War Without Mercy Race and Power in the Pacific War by John Dower

War Without Mercy

John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. Pantheon, 1987.

John W. Dower is a professor of Japanese history who received his Ph.D. In History and Far Eastern Languages from Harvard University in 1972 and has written extensively about popular culture in his scholarly work on Japanese and U.S. foreign relations history, including books such as Empire and Aftermath, Japan in War and Peace, and Embracing Defeat.

John Dower uses a wide variety of sources from the U.S., Britain and Japan to prove his thesis that the Pacific War was a merciless racial struggle that had far more in common with Hitler's war on the Eastern Front than the war between Germany and the Western Allies. Among these are diaries, letters, memoirs, newspapers, magazines, films, scholarly books and articles, radio broadcasts, official military and government documents, and statements by political and military leaders. His research into Japanese sources is the most valuable part of the book since that side of the war was traditionally too little studied in works by American scholars. He regards Frank Capra's documentary Know Your Enemy-Japan as a masterpiece of Allied propaganda, for example, as were publications like Read this and the War Is Won and The Way of the Subject on the Japanese side. None of these should be considered 'truth' in any neutral or objective sense, of course, no more than Japanese assertions that they were liberating Asia from western imperialism or American promises about bringing freedom and democracy there, but they did provide valuable insights about how each side viewed its enemies. Nazism racism, slave labor and genocide is better known than the policies of the Japanese in China, Korea, the Philippines and other Asian countries, but was certainly no less destructive. Japanese propaganda literally demonized the Western imperialists and their culture as greedy, exploitive and materialistic while completely ignoring the actions of its ally Nazi Germany, which was the most genocidal imperialist power of them all.

American political and military leaders were gravely concerned about the rise of nationalism in Asia and its threat to the Western powers there, particularly if it became allied to the communism and the Soviet Union, which later happened in China, Korea and Vietnam. Yet in the end, Japan's own racism and imperialism alienated potential Asian allies like Ba Maw in Burma, since its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere "proved to be as overweening as the Westerners had been before."[footnoteRef:1] According to the "Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus," produced by the Japanese bureaucracy in 1942-43, Japan intended to be the dominant power in Asia permanently once the Western powers were defeated. In the Pacific after the initial surrenders of 1941-42, very few Allied troops gave up or took prisoners, while the Japanese glorified the suicidal experience of the kamikazes and banzai charges as the highest ideal of heroism and self-sacrifice. In reality, millions of Asians died as a result of Japanese atrocities and slave labor, far more than the number of whites killed in the Pacific War. [1: Dower, p. 7.]