“We learned today of a P.T. boat picking up a canoe containing two Japs who were attempting to escape to Shortland Island. The P.T. boat threw them a rope, but the Japs refused to take it or to attempt to help get themselves on to the boat, so the Yanks opened up with their machine guns.” – Harry Stone, Stirling Island, Saturday December 4, 1943.

The Japanese moral code in World War Two was founded in the bushido “way of the warrior” code of the samurai warriors of the medieval period. The samurai were the military nobility of the time: the equivalent of the armoured knights in Europe (Figures 1 and 2). They were fierce and totally loyal to the Emperor, and willing to die in his service.

Feudal lord and poet Shiba Yoshimasa (1350–1410 AD) stated that a warrior looked forward to a glorious death in the service of a military leader or the emperor: “It is a matter of regret to let the moment when one should die pass by….First, a man whose profession is the use of arms should think and then act upon not only his own fame, but also that of his descendants. He should not scandalise his name forever by holding his one and only life too dear….One’s main purpose in throwing away his life is to do so either for the sake of the Emperor or in some great undertaking of a military general. It is that exactly that will be the great fame of one’s descendants.” (From the Chikobasho, a set of precepts written for the Shiba clan.)

Honour was an essential part of the bushido code. A samurai who had transgressed or offended the emperor, or who wished to avoid falling into the enemy’s hands, would commit suicide by a procedure called harakiri or seppuku: ritualised disembowelling. This was performed by plunging a knife into the abdomen and drawing it quickly from left to right. At this exact moment an appointed colleague might step forward and behead the individual with his sword (Figure 3).

In World War 2, Japanese soldiers (Figure 4)were trained to believe that surrender, individually or nationally, was unthinkable. There are many examples from witness’s accounts of Japanese soldiers choosing death over surrender. In a variation of the incident above recorded in my father’s diary, a group of four survivors on a raft were approached by an American ship. Rather than be captured alive, the officer shot each man in the mouth with his pistol. The youngest sailor did not want to be shot, and had to be held down by the other two before they too were killed. The officer then turned the gun on himself.

In the ancient bushido code of the samurai warrior brought into the twentieth century, Japanese servicemen were expected to demonstrate total loyalty to Emperor Hirohito (Figure 5) and complete ruthlessness to the defeated enemy. Surrender was explicitly forbidden. A defeated soldier had lost the right to life.

Today, many Japanese commentators point out that the treatment of prisoners of war in World War 2 was really a perversion of the ancient bushido code, which did in fact embrace the concept of mercy and humane treatment of prisoners.

Japanese soldiers were trained to expect no mercy from their captors if they were taken prisoner. Rather, they should die on the battlefield, by their own hand if necessary. To be captured was more dishonourable than to lose the battle (Figure 6).

A Japanese POW in the Pacific, on being told by his American captor that he would live to see Japan again, replied no, he would not be able to return home, because of the shame of not dying on the battlefield. The shame extended from the soldier to his family. The soldier’s manual explained that if he surrendered “your parents and family will never be able to hold up their heads again.”

Japan did not ratify the Third Geneva Convention of 1929 (although it had agreed in principle) setting out the rights of slain soldiers and prisoners of war. Consequently it’s government did not feel obligated to observe even the most basic rules of warfare in its army’s treatment of dead soldiers and POW’s. Torture, decapitation, bayoneting and burial alive of prisoners was common. One American remarked that until he was captured by the Japanese he had no idea there were so many ways of killing people. According historian Niall Ferguson, who tabulated the total death rates for POWs in World War Two, in German POW camps 1.19% of American prisoners died, in Japanese camps the figure was 33%.

Ironically, when interrogated, captured Japanese soldiers often demonstrated no idea of where they were other than that they were on an island somewhere in the Pacific. They had no conception of what they were fighting for apart from laying their lives down in the service of their emperor.

In the battlefield, the Japanese soldier was a ferocious enemy who, during training, had been effectively brainwashed to believe that “responsibility is like a mountain, life is like a feather”. The Japanese war cry “banzai!” means “10,000 years!” The soldier is dedicating his eternal soul to the Emperor for ten millennia.

At the beginning of the War in the Pacific, the Japanese soldier was regarded by Allied soldiers as a wily and formidable foe and an almost invincible jungle fighter. In February 1942 the Japanese Imperial Army had attacked and taken Singapore from the “back door” jungle of the Malay Peninsular, a task the British defenders believed was impossible. The Japanese had traveled down the peninsular by bicycle and taken the British, who were expecting an attack from the sea, completely unprepared. They outnumbered the Japanese 10 to one.

As the war progressed however, the myth of the invincible Japanese soldier was exposed. Trained to follow orders implicitly and without question, the troops in the field were not mentally equipped to improvise.

In Burma some Japanese in a foxhole were killed by a British officer while waiting to blow up a tank with a 500 pound bomb. When the survivors were asked why they hadn’t used the bomb against the British officer and his soldiers, the Japanese explained that they had been told to explode a tank: the British soldiers were not a tank.

American Marines in Guadalcanal were attacked by Japanese using “human wave” tactics: the kind of mass charges that had proved so disastrous and wasteful on the Western Front in World War 1. Thousands of young Japanese troops were cut down by American machine guns in frontal charges at key points on the perimeter around the captured airfield, notably on Edson’s or Bloody Ridge and at the mouth of the Ilu and the Matanikau Rivers.

The Japanese were trained to take every American and Allied soldier’s life using any means possible. Soldiers ostensibly surrendering would explode hand grenades hidden in their clothing, or if forced to strip held under their armpits. Wounded soldiers would call for a medic and shoot him as one approached.

Within days of invading Guadalcanal, photographs had been found on the body of a Japanese engineer of mutilated Marines on Wake Island following the Japanese attack on the island December 8, 1941, the same day as the attack on Pearl Harbour. (Wake Island, an American base 3,700 km west of Hawaii, had been attacked as a diversion by the Japanese at the same time as the main action at Pearl Harbour on December 7: because it was on the other side of the international date line, it nominally occurred the day before.)

https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/2017/07/24/an-unsteady-victory-at-the-battle-of-wake-island/

As rumour and evidence of Japanese atrocities circulated among Allied forces, the effect was one of “getting down to their level”. Basic human respect for the enemy was replaced by unmitigated hatred and the urge for revenge: for atrocities committed against their mates, for Pearl Harbour. From many accounts by American soldiers fighting in the Pacific, prisoners were rarely taken even on those occasions when the Japanese did surrender.

According to research by Richard Aldrich, a professor of history at the University of Nottingham, American and Australian troops sometimes massacred Japanese POWs. In “many instances … Japanese who did become prisoners were killed on the spot or en route to prison compounds.” Research by British historian Niall Ferguson reveals that “a secret [U.S.] intelligence report noted that only the promise of ice cream and three days leave would … induce American troops not to kill surrendering Japanese.” Ferguson found that the ratio of Japanese prisoners to dead in late 1944 was 1:100: that is, for every single Japanese taken prisoner, a hundred had died. Ferguson states that “taking no prisoners” was still “standard practice” among U.S. troops at the Battle of Okinawa.

Figure 7

The War in the Pacific descended to a level that was unmatched in the European theatre. “Japan, not Germany, is the main enemy”, said General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the South West Pacific Area. “Life under a civilized country (Germany) would be tolerable.” A display plaque in the Pacific section of the “Scars on the Heart” permanent exhibition at Auckland Museum states that while there was among Allied soldiers “a grudging respect for the Germans, there were no such feelings for the Japanese.”

Racial elements underpinned the War in the Pacific that were intrinsic to the fighting from the outset and which were themselves a product of entrenched cultural attitudes and prejudices on both the Allied (especially the American), and Japanese sides. (Refer also to section on “Souvenir Horrors”)

In official propaganda and popular culture of the time each portrayed the other as primitive, barbaric, uncivilised and unevolved: as little more than animals. Naturally, this made it easier for both sides to kill.

It was the expectation of the Japanese government and the Imperial Army that its soldiers be prepared, like the Samurai soldiers they were inculcated to emulate, to sacrifice their lives for the Emperor. But like soldiers in many battles throughout history, the dying soldier’s final words were often not “I willingly die for my Emperor!” or “I die for my country!” but “Mother! Help me!”

“A Jap bomber was shot down last night over this island – he was just going in for his run to bomb when a P38 got on his tail – the Japs fell in the sea off our gun with a big splash. There must be a lot of wrecks at the bottom of this harbour. No sign of the crew, no one even goes to look for them.” – Harry Stone, Stirling Island, Monday January 10, 1944.