The World at War (81 page)

LIEUTENANT FELIX PUTTERMAN

US Army Civilian Affairs

I would immediately identify myself to all the Germans, to indicate that I was Jewish and that I was not interested in their personal problems, that I was only interested in the services they could provide to keep our troops living at as high a standard of living as possible in a bombed-out community. Most of the troops at first were rather cold but then they began to warm up to the Germans. They found they had much in common with the Germans; the German standard of living was most akin to that of the American troops back home. As a consequence, because they seemed to be cleaner than the other people on the Continent, and for that matter even in the UK, the American troops began to feel that these were really people who lived the same way Americans did and that we had some philosophical differences during the war but in close day-to-day living it was certainly nothing that was dwelt upon in any seriousness.

URSULA GRAY

Refugee from Dresden who later married author J Glenn Gray

We got away by pretending we were French and they didn't touch anybody but German girls. Once I almost made a mistake because the Russians were just like children, they would go into a farmhouse, take everything the farmer possessed and then go out and throw it to other people, all the silver and all the linen. They saw my sister and me with a French tricolour on our bicycles and they threw silver spoons to us. I said
danke
in German instead of
merci beaucoup
and my sister was frightened because she thought now they knew we were not French and they're going to rape us. But they were so happy, so drunk, so child-like they didn't pay attention. So we were not raped, we were not attacked but it's just by sheer accident. I know many of my friends were raped and were pretty badly damaged to their souls and bodies.

LIEUTENANT GRAY

Very close to the end of the war I had a requisition, a very lovely home in the centre of Germany because I knew German. I was always given the unpleasant task of throwing out civilians for our troops and of course I promised them that they would get their own home back. These were not battle-hardened soldiers or officers whom I would have been sympathetic with, these were fresh troops. They drank themselves pretty senseless and began to shoot up the house, I had a great temptation to hold them up with my gun but they were so drunk that I feared they would shoot me. They made a total shambles of the house. I had to break my promise to the German civilians, who were probably no more Nazis than I was. This kind of thing was particularly disillusioning because a lot of our soldiers were wounded, our President was dead, and these colonels were pretending to be playing at war when they hadn't any justification, any real need for a holiday. A kind of corruption of military life which soured me. I still remember it with great anger.

LIEUTENANT PUTTERMAN

Some woman came to me to try to offer me her own services, although she was trying to paint it was something else. I looked at her and I was feeling particularly mean that day – my father was sick and the Red Cross had just told me that my younger brother-in-law had been killed in Germany – and I was about ready to tear anyone apart anyway with my own two hands. I said, in desperation, 'Look, don't bother me – you know you're dealing with a Jew, you don't want to have anything to do with me.' And she looked at me and she said, 'But you are a white Jew.'

CHAPTER 32
ENDURING THE UNENDURABLE

Just as one may see all of Japan's conquests after Pearl Harbor as an attempt to provide defence in depth for the enormous investment made to win an empire in China, so American strategy began and ended with the intention – announced publicly by General Marshall in November 1941 in an effort to deter Japanese aggression – of firebombing the tinder-box Japanese cities. As we have seen, the US plan to establish bomber bases in China was frustrated by Japanese conquest of those areas of the Chinese coast they did not already control. General Curtis LeMay, promoted out of the European theatre to take charge of a new Twentieth Air Force in China, had launched the first precision-bombing attack on Japan with the new B-29 Superfortresses in June 1944, but in January 1945 he was transferred to Twenty-First Air Force in the Pacific. After the capture of Saipan and neighbouring Tinian in July 1944, Tinian became the largest air base in the world and B-29s operating from it also conducted the high-altitude precision-bombing attacks for which the aircraft had been designed. Results were poor and LeMay instituted a policy of low-level area incendiary bombing that burned the heart out of Japan's cities. Two of the few cities still on his list were the targets of atom bombs on 6 and 9 August, after which Japan surrendered, but not without some last-ditch resistance by fanatical nationalists who believed it was better for the entire population to die rather than to bend the knee. The attitude of the Japanese ruling elite is so perfectly captured by Emperor Hirohito's first-ever broadcast that I have included the operative parts of his speech in this chapter. It reveals that the cultural gulf
between Japan and her opponents, so significant in the run-up to the war, still yawned widely at its very end.

MAJOR GENERAL CURTIS
LEMAY

Commander Twentieth and then Twenty-First Air Force, China and the Pacific

We'd always planned on using incendiaries in the campaign against Japan because the construction used in their cities made them very effective. But in order to use them properly you have to have a minimum concentration of incendiaries to get a good fire started – a minimum of aeroplanes. When we got that number we started, as a matter of fact we started a little bit soon, we should have had a few more aeroplanes. The Japanese seemed to be lacking in low-altitude defences and for that reason I decided to come down low, because we could carry a bigger load from China to Japan at low altitude than at high altitude, and the
bombing would be more effective. We tried it and it worked, and of course the attack itself was very effective and seventeen square miles of the industrial area of Tokyo was burned on the first attack.
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We then followed that up as rapidly as possible on other industrial areas because I fully expected the Japanese to recover more than they did. We took the armament out of the aeroplanes, with the exception of the tail guns, to allow more bomb load because the Japanese had no effective night-fighter system such as the Germans had developed.

TSUYAKO KII

Tokyo housewife

On 9th March 1945 I felt somewhat severe atmosphere that night and the alarm came, a man came shouting through a megaphone we must shelter in the school but I disobeyed because I thought that school was very dangerous, there were many houses standing around that school, so I ran to the big bridge over the Sumida river and I stayed all night around that bridge. There was no fire at first on my side but the other side was burning and the early morning of 10th March the fire started on my side so I crossed over the other side of the bridge and there it was already burned up so I kept myself rather safely at that place. I thought I could jump into the river at last chance as people had done in the middle of the earthquake of 1923.

MAJOR GENERAL
LEMAY

It wasn't until General Arnold's visit to the Marianas that we even thought about the end of the war. And he asked a direct question, 'How long's the war going to last?' We sat down and did some thinking about it and indicated that we would be pretty much out of targets around the 1st of September, and with the targets gone we couldn't see much of any war going on. They still had some capacity to fight, but not the war they had to fight. They had four and a half million men under arms that had never been committed to combat but they had no resources to face the attack that was facing them. We were destroying their oil refineries with precision radar bombing at night and they were hoarding about half a tank in each aeroplane they had left, camouflaged under trees for kamikaze attack against the invasion . . . the B-29s were flying at will over Japan and they couldn't do anything about it. As a matter of fact they'd been trying to get out of the war for about three months – they'd asked the Russians to be intermediaries but the Russians had been stalling until they got their war finished so that they could get into the Pacific War before it ended.

TOSHIKAZU KASE

Principal Secretary to the Japanese Foreign Minister

The idea of surrender did not before the war exist in the tradition of Japanese fighting services and even private soldiers preferred just to kill themselves to surrendering. So the idea of surrender meant for a military leader that he had to kill himself for whatever mistakes he committed, particularly with the Emperor.

HISATSUNE SAKOMIZU

Chief Cabinet Secretary

The disposition of the military people, the word surrender never in their dictionary so even the whole country became destroyed, people killed, still they do not want to surrender.

MARQUIS KOICHI KIDO

Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal

On one hand there were people strongly imbued with the Japanese spirit; these people said Japan must continue fighting and it was inconceivable that Japan would be defeated. Then there was a group of people who assess the situation rationally and with cool heads. The younger officers in the Army subscribed to extreme thinking that the nation could commit g
yakusatsu,
which means fighting to the end until all Japanese are killed. But it does not seem that War Minister General Anami was of that opinion. When I talked to him about ending the war he said, 'We should hit the US forces hard on the beaches once, because that would make the peace negotiations more favourable to Japan.'
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YOSHIO KODAMA

Nationalist politician and naval officer

Those who live in modern Japan will find it hard to understand the reason why the Japanese commit suicide – commit seppuku. But if you look at the long history of Japan you will see that whenever your pride is destroyed or when you throw away your pride it is quite proper for a man to commit suicide. The long history of Japan shows that many thousands, many tens of thousands, in the past have committed suicide for these very reasons.

DR JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH

Deputy Head of the US Office of Price Administration

The Japanese war effort was broken not from being bombed, but from the blockade, as well as from the defeats, from the bypassed armies and the lost divisions that were bypassed, and the fact that Japan no longer had a Navy. Japan was defeated before the atomic bomb and the defeat had been recognised. The Imperial Council had accepted the defeat and it was merely a matter of finding an avenue of communication with the Allied powers and getting all the bureaucratic element into line.

MAJOR GENERAL
LEMAY

I think once you've committed yourself to war – and by the way this is not done by military people, it's done by our duly elected official in government, both your government and mine – once you're committed to war I think then you're committed to completing it and bringing back normal peacetime conditions as soon as possible, which means using sufficient force and everything at your disposal to get it over with quickly. And this always saves lives, yours as well as the enemy's lives in the long run, because in a long drawn-out war you begin to get casualties from the side-effects of exhaustion, deprivation, disease and things of that sort, so getting it over as quickly as possible is the moral responsibility of everyone concerned.

TOSHIKAZU KASE

We knew that to bring about an early termination of hostilities we had to conduct
negotiations with our military opponents, but the High Command refused categorically to entertain the idea of talking with the enemy powers. The only great power left out of the enemy camp was the Soviet Union, with which nominally there existed the neutrality pact, and so this was the only window left open for peace. So we argued it out with the military command and we finally start negotiations with the Soviet Union in order to arrive at the final destination, which was Washington and London. We tried to get in touch with Stalin and we thought if one of the senior statesmen was sent with Emperor's personal letter addressed to Stalin, Stalin might receive him, because we thought that Stalin, being an astute politician, might be prepared for a showdown after the war with the democratic powers, particularly America. If he anticipated difficult relations after the war, he might deem it profitable to save Japan from the hopeless situation in which she was finding herself. That was the aim of our efforts directed towards Moscow.

CHARLES BOHLEN

US diplomat and Soviet specialist, at Potsdam

Molotov was there, Mr Byrnes, Secretary of State, myself and the Soviet interpreter and Stalin tossed a piece of paper across the table to Truman saying that they had just received this proposal from the
Japanese to send a mission headed by Prince Konoye. Stalin told Truman that his position was to refuse it and Truman entirely agreed with that. What the motivations were from Mr Truman's point of view: he thought that the war was almost over in the Pacific; the
atomic bomb had not been dropped when this proposal was made, and that there was no point in getting involved in complicated negotiations.

HISATSUNE SAKOMIZU

After the Potsdam Declaration the Foreign Minister Togo said in the Cabinet meeting that if we want to stop the war now, we must receive this declaration. They don't say anything about Emperor's position so we can stop the war without the question of the Emperor. We can keep the Emperor all right so we better receive this declaration as soon as possible. So many Cabinet Ministers said, 'Let us see the situation for a while,' so we did not receive the declaration. But after the atomic bomb thrown to
Hiroshima the Cabinet suddenly decided to stop the war.