BOOK
REVIEW Guantanamo, banzai and all
that The Anguish of
Surrender by Ulrich
Straus
Reviewed by Ian Williams
An imperial power was invading and
occupying other countries, and since it was
convinced that its troops were invincible, it never
bothered with the Geneva
Conventions when it took combatants as prisoners.
The power treated them as if it were outside the
law.
Welcome to the Bushido Empire of Japan
from 1941-45. Welcome to the Bush Empire of
America since 2001.
Ulrich Straus's
well-timed book, The Anguish of Surrender,
is about Japanese prisoners taken in World War II,
how their own leaders had indoctrinated them
and how the Allies treated them. It is more than
an academic treatise on an obscure nook of the
past. Even more than most histories, it has
lessons for today, not least if read in
conjunction with the report of the United Nations
Human Rights Commission on Guantanamo Bay released
last week. That report concludes that "terrorism
suspects should be detained in accordance with
criminal procedure that respects the safeguards
enshrined in relevant international law". The
authors also demanded that the detention facility
in Guantanamo be closed, since it was clear that
its sole purpose was to evade those safeguards.
A reader of either work can only conclude
that there was much less externally applied
anguish for a captured would-be kamikaze pilot
then than there is now for a suspected Taliban. Of
course the Bush crowd, ignoring the recent
revelatory pictures from Iraq's US-run Abu Ghraib
prison, shamelessly attacked the messenger, using
the occasion to attack Secretary General Kofi
Annan and the UN.
Anguish of
Surrender author Ulrich Straus is a
German-born Jewish-American and retired diplomat
who is wryly aware of the absurdities of prejudice
in his adopted United States, as well as the rest
of world. He had spent seven years in Tokyo with
his family before coming to the US as war loomed.
As an "enemy alien" he was unable to volunteer for
military service where he could use his knowledge
of Japan, although, with engagingly xenophobic
logic, he was still liable for conscription.
Despite the bureaucratic obstacles, he managed to
enroll in a Japanese-language program designed to
provide trained linguists for military
intelligence. As he points out, the US did not
intern him as a German enemy alien, although it
did intern all citizens of Japanese origin en
masse. The nisei (second-generation
Japanese-Americans) were highly unlikely to become
commissioned officers. Straus finally qualified.
In contrast, about the only way out of the
internment camps for Japanese-Americans was to be
conscripted to the armed forces. And even then, as
they fought abroad for freedom, their families
remained in the camps until the end of the war.
Then as now, there was a fear of the other. It was
as perilous to your civil liberties to look
Japanese then as it was to be visibly Muslim
now.
However, as Straus points out in his
fascinating study, the US was scrupulous in its
official attachment to the Geneva Conventions on
prisoners of war when it captured Japanese. I say
"official", since his research backs up what I
have heard from some veterans, that in the
immediate heat of battle GIs were less likely to
have international law at the forefront of their
thoughts, and so prisoners were not exactly
guaranteed safe transit to the rear.
Nonetheless, his book indicates that the
US treatment of Japanese prisoners once they were
officially processed was immeasurably more moral,
civilized and effective than the behavior now
condoned and encouraged by the White House.
Japanese prisoners were fed, clothed and, if
wounded, hospitalized alongside wounded GIs. They
were not shackled, hooded, sense-deprived or
locked in open cages, let alone subject to the
varying degrees of torture such as that admitted
at Abu Ghraib and redefined in the Guantanamo
facility in Cuba.
Since the expectations
of capture fostered by the Imperial Japanese
command were pretty dire, prisoners' main worry
seems to have been how to look one another in the
face with the shame of not fighting to the death.
However, it seems that many, impressed by the
humane conduct of their captors, ended up
cooperating to an amazing degree, even in some
cases to the point of helping target artillery or
providing much-sought details on the capabilities
of the Japanese navy's super-dreadnoughts. "The
fact that humane treatment came as a total
surprise only added to its effectiveness," Straus
writes. That it is still a total shock to the US
administration six decades later is a testament to
how vindictiveness can induce amnesia about
historical lessons.
Straus's conclusions
deal with the legacy of the Bushido-era
no-surrender policy on present and future Japanese
policy. "Sooner or later, the issue of how to
treat its own and its enemy's POWs [prisoners of
war] will have to be addressed even in a pacifist
Japan," he concludes, correctly, since some
Japanese politicians have as much difficulty about
addressing their past as some American politicians
have in dealing with their present.
However, with the present degree of
militaristic hubris and lawlessness of the supreme
commander of the US forces, one might also almost
recommend Straus's book as the core for a
guidebook for GIs taken prisoner in the many
future wars the White House seems to envisage,
since they may be captured by enemies who think
Washington has in effect abrogated its commitment
to the Geneva Conventions.
There is a
clear precedent. The Allies tried German Wehrmacht
General Alfred Jodl at Nuremburg. The charges
included shackling Canadian commandos and passing
on Adolf Hitler's orders that commandos, partisans
and the like should not be treated as POWs,
refusing them the benefit of a tribunal to
determine whether they were enemy combatants.
The Nuremberg court found: "Jodl testified
he was strongly opposed on moral and legal
grounds, but could not refuse to pass it [Hitler's
order] on. He insists he tried to mitigate its
harshness in practice by not informing Hitler when
it was not carried out."
Nonetheless the
Allied judges concluded, "Participation in such
crimes as these has never been required of any
soldier and he cannot now shield himself behind a
mythical requirement of soldierly obedience at all
costs as his excuse for commission of these
crimes."
Jodl was hanged in 1946. George W
Bush was re-elected president of the United States
in 2004.
The Anguish of Surrender:
Japanese POWs of World War II by Ulrich
Straus. University of Washington Press, 2005.
ISBN: 0295983361. Price US$27.50, 272 pages.
Ian Williams is author of
Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families,
Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd.
All rights reserved. Please contact us for
information on sales, syndication and republishing
.)
leaders had indoctrinated them
and how the Allies treated them. It is more than
an academic treatise on an obscure nook of the
past. Even more than most histories, it has
lessons for today, not least if read in
conjunction with the report of the United Nations
Human Rights Commission on Guantanamo Bay released
last week. That report concludes that "terrorism
suspects should be detained in accordance with
criminal procedure that respects the safeguards
enshrined in relevant international law". The
authors also demanded that the detention facility
in Guantanamo be closed, since it was clear that
its sole purpose was to evade those safeguards.
