Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45

by Max Hastings

The U.S. pro rata casualty rate in the Pacific was three and a half times that in Europe.

Americans came to expect in the Pacific a favourable exchange rate of one U.S. casualty for every six or seven Japanese. They were dismayed when, on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the enemy fared better, losing only in the ratio of 1.25:1 and 1.3:1, respectively, though almost all the Japanese losses were fatal, compared with less than one-third of the American. Pervading U.S. strategy was a cultural conceit about the necessary cost of victory. This proved justified, but should not have been taken for granted in a conflict between major industrial nations.

alternative scenarios suggest that if the conflict had continued for even a few weeks longer, more people of all nations—and especially Japan—would have lost their lives than perished at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The myth that the Japanese were ready to surrender anyway has been so comprehensively discredited by modern research that it is astonishing some writers continue to give it credence.

the history of World War II is, for the most part, a story of statesmen and commanders flawed as all of us are, striving to grapple with issues and dilemmas larger than their talents.

But in an imperfect world, it seems unrealistic to expect that any combatant in a war will grant adversaries conspicuously better treatment than his

own people receive at their hands. Years ahead of Pearl Harbor Japanese massacres of Chinese civilians were receiving worldwide publicity. Tokyo’s forces committed systemic brutalities against Allied prisoners and civilians in the Philippines, East Indies, Hong Kong and Malaya—for instance, the slaughter of Chinese outside Singapore in February 1942—long before the first Allied atrocity against any Japanese is recorded.

In August 1944, when German prisoners were arriving in the United States at the rate of 50,000 a month, after three years of the war only 1,990 Japanese prisoners reposed in American hands.

Allied hatred of, contempt for, and finally savagery towards their Pacific foes were surely inspired less by racial alienation than by their wartime conduct.

They learned that the only redemptive feature of war is the brotherhood which it forges.

By late 1944 Hitler’s people had suffered over half their total wartime losses, more than three million dead. By contrast, a year before capitulation Hirohito’s nation had suffered only a small fraction of its eventual combat and civilian casualties. Japan’s human catastrophes were crowded into the last months of war, when its fate was sealed, during the futile struggle to avert the inevitable.

After years in which Japan’s armies

had roamed Asia at will, killing on a Homeric scale, retribution was at hand.

MacArthur, by contrast, seemed to reject accountability to any earthly power.

MacArthur displayed a taste for fantasy quite unsuited to a field commander, together with ambition close to megalomania and consistently poor judgement as a picker of subordinates.

He shamelessly manipulated communiqués about his forces’ achievements, personally selected photographs of himself for press release, deprived subordinates of credit for successes, shrugged off his own responsibility for failures.

He made no jokes and possessed no small talk, though he would occasionally talk baseball to enlisted men, in attempts to deceive them that he was human. Marshall observed that MacArthur had a court, not a staff. Intimates of the “Bataan gang,” the handful of officers to whom he granted passage alongside his own family on the PT-boats escaping from the Philippines, remained privileged acolytes to the war’s end.

MacArthur’s belief that his critics were not merely wrong, but evil, verged on derangement. He claimed to perceive a “crooked

streak” in both Marshall and Eisenhower, two of the most honourable men in American public service.

MacArthur’s personal behaviour was no worse than that of Patton and Montgomery, but he exercised command under far less restraint than either.

If he was not among history’s outstanding commanders, he acted the part of one with unshakeable conviction.

Until late 1943, for instance, the U.S. Pacific Fleet never possessed more than four aircraft carriers.

Thereafter, however, American strength soared, while that of Japan shrank. A host of ships, planes, men and guns flooded west from the U.S. to the battlefields. At peak production in March 1944, an aircraft rolled out of an American factory every 295 seconds. By the end of that year, almost one hundred U.S. aircraft carriers were at sea. American planes and submarines were strangling Japanese supply routes.

Overlaid upon this, however, was a rational calculation by Tokyo. The superiority of American resources was manifest. If Japan pursued the war within the limits of conventional military behaviour, its defeat was inevitable. Its leaders’ chosen course was to impose such a ghastly blood price for each American gain that this “nation of storekeepers” would find it preferable to negotiate, rather than accept the human cost of invading Japan’s main islands.

Here was a vivid example of the spirit prevalent among Japan’s leadership in 1944–45. Many shared a delusion that human sacrifice, the nation’s historic “Yamato spirit,” could compensate for a huge shortfall in military capability. In modern parlance, they committed themselves to asymmetric warfare.

Japan’s early triumphs, however, reflected the local weakness of the vanquished, rather than the real might of the victors.

To an extraordinary degree, the two services—each with its own air force—pursued independent war policies, though the soldiers wielded much greater clout. The foremost characteristic of the army general staff, and especially of its dominant operations department, the First Bureau, was absolute indifference to the diplomatic or economic consequences of any military action.

The British, French and Dutch had much to be ashamed of in their behaviour towards their own Asian subject peoples. Nothing they had done, however, remotely matched the extremes, or the murderous cruelty, of Japan’s imperialists.

The leaders of Nazi Germany existed in a gangster ethos. Most of the rulers of Japan, by contrast, were men of high birth, possessed of cultural and educational advantages which made the conduct of their wartime offices seem all the more deplorable, both practically and morally.

While he deeply desired to be a conscientious monarch, Hirohito proved a fatally weak one, who cannot be absolved from the crimes of both commission and omission carried out in his name. He allowed others to wield executive authority in a fashion which wrought untold death and suffering, and he cannot have been unaware of the military’s bloody excesses.

The Japanese fought on, because no consensus could be mobilised to do anything else. A dramatic political initiative to offer surrender, even one supported by the emperor, would almost certainly have failed. Japanese strategy in the last phase of the war rested not upon seeking victory, but upon making each Allied advance so costly that America’s people, as well as her leadership, would deem it preferable to offer Japan acceptable terms rather than to endure a bloody struggle for the home islands.

English, properly used, is a clear and powerful medium of expression. Japanese, by contrast, is fraught with equivocation. Tokyo’s forces suffered chronic communications difficulties because signals were so vulnerable to misinterpretation.

For every four tons of supplies the United States shipped to its ground forces in the Pacific, Japan was able to transport to its own men just two pounds.

by the summer of 1944, many of those charged with saving Japan by their military endeavours possessed the hearts of lions, but the brains of sheep.

25 percent of his men were potentially brave, about 5 percent potential cowards, and the remainder neither. This seems a fair, indeed generous, valuation of most Allied units in the Second World War.

The pre-Pearl navy mustered 8,000 officers. Each war year thereafter, an additional 95,000 were granted reserve commissions,

Everybody was tired almost all the time, yet so effective had this navy become that “there weren’t many fuck-ups,” in the words of a young reservist. “It was an exhausting life that discouraged reflection, introspection, or anything more intellectual than reading.” A destroyer officer observed pityingly that two of his comrades, junior-grade lieutenants, were geriatrics of twenty-seven, “too old for the duty they had…The hours were too long and the physical demands too great. That’s when I learned that war is for kids.”

It was a sore point in the navy that officers received a disproportionate share of medals—they accounted for less than 10 percent of personnel, but received almost two-thirds of all decorations.

By late 1944, even the biggest ships were overcrowded: with gunners for additional batteries of anti-aircraft guns crammed onto upper decks; up to 10 percent surplus personnel to compensate for those who habitually “missed ship” on sailing for the combat zone; and staff officers. Experts on one new specialisation or another—flak or human torpedoes or mine counter-measures—were shoehorned into messdecks, to the chagrin of those who had to make space.

Each fleet carrier carried a mix of around fifty fighters, thirty dive-bombers, a dozen torpedo-bombers.

Until the last stage of the war, around one-third of carrier airmen could expect to die, in combat or one of the accidents inseparable from high-pressure flight operations. A catapult failure, careless landing, flak damage which injured hydraulics or undercarriage—all these things could, and did, kill a crew or two most days—10 percent aircraft losses a month were factored into the planning of carrier operations.

If an airframe was badly damaged, or a plane completed eight months’ service, it was most often tipped overboard. With American factories producing new aircraft by the thousand, a worn one seemed worth little.

The general’s grandeur was more imposing than his forces—until late 1944 he seldom controlled more than four divisions in the field, in Europe a mere corps command.

These setbacks were matched by extraordinary Japanese self-deceit about what had taken place. Vice-Admiral Ugaki rejoiced about a destroyer squadron’s “tremendous feat” of sinking three aircraft carriers, a cruiser and four destroyers. In truth, in the action cited the Americans had lost one destroyer.

At sea, the Japanese assembled forces of 9 battleships, 4 carriers, 15 heavy and light cruisers and 29 destroyers. This seemed impressive,

until measured against the U.S. Navy’s strength: 19 task groups around the Philippines comprised 9 fleet, 8 light and 29 escort carriers; 12 battleships; 12 heavy and 16 light cruisers; 178 destroyers; 40 destroyer escorts and 10 frigates. The United States now deployed more destroyers than the Japanese navy owned carrier aircraft. Third Fleet’s 200 ships occupied an area of ocean nine miles by forty.

American victory in the battles of Leyte Gulf was overwhelming. The Japanese lost 285,000 tons of warships, their opponents just 29,000 tons. American casualties of 2,803 were no more than the Red Army lost every four hours of the war. Japanese losses were far greater than at Midway in 1942. Yet this was, of course, a much less critical encounter.

Yet all too often, the words merely indicated that a force had come under fire, taken to cover and stayed there even before suffering significant loss. Footsoldiers hoped that support arms—artillery, aircraft or tanks—would discover a means

“The infantry policy was to avoid battle unless great force could be brought to bear on that particular point, and never to substitute courage of men for firepower,” wrote Philip Hostetter. “This meant a long war with much maneuvering.” It became a matter of bitter debate whether blame for American sluggishness lay with Walter Krueger of Sixth Army, or with those under his command.

An analysis of 519 Sixth Army fatal casualties showed that 1 man died of bayonet wounds, 2 from blast, 170 from fragments—mortar or artillery. Ninety-seven proved unclassifiable; the remaining 249 were victims of small-arms fire. In other words, in contrast to the World War II battlefield norm, on Leyte the Japanese relied chiefly upon rifles, machine guns and mortars. Short of artillery and lacking tanks, they had no choice. The Americans, meanwhile, inflicted an estimated 60 percent of Japanese ground losses with their artillery, 25 percent with mortars, only 14 percent with infantry weapons, and 1 percent with aircraft.

To sustain a single infantry regiment required thirty-four tons of supplies a day. It took 31/2 days, for instance, for stores shipped