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In the March/April 2005 issue of Books & Culture, Don Yerxa interviewed the distinguished British military historian Max Hastings about his book Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945. Now Knopf has published a companion volume by Hastings on the last phase of the Pacific War. He talked about it with Yerxa at the Commonwealth Hotel in Boston earlier this year.
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How was the ending of World War II in Asia different from the endgame in Europe?
We make a mistake when we speak of World War II in the singular; in fact, we really should talk about the World Wars II. The war in Asia was fantastically different from the war in Europe. The only people who regarded the Asian and the European theaters as an integrated whole were Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and their respective chiefs of staff. For everyone else, if you were fighting in Europe, Asia seemed a very long way away; and if you were fighting in Asia, then Europe seemed incredibly remote. A lot of British people who kept diaries all through the war—because they were conscious that this was a huge event—stopped keeping them in May 1945. As far as they were concerned, when the Germans surrendered, the war was over. And, of course, this was very tough for those hundreds of thousands of young men still fighting and dying in Asia.
One of the key points is that nobody in Western Europe really doubted that Hitler had to be fought to the finish and that the only way the war was going to be won was by Allied armies defeating and occupying Germany. But in Asia, it all looked rather different. There were a lot of Allied leaders who had serious doubts whether Japan would have to be invaded and whether it was going to be necessary to have the same fight to the finish. Churchill suggested at the Cairo conference and later again at Yalta that there might be a case for modifying the terms with Japan to shorten the war. But British influence on what happened in Asia was always pretty marginal, and first Roosevelt and then Truman slapped Churchill down.
I must say that I concur with the doctrine of unconditional surrender. Some historians have argued that the Allies should have considered the self-esteem of the Japanese, recognized that the emperor was so important to them, and offered them terms—and that if we had done this, it wouldn't have been necessary to drop the atomic bomb. I don't buy any of this. The Japanese had launched a war of aggression in Asia, and it failed with hideous cost in life and treasure, not only to the United States but above all to the people of Asia. In the summer in 1945 it was time to pay, and for the life of me, I can't see why the government of the United States and the Allies should have been expected to humor Japanese sensibilities and Japanese self-esteem in the circumstances then pervading. Because the war in Asia is much less known in the United States and in Europe than the war in Europe, some people have said, "Hitler represented an absolute evil. Surely the Japanese weren't as bad." Well, if you consulted the people of Asia, they would remind you that at least 15 million Chinese died in World War II (against 300,000 Americans and 350,000 Brits). Five million people died in southeast Asia, many of them in the most horrible circumstances, all to serve the cause of Japanese imperialism.
One hears more and more the doctrine of moral equivalence, that's to say, the Germans did terrible things, especially the Holocaust, but the Allies destroyed cities and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. I don't accept this doctrine of moral equivalence at all. Of course, all nations are morally compromised to some degree when they take part in war. Almost everybody who takes part in war does things they are ashamed of afterward. But insofar as any war in history can be thought of in terms of a right side fighting against an evil one, then World War II is it. It is important to note that if at any time the Japanese had wanted to end the war, stop the fire bombings, and avoid Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all they had to do was surrender. Pearl Harbor, the Japanese entry into the war, the attacks on the Philippines and Burma, were vastly more popular with the Japanese people than Hitler's declaration of war and invasion of Poland in September 1939 were in Germany. So, I've chosen my title, Retribution, advisedly. I do think the Japanese people brought their terrible fate upon themselves.
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