Murder in Tokyo

Perhaps the Japanese had been polite as they went about it--polite with that chill, grinning, hissing formality which is as ill-fitting as the cutaway coats and striped pants of their diplomats. Perhaps they had been brutal, with the special talent they have for torture.

But the manner of it was only a detail; whether for reasons of face, of propaganda, of vengeance was incidental. What the U.S. people now heard, from Franklin Roosevelt, was only that the Japanese had executed "some" of the eight American flyers captured last year after the bombing raid on Japan. The "some" was a delicate touch of cruelty--American mothers would not know how many or which of the eight were dead or alive, or when the rest might be executed.

For a day the U.S. people and their press wallowed in a bitterly helpless wrath exceeding anything since Pearl Harbor. If people had been complacent, they were not now; if they had hated the Jap before, no word was strong enough for their feeling now. From the staid New York Times to the most violent yellow journal, the editors laid on their most desperate adjectives, and none was stronger than the people's feeling. Some people, notably Congressman Ham Fish, even demanded that the U.S. take its turn at cold-blooded killing by reprisals against Japanese prisoners. (Such proposals were as stupid as they were contemptible: the U.S. has captured few Japanese; the Jap has some 17,000 U.S. troops. 11,000 Philippine Scouts, and about 8,200 U.S. civilians.)

Ticket to Hell. The President had expressed himself as aghast; he made the announcement suddenly, from a train-stop at Corpus Christi, Tex., "with a feeling of deepest horror."

The Army swore revenge through bombing and more bombing. Vowed Major General Jimmy Doolittle, now pasting the Nazis in North Africa: ". . . until they beg for mercy."

Flyers who accompanied Doolittle, interviewed in Washington, swore with shaking voices that they had bombed nothing but military objectives; that they had even passed up perfect but unscheduled targets in order to follow their orders with exact fidelity.

The Japanese wallowed, too, in the rich depth of the wound they had given the U.S. They had justified the executions easily: the flyers had bombed and strafed civilians, said the Jap. Now they went a step further: Jap broadcasts warned that all flyers who came over Tokyo would get a "one-way ticket to hell"; a Jap newspaper said Japan "has established a new international law in matters of air war." Berlin, unable to export anything but sympathy to Japan, purred approval of the Japanese "precedent."

Second Reaction. As always, as long as Americans are Americans, people began to examine the incident a little more reflectively as the week wore on. They noticed now a few facts they had skimmed too rapidly the first day.

For instance: the President had first learned of the capture and "punishment" on Oct. 19, a full six months ago. The fact that some had been executed was solidly confirmed by the Swiss Government to the State Department on March 12. The State Department had made formal protest on April 12. Yet the President had not told the people he was aghast at this "barbarous" recourse to "frightfulness" until April 21. Why the delay? Why was the announcement thus timed, and why announced from the middle of a trip about the country?

There was no simple, offhand explanation, and this made people wonder all the more. The last possible date of service to military secrecy or to the aid of the forced-down flyers had passed months before. The raid, even to many of its specific details, had been a U.S. open secret for a long time. The fact seemed to be that the raid, which had first been hailed as a great and famous thing, had gradually been publicly accepted as something less--a bold but ineffective exploit--in what the New York Herald Tribune called "our sophomore period in the war."

The dreary fumbling and bumbling about the literal facts of the raid ever since had steadily drained away public confidence. In a twelvemonth of war the people had been educated to a more accurate measure of military events. Now the forced, artificial pumping-up of the raid as a great thing, only because last week was its first anniversary, fell a bit flat.

However eagerly the people studied the pictures of Doolittle and his men (which had been held back for months beyond the time they might have served the Japs), it was more in curiosity than with a sense of enormous triumph.

This mood had solid roots: many Americans wanted to see not year-old pictures of one gallant but pitifully meager raid, but fresh, day-old pictures of raid after raid that leveled Japan into a shambles where not an altar, not a paper house, not a cherry tree still stood whole, and where nothing moved in the ruins.

This mood would gradually unkink itself from such savagery; the U.S. Army & Navy could be depended on to concentrate their blows at military objectives. But the feelings of Americans boded ill for Japan.

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