All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [409]
Intellectuals reflected on the vast experience the world had undergone. Arthur Schlesinger wrote grudgingly: ‘It was, I suppose, a Good War. But like all wars, our war was accompanied by atrocity and sadism, by stupidities and lies, pomposity and chickenshit. War remains hell, but a few wars have been driven by decent purposes and produced beneficial results.’ Schlesinger’s fellow historian Forrest Pogue, who had crossed north-west Europe with the US Army, wrote: ‘The war, while giving me a chance to see more of the world and of all kinds of people, nevertheless confused me … I lived more thoroughly an ordinary life than ever before … I found how much man lives next to the animal … it made me tougher-minded and more tolerant and sympathetic of human frailty … [but also] sufficiently confused so that I have not yet been able to discover any answers.’
In Asia, though handfuls of Japanese soldiers remained in hiding and even sustained guerrilla activity in the Philippines and on remote Pacific islands for months or years, MacArthur and his occupying army were received in Japan with almost slavish obeisance. Many of Hirohito’s warriors who had professed themselves willing to die for their Emperor admitted relief that the sacrifice was not required. Captain Yoshiro Minamoto and thirty crewmen of a kaiten suicide-boat unit emerged from hiding on the island of Tokahishi, off Okinawa, on 23 August, in response to American loudspeaker appeals. ‘I wanted everything done properly,’ said Minamoto, ‘so I had everyone wash their fatigues and clean their weapons. I paraded the men, we bowed towards Tokyo and saluted, then I led a group with a white flag towards the American lines. They treated us very well. I felt happy to have survived.’
On 15 August, all units at the island base off Japan where Toshiharu Konada commanded another suicide-boat detachment were warned to listen to the radio. Reception was so poor, however, that they could not hear Hirohito’s surrender announcement, and assumed that they had missed a mere patriotic harangue. Konada learned the news only after he drove to the island’s mountain headquarters. His commanding officer ordered all units to remain on maximum alert. Nobody could guess what might happen next: it seemed possible the broadcast was an American trick. Stunned and bewildered, Konada chose to walk back down the mountain road to the sea, collecting his thoughts. He assumed that he and his comrades would now be told to kill themselves. If the nation had embraced defeat, no other course seemed plausible.
In the event, these young men who had volunteered to die remained in readiness to launch themselves against the Americans for a further month, while slowly accustoming themselves to the notion that they might live. Konada started classes for his men in science and English, to alleviate their boredom and teach them things useful to their future. Only at the end of November 1945 did he reach his parents’ home on the mainland. His father, also a naval officer, had returned from the war convinced that his eldest son was dead: by a bureaucratic confusion, Konada had been officially listed among kaiten pilots lost attacking American shipping. ‘In those days, Japanese fathers did not show emotion,’ said the reprieved suicidalist. ‘He simply said, “We thought we would never see you again”; but I realised that he was happy.’ Other such families were less fortunate: of the vast number of Japanese troops who fell into Soviet hands following the last brief campaign in Manchuria, 300,000 perished in captivity.
For months after the war ended, men continued to die through mistakes or malevolence. On 29 August, Soviet fighters shot down a USAAF B-29 dropping supplies to a PoW camp in Korea, and several such fatal encounters took place in German airspace. Closure on the battlefield did nothing to alleviate starvation in many places: