CAN JAPAN BE BEATEN AT HOME?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 175, 30 October 1942, Page 6

CAN JAPAN BE BEATEN AT HOME?

AM

R.

discusses this question from personal

experience of Japan’s inflammable-and not so inflammable-cities.

N the Southern Solomons, Japan’s expansion appears to have met something hard and delimiting. Therefore the professional strategists — professional newspaper strategists-are talking of a slow advance north to Japan itself, from island to island. Slow advance it indeed will have to be, seeing that between Guadalcanar and Hondo lies a quarter of the Pacific Ocean sown like a minefield with fortified islands. Why then people ask, struggle through the far-spun meshes of the spider’s web, bursting it strand by strand? Why not strike at the centre itself? Why not bomb Japan? * * a

PART from the usual reasons for striking at an enemy’s centre, there seem special reasons why bombing Japan should be quite extraordinarily effective. Its completely war-geared totalitarian organisation leaves next to no margin of labour, transport, or direction to deal with local emergencies; the psychological effect of disaster at home might be overwhelming upon a people convinced of the inferiority of their enemies; plane bases are comparatively near to Siberia and China; and-most striking to the imagination-Japanese cities are an incendiarist’s paradise.

But these facts, or contentions, as usual mean something different from what they did in abstraction and at first glimpse. For example the Japanese rail and coastal shipping system is certainly working all-out for military purposes, and the few lorries and cars there are could do nothing to relieve the impossible congestion that extra strain would throw on it. But then the bulk of Japanese short-distance traffic has never gone by either steam or petrol. On many occasions, in many streets, in all the main Japanese cities I have seen "gitensha" jams easily as large as that tidalbore of cyclists which pours through the Christchurch bottleneck twice daily. And each machine was a "commercial vehicle" with huge panniers and carriers, or trailer, or sidecart, or even harnassed dog alongside to help it up hills. Such a hive-like, many-footed transport system, however militarily busy its major units may be, can not be put out ‘of action by bombing dislocations, however severe. Again events have upset the popular belief that air attack will demoralise populations that have been accustomed to think of themselves as safe behind their armies and seas. It did not break the British. It has not broken the Germans. And the Japanese peasantry and proletariat are certainly quite as amenable to discipline as the one, and as accustomed to enduring hard conditions uncomplainingly as the other. Potential Menaces But what about those Chinese and Siberian aerodromes? That the Japanese High Command regards them as a

potentially serious menace is plain from their efforts to occupy Chekiang and from their concentrations alongside the Far Eastern Soviet Republic. But again let us see the situation locally. From the German-held Channel Ports to London is under a hundred miles; London to Cologne is 250 miles; London to Berlin is 500-too far to have been effectively bombed so far. But Vladivostok to Tokyo is 650 miles, Kamchatka to Tokyo 1100 miles, Midway Island to Tokyo considerably more, Lishui and Chuchow (the Chekiang ’dromes) hardly nearer, Dutch Harbour twice as far (the Japanese occupation of Kiska in the meantime neutralises Port Mears which was only 900 miles away), while the US. mainland itself is as distant as Brisbane, or India.

Of course to bombers able to carry twenty tons and to make a round trip of six thousand miles these distances are small. But if the European war has proved anything about aerial attack it surely is that it must be overwhelming and continuous to be successful. The reason why the all-annihilating blitz of our pre-war imaginings did not descend on or about September 3, 1939, was not, indeed, as we now tend to think, that we were panicky prophets, but that Goering was caught unprepared. He needed thoysands of planes; he had only hundreds. Only once has each side staged a real blitz-the flattening by

five hundred bombers of Coventry, the conquest by a thousand bombers of Cole. A week of continuous "Coventrating" or "Cologning" by either side might bring the war to an end. But experts have been asking whether the "air-car-rier off the coast of Europe" has even the physical space to make this possible, or whether a Nazi-unified Continent has, under war conditions, the productive capacity for it. It is not likely that we shall soon see the heart of Japan’s war effort stilled by sky armadas launched off Midway Island sandbank; or from the Kamchatka forests, or the Aleutian rocks, or even from Chekiang, cut off as it is from Free China proper (by mountains) and from the world outside (by Japanese-sailed seas); or even from Vladivostok, halfsurrounded already by Japanese forces and half-Siberia away from the overworked Kuzgnetz factories that themselves in turn must go 1300 miles further on for their coal. Attacks on Japan at present can come only from occasional long-distance bombers-fiown probably from aircraft carriers and willing on landing to be interned in Siberia or stranded somewhere in China-bombers relying entirely on disorganising Japanese industrial life by hit-and-run incendiarism. What are their prospects? "An Arsonist’s Rhapsody" The light construction of Japanese houses is well known. Lying awake at night I have heard a man in the next room turning over the pages of a book! And the unpainted wooden walls and (Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous page) shingle roofs, the "tatami" (rice-straw-mat) floors, the moveable paper-screen room partitions, and the floor-cushions by day and floor-mattresses by night that are practically the only furnitureall these together make perfect firelighters. Moreover, with characteristic Japanese space-saving, these flimsy houses are packed close together. Even their gardens are miniature. "Slum" streets are only five to seven feet wide, while main shopping "White Light" arcades would run two side-by-side in narrow Willis Street, Wellington, Finally add that a great part of Japanese industry goes on in home-factories and back-yards, often piled high with material, Yes, urban Japan is an arsonist’s rhapsody. Tokyo and Yokohama, cities now c2ntinuous rather than contiguous (and, taken together, probably more populous than present-day London) might indeed be burned flat with one lucky two-pound incendiary bomb, were it not that such a complete gutting has already occurred. This was in 1923 when fire followed the Great Earthquake and homeless millions saw at e ening, for the first time in their lives, the purple cone of Fuji. The new Tokyo-Yokohama has been built with wide main arteries and a solid concrete modernistic fire-proof heart. Despite its million post-1923 dwellings being still of wood and paper, it probably gives, tonsidering also its many canals and parks, little more inflammable coverage than London. "Horrible Possibilities" However, for all its size and importance Tokyo-Yokohama is not the ‘real concentrated centre of Japanese industry and population. That lies around Osaka (wartime population-four million)namely, Kobe along the Bay and Kyoto up the valley (112 million each) and Nagoya across the Yamato peninsula (2 million) And for all Nagoya’s supermodern new factories, Kobe’s Hamburglike reclaimed docks and leafy hill-side suburbs that, with paint, might transplant to some Auckland bays — these cities are anything but modern. Climb the Tenoji Shrine in Central Osaka and you look across a choppy sea of unpainted, one-storey, wooden roofs among

which the ten-foot streets and canals that intersect the whole packed plain are lost to sight, and over which bob wooden village fire-watchtowers like bell-buoys in a channel, Nothing would avail against a rain of incendiaries here — not ingrained Japanese carefulness with fire, not the hand-cart fire-brigades, not the canals, not even the concrete walls that have been built across the prevailing wind. Of each thousand incendiary bombs dropped in London only about 75 reached places where nothing but ARP action could extinguish them, The number, it is calculated, would be 100 or so in Tokyo and Yokohama, 300-400 in Kobe, Kyoto, and Nagoya, but maybe as high as 700 in Osaka! That certainly offers horrible possibilities. But let us ask frankly what it entails. The civilian population will suffer, of course; suffer horribly, But the ship-yards and war-production factories, which are new and of concrete, and their workers, who are mostly housed in dormitories within the gates, can probably be affected only indirectly. We certainly cannot expect results in the least degree commensurate with the hopes some people had when the war with Japan began. The destruction of Japan’s power to fight will be a slow process, perhaps as slow as the destruction of Germany’s, unless events take a turn that no one at present can foresee.