The box cover of one of the volumes of “Sensi Sosho”.
After the
surrender of Japan in World War II, the US intelligence personnel found
themselves in a very comfortable position. The US occupation
administration simply gave an order - and the Japanese authorities quickly organized
the writing of the history of the Second World War in the Pacific from the Japanese point of view in order to make it easier
for American researchers to work on American history of the Pacific War.
Unfortunately,
from the triad “fast, cheap, high quality – chose two of three” the Americans
decided to dispense with “high quality”. As a result, the first Japanese
history of WWII, better known by its name in English as “Japanese Monographs”, was
largely a victim of haste.
First, the
monographs differed in quality: from the general history of military
transport throughout the war to the description of the capture of a small
island. The monographs themselves were small at first, apparently due to the
tight deadlines for writing. Where it turned out to be necessary to describe a
serious issue, the authors worked in the style of “novel in the newspaper” -
they divided the topic into chapters and proceeded them in turn one by one. There was no unified editing of proofreading. Over time,
the haste has subsided, and later Monographs were begun to resemble monographs
in size and detailed description of the topic.
The
Monographs themselves are largely paraphrases or quotations from official
documents. Which is not surprising, since the authors simply did not have the time
for serious analysis and synthesis.
Moreover,
not everything, that needed to be written, was actually written. For example, there
is no Monograph on the Battle of Midway and the attack on Pearl Harbor (the
monograph on Pearl Harbor is actually just a collection of documents). As I
understand it, this was due to the fact that the people, who could write these
monographs, were working directly with the Americans. In addition, not
everything, that the Japanese wrote, was translated into English.
The English
language of monographs, by the way, is a problem in itself. Of course, even a
bad translation is better than no translation - which explains the popularity
of monographs among non-Japanese researchers to this day. But this does not
change the fact that the Monographs were translated by a variety of translators,
who did not worry about the consistence of the translation of terminology, place
names, etc. Moreover, there are specific errors in the translations, especially
in the names of ships and the names of people, which are not so easy to
translate from Japanese.
As a
result, in the mid-1950s US personnel was tasked with editing and
proofreading the translations of some of monographs. But interest in them
faded, so only part of the monographs was edited.
Brief
history of creation, list and description of monographs (sometimes very
critical):
https://oregondigital.org/sets/easia/oregondigital:df72dt655#page/1/mode/1up
Texts of Japanese Monographs online:
https://pacificwararchive.wordpress.com/2019/01/27/japanese-monographs/
==========
The
shortcomings of the Japanese Monographs were already obvious at the time of
their writing, so the Japanese Institute of Military History begun to make a better quality history of
the Pacific War. The process was led by Hattori Takushiro, former Chief of
Operations of the General Staff of the Imperial Japanese Army.
8-volume work
“The Complete History of the War in Great East Asia” = 大東亜戦争全史, published in 1953-56, turned out
to be a book of a completely different level than the Japanese Monographs - the
quality of the authors’ work is evident here. But there are questions here as
well. First, history is written almost exclusively from the Army's point of
view and at a strategic level. There were simply not enough resources to
describe tactical actions. Secondly, the officers of the General Staff were not
inclined to particularly analyze or criticize their own actions.
Nevertheless,
this work was a quality research which turned out to be quite popular for a book on such peculiar topic. Japanese edition has been reprinted twice and had also been translated into English and Chinese. Its’ abbreviated version was translated into Russian under the title “Japan at War” (very rare thing for Japanese book). However, not everything
was translated - the tender souls of Soviet propagandists could not stand the
encounter with the real description of the Japanese campaign in Manchuria in
1945, so they simply threw it out of the book, replacing it with a condemning philippics against “falsifications” in the style of the editorial of the “Krasnaya Zvezda” newspaper (official newspaper of the Soviet Army).
==========
Meanwhile former officers of the Imperial Japanese Navy also worked on better quality history of the Pacific War, named “Nippon Kaigun Senshi” = “War History of the Japanese Navy” = 日本海軍戦史. In 1950 at least 11 small volumes were published. But those volumes were, in fact, improved versions of the Japanese Monographs, which hardly looked impressive compared to “The Complete History of the War in Great East Asia” then in the making. That’s why this project was abandoned.
==========
It is clear
that the Institute of Military History was not going to stop after the release
of Hattori’s book. There, work continued on the new Japanese history of WWII,
known as the “Senshi Sosho” = “Military History Series” = 戦史叢書. Work has accelerated sharply
after most of the documents, confiscated by the USA after the war, were
returned to Japan in the mid-1960s.
But
Japanese military historians were not going to limit themselves to documents.
Numerous veterans were involved in the work, who could use their diaries
(during WWII, keeping a diary was considered almost an integral part of the
life of an educated Japanese) and documents in their possession (which sometimes were not available elsewhere). Moreover, draft versions of the chapters of the
new history were actively discussed, and veterans, who were directly related to
these events, also participated in the discussions.
The first
volume of “Sensi Sosho” was published in 1966, the last (102nd) - in 1980. 2
more volumes with collections of documents were published in the mid-1980s.
The work on
“Sensi Sosho”, which lasted for almost thirty years, brought very positive
results. This time both army and navy points of view on the war were recorded
for the posterity. In these volumes there was a place not only for strategies,
not only for operations, but also for describing actions at the tactical level.
A huge advantage compared to previous histories was that at least some mentions
of the sources of the information have finally appeared which were not present in
previous versions.
But in
fairness, it should be noted that this version of Japanese official history was
not without flaws. A very sad division into history from the Army point of view
and history from the Navy point of view has been preserved. One and the same
operation can be described in two volumes: army and navy - and described in
different ways. And sometimes aviators also insert their point of view. At the
same time, even in dry lines, one sometimes feels a desire to hurt, to show
flaws of the opposite service.
The
Japanese did not succeed in creating a single, unified concept of the description
of the Second World War in the Pacific. Each volume is a “thing in itself”, and one volume
may well contradict with another.
It would be
useful to note the simple fact that the history of the war, written by the
participants, contains a lot of valuable details - but usually completely
devoid of any critical view of events. Not every person is able to engage
in self-criticism, while understanding perfectly well that it will be recorded in
the history book. On the other hand, given the paucity of the documents,
available to the authors of official history, the mass recruitment of veterans with
their diaries/documents was the best way to solve the problem. And for a historian, the
saddest thing is the lack of a full-fledged reference apparatus, which makes it
very difficult to verify the source of the particular information.
Despite its
historical value, “Senshi Sosho” has hardly been translated into other
languages. One volume (about the “Battle of a Hundred Regiments” in North China)
was translated by the Chinese, an excerpt from two volumes on the battles in
New Guinea and the Solomon Islands was translated by the Australians. Only
the Dutch were able to make a coherent effort to make a good translation into English of three volumes
dedicated to the capture of the Netherlands East Indies (current Indonesia).
Text of all
volumes of "Senshi Sosho" in Japanese:
http://www.nids.mod.go.jp/military_history_search/
Australian
translation (parts of 14th and 28th Army Volumes):
http://ajrp.awm.gov.au/ajrp/ajrp2.nsf/Web-Pages/JapaneseOperations?OpenDocument
Dutch
translations:
Volume 3
(Army): https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/35184
Volume 26
(naval): https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/65910
Actions of
the Army Aviation (34th volume and part of the 5th):
https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/3166200
==============
Unfortunately,
this is where the Japanese decided to end the official writing of the history
of WWII in the Pacific. With the exception of identifying and correcting errors
in the “Senshi Sosho”, there is no new work on the academic history of World
War II in Japan.
