The GI War Against Japan: American Soldiers in Asia and the Pacific During World War II

by Peter Schrijvers

Based on numerous diaries and letters, this book depicts the story of America's soldier sin Asia and the Pacific during World War II. Combining social and cultural history, the author examines the GIs' encounters with Asia's environmental, sociocultural and racial otherness and the impact that these encounters had on them. The Americans' experience in Asia and the Pacific presaged the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Genres: History, American History

335 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2002

About the author

Dr. Peter Schrijvers (1963- ) is a Belgian academic and writer of history books. He earned a masters degree in Modern History from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Catholic University of Leuven) an a PhD in US Diplomatic and Military History from the Ohio State University.
Today (2014) he is a Senior Lecturer American and international history at the School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales in Sydney.

Peter Schrijvers mainly writes academic books in English.

*****

Peter Schrijvers doceerde Amerikaanse geschiedenis in Australië, de VS en Zwitserland. Hij publiceerde zes non-fictieboeken over de Tweede Wereldoorlog, onder andere bij Cambridge en Yale, en was te zien op National Geographic. Momenteel is hij curator van Liberation Garden, het nieuwe museum over de Tweede Wereldoorlog in Leopoldsburg. Een hoofd vol vlammen is zijn eerste roman.

Reviews

[Josh]

Peter Schrijvers' The GI War Against Japan offers a compelling model for understanding the linkages between perception-experience-behavior in combat during the twentieth century. Yet his historical interpretation of the prevailing mindset among American servicemen and women during World War II is marked by some significant flaws that make this work significantly weaker in comparison to other cultural explanations of extreme violence in the Pacific Theater. While I think Schrijvers put together a useful model for understanding behavior during wartime (and/or the construction of soldiers' culture) I have some serious reservations about his causal linkages between popular culture, experience, and the perpetration of various war crimes.

The first part of Schrijvers book, entitled "Frontier," focuses on American perceptions of the Pacific Ocean, Asia, and its peoples. He suggests that American servicemen and women generally fit the role of "Pioneers, romantics, missionaries, or imperialists." Thus, soldiers viewed themselves as embarking of 20th century Lewis and Clarke expeditions into the unknown, trailblazing undocumented lands and observing cultures and peoples that had not been touched by civilization. More romantic-minded soldiers interpreted their initial deployment to the Pacific within the framework of vacationing and seeing exotic, foreign destinations. Still other soldiers with a more evangelical bent saw the Pacific as ripe ground for spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Finally, soldier-imperalists perceived the Pacific islands as inherently valuable for the development of its natural resources for the United States. To illustrate these four typologies, Schrijvers relies heavily on what soldiers wrote in memoirs, diaries, and letters. I commend Schrijvers for doing something that few other military historians have done by capturing the excitement, mysteriousness, and novelty of a draftee or volunteers first deployment to war and perhaps their first time traveling outside their county, state, or the country. While one could easily debate that these four typologies are arbitrary, that he has essentalized American culture, or that he has fundamentally misinterpreted what a soldier meant by saying that conditions on the Philippines were "frontier-like," these chapters still have considerable value for simply putting into words the expectations, perceptions, and dreams that American servicemen had aboard the ships that left New York City and other harbors in the United States.

Any novelty in this monograph wears off in Part II as Schrijvers describes the American experience in the Pacific. Here Schrijvers travels over well-trod ground to describe the epidemiological, biological, and geographical aspects of the Pacific Theater that troubled, confounded, and aggravated Americans. What you will not find are extensive descriptions of how American combat and face-to-face encounters with the Japanese played into the perception-experience-behavior model that Schrijvers constructs in the book. Here in lies the main problem with his thesis—he attributes far too much weight for American brutalization (or to borrow a phrase that Wayne Lee uses in Barbarians and Brothers—the increasing frightfulness of war) to cultural preconceptions of the Pacific, the disease environment, and the weather. While these were all factors contributing the soldiers' misery during the Pacific, by far the most significant factor fueling American hatred for the Japanese were the vicious, bloody encounters with the Japanese! Instead, the reader will find endless pages describing American encounters with A) Native Islanders B) Prostitutes C) Children and D) Japanese prisoners with very little attention given to American-Japanese combat interactions.

Because Schrijvers really eschews much discussion of actual combat and because his sample size encompasses literally everyone (except African-Americans, because Schrijvers thought their exclusion was justified because he couldn't give African-Americans enough attention) it's really hard to determine the validity of his conclusions about atrocity/brutalization given that most of his sources come from rear echelon personnel, clerks, senior officers, and WACs. For example, if Schrijvers had focused his book specifically on combatants and incorporated the African-American experience, which I dare say would be extremely important given that a large portion of this book deals directly or indirectly with perceptions, beliefs, and behaviors regarding race, we would probably have a much more solid monograph.

Overall, there is little in this book I could recommend other than the preface. I do think that Schrijvers' model is important because the linkages between perception-experience-behavior can have explanatory power for how soldier culture develops and becomes organic. If you are looking for explanations about extreme violence in the Pacific, I recommend reading John Dower's War Without Mercy.


I should also note that Peter Schrijver's The GI War Against Japan was reprinted as "Bloody Pacific: American Soldiers at War with Japan" in 2010. With the exception of the book and chapter titles, the two texts are one in the same.

[Andre]

I had very high hopes for this book but I was dissappointed in the end. At first it was really interesting to read about those odd sailor rituals to initiate newbies into the crew. It also sounded fascinating how the US military consciously cultivated the image of the Pacific as the new frontier (the west) and used names like Chickasaw, Arapacho, Molala etc for their ships. And apparently Jack London wrote stuff that influenced this. To this day I remember the idiotic dog-sleds from his whitefang book. In it he wrote that the sleds work because all the dogs are jealous and chase the lead dog, who runs away, which is ridiculous because how on earth would you even be able to stop such a sled?
That many sailors had such a romanticized idea of the pacific was not surprising. I was wondering whether this sailor got it wrong when he claimed the people of the Kolombangara island dyed their hair blond, and so I looked up the place and apparently it is one of the solomon islands, so these people probably had natural blond hair. I wonder whether it ever occured to sailors like this (or the author) that the natives simply preferred the new stuff from the US because they were better. Those sailors only think that it ruins a paradise. And why did the GI react with utter disbelief to the "poverty that haunted Asia's ancient cultures"?
And if these one here notices the difference between the british area and chinese area in singapoor, maybe this is based on fact? The author never states so far.
And did Americans and Chinese have a traditional love-hate relationship as the author claims? Did the GIs make up the stories of cannibals in remote areas of Espirit Santo or did they get that from the natives?
As for notions of considering people as higher who can communicate in your own language (here now english) is really not uncommon, and its not just the greeks who did that, the chinese did and still do that as well. But naturally only the greeks are mentioned, not the chinese, here. Which was one reason why I started to get really suspicious about this book.
This talk of nothing ever being thoroughly repaired but only patched and repatched in china reminds me of the tofu buildings today. And where did all these talk about theft come from? China was not in a good state after all back then. Because the author mentions that beforehand there was the popular image of the chinese as a people of reliable, hardy peasants. But this change in attitude is something he seems to attribute to racism and not reality. Which is really odd, since he claims that Chinese of all ranks lived under abominable living standards. Even the ones doing all the corruption? After all, the book states itself that Chiang Kai-Shek could claim all he wants that he had everything under control but he did not. And American servicemen were so weary they sometimes needed bodyguards.
And he claims that pacific islanders havda long history of accepting homosexuality. I need some proof for that. Also, what these soldiers were complaing about the chinese using teenage girls was proven earlier in the book when prostitites as young as 10 were mentioned, And that abuse of young boys is today used as evidence of chinese tolerance for homosexuality.
A point in the book where I seriously started to question its validity was when the author stated that American alertness to effiminacy of Asian and pacific males was in part the reflection of longstanding western tradituon of representing less advanced cultures as both feminine and childlike. The latter claim I belief because I have seen it before, and this book gives ample examples of referring to people as childlike, but there was nothing where people associated less advanced cultures with being femine. Seriously, nothing, confusing clothes does not count. So he made this claim but provided no proof of it.
And the author critizises the message of spreading civilization because of the two world wars being largely of western making, which is hypocrisy at its best as that not only downplays the russian, ottoman, chinese and japanese involvement but also ignores all the non-western imperialism that came beforehand.
And did "china, the ancient empire" once make such important contributions to medicine? Because the Qing Empire was long gone by this point so I wonder whether the author paraphrases the americans or actually believes "China" was an empire at the time. And maybe American medicine simply was better at the time? The USA was stable compared to the ROC, so naturally their medicine would be better. And according to him the "europeans" were pushed out by the americans, however, I would like if the author would be more specific than saying european colonists all the time. The only colonists at the time were Brits, Dutch, French and maybe some portuguese in the area.
There were some interesting highlights still at this point in the book, like that Manila was called the pearl of the orient and little new york because of how similar it was to the US. But then he came with nonsense like claims about a chinese custome of working with nature in cooperation. And then juxtaposing it to an american way of subjugating nature in conflict. Yeah right. Does this guy recite stereotypes or what? Granted, based on some earlier stuff, I would say he is.
Then the author came with tales of how the Americans treated natives and the most idiotic examples is flipping coins into the water to see new guineans dive for them and putting young filipino boys to bloody fights for a few cigarettes for the winner. And unlike him I wonder: Why would someone dive for coins or fight for cigarettes? Does the author wonder? I think not. And declaring these new guinean villages off limits for GIs sounds more like the prior mentioned "not spil their perfect life" nonsense and not this colonial/racist segregation that the author suggests here. At this point I was considering, giving this book up because I was sensing more and more a severe bias on the part of the author. Just at that point he even stated seggregation and colonialism as reasons for the prohibition of GIs fraternizing with the natives even in a region that was controlled by the Japanese since WW 1. But it makes sense when you don't know who of the locals you can trust. And if that many solomon islanders, fijian and filipinos were employed as guerilla troops and fighters, you have to wonder whether his prior statements regarding seggregation were reliable. Or the later ones about colonial atmosphere by the US military, especially since later statements show that the americans were simply very wealthy and the japanese were much worse, so naturally locals see them in better light. And shortly after he cites that so many GIs were friendly towards the natives and acted in ways that the natives considered respectful (e.g. giving out gifts etc) or how e.g. chinese officials always provided workers. This is the exact opposite of what he presented before, and he is doing it with much less space. So this is rather a collection of anecdotes that the author wants to know not a study.
Sure, the author writes well, but I really lost the interest because so much is so unstructured and contradictory since he writes quite generalizing. In the end I quit. I searched a bit through the rest of the book and the generalizations, of course contradictory, and bad structure continue. A book like this could have worked if the chapters had a better internal structure and the author would write less generalizing and contradictory.

[Amy]

Social history of experiences in the Pacific - uniforms, boredom, mental health, etc. - but thematic rather than chronological approach makes it hard to get a handle on the timeline of the actual combat.