Show 66 - Supernova in the East V

Introduction to Series

0:00What you're about to hear is part five of what we can now confidently say is going to be a six-part series on Japan and the war in Asia and the Pacific Theater in the Second World War. If you didn't catch the earlier editions of this, you might want to. If you don't mind, or if you already did, well, then without further ado, part five of Supernova in the East.

0:24December 7th, 1941.

0:30A date which will live in infamy. The events. That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

0:48The figures. Not quite the more man, the more humanity. From this time and place. I take pride in the words, Ich bin ein violiner. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

1:088-6 to Manhattan, urgent. Marine 6. Tower 2 has had a major explosion. The deep questions. I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their president should cook. Well, I'm not a crook. If we dig deep in our history and our documents, and remember that we are not descended from the fear of man. It's hardcore history.

1:33But I'm a field cop.

Japanese Advance on New Guinea

1:34We left off this story talking about a Japanese advance on the second largest island in the world, New Guinea. Which is part of the main theater of conflict in mid-1942 in the Pacific, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands. Specifically at this time, Guadalcanal, where the Marines have just landed in strength. And for quite a while in 1942, really the rest of 1942, this will be the focus in this part of the world.

2:06Now, we should not forget certain other things. The Japanese are fighting in China. Have been since before this war started. Will be fighting there till the end. That's never going away. And the Chinese get little credit in most countries for tying down the great bulk of Japanese forces and resources. The Japanese are also fighting in Burma, what's now Myanmar, against Indian forces, British forces, some Burmese forces, and other friends. Chinese forces too, by the way, in Burma.

2:36And they're fighting Australians and Americans in the New Guinea-Solomon Islands area.

Japanese Atrocities

2:42When last we spoke, the Japanese had just started their advance over the mountains, overland, from their bases in northern New Guinea, to try to take this important city on the south side of New Guinea, known as Port Moresby. I said it was Port Moresby, which is silly because it's spelled exactly as it sounds. And as this advance begins, the Japanese begin doing what they've done all along, which is sort of baffling to most observers. They're committing atrocities, horrible atrocities.

3:13They love beheading for some reason. And they've done the killing prisoners in Rabaul before this, the beheading, the civilian killings. And it's one of those things that sort of boggles the modern mind, because you can't help but ask the salient question, why? Why is this happening? How does this benefit anybody, right? Isn't this counterproductive? Well, if you look at the entire war, this was a fascination on the parts of the world when the war was over.

3:44Not just the war crimes trials, but studies, experiments, surveys, all sorts of psychological evaluations and post-war examinations of, you know, human conduct and behavior and orders and obedience to other people's orders were something that was highly focused upon because it is somewhat stunning. It seems a little bit easy to just say, well, you know, human beings can be terrible to each other. And it doesn't apply in some situations. I mean, for example, in Europe, the situation is much easier to boil down to leadership.

4:16I mean, the Nazi regime in Germany ordered these things. Don't have to get too complicated. You go look at things like the Ober Salzburg speeches and what Hitler was saying we're going to have to do to the polls, the orders before the attack of the Soviet Union about having to sort of throw civilized norms aside. Comments like, you know, Genghis Khan is remembered as a statesman today, so it really doesn't matter. I mean, the end result is how you'll be judged, not how you got there. And in the documents, and when you read this stuff, and this doesn't apply, by the way, to how they treated the Jews in the Holocaust because that had nothing to do with practicality,

4:50unless you want to say that, you know, it was revenge. Hitler said, well, if the Jews unleash another war on Europe, they'll be sorry. And boom, maybe that's what he's doing there. But a lot of this atrocious stuff was done or at least justified on practical grounds, right? I mean, take the way the Germans treated civilians in villages where partisan activity was nearby. If somebody took a shot at German soldiers, they'd line up civilians in the village and kill them. And of course, the goal wasn't to just be cruel. It was to try to deter them through terror, something that is generally frowned upon today.

5:23It's called collective punishment. And it's funny because everybody believes in collective punishment to one degree or another. I mean, you ever been in a classroom where the teacher's got a couple kids talking, you know, amongst the 30 students and says, if the talking doesn't stop, all 30 students have to stay after school. Or how about the football coach who says, if, you know, anybody starts, you know, fooling around, everybody's going to have to run laps. I mean, that's a way to sort of get the group to enforce behavior, right? The idea is if the Germans line up a bunch of civilians in a village and kill them for every partisan activity, the other villagers will go, stop this.

5:55We're the ones paying the price for this. So the idea may be completely flawed. In fact, evidence seems to show that in the Second World War, German atrocious attitudes toward the civilian population to stop partisan activity actually leads to more partisan activity. It's long been understood that the Germans were welcomed in some places as virtual liberators when they took over areas that had been occupied by the Red Army, and they turned those people against them by their cruelty. This is not a Second World War thing, of course, though.

6:27I mean, in the First World War, go look at the rape of Belgium. It's based on a similar sort of thing, killing civilians in villages in an effort to deter partisans. What's going on in Asia is a different story and much harder to pin down. I mean, as far as I can tell, and I could be wrong about this, I can see like three levels of responsibility here. What's going on with Japanese soldiers and this cruelty could be happening at the soldier level, which is an excuse that the Japanese sometimes use. I mean, in the Nanking situation in China, it was sort of a,

7:00well, you know, boys will be boys kind of excuse. Yes, the soldiers did things that were out of control, but, you know, can you blame them? It was a very hard fight to take the city. They'd lost a lot of buddies. You know, sometimes people lose their minds a little bit. You know, maybe a lack of institutional control, but this was not a deliberate effort to wipe people out. That would be the excuse. And listen, soldiers have been misbehaving since caveman time, so there's some validity to that, maybe. Of course, there's no excuse for the loss of institutional control, but we'll play with that as one of the possible levels that atrocities happen at.

7:33The actual ground level where the soldiers are, right?

Japanese Training Methods

7:38Then there's a high-level responsibility possibility, which is what's going on in Europe, right? You could say, listen, the emperor and the major leaders decided they wanted to have a, you know, iron fist, and this would be very in keeping with sort of fascist intellectual doctrine, right? An iron fist sort of strength, and we will crush dissent, and we will teach these people, you know, that sort of thing. And that can be true, too. But where we left the story was in discussing an affidavit from an Australian officer that was introduced in the post-war war crimes trials in the Asia-Pacific theater.

8:12It was recounted in Lord Russell of Liverpool's book, The Knights of Bushido, where in New Guinea, Australian troops were being atrociously killed. I think we used, as an example, a Samuel Elliot Morrison, I think it was, incident where he said some Australians had been tied to a tree, tortured and killed, and some Japanese soldier who spoke English had put a placard above the head of one of them that said he took a long time to die. Well, how do you think that's going to make the Australian soldiers react

8:44when they capture a Japanese soldier?

8:48Well, according to this affidavit, that's exactly what the Australian officer had done. A Japanese soldier had fallen into their hands, which is unusual, and the guy spoke English, which is a double rarity. And the Australian soldier who gave the affidavit says they took the Japanese soldier to the Australian corpses, not the ones tied to a tree, but some other ones, and basically said, why did you do this? And his excuse was the officers ordered us to. And his rationale was that he says, and these are my words,

9:19but this is what he essentially points out, that they were trying to create an intentional tit-for-tat retribution cycle of atrocities as a way to discourage their own troops from surrendering. I mean, that didn't happen very often anyway, right? But, you know, the thinking might be it never hurts to have an insurance policy. I mean, if some Japanese soldier was thinking about dishonoring himself, dishonoring his family, dishonoring his unit, dishonoring his branch of the service,

9:53dishonoring his country, well, we'll just add this little caveat. You're not going to spend a couple of years in some POW camp and be repatriated to your country. You're not even going to be put up against a wall and shot. You're going to be treated the same way we treated their captives. So you might as well take the honorable way out and kill yourself.

10:14We should also point out that the Japanese cultural viewpoints on suicide are complex and nuanced. They'd always had more of an embracing of that than many other cultures. But an attempt to sort of meld fascism with traditional Japanese cultural beliefs made it even more of an imperative. And the emperor's orders to his troops basically said, you're not to fall into the enemy's hands. And maybe making sure that the conditions were such,

10:45and I think we called it diabolical on the part of the officers, if this were true, making sure that the conditions were such that the Japanese soldiers would face torture and atrocities and then be killed at the hands of the enemy made it a lot easier to just say, it'd be better to slit my stomach, shoot myself, or hold a grenade up to the side of my head and take the honorable way out. So in trying to figure out why the Japanese would be committing all these atrocities, it's still an open question. Seems counterproductive, doesn't it?

11:17There's one other aspect that might be worth introducing into here, though, and part of the fascination.

Ogawa Matsutsugu's Account

11:23In the fighting in New Guinea, there will be a Japanese soldier named Ogawa Matsutsugu, and he will write a book after the war called Human Beings and Extremists, the Island of Death, New Guinea. I tried to get that book in English. It doesn't exist. Excerpts from that book we've already talked about in the show. It's called Japan at War, an Oral History by Haruku Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook. And in it, Matsutsugu talks about Japanese training methods,

11:56and I wonder how much these training methods contributed to how Japanese troops behaved. We'd said earlier, and using a line that was originally used for Jewish folks, I think, but it works wonderfully for all sorts of very distinct peoples on the planet. So using a line and converting it to the Japanese, we said that the Japanese are like everyone else, only more so. Well, every major military in the world has a process for turning their civilians into soldiers. Basic training, right? And, um, the Japanese versions of basic training

12:30in many respects paralleled those of other nations, except what Masatsugu says is when you actually got on the ground, in the field, in country, as they would have said in Vietnam, some of these officers and units took it upon themselves to go farther than most other armies went. He talks about what would be referred to in other places and times as blooding the troops.

12:55Masatsugu says that when he got to China, you know, in-country in that war, well, here's what he writes about what the officers made them do as part of sort of finishing their training. And again, try to imagine any other Allied army doing this, and there are photographs, by the way, in case you have doubts, and try to imagine how that might have some impact on how things actually turned out in the field. He writes, quote, I never really killed anyone directly. I shot my rifle so I might have hit somebody,

13:28but I never ran anyone through with my bayonet. In China, soldiers were forced to practice on prisoners, slashing and stabbing as soon as they arrived for training. Stab him, they'd order, indicating an unresisting prisoner. I didn't move. I just stood there. The platoon leader became enraged, but I just looked away, ignoring the order. I was beaten. I was the only one who didn't do it. The platoon leader showed them how, with vigor.

13:59This is how you stab a person, he said. He hit the man's skull and knocked him into a pit. Now, stab him. They all rushed over and did it. I'm not saying I determined it good or bad through reason. I just couldn't take the thought of how it would feel, running a man through with my bayonet. End quote.

14:21Considering the rarity of cameras in these scenes, it's interesting that there are a decent number of photographs of this actually occurring. Time Life actually published some during the war, and they are astounding to look at. No other military did this. No other major military did this. Does that create a different kind of soldier when this is how you train them? Even Japanese recruits showing up in veteran units would talk about, and I'm using the exact word here, how mean the veterans looked when they showed up.

14:54I mean, these are people who've been through a lot. I should also point out that James Jones, arriving on Guadalcanal, talked about seeing the Marines who've been fighting there for months, and he used the exact same word, mean.

15:06So in mid-1942, when these Japanese are starting their trek over the mountains, heading toward Port Moresby, and killing missionaries and their children and everything along the way, decapitating them, killing natives, this is all something that plays into the entire way that the Axis is viewed. They're just seen as somehow vicious. And atrocity-oriented and cruel in a way that even other armies,

15:39and listen, armies aren't generally known for good behavior in combat, but this was on a whole different level, and it created a level of hatred, as we said, in the Pacific, where if you interview or talk to Pacific veterans, getting to be a very hard thing to do now, there are fewer and fewer of them left, and actual combat troops, which is much, much, much different than other troops, they're different, and you can tell. They don't sound like Western front troops. They don't sound like soldiers from North Africa.

16:10They hate the enemy, and they hate them often, even to this day. And it's because of what they saw, and what they, the Japanese were cruel. And where that cruelty came from is hard to pin down.

16:25In New Guinea, when they start coming over the mountains in 1942, there is very little to stop them. And that's part of the heroic tale of the Kokoda Track, or the Kokoda Trail, which is one of the great moments in Australian military history. We should remember, there's only about 7 million Australians in the world at this time. So when we use numbers to talk about, you know, the size of forces and everything, remember how small

16:56this population is that they're drawing troops from. And we need to remember something more, as the Australians will point out, left, right, and center. Their army isn't there. Can you imagine having the Japanese that close to something like California, and having the army that would normally defend California on the other side of the world? Feel a little undefended, don't you? The Australian troops, who are part of their regular military, are fantastic. They are making up the tip of the Allied spear in North Africa against Rommel.

17:29Some of these units were at places like Tobruk. They were spending time in Syria, becoming excellent in that theater, learning all the little tricks of the trade, of fighting in the desert, which is a unique sort of an environment. So what happens when the Japanese

Kokoda Track Defense

17:43start coming over the Kokoda track, threatening the northern outposts of Australia, threatening Australia itself? Well, they have a bunch of what in the U.S. we would call, like, National Guard troops or reservists. And this is where the lore of the defense of the Kokoda Trail sort of begins. We should also point out something else. It has all the literary makings of a great tale. The stage is set for drama, isn't it? I mean, anyone who's interested

18:13in military history knows that if you combine one part small area to defend, like, for example, a pass, with one part threat of national extinction, throw in a little pinch of outnumbered, outgunned, and overmatched with a little dash of what the Aussies call mateship, which, you know, military comradeship, and you have a recipe for national military immortality.

18:45And in the Australian military annals, the Kokoda track is right up there with Gallipoli for those moments that just move the Australian soul.

18:57Your minds want a little bit of, like Thermopylae in ancient Greece, right? The only difference is at Thermopylae, you have the Spartan king and 300 of his best guys and some extra people, too. But, you know, you have the cream of the crop keeping the enormous hordes of the enemy at bay. In New Guinea, it's people the regular military refer to contemptuously, usually, with the term Chacos,

19:27which is short for chocolate soldiers.

19:33That's what the Belgians were called in the First World War, often by the Germans. They figured they would just melt when exposed to heat. The Australian regulars generally look down upon these people who are going to be the first line of defense in New Guinea because, after all, if they were any good, wouldn't they be with the tip of the spear in North Africa or Syria or even places like Singapore that just fell or Burma? These guys are what's left and they have to hold down the fort

20:03against Japanese veterans who have steamrolled everything in their path up to this point? Good luck with that. Right? Beating the British at Singapore. Beating the Americans in the Philippines. Who's going to stop them in late July 1942? These reservists, these National Guardsmen, these Chaco soldiers?

20:26I mean, at least in another incident that's similar to this, you get a Thermopylae in ancient Greece. At least the Spartans had a king there with 300 of their best guys. Part of the lore in this case that makes it so immortal is that it's not Australia's best guys and they're the ones sort of by fate tasked with this endeavor. Now, what makes it so terrible, though, is where this endeavor

20:56has to take place because to those of us not in combat, it just seems like it would be awful to be facing bullets and shells and aircraft and all that stuff. But everyone in the war on the front lines, anyways, facing that. What makes one experience of a combat soldier different than another are the other variables, like how terrible a place you happen to be in while you're facing the bullets and shells in the aircraft. New Guinea is on par with fighting in the Arctic

21:27or the Sahara Desert or the Amazon rainforest. And that makes all the difference in the world. I mean, there was a phrase that I ran across in the materials that purports to be a saying that Japanese soldiers had. And it's basically a comparison of the various places a Japanese soldier might find themselves fighting in or stationed in, you know, based on their good or bad fortune. And the saying is

21:58that heaven is Java. Hell is Burma. But no one returns alive from New Guinea. That's why the title of Ogawa Matsutsugu's book was Human Beings in Extremis, The Island of Death, New Guinea. And Matsutsugu says that people would come simply to look at him after the war because they couldn't believe somebody got out. That's how few people did. Remember, the Japanese are going to have a name for all these people

22:29that get lost in the war and then come back years later, right, to view their own gravestones, to go back to their families only to find out that their wives have remarried and their children have grown up with other fathers. They call them the living war dead, which is a fabulously interesting phrase. How many people do you have to have falling into that category to have to come up with a special phrase for it? And they had this all over the war, we should say. I mean, there were Germans returning from Soviet POW camps years later. The difference is that people didn't get lost

23:01in any other theater anywhere near as often as they got lost in the Asia-Pacific theater and a lot of people got lost in New Guinea because when you look at the terrain and the circumstances of the people who had to fight there, it is wild. Mountains that are on par with the Alps, a jungle that is as heavy as you will find anywhere, rainfall that sometimes tops the more than 300-inch mark.

23:31It is never dry in New Guinea except on a few particularly dry spots.

23:37I think it's Matsutsugu who wondered if you could drown marching in rain that was that heavy.

23:45Famed military writer James Dunnigan said about the New Guinea fighting that it combined the worst aspects of jungle and mountain combat, and that's what makes the situation so memorable for the people who fought there. Yes, they remember the fighting as combat troops on every front remembered, but they added to that the equivalent, as one author said, of fighting in an obstacle course. I mean, the number of veterans that talk about these things like the phenomenon

24:15of the false crest, for example, is a little bit shocking and pretty universal. The false crest phenomenon relates to the fact that the soldiers who fought in New Guinea and Osmar White, who was a war correspondent there, said something to the effect that, you know, geography is impartial, so it affects both sides equally. The climbing that these people had to do straight up and straight down, mountain after mountain after mountain, broke the spirits of so many of them, and their stories

24:45of soldiers on both sides breaking down in tears and embracing each other when they finally get to the top of some of these mountains and then to look over the horizon which had been invisible to them before they got to the top and seeing more mountains just the same as far as the eye could see. In his book, Kokoda, which is a pretty, pretty classic book, author Peter Fitzsimmons tries to give a sense of what the terrain is like. And by the way, when he refers to what he calls the diggers of the 39th, he's talking about

25:16the 39th Infantry Battalion and the diggers, that's a term for Australian soldiers, and he writes, quote, the diggers of the 39th, struggling up and over these godforsaken mountains, tried in vain to come to terms with their new surroundings. This was like no place they'd ever been before or even heard of. For many of them, particularly those from the often long, low, featureless plains of western Victoria, it was beyond their imagination. The mountains and ranges

25:48continued to the far horizons, to all points of the compass, valleys, crevices, and creases sprayed out seemingly at random, many of them filled with thick mist, and most of them the men knew, entirely uncharted by Europeans. Through it all, somehow, the track, he means the Kokoda Trail, the bloody track, poked and prodded its way roughly northward, sometimes gripping grimly to the side of a mountain above a raging torrent,

26:19sometimes going from rock to rock in that torrent for as long as a mile, sometimes glugging along beneath four feet of marsh, and often going up a slope which was just a few degrees off vertical to an absolute height at the top of the ranges of over 7,000 feet. Then, he writes, it wasn't just the gut-wrenching agony of reaching the top only to find that a dozen more hills exactly like it lay between them and sundown. It was the bone-jarring agony of the equally

26:49steep descent, torturing knees that had never been subjected to such punishment, and all the while risking falls that could maim a man for life. End quote.

27:01At the suggestion of some Australian listeners, I picked up Osmar White's book, Green Armor, and White was a war correspondent who essentially went with the troops and kept journals, and so it's a little like being with a travel correspondent, and as White finds something unusual, you discover it with him, and he talks about the primeval nature of the jungle in this area and how it is a little like Jurassic Park in the sense that it, he said at one point that 10,000 bombers could drop their load

27:31in one of these valleys he was talking about and it wouldn't leave a scar. If you sit still for a few hours, you get the feeling that you would start turning into a human Chia pet and start going all green and growing.

27:45In country like this, the help of the native peoples is vital.

27:53And the native peoples of New Guinea are fascinating, and the more I researched them, the more I started to fall in love a bit with my subject. There are about, and there were no surveys done, so who knows, about 2 million estimated people on the island at this point, and the diversity is impossible to describe because there's between 700 and 1,000 tribes of them. They speak between 700 and 1,000 different languages. A giant chunk, by the way, of the entire globe's

28:24language diversity comes from New Guinea, and the differences between one tribe of people and another tribe of people right next door could be stark. So trying to broad brush anything is a fool's errand. The people in Port Moresby, for example, who are in regular contact with Australia, very different than people's miles into the interior, which is a little like going into a time machine if you get off these trails because you start running into peoples that have little

28:55to no contact with the outside world. In fact, if you wanted to try to find some of the last remaining groups of human beings who have not been contacted by the outside world, you should have New Guinea on your short list. You should have some islands off the coast of India. That's always been a fruitful place to find some uncontacted tribes. The Amazon rainforest, always a good bet. Lots of things can hide in there. And New Guinea, even today, has tribes that, if not uncontacted, very little contact with the outside world.

29:28That is both fascinating and somewhat scary, and it makes the allied and Japanese armies look a little like one part John Wayne in a war film combined with one part pith helmet wearing great white explorer, kind of. One of the things to consider also is just like on Guadalcanal, there are few to no good maps. So the armies fighting here are flying blind, which is just one more reason

29:58you need the natives. And the indigenous peoples have always been important when outside powers are fighting in their territory. We always use the example of Apache scouts because that's one of my favorites. I mean, you want to go fight Apaches in the Dragoon Mountains? You better have Apache scouts or you're not going to find any. You want to go into Afghanistan and start going after tribesmen there? Better have some friendly tribesmen to help you. And in New Guinea, the one aspect that really gave the allies an advantage over time in this regard

30:28was they had more friendly indigenous peoples on their side than the Japanese did and they made a real effort to cultivate them. And they had to because remember the indigenous peoples of New Guinea are basically colonial subjects. I mean, there's a natural tendency to sometimes have a sense of resentment against the colonial occupiers, but pretty soon the Japanese for similar reasons to how the Germans would turn people in Eastern Europe that they had liberated against them

30:59when they could have had them on their side. The Japanese do quite a bit of that to the indigenous peoples of New Guinea and they will pay for that by not having their help and their help is such that the Australians will coin a term for the people there. Sounds a little bit politically incorrect today, but anyone who knows the story knows how much love and respect it is spoken with. The Australians called the indigenous peoples that helped them the fuzzy wuzzy angels.

31:30And many an Australian soldier and a bunch of Americans too owe their lives to the locals.

31:38We just spent all this time talking about the insane terrain, how wet it is, how crazy this footpath trod over millennia by the natives, how crazy it was for both Western troops and Japanese troops to try to negotiate these things. How on earth do you get the supplies, the massive amount of supplies that troops need to fight to them through this? It's not, there's no bulldozers making roads. The stuff for the most part has to come in on the backs

32:09of other human beings and the allies will contract in 1942 alone to use 32,000 natives as the equivalent of a human transport chain. You can airdrop some stuff and there is an air base, a small air base in Kokoda which is a prime strategic objective but you absolutely can't survive without the help of these natives. Not just as we said bringing the food in but if this track, this Kokoda track is so unbelievably

32:39hard on soldiers, what is it like to try to get wounded men from the front lines back to a place where you can treat, oh I don't know, like a blown off limb? the natives bring them down, a native on each corner of a cot carrying the wounded man, sometimes jumping from rock to rock to rock in streams. I mean, this is a story of human endurance and you can see why the Australians just sit there

33:11in awe of what was achieved here.

Native Peoples' Role in the War

33:13The conditions were heartbreaking and trying beyond belief. Now, what it isn't is an affair that you can sit there and put a big map up on the board and show these giant outflanking maneuvers and big arrows pointing everywhere although that's not stopping MacArthur of course from doing press conferences down in Australia showing that that's exactly what he's doing here but part of the way I want to talk about the whole upcoming war especially these island campaigns is to try to

33:43acknowledge the sameness of the experience for the soldiers fighting on the ground. For them, there's not that much difference because the war itself has nothing to do with generals for them and colonels and majors and captains as one Australian veteran pointed out Kokoda was a straight up corporal's war. That's because when you're out on some trail on patrol there is no general there with you. I love the way

34:15one of these squad leaders quoted in Eric Bergerid's book and I think it's one of the best I think I've said