Book Review - Slim the Standardbearer by Ronald Lewin

 Slim the Standardbearer: a biography of Field-Marshall The Viscount Slim by Ronald Lewin

Ware, Herts.: Wordsworth Editions, 1999 (first published 1976)  ISBN 184022214X

This is a workmanlike biography of an interesting man. The major part of the book focusses on Slims' Burma Campaign, which in a sense is right and proper, but I when I finished the book I felt a little short-changed, as Slim has written so well about that himself. I was hoping for a little more insight into the man than this book delivered, but it was still worth reading to remind oneself of what an extraordinary life he led.

The son of a failed businessman, Slim dreamed of an early age of joining the army, but funds (lack of) seemed to scupper that wish, until the advent of war in 1914. Despite the myth that Slim became a Field-Marshall from the ranks, he was actually commissioned immediately as a second lieutenant owing to his time spend before the war in the Birmingham University OTC (despite not being a student at the University - the first example of "Slim's luck"). He was sent to Gallipoli, where he was wounded: after his recovery he was sent to Mesopotamia to assist in the relief of Kut, where he was wounded a second time. 

After the war he was transferred to the Indian Army where he served with Gurkhas. It seems that this was one of the happiest times of his life - there was much low-level action against rebellious tribes, he met and married his wife, and slowly made his way through the ranks, impressing at Staff College in Delhi and at the Imperial Defence College.

Interestingly he also spent these years writing short stories for money (even though Lewin's book is only just short of a hagiography, Slim's nose for cash runs through the book, from ensuring expense accounts were suitably large, to augmenting his pension in any way he thought he could), which I think is a fascinating insight, although one that Lewin doesn't ponder too much.

Although he is famous for his campaigning in Burma in World War Two, he also served in Ethiopia against the Italians (where he was wounded yet again), and in Iraq, before being sent East. There, in Burma, he famously led the retreat back to India, and then the advance back to Rangoon, through a series of excellent strategic and tactical manoeuvres, and (with the close support of Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Commander of the South East Asian Theatre) working his way through the politics of logistics, supply and recalcitrant commanders (Wingate, Stilwell).

This is the major part of Lewin's work, and he describes well what is required of someone commanding an Army, and how the fighting is just one part. It was in Burma that Slim's ability to get people to follow him, his ability to listen, to plan on the run, and to connect with the average soldier were so much on display. Burma in many ways was (and is) a forgotten campaign, and so Slim's capability has been lost in time as the European and Pacific Campaigns have garnered most of the glory. He was probably the best British field commander of the War.

After the War Slim finally got the job for which he had been destined for a long time - Chief of General Staff. It was a difficult time to undertake the role, with the Army moving from a wartime footing to understanding what it's role would be during the Cold War. Slim instituted many reforms during this time.

Then seemingly out of the blue he was asked to be Governor-General of Australia. He took on the role with gusto, and was again a trailblazer, being the first of the "modern" G-Gs, touring the country and being a force for unification, while trying to stay outside of politics.

His final years as Constable of Windsor Castle were ones of enjoyment and social activities, before his decline and death in 1970.

Lewin's book covers this all in appropriate detail, but with little verve or insight - there is a later biography by Robert Lyman which may be better than this one.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - War at the end of the World by James P. Duffy

 War at the end of the World: Douglas MacArthur and the Forgotten Fight for New Guinea, 1942-1945

by James P. Duffy

New York: NAL Caliber, 2016                                                                          ISBN 9780451418302

This is a well-written and well-balanced account of the New Guinea campaign of World War II. James Duffy has not broken any new ground with this book, but what he has done is tell - side-by-side - the American, Australian and Japanese stories of this arduous campaign, in a simple narrative of the battles and decision making involved in winning (and losing) them.

The New Guinea campaign lasted from almost the beginning of the Pacific War to almost the end, and traversed the entire island from East to West. From early 1942 to late 1944 the Allied forces, through a strategy of targeted battles and bypassing large enemy bases, comprehensively defeated the Japanese forces. One stark statistic - in New Guinea the American forces lost 7,000 men, and the Australians a similar number. The Japanese lost over 200,000 men killed in the campaign.

The stark difference in deaths can be sheeted home to a few reasons: the overwhelming technological and materiel advantage of the Allies, the flawed battle tactics of the Japanese, and the inability of Japan to supply its troops with enough materiel (particularly food and medicine). As Duffy points out, MacArthur was also frugal with his troops, reluctant to attack large Japanese bases if he could avoid it. 

Rabaul was the first instance of where this tactic was used. Initially, from necessity owing to lack of troops, MacArthur constantly tried to avoid set-piece battles with large Japanese forces. What MacArthur wanted was hard ground for airfields. Although he was an Army man, MacArthur fully understood the crucial nature of air power, especially in a war that was fought over water and islands.

So, MacArthur's first thought when looking at the next Japanese conglomeration was "does it have an airfield suitable for my bombers, and is that airfield in the right strategic spot?" If the answer was no, the Allies moved on to the next area. Sometimes, if the Japanese force around a suitable airfield was too large, MacArthur sometimes found a suitable place where the Japanese weren't, and built his own airfields. In some cases an airfield could be up and running a couple of days after construction started. The construction companies, both the Australian and the American Seabees, were the unsung heroes in this forgotten war.

I imagine some Australian readers might quibble about the phrase "forgotten war" being applied to the New Guinea campaign, but I think that Duffy's term is apt. Certainly Australians generally know about the Kokoda campaign, and maybe Buna and Gona, but how many of us know much about the early campaigns in New Britain and New Ireland, the Markham Valley, Kalopit, Finschhafen, Manus Island and Los Negros, Hollandia and Aitape, Biak and Morotai?  

War at the end of the World is a great resource to understand these lesser-known battles, and at the same time to understand the Japanese viewpoint, which quite often gets lost in histories such as these. That the Japanese high command let so many troops wither on the vine is hard to understand, even with the difficulties that they had in moving troops as the war tipped in favour of the Allies. So many times Duffy writes of Japanese formations that were frittered away in piecemeal attacks, or suicidal defences of areas of little strategic value.

What I liked about this book was Duffy's even-handedness in describing the Australian and American contributions to victory. While we Australians might think we did it all, the reality is that the Americans did most of the heavy lifting. Duffy gets the balance right in my opinion - clearly pointing out the holding operations of the Australians at Kokoda, and how their preponderance of skill and battle experience led the way through the early battles at Buna and Gona, and then giving way to the greater numbers of Americans as they arrived in the theatre. 

As the subtitle of this book suggests, Duffy also has a focus on MacArthur throughout this book. He makes us aware that his one aim was to get back to the Philippines, and writes well on his constant battle with the Navy and Chiefs of Staff to get the men and material he required to prosecute the war. Duffy alludes to the politics surrounding his command, and how astute MacArthur was in managing the men around him, above him and below him as well.

With one caveat, I can recommend this book as a very good and detailed overview of what in many ways has become a forgotten part of the Pacific War.

The caveat is that the maps are appalling - too few, too lacking in detail, and too poorly printed to be of any use. This is inexcusable in a book describing a campaign that covers one of the World's largest islands. The blame for this can't be laid at the feet of the author, but it really lets the book down. The bibliography and index are serviceable.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I picked this book up, but found it a readable and relatively comprehensive narrative of this long and complex campaign.

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 - Hubris: the Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century by Alistair Horne

 Hubris: the Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century by Alistair Horne

New York: Harper, 2015                    ISBN 9780062397805

Those few who regularly read my blog will know that I've read a few books written by Alistair Horne, and enjoyed them all. I enjoyed this one too, as it is well written and informative, but I must state that I found the premise of the book a little thin. Horne, in his introduction to Hubris, states his aim to be to show how that state of over-confidence can lead to disaster, and how, often after a great victory, hubris creeps in and infects (Horne likens it to a virus) the body politic and the body military and leads to inevitable downfall.

To illustrate his point he chooses key battles from the first half of the Twentieth Century, Tsushima, Nomonhan, Moscow, Midway, MacArthur in Korea, and the battle of Dien Bien Phu. His contention is that in each case it was hubris that led to defeat, and that victory could lead to the development of hubris in the winners. This theory is fairly self-evident to any serious student of military history, and Horne does not add significantly to thinking in this area in my opinion.

Nevertheless, he does show the links between Japan's victory in 1905 and their over-confidence in Mongolia in 1939 and at Midway in 1942. America's crushing of Japan can be argued to have instilled a sense of inevitability to the United States and MacArthur's view that the Korean War would lead to a speedy victory; and the similar racist views of the French (as well as their internecine bickering and arrogance) led them to grievously underestimate the Viet Minh and General Giap.

Although Horne only touches on them, to me two other themes loom large in this book - racism, and ruthlessness. Much of the hubris shown by the Russians, Germans, Americans and French was engendered by their racist view of their opponents. European commanders - and political leaders for that matter - had a very dim view of their Asian brothers. What is fascinating to see is how these views remained unchanged, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Japan in particular suffered from European scorn, despite destroying the Russian Fleet in 1905 and conquering Manchuria and Korea after that. This meant little to the Americans and British who continued to see the Japanese and other Asians as less than human.

This racism led directly to their hubris when facing the "Asian hordes", as did their lack of understanding of the ruthlessness of their foes. Both MacArthur, and the various French leaders in Indochina (the revolving door of French military leadership at the time surely didn't help their cause) looked at their opponents through their own eyes. They failed to understand that the North Koreans, Vietnamese and Chinese were prepared to sustain much greater casualties than their Western counterparts could bear, and, although they may not have had the latest technology, they had a greater will.

No-one was more ruthless than Stalin. Unlike his Western "comrades" of World War Two, he had no racist limits to his thinking, so when Japanese troops encroached on his Mongolian border, he threw in his best troops, his best tanks, and Zhukov, his best general. In fact, when it came to the battle of Nomonhan, it was the Japanese who underestimated their Slavic opponents - not racially, but ideologically. Stalin smashed them, as he eventually smashed Hitler. Hitler's hubris came from his victory in France, and his racially inspired theories that led him to think that the Russians were less than human. Stalin was prepared to not only destroy his country to deny it to Hitler, but send millions of his countrymen and women to their deaths to stop him.

While Hitler was just as ruthless than Stalin, he didn't have as many men to sacrifice, and so lost.

As always, Horne writes smoothly and well - Tsushima is fading into history, and Nomonhan has always been obscure, so to re-read the narratives of those battles is pleasing. Horne provides good context for those battles and the others he discusses. He uses his narrative flair to take the reader right into the history of each battle, but his theoretical strength is less gripping; at times the hubris angle seems tacked on, or an afterthought to his racing narrative history.

So, what to make of this book? As narrative history it's gripping, as a theoretical work less so. I note that some of this book first appeared in the Military History Quarterly, and that makes sense to me, as I think the issue with this book is the lack of connexion throughout the book. It seems that Horne may have thought of these episodes separately and tacked them together. Perhaps I'm doing him a dis-service but, for me, this book was less than I hoped for given how it was marketed, but still was a good read.

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 - Hell on Earth by Michele Cunningham

Hell on Earth: Sandakan - Australia's greatest war tragedy by Michele Cunningham

Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2013                    ISBN 9780733629891


Sandakan - a name that sends a chill of horror through any Australian who knows something about the Pacific War. The full extent of the horror hits any visitor to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, where there is a wall mounted montage of photographs of the Australian servicemen who were known to be in the camp - about 2000 men - with those that died greyed out and only those surviving shown in sharp contrast.....six men.

That only six survived the Sandakan "death marches" is a relatively well known fact, but much of what led up to this appalling tragedy is not as well-known, and shrouded in myth and half-truth. Michele Cunningham, in this well-written account, has picked out as much truth as she can from those myths, using contemporary documents, transcripts from war trials, and interviews with survivors (her father was in Sandakan before being moved to Kuching camp along with all other officers in 1943).

We know how the Sandakan tragedy ended up, so it's a grim irony that the Australians that were sent there were volunteers for the most part, lured from Changi on the promise of more food and better conditions. The prisoners (and the almost 1,000 British soliders that came later) were taken to Sandakan to build airstrips for the Japanese Army. The treatment meted out to them was brutal from the start, and became worse as time went on, and the food was never adequate, and became less so as time went on.

By the time of the first "death march" in January 1945, the prisoners were certainly in no state to undertake heavy physical labour, and most were not in a state to be forced to march for nine days through thick jungle on a poorly constructed track. And yet that is what they now had to do, with only half the rations required to undertake the journey. The result was tragically predictable - most of the prisoners died, either on the march, or once they had reached their destination. It is here that Cunningham usefully unravels one of the myths of the marches: many of the prisoners died of the effects of prolonged malnutrition and the exertion of marching, rather than being shot by the Japanese (although the Japanese did shoot many who could not continue). The Japanese did kill the remaining prisoners during August 1945, but by that time most were already dead. Cunningham also shows us that many Japanese troops also died on these marches, as by 1945 supply was so poor that they were also suffering from lack of food and medicine. The six prisoners that survived escaped from the camp, or while on the march. There were other escapees, but they died before they could reach safety.

Cunningham spends a large portion of the book discussing Operation Kingfisher, which has been described as an aborted rescue mission for the prisoners, and has been the cause of some controversy. She quite convincingly puts to bed the notion that a rescue mission was set to go but not given approval by HQ. While many of the operations in Borneo had as one of their objectives to find out more information about the location and condition of prisoners, none of them had developed a plan to rescue them, and any claims to the contrary are simply wrong. As Cunningham shows, there was not the logistical ability to be able to storm the camps and get the prisoners away, even if they were in good health. There was also a very real fear on the Allied side that the Japanese would simply massacre the prisoners if they thought a rescue attempt was underway. In the end the Allies did come after the surrender, but it was too late for those at Sandakan.

In her search for evidence about what happened to the prisoners, Cunningham has read not only the transcripts of the War Crimes trials of the guards and commanders of the prison camp, but also where possible the interrogations of the six survivors, and has uncovered some disturbing discrepancies in statements and evidence, given with (understandable) vindictiveness as a driving force.  In particular, it seems that WO Bill Sticpewich was not above fabricating or conflating evidence to ensure conviction of certain guards. It also seems that his advice to the court as to the general behaviour of guards in the camp (i.e. whether they were brutal, or helpful to the prisoners) materially affected the sentences handed out.  While this behaviour is understandable, it belies the Allies claim of impartial justice meted out after the war.

Cunningham also doesn't hold back on evidence that the prisoners in Sandakan did not always pull together as team, as evidenced by the petty theft and shirking that she shows occurred during the prisoner's ordeal. War is a great leveller, and a great revealer of humankind, and those in the camps were no different - some were brave and others weren't, some gave of themselves to help the group, and others took from the group to help themselves. In the end (nearly) all of the prisoners met the same fate.

This book is well researched, and well argued. As much as is possible Hell on Earth is a definitive account of one of the darkest chapters in Australian military history. Well worth reading.

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 - Green Armour by Osmar White

Green Armour by Osmar White

Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1945

Osmar White was a journalist for the Herald & Weekly Times during World War Two, and was sent by that paper to cover the war in New Guinea. Green Armour is his collection of thoughts about what he saw during that time, and written before the War had finished, but written when he knew the War was won.

This provided the author with an interesting perspective - he had the liberty to write about the events he had seen at Wau, Salamaua, and Kokoda with more truthfulness than he could at the time, and his recovery from wounds he received at Rendova Island gave him time to think strategically about how those early efforts by Australian and US forces had paved the way for the later, successful use of such forces in the island hopping campaign waged by MacArthur and Nimitz throughout the Pacific.

The first section of the book deals with the beginning of the campaign in New Guinea, and focuses on just how woefully unprepared the Australian troops were for any serious invasion. White explains how, if Japan had been bold enough to attack Moresby in March 1942, they would have succeeded, as both land, sea and air power from the Allied side were virtually non-existent at that time. White graphically describes how the lone squadron of Kittyhawks were just enough to stave off disaster in that crucial period.

White then recounts his journey, with two other legendary correspondents in Chester Wilmot and Damien Parer, through the jungle to Wau to see at first hand the activities of Kanga Force. White's description of the cruel nature of the terrain, and the virtual impossibility of supply through the jungle, is masterful journalism. The title of the book "Green Armour" refers to the New Guinea mountain jungle, which protected Australian forces when they were on the defensive, and, as White shows, helped the Japanese when they became the hunted.

White was present during the worst of the fighting along the Kokoda Track, before the Australians had learned to use the jungle to their advantage, and when, frankly, they were routed by the Japanese. He describes the confusion, panic and fear that comes with not knowing where the enemy is at any moment. He also describes the effect of the country and lack of supplies and equipment, with underfed and poorly looked-after men suffering as much from disease and sickness as from the depredations of the enemy.

The third section of the book deals with the preparation and early phases of the New Georgia campaign. The landings on and around New Georgia were the first trial of the concept of amphibious landings and island fighting that was to dominate the rest of the Pacific War. White demonstrates in his description how the jungle made attack difficult, how the planning of this early campaign did not take into account the difficulty of the terrain, or the tenaciousness of the Japanese in defence. However, White does demonstrate how the overwhelming material advantage held by the United States was slowly being brought to bear on the fighting, and how this capacity was changing the thinking of the Commanders of those forces, and also the Commanders of the Japanese Forces.

This book has the status of a classic of the genre, and one can see why - as a description of the early fighting in the South Pacific, this is hard to beat. Recommended.

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