Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [43]
When American and British troops became familiar with the Japanese preference for self-immolation, by means often designed to encompass Allied deaths also, they grew unwilling to accept risk or trouble to take an enemy alive. “The understandable reluctance85 of our troops to trust any Jap no doubt contributes to the difficulty of inducing the enemy to surrender,” wrote an Australian officer on New Guinea. It is sometimes alleged that Western barbarism thus matched that of their foes. Yet it is hard to see why an Allied soldier should have risked a grenade from a Japanese soldier who, even when he made gestures of surrender, rejected the Western code whereby a prisoner contracted to receive humane treatment in return for forswearing further homicidal intent. After episodes in which Japanese taken aboard American submarines sought to sabotage their captors’ highly vulnerable craft, such rescues were abandoned. This was prudent.
Until Japanese began to give themselves up in substantial numbers in the summer of 1945, their surrenders were likely to be accepted only by units which needed sample prisoners for intelligence purposes. Those who reached POW camps, by choosing survival, showed themselves unrepresentative. They were nonetheless the Allies’ best sources of information about the mood in the ranks of the enemy. “We poor soldiers have to sacrifice our lives and fight with Type-38 rifles against Boeings, Consolidated B24s, North Americans and Lightning P38s,” said an embittered private soldier who surrendered to the Americans. In the safety of a POW camp in Australia, he described himself as a Christian and a Communist, and offered to assist his captors by writing “a Formal Examination of Myself86 as a Japanese…I wish to sound the alarm to awaken the Japanese people.” Private Sanemori Saito, taken on Bougainville, asserted that his commanding officer had gone mad, forcing the sick to report for duty, and sometimes calling parades at midnight. A construction unit officer captured while delirious with fever told his interrogators that “the Japanese possessed87 a blind faith in their leaders. Even though the military clique started war, the people were wholeheartedly behind it…PW thought the nearer hostilities came to Japan, the harder the people would fight.”
One strange figure whom Americans plucked from the sea proved to be a mixed-race soldier, only a quarter Japanese, christened Andrew Robb by his parents, Shigeru Sakai by the army into which he found himself conscripted. Robb hailed from Kobe, where he had been educated at the English mission school. When captured, he was on passage to garrison duty as a sergeant interpreter in the Philippines. As an “impure Japanese” he claimed to have been victimised during recruit training, and was thus heartily grateful to be posted overseas. “His own reaction88 to Japan’s chances had varied. Originally he had not thought her capable of overcoming the industrial power of the British and Americans combined, but Japan’s earlier successes had led him to think that the Allies might be too involved in Europe to handle the situation in the Pacific.” Robb said that he would like to inform his mother of his survival, but was fearful of “adverse public opinion” at home if his captivity became known.
This was a familiar sentiment among Japanese POWs. One suggested to his captors that the best means of encouraging defections would be, first, to avoid mention in Allied propaganda of the dreadful word “surrender” and, second, to offer those who quit post-war resettlement in Australia or Brazil. An aircrew lieutenant captured89 while foraging in New Guinea in July 1944 found himself the only officer prisoner among five hundred other ranks. Aboard the ship taking them to a camp in Australia, he told interrogators, some of his fellow captives proclaimed