Category Archives: war

by | 13 March 2024 · 2:45 am

Germany’s Eastern Victory in WW1

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 21-22, 25-26:

Germany’s confident hopes of a swift victory were halted in September 1914 by British, Belgian, and French troops on the Marne River in France. From this point onwards, the war on the Western Front became a stalemate, with 8 million troops stretched along a 450-mile front from the North Sea to the Swiss border. Numerous attempts to break the deadlock turned into dogged struggles for mere yards of territory, with millions of lives lost and little ground gained. Barbed wire entanglements impeded the advance of competing armies and machine guns mowed down advancing troops. It was a struggle in which an average of 6,000 troops were killed every day.

The stalemate in the west contrasted sharply with the stunning victories of the German Army on the Eastern Front in 1914 and 1915, masterminded by General Paul von Hindenburg, the chief of the Supreme Army Command (Oberste Heeresleitung, OHL), and his brilliant Chief of Staff, the Quartermaster General, Erich Ludendorff. By the end of 1915, the Germans had driven the Russian armies back remorselessly over 250 miles. These stunning victories turned Hindenburg and Ludendorff into national heroes. As the war progressed, Kaiser Wilhelm proved incapable of effective leadership, which resulted in a power vacuum, filled by the military high command. In late August 1916, Germany became a de facto military dictatorship led by Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who were able, until the later stages of the war, to ignore the wishes of the parliamentary parties.

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On 19 July 1917, Erzberger introduced a resolution in the Reichstag for a ‘peace without annexations’, which was passed by 212 to 126 votes. It was the first major intervention by the Reichstag to oppose the war, but Kaiser Wilhelm refused to be bound by the Reichstag. Hindenburg and Ludendorff considered the resolution a ‘scrap of paper’ and ignored it. The blame for the political crisis was placed on Bethmann Hollweg, who had rightly been sceptical about unrestricted submarine warfare. He was forced to resign as Chancellor.

His replacement, Georg Michaelis, who took office on 13 July 1917, was the first German Chancellor who was not of noble birth. His background was in business, but his only previous minor political posts were as an undersecretary of state in the Prussian Treasury, and as the head of the Reich Grain Agency (Reichsgetreidestelle), the office responsible for the distribution of corn and wheat. The prime movers in the unexpected elevation of this inexperienced bureaucrat to the role of Chancellor were Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who felt he would do their bidding. True to form, Michaelis kept the Reichstag completely in the dark on matters of war and foreign relations. He was forced to resign on 1 November 1917 after his refusal to give support to Erzberger’s peace resolution led to the loss of a vote of confidence in the Reichstag.

In Eastern Europe, relentless German military pressure contributed to the abdication of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II in February 1917, which eventually led to the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Ilyich Lenin coming to power in November of that year. Lenin’s return to Russia was assisted by his sealed train being given permission to cross German territory – an incident in which Ludendorff played a key role.

After seizing power, Lenin and the Bolsheviks opened negotiations for a peace settlement with Germany. This resulted in the signing of the punitive Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918, under which Russia lost possession of 34 per cent of its population, 54 per cent of its industry, including 89 per cent of its coalfields, and 26 per cent of its railways, and was also obliged to pay 6 billion marks in compensation for German losses. The Treaty completely contradicted the Peace Resolution of the Reichstag, which had pledged ‘peace without annexations’, yet the Reichstag deputies ratified the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk without suggesting any amendments.

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Filed under democracy, Eastern Europe, economics, Germany, industry, migration, military, nationalism, Russia, war

by | 12 March 2024 · 9:22 am

Bypassing the Reichstag in World War I

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 18-23:

At the start of the First World War, Imperial Germany was not a parliamentary democracy, but nor was it an autocracy. It had a constitution, a national parliament, and independent states which controlled the local budgets of each region. The national parliament consisted of the Reichstag directly elected by the German people and an upper unelected chamber known as the Federal Council (Bundesrat), with representatives from the 26 individual princely states. Voting in elections for the Reichstag was confined to all males aged 25 and over and based on a constituency-based, first-past-the-post system. Neither the Bundesrat nor the Reichstag had the power to draft legislation but were expected to approve it. Even so, more people were entitled to vote in German parliamentary elections in 1914 than was the case in Britain.

Despite the Reichstag’s lack of political power, German national elections were hotly contested….

The power and influence of the military was stronger than that of any of the political parties. It was often described as a ‘state within a state’. The Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II, the eldest grandson of Queen Victoria, had been in power since 1888. He had the final say on policy, controlled the armed forces, appointed the German Chancellor and the cabinet ministers and was able to veto decisions taken by the Bundesrat and the Reichstag. The German Empire’s governing system, dominated by the Kaiser, was called an ‘autocratic state’ (Obrigkeitsstaat). On the outbreak of war on 4 August 1914, the German Emperor told the assembled members of the Reichstag: ‘I no longer recognise parties. I know only Germans.’ He then asked the Reichstag members to endorse an Enabling Act which suspended elections and Reichstag meetings and afforded him unlimited powers. Under Article 68 of the then German constitution, the Army seized wide-ranging executive powers, which included a strict censorship of the press.

Kaiser Wilhelm decided to finance the war not by raising taxation, but by creating Loan Banknotes (Darlehenskassenscheine), issuing three-month Treasury Bills and printing money. The idea was for these loans to be paid back in the event of Germany winning the war, capturing territory, and imposing reparations on the defeated powers. It was only in 1916 that new taxes were belatedly introduced on business, but not on incomes. Only 13.9 per cent of Germany’s war costs came from direct taxation, compared to 18.2 per cent for Britain. During the war, the amount of money in circulation rose from 7.4 million to 44.4 million marks, which inevitably led to high inflation.

The Germans prided themselves on the superiority of their armed forces and the strength of their economy. In 1914, Germany possessed the most powerful and dynamic economy on the European continent, which had experienced 50 years of uninterrupted growth. Germany produced two-thirds of Europe’s output of steel, half its coal production, and 20 per cent more electrical energy than Britain, France and Italy put together. It had a population of 67 million, which had grown from 25 million in 1800. It was also Europe’s leader in modern industries such as chemicals and pharmaceuticals. In agriculture, it produced a third of the world’s output of potatoes.

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Germany in the period from 1916 to 1918 has been correctly described as a ‘Silent Dictatorship’. Censorship over newspapers was tightened; at the same time, Hindenburg ordered the systematic economic exploitation of German-occupied areas in France, Belgium and in East Central Europe, under the Hindenburg Programme of August 1916, which aimed to double industrial production by increasing the output of munitions, explosives, weapons, artillery, and ammunition. On 1 November 1916 Hindenburg and Ludendorff founded the Supreme War Office (Kriegsamt), under General Wilhelm Groener, to create a command economy ruled by the army. Compulsory military service was introduced for everyone aged 16 to 60, and businesses not related to the war economy were closed down. More alarmingly, compulsory hard labour was imposed on prisoners of war in labour camps, often under appalling conditions. Under the ‘Silent Dictatorship’, Germany pursued its war aims in a ruthless manner. At the beginning of 1917, the Imperial Navy (Kaiserliche Marine) adopted unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic to disrupt British and French supplies arriving from the USA. This proved counterproductive and provoked the Americans, led by President Woodrow Wilson, to enter the war on the Allied side in April 1917.

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by | 12 February 2024 · 5:44 am

New Sites for Convict Colonies

From In For The Long Haul: First Fleet Voyage & Colonial Australia: The Convicts’ Perspective, by Annegret Hall (ESH Publication, 2018), Kindle pp. 63-67:

Between 1783 and 1786, three different sites for convict colonies were under consideration – in Senegal, on the Gold Coast of Africa and in New South Wales on the east coast of New Holland. In December 1784, an exploratory expedition to transport convicts to Lemain Island, 700 km up the river Gambia in Senegal, was put forward. Following strong public and parliamentary criticism, the Lemain project was abandoned because of the region’s unsuitable climate. In May 1785, James Matra once again testified before a committee enquiring specifically into the suitability of Botany Bay as a penal colony. Even at this late stage, the committee was not prepared to rule out the free colonisation of this site. Despite much testimony in favour of a New Holland location, the majority of the committee believed that an African site would be more practical. In parallel with committee’s enquiries, the government was independently exploring various settlement options. The Home Office was increasingly anxious at the burgeoning number of transportees in prisons and Lord Sydney and Evan Nepean, thought that closer sites in Africa could be settled sooner.

The strain on the prison system by the end of 1785 was so great that additional naval ships had to be converted into prison hulks. The hulk Fortunée was moored at Portsmouth and the Dunkirk at Plymouth. The political and public pressure on the government was intense, and the Home Office commissioned a ship to explore possible locations on the west coast of Africa between Das Voltas (Orange River) and Angola. This expedition returned in July 1786 and reported that the soil in the Das Voltas was not suitable for cultivation. This report effectively ended any further consideration of Africa as a place for a British convict settlement.

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The often-cited belief that Botany Bay was planned solely as a dumping ground for convicts is unsupported by available documents. It may have been the main objective, but there is clear evidence the Pitt government saw tangible benefits in establishing commercial bases in the South Pacific. At the time, Britain was embroiled in conflicts with France, Spain and America, so there were also strategic reasons for establishing a territorial claim on the continent. Nevertheless, the endless debates on whether New South Wales was suitable suggests a begrudging recognition by the Tory government that this was a good locality – it was just a pity one had to go so far to dispose of the convicts, and to achieve these objectives.

Early assessments of the Botany Bay Scheme logistics by the Home Office appreciated that it would be quite different to sending convicts to America, which had been privately financed and organised. The Botany Bay Scheme would be administered by the government, transported by the Royal Navy and guarded by Royal Marines. This enterprise had no precedent in previous British convict transportations. The government, rather than private merchants, would be involved in convict transportation on a scale that they had never before attempted.

In August 1786, Lord Sydney informed the Admiralty of what he needed to transport 750 convicts to Botany Bay. He requested a naval warship that would escort and protect transport ships carrying the convicts and 160 marines as guards to the new settlement. The marines would be responsible to the Home Office for a term of three years.

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Filed under Africa, Australia, Britain, economics, France, labor, migration, Pacific, Spain, U.S., war

by | 10 February 2024 · 4:06 am

Era of Petty Capital Crimes, mid 1700s

From In For The Long Haul: First Fleet Voyage & Colonial Australia: The Convicts’ Perspective, by Annegret Hall (ESH Publication, 2018), Kindle pp. 17-19:

By mid-century the fear that increasing crime rates would lead to widespread social disruption spawned new penalties intended to discourage property theft. The legal imperatives for these were bolstered by a growing concern about the civil insurrection in France, especially after the French Revolution took place in 1789. The British Parliament passed bills reclassifying many petty crimes as capital offences (to which the death sentence applies). Capital crimes now included burglary, highway-robbery, house-breaking in daytime, private stealing or picking pockets above 1 shilling, shoplifting above 5 shillings, stealing above 40 shillings, maiming or stealing a cow, horse or sheep, or breaking into a house or church. The official punishment for these offences was now the same as for murder and treason – death by hanging.

Quite unfairly the new laws came into effect rapidly and were little understood by the poor, of whom 90% were illiterate. Consequently, the severity of the changes went largely unappreciated by the working class, which Thomas Paine – author of The Rights of Man – claimed was intentional to disadvantage the poor. Other enlightened members of English society, including the judiciary, strongly opposed the imposition of the new capital sentences for minor offences and this became a cause célèbre for many social reformers; the same people advocating for the abolition of the slave trade in the 1770s.

Mercifully, there were several ad hoc legal options available to those members of the judiciary who were inclined to avoid the imposition of a capital sentence. The legal loopholes were not recognised officially, but they were commonly applied, nonetheless. In particular, juries could be encouraged to apply pious perjury in assessing the severity of an offence when a prisoner was charged with a minor property or financial crime. Such actions permitted judges to assign imprisonment by transportation rather than the death sentence. For example, a court clerk could routinely understate the value of stolen property on the charge sheet in order that it was below the capital offence threshold.

In fact, the widespread application of judicial leniency in the late 1700s meant that transportation beyond the seas became the de facto sentence imposed by courts for minor crimes. Relaxation of the capital sentencing laws was tolerated because a sentence of transportation satisfied the political imperative of removing petty lawbreakers from decent society. Ironically, the lenient judicial practices posed a new problem for the prison system in England; where were all these transported prisoners to go? After 1775, the American Colonies no longer accepted transportees and there was no other offshore prison to send them to.

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by | 8 February 2024 · 3:04 pm

New Wealth in Britain, 1700s

From In For The Long Haul: First Fleet Voyage & Colonial Australia: The Convicts’ Perspective, by Annegret Hall (ESH Publication, 2018), Kindle pp. 13-15:

The 18th century in England was a time of enormous social, economic and political change. There were a multitude of reasons for these upheavals, but the principal ones were the all-embracing industrial and agrarian revolutions. These dramatically altered the lives of both urban and rural working classes by eroding traditional employment opportunities, and, ultimately, decimating the cottage-based industries. These changes took place when Britain’s colonial empire, along with its African slave trade, was burgeoning, but they also occurred in a period of major military conflicts with France, Spain and the American colonies. The burgeoning growth in international trade and commodity markets at the time contributed significantly to the overall wealth of the mercantile classes but, in most respects, it reduced the opportunities and living standards of unskilled and illiterate workers.

The advent of new industrial and transportation technologies proved a major factor in Britain’s increasing mercantile success. John Kay’s invention of the flying shuttle in 1733 and the carding machine in 1754 accelerated cloth weaving and were the forerunners of innovations that ultimately led to the complete automation of textile manufacturing. James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny in 1765; Matthew Boulton and James Watt began producing steam engines for factories in 1774. By 1780, the combination of Hargreaves’ inventions, Richard Arkwright’s water frame, and the increased access to canals linking major population centres, made Britain a world leader in the manufacture of high quality textiles.

These industrial advances increased the prosperity, sophistication and leisure pursuits of the British upper and middle classes of society and provided the intellectual environment for the appreciation of progressive social concepts, including the abolition of slavery. The mid 18th century in Britain was a time of far-reaching intellectual advances in scientific knowledge, politics and philosophy and is commonly referred to as the Age of Enlightenment and Science. The outspoken views of William Wilberforce, Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, Benjamin Franklin and many others, were discussed within literate and political circles and became catalysts for significant shifts in the social attitudes of the educated. The tolerant views of King George III cultivated a relatively liberal approach to social mobility and political change. George III suffered from bouts of porphyria during his 50-year reign but for most of this time he remained politically astute and active.

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by | 6 February 2024 · 7:02 am

Rooting Out Nazis in 1946 Germany

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 236-238:

The Spruchkammer tribunals were mocked for a good reason. They served mainly to whitewash suspect characters who needed certificates of good character, notoriously labelled Persilschein – after the washing powder Persil – to show they were ‘whiter than white, with all brown [Nazi] stains removed.’ The initial problem was to find anyone in the legal profession who was not themselves compromised – 90 per cent of German lawyers had been Nazi Party members. In Hamburg at the end of the war, every judge was a member of either the Party or an affiliated organisation. It was a dilemma that would never be resolved. So Nazi judges tried cases of Nazi crimes – including those jurists who had sent people to the gallows for ‘crimes’ that, until Hitler came to power, had not been offences, such as sexual relations between Jews and Christians. In the American zone not a single judge was removed from the bench after the war.

The majority of the police were Nazis, too, which ought to have prevented their involvement in such cases, but did not. Kurt Schumacher, the leader of the SDP, had been assigned a five-man police guard by the British Occupation forces, who had assured him that the police force had been ‘cleared of Nazis’. But on 15 May 1946 he angrily wrote to British officials to say that, after overhearing his bodyguards chatting, he found that four out of the five had been in the SS. He was also profoundly shocked to learn that the British had just appointed a notorious SS man, Lieutenant-Colonel Adolf Shult, as head of the police in the British zone. An Allied Control Commission report to the British Foreign Office explained: ‘It is fairly clear that if the denazification of the police is carried to extremes there would be no police force left. With conditions…[in Germany] as they are it would perhaps seem that the essential thing is to have a reliable police force and this cannot be achieved without some sense of security…The need is…[to] terminate the process of denazification at some stage for these reasons…We will surely still need the police as an instrument of military government.’ In an apparently seamless transition, many senior officers kept their jobs, among them Wilhelm Hauser, Chief of Police in the Rhineland-Palatinate, who, when he was an SS officer in Byelorussia, had been responsible for countless wartime atrocities.

No German institution was entirely ‘cleansed’. Brown stains remained everywhere. More than three-quarters of university professors had been Party members, and even those who briefly lost their jobs were reinstated. Dr Hans Preuss, Dean of the Theology Department at one of Germany’s foremost universities, Erlangen, in Nuremberg, was a fervent Nazi who, in the 1930s had organised the burning of books in the university’s library written by Jews or Marxists. Preuss was sacked in the summer of 1945 but got his job back the following year. Around two-thirds of Germany’s teachers had been Nazis, and at the gymnasia, the best secondary schools, the figure was higher. Thousands had been fired in the three or four months after the end of the war. In 1946, 90 per cent of them were reinstated. The British poet Stephen Spender, then a civil servant, who had been despatched early in the year to report on education in the British Occupation zone, could see why. Visiting a school in Hamburg, he asked the children what they were studying. ‘Latin and biology,’ they said. ‘Nothing else?’ I asked. ‘No, sir. You see the history, geography, English and mathematics teachers have all been fired.’

Many of the clergy, regardless of denomination, had also been Party members. After the sacking of numerous German civil servants, the Lutheran Bishop of Württemberg, Theophil Wurm, preached that they had suffered too much and were the victims ‘of extremely skilful propaganda…[most] had joined the Party thinking of the public welfare. They did not identify themselves with the regime.’ He was perhaps also thinking of himself. He had joined the Nazi Party in 1933, arguing that he had done so ‘in good faith…believing it could produce a religious revival,’ though he later began to oppose the regime and was removed from his bishopric. The American Religious Affairs Division of the Occupation reported to Clay that it knew of 351 active clergy in the American sector. Of these, only three were defrocked. In the summer of 1946 the Catholic Archbishop of Freiburg, Conrad Gröber, nicknamed ‘Brown Conrad’ because of his fervent support for the Nazis, issued a pastoral letter to his flock in which he blamed the rise of Hitler on ‘secularism’, neatly absolving the Church and the people from responsibility for what had happened over the last dozen years.

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by | 5 February 2024 · 6:13 am

Dilemma of Imperial India in 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 212-214:

For [Viceroy] Wavell, a respected general with a reflective mind – his collection Other Men’s Flowers is one of the most entertaining of all English verse anthologies – Britain ‘made an entirely wrong turn in India twenty-five years ago.’ He thought that if the Indians had been seriously offered the kind of Dominion status within the Commonwealth that ‘white’ territories such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa had obtained around the time of the First World War, there would have been a good chance of keeping India united. In the early 1930s Gandhi and other Congress leaders went to London for talks and were assured that soon India would gain a kind of self-government – but not yet. No date was given, and all goodwill with the nationalists was lost when in 1939 Wavell’s predecessor, Lord Linlithgow, declared war on Germany ‘on behalf of India’ without consulting any Indians at all. The Australian and Canadian governments, for example, were asked beforehand and made the decision for themselves. The British expected a million Indians to fight against the Germans.

Nehru, who loathed fascism and the Nazis rather more than some of Britain’s ruling elite did, said that it was hard for the people of India to fight for the freedom of Poland when they themselves were under foreign occupation. ‘If Britain fought for democracy she should…end imperialism in her own possessions and establish full democracy in India. A free and independent India would gladly co-operate…with other free nations for mutual defence against aggression.’

The British establishment tended to believe the dictum of the most magnificent of all the imperial grandees sent to oversee the smooth running of the empire: Lord Curzon. As Viceroy at the turn of the century, Curzon had declared, ‘As long as we rule in India we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it we shall drop straightaway to a third rate power…The rest is redundant.’ Few believed this as instinctively as did Winston Churchill, the most romantic of imperialists, who had battled all his political life to maintain British rule in India. Yet Churchill probably did as much as anyone to hasten its end.

When he was Prime Minister he had no intention of ever giving up the Jewel in the Crown. He told the War Cabinet that even if he was forced by the Indian nationalists into making some concessions, ‘I would feel under no obligation to honour promises made at a time of difficulty.’

Churchill regarded any notion of Britain leaving India, or even India being granted Dominion status, as ‘criminally mischievous’. He retained the sentimental attachment to the idea of the Raj that he had held as a junior cavalry officer on the North-West frontier in the 1890s. Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India during the war, said, ‘Winston knew as much about India as George III did of the American colonies…He reacts instinctively and passionately against any government for India other than the one he knew forty years ago.’

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by | 4 February 2024 · 6:44 am

Tito vs. Stalin in Greece, 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 258-259:

One country, however, did want to help the Greek communists. Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito began sending large quantities of weapons and money to the Greek Left – partly out of zeal to help comrades in need, but also to assert an independent line, what he called ‘a national route to Socialism’ – heresy in Stalin’s eyes. Tito, who had been in Moscow exile for years in the 1930s, had in many ways modelled himself on the dictator in the Kremlin. Already he had established a terrifying secret police force, the OGPI, led by the thuggish Ante Ranković, which had murdered thousands of opponents. Stalin distrusted the Yugoslav dictator, who he told Beria and Molotov was too ‘ambitious, too ardent and full of zeal’. In Eastern Europe only Yugoslavia had liberated itself, albeit with money and weapons from the Russians and Britain – but without the need of Soviet troops. Tito resented being ordered around by Moscow, as he told his cronies in comments that he knew would get back to the Kremlin. He had ambitions to be the most powerful communist in the Balkans, which would give him a big power base. Tito resented the Soviet Union’s interference in Yugoslavia’s territorial demands. For months after the war the Yugoslavs had laid claim to Trieste, and thousands of partisans surrounded the city, but the British insisted that it must remain under Italian sovereignty. Tito continued to protest and threatened a full-scale invasion. Finally, the Soviets ordered him to give up his claims on Trieste and grudgingly he agreed, though he could not hide his frustration. He said he did not want to be ‘small change in the politics of the Great Powers’.

Stalin now instructed the Yugoslavs to stop aiding the Greeks. He told two senior officials from Belgrade, Milovan Djilas and Edward Kardelj, that the insurgents in Greece ‘have no prospect of success whatsoever. What, do you think that Great Britain and the United States – the most powerful state in the world – will permit you to break their lines of communication in the Mediterranean? Nonsense. The uprising in Greece must stop, and as quickly as possible.’

But Tito defied the Russians. He continued sending arms to the Greek communists, in increased quantities. The consequences were soon dire for hundreds of thousands of loyal communists throughout the Soviet domains. It was the first sign of the spectacular Soviet–Yugoslav split which would dominate Eastern Europe over the coming few years – and the seeds were sown for a mass Stalinist purge throughout the ‘socialist camp’. Alleged Titoists would be murdered and tortured in Eastern Europe, as ‘Trotskyites’ had been in the Soviet Union of the 1930s. Again the Bolsheviks devoured their own children in an orgy of bloodshed. In Greece, the fighting would continue until 1949, leaving more than a hundred thousand dead, around one million homeless – and would increasingly turn into a front line in the Cold War conflict between East and West.

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by | 3 February 2024 · 5:55 am

Japan’s No. 1 Problem in 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 102-104:

Amidst the rubble of the cities, one of the saddest sights was that of orphaned children with white boxes hanging around their necks. The boxes contained the ashes of their relatives. In some cities, more than a quarter of the population was homeless – with a mass influx returning home from the front. More than five million Japanese were repatriated in the eighteen months after the war. Around 80 per cent were soldiers and the rest were colonists and their families from the empire Japan had conquered but had now lost. They were seldom welcomed back with open arms. Soldiers, in particular, were widely despised – and this in a country where propaganda, and long tradition, had conditioned its people to hold officers and men from the Imperial Army as the fount of all honour. ‘We were not invincible, as we had been told by our superiors,’ one officer recalled wearily, many years later. ‘The big shock was coming home and being shunned. People did not look us in the face.’ Army and people together were not ‘a hundred million hearts beating as one’, as the military mantra went. The people now regarded soldiers not as returning heroes but as discredited failures, and treated them as pariahs. But it was not only that the military had failed lamentably in its mission and left the country starving and ruined: since the defeat, the public had also been inundated with information about the atrocities Japanese soldiers had committed in China, the Philippines, Korea, Indonesia, and South-East Asia. Japan had been dishonoured in the eyes of its own people, for which the Japanese blamed their own soldiers.

But in the immediate aftermath of defeat questions of honour took second place. For at least the next two years food remained the biggest issue for most Japanese. Much of Japan had gone hungry long before the surrender. Shortages had been acute since the fortunes of war had turned in favour of the Western Allies and by the end of 1944 the majority of Japanese were malnourished. South Korea and Formosa (Taiwan) had been colonies since before the First World War and had produced large amounts of food for the home market. But the sinking of Japanese ships in the Pacific meant that these supplies were not getting through. American bombing of the cities had also disrupted food distribution, and 1945 saw the worst harvest since 1910. At the end of autumn 1945 the country was almost entirely out of rice. Thousands had starved to death and officials warned that ten million people now faced imminent starvation. They were exaggerating, but their panic prompted swift action from the occupying army.

MacArthur’s first, decent, instinct was to alleviate hunger and avoid famine. He cut through red tape, ordered the seizure of 3.5 million tons of food that the US Army had stockpiled for emergencies and had it shipped to Japan. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the House Appropriations Committee were indignant and demanded an explanation, but he responded with customary arrogance.

Among my more vivid earliest memories of Japan in the early 1950s was the sight of former Japanese soldiers, dressed all in white except for their green field hats, often missing a limb, begging in pedestrian underpasses or other unobtrusive places with lots of passing foot-traffic.

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Filed under economics, food, industry, Japan, Korea, migration, military, nationalism, Taiwan, U.S., war

by | 2 February 2024 · 6:05 am

Japan’s Abdication Crisis, 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 95-96:

Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni was the first member of the Japanese imperial family to break ranks and say it publicly. On 27 February 1946 he told a journalist from the New York Times that Emperor Hirohito should abdicate in favour of his son and a regent be nominated until Crown Prince Akihito, then aged twelve, came of age. Higashikuni, the Emperor’s uncle by marriage, was one of the few members of Japan’s ruling circle in the 1930s to have opposed war in Asia and to have warned against embarking on a route bound to result in conflict with the United States. After Pearl Harbor he had continually sought ways to bring about peace. Following Japan’s surrender in August 1945, he became Prime Minister, charged with overseeing the cessation of hostilities and reassuring the people that the Japanese empire was secure, despite the defeat. After two months he retired voluntarily, but he remained one of the most influential members of the government. Now he admitted that in Tokyo court circles the idea of abdication had been discussed for months; just a few days earlier he had told the Emperor in a private audience that he should stand down. He had said the same thing at a Cabinet meeting. Hirohito, he declared, bore ‘moral responsibility’ for the nation’s defeat, ‘to the dead and to his bereaved subjects’.

These unprecedented comments caused a sensation. Japan was a strictly hierarchical society. The imperial family and leading aristocrats seldom spoke out of turn or manifested any sign of disloyalty. A few days later the Emperor’s youngest brother, Prince Misaka, declared that Hirohito should accept responsibility for defeat and graciously volunteered himself as the regent. Another brother, Takametsu [sic, Takamatsu], was also suggested. Despite hunger and extreme hardship being uppermost in most Japanese minds, much of the country was talking about the possible abdication. The censored press, however, barely mentioned the issue, although there was a huge stir when one of Japan’s foremost poets, Miyoshi Tatsuji, published an essay urging the Emperor to step down as he had been ‘extremely negligent in the performance of his duties…[and] was responsible for betraying the loyal soldiers who had laid down their lives for him in battle.’

But the most powerful man in the country had decided against abdication. General Douglas MacArthur, the proconsul in charge of America’s occupation of Japan, was insistent on Hirohito staying on the throne – and whatever MacArthur wanted in postwar Japan he got. America would remake Japan from the top down and turn it from semi-feudal despotism into a model twentieth-century democracy rooted in Western precepts of freedom. The Americans would impose democracy by fiat on Japan, whether the Japanese wanted and liked it or not, but they would do so using imperial institutions, including the existing civil service. They adopted as their principal ally and functionary in the task an Emperor who just weeks earlier had been regarded by his people, and by himself, as a descendant of the gods. Despite such obvious ironies, the creation of the new Japan was a remarkable achievement – practical, efficient, bloodless – and of lasting importance in re-ordering not just Japan but, by example, much of the Asian continent.

At the beginning of 1946 neither princes nor poets would have dared to question Emperor Hirohito’s right to rule, despite the humiliation of total defeat. But early in the New Year, the Emperor issued a statement proclaiming himself human. It was the first stage of a process that turned Hirohito from an absolute ruler, literally worshipped by his people, into a constitutional monarch.

This chapter is perhaps the weakest in the book. Many small typos indicate it was neither written nor proofread very carefully, or that he relied only on occupation-era English language reports. For instance, it spells Daiichi [第一 ‘No. 1’] Bank as ‘Daichi’ Bank, Prince Takamatsu [高松] as ‘Takematsu’; Atsugi [厚木] Naval Air Base as ‘Atsugii’.

But the most egregious error in his account of the war in northern China was relying on outdated (and false) Chinese Nationalist sources that blamed Japan for destroying the Yellow River dikes that flooded huge areas and killed millions of people, but allowed the Chinese Nationalists time to withdraw their armies and capital deeper into the interior.

Disasterhistory.org offers a more up-to-date corrective.

Many people drowned in the flooding; far more would succumb to illness or hunger in the difficult months and years that followed. To the east, however, the river’s diversion halted the invading Japanese, who abandoned their westward march. The vital railroad junction at Zhengzhou was held for the time. The city of Hankou, China’s provisional political center after the fall of Nanjing, won a temporary breathing spell.

Strategically, breaking the dikes may have bought the Nationalist army time to withdraw and regroup, bogging down Japanese tanks and mobile artillery in fields of mud as Chinese forces secured their defenses around Zhengzhou. By preventing the Japanese from taking the railway junction, some scholars argue, the river’s diversion postponed the seizure of Wuhan by several months, giving the Nationalist government time to relocate its capital to southwest China in the city of Chongqing. But the Japanese simply redirected their advance from a north–south land attack along the railways to an amphibious assault along the Yangzi River that combined naval and infantry forces. Wuhan fell in October 1938, after the Nationalist central government had withdrawn into China’s interior.

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Like the numerous scorched-earth tactics that the Nationalists employed during the Sino-Japanese War, the breaking of the Yellow River dikes was undertaken in an atmosphere of high-level desperation and panic that grew from the Japanese war of terror. On the other hand, the Nationalist regime showed a willingness to sacrifice people along with resources to keep them out of Japanese hands. The breaking of the Yellow River dikes was the prime example of this tendency. In the eyes of Nationalist leaders, not unlike other modern regimes of the twentieth-century world, “saving the nation” could justify unlimited sacrifice on the part of the civilian population.

Throughout the war, the Nationalist government refused to take responsibility for the disasters caused by the Yellow River’s intentional diversion. Instead, the Nationalists claimed that Japanese bombing of the dikes had caused the floods, presenting the disaster as another example of Japanese atrocities against Chinese civilians. Chinese newspaper reports published in the summer of 1938 followed the official version of events. The Japanese denied these accusations, framing the flood as proof of China’s disregard for human life. When the disaster’s true causes eventually came to light after 1945, the Nationalist regime changed the narrative and presented the flood as evidence of sacrifices made by China’s people to save the nation during the War of Resistance.

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On shifting representations of the flood disaster see especially, Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley, “From ‘Nourish the People’ to ‘Sacrifice for the Nation’: Changing Responses to Disaster in Late Imperial and Modern China,” The Journal of Asian Studies 73:2 (2014), 447–469.

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