Reading 29

“Books of the era reveal a steady increase in derisive anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States—not to mention all the anti-Japanese movies of the 1930s. They (the ‘Japs’) had such bad, astigmatic eyes, it was claimed, that they couldn’t possibly fly sophisticated planes. Aboard the battle cruiser Repulse, shortly before she was sunk by Japanese dive bombers, senior officers were heard to observe that ‘those Japs are bloody fools . . . can’t fly . . . they can’t see at night, and they’re not well trained.’ As late as 1939, one American wrote, ‘The Japanese as a race have defects of the tubes of the inner ear, just as they are generally myopic. This gives them a defective sense of balance . . . the one physical sense in which an aviator is not permitted to be deficient.’

“Hence, the belief that the Japanese would simply never dare provoke a war with the United States was widespread. When the first Zero fighter attacked, senior Allied officers could not believe that the Japanese could independently design such an aircraft. In the Philippines, nine hours after Pearl Harbor, General MacArthur insisted that the pilots could not have been Japanese but must have been white mercenaries. One distinguished New York Times journalist, Otto Tolischus, would proclaim that the ‘Japanese mind works in a more elemental way . . . as a woman’s is supposed to do.’ Even an erudite curator from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington could inform President Franklin D. Roosevelt, encouragingly, that ‘Japanese skulls are some two thousand years less developed than ours.’”

- Alistair Horne, Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century (2015)

“New recruits heard stories about the enemy: ‘They hide up in the trees like wildcats. Sometimes when they attack, they scream like a bunch of terrified cattle in a slaughter house. Other times they come on so quiet they wouldn’t scare a snake.’ One marine remarked, ‘I wish we were fighting against Germans. They are human beings, like us … But the Japs are like animals … They take to the jungle as if they had been bred there, and like some beasts you never see them until they are dead.’ It was popularly believed that the Japanese could see in the dark, and survive on a diet of only grubs and roots. And one War Department pamphlet, adapted from a training film and entitled The Jap Soldier, informed readers that marines in the Solomon Islands believed they could detect the presence of the enemy from their odour, which they described as the ‘gamey smell of animals.’”

- Frances Larson, Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found (2014)