The GI War against Japan: American Soldiers in Asia and the Pacific during World War II (review)

Peter Schrijvers's The GI War against Japan is an interesting and evocative work. It should be read and its methodology debated because it may well anticipate a new approach to the practice of military history rooted in contemporary cultural studies. Schrijvers's thesis is bold, clearly stated, and well explicated throughout the text. He reduces all American military personnel, in all branches of the service, throughout Asia and the Pacific, to one composite. As mid-twentieth-century Americans, they were the products of a culture that gave them four interlocking identities as "pioneers," "romantics," "missionaries," and "imperialists." They constantly referred to earlier transcontinental migrants while viewing Asian localities and populations through an idealized filter largely derived from Hollywood films. They were confident of their superiority as Christians, and displayed condescending views of indigenous peoples even while rhetorically denouncing European colonialism. However, the Japanese, the "natives," and Asia's various environments disoriented them and frustrated their feelings of superiority and mastery. Fearing "cultural regression," they reacted with "rage" and "fury," using "industrial violence" and "technological destruction" to subdue their human and natural tormenters, a process that terminated in the use of atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The first reservation to this approach is that it imposes an unjustifiable homogeneity on hundreds of thousands of Americans whose primary commonality was that they were in uniform at the same time. During World War II, American propaganda portrayed the Japanese people as having dissolved themselves into emperor worship at the cost of their individuality. Modern cultural theorists would view that as an "essentialization of the subject." Schrijvers applies an equally broad brush to U.S. servicemen: they were all Americans so they all displayed certain "essential" characteristics which determined their attitudes and behavior. This permits him to devise a typology, the four identities, locate passages in letters and memoirs that can be read to support their universality, and argue that the nature of the Pacific War can be explained by a disintegration of those identities and their regeneration through extreme violence.

The central problem with Schrijvers's effort is the tension between narrative history, which relies on traditional connections between cause and effect, and "discourse theory," which tends to view language itself as a primary social referent. Shared rhetorical structures and "mythic systems" thus determine group action to the same or greater degree as nationalism, class position, or institutional location. Schrijvers perceptively analyzes the tropes or conventions of language used by the most articulate soldiers, sailors, and marines to record their experiences. However, he provides us with no compelling evidence that anything actually happened as a result of a collision between naïve cultural expectations and the harsh realities of a "war without mercy."

Missing from The GI War against Japan is any acknowledgement that proximity to combat, to say nothing of the intensity of combat stress, was the dominant human element of the Pacific War. Schrijvers skirts around everything revealed since 1943 about the climacteric of combat by such witnesses as Robert Sherrod, Tom Lea, James Jones, and E. B. Sledge. What we have learned (and have no need to unlearn now) is that yes, soldiers and marines hated the Japanese and felt culturally superior to them, and yes, they were alienated from their (quite hostile) physical environment, and yes, they existed in a miasma of frustration and rage. However, they were driven to that state by exhaustion, hunger, sickness, fear of failure, terror at the prospect of death or wounds, and perplexity at the apparent randomness of death or survival. Surely, frustrated romantic expectations such as those described by Schrijvers could have played no more than a tangential role in determining the collective behavior of soldiers in the Pacific Theater. The violence...