[Marxism] Socialist Policy in World War Two

[G K Milner]

Dear Tom,
                I looked at your article on Australia's emergence as a 
'sub-imperialist' power in the Pacific, from 'Marxist Interventions'.   I 
accept that Australia was a junior partner of British (and later US) 
imperialism, and had colonial possessions of its own (Papua New Guinea, 
etc).   But it seems unreasonable to me to exaggerate Australia's position 
in world affairs at any time.   I'll try to get hold of  a copy of the book 
by Peter Stanley you mention, arguing that Japan had no intention of 
invading Australia during World War Two.   But it seems paradoxical to me 
that the broken codes you talk about are so definite about Japanese 
intentions.   'Late April' 1942 is only a few weeks before the naval battles 
of Coral Sea and Midway that determined the ultimate fate of the Pacific 
War.

I am only surmising about this, but I would have thought that the Japanese 
military and naval high commands would have been aware that control of the 
Pacific in the long term must involve control of Australia.   For their part 
the US commanders were well aware of this fact, and after the fall of the 
Phillipines to Japan, MacArthur of course based the US Command of the 
Pacific theatre in Australia.   I find it difficult to believe that the 
Japanese would have decided definitively not to invade Australia only a 
short time before the battles that would determine whether such a project 
was possible.   Obviously, as Australia is an island, as well as a 
continent, it would have been necessary to mount an amphibious operation, 
requiring naval supremacy.   In any case, if Japan had won the Coral Sea and 
Midway battles, it is quite possible that they could have altered their 
plans and invaded.

I agree with you completely about the horror of the fire bombing of Tokyo 
and other Japanese cities.   Of course the same criticisms of the Allies 
could be levelled against them for the area bombing of German cities during 
the war.   In China, the Kuomintang had demonstrated its corruption before 
the general war began in 1939, and had proven to be an unreliable factor in 
the war of the Chinese to defend themselves against Japanese imperialism. 
You seem to have a equivocal position with respect to the defence of China, 
in which the best fighters and partisans were no doubt Communists, and you 
seem not to recognise that the conflict was in no way an 'inter-imperialist' 
war, but a war to defend a semi-colonial country from a predatory invasion.

I should respond also to some of the other posts on this subject.   The 
division of World War Two into two major theatres seems to be well 
established in scholarship on the history of the war, to answer Mark Lause's 
point.   One example of a very good, large scale, one volume history of the 
war that I have already mentioned is Guy Wint and Peter Calvocoressi's 
'Total War', which divides the treatment of the history into two halves: 
'The Western Hemisphere' and 'The War in Asia'.   Artesian's comment, and 
the extract from Lenin's war manifestoes posted by 'T', strike me as 
appropriate for World War One, but not so much for World War Two.   A lot of 
Lenin's formulations are relevant also for World War Two, but I do question 
the propriety of a 'revolutionary defeatist' position in every case.   There 
is such a category as the 'small country' as Lenin and Trotsky themselves 
recognised.   When Denmark, for example, which was (and remains) an 
'imperialist' country, owning territorial possessions in Greenland, was 
invaded by Nazi Germany in 1940, would the appropriate slogan for the left 
to have raised been 'defeat of your own bourgeoisie'?   There must be a 
better way.

In solidarity,

Graham Milner


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tom O'Lincoln" <suarsos at alphalink.com.au>
To: "Graham Milner" <gkmilner at eftel.net.au>
Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2009 9:17 AM
Subject: Re: [Marxism] Socialist Policy in World War Two


> Mark asked how we can separate the European and Pacific Wars.  Well, the
> Soviet Union kept out of the Pacific War till it was all but over, and as 
> I
> pointed out in my last post, Japanese and German coordination was  minimal
> during the war. In fact a German Nazi general was leading Chinese armies
> against Japan in the late 30s. Naturally the two theatres are
> interconnected. But then everything is interconnected.
>
> Theanks to Graham for  a detailed reply. I have interspersed some replies 
> of
> my own below:
>
>>>I'm not sure that I agree with you that the Japanese were prepared to
>>>leave
> the southern Pacific region 'neutral' at the outset of the war.<<
>
> No, they were prepared (even keen) to leave EAST TIMOR neutral, in order 
> to
> keep Portugal out of the war. Australia however violated Portuguese
> neutrality, after which Japan moved in and a terrible war ensued on East
> Timorese soil. See Frei, Henry (1996) 'Japan's Reluctant Decision to 
> Occupy
> Portuguese Timor, 1 January 1942-20 February 1942', Australian Historical
> Studies, vol. 27, no. 107, October.
>
>>>Was Australia an imperialist country in 1941?<<
>
> Well what else do you call its control of Papua New Guinea? It is true 
> that
> Australian imperialism emerged gradually out of Australia's role as a
> frontier of British imperialism. Here is something I've written about the
> latter process:
>
> http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/interventions/empire.htm
>
>>>I believe that Australia's war effort in the Asia/Pacific theatre was
>>>mainly
> a defensive one.<<
>
> Defending what? Japan had no plans to invade Australia. See Peter 
> Stanley's
> recent book which the publishers have stupidly called "Invading 
> Australia".
> In fact he documents the opposite. Stanley was for a long time the 
> historian
> at the War Memorial, he is a top notch expert. I can also provide many 
> other
> sources.
>
> The Australian war effort was "defensive" in the sense that Australia was
> defending "Australian territories" in Papua and New Guinea. I hopefully 
> don't
> need to tell you how cruel and racist Australian rule in PNG was. Though 
> you
> may not be aware of the terrible forced  labour and vicious punishments
> meted out to the "fuzzy wuzzy angels" on the Kokoda trail.
>
>>>Conscription for overseas service was introduced in
> Australia, but a geographical limitation was placed on the deployment of
> troops to a perimeter around Australia's near north.<<
>
> Yes, the near north where direct Australian imperial  interests lay. 
> Cynical
> use of the invasion fear allowed the  Australian ruling class to build
> public support for conscription to secure these interests.
>
>>>In the First World War Australia participated first as a close ally
> of Britain, and to a lesser extent for its own interests in the Pacific
> region (the former German colonies in this region, including German New
> Guinea, were placed under Australian control at the Paris Peace
> Conference). <<
>
> Here you seem to recognise there was an Australian imperialism. What you
> miss is that Australia's "own interests" included preparing for eventual 
> war
> with Japan, for which purpose Australia needed to ensure British backing.
> Prime Minister Billy Hughes apparently told a closed parliamentary session
> that conscription was necessary because 'Japan would challenge the White
> Australia policy after the war.Australia would need the help of the rest 
> of
> the Empire, and...if she wishes to be sure of getting it she must now 
> throw
> her full strength into the war in Europe.'
>
>>>I would see World War Two, from an Australian perspective,
> as primarily a war to defend the country from invasion<<
>
> See above. The Japanese  had no capability to invade, and no plans to do 
> so.
> What's more, because the Japanese codes had been cracked, the Australian
> government knew there was no invasion threat  -- they knew this by late
> April 1942. Yet for about a year after this, the government pushed 
> austerity
> drives, using the supposed invasion threat to impose sacrifices on the
> working class. GDP spiked upwards.
>
>>>I acknowledge that the use of nuclear weapons against  Japanese cities in
>>>1945 was a great crime,<<
>
> What of the allied fire-bombing, in which Japanese civilians 'literally
> caught fire and burned like sticks of wood. Women carrying infants on 
> their
> backs suddenly realised their babies were on fire.streets became carpeted
> with charred bodies.  Rivers grew choked with corpses.'  An aide to 
> General
> Macarthur described the firebombings as 'one of the most barbaric killings
> of non-combatants in all history.'   The overall death toll was larger 
> than
> at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. BTW you may have seen in the Australian press 
> the
> other day that the British considered gas attacks on Tokyo. So did the
> Americans. There is an Australian angle to that, too, but space 
> precludes...
>
> But  let's  look at a few other cases. In India, British measures to
> forestall a Japanese invasion included withdrawing boats and rice from the
> Bengali rural population, leading to an aggravation of the Bengali famine.
> It's impossible to say how many deaths this caused directly, but I would 
> be
> surprised if the numbers weren't comparable to the worst Japanese
> atrocities. An additional  motivation was probably to demoralise the
> independence movement through hunger.
>
> Then there is Chiang Kai-shek's 1938 decision to breach the Yellow River
> dykes. To temporarily stall the Japanese advance, up to a million Chinese
> died. That's such a gigantic death toll I'd better give a source: Lary,
> Diana (2004) 'The Waters Covered the Earth: China's War-Induced Natural
> Disasters', in Mark Selden and Alvin So, War and State Terrorism: The 
> United
> States, Japan and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century, Rowman 
> and
> Littlefield, Oxford.
>
> Speaking of Chiang, let me quote from my own book manuscript:
>
> "Japanese atrocities continued in the countryside on a vast scale, but at
> the same time, the Chinese Nationalist movement's 'notorious corruption
> resulted in hoarding and profiteering while millions of peasants starved.'
> In addition, the Nationalist armies - Australia's allies from 1941 
> onwards -
> extracted annihilating taxes from the peasants. An eyewitness described 
> how
>
> "peasants who were eating elm bark and dried leaves had to haul their last
> sack of seed grain to the tax collector's office. Peasants who were so 
> weak
> they could barely walk had to collect fodder for the army's horses, fodder
> that was more nourishing than the filth they were cramming into their own
> mouths. "
>
> Nor was this the end of it. The Nationalist army forces rampaged out of
> control, pillaging and raping; they were so hated that peasants often 
> killed
> nationalist soldiers who fell into their hands.  Gabriel Kolko says of
> Chiang Kai-shek's military conscription system: 'As a system of direct and
> indirect physical liquidation only the Nazi terror surpassed it during the
> war.'  Those who support the Pacific war on anti-fascist grounds might be
> startled to learn of the fascist tendencies in the Chinese Nationalist
> movement which
>
> "presented an ugly face to the world.and among its own more rightwing
> elements Fascist proclivities soon appeared.the Blue Shirts.soon became
> identified in the public mind with kidnappings, beatings, shootings and 
> all
> the thuggery of fascism.'  "
>
> Moreover, 'Chiang's New life Movement, like the Blue Shirt movement, was
> soon drawn into.Chinese Fascism, providing it with the necessary 
> historical
> myth.'
>
> We also need to remember that the Japanese forces were desperately
> over-stretched, many starving (there was malnutrition in Japan itself by 
> the
> time of Pearl Harbour). They had to live off the land so they plundered. 
> The
> conditions under which they fought generated hysterical behaviour. That
> Japan was making this desperate attempt at conquest was in turn caused by
> American attempts to strangle Japan before 1941. So in a sense you can 
> blame
> the Americans!
>
> But blaming particular nations is really rather pointless. This was an
> imperialist war on all sides.
>
>
>
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