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Remembrance: The Matter of Representation in World War II Historiography
âThe terrible things that happened in so many parts of China may be unknown to the wider world, but not to the people who lived through them or to their descendants.â1 -Diana Lary and Stephen MacKinnon1
The story of World War II in Asia and the Pacific is due a fresh examination, particularly with respect to the warâs vast human toll in China and Southeast Asia. To begin, a little-understood fact is that Imperial Japan directly attacked and occupied a far larger region and population than did Germany and her European partners together. The deaths, atrocities, and other casualties in Asia rivaled those in Europe. The destruction was no less.
Most Americans know something about the Second World War in Europe, a little about the war in the Pacific, and virtually nothing about the war in East and Southeast Asia. They are well aware of Nazi Germanyâs aggression, the Holocaust, and the major costly battles in the West. The popular view is that World War II was started by Germany with the invasion of Poland in 1939. Few are aware of, or fully appreciate, Imperial Japanâs even vaster and equally merciless aggression in Asia, which began with the 1931 invasion of Manchuria. This act was very likely the true beginning of World War II and the global upheaval that followed.
There was a holocaustâa great devastation, a reckless destruction of life2 âin Asia as well as in Europe. The war Imperial Japan started in one part of the world had much in common with that started by her Axis partners in the other. The Holocaust in Europe included the planned genocide of Jews and others in death camps. It also included open-air shootings and internment in forced labor camps. Death came in ghettos from fighting and starvation. Brutal death came to the Slavic peoples in Poland and the USSR. Other fighting took its toll. Likewise, the holocaust in Asia resulted in massive death and suffering from terror killing, retribution, biological weapons, and other violence against civilians throughout invaded East Asia. This included the maltreatment of forced labor, refugee flight ordeals, and Japanese war policy caused malnutrition, sickness, and disease.
The true story of this (1931-1945) theater of World War II is that Japan invaded Asian countries representing one third of the human race. This Great Asian-Pacific Crescent of Pain consisted of many hundreds of millions of people from Japan to Korea, China/Manchuria throughout Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and Indian Ocean islands.3 The Japanese military physically subjugated over half this population. The destruction of cities, towns, and villages was widespread. Many millions perished. The surviving casualtiesâwhose lives were probably shortened due to their injuries and hardshipsâwere in the many tens of millions. Those severely affected included the wounded and maimed, the raped and tortured, maltreated forced labor, massive numbers of destitute and despairing refugees and homeless, war orphans, and widows. Others affected by Japanâs aggression included brutalized POWs and civilian internees, victims of severe war-caused malnutrition and painful diseases, addicts (from Japanese opium sales), and ill-equipped and supported Chinese soldiers. Most of the casualties were comprised of noncombatant women, children, and men. The count of the dead and severely affected equaled the total population of the United States at the time. When relatives and communities traumatized by these casualties are added, the scale of the tragedy easily doubles. Few of the populations whose lands were invaded were unaffected.
The attempt at Asian domination was costly to Imperial Japan as well, but the toll was primarily military. However, during the last stage of the war, the battle for Okinawa and U.S. bombing of cities to force the end of the war caused considerable Japanese civilian deaths. The surviving Japanese casualties included the wounded and maimed, the homeless, orphans, widows, and military conscripts. Throughout the 1941-1945 period the entire nation withstood arduous working hours, economic losses, and diet deprivation.
A disturbing share of Imperial Army killing was done in cold blood. All told, the number of lives taken in the Far East, including the oceans and islands, from all war reasons, grew to approximately 45 percent of the total global World War II Allied death toll.
Today the memory of the Japanese invasion of Asia and the cost in lives has been relegated to the âattic of history,â the suffering unrecognized in the West or treated as if it counted for little. There is minimal attention paid to what the war did to the Chinese people. The painful war experiences of Southeast Asia and the Indian and Pacific Ocean islands are completely neglected. As well, little attention is paid to U.S. and Allied POWs and civilian internees who also endured terrible conditions and losses under the Japanese.
This lack of historic remembrance has left Americans with little understanding of why Japanâs limited remorse affects her relations with China and other Asian neighbors today, and how it can affect U.S. interests in the region due to our close post-World War II association with Japan. The dearth of information about the full extent of the war has also shortchanged the debate about the American actions in response to Japanâs war of aggression from 1931 to 1945.
Japanese historian Ikuhiko Hata writes, âThe Manchurian incident, the war in China, and the war in the Pacific should not be viewed separately but as one continuous war.â4 In this regard, an often-overlooked fact is that the United States after Pearl Harbor became allied with China and fourteen Western and Far Eastern nations and territories attacked by Japan. The Allies soon grew to twenty-six countries and by 1945 to at least forty-five. They were all part of the initial United Nations, which was formed in early 1942 to defeat and demilitarize the Axis. President Roosevelt explained this common cause in a speech soon after:
The United Nations constitute an association of independent peoples of equal dignity and equal importance. The United Nations are dedicated to a common cause. We share equally and with equal zeal the anguish and awful sacrifice of war. In the partnership of our common enterprise, we must share a unified plan in which all of us must play our several parts, each of us being equally indispensable and dependent one on the other.5
Of all the 1931â1945 Asian-Pacific War deaths, approximately 87 percent were Asian victims of Japanese aggression, 1 percent were Western Allies, and 12 percent were Japanese. The list of victim nations and their peoples is a long one. It includes Korea, (annexed by Japan in 1910) China (including Manchuria), Hong Kong, Indochina, (Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam), and the Philippines. The list continues with Thailand, Burma, eastern India, Malaya (Malaysia), Singapore, the vast East Indies (Indonesia), Timor, New Guinea, and Pacific and Indian Ocean islands.
The fact that Asia has gone through many tragedies throughout its history does not diminish the World War II experience. The fact of Chinaâs internal disarray does not mean that the country had any lesser right to independence from Japanese, or Western control and occupation than, for example, Poland or Russia from Nazi Germany. The clichĂ©s such as âLife was cheap in Chinaâ or âThere is little regard for life among Asiansâ are demeaning. There is no question that most Asians lived tough, bitter lives and had to be stoic to survive, but that does not mean lives were any less important to them than to a Westerner. Surviving family and community torment was no less so in the East than in the West. Asian Americans from the ancestral countries that were invaded have a right to expect these ordeals to be prominently recognized in American World War II histories and remembrances.
It is true China had more than her share of internal problems, but external colonial forces going back 100 years, including the wars with Japan in 1894-95 and again starting in 1931, exacerbated them. Despite all this, the often-fragmented Chinese military and citizenry defended China and contributed considerably to the ultimate Allied victory.
My concern about the incompleteness of the historiography of this period was aroused by the 1995 debate over the originally proposed Smithsonian Institutionâs Enola Gay display to commemorate the end of World War II. The Japanese losses from United States bombing, for example, were described in vivid detail while American casualties were treated in a matter-of-fact summary. Those in Japanese-invaded Asia were scarcely mentioned. Thus, amazingly little attention was given to the nature of the fourteen-year war the bomb ended. This was an astonishing omission.
The remarkable exclusion of history is continued every year during the August remembrance of the end of World War II in the Asian-Pacific Theater when the original Enola Gay proposal comes back to life. Americans are shown over and over again, through most of the media, the destruction of Japanese cities from American bombing. Not a word is devoted to the destruction of cities and regions where many times more lives were lost to Japanâs invasion of Asia. Nor is there an iota of recognition of how many Asian lives were at stake and saved by the abrupt atomic end of the war. These revelations are my motivation to make the case that the war in Asia and the Pacific is as much about Shanghai, Nanking, and Manila as about Pearl Harbor, Midway and Hiroshima.
The following chapters of this book explain why Japanâs complete defeat, as soon as it could be achieved, was so critical, particularly to the peoples of East Asia. In this regard, the 1945 American strategic bombing of Japan, including the use of fire and atomic bombs, made an early decisive end possible at a cost to Japan of a small fraction of all Asian-Pacific civilian war dead. The conflictâs real destructive machine was not strategic bombing. It was, in fact, the massive Japanese and Allied land armies with their artillery, tanks, and tactical air and naval support locked in battle, and the indirect effects, that caused the great majority of all war deaths. Cities and regions like Shanghai, Nanking, Soochow, Paoting, Hsuchow, Hankow, Chunking, Changsha, and Kweilin, for example, in China, and Manila in the Philippines, and hundreds of villages are clear examples of this massive death and destruction. These land armies would be further engaged in a huge battle in the planned U.S. invasion of Japan.6 Further, the navies and air forces cut routes of supply for war and subsistence. Civilians, as always, were caught in the middle and killed in great numbers from violence and economic disruption.
Iris Changâs best-selling book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1998), is the first book to successfully bring passion to the reality of a large part of the war in China. It began the overdue process of educating the American public that there was more to the Asian-Pacific War than Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. As with any work dealing with historic issues that have been long neglected, the book has had both its detractors and defenders.7 However, prior to the publication of Ms. Changâs book, most Americans gave little attention to Chinaâs side of the World War II story.
A typical example of the state of public knowledge is illustrated in an article in the Baltimore Sun on September 1, 2000 entitled âWar to preserve civilized world won 55 years ago.â It lists the World War II dead of the Soviet Union, Poland, Germany, Japan, and the United States. It remarks on the death camps in Europe and the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Not a word or count is offered for other Asian war victims who perished in numbers approximating the extraordinary loss of life in Poland and the Soviet Union combined, and eight times the loss of Japanese lives.
There are many reasons why the education of Americans about the war has been woefully inadequate. Virtually all forms of communication about World War II, such as history books, classroom work, museum exhibits, movies, and the news media, concentrate mainly on Europe and Nazi Germanyâs past. The Asian-Pacific Theater, particularly Imperial Japanâs invasion of Asia, receives far less attention. Since historically Americans have been primarily from Europe, there is a natural tendency for a Eurocentric view of the world.
A further illustration as to why attention is drawn away from the Far East is that after World War II Japan became a major U.S. Cold War ally and trading partner while China became a Communist adversary. This alliance discouraged attention to Japanâs past. There are also Americans who, one could argue, have been unduly sympathetic to the Japanese history, who have been influential in turning attention away from Japanâs responsibility for the war, its merciless conduct and its victims. Today, in American classrooms, the internment of Japanese-Americans as well as the casualties and issue of the atomic bomb are required subjects. But Japanâs aggression in China and the rest of Asia and the consequent casualties are not. This limited perspective of the war has created a view among many, particularly of the postwar generations, that the Japanese were the primary victims of the conflict and most deserving of our empathy.
The atomic end has clearly influenced the general view of the Asian-Pacific War. Hiroshima has rightly been held up as a reminder of the unthinkable consequences of nuclear war. But this tragedy has also been used as a distraction from the far greater tragedy the atomic bomb ended. The emphasis is exemplified by the focus only on Americanâ and sometimes Japaneseâ lives savedâexcluding any estimate of Asian and other Allied lives sparedâwhen evaluating how the war was brought to an end. Historian D.M. Giangreco called this failure the âlargelyâor rather, steadfastlyâoverlooked Asian aspect of the controversy.â8
Historian Robert P. Newman makes this point well: âHad John Hersey visited Nanking or Manila and written about these catastrophes; had there been no competing overshadowing spectacle in Japan fueled by supernatural science; had Hiroshima not become a shrine to the peace minded, the anguish of Japanâs victims might be more on our conscience.â9
Today, Japanâs defense for starting the war is often noted without analysis. One cannot help but notice how this tends to validate the harm Japan inflicted on the invaded populations. Japanâs culpability is avoided while suggesting that the United States behaved just as badly at one time or another or during the course of the war. This often involves greatly stretching the facts, making unproven assertions, and leaving out important ...
