At least a million Vietnamese died in their country’s great famine of 1944-45, which was directly attributable to Japanese insistence that rice paddies should be replanted with fibre crops for the occupiers’ use. Much Vietnamese grain was shipped to Japan, and rice commandeered to make fuel alcohol. The people of the Philippines and Dutch East Indies also suffered appallingly. In all, some five million South-East Asians died as a result of Japanese invasion and occupation, including 75,000 slave labourers on the Burma Railway. If the British could take little pride in their wartime stewardship of the Indian subcontinent, where white guests of Calcutta’s clubs could order unlimited eggs and bacon while Bengalis starved in the streets, never did they match the systemic barbarism of Japanese hegemony.
US forces fought their way across the Pacific supported by an awesome array of wealth and technology. American observers on the Asian mainland were appalled by the contrasting destitution which they everywhere perceived, and impressed by the political forces stirring. ‘There are over a billion people who are tired of the world as it is; they live literally in such terrible bondage that they have nothing to lose but their chains,’ wrote Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby in 1944. They noted the twenty-seven-year life expectancy in India, jewel in Britain’s imperial crown; a China where half the population died before attaining thirty. They described the lifeless bodies of child workers collected each morning outside factory gates in Shanghai; the beatings, whippings, torture, disease and starvation that were commonplace across the continent.
During China’s famines, vastly worsened by the Japanese war, people hunted ants, devoured tree roots, ate mud. The North China Herald deplored the prevalence of kidnapping and extortion: ‘In some districts, it has been customary to roast the victims in big kettles, without water, until the flesh falls from the bone.’ White and Jacoby wrote: ‘Everywhere in Asia life is infused with a few terrible certainties—hunger, indignity, and violence.’ This was the world Americans perceived themselves advancing to save, not merely from the Japanese, but from imperialists of every hue—including their closest allies, the British. Churchill nursed the ill-founded delusion that victory over Japan would enable Britain to sustain its rule in India, and reassert command of Burma and Malaya. The US cherished a parallel fantasy, equally massive and misguided, about what it could make of China. Frank Capra’s China film in the famous US War Department Why We Fight documentary series portrayed the country as a liberal society, and made no mention of Communists.
The Japanese, meanwhile, cherished their own illusions. As late as the summer of 1944, much of their empire still seemed secure, at least in the eyes of humbler members of its ruling race. Midshipman Toshiharu Konada loved his ‘runs ashore’ on Java from the heavy cruiser Ashigara. ‘Everything was so new and exotic to us young men,’ he said. Once a chorus of local children serenaded a leave party from the fleet with Japanese songs. Konada and a cluster of other men from his ship dined at a local Italian restaurant, ogling the proprietor’s daughter, one of the first European girls they had ever seen. ‘I thought: I am seeing the bright future of Asia here. The whole area seemed so peaceful. Many of the Chinese in Singapore were friendly to us.’
Twenty-year-old Konada was the son of a naval officer commanding a Pacific base. He himself had wanted to be a doctor, but relinquished that ambition when he was drafted in 1943. ‘I knew Japan must be defended, and I wanted to “do my bit”.’ The following year, when Ashigara and its consorts were redeployed to northern Japan to guard against an American threat from the Aleutians, ‘we started to feel a mounting sense of peril’. In the gunroom with his fellow midshipmen, ‘we never talked about what might happen after the war, because it seemed so remote’. He knew nothing of his father’s fate, because there was no mail from the Pacific islands. The midshipmen simply concentrated on their immediate tasks—studying hard for promotion exams and maintaining journals which were rigorously examined by their divisional officers.
Diversions were few in the long wait for a fleet action: every night, Konada or some other junior officer commanded a picket boat which patrolled the waters round the ship. Their biggest excitements were spotting the head of an apparent frogman in the darkness, which proved to be a giant turtle, and detecting torpedo tracks which translated into a shoal of tuna. They recognised the power of the American and British navies. However, when they gazed around their anchorages at the serried ranks of battleships, cruisers, destroyers which Japan still possessed, there seemed no grounds for despair. ‘We understood that this would be a long, hard war. But it seemed worth it, to achieve peace and security for Asia.’
Lt Cmdr Haruki Iki had been flying in combat since 1938, when he bombed retreating Chinese on the banks of the Yangtse. Iki, now thirty-two, was a famous man in the Japanese navy, the pilot who sank Repulse off Malaya. By the summer of 1944 he commanded a squadron flying long-range reconnaissance from Truk. They were bombed almost daily by high-altitude US Liberators. Most of the bombs fell into the sea, but raids caused the Japanese airmen to spend many hours in the caves which served as shelters. In the air, the planes under Iki’s command suffered relentless attrition. Replacement crews arrived scarcely trained. He found himself teaching signals procedures to radio operators who knew the principles of Morse code, but had never touched a transmitter. By high summer, the strength of his force had fallen from thirty-six aircraft to twelve. He was recalled to Japan to command a unit of Ginga bombers.
Masashiko Ando, twenty-three, was the son of a Japanese governor of Korea. None of this grandee’s three boys had wanted to pursue military careers, but all were obliged to do so. The eldest died fighting on Saipan, the second perished as an army doctor in New Guinea. By July 1944 this left Masashiko the only survivor, just graduating from the Navy Academy’s flight school. He had chosen to serve at sea, because an admired uncle was a naval officer. He was lucky enough to be in one of the last classes of cadets to receive thorough training, before fuel and aircraft became scarce. When postings were apportioned, he was the only cadet to apply for seaplane duty. Within a month, he was flying anti-submarine patrols in a single-engined, three-seater Judy dive-bomber.
He and his crew’s routine missions lasted two or three hours, covering convoys pursuing their sluggish courses towards Japan from Malaya or the Dutch Indies. Their aircraft were primitive by Allied standards. Lacking radar, they carried only a magnetic ship-detection device, together with a single 120-pound depth-charge, for the unlikely eventuality that they found an American submarine. Conducting box searches twice a day, month after month, might seem a dreary task, but it was not so to Ando, who loved to fly. His conscientious crewmen, Kato and Kikuchi, were younger than himself in years, but not in naval experience. They scanned the sea intently, searching for a telltale periscope wake.
After a while, they drank coffee from thermoses and ate their flight rations. These had improved somewhat since a disgusted pilot complained to their messing officer: ‘Every day might be our last! Is this muck the best you can do for our final meals?’ If they needed to urinate while they were in the air, a complex procedure was invoked. Each crew carried a folded oiled paper container which, once filled and sealed with a knot, was handed over the pilot’s shoulder to the magnetic search operator in the rear seat, to be thrown out of a window. Carelessness would cause the container to burst open in their faces. Even in the last year of the war, at Japanese bases in Indochina and the Dutch islands, there was enough to eat and plenty of fuel. Only aircrew replacements were in short supply. ‘We realised that Japan was in a tough spot,’ Ando said, ‘but not that we were in danger of losing the war. We young men believed that, whatever was happening, we could turn the tide.’
Staff officer Maj. Shigeru Funaki felt almost embarrassed that his life at China Army headquarters in Nanjing was so safe and comfortable—good food and no enemy bombing. ‘In Japan, one felt very conscious of what a mess we were in. But in China, our lives seemed so normal that we lulled ourselves into thinking that somehow, our country would come through OK. I was always proud of the fact that, whatever happened in other theatres, in China we remained victorious.