Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [135]
Only senior officers, privy to the airfields fiasco, understood that MacArthur had landed Sixth Army on the wrong island. It was fortunate that this American strategic error was partially redeemed by a matching Japanese one. Terauchi’s folly in compelling Yamashita to reinforce failure enabled Krueger’s formations to inflict heavy losses, to destroy units which would otherwise have been awaiting the Americans on Luzon. In Japan, the fall of Leyte precipitated the resignation of the government of the prime minister, Lt.-Gen. Kuniaki Koiso. Koiso had proclaimed this to be “the decisive battle”—so often a doom-laden phrase for his nation. Now it had been lost. Koiso paid the price, unlamented by his own people. He was replaced by a deeply reluctant Admiral Kantaro Suzuki, seventy-seven years old, deaf and ill, bereft of a coherent vision of his own purpose in power, save to preside over the cabinet.
If U.S. casualties in this first Philippines campaign seemed painful, they were in truth modest, either by the standards of the Japanese or by those of the European war. It was impossible to beat such a formidable enemy without suffering some attrition. Leyte proved a worse defeat than the Japanese need have suffered, a more substantial victory than MacArthur deserved.
CHAPTER EIGHT
China: Dragon by the Tail
1. The Generalissimo
YAMASHITA in the Philippines recognised that his struggle against MacArthur’s armies could have only one outcome. If the Americans found the campaign tough, they were always advancing. Even during this last phase of the Second World War, however, in one theatre Japan’s armies continued to gain ground, and to win victories. In China, a million Japanese soldiers sustained and even enlarged their huge, futile empire. Neither Mao Zedong’s Communists in the north nor Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists in the west and south proved able to frustrate Japanese advances. The killing and dying, the rape and destruction which Hirohito’s armies had unleashed in Manchuria in 1931, persisted and even intensified on the Asian mainland in the last months of the war.
Thirty-six-year-old John Paton Davies, a U.S. Foreign Service officer born in China, the son of missionaries, knew that country’s vastnesses as intimately as any man. He witnessed the Japanese seizure of Manchuria. For much of the war he served as political adviser to Lt.-Gen. Joseph Stilwell, until October 1944 Allied chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek. Afterwards, with the bitterness of a man whose diplomatic career was destroyed by Senator Joseph McCarthy for his alleged role in the American “loss” of China, Davies described the country as “a huge and seductive376 practical joke, which defeated the Westerners who tried to modernise it, the Japanese who tried to conquer it, the Americans who tried to democratise and unify it—and Chiang and Mao.” He likened China’s condition in the 1940s to that of fourteenth-century Europe. He was an intimate observer of twentieth-century America’s titanic and wholly unsuccessful attempt to impose its will upon a society impossibly remote in circumstances as well as geography.
China’s wartime sufferings, which remain unknown to most Westerners, were second in scale only to those of the Soviet Union. It is uncertain how many Chinese died in the years of conflict with Japan. Traditionally, a figure of fifteen million has been accepted, one-third of these being soldiers. Modern Chinese historians variously assert twenty-five, even fifty million. Ninety-five million people became homeless refugees. Such estimates are neither provable nor disprovable. Rather than being founded upon convincing statistical analysis, they reflect the intensity of Chinese emotions about what the Japanese did to their country. What is indisputable is that a host of people perished.