All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [420]
Japanese writer Kazutoshi Hando, who survived the Tokyo firestorm, said in 2007: ‘In the aftermath of the war, blame was placed solely on the Japanese army and navy. This seemed just, because the civilian population had always been deceived by the armed forces about what was done. Civilian Japan felt no sense of collective guilt – and that was the way the American victors and occupiers wanted it. In the same fashion, it was the Americans who urged that no modern Japanese history should be taught in schools. The consequence is that very few people under fifty have any knowledge of Japan’s invasion of China or colonisation of Manchuria.’ In the early twenty-first century, Hando lectured at a women’s college about the Shwa era: ‘I asked fifty students to list countries which have not fought Japan in modern times: eleven included America.’
‘It is important frankly to discuss what happened in the Second World War,’ he added, ‘because today relations between China and Japan are so poor. But there is a problem in starting such a discussion, because so few younger Japanese know any facts. There are many people who do not support our militant nationalists, but still find it offensive to endure endless criticism from China and Korea. They dislike those countries poking their noses into what they see as matters for the Japanese people. Most of us think that we have apologised for the war: one of our former Prime Ministers has made the most fulsome apology. I myself think that we have done enough apologising.’ This remains a matter of debate, and some British and American people strongly disagree with Hando. As recently as 2007, the head of the Japanese air force was obliged to resign his post after publishing a paper in which he asserted the philanthropic nature of Japan’s activities in China between 1937 and 1945.
Palestine was among the lands most conspicuously influenced by the outcome of the conflict. For more than two decades of British mandatory rule, its future had been keenly debated. Captain David Hopkinson was one among hundreds of thousands of British soldiers who passed through the ‘Holy Land’ in the course of his war service, and pondered its rightful destiny. Hopkinson had a special interest, because his wife was half-Jewish. He wrote to her from Haifa in 1942, expressing a hostility to Zionism founded in his belief that ‘Jews are of greatest value within the countries where they have been long established. I am as impressed as everyone must be by the technical and cultural accomplishments of Jews in Palestine, but for an intensely nationalistic minority to seek to carve out for itself an independent state from territories to which others also have a claim seems to be inconsistent with the high ideals of peace and humanity in which civilized Europeans believe.’
Yet in 1945, such temperate views were swamped by the ghastly revelations of the Holocaust. It is important to emphasise that, even after newsreels from liberated Belsen and Buchenwald had stunned the civilised world, the full extent of the Jewish genocide became understood only slowly, even by Western governments. But it became manifest that the Jews of Europe had fallen victim to a uniquely satanic programme of mass murder, which left many survivors homeless and dispossessed. The US commissioner of immigration Earl Harrison visited the Displaced Persons camps of Europe and was shocked by what he found there. He reported to President Truman in August 1945: ‘We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them.’ By a vast historic irony, Hitler’s persecution transformed the fortunes of the Jewish people around the world. It provided an impetus to Zionism which seemed to many Westerners morally irresistible. Never again would anti-Semitism be socially acceptable