Slaughter at Sea

The Story of Japan's Naval War Crimes

Mark Felton

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Maritime
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781844688586
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

The author of Japan's Gestapo details the atrocities committed by the Japanese Navy during World War II.
While the Japanese Navy followed many of the British Royal Navy's traditions and structures, it had a totally different approach to the treatment of its foes. Author Mark Felton has uncovered a plethora of outrages against both servicemen and civilians that make chilling and shocking reading. These range from the execution of POWs to the abandonment of survivors to the elements and certain starvation to the infamous Hell Ships. Felton, who lives in the Far East, examines the different culture that led to these frequent and appalling atrocities. This is a serious and fascinating study of a dark chapter in naval warfare history.

Chapter One

Towards the Setting Sun

It is necessary to have politics, economics, culture, national

defence and everything else, all focused on one being, the

Emperor, and the whole force of the nation concentrated

and displayed from a single point . . . This system is the

strongest and the grandest of all . . . there is no nation that

can compare with our national blood solidarity.

  Lieutenant Colonel Hashimoto, Japanese Cherry Society

The ships that flew the Rising Sun and blew the Russian Baltic Fleet to scrap iron at the Battle of Tsushima in 1904 were mainly British built; designed, crafted and riveted together in the great shipyards of Empire on the Clyde and elsewhere in England and Scotland. The officers who stood proudly upon the decks beside their ‘Japanese Nelson’, Admiral Heirachiro Togo, had been trained in the best traditions and tactics of the world’s most powerful navy, the Royal Navy, that bestrode the globe at the time like a huge octopus, its tentacles of power reaching into every ocean, and along the shores of every continent. Togo himself had received his officer training aboard HMS Britannia. The ordinary Japanese seamen, decked out in their square rig, looked for all intents and purposes like Oriental mirror-images of Britain’s ‘Jack Tars’, and the effect was intentional. When Japan had begun the construction of a modern battle fleet in the late nineteenth century, emerging from over two centuries of deliberate isolation under the feudal Tokugawa Shogunate, its designers and strategists had carefully studied and then copied the organization, methods, uniforms and traditions of Britain’s Royal Navy. Admiral Togo told his officers, ‘The English navy is very great . . . Study it. See all you can. Learn all you can . . . All other navies are negligible beside it.’1 But even in the early twentieth century, when many British officers served in the Imperial Japanese Navy as advisors and training instructors, these men noted that one important aspect of the ethos of the Royal Navy was conspicuous by its absence. The Japanese, though to all intents and purposes having carefully created a carbon copy of Britain’s navy, had failed to inculcate the officers and men with the British traditions of compassion, honourable warfare, civic duty and a care of duty towards those whose ships had been sunk or were otherwise rendered helpless. The Japanese were simply not interested in these concepts as they felt them to be alien in origin and not reflective of Japanese society and military culture. The glorification, as well as the perversion, of the old samurai military honour code called Bushido, that had kept Japan isolated and militarily obsolete for over two centuries, was being carefully cultivated amongst the officers and men of both the new Army and Navy. The combination of modern technology and mediaeval doctrines was an elixir certain to produce unspeakable destruction and barbarity at some point in the future, and Japan’s victory over Czarist Russia in 1905 was merely a prelude of what the new power in Asia was capable of, as ‘the Bushido spirit would propel Japan on an imperialist course of unparalleled ferocity and brutality.’2 This would begin thirty-three years after Admiral Togo had scored one of history’s most astonishing naval victories when Japan launched a full-scale war against China in 1937, and the slaughter would only end with the almost total destruction of one of the world’s most modern battle fleets in 1945.

It was the British, ironically, who actually began the process of encouraging many Japanese into a more militaristic stance. London had cancelled a cooperative naval alliance with Japan in 1921, an alliance that had seen the Japanese Navy protect British colonies in Asia, notably quelling a mutiny by Indian troops in Singapore during the First World War when Britain had sent most of her men and ships west. The alliance with Britain had kept the curb bit firmly between the teeth of the Japanese Army and Navy, and keeping Japan close had made sure that she had remained a friend instead of a potential foe in Asia.

As Britain and the world’s second power, the United States, along with a collection of lesser Western Powers with traditional interests in Asia, grew increasingly concerned about Japan’s growing naval strength, they convened conferences in London in 1921, and Washington DC and London in 1930. The intention was nothing less than the limitation of Japan’s surface fleet so that Japan was unable to ever tip the balance of power in the Far East in her favour by outnumbering and outgunning the British and Americans on the high seas.

By 1934 Japan was in the throes of a nationalist revolution, with democracy slowly being pushed out of mainstream politics as reactionary elements in the military and philosophical circles expounded the inequalities of British and American ‘imperialistic’ attitudes towards Japan. Many wanted Japan to challenge the imperialist nations by forging for herself an Asian empire. Sea power was going to play a central role in any future race for empire, as Japan depended almost entirely on imported resources, from iron ore to oil and wheat. The Japanese government soon felt secure and strong enough to ignore the naval restrictions imposed on her in 1930, arguing that such restrictions were unfair and Japan would have difficulty in defending herself if she was to abide by the American- and British-instigated naval reductions. The United States and British governments drew in a collective breath, and wondered what they should do, as Japan embarked on a massive rearmaments programme, shortly to be followed by German rearmament in Europe. Lured back to the conference table in 1935, Japan’s diplomats quickly snubbed the negotiations, pointing out the bullying attitude of the British and Americans towards their country and withdrew the next year. Japan was by this stage already a nation flexing her military muscles, as there had been conflict in China in 1931–2, and Japan was almost in the terminal grip of the militarists. In 1932 Japanese Special Naval Landing Parties had fought a long and ultimately successful battle with Nationalist Chinese forces in the Chapei district of Shanghai, as the Japanese demanded to extend their section of the International Settlement by all and any means, and demonstrating to the watching world the potential threat her armed forces now posed to the peace of Asia. Foreigners had watched the Japanese military in Shanghai in 1932, and many had witnessed terrible scenes that presaged much greater savagery to come five years later. An American, Rhodes Farmer, wrote of witnessing early Japanese atrocities: ‘A crowd of marines and ronin stood beside the two Japanese sentries on the far side of the bridge [Garden Bridge separating the Japanese part of Shanghai from the British side]. One of them bayoneted an old man and pitched his body into the [Suzhou] Creek. I saw several good-looking girls seized by the soldiers and dragged into neighboring buildings.’3

After 1936 the Imperial Navy’s fleet would grow steadily as the country began a massive warship construction program that would culminate in the two biggest battleships ever built, Musashi and Yamato, as well as a strong aircraft carrier force and submarine service. Japanese prime ministers who attempted to curb the ambitions of the militarists were removed from power or assassinated as the Army and the Navy vied for favour with Emperor Hirohito. The Army prevailed initially and was able to engineer a crisis in Manchuria that was turned into a full-scale war with China in 1937. The Chinese managed to resist sufficiently to prevent the Japanese achieving a rapid victory, although by 1938 most of eastern and southern China was under a brutal Japanese occupation. With the fall of France to the Germans in June 1940, many of the European colonies in the Far East, including French Indo-China (now Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) and the oil-rich Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia) appeared ripe for the taking. The British had begun to appear militarily weak east of Suez, and downright prostrated east of Singapore. The Royal Navy had withered on the vine in Asia as Winston Churchill withdrew all of the best ships and most of the modern air force to the war in the Mediterranean and Middle East. The Far East was a backwater to the war raging in Europe and North Africa, and Britain only had a finite amount of resources with which to police its empire.

Little regard was given to the barbarous Japanese invasion and occupation of eastern China by the Western powers, even though a mighty chorus of, mainly American, reportage clearly warned the comfortable colonists and their armies of what they could expect in due course from the hungry Japanese war machine. Far from the war in Britain, with its accompanying Blitz, rationing and blackouts, the British in Asia fooled themselves into believing two myths regarding the Japanese military. It was widely held that the Japanese were individually inferior in every way to the white soldier, sailor or airman, short, with bandy legs and bad eyesight, and that although they had trounced the Chinese, when faced with ‘real’, i.e. Anglo-Saxon, armed forces they would ultimately prove to be second-rate opponents. And many of the whites in Asia also believed that their lives were ultimately worth more than those of their Asian subjects, so when many of them were captured by the Japanese they were genuinely surprised that their captors treated them the same as other Asian captives. Although the mother nations of the region’s other great colonial powers, France and the Netherlands, were cloaked under German occupation, their eastern colonists ruled comfortably in territories free of Nazi tyranny. Frenchmen still governed in Indo-China, and Dutchmen still ruled in the East Indies. Alongside the slumbering British, concerns about the Japanese mistreating them should they have pierced the Anglo- Saxon military defences that thinly protected the region, were in the backs of minds rather than at the forefront until it was virtually too late.

The only problem that worried the Japanese was the likely reaction of the United States to any Japanese takeover of South-East Asia. The US Pacific Fleet, based at San Diego, with its advanced base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was enormously powerful and the Japanese realized that it would have to be neutralized at the same time as the Army and Navy moved to conquer the European colonies of Asia. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet, had a plan in hand by January 1941, outlining how the American threat could be removed from the equation. Ironically again, the British had provided the Japanese with the initial training and tactics to make their Pearl Harbor strike a reality. Just after the First World War it had been Royal Navy officers who had taught the Japanese about aircraft carriers, and trained many of Japan’s earliest naval aviators. And it was the British carrier aircraft strikes against the Italian fleet at Taranto and Cape Matapan in 1940 that had demonstrated to the Japanese how to transfer theory into reality. The Japanese had proved to be extremely competent pupils. At the same moment that Japanese naval planes would batter the helpless US Pacific Fleet into scrap iron at Pearl Harbor, army and naval forces were to attack and occupy southern Thailand and British Malaya (the Empire’s second richest colony after India) with the objective of capturing the modern naval base at Singapore. Other Japanese forces were to conquer the British colonies of Burma and Hong Kong, the vast archipelago of the Netherlands East Indies, the American protectorate of the Philippines, the international settlements in the old Treaty Ports of Shanghai and Tientsin (now Tianjin) in China (which up to then had been regarded as neutral territories by Japanese forces), and the Solomon and Central Pacific Islands. From these initial conquests Japan would push out its defensive perimeter to encompass lonely American outposts in the Pacific, extending the boundaries of the Empire way out into the great blue Pacific, and eventually pushing southwards virtually to the shores of Australia.

One of the most significant second-wave Japanese targets after the conquests of Indo-China, Malaya and the East Indies was Midway Island in June 1942. It was during the Battle of Midway that the IJN first demonstrated its contempt for prisoners taken during the air battle. The Japanese Navy’s blitzkrieg also struck the tiny American coral atoll of Wake, and here the Japanese abused and butchered again, on an even greater scale. All across South-East Asia and the Pacific, behind the Japanese defensive curtain, the IJN was killing people long since subjugated. Japan’s warships and submarines were entering the early rounds of a sea campaign that would turn increasingly brutal and sadistic as time went on. Togo’s Imperial Fleet, that had whipped the Russians in a display of naval strategy to rival Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, was now soiling itself and its reputation with a series of pointless massacres designed to earn it the enmity of all its opponents, and its eventual total destruction and eradication from the fabric of the nation.

As noted in the Introduction, one of the reasons the Japanese Navy was able to commit atrocities and war crimes both at sea and on land was because unlike many of the other combatant navies of the Second World War, the IJN administered vast land territories, particularly in the Pacific. This situation arose from conflict between the Army and the Navy in Japanese society before the war. The two services rarely cooperated until late on in the war, and each had its own agenda regarding the prosecution of the war which was usually at variance with the other. Some territories that were conquered by naval landing forces were subsequently turned over to army governance, but many, including the pre-war South Seas Mandate (which consisted of the former German colonies of the Marshall, Caroline and Marianas Islands awarded to Japan after being on the winning side in the First World War) were governed directly by the Navy. Many port cities captured by the Japanese, including Shanghai, were also under naval jurisdiction. Being both a land and a sea force, the IJN was able to extend its power over the conquered peoples and armies of many nations, beginning with the conquest of the Netherlands East Indies and New Guinea in early 1942.

Notes

1. Herman, Arthur, To Rule The Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World (Hodder and Stoughton, 2005), p. 522.

2. Ibid., p. 522.

3. Dong, Stella, Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City (William Morrow, 2000), p. 253.

Chapter Two

Tol Plantation

Those who are about to die salute you.

Telegram from Wing Commander J.M. Lerew on New

Britain Sent to RAAF HQ, Melbourne, 23 January 1942

The lush tropical island of New Britain in the Australian Mandated Territory of New Guinea was invaded by the Japanese in early 1942, followed shortly after by strong Japanese landings on Timor and Ambon islands in the Netherlands East Indies. The Allied defensive perimeter protecting Australia began to collapse under Japanese pressure as they swept on from Malaya to invest Holland’s huge Asian colony, and in the process thousands of Allied soldiers were left in the hands of the victors.

The Japanese invasion of the Netherlands East Indies began on 15 December 1941 with landings on North Borneo and Celebes Island. By the end of January 1942, following the Battle of Balikpapen, South Borneo and Celebes had been captured. The Japanese aim was to invest Java and cut the Allied defence of the region into two parts. To the west, now that Singapore had fallen to the Japanese, only Sumatra remained free, while to the east Timor provided a last defence line before Australia. In February 1942 Japanese forces captured Ceram, southern Sumatra, and Bali, and also launched air attacks on Darwin in Northern Australia. Java was now cut off in the west with a garrison of around 75,000 men.

On all of these islands, Japanese army and navy troops committed terrible massacres of surrendered Australian military personnel, even though they had successfully conquered this outer ring of Australia’s defences with very few casualties. The worst atrocity occurred at Laha Airfield on Ambon Island some time after the actual capitulation of Australian and Dutch forces, and this terrible story is described in the following chapter. On New Britain, Australian prisoners, who had only just been captured by the victorious Japanese, were butchered for no apparent reason other than to satisfy the apparent bloodlust of their captors. The blame for such large numbers of Australian servicemen (and a few servicewomen) falling into the hands of the Japanese on New Britain, Timor and Ambon is often laid at the feet of Prime Minister John Curtin’s government in Australia, which had dispatched forces to garrison these islands that were simply too small to hold their own against strong amphibious attacks. Even as piquets designed to slow down a Japanese advance towards New Guinea and Australia the forces were too weak to place a brake on the Japanese Empire’s rapid expansion. They were also unable to evacuate themselves once it became clear that they could not perform their missions because of Japanese naval and air supremacy, and these small, isolated garrisons were effectively abandoned to their fates after desultory attempts at resistance. Although many of the men involved in these debacles made it back to Australia, it was only by their own efforts, and not through any organized effort on the part of the Australian military, that they were ultimately spared a cruel captivity at the hands of the Japanese.

Rabaul, capital of Australian New Guinea and the largest settlement on the island of New Britain, was of strategic importance to Australia. Its airfields, seaplane anchorages and position only a few hundred miles from the large Japanese naval base at Truk in the Caroline Islands, made the place worth defending. However, Australia appeared unwilling to send forces to New Britain that could actually do the job, simultaneously committing the same error on Ambon in the Netherlands East Indies, where ‘Gull Force’, the Australian garrison, was being shipped.

The group sent to defend Rabaul was codenamed ‘Lark Force’, and consisted of a grand total of 1,400 Australian servicemen. Under the command of Colonel J.J. Scanlon from 8 October 1941, the area commander’s ‘teeth’ units consisted of Lieutenant Colonel H.H. Carr’s 2/22nd Infantry Battalion numbering 716 all ranks, 17 Anti-Tank Battery, Royal Aus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Towards the Setting Sun
• Chapter 2: Tol Plantations
• Chapter 3: Laha Airfield
• Chapter 4: In Enemy Hands: The Midway Pilots
• Chapter 5: Out of Bounds: Attacks on Hospital Ships
• Chapter 6: A Speck on the Ocean: Murder at Wake Island
• Chapter 7: Hell’s Way Station: American Prisoners on Truk
• Chapter 8: False Confessions: Extortion and Death in Borneo
• Chapter 9: The German Massacre: The Akikaze Executions
• Chapter 10: The Butcher Boat
• Chapter 11: Objection to Murder: The Behar Tragedy
• Chapter 12: Eliminate All Survivors
• Chapter 13: Death of the Richard Hovey
• Chapter 14: Running the Gauntlet
• Chapter 15: Superior Orders
• Chapter 16: The Rape of Manila
• Chapter 17: Retribution and Revenge
• Afterword
• Appendix1
• Appendix2
• Appendix3
• Bibliography
• Index