Free Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II by Laurence Rees Page A

were a lord, you still thought you were superior to any other nation.A great deal of this was because of the strength and power of the British Empire and because we considered that we were superior to people like the Japanese or the Chinese.’Despite the fact that the British colony of Hong Kong was within sight of the Japanese in China, many British soldiers believed that the Imperial Army did not represent much of a threat.‘The British were superior to everyone and it was ridiculous for anyone to say that the Japanese were so good — some little nation like Japan couldn’t possibly be better,’ says Anthony Hewitt speaking of the prevailing feeling at the time.‘When they were told that the Japanese Zero fighter was a far better aircraft than the Spitfire, people laughed.They said, “Oh, no, of course that couldn’t be true.”I think they thought that they [the Japanese] loved flowers and they liked geisha girls all dressed up in lovely clothes prancing around.They were really a sort of fragile race in some ways.’
    The view that the Japanese were both ‘different’ and ‘inferior’ appears to have been rife amongst the British at the time.In 193S the British naval attache in Tokyo wrote a report claiming that his research had shown that the Japanese had ‘peculiarly slow brains’ as a result of the ‘strain put on the child’s brain in learning some 6000 Chinese characters before any real education can start.’ 7 The commander-in-chief of British forces in the Far East, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, was similarly prejudiced.‘I had a good close up, across the barbed wire,’ he wrote in a letter to the Chief of the Imperial Defence Staff in 1940, ‘of various sub-human specimens dressed in dirty grey uniform, which I was informed were Japanese soldiers.If these represent the average of the Japanese army, the problems of their food and accommodation would be simple, but I cannot believe they would form an intelligent fighting force.’ 8 On a visit to Hong Kong, Brooke-Popham was just as frank in the views he expressed to Anthony Hewitt and his comrades: ‘Sir Robert Brooke-Popham told us that the Japanese couldn’t fly at night time because they couldn’t see at night and that they couldn’t fire machine guns because they were very bad shots.Everything you can think of — all silly little things!Remarks which were totally untrue.’
    Hewitt knew that Brooke-Popham was speaking nonsense, because he had first-hand knowledge of the seriousness of the threat from the Japanese.He had seen with his own eyes, standing on the border between Hong Kong and China, just how ruthless the Japanese could be.‘We watched the fighting down below and to my horror I saw them [Japanese soldiers] forming up Chinese soldiers and gunning them to death, which was a horrible thing.It was sickening what went on.But we stood there on that horrible line and saw almost daily some really beastly thing, like a poor Chinese person being robbed and then beaten by rifle butts or even tortured, and sometimes, for no apparent reason, actually shot dead.Straightaway we thought they were very brutal.The mere fact they shot those prisoners made us think that that was what they’d do to us if they attacked.’
    In 1937 Hewitt gained further insight into the Japanese when he become one of the few British officers ever to visit their country.He was amazed at the difference between the Japan of British prejudice and the Japan of reality.‘I was astonished to travel on the Japanese railway line from Kyoto to Tokyo.You went in a most super train which went very fast and which was frightfully well built and very comfortable and excellently done.The hotels were marvellous too.I stayed in the Tokyo [Imperial] Hotel and it was lovely — one of the best in the world, I think.It was an advanced country.They weren’t like the poor Chinese — it wasn’t a third-rate country at all.’And Hewitt’s admiration extended to his