S. Sandler — Encyclopedia of World War II in the Pacific

Автор: S. Sandler
Название книги: Encyclopedia of World War II in the Pacific
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Военная история
Страницы: 1212
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

Stanley Sandler, one of America's most respected and best-known military historians, has brought together over 300 entries by some 200 specialists in the field to create the first encyclopedia specifically devoted to the Pacific Theatre of World War II.
Extending far beyond battles and hardware, the coverage ranges from high policy-making, grand strategy, and the significant persons and battles of the conflict, to the organization of the Allied and Japanese divisions, aircraft, armor, artillery, psychological warfare, warships, and the home fronts, covering the interactions of each topic along the way.

From the Japanese point of view at the time, war with the United States was almost
entirely unprovoked. For they knew that it was the Americans who had despised Japanese
immigrants and insultingly segregated them in West Coast schools. It was the Americans
who had gone on about the “Yellow Peril.” It was the United States which had imposed a
state of naval inferiority on Japan at the Washington Naval Conference of 1922. And it
was the United States government which, for its own imperialistic purposes, objected to
Japan’s attempts to bring order (from Japan’s point of view) to a “decadent” and
“corrupt” Nationalist China.
In the war games played out on the polished floors of the U.S. Naval War College, Japan
was the most likely enemy. These war games, of course, assumed that the U.S. Navy was
by far Nippon’s most worrisome opponent; both nations fortified their Pacific island
territories against each other. Yet the Japanese had never, certainly in public, brandished
their swords against the Americans and their Pacific possessions, although they inveighed
against European and American colonialism in Asia. Up to 1931 the provocation and the
inflammatory rhetoric was almost entirely American.
This one-sided animosity actually intensified after 1931, and for far more tangible
reasons than any vague worries about the “Yellow Peril.” The Japanese invasion of
Manchuria in 1931 was an act of unmitigated aggression. Even so, it was certainly not
directed against the United States and in no way tangibly affected American interests. But
it did give a focus to the previously amorphous anti-Japanese feeling among many
Americans. Six years later, the launching of full-scale warfare against China, for which
Americans felt a sort of proprietary sympathy, sharply intensified that focus. The owner
of the enormously influential Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, Henry Luce, the
offspring of American missionaries to China, made sure that Japanese atrocities against
the Chinese people were vividly documented. These atrocities were well-documented
tales of medieval-like savagery, with entire cities put to the sword, and with women raped
and people burned and buried alive in literal orgies of wanton cruelty. Millions of
Chinese would die before the Japanese were finally evicted. This savagery seemed all the
more incomprehensible in that the Japanese were not reacting to any Chinese aggression
against their own nation. Although the Chinese had a contempt for the Japanese as
“barbarians,” the history of modern China had been one of Chinese resistance to Japanese
aggression, never the other way around. The popular author Pearl Buck, like Luce the
child of American missionaries to China, wrote movingly of the noble, patient spirit of
resistance to the Japanese invaders. (It must be remembered that of the 22 million deaths
in the Pacific War, some 19 million were civilian, and most of those deaths were directly
caused by the Japanese army.)
The conflict between Japan and the United States was no war over markets or colonies,
either. The United States was in the process of shedding its Philippine territory (which
had achieved commonwealth status and was scheduled for independence in 1946), while
the Japanese preached their own anticolonial rhetoric, although they were at the same
time most interested in the resources of those European and American Pacific colonies.
U.S. investments in Asia were minuscule compared to those of the European colonial
powers.
Rather, World War II in the Pacific was the result of a clash of political goals: the
Japanese calling for “Asia for the Asiatics” (always under Japanese dominion, of course),
the Americans demanding an “open door” policy in China (which might open the way for
future U.S. investments) and preparing increasingly to resist any further Japanese
expansion. The Japanese, with their war goals restricted to dominance in Asia, were thus
the only major belligerent of World War II with basically limited aims. Numerous
Japanese statesmen and diplomats (as well as a few Americans) endeavored to the very
eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (1941) to work out some modus vivendi
between these two nations that had so little reason for conflict. The Americans after Pearl
Harbor, of course, fought for nothing less than Japan’s unconditional surrender.
For Americans, World War II began and ended in the Pacific. And from the attack on
Pearl Harbor to Japan’s signing of the instrument of unconditional surrender aboard the
American battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945, the Pacific war was
essentially an American-Japanese war. The United States basically had only two serious
allies in the Pacific war—Great Britain and China. The contribution of the British
Empire/Commonwealth was but grudgingly tolerated by the Americans, while China
could be generally considered more of a victim of than an ally against Japan. The British
eventually reconquered Burma, but the contributions of America’s allies (except for the
Australians) consisted primarily of tying down large enemy formations.
Americans had no such reluctance in accepting any aid the Australians could give.
Hailing from a land with a small population and with most of its militarized young male
population on the other side of the globe in the Middle East, the Australians nonetheless
earned whole-hearted American respect as tough and resourceful fighters. The
Australians paid a bitterly high price for their participation in the Pacific war: some
50,000 POWs from the early disasters in Malaya and Singapore were held in nearly
unspeakable conditions by the Japanese for most of the war’s duration. All carried
permanent marks of this captivity for the rest of their lives. In addition, the rather
ignominious British defeats early in the Pacific war reoriented Australia’s defense
allegiance from the British Empire to the United States.
The United States did not enter World War II in response to any treaty commitments or
as the result of any geopolitical or strategic considerations, but solely because of the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Even then, the United States did not declare war on
Japan’s ally, Germany, but rather Hitler declared war on the United States in a decision
that in its inexplicable folly was only matched by his invasion of the Soviet Union six
months earlier.
Even though Americans felt more personal animosity toward Japanese than toward the
Germans, the fact remains that throughout World War II the American war effort was
directed primarily against Germany; it was al ways “Germany First.” Only about 15
percent of U.S. industrial capacity went toward the war in the Pacific. In their islandhopping
campaigns, the Americans faced primarily naval garrison troops and overall only
about 10 to 15 percent of the Japanese army. Only in the Philippines and in the South
Pacific did U.S. ground forces fight a mass continental-style campaign, and only at sea
did the United States devote the bulk of its military resources against the Japanese, as did
the Australians.
Oddly, the Japanese themselves were also not oriented primarily toward the Pacific. The
Japanese army concentrated on Southeast Asia and the China-Manchuria-Korea theater.
Even at the very end of the war, the Soviet armies found themselves facing some 20
percent of the Japanese army. As with the Americans, the Japanese devoted the bulk of
naval forces only to the Pacific, while army and other ground and air forces were
assigned elsewhere.
The war with Japan was more often than not a grudge match, and “Remember Pearl
Harbor” was no empty home front propaganda slogan. Americans knew that those who
fell into Japanese hands were often subjected to barbaric treatment. The news of the
Bataan death march (1942), coming after the fall of the Philippines, the greatest defeat in
American military history, inflamed those feelings, as did the execution of some captured
airmen from the famous Doolittle raid on Tokyo in early 1942.
U.S. troops responded in a cold rage, often shooting down the few surrendering Japanese
soldiers, mutilating enemy dead, using their skulls for souvenirs, and cheering wildly on
news of the atomic bombing of Japanese cities in August 1945. It is illustrative that the
worst single fire raid in terms of civilian casualties was not on Berlin, Hamburg, or
Dresden, but on Tokyo in March 1945, after which it was claimed that a broad-based
pyramid 100-feet high could have been constructed with the bodies of children killed in
that assault. Americans also used fire on the Pacific battlefields. The horrific napalm and
flamethrowers turned Japanese soldiers into human torches and were justified as the only
way to get the “fanatical” enemy out of his bunkers. The argument was not without
purely military merit, considering the minuscule Japanese surrender rate. Fire, however,
was rarely used against the Germans.
Judging by casualties inflicted compared to casualties suffered, the U.S. Army Air
Forces’ B-29 strategic heavy bomber was the world’s most efficient killing machine, and,
again, it was used only against the Japanese. The U.S. Navy, in turn, came far closer than
Germany ever had in starving an enemy into submission through unrestricted submarine
warfare. (It was America’s righteous horror at Imperial Germany’s use of just such a
campaign had led to its entrance into World War I.) And yet, the same U.S. military then
turned to the mundane tasks of military occupation of defeated Japan and gave that
crushed nation an most enlightened, even benign military government that could only be
equalled by the Western Allies’ military occupation of postwar Germany.
In the Japanese, the Allies found for the first time on any large scale an enemy that was
quite likely actually to fight to the hackneyed “last round of the last man.” Adolf Hitler
could exhort his troops to such sacrifice, but the Soviets captured some 100,000 German
troops at Stalingrad (1943) and the Americans and British bagged a similar number at
Tunis at the close of the North African fighting in 1943. But in the Pacific fighting, most
of the Japanese who wound up as POWs were more likely those knocked unconscious or
who were in some other way incapable of resistance—or of suicide. This “never
surrender” Japanese attitude was the main cause of the Japanese brutal treatment of
enemy soldiers who were unfortunate to fall into their hands. To the Japanese, prisoners
of war had disgraced themselves and were fit for little more than slave labor on starvation
rations as permanent “guests of the Emperor.” For those enemies who did fight to the
death, the Japanese could on occasion spare some sympathy. Japanese aircraft dropped
wreaths over the underwater wrecks of the British navy’s Prince of Wales and Repulse
the day after sending them to the bottom; their crews had fought bravely until their
warships had sunk under them, and they were thus (in Japanese eyes) entitled to the
honors of war. That said, it could be pointed out that the Chinese had resisted bravely at
Nanking, and the infuriated Japanese went on on a six-week drunken orgy of mass
killing, rape, beheading, and torture. The Americans and Filipinos had fought well at
Bataan and were subjected to the Bataan death march. Japan had not signed the Geneva
Convention of 1929, but nonetheless assured Allied POWs that they would be treated in
accordance “with the tenants of bushido,” small comfort indeed in light of the Japanese
record of almost unrelieved brutality toward their prisoners.
When dealing with the Japanese military in the Pacific war, the word “mindless” comes
up perhaps too readily. But when one examines the inane decision to provoke the
“sleeping giant” into war with the attack on Pearl Harbor, the assumption that such an
attack would so demoralize the “soft” Americans that they would sue for peace, the belief
that mass terror and murder would subdue the Chinese people, and the unexamined
conviction toward the end of the conflict that “our spirit will prevail against their steel,” it
is not too difficult to apply the term.
For all its unremitting ferocity, the Pacific war was a conflict without a prime villain.
Half a century after Hitler’s ignominious death in Berlin, the outpouring of books about
him shows no signs of abating. on Japan’s warlord Hideiki Tojo are basically those of
scholars writing for scholars. Unlike Hitler, Tojo was not the master of some dark
ideology incomprehensible to any “right-thinking” American. Tojo lived by the precepts
of bushido, a value system that by definition was reserved to the Japanese. Americans
had no worries that its sinister message would appeal to any citizen—except supposedly
to Japanese-Americans. Even well-informed Americans of the World War II generation
would be hard pressed to recollect Hideiki Tojo’s exact fate. (He was hanged three years
after the war.)
About the only thing that both Axis leaders had in common as far as Americans were
concerned was that both were often portrayed as ridiculous figures of fun, but even here
Hitler had the edge. Cartoons and caricatures of Tojo and of the rest of the Japanese
nation were rooted in the racist stereotypes of the times. Tojo was usually portrayed as a
dull-witted, buck-toothed, near-blind blunderer. But Hitler, with his Charlie Chaplain
mustache, his platform posturing during his incomprehensible speeches, his absurd
salute, always provided far more vivid copy for mimics, satirists, and comics. (One of the
most popular songs of the war years was the manic American band leader Spike Jones’
“Right in Der Fuhrer’s Face!” There was no Tojo equivalent.) In sum, what determined
Americans to “gain the inevitable victory, so help us God” (in President Roosevelt’s
words) was pure rage and hatred over the bombing of Pearl Harbor, not any one Japanese
villain or Japanese ideology.
Although the Pacific war threw up no personal icon of enemy evil, “Remember Pearl
Harbor” served just as well. There may not have been an arch villain in the Pacific war,
but this was nonetheless a war of hatred, and usually to the death. Like the Nazis, the
Japanese committed mass murder, and their name to this day is anathema in those lands
unfortunate to have been occupied by the Imperial Japanese Army. The “Rape of
Nanking” has not been forgotten by the Chinese more than sixty years later. And yet, the
Japanese did not practice genocide, if by that term one means the systematic
extermination of entire peoples. The Japanese, infuriated by Chinese resistance, still did
not intend to exterminate the Chinese people. The same could be said about the Japanese
occupation of the Philippines. And where the population more or less acquiesced to the
Japanese, as in Burma and Malaya, Japanese occupation laid burdens on their conquests
that were fairly light, considering that they were fighting a major war. At least on paper,
most of Japan’s conquests were given “independence,” and were to be treated as “Asian
brothers” in the great struggle against imperialism. “Asia for the Asiatics” resonated
strongly throughout the Pacific (except, from the start, in the Philippines) until the
Japanese occupiers tightened the screws as they began to lose the war.
World War II in the Pacific was a juxtaposition of the ancient and modern. The modern
saw vast oceanic distances conquered by modern fleet resupply and management
methods. It opened with two great naval battles, Coral Sea and Midway, where surface
ships never spotted each other but fought it out through air power and submarines. The
first and only use of nuclear weapons in war and an unrelenting submarine blockade
brought about the unprecedented unconditional surrender of a major power even though
its main army was still intact and its home territory uninvaded.
The “ancient” Pacific War can be seen in the brutal beach and jungle battles by lightly
armed soldiers that would not have been out of place in earlier wars. It can also be seen in
the medieval bushido code of the Japanese warrior, with its beheadings of captives,
contempt for technology, and its ancestor and emperor veneration. Many times, desperate
Japanese soldiers would stage a banzai charge, officers waving swords and lightly armed
soldiers screaming, against American troops who took some gratification in dispatching
them to the last man (or “to their ancestors”, as U.S. troops often laconically put it).
Entire cities could be given over to rape and pillage as a reward to the troops and as a
lesson in terror—a tactic of Genghis Khan. American and Australian troops on occasion
collected Japanese skulls, mounting them on tanks or mailing them home to girlfriends,
something almost unknown in the European theater. Although German cities, like their
Japanese counterparts, could be burned out in an evening by Allied incendiary bombing,
the use of the flame thrower and the horrific napalm jellied petrol bomb on the battlefield
was reserved for the Pacific theater.
This tremendous conflict altered the Pacific Basin in ways that could not be imagined in
1941 (see “Epilogue: Results of the Great Pacific War”). In presenting World War II in
the Pacific, we have attempted to provide as comprehensive a coverage of events from
the late 1930s to the Japanese surrender in 1945. Included are articles that describe
military campaigns, weaponry, diplomacy, politics, and the social effects of the war.
Articles on major personalities are also included. Because of space limitations, we have
not provided separate entries on all of the numerous players in the war. However, our
index reveals that the roles of all major figures are discussed throughout the volume, even
if they are not singled out in individual biographies.
We have also attempted to portray in an even-handed manner the Japanese perspectives
and expectations on the war. The articles on Japanese logistics and U.S. logistics, for
example, reveal how cultural differences affected not only how armies performed but the
very ways they were supplied during the course of the conflict. The article on stereotypes
reveals racial and cultural attitudes that affected how each side viewed the enemy—
points of view that hardened as the war progressed and the brutality of combat increased.
Finally, we hope that the articles can be enjoyed for the lively and accessible writing that
will make military subjects interesting for the nonspecialist. Military history is more than
a chronicle of aircraft carriers, battles, and generals and admirals. It is also about ordinary
people caught up, in this case, in one of history’s most cataclysmic moments.
Stanley Sandler