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

assessment of the capabilities of the Imperial Army.‘I saw a Japanese force carrying out an exercise and I realized that, from a military point of view, they were very advanced as well.They had excellent weapons, their soldiers were very highly trained, and they were really outstanding.’On his return to Hong Kong he submitted a report to his superiors outlining the extent of the threat he thought the Japanese posed, only to be told that he was ‘probably exaggerating the problem’.
    As the 1930s came to an end, Japanese foreign policy shifted even further towards the inevitability of a formal alliance with Nazi Germany.In a speech on 20 February 1938 Hitler lauded Japan for attempting to stem the tide of the worldwide communist threat and announced that soon Germany would formally recognize the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo.But by now the eyes of European states like Britain and France were more focused on the German threat than on the distant Japanese one.Pursuing a policy of appeasement, the British government acquiesced as the Germans first seized Austria and then, in an event that precipitated the Munich conference of September 1938, threatened to annexe the Sudetenland (the German-speaking regions of Czechoslovakia).The Japanese looked on in wonder as the Western democracies appeared to buckle in the face of German aggression.Indeed, there are Japanese who still today look at the desire of the Western Allies to reach a compromise agreement with the Nazis, contrast it with the comparative intransigence of Britain and the USA towards Japan during the same period, and see in this distinction another example of racial discrimination.But the cases are not analogous.Much of the British and American political elite believed that the Versailles Treaty negotiated at the end of the First World War had been too harsh on Germany — particularly in terms of territory, given that so much former German land had been redistributed to countries like Czechoslovakia and Poland.The argument that the German aggression of the late 1930s was merely an attempt to ‘right the wrongs of Versailles’ was persuasive to many.Opinion polls in the United States demonstrated that the general public were much more prepared to stand up to Japanese aggression in China than they were to German aggression in Europe. 9 The Germans, it appeared, had some justification, however tenuous, for their action, but the Japanese were perceived to be acting out of a straightforward and wholly reprehensible desire to expand their empire.
    In the summer of 1939, as Hitler plotted to annexe portions of Poland, the Japanese skirmished with Soviet forces on the Mongolian border.Ever since the Imperial Army had occupied Manchuria there had been tension between the two nations, with the position of the border always in dispute.The fierceness of the Soviet resistance to these border incursions by the Imperial Army, and Stalin’s disinclination to find a diplomatic solution to the problem, were at first sight surprising to the Japanese, since the Soviet leader faced a huge threat on his Western border.After all, in his autobiography Mein Kampf , published in the 1920s, Hitler had explicitly written of his desire for Germany to expand into Russia in search of Lebensraum .But now the Soviet leader decided that it was better to reach an accommodation with his ideological enemy in Europe than to appease the Japanese in Asia.As a consequence, August 1939 was a devastating month for the Japanese.On the 20th, the Red Army went on the offensive on the borders of Manchuria and began to beat back the Japanese.Three days later came the announcement that shocked the world — the Soviet — German Non-aggression Pact.Hitler astounded the Japanese government by reaching an agreement with Stalin that professed to guarantee that neither country would attack the other.It made nonsense of the Anti-Comintern Pact to which the Japanese had put their name just three years before.
    In