Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [291]
EIGHTEEN
Eclipse of Empires
ALTHOUGH JAPAN and Nazi Germany never significantly collaborated, the collapse of Hitler’s regime plainly hastened the defeat of Japan, because it enabled the Allies to transfer significant, though not unlimited, resources to completing the destruction of Hirohito’s shrinking empire. In the last weeks of the European war, Japanese emissaries in Berlin pestered leading Nazis in the hope of salvaging something for themselves from the wreckage of Hitler’s arsenal. After considerable difficulties, naval representative Vice-Admiral Katsuo Abe secured an interview with Admiral Karl Dönitz on 15 April 1945, and another with Keitel and Ribbentrop on the seventeenth. He begged that the surviving German fleet, and especially its U-boats, should be sent to Japan. The Germans curtly informed Abe that only three of their submarines had sufficient range to make the voyage. Hitler refused to grant the admiral an audience. Ribbentrop explained to the Japanese that the Führer was “extremely busy797.” Though a handful of U-boats sought refuge in Japan’s East Indies ports, embroiled in their own catastrophe the Germans cared unsurprisingly little about providing assistance to an ally close behind them on the brink of the abyss.
A British WRNS signaller, Peggy Wightman, wrote home from Mountbatten’s headquarters in Ceylon on 19 April, amid reports that the German war was hastening towards its conclusion: “The news is terrific isn’t it?798 I wonder what you are all feeling like. It is all so remote out here that I think we will all be feeling very funny when the day comes for your rejoicings.” Captain Ronnie McAllister, with his Gurkha battalion in Burma, said: “The end of the war in Europe799 was all very nice, but it didn’t mean a lot to us. Our horizon stretched way ahead. We thought we’d have to go into Siam.”
On 8 May, a foolish young officer of the Border Regiment ran out in front of his company waving his hat and crying exultantly: “Men! The war in Europe is over!800” He was crestfallen by the response: “There was a long silence, while we digested this, and looked through the heat haze to the village where Jap might be waiting…then someone laughed, and it ran down the extended line in a great torrent of mirth, punctuated by cries of ‘Git the boogers oot here!” and ‘Ev ye told Tojo, like?’” Yet Nimitz’s Pacific Fleet Strategic Intelligence Section noted with jocular satisfaction on 21 May: “If, as reports have it801, the German announcement of the death of Nazism’s chief protagonist was accompanied by the massive strains of Wagner’s requiem, ‘Twilight of the Gods,’ it is to the less decorous if more modern jangle of ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ that Nippon, now a Lone Ranger astride a white horse, jogs dolefully towards the last round-up.”
At midsummer 1945, major Allied ground operations against the Japanese were in recess. The armies of Slim in Burma, Krueger and Eichelberger in the Philippines, Stilwell—who, to widespread astonishment, was appointed Buckner’s successor—on Okinawa, Blamey’s Australians in Borneo and the south-west Pacific were engaged in mopping up. It was symbolic of the Japanese condition that some of their starving soldiers resorted to cannibalism. There were cases802 in New Guinea and Burma of downed Allied aircrew being eaten. Portions of beheaded U.S. carrier flier Marve Mershon were served to senior Japanese officers on Chichi Jima in February 1945, not because they needed the food, but to promote their own virility. Such gestures were not uncommon.
When driven by hunger to eat their own dead, Japanese soldiers