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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ian W. Toll
Started reading
September 1, 2020
General Umezu
A reporter noted that MacArthur’s hand shook with emotion as he signed.
“I shook so with excitement I could hardly sign my name.”
By the end of September 1945, the U.S. Eighth Army had a total of 232,379 troops in central and northern Japan,
At the high tide of the occupation, more than 700,000 Allied troops would be stationed in Japan.
A report produced by General MacArthur’s headquarters called the occupation “a great, though calculated, military gamble.”
The gamble paid off in spectacular fashion.
In foreign territories occupied by the Japanese, it had been a standard practice to requisition food from conquered populations.
But on August 18, MacArthur’s headquarters announced that the occupation forces would ship in their own provisions.68 Indeed, the occupiers would often provide food relief to local civilians, much of it in unofficial or ad hoc gestures of charity.
The perpetrators were arrested and imprisoned.
Military officers cooperated willingly in demobilizing their own forces and destroying remaining warplanes, ordnance, and weaponry.
With a sudden rush, ordinary Japanese understood how thoroughly deceived they had been by their own leaders.
The wartime military leadership was held in widespread contempt.
“Looking now at themselves more carefully than they had ever done in their history, the Japanese perceived not only the fanaticism of the militarists but also their own great ignorance in having trusted them. The people’s disillusionment penetrated to the marrow.”
Their fateful decision to attack the United States and the Allies in December 1941 had been founded upon a catalog of faulty assumptions.
From childhood, the Japanese had been taught that they were a unique race, guided by a divine emperor, watched over by their ancient gods, with a sacred destiny to rule Asia. Indulging shallow stereotypes about American culture and democracy, the Japanese miscalculated the temper and character of their enemy.
Worse, defeat was actually foreseen and even predicted by some of the men who had acquiesced in the fateful decision to launch the unwinnable war in the first place. Above all, the Pacific War was the product of a political failure in Tokyo—a failure of catastrophic proportions, one of the worst in the annals of any government or any nation.
During the Meiji era of the nineteenth century, when Japan’s samurai elite had first set out to modernize and industrialize their isolated and backward country,
In other words, Tokyo set out to make enemies of its primary trading partners, while making allies of nations that could do nothing to make good the inevitable shortfalls, leading to an entirely foreseeable economic and energy crisis.
No cabinet could be formed and no prime minister appointed without the consent of both the army and navy, and that consent could be withdrawn at any time, causing the government to fall.
In arguing against the Pacific War, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had repeatedly pressed this point upon his colleagues. There was no foreseeable scenario in which Japan could conquer and subjugate the United States, he warned—but it was at least possible that the United States could conquer and subjugate Japan.
but the astonishing success of this initial offensive owed as much to the local weakness of the Allies as to the prowess of Japanese arms.
Japanese naval operations were often inflexible and predictable, exposing a lack of adaptability
but the rigid command culture of the Imperial Navy was deeply entrenched.
venerated samurai philosopher Miyamoto Musashi had extolled the virtues of adaptability, which he called “mountain and sea changing.”
one Japanese intelligence officer’s estimate, the Allied offensive bypassed seventeen Japanese-held islands, leaving 160,000 troops to their rear.
about one-fourth subsequently died of starvation or tropical diseases.
These events, in June and July 1944, ensured Japan’s eventual strategic defeat no matter what the outcome of successive battles.
But this was war, not a board game, and conditions in Japan did not allow for the possibility of a negotiated truce until long after defeat had become inevitable. Another 1.5 million Japanese servicemen and civilians were to be sacrificed, like so many pawns, before the checkmate in August 1945.
But in tactical terms, the suicide plane was like a weapon from the future, allowing the Japanese to deploy guided missiles at a time when no other combatant possessed such weapons, or effective measures to counter them.
Memories of the war faded, and a culture of silence and forgetting took root in postwar Japan.
To the extent that they remembered the war at all, many Japanese remembered it as a tragedy that had befallen Japan, rather than as a monstrous evil that their nation had deliberately set in motion. Questions of accountability and self-reflection were largely banished from the public square.
to erect a bulwark against communism in Asia.
The Showa era, which remained the basis of the Japanese calendar throughout his reign, continued to the emperor’s death in 1989.
But many found it difficult to transition back into the civilian workforce.
As a rule, they did not choose to talk about what they had seen and done in the war.
Approximately 900,000 African Americans had served in uniform.
They had been on the right side of the conflict, and took justifiable pride in having vanquished fascism and Japanese military imperialism, but they did not look to the future with a great sense of optimism.
