The Pacific War

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THE speed with which Japan conquered Southeastern Asia and the Southwest Pacific is often contrasted with the painful slowness of our own advances. Why are we unable to return to our former positions in Asia as rapidly as we were ejected from them? Is it that our strategy is misconceived or that the Japanese are better fighting men?

The real reason is that we have not yet secured that complete command of the sea and the air on which speed depends. In this respect the defeat of Japan waits upon the defeat of the Axis in Europe.

Wherever we have command of the sea and the air the Japanese garrisons are doomed just as certainly as were our own men on Bataan, or as were the British in Singapore after the loss of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, But we do not yet have the bases from which to launch an overpowering offensive. Nor can we yet provide the overwhelming sea power which a vigorous offensive would call for.

Undermining Japan’s defenses

Japan has no way of successfully opposing our present strategy in the Pacific. She is compelled to surrender the bases we choose to attack, or to fight us on our own terms.

As the offensive develops in the Central and Northern Pacific, we begin to make more and more impression on Japan’s war machine. We are not destroying more planes than Japan is producing, but we are making serious inroads on her shipping. At this stage of the war it is much less important to kill Japanese than to destroy the ships and planes upon which the defense of their empire depends.

It was sound strategy which led, for example, to the by-passing of Kiska in favor of concentration on Attu. This is a pattern which will be repeated many times in the Southwest Pacific. It is a strategy for which our long-range bombers are being produced.

Our jumping-off places for attacks against the Japanese Empire are fantastic when compared with our bases around the European Fortress. Contrast Guadalcanal, the Hawaiian Islands, Attu, Chungking, Northern India, Port Darwin, and Port Moresby with the concentrated industrial might of Great Britain and with the Soviet Union.

We lack the advantage, which the Japanese used so effectively, of controlling air and naval bases on the coast of continental Asia. We have to conquer the deserts of Central Asia, the mountains of India, the vast spaces of the Pacific, and the cold wastes of Alaska. Even when Hitler is defeated we shall have made only a beginning in the Pacific.

Japan’s advance has been stopped but she has not been compelled to give up all thought of further aggression. One of the main reasons she has remained inactive for so long a period is the failure of Germany to take Cairo and Stalingrad last year. The Chinese are fond of pointing out that Japan’s aggression in the East opened the way to the rise of Fascism in Europe. But Japan’s major conquests were not made until Germany apparently had Europe at her feet.

Japan, Italy, and Germany

Japan, like Italy, came into the conflict when she thought the democratic world was on its last legs. Like Italy, Japan miscalculated and sooner or later will have to take the consequences.

The comparison of Japan with Germany holds in spite of the contrast between their industrial potentials. Japan is unquestionably the sole industrial power of Eastern Asia, whereas Germany has strong competitors on her doorstep. A further comparison, however, throws a great deal of light on the strategic positions of both of these allies: Germany has her main armies tied up in conflict with the Soviet Union, but she cannot win without destroying British and American naval power. Japan has the major part of her army on the continent watching Russia, fighting China, and occupying Southeastern Asia. Thus Japan, also, cannot win without victory on the sea.

The present disposition of Japan’s forces reveals the importance of her continental empire. Japan maintains thirty-nine divisions in Manchuria and Korea, thirty in China, ten in Southeastern Asia, and eighteen in the Pacific islands. To these we must add about five divisions of puppet troops. By this time next year it is possible that there will be ten or more divisions of Chinese puppet troops whom Japan claims to be arming with weapons captured from us in the Pacific.

Will the “Co-prosperity Sphere” crack?

How solid is this empire of Japan’s? When the really heavy blows begin, will the satellite and occupied countries try to dissociate themselves from the Japanese? Will they fight for us or remain passively indifferent? Japan is making every effort to consolidate her political empire. The techniques vary from buying off Thailand to crowning puppets with the laurels of democracy.

Japan’s basic purpose is to strengthen her own direct rule over all the people she has conquered and to have nothing stand in the way of the imperial will. We can expect to see constantly recurring reorganizations of internal administration. But the basic Japanese rule will be concealed behind the fiction that the members of the Co-prosperity Sphere are independent nations, with Japan merely the first among equals.

This fiction — which has been extended to Burma and reinforced in Occupied China by giving the Nanking government the right to tax Japanese nationals — has several advantages. At least on paper Japan has given to Oriental peoples all the things that other imperial powers either refused or gave reluctantly. But she has also driven out the imperial powers. At the same time the illusion is created that Japan is supported by Asiatic allies; she stands out, it might be said, as the arsenal of Asia in its struggle against the white man’s world.

Slant-eyed quislings wanted

The mistress of the Asiatic Fortress still looks with covetous eyes upon India. Japan is attempting to manufacture a fifth column in India with the assistance of Subhas Bose, who is directing a radio campaign to get the Indian people to revolt. In Singapore last month he was given the presidency of the Indian Independence League and declared his intention of setting up a Provisional Government of Free India and an Indian national army.

It is difficult to say whether this army is fictitious or real. Most of the Indians outside India are certainly not good material for soldiers, being mainly moneylenders and merchants, but there is no reason to doubt the reality of the army as a radio argument. Vigorous appeals to India to win independence by force of arms from within are broadcast from Asia and from Europe. The Japanese try to sell themselves to Burma as coreligionists of Buddhist persuasion, while they urge the pacifists and nationalists of India to fight.

The East Asia Religious League

Japan’s whole religious policy, indeed, is a further key to an understanding of the co-prosperity scheme. As with Germany, the underlying idea is state control over all religious bodies. The Imperial Rule Assistance Association, one of most powerful instruments of government, was behind what it called an attempt to realize “the closest religious coöperation among member races in the Co-prosperity Sphere.”An East Asia Religious League was set up a few weeks ago. It includes Shinto, Buddhism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism.

The League’s message informed the world that “it is the common task of religious men to liberate the oppressed from oppression and give coöperation for the liberation of humanity from Anglo-American oppression.”The German radio loyally intoned the message that “more than race it is Buddhism which unites Japanese and Chinese and the peoples of Southeastern Asia and Eastern India.”

The Germans were particularly impressed by the fact that Japan has been able to use religious organizations to collect money for the war. Evidently Japan is having some success in seducing religious groups to serve the government’s purposes. But there is no question as to what will happen to persons or groups which put religion before any policy, however unimportant, proposed by the state.

The Japanese naturally make full use of their newly acquired Catholic subjects. Tokyo Radio claims that the Pope is a popular figure in Japan, because he shares the ideals for which Japan is fighting.

The Pope’s statement on the bombing of civilian populations was reported from Tokyo with simple dignity: “We are very calm and serenely proud when we think that the reproach coming from such a high moral authority does not concern us . . . because in the course of this war ... we have respected the principles of humanity.... No one can accuse us of having bombed the civilian populations, churches, hospitals, or educational establishments.”

Japan’s rebellious subjects

No one can anticipate the behavior of Japan’s conquered peoples when liberating armies are at the gates. One straw in the wind, however, is the long history of the movement to liberate one of Japan’s earliest victims, the small kingdom of Korea. After two generations of Japanese rule of a harshness not sufficiently appreciated abroad, there is still some evidence that the spirit of Korea has not been completely broken.

There has been a Korean Provisional Government since 1919 when it was established in Shanghai. A strong Korean movement exists in the Soviet Union. In 1940 a Korean revolutionary army, later recognized by the National Government of China, came into existence. More recently there have been attempts to consolidate Korean political groups.

All this activity outside Korea has a direct relation to the continuing fires of resistance within the country. The Korean people would still be ready to fight against the Japanese if they had an opportunity. Both within and outside Korea there is plenty of evidence to show that the Koreans have kept up the struggle. The last Japanese ambassador to the United States, Admiral Nomura, lost his right eye at the hands of a Korean. In April, 1932, Shigemitsu had his leg broken by a bomb thrown by a Korean in Shanghai. Emperor Hirohito himself nearly lost his life at the hands of a Korean patriot. Although Korean political groups are too divided for any one of them to receive official recognition as the rightful government of Korea, the story of Korean opposition to the Japanese is significant and encouraging.

The significant part of the Korean story is that Japan spared no pains to crush all traces of Korean nationalism and culture. It ruled through a military police system whose brutality is a byword in the East. Koreans have no civil liberties; they are imprisoned, tortured, or shot without trial or appeal.

Former American residents in Formosa, to take an example of a country occupied even longer than Korea, were impressed by the number of police the Japanese considered necessary in order to feel secure. When the Chinese raided Formosa early in the SinoJapanese conflict, the air-raid alarm was not sounded until hours after the bombers had returned to China. The Japanese had used the time to set up machine guns in the street.

The Japanese system of political control can be counted on to keep resistance alive, but that resistance is useless until a few hours before liberating armies arrive. For the most part it is unorganized and leaderless. There is no use trying to use it at this stage of the war, but our task will be much easier if we can enlist such assistance as can be expected from disaffected subjects of the Japanese in the final stages of the campaign.

Chinese publicists fret

Discussion of China’s role in the war should always be considered in the light of China’s military and political resistance to Japan. Recent discussions of China in the American press have brought out two main theses:—

1. That the present government of China is politically reactionary to such an extent that it is a drag upon the war effort.

2. That China’s war effort is unimportant and cannot be resuscitated by injections of American material.

If these charges are true, the course of the war in Asia will lie seriously affected to our disadvantage. How true are they?

China must be judged in terms of China’s development, not in terms of the angry writings of Chinese publicists in America. The Chinese government is undoubtedly critical of the war effort, but this feeling springs more from disappointment over our military failure in the Pacific, following Pearl Harbor, and from the difficulties arising out of virtual isolation, following the loss of Burma, than from shifts within the government itself.

These shifts, which are caused mainly by the destruction of the modernized areas of China, are important, but they have not affected China’s fundamental will to resist, which is the chief thing. It is true that the united front, between the National Government and the Communist armies is more tenuous than it has ever been before, but that is largely due to the slower tempo of fighting.

It requires very little imagination to envision the complete change in the political atmosphere in China that would come about as a result of an obviously determined effort to smash our way into that country. The whole outlook of the people would change; present tensions would disappear, and political parties which now have the leisure to think of their differences might well find coöperation easier when the common objective of defeating Japan is within measurable distance.

The time will come when the routes to China will be open again. Until that time, many of the present tensions between China and her allies can be expected to remain.