Some just hated Stalin for being a genocidal jerk, some wanted to get out of the horrible POW camps, some joined the Nazis to become big people in their local area, etc.
They weren’t completely trusted. But for various tasks like Flak guns, minor guard duty, etc., they were good enough. Some also ended up working in death camps which made disposing of these eyewitnesses guilt-free to the Nazis.
The Western Allies promised to Stalin that all USSR citizens would be returned after the war. (There were several Hiwi units around Normandy and many were captured after D-Day.) Captured Hiwis were doomed and they knew it.
From memory the book I read (more than a decade ago and I freely admit my memory might be off) the reason schools were identifiable was that they had playgrounds and fields smack in the middle of otherwise built up areas and were distinctive.
I seem to recall from Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag”, that it was standard operational practice in the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, that anyone in the Soviet armed forces who had been captured by the Germans and survived, more-or-less automatically got ten years in the Gulag – reasons, a mix of extremist-ideological, and pragmatic (“who knew what subversive ideas these guys might have picked up in their time west of the USSR?”). Overall, not a lot of distinction was drawn between those who had blamelessly suffered and starved as POWs, and those who had enlisted to fight for Germany, and fallen into Soviet captivity at the end of the war – “ten years for all of them”, except for the most blatant and high-placed traitors.
If I remember rightly from Solzhenitsyn: mostly, the guys in the camps were (on the basis that nothing in Stalin-land made any sense anyway) philosophical about it all, and made friends with each other, and in their meagre free time, enjoyed verbally re-fighting their battles with each other of a few years previously.
It’s a constant source of (nitpicking, perhaps) irritation that far too many modern films and TV series set in WW2 seem to ignore that in varying degrees, with exterior lights showing, doors opening from lighted interiors, curtains that reveal interior lighting and so on. Even my generation (born just after WW2) regularly heard tales, often mainly comic, of how the air raid wardens going round banging on people’s front doors - and hauling them before the courts - if there was the slightest chink of light showing: and I’d imagine it was a lot tougher in Nazi-controlled countries.
Answering that question for Germany, it should be kept in mind that Germany had (and to a large extent still has) a quite differentiated system of secondary education. There is no concept of a high school in the American sense - there are different kinds of high schools depending on the future career plans. The most prestigious of them is the Gymnasium which ends with the Abitur diploma that was (and to a lesser extent still is) a requirement for university education. In the 1940s, Gymnasium curricula were still largely centered on what one could call a classic liberal education. Students would study Latin, ancient Greek, and German literature, and mathematics and natural sciences were present to a lesser degree. Other types of secondary schools, such as Realschule and Volksschule, were more geared towards a more vocational and less academic education.
During the war, these principles remained pretty much intact. There was a component of paramilitary training - not just hiding in shelters, but actually operating military equipment - added to school curricula, but that had started years before the beginning of the war, and it did not replace the traditional curricula. There was also an ideological indoctrination incorporated into curricula, but it never grew so big as to crowd out the more traditional subjects, which kept being taught as duing peacetime.
Pressing unwilling people into military service was actually pretty common outside of the Western Allies. There’s one poor Korean man who was drafted by the Japanese, captured by the Soviets, forced to fight for the Red Army, captured by the Germans, forced to fight for the Germans, and finally captured by the Americans on the other side of the world from his home.
Inspired by the fascinating posts by Schnitte and TokyoBayer, and realizing that I didn’t really answer Velocity’s question about what information kids in Japan got about the war, I went back and spent a couple hours going over more childhood memories with Dad.
I got quite a bit more about his general experience at school and some specific wartime memories, but most of it wasn’t directly related to Velocity’s questions. I can post them anyway if there is any interest. His school still exists and has a web site here: Jiyu Gakuen.
What he did say on the subject of wartime propaganda and information was this:
Most of their daily information came via radio. He recalls being rather uninterested in what he considered to be boring adult-oriented news, so he didn’t pay that much attention to what was said. He does remember hearing the announcement about Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway. Midway in particular was played down as not a defeat, but not really a victory either. The announcer seemed to be saying that there was nothing to worry about and the navy is just fine thanks, nothing to see here folks.
The only other radio broadcast he remembers is the one announcing the bombing of Hiroshima with “a new type of special bomb” that scientists later confirmed to be an atomic bomb.
In general there was no real sense of how well or badly the war was going, other than they were still fighting and to keep up their sense of patriotism and courage. Dad said that he only really realized they had lost when the war ended and he was sent back to his home in Tokyo. There he saw foreign soldiers everywhere and it finally hit him that Japan had been defeated and occupied.
Regarding information, like bomb shelters and military equipment and what to do in case of invasion, it was more theoretical and less immediate than what the German children experienced, as per Schnitte’s posts. Since there was no land invasion of Japan, and his school was outside Tokyo, there was very little preparation for resistance, and Dad never felt like he was in any real danger.
From roughly mid-1942 until the end of the war, a Japanese Imperial Army officer was stationed at the school as a teacher. Dad remembers the officer rather fondly, noting that he was very liberal and fatherly. The officer never yelled or beat the kids. Instead he encouraged open discussion and lead by example.
Once a week, all the kids were instructed by the officer in marching, formations, discipline, how to follow orders, and general indoctrination into martial values. There was no training in actual weapons, equipment or fighting techniques.
Once a year, an inspector would be sent to evaluate the entire school’s progress in the officer’s class. They would put on a parade for him and demonstrate their marching and attention to doctrine. Apparently the teaching officer was so beloved by the kids that the yearly inspection always went well and they scored very high marks.
Dad’s brother, who was in a different school, told him that they couldn’t stand their officer and hated their military training. Their yearly inspections went poorly and the inspectors would go away quite infuriated. It was suspected that the teachers at that middle school were anti-war and thus protected the kids from any real consequences from their poor inspections.
The Ministry of Education, at some point, banned all English language classes. The Principal at Dad’s school ignored the ban and kept teaching English. Dad credits this with giving him an advantage after the war, when he had to communicate frequently with American personnel.
I think that is everything really relevant to the OP, hope that helps!
prongo, another excellent post. I almost wish I were still married to my first wife so that I could talk to my ex-FIL again. I lived with them for 18 months and he and I shared many conversations while my wife was talking to her mother. We lived in Hino-shi, so about the same distance from Tokyo proper, but more straight west rather than north west.
Jiyu-gakuen (Liberal Academy would be a rough translation) was by nature less conservative than the schools my ex-inlaws attended. I knew of it and it has a good reputation.
One general note about teachers in prewar and wartime Japan is that they grew up in the age of strict compulsory military education which was becoming increasingly hardcore, ultra nationalistic. The extend to which this influenced the psychic of the nation cannot be overstated. The teachers would have gone through this indoctrination, but to their credit many of them rejected it. It did leave a lasting custom of obeying authority which complemented the Japanese society’s value placed on group cohesiveness.
It also helps to explain the reason which the Japanese were so quick to move beyond the war and to wholesale reject what occurred. “Dad” would struggle to explain this. There was also a taboo among many Japanese to really talk about the pre-war and wartime periods.
The father of one girlfriend had been a Zero pilot based in the Philippines and had somehow managed to not only avoid losing his life in the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, but also survived to the end of the war. He simply never discussed the war with his family so literally those were the only things she knew. She never mentioned that she had an American boyfriend.
One thing which people born into Western societies often fail to understand is that liberal thinking is relatively new in countries with younger democracies. Japan was a still only a few generations out of a feudal society and still carried many of those trappings. Even now, Japanese education does not encourage independent thinking, but rather how to study for tests. It was even much more so during the war.
prongo if you don’t mind a personal question, did you grow up in Japan, the States or somewhere else?
Also, do you mind asking your father about how rationing affected them? My ex-FIL was in the Den’en Chofu area, a more affluent area and they were much better off than many of the residents of Tokyo, many of whom spent hours a day attempting to buy food off the black market when available, or stealing when they couldn’t otherwise.
My ex-MIL grew up in Hirai, in the shitamachi part of the older, densely populated working class section (which is why it was targeted for the great raid) but her father was a green grocer and they had better access to vegetables and could barter for rice. No one had gasoline let along cars, of course.
While Japan wasn’t directly invaded, it was thoroughly defeated, with insufficient food for the civilian population. Widespread absenteeism due to illness from malnutrition and having to spend time attempting to obtain food and other necessities hurt their already weakened manufacturing.
I live in the States, but I grew up in Canada, where Dad had emigrated to for work after he finished university.
Dad lived in the Nakano district and said the worst of the bombing missed them as he believes there were no important targets nearby. He remembers being perpetually hungry, but not starving. Their daily diet was mainly cattle feed, or what used to be fed only to cattle. Vegetables like giant yams and pumpkins were a staple.
There was no milk or butter for the adults. Only the children were permitted milk and butter, and then only in small quantities. He does recall a very happy memory of the end of the war where he was given a whole stick of butter all to himself and he ate it like it was candy.
There was almost no meat or fish. The fishermen were afraid to go out into the bay for fear of being sunk by the Allies. The government helped to supplement their diet by issuing seed packets of what Dad calls “Edible Weeds” to plant in the family garden.
My grandfather would take a train, when it was actually running, to the countryside to buy what he could directly from the farmers. Dad’s uncle, aunt and grandmother, who lived in Takasaki, would visit regularly and always bring food with them. He is not sure how they obtained all the food, but they owned a Sake brewery and alcohol is usually a valuable trade good, so they probably bartered for it.
Beriberi was a real problem due to vitamin deficiency but his family managed to avoid any real health crisis. Overall he considers himself to have been very lucky and better off than most of the general population.
I get the impression that his school was not considered to be a typical example of Japanese schools. Dad said that the principal, Motoko Hani, was rather liberal and her philosophy for the school was “Learn by Working”, instead of the traditional liberal arts curriculum of book study. She was, however, very loyal to the Emperor and somewhat pro-war (according to my father anyway). So he thinks she was considered to be politically reliable and allowed to run the school without much oversight.
Thank you for the informative paragraphs on Japanese society and teachers. These are things I never learned and help me to understand Dad’s experiences and the people that influenced him as a child.
By coincidence, one of my uncles was also a Zero pilot, but based in Japan for the entire war as a pilot instructor. He too survived the war. I remember that driving with him was a terrifying experience. Uncle believed that since he used to be a fighter pilot AND he survived a terrible war, that he was essentially invincible and he drove like that. Crazy guy but very entertaining.
It missed them because Nakano wasn’t as densely populated at the time as it is now. Hachioji, further out on the Chuo line was burned.
They were simply targeting concentrations of homes. The trade winds over Japan made it completely impossible to aim the bombs from an altitude high enough to avoid the antiaircraft artillery. If they went against the winds, they would have too slow of ground speed and with the wind put it too fast for the aiming device. They switched to slow altitude night fire bombing with massage raids of hundreds of bombers. It took a certain concentration of houses to permit that that sort of strategy.
Yes, white rice was long gone for the average Japanese at least by mid '44. By the summer of '45 official rations couldn’t produce enough energy for work, so special workers, such those in war related industries (which was pretty much of what was left by then) were given additional rations but even those were inadequate.
The situation was getting increasingly worse towards the end of the war. Japan’s sugar was primarily imported from Formosa, its Taiwanese colony and Okinawa and the blockage has severely restricted those imports. Once Okinawa was invaded they lost all of that.
Food which the Japanese seized in the other conquered territories often rotted in overseas warehouses because they couldn’t transport it to Japan. (While the natives starved, but that’s another thread.)
A lot of the rice was grown in Kyushu and Hokkaido, by the end of the war they were having increasingly having difficulties transporting anything those islands. The USAAF had taken extensive surveys of the types of damage done from the bombings in Germany and where starting to apply those lesson Japan, which involved further attacks on transportation.
If the Japanese hadn’t of surrendered in August, then hundreds of thousands – if not over a million – would have lost their lives to starvation and disease.
Certainly the exception and no where near the rule, although some others also exists. Have you read Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window? by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, a TV personality? Very similar in many regards at her small school located actually within Tokyo.
As far as pro war, there simply wasn’t any way for people to voice opposing opinions otherwise. I haven’t read any accounts of really fanatically pro war people outside of the military. Certainly a principal would not have voiced any internal hesitation to her students.
As for the emperor, Westerners get this completely wrong. They hear that Japanese considered the Emperor “divine” and get an image of the Inca Emperor Atahualpa
who had to be obeyed even after he was captured and held prisoner by the Spanish.
Rather than “divine” then I think the concept of “holy” better expresses how he was regarded by his subjects. Japan had undergone that life altering transition from a feudal society, with men carrying swords and wearing topknots, to a modern society working in factories and wearing suits is less than 50 years, all of which can enacted only a generation prior to the war.
In other words, the grandparents of those alive during the war had gone from living in a quasi-fixed caste to economic competition, from kimono to dresses, from human pulled rikusha to trains. Changes which had taken place over a gradual period of hundreds of years in the West were abruptly forced upon the people in less than a lifetime.
Through all of this, the one enduring symbol of the uniqueness of Japan was the Emperor, and one which was hijacked by the ultra-nationalists to make even more of a cult of the position (but not the personality).
When I first started working in Japan in the late 80s and early 90s (I first lived there in the early 80s) there were men of your father’s generation in the workforce. I read extensively about Japanese society and the people in order to better understand them. I don’t know if you have had the opportunity to read it, but one of the books I highly recommend is Japanese Society by Dr. Chie Nakane. Written in 1970, it describes the vertical nature of relationships of that and previous generations. If one wishes to understand the Japanese military decisions in WWII or post-war to current Japanese political intrigue, that book needs to be memorized. I worked for corporations in the 1990s which were depicted perfectly in that tome.
He is lucky that the war ended as he would have been slated to be a kamikaze pilot in the final stand.