The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice. John Bourne

captured. However, for the most part, there can be no doubt that the astounding physical courage shown by Japanese soldiers came from spiritual indoctrination.

      The most remarkable behaviour shown by Japanese soldiers was their willingness to accept orders that meant certain death and their refusal to surrender. The death of the young is one face of war. All societies know this. Unfortunately for all concerned, the Japanese extreme veneration of death was unique and came dangerously close to becoming a cult of oblivion.

      Japanese views also struck at the very nature of the warrior code as understood in the West. In the West, death in war had value only if it had purpose. Soldiers were asked to risk their lives in battle, not commit suicide. An officer intentionally putting his men in a position where they had no reasonable chance of survival would in all likelihood not be obeyed in a Western army. (Every Western army had its equivalent of the Alamo, but these were very much the exception.) If conditions showed that further resistance was futile, surrender was honourable. The Japanese took this attitude as a sign of weakness. Although the Japanese did not understand it, surrender in a Western army was viewed very differently. Honourable surrender in the Western tradition prevented the needless squandering of one’s own men. It also prevented the needless squandering of the enemy’s life. It was a mutual agreement, manifested over centuries of history, that served as a brake on the worst excesses of war in Europe and in many other parts of the world. If Japanese officers did not hallow the lives of their own soldiers, they were likewise showing a contempt for the lives of the foe.

      The cult of death, which ultimately became the heart of Japan’s combat ethos and shaped the battlefield tactics employed, was obvious very early in the war. The early American soldiers going to New Guinea and Guadalcanal were miserably trained in military basics and there was no time for organised political indoctrination. (Pearl Harbor, naturally, was the ultimate proof that the Japanese were warlike, cruel and, most importantly, devious.) However, in all the South Pacific battles, examples abounded of the refusal of Japanese troops to surrender, regardless of circumstance. Stories multiplied on Guadalcanal and New Guinea of Japanese soldiers pretending to surrender only to fire upon their potential captors at the last moment. Soon most Allied infantry believed it was dangerous to try to take prisoners. Naturally the ‘rumour mill’ inherent in war made the perception even more vivid. Yet the image was valid enough.

      Stanley Larsen, at the start of an extremely distinguished military career, was a young US Army battalion commander attacking one of the last Japanese strongpoints on the almost impenetrable jungle ridges on Guadalcanal in January 1943. Japanese resistance was hopeless and the garrison of about 200 near starvation. Larsen got a tank up the ridge in the morning and crushed what was left of the Japanese line. At a time when there was no hope, what was left of the Japanese garrison attacked at night. It was a good example of the famous ‘banzai charge’. Larsen described what took place:

      ‘We gave them a chance to surrender but they wouldn’t. That night after the tank attack, the enemy made a banzai attack against a company which was overlooking their water hole. It was a steep slope. I’ve only been in two banzai charges, and they are terrifying. In this one 85 Japanese were killed. Twenty-one were officers and the rest enlisted. F company did not lose a single man. We had a bulldozer up there and we bulldozed a mass grave and all were buried there. That was the end of the Japanese strongpoint.’⁵

      What should be noted in Larsen’s narrative is the high number of officers and the lack of American casualties. The attack described was a method of suicide. Larsen’s story is only one of many from Guadalcanal and gives credibility to the even more miserable accounts of the end at Buna.

      In the last days of the Buna campaign, the newly arrived US 41st Division helped liquidate the Japanese garrison in January 1943. Sergeant Joe Murphy later recounted to the 41st Division’s historian a horrible battle at a Japanese field hospital:

      ‘Company G opened up on the shacks with all possible firepower. A hut collapsed under a stream of bullets. We flanked the shacks and picked off riflemen. From the nearby cemetery the Japanese light mortar fired only three or four times before we killed it. Meanwhile, grenades began exploding among the huts as able-bodied defenders and hospital invalids blew themselves up – or tried to blow up G Company. Some Japs fought in the open, some fought from foxholes and trunks of large trees. Others ran and were cut down. And in the huts our tense riflemen found live Japs under blankets and dead Japs under blankets. And G Company had no chance to check each corpse with a stethoscope – not when a pale hand might reach out to blast a grenade in your face. So G fired first and pulled blankets off corpses later. Some Nips were dead or dying of wounds, malaria, dysentery and blackwater fever. Some patients held live grenades under blankets and tried to blast us or blow themselves up. I saw one Nip rifleman with an amputated leg – prone and firing from the floor of a hut. We found newly dead grenadiers hiding under blankets beside skeletons.’⁶

      The murderous result of this dynamic can easily be imagined. Allied soldiers did take prisoners throughout the war when conditions were right. (In action, a high percentage of prisoners early in the war was of imperial soldiers found unconscious.) However, Allied soldiers believed that an apparent surrender might be a trick. They also believed, with reason, that the Japanese took no prisoners on an active battlefield. The obvious effect was that Allied soldiers became less likely to attempt to take prisoners. Sadly, until the end, the Japanese ethos rejected surrender. It is also undoubtedly true that, as the war progressed and the Allies engaged more common Japanese infantry units, Japanese troops attempting surrender were shot out of hand. This in turn reinforced Japanese propaganda that the Allies would murder any Japanese in their clutches (including civilians). The Second World War’s most tragic self-fulfilling prophecy was well in action early in the Pacific War.

      The tide began to turn at Buna and Guadalcanal, but the South Pacific remained a fierce struggle throughout 1943. A slow advance up the Solomons and the coast of New Guinea finally allowed the Allies to bypass Rabaul in early 1944. They were, however, still far from Japan. Many American soldiers sardonically quipped ‘Golden Gate in 48’ or ‘Join Mac and never come back’. In reality the long fight in the jungle proved well worth the cost.

      Drive to Tokyo

      Although not obvious in early 1944 Japan had suffered its Stalingrad in the South Pacific. Losses in aircraft, pilots, warships and seamen had been crippling and put serious strain on Japan’s limited production capability to replace these losses. The qualitative edge in both air and sea operations had shifted to the United States. Although large numbers of Japanese aircraft rose to contest the skies in 1944–45, Japan’s best pilots had perished in the South Pacific and the Allies were now beginning to pile up a colossal ‘kill ratio’ in their favour. Obviously, better US planes and pilots were also accompanied by a quantitative edge growing rapidly after mid-1943.

      The change in tempo of operations after Allied victory in the South Pacific was striking. Early in the war imperial forces had the edge. The long struggle in New Guinea and the Solomons was hard fought. However, once Rabaul was bypassed and the Allies moved into the open waters of the Pacific, every major engagement between fleets and air units was a crushing and decisive US victory. In June 1944, when the Americans attacked the Marianas Islands, knowing the island of Saipan was within range of Japan for the secret B-29 ‘Super-fortress’ bomber, the Imperial Navy sortied the core of the fleet in search of the ‘decisive battle’. Despite decent odds for Japan on paper, American fliers and submarine crewmen humiliated the once proud Imperial Combined Fleet.

      In October 1944 the Imperial Navy threw the dice for the last time. Attacking a massive American armada invading the island of Leyte in the Philippines, Combined Fleet made another futile attempt to defeat a major American invasion and thus gain some kind of leverage for an optimistically anticipated compromise peace. Despite some American errors, the resulting Battle of Leyte Gulf was an air and sea calamity for Japan. In the ensuing battle for the Philippines the Japanese Army Air Force was also shot to ribbons. Japan’s plight became so desperate that, for the first time in modern history, suicide became an integral part of a nation’s military apparatus when kamikaze air attacks were first employed over the Philippines.

      Also the line moved