Overland literary journal

OVERLAND 194
autumn 2009
ISBN 978-0-9805346-1-0
published 22 March 2009

‘KILL OR BE KILLED’

Tom O’Lincoln re-examines the Pacific War

Humour is revealing. Here is a joke from the Pacific War, related by three infantry veterans:

Typical of the laconic humour of the times was the story about the wounded Jap who said to the Aussie, in a sarcastic tone, ‘You think you’re going to be home for Christmas’ to which the digger replied, ‘And you think you’re going to hospital!’¹

The point, of course, is that the prisoner will be killed. This real or imaginary anecdote, drawn from old diggers’ memoirs, will evoke unease in anyone used to the edifying stories we usually hear about the Second World War. Our first thought might be that such episodes were shocking exceptions. They were not.

Elsewhere the same authors tell of finding enemy soldiers asleep and disposing of them in their blankets.² Peter Medcalf writes of one battle: ‘We took no prisoners, or wounded.’ Regarding another, he describes his mate shooting sleeping Japanese soldiers after voicing a cheerful: ‘Wakey, wakey.’³ Ken Clift writes that after a victory at Oivi, ‘very few of the enemy escaped. Many surrendered and were exterminated …’ Lest there be any doubt about his meaning, Clift adds: ‘Enemy wounded were shot on the spot after our own wounded were evacuated …’⁴

A veteran of Finschhafen records that in October 1943, a barge intended to transport Australian wounded and a prisoner failed to arrive. Two Australians took the prisoner into the jungle:

Shortly afterwards I heard the unmistakeable crack of a .303 rifle. Later I passed one of those men and asked, ‘what happened to the little Jap?’ He looked at me steadily for some seconds, and then replied, ‘The Nip? Ah, he shot through mate. Yair, he got away.’⁵

In 2001, Major General Paul Cullen, winner of two DSOs, also confirmed that Australians had bayoneted Japanese prisoners to death in New Guinea.⁶ Naturally there were rationalisations. Some have said that prisoners had to die because they might be dangerous:

We had no scruples about shooting any wounded who lay about a captured position – that was the only safe way. You could ask the average Australian soldier to clean up a position, including any wounded, and he would do so, not as he would shoot a horse with a broken leg or an old and ailing dog – then there would have been compassion and sorrow – but as he would shoot a killer dog which had got amongst the sheep.⁷

But it wasn’t the only safe way. Laurence Rees cites archival film showing how some American units dealt with potential danger from surrendering enemies. The Americans ordered, from a safe distance, the men to take off their clothes. By so doing, the Japanese showed they had no concealed weapons and were no threat.⁸

Such a catalogue of horrors! Of course not everyone killed the helpless, and there were tensions about the issue. In The Veterans, Eric Lambert portrays the capture of a wounded Japanese:

He writhed quietly on the ground. I ran up to finish him off … He opened his eyes again and looked at me … Then I knew I could not shoot him … We made a stretcher … As we slithered up the track with our prisoner on his improvised stretcher, a Don Company man stepped out to meet us. ‘What have you got there? Not a bloody live Nip?’⁹

Anyway there is no point blaming the individual soldiers, on either side. They were locked in desperate conflict, driven by their rulers. Killing prisoners didn’t come naturally and had to be learnt as part of a cycle of fear and hate - on both sides. ‘You can’t fight this war without hate,’ wrote the war correspondent Osmar White. ‘If you don’t hate enough, you’re going to be beaten.’¹⁰ Peter Firkins says:

The Australians knew that they were fighting against a truly merciless enemy, and that to be taken prisoner was an unthinkable fate. Consequently they matched the Japanese with a savagery equal to their own, and like them would sooner die than surrender.¹¹

But of course this was exactly how the Japanese thought:

No one told American or Australian soldiers that one reason why their Japanese foes often fought to the death was because they’d been told by their officers that Westerners didn’t take prisoners alive … Australian soldiers in New Guinea certainly lived up to this reputation and rarely took POWs.¹²

A perceptive veteran contended that fighting the Japanese brought out something Australian commanders had previously found difficult to awaken: ‘the killing instinct’.¹³ Henry ‘Jo’ Gullett, later a Liberal politician, explained it this way:

Because of the things they did to our dead and wounded we hated them. We never gave them a chance if we could help it. If an Italian or German were running away, one might let him go, but never a Japanese. You would kill him as you would a snake, because the next day you or a friend might not see him first.¹⁴

An AIF soldier described the New Guinea fighting as ‘an exercise in extermination’ and this mentality came from the very top. General Vasey himself set the tone with a directive to troops in Papua:

One does not expect a live tiger to give himself up to capture so we must not expect the Japanese to surrender. He does not. He must be killed … Truly jungle warfare is a game of kill or be killed …¹⁵

The road to war

How did the peoples of the Pacific become locked into this appalling conflict? If we date the war from Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941, then we appear to have a simple case of Japanese aggression – but in reality the roots of conflict lay far deeper. The fuse was lit in 1853 when US Commodore Perry arrived to force open Japan to western trade. It was an act of imperialist aggression. The resulting social crisis and its resolution via the Meiji Restoration gave rise to Japan’s own imperialism which, in many ways, took the west as a model.¹⁶ It would be stupid to apologise for either side, but to understand the war we must recognise how the cycle of big-power rivalry worked.

In some ways Japan was reacting defensively. Eight years after Perry’s visit, a samurai visited Shanghai, and reported:

Here most of the Chinese have become the servants of foreigners. When English and French people come walking the Chinese give way stealthily. Although the main power here is Chinese, it is really nothing but a colony of England and France … who can be sure the same fate will not visit our country in the future?¹⁷

Early in the twentieth century, the nationalist thinker Yutaka Hibino wrote in an influential book that his country faced a ‘world of sharp competition’. Indeed a ‘discarded scrap of flesh upon the Asiatic continent has the power to assemble the hungry vultures from the whole earth’ and ‘it is only when we have the strength to repulse our strongest enemies that we can in tranquillity sing the praises of peace’.¹⁸

Australia was a factor. Well before Japan launched its first war of aggression against China in 1894, Australian governments had launched their own mini-imperialist drive into the Pacific. The Queensland premier had sent a party led by a police magistrate to raise the flag in Port Moresby in April 1883, hoping to force Britain to annex New Guinea. While this effort failed, the First World War brought eventual success. In gold-rich Victoria a wide range of business figures backed the Polynesia Company in Fiji, and that led to other ventures – most famously the Melbourne-based Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR). By 1901 CSR held investments in Fiji worth over two million pounds.¹⁹

Here were the seeds of rivalry. Tokyo’s entry into the war against Germany set off alarm bells in Australia, after Japan seized German islands north of the equator. Prime Minister Billy Hughes reportedly told a closed parliamentary session that conscription was necessary because ‘Japan would challenge the White Australia policy after the war … Australia would need the help of the rest of the Empire, and … if she wishes to be sure of getting it she must now throw her full strength into the war in Europe.’²⁰

For working people the carnage of the First World War was tragic; to Hughes the fallen diggers represented chips he could cash in at the Versailles peace conference. Alarmed at the Japanese navy’s role escorting soldiers to Gallipoli, he sent as many troops as possible to the European fronts. The aim was to reduce British dependence on Tokyo, which would make Britain less likely to give concessions to Japan in the Pacific. Having invested so many Australian lives, he used them to great effect at the conference, demanding control of all the South Pacific islands taken from Germany. This was about both territory and race. Hughes and others secured a special ‘C-class’ League of Nations mandate to cover what is now Namibia and certain Pacific islands. Under such a mandate, the occupying power would be able to impose its own laws: most importantly (for Hughes) it could enforce ‘White Australia’ immigration controls.²¹

When Japan raised an anti-racist motion at Versailles, Hughes, on behalf of Australia, opposed it more aggressively than any other power. The Japanese delegation resented his intervention so bitterly that US President Woodrow Wilson feared the resultant tensions might damage his League of Nations project. To mollify the Japanese and prevent a row over racism at the plenary session, Wilson made concessions to Tokyo over territory in China. Thus Australian racism helped open the door for Japan’s expansion.²²

Hughes’ belligerence at Versailles also helped Japan’s militarist faction build popular support for war. Australian intelligence analyst Edmund Piesse complained after the conference: ‘I withdraw all my optimism about our future relations with Japan … we have been perhaps the chief factor in consolidating the whole Japanese nation behind the imperialists.’ Academic James Murdoch, visiting Japan around the same time, said similar things, adding: ‘If we are out for a scrap this is just the way to get into one.’ British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald put it even more sharply. When attempts at a ‘Pacific Protocol’ for dispute resolution failed, partly due to Australian bloody-mindedness, MacDonald called the White Australia policy ‘a menace to civilisation’.²³

The main responsibility rests, of course, with the great powers. It would be impossible to detail here the complex manoeuvres between them in the run-up to Pearl Harbor but the key point is that, contrary to popular perception, the west was not an innocent victim. On the contrary, by 1941 an oil embargo imposed by America was putting Japan in an impossible position.

A British Admiralty intelligence report acknowledged in 1942 that ‘had she not gone to war now, Japan would have seen such a deterioration of her economic position as to render her ultimately unable to wage war, and to reduce her to the status of a second-rate power’. Joseph Rochefort, Commander of Station HYPO, combat intelligence centre for the US Pacific Fleet, put it this way:

We cut off their money, fuel and trade. We were just tightening the screws on the Japanese. They could see no way of getting out except going to war.²⁴

Myth of liberation

Imperialist wars always present themselves as something else. John Curtin, explaining Australia’s war aims, declared that ‘we are at war with Japan … because our vital interests are imperilled and because the rights of free people in the whole Pacific are assailed.’²⁵ But how many people in the Pacific theatre were free? In a book review in Overland 193, I discussed Dutch repression in Indonesia.²⁶ The picture was equally grim in other colonies.

In Indochina rebellion met severe repression. During 1930 peasants staged hunger marches and seized control of landed estates, electing Xo-Viets (councils – a name clearly derived from Russian soviets) to run them. Their French rulers hit back with air and ground attacks causing 10,000 casualties.²⁷ The story of the Vietnamese Left in the following decade was one of constant repression, and the life of workers and peasants a continual misery. According to one observer of the massive 1937 strike movement against French capital:

The underlying cause of the social ferment is the poverty of the masses … all too often ignored by employers whose decisions are taken far from the colonies and dictated by a cold concern for the reduction of ‘general costs of production’.²⁸

In the Philippines, the United States hijacked a local independence struggle, sending troops in 1898-99 to wrest the islands from Spain. The Filipinos still demanded their rights and a cruel war ensued. By 1902 the death toll had surpassed 200,000 from fighting, starvation, exposure, torture and disease. A US Congressman’s first-hand report said the Americans ‘took no prisoners’ but ‘simply swept the country, and wherever or however they could get hold of a Filipino, they killed him’. The writer and anti-war campaigner Mark Twain savagely proposed that America re-design its flag, with the white stripes painted black, and a skull and crossbones instead of the stars. Once American control was secure, unequal trading arrangements ensured Filipino dependency on the US economy.²⁹

US Senator George Frisbie Hoar’s description of the American conquest of the Philippines – ‘devastation of provinces, the shooting of captives, the torture of prisoners and of unarmed peaceful citizens’³⁰ – applies to much western warfare in Asia. Rather than singling out the Japanese power grab for special condemnation, it makes more sense to see it as part of a wider pattern, beginning with earlier western conquests and continuing through to the brutalities of America’s Vietnam and Afghan wars.

This history includes Australia with its genocidal onslaught against Indigenous people, and its colonial presence in the Pacific. Consider Australian rule in Papua and New Guinea before the war. Under the Native Regulations and Ordinances in Papua, according to former district commissioner David Marsh:

A native wasn’t allowed to drink. He couldn’t go into a picture show with Europeans. When walking along the footpath the native was expected to move aside. We had the White Women’s Protection Ordinance which more or less said that if you smiled at a white woman it was rape … They also had a Native Women’s Protection Ordinance which seemed to say something quite different, and didn’t mean much anyway.³¹

In 1929, twelve years before the war for ‘freedom’, black workers in Rabaul struck for higher pay. Astonished to find themselves without breakfast, white mastas were outraged. ‘My coon’s not here’ complained one; another grumbled that there was ‘no response from the slave … the Government … is disgustingly lenient with the natives …why, the only thing a native understands is a beating.’ White police put the strike leaders on trial; and a white magistrate jailed them.³²

After the war, Australian rule remained dictatorial. In his 1992 Kokoda speech Paul Keating proclaimed that the diggers had fought and died there for the ‘liberty of Australia’.³³ They certainly hadn’t fought for the liberty of the local people.

At the 1944 Anzac Conference, Foreign Minister Evatt suggested that Australia and New Zealand should assert control of wide areas of the Pacific.³⁴ The US Ambassador in Canberra for his part had advice from one or more cabinet ministers that Evatt wanted ‘sovereignty over all Solomons, Hebrides, and Fiji groups’, and planned to ‘bargain for Australian ownership or domination up to the equator’.³⁵ Canberra cabled the British proposing to take responsibility for ‘policing’ East Timor, New Guinea and the Solomons and to ‘share in policing’ large sections of Indonesia as well as the New Hebrides.³⁶

Evatt was, as John Curtin put it, trying to secure ‘the future of the white man in the Pacific’.³⁷ Along with empire went its classic ideological underpinning: racism. The Tokyo war crimes trials prosecutors were right to condemn the Japanese state for promoting its own racial superiority.³⁸ But in supporting this condemnation, we are only credible if we take a hard look at Australia’s own racism.

In setting out war aims in early 1942, the Government had emphasised the ‘principle of a White Australia’.³⁹ Having built a nation by dispossessing others, it was hardly surprising white Australians should worry that someone might do the same to them. In promoting the war effort against Japan, the Prime Minister played on just such fears:

From the day that Captain Arthur Phillip landed here, until this hour, this land has been governed by men and women of our race. We do not intend that that tradition shall be destroyed merely because an aggressor marches against us … Australians, you are the sons and daughters of Britishers.⁴⁰

I quote Curtin himself because it’s so common to blame racism on the Australian working class. In the Second World War, the racist agitation came right from the top. General MacArthur declared that the Japanese soldier was ‘only one degree removed from a savage,’⁴¹ while that fine drink-sodden Australian specimen General Blamey called the Japanese fighting man ‘a subhuman beast’, and the Japanese as a whole as ‘a cross between the human being and the ape’.⁴²

From these august levels, hatred was promoted down through the ranks. Destroying the enemy, remarked the commander of the 7th Infantry Brigade at Milne Bay, was ‘a most effective way of demonstrating the superiority of the white race’, while the second in command of the 2nd/14th Battalion described enemy forces on the Kokoda Trail as ‘cocksure hordes [out] to glut their lust and savagery in the blood of a conquered white nation’. Not to be outdone, officers lecturing 9th Division soldiers explained that their Japanese adversary was ‘merely an educated animal’.⁴³

As seen through indigenous eyes

Meanwhile on the home front, another ‘free people of Asia’ suffered the most outrageous treatment. Australian Aborigines’ League honorary secretary, William Cooper, didn’t mince words:

the Aborigine now has no status, no rights, no land … he has no country and nothing to fight for but the privilege of defending the land which was taken from him by the white race without compensation or even kindness.⁴⁴

Aboriginal soldiers in the north didn’t even always get the miserable pay called for in official guidelines: ‘We used to pay them in tobacco. There were two sorts. One was like a liquorice stick and was called “Nigger-Twist”…’ A guide rebelled against this, throwing his rations on the ground in disgust and saying ‘we want white man tucker, same along you fellas’. In response, one of the whites ‘knocked him to the ground to make him be a good boy’.⁴⁵

Some in the establishment were terrified that Aborigines might become a fifth column, with sinister Lutheran missionaries turning them into a pro-German force. Army intelligence went so far as to take control of Beagle Bay Mission in Western Australia and intern missionaries of German descent, while the Member for the Northern Territory accused Patrol Officer Strehlow, son of a pastor and known for his pro-Aboriginal sentiments, of being a Nazi.⁴⁶ Strehlow did tell of one black man who informed his employer: ‘I am a German. You cannot touch me.’⁴⁷ This was just one way of expressing a wish for liberation; he was hardly likely to sympathise with the white-supremacist Nazi regime.

The deepest white fears centred on the spectre of Japanese influence. In August 1942 the manager of a station at Lake Tyers, where black soldiers had enlisted but had then been kicked out of the army, referred to ‘the generally expressed opinion of the youth of the Station … that they would get a “better spin” under Japanese rule’. The 2/4 Independent Company operating in the Northern Territory reported that ‘several natives on questioning favour the JAPANESE … They further state that the white men have not given them anything and on a number of occasions have molested them and their lubras’. A writer in North Queensland said Aborigines near Cooktown complained that whites had stolen their land and said that ‘bye and bye’ the Japanese would return it to them, while in parts of Western Australia it was ‘common talk among the natives that when the Japs came they (the blacks) would be boss’.⁴⁸

Again this was just a protest against dispossession: actual contact between Aborigines and Japanese was minimal. Where it did happen, it said more about white racism than anything else. One pastoralist warned anxiously that blacks were frequenting the part of Cairns called Malay Town, headquarters of Japanese fishing crews. But that was hardly remarkable given they were discouraged from entering other parts of the city.⁴⁹

So the Sydney Truth’s Adelaide correspondent was spouting rubbish when he claimed that ‘thousands of wild Aborigines in coast areas of the Northern Territory are a great potential Fifth Column’.⁵⁰ Yet some white officials forcibly moved Aboriginal clans. Blacks fought back. Patrol Officer Bob Darkin later recalled: ‘What we had to do was raid their camps at piccaninny daylight, just before dawn. Usually when you raided a camp half of them would get away. On one occasion out near West Point, they came back with their spears. I had about twenty or thirty natives all handcuffed … when their mates started throwing spears.’⁵¹

If they couldn’t move them, the authorities turned to strict control measures. In Western Australia, Moore River Native Settlement became a semi-concentration camp which blacks couldn’t leave except to work:

In June 1942, A Special Mobile Force stationed at Moora rounded up all unemployed Aborigines from the Midlands and interned them in Moore River as ‘possible potential enemies’; those in employment were forbidden to leave their place of residence without special permission.⁵²

Aborigines over the age of fourteen were issued with a Military Permit covering where they lived, worked and travelled. There were written in either red or black ink; red meant they were subversive.⁵³

In 1941, Western Australia amended its Native Administration Act to stop Aborigines moving south of the 20th parallel, known as the ‘leper line’, while at Katanning, one of many places where blacks had found themselves earning more money due to wartime construction projects, the local government confined them to shopping on one day of the week.⁵⁴

Fears that blacks might turn to left-wing ideas were perhaps more realistic than paranoia about alliances with the Japanese. Donald McLeod, a left-winger and sometime communist, helped organise strikes and protests against the permit system and other grievances from 1943 to 1947. He also founded a branch of the Anti-Fascist League which raised demands for Aboriginal rights.⁵⁵ According to an Army Intelligence report:

These half-educated half-castes and Aborigines have been largely influenced by communist and anti-capitalist propaganda for many years, and can almost invariably be swayed by the agitator. They are extremely class-conscious and consider they have had a raw deal from the white man.⁵⁶

So they had. In 1940 the Melbourne Sun noted the protests of Pastor Doug Nicholls:

Australians were raving [he said] about persecuted minorities in other parts of the world, but were they ready to voice their support for the unjustly treated Aboriginal minority in Australia…? ‘I saw my people on the Nullarbor Plain … begging for food … They seized pieces of apple peel, scraps of bread that were thrown out of the windows and doors. I can never forget it.’⁵⁷

The war was supposed to be about democracy but was nothing of the kind. Sapper ‘Bert’ Beros is famous for his poem about the ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels’, but his verses about ‘The Coloured Digger’ also reminded us:

He’d heard us talk democracy -
They preach it to his face -
Yet knows that in our Federal House
There’s no one of his race …⁵⁸

Scale of horrors

Since I began to study Australia’s Pacific war, I have discussed it with many people. Almost all initially questioned my emphasis. Didn’t Japan’s atrocities place it in a uniquely evil category? What, for example, about the ‘Rape of Nanjing’? The American writer Nicholson Baker, who has received a lot of flak for his critical work on the Second World War, is careful to disavow any ‘moral equivalence’ between Allies and Axis powers.⁵⁹

Well, let us see where the facts take us. The massacre at Nanjing cost perhaps 300,000 deaths,⁶⁰ yet it appears likely a similar number died due to British war measures callously implemented amidst the 1942-43 Bengali famine.⁶¹ Japan’s military ravaged the Chinese people but so – and on a similar scale – did Australia’s ally Chiang Kai-shek.⁶² How then might the remainder of Japan’s crimes, vile as they were, measure up against the half million civilians killed by allied fire-bombing and by the atomic explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Australia itself, to be sure, escapes opprobrium for the big-ticket atrocities. We committed no crimes on that scale (merely cheering on the Americans from a safe distance) but this country’s rulers were morally no better. Let us begin with the horrors of Japan’s invasion of China. Australian trade unionists made a stand against this in the famous pig-iron dispute, but western governments cared little for the fate of the Chinese. According to a historian, the November 1937 Brussels conference called to discuss the crisis in the Far East ‘paid no heed to the requests for aid made by the Chinese … and the Conference ended as a total, dismal failure. The responsibility for this rested equally on Great Britain and the United States.’⁶³

The Australian government’s attitude followed that of the British. Australian diplomatic correspondence in the period preceding the Brussels conference briefly acknowledges that the Japanese invasion ‘cannot be justified’, but treats it as a ‘dispute’ to be resolved through consultation and conciliation – prior to which one mustn’t ‘prejudge’ the issue. After visits from the Chinese and Japanese consuls, Prime Minister Lyons doesn’t bother to say what he told the Chinese but he refers to reassuring the Japanese and expressing hopes that nothing will upset the friendly relationship between the two countries.⁶⁴

Fast-forward to 1945 and Australia’s enthusiastic support for the merciless airborne terror against Japanese civilians. In fact communist writer Rupert Lockwood, in Japan’s Heart of Wood, had advocated the firebombing as early as 1943.⁶⁵ The mass media were a bit slower off the mark. On 19 March 1945, a week after the Tokyo fire bombings which cost over 100,000 civilian lives, the Melbourne Argus was still insisting:

The repeated raids on such centres of Japanese war industry as Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe furnish pretty convincing evidence that the smashing of Japan’s ability to make war is proceeding now on the same scientific basis as the campaigns which have played havoc with Germany’s war industries.⁶⁶

By 10 April, however, the editorial writers had apparently realised this was a war on Japanese society as a whole, with precious little ‘science’. They resorted to psychological caricatures to show that the bombing was still justified, and that nothing less than unconditional surrender could be accepted. While the Japanese were ‘literally facing destruction’, the Argus contended they might still resist because they were irrational:

We cannot prophesy from this, however, that Japan will follow the dictates of Occidental logic. She may prefer the dictates of bushido: that queer sense of national ‘honour’ that expressed itself in countless and unspeakable barbarities, and which may, for all we know, express itself in an incredible acceptance of destruction.⁶⁷

Then in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Argus sketched another dehumanising portrait of ‘The Japanese as a Fighter’:

He was a mass of contradictions – he fought grimly, enduring terrible wounds, until he was destroyed; or he ran in screaming fear; or he blew himself to pieces with a grenade clutched to his chest or stomach. He was cruel and dirty and bestial. He killed his wounded rather than have them fall into our hands. He plundered and raped the natives. The Australians and Americans came to loathe him as one loathes something that is dirty and rat-like …⁶⁸

Demonising the Japanese was, of course, a way to justify killing them en masse. It was not Australian journalism’s finest hour.

There remains the appalling Japanese mistreatment of forced labourers and prisoners. This has left deep scars. But was this necessarily worse than the instant death many surrendering Japanese faced at Australian hands? Moreover a balanced appraisal of all Japanese atrocities needs to consider the extreme conditions, including mass hunger, under which the Japanese were fighting the war.

Severe malnutrition resulting in many deaths had already appeared among the Kwangtung Army in Manchuria in mid-1938.⁶⁹ Elsewhere things were little better, as Peter Firkins relates:

When the atom bomb was dropped, the Japanese on Bougainville were in a pathetic condition … nearly 10,000 had died of diseases which were carrying off hundreds every month. They were near starving and almost at the end of their other supplies.⁷⁰

The troops at the front were hungry because the empire was hungry. A majority of Japanese were malnourished at the time of surrender. There had even been food shortages in some parts of the country before Pearl Harbor. By 1944 food theft was common. In August 1944, 30 per cent of workers at the Mitsubishi glass factory in Tsurumi were found to have beri-beri.⁷¹

How the horrible conditions at the front affected even the relatively well-provided-for Americans emerges from the account of Paul Montgomery, a US pilot who witnessed atrocities:

The marines I met they were just kids – seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old – and they appeared to me to be a bunch of animals. The told me [regarding stealing gold teeth from dead Japanese]: ‘Our chance of getting back to the United States is very slim and we’re just going to make the most of it.’ They were committed, they were determined they were not going home, and they were very mean. They’d be fighting in the chow line, they’d be fighting amongst themselves. Every opportunity they got they’d be in hand-to-hand combat – just because they were on edge.⁷²

In a careful study of such questions, Hiroaki Sato concludes that desperate measures by Japanese troops resulted from an unendingly desperate situation – indeed, a hopeless one, in the end.⁷³ The imperial armed forces were unable to provision their troops. They had to live off impoverished lands. They also had to endure ‘the frenzy and hysteria created by the furies of war’.⁷⁴

The Australian troops in the field were far better supplied with food and material,⁷⁵ their position was seldom desperate for long; yet as we have seen, they too fell victim to the ‘furies of war’, committing sufficient atrocities to make any Japanese-Australian blame-game a futile exercise.

I have emphasised that we mustn’t blame the rank and file soldiers. So many of them risked death for their ideals, or to protect their family and community as they saw it; and that fact remains compelling. Moreover there were many who challenged the racism or other injustices of the war. Once again, however, the same measure applies to both sides. If Australians had their noble side, so did their opponents. Captain Seki, a Japanese air force officer dragooned into making a kamikaze flight, told a reporter:

If it is an order, I will go. But I am not going to die for the emperor or for imperial Japan. I am going for my beloved wife. If Japan loses, she might be raped by Americans. I am dying for someone I love most, to protect her.⁷⁶

An Australian serviceman could have said that, as could soldiers of any nationality. It’s undeniably admirable on the individual level, but that doesn’t make the war itself something to admire. The Pacific War was a ruthless power struggle between rival empires, and it’s time to stop pretending otherwise.

1. Gordon Combe, Frank Ligertwood and Tom Gilchrist, The Second 43rd Australian Infantry Battalion 1940-1946, Second 43rd Infantry Battalion AIF Club, Adelaide, 1972, p. 185.
2. Combe, Ligertwood and Gilchrist, p. 231.
3. Peter Medcalf, War in the Shadows: Bougainville 1944-45, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1986, pp. 95, 65.
4. Ken Clift, Saga of a Sig: The Wartime Memoirs of Six Years Service in the Second AIF, KCD Publications, Sydney, 1972, p. 158.
5. R.J. Berry, interviewed in John Barrett, We Were There: Australian Soldiers of World War II Tell Their Stories, Penguin, Melbourne, 1988, p. 440.
6. ‘Australians “Killed POWs”‘, Age, 23 April 2001, p. 7.
7. Cam Bennett, Rough Infantry: Tales of World War II, Warrnambool Institute Press, Warrnambool, 1985, p. 162, emphasis added.
8. Laurence Rees, Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II, Da Capo Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2002, p. 134.
9. Eric Lambert, The Veterans, Shakespeare Head, Sydney, 1954, pp. 200-1.
10. Osmar White, Green Armour, Penguin, Ringwood, 1992, p. 286.
11. Peter Firkins, The Australians in Nine Wars: Waikato to Long Tan, Rigby, Melbourne, 1971, p. 332.
12. Tony Barrell and Rick Tanaka, Higher Than Heaven: Japan, War, and Everything, Private Guy International, Strawberry Hills, 1995, p. 23.
13. Mark Johnston, Fighting the Enemy: Australian Soldiers and their Adversaries in World War II, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2000, p. 79.
14. Henry (‘Jo’) Gullett, Not as a Duty Only: An Infantryman’s War, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1984, p. 27.
15. Margaret Barter, Far Above Battle: The Experience and Memory of Australian Soldiers in War, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1994, pp. 197, 188.
16. This was dubbed ‘mimetic imperialism’ by Robert Eskildsen in ‘Of Civilization and Savages: The Mimetic Imperialism of Japan’s 1874 Expedition to Taiwan’, American Historical Review, vol. 107, no. 2, 2002.
17. Quoted in John Livingston, Joe Moore and Felicia Oldfather (eds), The Japan Reader, vol. 1: Imperial Japan, 1800-1945, Penguin, Middlesex, 1976, p. 84.
18. Yutaka Hibino, Nippon Shindo Ron, or the National Ideas of the Japanese People, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1929, p. 51, pp. 151-2.
19. Roger Thompson, Australian Imperialism in the Pacific: The Expansionist Era, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1980, p. 164. On Australia’s nineteenth-century Pacific imperialism, see also Tom O’Lincoln, ‘The Neighbour from Hell: Australian Imperialism’, in Rick Kuhn (ed.) Class and Struggle in Australia, Pearson Longman, Sydney, 2005, pp. 179-80.
20. E.L. Piesse, Director of Intelligence, reproduced in A.T. Yarwood (ed.), Attitudes to Non-European Immigration, Cassell, Sydney, 1968, pp. 108-9. Piesse added that popular reports were ‘doubtless exaggerated’ but did not imply they were false.
21. These events are well summarised in Humphrey McQueen, Japan to the Rescue: Australian Security Around the Indonesian Archipelago During the American Century, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1991, p. 28.
22. See Sean Brawley, The White Peril: Foreign Relations and Asian Immigration to Australasia and North America 1919-1978, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1995, pp. 30-3.
23. Brawley, pp. 35, 66, 94.
24. Admiralty report quoted in David Day, The Great Betrayal: Britain, Australia and the Onset of the Pacific War 1939-42, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1988, p. 209; Rochefort quoted in Robert Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, Touchstone, New York 2000, p. 121.
25. Kristin Williamson, The Last Bastion, Lansdowne, Sydney, 1984, p. 125.
26. Tom O’Lincoln, ‘Battles over the War’, Overland, 193, 2008.
27. John Keay, Last Post: The End of Empire in the Far East, John Murray, London, 1997, p. 87.
28. Quoted in Ngo Van, Revolutionaries They Could Not Break: The Fight for the Fourth International in Indochina 1930-1945, Index Books, London, 1995, p. 47.
29. Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, Random House, New York, 1989, pp. 188, 192; Keay, 1997, p. 117.
30. Richard Welch, ‘American Atrocities in the Philippines: The Indictment and the Response’, Pacific Historical Review, 43, 1974, p. 233.
31. Quoted in John Waiko, A Short History of Papua New Guinea, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1993, p. 77.
32. Waiko, pp. 100-1.
33. Quoted in James Curran, The Power of Speech: Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Image, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2004, p. 220.
34. See David Day, Reluctant Nation: Australia and the Allied Defeat of Japan, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 181ff. Also John Edwards, ‘The Battle for Australia’, National Times, 6-11 February 1978.
35. Roger Bell, ‘Australian-American Discord: Negotiations for Postwar Bases and Security Arrangements in the Pacific 1944-46′, Australian Outlook, vol. 27, no. 1, 1973, pp. 15-16, 19-20.
36. James Wood, The Forgotten Force: The Australian Military Contribution to the Occupation of Japan, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1998, p. 16.
37. David Day, Reluctant Nation, p. 183.
38. John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, W.W. Norton, New York, 1999, p. 471.
39. Peter Dennis et al., The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1995, p. 323.
40. ‘Total Mobilisation Ordered: We Made Australia’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 February 1942, p. 9.
41. Quoted in Williamson, p. 184.
42. Johnston, Fighting the Enemy, p. 86.
43. Johnston, pp. 86, 85, 87.
44. Robert Hall, The Black Diggers: Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in the Second World War, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1989, p. 9.
45. Richard and Helen Walker, Curtin’s Cowboys: Australia’s Secret Bush Commandos, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1986, pp. 140, 149.
46. A. Blain, in Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, vol. 163, 23 May 1940, p. 1220.
47. Hall, p. 114.
48. Hall, pp. 114-17; see also ‘Donald Thomson’s Report’, Aboriginal History, vol. 16, no. 1, 1992, pp. 13-14.
49 Hall, p. 115.
50. Williamson, p. 170.
51. Daniel Connell, The War at Home: 1939 Australia 1949, ABC, Sydney, 1988, p. 50. On fears of a black fifth column, see also Alan Powell, The Shadow’s Edge: Australia’s Northern War, Charles Darwin University Press, Darwin, 2007, pp. 252-3.
52. Peter Biskup, Not Slaves, Not Citizens: The Aboriginal Problem in Western Australia, 1898-1954, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1973, p. 210.
53. Hall, p. 126.
54. Humphrey McQueen, Social Sketches of Australia 1888-2001, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2004, pp. 169-70.
55. Biskup, pp. 212ff.
56. Hall, p. 131.
57. Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A Documentary History, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1999, p. 161.
58. ‘Bert’ Beros, The Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels and Other Verses, F.H. Johnston Publishing, Sydney, 1945, pp. 24-5.
59. Nicholson Baker, interviewed by Ramona Koval, ‘Advancing Towards World War Two’, ABC Radio, 1 April 2008, at www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2008/2201788.htm.
60. The official Chinese government claim is 300,000. The Tokyo war crimes tribunal estimate was 200,000. See John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, Faber and Faber, London, 1986, p. 326, fn 26.
61. Paul Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943-1944, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1982, pp. 89-90, 97, 301; J.N. Uppal, Bengal Famine of 1943: A Man-Made Tragedy, Atma Ram and Sons, Delhi, 1984, pp. 188-96.
62. Gabriel Kolko says of Chiang Kai-shek’s military conscription system: ‘As a system of direct and indirect physical liquidation only the Nazi terror surpassed it during the war’ (The Politics of War: Allied Diplomacy and the World Crisis of 1943-45, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1968, p. 201). Kolko provides harrowing detail. See also June Grasso, Jay Corrin and Michael Kort, Modernisation and Revolution in China, M.E. Sharpe, London, 1997, p. 126. Further see Diana Lary, ‘The Waters Covered the Earth: China’s War-Induced Natural Disasters’, in Mark Selden and Alvin So (eds), War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century, Rowman and Littlefield, Oxford, 2004, pp. 147, 151-3 on the breaching of Yellow River dykes resulting in perhaps a million deaths.
63. Witold Rodzinski, A History of China, vol. 2, Pergamon, Oxford, 1983, pp. 168-9.
64. Robert Neale (ed.), Documents in Australian Foreign Policy 1937-1949, vol. 3, January-June 1940, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1975, documents 74-95, especially pp. 205-7.
65. Rupert Lockwood, Japan’s Heart of Wood, Current Book Distributors, Sydney, 1943.
66. Editorial: ‘The Epic of Iwo Jima’, Argus, 19 March 1945, p. 2.
67. Editorial: ‘Japanese Dilemma’, Argus, 10 April 1945, p. 2.
68. Brinsley Sheridan, ‘The Japanese as a Fighter’, Argus, 11 August 1945, p. 11.
69. Peter Williams and David Wallace, Unit 731: Japan’s Secret Biological Warfare in World War II, Free Press, New York, 1989, p. 47.
70. Firkins, p. 392.
71. Dower, Embracing Defeat, pp. 90-1.
72. Rees, p. 103.
73. We are used to thinking it took a superhuman effort by Australian troops to drive the Japanese out of Papua. But as a war correspondent explained, the Japanese fell back after getting close to Port Moresby because ‘they were exhausted, diseased and starving. They had no combat air support, no artillery except a few mountain guns hauled in pieces up and down muddy precipices, no transport planes to drop them food.’ See White, p. 208.
74. Hiroaki Sato, ‘Gyokusai or “Shattering like a Jewel”: Reflection on the Pacific War’, Japan Focus, 2008, at http://www.japanfocus.org/-Hiroaki-SATO/2662.
75. See Andrew Ross, Armed and Ready: The Industrial Development and Defence of Australia 1900-1945, Turton and Armstrong, Sydney, 1995, p. xv.
76. Quoted in Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002, p. 166. The reporter was unable to publish this at the time.

Tom O’Lincoln has published a number of books on Australian Left and labour history, and is writing one on Australia’s Pacific War.
© Tom O’Lincoln
Overland 194-autumn 2009, p. 64

Like this piece? Subscribe!