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By Root 1577 0

indoctrination that spread to the entire Japanese people. Every schoolchild had been taught of the shido minzoku, the outright cultural and genetic superiority of the Japanese race. That the Japanese should claim territories far beyond their island borders was accepted as perfect justice. The civilians had been educated to believe that it was only by a cruel trick of fate that the Japanese islands had been denied the wealth of natural resources, and so oil and rubber and iron would be taken from those inferior lands who had been so unjustly blessed. If the people of those far-distant lands were not grateful to assist in strengthening the Japanese culture, then the Japanese army would subjugate them and use them for labor. Already armies of slave labor had been used to build the bridges and roadways and airfields necessary for Japanese transportation. It mattered little to the Imperial Command if some of those laborers were in fact enemy prisoners of war. The Geneva Convention was an inconvenient irritant when the priority was to put food into Japanese mouths and fuel into their homes. What the civilians had not been told was that if any of those hordes of slave laborers became unfit, by disease or the abuse of their captors, few of the Japanese commanders in the field had any qualms about eliminating them altogether. The viciousness among the Japanese soldiers who dealt with the captives had concerned some in the Imperial Command, but no one there had issued any kind of order that it be stopped. The army’s militants were far too powerful and far too dangerous to the moderates in Tokyo. And many of those who fought a private war of conscience had come to accept that Japan’s desperate need for raw materials meant that sacrifices had to be made, and that no one outside Japan was qualified to judge Japanese morality.

As Japanese forces extended their empire to the limits of what their military could support, there had been the rare circumstances where Emperor Hirohito had blunted the behavior of his armies, holding back the sword, which the army saw as an annoying compromise. When the eyes of Tokyo looked elsewhere, those officers would often continue with the same viciousness against their conquered peoples that the more moderate officials in Tokyo found appalling.

The navy was entirely different, but in the Japanese hierarchy that mattered little to the army commanders. The two branches of the Japanese military were completely separate, no overlap of authority. And so there was very little cooperation in the various campaigns that had spread Japanese troops, ships, and planes across such a wide swath of the hemisphere. As difficult as it was logistically to maintain Japanese successes across Burma and Indochina, New Guinea and the Philippines, as well as China and the ocean of islands to the east, the lack of cooperation between the two services also produced a crippling handicap for their overall strategy. The army and navy commanders spent too much of their time and energy competing for the resources each needed to make war. To the disgust of the senior admirals, the army more often prevailed, and everyone close to the emperor understood why. Emperor Hirohito had a much greater grasp of ground tactics than anything that happened at sea. If the army had needs, they would be met.

Cho stood to one side, allowed him to pass, Ushijima adjusting his eyes to the lower light from the bulbs along the walls of the corridor. Behind him the larger guns from the battleships had begun their shelling again, the rumble coming up through the floor as the shells impacted.

“The Americans will run out of powder before this is over, don’t you think?”

Ushijima did not look back, let Cho’s idiotic glee drift past him. He saw the light of an office ahead, turned through the doorway, saw four women, neatly dressed, perched behind a row of desks, working in unison at typewriters. Standing behind them, like a mindful schoolmaster, was Colonel Yahara, who, after General Cho, was Ushijima’s most senior staff officer. Yahara seemed to avoid looking