Category Archives: Europe

by | 13 July 2020 · 9:40 am

Islands Seeking Hawaiian Protection

From A Power in the World, by Lorenz Gonschor (Perspectives on the Global Past, U. Hawaii Press, 2019), Kindle Loc. c. 2340ff:

Unsurprisingly, one of the key elements of this reassertion of Hawaiian political, cultural, and spiritual identity during Gibson’s premiership was a public reiteration of the concept of Hawaiian primacy in the Pacific. In late 1880, still dealing with the aftermath of the Moreno affair and preparing for his voyage around the world, Kalākaua had received a request by Tonga’s King George Tupou I to enter negotiations for a friendship treaty with Hawai‘i, modeled after those Tonga had already concluded with Germany in 1876 and Great Britain in 1879. The Hawaiian king had responded enthusiastically. Tonga did not follow through on it, however, likely because it experienced domestic instability throughout the 1880s (Rutherford 1996, 143). Against this backdrop of renewed interest in the South Pacific for engagement with Hawai‘i, shortly after the king’s return from the world tour, Gibson had once more written an editorial urging that “the policy of this kingdom should be to assist, in every way that is practicable, to preserve the independence of all those communities of Polynesian race which have not already been driven by circumstances to seek the protection of foreign Powers.” He went on to mention “the significant fact that twenty years ago the Hawaiian Government had been thus represented in the South Pacific by a Commissioner, Mr. St. Julian, whose assistance had been gladly availed of by the inhabitants of the islands.” When this proposal was ridiculed by the Missionary Party press, Gibson had provided a lengthy Hawaiian-language rebuttal, written as a fictional discussion between a Hawaiian diplomat and the minister of foreign affairs of the island of Rarotonga. As the new head of the foreign office, Gibson had now full access to the department’s archives and further studied St. Julian’s earlier correspondence with Wyllie (Bailey 1980, 200–201). Being of like mind with the king on this matter, the two men now intended to bring those visionary ideas to fruition at last.

At the same time, during 1882 and 1883, petitions were received from Butaritari and Abaiang in the Gilbert Islands, asking for Hawaiian protection or outright annexation by the kingdom (Horn 1951, 62). One such petition had already been received in 1878 from Tabiteuea in the same archipelago (60), which had led to detailed discussions in the English-language press, referring to Wyllie’s and St. Julian’s earlier project. Replying to these requests, Kalākaua refused outright Hawaiian annexation but declared his intent to establish closer political relations with the islands’ leaders and unsuccessfully invited them to attend his coronation (63). In May 1883, the king of the Tokelauan atoll of Fakaofo also wrote Kalākaua, requesting him to bring back his people who had left the island. To follow up with the Gilbertese chiefs, in July 1883, Gibson commissioned Alfred Tripp, a ship captain involved in recruiting Gilbertese laborers who had been a member of Kalākaua’s privy council since 1874, as special commissioner for Central and Western Polynesia. Tripp’s mission was cut short because his ship was wrecked in the Gilbert Islands, but he communicated with all major chiefs of that archipelago and brought home more petitions for Hawaiian aid or protection.

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by | 8 July 2020 · 11:40 am

Kalākaua as pan-Austronesianist

From A Power in the World, by Lorenz Gonschor (Perspectives on the Global Past, U. Hawaii Press, 2019), Kindle Locs. c. 2060, 2160:

During Kalākaua’s stay in Bangkok, relations with King Chulalongkorn of Siam were similarly warm and deep, and included the mutual conferral of high decorations. Like the Meiji Emperor and Viceroy Li, Chulalongkorn was presiding over a rapidly modernizing non-Western nation attempting to reach parity by hybridizing its system of government (Wyatt 1969, 1976, 2003, 166–209; Baker and Phongpaichit 2005, 47–80). Unfortunately, documentation of what exactly might have come out of possible discussions about Siam joining the proposed pan-Asian league has not been found.

During the following visit in Johor, at the southern tip of present-day Malaysia, relations between the Hawaiian king and another non-Western ruler reached another climax. Johor’s ruler, Maharajah Abu-Bakar, was another monarch using the tools of modernity to secure a certain degree of parity for his country (Trocki 1979; Andaya and Andaya 2001, 173–174, 202; Keng 2014). Because he had traveled extensively on his own, Abu-Bakar was Kalākaua’s first non-Western host as fluent in English as himself, so they could talk without an interpreter. But this more familiar atmosphere aside, the king also found the maharajah physically quite similar to a Hawaiian ali‘i, specifically, the late Prince Leleiohōkū I. As Kalākaua remarked in a letter to his brother-in-law, “if [the maharajah] could have spoken our language I would take him to be one of our people the resemblance being so strong.” Although Abu-Bakar could not speak Kalākaua’s native language, the two monarchs compared words in Hawaiian and Malay, and within a few minutes could identify a number of them that the two Austronesian languages had in common, and they reflected on the common origins of their peoples (Armstrong 1977, 44; Requilmán 2002, 164). Back home, Gibson was delighted to see his long-time vision of pan-Austronesian relations finally become reality and used the comparison between the two realms to point out flaws in the current state of affairs in Hawai‘i:

We are very glad that our Hawaiian King visited a Malay sovereign, the Maharajah of Johore: that His Majesty recognized striking evidences of kinship between Hawaiian and Malay: that His Majesty observed that these brown cognates of Johore were healthy, prolific and an increasing people, though living under the guidance and dominion of the European race; that His Majesty recognizes that there is no natural law, or destiny, that the brown races shall pass away in the presence of the whites, as is alleged in Polynesia; and that evidently decay and decline among His Majesty’s native people must be the results of some mischievous interferences with the natural order of things, and of hurtful radical changes affecting the sanitary condition of the aborigines of Polynesia.

…

Kalākaua maintained close relations with the court of Johor during the rest of his reign, attested by a steady exchange of letters between the two monarchs and their government officials throughout the 1880s. It was likely similar considerations of pan-Austronesian solidarity that later motivated Kalākaua to include Queen Ranavalona III of Madagascar among the heads of state he notified via autographed letters of the death of his sister Likelike in February 1887. Like Siam and Johor, the Kingdom of Madagascar was another non-Western hybrid state using strategies of selective similitude to achieve international parity (Valette 1979; Esoavelomandroso 1979; Brown 2006). At the time of Kalākaua’s letter, however, Queen Ranavalona’s government was embattled by French imperialism, which had led to the forcing of a French protectorate on the Indian Ocean island kingdom in 1885 and would culminate in the French conquest and colonial annexation of the island in 1896 (Randrianarisoa 1997). Hence, Kalākaua’s gesture to include the Malagasy queen among the heads of state of the world should be seen as a remarkable gesture of pan-Austronesian anticolonial solidarity.

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by | 23 June 2020 · 5:36 am

Fates of Foreigners in Shanghai, 1942

From Last Boat Out of Shanghai, by Helen Zia (Ballantine, 2019), Kindle pp. 129-132:

Once Britain and the United States declared war against Japan, life for Shanghailanders—the foreigners—swiftly changed. Immediately after December 8, 1941, all Allied nationals aged fourteen and above had to report to the Hamilton House near the Bund to register with Japanese gendarmes and receive ID numbers, as well as the red armbands they would have to wear at all times when in public.

Worse yet, Japan froze all bank accounts belonging to its enemy nationals. They were allowed to withdraw only two thousand yuan each month—a paltry amount for foreigners accustomed to pampered Shanghai lifestyles, effectively reducing them to the same income level as their Chinese servants. Each day, the Japanese military issued new edicts that further restricted where foreign Allied nationals could go, what they were allowed to do, how they conducted their lives.

Faced with bitter austerity, the Allied nationals were in a bind. Many expatriates worked for American telephone, gas, and electric utilities or the British waterworks, police, port, and customs. Now these entities were controlled by Japan, aiding its war effort. If Allied Shanghailanders quit their enemy-supervised jobs, they’d be stuck in China, destitute. Plenty of British bobbies, former coworkers of Pan Da, stayed on as members of the Shanghai Municipal Police—enforcing the will of Japan to crush all resistance. When their fellow Americans and Britons back home learned of their work for the enemy, they angrily denounced them, accusing them of collaboration, even treason….

At the start of the war in Europe in 1939, after Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland, Denmark had been a neutral country. As a Dane in Shanghai, Kristian Jarldane had expected his Danish passport to shield his family from trouble. Before Pearl Harbor, his household in the French Concession had carried on as if things were normal, in spite of the war outside their home. Bing and Ma watched baby Ole while Elder Sister socialized. Kristian still had his engineering job with the Shanghai Water Conservancy, which paid him in foreign currency—better than gold in the inflationary wartime economy. He joined other Shanghailanders in maintaining the three-hour lunchtime “tiffins,” as well as afternoon high tea. Kristian would return to the apartment promptly at four o’clock for some strong English tea and thick slabs of dark bread from his favorite Russian-Jewish boulangerie, to be served with eel, fish, or some other meat fried in pork fat and onions.

But the expanding world war began to disrupt everything. The first shock hit Elder Sister and her husband on April 9, 1940, when Germany invaded Denmark. The Copenhagen government immediately surrendered to the Third Reich, becoming part of the Axis with Germany, Japan, and Italy. The couple wondered if that would be a plus in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. As a Dane, Kristian wasn’t required to wear an armband, nor was he subject to the mortifying financial restrictions confronting other Shanghailanders. He had plenty of company, for the nationals of other Axis-occupied countries were also exempt, as were the stateless White Russians, Ashkenazi Jews, and Indian Sikhs. But then, one week after all Allied nationals had to register, Kristian received orders from the Danish consular staff. He was required to provide them with the names and contact information of all Danish members of his household. Everyone in occupied Shanghai was to be accounted for….

In early 1943, the Japanese issued the order that Shanghailanders had dreaded: All citizens of Allied countries were to be imprisoned. Kristian and Elder Sister watched helplessly as friends and neighbors were loaded onto trucks and shipped to one of the eight crowded and squalid internment camps on the outskirts of the city. Most of them were British and American men, women, and children. Some were forced to walk for miles and carry their own baggage, like coolies. Because the prominent Sassoons, Hardoons, and Kadoories—wealthy Baghdadi Jewish families who had lived in Shanghai for many years—were British citizens, they, too, were subject to internment. About seventy-six hundred Americans, British, Dutch, and other civilians were imprisoned between January and July 1943 to “prevent fifth-column activities and guarantee stabilized livelihood for the enemy nationals,” according to the pro-Japan Shanghai Times. Ironically, this same rationale was being used by the U.S. government to incarcerate 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent in 1942—and duly noted by Japanese propagandists to label critics as hypocrites.

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by | 28 May 2020 · 1:36 pm

Why Japanese Migrated to New Guinea

From Nanshin: Japanese settlers in Papua and New Guinea, 1890–1949, by Hiromitsu Iwamoto (Journal of Pacific History, 1999), pp. 57-58:

Migration in this period reflected Japanese social history. Migrants kept on coming from the rural southwest where underdevelopment continued as industrialisation was entrenched in urban centres. Rural depression intensified, particularly after the Russo-Japanese War, when industrialisation gained momentum with the rapid growth of export-oriented industries such as silk and cotton. The major impact on rural areas was the loss of self-sufficiency as agricultural production was integrated into the development of export commodities. As a result, rural-urban inequality increased, accelerating the tempo of the emigration of the rural people to urban centres and overseas. The statistics verify this. In only 10 years from 1904 to 1914, the number of overseas emigrants increased nearly threefold-from 138,591 in 1904 to 358,711 in 1914. The same tendency was seen in migration to Papua and New Guinea. The number increased from a mere two in 1906 to 109 in 1914, and most came from Kyūshū; 33 from Kumamoto, 28 from Nagasaki, and eight from Saga.

Most migrants were dekasegi-sha (literally ‘people leaving to earn money’) on three-year contracts, the same type of people seen in urban factories. The largest occupational group was artisans: 41 shipwrights, 18 carpenters and 13 sawyers. Many of them were from Goryō and Oniike villages in Amakusa. These villages were famous for boatbuilding from the Edo era, but in about 1907 many shipwrights lost their jobs due to the recession in the shipping industry. Eleven fishermen were another significant group. They came from fishing villages such as Isahaya-chō (Kita-takaki-gun, Nagasaki prefecture) and Jōgashima (Misaki-chō, Miura-gun, Kanagawa prefecture). Fishing villages in this period were also suffering a decline in jobs due to the development of a modern capital-intensive fishery and the resulting decline of small fishermen. Unemployment thus constituted a ‘push’ factor for emigration. It is highly probable that, like the migration to Thursday Island, the high wages in New Guinea became a major ‘pull’ factor.

Moreover the German administration’s different treatment of the Japanese relative to other Asians possibly became a ‘pull’ factor. The granting of European status delighted the Japanese who had been rejected in Australia because they were Asians. The migrants probably felt that the Germans recognised their national identity as subjects of an emerging empire which, they may have thought, was distinctive from other Asian countries. Although in reality the migrants were the victims of empire-building which increased the poverty of rural Japan, the improvement of their status from poor rustics to ‘Europeans’ satisfied their pride. Of course, such pride was merely an illusion which would vanish as soon as they returned to their impoverished villages, but it was a sweet illusion that attracted the migrants to the land of ‘dojin’ [“natives”].

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by | 23 May 2020 · 8:59 am

Nettuno Cemetery, Memorial Day, 1945

From The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, Volume Two of the Liberation Trilogy, by Rick Atkinson (Henry Holt, 2007), Kindle p. 578:

The muddy field, redeemed with bougainvillea and white oleander, soon became the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery, a seventy-seven-acre sanctuary where almost eight thousand military dead would be interred.

Here, on Memorial Day in 1945, just three weeks after the end of the war in Europe, a stocky, square-jawed figure would climb the bunting-draped speaker’s platform and survey the dignitaries seated before him on folding chairs. Then Lucian Truscott, who had returned to Italy from France a few months earlier to succeed Mark Clark as the Fifth Army commander, turned his back on the living and instead faced the dead. “It was,” wrote eyewitness Bill Mauldin, “the most moving gesture I ever saw.” In his carbolic voice, Truscott spoke to Jack Toffey, to Henry Waskow, and to the thousands of others who lay beneath the ranks of Latin crosses and stars of David. As Mauldin later recalled:

He apologized to the dead men for their presence here. He said everybody tells leaders it is not their fault that men get killed in war, but that every leader knows in his heart that this is not altogether true. He said he hoped anybody here through any mistake of his would forgive him, but he realized that was asking a hell of a lot under the circumstances…. He promised that if in the future he ran into anybody, especially old men, who thought death in battle was glorious, he would straighten them out.

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by | 21 May 2020 · 10:16 am

Japanese Status in German New Guinea

From Nanshin: Japanese settlers in Papua and New Guinea, 1890–1949, by Hiromitsu Iwamoto (Journal of Pacific History, 1999), pp. 47-49:

The main characteristics of German attitudes towards Japanese were leniency regarding legal status and caution in granting land grants. The Germans granted the Japanese European status around 1905. Until then they had no legal status. Granting European status was not confined to the Germans, as the Dutch granted the same status in the East Indies in 1899. Threlfall argues that Komine‘s usefulness to the administration as well as the effect of the emergence of Japan in international politics after its victory in the Russo-Japanese War facilitated the granting of European status.

Indeed the administration recognised Komine’s usefulness when Albert Hahl, the Vice-Governor and Governor from 1896 to 1914, met him. According to Hahl’s diary, in 1902 Komine reached Herbertshöhe from Torres Strait; around this time Hahl had been facing a serious shortage of government vessels to perform administrative tasks. The appearance of Komine solved this problem:

A chance incident helped to solve my dilemma. One fine morning there was a small schooner flying the Japanese flag to be seen riding at anchor in the Herbertshöhe Harbour. The skipper, Isokide [sic] Komine, told me that his water and provisions had run out on his voyage from Torres Strait, where he had been engaged in pearl-fishing. He had no money to purchase supplies and asked me to employ him. I inspected his little ship, found it suitable for my purpose, and chartered the vessel.

Hahl used Komine’s schooner for later trips around the Bismarck Archipelago.

However, Komine gave a different account of the encounter. His story appears in his petition for financial assistance to the Consul-General in Sydney in 1916. According to Komine, he reached Rabaul in October 1901 and accidentally met Governor Hahl who had been under siege by ‘little barbarians’:

Nearly at the end of my exploration I anchored at Rabaul in October 1901. At that time the place was German territory and the natives were strongly resisting German rule. The punitive expeditions were suffering failures. When I arrived there, Govern Hahl and his staff had narrowly escaped the tight siege of the little barbarians and they were holding this small place. Their vessels, which were their only resort, were wrecked on the reef. They tried all measures unsuccessfully and were just waiting to be slaughtered. However, when they found my accidental arrival, they were overjoyed as if my arrival was God’s will and begged me for the charter of my ship. My righteous heart was heating up, seeing their hopeless situation, and I willingly agreed to their request. At the same time I joined their punitive forces. Sharing uncountable hardships with them and applying various tactics all successfully, we finally conquered and pacified the little barbarians.

Apparently Komine dramatised the encounter to his advantage. German records indicate no such incident either at Herbertoshöhe or at Rabaul. Nonetheless Komine’s description verifies two facts: the administration was suffering from a lack of seaworthy vessels; and he accompanied Hahl on his trips to other places. There were mutual benefits: Hahl needed a vessel and Komine needed provisions for his voyage. This circumstance contributed to the development of the two men’s relationship and later led to the emergence of the Japanese community in German New Guinea.

The men’s characters may also have contributed to some extent. Komine’s determined and adventurous nature which had been demonstrated on his arrival may have appealed to Hahl who was, Sack argues, ‘by no means free of the racial prejudices of his time, but … liked people, even if they were black or brown or yellow’. Similarly, Firth claims that Hahl ‘had broader and more humane objectives, though still primarily economic ones … unlike many German governors in Africa’.

The European status given to the Japanese, however, shows German subtlety Hahl pursued strict policies to maintain a racial hierarchy with whites always at the top. He never allowed his personal friendship to undermine this hierarchy. When court cases involving Japanese arose, they were not heard in the European courts but in a separate court constituted only for the Japanese. Similarly, the Germans were cautious about giving commercial advantage. The administration did not grant the right to purchase freehold to the Japanese. Indeed, the administration introduced a discriminatory law to restrict non-indigenous coloured people acquiring land: ‘land could not be purchased from the government by natives or by persons who had not equal rights with Europeans; and land could neither be bought nor leased by persons unable to read and write a European language’. In addition, the Germans limited the land rights of the Japanese, and of the Chinese, to leases only for a term not exceeding 30 years.

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by | 13 May 2020 · 11:58 am

PTSD in Italy, 1944

From The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, Volume Two of the Liberation Trilogy, by Rick Atkinson (Henry Holt, 2007), Kindle pp. 507-509:

The newest units to join Fifth Army—the 85th and 88th Infantry Divisions, both in Keyes’s II Corps—were the first into combat of fifty-five U.S. divisions built mostly from draftees; their worth had yet to be proven. Four of six infantry regimental commanders in those two divisions had already been relieved, as Clark advised Marshall, “for a combination of age and physical reasons.”

There was more: the two British divisions still at Anzio remained so weak that both Truscott and Clark believed they would contribute little to any renewed offensive. The British Army since Salerno had suffered 46,000 battle casualties, with thousands more sick, yet replacements had not kept up with losses. Moreover, as Gruenther also noted, “Many British troops have been fighting for four or five years, and are in some cases pretty tired.”

Few British commanders disagreed. “Absenteeism and desertion are still problems,” wrote General Penney, back in command of the British 1st Division at Anzio after recovering from his wounds. “Shooting in the early days would probably have been an effective prophylactic.” On average, 10 British soldiers were convicted of desertion each day in the spring of 1944, and an estimated 30,000 “slinkers” were “on the trot” in Italy. “The whole matter is hushed up,” another British division commander complained.

Nor was the phenomenon exclusively British. The U.S. Army would convict 21,000 deserters during World War II, many of them in the Mediterranean. Clark condemned the surge of self-inflicted wounds in Fifth Army and the “totally inadequate” prison sentences of five to ten years for U.S. soldiers convicted of “misbehavior before the enemy.” A psychiatric analysis of 2,800 American troops convicted of desertion or going AWOL in the Mediterranean catalogued thirty-five reasons offered by the culprits, including “My nerves gave way” and “I was scared.”

A twenty-two-year-old rifleman who deserted at Cassino after seven months in combat was typical. “I feel like my nervous system is burning up. My heart jumps,” he said. “I get so scared I can hardly move.” Those symptoms affected tens of thousands, and added to Clark’s worries. “Combat exhaustion,” a term coined in Tunisia to supplant the misnomer “shell shock,” further eroded Allied fighting strength in Italy, as it did elsewhere: roughly one million U.S. soldiers would be hospitalized during the war for “neuro-psychiatric” symptoms, and half a million would be discharged from the service for “personality disturbances.”

All troops were at risk, but none more than infantrymen, who accounted for 14 percent of the Army’s overseas strength and sustained 70 percent of the casualties. A study of four infantry divisions in Italy found that a soldier typically no longer wondered “whether he will be hit, but when and how bad.” The Army surgeon general concluded that “practically all men in rifle battalions who were not otherwise disabled ultimately became psychiatric casualties,” typically after 200 to 240 cumulative days in combat. “There aren’t any iron men,” wrote Brigadier General William C. Menninger, a prominent psychiatrist. “The strongest personality, subjected to sufficient stress a sufficient length of time, is going to disintegrate.”

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by | 11 May 2020 · 2:01 am

Evacuating Monte Cassino, 1944

From The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, Volume Two of the Liberation Trilogy, by Rick Atkinson (Henry Holt, 2007), Kindle pp. 398-399:

THE holy road up Monte Cassino made seven hairpin turns, each sharper than the one before. Hillside tombs and a Roman amphitheater stood below the first bend, along with remnants of Augustan prosperity from the ancient market town called Casinum….

Rounding the last bend, fifteen hundred feet above the valley floor, the great abbey abruptly loomed on the pinnacle, trapezoidal and majestic, seven acres of Travertino stone with a façade twice as long as that of Buckingham Palace. On this acropolis, in an abandoned Roman tower, a wandering hermit named Benedict had arrived in A.D. 529. Born into a patrician family, the young cleric had fled licentious Rome, avoiding a poisoned chalice offered by rival monks and settling on this rocky knob with a desire only “to be agreeable to the Lord.” Benedict’s Rule gave form to Western monasticism by stressing piety, humility, and the gleaming “armor of obedience.” Black-robed Benedictines not only spread the Gospel to flatland pagans, but also helped preserve Western culture through the crepuscular centuries ahead. It was said that Benedict died raising his arms to heaven in the spring of 547, entering paradise “on a bright street strewn with carpets.” His bones and those of his twin sister, St. Scholastica, slept in a crypt hewn from his mountain eyrie. Over the span of fifteen centuries, the abbey had been demolished repeatedly—by Lombards, Saracens, earthquakes, and, in 1799, Napoleonic scoundrels—but it was always rebuilt in keeping with the motto “Succisa Virescit”: “Struck down, it comes to new life.” After a visit to Monte Cassino, the poet Longfellow described the abbey as a place “where this world and the next world were at strife.”

Never more than in February 1944. The town below had first been bombed on September 10, and within weeks more than a thousand refugees sheltered in the abbey with seventy monks. “To befoul the abbey,” complained the abbot, Dom Gregorio Diamare, “was a poor way of showing gratitude.” As the war drew nearer and wells ran dry, most civilians decamped for the hills or cities in the north. An Austrian lieutenant colonel, Julius Schlegel, who before the war had been an art historian and librarian, persuaded Diamarea to remove the abbey’s art treasures for safekeeping. Throughout the late fall Wehrmacht trucks rolled up Highway 6 to the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, hauling treasures in packing cases cobbled together from wood found in an abandoned factory. The swag was breathtaking: Leonardo’s Leda; vases and sculptures from ancient Pompeii; eighty thousand volumes and scrolls, including writings by Horace, Ovid, Virgil, and Seneca; oblong metal boxes containing manuscripts by Keats and Shelley; oils by Titian, Raphael, and Tintoretto; priestly vestments and sacramental vessels made by master goldsmiths; even the remains of Desiderius of Bertharius, murdered by Saracens in the eighth century. An immense thirteenth-century Sienese cross was “so large that it could only be carried diagonally across a lorry.” The major bones of Benedict and Scholastica remained in their monastery crypt, but silk-clad reliquaries holding mortal fragments of the saints also went to Rome after a special blessing by the abbot. Two monks rode with every truck to keep the Germans honest; even so, fifteen crates went missing and later turned up in the Hermann Göring Division headquarters outside Berlin.

As the evacuation concluded, Monte Cassino on Hitler’s orders became the linchpin of the Gustav Line. Kesselring in mid-December promised the Catholic hierarchy that no German soldier would enter the abbey, and an exclusion zone was traced around the building’s outer walls. But day by day both the town and surrounding slopes became more heavily fortified. A Tenth Army order directed that “allein das Gebäude auszusparen ist”—only the building itself was to be spared—and Hitler in late December ordered that “the best reserves must stand on the mountain massif. In no circumstances may this be lost.”

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by | 10 May 2020 · 6:45 am

Early Japanese Interest in South Seas

From Nanshin: Japanese settlers in Papua and New Guinea, 1890–1949, by Hiromitsu Iwamoto (Journal of Pacific History, 1999), pp. 15-16:

Until the late 19th century the Japanese government had no policies for the South Seas. The government was preoccupied with domestic affairs, while Germany, the United States, Australia, France, Spain, Netherlands, and Britain were involved in the acquisition and exchange of tropical islands. The Japanese government’s primary concern was to centralise governance in order to build a strong empire which could not be colonised. External affairs were secondary concerns in which the government was mainly preoccupied with the removal of unequal treaties imposed by Western nations and the promotion of national prestige. Although Japan’s expansionism was shown in the 1870s in Saigō Takamori‘s claim to invade Korea, Ōkubo Toshimichi‘s decision to send a military expedition to Taiwan and the government’s declaration that the Ryūkyū Islands and Sakhalin were parts of Japan, the expansion was limited to the adjacent region. The government’s involvement in South Seas affairs was marginal and largely confined to matters of national prestige and the rights of citizens abroad.

Japan’s first involvement in the South Seas was an embarrassing episode involving emigrants to Guam. In 1868 about 40 Japanese emigrated as contract labourers to work on a plantation where a Spanish employer treated them harshly. The Japanese were treated no differently from locals and the employer did not pay their promised wages in full. Their complaint to a Spanish administrator was ignored. In 1871, after some had died due to harsh work conditions, three managed to return to Japan to report their plight. The government was astonished and the matter was discussed, but it is unknown whether it took any action to save these migrants or protested to the Spanish administration. In 1868, 153 contract labourers in Hawaii suffered a similar fate. These incidents embarrassed the Japanese government which was acutely sensitive about its national dignity but probably the government, which was just managing to survive by pacifying rebels, chose not to protest in order to avoid conflicts that it could not handle confidently. The government could only ban emigration by enforcing tight regulations to avoid further national disgrace.

However, the issue of sovereignty over the Ogasawara (also known as Bonin) Islands provided an opportunity to stimulate Japanese interest in the South Seas. Although the Tokugawa government hardly resisted when Commodore Perry demanded the opening of Japan and proclaimed US possession of the Ogasawara Islands in 1853, some vocal Meiji officials in 1875 ’emphasised the urgency of return of the islands that could connect Japanese interests to the South Seas’. The report of the Foreign Ministry to the Prime Minister explained that ‘the islands were a strategic point in the Pacific sea route, which was extremely important in Japan’s advancement in the South Sea’. Then negotiations began and the US compromised. The issue signalled the beginning of the government’s awareness of its interests in the South Seas. It was also significant in that the government promoted national dignity by recovering territory.

As the incidents in Guam and Hawaii showed, the government was aware of its weak internal position and tried not to provoke other Western nations in the South Seas until the 1880s.

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by | 8 May 2020 · 6:12 am

Early Japanese Settlers in PNG

From Nanshin: Japanese settlers in Papua and New Guinea, 1890–1949, by Hiromitsu Iwamoto (Journal of Pacific History, 1999), p. 10:

A MASSIVE EXODUS OF PEOPLE WAS A WORLD-WIDE phenomenon during the 19th century. About 50 million Europeans emigrated to the Americas and 47 million Chinese and Indians emigrated to the Asia-Pacific. However, the scale of Japanese emigration was small. Rough estimates of Japanese emigration before the Pacific War are at least 1.6 million: from 1868 to 1941, 776,304 Japanese emigrated to areas other than Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan, and from 1936 to 1940 about 820,000 people emigrated to Manchuria. Comparable figures were 23.1 million from Britain, 4.3 million from France, seven million from Holland, 33.9 million from Germany and 22 million from Italy between 1851 and 1950. The number of Japanese emigrants to Papua and New Guinea was tiny: it was never above 200.

The smallness of Japanese emigration is attributed mainly to Japan’s seclusion policy which prohibited overseas emigration until 1868 and its integration into world capitalism. Destinations for Japanese emigrants were limited, because by the time Japan began to modernise, most Pacific-Asian countries had been colonised by European powers. Although Japan’s rapid modernisation from the late 19th century with colonisation of Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria and Micronesia created space for emigration, this was only possible in a short period of 50 years ending with the Pacific War.

Japanese emigration to Papua and New Guinea began around the turn of the 19th century. It was an offshoot from the settlement of Japanese pearl divers on Thursday Island where they were squeezed out by Australian restrictions on migration and by the exhaustion of pearl beds. The migration was also a result of a series of searches for new beds and a place to settle by an adventurous Japanese skipper Komine Isokichi.

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