11.8 — The War in Asia and the Pacific

The Second World War in Asia did not begin in 1939. It began in 1931, when Japan seized Manchuria, or in 1937, when full-scale war with China started.

By the time Germany invaded Poland, China had been fighting for two years and had already lost its capital.

Chinese deaths in the war are estimated at 15 to 20 million, the second highest national toll after the Soviet Union. A large majority were civilians.

This chapter covers the war that most Western accounts begin in December 1941.

Why Japan went to war

Chapter 9.13 covered the Meiji transformation. Here is what it became.

Japan industrialised successfully and had almost no natural resources — no oil, little iron ore, limited coal. Its industrial economy depended entirely on imports.

And it drew a conclusion that seemed to follow from the world it was in. The European powers had secured their resources by empire (Chapter 11.1). Japan, having defeated China in 1895 and Russia in 1905, having taken Taiwan and annexed Korea in 1910, concluded that security required the same.

The politics that produced it. Japan's constitution made the armed forces answerable to the Emperor rather than to the cabinet, and the army and navy ministers had to be serving officers — so the services could bring down any government by withdrawing their minister. A wave of assassinations of politicians in the 1930s, including two prime ministers, made civilian resistance dangerous. Junior officers repeatedly acted on their own initiative and were rewarded rather than punished.

Manchuria, 1931, is the case. Officers of the Kwantung Army staged an explosion on a railway line they guarded, blamed Chinese soldiers, and used it as a pretext to occupy the whole region. Tokyo had not authorised it and accepted it afterwards.

The League of Nations investigated and found against Japan. Japan left the League. This is the first demonstration that the post-1919 system could not enforce anything (Chapter 11.4).

China

Full-scale war from July 1937.

Shanghai was defended for three months at enormous cost. Then the capital, Nanjing, fell in December 1937.

What followed is documented by Japanese soldiers' own diaries, by Western residents who stayed, and by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Over roughly six weeks, Japanese forces conducted mass killings of prisoners and civilians and mass rape. The tribunal estimated over 200,000 killed; Chinese estimates are higher; some Japanese revisionist accounts are far lower. The event itself is not in serious historical dispute and its denial is a live political issue in Japan and a permanent obstacle in Japanese-Chinese relations.

John Rabe, a German businessman and Nazi Party member in Nanjing, used his party membership to establish a safety zone that sheltered perhaps 200,000 people. His diaries are a principal source.

The war then became a stalemate. Japan held the cities, the railways and the coast; the Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Chongqing; and the Communists under Mao built rural bases in the north.

Japanese policy in occupied areas included the "three alls" — kill all, burn all, loot all — in anti-partisan operations.

And Unit 731 in Manchuria conducted biological and chemical weapons research on living human subjects, including deliberate infection, vivisection without anaesthetic and frostbite experiments. Its personnel were granted immunity from prosecution by the United States in exchange for their data.

The Chinese Nationalists also breached the Yellow River dykes in 1938 to slow the Japanese advance, which flooded a vast area and killed several hundred thousand Chinese civilians. It belongs in the record.

Pearl Harbor

Why Japan attacked the United States is a question with a specific answer, and it is oil.

The sequence. Japan occupied northern French Indochina in 1940 and the south in July 1941. The United States responded with a total oil embargo, joined by Britain and the Dutch East Indies.

Japan imported around 80 percent of its oil from the United States. Its reserves would run out within about two years, and the navy's within less.

So the choice was: withdraw from China, which the army would not accept and which would mean abandoning a decade of war and enormous casualties; or seize the oil of the Dutch East Indies, which meant war with the Netherlands and Britain, and which could not be done with an intact American fleet at Pearl Harbor on the flank of the route.

The attack on 7 December 1941 sank or damaged much of the American battle fleet and killed around 2,400 people.

And it failed strategically in three ways. The American aircraft carriers were at sea and were undamaged, and carriers turned out to be the decisive weapon. The fuel storage and repair facilities were not attacked, so Pearl Harbor remained usable. And it unified American opinion completely, which had been substantially isolationist the day before.

Yamamoto, who planned it, is reported to have said that he could run wild for six months or a year but had no expectation of success in a long war. He was right about the six months.

The Pacific campaign

Japan's initial expansion was extraordinary. The Philippines, Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, Burma, and much of the western Pacific, within about five months.

Singapore's fall in February 1942 — a fortress considered impregnable, taken by a smaller force attacking overland through Malaya, with around 80,000 British, Indian and Australian troops surrendering — is the event Chapter 10.9 identified as destroying imperial prestige across Asia.

Midway, June 1942, reversed the naval balance. American codebreakers had partially broken the Japanese naval code and knew the target. Four Japanese fleet carriers were sunk in a few hours. Japan could not replace them; the United States could and did, building more carriers in the following three years than existed in the world in 1941.

And then the island campaign, which was fought under a specific and terrible condition.

Japanese forces very rarely surrendered. The military code held surrender to be dishonourable, and troops were told — with substantial truth given what their own forces had done — that captivity meant torture and death. So islands were taken by killing nearly everyone on them. At Iwo Jima, of a garrison of around 21,000, roughly a thousand were captured.

Civilian deaths on Okinawa — perhaps a third of the population — included large numbers of mass suicides, in some cases encouraged or ordered by Japanese soldiers.

Prisoners of war. Around 27 percent of Allied prisoners of the Japanese died in captivity, against around 4 percent of those held by Germany and Italy. The Burma railway, built by prisoners and by conscripted Asian labourers, killed around 12,000 Allied prisoners and a far larger number — estimates around 90,000 — of Asian labourers.

And the comfort women system. Tens of thousands of women, principally Korean and Chinese but also Filipina, Indonesian, Taiwanese and Dutch, were coerced into sexual slavery for the Japanese military. The Japanese government issued an apology in the Kono Statement of 1993 and the matter remains a serious dispute with South Korea.

India's part

Chapter 6.22 covered the political dimension. Here is the war.

Around 2.5 million Indians served — the largest volunteer army in history — in North Africa, Italy, Iraq, Iran, and above all in Burma.

The Burma campaign was substantially an Indian Army operation. Imphal and Kohima in 1944 were fought principally by Indian and British units against a Japanese offensive that included Bose's Indian National Army (Chapter 6.22). The Japanese offensive failed catastrophically, with far more men dying of starvation and disease than in combat.

And the Bengal famine of 1943 (Chapter 6.17) killed around 2 to 3 million people in the middle of this campaign, its causes including the loss of Burmese rice imports, the denial policy that removed boats and rice from coastal Bengal, wartime inflation, and the refusal of shipping for relief imports.

The end

By mid-1945 Japan's position was hopeless by any military measure.

Its merchant fleet had been destroyed, principally by American submarines, so the raw materials the war had been fought to obtain could not be shipped. Its cities were being burned.

The firebombing of Tokyo on 9–10 March 1945 killed an estimated 100,000 people in a single night — more than either atomic bomb — using incendiaries against a city built largely of wood.

And Japan had not surrendered. The government was divided; the army faction insisted on continuing; and the sticking point in the discussions was the position of the Emperor.

Chapter 11.10 is what happened next.

Where this shows up in your life

The memory politics are live. Japanese textbook treatments of Nanjing, the comfort women and Unit 731 are a continuing dispute with China and South Korea, and visits by Japanese politicians to the Yasukuni shrine — which enshrines convicted war criminals among the war dead — produce diplomatic incidents.

And the comparison with Germany is the one usually drawn. Germany's post-war reckoning was more thorough, more official and more sustained, and this is generally attributed to the different occupation policies — the United States retained the Emperor and much of the Japanese bureaucracy in order to govern the country and to face the Soviet Union, which meant the reckoning was incomplete by design.

The war's effect on decolonization was decisive (Chapter 10.9).

And the Chinese Communist Party's victory in 1949 is substantially a consequence of this war — the Nationalists bore the brunt of the Japanese offensives and were exhausted by it, while the Communists expanded their rural base (Chapter 12.3).

What the next page covers

Chapter 11.9 is the Holocaust — how a modern state organised the murder of six million people, the stages by which it developed from discrimination to extermination, how it was administered, who participated, what was known and by whom, what resistance there was, and why understanding the mechanism matters more than any amount of horror.