japanese Army’s officers were drawn from three sources. The first, comprising senior commanders and ‘in peace, most of the junior ones’,20 was drawn from the military academy where, in most cases, soldiers had undergone extensive training over a seven and a half year period before graduating with the ran
k of second lieutenant.21 The reserve officers formed the second source. They had usually served in the conscript ranks; were invariably amongst the best educated of the conscripts; were then trained at officer reserve schools; and, after gaining their commissions, were normally put into the reserve at home ready for active service when required. Second Lieutenant Tominaga Shozo was an example of this category. The last group of officers were those NCOs who were promoted through the ranks on merit after distinguished service.

  The other ranks in the Japanese Army were tough troops indeed. They were prepared to follow orders without question, and, therefore, death was a much more acceptable end than was the case with other nationalities. This attitude manifested itself in a number of ways: a soldier, when ordered, dutifully presented himself as a target before his foe in order to draw fire and thus expose enemy positions; snipers willingly penetrated an enemy perimeter during darkness to climb trees or coconut palms and later snipe at the enemy, fully understanding that death was almost inevitable; and others would lie ‘doggo’ amongst their dead in already forfeited positions, waiting to rise and strike at their foes as they passed by.

  The Japanese plan to secure a large South-East Asian empire was based upon an audacious and speedy naval dominance of the Western Pacific. In order to accomplish this task, the navy planned to deliver a crippling blow against the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and bomb Malaya and the Philippines. The Imperial Japanese Army’s task was to then invade Malaya and Singapore, the Philippines, Borneo, Sumatra and the Dutch East Indies. The outer limit of this huge empire was to stretch from the Indian–Burmese border, around the Dutch East Indies, north-east to the Marshall Islands, Wake Island and then north-west to the Kurile Islands.