WHY WE WERE WRONG ABOUT THE JAPANESE

Press, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 23801, 21 November 1942, Page 4

WHY WE WERE WRONG ABOUT THE JAPANESE

FAR EAST

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking in the last few months, mostly about ourselves as a group—all of us who make the Far East our hobby and overriding interest. I've been thinking, and trying to find out, in the last two months, how it was ,that we were so wrong. For I think that collectively there was never a group of mem styled as experts, who were so utterly wrong as all of us were in almost all our political-military thinking on December 6, 1941. . , I’ve been wondering what made us so wrong. I feel it very keenly. You see I’d been all through the South China Seas as a correspondent and it was my business to know the situation there. I believed that the South China Seas area was impregnable. I said it aloud, I said it in print. So did other American journalists. So did scholars. Some day I’ll have the whole answer to the question. Fundamentally I think it was a question of quality of manpower and quality of leadership—i.e., politics; secondarily, one of niateriai. I'm convinced right now that when the final answer is rounded off you 11 find that the role of the Anglo-American press is a great part of the answer to the sources of miscalculation and catastrophe. v „ I think that we, the press, deserve a large share of the blame. We deserve to be blamed both for timidity and stuoidity. We were shamefully used by‘the authorities in command; we let ourselves be used; and we betrayed both the people who .read us and the authorities who used us in our acquiescence. They 'started using us as part of an imperial policy of blutt. They finished by believing the legends we created at their suggestion. It all started back in early. 1940, right after the fall of France, when the Japanese were moving into Indo-Cnma and sizing up Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies seriously. In the fall of 1940, Pan-American opened up their new clipper route to New Zealand, and they celebrated the event by carrying a junket of American newspapermen out over the new line. At that time there was literally nothing of any military importance in the Malaya-Netherlands East Indies line. Nothing. But a newspaperman is one of God’s dumbest creatures. He can be shown a polished-up piece of ack-ack and be told it’s the worlds best. He doesn’t know what he s seeing He can be shown the same piece in 50 different places apd be given the impression that he’s looking at a bristling pin cushion of guns. He can be fooled on aeroplanes better than anything else. He doesn’t knqw a good aeroplane from a bad one —or at least he didn’t know in 1940. And you can dance the same squadron of aeroplanes over his head 10 times and he’ll think there are 10 squadrons; he can see the same squadron at 10 different airfields and believe that he’s seeing a ■ com-1 plete air force. That great junket m 1940 came to Australia and somebody thought it would be a goo*d idea to make use of it. Japan was coming; the Allies had nothing; maybe they could bluff the Japanese for a while. So a deliberate policy of bluff was laid down; lets bluff the enemy into believing we have large forces here! The newspapermen were invited oft to the Netherlands East Indies and Malaya, and there they had a field day. They were sold. They wrote dispatches quoting a thousand aeroplanes to the Far Eastern Command of the British, giving hundreds of thousands of troops to the Allies. . ' • , This policy of bluff was justifiable in 1940. It was a tool of war. It worked, too, for the Japanese might have pushed on had they known how weak we were then. The spate of publicity about Singapore’s strength really caused them to question again and ponder the situation. I don’t know when this policy of bluff became dangerous. I don’t think anybody but a few men in the British Ministry of Information, who had created the Frankenstein monster of Singapore’s legend, realised what was happening. Newspapers and magazines are the atmosphere in which modern men live. Even the crustiest admirals and generals . must read' the newspapers and magazines and they believe what they read. Along about the middle of 1941, so much had been written about Singapore that the officials there .were actually beginning to believe it themselves. They were beginning to think they were impregnable, too. The civilian British population had believed it all the time. But the officials who had been scared for a bit now were again placid; and content. There was criticism from time to time —frequently people did perceive that all was not well. But any official could point to the publicity that Singapore was receiving and say: "Look, this is how good we are!” '

The following personal letter was written by ,an American news, paper correspondent last July. Although not m ended for publica. . tinn it was printed by the “Far Eastern Survey as ■: to the attempt to find out what’s wrong with our thinking.”

I think the situation bothered th. Dutch more than the British. Tv! were howling for more aeroplani and they found the impression of th*istrength America had was not proper one for their needs. For this time so many of us had writ!?; about the Netherlands East Indies and Singapore that the most sedate bulk, tins in America were beginning £ prattle of the bristling air defences $ the South China Seas.'

By that time, you see, the le gtlli had come a long way. The British Ministry of Information had been sold a belief in Singapore’s might by the • Army, Navy, and the Royal Air Force. They sold it to us. We all sold it There’s a time lag in the circulatk-; of great truths that can be plotted m a graph, I think. It was midsmSwCof 1941 before America became pletely convinced of the South ChinaSeas’ defences. By that time; Dutch authorities in the Indies were worried by the publicity and trying to" turn its tide; some of the British didn’t like it. either, and were trying, to bring it to earth. ™ Even now, I cannot tell you flu 5 figures on our strength in the Far East’ ‘ on December 7. What I know F®: ■ prohibited from retailing, and I’m sure ' I don’t know all the facts. I picked - up the story of the campaigns UMalaya and in the Netherlands East . Indies from soldiers, officers, newspapermen, civilian officials. It wasV goofy, colourful campaign. Wonderful' newspaper stuff—crash of empires, crumbling will, retreat, rout, bombings, fire, cataclysms of history. I,gup.’ pose it always happens that way, ' v i>The one thing shining through this campaign that we haven’t yet written about is the cleverness of the Japanese. They had air superiority, granted-' But I think we had superiority in at- ' tillery, and certainly in Malaya we had superiority in numbers. I heard one officer, qualified to speak, say; “A . Japanese army half the size of our own, riding stolen bicycles, using captured artillery, drove us down Malaya and out of Singapore, without fighting?; a single pitched battle.” That'ian , exaggeration., But there’s this truth in it: the Japanese outsmarted us. They were clever; they used noise, they .used firecrackers, infiltration, camouflage, politics, everything—they just outwitted us

To get back to my point. Why did' we all misjudge so? I was talking the’; whole thing over with a British official ■ about a month ago, and he said: "Hie thing that surprised me most about all,, you fellows was the questions you';'' didn’t ask. You didn’t ask ,thq right f kind of questions; you wanted to know how many aeroplanes we had,’ 1 and how many anti-aircraft guns, and how many machine guns to a section", - He didn’t tell me the questions we should have asked, blit I think I know 'r them now. We were all of us seeking; out the few dry facts that could be JS o ; easily camouflaged or concealed or' distorted. But we never did pay ... enough attention to the calibre and quality of men who were to do thfe., lighting. [ I hope it isn’t heresy to all I’ve learned and said to declare that how < I think the most important element in,,,' any given equation is the quality of;; the manpower at hand, and-most of all the quality of -the leadership. Without material we can do nothing, I know. And I’m sure that basically • the whole social matrix of England r and Japan and Malaya determined the quality of men whom England, placed in command in Malaya and the quality, of the men whom Japan sent to con* > quer it. But it was personal vigour' and imagination and improvisation ?• that won it for the . Japanese and lost*, it for the British. ' It’s the sources of vigour and imwiii inatioh and improvisation that coiinF;'; in this war. The war at present plodding on in the same old way, and '. I think fundamentally it’s ; plodding because we are violating the basic, axiom of great wars: that great wan,'! are wars of. ideas as much as WWJ guns. And the Japanese idea* have been more potent than their gunpower. The Japanese are peddling ideas through Asia now to all the coloured people that are good coin wherever they go. And those ideas countj We don’t yet realise this war is a political .war for the political loyalties of almost a billion Asiatics who can swing this world any way they choose,; once organised. Curiously enough, tne, Filipinos are with us because we ve thoroughly sold them an idea that the Japanese can't unsell. They like us, they like what democracy wev* taught, they want more. But we’re trying to hold what s leu to us of Asia and reconquer the rest without offering a single thing to tne little peoples that can,half competewith what the' Japanese are onering them., We’ve just got to start, proselytising and propagandising real* istically—or else we-Tl still be fighting , this war two years hence. ___