Inferno - Max Hastings [412]
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: in the Soviet Union alone, around a million people perished between 1945 and 1947. All over the world there were accidents involving reckless abuse of vehicles or weapons, caused by young warriors casting off the shackles of discipline, killing themselves after the enemy had failed to do so.
For the most part, the conquerors and the conquered shared an overpowering relief that history’s greatest bloodletting was ended. Aboard the U.S. carrier Princeton in the Pacific, the chief ship’s clerk Cecil King exulted to have “seen it come out this way … just like Hollywood when the Marines come up over the horizon in the last reel.” The historian of a USAAF bomb group on Saipan wrote vividly, if ungrammatically: “The ending of the war was the greatest morale factor that has befell this group since its activation.” But while there were displays of rejoicing in the Allied capitals, and in the homes of families promised the return of loved ones, many people found it impossible to shake off the melancholy induced by years of suffering, fear and bereavement. After