I deserve a medal, really I do!

And it should be the 'Long Service and Good Conduct' medal!  I had better explain.  That Oliver Kamm started it all, as I pointed out here, by giving that Aussie twerp, John Pilger, an historical slapping over his ignorant, not to say mendacious, remarks concerning the background to the dropping of the A-bombs on Japan.  It provoked me into reaching for a book which I have owned for about 20 years and which I assumed I had once read, but on dipping into it, I realised that I had not.  The book, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan by Ronald H. Spector is, as the title suggests, a fairly hefty piece of work but I suspect it was not just its weight that put me off but the fact that the publisher, Viking, had failed to provide a single map - grrrrrh!  Happily, the little 'Memsahib' has recently purchased a very handsome, and equally heavy, new atlas and so, dear reader, I have spent the last few days staggering around my house with these two giant volumes, at huge risk to my back, my arms and my hernia, in order to educate myself so that I might better educate you, in turn.

The shameful truth is, that whilst I know a little of the geo-political squabbles between the USA and Japan that led up to the war, and a fair bit more on the details of the Pearl Harbour attack, and a lot more on the intricacies of the battle of Midway, the remainder of the Pacific campaign is, or rather, was, a total haze to me.  I could not, for example, point to Iwo Jima, or Bataan, on a map - could you? - and neither did I have the slightest inkling as to exactly when and in what order these massive battles took place.  I am ashamed.  However, now, courtesy of Mr. Spector's excellent book, I am very much better informed.  Of course, this campaign was riven with controversies, and not just on the background to the atomic bombing, and so one places a great deal of trust in the historian writing the book.  In my judgment, Mr. Spector passes the test in that he points up the differing views of both the participants and the later historians before giving us his own considered judgement.  It still doesn't make him right, but in these convoluted affairs there is rarely any definite right or wrong. 

The one thing that comes through very clearly in this book, and which happily confirms my own opinion, is the almost insane stupidity of the Japanese in taking on the USA at all.  I do realise that Roosevelt, in an administrative error that could not be corrected, virtually provoked the Japanese into war by cutting off their oil supplies; but then again, the Japanese would not have been so desperate for oil if they had not gone rampaging all over China during the previous decade.  In any event, the Japanese high command, with very few exceptions, did not approach war with America in any sense of nervousness, on the contrary, I don't know what the Japanese for 'bring it on' is, but that was their motto!

I am, as some of you know, an agnostic when it comes to belief in a God or an Intelligent Designer, but were you so minded, some of the incidents in this war would convince you of divine intervention.  For example, the amazing luck that the American carriers were not in harbour tied up alongside their doomed battleships in Pearl Harbour, or, the engine trouble that delayed a Jap reconnaissance plane which, if it had taken off on time, would have spotted the American carriers at Midway.  Of course, all that 'divine intervention' stuff is nonsense; the war was won by the huge industrial might of the USA, the extraordinary courage and stamina of its fighting men, the intellectual brilliance of its code-breakers and the intelligence and diligence of many of its middle-ranking officers.  I deliberately exclude most of its senior officers because, on the whole, they were rubbish!  As Spector puts it, more politely, "Because of its material superiority, the United States could afford such expensive - and occasionally dangerous - luxuries as divided command and the lack of an overall strategy in the war against Japan."  (I hope that none of my American readers assume that I think we, the British, were any better - indeed not, but that is a separate tale of folly!)

As to the 'dispute' over the decisions to A-bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I remain convinced that Truman took the decision reluctantly but in the correct belief that it was needed in order to shock the Japanese into a surrender that a large majority of the high command was not prepared to concede, and also, to save very many more lives that would have been lost had the Japanese fought to the last man, as most of their military wished to do.

 

Comments

[H]

Richard Overy also makes the point ("Why the Allies won") that the Japanese were extremely foolhardy to take on the Americans. Not only was much of their materiel pre-WWI vintage, and mostly tied up in China to boot, but they were almost completely unable to replace their losses in their only technically advanced forces, namely the carriers and the aircraft and crews based on them.

[Umbongo]

As H writes, the Japanese were extremely foolhardy to take on the US because of the Americans' overweening industrial might (the same goes for Germany). I know it's easy to look back and conclude that a US victory against Japan was a foregone conclusion (I'm sure this wasn't the feeling at the time in the US) but I can't imagine a scenario where the Japanese could have won. Even if every ship in the American Pacific fleet had been in Pearl Harbor on 7 December, the task for the US would have been longer and more bloody perhaps (and Australia might have found that they would have had some hand-to-hand combat outside Darwin) but I still couldn't conceive of a Japanese victory.

As to the correctness or otherwise of Hiroshimna and Nagasaki: if I'd been Truman and had to choose between 100,000 Japanese civilians being killed and up to 2 million US civilians in uniform dying I'm sure I'd have opted to drop the bombs. A nasty decision but not, really, a difficult one.

[David Duff]

'H', you are right but from my reading it was the loss of experienced *aircrews* that really crippled their efforts after Midway. At the outbreak of war, the Jap flyers had many more flying hours (and combat experience - and better planes) than the Yanks but after Midway and the Battle of the Philippine Sea, it was exactly the opposite. Thus, the advent of the Kamikaze campaign, apart from appealing to the Japanese psyche, also suited their problem with hopelessly inexperienced pilots and not very good planes.

'Umbongo', you are right, too, in attempting to find any convincing scenario in which the Japs might have won. On the subject of the A-bomb attacks and their justification, it is not only the likely casualties amongst American servicemen invading Japan which is critical in discussions on the subject, but also the death and injuries to Japanese civilians.

The battle for the small island of Okinawa, which in relation to Japan is something akin to the Isle of Man to Britain, took from April 1st to June 21st before organised resistance was brought to an end. 7,000 US soldiers died in addition to 5,000 sailors. But, also 70,000 Japanese servicemen died AND 80,000 Okinawans, mostly civilians (1). Just imagine trying to take the whole of Japan!

(1) From the book referenced in my post.