War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War by John W. Dower

4.5/5 stars

I was reminded of this disturbing book after a comment recently made by a Chinese security expert, Wang Jisi, who described the growing rivalry between the United States and China as a conflict between the “Yellow race” and “White people.” We have had a war defined in those terms before, of course, and it culminated in nuclear holocaust: The Pacific war between America and Japan. We tend to think of World War II as an ideological battle between democracy, fascism, and communism. In Europe, that was a reasonably accurate depiction. In the Pacific, though, the conflict was understood straightforwardly as a war between whites and Asians. War Without Mercy is the story of that war.

In the Pacific, both sides saw the enemy in primarily racial terms. The Americans, still living in the Jim Crow-era at home, had a rich store of negative stereotypes to draw upon when describing a racial enemy, whereas the Japanese were in the awkward position of needing to denigrate Westerners whom they also felt had recently taught them modern civilization. The Americans depicted the Japanese in their propaganda as subhuman, yellow “monkey-men,” with an irrational, fanatic, superstitious and sexually repressed culture. The Japanese meanwhile called Americans white “demons,” but focused their racial propaganda more on the exaltedness of their own race.

The war between Americans and Japanese was fought much more savagely than the war between Americans and Germans. No quarter was given to the captured, let alone civilians. Skulls, teeth, and bones were proudly displayed souvenirs taken from the tortured dead. U.S. officials expressed open glee at reports of tens of thousands of yellow “Jap” civilians incinerated in bombings. The mass internment of Japanese-American civilians at home also made perfect sense to many under the logic of race war. Americans viewed the Pacific War as a conflict to stop the “Rising Tide of Color,” while the Japanese saw it as an attempt to establish their own racial supremacy in Asia. Because there was not really an ideological dispute between the two, such as an intellectual conflict between communism and liberalism, for propaganda purposes it made sense to define the conflict as a war for supremacy between inferior and superior races. Once the war was understood on such uncompromising terms, the brutality could escalate without limit. By the end, the nuclear genocides of Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki just seemed a logical conclusion.

You should take this book seriously. It is a sobering reminder of how terrible a conflict between the U.S. and China could be. Just as in the Pacific War, there is little ideological competition between the two countries so an emerging understanding of the conflict in terms of race is now filling the vacuum. America does not really understand itself primarily as a white country any more, but Chinese elites have a distinctly 19th century political perspective and seem willing to get the ball rolling with a racial framing to any future conflict. Let’s pray it does not come to that. If it ever did, however, I expect the same pathologies that made the Pacific War so brutal will raise their heads from the swamps once again.