Brave Japanese

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Donald Maclntyre’s The Battle for the Pacific and Kenneth Harrison’s The Brave Japanese should be read side-by-side.

Both authors survey aspects of the Pacific War in retrospect and conclude that the Japanese were worthy and honourable foes.

r J I HE Battle for the Pacific is a com prehensive survey of the naval battles of the war, written by an Englishman who has already given us The Battle of the Atlantic and The Battle for the Mediterranean.

Now an historian with the Royal Navy, Macintyre was a wartime destroyer commander. Besides know ing his stuff, he is the more accom plished writer of the two authors.

His account of how the war was won is of absorbing interest, for in outlining the naval history from all sides (and he is as well-informed on Japanese as well as allied strategy and results) Macintyre lays bare for us the grand strategy of those years, on land and sea. The war thus comes into focus.

From the opening moves of the Java Sea to the final massacre of the remnants of the Japanese fleet at Leyte we are shown how Japan’s defeat was inevitable once America gained the breathing space in which to build up production lines at home.

Japan Ran Wild

Each new month that strengthened America depleted the brilliantly developed and manned Japanese Navy, until finally the Japanese could do little more than send poorly trained pilots fresh from school into suicidal Kamikaze attacks as a final hopeless gesture of defiance.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, C in-C of the Combined Fleet and an early convert to the supremacy of carrier-borne air power, had warned Prince Konoye even before the war that if I am told to fight regardless of consequence, I shall run wild con siderably for the first six months or a year, but I have utterly no con fidence for the second and third years”, Yamomoto, killed over Bougainville in April, 1943, never knew how right he was. But in the year or two that he did run wild he proved the

Allies could not match his men in fighting skill, and Macintyre at times paints an almost incredible picture of Allied naval inefficiency.

From the beginning the Japanese had been underestimated, but it took 12 months for the truth to sink in to the collective minds of Allied naval officers.

The Japanese night-fighting tech niques had been developed to such pitch that even without the help of radar (which some American ships had) the Japanese were able to teach some bitter lessons.

Probably the greatest Allied mis judgment was of the value of the Japanese torpedo—and it was the torpedo which emerged as the most important single weapon in the naval battles of the Pacific. American torpedoes were ineffective; the Japanese “Long Lances”, propelled by liquid oxygen, were devastating.

Kenneth Harrison, An Aus

tralian who tells his personal story of life as a Japanese POW in The Brave Japanese, agrees with Macintyre that the Japanese were underestimated as fighters, and that by and large they were an extremely brave foe.

His book, which takes him from Malaya to Thailand and Japan, covers the same ground, but in more detail, that fellow-POW Hugh Clarke did in The Tub, published in 1963.

Harrison hides nothing when des cribing Jap. brutality but he looks at his tormentors as individuals

rather than as typical representatives of a race.

In those tough days near war’s end in Japan, where Harrison and his ragged mates worked first in a shipyard and then down a coal mine, he shows that the lot of the Japanese civilian often was no better than that of the prisoners.

Harrison’s readable and enlighten ing account has no doubt been allowed to mellow by time. But this has helped him look at his prison days objectively and thus has given

us a book that is different from the usual POW stories.—Sl.

(The Battle For The Pacific.

Angus and Robertson, $4.59. THE BRAVE JAPANESE. Rigby Ltd., $4.25). is the latest title in Oxford University Press’ little “Life In The Pacific” series for schools. In 32 pages of clear text, Port Moresby woman Renata Cochrane (drawings by Anne Lissenden) tells of tradi tional dress in Tonga, Papua, Samoa, Fiji, the Gilberts and Hawaii. 45c.