To determine the extent to which racial identity played in a role in combat in the Pacific theater in World War II, it is necessary to examine the question from both sides of the conflict, i.e., from the standpoint of both the Japanese and the Allies. On the latter point, it is necessary to consider not only the racial attitudes of the U.S. military but also those of the British, French, and Dutch colonial authorities, Australian and New Zealand forces, and the Asian and Pacific Islander populations who found themselves under Japanese occupation. The conclusion can be drawn that, while not the primary factor driving the conflict, racial identity was an immensely complicating factor in an already complicated conflict.
From the Japanese side, the rise of ethnic nationalism in Japan has been well attested. Ronald Spector details this ascendance in his book on the Pacific war, referring for example to the concept of kokutai and how it permeated the Japanese military.[1] Assassinations politically motivated by nationalists occurred against the foreign minister in May 1932[2] and the prime minister by likeminded assailants two years earlier.[3] Once the war began, and Japanese ultranationalism was given free rein, its expression took two forms. On the one hand, violence in the form of atrocities committed against non-Japanese enemies, whether Chinese in the Rape of Nanjing or Americans in the Bataan Death March, was a clear enunciation of the superiority the Japanese felt over other peoples. On the other hand, as pointed out by Millett and Murray in the case of the Japanese conquest of Malaya, a British colony, the Japanese could act as "liberators" of fellow Asian peoples by ousting militarily the colonial rulers.[4]
From the Allied side, there was the obvious factor that certain Asian and Pacific populations were eager to collaborate with the Japanese because they were not the traditional colonial oppressor. More importantly, however, was the pre-existing conceptions that American, British, French, Dutch, Australia, and New Zealand forces had of Asian and Pacific peoples. In the case of the United States, these prejudices had been reinforced by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, with its subsequent renewal every 10 years until 1942, not to mention the sporadic violence committed against Asian and Asian-American communities along the West Coast of the United States and the internment of Japanese Americans during the war itself. As a result, as noted by Craig M. Cameron, atrocities committed by American soldiers against Japanese surrendering soldiers or POWs was very widespread. In dissecting John A. Lynn's quasi-defense of this behavior, Cameron notes that "the apologist notion that Allied soldiers acted only in response, in retribution, is one of the great fallacies to attaches to racist brutality: the displacement of brutality onto the victim."[5]
Perhaps no point of comparison regarding how race was a factor in the war is that with the European theater, particularly as fought between the Allies and Germany. Whereas Germany fought a war of extermination on the Eastern front, on the Western front, Germany abided by international treaties (with a few notable exceptions) in fighting the British and Americans, and the Allies conducted themselves correspondingly. In the same way that German soldiers felt free to commit atrocities in the east because of racist doctrine, American soldiers felt the same comparative freedom when fighting the Japanese. At least in the case of the Pacific war, race was not the cause of the war, but it was undoubtedly a factor.
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[1] Ronald Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan (New York: Free Press, 1983), Epub edition, 101-02.
[2] Ibid, 109
[3] Ibid, 123.
[4] Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War, 1937-1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2001), 198.
[5] Craig M. Cameron, "Race and Identity: The Culture of Combat in the Pacific War," International History Review, 27, no. 3 (2005): 558.
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