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Size of Japan

It is a small country - the size of California.

Japanese prisoners of war

The appalling treatment often meted out to their prisoners of war was a recent phenomena. In the Sino-Japanese war of 1894, their treated their Russian prisoners very well, and adhered to international agreements governing behaviour in war.

Japan in World War 1

They were on the side of the Allies.


Emperor Hirohito 1910-1989

His father had mental health problems, and he was brought up instead by a retired admiral. He was enrolled at a military school at age 7. The emphasis was on military subjects. His teachers included an army general, two navy rear-admirals and four active duty lieutenant generals. At his home, the army "had a trench dug inside the crown prince's compound, so that Hirohito could practice firing with machine guns. In the evenings, military tutors "played war-strategy games with him". He was constantly in the company of older military men, who encouraged him to act in a military manner.

General education in Japan was militaristic

Hirohito was far from alone in having a martial curriculum. For decades the army had seen to it that "physical culture, military training in the public schools, and 'military spirit education' in general should be encouraged," to produce "good and faithful subjects". "Every facet of the curriculum was permeated with emperor worship and militarism". The army officer-custodians of young Japanes minds had long endured rough corporal punishments in their barracks, and they transplanted their brutal treatment to the schools.

Japanese soldiers

Boot camp was utterly brutal. The leaders of the army began to teach a basterdized version of 'Bushido' (Way of the Warrior) tradition, that taught a cult of death. They told soldiers they they would die for the emperor. Recruits were constantly told their lives were worth nothing compared to the glorious contribution they could make to their country by dying in battle for the emperor. It was absolutely forbidden to withdraw, surrender, or become a prisoner of war.

Life for the trainee Japanese soldier...

"Brutality and cruelty were the rule rather than the exception in the Japanese army. The new army recruit entered a violent asylum where he was pummelled, slapped, kicked and beaten daily."

Billy Mitchell

One of the most exciting and fascinating parts of the book is the author's description of General Billy Mitchell, who almost single-handedly brought air power to America, and against great odds, fought to convince American leadership of the importance of aeroplanes in warfare.

Japan's Invasion of China 1931, 1937-1945

The Japanese campaigns in China were brutal and ruthless. They took over large sections of the eastern area of the country, including Nanking, which spawned the famous book "The Rape of Nanking", describing this fighting in all its savagery.


Japan's initial hostilities in the Second World War

1) 1940 Japan allied with Germany and Italy in the Triparate Act.
2) End 1941 : Japan fed up with sanctions from the USA, started a two prong attack.
- Pearl Harbour
- 20,000 troops landed on the east coast of Malaya, where there were 80,000 British troops. The Japanese won and the British surrendered.


The American air raid in response to Pearl Harbour (The Doolittle Raid)

The soldiers of Japan thought the Pearl Harbour attack would dishearten the Americans, but the opposite was true. It gave America a sense of moral ferocity that no government propaganda could have come close to matching. America's rage bordered on the genocidal.

The Americans planned a daring raid. They planned to fly bombers off aircraft carrier ships, which had never been achieved before - because bombers were so big. They were too big to land back on the ships, so had to fly on, after the raid, to land in unoccupied parts of China.

The raid was a great success. They dropped magnesium firebombs on Tokyo and other places on Honshu Island, causing notable damage.

Japan was bowled over by the intrusion. There were many casualties.....and the boast that Premier Hideki Tojo had made that "Japan has never lost a war in all the 2,600 years of her glorious history" was going to be destroyed.

The Japanese took terrible vengeance by infiltrating that part of China that had helped the airmen. It is calculated that a quarter of a million Chinese were killed in their three month campaign of revenge.

Biological Warfare

Japan was so outraged by the Doolittle Raid that it unleashed biological warfare, and experimented on Chinese civilians at the infamous Unit 731. They were infected with bubonic plague, pneumonia,epidemic haemorrhagic fever, typhoid and syphilis. The Chinese were injected with pathogens and their bodies used as disease incubators. The Japanese then sprayed these things across east China. The total number of casualties has never been determined, but the effects and be imputed from Japanese records "On reports stated that during one assault, a last-minute change in the wind led to the deaths of 1,700 Japanese soldiers and the injury of 10,000 more."

Japan was the only combatant of WW2 to use biological warfare.

Battle of Midway Island. 4th June, 1942.

Japan's navel power was hugely superior to America's navel power. But American intelligence gathering got warning that the Japanese were going to attack Midway Island (Part of Hawaii I think?). They therefore sent out bomber and fighter planes which caused havoc to the Japanese fleet of ships.

The Battle of Midway decided the outcome of the war. The Japanese fleet was crippled. Five minutes of applied American air power had turned the tide of the Pacific War. It was far from over though, because the Japanese would not surrender. Every inch of the way - the Japanese would not surrender.

American air power takes over the outer islands of Japan.

The Japanese built impregnable fortresses on islands like Rabaul and Truk. They thought these fortresses would secure the South Pacific. But using its airplanes, the US leap-frogged its way to victory. They used their airplanes to soften up the islands for the US Marines to capture. Not only would they bomb in advance of the troops, but they would keep the marines supplied with food, medical supplies and ammunition. These supplies would be flown in, and the wounded flown out. Island by island the Americans were heading for Japan.

War atrocities committed by the Americans and the Japanese.

These happened on both sides e.g., Japanese pilots were routinely shot out of the sky, rather than being taken prisoner, but it wasn't even handed. In spite of the efforts of the author to be fair to both sides, I got the impression that the Japanese were far more cruel towards the people they captured, not least because their culture had no respect whatsoever for POWs. In their books, anyone threatened with being taken prisoner should do the honourable thing and commit suicide, therefore people who allowed themselves to be taken prisoner were regarded as despicable. I think their attitude was greatly exacerbated by the experiences of fire bombing that the Japanese had at the hands of the Americans. It was horrendous. I think revenge played no small part in the way they treated their prisoners.... Suffice it to say I encountered levels of depravity and cruelty in this book that I didn't know existed.

Death rates in Prisoner of War Camps:
Germany ......4%
Italy................4%
Japan............27%

War atrocities committed by senior Japanese military against their own army.

For me this was almost the most shocking part of the book. Japanese troops left defending the islands were expected to fend for themselves. The Japanese army did nothing to support them. Incredibly, Allied bullets accounted only for one third of all Japanese troop fatalities in the Pacific war. The senior Japanese military's lack of strategy and planning accounted for most deaths. Indeed, when the Americans island-hopped toward Tokyo they simply bypassed these pitiful abandoned troops. Some of them tried to stay alive by farming and fishing. More than one-third died of sickness and starvation. On Wolwei, a force of over 7,000 men numbered fewer than 2,000 by the end of the war. All over the islands these soldiers tried to survive by eating things like boiled grass. In some instances they resorted to cannibalism.... eating their own comrades.

157,646 Japanese soldiers were sent to New Guinea. Only 10,072 survived. Allied bullets killed relatively few. The vast majority died through disease and starvation.


Examples of the Japanese refusal to surrender

On Attu, 2,350 Japanese soldiers fought to the end and just 29 became prisoners of war. A fatality rate of 98.8 percent.

On Tarawa, 99.7 percent of the imperial navy's force of 2,571 men stood in front of the Marines' bullets rather than surrender. Only eight Japanese were captured alive.

On Makin, only one out of more than three hundred men survived the battle.

At the Marshalls, the Japanese lost 3,472 and only 51 were captured, a fatality rate of 98.5 percent.

At Kwajalein, the Japanese garrison lost 4,938, with only 79 taken prisoner, a fatality rate of 98.4 percent.


Saipan

An island 1500 miles from Japan, that the Japanese never thought would be attacked. 40,000 naval and army forces defended the island. There were also approximately 20,000 civilians. The Americans attacked the island with vigour. Realising its soldiers and civilians were hopeless trapped, Japanese military leaders decided that all the Japanese on the island - soldiers and civilians alike - should die - and gave the order that this should be done. The Japanese army, often just using bamboo sticks, just hopelessly kept attacking the landing American soldiers. The civilians committed suicide by jumping off a cliff called Marpi Point - men, women and children. Just a few surrendered.

Iwo Jima Island

The air force bombed this island ferociously before the troops arrived. When the US Marines landed there, the fighting was terrible, but like Guam, Tinian and Saipan islands, it gave the Americans long airfields that B-29 airplanes could take off from, to bring war to the island of Japan.

Napalm

Napalm was invented by Harvard president James Conant, and scientists at MIT, DuPont and Standard Oil. The found that mixing Naphthenic and Palmitic acids (hence na-palm) with gasoline produced a sticky Vaseline-like yellow paste that stuck to materials and burned slowly. It was a perfect incendiary. This jellied gasoline would stick to anything - roofs, walls, humans - and it could not be put out. Water only splattered it.

Napalm link


Napalm fire bombing of Tokyo. 9th March 1945

This was ferocious and terrifying. An overwhelming downpour of jellied gasoline.
100,000 died - more than were killed at Nagasaki, and only slightly less than at Hiroshima.

Quote from Brigadier General Bonner Fellers. He described the Tokyo raid in a confidential memo as "one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of non-combatants in all history."

Several Japanese people interviewed for the book said they thought it was this fire bombing of Japan (other cities were later fire bombed as well) that ended the war, not the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But nevertheless it was the dropping of the atom bombs that finally provoked the senior military into surrender....

The Potsdam Declaration

26 July 1945

Issued by President Truman. "Japan shall be given an opportunity to end the war" It stated. .... Japan could surrender or face "utter and complete destruction".

There was no surrender, and in August there followed some more terrible bombing of Japan.

Hiroshima

Hiroshima housed the headquarters of the army that would defend Kyushu from American landings. 43,000 soldiers crowded amongst Hiroshima's 280,000 civilians, and there were a number of military installations and military factories.

Leaflets were dropped on Hiroshima and other towns the day before being bombed. Everyone was urged to get out of their cities. They were told that their towns would be obliterated.

6th August 1945: the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima

Defenders of the dropping of the atom bombs in Japan

"Word War II veteran Paul Fussell wrote "The degree to which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with lack of information about the Pacific war."

Marine veteran and historian William Manchester wrote, "You think of the lives which would have been lost in an invasion of Japan's home islands - a staggering number of Americans but millions more of Japanese - and you thank God for the atomic bomb".

Japanese pilot Mitsuo Fushida, who led Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour. In 1959, Fushida told Paul Tibbets "You did the right thing. You know the Japanese attitude at the time, how fanatic they were, they'd die for the Emperor.....Every man, woman and child would have resisted the invasion with sticks and stones if necessary... Can you imagine what a slaughter it would have been to invade Japan? It would have been terrible. The Japanese people know more about that then the American public will ever know."

But perhaps the greatest life-saving function of the atom bombs was that it shortened the fire bombing of Japan. Secretary of State James Byrnes said the atom bombs dis not cause "nearly as many deaths as there would have been had our air force continued to drop incendiary bombs on Japan's cities."

Against the dropping of the atom bombs

NOTE: Jan-Maat Landlubber here at GR suggests it was not the atom bomb which stopped the war, but a change to the terms of the peace treaty. "Apparently the idea that the nuclear bombs shortened the war on Japan is a myth - there's a discussion in The Shock of the Old. The two bombs cost 2 billion dollars and had the destructive power of a raid by 220 and 125 B29s respectively, but the same amount of money as was spent on the nuclear programme could have bought five times more artillery than the US had in the theatre, or one third as many more tanks or several thousand more B29 bombers - all of which would have been available for use far earlier on in the war. The crucial factor was apparently changing the terms of surrender...

Nagasaki

9th August 1945. Atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki. 70,000 were killed.

Russia invades Manchuria in China

The same day, over one million Soviet troops invaded Manchuria. Three months earlier, Stalin had signalled his intention to fight, when he let the USSR-Japan Non-aggression Act lapse. His troops overran Manchuria - and the Japanese emperor's "pioneers" who had settled there.

Surrender

14th August 1945. The Japanese surrendered.

Afterword

Emperor Hirohito's blame for involvement in the war was hidden by the Americans. They felt that the psychological blow of the 'god' being condemned would be too much for the Japanese people. Former Prime Minister Tojo and 27 other military and government officers were charged as Class A war criminals.

The chemical/biological warfare unit in Japan - Unit 731 - was offered immunity in exchange for valuable information based on its diabolical experiments. General MacArthur approved this deal.