Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II (24 page)

By June it was clear that two different strategies to end the war were emerging within the Japanese elite.
On the one hand there was the attempt to get the Soviet Union to help negotiate a peace, and on the other there was the desire of hard-liners within the army to wait until the Americans landed on the Japanese home islands and presented the Imperial Army with one final opportunity to defeat them.

In July the Allied leaders met at Potsdam in Germany to consider the terms under which Japan’s surrender would be accepted.
Present at that conference was Harry Truman, who had become President of the USA after Roosevelt’s death in April.
At Potsdam, he was given news that would radically shape the way the war ended, and would dictate the political strategy of the great powers for many decades.
He learnt of the successful test (code-named ‘Trinity’) of the atomic bomb in the New Mexican desert.
‘When word reached the President that the Trinity test was successful,’ says George Elsey, then naval aide to the President, ‘he was elated — he was very, very pleased.
He was delighted...
“delighted” is the wrong word...
he felt that here was a chance to bring the war to a speedy conclusion, and avoid the loss of American lives.’
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At Potsdam, Stalin mentioned that he had been asked to intervene on behalf of the Japanese to negotiate a peace, only to be told by the Americans that his help was not required in brokering a settlement with Japan.

In recent years there has been considerable controversy both over the Allied decision not to open peace negotiations at the time of the Potsdam conference and, especially, over the decision to use the atomic bombs a few weeks later.
It is true that President Truman did receive advice, from people as disparate as former President Hoover and undersecretary of state Joseph Grew, that unless the Allies agreed to preserve the institution of the emperor there would be no Japanese surrender.
Equally, US secretary of state Byrnes did tell Truman that one consequence of using the atomic bomb would be to demonstrate to the Soviet Union the power that the United States now possessed.
But none of that means that the prime motivation of the US leadership in deciding to drop the atomic bomb was anything other than the desire to ensure that there was no negotiated settlement with Japan.

Even if the Allies had decided to enter into peace negotiations with Japan at this stage (an act that would have broken the pledge they had previously made about insisting on ‘unconditional surrender’) it is doubtful whether sufficient consensus existed amongst the Japanese leadership to allow a settlement to be reached.
There would have been those in the Japanese elite who would have interpreted the Allies’ willingness to negotiate as a sign of weakness.
Was this not an indication, they would have argued, of how the Americans had finally become unable to endure the level of human loss that was being inflicted upon them by the heroic defenders of the Imperial Army?
Similarly, another obstacle to peace existed in the human form of General Korechika Anami, the army chief of staff, who still intransigently maintained that peace should only be negotiated after the elusive ‘decisive victory’ had been won on Japanese soil.
Thus huge numbers of Japanese troops were digging themselves in on the beaches of Kyushu (the place on the home islands where the Japanese expected the Americans to land) prepared to fight to the death to defend their homeland.

That July, as they pondered what course to take, the American leadership knew, thanks to intelligence intercepts, both about the Japanese attempts to instigate a negotiated peace through the Soviet Union and about the military activity on Kyushu.
It is hard to see, from the perspective of the American decision-makers at the time, how the combination of these two events suggested that the Japanese were now anxious to surrender.
On the contrary, did not the actions of the Japanese demonstrate that they might merely want a ceasefire in order to string out surrender negotiations while they regrouped?
At the front of the American consciousness was the way in which the Japanese had behaved during the discussions immediately preceding the outbreak of war — their delegation had still been negotiating in Washington only days before the US fleet was bombed at Pearl Harbor.
Understandably, the Americans were not inclined to take the Japanese government’s stated intentions at face value.

For all these reasons Truman decided, just days after the issue of the Potsdam Declaration calling once more for the ‘unconditional surrender’ of Japan, to order the use of the atomic bomb.
A special committee reviewed possible targets and finally recommended that the attack be made on a city on the southwestern end of the main Japanese home island of Honshu — Hiroshima.
On 6 August 1945 the American atomic strike force appeared high above the target.
‘We could see the bridge,’ says Charles Sweeney, pilot of one of the planes that accompanied the B-29 (named the ‘Enola Gay’) which carried the bomb, ‘the bridge in Hiroshima, which was the aiming point which we’d studied.
I saw the bomb falling free from his airplane.
It was much easier for me to see it than it was for anybody in his airplane to see it.
And I thought to myself, “for better or for worse...
it’s too late now.’”

For the citizens of Hiroshima it rapidly became clear that this was no ordinary bombing raid.
‘Large drops of rain started to fall heavily on us,’ says Suzuko Numata.
‘Of course, we didn’t know then that the rain was contaminated with radiation.
And the rain was black.
We got very wet.
My leg was soaked through with the black rain.
It was at that moment that I suddenly realized that my foot from the ankle down had disappeared.’

’As we tried to run away I saw many victims,’ says Akihoro Takahashi, ‘their arms held out in front of them and their skin all peeled off, their clothes all in tatters.
We were all more or less naked and we were all barefoot.
We dragged ourselves along, trying to escape wherever we could.
We were just like ghosts, like marching ghosts.
I saw a man whose upper body was stuck all over with pieces of glass.
There was another man whose upper body had lost all its skin and all we could see was the red, raw flesh.
There was a woman whose one eyeball had popped out.
I don’t remember whether it was the left or the right eye and she was covered in blood.
And amongst the corpses I saw a dreadful sight — a woman’s body with the intestines burst and scattered all around her on the ground.
There was a baby lying next to its dead mother, both with their skin peeled away.
The baby was still alive.
The baby was crying and crying and crying.
I just cannot forget that sound even to this day.’

In a story that demonstrates once again the distancing effect of high altitude bombing, Charles Sweeney reveals that while all of this suffering was taking place on the ground, at 32,000 feet he settled back into his return journey and had lunch: ‘I had a sandwich and some pineapple juice — we always had pineapple juice — and then I went back and took a nap.
And I woke up and had a cigar, and just kept on boring holes in the sky until we got back to base.
After we landed and went through debriefings and made out our reports, there was a big party.’

Events now moved swiftly — all against the Japanese.
Forty-eight hours after Hiroshima had been bombed Stalin, anxious to gain influence and territory for the Soviet Union, declared war on Japan and his troops quickly moved against the Imperial Army in Manchuria.
The following day, 9 August, having received no communication from the Japanese, the Americans dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagaski is seared into the consciousness of the world, and there is still passionate debate about whether it was morally right to use such a terrible weapon.
A large part of the controversy rests on the public perception that the atomic bomb was somehow so uniquely horrible that it should never have been used.
But that is a position that would surely have been incomprehensible to the hundreds of thousands of Japanese victims of the fire-bombing campaign that preceded the nuclear attacks.
Throughout June and July, American bombers conducted incendiary raids on Japanese towns and cities.
Indeed, contrary to popular belief, the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki was not the last American bomb to fall on Japan.
On 14 August Kumagaya was bombed by ‘conventional’ means — and, significantly, a greater proportion of Kumagaya (45 per cent) was destroyed as a result of this ‘conventional’ bombing attack than in the atomic raid on Nagasaki (40 per cent destroyed).
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Yet who in the West has ever heard of the horrific bombing of Kumagaya?
Why are the women and children incinerated by nuclear means at Hiroshima and Nagasaki worthy of remembrance in history when the women and children incinerated by fire-bombing in countless other Japanese cities like Kumagaya are not?
The truth is that in the context of the American saturation bombing offensive of spring and summer 1945 the nuclear bombs were merely a more effective way of delivering the same result — the elimination of Japanese civilians and the infrastructure of the country.
Their use was wholly in character with the bombing policy that preceded them.

In Tokyo, the dropping of the first atomic bomb did nothing to change the mind of die-hards like General Anami.
He and several other senior military figures still said that peace must be negotiated and that foreign troops should not be allowed to occupy Japan.
But prime minister Suzuki disagreed: he thought the time had come to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration.
By 10 August — after the bombing of Nagasaki — Hirohito had finally taken the decision that the war must come to an end.
A combination of the Soviet advance in Manchuria and fear of more nuclear attacks had finally convinced him to stop vacillating.

Once the Japanese had stated their willingness to accept the terms of the Potsdam Decalaration, the Allies hinted that the institution of the emperor might be kept.
This was not ‘negotiation’ but a pragmatic sign that the Americans, from their position of strength, felt that keeping the Japanese monarchy might make the forthcoming occupation easier.
Not with standing this shift in the Allied position, on 13 August the Japanese cabinet was divided — still the military hawks could not face the prospect of defeat.
On the 14th, in an attempt to break the deadlock, American planes dropped leaflets on Japanese towns and cities announcing that the government had accepted the surrender terms of the Potsdam Declaration.
That same day Hirohito reiterated to those around him his determination to end the war on the American terms, but Field Marshals of the Imperial Army told him that the war should carry on.
Earlier that day Field Marshal Shunroku Hata, who had just flown up from Hiroshima, had remarked that in his view the atomic bomb was ‘not that powerful a weapon’.
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Hirohito for once stood firm and shortly afterwards recorded a radio speech in which he announced the Japanese surrender — a speech due to be broadcast the following day.
But there still remained those in the military who would not accept the will of their supreme commander.
On the evening of the 14th fanatical military officers broke into the household ministry, searching for the recording of the emperor’s speech and killing the commander of the guard.
But the plotters searched in vain and, not receiving support from other military units, committed suicide.
On 15 August 1945, Emperor Hirohito’s speech announcing the surrender was played to the Japanese people.
The war was finally over.
General Anami, who had not supported the mutineers, was one of many senior military figures who committed suicide shortly afterwards.

It is significant — indeed, with hindsight astonishing — that there was still a dispute within the Japanese elite about whether Japan should surrender even after the swift gains secured by the Red Army in Manchuria and the dropping of two American atomic bombs.
Given such intransigence it is difficult to see how, without the dropping of the atomic bombs, Japan would ever have surrendered without the continuation — and possible escalation — of the fire-bombing campaign.

Whether an invasion of Japan would ever have been subsequently necessary is still one of the great unanswered questions of history.
Perhaps a combination of the continued conventional bombing and the threat from the Soviet Union (assuming the Russians would have declared war on Japan even if the first nuclear bomb had not been dropped on Hiroshima) would have forced the Japanese to concede defeat.
What is certain is that the statement that dropping the nuclear bombs ‘saved Allied lives’ is correct, since without the bombs being dropped the Imperial Army would have continued fighting for weeks, perhaps months, in Burma, Borneo, Malaya and elsewhere.

General Douglas McArthur arrived in Yokohama on 31 August to oversee the occupation of Japan.
Like most of the American occupying force he was immediately struck by how cooperative the Japanese had suddenly become.
Loyalty, obedience, dependability — all the qualities that Japanese citizens had directed towards the military regime — were now turned towards the occupiers.
McArthur appeared to the Japanese to be precisely the sort of strong, decisive military figure they were familiar with from their own history — especially as he chose, just like the Shogun, to work behind the figure of the emperor.

Hirohito remained on the throne, though under the American occupation he was a god no more, but a constitutional monarch at the head of a democratic government.
And without a doubt the Allied decision to retain Hirohito on the throne did ease the transition of Japan into a democratic state.
But there is compelling evidence that the short-term measure of allowing Hirohito to stay as emperor did profound damage to the country’s development.
Even today Japan is criticized as a nation because of an inability to apologize properly for the crimes committed in the nation’s name during the war — and the chief block to that sincere apology is the inability of the Japanese to express criticism for the past without, as a consequence, doing the unthinkable and criticizing the actions of Emperor Hirohito.
Japanese society during the war and in the immediate pre-war years was profoundly hierarchical.
Each person related to the hierarchy in a way that was much more rigid than even the German or Soviet totalitarian systems.
And as they sought instruction from those above them, there was only one individual in the entire structure who was perceived to have ‘free will’ — the emperor.
Of course, his power was constrained by many factors — the information his advisers chose to give him, the traditional role of the emperor as an arbiter rather than a proactive participant, and, not least, the fear that Hirohito must have had of precipitating a coup against him if he crossed the military too much.
But none the less, as history shows, Hirohito possessed enormous latent power within the system.
A different Japanese emperor — one of stronger character and greater integrity — might have ended the war two years earlier and prevented many of the war crimes that subsequently tarnished the reputation of Japan.
The fact that Hirohito not only escaped punishment for his participation in this war of aggression and destruction, but appeared to take no responsibility whatsoever for any of his actions, made it hard for anyone else in Japan to acknowledge truthfully what they themselves had done during the conflict.