Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

by Victor Davis Hanson

  The absence of large reservoirs of natural resources inside Japan, the rise of fascism in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, the history of racism by European colonists, and the discrimination against Asian immigrants to America helped to solidify the position of Japanese nationalists and right-wing militarists before World War II. For a small country like Japan, without either land or material reserves, but strapped with a large population, surrounded by a European colonial presence in Hong Kong, Singapore, Macao, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia, and confronted with a strong American military in the Pacific, it was natural that ancestral veins of samurai bravery should be reworked for new ore. The old chivalric code of Bushido, the Shinto idea of a chosen Japanese people, and the traditional exultation of the warrior might be transmogrified into a harsh and patently racist idea in the industrial age that foreigners were weak and cowardly and therefore fair game for the worst sort of atrocities when the inevitable war broke out.

  There were at least two primary foundations of prewar Japanese military thought. The first was the state religion of Shinto—unbroken imperial sovereignty of the living god, the emperor, the divine origin of the Japanese race, and the manifest destiny of Japan. In this regard, the blending of political and religious authority was not unlike that of the Achaemenids, Arabs, Aztecs, and Ottomans and entirely antithetical to their respective Western adversaries. Second was the ancestral and feudal samurai code that was reinterpreted and refashioned as Bushido by nineteenth-century militarists—the idea that the warrior values of a medieval elite could be superimposed upon the entire new nation-state of modern Japan.

  This other strain in Japanese culture—the lingering suspicion of things foreign—and the outbreak of hostilities with China in 1931 made the importation of the most recent technological innovations from abroad more difficult. The more a bellicose Japan sought a nationalist but Westernized military, the less likely America and Britain were to extend it easy financial credits, the latest technology, and imported resources. At home the more Japan sought the most recent designs in foreign military hardware, the more its own hypocrisy would become apparent. After all, it was again borrowing superior science from a society it ostensibly dismissed as corrupt and inferior, and yet it refused to undergo the radical political and cultural restructuring along Western lines that would ensure sustainable technological parity. The same paradox would plague much of the Third World for the rest of the twentieth century: buying Western technology is not the same as maintaining it, adapting it, fabricating it, and training a citizenry to use and improve upon it. Japan, for example, had even better planes than the Americans at Midway, but notions of individualism, freedom, and politics quite different from Western cultures. The rise of Japanese military governments, with their insistence on emperor worship, continued to stifle free debate, individualism, and popular dissent—at the moment when such an enlightened approach to research and industrial policy was most critical for the continued growth and innovation of Japan’s arms industry. This combination of Western hostility toward Japanese militarism, and Japan’s own reluctance to embrace an open and free society, resulted in a general stagnation of technological innovation—and an occasional inability to make use of even native genius.

  While the Japanese navy was technologically the equal of, or perhaps superior to, the Americans at Midway in June 1942, such parity could not last once the American government, private industry, and the citizenry at large mobilized for war. In fact, within a mere year and a half after Pearl Harbor, not only were Japanese forces numerically inferior to the American military, but in key areas such as aeronautical design, artillery, tanks, radar, nuclear research, medicine, food supply, base construction, and the mass production of matériel, they were far behind as well. By 1944 the Japanese air force, army, and navy were more or less using the same equipment with which they had started the war, while their American counterparts were producing planes, ships, and vehicles scarcely imaginable in 1941.

  About the only reason for American weapons inferiority at Midway was a general complacence following World War I, fueled by the country’s utopian ideas of world peace, by its isolationism, and by an economic depression. By late 1941 the Americans were still awakening from nearly two decades of abject neglect of military preparedness and were not free from sluggish economic growth and high unemployment. In contrast, the Japanese for nearly ten years had devoted a much larger percentage of their much smaller national product to defense expenditure, and had amassed far more firsthand empirical research from the battlefields of China. At Midway—for perhaps the last moment in the war—the Japanese had both better and more numerous planes and ships.

  There is also no real evidence that the Westernized Japanese military was reluctant to engage in decisive battle in the fashion of head-on Western practice. Ostensibly, the Japanese navy was every bit as aggressive as the American. Its nineteenth-century adaptation of German tactics of frontal charges and mass assault would prove disastrous against American army machine guns, automatic rifles, and field artillery. Its huge battleships were proof that its navy envisioned using superior firepower to blast enemy surface ships to pieces in set artillery duels, as had happened against the Russians in 1904. While it is true that the indigenous military traditions of samurai warfare had strong ritual elements that could elevate form over function—firearms although known since the sixteenth century were more or less outlawed for the next two hundred years—by 1941 the Japanese navy was aggressive and often as willing as the Americans to enter in a head-to-head battle to the death. Along with the importation of Western arms had come the Western idea of frontal assault.

  Where the Japanese were at a distinct disadvantage in their approach to Western battle practice was in the failure to use such decisive tactical engagements to wage a relentless war of total annihilation—a ghastly practice that was mostly outside their samurai traditions. The Japanese were not comfortable with the rather different Western notion of seeking out the enemy without deception, to engage in bitter shock collision, one whose deadliness would prove decisive for the side with the greater firepower, discipline, and numbers.

  Instead, against the Russians in 1904–5, and the Chinese from 1931 to 1937, the Japanese military fought a succession of brilliant battles, but such victories in themselves were often left incomplete and not necessarily seen as part of an overall strategic plan of destroying the enemy outright until he lost the ability to wage war. The Japanese knew plenty about killing thousands of combatants on the battlefield, and they were willing to sacrifice even more of their own in suicidal and heroic frontal assaults against entrenched positions, but such martial ferocity was not the same as the Western desire for continual and sustained shock encounters until one side was victorious or annihilated. In the Japanese as in the Islamic way of war, surprise, sudden attack, battlefield calamity, and disgrace should force an opponent to the bargaining table to discuss concessions.

  In the case of the Pacific War the Japanese preference for diversion and surprise at the expense of a series of frontal actions meant that often key opportunities were lost. After a brilliant unexpected attack on Pearl Harbor that left the Americans defenseless, there was no follow-up plan to keep bombing the island into submission, followed perhaps by raiding the West Coast ports to destroy the last home of the Pacific carrier fleet. Instead, Admiral Nagumo’s carriers immediately sailed away from Hawaii after the initial Sunday morning attacks of December 7, leaving the critical American fuel tanks that supplied the entire Pacific fleet unscathed— and the American carriers undiscovered and untouched. At the battle of Coral Sea in the weeks before Midway, a tactical Japanese victory led to a strategic defeat when the Japanese, stunned by the fierce American resistance and the loss of dozens of their best carrier pilots, postponed the invasion of Port Moresby. Both the battle of Midway and the later monumental engagement of Leyte Gulf saw Japanese tactics fail largely through the dispersion of their forces in the naïve belief that the enemy could be decei
ved rather than encountered and blasted apart:

  They overvalued surprise, which had worked so well at the beginning and always assumed they could get it. They loved diversionary tactics—forces popping up at odd places to confuse the enemy and pull him off base. They believed that the pattern for decisive battle was the same at sea as on the land—lure the enemy into an unfavorable tactical situation, cut off his retreat, drive into the flanks, and then concentrate for the kill. (S. Morison, Coral Sea, Midway, and Submarine Actions, May 1942–August 1942, 78)

  Japanese mobility and ruse were reflected not just in Admiral Yamamoto’s famous dictum about the relative industrial capacity of the two belligerents—that he could raise hell in the Pacific for six months but could promise nothing after that. Rather, almost all serious strategists in the Japanese military also acknowledged their discomfort with a quite novel situation of all-out warfare with the Americans and British that would require continual head-on confrontations with the Anglo-American fleet. In 1941 no one in the Japanese high command seemed aware that a surprise attack on the Americans would in Western eyes lead to total war, in which the United States would either destroy its adversary or face annihilation in the attempt. But, then, it was a historic error of non-Westerners, beginning with Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, to assume that democracies were somehow weak and timid. Although slow to anger, Western constitutional governments usually preferred wars of annihilation—wiping the Melians off the map of the Aegean, sowing the ground of Carthage with salt, turning Ireland into a near wasteland, wasting Jerusalem before reoccupying it, driving an entire culture of Native Americans onto reservations, atomizing Japanese cities—and were far more deadly adversaries than military dynasts and autocrats. Despite occasional brilliant adaptation of trickery and surprise, and the clear record of success in “the indirect approach” to war—Epaminondas’s great raid into Messenia (369 B.C.) and Sherman’s March to the Sea (1864) are notable examples—Western militaries continued to believe that the most economic way of waging war was to find the enemy, collect sufficient forces to overwhelm him, and then advance directly and openly to annihilate him on the battlefield—all part of a cultural tradition to end hostilities quickly, decisively, and utterly. To read of American naval operations in World War II is to catalog a series of continual efforts to advance westward toward Japan, discover and devastate the Japanese fleet, and physically wrest away all territory belonging to the Japanese government until reaching the homeland itself. The American sailors at Midway were also the first wave of an enormous draft that would mobilize more than 12 million citizens into the armed forces. In the manner of the Romans after Cannae or the democracies in World War I, American political representatives had voted for war with Japan. Polls revealed near unanimous public approval for a ghastly conflict of annihilation against the perpetrators of Pearl Harbor. The United States would also continue to hold elections throughout the conflict as the elected government crafted one of the most radical industrial and cultural revolutions in the history of the Republic in turning the country into a huge arms-producing camp.

  The Japanese, in contrast, had only sporadically adopted nineteenth-century European ideas of constitutional government and civic militarism—and both had been discredited by military regimes of the 1930s. Japanese military thinkers believed that a far superior method of fielding large and spirited armies—and one more in line with their own cultural traditions—lay in inculcating the entire population with a fanatical devotion to the emperor and a shared belief in the inevitable rule of the Japanese people. A few wise and all-knowing military officers alone could appreciate the Japanese warrior spirit, and most of them saw little need for the public to debate the wisdom of attacking the largest industrial power in the world:

  What Westerners did not realize was that underneath the veneer of modernity and westernization, Japan was still Oriental and that her plunge from feudalism to imperialism had come so precipitously that her leaders, who were interested solely in Western methods, not Western values, had neither the time nor inclination to develop liberalism and humanitarianism. (J. Toland, The Rising Sun, vol. 1, 74)

  After the battle of Midway, the magnitude of the disaster was kept from the Japanese people—even the wounded were kept in isolation— who were told only of a great “victory” in the Aleutians. In sharp contrast, the American electorate not only received intimate details of the battle but could actually read in a major newspaper the vital information that Japanese codes had been cracked before the shooting even began. Individualism was subsumed in Japanese group consensus:

  Because it [the Japanese leadership] was imbued with the national ideology it was difficult if not impossible for it to analyze the military situation in a coldly realistic, scientific manner. Japanese military training emphasized “spiritual mobilization”—Seishin Kyoiku— as the most important aspect of preparing troops for battle. Essentially, this was indoctrination in the spirit and principles of the Japanese national ideology: the identification of the individual with the nation and his subordination to the will of the Emperor. It was the continuation of a process which had begun much earlier in the schools. One reason for conscription in Japan was the opportunity presented for the military to train virtually the entire male population in the ideals of Bushido and the Kodo (the Imperial Way). (S. Huntington, The Soldier and the State, 128)

  The result was that for most of the war Japan deployed large forces and highly motivated troops—at Midway there were far more Japanese men under arms than American, and they were clearly as spirited and eager for battle. But the absence of civic militarism—the idea of a free citizenry voting to craft the conditions of its own military service through consensual government—would also mean a different kind of warrior: the often-stereotyped fanaticism rather than contractual obligation, spirit rather than cold reason, uniformity over individuality, the embrace of suicide in addition to sacrifice, and official praise of anonymous national spirit in lieu of individual citation and personal honorific decree. These more subtle cultural differences would clearly be manifest at Midway— and they would also help explain why a numerically superior foe was so soundly defeated.

  Much is made of Japan’s seemingly marked disadvantage in natural resources, its smaller population, and its tiny landmass. But at Midway, Japan had access from its newly acquired empire to plenty of oil for its ships and food for its sailors, who vastly outnumbered the Americans. We should remember that Japan’s population was nearly half that of the United States. Its burgeoning empire in the Pacific brought it a rich supply of strategic metals, rubber, and oil, and it had a good decade head start in equipping its military. For all practical purposes, with the Russian border almost silent by 1941, and large parts of occupied Manchuria relatively dormant for most of 1941–42, Japan was fighting a single adversary in the Anglo-American Pacific military—quite unlike the United States, which was devoting the majority of its equipment and most of its armed forces to defeating the Germans and Italians and supplying the British, Chinese, and Soviets thousands of miles away. America, not Japan, was in the unenviable and unwise predicament of fighting a two-front war with deadly adversaries and poorer allies. Whereas America clearly adopted a policy of defeating the Nazis first, nearly all of Japan’s resources were devoted to attacking the Anglo-Americans in Asia and the Pacific. The Japanese for well over a half century had made critical transferences of Western economic and military practices in creating a modern navy and a sophisticated industrial economy. At least for a brief period of a year or two, this long-standing adaptation of European technology had allowed it to compete with any Western military power, as its stunning naval victories in the first six months of World War II attested. Once the conflict began, Japan had secure sources of raw products and an entire energized military nursed on the religion of Japanese racial superiority, martial values, and imperial destiny.

  Religious fervor, Bushido, hari-kari, going down with the ship, and the kamikazes lent the Japanese a sense of
arrogance in victory—and fanaticism and fatalism in defeat. But such practices often had negative ramifications in the mundane practice of war itself and would prove no substitute for the freewheeling individualism of a “decadent” foe. Brilliant admirals are still needed after their ships blow up. Seasoned pilots are more valuable as instructors than as suicide bombers. Junior officers who are vocal rather than silent are critical assets; assessing rather than accepting blame may be shameful, but it is often indispensable in war; and the expertise of skilled generals is lost when they disembowel themselves. By the same token, ingenious Japanese sailors have hands-on experience that admirals should freely hear about. War planners need to fear an informed and aroused electorate; and arguing with an emperor over strategy is often a more fruitful exercise than bowing in his presence.