Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [354]
On 17 August there was an attempted mutiny at Atsugi air base, following which a Zero took off and flew to Hyakuri. Its pilot set about single-handedly inciting airmen to resume the struggle. “Don’t give up!” he begged them. His appeal met little support. Next day the base commander assembled all officers and NCOs, and delivered a stern harangue about the importance of accepting the surrender terms: “The price for any act of defiance will fall upon the Japanese people,” he said sternly. “It is the duty of each of you to keep the men of your commands under strict discipline.” The ground crews emptied aircraft fuel tanks and removed bombs. Next day, they also unbolted propellers to disable the planes.
Lt. Masashiko Ando landed a floatplane at his squadron’s base on the Dutch East Indies island of Surabaya, and strolled nonchalantly into the mess. He found other pilots plunged in silent gloom. “What’s up?927” he demanded. Somebody said: “The war’s over.” Ando asked flippantly: “Who’s won?” The notion that his own nation might acknowledge defeat was beyond his comprehension. “We young officers were like boxers in a ring,” he said later. “We had thought only of our own fight. We knew nothing about what was happening to the rest of the war. Now, we simply wondered what would happen to us.”
BALWANT SINGH BAHIA, an Indian Army engineer, was sitting with two sergeants in a signal lorry at Tharrawaddy on the main road north of Rangoon, when an NCO called: “Oh, war finish!928 War finish! They have dropped atom bomb on Japan.” I said: “What’s that one?” He said: “I come back one minute,” and swiftly returned with two small celebratory bottles of beer. Japanese survivors hiding on Okinawa saw the sky illuminated by a brilliant, thunderous firework display of naval tracer, and guessed its significance. Most emerged in the days that followed, to hear recordings of the imperial broadcast played to them by their American captors.
John Sandle’s regiment in Burma indulged a brief feu de joie on VJ-Day, but “the euphoria of the occasion soon evaporated, to be replaced by a feeling of melancholy at the utter futility of war in which our battalion had lost hundreds of men just to finish up where we had started four years earlier.” He was one of only two officers in his unit to have survived the entire campaign. They set Japanese prisoners to work rolling a cricket pitch for their mess.
At Aomi barracks in Japan, senior prisoner Stephen Abbott paraded the inmates in uniform and said: “Today is the greatest day in the history of our time. We must remember, however, that to obtain it millions of all nationalities have died. It is a day, not only for rejoicing, but also for sober thought. You are no longer prisoners of war, but you are soldiers of your countries and upon you rests a great responsibility for good behaviour and dignified example. Remember above all things that you are citizens of the free democracies of the United States and Great Britain. Be true to the ideals which during six hard years we have battled to maintain.” After dismissing the parade, Abbott and his fellow POWs waited three weeks for liberation. In the interim, at several other locations in Japan guards murdered captives. Sixteen U.S. B-29 aircrew at Fukuoka were hacked to death with swords.
“What reaction? Absolutely nil929,” British gunner Fred Thompson wrote at his prison camp on Java. “Perhaps it’s because we have been told nothing by the Japs…except today ‘no work’…maybe the reaction will set in later, when we realise what it means—the end of this existence of misery, hunger, humiliation. I thank God that I have survived and my friends here with me.” Next day, 17 August, exhilaration at last broke through: “Last night, 339 hearts in this camp missed a beat.”
Rod Wells, in Singapore’s Changi jail, recoiled in disgust from the fashion in which Japanese began to