A World at Arms (172 page)

The famous surrender ceremony on the battleship
Missouri
on September 2 came in the midst of a series of dramatic activities. Although August 15 had been the official date of victory, the fighting in Manchuria continued until August 21, and the last major Japanese army units in the Pacific theater were not disarmed until October 24.
¹⁴³
By that time, American troops which had begun landing in Japan itself on August 21 were in occupation of the whole country.
ⁿ
In spite of fears to the contrary, the occupation proceeded peacefully. Prime Minister Suzuki had been replaced by an Imperial prince; and in this instance once again, imperial authority had been invoked to assure a quick and effective transition from a policy of fight to the last breath to one of peaceful accommodation to a new system.
¹⁴⁴
Japan had been battered by bombing and isolated from what remained of her empire by submarines and mines destroying most of her shipping, but it had not been fought over inch by inch; and the vast majority of her soldiers and sailors would survive to come home and share in the rebuilding of a damaged but not devastated country.

The existing government structure would be simultaneously kept and remade, its personnel utilized and purged. The Americans arrived not to conquer but to reform. They planned to transform Japanese society, and in many ways they succeeded so well that the Japanese came to maintain many of the changes then made long after the American occupation had ended.
¹⁴⁵
Whatever the subsequent taboos in Japan about that country’s role in bringing on and conducting the Pacific War, in Japan after World War II, unlike Germany after
World War I, no one ever came to doubt that the country had indeed been defeated–and without what President Truman had called “an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other.”
¹⁴⁶

^a
MacArthur was actually not at his headquarters but on a warship keeping radio silence as it took part in covering the landing on Morotai (the Southwest Pacific parallel to the Palaus operation), and his Chief of Staff answered for him. It was too late to call off the landings on Morotai, Peleliu, and Angaur, and, as a result of the last two, the navy was able to make extensive use of Ulithi’s superb harbor in the eastern Carolines.

^b
The Australians had been invited to participate but refused to send a division; they wanted to take part but only if a whole corps under an Australian corps commander could be sent and thought that this might be the case elsewhere in the Philippines (see the Lumsden-Blarney talk of 9 August 1944 reported by the former to Ismay in PRO, CAB 127/33).

^c
The
West Virginia
and
California
had been “sunk” by settling in the mud; the
Tennessee
,
Maryland,
and
Pennsylvania
had been hit. Only the
Mississippi
had not been damaged in the Pearl Harbor raid, having been transferred to the Atlantic from Hawaii in the summer of 1941.

^d
Suzuki was able to evacuate a portion of the Leyte garrison to other islands to continue fighting there.

^e
Whitehead had succeeded Kenney after the latter’s promotion to command the Far Eastern Air Force, which also included the 13th Air Force, in June 1944.

^f
General Willoughby, MacArthur’s intelligence chief, had estimated 15 2 ,000.

^g
James,
The Years of MacArthur,
p. 738, suggests that the locally initiated operations in the Philippines influenced MacArthur in his defiance of Washington during the Korean War.

^h
The controversy concerned the employment of the Australian 7th Division, which, it was feared, would suffer excessive casualties. MacArthur was allowed to go ahead and called in a sixteen–day massive pre-invasion bombardment; the operation proved a tactical success. The key exchange is summarized in James,
The Years of MacArthur,
pp. 752–54.

ⁱ
There is an account in Harris and Paxman,
A Higher Fonn of Killing,
p. 135. It is not clear whether Roosevelt’s chief military advisors really did wish to use gas in this operation or–knowing as they did Roosevelt’s strong opposition to gas warfare–used this means to alert him to the very high casualties expected from the Iwo operation. See on this point also the somewhat different account in John Ellis van Courtland Moon, “Chemical Warfare: A Forgotten Lesson,”
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
45, No.6 (July–Aug. 1989), 40–43.

^j
In all discussion of World War II planes one must always remember that the conventional propeller engine is less efficient, and hence consumes more fuel and wears out more quickly, the higher the plane flies; the exact opposite of the jet powered plane.

^k
The California coast landing project did not become known until after World War II. When it was being planned, bombing had not yet so disrupted Japanese communications, and hence all relevant orders went by secure land channels.

^l
A study of the under–estimation of Japanese garrisons in the Pacific in spite of substantial breaks into Japanese codes and extensive aerial reconnaissance might shed some interesting light on American perceptions of the war and MacArthur’s leadership style. Drea’s book,
Mac Arthur’s Ultra
, is only a beginning.

^m
FRUS, Potsdam,
1: 909. On June 21, Field Marshal Brooke noted in his diary after meeting with General Clayton Bissell, the U.S. army’s chief of intelligence: “He is very interesting about Japan and evidently considers that the required results can only be obtained by invasion, and that encirclement is unlikely to achieve our object” (Liddell Hart Centre, Alanbrooke Papers).

ⁿ
Subsequently the western portion of the island of Honshu and the island of Shikoku were assigned to the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF).

CONCLUSIONS

THE COST AND IMPACT OF WAR

When the war in the Pacific ended with the Japanese surrender, the fighting in Europe had been over for more than four months. In both areas, peace was accompanied by turmoil. In East Asia, the stages of Japanese forces surrendering in widely scattered areas from Burma to New Guinea, from Luzon to Java, were a lengthy and complicated process, and one followed soon after by new troubles between local nationalist groups and returning colonial powers. Only in Japan itself, ironically, was there a real peace at a time when China was about to dissolve in renewed–or continued–civil war. But everywhere there was at least a sense of hope that, with the end of the fighting, things would somehow be better.

The world looked back on years of fighting which had caused enormous casualties and vast destruction. The Soviet Union had suffered the largest number of deaths. Earlier estimates of 20 million, which were occasionally derided as too high, now turn out to have been too low. New research growing out of the more open atmosphere in recent years has been pointing to figures closer to, and possibly in excess of, 25 million deaths. Of these, at most one-third were military, thus demonstrating in this case what was true for the war as a whole: the civilian casualties exceeded the military. Chinese casualties are much more difficult to estimate than those of the Soviet Union, but 15 million dead is a reasonable approximation. In Poland, close to 6 million lost their lives, while Yugoslavia suffered between 1.5 and 2 million deaths. About 400,000 United Kingdom soldiers and civilians lost their lives; about 300,000 from the United States. Germany lost over 4 million and Japan over 2 million lives in the war.
¹
The total for the globe as a whole probably reached 60 million, a figure which includes the six million murdered because they were Jewish.

At the war’s end, the movement of people caused by the great upheaval did not come to a halt. Millions had been displaced as refugees or deportees, and many of them found it difficult or impossible to go home.
²
In some instances political conditions in their prior home areas had so changed as to make return inadvisable. In other cases, the people who did try to go home found themselves so unwelcome on return that they had to flee once again. One of the more dramatic instances of this was the fate of surviving Jewish Poles who, on attempting to return, were chased back out, sometimes to the accompaniment of pogroms. British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden’s hope that Jews could stay–or go back to where they had been–proved illusory.
³
That, in turn, would add to the major difficulties of adjustment in the Middle East.

Another movement of people had begun in the last stages of the war and continued on an even larger scale after the cessation of hostilities. In Europe, many Germans had fled in view of the growing signs of defeat on the Eastern Front, especially in the winter of 1944–45. The insistence of the Germans on fighting until the last moment–unlike all of their allies–combined with irresponsible and incompetent evacuation procedures by the Nazi Party to condemn tens of thousands to their deaths.
⁴
Prior Allied agreement to the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia and subsequent agreement to similar expulsions from East Prussia, Danzig, and the other former eastern German territories turned over to Poland added millions more. It is impossible to sort out reasonably accurately the numbers of those who had fled by May 1945 from those who were subsequently expelled, but the total was well over ten million and thus constitutes the largest single migration of people in a short period of which we know. This uprooting was accompanied by great suffering to which little attention was paid elsewhere, partly because the whole process of moving people to fit boundaries–as opposed to the 1919 effort to adjust boundaries to people–had been inaugurated by the Germans themselves, partly because in post-war Germany the expellees and refugees picked as their spokespersons individuals who had themselves been enthusiastic advocates of or participants in the expelling of others from
their
homes.

The process of moving large numbers of people in the last days of the war and the immediately following period was not limited to Germans. Millions of Poles had to move from the eastern portions of their pre-1939 country, which had been assigned to the Soviet Union, and found new homes in the lands taken over from Germany. There were other such movements, though on a smaller scale, elsewhere in Europe. By
a supreme irony, those who had been selected by the Germans in January 1937 as the first people to be subjected to this sort of treatment, the German-speaking minority in the South Tyrol,
⁵
would for the most part escape that fate, remain in Italy, and eventually have their rights protected somewhat by an agreement between the Italian and Austrian governments. The mass transfers were, moreover, not limited to Europe. Approximately seven million Japanese were repatriated from the former Japanese empire to the home islands, while tens of thousands of Koreans, many of whom had been forced laborers, were returned to Korea. Other upheavals would follow on the mainland of Asia.

There was something of a converse in the repatriation of prisoners of war. Those American and British prisoners held by Germany and Japan who had survived the war were returned home promptly except for some freed by the Russians, who made difficulties about repatriation. The very large numbers of French prisoners as well as the disarmed former Italian soldiers, who had been employed as forced laborers in the German economy, also went back. There were serious problems about the Soviet soldiers who had enlisted in the German military, willingly or under pressure. At least for a while, the Western Allies forcibly repatriated those they had captured or who tried to get into their prisoner of war camps upon the German surrender; even more than the Red Army men who had survived in German prisoner of war camps, they were subjected to dire punishment on their return.

German soldiers fell into Allied hands in enormous numbers, especially in the last weeks of the war and with the surrender of May 1945. They were released over a period of ten years. The Americans moved rather promptly with those they kept in their own custody but turned over many to the French and British, who included many of them among those they held as laborers for a while; hundreds of thousands were kept in the Soviet Union for years to assist in the reconstruction of that country’s economy. The Western Powers released the few Japanese prisoners they had captured during hostilities and the vast numbers who surrendered at the end of the fighting fairly quickly, while the Soviet Union moved more slowly in repatriating the numerous Japanese soldiers who fell into its hands as a result of the campaign in Manchuria in August, 1945.
⁶

Although not always successful, an effort was made to hold back Axis prisoners who were suspected of war crimes so that, along with civilian suspects, they could be tried. The subject has only recently begun to draw serious attention, but there had clearly been a distinctive break in the military traditions of both Germany and Japan. Armies which had
conducted themselves on the whole rather honorably before, the Germans in World War I, the Japanese in that war and in the prior Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, acted fundamentally differently in World War II. Nothing like the systematic bayonetting of prisoners of war, for example, as practiced by the Japanese in Malaya and elsewhere, had characterized the conduct of that army in prior wars; large-scale participation in the massacre of civilians, which came to be a hallmark of German army activities in World War II had harbingers but no real precedents in World War I.
⁷