Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [251]
At the end of the war712, British private soldier Don Lewis of the 1/5th Sherwood Foresters recorded the fate of his battalion, almost a thousand strong when it went into action in Malaya at the end of 1941. Thirty-five men were killed in battle, and a further 11 died of wounds. In captivity, 50 died of “complaints unknown” a further 1 of diphtheria; 17 of malaria; 9 of beriberi; 11 of cardiac illnesses; 31 of dysentery; 21 of malnutrition; 1 was killed by a falling tree; and 1 by an Allied bomb; 45 were lost on Japanese convoys; 24 were merely recorded as “missing.” Lewis was among 287 men known to have returned to Britain.
Since 1945, pleas have been entered in mitigation of what the Japanese did to their prisoners in the Second World War. First, as mentioned above, there was the administrative difficulty of handling unexpectedly large numbers of captives in 1942, for whom no provisions of care or supply had been made. This has some validity. Many armies in modern history have encountered such problems in the chaos of victory, and their prisoners have suffered in consequence. Moreover, food and medical supplies were desperately short in many parts of the Japanese empire. Western prisoners, goes this argument, merely shared privations endured by local civilians and Japanese soldiers. Such claims might be plausible, but for the fact that prisoners were left starving and neglected even where means were available to alleviate their condition. There is no record of POWs at any time or place being adequately fed.
It is thus hard to dispute that the Japanese maltreated captives as a matter of policy, not necessity. They flaunted the cultural contempt with which their soldiers were taught to regard inferiors of their own society, never mind enemies who preferred captivity to death. A people who adopt a code which rejects the concept of mercy towards the weak and afflicted seem to place themselves outside the pale of civilisation. The casual sadism of the Japanese towards their prisoners was so widespread, indeed almost universal, that it must be considered institutional. There were so many cases of arbitrary beheadings, clubbings and bayonetings in different parts of the empire that it is impossible to dismiss these as unauthorised initiatives by individual officers and men. The indifference which the Japanese navy showed towards prisoners in its charge who found themselves struggling in the sea after their ships sank was shameful by any standard.
Japanese sometimes justify such inhumanity by suggesting that it was matched by equally callous Allied bombing of civilians. Japanese moral indignation caused many U.S. aircrew captured in 1944–45 to be treated as “war criminals.” For instance, eight B-29 crewmen of the 29th Bomb Group were killed in 1945 by suffering unanaesthetised vivisection carried out in front of medical students at a hospital in Fukuoka on Kyushu. Their stomachs, hearts, lungs and brain segments were removed. Half a century later, one doctor present, Dr. Toshio Tono, said: “There was no debate among the doctors713 about whether to do the operations—that was what made it so strange.” Many captured American airmen were beheaded, not only in the last days of the war, but even in the period immediately following the Japanese surrender.
Any society which can indulge such actions, whether or not as alleged acts of retribution, has lost its moral compass. Much Japanese behaviour reflected the bitterness of former victors about finding their own military fortunes in eclipse, becoming the bombed instead of the bombers. More than sixty years later, there still seems no acceptable excuse. The Japanese, having started the war, waged it with such savagery