The Nature and Outcome of Warfare - Essay Example

of the "The War of Thought is as important as that of armed might or economy". [Japanese army officer] Indeed, the nature and outcome of warfare, as of any human endeavor, are largely dependent on the individual talents and cumulative experiences of the people who engage in it. To study the material and technological aspects of modern warfare to the exclusion of its emotional, spiritual, and intellectual elements is foolish. The very existence of war requires that one possess not only the physical means to sustain an armed struggle but a mentality that predisposes one to initiate it or persevere in it. It follows, then, that hostilities cease when one of these two essential elements has been destroyed--when one combatant no longer possesses either the physical means or the psychological will to carry on the fight. What were the dominant ideologies and institutions of international politics of the twentieth century At the dawn of the twenty-first century, this seems a particularly appropriate question to ask. What distinguished them, what were their limitations, what was their potential, and what prospects do they hold for the new millennium The purpose of combat operations is to physically destroy the enemy's physical and material ability to make war. The objective of psychological operations is to erode his will to continue the fight. John W. Dower's War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986) is a superb analysis of the impact of cultural stereotypes and racism on the conduct of the war in the Pacific.1 John W. Dower assesses the impact of racial hatred, cultural stereotypes, and acid psychological factors on the conduct of the Pacific War. Yet his treatment of wartime atrocities, Japanese adherence to "death before dishonor," and Americans "obsessed with the task of slaughter" reveals only part of the story. Although he refers to the surrender of demoralized Japanese soldiers, the subject is peripheral to his work. This is understandable given his focus, yet one is left with a very dear impression that such occurrences were extraordinarily rare and insignificant events. More problematic is Dower's assertion that Americans in decision-making positions were so singularly unimpressed with the idea of waging a serious propaganda campaign against the Japanese that "such ideas had little impact." In fact, this is not the case. Psywar was not an afterthought on the part of Allied military commanders, nor was it always perceived as some "impractical plaything of effete civilians."2 In their attempts to demoralize Japanese troops Allied propagandists in the Southwest Pacific alone disseminated nearly 400 million propaganda leaflets and witnessed the capture of approximately 19,500 Japanese prisoners. The dearth of historical inquiry into the conduct of psywar against the Japanese, likely results from assumptions that deserve closer scrutiny. One such assumption seems to be that psywar could not have been effective against an enemy so thoroughly indoctrinated in a tradition that emphasized "death before dishonor" and the supreme virtues of loyalty to the emperor, unquestioning obedience to one's superiors, and self-sacrifice in the service of the nation. To be sure, soldiers in the IJA were thoroughly imbued with these values. But just as it did not prevent them from experiencing defeat on the battlefield, military indoctrination did not safeguard the emperor's soldiers from the ill effects of demoralization. The evidence shows that as the war progressed and Allied military successes mounted, morale among Japanese combatants markedly declined and Japanese soldiers became increasingly susceptible to the Allied war of words. Pacific War narratives provide graphic images of the brutal fighting in the Pacific, the atrocities committed by combatants, and the fight-to-the-death mentality that dominated among all fighting men in what has been characterized as a savage race war. Taken as a whole, this literature attributes to the war in the Pacific inherently different qualities from those that prevailed in other theaters during World War II, with the possible exception of the fighting on the eastern front. Integral to this way of thinking is the idea that despite the horror that inevitably accompanies warfare, combatants elsewhere somehow managed to retain a sense that the enemy was human, to remember that the ultimate goal was victory over the enemy rather than its extermination, and to adhere to ethical standards deemed essential among civilized people even in wartime. Not so in the Pacific, where American propagandists dehumanized the enemy and thus encouraged his extermination, where GIS' bigotry led them to callously and regularly mutilate the corpses of enemy dead, and where Japanese soldiers became human grenades and charged willingly, even gratefully, to their death in the service of their emperor. Allison3 asserts that one is led to believe that the Pacific War was peculiarly repugnant as it pitted the IJA, with its fanatical obsession with the principle of "death before dishonor," against an American army "obsessed with the task of slaughter" and "notoriously reluctant to take prisoners." (Allison, 116) The resultant kill-or-be-killed psychology gave rise to egregious behavior on the part of both armies and a level of inhumanity that far exceeded the norm even in an era when total war was accepted as both legitimate and necessary. One thing is for sure from these readings, that the Christian element had been strong. The main impetus had been race relations in the Pacific, particularly disputes over Japanese immigration to the United States. According to Lynn4, respect for 'domestic affairs' was formalized as one of the most significant principles of modern international law as a result of this debate on 'racial/national equality' in 1919. (Lynn, 15) The debate caused many conference participants to realize that the issue of 'racial equality' had significant implications for their domestic politics. 'Respect for domestic affairs' meant safeguarding the state from international intervention. Cecil said that, important as it was, 'the racial question' could not be solved 'without encroaching upon the sovereignty of States members of the League'. It was also clear that, despite their denials, the Japanese delegates hoped that the clause would eventually influence various nations' immigration policies. They were aware of its far-reaching implications for their 'domestic' affairs. One American thought it fortunate that they did not have to oppose the proposal openly. Joseph Henning is amongst the very few scholars who has critically evaluated the seminal years of American-Japanese history, normally considered to broaden from Commodore Matthew Perry's mission to Japan in 1853-4 to the end of the Meiji Era in 1912.5 Henning's first book, Outposts of Civilization, is a wonderful work on the cultural element of the correlation between Japan and the United States. Particularly, Joseph Henning tries to analyze how Americans and Japanese raised, re-constructed, and distorted their racial and religious metaphors of the Japanese as it became increasingly apparent that Japan (at least on a national level) was becoming an economically and militarily modern country. When Americans first started coming to Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century after Commodore Perry had "opened" Japan to the West and "western" civilization, they came in the certainty that, as Caucasians and Christians, they were civilized and the Japanese were not. These diplomats, missionaries, scholars, and artists believed it was their mission to bring Japan out of its exotic barbarism and towards civilization, and out of heathendom and towards Christianity. Throughout Outposts of Civilization Henning carefully describes the racial and religious worldviews of white Americans in the second half of the nineteenth century, and then he analyzes how they tried to "fit" the Japanese into these pre-conceived, seemingly determinist ideas of a racial hierarchy with Anglo-Saxons at the top, and Christianity (usually Protestantism) as the only true path to "civilization." (Henning, 88) By the start of the twentieth century, however, these racial and religious worldviews of who was civilized and who was not had become moot. After defeating China and Korea in 1895, and especially after defeating white, Christian (albeit Orthodox) Russia ten years later, it was clear that, "Japan had assimilated Western secular institutions without a national religious conversion. Its military and commercial prowess seemed to contradict the American belief in Asian inferiority" (p. 137). How to explain the dilemma that Japan had become an industrialized, "modern" country with its own colonies, and yet barely one percent of its population was Christian and clearly not of Anglo-Saxon origin William Griffis and others answered by asserting that Japanese actually weren't "Mongolian" as all other East Asians were racially classified at the time. The Japanese were a composite race, even part Caucasian, Griffis and others claimed. Meanwhile, Japan's political leaders became more helpful to American missionaries, and allowed Japanese Christians to serve as chaplains during the 1st Sino-Japan War and the Russo-Japan War. Even Emperor Meiji, who began his life as a Buddhist and then became the high priest of State Shinto, donated money to the YMCA in 1905. "Instead of accepting Japan as a modern power that disproved these beliefs," Henning writes, "they [Americans] stretched the terms Christian, 'Anglo-Saxon,' and 'white' to co-opt the Japanese" (pp. 163-64). And the Japanese had learned how to co-opt Americans. Although Americans knowledgeable about Japan, such as William Griffis and Alice Mabel Bacon, and Japanese such as Fukuzawa Yukichi and Kaneko Kentaro had worked for decades to promote a special relationship between Japanese and Americans, the constructions, re-constructions, and intellectual contortions to interpret Japan within the sphere of western civilization and modernity would ultimately crash against the Oriental Exclusion Act of the 1924 Immigration Law. In the conclusion, Henning reminds us that, "How we define others ... says much about how we define ourselves. Much of our own identity is invested not only in the qualities we ascribe to our particular people, but also in the allegedly unchanging differences between these qualities and those we ascribe to other peoples" (p. 172). In Outposts of Civilization, Henning utilizes a vast array of primary and secondary material from government, missionary, and education sources. Moreover, he employs recent science, philosophy, and social science material to buttress his interpretations. For example, Clifford Geertz, Jared Diamond, Stephen Jay Gould, Michel Foucault, and Edward Said all make at least a brief appearance in Henning's analyses. And he has carefully read the works of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer in order to discuss nineteenth-century views of evolution, race, and the concept of Social Darwinism. By looking at just the extensive endnotes and bibliography (pp. 175-233), somebody might think that Henning took a scattershot approach to finding sources for this study. With one partial exception mentioned below, however, Outposts of Civilization is a articulate study that never drifts far from its fundamental theme of how Americans (and some Japanese) constructed, re-constructed, and intellectually contorted images of Japan during the Meiji Era. In my view, there is little to criticize in Outposts of Civilization. Nevertheless, this meticulous chapter is a brilliant synopsis of how and why the "unequal treaties" of the 1850s were finally re-negotiated with Japan receiving equal trade and levy rights beside its Western equivalent. Despite its comparative brevity--which makes it ideal for classroom use--Outposts of Civilization is well-researched, well-written, and full of insightful understanding. Joseph Henning has made an important contribution to the literature on the cultural aspect of American-Japanese relations. Works Cited Allison B. Gilmore. You Can't Fight Tanks with Bayonets: Psychological Warfare against the Japanese Army in the Southwest Pacific. University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Pages: 114-119 Dower, W. John. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986), pages: 47-53. Henning, M. Joseph. Outposts of Civilization: Race, Religion, and the Formative Years of American-Japanese Relations. New York: New York University Press. 2000. Pages: 87- 94 Lynn M. Itagaki. Transgressing Race and Community in Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go. African American Review, Vol. 37, 2003. Pages: 14-21 Tomoko Akami. Internationalizing the Pacific: The United States, Japan, and the Institute of Pacific Relations in War and Peace, 1919-45. Routledge, 2003. Pages: 24-39 Read More