April 9, 2007
Bataan Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:35 PM EST Jack Kelly’s lead piece on this website today commemorates the sixty-fifth anniversary of the surrender of the American and Philippine troops who had defended the Bataan peninsula. The Japanese notoriously murdered almost 6,000 of those prisoners while moving them 70 miles to a P.O.W. camp. The Bataan death march was a famous atrocity when I was a boy, but its fame has been succeeded by a widespread conviction that the Pacific War was marked by appalling brutality on all sides, its viciousness caused by racism on both sides. This seems at most half-right. Japanese abuse of enemy prisoners may have been intensified by racial feeling, but the Japanese army’s treatment of its own soldiers was also remarkably savage, and it is not clear that Japanese racism was the main spur to Japanese atrocities. American troops were no doubt racist, but there is no evidence that our racism was the first cause of our subsequent behavior toward the Japanese, nor that our racism conditioned us to expect the astonishing barbarities that came our way at the hands of the Japanese. American soldiers were in fact astonished by the murderous sadism the Japanese army displayed toward prisoners, and by its gross breaches of the laws of war against American, British and Australian troops, and civilians. That we were so astonished, after very well-publicized Japanese savagery toward the Chinese, does suggest that we expected to enjoy a racial privilege, but there is no evidence that we did not intend to treat Japanese prisoners as we expected to be ourselves treated. There is no reason to think that subsequent American behavior toward the Japanese was anything other than reactive. For example, it made little if any sense to take prisoners when facing an enemy who made a practice of feigning surrender and then treacherously murdering any Allied soldiers who were successfully deceived. The Japanese army systematically murdered American medical corpsmen and generally behaved with absolute indifference to the laws of war. Allied troops rarely treated the Japanese as horrifically as the Japanese treated their own enemies, although Allied troops did take very few prisoners, and American troops did mutilate enemy dead, after seeing their dead mutilated. When Japanese resistance stopped, in August of 1945, American behavior changed immediately. This was by no means true of Japanese behavior against enemies who had no power to resist them, and the American occupation of Japan was as like Japanese behavior in occupied territory as chalk is like cheese. American aerial attacks on Japanese civilians seem unlikely to have been caused by American racism, for they were not very different from American aerial attacks on German civilians, barring the use of atomic weapons, which were not available before the German surrender (and there is no good evidence that we would have failed to use nuclear weapons against Germany). Some people find it oddly comforting to assert that everyone behaves with equal cruelty in war, but that is a gross libel on armies that have behaved with some or great restraint in war. The attempt to temper the horrors of war, and the behavior of armed men when they have enemies at their mercy, is not made more likely to succeed by claiming that occasional and sometime remarkable successes in those lines of endeavor never happened. The anniversary of the surrender on Bataan should make us reflect on the fact that laws of war are most likely to be observed when restraint is mutual, and that it is almost impossible to observe at least some of them when an adversary treats those laws with systematic (rather than occasional) contempt.
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