Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (106 page)

Although Hirohito's position required him to perform Shinto rituals and annual court ceremonies, he voluntarily embraced fixed routines and traditional practices because rigid order suited his temperament and furnished outlets for his frustrations. Always, however, the chief demands on his time came from his role as supreme commander.

I

World War II in the Pacific was officially termed by the T
j
government the “War of Greater East Asia” (
Dai T
'A sens
). It lasted
for three years and nine months. The main theaters of battle were the South and Southwest Pacific, where the Imperial Navy and its naval air force had never anticipated decisive battles. Instead the navy had assumed, and Hirohito had believed, that the Combined Fleet would go fleet to fleet, ship to ship against the American enemy only in the Central Pacific. What developed was an unplanned, unprepared-for, and escalating war of attrition in the south. The army and navy made piecemeal responses to unexpected attack, reinforced slowly and inadequately, suffered more and more defeats, lost more and more aircraft and trained pilots, troop and supply transports, fighting ships, and whole ground units.

There, in the southern ocean, during the first twenty-six months of the war, the naval air force lost 26,006 warplanes—nearly a third of its total power—and thousands of experienced pilots.
⁷
Many hundreds of thousands of tons of fighting ships went down. The loss of merchant and naval transport was especially crippling. When, toward the end of 1943, American forces under Adm. Chester Nimitz, commanding Pacific Ocean Areas, finally began their full-scale counter offensives in the Central Pacific, Japan was desperately trying to contract its defense perimeter and rebuild the naval air and sea power that had been destroyed in the brutal and barbaric South Pacific campaigns.

From the outset Hirohito shared his admirals' mistaken strategic assumptions, and he also held his generals' misperception of the primary enemy. The Army General Staff focused on the Soviet Union; kept most of Japan's ground forces in Korea, Manchuria, and China; and neither researched nor prepared for combat on the remote jungle islands of the Pacific even after that area had become the main theater. Hirohito too was fixated on the Soviet Union, though not to the same extent as the army, and not for so long.
⁸
Moreover, he grasped the shortcomings of the army's approach before the high command did, and thereafter worked to redirect it.

During the first two months of the war, from December 8,
1941, through late January l942, Japan's offensive against the weak, unprepared colonial armies in Southeast Asia unfolded almost exactly on schedule, and in accordance with the pre–Pearl Harbor war guidance plan, on which Hirohito based his initial interrogations. During this period the Imperial Army and Navy scored continuous victories. After destroying or crippling a large part of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and sinking the British battleship
Prince of Wales
and the battle cruiser
Repulse
on December 10 off Singapore, Japanese pilots inaugurated the conquest of the Philippines by wiping out most of MacArthur's just-reinforced air force on the ground. Guam, Wake Island, and Hong Kong fell in succession. Joint navy-army task forces seized the Celebes and the Dutch oil fields in Borneo on December 16, and landed troops and planes in the northern, southern, and eastern parts of the Philippines during late December. On January 3 they occupied Manila, which MacArthur had declared an open city, ostensibly to protect its civilian population but also because his forces were too weak to defend it.

The Japanese blitzkrieg attack gave the Allies no time to recover. Capturing already-built British and American airstrips in Southeast Asia and the Philippines, the naval air force advanced step by step, providing air cover for the sea and ground advance. Pushing farther into the Southwest Pacific with the aim of capturing Java in the Dutch Indies, a task force seized the Australian naval and air base at Rabaul in New Britain on January 22–23. Most of the operational goals in the South Pacific that had been set prior to Pearl Harbor had now been achieved. Key strategic resource areas of the south were in Japanese hands; the war's first stage as initially calculated had ended.
⁹

Sustained by the momentum of its success, determined to keep the enemy in retreat, and lacking any carefully thought-out plan for ending the war, Imperial Headquarters did not, at that point, stop its “drive to the south” and shift to a more flexible strategy. Instead,
on January 29, it ordered the Combined Fleet to capture the strategic points of Lae, Salamaua, and Port Moresby in the British (eastern) part of the island of New Guinea, thereby implementing the first step of a plan to isolate and ultimately attack Australia.
¹⁰
On February 7, the emperor placed his seal on
Daikairei
Number 14, ordering the Combined Fleet to attack the island of Timor in southeastern Indonesia.
¹¹
Hirohito was now as intoxicated by victory as his senior commanders. The joint navy-army task force captured the Portuguese and Dutch territories on Timor on February 20, Batavia on Java on March 5, and shortly afterward occupied Bougainville, the largest island in the Solomons chain, threatening American and British supply lanes to Australia.

On March 7 the liaison conference formalized the rapidly expanding Pacific offensive in a new policy document, whose first article declared: “In order to force Britain to submit and the United States to lose its will to fight, we shall continue expanding from the areas we have already gained,” and while “working long-term to establish an impregnable strategic position, we shall actively seize whatever opportunities for attack may occur.”
¹²
The next day Lae and Salamaua in New Guinea were occupied. By April 1942 the Japanese had captured strategic points in the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands, territory belonging to British India and running from the Malacca Straits all the way to the mouth of the Indian Ocean, thereby forcing the small British fleet in the Indian Ocean to remove to the coast of East Africa.

Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, Japanese army troops had earlier captured British Singapore on February 15. They had massed in Thailand and from there pushed into the British territory of Burma, capturing Rangoon (Burma's main port) on March 8, Lashio (the starting point of the Burma Road) on April 28, and Mandalay on May 1. In the South Pacific, at the start of May, the army and navy moved into the southern Solomons (Guadalcanal and Tulagi), and around July 21 they took Buna, on the extreme eastern end of New
Guinea, having earlier occupied Hollandia. Finally, on June 7, they pushed their vast Pacific defense perimeter north toward Alaska by placing garrisons on Kiska and Attu in the Aleutians.

While operations in the South Pacific were unfolding victoriously, the ground advance in the Philippines, despite initial, very quick successes, had soon slowed. American and Filipino troops withdrew to prepared positions in the Bataan Peninsula and the island fortress of Corregidor in Manila Bay; and there they remained. Right around this time Hirohito made his first major intervention in an ongoing Pacific front operation. Worried about the stalled offensive on Luzon, he pressed Army Chief of Staff Sugiyama twice, on January 13 and 21, to increase troop strength and launch a quick knockout of Bataan. Sugiyama, though prone to underestimate his enemy's powers of resistance, in this instance correctly observed that the Americans holed up on Bataan constituted no threat whatsoever to Japan's operations far to the south.
¹³
But no chief of staff could ignore the emperor's repeated “request.” On January 22, despite shortages of food, munitions, and manpower, the Japanese renewed their attacks on the Bataan Peninsula, while the high command set about finding adequate reinforcements should they be necessary.

In the battles that followed, the besieged American and Philippine forces—numbering approximately eighty thousand—inflicted heavy losses on the Japanese. On February 9 and 26 Hirohito again pressed Sugiyama about the operation on Bataan. Finally, on April 9, weeks after General MacArthur had escaped by PT boat and B-17 bomber to Melbourne, Australia, the holdouts in Bataan surrendered. Those on Corregidor capitulated a month later.
¹⁴
The prolonged American-Filipino defense of Bataan-Corregidor had set the stage for the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway that followed by allowing American intelligence analysts to intercept, decode, and analyze Japanese radio transmissions.

It is impossible to say whether Hirohito was notified of the
Imperial Army's gratuitous mistreatment of some 78,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war in the infamous “death march” out of Bataan. He was confronted by a prisoner-of-war issue soon after Bataan fell, however. Sixteen U.S. B-25 bombers, launched “no return” (with just enough fuel to land on friendly Chinese airfields) from the carrier
Hornet,
bombed Tokyo, Yokohama, and Nagoya. This event occurred on April 18, nine days after the fall of Bataan. Eight of the fliers, commanded by Col. James Doolittle, were later captured when their planes went down over Japanese-occupied territory in Kiangsi Province, China. Sentenced under the “military regulations” of the theater commander to be executed “because of their act against humanity,” the Americans were soon transported to Tokyo, where their cases were referred to the Army Ministry.
¹⁵

T
j
initially opposed death sentences for the American prisoners, fearing (rightly) American retaliation against Japanese living in the United States. Sugiyama and the entire Army General Staff, however, insisted on executing all eight so as to teach Americans (whose bombing had killed about fifty civilians) an object lesson and thereby decrease the likelihood of further air attacks. The executions would be authorized by an
ex post facto
military regulation specially drafted by the Army Ministry.
¹⁶
Hirohito, however, chose to intervene and commute the punishments of five. Why he allowed the others to die in violation of international law cannot be answered; at the end of the war the Japanese destroyed all records and documents pertaining to prisoners of war. Perhaps Hirohito wished to demonstrate his “benevolence,” but not an excess of that quality. Or perhaps, having sanctioned by this time so many violations of international laws, he was simply untroubled by breaching yet another one.