Thoughts of the victims of war in a Valencia air raid shelter

If you’re sightseeing around our local city, Valencia, the saddest sight you can see is an air raid shelter. I’ve visited two and there are many others.

Inside the air raid shelter under the Valencia town hall

They date from “the war”. However, I believe when most of us say “the war” we probably still mean the Second World War, if we’re from countries that took part in it. In Spain, “the war” means the Civil War the raged from 1936 to 1939, led to the overthrow of the Spanish Republic and ushered in 36 years of dictatorship under Francisco Franco, ending only in his death.

On the other hand, there are many people, inside and outside Spain, who would reckon that the Spanish Civil War was a part of the Second World War. That makes some sense. After all, despite signing the same non-intervention treaties as the democracies, Germany and Italy, then under Nazi and Fascist control respectively, sent not just weapons but military forces to support the Franco rebellion. Only the Soviet Union supplied the Republic, and then only with toxic strings attached.

So major players in the Europe-wide conflict that was about to break out were involved in the Spanish war. The air raid shelters in Valencia were built to withstand attack by Italian forces, chiefly in the form of bombing raids from bases they had set up on the island of Mallorca.

One of the striking aspects of our visit was a video they played us. At several points, I realised that I wasn’t listening to Spanish any more, but to Italian. What was being played was Fascist propaganda about how ‘heroes’ from the Italian air force were taking part in raids on Valencia to make civilisation safe from ‘Soviet communism’, in a fight many saw as a Christian crusade.

Down in that air raid shelter, that irony was particularly bitter. These were shelters for civilians, and they were the main victims of the raids. The propaganda claimed the bombers were targeting armament factories and military concentrations. In reality, they were dropping their bombs on civilian dwellings.

No one puts that better than the great New Zealand cartoonist David Low, who has Franco being told that his Arab troops are concerned by the ‘unchristian’ behaviour of his army.

David Low has an officer reporting to Franco, Mussolini and Hitler
“Excellency, the Moorish troops are disturbed.
They say our conduct of the war is unchristian.”

The assault on civilians would become the hallmark of the long struggle that the Spanish Civil War announced: heavy bombing of civilian centres, often described as a means of ‘weakening enemy morale’. Killing civilians to undermine morale? There’s a word for that. It’s terrorism.

And I was particularly struck by one of the photos in the air raid shelter. A mother with her child. Both faces are paralysed with fear. And it’s perfectly obvious that neither has been guilty of an act that merits the punishment they’re undergoing.

Part of the display in the air raid shelter
Left, a bombed home. Right, a terrified mother and child

Sadly, this kind of terror bombing was by no means limited only to the enemies of the democracies in those years of war. In fact the worst bombing was carried out by the Western powers themselves, something they should perhaps bear in mind when they denounce terrorism today. Dresden, Cologne, Hamburg all but destroyed, with tens of thousands of dead.

And, to top it all and inflict still greater destruction, there were the atom bombs dropped on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Mentioning those Japanese cities reminds me of the only reason I disagree with those Spaniards who say the Second World War started with the conflict in Spain. That same David Low I mentioned before had a different view, which I share. After all, there was a Pacific Theatre to World War II as well as a European one. Fighting started there in 1931, when Japanese troops invaded Manchuria, five years before the uprising in Spain and eight before the Nazi invasion of Poland.

In the background, the “Japan-China mixup” as a mugging
In the foreground, the USA, France, Britain,
Germany and Italy are walking away
One is saying, “Don’t you think, after all, there
may be something in the idea of having a police force?”
Another replies, “Tut Tut! Too risky! Much wiser and cheaper
to wait until we’re all murdered in our beds

Just as in Spain, the democracies stood back and did nothing. And, just as Low warned, they paid the price. All the enemies they would face in the official Second World War – Japan in the Pacific, German and Italy in Europe – were using the earlier conflicts to get into shape to fight the big one.

A tragedy. Which makes visiting the Valencia air raid shelters such a sad moment. Though perhaps a necessary one.

Treason in the White House

The price of not being prepared for war can be an end to peace
Syrian Kurds flee the fighting as Turkey invades

Oh, say can you see,
By the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed,
At the twilight's last gleaming?

The words of Francis Scott Key’s poem, which became the lyrics for the US national anthem, refer the American flag flying over Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Maryland, after a night’s bombardment from ships of the British Royal Navy in September 1814. The image of the flag still flying proudly in the dawn, despite such a battering from what was then the world’s leading naval power, is a tribute to the pluck of a still small nation standing up to the oppression of a far more powerful one.

I don’t believe that war is glorious, even less that it should be fought for glory. It should be fought as a last resort, and only because the principle at stake is so vital that even deliberately killing others is a price worth paying to protect it. That was the case in Fort McHenry, for instance.

Even better, however, is to be able to use the threat of military force to protect the principle, without actually activating it. The Principal of my first college was a former General, Sir John Hackett. He once told me that a military commander who has to give the order to open fire has already failed. The perfect military engagement, in his view, was one where the winning side deploys such overwhelming force that the other backs down without firing a shot.

Sometimes, indeed, the mere presence of a powerful nation’s soldiers in a potential war zone can deter other nations even contemplating military action.

These are principles known well in the United States. Let’s see what a few presidents have said on the subject.

George Washington declared that “being prepared for war is one of the most effective ways of preserving peace”. It wasn’t an original thought. The Romans had a similar saying, “si vis pacem, para bellum”, “if you wish for peace, prepare for war”, and the Greeks and Chinese voiced the same idea earlier still.

To be a great nation requires certain qualities. “We must dare to be great; and we must realise that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage”. That’s true even without war, but it’s certainly true of war in particular. Being prepared for war requires being ready to engage in toil, to make sacrifices and to display high courage.

That was Teddy Roosevelt.

There’s another quality that great nations, like great individuals, enjoy and display. “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty,” as another President put it. And he’s right: without loyalty, high courage, toil and sacrifice will produce little worth having.

Who was that President? Why, Donald Trump. Interesting, isn’t it, that he talked about “I need loyalty”? He needs it from others. He doesn’t need to show any himself.

Which is why he’s suddenly pulled out of Syria, leaving his allies, the Kurds, at the mercy of Turkey. Which has prompted invaded.

The American presence was the classic case of simply being present. They weren’t there to fight the Turks. But their mere presence meant that an invasion couldn’t be launched – it might have led to American losses and a massive American retaliation. Trump could have preserved peace by being ready for war. Instead he claimed:

WE WILL FIGHT WHERE IT IS TO OUR BENEFIT, AND ONLY FIGHT TO WIN. Turkey, Europe, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Russia and the Kurds will now have to figure the situation out…

Figuring the situation out for the Kurds sounds like getting themselves massacred by the Turks. Which, incidentally, means they won’t be able to guard prisoners from the ISIS terrorist movement, now poised to escape and start their campaign again. After three years of US effort against them. That doesn’t sound like “FIGHT TO WIN” but much more like “FIGHT TO LOSE”.

The loss will be down to a failure to show precisely the loyalty Trump himself demands.

Let’s end with some other words from a US President, on the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 a date which will live in infamy the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

We can add another date to the roster of infamy: 8 October 2019.

The day Donald Trump decided to pull out of Syria, without notice, betraying his Kurdish allies to the invading Turks.

Personality cults: toxin of our times

One of the benefits of having dogs is that you have to go for walks. It may be cold and wet, or oppressively hot, but the dogs always know that what you really need is another walk.

And they’re right.

Now, and I hesitate to write these words, in case they read them, but even with the company of two charming dogs, I find those walks not entirely exciting. So I take earphones, and an audible book downloaded to my phone. That passes the time satisfactorily, while Luci and Toffee hunt around smelling any patch of ground that seems potentially interesting, or playing with small dogs and running away from large ones.

Luci with Toffee behind her.
Great fun but walks need a little more...

Currently, I’m listening to a book I previously read, Ian Kershaw’s biography Hitler. I seem to be getting more from it this way than from reading it. Perhaps it’s the intimacy of a voice speaking directly into my ear. But what perhaps 
makes the book more vivid to me now is that it feels so much more topical. 

Whether on the first or second time through, the picture that emerges is of a Hitler who was not unintelligent, but hopelessly limited. Perhaps one could describe him as selectively stupid.

For instance, he warned the Jews before the war that if they dragged Germany into another world war, they would pay the price, through the annihilation of Jewry. 

He then invaded Poland, and found himself at war with France and Britain.

Two years later, with Britain still undefeated, he invaded the Soviet Union, convinced the German army could strike a knockout blow in a matter of months, leading to a complete collapse of the Soviets. So now he was in a major European war.

A few months later, Hitler’s ally Imperial Japan attacked the United States and he declared war too.

So now he was in a world war.

The Jews had absolutely nothing to do with any of those steps. Indeed, they had been increasingly victimised as each military adventure got under way. Even so, this was the point at which Hitler, claiming that the Jews had indeed dragged the nation into this terrible conflict, decided that his warning was about to be verified, and Nazi Germany launched its programme of Jewish extermination.

As Kershaw points out, there’s little doubt that Hitler believed what he was saying, however contrary it was to any real evidence. That’s what I mean by blinkered. It’s also what I mean by selective stupidity. It allowed him to delude himself into adopting a series of views with no basis in reality.

It wasn’t, however, the only form of stupidity at play. Or the only form of delusion. Much more widespread was the poisonous beliefs that formed the bedrock of Hitler’s power: the personality cult that developed around him and which meant that any statement he made had to be true, simply because he’d made it.

Hitler was a self-deluded limited man, and profoundly dishonest, but he came to be thought of in Germany as incapable of error.

No attitude is more dangerous. Because if a man is infallible, to question him isn’t merely an error, it’s a lie. To disseminate such a lie is nothing short of treason.

If such questioning is by someone powerful, say the newspapers, then the treason is particularly deadly. The damage is done not to the revered personality – he is above such damage – but to the people who may read or listen to the lies. To protect them, not the leader, it’s necessary to shut down the purveyors of these distortions. Indeed, it may even be necessary to punish the people who produce them.

This is a crucial step to take. Because democracy itself is based on suspicion of its leaders. We elect people to power, but then we surround them with institutions designed to monitor them and question their actions. We never give way to unqualified faith in leaders but expect them to be, like any human, fallible and therefore likely to have to be replaced at some stage.

Personality cults represent an opposed point of view and, consequently, tend to lead to authoritarianism.

Now in long-established and deeply-rooted democracies, such as the United States or Britain, there are mechanisms in place which may be able to prevent that decline into autocratic rule. It may be possible to remove the personalities at the centre of a cult from power before they can consolidate their hold. The great question of our time is whether they are strong enough. Because, and this is why Kershaw is so topical, personality cults are back with a vengeance.

Donald Trump in the US is the head of a personality cult, that sees him as infallibly right, a view he shares. So anyone who questions him is not merely incorrect, but an enemy. Again, the media, or the mainstream media to use today’s dismissive term, are the among the most dangerous. 

Trump would not, I think, launch a Holocaust as Hitler did. However, I’m convinced that he would have no hesitation in locking up opponents if he could. He’d be sure he would be serving the people by doing so.

It’s no accident that the cry of ‘lock her up’ rings out at his rallies.

Not so different as one might think
as both lead personality cults

We have a similar problem in Britain. The Labour Party has been invested by a personality cult. Jeremy Corbyn is seen by his supporters as incapable of error. I’ve been told that I need to show ‘faith’ in the leader, the most dangerous attitude towards leaders. I’ve been told that he is being ‘savvy’ when he refuses to back either side of the Brexit debate, though that merely strikes me as dishonest. And I see in him the same self-deluding tendency to believe that he cannot err: he’s a man of the left so that all his positions are left wing, even when he is pandering to hard right Brexiters whose support he feels he needs, to win office.

As with Trump’s followers, Corbyn’s also loathe the ‘mainstream media’.

Corbyn is no Hitler, of course. However, he necessarily embodies the same tendencies towards authoritarianism that mark all personality cults. Equally, by their unqualified faith, his supporters encourage and reinforce that trend.

Forget the man. Forget his policies. It’s the qualities of a cult themselves that are toxic and need to be resisted.

I’m indebted to Kershaw for reminding me of that vital lesson. And to my dogs, of course, for obliging me to listen to him again.

The debt Britain owes Gina Miller

The trouble with populists is that they’re always in a hurry.

When they’ve seen that something needs to be done, they want to do it now. They don’t want to have to waste time with the niceties of consensus building and scrutiny – they take so long and delay necessary action. You can see it with Trump in the States: he wants to reintroduce torture as a weapon of policy, and wants to do it quickly, by means of an executive order.

The Guardian quotes Steve Kleinman, retired air force colonel and chairman of the research advisory committee to the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG):

“If the US was to make it once again the policy of the country to coerce, and to detain at length in an extrajudicial fashion, the costs would be beyond substantial, they’d be potentially existential. We’ve seen how [torture] promotes violent extremism, how it degrades alliances. We’ve seen how it only serves to provide information that policymakers want to support [desired policies], not what they need,” Kleinman said.

“A lot of these people who weigh in heavily on interrogation have no idea how little they know, [and do so] because of what they see on television,” said Kleinman, who emphasized that he was not speaking for the HIG.

But populists are in a hurry. They don’t want to have to stop to take such annoying and delaying objections into account.

It was always so. Julius Caesar marched on Rome because it was time to do away with the corrupt and inefficient republic. Napoleon launched a coup d’état because it was time to restore order to France and let her be great again. The war clique in Japan in the 1930s did away with the opposition to its rule because it knew it was time for the Empire to astonish the world with its military prowess.

Sadly, a little opposition might have avoided outcomes far worse than the problems they were trying to fix. Caesar’s actions replaced a rotten republic by an Empire which again and again became a bloodthirsty tyranny. Napoleon led France to momentary glory then utter failure, on the retreat from Moscow and the field of Waterloo. Japanese militarists won spectacular victories throughout 1942 and then were forced step by step to the loss of all they had gained and the destruction of much of what they had at home.

Now, one of the things about populists is that they’re often popular. They can frequently put together a popular majority (not Trump, as it happens, but he did win the election despite that). As democrats, we’re obliged to go along with the majority view (or the electoral win, at any rate, in the case of Trump).

But the lesson of those cases is that even when they have popular support, and they’re in a hurry, we should not on any account slacken in our scrutiny of the measures they propose.

In Britain, a popular majority decided in June of last year that Britain should leave the European Union. It was a misguided decision, as the country will discover over the next decade or two. But the decision has been taken and I see little or no chance of its being reversed. Britain will leave the EU.

The process starts with triggering what is known as Article 50. The Prime Minister, Theresa May, decided that she would do so. After all, the people had spoken. As Prime Minister, she could take that step using prerogative authority, a hangover of truly monarchical power, now exercised by ministers rather than the crown.

Gina Miller: staunch champion of British constitutional rights

Any true democrat must therefore be immensely grateful to Gina Miller. She launched a case, later joined by a number of other plaintiffs, demanding that the government should not act without the authority of parliament. She won the case and the government’s appeal against that judgement has now been rejected by the Supreme Court.

By a majority of 8 to 3, the Court ruled that leaving the EU would have a major impact on British laws, and only Parliament can make, change or revoke laws.

The effect on the Brexit process will be nil. Parliament will certainly approve the triggering of article 50. Britain will still take the senseless and self-destructive step of leaving the EU. But at least we have established that government, on major, law-making matters, can’t simply by-pass our elected representatives. It must win their consent to such steps.

That may be slow and dull. It’s horribly frustrating for the hurried populists and their supporters. But, as the examples of Caesar, Napoleon and the Japanese Empire demonstrate, the alternative is far worse.

Trump seems likely to prove the point again over the next few years.

Gina Miller has suffered horrible abuse in social media and the press. Any Brit that cares about the constitutional settlement of the country, and believes that any idea, good or bad, ought to be subject to scrutiny, should be deeply grateful to her.

Thanks, Gina. The personal cost to you has been immense, I know. I salute your courage and principled determination.

An anniversary. With a message for today

Seventy-five years ago today, a powerful military nation made a fatal military error.

Instead of swinging northwards from its conquered territories in China and tackling the Soviet Union, then gripped by a life and death struggle against Nazi Germany, the Empire of Japan chose to go South and attack the Far Eastern possessions of Holland and Britain. If it had done only that, it might have achieved its aims: its forces on both land and sea quickly overcame the British and the Dutch. But they weren’t satisfied with so much and overreached, attacking the United States too.

Had Japan taken on the Soviet Union, the world might have been a profoundly different place. The Soviets might have had to divert forces from the Western Front and weaken the fight against Hitler. The United States might have felt it impossible to join the war at that stage. The outcome might have been a great deal less favourable to the Western powers.

It didn’t happen. Admiral Yamamoto had opposed the Southern strategy but, bowing to the orders he was given, decided the only way to make a success of it was to launch an attack on the US so powerful that it would knock them out in one strike. He combined careful planning with intensive training of both naval and air forces, and finally a brilliantly executed attempt to destroy US naval power in the Pacific with a single blow against Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese embassy in Washington had trouble translating and typing its government's warning to the US, with the result that the attack occurred before the the message was delivered. That led Franklin Roosevelt to describe 7 December 1941 as a day that would “live in infamy”.

More to the point, it was an attack that looked like a victory – it wreaked huge damage on the US Pacific fleet – but it failed to deliver the knockout blow Yamamoto sought. Instead, it led to a war that would ultimately cost Japan as many as three million dead, culminating in the double atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was the end of the expansionist dream of the Japanese Empire. Instead, the United States emerged as the major power in the Pacific.

Pearl Harbor: it looked like a victory for Japan
but it ultimately ensured the Empire's defeat

That’s a position the US has held on to, sometimes grimly, ever since. It’s flexed its military muscle, not always with success – viz. Vietnam – but it has relied above all on its huge economic and commercial strength. The greatest challenge in recent decades has come from a new source, China. That was a threat that Obama spent a great deal of time and effort countering. Notably, he negotiated the Trans Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement between twelve nations not including China.

The election of Donald Trump, however, killed the deal. He made it clear that he would drop it on his first day in office. That was a piece of news that must have been received with celebrations in Beijing: it marks a withdrawal by the US leaving the field open to China.

The attack on Pearl Harbor was a triumph of wishful thinking over good sense. By overreaching, Japan ensured the victory of its enemy. Ideology led to a reckless military act that rebounded catastrophically on its perpetrator.

It’s a lesson Trump could do with learning. Governed by his ideological concerns, he too has behaved recklessly, in the commercial rather than the military field, and with a withdrawal rather than an advance, but, in all likelihood, with the same drastic effects. A decision his compatriots could well come to regret.

Especially if he persists with his apparent addiction to picking fights with China.

Lost in Translation? Lives may be at stake

In the grand days of the British Empire – or Empuh – we Engish speakers understood that if Johnny Foreigner didn’t understand what we were telling him, we just said it again, louder. After all, it was in his interests to cotton on, pronto. He needed to grasp our instructions to him before he faced the inevitable consequences of not carrying them out.

Things changed little as the accent of the English addressed to him became increasingly American. In fact, if anything, it was more important than ever that all those blighters, aliens as we liked to call them, learned God’s language because the stakes became even higher when they got into trouble for not knowing it.

The attitude prevails to this day, which is why foreign languages attract less and less attention in the curriculum of British schools. Or American ones, come to that.

Still. At the risk of sounding downright unpatriotic, this business of not knowing the lingo the lesser races speak has, occasionally, been a bit inconvenient to us rulers of the universe (sorry, don’t want you to think that we’re all of us rulers of the universe – I should have said the small number of us who take on the terrible burden of ruling the universe for the sake of all mankind). Take, for example, the run-up to that nasty spot of unpleasantness between the United States and the Empire of Japan. You know, in the Pacific, starting in December 1941. A business both sides could have well done without.

It seems things might have been just a bit helped by a better understanding of Japanese in the months before war broke out. Or, putting it another way, sometimes having a bit of information can be worse than having none at all. And if they’d grasped the language, the Yanks might have been considerably better off. Especially the ones who got killed or injured in said unpleasantness.

The Secretary of State of the time was Cordell Hull. And he had the benefit of code-breaking services that deserved their name of ‘Magic’. For instance, all messages from the Japanese Foreign Secretary Shigenori Tōgō to his negotiating in Washington were being cracked.

But then they had to be translated.

His translators led Hull to believe Tōgō had written to his team:

Well, the relations between Japan and the United States have reached the edge and our people are losing confidence in the possibility of ever adjusting them.

He should have read:

Strenuous efforts are being made day and night to adjust Japanese-American relations which are on the verge of rupture.

John Toland, who describes these exchanges in his invaluable book, The Rising Sun, tells us that many Japanese commentators think the translation errors of the time were deliberate. Toland doesn’t agree: “It is far more likely that the inaccuracies came from ignorance of the stylised Japanese used by diplomats. It is also possible that the hastily-trained translators wanted to make their copy more readable and interesting.”

The errors could be serious. For instance:

Conditions both within and without our empire are so tense that no longer is procrastination possible, yet in our sincerity to maintain pacific relationships between the Empire of Japan and the United States of America, we have decided, as a result of these deliberations, to gamble once more on the continuance of the parlays.

would have been better translated as:

The situation both within and outside the country is extremely pressing and we cannot afford any procrastination. Out of the sincere intention to maintain peaceful relations with the United States, the Imperial government continues the negotiations after thorough deliberations.

Worse still, the sentiment rendered as:

This time we are showing the limit of our friendship, this time we are making our last possible bargain, and I hope we can thus settle all our troubles with United States peaceably.

was really:

Now that we make the utmost concession in a spirit of complete friendliness for the sake of peaceful solution, we hope earnestly that the United States will, on entering the final stage of the negotiations, reconsider the matter and approach this crisis in a proper sprit with a view to preserving Japanese-American relations.

So what ensued was a dialogue of the deaf. Or perhaps deafness wasn’t the issue: we might say that, on the American side at least, what we had a team that was partially sighted – and that was perhaps worse than having no sight at all.

Pearl Harbor: a disaster that might have been avoided
with better knowledge of modern languages?

The negotiations, perhaps inevitably, failed. On 7 December, Japanese forces launched a devastating attack on Pearl Harbor. That started a war that would leave at least 2.5m Japanese dead and 106,000 Americans (in the Pacific Theatre).

And we still think that mastering foreign languages isn’t that important a goal?

Fighting yesterday's battles

Generals, it’s said, tend to fight the last war. As do admirals. Why, politicians too, and even their supporters.

It’s true that admirals, in learning their craft, often have to follow successful examples from the past. However, that’s only useful if conditions have remained the same. Sadly, they seldom do.

That can even happen when people make a valiant effort to get ahead of the game. Take US Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan. He researched the subject extensively and concluded that control of the sea was vital in war. The best way of winning such control was through a decisive action between great fleets, in which one would comprehensively defeat the other (see Trafalgar, for instance).

Mahan was read around the world. British sailors devoured his work. The German Kaiser insisted his senior officers study him. Even distant Japan learned the lessons, and applied them in its comprehensive defeat of the Russian imperial fleet in 1905. 

The world’s then dominant naval power, Britain, decided to protect its position by equipping itself with huge battleships. They would be built of steel not wood and have massive guns mounted in turrets so they could be swung to fire in multiple directions. They would be called Dreadnoughts and the first, the original HMS Dreadnought, was launched in 1906. Other nations quickly followed suit, spending huge sums on their own giant battleships. They included the US, even though it had already been home to the event that would make these leviathans obsolete.

Dreadnoughts: already the past
And one plane: harbinger of the future

In 1903, the Wright Brothers gave the first demonstration of controlled, steered flight in a heavier-than-air machine. It wasn’t obvious at the time but the successors to that prototype, together with the submarine, would mark the catastrophic end of the time of the battleship – even though, at that stage, it hadn’t even begun.

The power of submarine warfare was shown in World War 1. Submarines were the unseen enemy that sank merchant as well as military ships, destroying a nation’s ability to defend its trade links, and therefore ultimately – especially for an island nation – its ability to survive at all.

Surface navies were sidelined. Britain and Germany fought only one major sea battle, at Jutland, and whatever Mahan may have thought, it proved indecisive. Instead, all the aspirants after Nelsonian glory in the Royal Navy had to resign themselves to a much less inspiring though far more necessary task: convoy protection. Keeping merchant ships afloat despite submarine depredations was the only way to keep vital supplies flowing.

Air power was dramatically demonstrated in World War 2. In just two waves of attack on 7 December 1941, Japanese carrier-borne aircraft destroyed the battleships of the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. Just three days later, Japanese planes sank the British battleship Prince of Wales and her accompanying battlecruiser Repulse. The US fleet had been caught by surprise and sunk at anchor but the British ships had been at sea and fully prepared. No clearer illustration could be provided that battleships weren’t the decisive force at sea so many had believed: planes were. The era of the aircraft carrier had dawned. Just five months after Pearl Harbor, the US repelled a Japanese invasion force, at the battle of the Coral Sea – the first naval engagement in which the opposing fleets never sighted each other, instead battling it out through their aircraft.

Meanwhile, two submarine wars were being fought. In the Atlantic, the German U-boat offensive came close to starving Britain, but was ultimately defeated and, just as at the Coral Sea, the key factor was airpower: long range planes based in Iceland attacked submarines on the surface and hit them before they could dive. Meanwhile, the long-suffering Royal Navy had to spend most of its energy in the inglorious chore of guarding convoys.

In the Pacific, on the other hand, US submarines emerged victorious. In the last few months of the war, not a single tanker reached Japan, denying industry and the military of the fuel oil vital to prosecute the war. Japan’s failure to foresee the importance of submarine warfare and lay on counter-measures cost it dear.

Not everyone was caught up in the past. Some, in the Japanese and US navies alike, realised that new conditions had created the need for new doctrines. But many clung on to the old notions, particularly in Japan, where hankering for the decisive naval engagement between great ships survived until the end of the War.

They were looking backwards. It didn’t work. It was the people who moved with the times who came out on top.

A lesson we still need to learn. In Britain today, we have a Right that looks back nostalgically to a time when the country bestrode the world alone and didn’t need to depend on others. And we have a Left that longs to fight the battles of the forties and fifties again, where our salvation apparently lay with state control, forgetting that when we actually tried that out, the State proved more stifling than inspiring.

Ah, well. Yesterday’s battles. So much more fun to fight, even though they don’t prepare us particularly well for the far more complex ones we face today.

As the champions of the battleship discovered.

Deadly centenary

A hundred years ago today, nearly 60,000 British young men – not for the most part soldiers, but civilians in uniform – who had been reasonably fit and well in the morning, were injured or dead in the evening.

Nearly 20,000 of that number had been killed. It remains the worst single day's losses by the British Army in its long and not always glorious, but usually bloody, history. The French, heavily engaged on another part of the front, at Verdun, were less involved but still lost 1500. The Germans, on the other side, lost 10,000 – 12,000.

This was the first day of the Battle of the Somme. It was the British Army’s first massive engagement of the First World War. In the end, the battle would last another 140 days and cost 1.3 million lives. Both the French and the British lost 400,000 and the Germans 500,000.

To set that 1.3 million in context, the English city of Birmingham has a population of 1.1 million, the German city of Munich 1.26 million and the French city of Marseille 800,000. The four-month battle had the equivalent effect of wiping out the entire population of any of those cities, and in the case of France, you could chuck in Lyon too.

Achievements of the Somme offensive

At its greatest extent, the Allied advance was five miles.

It was unfortunate that Lord Kitchener, probably the only British officer whose authority might have imposed a different plan from the one carried out, was drowned at sea. But even Douglas Haig, who had direct responsibility for the offensive, wasn’t anxious to attack on the Somme. He preferred an offensive near Ypres in Belgium, where the Germans were far less well dug in. He got his way a year later, in what came to be known as the Second Battle of Ypres, by which time the Germans had much improved their defences, so the battle was again a massacre and failure.

At the Somme, it didn’t help that the seven-day artillery barrage that preceded the offensive had little effect on the German trenches of even the barbed wire in front of them. Indeed, because the shells cut some paths through the barbed wire, it gave the Germans a clear indication of where to concentrate their fire when the British came.

It also didn’t help that the barrage stopped ten minutes before the assault started. Ten minutes were more than enough for the Germans to emerge from their deep dugouts and be ready to greet the British advance with the deadliest of fire.

Still, the battle wasn’t an entire failure. One of the aims was to relieve the pressure on the French at Verdun, and it achieved that. But did it achieve anything else?

Should the Germans or the British govern Tanganyka? Or isn’t it better to leave it to the Tanzanians?

Should the Germans or the Japanese hold on Tsingtao in China? Or is it best to leave it to the Chinese, so that the only legacy of that foreign occupation is quite a pleasant, light, German-style beer served in Chinese restaurants?

Is it appropriate that a government in Vienna should run Prague? Or could it be left to the Czechs?

For these things, the civilians in uniform died or were maimed. I suspect few people feel today that the cause they died for was worth the sacrifice. And the worst of it is that twenty years later, their heirs were called on to fight out the conflict again.

Leaving the only real lesson to learn today, the hundredth anniversary of that great killing, is that we should never, but never, do it again.

Terrorism: hardly a tactic refused by the West, and by no means an expression of power

The atmosphere today is febrile with the fear of terrorism. 

Not without reason. If the attacks on Paris prove anything, they prove that terrorists are capable of reaching right into the places we think of as safest and hit us there. That’s a prospect that makes ISIS seem frighteningly powerful.

We’d do well, however, not to be carried away by our natural fear. In particular, we mustn’t overstate the power of a terrorist movement. In reality, terrorism is precisely the opposite of the expression of power – it is a blind lashing out in impotence, by a movement incapable of exerting real power against its foes.

Nor should we make the mistake of thinking the West incapable of acting in equally terrorist ways. Indeed, we should remember that when the Western democracies went for terrorism, they wreaked incomparably more harm than ISIS ever has.

After the defeat of France by Nazi Germany, Britain was briefly left to fight on alone – although it wasn’t quite as isolated as that sounds, since it could draw on the support of a still substantial empire. However, Britain was in no state to wage an effective ground war against Germany. Indeed, when France and Britain together had decided to strike at Germany using ground forces, it was through an invasion at Narvik in Norway, designed to win access to Swedish iron ore supplies, and deny them to the Nazis. The campaign ended in the ignominious retreat of the French and British forces, and the defeat of Norway by Germany, which promptly occupied the country (as it had Denmark on the way).

At sea, British dominance was unchallenged. But Germany wasn’t fighting a naval war, apart from the submarine campaign against convoys supplying Britain – in which it was giving the Royal Navy a tough battle.

So, in its inability to achieve any kind of success on land, and fully committed in a defensive battle at sea, Britain could only turn to air power to produce some evidence to its population of effective action against the enemy. Hence was born what came to be called the strategic bombing campaign. Cutting through technical and apparently neutral terms, that was the mass bombing of German cities.

The thing about bombing cities is that the only thing it will certainly do is kill a lot of civilians. Indeed, something like 305,000 Germans were killed by this campaign. Nearly 800,000 were wounded. 7.5 million were made homeless.

Aftermath of the bombing of a German city in World War 2

Naturally, the campaign wasn’t openly described as terrorism in Britain (it was, equally naturally, in Germany). It was justified as a way of degrading German industrial capacity, in which it was a failure: production continued to grow throughout the war. However, it was also presented as a means of breaking the population’s willingness to support the war. The Area Bombing Directive of Valentine’s Day 1942 (history is full of ironies) which began the carpet bombing of cities, set as its objective “to focus attacks on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular the industrial workers.” That really is the textbook definition of terrorism: deliberate targeting of a civilian population in order to destroy its morale.

The Germans used the same approach. Over 60,000 British deaths were caused by German bombing. The Germans were just as happy to adopt terrorist tactics as the British; only lack of resources prevented them causing the same level of damage.

So a first observation: it would take over 2000 attacks like last Friday’s in Paris to inflict on the French the kind of destruction the Allies wreaked in Germany. When it came to terror, we had the resources to be a lot more effective at it than ISIS is or ever will be.

And a second observation: it was no evidence of strength on the part of Britain, and later the USA. It’s hard to point to any advantage to the Allied cause that came from bombing German cities. Indeed, it often did us harm. As military historian Correlli Barnett has argued, the campaign diverted resources from providing air cover for convoys, driving Britain nearly to starvation at the height of the U-boat campaign. When it came to depleting German capacity, far more was achieved by bombing railways and canals. No, the bombing was the reaction of a nation that could see no way to win significant victories for the time being, lashing out at its enemies in the only way it could. It hardly mattered whether it did anything useful.

The use of terror tactics by ISIS is of the same order. It had some spectacular success initially in Iraq and Syria but now it’s bogged down. Terror is a way of venting its hatred against its enemies, whether in Lebanon, at Sharm El Sheikh, or in Paris, and it matters little whether it achieves anything for its cause.

In fact, it looks strongly as though ISIS is doing itself harm. It has brought down a Russian airliner and attacked Paris. That has suddenly brought together people who were having real trouble reaching any kind of common ground. We may even see NATO and Russia finally coordinating their actions in the Middle East to defeat ISIS, before considering the questions on which they have differences.

Rather like Japan attacking Pearl Harbor, ISIS may have woken a sleeping giant. That may seal its fate.

See what I mean? The use of terrorism doesn’t show power, it shows weakness. In this case, a possibly fatal weakness.

An early and illustrious exponent may explain why politicians indulge in so much BS

When it comes to BS, I’m sure most would agree that few can rival politicians. 

To be fair, I’ve worked, and even enjoyed working, with a number of salesmen (which includes women, by the way) who would give them a good run. Overall, however, I have to say that none achieve quite such outstanding mastery of BS as our statesmen.

Generally speaking, the ‘B’ in ‘BS’ stands for ‘Bull’. That’s why I was amused to come across a case of a fine BS performance by a politician where the ‘B’ stood for ‘Bird’.

The particular politician who established himself as a champion in this field was William Henry Seward. He would later win his place in history, firstly by being the front runner for the Republican US Presidential nomination in 1860. To the amazement of many, he failed to become the candidate, and then showed his quality by backing the rival who beat him, Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, at a time when the tradition was that candidates did not campaign for themselves, Seward did more to secure Lincoln’s election than any other man, canvassing 15 states, all but one of which went to his candidate in the general election, giving Lincoln the White House.

Seward then became Lincoln’s most valuable ally and his Secretary of State throughout the Civil War.

His great BS moment, however, came some time before all this. Back in 1856, then Senator Seward took legislative action to address the growing needs of US agriculture. At the time, one of the world’s main fertilisers was guano – sea bird excrement. BS, in fact.

Guano was mostly collected from islands on which the stuff had gathered for years or centuries. Rather like the Bull form of BS, which piles up in every increasing depth in our great legislative arenas.

Seward brought forward a proposal to give the US the right to occupy any guano island not already in the possession of a foreign nation. He was successful, and the Guano Island Law was enacted on 18 August 1856. Seward had made it clear that it was not intended to provide the United States with a means to extend its possessions, but only to give it access to sources of guano not claimed by anyone else, which could be given up later, once the supply had been exhausted.

However, though it left in this option for the US to withdraw from such islands, it didn’t make it obligatory to do so. Guano ceased to be a particularly useful fertiliser, as other new forms became available, soon after the law was adopted. But of the more than 100 islands claimed, the United States still holds on to twelve. One at least is relatively well known.

Within six months of its attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, which failed to eliminate the US threat to Japanese naval dominance of the Pacific, Japan had another go at achieving that aim. On 6 and 7 June 1942, a major battle was fought that cost Japan four aircraft carriers to the US’s one. By then, Japan no longer had the resources to make good such losses. In other words, it was a turning point in the war in the Pacific, after which Japan never again had the opportunity to knock out the US as a naval rival.

By what name do we call that battle? By the name of the American naval base that was the key to the Japanese attack: Midway.

Idyllic Midway Atoll.
But the airstrip shows that the military matters more than the guano

The Midway atoll was a collection of islands seized by the US under the provisions of Seward’s Guano Island Act. One of the twelve such possessions that was never given up. Even though the guano is, presumably, no longer anything more than a bit of an unsightly nuisance.

All this, I feel, makes Seward something of a BS star. I mean, how many politicians have achieved anything of such lasting effect from mere BS? He became a major American statesman later, one of the great Secretaries of State, but you have to admit that you can already see from his guano measure, that he would leave a lasting mark on American history.

Incidentally, the Guano Islands Act has never been repealed. It’s on the US statute book to this day. It’s still in effect.

Perhaps that’s why so many politicians go in for so much BS: they know from Seward’s example that it can be of historic importance.

Sadly, however, they seldom get beyond the Bull variety.

From Japan: a striking study of death in war, and another of peace in death

Don’t get me wrong: The Eternal Zero is not a great film. There’s far too much overacting, some of the sentiment is nothing short of cheesy, and the use of massed violins in the background whenever the plot gets poignant is so overstated you have to smile at it.

No. What makes The Eternal Zero worth watching is that it’s a Japanese view of the Japanese side in World War II, and that’s immensely refreshing.

The story starts with the discovery by a young woman and her younger brother that the man they have always called grandfather, is in fact the second husband of their grandmother and the stepfather, rather than natural father, of their mother. Their blood grandfather, Kyuzo Miyabe, was an airman of the Japanese Imperial Navy, killed in a 1945 Kamikaze mission. His role gives the film its title: he flew Mitsubishi Zero fighters.

The Mitsubishi Zero

The film has been criticised as a glorification of the Japanese war effort, which surprised me. It struck me as a well-crafted denunciation of the war. As the young people find out more about the film’s true protagonist, Miyabe, they get to know a man whose only objective in the war was to survive it and to return, alive, to his family. Already, after taking part in the attack on Pearl Harbor, where he points out to the triumphant young pilots that there was nothing to cheer about since they sank not a single aircraft carrier, he realises that the war is lost.

From then on, therefore, he sees every life lost as a waste. Some of the finest young Japanese men are being recruited as pilots; he believes that they have much more to contribute to Japan alive, after the fighting is over, than dead in a lost cause. That view only intensifies when he finds himself training these men to take part in Kamikaze missions.

Sacrificial victims in a hopeless cause

Did anyone hold these views in Japan back then? I don’t know. But it’s a pleasure to see them being advanced by a film maker today, as a legitimate view of the war, especially when leading figures, such as Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, are still not prepared to face up to the shame and waste of the nation’s war effort. And whatever its other failings, the film communicates its central message powerfully.

So how did a man committed to surviving manage to die as a Kamikaze pilot? Well, that’s the central irony of the film, and you’ll have to watch it to find out. In my view, the explanation it gave worked and wrapped up the plot well. If, perhaps, a little cheesily…

Still, well worth watching for all that.

Departures – a film I keep coming back to

Since I’m on the subject of Japanese films, did you ever see Departures? Now that really is extraordinarily good. The fact was recognised in its winning the 2009 Oscar for best foreign film (beating Waltz with Bashir which is maybe a little over the top – the Israeli study of the horror of the invasion of Lebanon is outstanding).

Departures is the tale of a young cellist with a Tokyo symphony orchestra that goes bankrupt. He’s forced to find a new job, for which he heads back to the old family home he has inherited, out in the country, where he was brought up by his mother after his father left them. He takes a job with a company called ‘Departures’. However, it isn’t a travel agency, which would have been honourable, but a company concerned with that other, final departure we all have to face, to an undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller ever returns.

The handling of the dead is, apparently, regarded as far from honourable, leading to terrible shame when the truth finally comes out.

The film deals with issues of life as well as of death, it handles loss and joy, shame and vindication, with sensitivity and poignancy. It explores what it is to be a parent, a partner or a child. It shows how colleagues can react with loyalty and support. Above all, it shows how the sensitive and, in this instance, supremely skilful treatment of a dead body can contribute to making harrowing loss bearable.

A bereavement accompanied can be more bearable

Strongly to be recommended.

Art for the pleasure of Art, thanks to Carl Randall

It was refreshing to hear Carl Randall speak about his paintings, at a new exhibition that has opened at the Berloni Gallery in London’s West End.

We first came across his work at the National Portrait Gallery, which had honoured him with a BP travelling prize that had enabled him to spend time in Japan and produce a series of paintings which kept us spellbound by their detail, their vivacity and their enchanting – sometimes humorous – ability to present Japanese life as it strikes a foreign visitor.

Exactly the atmosphere of bustle and liveliness of a busy Japanese station

So going to hear him speak about his paintings was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up. It proved well worth it.

First of all, because he talked plainly and simply about his paintings, about his time in Japan, and above all about what he’d been trying to do. On display were more of the works we’d come to associate with him: packed with people and places, breathing life and bustle, enjoyment or concentration.

Carl Randall introducing his paintings to us
at the Berloni Gallery

But we also discovered a new side of his art. There were some swift stolen sketches of travellers in trains, absorbed in themselves, their phones, their music, or just passing the time on the way to work. 

And then other pieces, as large as the ones we already knew, but largely empty – as he explained, he was working to a more Japanese idiom, in which “negative space” (what I’ve always thought of as “white space”) isn’t shunned, but used to heighten the impact of the detailed painting. He had several Japanese ink works, on Japanese paper, in which he’d used a single model or perhaps two models, repeatedly, sketching their heads over and over, but leaving wide areas untouched. The ink sometimes ran, sometimes splashed, sometimes simply soaked differently into the absorbent paper, giving an engagingly unpredictable effect to the final result.

Japanese faces in the Japanese style
Japanese ink on Japanese paper

He’s working now on a series of fifteen “portraits of London”. That’ll be fun, to see him take on with the same verve and gusto, scenes from another country and another city, and one he knows in a very different way, as his home rather than the objective of an outsider’s visit.

But I described listening to Randall as “refreshing”. One of the more refreshing aspects was the way he kept pointing out the almost gratuitous nature of some of his techniques. He often subverts perspective, showing a large figure in the distance and a smaller one in the front.

“I do it because I like it,” he explained, “I like the flattening.”

I enjoyed that because it reminded me of many conversations I’ve had with people who’ve earnestly assured me that Jane Austen, or Graham Greene, or Salman Rushdie deliberately wrote something or other. In other words, they want to tell me about the author’s intent. But they have no idea of what the author intended and in the first two cases, they certainly can’t even ask, as they’re both dead; even in the case of Rushdie, they’re unlikely to get the chance to check, and even if they did, they might be disappointed with the answer.

So I was delighted when Randall assured us that his flattening of perspective didn’t symbolise anything in particular, except for his pleasure in doing it. That doesn’t stop a viewer seeing symbolism in it, and perfectly legitimately – a viewer, or a reader, has every right to see symbols in a work of art, and it matters not a jot that the author or painter intended none of it. After all, what something symbolises is a matter for the observer, not for the creator; if you see it, then it’s there.

But it was highly refreshing to hear an artist assure us with great sincerity that it wasn’t there because he deliberately put it there.

So we passed great hour or two, in good company, with fine paintings. 

Want to know more? Check his website.