War Crimes on the Road to Pearl Harbor by Craig Nelson
In August 1937 Japanese troops invaded Shanghai. Chinese resistance was strong, and
it took four months for the Imperial Japanese Army to triumph. The
Japanese then burned the town of Sung-chiang to the ground, killing
100,000 civilians, and slaughtered nearly the whole 350,000 population
of ancient Suzhou on November 19. “Smoldering ruins and
deserted streets present an eerie spectacle, the only living creatures
being dogs unnaturally fattened by feasting on corpses,” Manchester’s
Guardian reported.
Surging up the Yangtze River, the Imperial Japanese Army was by
the second week of December assaulting Chiang’s capital, Nanking.
As the Chinese abandoned their homes and the last of the Americans
were extricated from the city by embassy staff, the American gunboat
Panay waited at anchor in Nanking harbor to escort the last of the US
consulate to safety. After the evacuees boarded on December 11, Panay
sailed upriver to avoid the barrage of gunfire.*
On December 12, Japanese pilots were ordered to attack “any and
all ships” in the river above Nanking. Knowing Panay was there, the
aviators asked for confirmation of the order. It was confirmed. For
twenty minutes, the Japanese bombed and strafed the American gunboat,
injuring the captain and several others. Finally Panay was abandoned,
as were two of her accompanying tanker barges. Survivors
reported that the Japanese even strafed the reeds along the riverbanks
where they were swimming to shore.
The crew and embassy staff were cared for by local Chinese for
two days until they could be taken aboard HMS Ladybird and USS
Oahu. The final tally was three dead, with an additional forty-three
sailors and five civilians wounded. Instead of any military retaliation,
though, the United States requested the Japanese pay $2.2 million in
reparations and make “a formally recorded expression of regret, an
undertaking to make complete and comprehensive indemnifications;
and an assurance that definite and specific steps have been taken which
will insure that hereafter American nationals, interests and property
in China will not be subjected to attack by Japanese armed forces or
unlawful interference by any Japanese authorities or forces.” The US
State Department explained, “The overwhelming endorsement given
by the people of the United States to the manner in which the Panay
incident was settled attested to their earnest desire to keep the United
States out of war.”
When the Nationalist capital fell on December 13, 1937, fifty thousand
Japanese soldiers took control of a metropolis of half a million.
Posters were tacked on street corners: trust our japanese army—
they will protect and feed you. Going neighborhood by neighborhood,
the conquerors eased Chinese civilians into surrender and
divided them up into groups of around 150. The new commander
in chief of the Nanking area army was a prince, Lieutenant General
Yasuhiko Asaka, given the job by his nephew Hirohito. His order: “Kill
all captives.”
Historian Iris Chang: “The Japanese would take any men they
found as prisoners, neglect to give them water or food for days, but
promise them food and work. After days of such treatment, the Japanese
would bind the wrists of their victims securely with wire or rope
and herd them out to some isolated area. The men, too tired or dehydrated
to rebel, went out eagerly, thinking they would be fed. By the
time they saw the machine guns, or the blooded swords and bayonets
wielded by waiting soldiers, or the massive graves, heaped and reeking
with the bodies of the men who had preceded them, it was already too
late to escape.”
Kuomintang forces fled to inland Chongqing, and Japanese soldiers
rampaged through the streets of Nanking for months on end in what
became known as Nanjing Datusha—the Rape of Nanking—
killing somewhere between 260,000 and 350,000 civilians
. . . the exact number is still unknown. Japanese military correspondents reported back
to their Tokyo readers, “One by one the prisoners fell down to the
outside of the wall. Blood splattered everywhere. The chilling atmosphere
made one’s hair stand on end and limbs tremble with fear. I
stood there at a total loss and did not know what to do. . . . There was
the dark silhouette of a mountain made of dead bodies. About fifty
to one hundred people were toiling there, dragging bodies from the
mountain of corpses and throwing them into the Yangtze River. The
bodies dripped blood, some of them still alive and moaning weakly,
their limbs twitching. . . . After a while, the coolies had done their job
of dragging corpses and the soldiers lined them up along the river.
Rat-tat-tat machine-gun fire could be heard. The coolies fell backwards
into the river and were swallowed by the raging currents. . . .
Those in the first row were beheaded, those in the second row were
forced to dump the severed bodies into the river before they themselves
were beheaded. The killing went on nonstop, from morning
until night. . . . I’ve seen piled-up bodies in the Great Quake in Tokyo,
but nothing compared to this.”
A Japanese veteran of Nanking, Hakudo Nagatomi, remembered the
details: “Few know that soldiers impaled babies on bayonets and tossed
them still alive into pots of boiling water. They gang-raped women
from the ages of twelve to eighty and then killed them when they could
no longer satisfy sexual requirements. I beheaded people, starved them
to death, burned them, and buried them alive, over two hundred in all.
It is terrible that I could turn into an animal and do these things. There
are really no words to explain what I was doing. I was truly a devil. . . .
Soldiers would force one group of Chinese captives to dig a grave, a
second group to bury the first, and then a third group to bury the second,
and so on. . . . One method of entertainment was to drive mobs
of Chinese to the top stories or roofs of buildings, tear down the stairs,
and set the bottom floors on fire. . . . Another form of amusement
involved dousing victims with fuel, shooting them, and watching them
explode into flame. . . . Many women in their eighties were raped to
death. . . . Chinese witnesses saw Japanese rape girls under ten years of
age in the streets and then slash them in half by sword. In some cases,
the Japanese sliced open the vaginas of preteen girls in order to ravish
them more effectively. . . . After gang rape, Japanese soldiers sometimes
slashed open the bellies of pregnant women and ripped out the
fetuses for amusement. . . . The Japanese raped a barber’s wife and then
stuck a firecracker in her vagina. It blew up and killed her.”
Beyond raping somewhere between twenty thousand to eighty thousand
women, the Japanese disemboweled them, cut off their breasts,
tried to see how deeply they could punch their way inside their vaginas,
had fathers rape daughters and sons rape mothers while the rest of the
family watched, nailed women to walls, carved organs out of the bodies,
hung women from hooks by their tongues, and buried young men
up to their waists for the sport of unleashing German shepherd attack
dogs to tear them apart. Raping a virgin, some believed, made you
stronger; carrying a packet of their pubic hair could protect you from
injury. After raping, Nagatomi remembered, “We always stabbed and
killed them. Because dead bodies don’t talk. . . . Perhaps when we were
raping her, we looked at her as a woman, but when we killed her, we
just thought of her as something like a pig.” In time the Imperial Japanese
Army would establish “comfort houses,” or brothels, stocked by
captured Taiwanese, Korean, and Chinese women, who were referred
to as “public toilets.”
An anonymous soldier remembered, “I personally severed more
than forty heads. Today, I no longer remember each of them well. It
might sound extreme, but I can almost say that if more than two weeks
went by without my taking a head, I didn’t feel right. Physically, I
needed to be refreshed. I would go to the stockade and bring someone
out, one who looked as if he wouldn’t live long. I’d do it on the riverbank,
by the regimental headquarters, or by the side of the road. . . . A
good sword could cause a head to drop with just an easy motion. But
even I sometimes botched the job. . . . Sometimes I’d hit the shoulder.
Once a lung popped out, almost like a balloon. I was shocked. All
I could do was hit the base of the neck with my full strength. Blood
spurted out. Arteries were cut, you see. The man fell immediately,
but it wasn’t a water faucet, so it soon stopped. Looking at that, I felt
ecstasy. . . . It was almost like being addicted to murder. When I met
people, I often looked at their necks and made a judgment. Is this an
easy neck, or hard to cut?”
While the Japanese military and her civilian government would
frequently give speeches promoting their policy of “Asia for Asians,”
the Rape of Nanking would instead turn out to be one element in a
cavalcade of gruesome Japanese war crimes against Asians. Starting
in 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army began using chemical weapons
on the Chinese, escalating to lewisite, phosgene, chlorine, and nausea
red gases in 1938, and then mustard gas in 1939. Over the ensuing
decade, the Japanese army built and staffed a “water purification unit”
outside the Manchurian city of Harbin, which was in fact a testing
ground for bacterial warfare, using prisoners as living guinea pigs to
be infected with bubonic plague, pneumonia, epidemic hemorrhagic
fever, typhoid, and syphilis. Founded by an army medical lieutenant
general, Shiro Ishii, it was known as Unit 731.
Where did this barbarism come from? One Asian scholar, Robert
Edgerton, believes that Japanese soldiers were once among the world’s
finest, but their attitudes changed in the 1930s. Bushido, their military
code of honor inherited from the samurai, was now interpreted as
meaning no soldier would be held accountable for crimes committed
against an enemy. Many found guidance from Tsunetomo Yamamoto’s
eighteenth-century Book of the Samurai: “Meditation on inevitable
death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind
are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows,
rifles, spears, and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being
thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being
shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from a thousand-foot
cliff, dying of disease, or committing seppuku [suicide by disembowelment]
at the death of one’s master. And every day without fail one
should consider himself as dead.”
Japan, then, had the appearance of a civilian government, but it was
a de facto military dictatorship. Yet, unlike the smooth governance
offered by other fascists, all of this resulted in anarchy. In the fourteen
years of the Great East Asia War—from 1931’s Manchurian Incident,
to 1945’s unconditional surrender—Japan was led by fifteen different
prime ministers. This wasn’t just a fascistic and chaotic government;
it was one so marred by threats of domestic violence that even the
revered emperor regularly feared his assassination. One simple expla-
nation for Pearl Harbor, then, is the great difficulty American leaders
had in crafting an effective defense strategy against an enemy that had
lost its mind.
*Panay’s launch, on November 1, 1927, had been ominous. Chinese bandits had
stolen the grease to be used to slip her from Shanghai’s Kiangnan Dockyard and
Engineering Works into the water, substituting a cheap replacement. Instead of
launching stern-first, Panay slid sideways out of dry dock, coming to a stop halfway
down the rails. This, as any sailor knows, is a dark portent.
“Excerpted from Pearl Harbor: From Greatness to Infamy by Craig Nelson. Copyright © 2016 by Craig Nelson. Published by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Reprinted with permission.”
What Inspired You To Write PEARL HARBOR: From Infamy to Greatness?
On 9/11, I saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center from my roof deck about a mile away, I started being afraid of planes flying overhead. I’d see one and think, Why is it there? Where is it going? So I did research to try and cure this phobia, and discovered that thousands of Pearl Harbor survivors had the exact same fear. I’d written The First Heroes about the American reaction to Pearl Harbor — how the Doolittle Raid inspired Americans to believe that the Allies might win World War II. Then, I realized the 75th anniversary was coming, and that this may be the last moment to capture that history before it all fades away. The median age of Pearl Harbor survivors is around 93. I knew the time was now.
What are the things most Americans don’t know about Pearl Harbor?
After five years of research, I’ve decided that Pearl Harbor is the most important moment in modern American history. America’s role on the global stage, the size of our state department and foreign aid programs, the creation of the strongest fighting force the world has ever known, the size of our intelligence agencies, the birth of our nuclear arsenal, and the fact that there has been no World War III in seven decades — all began at Pearl Harbor. After reading this book you will see how the country we live in today was born not on July 4, 1776 but on December 7, 1941.
How did it happen?
Japan’s rush to war with the United States has usually been portrayed as a unstoppable force headed by war-mongering fascists. Instead, nearly the whole of Japan’s navy did not want to attack American soil and it took a number of years for the army to cow them into it. Along the way, nearly every Japanese leader, from Emperor Hirohito to General Tojo to Admiral Yamamoto, had mixed feelings about going ahead, swinging back and forth between war and peace. During this tumultuous period, it would have been fairly easy for Washington to talk Tokyo into a treaty, and Pearl Harbor might never have happened.
Instead, when I looked at General Marshall and Admiral Stark’s memos to Roosevelt and Secretary of War Stimson’s diaries from that time, I found how frequently the U.S. military insisted that Oahu was an impregnable fortress, and that Japan would never attack it. This inspired Roosevelt and Secretary of State Hull to be diplomatically belligerent with Tokyo. Stimson said that he knew the Asiatic mind, and that the Japanese would only respond to roughness. Instead the Japanese felt like they were being pushed into a corner. Finally on November 5, 1941, the US navy and army admitted that Japan’s forces in the Pacific were far greater than America’s, and begged Roosevelt to stall for time. But it was too late. By that time, Japanese leaders were living in an echo chamber, hypnotizing themselves out of any kind of logic. It was impossible then, as it is now, for the U.S. military to create a defense strategy against an enemy that has lost its mind.
Why was this the day of infamy?
When they saw the situation turning hopeless, Japan’s ambassadors in Washington went behind the backs of their government to urge that Roosevelt directly write Hirohito a letter of friendship to resolve their nations’ differences. The president did it, but an army officer stationed at Tokyo’s cable office made sure that his message arrived too late at the Imperial Palace. That same Major Morio Tomura then delayed Tokyo’s own cable to Washington ending diplomatic negotiations, so that Pearl Harbor was attacked before the announcement was formally presented.
What are your favorite moments in the book?
One great story comes from the lead Japanese dive bomber, Zenji Abe. Years after the war when he was a police officer, Abe learned that Tokyo had not declared war before attacking America, and he was mortified with shame. He spent the 1980s traveling across Japan to find the surviving airmen who’d participated in the attack and convinced them to sign a letter of apology. He then tracked down the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association and the home address of one of its officers. Abe flew to Atlanta with his letter, spent two hours in a taxi getting to the house, and knocked on the door. He explained who he was in halting English, and showed the man his letter. The American sailor told the Japanese pilot that he could take his letter and shove it up his ass, and slammed the door. Crushed, Abe went home, but he refused to give up. He began the Japan Friends of Pearl Harbor Society, and convinced a group of his fellow pilots to come to Hawaii for the fiftieth anniversary. There they met a marine from the West Virginia, a bugler by the name of Richard Fiske, who had not only survived Pearl Harbor, but also the battle of Iwo Jima, which killed sixty-eight hundred Americans and nineteen thousand Japanese. Fiske called Iwo Jima “thirty-six straight days of Pearl Harbor.” The marine had spent his postwar decades so filled with loathing for the Japanese that thinking about them made him physically sick.
When Fiske met the men who had been his lifelong enemies in person and suddenly saw them as human beings, as soldiers like himself, he “suddenly hugged me,” Takeshi Maeda said. “He was maybe as tall or a little taller than me. And I saw tears coming out of his eyes. And I told him, ‘I’m sorry for sinking your ship.’ But he said, ‘No, don’t say sorry, because it was a war between two nations. And we were soldiers, and it was our duty to fight. And there is no need for you or I to be sorry.’ ”
Later, Richard Fiske said: “We didn’t even shake hands, we just hugged each other. I’ll never forget that. Bringing the Japanese veterans and the American veterans together . . . I think it’s one of the greatest things that ever happened. Because it shows the world that here are two opposites, and now they’ve clasped their hands in friendship.”
After five years spent on this history, and so much of that time seeing the worst that people can do, I was so happy to see the best …
Some Pearl Harbor mysteries remain to this day. On November 22, 1941, a series of ads appeared in the New Yorker magazine for what was called “Chicago’s favorite game: THE DEADLY DOUBLE.” Under the headline “Achtung, Warning, Alerte!” it pictured a group of people sheltered from an air raid, playing dice numbered 12 and 7 — numbers on no known dice. Military intelligence investigated whether this was a secret warning, but every lead was a dead end. The ad’s copy had been presented in person at the magazine’s offices, and the fee paid with cash. Neither the game offered in the ad, nor the company that purported to make it, ever existed.
Another amazing story is that during the attack, a kitchen attendant, a busboy really, aboard the West Virginia, named Doris Miller, had just received a few hours of training in gunnery. Miller jumped onto an antiaircraft cannon and became one of the heroes of Pearl Harbor. But because he was black, he received a Navy Cross instead of a Medal of Honor. Doris Miller then died a few years later when his ship went down outside the Philippines, but the unfairness of his not getting that Medal of Honor made him an emblem for the civil rights movement, that eventually led to Harry Truman finally integrating the defense department in 1948.
One of my favorite discoveries was finding out that the first official news from Washington that Americans heard was from Eleanor Roosevelt, who had a weekly radio show on Sundays, listened to by 45 million. Every listener knew the Roosevelts had four sons all serving their country.
One last great one: When the man who led Japan into war, Hideki Tojo, was captured by the Americans, an American dentist made him new dentures. And he had ‘Remember Pearl Harbor’ inscribed into them in Morse code.
How did you research this story?
December 7, 1941 is the most written-about moment in American history, and when I first started out, the job seemed overwhelming. I decided that the solution was to redo the research from scratch through archives and libraries, and hired a team to help me. The key source materials are huge. The federal government’s archives in Washington is a stack of documents 48 feet long, 6 times the size of me, and arrives on its own trolley. Japan’s World War II documents have been published. They are 102 volumes. On top of all this were the memoirs and diaries of the key figures on both sides. The five years of research produced almost a million pages of notes which became the foundation of this book.
What was the most difficult part of PEARL HARBOR to convey?
That old saying “If only one man dies, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s statistics” is true; it was very hard to get across the human drama of such a massive event. I tried to solve that by bringing the lost and the found back to life through the massive oral history archives, including the Pearl Harbor Survivors’ Association; the National Archives and the Navy in Washington; the state of Hawaii in Honolulu; and a Japanese-American trove in California. If I couldn’t reach them in person, at least I could honor their lives by letting them speak for themselves.
What would you like your readers to take away from this book?
Few Americans realize how dramatically this one moment changed America in every way. After you read this book, you’ll see what a signal and earth-shaking event Pearl Harbor was in American history. Everything that happened in the wake of 9/11, to take one example, in defense, in security, in intelligence, in diplomacy, was just an amplification of the United States reaction to Pearl Harbor. And those key changes are still with us, 75 years later …
How to order: Pearl Harbor: From Greatness to Infamy by Craig Nelson is available everywhere books are sold – Amazon, Barnes & Noble or your favorite independent bookstore.