In the March/April 2005 issue of Books & Culture, Don Yerxa interviewed the distinguished British military historian Max Hastings about his book Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945. Now Knopf has published a companion volume by Hastings on the last phase of the Pacific War. He talked about it with Yerxa at the Commonwealth Hotel in Boston earlier this year.
How was the ending of World War II in Asia different from the endgame in Europe?
We make a mistake when we speak of World War II in the singular; in fact, we really should talk about the World Wars II. The war in Asia was fantastically different from the war in Europe. The only people who regarded the Asian and the European theaters as an integrated whole were Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and their respective chiefs of staff. For everyone else, if you were fighting in Europe, Asia seemed a very long way away; and if you were fighting in Asia, then Europe seemed incredibly remote. A lot of British people who kept diaries all through the war—because they were conscious that this was a huge event—stopped keeping them in May 1945. As far as they were concerned, when the Germans surrendered, the war was over. And, of course, this was very tough for those hundreds of thousands of young men still fighting and dying in Asia.
One of the key points is that nobody in Western Europe really doubted that Hitler had to be fought to the finish and that the only way the war was going to be won was by Allied armies defeating and occupying Germany. But in Asia, it all looked rather different. There were a lot of Allied leaders who had serious doubts whether Japan would have to be invaded and whether it was going to be necessary to have the same fight to the finish. Churchill suggested at the Cairo conference and later again at Yalta that there might be a case for modifying the terms with Japan to shorten the war. But British influence on what happened in Asia was always pretty marginal, and first Roosevelt and then Truman slapped Churchill down.
I must say that I concur with the doctrine of unconditional surrender. Some historians have argued that the Allies should have considered the self-esteem of the Japanese, recognized that the emperor was so important to them, and offered them terms—and that if we had done this, it wouldn’t have been necessary to drop the atomic bomb. I don’t buy any of this. The Japanese had launched a war of aggression in Asia, and it failed with hideous cost in life and treasure, not only to the United States but above all to the people of Asia. In the summer in 1945 it was time to pay, and for the life of me, I can’t see why the government of the United States and the Allies should have been expected to humor Japanese sensibilities and Japanese self-esteem in the circumstances then pervading. Because the war in Asia is much less known in the United States and in Europe than the war in Europe, some people have said, “Hitler represented an absolute evil. Surely the Japanese weren’t as bad.” Well, if you consulted the people of Asia, they would remind you that at least 15 million Chinese died in World War II (against 300,000 Americans and 350,000 Brits). Five million people died in southeast Asia, many of them in the most horrible circumstances, all to serve the cause of Japanese imperialism.
One hears more and more the doctrine of moral equivalence, that’s to say, the Germans did terrible things, especially the Holocaust, but the Allies destroyed cities and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. I don’t accept this doctrine of moral equivalence at all. Of course, all nations are morally compromised to some degree when they take part in war. Almost everybody who takes part in war does things they are ashamed of afterward. But insofar as any war in history can be thought of in terms of a right side fighting against an evil one, then World War II is it. It is important to note that if at any time the Japanese had wanted to end the war, stop the fire bombings, and avoid Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all they had to do was surrender. Pearl Harbor, the Japanese entry into the war, the attacks on the Philippines and Burma, were vastly more popular with the Japanese people than Hitler’s declaration of war and invasion of Poland in September 1939 were in Germany. So, I’ve chosen my title, Retribution, advisedly. I do think the Japanese people brought their terrible fate upon themselves.
Most accounts of the Pacific War by American authors feature carrier and amphibious warfare, colorful admirals, and a rather theatrical general. How does one’s understanding change, when the Pacific War is placed in the context of the simultaneous war in China?
If people like me are going to write books about World War II sixty-three years after it ended, when so much has already been written, we have to ask ourselves what we can add. Whenever somebody produces a book that claims to make revelations about the war (for example, that Churchill plotted De Gaulle’s assassination or that the Allies were responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of German prisoners in 1945), they almost always turn out to be nonsense. I never look for revelations. I want to describe what it was like. I don’t think people care so much about what division went this way and which division went that way. People are interested in war as human experience. And that can take you all the way from the White House view, through MacArthur’s headquarters, right down to the guy in the foxhole. Much of the history that was written in the first couple of generations after the war was terribly nationalistic. I’m trying to set what our people did in context and say hang on a moment. Sure, American and British prisoners suffered terribly in Japanese hands, but many times more Asian prisoners and slaves died at the hands of the Japanese. And they deserve to be mentioned. People are amazed to be reminded that the Japanese army had a million men in China throughout the war. That was more than fought MacArthur; more than fought Nimitz’s marines; more than fought William Slim’s troops in Burma.
Often one reads about how costly island battles such as Iwo Jima or Okinawa were in terms of American casualties. One of every three Marines who landed on Peleliu was wounded or killed. By any standards these are terrible losses. But if one examines this in global terms, the United States was able to use its enormous wealth and technology to win the war fairly cheaply. In the end it took about 100,000 American lives to defeat Japan. The Russians were sometimes losing that many in a couple of weeks. Now, some poor bastard in a foxhole on Iwo Jima in February 1945 would have laughed at you (or something much worse) if you had said that the casualties weren’t that bad. But in the context of the Russian and Chinese theaters, for example, the Western Allies fought a relatively privileged war.
I try to ask unexpected questions of people who were there. For example, I was interviewing a former Japanese fighter pilot, Lt. Toshio Hijikata, who spent the early summer of 1945 pretty much the way RAF pilots did during the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, sitting on grass airstrips waiting to be scrambled in their Zeros in futile attempts to stem the tide of General Curtis Lemay’s B-29s. I asked him what he did between sorties, all those hours hanging about. And he said that he played bridge. I was amazed. That didn’t fit my image of a kamikaze pilot. He said in the Japanese navy the British Royal Navy tradition was very important. “Let me tell you,” he said, “we played for pretty high stakes because we didn’t expect to have to be around to pay.” I was riveted by this picture of Japanese pilots sitting around in a circle calling two spades, three clubs to each other between battles.
I also interviewed Yang Fa Shun, a very old peasant in northern China near the Russian border. He described his experiences during the Japanese occupation and also noted that he was a witness to the Soviet Army, 1.5 million strong, sweeping into Manchuria in August 1945 during the last great campaign of the war. I asked this old peasant if he had any happy memories of his own childhood. He burst out angrily: “How can you ask me such a question? Our lives were pure hell. It was just work, work, work and always knowing that if you did anything that displeased the Japanese, you ended up like so many others, thrown into the river with a rock tied to your feet.”
Recollections such as these are not big things. But they are captivating when you pile them together. I found a letter in the U.S. Army censors’ file at the National Archives from a corporal, Ray Haskel, which read like something out of a script for South Pacific. He wrote to Myrtle Ristenhart, a Hollywood starlet whose picture he’d seen in Life magazine. I won’t repeat it here because you can find it in the book. But it was a very moving letter from this desperately lonely young man sitting there in the middle of nowhere without a girl in sight. I’ve been interviewing old people about their experiences in the war for over thirty years, and I never stop being riveted by the yarns they tell.
There are some inevitable questions that come with any discussion of the war against Japan, and you address them in your book. To what extent is race a useful category of explanation for this war?
Race obviously was a factor, but I think it was less of a factor than some people have suggested. John Dower has written on this, and all of us who write about this period are indebted to him. But I think Dower overstates the extent to which this was a racially based war. It is true that the Western Allies and America in particular worked up a pretty good hate for the Japanese, but this wasn’t because they were “yellow-skinned.” I would argue that a lot of the hate for the Japanese derived, not from the fact that they were Orientals, but because they behaved with an unspeakable brutality. Japan had established a reputation for appalling behavior in China with the Nanking Massacre, long before the Pacific War started. And while there is no doubt that in the later stages of the war U.S. and British personnel were involved in breaking the laws of war and committing atrocities, the Japanese started it, and behaved wretchedly long before the first recorded atrocity by westerners toward the Japanese. Once the word gets out that your prisoners are being treated with unspeakable barbarity, once the word is out that the other side is not playing the game by the cultural rules you understand, I don’t think it is realistic to expect that your side is going to maintain perfect standards. To cite one extreme example, some historians have argued that the United States would never have dropped the atomic bomb on Europeans. We only saw fit to use them against Asians. I think this is completely untrue. If the atomic bomb had been completed a year earlier, it would have been dropped on Berlin. It is a big mistake to judge the atomic bomb decision in isolation. It took place in the context of years of heavy bombing of cities, in which vastly more people were killed than died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the same way, British and American air forces had gotten so proficient in Europe by the spring of 1945 that German defenses had all but collapsed. Something like 200,000 to 300,000 people died in the bombings between January and May 1945. I do not accept the assertion that dropping an atomic bomb on Berlin was unthinkable against that background. There is another factor: technological determinism. The history of war demonstrates that when a weapon is built, it gets used. It would have required an extraordinary intervention by Truman to stop the great juggernaut of the Manhattan Project.
How well did the Allies work together in this theater as compared to the European theater?
I had not realized when I started Retribution just how poisoned relations between Britain and the United States had become. The British were exhausted and broke. And the Americans were passionately, almost obsessively determined that American resources and lives should not be expended to restore the British Empire. So in the Far East, the British tried to stay in the game, even though they knew the Americans really didn’t want them out there, and they didn’t have a lot that they could bring to the party. When a British battle squadron was at last ready to join the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Churchill had to appeal personally to Roosevelt to get Admiral King to take it. Most of the British big ships were getting pretty old and battered. They did not have air-conditioning. Their carriers did have armored flight decks—a big help in dealing with the kamikazes—but frankly our few dozen ships looked pathetic along side the huge and fantastically efficient American fleet. And it was just a reflection of resources. By this stage, the British were exhausted and bitter. They felt that in the last year the Americans in Asia pretty much took the gloves off. This was an American war, and things were going to be done in an American way. And we don’t give a damn what you British think about it. The irony is that the United States and Britain were pursuing equally idiotic goals. The British were under the illusion that they could restore their Asian empire and keep India. The Americans quite rightly perceived that this was not going to wash. But on the other hand, the Americans believed they could turn China into a great democratic society and close ally of the United States. The Brits understood that the United States wanted out of China something far bigger and far more sophisticated than it was capable of delivering. By about 1945, most Americans who had anything to do with China realized this. Chiang Kai-shek’s regime was so corrupt, and China was so poor. To make China a major player in the war was a crazy illusion. The Brits were crazy about their empire, but the United States was equally crazy about China.
What do you most hope readers will take away from your book?
I’ve spent a lot of my life writing about wars. And I am convinced that people need to have a very clear understanding of the limits of military power. I’m afraid one reason some of us feel quite sore toward George Bush and the neocons is that they’ve got us all into this frightful mess in Iraq despite the fact that many of them personally went to some trouble to avoid ever hearing a shot fired at the sharp end. I’m not a pacifist at all; I believe we must be willing to use force in the right cause. But equally, the study of history confirms how ghastly the consequences of the use of force are, as well as the limitations of force. The great mistake of the neocons was to believe that they could leverage the military power of the United States to do things that nobody who understood anything about Middle Eastern cultures thought for a moment were viable. What one has got to hope is that the next president of the United States has a better understanding of the possibilities and limitations of military power than President Bush.
Donald A. Yerxa is assistant director of The Historical Society and editor (with Joseph S. Lucas) of Historically Speaking, where this interview will appear in a slightly different form.
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