The operations of Chiang Kai Chek against the Japanese are another
example of rejecting the enemy's style; over the enormous terrain of
China, the defending armies could scatter and hide from aircraft; the
cities fell or were gutted by fire; but the people moved around them,
the armies remained. Japan's attack on Britain and ourselves began
with islands, where the lesson of China could not be applied; and the
islands were dependencies, not free nations like China, so the
psychology of defense was also different; in the opening phases there
was no choice and the Japanese forced us to accept their way of making
war. Their way, it appears, is appropriate to their beliefs, their
requirements in food, their capacity to imitate Europe, and dozens of
other factors, not precisely similar to ours. Their experience and
outlook in life and ideas of honor may lead to the suicide bomber;
ours do not. Our dive bombers feel no shame if they miss a target;
they have a duty which is to save their ships and return for another
try; it is against the whole natural tradition of the west that a man
should kill himself for the honor of a ruler; we would not send out an
army with orders to gain honor by death, as we prefer to gain honor by
victory. So in the true sense it would be suicidal for us to imitate
the Japanese; our heroism-to-the-death is the arrival, at the final
moment, of a last reserve of courage and devotion; it is not a planned
bravery, nor a communal devotion, it is as private as liberty--or
death.
Our heroism rises out of our lives. Our science of victory will have
to be based on our lives, too, on the way we manufacture, play games,
read newspapers, eat and drink and bring up children. It is the
function of our high command to translate what we can do best into a
practical military strategy. The civilian's function is to provide the
physical and moral strength needed to support the forces in the field.
Here the civilian is qualified to make certain demands, because we
know where our intellectual and moral strength lies; we can work to
keep the tactics of variety operative in the field of public emotion.
The next two chapters are a translation of the tactics of variety into
terms of propaganda and its objective, which is unity of action.
CHAPTER III
United...?
When I began to write this book the unity "made in Japan" was
beginning to wear thin; when I finished people were slowly accustoming
themselves to a new question: they did not know whether an illusion of
unity was better than no unity at all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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