Inferno - Max Hastings [131]
Hachiro’s contemporary Hayashi Tadao was another fatalist, strongly opposed to the war. His diary repeatedly expressed disgust towards his own country. He asked himself: “Japan, why don’t I love and respect you? … I feel that I have to accept the fate of my generation to fight in the war and die … We have to go to the battlefield without being able to express our opinions, criticise and argue pros and cons of issues … it is a great tragedy.” Japan’s 1941–42 successes against feeble Western resistance caused both sides to overrate the power of Hirohito’s nation. Just as Germany was not strong enough to defeat the Soviet Union, Japan was too weak to sustain its Asian conquests unless the West chose to acquiesce in early defeats. But this, like so much else, is more readily apparent today than it was seventy years ago, in the midst of Japanese triumphs.
Until December 1941, the sluggish, humid, pampered rhythm of colonial life in Asia was scarcely interrupted by events in Europe. In America’s Philippines dependency, army nurse Lt. Earlyn Black was one of thousands of expatriates who revelled in a life of comfort and elegance, cushioned by submissive servants: “Each evening we dressed for dinner in long dresses, the men in tuxedos, dinner jackets with cummerbunds. It was very formal-type living. Even to go the movies, we’d put on a long dress.” Another nurse, twenty-five-year-old Lt. Hattie Brantly from Jefferson, Texas, found the notion of war with Japan inconceivable: “It was a joke and our Chief Nurse would say in the mess, ‘Have another biscuit, girls. You’re going to need this when the Japs get us’ … We just sort of rocked along and were happy, and didn’t give it too much thought.”
Likewise in British Singapore, a Czech motor engineer, Val Kabouky, described the white residents as “modern Pompeiians.” Even after more than two years of war, 31,000 Europeans among a population of 5 million Malays and Chinese sustained a parody of imperial privilege. New Western arrivals in the colony who sought to learn as much as was necessary of the local language could purchase a phrase book entitled Malay for Mems—short for “Memsahibs.” It was couched in the language of command: “Put up the tennis net,” “You must follow the Mem,” “Shoot that man.” In 1941 arriving troops, especially Australians, were disgusted to find themselves excluded from the colonists’ social bastions. Indians were not permitted to ride in the same rail carriages as the British, nor to enter their clubs. There was a mutiny in the Hyderabad Regiment when an Indian officer was ordered home for having sexual relations with a white woman; he was reinstated and the affair hushed up, but bitterness persisted. Lady Diana, wife of the British minister Duff Cooper, wrote with aristocratic scorn for the pretensions of the British expatriates: “most frail, tarty and peasant-pompous.” Her own enthusiasm for Singapore’s tourist charms struck a bizarre note as catastrophe unfolded farther north: “There is the working life of the Chinks going on before your eyes down every street—coffin-making, lantern-painting, and a tremendous lot of shaving. I never tire of strolling and savouring.”
In Malaya, Britain’s military commanders and rulers alike reflected a paucity of talent. The empire seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of unwarlike warrior chieftains. Air Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, commander-in-chief Far East until the end of 1941, was a sixty-three-year-old former governor of Kenya. Lt. Gen. Arthur Percival, the army commander, was a long-serving staff officer whose meagre operational experience had been gained against the Sinn Féin insurgency in Ireland. Sir Shenton Thomas, the colony’s governor, said to the