<Book Review>

Summer, 1945: Germany, Japan and the Harvest of Hate
Thomas Goodrich
The Palms Press, 2018
Reviewed by Tadashi Hama***
“We ought to get rid of them as soon as possible.”“Kill them all, men, old men, children and women, after you have amused yourself withthem!”“We knew we had to kill a lot of women and kids… Had to be done.”***
Thomas Goodrich has authored a number of books with a theme that is not for thesqueamish: atrocities as inevitable products of human conflict. In his previous work on
the American Indian Wars, Scalp Dance, (Stackpole Books, 2002) he documented theblow-for-blow torture and slaughter between the Indians and whites. What gives
Goodrich’s books its visceral realism is that he cites from diaries and personal
recollections, allowing both perpetrators and survivors to freely express themselves.
There is no place for sentimentality in Goodrich’s historical narratives. Certainly, thoseof us raised in today’s “civilized” and “enlightened” times will wince upon reading of thewhites’ raw hatred of the Indians, and will likewise wince on reading the current book.
The Second World War, the subject of Goodrich’s latest book, is indeed viewed withmuch sentimentality by those who did not have to fight and by those born long after theend of the war. The modern view of war contrasts with the strong anti-war sentiment ofan overwhelming majority of Americans in the late 1930s and early 1940s, whoremembered the senseless carnage of the previous European war that was fought to makethe world “safe for democracy”. Nonetheless, following Pearl Harbor, the politicalestablishment, with support from the mass media, sent America’s young men to fight anddie in the Pacific and in Europe to once again save the world for democracy.1 The
dominant narrative during and long after the war is that the Allies, namely, the US,
Britain and Soviet Russia, fought and defeated fascism and all that fascism entailed.

1

Further historical details of the complete turnaround in public thinking and US policy may be found inBarnes, H. E. (1953). Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. Cauldwell, ID: Caxton Printers. The Roosevelt
Administration did all it could to silence and marginalize anti-war dissenters, e.g. Duffy, J.P. (2010).
Lindbergh vs. Roosevelt. NY, NY: MJF Books; Hoover, H. (ed. Nash, G.H.) (2011). Freedom Betrayed.
Stanford, CA: Hoover Institute Press.

1The voices of the defeated, no matter how brave or determined they were, are crushed bythose of the victors—it is the victors that write history and dictate the fate of the losers.
“Seldom,” Goodrich points out, “does one here about the crimes against the Germans or
the crimes against the Japanese, of the deliberate firebombing of millions of German andJapanese women and children, of the wholesale rape of countless women and children, ofthe utter and abject subservience that both nations even today still find themselves lockedin.”Former American journalist Tom Brokaw dutifully echoed the official narrative, thepolitically correct view, of the Second World War in his book, The Greatest Generation
Speaks (Random House, 2001): “They answered the call to help save the world from thetwo most powerful and ruthless military machines ever assembled, instruments ofconquest in the hands of fascist maniacs… when the war was over, the men and women
who had been involved, in uniform and in civilian capacities, joined in joyous and shortlived celebrations… They stayed true to their values of personal responsibility, duty,
honor and faith.” In the sanitized official narrative of the Second World War depicted byBrokaw and his colleagues, Allied soldiers, to paraphrase Harry Truman, “restoredfreedom” and “cleansed” the world of “evil”. Because Allied soldiers fought for“freedom”, it is unimaginable that they could have murdered prisoners of war or raped
civilians. Upholding the official narrative is not only willful neglect of real history butalso approval of a distorted history and allows one to believe that all one needs to go to
war is a righteous cause or having “God on our side”. This thinking sets the stage formore wars and endless suffering.
Given the pervasiveness of the official narrative and the thoroughness of war time
censorship, one would reflexively ascribe the calls for death found at the beginning of
this review, found in the current book, to the “evil” and “fascist” Germans and Japanese.
It will come as a surprise to those with historical blinders that these quotes were made by
the Allies, by those who were fighting in the name of democracy. The first was made by
Prime Minister Winston Churchill, on sending Soviet prisoners of war captured by theGermans back to the Soviet Union—he knew that they faced slave labor and certain death.
The second quote was made by Soviet Journalist Ilya Ehrenburg, espousing his deathwish for the annihilation of the German people. The final quote is by Army Air Force
General Curtis LeMay on his assessment of the March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo, inwhich civilians were “scorched and baked and broiled to death.”“Our boys” fought Germans, racially and culturally similar to white Americans,nonetheless despised by the American political and military establishment, including
Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Supreme Allied Commander inEurope Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. Long before the German military capitulated on May 8,1945, the Allies murdered both prisoners of war and civilians. Official German
capitulation did not halt the denigration of Germans. Those who were unfortunate enoughto be taken prisoner were locked up in sprawling open-air latrines that doubled asconcentration camps where many starved to death. Those captured and incarcerated by2

the “gallant soldiers of the Red Army” were repeatedly tortured until they either died orconfessed to committing entirely imaginary crimes.2
Why have most Americans not heard of the horrid behavior of “our boys”? Throughout
the period after the Germans laid down their weapons, Goodrich points out that the US
government imposed censorship. It told the media to “deify” their friends and “vilify”
their enemies—stories of “looting, rape and murder”3 were not to reach Americans backhome. Goodrich states that the press was “transformed into an obedient herd ofpropagandist.” If reports of abuse made it into the mainstream media, US officials andGen. Eisenhower quickly denied any wrong doing by Americans and cast blame on theGermans. It should not be surprising that people today, who are very familiar with US
history, are vociferously skeptical when America announces that it is engaging in anotherwar for the good of “freedom” and “democracy”.
A key differentiation of the current book from others in its class is that it highlights theparticularly rabid hatred by white Americans of the “devious” and alien Japanese people.
Goodrich writes that the “The job of demonizing the Japanese was simple.” TheJapanese were viewed as vermin and the book notes that “bug sprays” and “rat traps”
were “advertised as great ways to kill ‘insects, rodents and Japs.”4 The current bookdetails Americans shooting surrendering Japanese soldiers and civilians alike—as if there
were “vermin”. In fact, the current book points out that the men were ordered not to takeprisoners. Goodrich does not attempt to minimize white Americans brutality by showing
how equally “racist” the Japanese were, as other have done (e.g. John Dower, War
without Mercy (Pantheon Books, 1986)). Japanese “racism”, Dower and others suggest,is somehow the same as or more horrid than American soldiers mutilating Japanesewounded as well as corpses for body parts, sending them back home to loved ones.
Despite a Joint Chiefs of Staff directive in January 1944 prohibiting making war trophies
out of Japanese body parts, in June, President Roosevelt graciously accepted a letter
opener made from the arm bone of a Japanese soldier.5
What is one to make of the eager “hunting” of Japanese soldiers, or “dirty animals” bywhite American soldiers? It could be that their low educational attainment at that time
made them susceptible to government propaganda. A literate American was defined as

2

Detailed histories of the imprisonment and torture of prisoners in the Communist bloc long after Germany
surrendered can be found in Sack, J. (1993). An Eye for an Eye. NY, NY: Basic Books and MacDonogh, G.
(2007). After the Reich. NY, NY: Basic Books.
3
Further details of American excesses in “liberated” Europe can be found in Hitchcock, W. (2009). The
Bitter Road to Freedom, (NY, NY: Free Press).
4United States government publications showed the Japanese as hideous beasts. An informational booklet
published by the US War Department on the Japanese army stated that “most Japanese soldiers are ofpeasant stock.” (Soldier’s Guide to the Japanese Army, Military Intelligence Service, November 15, 1944.)
Even popular children’s book author Theodore Geisel (“Dr. Seuss”) offered his skills to the war effort,
depicting Japanese Americans as saboteurs and the Japanese as monsters:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5020743/Shocking-WWII-propaganda-pamphlet-spottingJap.html; https://www.sandiegoreader.com/photos/galleries/2015/mar/06/dr-seuss/
5Weingarten, J.J. (1992). The trophies of war. The Pacific Historical Review 61: 53-67.

3

one who could read and understand English at the fourth grade level.6 Prior to PearlHarbor, over 347,000 men of draft age were unable to sign their own name on their
Selective Service Registration cards. A survey found that World War II veterans had
about “11 years of schooling but no high school diploma.”7 However, one could also
surmise that white American hatred of the Japanese was not merely a Pavlovian response
to media prompting, but something that lurked deep within the American psyche. InBrokaw’s The Greatest Generation Speaks, the word “Jap” appears only three times,
somewhat surprising given the fact that letters from “Jap hunting” American soldiers
stationed in the Pacific were included in his book. Nonetheless, in the one of the three
instances, late Senator and Medal of Honor winner Daniel Inouye recalled the time after
the war he was called a “Jap”, despite being dressed in his US Army officer’s uniform
and the loss of his right arm, and denied service by a barber in Oakland, California.
Summer, 1945 is unflinching in detailing the effects of war on combatants and civilians,from the “peacetime”, post-war torture and imprisonment of Germans in Allies prisonsand concentration camps to the fire bombings of civilians in defenseless Japanese cities.
The ultimate human horror, surviving a nuclear attack, rightly makes its appearance aswell. Given the horrors unleashed by the Allies, readers will reflect on the relevance ofthe so-called war crimes trials held at the end of the war, as Goodrich does. Those whoare comfortably ensconced in the official fairy tale of the Second World War will do wellto ignore this book. However, Goodrich’s latest book is sure to enlighten those who seek
historical truth. The gap between truth and myth is great—Edgar Jones, an American
veteran of the European and Pacific Theaters, cited by Goodrich, asks a rhetoricalquestion: “What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought anyway?”

6Frey, M. (2015). Education, classification, and military strength: a look at the development of the US
Army during World War II.
https://history.army.mil/events/ahts2015/presentations/seminar6/sem6_MarkFry_text_ImpactOfEdLevels.pdf
7
Light, P.D. (1998). Marching Upward, Thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

4