Is Hitler Running Japan?

(See Cover)

To Suzuki-san, Japan's man in the street, this was a day of days. By special dispensation of the Son of the Sun, he could take a bite of sweetmeats, and he was allowed enough extra sake to make the New Order race through his tight little veins. He could stand in the open places and shout banzai for General Yamashita until he was froggy. He could go to the plaza by the moat and watch, with a tingle in his buttocks, as The Emperor himself rode out on his charger White Snow, showing his unbearably beautiful self to the bowing thousands. He could meander into Hibiya Park and listen to the public gloating.

If he stayed long enough, he would see a tall white man, with huge shoulders and a crunching jaw, get to his feet and shout, in clear Japanese: "Japan and Germany. . . . Germany and Japan. ..."

Suzuki-san probably would know who this speaker was: Major General Eugen Ott, German Ambassador to Tokyo. But he probably would not know why this foreigner's tone was so cordial, his eye so gleamy, his smile so quick. He would not know why General Ott was so warm whenever he mentioned the name of Lieut. General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the conqueror of Singapore, the hero of this day of days.

Not a Tool. The reason was this: General Yamashita, perhaps more than any other Japanese general, represents the extreme pro-German element in Japan. That he should have been the one to take Singapore was cause for special satisfaction to Eugen Ott. This event-considering the showing of the unhappy Italians-marked the first great milestone of Axis collaboration. It promised much for the future, not only of Japan, but of Germany as well.

The word for this event was cooperation. In the democracies the final mistaken hangover from the idea that the Japanese were little monkeys, just playing at the game of mankind, was the idea that the Japanese were little lackeys, just playing Germany's game. There was no basis in fact for the impression that Adolf Hitler had ordered, or blackmailed, or even wheedled Japan into its southward drive for riches. Japan wanted to be rich. Japan had begun the process of solving problems with the sharp edge of a sword back in 1931, two years before Hitler came to power. Japan is not Germany's tool.

The Pupils. German-Japanese military relations began in the year that Tomoyuki Yamashita was born, 1885. The Japanese, when they first opened themselves to the world, had modeled their fighting forces on the French. But France's humiliation in the Franco-Prussian War eventually turned the Japanese genius for emulation toward Germany. In 1885 a student of Marshal von Moltke, Major Meckel, went to Japan with a military mission to teach the sword swingers the smell of powder.

Meckel taught them the principles of Clausewitz, which they eagerly took over, revamped, stamped Made in Japan. After a victory at Liao-Yang in the Russo-Japanese War, Field Marshal Prince Iwao Oyama cabled Meckel: "We hope you are proud of your pupils."

Prussian of the East. Tomoyuki Yamashita's exposure to Germanics came early. His course of studies at the Imperial Military Staff College was interrupted shortly before World War I by an order to go to Germany and have a look around. Kaiser Wilhelm, then in his finest military feather and almost ready for war, had done quite a little chanticleering about the then fashionable Yellow Peril, but there were many in Berlin who regarded London as the real root of all evil. Among them was a young philosopher named Karl Haushofer (now Adolf Hitler's theorist on geopolitics), who had met Yamashita in Japan in 1908 and now befriended him, publicly accoladed the Japanese as "the Prussians of the East," and sent Yamashita home fat with admiration for German militarism.

In 1916 Yamashita graduated from the Staff College in Tokyo. Two of his classmates were Hideki Tojo, now Japan's Premier, and Hoshira Oshima, now Japan's Ambassador to Berlin. Tojo, Yamashita and Oshima at once threw themselves into the Young Officers' clique, a fiercely burning furnace of Japanese militarism. As long as World War I lasted, these young faggots burned with a single flame: they were hot for Japan to take advantage of the war and move in on China.

It did not take long, after the war, for Japan to cozy up to its recent enemy, Germany. Oshima and Yamashita were dispatched to Europe-Oshima became a military attache in Berlin; Yamashita, after a short stay in Germany, went to Poland, where he worked up a first-class hate against nearby Bolshevism.

From 1927 to 1930 he was military attache in Vienna. There he found a great friend in the present Colonel General Alexander Loehr, Commander in Chief of the Fourth German Air Fleet. He made many trips to German airfields and factories.

The Martial Years. The next decade saw Japan on the march, first in Manchuria, then in China. Yamashita, who served a term in the War Office as Chief of the Military Affairs Division, began to talk Nazi-fashion. "War," he said, "is the mother of creation." Japan, he cried, was a have-not. Morals, he decreed, must be simon-pure.

When the "China Incident" broke out, Yamashita fought in North China under the command of another Germanophile, General Count Juichi Terauchi. Count Terauchi, who has since visited Germany (see cut), was last week named Supreme Commander of the entire southwestern Pacific theater.

Yamashita's experience in North China was rigorous preparation for his recent labors. He commanded on the tangled, hilly Shansi front and had to combat the best of China's guerrillas. He used many of their war tricks in Malaya.

Visit of the Spirit. In 1939 the late German ace and parachute expert, Ernst Udet, visited Japan and inspected the Japanese Air Force. He is said to have reported to Hermann Goring that Japanese flyers, though brave and willing, were no sky-beaters. Part of the trouble was technical, part organizational. In 1940 Tomoyuki Yamashita was given his big chance, the job of reorganizing the Japanese Air Force. To his mind, the first thing to do was see how the Germans did it.

With a troupe of 40 assistants, General Yamashita went across Russia to Berlin. He arrived there in January 1941, and stayed almost six months. He and his men were taken in hand by German officers who had seen action in the Far East, notably the Navy's Vice Admiral Grassman and the Luftwaffe's Colonel General Otto Keller, Commander in Chief of the First German Air Fleet, now in Russia.

Yamashita inspected the broken Maginot Line and German fortifications on the French coast. He watched German flyers in training. He is said to have persuaded Hermann Goring, for whom he had wangled a decorative bauble, the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun, to let him fly in a raid over Britain.

But the big event was his talk with Hitler. "I felt," he said afterward, "that in the mind of Hitler there was much of spiritual matters, transcending material plans. When I met the Fuehrer he said that since boyhood he had been attracted by Japan. He read carefully reports of Japan's victory over Russia when he was only 17 years old and was impressed by Japan's astonishing strength."

The Fuehrer, he said, promised to remember Japan in his will, by instructing the Germans "to bind themselves eternally to the Japanese spirit." In fact, General Yamashita was so hopped up that he said: "In a short time, something great will happen. You just watch and wait."

Yamashita persuaded the Germans to let him have more than 250 technicians, engineers and instructors. He went home. He performed a major operation, a most significant operation, on Japan's Air Force.

Teaching Teacher. Japanese military aviation had been built on a dream. The Italian Giulio Douhet had dreamed of great fleets of heavy bombers roaring over the enemy and, presto, wiping him out. And so the Japanese built heavy bombers, fleets of them. But these fleets merely nibbled at the edges of Chinese vastnesses of terrain and courage.

In Germany Yamashita had been excited by the Luftwaffe's function as heavy artillery mounted on hawks' wings. He had acquired licenses to build Stukas and light attack bombers. He had also got the rights for the 800-horsepower B.M.W.-132 radial motor, and for certain precision instruments made by Patin and Telefunken.

The result is the Air Force which so far has had its way in the southwest Pacific. It is not the Air Force of the brutal, aimless, bootless raids of Chungking. It has been as smooth as a team of riveters tossing white-hot rivets into tiny buckets, or driving them cleanly home. In Malaya this Air Force confused and broke the British, made their calm confidence look like childish complacency.

That Air Force actually taught its teacher, Adolf Hitler, some tricks. In skillful use of the torpedo bomber, it excelled anything the Germans had devised. In speed of maintenance, fueling and supply far from home base, it suggested the solution of problems which had seemed formidable to the Germans. In widespread yet effective dispersion of effort, it gave the Germans something to ponder.

This was the extent of Nazi influence on Japanese fighting. The Germans did not ram anything down Yamashita's throat. He asked for advice. Intelligently he sought a better way. Flexibly he applied it. In his ability to learn the lessons of a quick war quickly, Tomoyuki Yamashita proved himself a very good soldier.

Whither Collaboration? German-Japanese collaboration will undoubtedly go far beyond anything Tomoyuki Yamashita himself can command. Eventually it may involve a synchronized German-Japanese squeeze on India. It may, sooner than that, involve a squeeze on Russia.

It was probably not a coincidence that Japan's commanders in the southern drive --Yamashita, Doihara, Honma, Terauchi --are from the next-to-top military drawer. Still neatly folded away in the very top drawer are Japan's very best-Itagaki, Sugiyama, Nishio. They may be in reserve for the crucial attack on Russia.

If they lead an attack on Russia, they will not be doing so because Adolf Hitler orders them to. They will be doing so because they are able and ready to do it. They will be able to do it because they- especially their Tomoyuki Yamashita-were able to learn lessons well.

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