All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [271]
If Japanese conduct in victory had been barbaric, amid defeats it became progressively more murderous. The principal victims of their Asian rampages were not the British, Australians or Americans, whose pride and prestige were more vulnerable than their citizens, but the native inhabitants of the societies over which Tokyo assumed hegemony, China foremost among them. ‘Terrible things were done by Japan in China,’ says modern Japanese writer Kazutoshi Hando, but many of his compatriots still decline to acknowledge this.
Not only Japanese nationalists, but also some modern Western historians, argue that the United States provoked Japan into war in 1941. They suggest that conflict between the two nations was avoidable, and propound a theory of moral equivalence, whereby Japanese wartime conduct was no worse than that of the Allies. But the Japanese waged an expansionist war in China, massacring countless civilians, for years before President Roosevelt imposed economic sanctions. A contemporary Japanese nationalist later sought to justify his nation’s policies by asserting: ‘America and Britain had been colonising China for many years. China was a backward nation … we felt Japan should go there and use Japanese technology and leadership to make China a better country.’ The record shows that Japanese conduct in China was both wholly self-interested and shamelessly barbaric. But sufficient Japanese remained convinced of their nation’s ‘civilising mission’ and of the legitimacy of their claims upon an overseas empire to render their government implacably opposed to withdrawal from China, even when Japan began to lose the war and to ponder negotiating positions. If European imperialism was indisputably exploitative, the Japanese claimed rights to pillage Asian societies on a scale and in a fashion no colonial regime had matched.
American enthusiasm for the Nationalist regime, and for China’s potential as an ally, persisted until 1944, when the Japanese launched their last major conventional offensive of the war, Operation Ichigo. This was designed to eliminate American bomber airfields in China, and open an overland route to Indochina. It conclusively exposed the impotence of Chiang Kai-shek’s army, whose formations melted away in its path. Vast new areas of central and southern China were overrun – almost bloodlessly for the Japanese, though emphatically not for the Chinese. Once more, they died in their thousands and hundreds of thousands, as the warring armies swept over them. It is remarkable that Japan embarked on Ichigo at a moment in the war when such an ambitious operation had become strategically futile; its only significant achievement, beyond slaughter, was to disabuse Washington of its illusions about China. By 1945 the US chiefs of staff had abandoned notions of seizing Taiwan and using it as a stepping-stone to create a perimeter on the mainland. They recognised that the country was incapable of participating effectively in the war. China was merely a great victim, second only to Russia in the scale of its sufferings and losses, while denied the consolation of any redemptive military achievement.
2 JUNGLE-BASHING AND ISLAND-HOPPING
At the January 1943 Casablanca summit conference, the Western Allied leaderships reasserted the priority of defeating Germany, but agreed to devote sufficient resources to the war against Japan to maintain the initiative – the Americans