Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II (17 page)

Just as their reaction to the Doolittle raid demonstrated the political naiveté of the Japanese in thinking that by executing the fliers they would be able to prevent the Americans making further air attacks, so the two great sea battles of summer 1942, first at the Coral Sea and then at Midway, showed how militarily the Japanese had miscalculated the likely turn the war would take.
At the battle of the Coral Sea, fought in early May, the Allied fleet sought to prevent the Japanese landing at Port Moresby in New Guinea.
This was the first naval battle in history in which the opposing ships never came in sight of each other.
It was a reminder to the Japanese — if one was needed — of how disastrous it had been to destroy only the American battleships at Pearl Harbor.
For the Pacific War was to be a conflict in which the carriers were king.

Admiral Nimitz, overall commander of the American Pacific fleet, knew of the planned Japanese invasion from intelligence intercepts.
As a result two task forces, each based around an aircraft carrier, the USS
Lexington
and the
USS Yorktown
, together with a third force of destroyers and cruisers, moved on the Japanese Imperial Navy under the command of Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi.
As battle was joined, the Americans had initial success when their warplanes sank the Japanese carrier
Shoho
.
On 8 May, the day of the fiercest conflict, the Americans inflicted damage on another Japanese carrier, the
Shokaku
, but the fighters and bombers of the Imperial Navy fought back successfully, sinking the
Lexington
and severely damaging the
Yorktown
, with the result that the battle was an uneasy draw.
The Japanese had succeeded in inflicting more damage on the Americans than they sustained themselves, but their landing at Port Moresby had been prevented.
Moreover it was the Americans, with their superior industrial capacity, who were far better equipped to replace their losses.

If the battle of the Coral Sea had been a draw, there was no question about the result of the battle of Midway, fought one month later in early June.
It was a decisive American victory, and in many ways the turning point of the war.
After a mere six months of success, the Japanese were about to embark on three years of relative failure.
Vital to the American success at Midway was, once again, the use that Nimitz made of intercepted intelligence material.
He trusted absolutely the information given to him — that the great Admiral Yamamoto, architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, was directing his main thrust against the islands of Midway, US territory far out in the Pacific.
That intelligence, combined with false signals information generated by the Americans which led the Japanese to believe that the USS
Hornet
and USS
Enterprise
were not in the area, was to prove decisive.
Because he did not believe these carriers were nearby, Vice Admiral Nagumo (surprisingly still in command of an Imperial Navy task force after his less than striking performance at Pearl Harbor) allowed his planes to be caught by surprise on the deck of his own carrier.
Four Japanese carriers were eventually sunk at Midway, and Yamamoto was forced to abandon the whole Midway operation.

In Japan the enormous significance of the Midway defeat was not immediately appreciated.
In a striking example of how the Japanese High Command structure was flawed and interwoven with rivalries, it took some time for the Imperial Navy even to admit the extent of the defeat to their army colleagues (though they did tell Hirohito their true losses).
Viscount Kido, who talked to the emperor about Midway on 8 June 1942, records: ‘I had presumed the news of the terrible losses sustained by the naval air force would have caused him untold anxiety, yet when I saw him he was as calm as usual and his countenance showed not the least change.’
¹
It is not possible, of course, to know for certain the exact reason Hirohito reacted to the news of Midway in this way, but the evidence of his past behaviour in similar circumstances points to his insouciance being the result of a blissful inability to comprehend that the war had turned, rather than a calculated brave face in front of his subordinates.
Just two months later, however, Hirohito and the rest of the Japanese High Command were to become all too aware of the appalling mistake they had made in thinking the Americans would soon tire of the war and sue for a compromise peace.

On 7 August, 19,000 men of the US 1st marine division landed on the island of Guadalcanal in the Solomons group.
It was the start of the Allied counter-offensive — something the Japanese had thought could not possibly be mounted so soon.
The Americans, in a taste of the horrors to come during their ‘island-hopping’ campaign, found dislodging the defenders hard and bloody.
The Japanese poured reinforcements into the area and for a time the Imperial Navy had supremacy of the sea.
US marines, deprived of vital supplies, fought fiercely to defend Henderson Field, the airstrip in the centre of the island.
In October Vice Admiral Halsey took command of US naval operations in the area and immediately pursued a more forceful and effective naval strategy.
(Halsey’s character is best illustrated by his promise after Pearl Harbor that by the end of the conflict ‘Japanese would only be spoken in hell.’)
²
In September the Japanese managed to come as close as 1000 yards (900 m) to the vital airstrip.
But still the marines held out.
At sea Halsey’s fleet managed to stop Japanese battleships shelling the American positions, and so the planes operating from Henderson Field (the ‘Cactus Air Force’) were able to destroy many of the Japanese reinforcements as they landed on the beaches.

By the start of 1943 the US position on the island was secure and the Japanese had to pull back to islands in the northern part of the Solomons.
Victory had come at a heavy cost — more than 6000 Americans killed or wounded — but it was worth it.
Guadalcanal marked the moment at which the Japanese land advance was turned around.
With Midway at sea and Guadalcanal on land the Allies had demonstrated that they were more than likely to win this war.
The only problem was that despite losing 24,000 men on Guadalcanal the Japanese government showed no signs of wanting to sue for peace.
Moreover, the soldiers of the Emperor were fighting with a determination that astounded their opponents.

From the first moments of the war the Americans had noticed a peculiar characteristic of their enemy.
‘I remember one incident when we were capturing our first island,’ says Gene La Roque.
‘We’d appeared to have subdued the few Japanese that were defending the island, and in the late afternoon a couple of my shipmates and I saw this Japanese patrol boat — probably about 150 feet [45 metres] long — and we decided to go over and see how these Japanese lived, because we didn’t see anybody on board.
As we approached this boat in this lagoon on a peaceful afternoon, two men rushed out from down below, and we thought they were probably going to surrender or that they were going to shoot at us.
Instead they went up on the bridge structure, walked out and back and hung themselves right before our eyes from the yardarm.
That gave us a good idea of what we were up against.
These folks were not gonna give up easily.’

Both on land and at sea the Japanese demonstrated from the first that they were prepared to die sooner than surrender.
As already seen, one reason for this devotion to duty is clear — the Imperial Military Service Code instructed members of the armed forces not to ‘bring shame’ on themselves and their families by becoming prisoners of war.
But that is not the whole story — after all, Stalin had issued similar instructions to the Red Army but that had not prevented whole Soviet armies surrendering to the Germans.
Crucial to the determination of the Japanese not to give up was the role of the emperor — their belief that their supreme commander was a god played a powerful part in making the Japanese armed forces fight to the end.
‘We were told that the emperor was a living god,’ says Hajime Kondo, then a soldier in the Imperial Army.
‘If you go to war and die in action then you become a god and are enshrined at the Yasukini shrine and the emperor will kindly come and pray for you.’
The consequence of this was clear — ‘We never thought of surrender.’

The ferocious way in which the Japanese were prepared to fight to the death did not make the Americans respect them more — it had quite the opposite effect.
‘I thought they were very cruel, they were sadistic,’ says Michael Witowich of the US Marine Corps, ‘and they wanted to die for the emperor, and we had to go out there and help them die for the emperor.’
Witowich fought right across the Pacific with the marines.
He had first-hand experience of just how fiercely the Japanese were prepared to defend every inch of land, sea and coral reef they held.
Taking the tiny island of Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands in November 1943 he describes simply as ‘Hell’.
Rear Admiral Keiji Shibasaki, the commander of the island, had instructed his men to construct a deep series of defence tunnels and pill boxes.
He boasted that Tarawa ‘could not be taken by a million men in a hundred years.’
³
As a result, the landing was one of the most tortuous the US Marines ever attempted.
‘As we were going in the boat got hooked on the coral,’ says Witowich, ‘because the tide was going out.
Two of us went out and then a shell hit the boat.
Bodies just blew all over — parts of bodies, heads, legs.
And we started swimming waist-deep to the beach.
How could you help them [fellow marines] when your job was to go in and fight the Jap?
How could you save them in the water?’
Once he moved off the beach he attacked the Japanese defences: ‘I blew a lot of them out of the caves.
We put gasoline in the slits of the pill boxes and lit it with a flame thrower and we shot the hell out of them as they were going out.’

Tarawa did not hold out the ‘hundred years’ that Keiji had promised, but just three days.
Yet it cost 1000 American dead to take the island — with the Japanese losing five times that number.
‘You can imagine the smell that was there on Tarawa,’ says Michael Witowich.
‘It’s like cat manure.
It’s horrible.
Makes you want to puke.
I put some cotton in my nose but the smell was still horrible, with the maggots crawling over the bodies, over their eyes and mouth.
And we sat there eating our rations — a dead Jap here, a dead marine there.’
After taking part in the fight for Tarawa he became ‘very bitter about losing my buddies.
Seeing them lying there, burying them, leaves an awful feeling in your heart.
Fellas that you trained with, went on liberty with — young kids, sixteen, seventeen.’

Experiences such as these helped fuel in the US marines a deep hatred of the Japanese — a hatred that found one expression in the mutilation of Japanese war dead.
Some American marines took the heads of Japanese soldiers, boiled them and kept the skulls as souvenirs.
Time
magazine even carried a photograph during the war of a young woman, the girlfriend of an American sailor, gazing wistfully at a present that her boyfriend had sent back from the Pacific — a Japanese skull signed on the cranium by him and his comrades.
Marines also smashed open the corpses’ jaws.
‘They would turn these bodies over and hit them in the back of the head with the butt of a rifle,’ says Paul Montgomery, a US air force pilot who witnessed such atrocities.
‘I saw marines that had a paper sack of gold teeth — it weighed probably 10 or 15 pounds [4 or 6 kg].
I saw one marine that had a considerable sack of gold teeth he was gonna take home with him.
Now, that’s rather brutal....The marines I met they were just kids — seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old — and they appeared to me to be a bunch of animals.
They told me, “Our chance of getting back to the United States is very slim and we’re just going to make the most of it.”
They were committed, they were determined they were not going home, and they were very mean.
They’d be fighting in the chow line, they’d be fighting amongst themselves.
Every opportunity they got they’d be in hand-to-hand combat — just because they were on edge.’

It is rare for an American serviceman to confess personally to committing atrocities on war dead — but during our interview with him, Michael Witowich did: ‘I shot him [one of the Japanese dead] in the head with a .45 and automatically the mouth opens up.
Man!
All them gold teeth staring at me.
And I didn’t knock them out with a rifle, but I used pliers.
I had a whole canteen of gold teeth.
That’s kind of cannibalistic, but during the war everything is horrible.
I guess I just had so much hate while I was doing that, you know.
There are a lot of atrocities in war — on both sides.
Not only on one side, on both sides.
Call it revenge, call it what you want.’

’Everyone wanted souvenirs,’ says James Eagleton, another former marine.
‘I got home with a couple of Japanese rifles and a Japanese flag.’
As far as the more ghoulish souvenirs were concerned, he told us that ‘in the two years I was overseas I saw one head of a Japanese soldier put on a stick.
And our Roman Catholic priest just blew his top, because the lieutenant that had done this was one of his parishioners.’

The atrocities committed by the Japanese during the war are common knowledge, but these atrocities committed by the Americans have received a great deal less publicity.
During research for this project it became clear that many US marines had witnessed or participated in mutilation of the Japanese dead, but few wanted to talk about it openly.
How common this kind of behaviour was is hard to establish, but anecdotal evidence suggested that it occurred a great deal.
When Charles Lindbergh was flying back home to America after visiting the Pacific during the war, he was asked at Hawaii if ‘he had any bones in his baggage’ .
He was informed that this was a ‘routine question.’
⁴

All of which begs the question: why did American marines treat the Japanese dead in this way?
There is no evidence that the mutilation of war dead occurred in any comparable way amongst Allied troops during the conflict in western Europe.
But from the start, the conflict in the Pacific was different.
Hatred of the Japanese, of course, pervaded everything the marines felt and did.
But it was a hatred supported by other emotions — a residual guilt, perhaps, at the way these ‘sneaky’ Japanese had managed to take them by surprise at Pearl Harbor (’We’re gonna have to slap the Dirty Little Jap’ go the lyrics of a popular song of the time.) The desperate way in which Japanese soldiers were prepared to fight to the death also contributed to a sense that they were not ‘human’ in the way that Westerners were, as did the knowledge of the mistreatment of Allied POWs in Japanese hands and the other-worldliness of the Japanese system of government with a god-emperor at its head.
There was also simple incomprehension at the propensity of the Japanese to commit suicide rather than be taken alive (’I thought the point of fighting in a war was to try and survive it,’ one American serviceman said to us over a cup of coffee after his interview).