Show 67 - Supernova in the East VI

0:00What you're about to hear is part six of a six-part series on the Second World War in the Asia-Pacific Theater. If you have not heard the earlier segments, please go check those out. You probably want to hear this in order, but there's a few of you out there who don't care about that sort of stuff, in which case, well, catch up and join us, won't you, for part six of the light and airy story that is Supernova in the East.

0:36It's history. 1941, a date which will live in infamy. It's hardcore history.

0:49People who are knowledgeable about the Second World War, and many people are, it's one of those subjects that fascinates human beings the world over, understandably so, people who are aficionados of the Second World War knows that the rhythm of the Second World War reminds you of an opera or a musical theater production where the end is going to be like the end of the world, a Ragnarok or a Gatardammerung, and the whole last year of the war is whipping yourself up like a roller coaster going uphill waiting for that giant dip where you're building

1:23up to that horrific ending. The last year of the Second World War is the worst year of the Second World War, and the kind of numbers that demonstrate that are, for example, casualties, killings. Look at the German deaths, for example, in January 1945. That's a month that is mind-blowing. The Germans will have more than 400,000 of their soldiers, maybe closer to 450,000 of their soldiers die in that month alone. For comparison purposes, that is more military deaths than the United States suffered, all

1:56branches of service, all cause of mortality for the whole war.

2:01Historian Neil Ferguson says the German military loses more soldiers in the last year of the war than the entire rest of the war put together. And some of the latest estimates of casualty numbers suggest the Germans were losing, on average, 10,000 soldiers every day in 1945. So from January 1st to May 8th, when the war ended in Europe, 10,000 a day on average. That is almost twice as many people as the United States lost at the Battle of Antietam, which many military historians consider to be the worst day in U.S. military history,

2:33and the Germans were getting it day after day after day. If you think to yourself, and this would be totally understandable, who cares, right? The Germans are reaping what they sowed. That would be fine, except it's hardly just the Germans. In his book, How Wars End, author Gideon Rose says that every month in 1945, between 100,000 and 250,000 non-combatants in Asia were dying, again, every month due to the actions of Japanese

3:04forces, these are data points, but you have to add all the other data points up, too, and see the conveyor belt of death, the factory assembly line of human destruction that's going on in 1945, or really the last year of the war. I mean, you don't have to really imagine too much to just know that the Holocaust is going on during this time period in Europe, and people are dying in those camps every day. So every day the war continues. That tally goes up reliably. I'm reminded of a song by the rock band, the MC5, from the late 1960s, early 1970s.

3:39They wrote a song, which I think is about the Vietnam War, and it's entitled The Human Being Lawnmower. And to me, the imagery, as horrific as it is, works better for the Second World War, and especially the end of the Second World War, than it does for Vietnam, a lawnmower that cuts human beings instead of blades of grass, or an assembly line that's reliably heading towards a furnace or a chopping machine with people on it. And when the lead singer would say the words, the human being lawnmower, he would emphasize

4:13what was going on by then saying, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, human being lawnmower, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop. That's what's going on in the last year of the war. So why is the last year of the war still going on?

4:26Neil Ferguson, in his book, The War of the World, quotes an aide to U.S. General Omar Bradley, who is fighting the Third Reich in Europe. And the aide made this statement, Ferguson says, at the end of 1944, and the statement was, quote, if we were fighting reasonable people, they would have surrendered long ago, end quote. But they're not fighting reasonable people, clearly. They're fighting a fanatical regime in the Third Reich, which is committed to going down with the ship and taking the entire country down with them.

4:57And the Japanese, we've already pointed out, to outside observers who are not Japanese, it's always looked fanatical. Hitler and his cohorts know that they're not surviving the post-war period regardless. They're all going to hang at the end of a rope. So maybe that influences their decision to take everything down with them. His propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, had famously said, if we have to leave, we'll close the door behind us with a slam that all the world will hear. Pity that all the German civilians need to go with them.

5:29And in the Japanese situation, their military is planning for a last-ditch stand on the home islands. If it comes to that, the army thinks they can put two and a half million Japanese soldiers into Japan's built-up cities and then add to those numbers with a ton of civilians that, as we said in the last segment, are training with bamboo spears by this time and make life impossible for an invading army.

5:57What's the goal? What's the end game? Well, both the Germans and the Japanese are hoping to inflict a last big blow against their enemies that causes their enemies to rethink the peace terms. Because as, you know, even a cursory understanding of the Second World War makes clear, the peace terms are unconditional surrender. And the reason we know that is the Allies made an attempt to broadcast this, make it known to everybody.

6:28The terms are, you give up, and then we decide what we're going to do to you. Now, this is controversial. After all, if the terms of surrender are going to be that harsh, the Axis powers are going to fight longer than they otherwise might, which means the human being lawnmower, the conveyor belt of destruction continues longer. The Holocaust goes on longer. The Asian civilians die, you know, more day. I mean, just, it's controversial. But there's an attitude, if you look at the sources, that you need an unconditional surrender

7:03if you're going to finally end this recurring problem. And the Germans especially are seen as a recurring problem. My stepfather, who was half German by ancestry, had said, look at the German history over the past hundred years, right? The Franco-Prussian War, the First World War, the Second World War. That is three generations of German youth going off to fight in wars that destabilize the international system. Franklin Roosevelt thought it was Prussian or Junker militarism that was at fault and that countries needed to have finally this tendency rooted out of them.

7:39And to do that, a free hand would be necessary. You couldn't have some sort of deal, like the deal that ended the First World War. You needed the ability to remake these societies to finally end the repeat offender status of some of these places, right? Who would upset the peace of the world. So for many people, it was this view that the entire sacrifice of all three of those wars, but especially the Second World War, would be in vain if it didn't end the right way. There's a quote from Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Breckenridge Long that's used in Gideon

8:13Rose's book where he says, quote, we are fighting this war because we did not have an unconditional surrender at the end of the last one, end quote.

8:23It's controversial, though. And people like Winston Churchill sometimes seem to vary in his views that you find on whether or not he was for it or open to some sort of conditional peace in his book series, The Second World War, which cannot be taken as gospel truth. You know, you take it with a grain of salt because he's bolstering his own post-war image. But he knows that unconditional surrender is controversial. So he tries to defend it, and he says that they tried to sit down and come up with conditional

8:57terms, right? If it was not going to be unconditional, what should the surrender terms be? And he wrote, quote, they looked so terrible when set forth on paper and so far exceeded what was in fact done that their publication would only have stimulated German resistance. They had, in fact, only to be written out to be withdrawn, end quote. We should also recall that there were political reasons in the Allied alliance for doing this, too. The Soviets were very suspicious that the Western allies would cut a separate deal with Germany

9:29and sort of leave them in the lurch. An announced public pledge for an unconditional surrender helped bind all the allies together in a united cause, right? No one's going to make a separate peace. But it meant the war would go on longer, and both Japan and Germany were hoping for some sort of last-ditch punch in the nose that would wake the Allies up to the fact that, you know, this war could continue for years if you didn't come up with a better peace deal.

9:59I mean, that's really what something like the Battle of the Bulge, the Second Battle of the Ardennes in 1944, that could be the only reason to do that. Because there was no war-winning element to that. The whole point was to do such damage and maybe have a whole bunch of Allied troops sort of surrounded and endangered so you could maybe bargain with them. And in Japan, they were continually looking for the last great battle that would help wake the Allies up to the idea that unconditional surrender was a bridge too far. When last we spoke, we were talking about the Battle of Saipan in July 1944.

10:36Well, the Navy, the Japanese Navy, had thought that the war had been decided, some of the naval experts after the Battle of Guadalcanal and most of the rest, at least after the Battle of Midway, in the Japanese War Journal of Imperial Headquarters quoted in Richard B. Frank's book, Downfall. Well, they were very open, and this is official, that the war was over in terms of who was going to win. And it said, quote, We can no longer direct the war with any hope of success.

11:08The only course left is for Japan's 100 million people to sacrifice their lives by charging the enemy to make them lose the will to fight. End quote.

11:20That is an amazing statement. We will sacrifice all the people in this country to get a better deal than unconditional surrender. And what was it that the Japanese really were holding out for? The Emperor. They were worried that an unconditional surrender might mean that the Emperor and the entire Imperial system would be tossed out. And this was something they could not live with. What's more, the idea that the Emperor might be treated as a war criminal and might be hung

11:52or something after the war was intolerable to a ton of Japanese people, including a ton of civilians. I mean, remember, there's a decent number of Japanese folk who consider this person a living God. His voice has never even been heard by the public. I mean, there's a whole lot of stuff that makes this an almost superhuman figure. And the idea that the country might have to lose, there really weren't 100 million people in Japan. It's more like 70 or 75 million. But I mean, that you might have to sacrifice that to keep one guy on the throne.

12:23Wow. That's, well, if we were fighting reasonable people, it would have been over already. This is not reasonable. I read a couple of different takes on this that suggested it was a lot more than the Emperor. This is the Imperial system, which includes a lot of what we would call the oligarchy or the old guard. There's a lot of people who have a stake in the Imperial system and they would all be thrown to the wolves if this went away. But it would seem to be the kind of thing where you're going to keep the human being lawnmower

12:54operating at breakneck speed to keep a single guy from the gallows after the war, maybe. The problem Japan has is different than Germany. Because one of the things we said at the end of the last segment was that the famous plot against Adolf Hitler on July 20th, Operation Valkyrie, where a bomb exploded in a meeting room attempting to take Hitler out. Well, that's an attempt to get rid of the fanatic in chief, right? I mean, as I said, if we were fighting reasonable people, the war would be over long ago. But in Germany, you have to get rid of the unreasonable person at the top to have a chance

13:27to do that. Japan's government's very different. It's hard to put your finger on who's in charge. And we dealt with this extensively in the first segment of the program, pointing out that Japan's system was one that outsiders certainly, but even insiders sometimes, could have a tough time figuring where the buck stops. Author Ian W. Toll had written a line that just, I think, was a perfect summation of that, where he said, quote, the same institutional defects that had produced Japan's irrational

13:58decision to launch the war in 1941 now prevented a rational decision to end it, end quote. And S.C.M. Payne, in his book, The Wars for Asia, 1911-1945, had said that Japan's government had been called a government by acquiescence or a system of irresponsibility. And he said, quote, because if everyone is responsible for policy, then policy formation becomes anonymous so that no one is actually held accountable. The primary value emphasized in decision making was a consensus reached through informal procedures,

14:34end quote. A consensus that required the most diehard fanatical elements of the military to be on board. And at least the army was not. And this, by the way, is why everybody spends so much time talking about the 19th century development of the Japanese constitutional system design and everything to get us to the Second World War. Because the Second World War is where a couple of major things happen where you just go, it's almost like a tragic flaw in Greek theater, where it was built into the Japanese

15:07system a long time ago, and it only comes out when the system's under massive stress, like, you know, a world war. But the fact that the army and navy, for example, have an outsized amount of control and influence tends to bend the decision making in a more hard line sort of way. And people who want to talk about peace actually put their own lives in danger to do so. So in both Germany and Japan, as the war starts to grind into the last year, anybody who tries to bring up the idea of peace or who suggests that the war may be lost are enemies of the

15:45regime. In Germany, in the last year of the war, between 10,000 and 20,000 people, I read, were hung or executed in some other way, soldiers and civilians alike, on charges of what was called defeatism in Japan. And Marius B. Jensen, the historian, says that the military was watching the people and had jailed some people for high-level defeatism, as it was called. And Saburo Ionaga, in his book, The Pacific War, talked about how careful, those were his

16:18translated words, peace advocates in the government had to be. He says that they faced assassination or a coup. And he blames the army, but that's who he blames for a lot of things. The point being that even bringing up what might be a rational question, like, do we have to have Armageddon? Is that the way this whole thing has to go? Could get you charged as an enemy of the state. And in a place like Germany, it could get you hung. So rationality isn't just in short supply. It's actively punished by death. I keep thinking of both the average Japanese person, who may or may not have wanted to

16:55die for the emperor.

16:58Are they looking forward to actually taking up arms with their women and children and fighting alongside the Japanese army in the built-up areas of Japan in house-to-house, hand-to-hand combat against the Allied forces? Something tells me there are going to be a lot of regular Japanese folks who would see that as a failure of government.

17:18And once again, there are going to be people who say, well, then they shouldn't have started the war. They shouldn't have mistreated all of the populations they dealt with so much, which is a fair point. But let's remember that if the Japanese are going to die because they're going to have to be rooted out of all these buildings, somebody is going to have to do the rooting out. And this is what my stepfather was referring to once when he talked to me about how it was a kind of a double-edged sword reading in the newspapers about how well the war was going.

17:50Because my stepdad's a guy who got into the Second World War at the real tail end of it. So had there been a 1946 continuation of the war, that's when he would have been in the thick of it. So like a lot of people by the end of the war, he was kind of trying to time it out in his head, right? Is this thing going to be over before I'm on the frontline areas? He was a naval guy, but the frontline areas was right off the coast of Japan if there was 1946 fighting.

18:15And he said every time there'd be another victory in another island taking another closer hop to Japan, you know, and more of the shrinking of the blast radius of Japan's supernova, he said that's the same as saying we're one step closer to the final battles for Japan's home islands, the Ragnarok, right? And he's thinking to himself, you know, everybody already knows how diehard the Japanese were on all these islands we've already had to take from them that they don't care about as much as the home islands.

18:46And we still have to go do, I mean, nobody was looking forward to this. I just keep thinking about how unnerving the previews to it all would be if I were a nearly fighting age young man in the United States in, say, April, early May 1945. And I'm reading about the Battle of Berlin, right? The last assault the Red Army launches on Hitler's capital city with Hitler in it, that

19:18the last big battle, right? It's going to end right here. Ragnarok in Berlin. If I'm reading about that, something that turns into arguably the worst urban combat in human history. The Red Army loses more than 80,000 men in 16 days. The Germans lose more, more than 20,000 civilians. Hitler kills himself in the bunker with the Soviet troops yards away. The only way it could have been more last ditch is if a Soviet soldier had broken down the bunker doors and stabbed Hitler with a bayonet.

19:49And Hitler is not perceived as any more fanatical than Japanese leadership. And maybe your average Japanese loyal soldier and maybe even his wife and child. Who knows? But to somebody like yours truly reading the paper, this would have looked like a horrible preview of what the Tokyo situation is going to look like in a few months when we get to that. And yet the alternative to Ragnarok is to let the human being lawnmower continue to rack up

20:20obscene monthly death totals until it's stopped. There are no good choices, are there? And choices are where people like yours truly, I know many of you too, we just, we can't help but look at the choices and become fascinated with, I mean, it's tempting always for a person who's into war games and chess and all that stuff to think about this in terms of a game, like a geostrategic card game. And the danger with that is all the decisions look so much easier when you're looking at them

20:52now. You have no idea all the little influences and roadblocks and inhibitors and pressures and everything else that was working on the historical figure. I always have this image of them coming back in a time machine and hearing someone like yours truly say, well, here's what you should have done. And having them say, oh yeah, sure. You don't think I would have done that if I could have, but I couldn't have because of all these things that are not even in your history books that were acting on me. So with that having been said, it's still hard for me to not look at this sometimes like a card game. And in 1944, what's fascinating of that year is that the Germans and the Japanese

21:28only have a few meaningful cards left to play. A limited amount of harbored and stockpiled strength, a little bit of rocket fuel, if you will, that they've kept aside for just this time. So what do you do with it? What do you use it for? What is a worthy goal to use some of your last remaining strength for if winning the war probably isn't on the table? I never like to say it's never on the table because war is full of weirdness to the degree that you just ever, you can't ever say

22:01ever. Somebody's always pulling victory out of the jaws of defeat. But basically there are no war winning cards left to play, at least no obvious war winning cards left to play. So how do you play what cards you still have left? That's fascinating to me. The Germans offensive in late 1944, the one in the second Ardennes, as it's called, we Americans call it the Battle of the Bulge. That's an example of Hitler playing one of those last cards. I've got the stockpile of stuff. Let's use it here. What was he trying to do? Historians and armchair generals ever since have been critiquing that decision. There

22:34were a lot of people even at the time that maybe would have liked to have seen all of that stockpiled strength used against the Red Army instead to maybe forestall what happened in Berlin long enough to let the allies get there first. The Western allies would be a better way to put it, right? Because the Soviet Union's an ally as well. But regardless, you know, hindsight's 20-20, right? The Japanese cards that they have to play, they're playing early on in 1944. I mean, they launch an offensive in the Burma-India theater in March 1944. And then a month later,

23:12they launched the largest offensive of the war on their part. And I think I read the largest offensive in Imperial Japanese Army history with the Ichigo campaign in China. We mentioned both these campaigns actually briefly in the last segment. But the Ichigo campaign is the kind where you look at and you don't even know how the Japanese do it. We mentioned a long time ago that to me, the Japanese look like one of the peoples on the planet that punch above their weight class. Because they are able to pull off stuff where you would look at their population

23:46numbers and their geographical questions and their history and think that they're just not, they're not going to be able to do that. And then they achieve it anyway. And I sometimes wonder, looking at their history, if maybe they just have to. We've talked about the limitations of their somewhat dysfunctional subpar, usually in terms of outcome government design. We've talked about the problems that they have with the organization of the military, and how you have this issue with mid-level officers able to exert an undue amount of control and influence over military policy.

24:18These are all things that put the Japanese into very tough situations. And time and again, somehow, despite all of the impediments and the odds against them, the Japanese people managed to pull the fat out of the fire more times than not. I read somewhere that for the Ichigo offensive, the Japanese stockpiled ammunition for two years, and aviation air fuel for eight months. And when they launch this multi-stage offensive that will go from April 1944 to at least December 1944,

24:50I believe there's still significant fighting going on in January 1945. The half a million Japanese troops, more than 15,000 vehicles, more than 100,000 animals, launched this assault on China that is ferocious. And, you know, we should point out that nowhere in the Pacific was anybody facing armies like 500,000 Japanese soldiers. These are land war in Asia-sized armies. Okay. I mean, the big battles in the Pacific later on are going to be fractions of this number.

25:22However, the only exception I can think of is the Philippines campaign, which is still to come. But even then, the Japanese are more on the defensive there, whereas in China, on the Ichigo offensive, it is a massive, many months-long assault. But when you're fighting Chinese armies, which are traditionally very large, and in this campaign, the Japanese are often outnumbered and fighting multiple Chinese armies, which means lots of troops, you better have lots of troops. The irony of the whole thing is that the Japanese will, in large part, succeed in many ways in this

25:59offensive. If you were judging this offensive outside of the context of the war, you'd go, wow, they pulled off a lot of upsets here. Almost knocked the nationalists out of the war, did retake the American air bases they wanted eliminated, did connect these territories they wanted connected. But as so many historians I was reading pointed out, so what? So you took this giant amount of remaining rocket fuel you'd stored up and saved to use somehow, and you did it in a way that won't slow the Allied advance across the Pacific Islands and toward the Japanese homeland at all?

26:32Right? Was that a wasted card? You actually achieved a lot of what you wanted to achieve? It actually worked out pretty well, judging by, you know, a non-contextual sort of standard, but in a contextual sort of standard didn't do anything to slow down the losing of the war. Needless to say, it keeps the human being lawnmower working overtime. I mean, 750,000 Chinese soldiers may have been killed. I've seen like 100,000 Japanese as a death toll sometimes. The numbers are hard to trust and

27:04differ source to source, and the methodology is different. But there may have been 200,000 Chinese civilian deaths due to this offensive. And in the same way that there are critics of Hitler's decision to use some of his last precious rocket fuel against the Western allies instead of against the Soviets, saying that it was essentially a boon for communism and it trapped more of Central Europe behind the Iron Curtain, a similar charge is sometimes made against the Japanese for the

27:35Ichigo campaign. For example, Japanese military historian Haira Takeshi, writing in The Battle for China, proclaims the Ichigo campaign to have been a disaster for both the Japanese and the nationalist Chinese. He says the only winners were the communists because they sat back and watched their two worst enemies, the Japanese and the nationalist Chinese, kill each other off. The nationalist and the communist Chinese, of course, had been fighting a civil war when the Japanese invasion of China sort of temporarily put a damper on that, but it will spring into new

28:12life after the Japanese are defeated. And because perhaps of the damage that was done to the nationalists, the nationalists will lose that civil war. And well, of course, we have a communist China today. So there are some historians who suggest that the Japanese helped give us a communist China today. It's interesting and fascinating to contemplate, isn't it? Considering that in 1944, Japan was probably the most anti-communist country in the world. There's some historical irony to it, isn't it? Talk about not getting what you wished for.

28:43I happen to find much more intrigue in the Japanese offensive in Burma, the one that kicks off a month before Ichigo and was supposed to act sort of in tandem with it. To me, it's much more interesting because there's a wild card element involved. And if you're where the Japanese are at this time in the war, wild cards look good. How about playing a joker card in a campaign, right? Introduce a little chaos somewhere where it might do some good for your war effort. And if you can't win the war, what can

29:19you do? The Japanese offensive in central Burma is known as the Yugo campaign from the Japanese viewpoint. In Anglo-American histories, it's often referred to as the invasion of India in 1944. Now, most military history accounts of the Yugo campaign state the sort of goals that also don't really do a whole lot to keep Japan from losing the war. It doesn't even really do much to slow it

29:50down. I mean, you know I love the Encyclopedia of Military History by R. Ernest Dupuis and Trevor Dupuis. They describe the Japanese goals this way. By the way, Kawabe and Mudaguchi are two Japanese generals. Quote, Kawabe had directed Mudaguchi to prepare for an offensive across the mountains into eastern India with three of his divisions, which, with attached units, totaled nearly a hundred thousand veteran combat troops. The objective was twofold, they write. First, to seize the Imphal-Kohima

30:23plain of Manipur, the logical assembly area and base for any allied invasion of central Burma from India. Second, to cut the railroad line into Assam, which passed through Manipur and which carried almost all the supplies, all the supplies into China that they were sending. End quote. So this doesn't sound a whole lot different than the Ichigo campaign, does it? The sort of sound military objectives that won't keep you from losing the war. But there's a secondary consideration, or a lot of

30:55my history books will call it a secondary objective. Sometimes they'll have a whole paragraph outlying the seizing of the railheads and all these military things, and then add like a couple of words or a single sentence at the end of the paragraph and say something to the effect of, oh yeah, and maybe prompt some sort of a rebellion in India. That little secondary consideration is the most interesting part of this plan to me. And the most scary to a dedicated imperialist like Winston Churchill. In his book, well, series of books, The History of the Second World War, written not that long after

31:28the Second World War, and sometimes you can see it as almost a window into the psychology of Winston Churchill. Churchill doesn't talk at all about seizing this railhead or this. He lays out what the head of the greatest colonial power in human history. His worry is, and he puts it this way, he says, quote, they, meaning the Japanese, propose to invade eastern India and raise the flag of rebellion against the British, end quote. Raise the flag of rebellion against the British. What would that even mean?

32:04Well, first we have to recall the global situation in 1944. A ton of the world are colonial possessions during this time period. I mean, go look at a map. And a lot of the places that aren't colonial possessions are de facto ones, where they're sort of under the control of other people. I mean, but almost all of Africa is colonized during this period. Most of the places that the Japanese took over after the Pearl Harbor attacks, they didn't take from the indigenous peoples. They conquered those

32:40places from the colonial countries that had taken them over a long time ago. I mean, the Japanese threw out the Dutch who were controlling places like Java and Sumatra. They threw out the French who were in Indochina, right? Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam today. They threw the British out of Burma. And now the British were in India. And what if the Japanese could have cloud seeded a revolution there? It's a weird thought, isn't it? Cloud seeding a revolution. But if you look at the

33:12histories of the late 1940s after the Second World War, the 1950s, the 1960s, really into the 1970s, there are so many wars and struggles and political problems that one could broadly classify as the unraveling of colonialism. I mean, the Vietnam War is as a result of the unraveling of colonialism. And so many of these places that will fall into these categories in the decades after the Second World War have the seeds and the nucleus of those things in existence already.

33:44I remember a history professor pointing out that one of the key amplifiers and accelerators of this process was that the Japanese didn't just throw out these colonial powers when they took over these countries from them. They threw them out quickly and at the same time. So instead of the Dutch having to leave the Indies and then 10 years later, the French having to leave Indochina and then 10 years after that, the British having to leave India, the Japanese threw them all out in a matter of months

34:15and kept them out of those territories for years. And so when those countries evicted the Japanese and retook their colonial possessions, those colonial possessions had not had their colonial masters there for some time. Tough to put those genies back in the bottle, especially when those areas weren't too happy with the colonial masters already. India is a perfect example of that. By 1944, there are some seriously angry Indians and they're angry at the British. Recall our conversation earlier on

34:51when we had talked about how the Indians who already were for years before this time advocating for independence from Britain, how they even found themselves in the Second World War was a slap in the face. The British Viceroy just said, we're in. Didn't ask Indian leadership or the top people in India at all. In 1942, when talks broke down on Indian independence, Mohandas Gandhi, called Mahatma Gandhi, the great soul, he starts the Quit India campaign, which says we're not going to cooperate with

35:23the war effort. For his troubles, he gets thrown into jail along with most of the leadership of his political party. There will be something like 100,000 Indians thrown into prison during this time period. There will be riots, rebellions, protests. At some of these protests, troops will open fire and hundreds, if not thousands, those numbers are debatable, will be killed. There is a famine in Bengal in 1943, which we also mentioned, which will stretch into 1944, which it's a very controversial issue. It's often blamed on war-related things. And a guy who gets the lion's share of the blame on the

35:58part of some people is Winston Churchill. And he's called genocidal by some Indians today. But millions will die in this. It contributes to the mood. Brigadier Peter Young, who wrote a book in the 1970s called A Dictionary of Battles, claims that it was taking 100,000 British and Indian soldiers to keep the lid on unrest in India during this time period. So this is even before the Japanese make their move here. Worth pointing out that India is not the kind of place, no country is, but especially

36:28not India, that is of like mind about anything. It is an enormous country and potentially the most diverse country I've ever seen, top to bottom, side to side. And it was even bigger in this period than it is now because its territories included the modern states of Pakistan and Bangladesh as well. Some of these people support the British. There are princely groups, for example, that have an arrangement with the colonial powers. The Muslims and the Hindus have different opinions on things.

37:00We'd mentioned earlier there's two and a half million Indian soldiers fighting for the allies. But there's also Indian soldiers fighting with the Japanese against the allies. It's a much smaller number. But in this campaign, this invasion of India in 1944, they're going to play an important role. They're led by a charismatic Indian figure. His name is Subhashjandra Bose. And, you know, if you wanted to make a really poor analogy, and I apologize for this, but Gandhi and Martin Luther King have some similarities because Martin Luther King modeled some of his tactics on Gandhi's

37:36nonviolent approach. Well, if you want to equate those two, then Subhashjandra Bose is more like an unreformed version of Malcolm X. His attitude is much more of by any means necessary. And whereas Gandhi eschews violence to get the British out of India, Bose embraces it. And he's leading a bunch of Indian troops. I think the Indian army fighting with the Japanese is like 16, 17,000 people. I think he's leading 7,000 or 8,000 in this assault on India. A lot of these Indians were POWs,

38:08and they were offered the chance. You know, when Singapore fell, a lot of them fell into Japanese hands. They were offered this chance to be in horrific POW conditions or join this army. And a lot of them, unsurprisingly, did. But Bose is involved in trying to tell the Japanese commander, listen, you defeat the British military forces here, and I will go into India with these Indians. We'll carry Indian flags of independence, and we'll raise India to rebellion. What would happen if that actually occurred? I mean, I can't think of any card the Japanese could play at

38:43this point in the war that would create more, if you'll pardon the Star Wars reference, but more of a disturbance in the Allied force than prompting a rebellion in India. Now, because India is not of one mind, I don't think you'd ever see anything like India just flip to the Axis powers. But you could easily see India descend into chaos because you'll see it after the Second World War during the chaos involved in independence. And India is one of those countries that five minutes after it descends

39:14into chaos. You have a humanitarian catastrophe on your hands. If it's taken 100,000 British and Indian troops to keep Indian unrest under control without any of that, what's it going to take if India goes sideways on the Allies? What's more, if you really want to start talking about fascinating what-ifs or counterfactuals, why would this stop at India? Those of you who remember the Arab Spring not that long ago will recall how amazing it is to see how quickly an idea and a mood, if you will,

39:48can spread. We once described ideas like an intellectual contagion. And there were many people who said that the Arab Spring was only made possible because of modern day communications. But that's happened many times in the past. Those of you who look at the famous year of 1848, the so-called year of revolutions and how many revolutions sprung up in so many different countries at once. I mean, what if the Japanese could cloud seed a revolution here on the part of a bunch of these colonially oppressed? Is that a good way to put it? Subject peoples.

40:24It's a joker card, right? It's to introduce a little chaos into the equation and see what happens. And let's recall that the Japanese propaganda has been laying the groundwork for this for years. That's why we brought it up much earlier in this conversation. I think maybe in the very first segment where we talked about Pan-Asianism, which is an intellectual doctrine with a long history and many countries have their own version of it. But the Japanese took a little bit of that and injected it into their concept of an economic union, the famous greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere.

40:59They were consistently saying things like their troops were pushing for Asia for the Asiatics. We had quoted again in the first show, I think, that Japanese soldier who said that he was fired up by his teacher back in, I think it was their version of high school, who was talking about the white man and what he was doing in Asia to Asians. And that same teacher talked about black folks in the United States, Native Americans in the United States. And this Japanese soldier said he was fired up to free all these people. In 1943, the Japanese make a big show of giving independence to a bunch of

41:37these countries like Burma, for example, although they're not really giving it to them. It's a great propaganda tool. And back in 1941, to name just one example, the Japanese foreign minister said, quote, Japan is determined to shatter the white man's mastery over all the Orient, end quote. If you are a British man in London reading the London Times in the morning or a Frenchman in Paris doing the equivalent, that sends a chill up your spine. But if you're a Vietnamese person in French

42:08Indochina or a Burmese person in Burma or an Indian person in India, and many of those people, if you look at the rules sometimes, not all places were the same, but they're living under rules that make them seem like second class citizens. Some of the rules I've seen remind one of the Jim Crow South or apartheid South Africa. Well, the Japanese driving out your colonial rulers from far away from your homeland might look a lot more like liberation than conquest. And if the Japanese

42:41had only been able to walk the walk a little bit better and live up to their hype a little bit, who knows what they might have accomplished. But as we've said over and over, they didn't. And I don't know if that's because the entire thing was nothing. This is what I learned growing up, by the way, but nothing but a fig leaf for Japanese brutal imperialism the whole time. Or whether it was a case of the Japanese right hand not knowing or caring what the Japanese left hand was doing. Oftentimes the military people seem a lot more dismissive of this idea of Asia for the

43:16Asiatics and the Japanese as the tip of the spear for Asian independence than Japanese intellectuals, citizens, or soldiers do. It's a cause worth dying for if you think about it, though. I mean, many of the peoples fighting on the good guy side and the bad guy side in a whole lot of wars think they're fighting for good reasons. I'll never forget the Nazi daggers emblazoned with the phrase, God is with us. Bottom line, though, is that even though something like that is a huge long shot,

43:51the Japanese might be trying to cloud seed a revolution here. And that's a fascinating concept when you're down to your last few cards. If India went sideways on the British, you would have a circumstance where the great supply center for the entire Asia war from the British Empire would be unusable or cut off. According to Brigadier Peter Young in his book, A Dictionary of Battles, it's already happening with sabotage and everything else. Now, as a guy who'd rather swing for the fences

44:23at this point in the war, if I'm the one playing the Japanese geostrategic card hand or throw a Hail Mary pass or put all of my chips on one last roll of the die or one spin of the roulette wheel, this idea appeals to me a lot more than the Ichigo offensive. The problem, of course, is the way it's carried out. The Japanese do something here that, once again, I try to figure out an American equivalent. If an American army went into battle without enough supplies and the plan was to

44:55take a chance on them starving to death, I wonder how the American people would react to that. And the reason I bring it up is because the Japanese are going to do this multiple times in Burma. There's a diversionary attack that they launched before the Yugo campaign in a place called Arakhan, and the Japanese plan on not providing enough supplies for their troops. I guess that's a good way to get away from a supply problem, right? Just don't supply enough. But the country is difficult to supply regularly. The Japanese will do the same thing in this Burma campaign where they send their

45:30troops to attack Imphal and Kohima, or the places, and only give them something like 20 or 21 days worth of supplies. The goal, they say, is to take what you need to live, the bullets you need to fight, the food you need to eat, the medical supplies you need to take care of your wounded from the enemy after you defeat them. Which, of course, leads to the very interesting question, what happens if you don't? Or what happens if you don't defeat them in time to have what you need before the supplies run

46:03out? Well, it's a catastrophe, right? And while General Mutaguchi is issuing press releases saying that this giant offensive is going to change the whole complexion of the war, real rah-rah stuff, some of his divisional commanders clearly see what's about to happen here. In his book, Hirohito's War, Francis Pike talks about one of them, Lieutenant General, I hope the name pronunciation is correct, Sato. And Sato's troops are going to have to cross the Chindwin River,

46:36which is sort of one of these big dividing lines, in order to make these attacks. And Pike writes, Lieutenant General Katoku Sato, commanding the 31st Infantry Division, had to transport his troops a thousand miles before the offensive was launched. He was deeply pessimistic about the plans for the campaign, though he was partially mollified by promises of 250 tons of supplies before March 25th, and then 10 tons per week afterwards. None of these supplies actually arrived. Before leaving the

47:09Chindwin, Pike writes, Sato toasted his fellow officers with champagne, telling them, quote, I'll take the opportunity, gentlemen, of making something quite clear to you. Miracles apart, everyone is likely to lose his life in this operation. It isn't simply a question of the enemy's bullets. You must be prepared for death by starvation in these mountain fastnesses. End quote. Pike then says they were prophetic words. End quote.

47:39Now, you don't see a lot of starvation. I mean, real, like dying from hunger starvation amongst modern armies. But in fairness to the Japanese, part of the problem here is the terrain. It is awful country to try to get supplies to troops through. So much of the Asia Pacific theater is, isn't it? And we'd used a line from several of my history books, sort of a saying amongst Japanese troops comparing the relative merits of places they might find themselves serving in. Like,

48:10one of them was that heaven was Java, hell was Burma, but no one returns alive from New Guinea. And we were trying to point out when we said that how terrible a place to fight New Guinea was. But Burma, if it's better, is only better by the nth degree. It has the same combination of wonderful terrain types that make a place like New Guinea so difficult to fight in. Heavy jungle with really high mountains. It's actually on the way to the Himalayan range. So you get these 7,000 foot mountains

48:42with heavy jungle. And the jungle is so heavy, the British commander makes a mistake in thinking that the Japanese won't be able to get large numbers of troops through it. He's wrong about that. But the Japanese won't be able to get lots of supplies through it, which contributes to the starvation problem. The other issue with terrain like this is it is absolutely made for disease. New Guinea is one of the wettest places in the world. Burma is wetter. Up to five inches of rain a day during the monsoon

49:15season. And the monsoon season lasts half the year. It pretty much shuts down military operations, which is part of the reason why you haven't seen as much action in Burma, although there's been skirmishing and and some things going on. I mean, you really only have half a campaign season. But the disease is as bad as the worst places in the Asia Pacific theater. Start with malaria and work your way down an exhaustive list. The majority of casualties are caused by disease and not by enemy bullets. And sometimes some of these units reach disease casualty rates of like 600 percent.

49:52And 600 percent means that people are coming back from recuperation and getting it again, that new people are being brought in as replacements and then they're getting sick. It is completely muddy once the rain starts and there's only a few good modern roads. And those places become the key points that are fought over.

50:13The army that the Japanese are fighting is one of the most diverse in the world. And I often try to imagine myself as a Japanese soldier during this time period from a small island nation. You find yourself in Burma and in in the north, you're fighting Chinese troops and American troops, sometimes Chinese and American troops together. In this campaign, you're fighting the British Empire whose armies are some of the most diverse ever fielded. So you have your troops from Great Britain, of course, you're Englishmen, you're Scotsmen, you're Welshmen. I'm sure there

50:43are some Irish guys there. There always seem to be. But then you have a ton of Indians from all over India. You have the famous Gurkhas from Nepal who fight with the British. And then you have a bunch of people from sub-Saharan Africa, East and West Africa, the colonial regions are called. But those form a multitude of modern day African countries. The poor Japanese person is getting like a visual representation through the diversity of the army that they're facing of the depth of allied power and resources right here. Here's the way Yasmin Khan in her book India at War describes

51:19the kickoff of this campaign when the Japanese in the first week of March push across the Chindwin River and start this offensive quote. The Japanese did make an ambitious incursion into Indian territory, but by 1944, the Allies were fully prepared for it. In March 1944, the Japanese pushed into the Northeast and advanced along the Imphal-Dimapur Road in an attempt to cut Imphal's supply lines and to capture the strategically pivotal Kohima. The 14th Army, an eclectic collection of nearly half a

51:52million troops, including British infantrymen, Canadian and American pilots, the Assam rifles, the King's African rifles, and troops from the Gold Coast, had been trained, equipped, and honed into a modern fighting force by now. Among the infantry, morale was high, there was an effective organizational esprit de corps, and a powerful air support gave the Allies a distinct advantage. Nonetheless, the Japanese made a massive thrust, sending in 85,000 men, far more than had been expected,

52:26and for a time it looked as if they might cut off and occupy Northeast India at Kohima. But in stark contrast to 1942, she writes, the Japanese quickly became overstretched, as their supply lines were bogged down over hundreds of miles of difficult terrain, winding back into Southeast Asia, end quote.

52:48Basically what happens is the British are ready for this assault, but it just happens sooner than they thought it was going to happen, in greater strength than they expected, and more quickly than they'd accounted for, which puts them at a disadvantage initially. The Japanese are able to get around the flanks of a bunch of units, they cut one major force off that has to fight its way out, and then they basically surround their two areas that they're after, Imphal and Kohima. Kohima is a mountain village that's heavily jungled about 80 miles north of Imphal, and the Imphal plain is a

53:21large, relatively open area. The Japanese were basically put both of them under siege and several times tried to assault them and overrun them. Part of the reason for the heroism here is that not only are they cut off, but the British imperial forces are badly outnumbered, I think there's 15 to 20,000 Japanese attacking Kohima, for example, and something like 1,800 defenders at Kohima. This is actually, it's funny, this is both a little known affair, especially outside the British Empire and the

53:53Japanese homeland today, and yet it was voted in 2013, I believe, Britain's greatest battle of the modern era, beating out such famous encounters as Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo and the British landings at Normandy on D-Day, and yet the victory was won by an army that's known as the Forgotten Army. So does that tell you something? There's a couple of reasons that might explain this, starting with the terrain. I mean, jungle and mountain terrain has a way of frustrating large forces being used,

54:30and in an earlier discussion when we were talking about Guadalcanal and places like that, we quoted from Eric Bergerid's book, Touched with Fire, where he talks about how so much of the fighting devolves down to like squads and companies and patrols and things like that that are very different than what the large armies in, say, North Africa or the Western or Eastern Front in Europe or even in Italy are dealing with. In his book, Japan's Last Bid for Victory, The Invasion of India in 1944,

55:00author Robert Lyman describes it this way, quote, When Field Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell, the Viceroy of India, visited Headquarters 14th Army in August 1944, he was perplexed by the nature of the fighting, describing it in a letter to London as taking place strangely in what he called penny packets. He was right. The battle did not involve massed brigades and divisions, fighting in carefully choreographed coherence on a perhaps

55:31traditional model, if a normally chaotic battlefield could ever be described thus, but was instead, Lyman writes, a confused and disparate section and platoon, sometimes company-level struggle, fought at many different points of the compass in the jungle, matted hills and valleys encircling the Imphal plain, and the swampy terrain around Bishanpur. None of the land battles were directly interconnected. The struggles for the north and northeast, the south and southeast, being conducted

56:04largely independent by both attacker and defender, end quote. Add to that the fact that battle is a very strange term to use for 20th century large-scale conflict because it's so different than all the previous eras that came before it, when a battle usually meant one really horrible day. The really terrible battles in human history up until the modern era are two or three days long. Now, we're not

56:35talking about sieges, which can go on for months or even years, but a battle is generally something on a small enough area where if you can get above the fray and the dust and the commotion and the chaos, get up to a hill, maybe with a little spyglass, you can usually see the whole thing. Not here. Not in the 20th century. You're better off referring to these things to avoid confusion, and they often are referred to, instead of battles, as operations. Operations that are the sum total of thousands of

57:08potentially fatal tasks. So when you read the accounts of a veteran in these modern operations, their entire war experience may be when they ran into a concealed gun in a hill a mile away from the road that they're on that shuts down road traffic until they can figure out a way to outflank the gun and take it out, right? That's one of those, you know, thousands of little potentially fatal tasks that when you add them all together equals an operation like the YMFAL-Kohima campaign.

57:40But it sure makes it less dramatic in the big picture sense and much harder to follow. But in the small unit sense, it is as dramatic and horrifying as any encounter you'll find in the war. Maybe worse. If you look at the big picture timeline in the first week of March, the Japanese cross the Chinwin River, as we had said, they blow past the flanks of one major unit, surround it, and it has to fight its way out. Then they advance on Infall and Kohima and manage to put those places

58:13under siege. If this had been an earlier war, those places would be cut off and the British and Imperial troops in those places would begin to run out of ammunition. They wouldn't have any reinforcements. They would run out of medical supplies. They would run out of food. And that would be that. The difference here, though, is, and this is what frustrates the Japanese, the Allies have the ability to supply the cutoff areas by air. This is huge and it's a new development,

58:47right? And it was only really in the Second World War that the capability existed to even try this. And past attempts had been hit or missed, to say the least. I mean, when the German army is surrounded by the Soviets at Stalingrad, the Luftwaffe tries to fly in supplies and they can't manage to provide anywhere near enough for a starving army running out of ammunition that has to surrender. But here, there are American air assets that have been flying supplies over what's called the Hump,

59:22which are a bunch of mountain ranges, into China. It's also called the Skyway to Hell. And the British are able to borrow some of these big, heavy supply planes to add to their Spitfire and Hurricane fighters, which they're using in a mostly ground attack role, to change the entire equation and begin to supply their cutoff troops with what they need to keep fighting. And recall, the Japanese have only a limited amount of this stuff themselves. They can't do the air supply thing. And if they can't

59:55take the supplies of the people that they cut off and are fighting at Imphal and Kohima, they're going to run out of supplies themselves. I like the way the British general in charge of this operation describes it. His name, by the way, is Lieutenant General William Slim. He's a very fine general. He cops to his mistakes initially here, underestimating the Japanese speed and size and whether or not they can get through the jungle with their troops, but then explains really the entire battle in the terms that will decide it. And he says, quote, as I struggled hard to redress my

1:00:31errors and to speed by rail and air these reinforcements, I knew that all depended on the steadfastness of the troops already meeting the first impetus of attack. If they could hold until help arrived, all would be well. If not, we were near disaster. End quote. So that's what has to happen. And the air supply helps. But bottom line, it's a question of heroism. And I am not a glory guy when it comes to war. Put me in the camp of the William Tecumseh Shermans, the American general

1:01:05who had said that war's glory is all moonshine. I don't think killing other people's glorious, but I think surviving against incredible odds, putting up with the privation and the hardship, enduring the unendurable for the sake of whatever is motivating you to do so can often be heroic. And it's a shame that things like the colonial overtones or if you're the Japanese or the Germans, the evil cause in which you're you're fighting, that that somehow or sometimes overshadows the heroism

1:01:41of the troops involved. Rarely do you read combat accounts where the troops are talking about things like, you know, a German soldier saying he's ready to fight and die for more Lebensraum for Germany, right? Or an American who's fighting and dying for the larger cause of freedom for the world, or a Japanese soldier who's fighting and dying to conquer and control other Asian peoples, or even a British soldier from Kent, maybe, or a place like that, ready to lay down his life so Britain can

1:02:18maintain its colonial dominance of a place like India. That's generally not what it's about. At bottom line, of course, it's about kill or be killed. But above that, you'll read so many accounts where soldiers are fighting for their comrades or their unit or the esprit de corps of the group that they belong to, or maybe just to not let down those other people that are depending on them. I mean, it's very baseline stuff. Your worldview and your horizon shrinks and the lens you view things through is very narrow and immediate. So I don't like the idea that, and this is a problem

1:02:56in India. I read that the Indians have a hard time sometimes trying to figure out how to portray this whole affair because it's so overshadowed with the colonial question. Were Indian troops fighting with the British mercenaries fighting for the colonial master, or were they heroes fighting for post-war Indian independence? I mean, it's a complicated question. And as John Toland wrote in his book, The Rising Sun, this whole Burma campaign is an ideological and geographic nightmare. But that shouldn't overshadow what was done there by all the soldiers on all sides.

1:03:29I mean, read some of the accounts. First of all, the Japanese threw themselves at the enemy wave after wave, sometimes suicidally. The British General Slim was very critical of the throwing away of Japanese lives. He also had a true admiration for the Japanese as a fighting people because the Japanese

1:03:59Well, let me just quote what's said in Robert Lyman's book, Japan's last bid for victory. Quote, With the difficulties posed by the climate came a stark reminder to any British Commonwealth troops who had not yet experienced the toughness of their adversary, of just how extraordinarily fit and physically hardy were the Japanese, how committed they were to achieving their objectives, how apparently unconcerned they were with regard to human comforts, and how determined they were to do with the Emperor through their officers, demanded or die in the

1:04:33attempt. Repeated, fanatical, and suicidal attacks were thrown at the British, Indian, and Gurkha defenders, and counterattacks had to face the toughest defensive positions imaginable, prepared by men whom General Slim was to describe as warrior ants. As the days went by, the battlefield became one large charnel house, littered with bodies in various states of decomposition, as it was rarely easy to recover and bury the dead. End quote. You can even look, by the way, at the photographs, and as the battle goes

1:05:07on, the areas that are highly fought over go from, you know, heavy, lush jungle where you can't see five feet in front of your face to terrain that looks like First World War battlefields, especially the ones that used to be forests but have been shelled into wasteland. General Slim actually says that the battle for Kohima is the only one he'd seen in the Second World War that reminded him of the First World War. Hard to know which is different. Kohima, the British forces, the Imperial forces were so badly

1:05:39outnumbered that they eventually get pushed onto one hill, something like 350 square meters, and they will be fighting over a tennis court, an actual, it's called the tennis court, where the Japanese are on one side of the tennis court fighting British Imperial forces on the other side of the tennis court, and they're throwing grenades at each other for days and days and days. That's not glorious, but it's heroic on both sides. In his book, Hirohito's War, author Francis Pike

1:06:14tries to give a sense of what the fighting was like and writes, quote, Most famously, there was a five-day tussle across the tennis courts belonging to the deputy commissioner's bungalow. Soldiers dug in on either side had to live through torrential rain and eat shit and sleep in their trenches. The courts were covered in the bloated bodies of slain Japanese soldiers. Enormous black flies filled the air. The stench of death was gut-wrenching. Major John Nettlefield

1:06:46observed, quote, The place stank. The ground everywhere was plowed up with shellfire, and human remains lay rotting as the battle raged over them. Flies swarmed everywhere and multiplied with incredible speed. Men retched as they dug in. End quote. Pike continues, quote, Hand grenades rather than tennis balls crisscrossed the courts. The resilience of the defenders proved the morale that General Slim had instilled in his troops. In one notable engagement, John Harmon,

1:07:18son of the millionaire owner of Lundy Island, a lance corporal with the Queen's Royal West Kent Regiment, single-handedly charged a Japanese trench, killed its five occupants before being fatally shot returning to his own lines. Dying in his company commander's arms, he gave his last words, I got the lot. It was worth it. End quote. But this is unsustainable for the Japanese because unlike their opponents, they are running out of supplies and not just food, but ammunition, bullets, shells, medical stuff,

1:07:55everything. When you look at the numbers that the Japanese units were reduced to, I have a hard time finding similar numbers in any conflict anywhere because normally units break and run before they hit those kinds of numbers. I mean, in one situation that Pike recalls, one soldier says that the losses had been dreadful. The regiment had started out 3,800 strong and now just had a few hundred men left and many of them invalids. General Sato asks his superior, General Mutaguchi, a man often referred to as a

1:08:34blockhead by some of his subordinates, permission to retreat. He's denied. He asks again and he's denied and then says, quote, This is shameful. Mutaguchi should apologize for his own failure to the dead soldiers and the Japanese people. End quote. General Mutaguchi's response is to sack General Sato and send a subordinate with a sword to him so he can kill himself, which Sato refuses to do. Mutaguchi will do the unthinkable

1:09:09here and sack three of his divisional generals, one for incompetence, one for ill health, and Sato for disobedience. Sato doesn't care. He orders his troops to retreat right around the same time that the monsoons open up.

1:09:27The Japanese on the defensive are just as difficult for the allies to deal with as they are on the offensive and they have to be dug out position by position at huge cost to the allied soldiers who have to do this. In his book, Japan's Last Bid for Victory, author Robert Lyman tries to give a sense of how hard it was to dig the Japanese out of these defensive positions. He says that the

1:09:57British Imperial forces ate away slowly at the Japanese defenses and said, quote, Nowhere were sudden gains made, but by gradual perseverance and the application of focused firepower, the Japanese were destroyed bunker by bunker, trench by trench. Rarely did the Japanese run or retreat, remaining to die where they fought. Lieutenant Lindhorn Heiget of the Dorsets considered the Japanese to be magnificent trench warriors. Quote, Every army in the world talks about holding

1:10:31positions to the last man. Virtually no other army, including the Germans, ever did. But the Japs did. Their positions were well-sighted and they had a good eye for ground. They relied on rushing and shouting in the attack. We thought they were formidable fighting insects and savages. We took few prisoners, about one or two in the whole war. We wanted prisoners, but wounded men would have a primed grenade under them. So stretcher bearers were very careful. End quote.

1:11:05British General William Slim concurs, and he says, quoted in Francis Pike's book, quote, Whatever his thoughts about the capabilities of Japanese commanders, Slim was profuse in his admiration for Japanese troops. Quote, There can be no question of the supreme courage and hardyhood of the Japanese soldiers who made the attempts. I know of no army that could have equaled them. End quote.

1:11:34Reading of the Japanese experiences in the retreat is horrifying. They literally are starving to death. When the skies open up and the rains start, it turns into a wetter version of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. The troops are committing suicide left and right. The Japanese referred to the road out as the road of human remains. It's often translated into the road of bones. There are many stories of soldiers taking grenades, sometimes in pairs, and they will

1:12:11embrace their comrade and blow up a grenade between them. There are medical orderlies injecting wounded troops with something to kill them quickly. The eating grass, potatoes, snails, lizards, snakes, monkeys, anything they can get their hands on. It's one of the worst retreats I've ever read about. And when it's over, the Japanese, between the fighting in Kohima, Imphal. Imphal was under siege, by the way, for like 88 days before it was broken. And the diversionary attack in the Arakon area,

1:12:45about 65,000 Japanese die. Most of those fatalities occurred during the retreat and were caused by either suicide, disease, or starvation. The Allies suffered a fraction of the number of deaths. And according to author John Toland, quote, In all, 65,000 men died, more than two and a half times the number lost on Guadalcanal,

1:13:17and about as many as fell on Leti. Mutaguchi, his chief of staff, and senior staff officers were relieved of their posts, as was Kawabe and his chief of staff. The command shakeup and the destruction of the 15th Army, the Japanese 15th Army, infected every other unit in Burma. And by the end of the year, Japanese rule was at the point of collapse. End quote. This is one of the worst defeats in Japanese history. Some historical sources call it the

1:13:50worst defeat they'd ever suffered up till this time. And yet, interestingly enough, this is considered to be a subsidiary front in the war, because it's not a decisive one. As we said, if you're going to play a bunch of cards, what can this card do to forestall Japanese defeat, which is coming at an increasingly rapid pace from the other geographic direction entirely from the Pacific. The Pacific was the last thing we were talking about when we left off

1:14:26the last segment. We were in mid-1944. The Americans had just taken Guam, Saipan, Tinney, and the Marianas Islands. And before the last Japanese snipers are cleared out of the trees, the American naval construction engineering people, the Seabees, are out there building airfields. And this means the Japanese are on the clock, and they know it. They can do the math. They realize these islands are probably in range. Round trip of America's brand new super bomber, the B-29.

1:14:59Never used against Germany, by the way. Looks like an early 1950s Cold War bomber, rather than a Second World War bomber. As soon as they can get them to these islands, get all of the necessary support materials together, and these airfields finished, the bombing starts. And the Japanese do not have to imagine what it might be like to have their cities bombed. They can look at real photographs of what's happening to their Axis partner, Germany, right now. By 1945, by the end of the war, I believe amongst

1:15:34mid and large-sized German cities, only Heidelberg is significantly untouched. I'm going from memory here, but as I recall, Heidelberg, special in that regard. You want to go see what Germany used to look like? You got to go to Heidelberg, unless you want to see a recreation. I was in Munich, and they've rebuilt some of it to look just like it looked before, but it has a feel to me when you're used to the old buildings of like a movie set. But what are they supposed to do? That generation in Germany created the conditions where the cultural, architectural heritage of Germans forever into the

1:16:08future is gone. And they're not the only ones who suffer. It's a cultural monument that we all suffer because it's gone. Significant that one generation of human beings could cost. I mean, it's the same thing Churchill looked at when he saw the films of the German cities in rubble and wondered if this was a bridge too far to win the war. But if you look at how events unfolded, it all is pretty understandable. You can see how people got sucked into this idea that anything's better than losing this war, total war, and anything

1:16:40means using everything you have. And there are a lot of people arguing that this bombing stuff shortens wars. And as we've seen, the human being lawnmower is at work at all times, every day, racking up its daily totals. If you shut the war down months early, well, that's that many daily totals that don't, you know, go into the fiery furnace. It's logical insanity is the way it's been described. If the Japanese were reasonable people, they would surrender now. See, there's many points in 1944 where you go, okay, now would be a

1:17:13really good time to spare your cities and the cultural heritage of the Japanese people and all that for the future. But part of what makes the Japanese so compelling, I mean, 500 years from now, when the young people are reading the history and getting interested in the subjects, Japan is going to be, I think, compelling the way that many other people throughout the past who were willing to fight for their country, right? This is a kind of a patriotic sort of a feeling taken to extremes and then becoming poisonous. And we talked about this earlier in this series, didn't we? We

1:17:48called it super patriotism. The Japanese are going to go to lengths that you admire because it shows how far the human spirit can be pushed, right? It's interesting to see some of our extremes. At the same time, it's debilitating to watch because it's often being used in a way that seems wasteful. It doesn't have to happen. And that's why sometimes you'll read these books about the kamikaze, for example, and they will make it beautiful in a Japanese cultural sense and talk about the falling of

1:18:23the cherry blossoms and all these sorts of things, um, in order to put some sort of an artistic or spiritual coating on the idea of a young man with his whole life ahead of him flying his airplane extra loaded with bombs into an allied ship.

1:18:42Now I've read the letters from kamikaze pilots and you get all sorts of different people who do that for all sorts of different reasons. It's not this monolithic, fanatical robot image. We thought of them when I was growing up, not at all, but there's a number of people out there that think that this is what you should be doing if you love your country, right? Same thing these Japanese soldiers did when they would strap themselves and put a mine on their back and then run under an American or a British tank and blow themselves up. Most armies don't do that. The Japanese are like

1:19:18everyone else only more so, right? And the B-29 countdown has begun once these Marianas Islands have fallen into U.S. hands. The question of what to do next is paramount at this particular time and the high command of the allies disagrees over what this should be and the main disagreement is within the United States chain of command. The army and the navy have different ideas on how the rest of the war should go.

1:19:49Both sides would like to sort of end up at least off the coast of Japan as the end destination. But the path to get there? Well, the navy has one idea under Admiral Ernest King, who's a tough customer, and the army in this situation, he's not the general of the army, that would be George Marshall, but the guy whose opinion matters in this situation is our old friend Douglas the Situation MacArthur, who comes to Hawaii in mid-1944 for a big strategy conference over what to do next.

1:20:23And Franklin Delano Roosevelt's going to be there, which is a huge deal. I mean, when you look at how really, really sick Franklin Roosevelt is in mid-1944, I mean, it is not too much to say that he is dying. I've read a bunch of good books lately that talk about how pretty much everyone who hadn't seen him for a while is shocked when they do. Even MacArthur wrote that after seeing him, he just knew he didn't have a long time left. And by the way, Roosevelt is running for office at this time for his fourth. No other president has ever been elected more than twice or run more than twice.

1:20:58I mean, Roosevelt is dying and he's going for his fourth term.

1:21:03I love the whole sort of reality series mood that is cast when this conference kicks off because Roosevelt arrives, the Navy's waiting for them, everybody's, you know, very, because when the president shows up, you know, everybody salutes a lot and everybody's, everything's been prepared and everybody's ready. And Douglas MacArthur is not there at the meeting with the president. He doesn't show up for 40 minutes. And I love the way author Jonathan W. Jordan describes it in his book, American Warlords.

1:21:37Um, president Roosevelt is on the USS Baltimore with the Navy guys and they've been waiting for like 40 minutes and that's where the narrative picks up, quote, 40 minutes after Baltimore's gangplank was lowered to the pier, the air was split by the shriek of a police siren, a motorcycle escort appeared leading what Sam Rosenman remembered as quote, the longest open car I've ever seen in front was a chauffeur in khaki and in the back, one lone figure and

1:22:08quote, Jordan continues, quote, that figure wore a crushed general's hat and a brown leather jacket. Mr. Catch had arrived. Let me stop the narrative real quick. Mr. Catch was the code name or something like that for MacArthur that the president and the other side had. So this was Mr. Catch. Mr. Catch had arrived. McArthur's car drove to the gangplank to the wild applause of the crowd. He bounded up the ramp, stopping halfway to acknowledge another round of applause, then

1:22:38strode onto the cruiser's deck. He saluted the commander in chief before shaking Roosevelt's outstretched hand. Hello, Douglas, said Roosevelt. What are you doing with that leather jacket on? It's darn hot today. Well, I've just landed from Australia, McArthur said with a smile. It's pretty cold up there, end quote. Well, Jordan points out that McArthur had actually had time to shave and get ready and the whole thing. He wore the leather jacket for effect. That's his branding, like the corncob pipe and the crushed hat.

1:23:11And he's in Hawaii and he shows up in the whole garb because he's in costume. I mean, uniform. He's an interesting. See, and we've said this before, you have to acknowledge, I think anyway, Douglas MacArthur's military talent. Sometimes he does extraordinary things. But he is an interesting guy. Talks about himself in the third person, as we said before. No one who talks about himself in the third person is your normal kind of customer. Just going to make a broad brush statement about that.

1:23:43George likes spicy chicken. Little Seinfeld joke there for you Seinfeld fans.

1:23:52MacArthur's favorite pronoun is I. And it's the one he used when he was forced out of the Philippines by the Japanese way back in 1942. I shall return. It's one of the most famous phrases of all time. But as we pointed out at the time, there were a bunch of historians and contemporaries who were saying, you know, he should have said the United States will return or or so. But but he made it personal. And because he made it personal, it's one of the things that goes into his argument that

1:24:23he makes at the strategy conference about, you know, what should happen next? Well, he says, we should go back to the Philippines. I'm going to return. And he gave a whole host of good reasons why that should be the way, you know, sort of to Japan. Let's take the Philippines. And we promised those people we have POWs in there that the Japanese will kill us. A lot of good reasons. But part of it was he, you know, he'd made a promise and this was wrapped up in his destiny somehow. And he wanted to go through the Philippines and then you go up toward Okinawa, which is it's Japanese, but not Japanese.

1:24:54It depends on who you talk to. Talk to an Okinawa and they have a different opinion sometimes, but but it's it's considered a home island. And then from Okinawa, you keep going. What the Americans need is a place that can serve the same role that Great Britain serves in the Normandy landings. You know, on D-Day, you had a big place where you could you get all your troops together and all the supplies you need and build up and then boom, cross the water and you're there and your supply hubs right off the shore. The problem is, is there's nothing right off the shore from Japan. So if you take the Philippines and you decide that this is going to be your big supply hub

1:25:26where you can gather troops together for the eventual invasion of Japan, it's still a long sea ride to Japan from there.

1:25:35The Navy, Ernest King, Admiral Ernest King has sent. He wanted to come himself, but maybe the actual face to face meeting at a strategy session between a guy like MacArthur and a guy like King, and we talked about what they were like earlier, might have been too many sparks for Franklin Delano Roosevelt to keep from blowing up. So he he sends a subordinate since Admiral Nimitz, who he then accuses of not having a spine. He'll never represent things against. He'll he'll get eaten up by Douglas MacArthur was basically the gist of his statements.

1:26:06And Douglas MacArthur prevails in the strategy session because the Navy wants to go take Formosa, which is modern day Taiwan, and use that as the big supply base that they can start the Japan attack from.

1:26:20MacArthur wins out, though, in the long run on this deal. But that doesn't stop the Navy advance, the island hopping that's been going on now for a long time. And the Marianas Islands campaign we just talked about is the latest island hop. So that's going to continue through the Central Pacific, too. So think of two routes of approach to Japan. MacArthur is going to go up through the Philippines and that route, the U.S. fleet and the Marines and some army help is going to go through the Central Pacific. You know, next major stop on the list, Iwo Jima. But there's going to be a little quick thing that the Navy wants to take care of first.

1:26:52Or I've actually read a lot about this because it's controversial how an island chain like the island chain that contains the island of Peleliu, how that ends up on the to do list eventually, because there's a lot of history that suggests that it was supposed to be crossed off or that it never should have happened. I mean, it's interesting. And the reason it actually matters is because what will happen on Peleliu is not what is expected to happen on Peleliu. And when things go wrong, people ask questions for a long time afterwards. Right. When you lose a lot of Marines, people start going, well, was this trip really necessary?

1:27:26And Peleliu is controversial that way. Peleliu is a little island. It's a coral reef, basically, sort of off the coast of the Philippines a ways. And one of the arguments for why this was necessary is it was going to take these islands so they couldn't use air bases against MacArthur when he lands in the not too distant Philippines. Well, the prediction is, is that they'll go in there, they'll take these islands in two days, maybe four days. Should be a sharp little fight, a little like Terawa, so it's going to be rough for a very

1:27:57short period of time, but maybe really rough. And instead, the situation on Peleliu turns into a kind of disaster. It turns into, I've seen it called the worst combat that the U.S. Marines ever saw. I think that's arguable, but the invasion of Peleliu is something that reminds me of what the Japanese had wanted to do in terms of their grand strategy of taking all these islands and then forcing the Americans and the British and the Australians and the New Zealanders

1:28:29and the South Africans and on and on and on to take them back at super high cost because the Japanese were going to reinforce these places, have guns everywhere and steel doors and it was going to be like something of a James Bond film. But they never really did that on the outer islands very much. On Peleliu, though, it's sort of, let's call it the model home for what the Japanese would have liked to have seen all these islands built up to a level of. I mean, when you have metal doors that open up and a gun pops up and fires and goes back inside and the metal doors close, I'm calling that James Bond-ish.

1:29:00That's the kind of stuff that the people who landed on Peleliu got to deal with. That and the fact that they're on an absolute coral atoll. It is not dirt. It is rock. And it is usually around 110 degrees or more in the daytime on a rock. This is one of those campaigns, by the way, that you wish there was more visual material to see, you know, photographs, movies, those kind of things.