John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986)
An authoritative treatise on an uncomfortable subject, John Dower’s War Without Mercy explores the prominent role that racism played in shaping American and Japanese attitudes, perceptions, and decision-making throughout the Second World War. A professor emeritus of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dower has written extensively on the history of Japan and especially its involvement in World War II. The initial genesis for this book came from a casual conversation about how quickly race hate dissipated after the Japanese surrender and during the American occupation, which then inspired the author to explore the influence of racism on the prosecution of the war in the Pacific.
Dower argues that racist ideology at home and abroad fueled the war for both belligerents as notions of race-based superiority permeated American and Japanese strategic thought. These beliefs directly influenced intelligence estimates and planning while leading to atrocious behavior culminating in exterminationist conduct on the battlefield. The Japanese, as the author shows, believed themselves superior and that they should dominate all peoples in Asia while portraying their American adversaries as devils and demons. The Americans, on the other hand, viewed the war as a cause to defeat a treacherous and savage people that were frequently portrayed as apes, rodents, or vermin. American and Japanese convictions in their uniqueness and racial superiority were therefore reinforced as each experienced escalating battlefield brutality. A prolonged, forty-four-month war hardened the combatants and normalized outrageous conduct that was once unacceptable. Propaganda at home coalesced with bitter fighting in the Pacific theater to create an intense sense of “other” in adversaries while reinforcing ideas of racial superiority.
The author draws on sources from both sides of the Pacific Ocean to relate an objective, balanced assessment. Japanese sources are scarce, as Imperial officals destroyed many official papers in the final weeks of the war. Fortunately, a chance 1981 discovery of an eight-volume study from the Japanese Population and Race Section of the Research Bureau of the Ministry of Health and Welfare became an integral record for Dower’s thesis. The newly discovered wartime study shed light on Japanese behavior in occupied territory and reinforced extant knowledge on Japanese racial beliefs. Dower also examines contemporaneous cartoons, songs, movies, and writings to get a sense of overall racial attitudes and thought processes. Certainly not traditional sourcework, these pieces of pop culture show not only how people in each population thought of one another, but also how external forces shaped their views. For instance, Frank Capra’s Know Your Enemy—Japan is a reflection of the time that served as a powerful influence in shaping American attitudes toward Japanese people.
The book is organized into four parts. The first portion outlines in great detail how each side framed the other as racially inferior, and how these ideas permeated their forces and contributed to atrocious soldier behavior on the battlefield. The second part displays U.S. perception of the war and Japanese people, while part three flips the focus and shows Japanese views of Americans. The final section, an epilogue, traces racial biases and beliefs from the end of the war to the mid-1980s when the book was written. The author asserts that immediately following the war, both Japanese and Americans set aside racial hatred. However, Dower contends that these notions of superiority and inferiority still exist, often shifted to other enemies, but ready to be recalled as needed. The book’s merit is in its outstanding depiction of how a state constructs race-based campaigns and how prolonged conflict combined with racist attitudes can make war crueler than necessary.
War Without Mercy is a foundational text on the role of race and racism in war, especially in the Pacific. Often neglected in favor of studying Nazism and the Holocaust, this book shows that race played a key role outside of Europe as well. With this text, Dower opened a new conversation on racism in the Pacific, while placing himself into the broader conversation on the role of race in war. War Without Mercy is an excellent book for anyone wishing to understand implicit racial biases among cultures and how it affects national strategic level decision making. Because of its logical organization and the author’s engaging prose, this book is accessible to a broad audience- a painful but essential feat with a subject of this magnitude.