Retribution
In the interest of balance and fairness after last night’s post on Max Kennedy’s kamikaze-friendly Danger’s Hour, here’s Max Hastings’ Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45. I haven’t read it, but the tsk-tsk review by Kai Bird of the Washington Post has me hooked:
Too often the little actors in history are forgotten in the shadows of the kings, presidents and generals who send them into battle. In Retribution, Hastings does not leave out the big actors, but what is new and original are the personal stories he has extracted from oral histories and his own interviews with veterans of the American, Japanese, Russian, Australian and even Chinese armies. A fine writer, Hastings conveys many heartrending testimonies. He quotes a sailor describing his friend’s decapitation during a kamikaze raid: “His head fell off at my feet. I looked down . . . and I believe his mouth was still trying to tell me something.” A Japanese soldier observes his starving men cooking the remains of a dead officer. A Marine on Iwo Jima comes across “piles of dead Marines, waiting to be collected.”
Hastings’s veterans recount numerous firefights, ambushes, massacres and rapes. War crimes are committed by all sides — but most methodically by the Japanese.
So far so good. Bird likes this part:
He is very tough on MacArthur, criticizing many of the Pacific commander’s strategic moves, particularly his decision to waste lives and resources in seizing Manila. Describing the U.S. loss of 8,140 men on Luzon, Hastings observes that “Japanese barbarism rendered the battle for Manila a human catastrophe, but MacArthur’s obsession with seizing the city created the circumstances for it. . . . MacArthur presided over the largest ground campaign of America’s war in the Pacific in a fashion which satisfied his own ambitions more convincingly than the national purpose of his country.”
Americans, after all, start as war criminals and have to work back from that, and are usually responsible due to their lack of understanding for the barbarism of others. We all know that. That quote fragment does make it sound like MacArthur forced the Japanese into barbarism, though there is the possibility I suppose that he somehow strategically didn’t stop it fast enough. Never mind. Bird has a bigger bone to pick:
But when it comes to Retribution’s central theme — that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wholly justified and necessary to persuade a recalcitrant enemy to surrender — Hastings abandons his critical faculties. He is not content simply to argue that “the fate which befell Japan in 1945″ was “retributive justice” for that country’s misdeeds. In language reminiscent of the patriotically correct criticism of the Smithsonian’s attempt in 1995 to mount an exhibit about the Enola Gay, Hastings asserts, “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.” He calls these unnamed writers “peddlers of fantasies.”
Of course, the American Legion agrees with him. But it is an assertion rather than an argument, and the evidence of ongoing, robust debate is abundant. Numerous historians continue to question one aspect or another of the standard defense of President Harry Truman’s decision to use the bomb, in the words of J. Robert Oppenheimer, “against an enemy that was essentially defeated.” Three years ago, the Japanese scholar Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, who teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, published a widely praised book, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman and the Surrender of Japan, revealing evidence from Japanese and Russian archives that it was the Soviet entry into the war — and not the atomic bombings — that induced surrender. But Hastings does not alert his readers to this new evidence.
Squeeze play. Americans with A-bombs at one end (future Legionnaires among them, no doubt), crazy Ivans at the other. I’m sure it looked pretty grim. OK. Hastings researches and writes his own history, and doesn’t happen to agree with the one that Bird, assorted pacificists and Japanese scholars prefer. If numerous historians are questioning this or that, I don’t know why Bird has a problem with the occasional voice from right field that says, hey, maybe the Japanese were asking for it. You know, Tarawa, Iwo Jima and various other fights to the death, culminating with the horrors of Okinawa. That on top of the murder and enslavement of POWs and the rape of captive nations. Bird is appalled. No, not by Japanese war crimes …
In the end, I don’t quarrel with many of the facts in this book. But I am appalled by the critical evidence left out. This is both unfortunate and unnecessary because Hastings’s narrative is fully compatible with a more nuanced interpretation of how the Pacific war ended. He amply demonstrates, for instance, that the Japanese were essentially defeated before the atomic bombs fell. But the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain a hot-button issue, something that can make otherwise responsible historians nose-dive into polemics.
Not to mention polemics nose-diving reviewers, who won’t be satisified until Hastings recognizes that half a million or more American deaths, up to 10 million Japanese deaths, the execution of tens of thousands of Allied POWs, and any number of other Japanese atrocities would be preferable to a couple of good A-bombings. I’m a little surprised Bird didn’t get into the fact that Pearl Harbor was America’s fault for failing to support Japan’s need for resources to fuel the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, because that is also important. Bird does have a point about the Japanese being “essentially defeated.” Everyone knew that. Even Japan’s top warmongers, which is why they were bent on a massive nihilistic act of national seppuku to assuage their own honor.
Well, this Hastings chap sounds like an unrepentant Yank-apologist total warmonger. Who thinks MacArthur had a bit of a self-serving streak. Count me in!
My Herald co-worker Jay Fitzgerald of Hubblog fame, is partway through Retribution and likes it. The basic premise, he was telling me tonight, is that up against an enemy that refused to surrender under any circumstances, beheaded prisoners, used suicide bombers, figured in mass death for its own civilian population … hey, that all starts to sound familiar, just like Max Kennedy said … American forces in the Pacific began fighting dirty themselves, and that they really had no option, and they knew they were going to have to do it util it was over. Sounds like an interesting read. Maybe, as Kennedy suggested, the big conventional Good War does have relevant lessons for today war’s irregular conflicts after all.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:42 pm Comments (6) on Wednesday, December 10, 2008
6 Responses to “Retribution”
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December 11th, 2008 at 4:49 am
Russia didn’t start pushing against Japan militarily until after the US had hinted at using the bombs on Japan. Russia knew about the existence and power of the bombs because of the many socialist utopians that worked on the project just couldn’t help themselves from wanting to share the info with their good friends and bed buddies of the Uncle Joe Fan Club.
So, once word came out that use of the bombs was being seriously considered, the Russians launched a massive land grab toward the Japanese. If the Allies (primarily, American forces to be risked) had decided to go with the invasion, Russia would have waited it out and then, if it failed, struck a deal with Japan. Russia and Japan were still keeping diplomatic contact all through the war.
We know now from declassed radio intercepts from that period that the Japanese Army was much stronger, better equipped and in greater numbers than had been expected in the home islands.
Japan still held stockpiles of POL (petroleum, oil, lubricants) in China ready for quick shipment to Japan ahead of any invasion. Japan still controlled the Shanghai oil fields which produced plenty enough for the purposes of maintaining an active air defense in the final rush as an invasion fleet approached.
Japan had a double handed arse load of combat aircraft squirreled away, many of them in caves dug into mountainsides that let out onto runways that were hard to detect from aerial observation.
Japan wasn’t so much beaten and ready to quit, but was strong enough to believe that it could bloody the Americans badly enough to force a deal that would leave them much, if not most, of their Pacific and Asian conquests.
But, it’s often the case with the sort of broken brained moron that can learn to love that pomo/moral equivalence tardation crap, knife wielding serial killer = life saving surgeon because both use edged weapons/tools in their actions.
December 11th, 2008 at 6:18 am
Well, gee, what with Stalingrad surrounded and the Wehrmacht in the suburbs of Moscow the Soviets were “essentially defeated” too.
December 11th, 2008 at 6:19 am
Leningrad, I mean.
Coffee hasn’t kicked in yet…
December 11th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
“But when it comes to Retribution’s central theme — that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wholly justified and necessary to persuade a recalcitrant enemy to surrender —”
That’s correct. The Japanese were engaged in massive atrocities and had MURDERED millions of innocent people just in China alone. The choice was simple: either murder their civilians with napalm or atomic bombs, or allow OUR civilians (and captured military) to continue to be murdered by the Japanese army…and that’s an easy choice.
Better ALL their civilians killed than one more civilian or POW on our side murdered.
If the Japanese had been playing by the rules, things would have been different, but they weren’t, and they got exactly what they deserved as a consequence.
The bombings were totally justified and absolutely necessary.
December 12th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
I’m going to agree with Dave, but my perspective is a little different.
First, the Japanese were playing by the rules, their rules. From their perspective, we had enacted a racist law to exclude them from migrating to the US, because we didn’t want the competition. Then we cheated them in the Naval Treaty with the 5:5:3 business limiting the size of their fleet, and tried to prevent them from becoming a colonial power like us (Spanish-American War), Britain, France, and Holland.
The average Japanese had about as much influence on his government as the average American Negro of the 1930s had on ours. So lets separate the people from the government.
Fast forward to 1945. Japan is starving, due largely to our submarine fleet, and there is no way they can continue fighting. The people know this, but they are powerless to do anything about it. Hitler had his Gestapo and the Japanese had their Kempeitai…
August 6, 1945, Hiroshima, Japan. My father-in-law had traded days off with a co-worker. He and my mother-in-law are foraging for firewood, when the bomb explodes. My sister-in-law was knocked down from the blast. They later find a horribly burned little boy, who they try to care for, but he dies. Let’s just say they are not pre-disposed to like Americans. What does she say about the bomb? “As bad as it was, at least it ended the war.” The people were prepared to fight to the death, but this ended it.
She never mentioned the Russians. I’m convinced. Considering my dad, then a P-47 pilot, and my uncle, a Marine, would have been part of the invasion, I’m glad it ended. The museum at Peace Park is a gruesome display of just how horrible it was. The young men in the Arizona didn’t die any easier, so I’m not going to be too easy or too harsh on either side. It would have been better avoided. If it couldn’t be avoided, then it was best ended quickly.
December 12th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Thank God for the Atom Bomb ! (With Thanks to Paul Fussell)
It is conservatively estimated that 250,000 civilians under Japanese occupation in Asia were perishing each month by the time Enola Gay & Bock’s Car did their fine work in ending the War.
My Dad was with the 20th Air Force, 58th Bomb Wing, 462 Bomb Group, The Hellbirds, on Tinian Island. Dad always said that the happiest men he’d ever seen were the young Marines of the 1st Marine Division camped near his B-29s on West Field when word came through that the A-Bombs had ended the War. “Those boys kept coming up to our airplanes and kissing and hugging the landing gear. They were going home instead of the Jap beaches. Damn happiest bunch I’ve ever seen !”