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 - Indonesian upheaval by John Hughes

Indonesian upheaval by John Hughes

New York: Fawcett Publications, 1967

As Australia's nearest neighbour, the fourth-most populous country in the World, and despite sporadic attempts to engage the public, the knowledge of Indonesia's people and history by Australians is pitifully small. It is not a subject dealt with either at schools or universities in Australia (with some minor exceptions), and Indonesians do not form a large population grouping in Australia, so little knowledge comes via osmosis. Most Australians know Indonesia via Bali, a popular holiday destination; but Bali, a majority Hindu island, is not typical of the wider Indonesian culture, which is overwhelmingly Muslim.

Australia's relationship with Indonesia goes through regular tense moments, most recently over the independence of East Timor, and previously through the Confrontation over Malaysia, in which Australian troops took part.

I am no different to the majority of my countrymen, knowing little of the archepelago to our north; and while I knew that the first great national leader of Indonesia, Sukarno, was overthrown by the military headed by Suharto, I knew little of the detail. John Hughes - a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist working for the Christian Science Monitor - has written a blow-by-blow account of the coup and following struggle that led to what was a major change in direction for the country. The book is based on his journalism at the time, when he was correspondent in Jakarta.

The overthrow of Sukarno was anything but a typical coup d'etat: in fact it is hard to know even now exactly what was going on during the initial attempted coup. On the night of the 30th of September 1965, squads of army soldiers left the Halim Air Force Base to capture six of the country's top generals. Two were killed resisting capture, and the others were taken back to Halim where it seems they were tortured before being murdered. As well as the insurrectionist army troops, there were thousands of Communist activists at the base ready to fight.

So far, so standard coup. But it was the events that followed that were extremely odd. Sukarno himself left his palace and went to Halim, where he spoke to officers involved in the coup, and seemed to understand, if not condone, the events of that night. Sukarno had over the previous years been moving more and more towards communism, and had become particularly close to China. The Indonesian Communist Party was one of the largest in the world at the time, and had some representation in cabinet, although no real power. It's possible that the Communists thought that if they "decapitated" the army, it would give Sukarno freedom to move more definitively to the left.

Sukarno however, wiley politician that he was, played for time, waiting to see how the coup played out. He didn't have long to wait: the plotters had not planned the next stage of the coup - perhaps they thought Sukarno would come out vocally in their favour - and the army, led by Suharto, quickly regained control of the situation.

Then came the massacre - the army let loose the anti-communist forces in society, and over the next few months hundreds of thousands of communists, suspected communists, or merely the unlucky, were slaughtered. The left had been destroyed, and Suharto took over the reins of government, although Sukarno had not been removed.

By the mid 60s Indonesia was in a sorry state economically - people struggled to feed themselves, and infrastructure was collapsing. Sukarno had for many years blamed outside forces for this state of affairs, but now, after the coup attempt, the populace and in particular the students, found their voice and increasingly laid the blame for their plight at the feet of the President.

As Suharto and his allied increased their control over government affairs, Sukarno was progressively sidelined, until, a year after the coup attempt, he was removed from the post of president, which Suharto claimed after an election.

This book, published just after Suharto became Acting President, gives an on-the-ground account, in a slightly breathless style, of how all this came about. As a work of great political insight it's not great, but as a primer of the course of events it is useful.

Fifty years have passed, and still there is a pall of silence over the massacres and other dark activities that occurred at that time. Suharto - who ended up as much of a dictator as Sukarno - has gone, and Indonesia is a democracy with a growth rate that many other countries would envy.

Indonesian upheaval is good journalistic writing covering a vital piece of Indonesian history.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell