42 The Second World War: Asia and the Pacific

In a few decades at the end of the 19th century, Japan transformed itself from an isolated medieval state to a modern industrial power. Mimicking the great Western powers, the country also developed imperial ambitions, taking Taiwan and Korea from China in the war of 1894–5, and putting a stop to Russian expansion in the Far East in the war of 1904–5.

During the 1920s Japan—short of land and resources for its burgeoning population—experienced severe economic difficulties, and many people, particularly in the army, believed that only strong military government and territorial expansion could solve the country’s problems. Their ardently militaristic and xenophobic nationalism centered round the emperor, a figurehead who was nevertheless worshipped as a living god.

Some elements in the army began to take matters into their own hands. Japan had gained the right to station troops to protect its South Manchurian Railway, and when in September 1931 a section of the railway was blown up near the city of Mukden (modern Shenyang), the army blamed the Chinese and used it as an excuse to occupy the whole of Manchuria. The League of Nations condemned the occupation, but Japan simply left the League.

Japanese ambitions The militarists increasingly gained control of the government in Japan, which repudiated international limits on its naval strength, and saw itself, alongside Germany and Italy, as one of the most unjustly treated countries in the world. Japan allied itself with Germany and Italy, and in 1937 launched an all-out attack on China. The Japanese occupied much of the coast, and the capture of the then Chinese capital was followed by the “Rape of Nanking,” in which as many as 300,000 Chinese civilians were massacred. Nevertheless, resistance by Chinese nationalists continued.

“Our national situation has reached an impasse … the only path left open to us is the development of Manchuria and Mongolia.”

Lieutenant Colonel Ishiwara Kanji, one of the army officers involved in the annexation of Manchuria in 1931

The USA—which had its own interests and territories in the Pacific (including Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines)—grew alarmed at Japanese expansionism, and sought to restrict Japanese access to strategic raw materials, such as coal, iron ore and oil. For its part, especially after the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, Japan had its eye on the colonies of Britain, France and the Netherlands in southern and southeastern Asia, which it intended to absorb into a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” This was dressed up as a liberation of Asian peoples from colonial rule, but in fact the intention was to swap European for Japanese domination, acquire strategic raw materials (such as Malayan rubber and Burmese oil), and at the same time to create a market for Japanese manufactured goods.

Japan demanded that all passage of supplies to the Chinese nationalists through French Indochina and the British colonies of Burma and Hong Kong should stop. To enforce this, in July 1941 Japanese troops occupied French Indochina, resulting in the US government freezing all Japanese assets in the USA. Prince Konoe, the Japanese premier, tried to broker a deal, but when the US government insisted that Japan withdraw from China and also from its alliance with Germany and Italy, Konoe resigned, and was replaced in October 1941 by General Hideki Tojo. Tojo, while continuing to negotiate with the USA, was in fact planning all-out war. On December 7, 1941, while talks continued in Washington, Japanese carrier-borne aircraft attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, on Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands. It was, President F. D. Roosevelt told Congress the following day as he requested a declaration of war, “a date which will live in infamy.” But, by bringing an end to American isolationism and given America’s huge resources, the attack ensured that, given time, the war was as good as lost as far as Japan and Germany were concerned.

The road to perdition The same day as Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces attacked US and British bases elsewhere in east Asia and the Pacific. There followed one of the most spectacular offensive campaigns in history, and by the middle of 1942 Japan had occupied most of the island groups of the western Pacific, plus the Philippines, northern New Guinea, the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia), Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaya, Singapore and Burma, and was threatening India itself, the jewel in Britain’s imperial crown. The campaign was accompanied by appalling acts of brutality, the Japanese then regarding all other races as inferior species, and treating any soldiers who surrendered to them rather than fighting to the death as contemptible cowards, to be used as slave labor and subjected to starvation, beatings and summary execution.

“I fear we have only awakened a sleeping giant, and his reaction will be terrible.”

Admiral Yamamoto, (attributed), commander of the Japanese fleet that attacked Pearl Harbor

The Japanese advance was turned back in June 1942 at the Battle of Midway, in which the Japanese lost four aircraft carriers and 248 aircraft. It proved to be the turning point in the Pacific War. The Japanese did not have the resources to replace such losses at anything like the rate that the Americans could. Although there were still years of hard fighting left, from this point on the Japanese were forced into a desperate retreat. By mid-1944 the Americans had retaken islands close enough to Japan to provide bases from which their bombers could begin the devastation of Japanese cities. But the closer the Americans came to Japan itself, the stiffer the Japanese resistance. Faced with Japan’s refusal to surrender, and the prospect of enormous casualties should they attempt an invasion of the Japanese home islands, the Americans decided to deploy a horrendous new weapon. On August 6 they dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, instantly killing 78,000 people. A second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later. On August 15 Emperor Hirohito made his first ever radio broadcast to his people, announcing the unconditional surrender of all imperial Japanese forces to the Allies.

The atomic bomb

In 1939 the great physicist Albert Einstein, who as a Jew had been obliged to flee to the USA from Nazi Germany, wrote to President F. D. Roosevelt to warn him that the Germans might already be working on nuclear weapons. As a consequence, Roosevelt authorized the Manhattan Project, which in utmost secrecy assembled a team of the world’s top physicists and engineers to develop an atomic bomb. The first device was tested in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, prompting the Project’s director, Robert J. Oppenheimer, to quote a line from the ancient Hindu poem, the Bhagavadgita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” It was the birth of the nuclear age: as Oppenheimer remarked two years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “The physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge that they cannot lose.”

the condensed idea

Japan overextended itself in taking on the USA