Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [13]
A British soldier expressed in his journal reflections about wartime conscript experience which have almost universal validity: “Men live conscious17 all the time that their hearts, roots, origins lie elsewhere in some other life…They measure the hardships, privations, weariness here against the memory of a past that they hope to continue in the future…Since their hearts reside elsewhere, they face the present with an armoured countenance.” The author meant that most warriors seek to preserve their sanity by shielding some corner of themselves from proximate reality, so often unpleasant. U.S. naval officers protested at the assertively unseamanlike outlook of cryptanalysts working at the Pacific Fleet’s superb “Magic” code-breaking centre in Honolulu, which played such a critical part in Allied victory. Their commander dismissed their complaints: “Relax, we have always won18 our wars with a bunch of damned civilians in uniform anxious to get back to their own affairs, and we will win this one the same way.”
Winston Churchill often asserted his conviction that the proper conduct of war demanded that “the enemy should be made to bleed and burn every day.” The Pacific and Burma campaigns, by contrast, were characterised by periods of intense fighting interspersed with long intervals of inaction and preparation. Whereas on the Russian front opposing forces were in permanent contact, and likewise in north-west Europe from June 1944, in the east Japanese and Allied troops were often separated by hundreds, even thousands, of miles of sea or jungle. Few Westerners who served in the war against Japan enjoyed the experience. It was widely agreed by veterans that the North African desert was the most congenial, or rather least terrible, theatre. Thereafter in ascending intensity of grief came north-west Europe, Italy, and finally the Far East. Few soldiers, sailors or airmen felt entirely healthy during Asian or Pacific service. The stifling heat belowdecks in a warship made daily routine enervating, even before the enemy took a hand. The only interruptions to months at sea were provided by brief spasms in an overcrowded rest camp on some featureless atoll. For those fighting the land campaigns, disease and privation were constants, vying as threats to a man’s welfare with a boundlessly ingenious and merciless enemy. “All the officers at home19 want to go to other theatres because there is more publicity there,” wrote one of MacArthur’s corps commanders, Lt.-Gen. Robert Eichelberger, in a gloomy letter to his wife.
Eichelberger was a career soldier, one of those whom war provided with dramatic scope for fulfilment and advancement. Civilians in uniform, however, were vulnerable to the misery identified by British novelist Anthony Powell, “that terrible, recurrent20 army dejection, the sensation that no one cares a halfpenny whether you live or die.” “Hello, suckers,” “Tokyo Rose” taunted millions of Allied servicemen from Radio Japan. “I got mine last night, your wives and sweethearts probably got theirs—did you get yours?” Corporal Ray Haskel of the U.S. Army wrote from the South Pacific to a Hollywood starlet named Myrtle Ristenhart, whose picture he had glimpsed in Life magazine. Rodgers and Hammerstein would have appreciated his sentiments: “My dear Myrtle21, guess you are wondering who this strange person could be writing to you. We are here in the Pacific and got kind of lonesome and so thought we would drop you a few lines…There isn’t any girls here at all but a few natives and a few nurses and we can’t get within ten miles of them…When you can find time please answer this letter and if you have a small picture we would appreciate it, Sincerely your RAY. PS I am an Indian, full-blooded and very handsome.”
“Here it is a Burma moon22 with not a girl in sight and a few dead Japs trying to stink you out,” Sgt. Harry Hunt of the British Fourteenth Army wrote miserably to a relative in England. “…It must