Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (83 page)

In 1945 the Allies were agreed about convicting and hanging the leading Nazis. Lower down the scale the difficulties began. The Russians were the first to reach the main death-camps. Some of the officials there disappeared, possibly to work for their captors. The links between the Nazi and Soviet security forces had always been strong, and were cordially resumed after the war. Himmler had always admired Soviet police methods (he believed Stalin had distinguished Mongol blood from Genghis Khan’s horde) and his
head of the Gestapo, s s General Mueller, probably went to work for the
NKVD
.
⁸⁸
Many of the Prussian police officials, who had served Goering, went on to high office in the police of the East German People’s Republic, which Stalin in due course set up.

Among the British and Americans, the ardour to punish lasted longer but was eventually damped by the march of history. By the time the I.G.Farben executives were sentenced at Nuremberg (29 July 1948), the Berlin blockade had started, Germany was now a potential ally and the resuscitation of German industry was an Anglo—American objective. So Karl Krauch, the man who Nazified the firm and personally selected Auschwitz for the
Buna
plant, got only six years. Eleven other executives got prison terms from eight years to eighteen months – ‘light enough to please a chicken-thief, as the prosecutor, Josiah DuBois, angrily put it.
⁸⁹
By January 1951 all the German industrialist war-criminals had been released by act of clemency by the Allies. Alfred Krupp, sentenced to forfeit all his property, got it back, since John J. McCloy, the US High Commissioner, felt that ‘property forfeiture was somehow repugnant to American justice’. When the work of retribution was handed over by the Allies to the Germans themselves, the results did not indicate any intensity of collective remorse. An indemnity was paid by the new Federal Government to the new Zionist State of Israel. But individual slave-labourers who pressed their claims found the German courts unsympathetic. Out of half a million surviving slaves, 14,878, after years of litigation, eventually received sums rarely amounting to $1,250 each. Rheinmetall, after a long legal rearguard action, paid out $425 to each former slave. Krupp paid a total of $2,380,000 in 1959, after pressure from the American government. Friedrich Flick paid not a penny, and left over $1,000 million when he died, aged ninety, in 1972.
⁹⁰
But who is foolish enough to believe there is justice in this world?

There were many reasons why retribution was confused and inadequate. When the Hitler regime collapsed in fragments, America and Britain were still waging an increasingly one-sided war of total destruction against Japan. The Pacific war saw the greatest naval battles in history, determined by the overwhelming advantages of resources and technology, which increased inexorably. The Japanese began with the brilliant Zero fighter. One fell intact into American hands in the Aleutians on 4 June 1942. An aircraft to counter it, the Hell-cat, was promptly designed and manufactured in prodigious numbers.
⁹¹
Japanese aircraft production reached its peak in June 1944, when 2,857 were produced; thereafter, it was steadily reduced by Allied bombing. In the whole of the war Japan made only 62,795 aircraft, of which 52,109 were lost.
⁹²
The United States was producing more than 100,000 a year by 1943. It was the same story with warships. During the
war, Japan could only get twenty carriers into commission, of which sixteen were destroyed. By the summer of 1944 the United States alone had nearly 100 carriers operating in the Pacific.
⁹³
The imbalance was reinforced by Japan’s irrational strategy. Japanese submariners were trained only to attack enemy warships. On the General Staff, only two officers were allocated to anti-submarine, mining and anti-aircraft warfare, contemptuously categorized as ‘rear-line defence’. Even a limited convoy system was not adopted until 1943 and full convoying began only in March 1944; by that time the US navy had hundreds of submarines and a full-scale ‘wolf-pack’ system.
⁹⁴
As a result, out of the 6 million tons of shipping with which Japan began the war, she lost over 5 million: 50 per cent to submarines, 40 per cent to aircraft, the rest to mines. The mistakes of the navy compounded that of the army which, in its territorial greed during the first five months of war, scattered its forces over 3,285,000 square miles, with 350 million ‘subjects’, garrisoned by 3,175,000 men, most of whom had to be supplied by sea. The result was that the Japanese navy destroyed itself, as well as the mercantile marine, in the increasingly futile effort to keep the army alive and armed. Many in fact starved to death or, lacking ammunition, were reduced to fighting with bamboo spears.
⁹⁵

The Japanese army strategy was to cling to its gains, arguing that US conscripts would be no match for Japanese soldiers in close-quarter fighting, and that high casualties would lead American public opinion to force its government to compromise. But once the Allies had established sea and air superiority, they adopted the ‘Central Pacific strategy’ of hopping or leap-frogging the Central Pacific islands, on the route to Japan itself, using amphibious landings and making maximum advantage of overwhelming firepower.
⁹⁶
The Japanese fought desperately throughout, but technology and productivity allowed the Americans to establish and maintain a colonial-era casualty-ratio. The pattern was set in the ‘hinge’ battle of Guadalcanal, November 1942, when the Japanese lost 25,000 against only 1,592 American fatalities. When the Central Pacific offensive began, at Tarawa Atoll in November 1943, the Americans had to kill all but seventeen of the 5,000 garrison, and lost 1,000 men themselves. As a result, they increased the fire-power and lengthened the leap-frogging. At the next island, Kwajalein, the air-sea bombardment was so cataclysmic that, an eye-witness said, ‘the entire island looked as if it had been picked up to 20,000 feet and then dropped’. Virtually all the 8,500 defenders had to be killed, but firepower kept American dead down to 373.
⁹⁷
These ratios were maintained. On Leyte, the Japanese lost all but 5,000 of their 70,000 men; the Americans only 3,500. At Iwojima, the Americans sustained
their worst casualty ratio: 4,917 dead to over 18,000 Japanese; and in taking Okinawa they had their highest casualty-bill: 12,520 dead or missing, against Japanese losses of 185,000 killed. But in general American losses were small. Most Japanese were killed by sea or air bombardment, or cut off and starved. They never set eyes on an American foot-soldier or got within bayonet-range of him. Even in Burma, where the fighting was very severe throughout and sea-air superiority could not be used, the Indo-British 14th Army killed 128,000 Japanese, against their own total casualties of less than 20,000.
⁹⁸

The object of the Central Pacific strategy was to bring Japan itself within range of land-based heavy bombers, maintaining a round-the-clock bombardment on an ever-growing scale. In short, this was the war the air expert Douet had predicted in the 1920s, the British Appeasers had feared in the 1930s, and which Churchill had tried to wage against Germany. It started in November 1944, when the captured Guam base came into full use, and B29 Flying Fortresses, each carrying eight tons of bombs, could attack in 1,000-strong masses with fighter-escorts. In 1939 Roosevelt had sent messages to the belligerents begging them to refrain from the ‘inhuman barbarism’ of bombing civilians. That attitude did not survive Pearl Harbor. From March to July 1945, against virtually no resistance, the B29s dropped 100,000 tons of incendiaries on sixty-six Japanese cities and towns, wiping out 170,000 square miles of closely populated streets. On the night of 9–10 March, 300 B29s, helped by a strong north wind, turned the old swamp-plane of Musashi, on which Tokyo is built, into an inferno, destroying fifteen square miles of the city, killing 83,000 and injuring 102,000. A British eye-witness in a nearby
POT
camp compared it to the horror of the 1923 earthquake which he had also experienced.
⁹⁹
Even before the dropping of the A-bombs, Japanese figures show that raids on sixty-nine areas had destroyed 2,250,000 buildings, made 9 million homeless, killed 260,000 and injured 412,000. These raids increased steadily in number and power; and in July the Allied fleets closed in, using their heavy guns to bombard the coastal cities from close range.

On 16 July Oppenheimer’s plutonium bomb was exploded on the Almogordo bombing-range in New Mexico. It generated a fireball with a temperature four times that at the centre of the sun. Oppenheimer quoted the phrase from the
Bhagavadgita
, ‘the radiance of a thousand suns… I am become as death, the destroyer of worlds.’ Fermi, more prosaically, calculated that the shock-wave indicated a blast of 10,000 tons of
TNT
. The news was flashed to the new American President, Harry S.Truman, on his way back from
Potsdam. A protocol, signed by Churchill and Roosevelt at the latter’s Hyde Park estate on 9 September 1944, had stated that ‘when the bomb is finally available it might perhaps after mature consideration be used against the Japanese’. Truman promptly signed an order to use the bomb as soon as possible and there does not seem to have been any prolonged discussion about the wisdom or morality of using it, at any rate at the top political and military level. As General Groves put it: ‘The Upper Crust want it as soon as possible.’
¹⁰⁰
America and Britain were already hurling at Japan every ounce of conventional explosive they could deliver, daily augmented by new technology and resources; to decline to use the super-bomb would have been illogical, indeed irresponsible, since its novelty might have an impact on Japan’s so far inflexible resolve to continue resistance.

The Emperor had been told that the war could not be won as early as February 1942. In 1943 the navy had reached the conclusion that defeat was inevitable. In 1944 Tojo had been thrown out by a navy
putsch.
None of this made any difference. The fear of assassination was too great. In May 1945 Russia was asked to mediate. But Stalin sat on the offer, since in January at Yalta he had been promised substantial territorial rewards to enter the Japanese war in August. On 6 June the Japanese Supreme Council approved a document, ‘Fundamental Policy to be Followed henceforth in the Conduct of the War’, which asserted ‘we shall … prosecute the war to the bitter end’. The final plan for the defence of Japan itself, ‘Operation Decision’, provided for 10,000 suicide planes (mosrly converted trainers), fifty-three infantry divisions and twenty-five brigades: 2,350,000 trained troops would fight on the beaches, backed by 4 million army and navy civil employees and a civilian militia of 28 million. They were to have weapons which included muzzle-loaders, bamboo spears and bows and arrows. Special legislation was passed by the Diet to form this army.
¹⁰¹
The Allied commanders assumed that their own forces must expect up to a million casualties if an invasion of Japan became necessary. How many Japanese lives would be lost? Assuming comparable ratios to those already experienced, it would be in the range of 10–20 million.

The Allied aim was to break Japanese resistance before an invasion became unavoidable. On 1 August 820 B29s unloaded 6,600 tons of explosive on five towns in North Kyushu. Five days later America’s one, untested uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan’s eighth largest city, headquarters of the 2nd General Army and an important embarkation port. Some 720,000 leaflets warning that the city would be ‘obliterated’ had been dropped two days before. No notice was taken, partly because it was rumoured Truman’s mother had once lived nearby, and it was thought that the city, being pretty,
would be used by the Americans as an occupation centre. Of the 245,000 people in the city, about 100,000 died that day, about 100,000 subsequently.
¹⁰²
Some died without visible injury or cause. Others were covered with bright, multi-coloured spots. Many vomited blood. One man put his burned hand in water and ‘something strange and bluish came out of it, like smoke’. Another, almost blind, regained perfect sight; but all his hair fell out.

Publicly, the Japanese government reaction was to send a protest to the world through the Swiss embassy. Having ignored international law for twenty years they now denounced ‘the disregard of international law by the American government, particularly the brutality of the new land-mine used against Hiroshima’. Privately, they summoned Nishina, head of their atomic programme, to Tokyo to demand whether the Hiroshima bomb was a genuine nuclear weapon and, if so, whether he could duplicate it within six months.
¹⁰³
This does not suggest that a single atomic weapon would have been decisive.

The second, plutonium-type, bomb was dropped on 9 August, not on its primary target (which the pilot could not find) but on its alternative one which, by a cruel irony, was the Christian city of Nagasaki, the centre of resistance to Shinto; 74,800 were killed by it that day. This may have persuaded the Japanese that the Americans had a large stock of such bombs (in fact only two were ready, and scheduled for dropping on 13 and 16 August). On the following day Russia, which now had 1,600,000 men on the Manchurian border, declared war, following the bargain made at Yalta. A few hours before, the Japanese had cabled accepting in principle the Allied terms of unconditional surrender. Nuclear warfare was then suspended, though conventional raids continued, 1,500 B29s bombing Tokyo from dawn to dusk on 13 August.

The final decision to surrender was taken on 14 August. The War Minister and the two chiefs of staff opposed it, and the Prime Minister, Admiral Suzuki, had to ask the Tenno to resolve the dispute. As Hirohito later put it: