Book Review - A History of Modern Japan by Richard Storry

 A History of Modern Japan by Richard Storry

London: Penguin Books, 1990 (revised edition published 1982)  ISBN 014013512X

This is a good, if somewhat dated, political history of Japan focussing on the Meiji period and beyond. At 300 paperback pages covering 150 years of history, it is necessarily brief, but no less informative for that. Storry begins his history with a brief overview of Japanese history prior to Perry's mission to Japan, writing about the rise and fall of the Emperors, Shoguns and Tokugawa, explaining that while Perry's visit and ultimatum to the government was a major factor in the cataclysmic changes that overtook Japan, there were other internal pressures that were also released by the Black Ships arrival.

One thing that is conveyed well by this book is the fact that in a generation and a half Japan changed from a feudal aristocracy into a modern industrialised country, more along the lines of Germany than Britain, but perhaps with a British sense of empire and mission.

Before the war Japan was not a democracy in the modern sense - with limited suffrage, the state was ruled by a small group of aristocrats, business men and the military. The military successes against Russia in 1904-5 gave the Army and Navy greater prestige, enough to enable them to destroy any government by withholding their ministers. This power, in combination with a resurgent sense of nationalism, led the Army in particular to dream dreams of expansion in Asia. Dreams that the Army acted on without the approval of the government. 

The weakness of the various cabinets that were formed in the 1920s and 30s meant that inexorably Japan was drawn deeper and deeper into their Manchurian adventure, their Korean annexation, and eventual invasion of China. The World looked on askance, but had it's own problems to deal with, and didn't focus on Japan's aggression until it was very much too late. Meanwhile in Japan itself, those political actors who understood that Japan could not conquer China, defeat Russia and take over the Pacific at the same time were sidelined or assassinated.

The Pacific War came to Japan even though most in the Navy and the government didn't want it. Their feeling was that the West, with its sanctions, forced them into action. Japan didn't have the infrastructure, industry or manpower to win all the battles it picked, and their defeat was total.

The rebuilding of Japan, and its ability to put the past behind it and turn into a modern democracy, is testament to the spirit of the Japanese people - in eighty years they went from feudalism to an empire, and after the war they went from abject surrender to the second biggest economy in the World. Storry tells us that Japanese inquisitiveness and willingness to learn from others are key attributes that enabled them to build and build again.

For a quick update on modern Japanese history, that deals well with the confusion of the 1930s in particular, this is worth a read.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Tokyo Trial by Higurashi Yoshinobu

 The Tokyo Trial: War Criminals and Japan's Postwar International Relations by Higurashi Yoshinobu

Tokyo: Japan Publishing Industry Foundation for Culture, 2022   (First Japanese edition 2008)

                                                                                                                   ISBN 9784866582306 

Those of us with an interest in World War Two history, it would be fair to say, have some sort of understanding of the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi Leaders that took place after the War - who was tried, what the charges were, and the sentences handed out. Knowledge of the Tokyo Trial of "Class A" war criminals is much less common - people might know that it happened, and that Tojo was executed, but that might be the limit of what people know.

Higurashi has written a comprehensive history of not only the Tokyo Trial, but the strategic and political factors that weighed on its staging, who was charged, and what happened to the prisoners after the Trial finished. A Professor in the Faculty of Law at Tokyo University; Higurashi cannot himself be charged with being a great stylist (the translation by the Japan Institute of International Affairs may not have helped his cause here), with the text being quite dry and legalistic, and the book sometimes back-tracking on itself. These issues can lead the reader to get lost occasionally, but are minor impediments to working through the text.

The book is comprehensive: in eight chapters, Higurashi covers viewpoints on the Trial, the framework of the Trial, what charges were brought, the Japanese response, how the Judgement was written, why there were no further trials, and how and why the surviving Class A prisoners were released. He describes how the Trial became problematic almost from the start. The Allies had already begun the process of developing charges in Nuremberg, and tried to translate that process to the Japanese sphere, which didn't really work. There was no all-governing party such as the Nazis, and no SS, so the charges for the "Class A" criminals were confined more to waging aggressive war and conspiracy (war crimes such as atrocities and murder of prisoners etc. were "Class B" and "Class C" trials, and so are not covered by Higurashi).

Conspiracy was not a concept in Japanese law, and there was much discussion about ex-post-facto law. However, the trial moved forward, with general approval of the Japanese populace, who were looking for someone to blame for their predicament. How the Emperor escaped getting any of the blame for the War is well-explained in this book - a combination of politics and loyalty meant that he was never brought to trial, despite many of the nations participating in the proceedings wishing to do so. In this case, as in many others, the wishes of the United States were granted, as they felt that lenient treatment of the Emperor was key to controlling Japan during the Occupation.

Higurashi describes in great detail the progress of the Trial, the conflicts between the various Allied powers, how the verdicts were reached, and the dissenting judgement of Judge Pal from India. He notes that by the time the Trial was nearing its end, not only the Japanese population, but also the peoples of the Allied nations were less interested in the outcome (the full transcript of the Trial has never been published, according to Higurashi). The Allied populations were more interested in the trial and conviction of the "Class B" and "Class C" criminals.

At the end of the Occupation, Japan began lobbying for the surviving "Class A" criminals to be released. The onset of the Cold War meant that Japan was a vital strategic asset to the Western Powers, and so quickly and quietly, about ten years after conviction, the surviving prisoners were paroled - many went on to careers in politics in the New Japan.

Higurashi briefly describes the development of the idea in Japan that the trial was merely "Victor's Justice", and how it came to be that war criminals were inducted at the Yakasuni Shrine, but that is not the focus of this work.

This is not really a book for sitting down and reading in front of the fire: it is however a highly detailed and solid reference work on the Trials. While the translation may be workmanlike, the apparatus is very good - a good index, and useful bibliography.

If you are at all interested in the Tokyo Trial, this is worth hunting out.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Whirlwind: the Air War against Japan 1942-1945 by Barrett Tillman

 Whirlwind: the Air War against Japan 1942-1945 by Barrett Tillman

New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2011          ISBN 9781416584414

This was an interesting and informative book. It was also a frustrating and annoying one. While it does describe the American air war against Japan, and does have some interesting historical information to impart, it focuses too much on the American side, not enough on the Japanese, and the style is so cliche-ridden it takes away not only from the information Tillman is trying to impart, but also from the pleasure of reading.

The book starts with a brief survey of the development of strategic thinking around air power, and specifically strategic bombing, which is a useful entree into what comes later. We then move on to the Doolittle raid, before moving into the main part of the story, and the book.

The main part focuses on the B29 - its development, initial use from China, and then the raids engendered from the Marianas, before the two atomic bomb missions that ended the war. Tillman covers the initial arduous missions that originated from China, flying their bombs, fuel and equipment "Over the Hump" from India - it took seven journies over the Himalaya to transport enough fuel for one 'plane's bombing mission.

The results from these sorties were underwhelming, partly because the B29 could only reach the south of Japan, and because the American bombing strategy was not effective with the new bomber. Precision daylight bombing, which was the American way, achieved poor results in Japan. One of the issues was that, from 32,000 feet, the B29 was flying in the jetstream, which affected the fall of the bombs, the first time any 'plane had this problem. The lack of numbers of aircraft over the target was a problem as well. Before Curtis LeMay turned the whole B29 operation around, the poor serviceability of the fleet meant that many bombers never made it to the target.

Curtis LeMay, young and focused, was not satisfied with the poor results the B29s were achieving, and so he completely changed how they operated after a blitz of training and maintenance fixed the problems of navigation and serviceability. From high-altitude precision bombing, he changed to low altitude carpet bombing with incendiaries which, over the course of a few months, destroyed about 40% of the urban area of Japan's main cities. This bombing, while terrifying to the victims, was much more effective in crippling the industrial capacity of Japan than the previous strategy.

Tillman spends some chapters on the Naval contribution to the campaign - by 1945 the Japanese ability to defend against mass incursions of aircraft was limited, and so Carrier task groups could sail close enough to any part of Japan and wreak havoc, which they did mainly against airfields and naval assets. Tillman writes about the futility of some of these attacks, especially against the Japanese Navy in the Inland Sea, which had been effectively bottled up by the B29s that mined many of the waters around Japan, apart from the fact that Japan's stocks of fuel oil were practically exhausted.

The books final chapters deal with the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which covers all the bases of that story, from an American viewpoint.

So, as a work of history, Whirlwind covers the bases, and if you know nothing about the history of the Pacific War you will learn something. The main issue I have with this book is the style that Tillman has chosen to use in writing this book. It's a bit too tabloid for the kind of serious history I think he intended, and some of the metaphors and similies he's used are quite jarring and occasionally border on the offensive. Another annoyance are the seemingly endless non-sequiters which leave the reader scratching their heads trying to work out the point that Tillman was trying to make.

I was looking forward to this book, but finished it feeling underwhelmed. It could have been much more than it is. I'll keep looking for a definitive tome on this subject.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Zone of Emptiness by Hiroshi Noma

Zone of Emptiness a novel by Hiroshi Noma

Cleveland OH: The World Publishing Company, 1956

What an interesting read -When  Zone of Emptiness was originally published in Japan in 1952, it not only became a very popular novel, but was one of the many works of art from the early 50s that helped demolish the idea that the Japan of the wartime years consisted of a monolithic country all focused on one purpose and one God-Emperor.

The novel is written around two main characters, Kitani and Soda, who are privates at an army base near Osaka, late in the war. While there is no talk yet amongst the men of losing the war, they know that to be sent to the Southern fronts was a death sentence.

Kitani has just returned to his unit from two years in prison, to which he was sentenced for stealing an officer's wallet. Soda is a university student who has been drafted, and is working in the headquarters section of the unit. Kitani and Soda strike up a friendship, despite their differing backgrounds. Kitani is consumed by rage at his sentence, blaming Lieutenant Hayashi for pressing false charges against him, as well as his lover, the prostitute Hanai, whom he thinks betrayed him. His one desire is to exact revenge against these two, and any other accomplices in his fate. Soda has fallen in love with Kitani, and so tries to help him if he can.

The book's wider themes are the corruption that existed in the Japanese Army - Kitani learns at the end of the book that he was in fact the dupe of another Lieutenant who was engaged in ripping off supplies, which is one of the reasons he gets such a harsh sentence - and the lack of a feeling of duty amongst the men. Like most men in most armies most of the time, they are more concerned with keeping warm and fed, rather than the larger issues of the War, and right and wrong. The casual brutality with which the Japanese Army is associated is on display here, as well as a lack of brotherly feeling between the troops.

In the end the story is a tragedy - Kitani cannot revenge himself for the wrongdoing that he perceives has been done to him, and the corruption within the Army means that he is sent to the Front, as the rich father of one of those initially picked to go bribes the Sergeant to change the names on the list. The book ends with Kitani on the ship at night, waiting for the inevitable, and wondering if in fact Hanai may have been true to him after all.

The title of the novel comes from the character Soda, who sees life in the Army as a Zone of Emptiness - a place that is completely disconnected from the outside world, where nothing of any import occurs. He feels trapped, both physically and mentally, and morally as well, as he witnesses the corruption around him, knowing that there is nothing he can do to stop it.

One can easily see how this book would have made such an impact on publication - given the indoctrination of the Japanese people during the war years, this book would have been seen as iconoclastic, as well as possibly ringing true to those veterans who had made it back home. It is a searing indictment against Imperial Japan.

It seems that there has only ever been one translation into English of this book, the one I read, published in 1956 - interestingly a translation by Bernard Frechtman of the French translation of the Japanese original, which was published as Zone de vide.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Fires on the Plain by Shohei Ooka

Fires on the Plain by Shohei Ooka, translated by Ivan Morris

Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1957 (1990 printing)    ISBN 0804813795

I'm glad that my reading of Embracing Defeat by John Dower led me to this novel by one of the most well-known writers of Post-War Japan. Shohei Ooka was drafted into the Japanese army in 1944 and sent to the Philippines - Fires on the Plain is loosely based on his experiences there.

We first meet the protagonist of the story - he definitely doesn't see himself as a hero - Private Tamura, as he is being upbraided by his commanding officer from returning to his unit from hospital. It's made clear that food, not fighting, is the number one priority, and he is just an extra mouth to feed. So he heads back to the hospital, where he is unable to enter as without food he is not welcome. So he camps with the other hospital rejects, where he meets the unscrupulous old soldier Yasuda, and the young soldier he has under his sway, Nagamatsu.

When the hospital is bombarded by the Americans, he escapes into the hills. Sure that he will soon die, he wanders aimlessly until he finds an abandoned field of potatoes, and recovers his health. One day he explores a little further, and sees from the top of a hill the cross on a church in a village down by the shore. Seeing the cross makes him think of his own early-life battles with the concept of God, and he makes the decision to head down to the village to meet his fate.

When he gets there he finds the village deserted, apart from dogs and the corpses of some Japanese soldiers that have been massacred. He enters the church, but finds himself unmoved by the experience. When he is resting in the vicarage, he is disturbed by a Filipino couple who enter the house: there is a confrontation and Tamura (accidentally?) kills the woman, while the man escapes. He finds what they were looking for - a cache of salt - and leaves the village, discarding his rifle on the way back to his hilltop garden.

When he gets back there he finds a group of Japanese plundering the garden. He befriends them by offering some of his salt. They inform him that all soldiers have been ordered to fall back to the coast where they will be evacuated by the Navy. As they head toward the rendezvous point the stragglers become a stream of bedraggled, starving and dying troops. Tamura runs into Yasuda and Nagamatsu again, trying to swap tobacco for potatoes.

The troops mass to attempt a night-time crossing of the main highway, now under the control of the Americans. It turns into a massacre that Tamura escapes by heading back the way he came. Looking down on the highway from the hill he has escaped to, Tamura sees an American Red Cross truck arrive at the scene of the previous nights massacre: he sees the medics collect those still living, and tend them before taking them away. He then decides to surrender, and heads back down to the highway. When he gets there, he witnesses another Japanese soldier being shot while attempting to surrender, and flees to the hills again.

Now starving, his thoughts turn to cannibalism, and when he comes across a dying Japanese officer who offers his body to Tamura for food, Tamura has a crisis, and decides that not only will he not eat human flesh, but he will no longer eat any living thing. He eventually collapses, but is rescued by Nagamatsu, and taken back to the camp he is sharing with Yasuda. They have been surviving on "monkey meat", which Tamura soon realises is human flesh: Nagamatsu has been hunting surviving Japanese soldiers for food. In the madness that follows Nagamatsu kills Yasuda, and Tamura kills Nagamatsu, before beginning his wanderings again, collapsing and being taken prisoner.

The book ends with Tamura being in a mental hospital, trying to process his experience.

When the book was originally published in 1951, it was a sensation in Japan, with it's clear-eyed view on personal responsibility for death, the horrible truth of the final months of the Japanese Army, and the smashing of the myth of troops willing to die gloriously for the Emperor.

Ooka dwells on a few themes in this book, mainly what it means to be human, what is God and how is God relevant to humans in situations such as that described in the novel. This translation, by Ivan Morris, reads well and fluently, and the book is quite gripping - I read it in two sessions.

Recommended.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Embracing Defeat by John W. Dower

Embracing Defeat : Japan in the wake of World War II by John W. Dower

New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999          ISBN 0393046869

Has any country in modern times ever been as comprehensively defeated in was as Japan in 1945? How does a country cope with such a crisis? How do the victors treat such an enemy? John Dower, in this comprehensive and well-written book, looks at these questions: how Japan coped with defeat, occupation, and the beginnings of reconstruction. This is obviously a book about the Japanese, but in many respects it is also about the Americans, and their behaviour as occupiers. Japan's initial reaction to defeat was shock and despair. The country had been ravaged by the War and millions of men killed, only to be laid prostrate before the victors. Starvation was a very real possibility in the early days of the occupation, and while black-marketeers and other fat-cats did well, many Japanese were financially, physically, and spiritually ruined by defeat and what came after.

The Occupation, headed by General MacArthur and the bureaucracy of SCAP (Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers), had total control over the country. The Americans excluded the other Allies from any real input to the decision-making process, and controlled the Japanese Government through a mix of carrot-and-stick. The decisions of SCAP were final, and neither politician or press could criticize the Occupation forces in any way. SCAP also engaged in censorship of published and broadcast material, with a strict prohibition on publicising that such censorship was even occurring.

This was not the only circumstance that jarred with MacArthur's lofty declamations promising freedom and justice for all. Japan's freedom to vote for a Government of  their choice was circumscribed by harassment of left-wing parties, and the insistence of the US on the retention of the Emperor. The Japanese people saw the hypocrisy of much of what occurred, which only added to their cynicism about the occupation, after a hopeful beginning. Allied hypocrisy and Japanese cynicism reached a height during the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Initially the Japanese public were shocked to hear of the horrible acts committed by their troops, but the way the trial of the Class A War Criminals was conducted - excluding the Emperor from all blame, not allowing the defendants a proper defence, excluding the Japanese from playing a part in the prosecution, not ensuring all evidence was translated into Japanese - led to a widespread feeling of the trials being merely victor's justice.

Much of the grand rhetoric MacArthur espoused at the beginning of the occupation about freedom and peace had dissolved by the time the occupation was over. While elections were held and suffrage extended, the power of the bureaucracy was not diminished vis-a-vis the elected representatives of the people. Dower points out that this ironically was the outcome of SCAP's total domination of government affairs during the occupation: when the American bureaucrats left, the Japanese bureaucrats took over. Similarly, after SCAP broke up the large Zaibatsu, they left the door open for them to morph from industrial enterprises to financial enterprises, and thus continue in a slightly different form.

The biggest change in Japan during the occupation years was in thinking about military power, and war-making ability. MacArthur enforced the carriage in the Constitution of Article Nine, rejecting war as a solution to diplomatic problems and forbidding the country from having armed forces. There was some "wriggle room" in the wording of the final document (Dower writes well on the problems of translation from English to Japanese, and how the Japanese at times managed to twist meaning in the translation process) but most Japanese understandably supported such an initiative. When the Korean War broke out however, the US were not only keen for the Japanese to produce munitions, but also wanted them to re-arm: perhaps the ultimate irony. Article Nine has been a problem for Japan ever since.

Dower has immersed himself not only in the machinations of politics, but also in the day-to-day lives of the Japanese during this time - how they survived, what they thought of their rulers both foreign and domestic, and how they came to terms with defeat, loss and grieving. He also shows us the explosion of culture that sprung out of defeat, and the new-found freedoms (despite the censorship), that defeat and occupation gave everyday citizens.

Embracing Defeat is well-worth reading for anyone interested in the history of Japan, and of World War II. Highly recommended.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Japan's Decisive Century by Shigeru Yoshida

Japan's Decisive Century by Shigeru Yoshida

New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967          LC No. 67-22296

This is a book that is in turn informative and disingenuous: written by Shigeru Yoshida, Japan's Prime Minister in 1946-47 and again from 1948-54, it originally written as an essay for the Britannica Book of the Year in 1967.

Given its origin, the broad-brush approach Yoshida takes is understandable. What is less understandable is how one writes a history of Japan covering the years 1867-1967 and entirely leaves out the years 1931-1945, which - to this reader at least - would seem to be the crux of Japan's "decisive century".

Yoshida himself was not an advocate of war with the Western Powers in the 1930s, but chooses not to discuss in any way the progression of Japan from an Imperial Power that was Asian in outlook to one that waged war across the Pacific. This is a fatal lacunae in this book, and one which turns it into a work of two separate parts.

The first, dealing with the opening of Japan to the West, shows how Japan worked hard at adopting from the West the institutions, technology, and skills to enable them to remain - almost uniquely in Asia - free of Western domination. Yoshida then posits that Japan, after victory over Russia, lost her way morally, which allowed the militarists to dominate.

He weaves a similar story around Japan's post-war renaissance, with his people's ability to absorb what they needed from others, and working hard together with a spirit of sacrifice to enable the country once again to grow. At the time of writing, Yoshida was concerned that moral drift had once again become a danger to the country.

Yoshida has written this book with his eye on Western readers rather than on reaching for historical truth. As such it is a fascinating insight into how this post-war leader viewed his country's recent past.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Retribution by Max Hastings

Retribution : the Battle for Japan 1944-45 by Max Hastings

New York: Vintage Books, 2007                  ISBN 9780307275363

Max Hastings and Antony Beevor have become the doyens of World War II history in the early Twenty-First Century. Retribution is an interesting concept; an overall look at the final twelve months of the entire Eastern War. How to tackle such an immense task is a valid question, which Hastings has answered by looking at topics in turn. He begins with the summit held at Hawaii in July 1944 between Nimitz, MacArthur and Roosevelt, where the future of US strategy for the war was confirmed. Hastings sets the scene in this chapter, briefly covering the flow of the War to this stage, and laying out for the reader the tensions that existed between the Allies, and within the US itself.

His chapters then range from Burma, the Philippines, the Island Campaigns (focusing on Iwo Jima), the Nationalist Chinese, Prisoners of War, the Communist Chinese, the bombing offensive, and finally the atomic bomb and Russian offensive in Manchuria. While he writes well and at times eloquently about specific incidents, he also develops some themes throughout the book that are worth discussing.

The first theme is that of logistics, supply and technology. Early in the book, Hastings repeats the astonishing statistic that for every four tons of supplies shipped by the US to its armed forces, Japan shipped two pounds to theirs. While America realised the importance of supply, Japan didn't, and Hastings points out that the Japanese never came to grips with the idea that supply was just as important as the fighting quality of their troops.

America not only won the supply battle, but also the technology battle, and Hastings shows that more than in previous wars, improvements in technology, often gained at great expense, sometimes drove policy. Having spent a fortune on developing the B29, the US felt they had to find a way to use it. Enter Curtis LeMay, who changed the precision bombing tactics favoured by the USAAF up until 1944 to area incendiary bombing, the success of which meant some post-fact justification, given the previously espoused aversion to bombing civilian areas. Hastings' chapter on the atomic bomb is also instructive in this respect, with the political leaders not really grasping the World-changing nature of the device before it was used, but with the amount of money and effort required to create it part of the decision-making process. Hastings is also aware of the politics behind the decision to use the atomic bomb, with the US desire to win the war before the intervention of the Soviets certainly playing a part.

The friction between the Allies is a fascinating story, well-portrayed in this book. The US were very reluctant for the Colonial Powers to take up their former territories after the War, to the extent that they refused to help the French in Indo-China, while Britain and Australia for differing reasons were critical of the US efforts to sideline their input to Japan's defeat. The games played by the Nationalists in China eventually saw them lose the whole-hearted backing of the US, as the latter country began to fully realise the corruption and ineffectiveness of Chiang's regime.

The conflict within the US armed forces and government is also well-covered by Hastings. MacArthur was in many ways a loose cannon: his narcissism led to many a failure, but his popularity back home meant he couldn't be relieved of command. Hastings paints the re-taking of the Philippines as more wasteful than it should have been, with the destruction of Manila essentially a by-product of MacArthur's vanity. Hastings has little time for MacArthur as a battle commander, and no time for his publicity-seeking or politicking. He also deprecates Halsey for his error in pursuing the Japanese carrier decoy at Leyte Gulf, which Hastings puts down to Halsey wanting to one-up Spruance. There is no love lost either for Mountbatten, whom Hastings sees as out of his depth. In fact the only Allied commander whom Hastings admires is Slim, all the while acknowledging that Burma was in many respects a sideshow of the War.

And what of the Japanese commanders and government? It was clear to many if not most, that the War was lost in 1944, so why did they fight on? Honour and "Face" were certainly part of the equation, but also the mistaken belief that if they inflicted massive losses on the Allies, Japan might be able to reach a negotiated truce. Their lack of understanding of Allied feelings and indeed self-knowledge of their own actions in the War led them to believe - even as late as July 1945 - that they could reach an armistice that would allow them to keep Manchuria, Formosa and Korea and not be occupied. The combined blows of the atomic attacks and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria gave the Emperor a way of forcing a surrender onto his government while maintaining some sort of "Face", and a way to "endure the unendurable". The devastation that such wrong-headedness unleashed on their own people and country almost beggars belief, but as the title of this book suggests, perhaps it was a just punishment for what the Japanese perpetrated across most of Asia.

This book is certainly a must-read for anyone interested in the history of World War II: there is much more within its pages than this review has covered, all of it interesting and well-written.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Hidden Horrors by Yuki Tanaka

Hidden Horrors : Japanese War Crimes in World War II by Yuki Tanaka, with a foreword by John W. Dower

Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1996                 ISBN 0813327180


This is an interesting book with much food for thought, which endeavours to map out a new path for academic study of Japanese war crimes. Tanaka looks at some specific war crimes committed by Japanese soldiers and sailors, and tries to show how such things could have occurred through looking at the structure, training and beliefs of Japanese society and the Armed Forces in particular.

The first crime he examines in detail is the Sandakan Death Marches, where he notes how the Japanese mostly used Koreans and Formosans (Taiwanese) as guards for Prisoners of War. The brutal treatment handed out to these guards by their Japanese masters, they passed on to the Prisoners under their control. Tanaka also looks at the way Japan did and did not abide by the Geneva Convention, using prisoners for war work, and progressively starving them as Japan's position in the War became more perilous. While not excusing individual acts by Japanese soldiers and sailors, Tanaka shows the reader how the culture of the Japanese Armed Forces and the pressure of war led to such outcomes. It is interesting to note that in the first of the Sandakan Marches many Japanese also died. The horrific logic of war crimes came into play at Sandakan as well, with earlier outrages driving the Japanese to ensure that they left no witnesses alive.

Tanaka then moves on to the topic of rape and "Comfort Women" (a topic he has written on at some length subsequent to this book). He draws parallels here with both the Russians in Germany and the Allied occupation of Japan. The treatment of women in war is often horrific and Tanaka has some ideas on the transgressive nature of women in uniform, and how male bonding in war can lead to such outrages; ideas that others have written on in more detail.

Tanaka's next subject is Japanese cannibalism, on many levels perhaps the most troubling crime. This practice was quite widespread, and was not always the result of hunger. Sometimes dead Japanese were eaten, and sometimes even shot for food. Tanaka can give no real reason for the cannibalism that makes sense, except where is was obviously driven by hunger... certainly it was something that the Japanese wanted to hide when they could, with Allied discoveries of this practice usually occurring after they surprised groups of Japanese, or made sudden advances on the battlefield. The Allied attitude to reports and evidence of these crimes is interesting as well. While the Americans thought that such things should be publicised in aid of the war effort, the Australians were against the idea because of the distress it may have caused on the home front. That there were so few prosecutions for the crime after the war is put down by Tanaka to the reason that it would have caused distress to families of the victims, and the problem of providing evidence that would stand up in a court-room (i.e. of eye-witnesses to the consumption of the flesh, rather than evidence of cooking etc.).

The next chapter, on Unit 731, investigates the concept of "doubling": how doctors could experiment on live people, and how they justify it. Tanaka also here begins to look at Japanese acknowledgement that what they were doing was wrong, at least to the extent that they wanted to avoid punishment. The members of Unit 731 captured by the US were given immunity from prosecution on the basis that they handed over their research, after the US were assured that no Prisoners were used in experiments. The Soviets later showed that these assurances were lies.

Which brings the reader to the last crime that Tanaka looks at, the massacre of civilians at Kavieng. Tanka uses this incident to look at several things: how the Japanese concept of Gyokusai ("glorious self-annihilation") led to the "strategic necessity" of eliminating civilians, and how the soldiers involved knew they were doing something wrong, as they were ordered not to speak of the killings and rehearsed a cover story to explain the deaths away. What is also interesting in this example is that senior officers ensured the massacre happened in such a way that they could avoid blame. The readiness of such officers to blame conveniently dead colleagues for crimes was also much in evidence after the War.

In his conclusion, Tanaka shows how the Japanese Military moved from being a force that was compassionate to its prisoners and its own members who had been taken prisoner (in the early 20th century), to one where it was better to die than be taken prisoner. This certainly had an effect on how the Japanese treated Allied captives. The Japanese belief in themselves as the chosen race, and in their Emperor as a god, had a malignant effect on their treatment of conquered peoples. Tanaka calls in this book for a new historiography of Japanese war crimes, whereby Japanese - in a similar manner to the Germans - look at the whole of the wartime era, and how as a country they could have come to a point where such horrors were allowed to happen. This new historiography has yet to happen in Japan in any major way, although this book is now over 20 years old.

One for the serious students of the Pacific War, this book is worth reading, although in lacking a bibliography it leaves limited options for further study.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Japan's Imperial Conspiracy by David Bergamini

Japan's Imperial Conspiracy by David Bergamini, with an introduction by Sir William Flood Webb

London: Heinemann, 1971                               ISBN 0434066907

What a piece of work this book is. The subtitle on the cover; "how Emperor Hirohito led Japan into war against the West", is what Bergamini sets out to show us in over a thousand closely argued and densely woven pages. Bergamini (who was interned by the Japanese in the Philippines during the war) sets out to show the reader that Hirohito, far from being the puppet ruler of common historical thought, was actually a driven empire-builder, who spent decades preparing his "Strike South" into Asia, attempt to rid Asia of American and British influence and assert Japanese overlordship of the globe. There is no doubt that Bergamini had a fire in his blood to prove his thesis.

Whether he does, even after a thousand pages, is unclear. Even though there are almost one hundred pages of notes, Bergamini often puts his own interpretation on what his sources are saying, sometimes to the point of stating that the sources mean the opposite of what they say. He makes much of the allusive style of the Japanese, and the horror of losing face, to perhaps twist motivations and actions of people to fit his ideas.

So what is his thesis? Basically that Hirohito was fulfilling his grandfather's pledge to rid Japan of Westerners and become a great empire. The two options to do that were to "Strike North", attack Russia and slice off Siberia for a Japanese enclave, or "Strike South", and move into South-East Asia and gain the raw materials there. Bergamini sets up the two factions, and shows that Hirohito early on decided on a "Strike South" strategy, and spent years discrediting the "Strike North" faction by engineering all the coups and assassinations that occurred during Japan in the 1930s. Hirohito then prosecuted the War, not as a puppet-like figurehead, but as a vigorous war leader.

Unfortunately for Bergamini, when he gets to the crucial parts of his thesis, the evidence lets him down. During the various coups in the 1930s, Hirohito did not play the part Bergamini wants him to play, and the general absurdity of his idea that Hirohito would countenance a coup against his government and assassination of his Prime Minister to discredit one faction or another is a bit too much to take.

However, there is a lot of information in this book, and it is a fascinating insight into recent Japanese history. The quick technical advancement of the Japanese nation, which combined with a kind of naivety about world opinion and affairs, is something that characterises the period of which Bergamini is writing.

When it gets to the War (to give an idea of how much space Bergamini commits to the intrigues of Japanese history before the War, the Pearl Harbour attack doesn't appear until page 800), Bergamini is perhaps on surer ground, but still draws some strange conclusions; for instance, he claims that Japanese brutality toward prisoners was a deliberate ploy to try and get the West to sue for peace - now the Japanese may have been naive as to the ways of the West to a certain extent, but it's hard to see how Bergamini can come to the conclusion he does on the evidence he presents.

So what was Hirohito's role in the planning and execution of the War? Bergamini is probably right when he (briefly, given the size of his book), explains how Hirohito escaped charge at the end of the War, and that the 28 "Class A" war criminals sent to trial were carefully picked to ensure that Hirohito's name was not sullied. There is no doubt that Hirohito should have faced court as did other leaders of Japan, he was not a constitutional monarch like George VI, and had much more control over events than has been generally explained. Certainly the Australian Government wanted Hirohito to be tried. The Americans - led by MacArthur - who had to run occupied Japan, knew that they needed a compliant Hirohito to enable that occupation to take place, and to help Japan rebuild herself after the devastation. To a Western outlook, Hirohito cannot have escaped the moral guilt of waging aggressive war, even though he escaped the arms of justice.

I'm not sure if I recommend this book or not. There is certainly a lot of information in here for the student of recent Japanese history, but it needs to be leavened with much other reading.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The path of infinite sorrow by Craig Collie & Hajime Marutani

The path of infinite sorrow : the Japanese on the Kokoda Track by Craig Collie & Hajime Marutani

Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2009            ISBN 9781741758399

The campaign along the Kokoda Track (or Trail, as my Father’s generation would have it), is an icon of Australian military achievement. Pushed back over the Owen Stanleys by a superior Japanese force, the militia forces of Australia eventually halted the attack at Ioribaiwa and Imita Ridge, and then with the help of AIF forces returned from North Africa, they pushed the Japanese back to the Northern coast of New Guinea and destroyed them in the battles around Buna, Gona and Sanananda. There have been many Australian treatments of the campaign, with Peter Brune’s Those ragged bloody heroes one of the best, along with the Official History.

The path of infinite sorrow is that altogether rarer thing, a history of the Kokoda campaign from the Japanese viewpoint. Collie and Marutani have written the Japanese side of the story using, as a base, interviews conducted in the early 2000s with some Japanese survivors of the campaign. The result is an interesting and enlightening book.

Many Australian accounts of the campaign emphasise the terrible conditions and the fear of an unseen enemy, portraying the Japanese as supermen, with the jungle being their natural habitat. It is enlightening to read that the Japanese struggled just as much with the conditions, and saw the Australians as dangerous enemies, who were rarely seen owing to their natural ability to fight in the jungle – and brave beyond compare because they wore hats rather than helmets in battle!

The authors give a good account of the leadup to Kokoda, describing Japanese attempts to reach Port Moresby by ship failing after the Battle of the Coral Sea. When a force was landed on the coast, its task was not to reach Moresby, but merely to reconnoitre the track leading to Kokoda to see if it was suitable for an army to campaign along. Instilled with martial spirit, the over-enthusiastic officers of the South Seas Detachment turned their reconnoitring mission into a full-scale assault, and soon overwhelmed the Australian force holding Kokoda.

As the Australians dropped back, the problem of supplying an attacking force over a precipitous walking track became more acute, and by the time the Japanese reached Ioribaiwa they were at the end of their tether logistically and physically. The troops could see the lights of Moresby at night, but neither had the strength or the numbers to take the next ridge, let alone face the Allied troops that would have awaited them closer to the town. Supply was not only a problem along the Track itself, but also to the rear bases at Buna and Gona, as the combination of Allied air attacks and the prioritising by the Japanese of the assault on Guadalcanal meant that few supplies were getting onshore in New Guinea.

The Japanese withdrawal back to the Northern coast became a rout, with troops falling out of line with disease or hunger, to be left to die or make a futile final stand when the Australians came down the track. When the retreat had been completed, the coastal beach-heads were defended by a force that consisted of some infantry, engineering and other non-combatant forces, and those ill or wounded troops that could hold a rifle.

Despite an ingenious and deadly system of interlocking bunkers, it was only a matter of time before the Allied troops (the U.S. Army had now joined the fray) over-ran the Japanese defences, leaving only a few able to escape death or imprisonment. It was a complete defeat for the South Seas Detachment

.

This book is a well-written account, easy to follow for those unfamiliar with the battles of the campaign and - by using interviews as the basis for the narrative – brings the reader right into the misery and pain of soldiering in New Guinea in 1942. There is some discussion of grander strategy, but as this book is focusing on the soldier’s experience, it is always in the background.

 While there is an acknowledgement in the text of the brutality and cannibalism of the Japanese soldiers during the campaign, it is rather lightly brushed over, perhaps in deference to the feelings of the Japanese who were interviewed. While there can be some argument that the instances of cannibalism were driven by the extreme circumstances of the Japanese troops, who were literally dying of hunger by the end of the campaign, to excuse the bayoneting of bound prisoners in cold blood with the lines “This is not inconsistent with Japanese military training….Military training is not for the squeamish; he who hesitates in hand-to-hand fighting is lost.” is a very cheap way out of looking at the issue. It’s clear in the book that the Australians were just as proficient in hand-to-hand fighting as the Japanese, and yet their superiors didn’t find it necessary to make them kill defenceless people. A greater insight into why the Japanese felt the need to kill like this would have been a welcome addition to the book. Not many prisoners were taken by the Australians, as most of the Japanese fought to the death, and after a few instances of Australians being killed by wounded Japanese, they “took no chances.” The New Guinea Campaign was war at its cruelest, of that there is little doubt.

While there is no doubt of the courage of the soldiers on both sides of this campaign, we can question the strategic and tactical nous of the officers on both sides. That the Japanese could have ever thought they could attack Moresby in any sensible way via the track was wrong thinking, and each step beyond Kokoda made the idea more absurd – they were just wasting men and material for no good purpose. The Allied tactics of island fighting had yet to be perfected, and the continued frontal assaults of the bunkers at Buna and Gona without adequate artillery or tank support were for the most part futile and wasteful as well.

In the end it was the overwhelming technological and numerical advantage of Allied ‘planes, artillery and tanks that ensured not only the end of the New Guinea campaigns, but the defeat of the Japanese Empire. After the war, veterans of Kokoda from both sides struggled to make sense of their experiences: those few Japanese veterans who made it back to Japan mostly did not want to relive what had been a terrifyingly traumatic experience. My great-uncles who fought with the AIF in the campaign also suffered for the rest of their lives, but at least they were on the winning side.

Given this is an Australian trade publication, the apparatus of the book is good – useful maps and notes, and a reasonable bibliography and index. For the student of the Pacific War, especially of the New Guinea Campaigns, The path of infinite sorrow is required reading.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

  

Book Review - Macarthur as military commander by Gavin Long

MacArthur as military commander by Gavin Long

Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1969

I wonder, if a straw poll was taken today, how many "men and women in the street" would be able to tell a questioner who Douglas MacArthur was. In the 1940s and 50s I think you wouldn't have had a problem with name recognition - the best known general of the Pacific War, overlord of occupied Japan and - until his firing - the general in charge of the Korean War. History moves on.

Much has been published on this man - some good, some tendentious, all with a point of view, and widely differing points of view at that, for he was a man who generated much feeling both good and bad, and who was central in many key decisions in the Pacific world for a decade or more.

It seems there have been far more polemics and opinion pieces published on MacArthur than on other Allied leaders of the War, but there have been many balanced works as well, of which MacArthur as military commander is one. Gavin Long may not be a household name, but as General Editor of the Official History of Australia in World War Two (and author of several volumes of that series) he had a huge knowledge of the events of the Pacific War and a well-honed writing ability. The book under review benefits from both that knowledge and skill.

Of the many qualities that MacArthur may have said to have had, one that comes out time and again through this book is luck. MacArthur seems to often be in the right place at the right time, to earn accolades that perhaps he shouldn't have, and, (even when he was finally put out to pasture) to be able to cast aside setbacks and defeats.

Long, in this short (just over 200 pages) book, looks mostly at the campaign decisions that MacArthur took during his career, in a dispassionate way, pointing out where he was inspired, where he was wrong, and where other forces conspired to put him into a tricky position.

World War One was a lucky war for MacArthur, who had distinguished himself earlier in Mexico in an exploit that led some to recommend him for the Medal of Honor, and others to question his judgement and ability to obey orders (there was no doubt of his personal bravery however). By the end of 1918 he was already a Brigadier-General.

After the war he became Superintendent at West Point, was promoted Major-General (the army's youngest), and, in 1930, the Army's Chief of Staff. In this position he became known for leading the troops in the cleanout of the Bonus Army, and eventually quit over the reduction in funding given to the Army. Long dwells a little on these activities even though they are not strictly speaking military command, because they shine a light on MacArthur's character. The first point made is his willingness to do a dirty job if he saw it as the right thing to do (he was notoriously anti-left wing, and often railed against communists and communist influence). The second is his sometimes almost hysterical over-reaction to events, famously offering his resignation to Roosevelt over army cuts stating "when we lost the next war, and an American boy, lying in the mud with an enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat, spat out his last curse, I wanted the name not to be MacArthur, but Roosevelt." His resignation was not accepted, as Roosevelt knew that would go down badly in the press. Which is the third point Long begins to draw out in this section of the book: MacArthur, before most, was well-aware of the power of a positive image in the press, and was always careful to engender and encourage that. These qualities would remain evident for the remainder of his career.


Eventually MacArthur resigned from the US Army to take on the role of building an army for the newly independent Phillipines. Beginning in 1935, he had a fine-sounding plan of how to increase capacity in the armed forces of the Phillipines on the way to them being able to stand on their own. What was shown in 1942 was that while the planning might have been sound, the implementation was severly lacking, with the Phillipine army unable to provide much co-ordinated resistance to the Japanese onslaught.

MacArthur quickly got over the ignominy of leaving his remaining troops behind on Bataan, and arrived to a hero's welcome in Melbourne in 1942. It would seem that much of the adulation thrust on to him was more relief that him being in Melbourne meant that the US was going to be in all the way in the Pacific with Australia, but it nevertheless was very gratifying for MacArthur. He quickly overawed the mostly provincial Australian politicians, and set about exercising his new command - the South West Pacific Area.

At first he did not have much to work with, and most of that was Australian. He was quick to denigrate the Australian's fighting abilities, but had to backtrack when American troops finally arrived and had to be dug out of a hole by those same Aussies. This became a disturbing part of MacArthur's commanding style - to be American focussed, to not take useful advice when it was offered (after all, by 1942 the Australians had been fighting for nearly 3 years, and many of the Aussie commanders had also spent 4 years fighting in WWI, so they knew a thing or two), and, when a setback occurred, to blame others rather than himself.

Unfortunately, the way the US set up the structure of war-fighting in the Pacific made it easier for MacArthur (and others) to shift blame than it should have been. The constant inter-service bickering over the correct strategy for fighting Japan caused many problems, and in fact probably cost many lives. MacArthur constantly felt he was not being assisted properly by the US Navy, and vital men and equipment were funnelled to island-hopping campaigns in the mid-Pacific rather than to his land campaign.

One of the things MacArthur was known for during the war was the strategy of bypassing Japanese strongholds to let them "wither on the vine" while Allied forces struck closer to Japan. Long shows that this was not an idea that MacArthur initiated, and one he agreed to reluctantly, initially because he didn't have the forces to take on some of these strongholds (Rabaul), and later only if it suited him. Certainly when it came to re-taking the Phillipines he had no thought of bypassing any Japanese troops left there, even though strategically it made good sense. In fact, from Long's book the reader does get the strong impression that MacArthur was driven by the earlier failings in the Phillipines to make sure he personally freed the whole country, that his military decisions there left something to be desired, which probably led to a longer and costlier campaign than could otherwise have been the case.

Meanwhile the decorations kept flowing in: while MacArthur was always publicly modest about awards and honours, Long leaves us in little doubt that he did nothing to stop others recommending him for them, and was more than happy to recieve them.

After the war, as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, MacArthur had unprecedented power over the people of Japan. In many ways this period was his finest hour, as - from the ground up - he rebuilt a society and country absolutely devastated by war. In many ways he set himself up as a replacment to the Emperor: remote, discoursing from on high, and leaving the hack work to his minions. In the whole time he held this position he never visited any part of Japan outside Tokyo. He ruled in a way that he thought the "Asian mind" would respect, and he did set Japan on the path to physical prosperity and stable politics. He also unashamedly persecuted left-wing politicians, censored opinions unfavourable to his, and had little respect for historic Japanese institutions. He became a god-like figure, whom no-one could contradict (by this time, and in fact for many years previously, his personal staff contained only those who agreed with, if not worshipped, him).

Then came the Korean War. MacArthur ended up with the command because he was there, he had troops on the ground in Japan, and the situation was desperate. With typical bravado, he made wonderful speeches, denigrated the quality of the troops he had on hand, asked for more from the US, and proceeded to salvage the situation. His landing at Inchon, which famously turned the tide, was another example of MacArthur's luck - so many things could have gone wrong that went right on the day of the landing, even if the idea was not as revolutionary as his boosters would have had us believe - MacArthur himself had overseen dozens of such operations in the Pacific six years previously.

It is this, the last part of MacArthur's military career, that is the most interesting, and Long deals with it well. Once he had regained the initiative, MacArthur saw his situation as an opening to have it out with the Communist world here and now, to deliver them a crushing defeat that would curtail the threat for generations to come. His superiors in the US didn't see it that way, and didn't want this war to grow bigger than it had become. MacArthur used his popular image to drive his agenda, and wilfully misconstrued instructions from the President, which led to his removal from command. It seems, in Long's telling, that he had been for too long used to getting his own way without interference, and this was the comeuppance. It has to be said that apart from Inchon, his direct influence on the Korean War was perhaps less than that of those under him, such as Ridgeway, who took over after MacArthur was relieved, and prosecuted the remainder of the war successfully - and in accordance with the wishes of his civilian masters.

MacArthur was and is such a fascinating character - one of the few people who had a direct influence on history in the twentieth century, a pulsating bundle of bravery, smarts, and vanity; thin-skinned, vindictive, magnanimous, and certainly worth the print devoted to him over the years.

As an introduction to his military career, MacArthur as military commander is a good one.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The wages of guilt by Ian Buruma

The wages of guilt : memories of War in Germany and Japan by Ian Buruma

London: Jonathan Cape, 1994                                           ISBN 0224031384


Ian Buruma, born in Holland and spending some of his formative years in Japan, has almost the perfect CV to have written this book. Born into a country that was vicitm of the Nazi terror during World War II, but having an understanding of the language and culture of Germany, he also - through his time in Japan - has a similar understanding of their language and culture.

I feel sure that it his experience of both cultures that led him to write this book - a meditation on the reactions of both nations to their twentieth century history, focused on the War and the years immediately preceding it, and how that history has played out into their modern-day realities. It is a meditation on guilt versus shame, and how different accidents of history can change the way a country looks backwards and forwards.

Buruma tackles the subject by looking at themes that go across both Germany and Japan: remembering, teaching, memorialising. And what he finds is that although there are major differences in the way that Germany and Japan look back on their war years, there are also some similarities.

How to account for the differences? Buruma in not prescriptive, but he does have some theories, which I think make sense. One is the culture of shame versus the culture of guilt. Japan, by virtue of its history and religious outlook, is a country that has a shame culture rather than a guilt culture. The shame culture suggests that (and of course these are generalisations) on the whole Japan wishes to hide the sins of its past, and not bring them up in any forum. This has led to the Japanese having a distorted picture of the war - highlighting the bad that happened to them (atomic bombs, Okinawa), but having no contextual information to place those tragedies within the wider sphere of Japanese aggression, as that story is hidden from view, via selective memorialising, textbooks and a general frowning on openness.

By contrast, Germany's guilt culture, by virtue of its history and religious outlook, predisposes the country to look at past wrongs and try to face them. This may not be done by the perpetrators, and tends to have been begun by the generation born after the War. Buruma charts a history where the perpetrator's generation tried to forget, the children of that generation accused their fathers of all crimes, and the current generation has spent more time trying to find the truth, and is interested in the history of the time in a more holistic manner.

Which is not to say that those people who work to expose the truth in Germany are immune from any backlash. Buruma writes about Anja Rosmus from Passau, who started to look at the Nazi history of her town and to find skeletons in cupboards. She became an outcast for her actions, being shunned by her neighbours, and worse from those who thought the past was best left un-looked at. Buruma speaks to the other side of this debate too, to those who see the likes of Rosmus as people who besmirch the reputation of their town and country by undertaking this research. Of course the truth is the truth, it's what one does with it that matters.

Those that travel down such a path in Japan are liable to suffer worse than their compatriots in Germany. Buruma relates the stories of several Japanese who have tried to expose some of the history of Japan's war years, or to talk openly about the guilt of the Emperor, and while the stories of the Germans involve harassment, those of the Japanese involve gunshots and death threats. The path to truth by those Japanese who have the mind to find these things out (interestingly, many of whom are Christian) is made harder by the way the Americans absolved the Emperor of any blame for the war - his re-creation into a passive observer while the military ran the country has created confusion in the Japanese body politic: whereas in Germany it was clear that Hitler was the source of evil, and Germans can question the way they accommodated or reacted to his rule, Japan found itself after the war with no narrative of loss that they could cling to, and an occupying power that almost wanted them to forget.

Of course this review skates the surface of Buruma's arguments, which are more nuanced than their description here and which are backed up by many examples. However, in some ways what he uncovers fits the standard narrative of both countries since the War - that Germany as a country has accepted its crimes and tried to assimilate and deal with the consequences of that, while individual perpetrators have tried to escape punishment, and that Japan has - for a number of reasons - not yet been able to face its past in a way that assists in helping it move forward.

If you are at all interested in this question, this book is well worth reading.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The battle for Okinawa by Hiromichi Yahara

The battle for Okinawa by Colonel Hiromichi Yahara, translated by Roger Pineau and Masatoshi Uehara, with an introduction by Frank B. Gibney

New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995.                             ISBN 0471120413

The battle for the island of Okinawa was the bloodiest of the whole Pacific War. From the opening bombardment in April through to July, much of the island became an inferno of fire, explosive and steel, in which both sides took staggering casualties, and the Japanese Thirty-Second Army was destroyed. The battle saw the first widespread use of Kamikaze tactics, and was the also the first time that Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner in any sort of numbers.

One of those prisoners was the author of this book. Col. Yahara was not just any prisoner, he was a senior staff officer of the Thirty-Second Army, so his views on the battle are worth having - and we so nearly didn't have them at all. Not only did he survive the fighting - his commanding officer denied him the right to commit suicide by ordering him to report to Tokyo - he got captured trying to escape the island. He went through a crisis once in custody, but, through his realization that the government wasted the lives of all those on Okinawa and was going to do the same in Japan, he decided that the Empire was not worth dying for after all.

This refusal to succumb to that prevailing ethos damaged Yahara's post-war life and career, and he didn't write this book until 1973, near the end of his life. It was his attempt to set the record straight after years of myth-making by both sides.

The book as we have it here consists of two sections: the first dealing with the creation of the Thirty-Second Army and preparations for the battle, and the second dealing with the last phase of the battle, Yahara's attempted escape and eventual capture.

Yahara was a clear-sighted and rational man, and so knew even before he set about planning the defence of Okinawa that the Japanese would lose the battle. He knew that, despite the regime's trumpeting of the indomitable will of the Japanese soldier, the Allies overwhelming superiority of men and material meant that there could only be one outcome. Yahara did, however, believe his superiors when they told him that the invasion force would be met with a heavy air response in the initial hours and days. Therefore he developed a battle plan that focused on attritional warfare, with troops well dug in to fortified positions, instructed to wait for the Americans to come on to them.

Yahara's strategy was probably the correct one, but he was overtaken by events, and his superiors. The envisaged air attack on the landing never eventuated, and, his superior officers being of the old school, many troops were wasted in futile frontal attacks. When Yahara picks up the story again in the second half of the book, the troops are retreating to their final positions, and are running low on food and ammunition. This section of the book becomes hard to read, as more and more people are sacrificed for no reason, as the following extract demonstrates - "Our new infantry units were poorly trained. For want of antitank weapons, we had to use Okinawan conscripts armed with bamboo spears. They were all destroyed in one day....It was frustrating to see our men being killed by a well-equipped enemy, while we had nothing left to fight with."

There is no thought of surrendering, even when General Buckner asks them to - it was not the way of the Samurai. Yahara had a more nuanced view of such a proposal - he had spent time in the USA in the thirties, and knew the horror stories spread by high command about the treatment of prisoners by the Americans were not true. He expands somewhat on this in his text: "Indeed, it is a high ideal to fight to the end to maintain national morale. But were our leaders worth the sacrifice of an entire people? With the end of the war in sight, they shout at us: " Millions of people must die for our nation." Why? ...It was foolish to force everyone to die, simply because Japan had never before lost a war."

At the time Yahara could not bring himself to espouse this view, and the battle raged on until nearly all the Japanese were dead. Yahara stayed on in the headquarters cave until his superiors committed Seppuku, and then got into civilian clothes and tried to escape. He caught up with a group of other civilians hiding in a cave, and helped them surrender to the Americans rather than get killed. He then tried to get to the north of the island to find a ship to Japan, but was betrayed by another Japanese soldier.

The book has insertions from Frank Gibney, who was in Okinawa working for US Army intelligence. He sets the scene for readers of the book, and includes a transcript of Yahara's interrogation, which took place in August (on the day of the Hiroshima bombing), and focussed more on preparations for the invasion of Japan, which is fascinating in itself.

While the first half of Yahara's book covers the poor preparation for the invasion of Okinawa - not enough munitions, the inability of the navy and air force to get troops to the island without being shot down or sunk - his idea to run a battle of attrition had a big effect on US strategy. The enormous losses suffered by the US on Okinawa, combined with the fact that the main islands of Japan only offered a few places to mount an invasion, led the Army to predict a million casualties from such a landing.

Faced with this horrendous prediction, the new President, Truman, made the fateful decision to use the atomic bomb, which led to a quick surrender by the Japanese.

A fascinating read, this book is one for aficionados.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Sowers of the wind by TAG Hungerford

Sowers of the Wind : a novel of the Occupation of Japan by T.A.G. Hungerford

Sydney; Angus and Robertson, 1954


I grew up in an old timber house, the type that has a very long hallway running through the house from the front door. At the end of the hallway, before it turned to enter the living room, were two things that never moved (until my parents sold the house, long after I left home). One was a sandalwood chest that was given to my Mother by her Mother, and the other was a large Japanese Geisha doll on a hallstand. As a child I never questioned why we might have such an item in Country Australia - it was only later that I discovered that it was a gift to my Mother from one of her Uncles who served in the Occupation Force in Japan directly after World War II. I had not thought of that doll for a long time, until I read this novel.

I have written about T.A.G. Hungerford's most well-known novel, The ridge and the river, here. Reading that book inspired me to find out more about Hungerford, and to seek out other writings by him, and so to the book under review. After service in the War, Hungerford signed up for the BCOF, and Sowers of the wind is the result of that experience. The book won the Sydney Morning Herald Literature Prize in 1949, but the book was not published until 1954, possibly because the the graphic nature of the content was not appropriate reading material while Australian troops were still in Japan (the BCOF officially wound up in 1952).

Sowers of the wind follows a group of Australian soldiers from the time they arrive in Japan to begin the occupation, until the majority are sent home after their service has ended. The book is based around the Occupation Force's headquarters in Kure, and deals mostly with the troops' relationships with the Japanese people, and each other.

The main protagonist (no-one in this book is a 'hero') is Sergeant Rod McNaughton, who has control of a group of soldiers that run the docks in Kure, unloading all the material needed by the troops and hangers-on of the force. McNaughton, like many in the Force, comes face-to-face with the confusion of having to deal with the Japanese as people, while remembering how he and his mates fared in the jungle, as well as dealing with other Australians who didn't fight, but have come along for the ride to drink, whore and black-marketeer as much as they can.

In many ways, this is a deeply cynical novel. Most of the Australians are depicted as trying to get the most that they can for themselves, either to make up for what they felt they lost during the War years, or just because they can. "Wogging" (as black marketeering is called in this book) is the preserve of everyone, and those of purer mind may not have been going to the brothels, but they did have Japanese "wives", who they set up with a roof over their heads and to whom they provided food and other goods purloined one way or another.

Where The ridge and the river had a compelling narrative line running right through it, Sowers of the wind is much more episodic, with characters moving in and out of the story as Hungerford needs them to present a scene or pose a moral conundrum. The Japanese in the story are alternately shown as apes or human - Jimmu, the head storeman and his wife are used by Hungerford to show how many Japanese lost absolutely everything in the war - the picture he paints of Jimmu's wife the last time McNaughton sees her after Jimmu's death, kneeling outside her house holding the photographs of her four sons, all killed in the War, is heartbreaking.

Almost as heartbreaking are the stories of Flannery and Darcey, who's lives are ruined by their stint in the Occupation Force. Even McNaughton leaves Japan as a diminished man - as they landed he had high hopes of forging a partnership with the Japanese, and for the Australians to be good role models; but by the end of the book he is leaving a pregnant "wife", after engaging in blackmail - for despite all the good he tried to do he cannot change the essential corruption that is engendered by the soldiers literally being lords of all they survey.

Sowers of the wind is not as good a book as The ridge and the river - Hungerford has a point to make, rather than a story to tell, and it shows in the sometimes stilted writing, lack of character development, and sudden breaks in point-of-view. That said, this book is well worth reading to get a flavour of what is perhaps one of the less glorious feats of Australian arms.

Check your local library for a copy of Sowers of the wind, or you can check out a great new website, www.booko.com.au, where you can search for the best price for new and second-hand books.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell