ABSTRACT
World War II in the Pacific ended with the American military and economic colossus bestriding a prostrate Japan as well as the nonCommunist world. The most significant, the most consequential event of the twentieth century, World War II, had concluded. Nothing in the preceding forty-five years and nothing through the end of the millennium approaches the changes wrought by the that conflict, Time itself had been redefined into prewar and postwar eras. “Before the war” and “after the war,” something like B.C. and A.D., soon became common informal dating methods. The Pacific war had indeed taken its toll: Manila, capital of the Philippines was as destroyed as Warsaw, Poland. The Japanese lost more than one million battle dead on all fronts, the Americans nearly 60,000, and the Australians around 2,000, not to mention the millions of noncombatant and civilian casualties. As always, the fatalities as well as the wounded and prisoners of war fell by far the most heavily on the infantry, the leading edge of the battle. One major change from earlier wars was that for the first time, except on the Western front in World War I (1914-18), disease did not claim more lives than did enemy action, although tens of thousands of Japanese troops died of tropical diseases in the closing months of the British reconquest of Burma. In the postwar Pacific, the rapacious economic and militaristic engine that had been Imperial Japan was gone, driven out by American, British, and Australian armies and navies. Slave labor, deportations, and officially sanctioned mass murder (200,000 at Nanking, scores of thou-sands in prisoner of war camps, and literally millions in China), for a short moment, ended. Japan’s fraudulent Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere had meant, in truth, prosperity-and actually only the potential of prosperity-solely for Japanese. A new economy slowly began to sort itself out from the Pacific war’s wreckage. Japan, the major military and political force in the Far East since the 1930s, had seen its once-vast empire reduced to the bombed, burned, and broken wreckage of the home islands, a result of ruthless U.S. air and naval bombardment. (Japan was the only major power to surrender
without an enemy’s invasion.) Tokyo s population had fallen from seven to three million. Japan’s voracious, live-off-the-land armies, still 5.5 million strong at war’s end in 1945, no longer scoured Asia’s countries, in itself an inestimable blessing. Its sleek, well-trained navy lay on the bottom of various oceans and seas, and an air force made famous by the dreaded Mitsubishi Zero had been shot from the skies. At least 1.1 million Japanese soldiers had died, as had 670,000 civilians. Some estimates range as high as 2.3 million if one counts from 1937 to 1945. Fleets of futuristic, silvery B-29 Superfortresses (boldly left uncamouflaged as a mark of U.S. air superiority over Japan) had destroyed Japan’s cities and had cut its lines of communication and commerce. The nation’s merchant fleet, its colonies and conquests, and its imports of food, fuel, and raw materials were gone. Flocks and herds had been eaten or reduced through neglect. Home island railroads had collapsed from overuse, deferred maintenance, and from the inadequate ministrations of untrained operators. The very productivity of the soil had waned from the absence of fertilizer, farm workers, and machinery. Inflation raged, unemployment awaited returning servicemen, and barter and black markets were about the only commerce that flourished. About 6.6 million Japanese-military, administrators, colonists, and businessmen-were scattered about Asia at war’s end. The Americans forcibly repatriated them to Japan, even those who had lived peaceably in their adopted countries for decades. Another 1.2 million non Japanese in the home islands, whom the Japanese had brought there by force, wanted to leave and return home. Those movements were the largest mass waterborne migrations in history. Yet Japan’s losses had been small compared to those of its victims, in particular, China. For eight years, China had been battled over and stripped of its resources. The Japanese had fought in China under the “Three Alls” principle: take all, burn all, and kill all. Some 1.3 million Nationalist Chinese soldiers had died as had, by very rough estimate, some 22 million Chinese civilians, mostly from starvation and privation rather than direct combat losses. These losses, very difficult to document as they are, may well have exceeded those of the Soviet Union in World War II. Those alive were in turmoil, with Nationalist fighting Communist and bandits infesting the countryside. Prices were 2,000 times higher than in 1937. The war had been an economic catastrophe and an inflationary disaster. China’s middle class had been nearly wiped out, except for war profiteers. Corruption, incompetence, and inflation had ruined Chiang Kai-shek’s government and destroyed its popular appeal. Industry barely functioned, hardly assisted by the Soviet s “Treatment of Manchuria, where factories were carried off in wholesale lots in the last weeks of the war by China’s “ally.” The Nationalists were stumbling their way to defeat, yet the Communists had not yet developed into the fearsome threat they would one day become.
