The Second World War (149 page)

‘
If we are American
,’ wrote Anne Applebaum, ‘we think “the war” was something that started with Pearl Harbor in 1941 and ended with the atomic bomb in 1945. If we are British, we remember the Blitz of 1940 and the liberation of Belsen. If we are French, we remember Vichy and the Resistance. If we are Dutch we think of Anne Frank. Even if we are German we know only a part of the story.’

50

The Atomic Bombs and the Subjugation of Japan

MAY–SEPTEMBER 1945

A
t the time of the German surrender in May 1945, the Japanese armies in China received orders from Tokyo to begin withdrawing to the east coast. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist armies were still badly battered from the Ichig
Offensive, and their commanders felt a deep bitterness towards the United States for having failed to heed their warnings.

Stilwell’s replacement, General Albert Wedemeyer, began a programme of rearming and training thirty-nine divisions. He forced Chiang Kai-shek to concentrate his best forces in the south towards the border of Indochina. The American plan was to cut off the escape route for Japanese forces from south-east Asia. Chiang on the other hand wanted to reoccupy the agricultural regions to the north to feed his troops and the starving population in Nationalist areas, but Wedemeyer threatened to withhold all US aid if he refused. Chiang knew that the Communists had already moved south to fill the vacuum left by the Japanese retreat. Wedemeyer’s intervention contributed to the Nationalists’ defeat in the civil war to come, but Washington at that time assumed that Japanese resistance would carry on into 1946.

Roosevelt’s representative in China, the unpredictable Patrick J. Hurley, had started negotiations between the Communists and the Nationalists in November 1944. Talks broke down the following February, largely because Chiang Kai-shek was not prepared to share power and the Communists were not prepared to subordinate their army. At this time when the Kuomintang was split between liberals and reactionaries, Chiang promised sweeping reforms in the spring, but the only changes made were those designed to satisfy the Americans. The great reformer of the past now supported the old guard, and corruption continued unabated. To complain openly risked attracting the brutal attentions of the secret police.

His capital of Chungking displayed a huge gulf between the rich minority and the impoverished majority, who suffered from spiralling inflation. American troops were conspicuous in their enjoyment of the town. ‘
A honky-tonk
half a mile from US Army headquarters served adulterated whisky and unadulterated tarts,’ wrote Theodore White. ‘“Jeep girls”
took to riding in the open streets with American Army personnel, in full view of the scandalized citizenry.’ In the countryside the forced recruitment of soldiers, with bounties paid to press-gangs, stirred the slow-burning resentment of the peasantry. Only those who could afford to pay large bribes were immune, and the grain tax discouraged farmers from selling their produce. The Communists from the headquarters in Yenan had also imposed a grain tax, and the impression given that peasant life under their rule was idyllic could hardly have been further from the truth. The
opium trade
, which filled Mao’s war chest, had triggered a rate of inflation almost as bad as in Nationalist areas and anyone who protested or criticized Chairman Mao was treated as an enemy of the people.

Fighting between Communists and Nationalists had already begun in Honan province, and also in and around Shanghai. Despite the large concentration of Japanese forces there, Communists and Nationalists fought an underground war in the belief that control of the great port and financial capital would be crucial when the occupiers left.

Despite the imminence of their country’s defeat, atrocities against the Chinese population, especially women, continued in the areas still held by a million Japanese troops. As in other areas of occupation, such as New Guinea and the Philippines, Japanese soldiers short of rations regarded the local population and prisoners as a food source. The Japanese soldier Enomoto Masayo later confessed to having raped, murdered and butchered a young Chinese woman. ‘
I just tried to choose
those places where there was a lot of meat,’ he confessed later. He then shared the meat with his comrades afterwards. He described it as ‘nice and tender. I think it was tastier than pork.’ Not even his commanding officer remonstrated with him when he told him the origin of their meal.

Other horrors were already known to the Allies. In 1938 the biological warfare establishment
Unit 731
had been set up outside Harbin in Manchukuo, under the auspices of the Kwantung Army. This huge complex, presided over by General Ishii Shir
, eventually employed a core staff of 3,000 scientists and doctors from universities and medical schools in Japan, and a total of 20,000 personnel in the subsidiary establishments. They prepared weapons to spread black plague, typhoid, anthrax and cholera, and tested them on more than 3,000 Chinese prisoners. They also carried out anthrax, mustard-gas and frostbite experiments on their victims, whom they referred to as
maruta
or ‘logs’. These human guinea pigs, around 600 a year, had been arrested by the Kempeitai in Manchuria and sent to the unit.

In 1939 during the Nomonhan fighting against Marshal Zhukov’s forces, the unit had put typhoid pathogen into rivers near by, but the effect was unrecorded. In 1940 and 1941 cotton and rice husks, contaminated with black plague, were dropped from aircraft over central China. In March
1942, the Imperial Japanese Army planned to use plague-fleas against the American and Filipino defenders of the Bataan Peninsula, but the surrender took place before they were ready. And later that year typhoid, plague and cholera pathogens were sprayed in Chekiang province in retaliation for the first American bombing raid on Japan. Apparently 1,700 Japanese soldiers in the area died as well as hundreds of Chinese.

A biological warfare battalion was sent to Saipan before the American landings, but most of its members were evacuated beforehand only to be drowned when a US submarine sank their ship. There were also plans captured by marines on Kwajalein to bomb Australia and India with biological weapons, but these attacks never materialized. The Japanese also wanted to contaminate the island of Luzon in the Philippines with cholera before the American invasion, but this too was not carried out.

The Imperial Japanese Navy at its bases of Truk and Rabaul had experimented on Allied prisoners of war, mainly captured American pilots, by injecting them with the blood of malaria victims. Others were killed during experiments with different lethal injections. As late as April 1945, around a hundred Australian prisoners of war–some sick, some healthy–were also used for experiments with unknown injections. In Manchuria, 1,485 American, Australian, British and New Zealand prisoners of war held at Mukden were used for a variety of experiments with pathogens.

Perhaps the most shocking element in the whole story of Unit 731 was MacArthur’s agreement, after the Japanese surrender, to provide immunity from prosecution to all involved, including General Ishii. This deal allowed the Americans to obtain all the data they had accumulated from their experiments. Even after MacArthur had learned that Allied prisoners of war had also been killed in the tests, he ordered that all criminal investigations should cease. Soviet requests to prosecute Ishii and his staff at the Tokyo War Crimes tribunal were firmly rejected.

Only a few doctors who anaesthetized and then dissected captured American
bomber crews
were prosecuted, but they had nothing to do with Unit 731. Other Japanese military doctors performed vivisection on hundreds of conscious Chinese prisoners in numerous hospitals, but they were never charged. Doctors in the Japanese Medical Corps demonstrated little respect for human life, since they willingly followed orders to dispose of their own ‘
incapacitated soldiers
, with a good chance of recovery… on the grounds that they are useless to the Emperor’. They also taught Japanese soldiers how to commit suicide to being captured.

By the time Japanese resistance on Okinawa had ended, American commanders in the Pacific turned to re-examining the next phase, the invasion of the home islands. The kamikaze attacks and the refusal of the
Japanese to surrender, combined with the knowledge of their biological warfare capability, made it a sobering task. The plan had been agreed by the joint chiefs of staff as early as 1944. It estimated that Operation Olympic to take the southern island of Kyushu in November would cost 100,000 casualties, and Operation Coronet in March 1946 to invade the main island of Honshu 250,000. Admiral King and General Arnold preferred to bomb and blockade Japan, to starve it into surrender. MacArthur and the US Army complained that that would take years and cause unnecessary suffering. It would also mean the death by starvation of most Allied prisoners of war and forced labourers. And since the bombing of Germany had not achieved victory, the army won the navy round to the idea of an invasion.

The Imperial Japanese Army was resolved to fight to the end, partly out of an imagined fear of a Communist uprising, and partly out of
bushid
pride. Its leaders felt that they could never consent to surrender when General T
j
’s
Instructions for Servicemen
had declared: ‘
Do not survive in shame
as a prisoner. Die, to ensure that you do not leave ignominy behind you.’ Civilian politicians of the ‘peace party’ who wanted to negotiate would have been arrested, or even assassinated, if it had not been for the Emperor’s own indecision over what to do next. The former prime minister Prince Konoe Fumimaro later pointed out that
‘the army had dug
themselves caves in the mountains and their idea of fighting on was to fight from every little hole or rock in the mountains’. The Japanese army also intended that civilians should die with them. A Patriotic Citzens Fighting Corps was being formed, many of whose members would be armed with nothing more than bamboo lances. Others were to have bombs strapped to them which they would detonate as they threw themselves against tanks. Even young women were pressured into volunteering to sacrifice themselves.