The war in the Pacific

My uncle George York fought in the Pacific and in Alaska. The latter campaign to retake a couple of islands of snow and ice is little remembered these days, but it was just as savage as any of the other battles with the Japanese. It ended with a final banzai charge, a frequent occurrence when the Japanese had no hope of winning but honor must be satisfied. He later fought in the jungles of the South Pacific, a horrible place whose hardships can scarcely be imagined today. The climate and terrain were as much an enemy as the emperor's soldiers. When rain fell -- it fell every day -- it was like standing under a waterfall. The roar was deafening and the torrents turned the ground into a thick gumbo. Even tracked vehicles bogged down in it. Not there was much room in those claustrophobic jungles for them to move around. Feet rotted in that climate and nearly everyone got malaria. Like many WWII vets, my uncle, who returned yellow and suffered relapses for several years, was silent about his experiences. But I did see one terse letter that someone kept. "People are no damned good," he wrote. A single sentence paragraph that laid out his life experience and the philosophy he derived from it as well as a thick volume.

I wonder if misanthrophy runs in my family. My mother was reclusive, my younger brother is a hermit. My older brother certainly has nothing good to say about anybody, and my wife remarks on my sourness at times. There are Scots in our background, a mean and miserable people. On the other hand, if you don't set your expectations too high about other people you are less likely to be disappointed by their behavior. Human nature never changes, one explanation for the bloody past. The butchery that breaks out ever now and then shows that barbarism hasn't gone away; it just bides its time. Africa proves it and it wasn't that long ago that even "civilized" Europeans were slaughtering people in Bosnia. Genetic engineering shows promise for altering human behavior, but only an optimist would bet we won't find a way to screw that up.

HBO has a new series about the Pacific War that I was tempted to boycott because Tom Hanks, an executive on the production, said in interviews there was little moral difference between Americans and Japanese in that war. I'm used to historical and other forms of ignorance by Hollywood actors, but projecting political correctness backward like that is revolting. Anyone who has read any history of the era knows the Japanese behaved like beasts toward anyone who got in their way, particularly the Chinese. The cruelties described in contemporary accounts and in books like The Rape of Nanking are so sickening it is hard to read them. People nailed to walls, buried to their necks and then trampled over by horses or around to jelly by tanks, fetuses bayoneted from wombs, beheading contests between officers. The Japanese took the position that anyone who surrendered in battle were less than human. Other races were subhuman anyhow, according to the Japanese, and this made them even more subhuman. They refused to surrender even when their situation was hopeless. They were ordered to lure enemies close enough to kill under the guise they were giving up. So Allied soldiers learned pretty quickly to take no prisoners. Japanese soldiers and sailors were taught that they would become demigods if they died for the emperor. Even Hirohito was compelled to go along with the belief that he was divine even though he knew it was nonsense.

The reviews of the HBO series have been pretty good, so I might relent in the end and watch the series when it is available from Netflix. Hollywood has an admiration for the war in Europe, as evidenced by Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers. I think the absence of a Jewish holocaust in the Pacific may make them more likely to demonize Americans who served there. Anti-Americanism is the default position in Hollywood.