A World at Arms (98 page)

The preconceptions of the American public also hindered the full utilization of women in the war effort. Millions were drawn into industrial and other work related to the war, if only by replacing men in the service, but there were real limits on the levels to which they could rise. The image of “Rosie the riveter” fit some who filled critical jobs, but many saw themselves as only temporarily in such capacities.
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The American military was even slower to accept women. In the face of ever more obvious shortages of men and pressure from patriotic women who wished to serve, the armed forces slowly and reluctantly relented. Under prodding from Chief of Staff Marshall, the army took the lead; and by the end of hostilities, hundreds of thousands of women had volunteered to serve in the army, air force, navy, and marines.
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Their experience helped to form the basis for subsequent changes in American society.

One of the ways wartime service assisted the later advances of both Blacks and women was their ability, as veterans, to take advantage of the wartime plans for post-war America. These plans were discussed in considerable detail during hostilities and included very important departures in the benefits to be accorded veterans of the armed services. Instead of, or in addition to, the types of benefits which had been a part of prior American wartime mobilization–bonus payments, pensions, medical services–the World War II program included some novel features. A “GI Bill of Rights” emphasized educational benefits, which would enable literally millions of veterans to pursue higher education after the war, and home loan entitlements, which greatly eased the path to house–ownership for millions more. These massive investments by the federal government in those who had served the country in wartime had a major impact on post-war America, and they would provide some new openings for advances by both Blacks and women.
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There was also planning for demobilization and reconversion in the domestic economy, but it is probably correct to assert that in President Roosevelt’s thinking the most important part of post-war planning was the continuing effort to obtain public support for American participation in a world organization and for a continued active role by the United States in international affairs. Influenced by the disasters which had overtaken the Wilson administration in the 1918 and 1920 elections and which had turned the country in directions that Roosevelt, like increasing numbers of Americans, believed had contributed to the outbreak of another world war, the President was determined to do things differently. Symbolized by the holding of both the preparatory conference and the founding conference of the
United Nations Organization in the United States, these efforts were to be a double success: the organization was formed with United States participation, and the American people would be willing to support a major role for their country in international affairs after the war.
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By the time Japan attacked Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States, the country had been at war continuously for almost 4
years. The conflict with China, which Japan had begun in July, 1937, had already absorbed enormous resources. Whatever could be saved in the periods when a quiet stalemate replaced bursts of heavy fighting had been expended in bouts of border fighting with the Soviet Union in 1938 and 1939, both of which Japan had lost. The country which expanded the war in December 1941 was, therefore, one which had already placed its people and its economy under severe strains. The internal restructuring which Konoe Fumimaro had initiated in the summer of 1940 had in practice made only slight progress; the same bureaucracy which had blunted the efforts at government by political parties thereafter restrained the attempt to establish a mobilizing dictatorship.
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The first stages of the Pacific War seemed to make any complete mobilization unnecessary. The enormous and quick victories exhilarated the home front, silenced the doubters, and made the leaders dizzy with success. Nothing seemed impossible; the Japanese were obviously superior to others, especially to Whites; and whatever Japan might want she could get. Extravagant plans were now elaborated for a huge Pacific empire which would include not only the Southeast Asian and South Pacific areas already conquered, but Alaska, the western provinces of Canada, the northwestern United States, and substantial portions of Central and South America.
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At horne, the setbacks of the summer of 1942 were concealed from the public and even from many in the government. The continued successes in Burma obscured the checks Japan’s forces were encountering in New Guinea and the Solomons in the second half of 1942.
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Although the Tokyo raid of April 1942 had been a shock, it was only the public admission of defeat in the Aleutians in May 1943 that began to show the Japanese people that all was not going well. At home, the regime operated relatively leniently.
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In the newly conquered empire, however, the story was very different.

Japanese policy in the occupied territories looked in the first place to the elimination of any and all European influence. The Germans were
excluded like all others, and only Japan was to draw on the resources and to control the future of the expanded empire.
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After bitter debate inside the government, a special ministry, the Greater East Asia Ministry, was established to exclude the Foreign Ministry, which was seen as too traditional, from the process of directing an enlarged empire in collaboration with the military.
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This step itself showed that the periodic announcements from Tokyo that the peoples of Asia were to be liberated and allowed to determine their own fate were a sham and were so intended. If any of the territories nominally declared to be independent were in fact to be so, they could obviously be dealt with by the Foreign Ministry, which existed precisely for the purpose of handling relations with independent states.

As it was, the new ministry in practice had little to do because the military ran the new empire to suit themselves, a subject discussed near the end of this chapter. Aside from sponsoring a great deal of propaganda, the major activity of the Greater East Asia Ministry was to be the holding in early November 1943 of a big conference in Tokyo of key figures from the supposedly independent portions of the empire. With English ironically selected as the only common language of the assembled dignitaries, the nominal Prime Ministers of puppet governments regaled each other with praise for the Japanese and assurances of triumphs to come. As a special guest, the extreme Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose tried out his eloquence, explaining to the presiding General Tojo and the assembled “Allies” of Japan: “If our Allies were to go down, there will be no hope for India to be free for at least 100 years.”
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Less than four years later India was free.

Soon after this meeting in Tokyo, that city and other Japanese cities were beginning to be subjected to American bombing, first from bases in China and then increasingly from bases in the Marianas. These operations are discussed in
Chapters 10
and
16
; the focus here must be on their effect on the Japanese at home. Unlike the people of China, Poland, Britain, and Germany, which sustained heavy bombing early in the war, this was not the case for the Japanese. The air raids of 1943 and 1944 were small and had a minimal impact on the population as a whole. Far more significant in their effects on the daily lives of Japanese were the lengthening casualty lists from the fronts, the ever greater stringency of rationing and shortages, and the sense of worry about a war that by 1944 had been going on for seven years with no end in sight. But unlike in Germany, Italy and their satellites, there was little resistance to official policy in Japan.
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It was the stepping up of the bombing in early 1945 which brought
devastation to the cities of Japan. More vulnerable than many European cities because of the heavy reliance on wood supports and rice–paper partitions, huge areas of one city after another burned out in great fire raids. The American capture of bases closer to Japan, first on Iwo Jima and later on Okinawa, facilitated an intensification of the air assault. This assault came to include carrier based American and British planes in ever larger numbers in the spring and summer of 1945; and, to the consternation of the people in coastal cities, this was supplemented by shelling from American and British warships sailing along the coast in broad daylight.
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The last part of the war in some ways compressed into six months the destruction from the air visited on Germany in three and a half years; and while Japan was not devastated by ground fighting as Germany was in the last half year of the war in Europe, the devastation by fire of her cities was immense. For the people of Japan the war, especially in its final stages, would prove a horrendous ordeal; having sowed the wind, they now reaped a whirlwind.
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In a way, it was this destruction of the old physical order of the country which prepared the way for the remaking of its political, economic, and social order afterwards. Two and a half million Japanese had died or disappeared, three–fifths of them from the army, and the country had to find room for seven million people repatriated from the former empire.
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Ahard road lay ahead.

In China, as in Japan, war had been a fact of life and death since 1937. By December 1941, very large portions of the country were under Japanese occupation, and these included the most important industrial areas, ports, and major urban centers. In the countryside of the area under nominal Japanese control, Communist guerillas drew increasing support from the peasantry. At the front, however, the Communist Party had drawn from the “Hundred Regiments Campaign” of August 1940, which had hurt the Japanese but had seriously damaged the Communist forces, the lesson that a frontal war with Japan was not in the party’s interest.
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In line with earlier views of Mao Tse-tung, they would concentrate hereafter on minor guerilla actions against Japan while preparing for a post-war showdown
with the Nationalists. As the New 4th Army incident of January 1941 showed, open warfare between Communist and Nationalist Chinese armies was coming to be an accepted feature of the situation.
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In unoccupied China, inflation added to the other woes of a torn country. The central government had only the most tenuous hold on the provinces, in which local military leaders starved their own troops, generally avoided fighting the Japanese, and exploited the peasantry. The regime of Chiang Kai-shek was both corrupt and ineffective, expecting the other enemies of Japan, especially the United States, to defeat China’s enemy. But both the Japanese hopes and the American fears that China would withdraw from the war were unrealistic. Chiang realized who would most likely win, and he could expect to control the future of China only in alignment with the winners, not the losers, of the war. Even Bose realized that there was no prospect of a switch;
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instead of choosing to “fight or switch,” Chiang preferred to do neither.

The Japanese offensive of 1944 in China, therefore, struck at Nationalist forces which were simply no longer ready to fight.
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They fled or surrendered, and the Japanese army captured a number of the newly built American air bases. Until the very end of the war, Nationalist control was limited to the interior of China and was tenuous even there. Only a portion of the area lost in 1944 was recovered in the first half of 1945.
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When Japan surrendered, therefore, Chiang’s international position was secure, but his domestic power was fragile.

In the international area, the Nationalist government was one of the victors. Its representatives spoke for a state considered one of the great powers, holding by virtue of that status one of the permanent seats on the Security Council of the new United Nations Organization. Here was surely a dramatic reversal of the situation at the end of World War I when it had been Japan that ranked among the leading Allies-and had been unable to secure a statement on racial equality included in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The last of the so-called “Unequal Treaties,” which provided extra–territorial rights for foreigners in China, had been abrogated. A treaty between the Nationalist government and the Soviet Union, worked out in the summer of 1945, promised Chiang’s government the full and continued recognition of Moscow.

The domestic picture, however, did not match the international one. As Japanese forces on the mainland surrendered, the Nationalists moved forward; and where they could not move fast enough, the Americans helped them move, sometimes by air–lifting the Chinese
troops. But many of the Japanese weapons, especially in the northeastern part of the country, fell into the hands of Mao’s Communist armies, and even in the cities now garrisoned by the Nationalists, there was little enthusiasm for a regime which had been gone for years. As China drifted into open civil war, the regime of Chiang Kai-shek was by no means as secure as it looked, and its huge forces would melt away quickly in the heat of battle.
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The gamble on saving the fighting strength of the Nationalist armies for the post-war confrontation with the Communists proved a losing one.