This book uncovers some unpalatable truths about Allied behaviour in the Pacific War, 1939-1945, in the context of an analysis of how both sides in the war (Japanese and Allied) used extreme racist language to fuel an orgy of violence and atrocities. The author, Professor John W. Dower from MIT, attempts to address the twin issues of how salient racist thought and propaganda was in the Pacific war, and how that racist fury managed to change so quickly to cooperation after the war finished. But this story relies fundamentally on a correct appraisal of the actions of both sides in the war, and particularly on an unvarnished view of Allied behaviour. Everyone knows how badly the Japanese behaved in the war, but I think very few people are aware that the Allies also engaged in a great many atrocities, including torture and wholesale slaughter of prisoners of war and surrendering soldiers. I certainly was ignorant of the scope and prevalence of the atrocities committed, and the acceptance of them (both open and tacit) in the media and higher echelons of the military at the time. Professor Dower’s argument is that these atrocities were unique to the Pacific theatre, and were inculcated through an intense campaign of racism and dehumanization of the Japanese in western media and propaganda that, although often using different imagery and style to Japanese wartime propaganda, essentially mirrored the techniques and purpose of that propaganda. The result was a war of unprecedented fury and ferocity – at least from the perspective of the US and commonwealth countries. Obviously for the Russians, Germans and Eastern Europeans the role of racial ideology in driving a war of extermination was well understood by 1943, but the conflict between Germans and the Western allies was largely free of racial hatred, and very few atrocities occurred on either side. So from the perspective of the Western Allies, the war in the Pacific theatre was conducted, propagandized and envisioned very differently to that against Germany.
This racist propaganda was both extreme and potentially catastrophic. By 1945, both the general public and policy-makers in the US were accepting of an exterminationist stream of thought, which led to speeches like this by Major George Fielding Eliot, who said that the Allies’ aim must be:
The complete and ruthless destruction of Japanese industry, so that not one brick of any Japanese factory shall be left upon another, so that there shall not be in Japan one electric motor or one steam or gasoline engine, nor a chemical laboratory, not so much as a book which tells how these things are made
Churchill suggested reducing all Japanese cities to ash, and one person assigned to planning Japan’s post-war construction called for their “almost total elimination” as a race. Fortunately for all involved, saner heads prevailed by the end of the war.
This book makes clear the tit-for-tat nature of some American atrocities and doesn’t attempt to compare savagery or indecency – it is interested in comparing the role of racist ideals in driving exterminationist behaviour. But it does not attempt to exonerate allied soldiers on the basis of their prior experiences – and makes clear, in any case, that much allied bad behaviour occurred before the full extent of Japanese atrocities was known or had been communicated to the troops. Indeed, some of the most basically racist western propaganda was conceived of before Pearl Harbour, and certainly before the general principles of a furious and merciless war were already germinating long before the Japanese atrocities had been well-understood. It makes for uncomfortable reading when the statements and behaviour of the allied soldiers are compared with those of the Nazis in the Eastern Front. For example, keeping body parts as trophies, throwing prisoners alive from aircraft, killing prisoners or survivors en masse, and cutting gold fillings from Japanese survivors while they were still alive, were common practice amongst US, British and Australian soldiers. Accounts from captured Japanese soldiers and their diaries indicate they went to ingenious lengths to find ways to surrender without being executed, because they knew this fate awaited them; and many soldiers were killed attempting to surrender.
This has led me to ponder a couple of questions that I will return to over the course of reading this book, some of which challenge my accepted understanding of how the war was conducted and what decisions were made. Here are a few:
- George Fraser, author of the excellent Flashman series, has written an autobiographical account of his days in Burma under general Slim, the very thoughtful and interesting Quartered Safe Out Here, which I highly recommend. He routinely recounts the accepted notion that “the Japanese never surrender.” He was writing of 1945, by which time the Japanese must have known that surrender was, largely, a death sentence. Did he know this fact and chose not to include it? In fact, did he sanitize this aspect of the war from his account, and if so how much can his version of events in Burma be trusted?
- We have clear and accurate accounts of the numbers of soldiers who died in Japanese captivity, but to the best of my knowledge no similar figures have been compiled for the Allies. Could it be that Japanese prisoners of war actually had similar (or worse!) survival rates in Allied captivity due to the practice of murdering them on capture? If so, how should modern western interpretation of our role in the war change to account for this – what kind of outrage can we level against our former enemies if we behaved the same way?
- I have always accepted the western account of the nuclear attacks and fire-bombings in terms of the Japanese refusal to surrender, and even partially the claim that this approach saved lives because it avoided an invasion of the mainland. But how much should we trust those analyses when accounts of the Japanese martial character, the conduct of the war, and all assessments of the likelihood of surrender, were based on highly racially charged and often inaccurate assessments of Japanese motivations and behaviour? How truthful was the underlying information that led to these decisions? How is it that the country which sent notes to all its allies in 1940 asking them to refrain from urban bombing campaigns was happily broadcasting its joy at reducing cities to ash within 4 years? Was this change really purely or even partially driven by strategic necessity?
- Given that this racist propaganda was being built up before the war and was unleashed in full force as soon as the war started, is it possible that the war itself was much more preventable than leaders and opinion-makers of the time were willing to believe? To what extent was the racist propaganda about the implacable Japanese enemy a self-fulfilling theory?
I’ll come back to some of these questions over the next few weeks as I read through this compelling and extremely unpleasant book. For now I’m on holiday in Beppu and with patchy computer access, so nothing more on this will happen for a week or so, but I certainly aim to return to this topic soon.
July 10, 2011 at 12:45 am
Very interesting. The Pacific War was dehumanizing to everyone. This is not really new information, though, so I would be cautious about accepting the extent the author describes the atrocities as gospel. There are many who go too far in trying to “correct” the historical record, just as there are those who seek to sanitize it. Those of political bent will usually identify with the intent rather than the facts.
Fraser whrote at least three books about his time in the Chindits, maybe more (too lazy to look at wikipedia). By their very nature, operating long term behind the front lines, surrender was not an option for either side (on top of the more intimate brutality of that war). Not sure what your point is there…
Scavenging corpses (and the not yet dead) for items like gold fillings is well documented. The scene in The Thin Red Line after the soldiers finally took the hill was very disturbing. That book speaks to much of what you are discussing here (first printed in 1961 if I recall). The main character manages to stay above it all, even in the thick of it.
Anyway, fascinating post on a fascinating subject. I hope you try to remain objective and focused on the facts – which are dark and relatively sanitized here in the States.
******
Aside – my comment to you on another blog was indeed a silly soundbite (most soundbites are). But it was more accurate than your childish attempt to call that post racist. As far as the race card, I know exactly what it is, I see it every day, and your refusal to acknowledge your playing it does not change the truth.
However, I can certainly sympathize with your defensiveness regarding what you perceived to be a broad insult to your friends. You just need to strive to understandwhat the point is, rather than avoiding it by hurling standard-issue accusations of racism.
*****
Aside part deux – I first came across you when you were trolling OSR imbeciles like Raggi and J. Malizewski (or however). I guess you were doing that to draw attention to your blog. Then you got into dogmatic fights with noisms and others, talking past eachother and not even addressing the points the other made. Your bias for rhetoric is frankly boring, and very deceptive. I would not have cared but you did have some posts on the cat you rescued. So I knew you were a decent guy despite the pompous BS and prefabricated opinions. I am a big fucking softie and I check your blog every now and then for updates on the cat. I hope he is still around and you guys are happy together.
July 10, 2011 at 6:32 am
I’m surprised that you’ve only just got around to this; I read this text a long time ago. I always remember this book when World War 2 veterans get lauded by the media; most of our guys were war criminals too.
If you keep digging in this direction, you’re going to hit on a truth that 98% of Westerners just simply can not bring themselves to accept. I’ll read your posts with interest, and I hope you have an excellent holiday.
July 11, 2011 at 4:05 pm
On a tangent: Thank god you’ve gone back to this format again. I can stop wondering if an Elder God was doing your page layout.
July 12, 2011 at 7:55 pm
Paul: I determined after a week that the new format made no difference to how people accessed my blog, so off it went. It was truly the webpage design from beyond space and time, wasn’t it?
I’m in a frenzy of moving-related packing and complex explorations of the politics of Beppu’s rubbish disposal system, so have little time for blogging this week!
July 13, 2011 at 9:11 am
The dogs of blogging demand to be fed! We demand an insightful look into Japanese rubbish disposal with contrasts to UK and Australian practices! How does a relatively crowded island with minimal spare landmass dispose of trash? How does their recycling work?
Most importantly, are any of the garbage trucks Hello Kitty branded?!
July 17, 2011 at 12:58 pm
[…] from Beppu and continuing my reports on the book War Without Mercy that I introduced here before my travels commenced. I’ve finished the section on allied and Japanese war atrocities, […]
July 17, 2011 at 6:34 pm
Paul, the garbage trucks in Beppu have angels on them, and I have now had several adventures with the garbage disposal system here, and will be posting on it shortly. After a week of throwing shit out ruthlessly, I think I need to become an AD&D 1e monk and renounce all material possessions.
Timothy, I have heard about The Thin Red Line but I don’t think it constitutes a mainstream representation of the war, does it? Didn’t it languish in obscurity until revived by that movie maker? I think the majority view of world war 2 is the sanitized version, which is what this book addresses (though this is not its prime focus – there is no polemicizing about how an injustice was done to the memory of the Japanese war dead through revisionism, and in fact no discussion of the revisionist process itself at all (yet)). My interest is in the truth behind the sanitized version, and what its implications are for things like the discussion about area bombing and nuclear attacks, etc.
As for the patronizing aside – I was under the impression that one of the main “sins” of my “trolling” post was that it ascribed motives and morals to people I don’t know based on their gaming/writing. It appears you have repeated the sin in your comment. And you really should learn what “playing the race card” means before you invoke this rhetorical device anymore. One plays the race card when one wants to shut down a debate by accusing one’s interlocutor of being racist. I’m decidedly not doing that in my posts on race and Tolkien – unless there is some debate you think it is relevant to that it shuts down? As far as I can tell I’m starting or joining in with a debate about whether or not the representation of race in LoTR is racist. I think I’ve even been at pains to point out that my theories about race in Tolkien are neither a reflection of his political views nor of any relevance to the literary merits (or otherwise) of his work. So there is no debate I am shutting down by yelling “ooo! Racist!” Similarly here, I’m not shutting down a debate about e.g. the righteousness of WW2 by saying “they were racist,” I’m raising/entering a different debate about how race was used as a propaganda tool in world war 2. This will lead to discussion about whether the decision to attack Japan with nuclear weapons was biased by considerations of race. But that’s not playing the race card.
So get these things straight. I will shortly be putting up a post about race and Dwarves in LoTR, based on the latest fanboy nerdrage, and you can give an opinion there if you have a problem with this whole Tolkien-and-race thing. But when you do it would be good if you didn’t start with accusations of cowardice or moral infortitude, if you could get the rhetorical claims right and (just as an aside) if you could try and understand that a lot of the people reading and commenting here are British/antipodean and have different cultural baggage about race than most Americans. But please do continue to comment, I think Noisms may have passed up the antagonist role now that he’s become busy in the UK, and my blogging works better when I have someone to disagree with.
July 18, 2011 at 9:50 am
“And you really should learn what “playing the race card” means before you invoke this rhetorical device anymore. One plays the race card when one wants to shut down a debate by accusing one’s interlocutor of being racist.”
It primary use is simply just accusing the other of being racist. That can have the effect of shutting down debate, but simply tarring the other person can also be a goal. [1]
For example, if I said that Obama was a bad president (with or without examples) and you immediately said I just disliked him because he was black, that would be playing the race card. My saying you’d done that would be an attempt to defend myself.
There’s a second meaning that is when you invoke racist images/ideas to support your argument. The wikipedia example is a black person taking a while person’s job to support opposition to racial quotas.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_card
July 19, 2011 at 1:35 am
faustusnotes, my playing the race card comments were relating to your actions on another blog when you exploded with accusations of racism, because of the authors using the phrase otaku to explain what an extreme nerd is. You know that is the truth, and you chose to mischaracterize what i said here. That is called lying – though no doubt you have rationalized that away as well.
Thanks for the invite, but I prefer honesty in debate which you are unwilling to provide. There is much more to say, but it is obvious you simply wish for antagonism with no respect for accuracy.
I’ll glance at your Tolkien dwarves post – it certainly has stirred up some reflexive grognardism – but given your proclivity for mischaracterization, I will probably skip it.
Good luck (sincerely).
Timothy
July 19, 2011 at 8:48 am
Timothy, I didn’t play the race card on the other blog. I didn’t tell Gwydion he was wrong because he was racist; I told him that he could have said the same things without using the racist backdrop. Perhaps you missed that part of the exchange? I told you over there that you should get it right, and you refused to engage me there and came here; so I repeat it here. Both in Gwydion’s blog and here, no one is shutting down any debate through claims of racism. It’s you with the proclivity for mischaracterization, because you don’t understand the difference between asking someone to change the terms in which they present their opinion, and asking someone not to present their opinion at all.
August 28, 2011 at 10:28 pm
[…] my series on War Without Mercy, Professor Dower’s analysis of race propaganda and its role in World War 2, we get to the […]
October 15, 2011 at 3:36 pm
[…] is to be my last post on what I’ve learnt from John Dower’s War Without Mercy, and it is also to be my most speculative. Did the feverish anti-Japanese propaganda of the Pacific […]