Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (84 page)

At the time of the surrender, there was no prospect of agreement no matter how many discussions they had …. When Suzuki asked me at the Imperial conference which of the two views should be taken, I was given the opportunity to express my own free will for the first time without violating anybody else’s authority or responsibilities.
¹⁰⁴

Hirohito then recorded a surrender message to the Japanese people which admitted that ‘the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage’ and that in order to avoid ‘the total extinction of human civilization’ Japan would have to ‘endure the unendurable
and suffer what is unsufferable’.
¹⁰⁵
Army officers broke into the palace to destroy this recording before it was broadcast, killed the head of the Imperial Guard and set fire to the homes of the Prime Minister and the chief court minister. But they failed to stop the broadcast; and immediately after it the War Minister and others committed suicide in the Palace square.
¹⁰⁶

The evidence does not suggest that the surrender could have been obtained without the A-bombs being used. Without them, there would have been heavy fighting in Manchuria, and a further intensification of the conventional bombardment (already nearing the nuclear threshold of about 10,000 tons of
TNT
a day), even if an invasion had not been required. The use of nuclear weapons thus saved Japanese, as well as Allied, lives. Those who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the victims not so much of Anglo—American technology as of a paralysed system of government made possible by an evil ideology which had expelled not only absolute moral values but reason itself.

The true nature of Japan’s form of totalitarianism only became apparent when the row camps were opened up and the International Military Tribunal began its work. Its president, Sir William Webb, noted:

… the crimes of the Japanese accused were far less heinous, varied and extensive than those of the Germans accused at Nuremberg [but] torture, murder, rape and other cruelties of the most barbarous character were practised on such a vast scale and on such a common pattern that the only conclusion possible was that those atrocities were either secretly ordered or wilfully permitted by the Japanese government or its members, or by the leaders of the Armed Forces.
¹⁰⁷

David James, the British interpreter who visited the main camps after the surrender, noted the collapse of absolute moral values among officers of the post-1920s intakes, who had been ‘thoroughly drilled in
Kodo
and state Shinto’ and who were responsible for the routine cruelties: ‘they had the same killing instincts in and out of action …. For that reason there was that common pattern of atrocity which appeared to surprise the Tribunal sitting in Tokyo.’ The regime did not possess concentration camps as such: at the most it had only four hundred political prisoners of its own. But its
POT
camps were run on the same economic principles as Nazi and Soviet slave-camps. After visiting them James reported in September 1945:

The basic principles of Japanese row administration were: extract the maximum amount of work at the minimum cost in food and military supplies. In the end this plunged them into an abyss of crime which engulfed the entire administration and turned Japanese into murderers pure and simple …. All camps were run on the same lines: they did not break any of their own regulations … if we try them we must bring evidence against individuals but it is the system which produced the criminals.
¹⁰⁸

Hence, of the 50,00 prisoners who worked on the Siam railway, 16,000 died of torture, disease and starvation. Captured Japanese field orders repeatedly emphasized that prisoners thought to be of no use were to be killed. Evidence before the courts showed that Japanese medical officers removed hearts and livers from healthy prisoners while they were still alive. Cannibalism of Allied prisoners was authorized when other food was not available. The Japanese killed more British troops in prison camps than on the field of battle. The Japanese
POW
record, in fact, was much worse than the Nazis’: of 235,000 Anglo—American
POWS
held by Germany and Italy only 4 per cent died, whereas of the 132,000 in Japanese custody 27 per cent died.
¹⁰⁹

The Allied Tribunal in Tokyo sentenced twenty-five major war criminals, especially those responsible for planning the war and the four major horrors – the Nanking massacre, the Bataan ‘death march’, the Thai—Burma railway and the sack of Manila. Seven, including Tojo, were hanged. Local military commissions condemned a further 920 war-criminals to death and over 3,000 to prison. Of the non-white judges of the Tribunal, the Indian, Radhabino Pal, dissented, saying the Japanese had acted throughout only in self-defence and that the trial was ‘victors’ justice’. The Filipino judge, Delfin Jarahilla, said the sentences were too lenient. In fact Japanese atrocities against Indian and Filippino soldiers and against Chinese, Malay and other non-white civilians were infinitely more savage and numerous than any inflicted on the Anglo-Americans.
¹¹⁰
The chief victims of the system were the Japanese people, of whom more than 4 million died: for the same dogma which taught men to treat prisoners as capital criminals was responsible both for the decision to embark on suicidal war and the delay in making peace. Prime Minister Konoye, one of the guilty men, left by his deathbed a copy of Oscar Wilde’s
De Profundis
, having carefully underlined the words: ‘Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still’ – an epitaph for totalitarian Japan.
¹¹¹
And, as we have noted time and again in this book, the holistic principle of moral corruption operates a satanic Gresham’s Law, in which evil drives out good. The American aircraft which destroyed the convoy reinforcing the Lae garrison in New Guinea, 3 March 1943, machine-gunned the survivors swimming in the water, reporting: it was a grisly task, but a military necessity since Japanese
soldiers do not surrender and, within swimming distance of shore, they could not be allowed to land and join the Lae garrison.’
¹¹²
It became commonplace for the Allies to shoot Japanese attempting to surrender. One of the defending counsel at the Tribunal, Captain Adolf Feel Jr, exclaimed bitterly: ‘We have defeated our enemies on the battlefield but we have let their spirit triumph in our hearts.’
¹¹³
That was an exaggeration; but it contained an element of truth. The small-scale Japanese bombing of Chinese cities in 1937–8 had been condemned by the entire liberal establishment in America. When the time came to determine the first target for the atom bomb, it was the President of Harvard, James Conant, representing the interests of civilization on the National Defense Research Committee, who made the decisive suggestion ‘that the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses’.
¹¹⁴

In any case, the confusion of moral issues by the end of the war was fundamentally compounded by the presence, in the ranks of the righteous, of the Soviet totalitarian power. There was scarcely a crime the Nazis or the knights of bushido had committed, or even imagined, which the Soviet regime had not also perpetrated, usually on an even larger scale. It ran precisely the type of system which had produced the war and its horrors. More specifically, the Nazi-Soviet Pact of September 1939 and the Japanese-Soviet Pact of April 1941 had made the Axis aggressions possible.

Nevertheless, Soviet Russia not only judged the guilty of the war it had helped to create but emerged as its sole beneficiary, by virtue of precisely one of those secret wartime treaties – or bribes – which the Treaty of Versailles had so roundly condemned. And not only Versailles. The Atlantic Charter of 14 August 1941 (reiterated in the United Nations Declaration of 1 January 1942) stated that the signatories ‘seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other …they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely-expressed wishes of the peoples concerned’. The Anglo-Russian Treaty of Alliance, 26 May 1942, stated (Article 5): ‘ they will act in accordance with the two principles of not seeking territorial aggrandizement for themselves and of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states’. Yet at the Yalta Conference of January 1945, in return for agreeing to enter the war against Japan ‘two or three months after Germany has surrendered’, Stalin demanded recognition of Russia’s possession of Outer Mongolia; southern Sakhalin and adjacent islands; internationalization of Darien with the safeguarding of the ‘pre-eminent interests of the Soviet Union’; the lease of Port Arthur as a base; the right to operate, jointly with the Chinese, the Chinese Eastern railway and the South
Manchurian railroad, with safeguards for ‘the pre-eminent interests of the Soviet Union’; and, by outright annexation, the Kuril Islands. Roosevelt agreed to all these acquisitive conditions virtually without argument; and Churchill, desperate for his support on issues nearer home, acquiesced, since the Far East was largely ‘an American affair …. To us the problem was remote and secondary.’
¹¹⁵

China, the principal victim of this gross act of territorial larceny, which made the destruction of her regime possible, was not present at Yalta and, though an ally, was not even informed of these terms in principle until six months later, or in detail until 14 August, by which time Russia had declared war and the agreement was irreversible. The official Russian declaration of war was not-issued until four hours after the Japanese had agreed in principle to yield.
¹¹⁶
Stalin got his blood-bargain for nothing, and the legitimate powers could not justify the surrender of their salient wartime principle even on grounds of iron military necessity.

What gave an additional dimension of mockery to the trials of German and Japanese war-criminals was that, at the very time when the evidence for them was being collected, Britain and America were themselves assisting Stalin to perpetrate a crime on a comparable scale, to the point of using force to deliver the victims into his hands. The Allies knew, and said nothing, about the Soviet deportation of eight entire nations in the years 1941 and 1943–4, though this was a war-crime under the definition of genocide later drawn up by the United Nations (9 December 1948). But they could not ignore the Soviet demand, made on 31 May 1944, that any Russian nationals who fell into Allied hands during the liberation of Europe must be returned to Russia, whether or not they were willing. In practice it was found that 10 per cent of ‘German’ prisoners were in fact Russians. Some wanted to return; some did not. They were units in a vast human convulsion few of them understood. A British intelligence report (17 June 1944) noted: ‘They were never asked if they would like to join the German army but simply given German uniforms and issued with rifles …. These Russians never considered themselves anything but prisoners.’
¹¹⁷
The Americans resolved the dilemma by treating any prisoner in German uniform as German unless he insisted he was not. The British Foreign Office insisted on a pedantic rectitude. Its legal adviser, Sir Patrick Dean, minuted (24 June):

This is purely a question for the Soviet authorities and does not concern His Majesty’s Government. In due course all those with whom the Soviet authorities desire to deal must be handed over to them, and we are not concerned with the fact that they may be shot or otherwise more harshly dealt with than they might be under English law.

On this basis, and despite Churchill’s misgivings, the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, forced through the War cabinet a decision (4 September 1944) which wholly conceded Stalin’s case, and which was later written into the Yalta agreement.
¹¹⁸

As a result, many hundreds of thousands of human beings were dispatched to Stalin’s care. Of the first batch of 10,000, all but twelve went voluntarily. An American diplomat watched their arrival: ‘They were marched off under heavy guard to an unknown destination.’ With time the reluctance increased. The men aboard the
Empire Pride
, which docked at Odessa on 10 June 1945, had to be held under armed guard and included many sick and injured from desperate suicide attempts. A British observer recorded:

The Soviet authorities refused to accept any of the stretcher cases as such and even the patients who were dying were made to walk off the ship carrying their own baggage … [One] prisoner who had attempted suicide was very roughly handled and his wound opened up and allowed to bleed. He was taken off the ship and marched behind a packing case on the docks. A shot was heard but nothing more was seen.

He added that thirty-one prisoners were taken behind a warehouse, and fifteen minutes later machine-gun fire was heard. The senior
POW
on the ship, a major, informed on about 300 of those on board, all of whom were probably shot. Then the major was shot too – a typical Stalin touch.
¹¹⁹

In an excess of zeal, the British Foreign Office also handed over 50,000 Cossacks who had surrendered in South Austria. These men had been refugees for over a generation and were not liable to repatriation even under the Yalta deal; but they were given to Stalin as a kind of human bonus, together with their wives and children. Some 25,000 Croats were likewise ‘returned’ to the Communist regime in Yugoslavia, where they became showpieces of a ‘death march’ through the cities: ‘… starved, thirsty, emaciated, disfigured, suffering and agonizing, they were forced to run long distances alongside their “liberators”, who were riding on horses or in carts’.
¹²⁰
In order to force these men, women and children across the frontiers, British troops had to use their bayonets, in some cases shooting to kill to break resistance, and occasionally employing even flame-throwers. There were large numbers of suicides, sometimes of whole families.
¹²¹
Of those presented to Stalin many were promptly shot. The rest lingered on in the camps, their existence unknown or forgotten, until in due course Solzhenitsyn drew attention to the vast scale of this particular infamy. But of course forcible repatriation was only one aspect of the problem raised for the Anglo-Saxon powers by their now triumphant totalitarian ally.