American WWII History as Selective Memory

Karl Muth explores how America remembers WWII.

The American narrative for the Second World War focuses, oddly, more and more on the war in Europe. From Saving Private Ryan to Schindler’s List to The Train (one of Frankenheimer’s most underappreciated films, in my view) to Inglorious Basterds, the Nazis are a convenient enemy and come with all sorts of historical memes, convenient clichés, and fit into a narrative American audiences are hungry for after the War in Afghanistan, which has lasted more than three times longer than the American participation in World War II.

I want to highlight just how differently Americans think about the Pacific Theatre, Oriental participants in the war (I carefully use the word Oriental here as “Asian” participants in the war would include the Russians and others to whom I am not referring and the relative neologism “Pacific Rim” is incorrect to use here geographically, historically, and geopolitically), and the inexorably intertwined history of American racism and American historical concepts surrounding World War II.

I remember being outraged as a child learning about the internment camps the United States operated to imprison, exclude, and degrade American citizens who happened – by no fault of their own – to have more Japanese genetics or more Japanese surnames than average. Even more idiotic and arbitrary was the decision to imprison people of Japanese descent in parts of Washington, Oregon, and California, and Arizona (why Arizona?), but not in Nevada or eastern Washington or New York City. I ask rhetorically: apparently there was no threat of Japanese in Chicago or New York (which boasted comparatively large Japanese populations even in the 1940’s) deciding to blow up a building?

Most absurd, of course, is the concept that someone with Japanese genetics has a loyalty to whatever government happens to currently be in power in Japan. There were no initiatives to round up people with German surnames in Milwaukee or Philadelphia or Boston (all places with substantial German populations in the 1940’s and plenty of important targets for domestic terrorism). The Italian communities on Taylor Street in Chicago and in Boston’s North Square (now North End) weren’t rounded up and thrown into internment camps. This, despite the large Nazi spy ring (Duquesne Spy Ring) operating in the U.S. and a planned attack on New York Harbour by the Italians that would have depended at least partially upon the cooperation of Italian-Americans.

The history of the American space program in the 1950’s and 1960’s is punctuated with gloating about the recruiting (or abduction?) of German scientists after WWII and the use of German rocket technology as a basis for many American rocket programs. The same “brain drain” bragging permeates some of the aerospace, manufacturing, and even petro-agricultural literature of the time (the early American experiments with grain-derived motor oils and motor fuels were based on German research). Almost never discussed, even for a sentence, is the American failure to recruit equally-bright minds from the Japanese ranks. The Japanese had engaged in a very different type of warfare, making the best of a limited-resource situation and therefore putting an emphasis on guerilla warfare and tactics that allowed prolonged operations despite limited manufacturing capability. These are precisely the types of skills, tactics, and areas of expertise American allies in Latin America, southeast Asia, and elsewhere would need in the coming decades, but little or no value was placed on them during the American occupation of Japan (which would have provided an ideal recruiting ground).

Perhaps the most troubling piece of racism in America’s WWII history is the decision to drop two nuclear weapons on Japan. When Truman assumed the presidency in 1945, he inherited the Targeting Committee that Roosevelt had recently created. The Committee contained two Army Air Force officers who had been extensively briefed on the capabilities of the B-29 bombers and five scientists (one British, four American). The Committee had already done two rounds of target selection. Importantly, the Committee contained multiple people who had visited Germany but no one who had ever visited Japan. Many histories of the bomb’s development – including the very good book by Richard Rhodes, which I read as a teenager and which remains among my favourite history books – make it clear that B-29 conversion training for the first three flightcrews was finished by late 1944 and that a nuclear bomb could have been delivered to Germany by January of 1945 (with, arguably, much less challenge than the delivery of two nuclear weapons to Japan). There had been shock at the level of destruction caused by the Eighth Air Force’s firebombing of Dresden and, I suspect, a well-documented nuclear strike against a “white” city like Berlin would have been seen as more morally questionable than a similar strike against a “non-white” city like Hiroshima.

To look at how the war is perceived by the latest generation – the so-called Millenials – videogames are a useful thing to look at. My friend and colleague Tom Kirk and I would occasionally play videogames when we lived in the same flat in London. Among these would be WWII-themed games. So, I decided to look and see what the ten most successful WWII-themed videogames are. Not a single one allows you to select the Chinese when you elect to play for the Allies. In only one of these simulations is the player allowed to play as the Allies and choose the Russians. And not a single one allows you to select the Japanese when you play for the Axis. In these games – one of the primary sources of education about Twentieth Century warfare for the current generation – it’s as though the Pacific theatre didn’t exist. In every one of these simulations, the central activity (whether the player is American, German, or British) is to drive around the French countryside in mixed mechanised infantry units (which was, historically, a very small portion of the war) and many of the central themes revolve around liberating concentration and work camps full of Jews (despite this often being only a secondary or tertiary objective of Allied forces in these missions).

The value of Asian culture is also devalued in the American historical narrative. The value of art looted by the Germans, for instance, is often inflated or played up as a substantial piece of the war (it is examined explicitly in the Frankenheimer film mentioned, supra), even though only in mid-1943 did the American forces even become aware that art looting was a major piece of the German command structure’s plunder strategy and even though it wasn’t until Operation Achse in late 1943 that caches of stolen art were actually discovered by the Allies (after this, reclamation of European cultural artifacts became a command priority level issue). Meanwhile, General Stilwell (then the American contact assigned to General Chiang Kai-shek) showed no regard for the massive amounts of Chinese art and artifact being thrown into piles and set on fire by the invading Japanese. Throughout the war, little attention was paid by European and American forces to the cultural importance of anything Asian destroyed during the war.

To this day, there is a failure to recognise events among Asian belligerents as being on par in their intensity or atrocity with the European counterpart events. Though approximately 300,000 people (nearly all civilians who were Han Chinese by ethnicity) were killed and over 30,000 women were systematically raped or captured and kept to be raped continuously for months, European historians concentrate on the systematic elimination of Jews as (seemingly) the only relevant genocide (or “ethnic cleansing” may be more appropriate to use here, as it is closer to a translation of the Japanese intent) question during WWII. The American government has done little, if anything, to denounce statements made by Yuko Iwanami, Shinzo Abe, and some prominent Japanese academics, claiming that these murders and rapes were valid military tasks assigned to infantry units (and, hence, that no crimes occurred). In general, the level of casualties – particularly those in the Pacific theatre – is both poorly-described and underappreciated in the American scholarship. Most scholars recognise that between fourteen and twenty million Chinese died in WWII, most of them civilians. Even if we take the low civilian death estimate (the one Japanese historians tend to favour), there were about fifteen Chinese civilians killed for every American (soldier or civilian) killed during WWII. There were three Chinese civilians killed for every Japanese person (soldier or civilian) who died. Most agree that between 4.8 million and 5.8 million Jews were killed, which is on par numerically with the organised democide (to use R. J. Rummel’s term) of Chinese civilians by the Japanese (this number can be broken down further and includes the killing of 400,000 prisoners of war taken by the Japanese, most of whom were Chinese, and the killing of many more in medical experiments and weapons testing, as described in the paragraph immediately infra).

During the war crimes trials of the Japanese, which scarcely garnered any media attention in the Unded States when compared to the media circus of the Nuremburg Trials, the Americans came to the defense of many of the most terrible Japanese leaders, including Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii, a self-proclaimed expert on torture and bioweapons. The Americans granted Shiro Ishii immunity for his grotesque experiments on live prisoners, which were no less appalling or frequent (Shiro Ishii’s laboratory experimented on over 10,000 human subjects per year, many of them of Han Chinese ethnicity) than the Germans’ experiments. Ishii’s experiments were very organised, taking place in a complex of buildings built in Harbin, China (then Japanese Occupied Sino Territory) that covered roughly the size of a small university campus. The buildings were specifically designed to take large numbers of Chinese each month into various chambers and rooms for force abortion, torture, vivisection, and exposure to weaponised disease. In exchange for immunity, the Americans received the data from his experiments which included over two thousand gas chamber tests of poison gas, weaponised anthrax, and plague. Ishii was never tried and lived to the age of sixty-seven, even being allowed to give lectures in the United States. That there were serious war crimes with lasting effects perpetrated by Japan is hardly discussed in American schools and the inadequate prosecution of these crimes is rarely mentioned, even in top Western international law curricula.

Rarely do the Americans consider as analogous – or even vaguely similar – their protection (and participation in the creation) of two nuclear-armed, occasionally-apallingly-right-wing-in-recent-years places of refuge (Israel and Taiwan) in the decades following the war. These are arguably the most ambitious, recognized-by-most (roughly fifty countries refuse to recognize Israel, while about two dozen do not recognize or have diplomatic relations with Taiwan) affirmative relocation or resettlement campaigns in human history (not since the relocation of settlers from the Roman periphery after the Germanian wars had a quasi-state resettlement of this scale been attempted). Both were described as "islands of democracy" by multiple U.S. presidents and both benefitted from billions of dollars of American investment, aid, and expertise. Yet Taiwan is often seen as sui generis, a product of internal tensions about communism in China. Similarly, Israel is often seen as without analogue given the politics of its founding and its legal structure – this latter argument is, however, largely erroneous (for instance, many scholars hold up Israel’s “law of return” as unique, though both Taiwan and China offer laws of return that are extremely similar in both their syntagma around the concept of return and intent to provide an offer of belonging and refuge for a growing diaspora).

The reason this blog is not entitled “American WWII History as Racism” is that is not the message I hope to communicate. Certainly there were racist overtones of European superiority (culturally, militarily, etc.) throughout the war from both Axis and Allied participants. However, the involvement of the Pacific theatre in the American view historically is one of convenience. When something happened in the Pacific that was noteworthy and either provided a justification (Pearl Harbour) or an accolade (Battle of Midway), it is included in the historical narrative. Everything else, which includes about 99% of what happened during the war west of California and east of Cologne, is conveniently excluded.

And, I fear, these excluded pieces – which make up an important piece of our history as Asian people – will be forgotten about in a generation or two.