Hirohito, the war criminal who got away

This month the global media marked the 75th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The cities’ destructions were momentous indeed, but the coverage has squeezed out other memories of the Pacific War. Who remembers Japan’s genocidal campaign in China that killed more than 20 million people — thousands of them by poison gas and canisters containing plague and typhus? Or the murder of 35 per cent of the 200,000 soldiers and civilians held in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps that meted out unspeakable cruelties? Certainly not the BBC, which failed to put Hiroshima and Nagasaki into any kind of historic context.

For example, a BBC article on the anniversary said that ‘critics have said that Japan was already on the brink of surrender’. This blatant untruth was left hanging. Even after the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, vice admiral Takijiro Onishi, the main architect of the kamikaze campaign, burst into a war council meeting to declare: ‘If we are prepared to sacrifice 20 million Japanese lives in a special [suicide] attack effort, victory will be ours.’ The Japanese military’s fanatical death cult was even better illustrated by army chief of staff, General Korechika Anami, who pleaded: ‘Would it not be wondrous for the whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?’

Neither is it ever pointed out that Japan had, under the aegis of Dr Yoshio Nishina, a protégé of the great Danish particle physicist Niels Bohr, designed if not yet built its own nuclear weapon. As one of Nishina’s colleagues said: ‘If we’d built the bomb first, of course we would have used it.’

Before the atomic bombings, any peace negotiations being conducted by Japan through intermediaries had in any case fallen a long way short of the unconditional surrender demanded in the Potsdam Declaration issued by Harry Truman, Winston Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek.