Sorry to disappoint antisemites, but Operation Starvation is not an Israeli plan to murder millions of Palestinians; it was a US plan to starve Japan into submission at the end of the Pacific War. However, comparisons with Israel Defence Force’s (IDF) current strategy for defeating Hamas, and the changing legal landscape of warfare since World War II, are enlightening.
Japan’s death cult was in full swing
By April 1945, Japan had lost the war in the Pacific. At the naval Battle of the Philippine Sea, the Japanese fleet lost so many aircraft that the engagement was named ‘the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. Months later, the Japanese Navy suffered even greater defeat at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Thereafter the Japanese navy was nonfunctional – the war was lost.
Only as a last-gasp effort, the behemoth battleship Yamoto, at 72,000 tons the largest ever built, was given a one-way suicide ticket to the Battle of Okinawa. It didn’t make it. Hit by13 torpedoes, the Yamato capsized killing 287 of her 3,332-crew. Admiral Soemu Toyoda, commander in chief of the combined fleet, displaying the delusional fanaticism of all death cults, described it as an opportunity
‘To fight gloriously to the death to completely destroy the enemy fleet, thereby establishing firmly an eternal foundation for the Empire.’
By this time, Japan’s death cult was in full swing. Starting at Leyte Gulf, kamikaze suicide planes became de rigueur. With airplane kill ratios now at 13:1 in favour of US pilots, if Japanese pilots were going to die whatever, why not send up them up in cheaper planes designed as bombs?
As an idea it was a no-brainer. But only if Japanese pilots went along with it. Of course they did. Brainwashed by Imperial Rescripts from childhood, it was promised that dying for Emperor Hirohito would guarantee eternal life – like Hamas and other Islamic death cults, but without 100 virgins or, more accurately, houris (beautiful companions).
In total some 1,500 kamikaze pilot sacrificed themselves on Okinawa. Another 12,000 kamikazes, not including shinyo, suicide boats, and kaiten, suicide torpedoes, awaited a US invasion of the Japanese mainland. Thankfully for American and British servicemen, an estimated 500,000 of whom would have died, president Harry Truman authorised the war-ending dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Up to five million Japanese lives were also saved – including the lucky kamikaze pilot I met when I lived in Tokyo.
By the early summer of 1945, US Admirals were complaining that there were no Japanese ships left to sink. On the mainland hunger was already stalking the cities. As one Japanese businessman confided to me, ‘I was not only hungry during the war but for five years afterwards.’ So, the US faced an almost identical problem to the one faced by the IDF in Gaza. Hirohito’s forces had been defeated but where was the surrender?
Surrendering, of course, would have been the logical thing to do. Sadly, death cults are not logical. And they are impervious to the suffering of civilians. As Japanese defence minister, General Korechika Anami, said after Hiroshima, ‘would it not be wondrous for the whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower.’
Similarly, the Japanese Army, like Hamas in Gaza, used women and children as human shields. Unlike the IDF’s voluminous ‘rules of engagement’, the US army was not so picky. One GI on Okinawa confessed: ‘It was a terrible thing not to distinguish between the enemy and women and children…now we fired indiscriminately.’
For the Okinawan survivors, the arrival of the US army was a relief. Food and medicine arrived in abundance. Marine-Sergeant Romus Burgin noted that the Okinawans ‘were happy we were there. They wanted us to liberate them from the Japs. They didn’t like them.’
One suspects, from the number of Palestinians who have demonstrated against Hamas in recent weeks, that many, if not most of the Gaza’s population, would like to rid themselves of Hamas.
The problem for the US Army faced with the daunting prospect of an invasion of Japan was the same as that faced by the IDF in Gaza. How do you get an enemy to surrender when every enemy combatant is resigned to death, not just as a duty but as a reward? Do you press on and kill every fanatic no matter what cost to your own troops?
For America’s military leaders in 1945, the answer to the Japanese surrender conundrum was to starve Japan even more. Hence the reasoning for Operation STARVATION. It should be remembered that America’s leaders did not know for sure that the presumed ‘war ending’ atom bomb being developed at Los Alamos in New Mexico, would work.
In April 1945, General Curtis LeMay put the B-29 (Boeing Superfortress) mine-laying bombardment wing into operation in the Shimonoseki Straits. A primary role of the mines was to interdict food as well as war materiel from crossing the Sea of Japan from Korea to the major ports on the southern coast of Honshu. Admiral Nimitz, commander of the US Pacific Fleet, commended LeMay for the ‘precision and determination which arouses our admiration. It is a definite contribution toward winning the war.’
The mining effort was subsequently extended to Kyushu and effectively cut it off from two of the other main islands, Honshu and Shikoku. Even more important than cutting Japan off from Korea, mining completely disrupted Japan’s intercoastal traffic which was an essential component of its food supply chains. Running in parallel, the firebombing of Japan’s housing stock (eventually 40 per cent of the total) also impacted food supply chains. After the war, the US Strategic Bombing survey concluded that Operation STARVATION was second only to the American submarine in the destruction of Japan’s merchant fleet.
The civil servant charged with the relocation of five million Tokyo residents to the countryside noted that:
‘The food situation affected all classes…the chief trouble was not so much in rice but in secondary articles of diet – vegetables, fish, particularly in the cities.’
Food price inflation and hunger had a liberating effect on the hitherto fanatical Japanese. The collapse in morale manifested itself in growing absenteeism, industrial go-slows and even strikes, which were officially banned. Increasingly the feared kempeitai (secret police) were ignored and indeed overwhelmed by the numbers of disgruntled civilians – evidence that contradicted Japan’s post-war Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, General Douglals MacArthur, who mistakenly believed that social stability was dependent on the retention of Emperor Hirohito as head of state.
If the IDF faces virtually identical problems to the US in terms of how to get a death cult to surrender, the way the world perceives Israel’s enemy combatants could not be more different. In the Pacific War, there was no outcry in America or elsewhere that starving an enemy was an immoral or illegal act. From time immemorial, starvation has been a standard tactic in siege warfare.
Sun Tzu, the 5th Century BC author of The Art of War, would have been astonished at the idea that starving an enemy was immoral. Not only did he believe that ‘The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting,’ but he specifically advised, ‘When the enemy is relaxed, make them toil. When full, starve them’.
Even President Abraham Lincoln, who the Lincoln Heritage Museum eulogises as ‘an exemplar and a model of virtue perhaps more than any person in world history’, was an advocate of the use of starvation. During the American Civil War, his Lieber Codes on military conduct, an important influence on the later Hague Conventions, stated that ‘war is not carried on by arms alone. It is lawful to starve the hostile belligerent, armed or unarmed, so that it leads to the speedier subjection of the enemy.’
The legality of the use of starvation only began to change after World War II. Nevertheless, the 1949 Geneva Convention still authorised the use of starvation against combatants as a legitimate method of war. In 1977, Article 14 was added to emphasise that ‘starvation of civilians as a method of combat is prohibited.’ Again, these restrictions did not apply to combatants.
Today international law still allows the denial of food and water to enemy combatants, though, increasingly, the concept of ‘proportionality’ has crept in. But the consensus of the international law establishment, along with globalist bodies like the United Nations, seems to have moved further along the path of protecting not only Palestinian citizens but also Hamas combatants.
The IDFs current plan is to occupy northern Gaza and isolate Hamas terrorists while enabling targeted humanitarian aid to be delivered only to non-combatant civilians. However, the UN and other international aid group are reported to be baulking at the Israeli plan to feed the Palestinians through the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) in Safe Distribution Sites (SDSs) in the south. (SDSs are walled garrisons being built by Israel, which allow food trucks to enter by a main gate without risk of Hamas interception. Food is doled out to individuals who enter by pedestrian entrances.)
In Europe, there appears to be little, or no, understanding of the unique difficulties faced by the Israeli government
It seems that the UN, increasing numbers of European countries, and even a growing number of British conservative politicians favour the humanitarian supply system of the first Israel-Hamas ceasefire. The problem for Israel is that this system not only fed Hamas, but enabled them to profiteer from the humanitarian supplies that they sequestered. Control of these supplies also gave Hamas a large measure of power over Gaza’s civilian population.
Sentiment in Israel towards the international community’s perfidious and hypocritical approach, which seems to favour Hamas, a terrorist organisation, over the Middle East’s only functioning democracy, is hardening. European governments are despised.
In Europe, there appears to be little, or no, understanding of the unique difficulties faced by the Israeli government which is trying to balance the requirements of international law with eradicating a defeated but unyielding death cult. Unlike the US at the end of the Pacific War, the Israelis cannot resort to the use of an atom bomb or starvation of civilians as weapons. A look back at how the Allies, unfettered by today’s international legal quagmire, dealt with Japan’s death cult in World War II is instructive.
Except for President Donald Trump and his administration, the moral fecklessness of the West and its institutions has been abominable. Israel should not let this distract it from its own priorities. No matter how hard it tries, Israel will never be able to meet the unrealistic moral and legal requirements of an international community which is heavily slanted against it.
For all our sakes, Palestinians included, the war needs to be won, and the Hamas death cult destroyed. Whatever measures Israel takes, realistically a high level of collateral suffering for Palestinian civilians is unavoidable – that is the nature of war. As Thucydides, author of The Great Peloponnesian War, famously said, ‘The strong do what they can and weak suffer what they must.’
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