September 1, 1945 - Hong Kong

Keiji MAKIMURA, 29 August 1945

DELIVERANCE

South China Morning Post, September 1, 1945

Henry Ching, Post editor for 33 years until 1958, wrote this editorial on September 1, 1945, when the paper reappeared for the first time after the Japanese occupation.

How long dead? Three years, eight months and six days. Forty-four months lost from our lives - a thousand and more dreary days and nights of waiting and hoping, starving, praying and enduring. Not really dead, only buried alive, conscious of great tumult far off, wherein we could have been participating - wish-dreaming with all the phantasmagoria of delirium. Now for us, the forgotten folk, life begins again. We return to the world like Phra the Phoenician. Some are not with us, will not awaken again. Requiescat! And we who, by the grace of God, survive, emerge from entombment leaner, prematurely aged and spiritually very tired, to justify our existence anew, to try to overtake the march of time, to fill the great gap in our knowledge of our fellow men and of humanity's affairs. History has moved far on, left us stumbling an age behind.

How much elated? The bewilderment of that tragic Christmas Day when our world came to an end returns to us. Can this be it? Can this peace be deliverance? Aye, this is Peace - this is The Day, in faith whereto throughout those interminable months we refused to die. So mild a day, so tame an ending! In the comfortable countries they have already given their thanks and abandoned themselves in celebration. We too had thought to rejoice mightily, in overnight relief: thought also to be avenged for hardship and tyranny, for persecution and slappings - prepared to take again the risks of bombardment, of looting, of starvation, even of vindictive massacre, if only to prevent the vulture horde from escaping with their surfeit. Frustrated to the end; tantalized by uncertainties, rumours and delays, to us the truce brought little more than a fuller realization of our weariness.

How much chastened? The gaping ruins, the walking skeletons, the accumulation of filth, the degradation to be seen on all sides - these are the superficies of a devastation of pride. We have been guilty of failure; we have rediscovered poverty. We have sampled want. We know just how unfitted we are to wrest a livelihood from a primitive economy, without the aid of privilege; we know how it feels to be beggars and helpless. We comprehend how the submerged other half lived and what it is that makes criminals. We appreciate the value of friends, and we have learned why some of us had none. Few can now recall the old recriminations, and many would prefer that they would be forgotten. They are part, however, of the sins of the past and of the warnings for the future. Tolstoi in his 'Peace and War' says that wars are not brought about by politicians, nor even by policy. He agrees that war is the explosion of accumulated conditions, and that those conditions are created by selfishness, by wrong thinking. None of us must cry 'Peccavi.'

How much regenerated? With the end of a difficult war a more difficult task begins - to construct the new world order, to secure the general acceptance of the truth that war will only cease when the causes of war have been destroyed. Are we equal to it? Hong Kong the proud, the beautiful, out-raged, dragged in the mire, to be a foul trollop - Hong Kong is but one of many victims. Her rehabilitation is a task peculiarly ours. It will need much patient effort, for so many of our local institutions have been destroyed, and so many habits have been changed. Success will be great or small in proportion to the sanity that has been left to us, and in ratio to our consciousness of our obligations.

As we return to our own, our rugged familiar Catskills greet us wanly, yet encouragingly. They too have suffered; and because we have bled with them we should know at last what these green hills mean to us. We owe them more faithfully our love and our loyalty, so that this our Hong Kong may flourish again, more beautiful, more prosperous, more progressive - and purer of soul.

The week of liberations

The 70th anniversaries of the end of World War II took place last week. Starting with the general surrender of Imperial Japan on September 2, other surrenders were accepted throughout the Pacific. The result is that for 70 years Japan has enjoyed a prosperous peace and the United States and Japan have become unshakeable allies. 

Much ceremony surrounded the liberation of the Pacific. It is worth remembering these events and their participants to appreciate how far the war was fought and how wide the peace would extend.

On the morning of September 2, 1945, aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay is the Empire of Japan became history. U.S. General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, the Commander in the Southwest Pacific and Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, accepted Imperial Japan’s surrender on behalf of the Allied Powers and signed in his capacity as Supreme Commander. After MacArthur came Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz for the United States and then representatives from China, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, France, the Netherlands, and New Zealand.

On September 3rd, Major General Edmond H. Leavey, Deputy Commander of the United States Army Forces, Western Pacific, in Baguio, Philippines, accepted the surrender of all Japanese Forces in the Philippines and officially ended the war there [Video]. The John Hays Air Base at Baguio had been the first target bombed by Japan in their invasion of the Philippines on December 8, 1941.

Aboard the HMS Glory

On September 6, at Rabaul, New Guinea Australian Army Lt. General Vernon A.H. Sturdee on board the British carrier HMS Glory accepted the surrender of Japanese forces on New Guinea, New Britain and the Solomon Islands. At Bougainville on September 8, the surrender of local forces were accepted by Australian Army Lt. General Stanley G. Savige, II Corps commander and American Marine Lt. Colonel John P. Coursey who survived the Pearl Harbor attacks on the USS Arizona.

On September 9,on Morotai, part of the Moluccas, Australian Brigadier General Thomas W. Blamey accepted the surrender of the Japanese Second Army in the Netherlands East Indies [Video]. On the same day, Japanese Expeditionary Forces in China, Formosa, and northern Indo-China were surrendered in Nanking to KMT General Ho Ying-chin. Japanese forces in Manchuria surrendered to scattered US Marines units or not at all. Russia and Japan have yet to sign a peace treaty.

Also on the 9th, the Japanese government and armed forces in Korea were surrendered in Seoul. The territory south of the 38-degree parallel surrendered to Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, Commanding General of the XXIV Corps and Admiral Kincaid, Commander of the U. S. Seventh Fleet. Forces north of the 38-degree line were surrendered to the Russian commander.

On 10 September, Wotje Atoll and Maloelap in the Marshall Islands capitulated. The next day Timor just north of Australia, Ponape in the Carolines, and the remaining Japanese forces on the New Guinea mainland surrendered. 

Formal surrender of all southeast Asia, the Netherlands East Indies, and the various islands to the east was signed on the 12th at Singapore by Lord Louis Mountbatten.  And on September 13th, the Japanese 18th Army on New Guinea was surrendered at Wewak to Australian Major General Horace C.H. Robertson

On September 2nd, General MacArthur had broadcast the announcement of peace to the world. His words expressed the thoughts of one who had felt both the bitterness of defeat and the gratification of victory, who knew well the horrors of warfare and the futility of attempting to achieve peace by resort to the sword.

Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won.... 

As I look back upon the long, tortuous trail from those grim days of Bataan and Corregidor, when an entire world lived in fear, when Democracy was on the defensive everywhere, when modern civilization trembled in the balance, I thank a merciful God that he has given us the faith, the courage and the power from which to mold victory. We have known the bitterness of defeat and the exultation of triumph, and from both we have learned there can be no turning back. We must go forward to preserve in Peace what we won in War. 

A new era is upon us. Even the lesson of Victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization. The destructiveness of the War potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concept of War. 

Men since the beginning of time have sought peace. Various methods through the ages have been attempted to devise an international process to prevent or settle disputes between nations. From the very start, workable methods were found insofar as individual citizens were concerned but the mechanics of an instrumentality of large international scope have never been successful. Military Alliances, Balances of Power, Leagues of Nations all in turn failed leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. The utter destructiveness of war now blots out this alternative. We have had our last chance. If we do not devise some greater and more equitable system Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advance in science, art, literature and all material and cultural developments of the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh....

COMMEMORATING THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ATOMIC BOMBINGS

ENDGAME: AUGUST 1945 IN ASIA AND THE PACIFIC

August 6, 2015

8:30am-7:00pm

Institute for the Study of Strategy and Politics 

U.S. Navy Memorial

 Burke Theater

701 Pennsylvania Avene, NW

Washington, DC 

Speakers

Richard C. Thornton, Professor, George Washington University; James D. Perry, Ph.D.; F. Charles Parker, Ph.D., Author, Vietnam: Strategy for a Stalemate; David M. Glantz, Editor, Journal of Slavic Military Studies; D. M. Giangreco, Author, Dear Harry and Hell to Pay; Norman Friedman, Naval Analyst; John T. Kuehn, Professor, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.

The end of the Japanese Illusion

The moment the sky over Nagasaki lighted up, 

I made a bet with my fellow POW that we would soon be set free. I was right.

By 

LESTER TENNEY

Wall Street Journal, Aug. 5, 2015
Japanese

What does it mean to fight to the end? In April 1942, it meant fighting until my tank battalion and I were forced to surrender at the Battle of Bataan. For everything else that followed I only fought to survive: the Bataan Death March, brutal transport aboard a “hell ship” to Japan and slave labor in a Mitsui coal mine.

For my imperial Japanese enemy, in contrast, to fight to the end meant to give his life in a presumably noble and glorious fashion. He would die for the emperor—who ruled by divine right—confident that he would be enshrined with his ancestors for his efforts in defense of a mythic civilization. There could be no surrender and no negotiated peace. Death itself was beautiful, and death alone was honorable.

click to order

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, upended this belief. The bombs showed the Japanese the devastating and ultimately inglorious outcome of their fight. The bombs offered no true opportunity for confrontation and no chance of death with honor; they promised only obliteration.

Like its erstwhile ally Nazi Germany, Japan was fighting an ideological war. A superior race was destined to guide those less graced. Death for the empire earned a blessed afterlife in their emperor-god’s eternal favor. For a loyal subject, surrender was a betrayal of everything that sustained the empire’s system of patriotic values. The only option in the face of certain battlefield defeat was to fight to the death.

Japan tried to keep fighting long after any chance of victory was gone. On the mainland, women, children and the elderly were armed with sharpened bamboo sticks. Beginning in May 1945, schools for disabled children were ordered to organize military units and women ordered to serve in volunteer combat units. Young men were recruited by the hundreds for kamikaze missions aboard wooden gliders or small boats.

The country’s infamous biological-weapons research program was hard at work concocting flea-borne plague agents to float by submarine and balloon towards populated American shores. By late-spring 1945, some incendiary explosives called fugo had already landed on the West Coast.

On Okinawa during the 82-day battle from early April to mid-June 1945, the Japanese military instructed civilians to fight and die rather than surrender to the advancing U.S. forces. Civilian households, comprised almost entirely of women and children, were given grenades and encouraged to destroy themselves along with any Americans they might encounter. Many did.

In late spring 1945, I saw that the cruelty with which we prisoners of war were treated was only increasing. Our guards told us that Japanese units facing attack had received orders to kill all military and civilian POWs in their custody. They were to unburden themselves to focus on the fight. The executions were to begin Aug. 17.

click to order

No Japanese soldier or civilian was preparing to surrender that August.

Early* on the morning of Aug. 9, from the POW camp where I was held some 30 miles across a bay, I saw the sky over Nagasaki change. It glowed red and the air turned warm against my skin.

Until then, red was the color of my subjugation. My Japanese guards were certain that red had a uniquely Japanese meaning. It wasn’t just the central color of their flag, it was viewed as emotionally representative of their pure spirit and sincerity. The red sky over Nagasaki ended those illusions.

At that moment, I made a bet with a friend that soon we would all be set free. I was right.

Japan’s surrender saved us. The dropping of the bombs, as Emperor Hirohito himself acknowledged, was the only thing that made that surrender possible. As he explained to his subjects, “Should we continue to fight, it would only result in the ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation.” The bombs’ indiscriminate, total devastation, as no battle or bombing before it, showed the consequences of trying to fight to the end. The bombings destroyed hope and glory, past and future.

It’s also true that the bombings were acts of tragic and unprecedented violence. The bomb—this “cruel weapon,” as the stunned emperor recorded in his surrender message on Aug. 15—ruined two cities, brought suffering and death to many tens of thousands of people and drastically altered landscapes and ecologies. Its use also transformed the nature of modern warfare and erased the last faint lines separating civilian and military, illegitimate and legitimate targets.

We POWs—men who were starved and tortured, who suffocated in the holds of hell ships, who were beaten at will, who died for lack of medical care and who saw friends worked to death—have no doubt that the atomic bombs ended the war. The bombs took away all the justifications for Japan to continue to fight.

The visual obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed that Japan could soon cease to exist. Or as the emperor concluded, “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.” There would be no glorious end.

Mr. Tenney served in the 192nd Tank Battalion of the U.S. Army.

*actually late morning, 11:01am in Nagasaki.

Emperor Hirohito's speech to end the fighting

Why Japan's 1945 surrender speech is almost incomprehensible

On Saturday, the Imperial Household Agency released a digital version of the original 1945 Hirohito speech announcing Japan's surrender.

By Mari Yamaguchi, reprinted from Associated Press August1, 2015

TOKYO — The 4 ½-minute speech that has reverberated throughout Japan's modern history since it was delivered by Emperor Hirohito at the end of World War II has come back to life in digital form.

Hirohito's "jewel voice" — muffled and nearly inaudible due to poor sound quality — was broadcast on Aug. 15, 1945, announcing Japan's surrender.

On Saturday, the Imperial Household Agency released the digital version of the original sound ahead of the 70th anniversary of the speech and the war's end. In it, the emperor's voice appears clearer, slightly higher and more intense, but, Japanese today would still have trouble understanding the arcane language used by Hirohito.  [See below for text in English]

"The language was extremely difficult," said Tomie Kondo, 92, who listened to the 1945 broadcast in a monitoring room at public broadcaster NHK, where she worked as a newscaster. "It's well written if you read it, but I'm afraid not many people understood what he said."

click to order

"Poor reception and sound quality of the radio made it even worse," she said. "I heard some people even thought they were supposed to fight even more. I think the speech would be incomprehensible to young people today."

Every Japanese knows a part of the speech where Hirohito refers to his resolve for peace by "enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable," a phrase repeatedly used in news and dramas about the war.

When people heard that part 70 years ago, they understood the situation, Kondo says. But the rest is little known, largely because the text Hirohito read was deliberately written in arcane language making him sound authoritative and convincing as he sought people's understanding about Japan's surrender.

Amid growing concern among many Japanese over nationalist Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's push to expand Japan's military role, the current Emperor Akihito is increasingly seen as liberal and pacifist, and the effort by his father, Hirohito, to end the war has captured national attention.

Speaking in unique intonation that drops at the end of sentences, Hirohito opens his 1945 address with Japan's decision to accept the condition of surrender. He also expresses "the deepest sense of regret" to Asian countries that cooperated with Japan to gain "emancipation" from Western colonization.

Hirohito also laments devastation caused by "a new and most cruel bomb" dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and asks everyone to stay calm while helping to reconstruct the country.

Its significance is that Hirohito, who at the time was considered a living deity, made the address, said Takahisa Furukawa, a historian at Nihon University in Tokyo.

"What's most important is the emperor reached out to the people to tell them that they had to surrender and end the war," he said. "The speech is a reminder of what it took to end the wrong war."

On the eve of the announcement, Hirohito met with top government officials to approve Japan's surrender inside a bunker dug at the palace compound.

Amid fear of violent protest by army officials refusing to end the war, the recording of Hirohito's announcement was made secretly. NHK technicians were quietly called in for the recording. At almost midnight, Hirohito appeared in his formal military uniform, and read the statement into the microphone, twice.

A group of young army officers stormed into the palace in a failed attempt to steal the records and block the surrender speech, but palace officials desperately protected the records, which were safely delivered to NHK for radio transmission the next day.

The drama of the last two days of the war leading to Hirohito's radio address was made into a film, "Japan's Longest Day," in 1967, and its remake will hit Japanese theaters on Aug. 8.

Imperial Surrender Broadcast

by Emperor Hirohito of Japan 

At noon on August 15, 1945, the Emperor of Japan delivered the following over the radio. Not only did this speech signify the end of World War II, but it meant the end of the Emperor’s status as a deity. This was the first time in history the people of Japan had ever heard their Emperor’s voice. Japanese text here.

To our good and loyal subjects: After pondering deeply on the general trend of the world and the actual conditions pertaining to our Empire today, we have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure. We have ordered our government to inform the government of the United States, Britain, China, and the Soviet Union that our Empire accepts the provisions of their joint declaration (the Potsdam declaration).

To strive for the common prosperity and happiness of all nations, as well as for the security and well-being of our subjects, is the solemn obligation which has been handed down by out Imperial ancestors and which lies close to our heart. Indeed, we declared war on America and Britain out of our sincere desire to ensure Japan’s self-preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement. But now the war has lasted for nearly four years. Although the best has been done by everyone—the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of our servants of the state, and the devoted service of our hundred million people—the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interests.

The enemy, moreover, has begun to employ a new most cruel bomb, the power which to do damage is indeed incalculable, taking toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would only result in the ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation . . . but would lead also to the total extinction of human civilization. Such being the case, how are we to save millions of our subjects, or ourselves, to atone before the hallowed spirits of our Imperial ancestors? This is the reason we have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the joint declaration of the Powers.

We cannot but express the deepest sense of regret to our allied nations of East Asia, who have consistently cooperated with the Empire toward the emancipation of East Asia. The thought of those officers and men who have fallen on the field of battle, of those who have died at their posts of duty, or those who have met with untimely death, and of their bereaved families, pains our heart night and day. The welfare of the wounded and war victims and of those who have lost their homes and livelihood are objects of our profound solicitude. The hardships and sufferings to which our nation is to be subjected hereafter will certainly be great.

We are keenly aware of the inmost feelings of all our subjects. However, it is according to the dictates of time and fate that we come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable. Having been able to save and maintain the structure of the Imperial State, we are always with you, our good and loyal subjects, relying upon your sincerity and integrity. Beware most strictly least any out burst of emotion, which may engender needless complications, or any fraternal contention and strife, which may create confusion, lead you astray and cause you to lose confidence of the world. 

Let the entire nation continue as one family from generation to generation, ever firm in its faith in the imperishability of its divine land, and mindful of its heavy burden of responsibilities and the long road before it. Devote your united strength to construction for the future. Cultivate ways of rectitude, further nobility of spirit, and work with resolution, so that you may enhance the innate glory of the Imperial State and keep pace with the progress of the world.