CHAPTER 1
WINTER 1945
In Japan there is a philosophy of death and no philosophy of life.
Kiyoshi Kiyosawa, Japanese historian, January 1945
… there is a point beyond which we will not tolerate insult. If [the Russians] are convinced that we are afraid of them and can be bullied into submission, then indeed I should despair of the future relations with them and much else …
Prime Minister Winston Churchill to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, March 1945
THE BIG THREE SMILED AT the world from the grounds of the Livadia Palace in the Crimean resort town of Yalta. It was February 1945. The chill blowing off the Black Sea pressed the leaders into greatcoats and fur hats: Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Marshal Josef Stalin were meeting here to carve up the old Continent devastated by war and decide the outline of the postwar world.
Peace in Europe was at hand. The destruction and unconditional surrender of Germany were imminent; Japan’s defeat would assuredly follow. Roosevelt had honoured his agreement with Churchill to defeat ‘Germany First’, and the bulk of Allied troops were then in Europe. From the west, over the previous six months, General Eisenhower’s armies had swept across northern France, freed Paris, defeated Germany’s last stand at the Battle of the Bulge and reached the shores of the Rhine. From the east Soviet tanks, troops and artillery had rolled across the Baltic, smashed the Nazi grip on Poland and stood on the threshold of the Fatherland, 65 kilometres from Berlin. No conflict had matched in scale and fury the battle on the Eastern Front, where the Red Army and the Wehrmacht were locked in the vestigial shambles of total war; millions of troops had been killed or wounded and countless civilians slaughtered, raped or left homeless. From his Berlin bunker, the Führer continued hysterically to issue orders that imagined pristine armies on the march where there were only ragged columns of bleeding, hungry, broken men.
Winter kept them warm: the Big Three made a great show of friendship at Yalta, hosting banquets, raising toasts, joking. Photographs present Roosevelt, perhaps the greatest Democrat, now very sick, sitting up in his wheelchair wrapped in a black cape, evoking the patrician hauteur of a Roman tribune; Churchill, lounging about in his greatcoat like a breathless bulldog, radiating delight at the top table, cigar smoke trailing in the direction of his loquacious argument; and Stalin, small and sharp amid the gathering darkness, in his flashing eyes and faithless smile a fixity of purpose that seemed to concentrate the air of menace that preceded him like a personal storm.
In the closing stages of the conference Stalin offered an eloquent expression of goodwill tinged with a warning: ‘It is not difficult to keep unity in time of war,’ he toasted his comrades-in-arms, ‘since there is a joint aim to defeat the common enemy … The difficult talk will come after the war when diverse interests tend to divide the Allies. It is our duty to see that our relations in peacetime are as strong as they have been in war.’
Mutual distrust between Anglo-America and the Soviet Union simmered at Yalta. The Big Three brought deep suspicion and clandestine intent to the table. Several great issues threatened to destabilise, or possibly break, the West’s alliance with Moscow: the question of German and Polish borders; the political status of Eastern Europe; and the terms of Russia’s involvement in the Pacific War. Long before Yalta the ‘danger’ of the Soviet Union had occupied anxious discussions in the State Department. For its part, Moscow was determined to reject any Anglo-American attempt to limit its hegemony over Eastern Europe. On both sides, anxious suspicions were about to flare into fierce disagreement.
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A secret that would astonish the earth – had its contents been revealed – lingered over the Yalta talks: Roosevelt and Churchill arrived bound by a private agreement, signed on 19 September 1944 at the President’s Hyde Park Estate in Washington, not to share with the Soviet Union or the world the development of an extraordinary new weapon that, in theory at least – it had not been tested – drew its power from an atomic chain reaction.* The British codenamed the weapon project ‘Tube Alloys’; the American government dubbed it ‘S-1’. The Hyde Park Agreement conceived of an Anglo-American duopoly over the development of an atomic bomb, ruled out any international controls over the new weapon and named, for the first time, its future target:
‘The suggestion,’ Churchill’s one-page agreement with Roosevelt stated, ‘that the world should be informed regarding tube alloys with a view to an international agreement regarding its use and control is not accepted. [The weapon] should continue to be regarded as of the utmost secrecy … but when a “bomb” is finally available, it should be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender.’†
A handful of British and American officials were aware of Tube Alloys (or S-1): Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s closest cabinet colleagues and those entrusted with leading its construction. The then vice-president Harry Truman, most American and British politicians, and just about everyone else were ignorant of the project. Stalin and his top officials, via their spies (chief of whom was Klaus Fuchs, an exiled German physicist working in the US), were, however, already well informed. Indeed, at this time, Stalin knew more about work on the atomic bomb than virtually every US congressman.
One Washington insider was Henry Stimson, a conscientiously Christian, Ivy League alumnus who served as Roosevelt’s Secretary of War. At 77 Stimson’s long life bracketed the sabre and rifled musketry of the late 19th century, the machine guns of the Western Front and the recent firebombing of German cities. He now contended with the prospect of nuclear war. His outlook was Victorian; his morals, patrician. An ‘unabashed elitist’, Stimson believed ‘richer and more intelligent citizens’ should guide public policy, and that Anglo-Saxons were superior to the ‘lesser breeds’, as he was apt to say. He also dedicated his term as War Secretary to eradicating the nastier aspects of war: he detested the submarine; embraced the 1928 Kellogg–Briand Pact that called for the renunciation of war; and campaigned tirelessly for arms control, international co-operation and mutual trust. Indiscriminate slaughter vexed the conscience of this fastidious gentleman.
Stimson had no illusions that S-1 could be kept secret, and yet he believed sharing the secret of the new weapon with Russia should deliver something in return to America. Stimson knew the Russians ‘were spying on [S-1]’, as he recorded in his diary on 31 December 1944, and told the President so, ‘but … they had not yet got any real knowledge of it and that, while I was troubled about the possible effect of keeping from them [the work on the atomic bomb], I believed that it was essential not to take them into our confidence until we were sure to get a real quid pro quo from our frankness’. Roosevelt had said he agreed.
At Yalta, however, Roosevelt’s mood changed. Notwithstanding Stimson’s advice and the Hyde Park pact, the President felt tempted to divulge the atomic secret to the Russians. Circumstances had shifted: several French and Danish physicists knew of the bomb; and FDR pondered whether candour might remove the risk, and diplomatic uproar, of the French revealing it to Stalin first. Churchill was aghast: ‘I was shocked,’ he told Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, before Yalta, ‘when the President … spoke of revealing the secret to Stalin on the grounds that de Gaulle, if he heard of it, would certainly double cross us with Russia.’ Paramount in Churchill’s mind was the preservation of Anglo-American control of atomic technology; only the British and Americans, Churchill believed, could be entrusted with it: ‘You may be quite sure,’ he told Eden, ‘that any power that gets hold of the secret will try to make [the bomb] and that this touches the existence of human society.’
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In the event, FDR kept the secret. Nobody spoke openly of the bomb at Yalta; the early atomic manoeuvring played out in private salons and the minds of men. The delegates’ top priority was the division of Germany, whose defeat loomed as inevitable. The Big Three formulated an ultimatum to Berlin, which they announced on 11 February 1945: ‘Nazi Germany is doomed,’ it warned:
It is our inflexible purpose to destroy German militarism and Nazism and to ensure that Germany will never again be able to disturb the peace of the world. We are determined to … wipe out the Nazi Party, Nazi laws, organizations and institutions, remove all Nazi and militarist influences from public office … It is not our purpose to destroy the people of Germany but only when Nazism and militarism have been extirpated will there be hope for a decent life for Germans …
The words may have been written for Tokyo: by extension, Roosevelt would accept nothing less than the ‘unconditional surrender’ of Japan. The popular phrase would prove a dangerous hostage to fortune. FDR first used it at Casablanca in January 1943, as an unintended ad lib at a press conference. A prior disagreement between two French generals reminded him of commanders Lee and Grant: ‘We had a general called U.S. Grant,’ he told reporters, ‘he was called Unconditional Surrender Grant. The elimination of German, Japanese and Italian war power means [their] unconditional surrender.’ The President’s words surprised his listeners, appalled the State Department – which had not been informed and feared it would prolong the war and, initially at least, delighted Churchill: ‘Perfect!’ the British Prime Minister exclaimed. ‘And I can just see how Goebbels and the rest of ’em’ll squeal!’ Under the terms of unconditional surrender, the Germans and Japanese would have to lay down their weapons, yield all territory won by conquest, and abandon the whole infrastructure and philosophy of militarism – or face annihilation. There would be no negotiation.
Churchill had gnawing doubts about the wisdom of the policy’s extension to Japan; he well understood the Japanese people’s fanatical devotion to their Emperor, and wondered whether the wording might be softened to encourage Tokyo to disarm. No doubt he continued to believe, as he told US Congress in May 1943, ‘in the process, so necessary and desirable, of laying the cities … of Japan in ashes, for in ashes they must surely lie before peace comes back to the world’. Yet might not a subtle relaxation of the surrender terms avoid further Allied losses, he wondered. And so at Yalta, alone among his American and Soviet colleagues, Churchill suggested that ‘some mitigation [of the terms of surrender] would be worthwhile if it led to the saving of a year or a year and a half of war in which so much blood and treasure would be poured out’. The President dismissed Churchill’s proposal. The Japanese would interpret leniency as weakness, Roosevelt argued. The American people would not tolerate peace negotiations with an enemy who had killed or maimed tens of thousands of American soldiers.
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Japan had to be defeated before she would surrender. To this end, Churchill and Roosevelt openly sought Russian entry in the Pacific War. Whatever their personal view of the Soviet dictator – and Churchill loathed the tyrant George Orwell had recently described as a ‘disgusting murderer temporarily on our side’ who had packed off millions to the Siberian Gulag – the Americans and British needed Soviet help, not least because the Chinese, a spent force, had failed to defeat the Japanese occupying forces, who showed every sign of fighting to the last man. Hence London and Washington desired Russian entry ‘at the earliest possible date’, stated the US Joint Chiefs of Staff in November 1944. Russian military aid would, however, come at a cost, cautioned Roosevelt’s right-hand man, the wily James Byrnes, on several occasions: the more America appealed for Soviet military assistance, the more Stalin would demand in return.
However, the Soviet position in the Pacific was complicated. Until Yalta, Stalin had trod a careful line between threatening and appeasing the Japanese. He initially praised the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact, which had been ratified on 25 April 1941 at a lavish party in Moscow where Stalin had ‘danced around like a performing bear’, embraced and kissed the Japanese delegation and even toasted a ‘Banzai!’ to the Emperor, according to witnesses. The pact stipulated ‘peaceful and friendly’ relations between the two countries until it expired in April 1946. Moscow, however, had had no intention of honouring the spirit of the agreement: in 1941 it bought time for Stalin to re-arm and confront the German threat, safe in the knowledge of a neutral Tokyo in his rear – hence the Generalissimo’s performing bear act. In time, however, he resolved to turn his great armies east and avenge Russia’s loss to Japan in the war of 1904–05. Indeed, Moscow’s successive breaches of the spirit of the pact were drumbeats to the invasion of Japan.* In late 1944, Stalin ratcheted up the stakes in anticipation of striking a better deal at the peace. He fixed his hungry eye on the spoils of Japanese conquest. He wanted to be ‘in at the kill’, as he said, to recoup his down payment of men and materiel likely to be lost in the Pacific. His price included territory Japan had seized from Russia in 1905. In November 1944, Stalin reasserted his price for Pacific entry to Averell Harriman, the US ambassador in Moscow: the Kurils and South Sakhalin should be returned to Russia, along with leases on Port Arthur, Dairen and several railway lines; Outer Mongolia, which had in fact been under Soviet control since 1921, should remain ‘independent’. Harriman saw no serious objection and Stalin’s timely denunciation of Japan as ‘an aggressor on a plane with Germany’ cheered their relationship along.†
Stalin further pressed these demands on the table at Yalta. He aimed to cement the Soviet Union’s strategic claim on Asia. Britain and America acquiesced. On 11 February 1945, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill signed a Top Secret ‘protocol’: ‘The former rights of Russia,’ it stated, ‘violated by the treacherous attack of Japan in 1904’ would be restored, and the islands and leases ‘handed over’ to the Soviet Union after the surrender of Japan.
Roosevelt said nothing of this deal, struck the day after he was officially supposed to leave the Crimea (Stalin had personally asked the President to stay another day). The strictest secrecy prevailed; Byrnes, hitherto one of the President’s most trusted advisers, later claimed he was unaware of the deal; Congress was not informed. The President believed the agreement fair: ‘[The Russians],’ he said later, ‘only want to get back that which has been taken from them.’*
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The ‘Russian Protocol’ was a rare moment of unity at Yalta. In fact deep divisions flared over the break-up of Germany and pushed American and British relations with the Soviet Union to the point of collapse. The argument was technically over the nature of the political system in the recently liberated countries of Eastern Europe. The dispute, however, went to the heart of the question of whether liberal democracy or Soviet communism would prevail in the post-war world.
Stalin’s brutal pragmatism outmatched Churchill’s florid eloquence on the future of Poland. Replying to the British leader’s rosy defence of Polish freedom, Stalin barked that ‘twice in the last 25 years the “Polish door” had opened and let hordes of Germans overrun Russia … Russia was determined this time that it would not happen again’. Stalin proved the ‘real boss’ of proceedings at Yalta and a formidable adversary; his generals jumped to his elbow at the slightest nod.
Churchill and Roosevelt clung to a few brittle reeds in this Soviet gale: the Polish leaders in exile, they insisted, should be invited to participate in a post-war Polish democracy. Churchill had recognised the Polish émigré government in London at the start of the war; how could he face Parliament if he abandoned them? The London Poles were ‘our’ Poles: democratic, hostile to communism, with popular support; Poland’s provisional government then resident in Lublin were Moscow’s Poles, subservient to Soviet demands. Churchill ‘objected violently’ to any recognition of the Lublin Poles.
To no avail: the Soviet leader would impose his chosen regime on Poland, by stealth. On paper Stalin agreed at Yalta to ‘guarantee’ ‘unfettered elections’ by ‘secret ballot’, ‘universal suffrage’ and so on. In practice, Stalin immediately reneged on the Yalta declaration. By March 1945, the Soviet Union had torn up the script, bit by bit: Molotov obfuscated and delayed over the agreed terms, while the Red Army consolidated its grip on Warsaw. Poland soon fell behind the Soviet shadow, as Churchill had warned. With the prescience that had marked his wilderness years, the British leader perceived in Soviet actions a pattern of forceful acquisition, the unyielding nature of which had partly eluded Washington. ‘The Russians,’ he wrote to Roosevelt on 8 March 1945, ‘have succeeded in establishing [in Eastern Europe] the rule of a communist minority by force and misrepresentation … which is absolutely contrary to all democratic ideas … Stalin has subscribed on paper to the principles of Yalta which are certainly being trampled down…’
Churchill’s undying faith in the nostrums of freedom and democracy, his steadfastness when all seemed lost, profoundly moved Roosevelt. The British Prime Minister was the first to grasp the true nature of the beast behind Stalin’s grey uniform and steely black eyes. ‘We are in the presence of a great failure and utter breakdown of what was agreed at Yalta…’ he reminded Roosevelt on 13 March 1945. In that doom-laden rhetoric lay the beginning of the end of the Soviet–American alliance, the fault lines of the Cold War. Britain and America stood helplessly aside – there was little they could do – as Moscow claimed a string of East European ‘satellites’ against the hated Germans. The Western leaders had blinked; then they shut their eyes.
The President’s last letters to Churchill reveal a mind on the threshold of a new and terrifying world: ‘Our peoples,’ Roosevelt wrote on 27 March 1945, ‘are watching with anxious hope the extent to which the decisions at the Crimea are being honestly carried forward.’ They were not; on 3 April, negotiations with the Soviets were ‘at breaking point’, Averell Harriman, America’s ambassador in Moscow, warned the President. Harriman dispatched a list of Soviet breaches of Yalta to Washington.
Soviet–American relations were now frigid and Roosevelt very ill. The President’s famed diplomacy found no traction in the brutish new dialogue that ran roughshod over his patrician decency. James Byrnes, the man many saw as president-in-waiting, had a clearer grasp of the forces that engulfed them, and shared Churchill’s glimpse of the coming darkness. Indeed, Byrnes already saw the dispute with the Soviet Union in military terms: ‘Because of Russia’s potential developments and strong army, [Byrnes] thinks [the] US should stay well-armed,’ his private secretary observed.
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While the Big Three wrestled over the future of Europe, fighting in the Pacific approached the shores of Japan. Here the Allies faced an enemy who, it appeared, was willing to fight to the last man, woman and child. As Joseph Grew, US ambassador to Japan for 10 years, had warned in 1943: ‘I know Japan … I know the Japanese intimately. The Japanese will not crack. They will not crack morally or physically or economically, even when eventual defeat stares them in the face … Only by utter physical destruction or utter exhaustion of their men and materials can they be defeated.’ The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor; the brutality of Japan’s southern advance; the torture and butchery of prisoners and locals; the enslavement of nations – all alerted the Allies to a new kind of foe, and a new kind of war. They were not fighting an opponent who hoped to live – even the Germans surrendered when overwhelmed; nor an enemy who observed any recognisable moral or physical constraints; but rather a kind of unnatural spirit that seemed to glorify cruelty and death. That, at least, was how the Allies viewed ‘the nips’ – from the soldier at the frontline to the people and political leaders at home.
By early 1945 a darker vision of the Pacific enemy prevailed. Washington and London had gathered evidence of Japanese atrocities that portrayed an enemy intent not only on torturing and murdering prisoners and civilians – in contravention of all recognised rules of warfare (the Japanese had refused to sign the Geneva Convention of 1929, which prescribed the humane treatment of prisoners); but one that had adopted such brutality, in the name of racial conquest, as a policy of war. Allied war planners were aware of the facts, for example, of the 1937 ‘Rape of Nanking’, during which the Japanese butchered tens of thousands of Chinese civilians and raped more than 20,000 women. More recent Japanese atrocities involved American soldiers: on the Bataan Death March, for example, 2330 American and 7000 Filipino prisoners died of starvation, sickness, torture and execution after General Douglas MacArthur’s forces surrendered to the Japanese in the Philippines on 9 April 1942. ‘To show [the prisoners] mercy is to prolong the war,’ was how the Japan Times justified the general treatment of prisoners at the time.
They showed little mercy to the very end, as countless examples demonstrated: in Rabaul in 1942 Japanese troops tied 160 Australian prisoners to palm trees and bayoneted them to death, as practice, placing a sign, ‘It took them a long time to die’, beside the bodies; in Palawan, in December 1944, the Japanese commander ordered the elimination of 150 American prisoners, who were drenched in petrol, crammed into air shelters, and ignited; those who tried to escape were shot. Washington and London were aware of ‘Unit 731’, Japan’s biological warfare unit, which was developing a ‘bacillus’ bomb that would spread lethal bacteria and poison enemy food and water supplies. The Imperial Army had used biological weapons, containing typhoid and cholera bacteria, against Chinese cities in 1942. In late 1943, Unit 731 reportedly planned to spread lethal bacteria over Burma, India, Australia and New Guinea; and in 1944, to drop biological weapons on the Americans at the Philippines and Saipan.* The Japanese forces’ proposed ‘cholera strategy’, according to enemy documents captured on Luzon in March 1945, recommended spraying bacterial solutions by aeroplane; dropping bombs containing bacteria; dropping infected insects, animals and animal tissue; and leaving pathogenic organisms behind while retreating.†
Evidence of Japanese war crimes implanted in Allied minds a cold and unyielding hatred, which intensified the sense that they were fighting a retributive war – not only against the Japanese armed forces, but against the Japanese people. This thinking permeated the highest levels of Allied command. In Admiral Bill Halsey’s eyes, the Japanese were ‘bestial apes’, a commonly held view; to the Australian commander, General Sir Thomas Blamey, the Japanese were ‘not normal human beings’ but ‘something primitive’: ‘Our troops have the right view of Japs,’ he said. ‘They regard them as vermin.’
Indeed, American, British and Australian servicemen were trained to think of the Japanese as ‘bloody little yellow swine’, ‘semi-educated baboons’ and ‘filthy monkeys’ – some of the less vehement epithets used in troop training. Marines went into battle with the words ‘Rodent Exterminator’ stencilled on their helmets. Leatherneck, the marines’ magazine, cast the enemy as a species of lice, Louseous Japanicus, that had reached epidemic levels: ‘Before a complete cure may be effected the origin of the plague, the breeding grounds around the Tokyo area, must be completely annihilated’. This issue appeared on 9 March 1945, the night of the firebombing of Tokyo. Frontline soldiers did not need to be told to hate ‘the nip’. The evidence of their eyes decided the servicemen’s feelings: the sight of their comrades’ mutilated bodies and the suicidal fury of Japanese troops. In this sense, the soldiers’ hatred was emotional – and understandable.
At home, the media routinely portrayed the Japanese as beneath contempt: cunning little rats; disfigured, slant-eyed freaks; a simian invasion, and so on. To the press, this was a racial war in all but name: ‘In Europe,’ wrote Ernie Pyle, the GIs’ favourite war correspondent, ‘we felt that our enemies, horrible and deadly as they were, were still people. But out here I soon gathered that the Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman or repulsive; the way some people feel about cockroaches or mice.’ Upon seeing Japanese prisoners, Pyle wrote: ‘They were wrestling and laughing and talking just like normal human beings. And yet they gave me the creeps and I wanted a mental bath after looking at them.’ Serious magazines such as Science Digest and Time soberly examined whether the Japanese people were in some way genetically inferior: ‘Why Americans Hate Japs More than Nazis’ ran one headline in Science Digest. Hollywood never cast a good Japanese, but often a good German.
Western governments were ready to exploit and popularise the hatred of the Japanese. The Germans were a bit ‘like us’ – if deceived by an evil doctrine – but ‘there was no such thing as a good Japanese; Japanese were all evil beyond redemption’, was a typical view. Washington legislated to intern Japanese Americans, though not German or Italian ones, ‘giving official imprimatur to the designation of the Japanese as a racial enemy’.
Nor did Allied leaders attempt to distinguish the Japanese armed forces from the Japanese people, and easily conflated the loathing of the military regime with a general contempt for the race. Roosevelt himself was not above making crude racist jokes about the Japanese, and commissioned a study of the ‘scientific’ evidence of the inferiority of the ‘Asiatic’ races and the effects of racial crossing, in which Smithsonian Professor Hrdlicka remarked that the Japanese were ‘utterly egotistic, tricky and ruthless’. Churchill, a grand old white supremacist, wanted those ‘yellow dwarf slaves’ dead in great numbers, as soon as possible; he never forgave them for humiliating Britain at Singapore. Australia’s Labor government outdid them all, introducing a formal policy of racial hatred as an instrument of war, which broadcast advertisements that ended, ‘We always did despise them anyhow’. A lone voice opposed the use of hatred as war policy: Robert Menzies, Australia’s conservative Opposition leader, in one of his most dignified speeches, attacked this hysterical demonisation of a whole people.
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Ordinary Japanese people were ignorant of, or wifully blind to, the atrocities being committed in their name. The truth of what their soldiers had done at Bataan and on dozens of coral atolls throughout the Pacific went unreported. The torture and murder of prisoners was not a feature of Japan’s prison camps in previous wars; during the Russo–Japanese and Great War, the Japanese had treated their Russian and German prisoners with care and dignity.
The people, however, heard little from the frontline except news of real or imagined victories. In the winter of 1944–45, most Japanese refused to believe the portents of doom that filtered through after the American landing on the Philippines. They were too thoroughly immersed in the myth of Japanese supremacy to contemplate defeat; surrender was unthinkable.
A series of spectacular military triumphs had persuaded many ordinary Japanese of their sacred destiny – to rule the world. By 1945 this notion relied on a mystical faith in Japanese ‘spirit’, the residual delusion of four decades of unbeaten conquest. In 1894, the Meiji Emperor looked out from his headquarters in Hiroshima, the point of his troops’ embarkation and triumphal return, flushed with pride after victory in the first modern war with China. Greater laurels awaited the armies of Nippon: only the fall of Singapore in 1942 would imbue the Imperial name with greater reverence than Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1904–05. The astonished world witnessed in those offensives an undeveloped Asian nation, scarcely freed from the shackles of feudalism, crush the armies of the Tsar and the British Empire. Europe and America strained to comprehend how this little archipelago, so recently ‘opened’ to the West, managed to wipe out the Russians at Port Arthur, then deemed the world’s most impregnable fortress; inflict 100,000 Russian casualties at the battle of Mukden in March 1905; and sink Russia’s Baltic fleet, which had sailed halfway around the world to meet its dismal end on the seabed of the Tsushima Strait. To Russian anger, Japan seized under the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 a lease on the southern Liaotung – later the Kwantung – Peninsula; control of Russian railroads and other assets in Manchuria; a claim on the southern half of the island of Sakhalin; control of the strategically important cities of Dairen and Port Arthur; and a virtual protectorate over Korea – the ‘dagger’ pointing at the heart of Japan – which Tokyo formally annexed in 1910 as a bulwark against future Russian aggression. The wounded Russian bear crawled back into her cave; her pride never forgave the Japanese for the loss of so much blood and wealth. Indeed, Moscow’s humiliation long outlived the Russian Revolution, and the new Soviet empire hankered for revenge.*
The defeat of Russia emboldened the Japanese to embrace a policy of conquest. The country’s acute shortage of raw materials also impelled it to covet an Asian empire that would supplant the British, French and Dutch colonies in the Pacific. The wealth of the British Empire had not gone unnoticed in Tokyo. To this end Japan’s rulers – in league with the armed forces – precipitated the occupation of Manchuria in 1931 that led to the creation of the puppet state Manchukuo, infuriating Russia; withdrew sulkily from the League of Nations; provoked the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 1937 in order to justify the full invasion of China; joined fellow pariahs Germany and Italy in the Tripartite Pact, signed on 27 September 1940; and occupied French Indochina, triggering US trade sanctions and the likelihood of war with America. In October 1937 President Roosevelt had demanded the quarantining of Japan and Germany for spreading an ‘epidemic of world lawlessness’; in December 1941, without warning, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
Throughout Japan’s military expansion, the Imperial forces claimed to be acting in the Emperor’s name, or with the Emperor’s tacit approval. Since the 1920s, the Japanese people had been taught to believe in the policy of military expansion as the divine right of Nippon, an expression of the Imperial Will. In the 1930s, Tokyo’s newly minted propagandists dusted down the ancient idea of the Emperor’s divinity. The Essence of the Kokutai (the Imperial state), published in 1937 by the Thought Bureau of the Ministry of Education, described the Emperor as a deity in whom the blood of all Japan ran, back to Jimmu and the Sun Goddess. ‘Our country is a divine country,’ stressed The Essence, ‘governed by an Emperor who is a deity incarnate.’ Belief in the Kokutai became orthodoxy.*
Hirohito, accordingly, despite his diminutive appearance, shrill voice and spectacles, embodied the power of the sun, ‘the eternal essence of his subjects and the imperial land’. He existed at the heart of Japanese identity. The people worshipped him as Tenno Heika, the ‘Son of Heaven’, and a divine monarch. Their adoration of the Emperor cannot be understated: killing or removing him dismembered the body and soul of the nation; the rough equivalent of the crucifixion of Christ.
While he had no official policy-making role, Hirohito held the title of Supreme Commander of the Imperial forces. Often he was the dupe of the commanders, who used his name to justify aggression. Until 1944, Hirohito approved in silence, or through courtiers, or other codified channels, Japan’s policy of military expansion. He excused the elite Kwantung Army’s crimes in Manchuria as ‘excesses’; he approved the invasion of China; he formally ordered the capture of Nanking; and he frequently exhorted the troops to rise to the challenge. Often Hirohito gave the green light by saying nothing, or cued action with the faintest approbation: on the eve of Pearl Harbor, for example, he pointedly did not ask newly appointed Prime Minister Hideki Tojo to attempt to heal relations with Britain and America, as he had asked Tojo’s predecessors. Or he simply failed to check aggressive interpretations of his words: when Tojo fell, in 1944, he pressed Japan’s new leaders to continue to prosecute the war, which they interpreted as Imperial orders to destroy America and Britain.*
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The Japanese regime promoted love of Emperor in tandem with hatred of the West. The people were exhorted to hate the enemy, and hate him to death. The Americans and their allies were cowards and monsters, morally depraved and barbaric, who sent skulls of Japanese boys home to America as souvenirs (as several Japanese newspapers claimed). Anti-American articles and posters appeared every day: ‘If one considers the atrocities which [the Americans] have committed against the American Indians, the Negroes and the Chinese,’ fumed the respectable economic newspaper Nihon Sangyo Keizai, on 5 August 1944, ‘one is amazed at their presumption in wearing the mask of civilisation.’
‘The demons and beasts are desperate in their all-out counter-offensive!’ stated a leaflet issued by Japan Steel’s Hiroshima Plant. ‘We will wipe them out by increasing production! Now is the time to send letters of encouragement to our soldiers!’
Japanese children were prime targets of this propaganda. Throughout the 1940s, school posters urged children to ‘Kill the American Devils’; boys and girls were instructed to attack images of Churchill and Roosevelt. The message found its mark. In February 1943 teachers asked schoolchildren in Aomori Prefecture to suggest ways of disposing of some 12,000 ‘blue-eyed sleeping dolls’ donated to Japanese schools years earlier by American charities. Of 336 children in one school, 133 chose to burn the dolls; 89, to dismember them; 44 to send them back to America; 33 to throw them into the sea; 31 to exhibit and torture them; and five to drape them with a white flag. One child suggested they be used as models for identifying American spies.
The Japanese regime keenly implemented this program of demonisation on the country. In 1942, for example, an army PR man rebuked on national radio a Tokyo woman who had exclaimed, ‘Poor fellows!’ at a ragged line of American prisoners of war passing in the street; in April 1943 the army severely criticised a newspaper that had dared mention ‘the existence of positive elements in the American heritage’. And older Japanese found it hard to shed their admiration for European and American culture and technology, which they had been taught to respect, even emulate, in earlier benign times.
In the 1940s, ‘Thought Prosecutors’ roamed the cities under the control of the Justice Ministry, ferreting out ‘dangerous thinkers’ – pacifists, leftists, journalists and Koreans. Meanwhile, Special Higher Police (tokko ka), deployed under the Peace Preservation Law, monitored the mind as well as the voice of Japan. That meant throttling the expression of both. In 1944, a Mainichi reporter thoughtfully asked in an article, ‘Can Japan Defeat America with Bamboo Spears?’ A furious Tojo had the miscreant dispatched to China. Persistent dissidents were tortured. But few challenged the censorship laws. Between 1928 and 1945, only 5000 people were found guilty of violating the Peace Preservation Law. In 1934, the peak year, 14,822 were arrested and 1285, prosecuted; in 1943, those figures were 159 and 52 respectively. Only two were sentenced to death: Richard Sorge, the Soviet master spy, and his accomplice Hotsumi Ozaki, for espionage.
By 1945, most Japanese had become compliant self-censurers who rallied around the war effort. State-approved intellectuals applauded the war as a sacred cause against ‘Anglo-Saxon exploitation’. Poets eagerly volunteered to recite their haiku in factories and at the front. Newspaper editors exulted in news of victory and distorted evidence of looming defeat.
By suppressing the most obvious truth – that Japan was losing the war; yoking a brutal version of Bushido, the samurai code, to Japan’s ‘divine destiny’; and imposing a series of nihilistic slogans (‘one hundred million hearts beating as one’ – ichioku isshin; ‘The eight corners of the world under one roof’ – hakko ichiu) on the nation, Japan’s more fanatical commanders hoped to lead the people in an act of national seppuku (ritual suicide), a blood sacrifice to the Emperor, rather than surrender. As 1945 opened, the regime seemed to be succeeding in binding the people to a mass-suicide pact: most Japanese showed a willingness to fight to the death, with bamboo spears, if need be.
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Not all Japanese were completely fooled. Doubts stirred in the minds of the better-informed, or more intelligent. After the fall of Saipan, in late 1944, many people privately began to question whether they were winning the war. The struggle to survive seemed grossly at odds with the glad tidings of government propaganda. ‘If we’re winning the war why have we so little food?’ people reasonably wondered. Government agents requisitioned all the rice they could carry, leaving middle-class families hungry, and poorer ones, starving. ‘We were always told, “we’re winning the war, we’re winning the war”,’ remembers a then 20-year-old maths teacher. ‘But everything was rationed. The shops were all closed.’
‘We heard only good news,’ said Kiyomi Igura, a young nurse from Nagasaki in 1944. The city held a lantern festival at news of the fall of Singapore and ‘everybody walked about holding lanterns’. That was February 1942; in the winter of 1945, Nagasaki ‘began to have doubts’, she said, ‘but no-one could bring themselves to say that Japan might lose.’ Victory was assured, despite the food shortage: ‘The mood of the time was very much that Japan would definitely win the war.’
A few brave citizens dared to criticise the government and challenge the Peace Preservation Law. Some broke the censorship rule that forbade the reading of pamphlets dropped from American planes; they read of terrible losses on distant battlefields – in New Guinea, Burma and the Philippines. The people grew dimly conscious of a coming trauma, of a creeping realisation that ‘we were all going to be killed’.
Those are the words of a man who, at great personal risk, committed his thoughts to paper. The liberal historian Kiyoshi Kiyosawa wrote a ‘diary of darkness’ in which he charted the moral and spiritual degradation of Imperial Japan. A well-connected, cultured man, Kiyosawa struggled in vain to reconcile the obscenity of Japanese military rule with his rectitude and intellect. His was a voice of sanity in a world of madness: ‘When I listen to the morning radio,’ he wrote on 15 December 1943, ‘I find it completely insulting to the intelligence. There is the attempt to make the entire nation listen to stuff that has descended to this … Even if I do listen, I am enraged.’
Kiyosawa’s calm, almost innocuous, words render his barbs sharper. He noted the effect of Tokyo’s policies on ordinary people: soaring inflation, parasitic black marketers, cheated farmers and acute malnutrition (‘Not one orange appears in the shops’) were not incidental hardships, the tolerable sacrifices of war. They were signs of a nation on the brink of military and spiritual collapse, the miscarriage of bad leadership and public stupidity: ‘… the media world is still getting its ideas from divine inspiration. Is it possible to win the war in this way?’
He took a scythe to the regime:
I would like to mow down
the thick weeds of silly ideas and politics
which thickly surround us …
The kamikazes were not heroic; they were blind, lost young men, a terrible waste: ‘Outstanding youths are on the brink of … complete destruction.’
‘Spirit’ alone would not win the war; the ‘ghosts of our fathers’ were dead: ‘It goes without saying that the intellectual background of the Pacific War is based on extreme feudal ideas. The celebrity of … the “Forty-seven Ronin” [the fable of 47 Hiroshima samurai who disembowelled themselves for their Lord] has never been as intense as it is at present.’
The US Navy blockade ensured Japan’s steady exhaustion of raw materials. The shops’ shelves were bare. ‘Japan has finally come to an internal stalemate,’ wrote Kiyosawa. The empty holes that had been shops in the Ginza, Tokyo’s retail district, looked ‘as if teeth had been extracted’. By August 1944, the ‘Greater East Asian War’ had ‘robbed’ Japan of all kinds of iron. The railings on bridges, the fences of cemeteries, and even the bronze statues of the Sojidera, a Zen Buddhist temple in Yokohama, no longer existed. All had been requisitioned, removed and melted down. Hiroshima, Nagasaki and other Japanese cities were similarly denuded; their temples and churches stripped of platinum, gold and other metals, to be turned into weapons.
Kiyosawa dared to ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolled for Japan, for Tojo and his cabinet, whom he judged the most stupid on record and who were forced to resign in July 1944, after the loss of Saipan. Tojo’s resignation statement on 19 July disgusted him: ‘I deeply regret the anxiety that [this loss] had caused to His Majesty … But these developments [give us] the opportunity to smash the enemy and win the war. The time for the decisive battle has arrived.’ Kiyosawa held Tojo and his cabinet personally responsible for ‘plunging Japan into misery’. In January 1945 Kiyosawa lost faith in Japanese spirit and descended into his own dark place: ‘In Japan there is a philosophy of death and no philosophy of life.’*
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A short-lived duumvirate of General Kuniaki Koiso and Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai succeeded Tojo and continued, at least in public, to drum up enthusiasm for the war. In private, Yonai and other relatively moderate cabinet members dared to discuss how they might terminate it. By the end of the year most high officials knew the war was unwinnable.† Some ministers secretly contemplated open surrender. In late 1944 Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo dared inform Marquis Koichi Kido, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal and the Emperor’s closest adviser, that ‘unconditional surrender, may be unavoidable’. Kido, among the best informed of the elite, had earlier confided in his diary that 1944 looked ‘precarious’, and drew up a ‘peace proposal’, which he set aside for extraction at the appropriate time.
In early 1945 these men came together as a loose gathering that would be called the ‘peace party’, a clandestine group of top officials who secretly believed that Japan had lost the war; that a way must be found to open negotiations with America; and that any peace deal must preserve the Imperial line. They deeply distrusted the armed forces, and lived in constant fear of assassination. Foreign minister Togo, the most consistent ‘dove’, became their unofficial leader. With his round glasses, caterpillar moustache and thoughtful demeanour, Togo fitted the traditional Japanese mould of the intellectual public servant. Born in 1882, in Satsuma, to a samurai family, he had risen rapidly through the foreign service to become ambassador to Germany in 1938. Having lived in ‘the west’, Togo felt he understood it. He had also warned against militarism. His essay, ‘A Foreign Policy for Japan Following Withdrawal from the League of Nations’, of 27 March 1933, had urged Japan to consolidate in Manchuria and advance no further into Asia: ‘It is essential that … we avoid conflicts with other countries, unless conflict be forced upon us,’ Togo had cautioned. ‘The basic policy towards the United States should be … to prevent war.’ His quiet demurral fell like a snowflake on a gathering firestorm.
Twelve years later, in January 1945, Togo, together with Kido, Yonai and other less consistent moderates, found themselves contemplating the imminent destruction of Japan. Circumstances forced them to consider not whether, but how to surrender. Their long debates hinged on three questions: (1) How to persuade the Japanese forces to lay down their weapons? (2) What were the most favourable peace terms Japan could hope for? (3) Would the Emperor, if shown the gravity of the situation, be prepared ‘to wager the future of his throne’ and intervene to end the war? They knew that the armed forces ‘could only be controlled through the Emperor, whose influence could deal a crushing blow to any would-be opposition’ to ending the conflict.
Meanwhile, the American forces drew closer to the Japanese main islands. In early 1945 the Tokyo regime deemed the cities on the southern island of Kyushu the frontline of a planned American invasion. The inhabitants were warned to prepare themselves. Every day the people scanned the horizon and strained their ears for the sight and sound of enemy aircraft. The airfields of Saipan, now in the hands of the US, were within striking distance of Tokyo, and from December 1944 there were nightly air raids on the capital, Osaka and other cities.
The moderates ensured the Imperial Household was kept aware of the rising threat to the homeland. The Emperor heeded the warnings, and started to distance himself from the militarists. From late 1944 Hirohito sensed the war was lost and requested an assessment of the military outlook from Prince Fumimaro Konoe, a member of one of Japan’s most prestigious families. Konoe, an intelligent observer of events, had, like Togo, advised against going to war with America. On 14 February 1945, as American forces invaded the Philippines and the Big Three met at Yalta, Konoe delivered his verdict: ‘I regret to say,’ he told the Emperor, ‘that Japan’s defeat is inevitable.’