Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II (18 page)

At the start of the war the Japanese had been dismissed as ‘inferior’ warriors, but in the wake of Pearl Harbor and the swift Japanese victories in Southeast Asia that perception had changed to one of grudging acceptance that they were a tougher adversary than had first been believed — but they were still not credited as being ‘civilized’.
The logic was simple — and perverse: the Japanese were now thought to be formidable opponents precisely because they were prepared to fight in ways that no civilized soldier would be willing to.

It is significant that German soldiers went through a similar process of shifting belief during the campaign on the Eastern Front.
Once the Red Army had demonstrated their considerable resilience in cities like Stalingrad, the Germans gained a reluctant respect for their enemy, but it did not make them rethink the propaganda image of the Slavic fighter as ‘subhuman’.
Just as with the American view of the Japanese, the paradox was that their image of the enemy could change from one of incompetence to super-competence without altering the original bedrock of prejudice and racism.

The Japanese, of course, had entered the war on a not dissimilar platform of prejudice — convinced that the Americans would not have the stomach for a long fight.
The Japanese plan for the Pacific War had always been to win a string of quick victories, disable the American fleet, secure the boundaries of the new Japanese empire and then make a compromise peace.
No thought had been given to what would happen if the enemy started winning decisive victories, and then showed no inclination to end the war without the unconditional surrender of the Japanese.
Given the enormous resources of the United States it was obvious to everyone that a long war would be calamitous for Japan.
‘From the time when our line along the Owen Stanley Mountains in New Guinea was broken through [September 1942] I lost hope of victory,’ Hirohito recorded in his monologue after the war.
‘So I thought that by thrashing the enemy somewhere we would be able to gain a negotiated peace.
But we had a treaty with Germany against concluding a separate peace; and we could not violate an international agreement.
So I was more or less thinking wouldn’t it be good if Germany was quickly defeated.’
⁵

The disingenuousness of Hirohito’s explanation as to why for three bloody years Japan continued a war he knew could not be won is breathtaking.
The notion that he did not want to make peace out of fear of violating an ‘international agreement’ made with Nazi Germany is nonsensical, given that in the course of the war in China Japan had broken a series of treaties (not least the whole raft of agreements signed at the Washington Conference in the early 1920s).
The Nazis, too, had shown their contempt for international agreements when they smashed into the Soviet Union in blatant disregard of the Non-aggression Pact signed in 1939 (Goering once memorably described international treaties as ‘so much toilet paper’).
A more plausible explanation for Hirohito’s position was that he wanted to continue fighting in order to preserve the ‘institution of the emperor’ and in the process save his own skin.
As a result, his strategy of chasing one decisive victory as a stepping stone to suing for a compromise peace — by which he meant a settlement which would leave him on the throne — was to have disastrous consequences for the country he governed.

The next eighteen months brought the imperial forces nothing but a string of defeats throughout their fledgling empire.
The first half of 1943 brought the loss of Guadalcanal, the fall of Buna in Papua and defeat in the Aleutian Islands.
After a lull in the summer of 1943 the autumn brought more disasters with the successful Allied landing at Finschhafen in Papua, whilst 1944 dawned with the Americans landing on the Marshall Islands.
In February that year, in the face of defeat after defeat, prime minister Tojo attempted to consolidate his position and ensure the cooperation between the navy and the army that had previously been lacking by replacing the army chief of staff, Sugiyama, with the only man he felt was up to the job — himself, whilst the chief of the navy staff was replaced by Tojo’s creature Shimada.
With this new team in place, Tojo believed the Japanese could at last win the decisive victory that would pave the way for peace.
The setting for this great victory would be the battle for the island of Saipan in the Marianas and the conflict in the seas around it.

Saipan was not just another in the long line of islands that the Japanese had tried (and failed) to defend for the last two years.
Unlike the others, it was territory that had been held by the Japanese before the war.
Even though, since the island was held as a mandate, this was not strictly speaking Japanese soil, the arrival of the Americans on its shores marked a worrying development for the Imperial High Command.
If the enemy was not exactly at their doorstep, they had certainly arrived in their backyard.

The 2nd and 4th US marine divisions, comprising some 77,000 men, landed on Saipan on 15 June 1944.
The geography of the island was ideal for the defenders, with high ground overlooking the landing beaches.
The 32,000 Japanese troops under the command of Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito inflicted heavy casualties on the marines beneath them as they came ashore.
‘How I ever went through the twenty-five days and twenty-five nights on Saipan, I don’t know,’ says Michael Witowich, one of the US marines who took part in the battle.
‘Day in day out, day in day out, no sleep.
Only God would know the suffering you’ve got to go through.
I can’t forget my buddies, the horror, seeing them dying and screaming, “Help!
Help!”
There’s nothing you can do.
Guys that are screaming and yelling.
Horrible.
You can see pictures, you can read about them, but you have to be there to listen to the death rattle and the feeling that you get by seeing what’s happening.
It’s horrible.’

As the marines fought on the beaches, Saito was convinced that the approaching Japanese fleet would sink the American ships that were supplying the attackers.
But it was not to be.
Once again, in the ensuing sea battle the Japanese experienced disaster, losing three aircraft carriers and 500 planes.
American reinforcements poured on to the island.
Given that it was forbidden for Japanese troops to surrender, Saito could do nothing more than retreat to defensive positions in the centre of the island and fight to the end — and the end came three weeks later, on the night of 6 July 1944, when 4000 Japanese troops launched a huge banzai suicide charge against the Americans.
Three days later many of those left alive committed suicide by jumping from the cliffs at Marpi Point.
Significantly, for the first time in the war it was not just soldiers and sailors who killed themselves but civilians as well — including thousands of women and children.
‘They would get the child in their arms, and they’d bend over and jump off the cliff,’ says Michael Witowich, who was on patrol nearby.
‘They’d jump and you could hear the screaming of the children on the coral.’
Seeing the children waiting to leap to their deaths, he decided to act: ‘I used to shoot the children as they went down, so they wouldn’t suffer when they hit the coral.
I used to think in my dreams whether it was right for me to do that, so they wouldn’t have to suffer when they went down.
‘Cos when they hit the coral they’d still be alive and have a horrible death, so it’s like shooting a horse that breaks its leg — and this is a human being.’

The civilian suicides on Saipan marked a turning point.
Up to that moment suicide had essentially been the prerogative of the military, or of senior figures within the Japanese elite.
Now, fuelled by the desperate knowledge that their soldiers must not be taken alive, thousands of ordinary civilians took their own lives.
The Japanese army on the island played a key role in encouraging civilians to die, convincing them that it would be shameful to survive the occupation of the island and that the Americans would torture, rape or kill them if they were captured alive.

Japanese propaganda films made shortly after the loss of Saipan emphasize the nobility of dying in the struggle against the Allies, and the message was spread even amongst Japanese school children.
‘We have heard that all our soldiers on Saipan died bravely,’ shouts an army officer to a parade ground full of solemn-faced young children in one newsreel.
‘All the Japanese civilians on the island cooperated with the army and shared their fate.’
The propaganda did not trumpet the reality — that for the first time in the conflict Japanese pre-war territory had fallen and that as a result Tojo had resigned (to be replaced by Kuniaki Koiso, who survived as prime minister until April 1945).
Instead, it proselytized the fiction that there can be glory in defeat if it is marked by self-sacrifice for the good of the nation, the good of the emperor.
The desire for the last elusive ‘victory’ was becoming corrupted into the belief that defeat could become victory if the enemy took the land but not its people.

It was this attitude that was to influence the creation of the most uniquely Japanese military unit of the war — the kamikaze (’divine wind’) — and it was during the battle of Saipan that the seeds were sown for the birth of these institutionalized suicide squads.
On 19 June 1944, in the seas around Saipan, the Japanese air force lost a total of 315 aircraft to the Allies.
It was obvious that Allied military technology had progressed so quickly that the advantage the Japanese Zero fighter had possessed in the early days of the war had evaporated.
Six weeks later in Tokyo, Warrant Officer Shoichi Ota believed he had come up with a solution to the problem.
He showed a drawing of a missile he had conceived to design technician Tadanao Miki.
Incredibly, Ota’s plan called for a missile to be slung underneath a bomber and then piloted the last few miles to its target by a human being.
‘I was amazed,’ says Miki.
‘I thought, “Who’s going to pilot it?”
As an engineer I was against it.
I felt a person’s life could not be regarded so lightly.
But then Ota said, “I would pilot it.”
That’s what he said.
And I thought, “Oh my God!”’
⁷
As a result of Ota’s personal commitment to the project, the missile was put into production.

At the same time as Ota’s missile was being built, Japanese pilots were showing that they too, without specific orders, could sense the mood of the nation.
On 20 August the Ozuki fighter unit was sent into action against American bombers approaching the home islands of Japan.
‘During the dogfight,’ says Masaji Kobayashi, who flew on the sortie, ‘two pilots suddenly announced that they were out of bullets and were going to crash into the B-29s.
I saw two of them deliberately crash their planes into the B-29s.
It was not planned but spontaneous.’
Just as with the sacrifice at Saipan, Japanese newspapers proclaimed that this airborne suicide attack was proof that spiritual strength was every bit as potent as military power.
But Japanese commanders (especially Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi) realized that, outnumbered as they were, it was nothing more than a gesture to sacrifice one Japanese plane for an American one.
If this suicide tactic was to have military as opposed to propaganda value, the target would have to be more significant.
And there was nothing more threatening to Japan than the American aircraft carriers — the war ships that had, from the Japanese perspective, so tragically escaped destruction at Pearl Harbor.

As a result, in October 1944, as the Allied fleet approached the Philippines, and with Ota’s piloted missile not yet ready, the elite Japanese 201st Air Group was given a new task.
Volunteers were called for, and told that their mission would be to fly a plane packed with explosives directly into an Allied carrier.
It was the job of Wing Commander Tadashi Nakajima to explain the new plan to the assembled pilots: ‘I said, “Those who volunteer please write down your names on a piece of paper.”
I wondered.
What would I do if nobody did?
But that evening an officer brought all the scraps of paper to me.
In the whole unit only three had not volunteered.’
The three who had not put their names down were in the unit hospital.
Every able-bodied pilot had said he was prepared to die — some had even signed the request form with their own blood.
‘Later that night,’ recalls Nakajima, ‘one of the officers said, “You asked the rank and file, but you didn’t ask us.”
I replied, “I didn’t ask you because I
knew
you would volunteer.”
And the officer smiled.
He was very happy to hear that.’

On 25 October 1944, aircraft of the Japanese 201st Air Group left their base in the Philippines to mount suicide attacks on Allied carrier groups just over 400 miles (650 km) away.
‘I had just finished breakfast,’ says Robert Fentriss, one of the American sailors in the carrier group targeted by these first kamikazes, ‘and about that time the general alarm went, bong-bong, and then there was the rat-a-tat-tat-tat of machine guns and then WHOOM, that was it.
And in just a fraction of a second the ship was in a roaring inferno.
There was smoke and you couldn’t see — all sorts of confusion.’

’I watched this plane come in,’ says John Mitchell, a gunner’s mate on a nearby US warship, ‘and it just kept coming in.
It was like slow motion almost, because he was firing his guns.
I almost saw the projectiles hitting the deck.
And the plane kept coming in and it didn’t pull out.
And I yelled, “Pull out, you bastard, pull out!”’

The US carrier
Santee
was severely damaged by the kamikaze attacks.
But such was the shock and disbelief amongst the American sailors that it was not until the next day that they fully understood that the Japanese were mounting a mass, planned suicide attack.
‘I was just absolutely dumbfounded,’ says Robert Fentriss.
‘I could not believe that someone would do something like that.
I couldn’t believe what I had seen.
And I said to one of my shipmates who was standing very close to me, “Did you see what that joker did?”
or words to that effect.
That’s the first time I knew it was a kamikaze.’
‘We were a really cocky bunch,’ says Bill Simmons, another US sailor in the same carrier group.
‘We thought we had the war won.
And then when they began the kamikaze attacks, it just scared the living daylights out of everybody.
Suddenly we were not the great navy we felt we were.’