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Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45

The worst of friends

Max Hastings
HarperCollins, 670pp, £25,

Max Hastings

Wednesday, 3rd October 2007

Michael Howard

In the first place, the victorious allies in this conflict were united by little except mutual contempt. The Americans despised the British whom they believed, with some justification, to be simply fighting for the restoration of an empire that they themselves were equally determined to destroy. The US navy did its best to exclude the royal navy from any participation in the Pacific war; though it has to be said that its contribution, when it ultimately made one, was rather pathetic. For the US army the only point of the British campaign in Burma was to open a route to help Chiang Kai-shek whose armies, they believed, would liberate the Chinese mainland and provide the necessary launching pads for an invasion of Japan: their commanders in south-east Asia, first ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell and then the anglophobe Albert Wedemeyer, were explicit in their loathing of their British colleagues and their contempt for the Chinese. In Washington the illusion reigned that Chiang Kai-shek was a great democratic leader who could make China one of the four policemen of the post-war world. The British saw him as a brutal and corrupt warlord interested in nothing but feathering his own nest.

As for the Australians, they resented both the British who had abandoned them and the Americans who neglected them: their co-operation with both was minimal.

Relations between the American armed services were equally acrimonious. The navy believed that no invasion would be necessary, and that Japan could be brought to her knees by blockade. The US army air force believed that she could be defeated by bombing, and would need to be if the huge investment in B29 bombers was to be justified and they were to win their spurs as an independent arm. Independent of both, the megalomaniac General Douglas MacArthur fought a separate war to fulfil his pledge to liberate the Philippines. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff, themselves barely on speaking terms with one another, made no attempt to impose any strategic priorities on these squabbling paladins. They did not need to: American wealth and industrial productivity was great enough to pour resources into all of them. Meanwhile on the peripheral stage of Burma General Bill Slim, one of the few really human figures in this grand guignol theatre, fought a campaign that had little to do with defeating Japan and everything with the restoration of British face after the humiliation of the surrender of Singapore. But even that he was only able to do thanks to the facilities provided by the United States air force.

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