Current Viewing: Rugby World Cup

I am watching England being slowly ground into humiliation by an astounding Argentinian team On the second day of the biggest contest of the world’s most important sport. It’s a war of attrition out there but the Argentinians are proving once again that the future of sport lies in the southern hemisphere. Sadly I am neither in the south nor the east for the first two weeks of this titanic struggle: I am in scungy, embittered London for a (great!) course on mathematical modeling of disease[1]. This means I have to watch the games in the morning and will miss most, but I can at least enjoy this weekend’s.

I love watching rugby. It’s the perfect synthesis of physical contest, teamwork, bravery and skill, and it happens at a pace and intensity that other contact ball sports lack. I love also the special tactics that derive from the specialization of the players when they are forced to mix it up in a chaotic melee. It also lacks the posturing and false machismo of soccer, and the nationalism of rugby doesn’t come with the nasty violence or racism of that sport. It’s culturally a million miles away from the other British code… It’s the best side of sport.

In today’s other game in a remarkable upset, Japan stood up to France right up to the last 10 minutes, even looking like they might win at one point, until their fitness gave out and les bleus marched home. Fans all around the world were hoping for a miracle there, but it didn’t come. However, I have hopes that this time around they will be able to get some victories. In 2007 they got their first ever points in a cup; this time they can hope for victories.

And of course I am hoping for a NZ victory, but they are famous for choking at the last. Can they do it in their home country in 2011? And if they can’t should Australia annex them?

—
fn1: one of my fellow students is the Australian Nobel laureate Barry Marshall, who identified the cause of stomach ulcers[2]

Fn2: and thus proved that the future of science is also in the southern hemisphere

 

Social Scientists and the Construction of Propaganda

We continue our series on Tim Power’s War Without Mercy with a discussion of the role of social scientists in the construction of propaganda. We have already seen that Japan’s social scientists were working on the question of how to construct a new social order for the pacific under a Japanese empire, but their role by no means ended there, and nor was this kind of distasteful theorizing limited to Japanese scholars. In fact the work we saw in our previous post was largely conducted in secret,and served less to construct propaganda as it drew on existing racial ideology to develop practical plans. And in this we see the nub of a fascinating problem. By the time Japan had spent 10 or more years at war in the Pacific her propaganda had become so entrenched that the social scientists’ work had itself been infected by the kind of foolish ideologies that so much effort had previously been put into convincing the population to believe.

The same can be observed of allied war planers before the war. Based on the theories of racial and social scientists, Britain’s military planners really believed that Japanese would make bad pilots and couldn’t win aerial warfare – they had been told by their scientists that the way Japanese women carry their infants affects their inner ear and makes them unsuited for aerial manoeuvres. Also they believed the Japanese to be short-sighted and timid, and had been told that their lack of initiative would make them predictable and uncreative war planners. Even at Iwo Jima, when the Japanese defence used coordinated heavy artillery, they decided the Japanese must have German support; they assumed this after initial victories in the Pacific as well, because their racial theories didn’t allow non-white races to win.

These fallacies in the support of propaganda were not accidental, either. Sometimes considerable effort would be put into research and justifications for certain political views. Social scientists played a key role here, presenting both academic and popularized descriptions of Japanese culture that supported the views being presented by government propagandists. Extensive effort was put into proving that the Japanese as a race were trapped in a childlike mental state, with the preferred theory appearing to be that Japanese toilet training techniques were so horrific that they arrested the development of the Japanese psyche, rendering them also vicious-tempered and subservient to authority figures. That’s right, a whole race’s psychology traced to it’s choice of toilet paper, and entire theories of wartime conduct developed on this basis.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a whole bunch of social scientists spent a large amount of time working on a complex set of theories that ultimately ended up agreeing very closely with the base propaganda of the US government and Leatherneck magazine, any more than that a previous generation of scientists labored to prove that blacks were inferior to whites; or archaeologists managed to prove that the white race settled India. It’s a salient lesson to all of us – especially those of us in or near academia – that the much-vaunted intellectual freedom and independence of academia always ends up telling us what we want to hear. This shouldn’t seem so surprising, given human nature and the way society works, but the history of academia’s service to unpleasant ideas should stop us being too self congratulatory about how free-thinking we really are in our ivory towers. My own field of statistics prides itself, I think, on being quite independent and free-thinking[1], but it’s worth remembering the somewhat unpleasant eugenics of Fisher, and the role of demographers and population planners in the Nazi occupation of eastern Europe – all very good examples of academics supporting the status quo when, in retrospect, the status quo was obviously wrong and in many ways evil.

Maybe things have improved since world war 2, but maybe also they have just become more sophisticated, or the stakes have been lowered. We’ve seen plenty of social science in support of foreign intervention (e.g. The domino effect) and dictatorship (some of our more morally bankrupt economists on Chile, and a wide smattering of pre-70s leftists on Eastern Europe), and the history of population planning hasn’t been free of controversy in the post-war era. So it’s worth remembering that quite often scientists are working as hard to reflect perceived wisdom as they are to uncover genuinely new ideas. Where the propaganda is needed the academics seem to be able to find a basis for it; and where it has already taken hold they are as likely to perpetuate it (or just lend it a little nuanced sophistication) as they are to challenge it. And you certainly can’t rely on us to bear the load of intellectual honesty when the stakes are high. So next time a scientist tells you they have stunning proof of a commonly-held prejudice, you should probably just smile and back away politely. Who knows where their work will end – it could be a population planning document whose contents have long since passed into preposterous fantasy; or it could be a firestorm in Tokyo. But like as not, their work isn’t going to get you to any profound truths – or at least, that is the lesson we can learn from the involvement of academics in the development of the theory underlying propaganda and race hate in world war 2.

—

fn1: though maybe this field is better characterized as a bunch of ratbag leftists, at least in my experience

 

Strangers and Demons in WW2 Japanese Race Propaganda

Continuing my series on War Without Mercy, Professor Dower’s analysis of race propaganda and its role in World War 2, we get to the last main section, on Japanese racist propaganda. This is a very different section to that on US propaganda, because the Japanese approached the problem of how to portray their enemies very differently to the Americans, and had a very different historical perspective on the bad guy. The section also includes a dissection of a fascinating piece of wartime Japanese research, a massive document setting out a vision for Asia and ultimately the world if Japan won the war. This document was written by an obscure section of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, was almost 4000 pages long, and was only discovered in 1981. It essentially sets out the racial policy of the future East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, so gives a meticulous insight into not only how the wartime authorities viewed race, but how they intended to enact their race policy in the future.

Dower portrays the Japanese as having their own race trap, deriving from their admiration of America and Britain during the Meiji era, and the fact that many of their achievements in the 50 years since the restoration were based on western industry, technology and ideas. So they couldn’t dismiss the source of these ideas as necessarily inherently inferior, and instead had to find an ideology which would enable them to strip the best out of the western way of life, while making it somehow appear undesirable. They did this through the application of ancient folklore and imagery that had a strong social acceptance in Japan: establishment of the Emperor as direct descendant of god; exaltation of the concept of purity, and its links to race, emperor and war (and death); and depiction of the enemy as demons and outsiders.

The Emperor

I don’t want to talk about this in too much detail, because it’s not the focus of the book and the Emperor remains a much-revered part of Japanese life; a lot of western interpretations of the Emperor’s role in world war 2 are wont to cast the institution as eternally bad, when it’s more a case of the position being forced into service to a militarized state. I have mentioned before that Basil Chamberlain identified the exaltation of Emperor to religion, and the uses this religion was going to be put to, in a famous essay in 1905, and Power’s book reiterates this point. To quote Chamberlain:

Mikado-worship and Japan-worship—for that is the new Japanese religion—is, of course, no spontaneously generated phenomenon. Every manufacture presupposes a material out of which it is made, every present a past on which it rests. But the twentieth-century Japanese religion of loyalty and patriotism is quite new, for in it pre-existing ideas have been sifted, altered, freshly compounded, turned to new uses, and have found a new centre of gravity. Not only is it new, it is not yet completed; it is still in process of being consciously or semi-consciously put together by the official class, in order to serve the interests of that class, and, incidentally, the interests of the nation at large.

The purpose, of course, and “the interests of the nation at large” was war, military dictatorship, and the subjugation of the individual to the state. Indeed, in some ways Japanese racist propaganda served not so much to make the Japanese hate the enemy, as to bind them together against the enemy. As Chamberlain put it, in his foresightful essay:

On the one hand, it must make good to the outer world the new claim that Japan differs in no essential way from the nations of the West, unless, indeed, it be by way of superiority. On the other hand, it has to manage restive steeds at home, where ancestral ideas and habits clash with new dangers arising from an alien material civilisation hastily absorbed.

Professor Power observes too that Japanese wartime propaganda didn’t aim to make the Americans look lesser so much as it aimed to make the Japanese look better. And it did this through the Emperor and the notion of the Japanese as unique, of divine descent, and pure. These concepts were all embodied in the emperor, and the propaganda had it that they could be preserved through filial service to the emperor; indeed, the entire vision for the future was of the Emperor as father of the nation, and by extension as the guiding hand over all the races of the world, set into their proper place according to a theory of racial superiority that had Japanese as the only “pure” blooded people on earth, pre-destined to lead all the others.

Purity

Purity is an important and enduring concept in Shintoism, and was reconceived in political and nationalist terms by Japan’s propagandists. Foreign social ideas – especially those of individualism, freedom, and the self – were portrayed as impurities in the Japanese body politic, and Japan’s citizens encouraged to purge themselves of such filth. War, of course, would be the purifying fire into which this slag would be melted down. One powerful image in Power’s book shows a woman brushing the dandruff out of her hair, and the dandruff as it falls turns into American and British political ideals – selfishness, liberalism, etc.

Japanese racial theory also had Japan as the only “pure” race, untouched by significant immigration or miscegenation and thus retaining a unique set of characteristics. Maybe such an ideal doesn’t have to be prima facie racist, but the pretty clear understanding in racial theory in Japan was that this purity of heritage (which was almost certainly fictitious anyway) made them superior, and the picture in this post shows pretty clearly how they viewed the “impure” south East Asian races – as dark-skinned labourers beneath the light of Japan’s sun. And the report from the Ministry of Health and Welfare makes this goal clear, in the section entitled An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus. The Japanese, pure through divine right and selective isolation, were best placed to “lead” the other races of Asia into the future, and the other races would have their future direction and role decided according to a racist doctrine based on foolish 1940s conceptions of what each race was good at. Largely, they were to be consigned to the role of labourers and suppliers of resources to the advanced Japanese economy.

There’s nothing of exterminationism in this propaganda, but a lot of material that skirts close to advocating slavery and colonialism. It doesn’t really differ from the views of many colonialists in Europe at that time, I suppose – I’ve even heard defenses of slavery on the “it’s for their own good” line – but this is the nature of the grubby racial politics of the west in the interwar era. A newcomer to the global scene could make up a fanciful political theory based on a silly superstition and a fabricated history, and elaborate a systematic process of enslavement and exploitation for half a hemisphere, and in their defense they would be able to say “it’s no different to what everyone else is doing!” And in fact a lot of Japanese propaganda presented the “purifying” light of the Japanese sun either driving out the colonialist westerners, or revealing their true form as demons, necromancers and evil interlopers.

Demons and Strangers

This brings us to the third and most prevalent part of Japanese propaganda, the representation of Americans, British and Dutch as demons and outsiders. Power describes the role these creatures play in Japanese folklore as two-sided: they can be forces for evil, or they can be helpful. This makes them the perfect double-sided image for the western powers, whose technology the Japanese imported (and in many cases improved), but whose ideals they wanted to cast out, along with their physical presence in Asia. In propaganda aimed at their Asian colonies they could portray the west as colonialist and outdated powers being driven out; but to their own people they portrayed them as demons with two faces, presenting a human or pure image to Japan while hiding an evil face. They could also present them as outsiders, a powerful concept in Japanese that can be both liberating and terrifying. Thus they can (literally) demonize their enemy without reverting to any of the forms of scientific racism that infected western depictions other nations, while at the same time excusing their enemies’ former teaching role. In some ways this image hasn’t changed – the ideas outsiders bring to Japan are often seen as simultaneously threatening and empowering, and Japanese people’s fascination with foreigners is often mixed with fear and trepidation. After the war ended, Power observes that this propaganda proved remarkably malleable – the demons and outsiders just changed their face, and went from being the terrible demonic other to the helpful, inspiring, slightly strange other – just as American propaganda turned the Japanese from petulant children who couldn’t be reasoned with to a young democracy in need of tutelage and guidance.

This demonization of the other also shows that you don’t need to construct directly exterminationist, vile racist propaganda to convince a people to fight bitterly to the very end. A complex synergism of religious imagery, faux history and carefully-adapted folklore ideals will do the job just fine, if you tune it correctly. In fact, I think this has many elements in common with a lot of the propaganda we see in support of the global war on terror. The better stuff (I am referring here to that which our more reasonable supporters of the war give us, not the loony American right) doesn’t tell us that muslims are animals who need to be put down; the village doesn’t have to be destroyed to be saved. Rather, we are presented with a (mythical) ideal of western liberal democracy as pure and perfect, built up through long trial and testing, yet fragile and vulnerable to the influence and impact of the other. If we attack them and overcome them in the correct way we can guide them to a society like ours, and lead them forward to a better tomorrow – which is what we’re trying to do in Iraq and Afghanistan now, and failing at in both cases (probably). On the way, of course, just as the Japanese did, we reveal ourselves to not be the pure and ideal society we pretend – Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and regular wedding party slaughters in Afghanistan prove that our society is not quite what we say it is – but our propagandists overlook these small inconsistencies and the faux history (divorced of the native genocide, colonialism and extermination that made our societies rich in the first place) in order to present the greater myth. And, just as at some times and some places in Japan’s 15 year war in the Pacific, these images really did seem to present a better future, so too the simple story of liberal democracy shining a light into the darkness can present the same hope for a better world. But the Japanese experience perhaps shows us that better worlds aren’t made through war, or if they are it probably isn’t worth the suffering, and certainly isn’t the only way.

The Japanese propaganda of the war liked to present them as purer than Americans, driven by greater ideals and united by stronger bonds, and also depicted the Japanese as liberators casting colonialism out of the Pacific. Power points out that they really did serve this role in some ways, showing the people of the Pacific that the colonial powers weren’t invincible and that sufficiently energized Asians could turn the colonialists’ own tools and technology against them. At the same time their scorn for the moral inferiority of Americans led the Japanese to completely misunderstand America’s willingness to fight – just as American propaganda overestimated Japanese obstinacy in the last year of the war. Both sides’ propaganda may have worked against Japan, leading to a situation of frenzied violence where both sides refused to believe what the other side really wanted. But there’s a lesson in this that is particularly compelling – the propagandist really does believe their own work. Propaganda goals are set on high, and propagandists listen to a lot of material being written in their own and other countries about the enemy – they don’t form their opinions in a vacuum. In the pre-war era, and during the war, this material was facile, shallow and wrong, but it was incorporated into the propaganda and really seems to have been believed by the planners and policy-makers of the era. American and British military planners really did believe that Japanese pilots were inferior due to Japanese child-rearing practices; Japanese war planners really did believe that the Americans would give up after 6 months because they were morally weak and lazy. For my next post on this book, I’ll look at how propaganda serves to reinforce rather than reflect prevailing views, and can be a negative form of information in a war. Certainly in world war 2, it appears to have served the role of reinforcing a vicious spiral that was circling in towards genocide, and although fortunately for the Japanese cooler heads prevailed, the experience of that war shows that propaganda of this kind isn’t just a tool of war, but can become a driving force and, at its worst, a self-fulfilling prophecy. What does this tell us about the decision-making that led to the fire-bombing of Japanese cities and ultimately the use of nuclear weapons? What would the Japanese have done with nuclear weapons if they had them, given their use of images of purification through fire and death? This is also something I want to explore in a future post about this book.

 

 

America Destroyed

Manifest Destiny

Returning to Hearts of Iron 2 after a long hiatus, I finally struck the motherlode and annexed the USA after months of trans-atlantic hide-and-seek. The forces of imperialism and racism refused to surrender, showing much more bravery and persistence than my top social researchers had credited them with, and after I captured all of mainland USA they moved their capital to their offshore imperial holdings: first some godforsaken place on the Atlantic coast of latin America, which of course I liberated; then Greenland, which is easy to invade because there is nowhere for US soldiers to hide; then their colonial possessions in Iceland. Getting to Iceland required that I declare war on Portugal and capture the Azores, sinking the Portuguese Atlantic fleet in the process. This was unfortunate, but ultimately my continental European campaign will be made easier by the availability of a second front – I am after all at war with Republican Spain, and a second leaping-off point for the invasion of Britain will be handy.

Once I had overrun Iceland the USA continued its flight, like Gaddafi or Hussein; they moved their capital step by step across the Aleutians and the Manchukuo 8th Division followed them, in concert with one of my more hardened units of marines; after the Aleutians had been entirely occupied they disappeared for a month or two, but I finally discovered them cowering on a slip of land in the Pacific called Tinian Island – right under my nose, in fact, because the neighbouring islands were garrisoned by my home guard. So, in went Manchukuo’s famous 8th, once again, and the final battle was joined. This was a battle of bureaucrats as much as anything else, because the US lacked soldiers, industry or equipment, and was hiding in what was essentially a coral atoll. The president himself, his family and the few retainers and functionaries of the surviving government of the USA were all that remained and, I’m sad to say, they fought to the last family member. Or so the grizzled veterans of the Manchukuo 8th told me. Only the most barbaric of peoples would force even primary-school aged children to fight! Such a shame they all had to die … though I hear there was rejoicing on the streets of America (or what’s left of them, in most cases) after 6 years of war were finally brought to an end.

So now I find myself facing off against China, who declared war on me 2 years ago and in the first heady stages of that war managed to seize huge amounts of territory from me – all of India, Burma, Nepal and Tibet, in fact. I hold them in a line from the border of Burma through Guangzhou and up to Qingdao, and also the northern areas around Beijing, but it’s been a desperate slog for both sides, as huge numbers of my soldiers have been tied up in the USA and getting them back can take months of reorganization. I’ve now started landing forces around Qingdao and western Thailand ready for the big counter-attack: my aim is to cut off huge chunks of the Chinese army at Tianjin in the North and Sittang in the south, and then destroy them, before pushing into the inland from Beijing and Guilin and working an encirclement the size of a continent.

In many ways China have been harder than the US, because they US focused its industry on naval and airforce units, and when I finally landed on the mainland they had very little infantry for me to roll up – in fact a good 3-6 month period of the war on the west coast was taken up with defeating a large Canadian land army. But the Chinese have an enormous land army, that is fielded in great clots of men – 100,000 here, 200,000 there, maybe a million in total camped around Beijing and Tianjin and constantly trying to break through that poor beleaguered city. Every victory is followed by a defeat, and battlezones like the plains south of Beijing or the karst landscapes of Guilin have seen our armies crossing and re-crossing the killing zones for months. The nature of the Chinese campaign, with so many soldiers, makes it very hard to conduct encirclement operations, because they have so many soldiers that they have an excellent defense in depth. I have to wait for them to push a salient towards the sea, then snap it off in counter-attacks that are costly in time and men. So far I think I’ve captured about 100,000 men (10-12 divisions) at the loss of 20,000 of mine, and I have the enemy teetering on the brink of collapse. I regularly devastate their industrial centres, and their capital is a smoking, radioactive hole – Chengdu and Chongqing have both been nuked, and thrice hit with conventional missile attacks, as have many of their industrial centres. I’ve captured Nanjing, Guangzhou and some of the mountain approaches to the South, and hope soon to overrun Guilin. I know that they’re unable to maintain reinforcements for their army, feed their populace and keep dissent under control without abandoning all other industrial tasks. I think soon they will lose the ability even to control dissent and reinforce their troops.

In anticipation of this, I’m now reorganizing my naval forces to start starving the British, with a naval blockade of Britain itself and a submarine force set to prowl the Caribbean. China is going to take another year to beat, and I’m going to need to leave a huge force there in readiness for any aggression by the Soviets, but I think in a year’s time I’ll be in a position to start attacking Western Europe. I hold the Azores and Iceland, so a simultaneous attack on Portugal and the UK is a distinct possibility. But first I’m going to clean up the UK’s Caribbean territories, to ensure there is no way they can stage counter-attacks on the US.

The big problem I’m having with this game is that the computer never surrenders. Even when I have reduced it to a rump of two provinces, with no military or industry, it still refuses to surrender. This drives me crazy, because it means I waste months trying to find and capture every single territory the enemy possesses, even coral atolls like Tinian. I even once tried starting the game from a saved game as my enemy, and suing for peace with myself, but the computer wouldn’t accept my generous offer. This makes the endgame of every war unrealistic and is going to be a particular pain in the arse with Britain – conquering Africa is sooooo tedious.

Other than that, though, I’m having  a great time. The main question I have to put to my readers: what shall I call America? It’s clearly no longer the USA, so what should I call it?

 

Propaganda, and Labelling Terrorists “insane”

With typical alacrity, the islamophobic right have moved from claiming the Norwegian terrorist was a muslim, to claiming it was a “false flag” operation to claiming he is just a lone madman. The reasons they have to do this are obvious – labeling him a terrorist places him in a political context, and the political context in this case is scum like this, who have been peddling exterminationist anti-muslim, anti-”marxist” propaganda with increasing stridency in the past few years.

Recently on this blog I’ve been examining the role of propaganda in driving Allied and Japanese atrocities in world war 2, based on my reading of the book War Without Mercy. The “lone madman” excuse is relevant to this, because a lot of the people making this claim are doing so purely on the fruits of Bleivik’s work – that is, anyone who would kill 70 unarmed people must be a madman – and I don’t think history tells us this is a valid logical approach. The right-wing shockjocks and anti-”cultural marxists” are unable to point to his writings as proof of his insanity, since they are basically a quite lucid reproduction of the works of Pam Geller, early Little Green Footballs, Free Republic, Glenn Beck, Andrew Bolt and Melanie Phillips. So instead they point to his actions as evidence of his insanity (just as they also point to his actions as evidence he can’t be a christian).

But the history of war – and even recent wars, in Vietnam and World War 2 – show us that you don’t have to be a madman to kill a lot of unarmed people. The atrocities depicted in War Without Mercy were carried out by otherwise quite ordinary people who returned comfortably and without difficulty to ordinary lives after the war. Machine-gunning lifeboats, murdering unarmed sailors floating in the water, shooting significant numbers of prisoners in cold-blood, calibrating your flamethrowers so it takes the enemy a while to die, cutting out their fillings while they’re still alive, making them dance to your shooting before you finally tire of the game and kill them, throwing them from planes, or forcing them to fight after they try to surrender – all in a day’s work for some ordinary Allied soldiers in the Pacific War. So are we to conclude that these ordinary soldiers were also mad? We can’t conclude they were driven mad by war, since none of these things were done in significant numbers in Africa or Europe, even when the Allies were losing. Why should only Allies in the Pacific theatre be mad? Some selection process?

No, the answer is that they weren’t mad, and they were doing what they believed was necessary. For another example of the same, consider the “order police” described in Richard Browning’s Ordinary Men. These soldiers, mostly too old to join the regular army, usually married and with children of their own, participated in large-scale extermination of Jews in Eastern Europe over a 2 year period during world war 2. They were offered at first the chance to avoid these duties, many of them had to get drunk to do it, and often they tried to get local collaborators (e.g. Tiwis) to do the worst of it. But many of them still did it, even though it sickened them. They were doing what they thought was necessary, and they thought it was necessary because the propaganda told them so. History provides us many many examples of people who did terrible things from a position of lucid sanity, and there is no reason to judge the Norwegian terrorist by any different standard.

If he is mad, he will be judged so on DSM-IV criteria by a physician, not on the basis of this action. Similarly, if he is christian he should be judged so on his participation in christian rites and acceptance of Jesus, not on the basis that “no christian would kill 70 unarmed people.” And whether or not he was insane, the islamophobic right needs to accept that he picked his targets based on their propaganda. Whether he chose to kill 70 people because he was insane or because he thought it was a necessary first act in a war, the people he chose to kill were identified for him by the right-wing propagandists whose ludicrous paranoid rantings he was so obssessed with. He is a terrorist of the right, and the right needs to accept the crucial role their propaganda played in prepping him and identifying his targets.

 

Experimental Results with Heavy Armour

The French soldiers at the Battle of Agincourt were so exhausted by the time that they entered battle that they could barely have fought, according to new research reported in the Guardian. A professor of biomechanics asked staff from the Royal Armouries Museum to walk and run in replica armour from the 15th century, based on a variety of designs, and took measurements of oxygen use, which enables estimates of energy consumption. The Guardian website has a video of how they did it.

Apparently running in a typical suit of armour uses 2 times as much energy as running in normal clothes, because the armour weighs up to 30kg; but worse than that, running in a backpack carrying 30kg of weight uses only 1.7 times as much energy. This is because the armour distributes some of that 30kg onto the limbs, which move more than the back during ordinary movement. Additionally, armour constricts breathing. The news report also points out that in Agincourt the French had to slog through mud, which would further add to their energy load. Interestingly, armour is comparatively more efficient when running (1.9 times the energy load) than walking (2.3 times).

I’ve always been suspicious of mediaeval re-enactors oft-repeated claims that plate armour is easy to move in and not that exhausting. I suspect this comes from their limited experience of battle. I’m guessing that most mediaeval re-enactment battles cut straight to the chase, and ignore the lived experience of 15th century soldiers. Most battles probably consisted of many hours of standing and walking, and obviously we don’t do things like mediaeval re-enactment in order to reproduce the tedium of ancient warfare (or the cholera and dysentery, for that matter). So if you cut out the long, arduous process of getting to and from the battle, waiting fororders, etc. the armour probably doesn’t seem so bad. But if you think about moving around for hours in it, and the battle itself just a short part in the middle, you can see that the energy expense of just walking would be a terrific burden on the use of armour. When we think about adventurers in caves and dungeons, slogging around for hours in their full plate, it makes sense that it should put an inordinate penalty on their combat actions to represent this. Warhammer 3 reproduces this nicely with punitive encumbrance rules that quickly punish characters with fatigue penalties; I don’t think D&D was ever so good at this (largely because no one ever bothered with the encumbrance rules, I guess). Of course Rolemaster does it with complex movement manoeuvre penalties, which would be really good if they were combined with fatigue (which I don’t recall RM using).

I think the Guardian has probably over-egged the pudding on this one though, so here’s a few additional thoughts:

• The study subjects weren’t fit: Some workers at the Royal Armouries are probably re-enactment types[1], and might be used to armour, but at a guess most of them weren’t that fit or trained for running in armour. My guess is that, just as longbowmen trained to use the bow, mediaeval soldiers trained for their armour, though this guess could itself be over-optimistic (“training” is actually a pretty modern concept). So it could be that the relative burden of armour compared to no armour is reduced in mediaeval soldiers compared to modern archivists, since fitness training tends to adapt the body to specific activities
• The study subjects were modern: and thus almost certainly physically healthier than a mediaeval soldier, with better diet and less childhood illnesses to reduce fitness. However, they were likely also bigger, and bigger people (I think) use energy less efficiently. But one should never underestimate the importance of good modern diet, housing and healthcare (as well as childhood fitness training at school) in improving the fitness of modern people over their ancestors. So it could be that armour was even more exhausting for the mediaeval knight
• Study bias due to armour type: Wikipedia tells me that actually most soldiers didn’t use the type of armour depicted in the video on the Guardian site, and were more likely to wear weaker wrought iron or composite armour types, that are probably also easier to move in (though wrought iron full plate could be awful, I would guess!) It also tells us that the elite knights in the vanguard at Agincourt[2] were relatively unharmed by the longbows. Still, they would then have to engage in melee combat against lightly-armoured and mobile foes while exhausted. So the best tactic for these guys would be to ensure they were surrounded by less heavily-armoured allies while they regained their breath; unfortunately, the longbowmen would have reduced the numbers of those less armoured mooks quite hideously (the stats and description of the bows at that wikipedia entry suggest that for the lighter-armoured French soldiers Agincourt would have been truly terrifying). In any case, the army fielded at Agincourt would not have looked much like the army being tested in the linked study
• The longbow was actually not that effective: Wikipedia also tells us that, although they had a few successful battles, the French quickly got the measure of the longbowman as a weapon of war, and in some battles either defeated them or routed them. This is probably because tactics based on the longbow depend on this phenomenon of exhaustion – you thin out the lightly-armoured troops in the charge, and by the time the knights reach you they’re too buggered to fight. But I guess this depends on either a numerically superior force or having very good positioning to force a long charge (as happened at Agincourt, with mud). This goes to show that tactics are ultimately more important than most single weapons or devices. Also, I guess that although the longbowman appears, superficially, as an appealing strategic investment (lightly armoured, so cheap to equip, and manpower was something every mediaeval country had an excess of), he was probably actually a type of elite professional troop that was highly expensive to develop (15 years on that bow!), and you only need to beat them in battle once or twice to have essentially destroyed a once-in-a-generation investment. So maybe as a military tactic the longbow was as much of a dead end as the knight. The pikeman, on the other hand…

It’s nice to see science attempting to answer some of these questions about how the ancient world waged war or achieved some of its more impressive peace-time achievements (like the science of longitude, cathedrals, etc.) Some of what we think of now as quite barbaric or backward practices, or don’t esteem because they’re trivial in the modern world (like church-building) actually required prodigious talent and willpower (like any kind of mediaeval warfare) or skill, and it’s good to appreciate that.

—

fn1: If you’re from the Museum and you’re reading this, please don’t sue me for this slur

fn2: Ah, the days when the people who chose to go to war actually had to lead the charge! I bet if that were expected of your average modern politician, we would have much much lower “defence” budgets that were actually for defence.

 

The Allies’ World War 2 Race Trap

"Let the punishment fit the crime"

Back from Beppu and continuing my reports on the book War Without Mercy that I introduced here before my travels commenced. I’ve finished the section on allied and Japanese war atrocities, which were numerous and terrible on both sides, and which I briefly mentioned in my previous post, and now I’ve also read the section on allied representations of the enemy. This section makes clear that the allied response to Japanese aggression was both furious and exterminationist in its content. That is, the allied war planners and propagandists, and allied media, made clear both their deep hatred of the Japanese, its racial origins, and their belief that the only solution to the problem of Japanese aggression was extermination of the Japanese as a race. Obviously since the Japanese survived this goal was not enacted and cooler heads prevailed,  but the propaganda that was driving the allied war effort in 1943-45 was genuinely disturbing stuff.

Exterminationism, US style

However, the nature of allied propaganda began to create uncomfortable contradictions in both internal political struggles in their own countries, and between them and some of their less “enlightened” allies. This is because it called on fundamentally old-fashioned racist tropes, but its connection to exterminationism and the defence of the colonial project led them into tricky political terrain.

The Eternal Racist

In an illuminating section of the book, professor Power points out that the allied anti-Japanese propaganda used in WW2 drew on a wealth of existing racist caricatures with almost no change or originality, simply substituting Japanese for Native Americans or black Americans. In fact, Roosevelt’s own father had been saying almost exactly similar exterminationist things about Native Americans, and the common images used to describe Japanese were borrowed directly from the racist lexicon: they were animals, apes, children, insane, cunning, treacherous and had special “occult” powers. The accusation of “occult” powers was particular to anti-Asian racism and had previously been used against the Chinese; but all the other epiphets and images could have been used for any previous racial enemy of the US or Britain – and Power observes almost exactly equivalent language being used against Native Americans, black Americans, Mexicans, Chinese migrants and the Chinese nation, and then finally the Phillipines, over the course of just 150 years. He also points out that the original Spanish descriptions of the Native Americans of South America were interchangeable with the allies’ claims about the Japanese; and to this he could undoubtedly have added the British defense of their colonial practices in India, and western descriptions of Aborigines and Maoris[1].

The Colonial Project Continues

The other aspect of allied propaganda that was quite surprising was its open acknowledgement and approval of the colonial project in the Pacific and Asia. The US even had a popular song, To Be Specific, It’s Our Pacific that summarized western ideas about the war. Political and opinion leaders didn’t shy from defending their right to own territories or colonies in Asia, and their anger at Japanese temerity in attempting to either establish its own colonies, or to take theirs. The war now is seen as a war to preserve freedom, but the western peoples of the 1940s were comfortable seeing it as a war to preserve their overseas colonies. One report to war planners even observed that many Asians in the fighting territories saw the war “cynically” as a war between fascists and imperialists. How very cynical of them! Churchill openly stated his aim as the preservation and continuation of Britain’s colonial possessions, and many war leaders saw the Pacific war specifically as a race war, between “white supremacy” and the “coloured races.” They worried that the “coloureds” were stirring, and explicitly saw the Japanese attack as a threat to the long-standing world order. Having portrayed the Japanese as apes and animals, they now had to face the fact that these “apes” were capable of besting the “superior” races in military activity, and were setting an example that other Asians might choose to follow. Some of the more alarmist planners saw in this the germ of the long term collapse of the white race, and openly stated so.

These worries were acutely seen in two areas: fear of the effect of the war on black Americans, and fear of the collapse of China.

Racism at Home

It’s well-established (though not often discussed) that the US was extremely racist in its dealings with black soldiers. Black Americans were not allowed in combat roles until very late in the war, were not allowed many promotions or the best or most skilled jobs in the army, and were even required to maintain a separate blood plasma supply: that’s right, black blood couldn’t be used in white soldiers, even though the people writing this policy knew that the scientific evidence was that the blood types were indistinguishable. Some racists portrayed plans to amalgamate the blood supplies as an attempt to weaken the white race by merging its blood with black blood. Black American blood. In Australia, the US government sought (and was granted, I think) special permission to maintain its segregation laws in the housing of US soldiers in Australia, and conflict regularly occurred between US and Australian soldiers in public places when Australian men and women failed to observe American ideals about segregation – particularly, Australian women would date black soldiers and the soldiers would be punished by their white colleagues for miscegenation[2]! Black Americans were acutely aware of their unequal status as combatants for “freedom,” as exemplified in these two slogans from black freedom activists:

Defeat Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito by Enforcing the Constitution and Abolishing Jim Crow

and

I want you to know I ain’t afraid. I don’t mind fighting. I’ll fight Hitler, Mussolini and the Japs all at the same time, but I’m telling you I’ll give those crackers down South the same damn medicine[3]

One black soldier upon enlistment gave as his suggested headstone “Here lies a black man killed fighting a yellow man for the protection of the white man.” This distinction between racism at home and race-hate abroad created a problem for the white authorities, a problem they were aware of and, sadly, not particularly interested in addressing: how can you call for the extermination of a race of apes overseas, using exactly the same language you use to describe a group of people you are oppressing domestically, and expect loyalty from those same people? And how can you maintain your theories of superiority over that domestic group, when the people you paint in the same language overseas are kicking your arse in an area the size of the Pacific?

Loyalty from black Americans was a source of worry for American war planners, who broke up a few groups that may have been getting support or information from the Japanese, and the Japanese certainly attempted to use the Jim Crow laws as propaganda against America (in Japan). However, black American loyalty was largely to America, and the bigger worry for US policy makers was that the Japanese might provide black Americans with inspiration in their own struggle. With Japanese defeat looming, a large number of Americans would be returning from the front armed with the certain knowledge that “inferior” races could defeat “superior” races, and that the racial policy of the past 50 years was hollow; but at the same time they were exhorting white men to exterminate Japanese men with the same underlying logic of white supremacy that was being used to hold black people down in the US. Would this not make US blacks extremely uncomfortable? By using this language, the government had basically shown itself to be of a piece, ideologically, with the supremacists who still murdered black men in the South.

The US response to this appears to have been weak, with no real effort made to amend domestic laws or to move towards the end of segregation and Jim Crow. The only efforts they made were security efforts, to arrest domestic activists and look harder for evidence of connections between Japanese and militant black movements. They showed a little more foresight in dealing with the problem of the “coloured races” rising up abroad, but even there they were complacent and had great difficulty shaking off basic racism, as is shown in the case of the allies’ dealings with China.

The Collapse of China and World War Three

The allied war planners’ biggest fear was that China would collapse or surrender, freeing up 2 million Japanese soldiers to advance into Asia and lending all of China’s economic, industrial and manpower resources to the Japanese. Almost as devastating would be a peace treaty between China and Japan, and the most likely cause of such a treaty – besides China’s exhaustion after 7 years of war – would be their treatment by their allies. Churchill had made it clear he intended to maintain British colonies in the Far East, and the allies refused to rescind a special treaty which prevented China from trying foreigners in local courts. But worst of all was US racism toward Chinese migrants in the US, who were placed in a special category of undesirables and refused both admission and naturalization rights. The catalogue of racist laws applying to the Chinese in the 1940s is quite horrifying, and saddening, and shows an intense and abiding anti-Oriental racism in the west at that time. It was impossible for Chinese to become US citizens at the start of the war, and almost impossible for them to enter the country at all, or only at a very high price and often with extreme difficulty. These laws were a big issue to Chinese in China, and it was obvious that the threefold combination of British imperialism, US racism, and allied special privileges in Asia could turn Chinese attitudes against their western allies. But it was extremely difficult for the US to give up its anti-Chinese laws, and in 1944 as a comprise it allowed a quota of just 105 Chinese a year to become citizens, provided they were new migrants. This was the WW2-era Americans’ idea of a compromise to a lower race. Even though they were fighting a huge and terrifying war in the Pacific, whose outcome at least partly depended upon their treatment of their local allies, they couldn’t properly give up their racist ideals. Similarly Britain, which was highly dependent on its colonial armies as a bulwark against Japan and knew that at least some of the countries it relied on were shaky, refused to give up its colonialist policies in Asia. By this time India was beginning to rebel against white rule, the Burmese had at one point showed allegiance to Japan, and the Japanese were using the language of the East Asia co-prosperity Sphere to claim that they were liberating Asia from white imperialism. Had they behaved less like colonialists themselves this propaganda might even have been successful.

This toxic mix of rebellion by the “inferior” Japanese, activism in colonial provinces, black activism at home, and fears of Chinese collapse, led many commentators in the West to fear that the world was on the brink of a new war that might explode from the ashes of WW2 – a war between the races, with the Eastern “coloureds” rising up against the “superior” whites. The fear of Americans was that the Chinese would fall behind this rebellion and the west would be both outnumbered and outgunned. They spoke of Japan “winning the war by losing” and of the “rising wind” becoming a hurricane.

The Pacific War as a Missed Opportunity

Very few western commentators and politicians saw either the logic or the principle of the obvious measures required to prevent this hurricane – rescinding racist laws, voluntarily withdrawing from their colonies, and ushering in a newer, fairer world order – even though many of Japan’s reasons for entering the war were connected to its racist and unequal treatment between 1905 and 1937. So it was that the war came to its end with the West still convinced of its superiority – perhaps even reassured, after putting Japan “in her place” – and unwilling to consider the wholesale changes that would be required to restore peace to half the world. So it was that over the next 20 years we saw colonial territories throw out their masters, often violently and with huge death tolls in India, Indonesia and Malaysia, the establishment of new and fucked up Juntas in Burma and Africa, and the collapse of economies through war and the scorched earth policy of the colonial masters. Following this was the civil rights movement in America and the sad and terrible disgrace that is the US invasion of Vietnam. Instead of seeing Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour as a wake up call and the ensuing war as the final battle over racist ideology, that they must inevitably lose, the colonial powers mistook it as a chance to reassert their grip, and in tightening the screws they just increased the pain that those countries were willing to bear in order to gain their freedom. As the universe’s most famous freedom fighter once said – the more you tighten your grip, the more they slip through your fingers. This means that the Pacific War was not just a catastrophic and avoidable mistake at the time it happened, but the one useful lesson that could have been gained from it was missed, and a teaching moment for Western Imperialism was overlooked. The ensuing history of Asia was written largely in blood, much of it probably avoidable if the allies had not cleaved so strongly to the racist ideals that underlay their ideology in both war and peace at that time.

(Note: Illustrations are from the text).

—

fn1: As an interesting aside, our approach seems to have become much, much more mature in recent years – descriptions of Afghani and Iraqi enemies are generally much less dehumanizing than those used in World War 2, even though al Qaeda’s treachery on September 11th was comparable with – or worse than – Pearl Harbour.

fn2: I’m taking this information from an ABC documentary on segregation in Australia, not from Power’s book.

fn3: Note here a subtle effect of the racist tone of war propaganda. The western European enemies (Italy and Germany) are identified with their leaders; the Pacific enemy are identified as a race

 

Current Reading: War Without Mercy

This book uncovers some unpalatable truths about Allied behaviour in the Pacific War, 1939-1945, in the context of an analysis of how both sides in the war (Japanese and Allied) used extreme racist language to fuel an orgy of violence and atrocities. The author, Professor John W. Dower from MIT, attempts to address the twin issues of how salient racist thought and propaganda was in the Pacific war, and how that racist fury managed to change so quickly to cooperation after the war finished. But this story relies fundamentally on a correct appraisal of the actions of both sides in the war, and particularly on an unvarnished view of Allied behaviour. Everyone knows how badly the Japanese behaved in the war, but I think very few people are aware that the Allies also engaged in a great many atrocities, including torture and wholesale slaughter of prisoners of war and surrendering soldiers. I certainly was ignorant of the scope and prevalence of the atrocities committed, and the acceptance of them (both open and tacit) in the media and higher echelons of the military at the time. Professor Dower’s argument is that these atrocities were unique to the Pacific theatre, and were inculcated through an intense campaign of racism and dehumanization of the Japanese in western media and propaganda that, although often using different imagery and style to Japanese wartime propaganda, essentially mirrored the techniques and purpose of that propaganda. The result was a war of unprecedented fury and ferocity – at least from the perspective of the US and commonwealth countries. Obviously for the Russians, Germans and Eastern Europeans the role of racial ideology in driving a war of extermination was well understood by 1943, but the conflict between Germans and the Western allies was largely free of racial hatred, and very few atrocities occurred on either side. So from the perspective of the Western Allies, the war in the Pacific theatre was conducted, propagandized and envisioned very differently to that against Germany.

This racist propaganda was both extreme and potentially catastrophic. By 1945, both the general public and policy-makers in the US were accepting of an exterminationist stream of thought, which led to speeches like this by Major George Fielding Eliot, who said that the Allies’ aim must be:

The complete and ruthless destruction of Japanese industry, so that not one brick of any Japanese factory shall be left upon another, so that there shall not be in Japan one electric motor or one steam or gasoline engine, nor a chemical laboratory, not so much as a book which tells how these things are made

Churchill suggested reducing all Japanese cities to ash, and one person assigned to planning Japan’s post-war construction called for their “almost total elimination” as a race. Fortunately for all involved, saner heads prevailed by the end of the war.

This book makes clear the tit-for-tat nature of some American atrocities and doesn’t attempt to compare savagery or indecency – it is interested in comparing the role of racist ideals in driving exterminationist behaviour. But it does not attempt to exonerate allied soldiers on the basis of their prior experiences – and makes clear, in any case, that much allied bad behaviour occurred before the full extent of Japanese atrocities was known or had been communicated to the troops. Indeed, some of the most basically racist western propaganda was conceived of before Pearl Harbour, and certainly before the general principles of a furious and merciless war were already germinating long before the Japanese atrocities had been well-understood. It makes for uncomfortable reading when the statements and behaviour of the allied soldiers are compared with those of the Nazis in the Eastern Front. For example, keeping body parts as trophies, throwing prisoners alive from aircraft, killing prisoners or survivors en masse, and cutting gold fillings from Japanese survivors while they were still alive, were common practice amongst US, British and Australian soldiers. Accounts from captured Japanese soldiers and their diaries indicate they went to ingenious lengths to find ways to surrender without being executed, because they knew this fate awaited them; and many soldiers were killed attempting to surrender.

This has led me to ponder a couple of questions that I will return to over the course of reading this book, some of which challenge my accepted understanding of how the war was conducted and what decisions were made. Here are a few:

• George Fraser, author of the excellent Flashman series, has written an autobiographical account of his days in Burma under general Slim, the very thoughtful and interesting Quartered Safe Out Here, which I highly recommend. He routinely recounts the accepted notion that “the Japanese never surrender.” He was writing of 1945, by which time the Japanese must have known that surrender was, largely, a death sentence. Did he know this fact and chose not to include it? In fact, did he sanitize this aspect of the war from his account, and if so how much can his version of events in Burma be trusted?
• We have clear and accurate accounts of the numbers of soldiers who died in Japanese captivity, but to the best of my knowledge no similar figures have been compiled for the Allies. Could it be that Japanese prisoners of war actually had similar (or worse!) survival rates in Allied captivity due to the practice of murdering them on capture? If so, how should modern western interpretation of our role in the war change to account for this – what kind of outrage can we level against our former enemies if we behaved the same way?
• I have always accepted the western account of the nuclear attacks and fire-bombings in terms of the Japanese refusal to surrender, and even partially the claim that this approach saved lives because it avoided an invasion of the mainland. But how much should we trust those analyses when accounts of the Japanese martial character, the conduct of the war, and all assessments of the likelihood of surrender, were based on highly racially charged and often inaccurate assessments of Japanese motivations and behaviour? How truthful was the underlying information that led to these decisions? How is it that the country which sent notes to all its allies in 1940 asking them to refrain from urban bombing campaigns was happily broadcasting its joy at reducing cities to ash within 4 years? Was this change really purely or even partially driven by strategic necessity?
• Given that this racist propaganda was being built up before the war and was unleashed in full force as soon as the war started, is it possible that the war itself was much more preventable than leaders and opinion-makers of the time were willing to believe? To what extent was the racist propaganda about the implacable Japanese enemy a self-fulfilling theory?

I’ll come back to some of these questions over the next few weeks as I read through this compelling and extremely unpleasant book. For now I’m on holiday in Beppu and with patchy computer access, so nothing more on this will happen for a week or so, but I certainly aim to return to this topic soon.

 

The Battle for Pearl Harbour, 1947-48

Bye Bye Hollywood!

The hardest battle of my war so far has been the occupation of Pearl Harbour, which took just over a year and was bitterly fought on both sides. Final victory came after a year of fruitless land battles, a near-successful starvation campaign on my part, the death of probably 30000 merchant seamen, the near total destruction of the US surface fleet, and ultimately the complete annihilation of Los Angeles and San Francisco. By February 1948 I had lost about 6 divisions of soldiers, 6 submarine flotillas, 6 transport flotillas, a single aircraft carrier, perhaps 50 or so convoy ships and a couple of light cruisers. The US had lost about 30 divisions of soldiers (including advanced marines, motorized divisions and heavy armour), about 10-12 carriers, 5 or so battleships, its entire complement of troop transports[1], all supply convoys operating in the Pacific and their cruiser escorts, probably 40-50 destroyers, and its entire complement of mid-sized ships. By the end of the Pearl Harbour campaign, with its supply lines disrupted by nuclear attack and dissent, a force of 3 advanced carriers would be so weak that in one instance it was annihilated by a group of interwar heavy cruisers escorting my transport ships. I estimate the total human cost of this for the USA to be quite staggering – 300,000+ soldiers, 30,000+ merchant sailors, possibly upwards of 30,000 sailors, and the entire populations of Los Angeles and San Francisco.

A long campaign proceeds from a very simple mistake

The campaign dragged out for so long because I lacked sufficient transports to safely invade two Hawaiian islands simultaneously. Concentrating on the key island (Pearl Harbour), I managed to win a brutal amphibious assault, but I didn’t realize that the soldiers on that island could island hop without ships, so they skipped over to the neighbouring island without losing any significant numbers. My own forces, exhausted and worn down after an amphibious assault that took several days, could do nothing to pursue the enemy while it was in tatters, and I hadn’t organized a second set of reserves to bring in to the fray quickly. I had, in essence, failed to prepare for the invasion properly, fielding a force of only 8 divisions of marines and having nothing in reserve for a second attack. By the time I got my act together, the US had consolidated some 15 Divisions on the neighbouring island, and was attempting to land more. It’s just not possible to attack a force of 15 Divisions when you have to cross a narrow channel to do it, and worse than that, US soldiers are excellent fighters. When they’re well supplied you’re lucky if you can beat one division of well dug-in modern soldiers with all 8 Divisions of your marines. Dug into mountainous Kauai, with more troops landing on nearby Niihau, there was no chance I was going to complete the conquest of Hawaii. There followed a short period of stalemate before I was able to capitalize on a tactical error to capture all the more eastern isles (Hawaii and Maui), but the problem remained. America was facing its own Iwo Jima here, and any assault on it would be disastrous for all involved, but probably unsuccessful for me. A different approach was me.

A campaign of starvation

The main method for defeating overwhelming forces is to cut them off and starve them into a condition of weakness, so I decided that, with my navy in command of most of the high seas and only one significant carrier group still functioning on the US side, I could probably attempt to shut down the US army on Kauai by a blockade. I set my main carrier group (a force of 15 carriers plus screen ships) to work in the northeast Pacific, and set other smaller fleets to work immediately around Hawaii. I also redeployed ballistic missiles to Hawaii, in anticipation of the development of my first atomic bomb. During this campaign I also starved out the smaller US forces on the Line Islands and, eventually Wake Island – the latter was proving a considerable problem, since its naval bombers were disrupting my naval activities, and its capture in late 1947 left the US with nowhere left to base aircraft anywhere in the Pacific.

This starvation policy worked well in some respects. I quickly reduced the US to a very small number of convoy ships, reproducing results like the Disaster of PQ17 very regularly. This means that the US would be unable to supply other forces, to import materials from distant outposts, or to trade properly. However, somehow the convoys continued to get through my cordon, and the soldiers never properly starved. The US also introduced a similar scheme on me, operating from Diego Garcia in the Indian ocean to reduce my Indian Ocean convoys.This had the same effect on me – diverting supply ships away from Pearl Harbour. In late August 1947 my Samoan expeditionary force was disbanded due to lack of supplies, and I suddenly realized a huge problem. Troops in Hawaii were now out of food for large periods of time, and I couldn’t supply my ballistic missile squad, so I couldn’t operate my planned nuclear attack. I had to act fast to divert production to convoys, but it wasn’t until December 1947 that I finally restored regular supply to Pearl Harbour. This was potentially disastrous – had the US attacked at that time I probably would have lost the defense. Perhaps they didn’t attack for the same reason as me – lack of reliable supply. But I think they didn’t know my situation, and saw the numbers of troops on Pearl Harbour as too difficult to break. In fact these numbers were part of the problem – I had so many troops and ships in the area that I couldn’t supply them fast enough with my available convoys (or even when I doubled my convoy force!) This is a big problem for Japan in the Pacific, because holding all these scattered islands and possessions (in my case, from Oman to New Zealand) requires huge reserves of convoys that are very vulnerable to attack.

So, I redistributed some of my troops to other islands (Midway, Wake, Kwajalein) and rebalanced supply by December. I then decided to strike the final blow in my policy of starvation before shifting to the attack – a nuclear strike.

Nuclear apocalypse comes to America

At this point I discovered that I’d misunderstood the game interface, and had probably been in possession of a bomb since May some time – my next bomb would be ready in December. So I had one to play with in November, and another coming a month later. My first attack was on the highest value target on the West Coast, Los Angeles. I reduced the entire city to ash, setting all its productive, industrial and infrastructure capacity to 0. A month later I followed up with San Francisco, and also a conventional missile attack on San Diego and Portland. By January dissent in the US was running at 10%, which is a huge drain on their fighting ability, supply effectiveness and industrial capacity. After this attack I think the masterminds of the US war effort decided to redouble their efforts to supply Hawaii and recapture Pearl Harbour, because my carrier fleet in the East Pacific intercepted several larger fleets, all of which met a similar fate to the rest of the ill-fated US navy. The remains of the US’s carrier fleet went to the bottom of the sea, and I now possess the largest, most powerful navy in the world, in control of the largest empire. But, the US still controlled half of Hawaii, and remained a threat to my installations there. I began reshuffling my forces to strike the final blow, beginning with the naval capture of Niihau. Still lacking sufficient transports, I was again reduced to shuffling forces one at a time, but due to the supply restrictions I was now basing my marines in Midway Island.

The final battle: grasping the chance of a desperate error

While I was shuffling my forces around the US launched a desperate attack from Kauai against Niihau to try and recapture it. Were this to work, I would lose some 12 Divisions of troops to the US aggressor, and given their supply situation I doubt the survivors of that battle would be treated according to the laws of war. I had to launch a desperate counter-attack, which I did first of all by flank-attacking them from the neighbouring island of Pearl Harbour. Even throwing 12 more Divisions into the battle didn’t turn the tide though, just slowed down the inevitable destruction. But I had a force of semi-battle ready marines in Midway, which I sent in to attack the island on which the US was based – an enveloping attack that, in my past experience, was still not a very reliable tactic against a large and dug-in US force. I also dispatched my central carrier group to bombard the island, and threw more soldiers from Pearl Harbour into the battle to prevent the US from achieving a preliminary victory in Niihau. The extra troops delayed the inevitable just long enough for my marines to hit the beaches, and this turned the tide. The defenders in Niihau repulsed the US attack, and then my marines slaughtered them on the beaches. Some 12 infantry and 3 armoured divisions were cleaned up in that final, desperate battle, and all of Hawaii had fallen into Japanese hands.

The aftermath

First I want to make it clear that Japanese forces won’t treat our prisoners with the same callous disregard that the US were willing to show in those final twilit hours of their illegal occupation of Hawaii. They will be treated with honour as prisoners of war, and given the situation in their homeland now I suspect they’ll be glad of the rest and recuperation that time in a Japanese prison camp has to offer them. I now control all of Asia from Oman to Hawaii, Korea to New Zealand, with the exception of Nationalist China and Australia (which is in any case a puppet of mine after its earlier conquest). For now I’m leaving Nationalist China while I finish off the US, because capturing China opens a huge border with Russia. I will have another nuclear weapon ready in May, and I’m confident that by then I will also have several ICBMs built. My plan is to strike New York, which will probably throw the US into such disarray that they will suffer a coup or collapse to barbarism (partisans). I will then invade through Seattle.

Some lessons learned:

• Dissent is a powerful tool: Not only does it weaken armies, but it reduces industrial capacity (10% dissent in the US equates to 40 points of IC – I only have 230). Reduced IC can only be recovered by increasing the amount of money produced[2], but liberal democracies[3] require a lot of consumption to reduce dissent. This means that the US not only loses IC from dissent, but then has to devote more IC to quelling it. Once my third strike pushes dissent up higher, I aim to destroy other industrial centres, and capture the remaining West Coast centres in Seattle. Then it will be virtually impossible for the US to stifle its dissent and thus to continue to fight the war
• Starvation is difficult: Even with complete control of the seas it’s very hard to blockade an island like Hawaii that sits at the juncture of several ocean regions. This, I suppose, is why it’s strategically important
• Nuclear weapons turn the tide: There was a noticeable degradation of combat ability after I nuked the US. Dissent, loss of supply capacity all worked to prevent effective combat
• Watch your convoys and supply load: As your territories expand – especially across many scattered islands – your supply convoy load increases dramatically. If you cluster too many troops on one island they will inevitably lose supply, and you open the risk of the entire lot of them being wiped out in one mistimed battle. As your empire grows, your convoys need to grow in accordance. Convoys don’t develop, so are perfect beneficiaries of gearing. Set a train of 9 or 10 running when you start expanding, and you’ll be fine. And if you see lots of little messages saying they’re being sunk, send one of your navies out to deal with it. And if you aren’t tough enough to protect your convoys, give up – you’re done for.

From here on I just have to work out how to capture the whole USA without marching across it, which will take forever. I’m thinking of a strategy of spies and launching a coup, but I really don’t fancy my chances. In the meantime I need to capture Diego Garcia to prevent attacks on my flank; and then I need to decide whether to head into Europe through the Suez canal, or deal with the last part of Asia that isn’t already mine – China.

With nuclear weapons at my disposal, these decisions are a lot easier than they were before. Unless someone else gets them too … and there’s only one way to make sure that doesn’t happen…

—

fn1: which, if they were sunk while carrying troops, means that the US may have lost an additional countless number of soldiers. I don’t know how many transports I sank, but if they were all populated with troops in movement, I may have killed another 200-400,000 soldiers by this means.

fn2: Hearts of Iron 2 uses the George W. Bush approach to controlling dissent during war – higher consumption!

fn3: Ha! It is the twilight of their age. From here on the world will see only Shogunates.

 

Star Wars as Political Science

It’s not exactly unsung at the moment, but I thought I’d link to this excellent news article announcing the death of Obi-Wan Kenobi in a firefight with Imperial Storm Troopers on Alderaan. It’s a rare occasion that I enjoy humour based on morphing real life figures into fictional characters, but this is one of those moments. The delicious peskiness of casting Obama as Darth Vader is so perfect in so many ways, as is the satire of modeling Obi-Wan Kenobi as a terrorist mastermind. It makes very nicely the point that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, but at the same time pokes fun at the semi-mystical powers ascribed to bin Laden by the American intelligence community – by giving him actual semi-mystical powers. This isn’t the first time the US security apparatus has been compared to the Empire either – the brilliant parody Troops does a similar job of turning the evil bad guys of Star Wars fame into everyday men trying to bring order to the Universe, and is well worth watching.

The real brilliance of this Galactic Times article though lies in the comments, which manage to take the piss out of every single conspiracy theory floating around in the war on terror, from September 11th onward, without ever straying from the Star Wars format. We have demands to see the body, claims that Vader was actually born on Tatooine, accusations that the destruction of Alderaan was done by the Empire, demands to cut spending on war, suspicion that Vader is himself a Jedi, and fears of further losses of personal freedoms. It’s like the entire 10 years of the GWoT can be morphed into the Star Wars framework, reduced to farce and genuinely criticized all at the same time. It also does a great job of undermining conspiracy theories – we know that in the Star Wars context most of the conspiracies are true, but precisely because it’s an insanely cool science fiction story set somewhere else, a long time ago.

Conservatives of course are pissed about this, because it doesn’t take the GWoT seriously and implies Osama is the good guy, but even here the irony is perfect. After years of unrestrained attacks on Obama, they find themselves defending him against accusations he is Darth Vader – even though they have spent years accusing him of wanting to introduce “Fascism” to the US, of being a closet muslim, of planning “death panels” who will decide who gets health care and who dies, of sympathizing with Osama, of not being American, and of course of wanting to undermine the Republic with his health care socialism. The Australian conservative ex-Prime Minister, John Howard, even claimed in 2007 that Osama bin Laden would be “praying for” Obama to win the election [how wrong that was!] So now they find themselves defending him from comparisons with someone they have until recently quite openly implied he wants to be.

Perhaps because its construction was based on a theory of the development of myths, Star Wars will always be amenable to parallels with significant real world stories; but I think it says a lot about the lies, misinformation and hyperbole connected to the war on terror – and particularly to Osama bin Laden – that the real world story fits so well with a silly myth from another galaxy. Dishonesty, bad motives, incompetence and lack of faith in our own governments have combined to turn the war on terror into a story so incomprehensible to most of us that it might as well be fiction.