Category Archives: war

by Joel | 1 September 2024 · 6:15 am

Capt. Cook’s Cruelty, 1777

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 173-174:

Several months earlier, when Cook was passing through islands in the Tonga group, he had shown a taste for cruelty that some of his officers found both surprising and alarming. In the face of what he called the “repeated insolence” of the Natives—jackets, shoes, and a pewter basin had gone missing, as had daggers, bayonets, and muskets—Cook’s fury smoldered. On Tongatapu and its nearby atolls, he took to flogging Natives far past the daily limit of twelve lashes per man allowed by navy rules; in one instance, he had a Native whipped a sadistic seventy-two times. He cut off the ears of some of the most egregious thieves, and in at least one case, on his orders, a cross was carved into a Native man’s shoulder, all the way to the bone.

Yet Cook had never visited on anyone the kind of widespread retribution that he was now unleashing on the people of Moorea—punishing the many for the misdeeds of an individual. It seemed Cook had taken leave of his senses. The wanton destruction of the homes of people he had no proof were actually connected to the theft—this was a first. Although some of his men threw themselves into the vandalistic acts with gusto, most were appalled by the harshness of their captain’s orders. They understood Cook’s initial frustration over the theft, but his lust for retaliation had grown into something terrifyingly toxic, with no sense of proportion.

“I doubt not,” thought one lieutenant, “but Captain Cook had good reasons for carrying his punishment to these people to so great a length, but what his reasons were are yet a secret.” It was “all about such a trifle as a small goat,” wrote Midshipman George Gilbert. Cook’s reprisals “were so different from his conduct in like cases in former voyages.”

Later in the day, for good measure, Cook had members of his party stalk down to the water’s edge and rip apart every canoe they could find. This was much more than a passing insult. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of a canoe in Polynesian society—the labor and craftsmanship it entailed, the utility it provided, the livelihood it advanced. Canoes were transportation, but they were also art. What the horse was to the American West, the canoe was to the Society Islands. To destroy canoes was to strike at the people’s independence, their means of sustenance and of getting about, their sense of aesthetics—and, to some extent, their sense of identity, too.

Cook, who surely understood this, persisted through the day, and the day after that: He sent teams of men along the coast to smash up every outrigger they encountered. Some Mooreans filled their beloved vessels with heavy rocks and sunk them in the lagoon shallows, thinking this might deter Cook. It didn’t. “The Captain,” wrote Lieutenant John Rickman in horror, “ordered the canoes that were sunk to be weighed up and destroyed.”

It is extraordinary that the islanders didn’t rise in defiance and kill these white-skinned invaders. The Native weapons may have been no match for muskets, but the Mooreans outnumbered Cook’s small party by a thousandfold. They could have made quick work of the Englishmen, but for some reason they remained pacific, even as parts of their island were consumed in flames.

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by Joel | 14 August 2024 · 6:15 am

Dutch & Portuguese Role in Barbados

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 142-145:

Discovered by the Portuguese in 1500, Brazil became the site where the Portuguese first managed to reinstall the sugar plantation complex they and the Spanish had pioneered on the Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa, and to achieve its continuity and growth. By 1526 Brazil was exporting sugar, and in the early 17th century its output superseded not only that of earlier Atlantic outposts but also that of the rapidly declining Spanish-Caribbean sugar industry. Part of the reason for this success was that the Portuguese straddled both shores of the Atlantic. Most of the slaves, on whose labor the early Brazilian sugar industry depended, came from the Portuguese colony in Angola, the civil war-ridden neighboring kingdom of Kongo, or the Portuguese factories in the Bight of Benin and Cape Verde (which drew on Senegambian sources). As a result, Portuguese planters in Brazil did not face a problem their Spanish colleagues in the Caribbean would unsuccessfully struggle with for another two centuries: the highly restrictive and inefficiently organized asiento system by which Spain provisioned its New World colonies with African slave labor. While Spanish plantations floundered after the turn of the 17th century, the same period marked the beginning of a boom in Brazil. If the British and French in the Caribbean were looking for a model for hyperprofitable overseas agricultural enterprises, by that time it would not have been Hispaniola or Cuba but the northeastern Brazilian province of Pernambuco.

But what about the Dutch? Like other northern European nations, the Dutch initially began to prey upon the Spanish fleet in the second half of the 16th century. Like the British and French, they also perceived the advantages of piratical raids on the Spanish mainland colonies. By the early 17th century, however, the new Dutch West India Company, founded in 1621, embarked on a different course of action. Its novel approach was not merely to skim off profits by raiding Iberian colonies or preying upon the homeward-bound fleet, but to take over the very source: fully developed colonial enterprises.

Aware of the advantages the Portuguese enjoyed by maintaining a connection between Angola and northeastern Brazil, the Dutch seized control of both places at once. Between about 1630 and 1650 they achieved three distinct but interrelated goals: they subjected both regions to a rigorous scheme of capitalistic development, pumping in the requisite cash and credit for building up the plantation infrastructure of Brazil; they continued their role as major maritime architects of legal and illegal commercial links between the Caribbean colonies of various nations; and they turned Amsterdam—which already was the center of finance and banking in northern Europe—into one of the major international European markets for sugar. In contrast to the Portuguese, the Dutch apparently had no strong interest in monopolizing sugar production. In their view, profit lay in offering credit and taking over commercial shipping and distribution.

…

While the importance of the Dutch introduction of sugarcane to Barbados in 1637 is open to question, the crucial role of Dutch merchants in providing financial backing with which British settlers built the first sugar mills on that island is beyond dispute. Dutch planters and sugar masters also taught the British Barbadians what they came to call the “method of Pernambuco”—which included not only the know-how of planting, milling, and processing cane, but also the rudiments of a legal code regulating slavery. Dutch ships, finally, linked Barbados’s emerging plantation economy both to the supply of African labor provided by the Atlantic slave trade and to the effective and profitable distribution networks in the Netherlands. Although the extent of Dutch involvement has lately become the subject of debate among historians, it may be safe to say that within little more than the decade between 1640 and 1650, the Dutch helped to transform Barbados from a slaveholding society with a large yeoman population engaged in fairly diversified economic pursuits into a slave society solidly based on sugar monoculture.

…

These developments were due in no small measure to a fortuitous Atlantic conjuncture. For the “sugar revolution” in Barbados occurred at a time when English metropolitan control over the island faltered. What allowed the Barbadians to engage in such principally illegal dealings with the Dutch was the colonial result of the turmoil in the metropole incited by the English Civil War. As the eminent historian of that war, Christopher Hill (1986), put it, between 1641 and 1650, Barbados virtually became an independent state, or at least approached a state of home rule. As a consequence, the emerging planter elite began to control legislative and executive matters in a manner unprecedented in any New World colony. Only when the British Parliament sent the fleet in the fall of 1651 did the Barbadians finally resubmit to imperial control. They arguably did so, however, because they had become too afraid of their own slaves and rebellious servants to risk giving out arms to them—a situation foreshadowing the agonizing decisions the Jamaican planter elite made when the protest of the 13 North American colonies against British commercial legislation began to escalate into a full-scale colonial war more than a century later.

Still, the intervening period had allowed the Barbadian planter elite enough autonomy to achieve three major objectives: first, to engineer the crucial economic takeoff with the help of Dutch capital and distribution networks; second, to forge a brutal slave code—first properly codified in 1661, but developed in the 1640s—that allowed masters almost unlimited power to exploit their human chattel; and third, to begin a process of concentration of landholding that effectively pushed small freeholders off the island.

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Filed under Angola, Brazil, Britain, Congo, economics, Equatorial Guinea, labor, migration, Netherlands, Portugal, slavery, war

by Joel | 13 August 2024 · 6:06 am

The Sugar Revolution in Barbados

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 139-142:

Initially, the character of British settlement in Barbados resembled the first successful British colonial experiments on the North American mainland. As in Virginia, the first group of Barbadian colonists had been sent out by a charter company that intended to “plant” them there in the sense discussed above. Little is known about the first years in Barbados, but it seems as if the colony almost failed. As in Virginia, the British policy was to give out land grants to settlers and to employ the labor of indentured servants (Barbados had no indigenous population). The first commercial crops in Barbados were tobacco and, to a lesser extent, cotton—largely because the Barbadians tried to emulate the tobacco-driven success story Virginia had experienced in the 1620s. But tobacco cultivation in Barbados turned out to be a failure. Although the European tobacco market remained good until the late 1630s, the Barbadian product was considered vastly inferior to that of Virginia.

Nevertheless, in the 1630s the population of Barbados grew rapidly. As in Virginia, a majority of its inhabitants arrived as servants hoping to acquire land after the expiration of their term. Quite a large number of them, however, came involuntarily: they had been rounded up in British cities as vagrants, criminals, or seditious agitators and sentenced to “transportation.” This practice of deporting surplus populations from the metropole became so common that the phrase “to Barbados someone” (meaning to spirit away innocent people to servitude in the Caribbean) entered the lexicon of everyday English speech at the time. Many of the Irish defeated by Cromwell, followers of dissident sects, and royalists sentenced by Parliament during the English Civil War likewise found themselves aboard ships bound for the West Indies.

Temporary servitude was not uncommon in England at the time. As in the North American mainland colonies, most settlers to Barbados were attracted by the promise of eventually acquiring freehold status, but the margin of opportunity gradually shrunk as wealthier planters increased their holdings through purchase. Land available to ex-servants or free newcomers to Barbados virtually ran out at the end of the 1630s, and, unlike in Virginia, there was nowhere else to go. Also unlike the situation in England, where servants and apprentices enjoyed a certain amount of legal protection, was that Barbadian masters exercised almost unrestrained control over their servants and often abused them in ways entirely unprecedented in the mother land. As early as 1634, white servants rebelled on Barbados: and, as in the case of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia (1675), there are good indications that these servants, particularly the Irish, repeatedly tried to join forces with similarly maltreated Africans.

…

Nevertheless, by the end of the 1630s, Barbados still had not developed into a genuine plantation society. Although demographic data for this period are notoriously unreliable, toward the end of the 1630s the island had a population of almost 6,000; of these, some 760 held land—a proportion comparable to that in the European countryside, which is especially noteworthy because Barbadian landholdings still greatly varied in size. Some of the larger planters held tracts of several thousand acres, but the majority of freeholders farmed small parcels between 10 and 50 acres each. This situation changed drastically in the 1640s. Within less than a decade, most members of the white yeomanry on Barbados were squeezed off their land: servants were replaced by African slaves, and the social organization of the island irreversibly switched from that of a society with slaves to that of a society organized around the legal institution of slavery.

…

The reason for this dramatic transformation was sugar. Understanding the Barbadian “sugar revolution” requires stepping back to look at the development of sugar planting in the Americas after the decline of the early Spanish experiments. Both figuratively and literally, sugar arrived in Barbados from Brazil and aboard Dutch ships. It took hold there not because of British metropolitan intentions, but in spite of them.

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Filed under Africa, Britain, Caribbean, economics, labor, migration, military, slavery, Virginia, war

by Joel | 2 August 2024 · 6:04 am

I’ve quoted many passages from Matthew Madden’s painstaking translation of Chan Samoeun’s uniquely detailed memoir of an especially horrible era in Cambodian history, for reasons that echo the translator’s poignant Afterword quoted below.

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 637-640:

I still have a special affinity for the early chapters of Prisoners of Class, which capture so many details of 1975 Phnom Penh at the moment of Khmer Rouge victory. I feel almost greedy for those details; I collect any photograph, map, or description from the city’s past that I can find. I feel a deeply personal connection with and nostalgia for what I am now coming to think of as “Old Phnom Penh,” and very fortunate that I got to know it well in the last years before it began to change dramatically. With the breakneck pace of economic investment and development, seemingly devoid of coherent urban planning, increasingly little of Old Phnom Penh remains now, at least on the surface. I have been taken completely off guard by the speed and scope of the transformation in recent years, which is hard to overstate. (This has been a common topic of conversation with Samoeun, as he feels a similar disorientation.) The city had changed so little during my first several years there, and still looked so much like it had in pictures and film from before the revolution, like an insect trapped in amber, that I never imagined I wouldn’t be able to just continue revisiting old haunts or exploring landmarks whenever I liked, finding them much as they had always been, or that everything was about to become so different, so quickly.

It is truly the passing of an era.

Passing, too, is the generation of people who lived through the most turbulent, defining, and transformational eras of modern Cambodian history in the twentieth century—the post-colonial “golden age” of Sihanouk and the Sangkum (1954–70); the Khmer Republic and civil war (1970–75); and the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–79). It is a generation now grown unexpectedly gray-haired and frail. In my early years in Cambodia, including when I first discovered Prisoners of Class, this generation constituted the backbone of Cambodian society. They were the parents, the shopkeepers, the maids, the farmers, the doctors and nurses, the taxi and cyclo drivers, the policemen, the politicians—all of the aunties and uncles of Cambodia. At that time, only the youngest Cambodians, those about my age and younger (I was born in 1977), had no memories of Khmer Rouge rule. For everyone else, virtually the entire adult population of the country, the Khmer Rouge era was fairly recent memory, and the effects of it were pervasive. (And in rural areas, especially, a sizable percentage of that population had themselves once been Khmer Rouge in some form or other.) I somehow don’t know that I ever truly appreciated that this would change.

But now, the vast majority of people in Cambodia have no memory of those events. Nobody younger than about their late forties or so—and current demographics skew overwhelmingly young—has even so much as an early childhood memory of the realities of Democratic Kampuchea, and nobody under their late fifties or so has any memory of life in pre-war Cambodia. And those numbers keep going up every year from this writing. And now many of those who do remember, especially those who were grown when the Khmer Rouge captured power, are dying out slowly, soon to be quickly. Samoeun’s thick black mop of black hair has now turned silver. Before long there will be nobody at all left who remembers what happened, and the country that they knew will have finally passed, transformed, to an entirely different cohort of forward-looking Cambodians. It will all belong to the past, to the history books.

Thus Prisoners of Class is and will remain a precious link to history, a priceless document to remind later generations of the now almost unthinkable things that occurred, to memorialize the heroic travails and losses (and crimes, lest we forget) of the now-passing generation. In the preface to Prisoners of Class, the author laments that “in Cambodian society we have very few articles or books describing the real lives of people who lived in any era of our history.” How fortunate indeed that that young man felt compelled to write down everything that he and his family saw and experienced while the memories were so fresh. How fortunate that he thought to include so many details! And how fortunate that he had the heart of both a chronicler and a poet. Though he almost certainly did not appreciate it at the time, that labor of personal writing would become a historical treasure memorializing, for all time, not just him and his family, but his entire generation, a whole era, a whole country, for future generations of Cambodians—and now for the world outside of Cambodia as well.

So now, with this translation, it is my hope and aspiration to give this important historical document an even wider distribution, a stronger foothold, a larger audience, to preserve and propagate a witness of a not-so-distant but rapidly receding past, for many more people in many more generations to come. May it become an essential and immortal resource for all those who seek to understand Cambodia’s turbulent twentieth-century past.

Matthew Madden, 17 September 2023

Mekong River Press has also made several chapters freely available online, as well as photos and maps of people and places cited in the book.

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Filed under Cambodia, democracy, education, literature, migration, publishing, war

by Joel | 1 August 2024 · 10:15 am

Cambodian Liberation Day, 1979

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 605-607:

The sun has set over the horizon, leaving behind scattered patches of light in the gaps between the trees, and a red light in the western sky. As we walk along, dragging our feet, carrying our bundles of rattan on our shoulders, trudging sluggishly along the sandy path, we are still about a kilometer away from Moung Thmey. Suddenly a cloud of dust rises before us and moves closer, growing larger and blocking out the rays of light from the sun. It is a group of several oxcarts galloping and racing one another, as though celebrating some joyous occasion.

The riders cry out, “Hooray! We are free! Hooray! We are free! Hooray! Hooray!”

When the oxcarts draw near to us, some motherly women shout out, “Boys! The Front [see note below] has liberated us! Drop your rattan, boys, and go back to your home villages! We are free!”

This is an odd message that we have never heard before, that we have never even imagined. These several oxcarts appear to be returning from the rice-harvesting worksite. They drive past us with sounds of laughter, while we are left puzzled, wondering if there is really anything to be happy about. We return to camp, eat our food, and go to bed quietly. Nobody seems to know anything about freedom as the villagers seemed to.

…

10 January 1979

Today we have to remain in camp and work, twisting ropes and weaving bangky baskets. Starting at dawn, on Route 68, a strange thing happens that we have never seen since arriving here: a sporadic stream of vehicles is driving north, sometimes one, sometimes two or three, at fairly slow speeds. As we weave baskets, we glance at the vehicles driving along the road. I see a bus painted red from the windows down and white from the windows up, which I used to ride from Phsar Daeum Thkov to Phsar Thmey [Phnom Penh’s domed, art deco “New Market” built in 1937]. Men and women dressed in black sit quietly on the bus with serious, somber faces. Where are they going? Perhaps they are going to attend a meeting in Samraong.

…

11 January 1979

We rise in the dark and eat our porridge, as usual. After eating, the economy team informs us that the situation is tense, and the unit leaders and brigade chairman have all fled the camp. We all divide up the remaining uncooked rice, salt, and prahok [fermented fish paste] to go our own separate ways.

The sun rises over the trees, and we have finished dividing up the food supplies, and now we pack up our clothing bundles to leave camp. We walk to Moung Thmey, then suddenly we hear the sounds of gunfire. The villagers conclude that there must be fighting at Spean Moung. I am not familiar with the place, but by the sound of the gunfire, it is maybe only two or three hundred meters from the village.

The sound of gunfire increases in frequency and volume. The villagers run in panic to find hiding places. We start to scatter. Some of us are trying to find a way back to Region Five because their parents and siblings are there. Some seek refuge with the villagers to await an opportunity to continue their journey to Region Five. I have no doubts: we will not be returning to Region Five; my brother and I are going to get away. Four or five young men from the mobile brigade travel with us. We escape into the forest area, toward the villages in the forest, where surely there is no fighting going on.

Farewell, Moung Thmey, Srey Snom! Farewell, collecting camp!

Farewell, criminal prison! Farewell! Farewell!

[Note, p. 729:]

The Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation (a.k.a. Salvation Front), a politico-military organization formed of Khmer Rouge defectors that united with the Vietnamese army to overthrow the Khmer Rouge regime. The Vietnamese army, along with the Salvation Front, invaded Cambodia on 25 December 1978, reaching Phnom Penh and driving out senior Khmer Rouge leaders on 7 January 1979 (a day now celebrated as a day of national liberation.) These forces continued to advance through the rest of the country in the following days, gradually taking over the country and driving the Khmer Rouge out of populated areas and into the jungles along the Thai frontier. The Salvation Front’s members would form the core of the post-Khmer-Rouge government in Phnom Penh, and the Vietnamese army would continue to occupy Cambodia for another decade.

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Filed under Cambodia, labor, military, nationalism, philosophy, slavery, Vietnam, war

by Joel | 23 July 2024 · 12:07 pm

Khmer Rouge vs. Religion

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 411-412:

Every aspect of faith—religion, neak ta [tutelary deities], ghosts, demons—has been erased. The monks have all been defrocked and forced out of the priesthood to live as laymen. All wats and temples have been abandoned and converted into pig farms, warehouses, and granaries, or torn down completely in some cases, like the temple in Wat Trapeang Thmor.

But some temples possess great power and cause peril for those who tear them down. I hear that this was the case when the Organization ordered the tearing down of the temple in Wat Chey in the town of Phnom Srok.

A story is told: One day Comrade Hat, the chairman of Phnom Srok district, ordered someone to tear down a neak ta shrine. The man was hesitant because he had known the power of the neak ta, but he did not dare to argue with the decision of the Organization. Perceiving the reticence of the man, Comrade Hat secretly followed him and spied on his activities. Carrying a hatchet and a crowbar, the man walked to the neak ta shrine, knelt down, placed his palms together and reverenced the neak ta, and said out loud, “Comrade Hat has ordered me to take down your shrine. If you are displeased, please take it out on him!”

Understanding the mindset of the people, Comrade Hat showed himself before the neak ta and stopped the man from tearing down the shrine. In fact, during the war, the Khmer Rouge soldiers all followed gurus and carried protective magic amulets such as chae kach [small elephant tusk embedded in a tree], khnay tan [boar’s tusk], katha [prayer scroll] necklaces, yoant [magical drawing] scarves, etc. That is to say, they also believed in and reverenced supernatural objects. Now the senior levels of the Organization have given them orders to erase these beliefs, and they have to comply, but in their feelings they are still uneasy, still frightened, especially when they hear that the people who follow their orders place the responsibility for it on them.

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by Joel | 9 July 2024 · 7:53 am

Japanese Navy in the Persian Gulf, 1990

From Geography and Japan’s Strategic Choices: From Seclusion to Internationalization, by Peter J. Woolley (Potomac Books, 2005), Kindle p. 143:

Japan’s final contributions [to the 1990 war on Iraq] totaled $13 billion. Only three countries had spent more: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. Japan had also frozen Iraqi assets and embargoed Iraqi oil. And its initial financial commitment in August of 1990 beat Germany’s announcement by ten days. Nonetheless, it was, as critics had charged, largely “checkbook diplomacy,” which incurred no substantial risk to the Japanese people.

The deployment of minesweepers, even after the hostilities were over, was a signal departure from the policies of the past. [Prime Minister] Kaifu was forced to deploy them without the aid of any legislation from the Diet, claiming that they were not going to a war zone but would be in international waters, merely clearing obstacles for international shipping. It would take some time for the Japanese public and the parliament to come around. The LDP leaders believed, however, that if the minesweeping mission was successful, the public would support a substantial change in defense policy and allow the SDF to be deployed on other missions.

Six ships and a crew of 511 made the trip to the Persian Gulf. The vessels were small but relatively modern. The largest of the six was a ship-tender of 8,000 tons. The mine warfare ships were just 510 tons and did indeed have wooden hulls. But then, recent minesweepers all had wooden hulls as a precaution against magnetic devices.

The minesweepers probably would not have been more useful had they been sent sooner. Before the UN deadline expired, little minesweeping was done because the allied commander did not want to risk touching off an early confrontation. After the deadline expired, minesweeping was mainly to give the appearance that the allies might make an amphibious assault on the Kuwaiti coast. Japan might have joined the allied minesweepers somewhat sooner but even its arrival in late May was useful. Iraq had dropped over a thousand mines in a long swath off the Kuwaiti coast. It took more than two dozen minesweepers and ten support ships from eight different countries over four months to clean up the mess.

According to a map in the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force Museum in Kure (near Hiroshima), Japan itself laid 55,347 mines to defend its perimeter: 15,474 along the Tokai and southwestern island chain, 14,927 in the northern Honshu and Shikoku regions, 10,012 along the coast of Kyushu, 7,640 along the south coast of Korea and across the Yellow Sea, and 7,294 around Taiwan.

The same map shows that the U.S. laid most of its 10,703 naval mines in the Inland Sea and along the Japan Sea coast (to destroy economic supply routes). When we visited the museum in 2015, a total of 297 American naval mines from World War Two remained unaccounted for. Mine disposal efforts continue to this day.

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Filed under economics, Germany, Iraq, Japan, Middle East, military, U.S., war

by Joel | 8 July 2024 · 6:22 am

Japanese Navy in the Korean War

From Geography and Japan’s Strategic Choices: From Seclusion to Internationalization, by Peter J. Woolley (Potomac Books, 2005), Kindle pp. 110-111:

When the Japanese withdrew from the Korean peninsula in 1945, the allies had split Korea into north and south, allowing the Soviets to set up a Stalinist protégé to head a communist government in the north. Meanwhile, the Western allies installed a proto-constitutional regime in the south. On June 25, 1950, the Soviet-armed North surprised and quickly overran the South. The North Korean army took the capital, Seoul, in a matter of days and advanced down the peninsula in a matter of weeks. It was stopped only ninety miles from the Strait of Tsushima by U.S. and South Korean forces desperately defending the last perimeter and using Japan as their rear base of supply and air operations.

The strategic importance of Japan to the United States and vice versa seemed to crystallize. For Japan the tables had turned completely. Rather than being the strong man of Asia, bullying its way over the Asian mainland, it was prostrate at the feet of the allies, a small archipelago on the edge of a vast continent dominated by large, aggressive powers, protected only by its erstwhile rival for Pacific power, the United States. For the United States, Japan ceased to be the demon of the Pacific and was a strategically invaluable outpost on the far side of the world’s largest ocean on the edge of the Asian expanses. Indeed, the conqueror of Japan, the supreme allied commander and a student of Asian history, took a page from Japanese military history in launching the most audacious amphibious counterattack on Korea, the “dagger pointed at the heart of Japan” as it had been called a century earlier. Landing in Inchon in mid-September precisely where the Japanese had landed in 1904, MacArthur drove his forces to Seoul in ten days, cutting off North Korean troops that had overrun the length and breadth of the peninsula. His reenactment of the Japanese landing in Inchon exceeded in speed, audacity, and effectiveness any and all of the many amphibious attacks in the Pacific during the war. Vital to the plan was the proximity of Japan, which provided a rear base for troops and supplies, safe ports for naval vessels, and air fields for fighters and bombers. But Japan’s participation in this war was more than just a passive staging area for U.S. operations.

Japanese minesweepers operating now under the auspices of the Maritime Safety Agency were called into service for the United States in late 1950 to clear North Korean harbors of mines sowed by the North Koreans. The United States was woefully short of both minesweepers and experienced crews, and the deficit could not be made up by any of the other fourteen UN member nations taking part in the fight. In fact, “there was only one expertly trained and large minesweeping force in the world qualified to do the job, the forces of the Maritime Safety Agency.” Unbeknownst to the Japanese public at the time, Japanese crews operated in foreign waters, in a war zone, against an undeclared enemy regardless of Article 9 of the constitution.

I first heard about Japanese minesweepers from two grizzled characters, one very talkative, the other very taciturn, whom we met on a beach in Tsuruga in 2011. The taciturn man had been a Japanese Navy captain in command of a minesweeper recruited by the U.S. Navy, according to his loquacious companion. That’s where I learned the Japanese word for ‘naval mine’: 魚雷 gyorai lit. ‘fish-thunder’, which more commonly refers to torpedoes, as in 魚雷艇 gyoraitei ‘torpedo boat’. (Torpedoes are also called “fish” in anglophone sailor slang.)

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Filed under Japan, Korea, language, military, U.S., war

by Joel | 7 July 2024 · 8:27 am

Japan vs. Germany in the Pacific

From Geography and Japan’s Strategic Choices: From Seclusion to Internationalization, by Peter J. Woolley (Potomac Books, 2005), Kindle pp. 80-84:

The European war that began in August 1914 was more than European. Though it was the great European powers that immolated themselves in both victory and defeat, the war was fought around the globe and had immediate consequences for Asia and Japan.

The requirements of the European war were such that Britain, France, Germany, and Russia had to redeploy the troops maintaining their empires in Asia to the European theater of war. At the same time, they all wanted to defend those parts of their empires they could while depriving the enemy of his. Japan was Germany’s foe in this war and a very useful ally of Britain. The war was the final denouement of the tsarist regime in Russia and, when the Bolshevik Revolution had run its course, it would present Japan with a new, virulent, and formidable neighboring regime. Moreover, the successful Marxist revolution in Russia would embolden the nascent communist party in China just as the Bolshevik regime would aid and abet the Chinese revolutionaries who would one day make their own revolution and reshape Japan’s geopolitical reality. In the meanwhile, it was Japan that had an unprecedented opportunity to reshape the geopolitical contours of Asia.

Japan entered the war without hesitation on the side of Britain, sending an ultimatum to Germany on August 15 demanding that Germany withdraw all naval forces from Asian waters, disarm those not withdrawn, and turn over to Japan the whole of Germany’s Chinese territory. A week later, Japan blockaded the German-controlled port of Tsingtao and in early September Japan landed a force in order to assault the port from the rear. By November 7, 1914, Japan had taken the base at Tsingtao. At the same time, Japan also took over Germany’s other Pacific territories and bases, including the Marshall Islands, the Mariana Islands, Palau, and the Caroline Islands, prizes Japan kept as rewards for its participation in the war against Germany. The former German possessions gave Japan’s navy an orientation very different than it had before. Japan’s armed forces were arrayed across the Sea of Japan to China and the continent and, for the first time, had far-flung bases and possessions southward and eastward across the world’s largest ocean.

It is a common view of historians that Japan’s participation in the war was solely to further its territorial ambitions. A typical summary of the period opines that “the Japanese Empire was keen to make the most of the golden opportunity which Germany’s occupation with European events provided. . . . She proceeded to seize every Germany territory in the Pacific she could lay her hands on.” Doubtless this view comes from the Twenty-One Demands that Japan made on China—actually a series of memos that pressed the Chinese to give to Japan the same concessions they had given to Germany, plus several additional ones. The memos put Japan at odds with the United States, which was lamely arguing to restore China’s territorial integrity. In fact, the memoirs of Germany’s Kaiser, written after the war, support this view: “the rapid rise of Tsing-tao as a trading center aroused the envy of the Japanese. . . . Envy prompted England in 1914 to demand that Japan should take Tsing-tao. . . . Japan did this joyfully.”

Yet few history books note Japan’s contributions to the allied effort against Germany. All the great powers, most especially the United States, were apprehensive about Japan’s potential to become the dominant power not only in China but in the Pacific. Germany even briefly tried to pit the anxieties of the North American power against Japan in an effort to save Germany’s Pacific possessions. Britain too was ambivalent about Japan, first demanding that Japan enter the war immediately, then trying to limit the scope of Japan’s operations. But it must be said that Japan adhered to both the letter and spirit of the alliance it had made with Great Britain. In addition to joining the war immediately and taking Germany’s Asian bases, Japan served a number of other roles. First, Japan’s navy helped Britain drive German warships from the Pacific. The Japanese Imperial navy also allowed Britain, and later the United States, to minimize their forces in the Pacific, freeing those ships for duty in waters surrounding Europe. Further, Japan escorted convoys of troops and war materials from the British dominions in the Pacific to Europe—no small task in an era of mine and submarine warfare. Meanwhile, Japanese yards produced both ships of war and merchantmen for British allies. And beginning in 1917, Japan sent two flotillas of destroyers to the Mediterranean Sea to assist Britain in antisubmarine operations and escort troop transports. In the Mediterranean theater alone, the Imperial navy had thirty-two engagements with submarines and escorted a total of 788 allied ships.

One of the few who gave Japan its due was Winston Churchill, who served as Britain’s first lord of the admiralty and wrote a prodigious history of the war. To him Japan was “another island empire situated on the other side of the globe” and “a trustworthy friend.” Similarly, Lord Grey, who served as Britain’s foreign secretary, wrote that “Japan was for us for many, many years a fair, honorable, and loyal Ally.” Nonetheless, when the time came for postwar negotiations, Churchill and Grey were out of office and Britain had obligations to Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, who had all given Britain their firm support in the war.

The Australians and New Zealanders, chips off the Anglo block, were alarmed by Japan’s reach in the Pacific at the war’s end in 1918, and equally aware of Britain’s diminished naval strength. They insisted Japan give up any of the former German holdings south of the equator. Likewise, the United States apprehended Japan, its navy, and its extensive Pacific outposts as a maritime rival and a potential threat to free trade in Asia. As a result, Japan, the United States, Britain, and its oceanic dominions now found themselves in a peculiar geographical and political puzzle.

Japan was Britain’s ally, had built a formidable navy, and had acquired far-flung Pacific bases. Australia and New Zealand were dependable British dominions but strongly preferred to have their security guaranteed by the motherland rather than by Japan. The United States never had a peacetime alliance with Britain, but Britain valued U.S. friendship, and the two democratic, commercial, naval powers sat astride the Atlantic Ocean. Meanwhile, Japanese and American interests and possessions in the Pacific were not separated by any discernible boundary and the two powers viewed each other as rivals. The Americans also insisted on an “Open Door” trading policy in China but Japan clearly had gained the upper hand over the Europeans in that chaotic country.

The Americans had some reason to be concerned about Japan’s new position in the northwest Pacific. Japan had been consolidating its control in southern Manchuria and Korea, had taken over Shantung, and had won most of its twenty-one demands from China. The Open Door policy, the idea that outside powers would compete on equal terms in China and respect its sovereignty, was seriously threatened by Japan’s increasingly advantageous position. Government in China was becoming ever more fragmented and corrupt.

The American government also had domestic pressures to deal with in regard to Asian policy. Navalists saw British power fading and Japanese power expanding. The trend seemed to be toward Japanese dominance in the Pacific. Likewise, American traders wanted the government to take a more aggressive stance that would give them some advantage—or at least, not put them at such a disadvantage in Asia in general and in China in particular. Christian missionaries were also keen to set to work on the vast populations now accessible to their gospel. But worst of all, and most outspoken, the racist Anti-Immigration League in California made barring Japanese immigrants from schools, jobs, and property the sine qua non of their agenda and, consequently, of California politics. The Californians now found allies in various anti-immigration societies in the eastern United States as well as in worker unions and even in recent European immigrants who feared the Asians would not only drive down wages but take their jobs. Thus, the nascent Japanese-American rivalry found expression even at the level of local politics.

Complicating matters further, the Western allies, including Japan, still had troops in Siberia. Their intervention there was a confused, fruitless, and embarrassing attempt to stave the Bolshevik Revolution, or rescue the Czech freedom fighters, or prop up an alternative government, or prevent the massive resources of Siberia from falling into somebody else’s hands, or something similar. Everyone, except perhaps the Japanese, was ready to leave Siberia but not so willing to leave first and allow Japan a free hand. Consequently, the peace conference at the palace Versailles was an infamous mess.

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by Joel | 5 July 2024 · 5:27 am

Prudence of Tokugawa Isolation

From Geography and Japan’s Strategic Choices: From Seclusion to Internationalization, by Peter J. Woolley (Potomac Books, 2005), Kindle pp. 43-46:

Events outside Japan in the seventeenth century emphasized the prudence of the Tokugawa seclusion. This was the Age of Expansion—and not just for Europeans. In China, the Ming Dynasty was coming to an end at the hands of the Manchus, people the Ming once ruled. The Manchus gained control of Inner Mongolia before moving south and taking Manchuria and then Korea in 1637. They took the capital, Beijing, in 1644, prompting the Ming emperor to commit suicide. They spent the rest of the century subduing the remainder of China, defeating the last resistance in Taiwan in 1683. They would later add to their empire Outer Mongolia (1697) and Tibet (1720) to make the largest Chinese empire in history.

India had expanded to, then fallen victim to the expansion of others. The Mogul emperors had consolidated the vast subcontinent under their rule, adding the last big piece, Afghanistan, in 1581. By the end of the next century, however, the government had fallen into decline. Its infighting and inefficiency would eventually weaken and divide India to the point where the British could become the real rulers.

In Russia, Ivan the Terrible was creating an empire at the same time as Japan had been fighting its civil wars. Russians crossed the Ural Mountains into Asia and by 1584 had defeated the Tatars. They went on to colonize Siberia over the next several decades, reaching the Pacific Ocean by 1639, thereby becoming neighbors of Japan.

The Europeans continued to explore, conquer, and settle. In contrast to Tokugawa’s stable Japan, a chaotic Thirty Years’ War began in 1618 between Catholics and Protestants, which slowly engulfed the European continent. By its end, Germany was in ruins and hundreds of thousands were dead from disease, famine, and massacre. The Tokugawa strategy of seclusion then seemed like the wise choice. The only question was how long it could last.

The 250 years between the founding of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1603 and the first American attempt to force Japan to abandon its seclusion in 1853 were not years of stagnation in or outside Japan. In Japan there was political stability but also long-term trends toward urbanization and bureaucratization. A middle class of merchants emerged: people who accumulated wealth but did not necessarily control land. Nor did they have the same obligations and restrictions as the government and ruling class.

To be sure, there was more change taking place outside Japan than there was within. Much of this change would impinge sooner or later on Japan’s foreign policy as well as its domestic harmony. While most writers focus on the technological changes of the era, social, political, and intellectual changes were just as important. If Europe’s seventeenth century was the Age of Expansion, its eighteenth century was the Age of Enlightenment, which laid the foundations not only of modern science but of democratic conceptions of government as well. Notions such as the divine right of kings, raison d’état, and the innate superiority of a ruling class were on their way out. While Japan remained secluded in the fifth reign of its Tokugawa Shogunate, the English philosopher John Locke was publishing his Second Treatise on Civil Government, emphasizing the triune values of individual liberty, the sanctity of property, and equality under the law. Montesquieu’s treatise advocating a separation of government’s basic functions into separate institutions, De L’Esprit des lois, followed in 1748. Jean Jacques Rousseau’s appeal to the “general will” of the people in Le Contrat Social followed in 1762. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations argued the advantages of free trade in 1776. And James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay produced The Federalist Papers in 1787 and 1788. These works presaged an Age of Revolution. But in Japan none of this would be discussed: the most influential philosophers were Kamo no Mabuchi, Motoori Norinaga, and Hirata Atsutane.

A small school of Japanese writers began both to lead a return to ancient Japanese literature and to critique Chinese influences on Japan—influences they deemed to be impure blots and accretions on Japanese culture. Thus, one curious effect of Japan’s self-imposed seclusion was that the Chinese became the foreigners. The philosophers advocated the revival of Shinto, an indigenous animistic religion in which many things, living and inanimate, had kami, or spirits. Hundreds of native folk tales were attached to Shintoism, many supporting the notion that Japan was the center of creation and the emperor was divinely appointed.

Shinto had been gradually eclipsed by Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, each of which made its way to Japan through Chinese and Korean missionaries as early as the sixth century. Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769) was, not coincidentally, the son of a Shinto priest and was most influential in attracting attention to and reverence for classic Japanese literature—literature that included Shinto mythology. Mabuchi was succeeded in his endeavor by a disciple, Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801). Motoori’s quest was to discover the true Japanese culture, now overlaid with so many foreign influences. He saw in Japan’s distant past an ideal society ruled by the descendents of Shinto deities— the emperors. His works and speeches became very popular. But his writing had more than nostalgic undertones. Demanding new reverence for the emperor was a subtle criticism of the Shogunate that ruled in the emperor’s name. And criticizing Confucianism was tantamount to criticizing the political leadership which not only had been schooled in Confucian thought but was— Motoori implied—subservient to China. And though the Shogun gave Motoori official honors, it was Motoori’s own disciple, Hirata, who drew the ultimate conclusion: that all gods were born in Japan and none outside, thus Japan and the Japanese were a category of creation all by themselves, one that was perfect and pure—when free from the corrupting influences of outsiders.

Hirata, born the same year that the Americans produced their Declaration of Independence, became the leader of a full-blown Shinto revivalist movement. That movement was subtly critical of the government, for which Hirata spent the last two years of his life under house arrest. Though he died before the opening of Japan, his disciples were later appointed to important posts in the government, bringing with them their ideas of Japanese cultural purity to the strategic conversation.

Perhaps fundamentalist ideas such as Shinto revivalism were also the result of the strange political climate in Japan. While politically stable and peaceful, social volatility threatened. Peace and stability had brought overpopulation and a recurring threat of famine, since trade was so severely restricted. This allowed merchant and artisan guilds, or kumi to monopolize a particular distribution, trade, or manufacture. The leaders of the kumi were rich and getting richer, and this naturally caused resentment in both the aristocratic class and the underclass. Women were feeling the brunt of a more and more regulated society under an increasingly fearful, conservative government: their dress, civic participation, businesses, and even leisure arts were more and more carefully proscribed. Meanwhile, the police were easily corrupted and the highest officials were profligate in their spending and increasingly arbitrary in their enforcement of laws. All of these consequences and benefits of seclusion would be starkly outlined when Japan was confronted by the need to reevaluate its strategy of seclusion.