Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [15]
Tan Yadong, a nineteen-year-old Chinese who served the Japanese in the same capacity, was accused by a Japanese officer of failing to be an “obedient person.” After two five-day spells of solitary confinement, “I became an obedient person.” She was vividly reminded of the consequences of displeasing the Japanese when one of her comrades failed to take contraceptive medicine, and became pregnant. “They didn’t want this baby27 to be born so they hung this poor girl from a tree. They killed her by cutting her open with a knife in front of all the people of our village. I was quite close, only six or seven metres away. I could see the baby moving.”
At least a million Vietnamese died in their country’s great famine of 1944–45, which was directly attributable to Japanese insistence that rice paddies should be replanted with fibre crops for the occupiers’ use. Much Vietnamese grain was shipped to Japan, and rice commandeered to make fuel alcohol. The people of the Philippines and Dutch East Indies also suffered appallingly. In all, some five million South-East Asians died as a result of Japanese invasion and occupation, including 75,000 slave labourers on the Burma railway. If the British could take little pride in their wartime stewardship of the Indian subcontinent, where white guests of Calcutta’s clubs could order unlimited eggs and bacon while Bengalis starved in the streets, never did they match the systemic barbarism of Japanese hegemony.
U.S. forces fought their way across the Pacific supported by an awesome array of wealth and technology. American observers on the Asian mainland were appalled by the contrasting destitution which they everywhere perceived, and impressed by the political forces stirring. “There are over a billion people who are tired of the world as it is; they live literally in such terrible bondage that they have nothing to lose but their chains,” wrote Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby in 1944. They noted the twenty-seven-year life expectancy in India, jewel in Britain’s imperial crown; a China where half the population died before attaining thirty. They described the lifeless bodies of child workers collected each morning outside factory gates in Shanghai; the beatings, whippings, torture, disease and starvation that were commonplace across the continent.
During China’s famines, vastly worsened by the Japanese war, people hunted ants, devoured tree roots, ate mud. The North China Herald deplored the prevalence of kidnapping and extortion: “In some districts28, it has been customary to roast the victims in big kettles, without water, until the flesh falls from the bone.” White and Jacoby wrote: “Everywhere in Asia29 life is infused with a few terrible certainties—hunger, indignity, and violence.” This was the world Americans perceived themselves advancing to save, not merely from the Japanese, but from imperialists of every hue—including their closest allies, the British. Churchill nursed the ill-founded delusion that victory over Japan would enable Britain to sustain its rule in India, and reassert command of Burma and Malaya. The U.S. cherished a parallel fantasy, equally massive and misguided, about what it could make of China. Frank Capra’s China film in the famous U.S. War Department Why We Fight documentary series portrayed the country as a liberal society, and made no mention of Communists.
The Japanese, meanwhile, cherished their own illusions. As late as the summer of 1944, much of their empire still seemed secure, at least in the eyes of humbler members of its ruling race. Midshipman Toshiharu Konada loved his “runs ashore” on Java from the heavy cruiser Ashigara. “Everything was so new and exotic to us young men,” he said. Once a chorus of local children serenaded a leave party from the fleet with Japanese songs. Konada and a cluster of other men from his ship dined at a local Italian restaurant, ogling the proprietor’s daughter, one of the first European girls they had ever seen. “I thought: I