Casualties of War

EMPIRES ON THE PACIFIC: World War II and the Struggle for the Mastery of Asia

By Robert Smith Thompson, Basic Books: 434 pp., $30

FREE TO DIE : FOR THEIR COUNTRY, The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters

in World War II, By Eric L. Muller, University of Chicago Press: 230 pp., $27.50

On Sept. 2, 1945, an armada of almost 260 Allied warships lay at anchor in Tokyo Bay. Aboard the battleship Missouri, Allied generals and admirals, including Douglas MacArthur, William F. “Bull” Halsey and Chester W. Nimitz, who had led American forces to victory in the Pacific, awaited Japanese officials who were to sign the surrender documents. It had been a war fought under a simple dictum suggested by Halsey as he assumed command: “Kill Japs. Kill Japs. Kill more Japs.” Just ashore, the capital city of Japan lay in charred ruins, as thoroughly gutted as Japan’s imperial ambitions.

The ceremony itself was heavy with the victor’s symbolism. Behind the triumphant Allied command stood the skeletal figures of American Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, who had surrendered the fortress island of Corregidor in the Philippines, and British Gen. Arthur E. Percival, who had surrendered the “impregnable” island fortress of Singapore as the war began. Both had just been released from Japanese prison camps. With a superb eye for the telling detail, Robert Smith Thompson points out in “Empires on the Pacific” a final small humiliation for the Japanese: Above them fluttered the old “thirty-one starred American flag that had flown over the flagship of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry,” the American who “opened” feudal Japan to the West in 1853.

Not so long after war’s end, Tom Noda arrived in occupied Tokyo and found work as a Japanese interpreter for U.S. Army court-martial proceedings. There was irony in this. As Eric L. Muller tells us in his fascinating “Free to Die for Their Country,” Noda had been through a grim wartime odyssey known to few Americans. A Nisei, or second-generation Japanese American, he watched his family’s ranch go to a white farmer for a penny on the dollar as West Coast Japanese Americans prepared for internment during a wartime panic. A teenage citizen, he soon found himself behind barbed wire, guarded by soldiers at a “relocation center” in Wyoming, one of 10 internment camps for Japanese Americans in the West. Later, he dutifully followed his despairing father, who had requested repatriation to Japan, to a camp meant to segregate “troublemakers” where, rights and property gone, he was drafted into the U.S. Army.

Though many Americans know of the bravery of the all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the Army’s most highly decorated unit, next to none know of the grit of Noda and other young Japanese Americans who refused to fight for a government that unjustly imprisoned them and their families. He joined hundreds of Nisei resisters who were brought to mass trials in Western states and regularly sentenced to long prison terms. Uniquely in his trial, though, a California judge found the indictments “shocking to his conscience” and freed “the American born Japs,” as the local paper termed them, to be returned to their barbed wire camps. (“As courtroom victories go,” Muller comments, “this was a decidedly Pyrrhic one.”)

Finally, Noda was among the 20,000 Japanese Americans in those camps who, with Japan’s defeat already inevitable, despairingly or defiantly requested expatriation or repatriation; and one of 5,000 actually sent to Japan after the war, though he later regained his U.S. citizenship. Noda and his compatriots were but a few overlooked casualties among millions of lives destroyed in what Thompson terms “the struggle for the mastery of Asia.”

That struggle was in progress less than a century before Noda’s arrival in Tokyo Bay when Perry’s modest four-ship flotilla, backed by a rising continental power, first appeared off Japan. Perry came offering trade and threatening war. In the nearly century-long exchange of goods and blood that followed, oppressive European empires--Russian, Dutch, French and British--crumbled, Japan’s brutal “Co-Prosperity Sphere” peaked and collapsed, and the Pacific was transformed into an “American lake.”

Perhaps Perry had already dreamed as much. Pointing to America’s triumph in the Mexican war, he warned his Japanese counterparts, “Circumstances may lead your country into a similar plight.” The Japanese hardly needed to look to distant Mexico. Only a few years earlier, the Western powers led by Great Britain had fought their way into China, turned its great coastal cities into foreign-controlled “treaty ports” and established the inviolability of Westerners from Chinese courts. The Japanese took the hint and “opened” their land. On Perry’s return, Thompson tells us, “the press likened him to Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and Captain Cook.” And why not? He was an apt symbol of expansive American dreams that would barely outrace reality.

By placing the United States among the jostling “empires” of its title, “Empires on the Pacific” boldly sets out to explain how we came to be the only superpower on this planet. Thompson brings much recent scholarly work on Asia and empire into the popular realm. His goal is to shatter “the most enduring myth” of America’s great war in the Pacific, “that of undiluted American idealism.” His America enters the war weighed down with the territorial baggage of a young empire--Alaska and Midway, Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines (America’s own pre-war “Raj”)--and with an imperial, if home-grown, mind-set. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, according to Thompson, was intent on ensuring that the United States would succeed Britain and foil Japan as the ultimate arbiter in Asia, and he would prove ready at Yalta to trade off spheres of influence with Russian dictator Joseph Stalin: the Far East for an East European empire.

The Pacific in this account was the place where the greatest of Great Games has never stopped being played, where from the Nanjing massacre and the Bataan Death March to Hiroshima, the struggle for mastery plunged the world into abysmal depths of slaughter and destruction. Thompson’s point is that, whatever its stated ideals, the United States played with the best of them.

Most Americans believe that the Pacific theater during World War II opened with Pearl Harbor. Not so, Thompson insists; from an Asian perspective, it began when Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s turned into the century’s first Vietnam. Bogged down on the Asian mainland and pressed by Americans, the Japanese proved unwilling to withdraw, leaving “only one choice: preemptive attack.” Thompson refocuses the imperial struggle in the Pacific on China, a vast disintegrating empire that proved strangely resistant to any imperial vision of Asia--British, Japanese, Soviet or American. Whether ruled by warlords, a radical communist regime or a communist bureaucracy in a burgeoning capitalist state, China has been remarkably unaccommodating to superpowers of any sort, a crucial point of Thompson’s that is still to be fully absorbed by American leaders.

Unfortunately, Thompson’s book, which begins so promisingly as a vivid history of Pacific empires, founders on the shoals of the war itself. The American victory in the Pacific turns into a dutiful, slug-’em-out military history of generals and leaders. (“Halsey then went north.... “) Sadly, given recent scholarly work, Japanese lives and viewpoints are largely missing and the “natives” whom the Europeans colonized, the Japanese “liberated” into another kind of bondage and we then “protected” from communism, are nowhere to be found.

If Thompson nonetheless offers a more realistic historical framework for understanding the world’s future superpower, Muller and Greg Robinson suggest new ways of grasping how the clash of Pacific empires played out at home. Muller moves the history of racial suffering and resistance into new territory in his tale of how a minority of internally exiled Nisei dealt with a world in which a Hearst columnist could write of Japanese Americans, “herd ‘em up, pack ‘em off and give ‘em the inside room in the badlands. Let ‘em be pinched, hurt, hungry and dead up against it.”

Yet like most multicultural histories focused on the powerless, Muller’s doesn’t explore power itself. In “By Order of the President,” Robinson focuses not on the internees but on the president who signed Executive Order 9066 that put them in internment camps. If internment is now seen as a blot on the Roosevelt era, the president himself has generally been viewed as above the fray. Robinson’s judicious exploration of the record shows that Roosevelt was, in fact, deeply involved, his racial attitudes helping to determine the fates of nearly 120,000 Japanese American internees.

Despite early friendships with elite Japanese students at Harvard, FDR came to believe that Japanese immigrants were dangerously unassimilable and, in Robinson’s summary of his views, “should be excluded on racial grounds, from equal citizenship and property rights with whites.” He also came to accept Japan as an imperial foe and the Japanese American community as a potential source of fifth columnists. These were commonplace views at the time. Not surprisingly, when faced with a nasty stew of rumor, innuendo and misinformation in early 1942 (despite the fact that not a single act of sabotage had been committed by a Japanese American), the president was well primed to exhibit what Robinson calls a “deadly indifference” and “astounding casualness” in the name of pragmatism and national security, while signing an order violating “all the democratic principles he so eloquently espoused.”

Today, when Arab immigrants languish in detention, military tribunals loom and, in the name of national security, precious rights are thrown aside no less casually than under Roosevelt’s signed Order 9066, these studies of a long-gone war hold an eerie resonance. Robinson’s book reminds us that panicky acts in a national crisis that sacrifice rights for which we claim to fight emerge not just from immediate insecurity but from deeper prejudices and fears. Muller’s tales of resistance to injustice remind us that pragmatic acts in the present may look like cruel and shameful agendas tomorrow and that democracy, however loudly hymned, is hardly the unalloyed experience of Americans in tough times. Thompson’s sobering work suggests that in our world, acts of national altruism and goodness often take second place to the imperial urge to mastery.

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Tom Engelhardt is the author of “The End of Victory Culture” and a consulting editor at Metropolitan Books.