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Ghost of War: The Sinking of the Awa Maru and Japanese-American Relations,1945-1995

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In the foggy night of April 1, 1945, a large Japanese passenger-cargo liner, loaded to the Plimsoll line, raced past the coast of Fukien province in China. The American submarine Queenfish tracked her by radar and sonar and launched torpedoes that sank the Awa maru.
One man survived. Two thousand military experts, bureaucrats and camp followers did not, including some children. Also lost were tons of tin, rubber and other military cargo.
It was not supposed to happen that way. The Awa maru had sailed south on an American safe conduct to deliver food and medical supplies to Allied prisoners of war in Southeast Asia.
The Japanese were not supposed to load the ship with desperately needed military specialists and critical materials, but they did. The Americans were not supposed to sink her, but they did.
Roger Dingman's exhaustive history explains how the story of the Awa maru came to be understood so differently in America and in Japan.
Actually, though there was no attempt at a cover-up, the Awa maru was soon forgotten in America, though it was labeled (by Navy officers) the "biggest mistake" of the undersea offensive in the Pacific.
It was different in Japan, where the loss of the Awa maru was incessantly publicized to promote nationalism.
Dingman enthusiastically agrees that the Japanese nation was a victim in the war, a strange proposition. As far as I know, the only Japanese victim during the war was Hotsumi Ozaki, the spy who tipped off Richard Sorge and was executed.
But even before it is possible to play the victimization game, Dingman must show that America violated international law, intentionally or by error; but neither he nor the other modern Pufendorfs can say what law.
Dingman's narrative makes it clear (except to him) that the ship sailed under a contract, not a law. The Japanese defaulted even before the Awa maru sailed north.
That should have freed America of its obligations, but the question is moot. America agreed not to molest a mercy ship. On April 1, 1945, no such ship existed.
Except, of course, the Americans didn't know that. They thought Awa maru was a warship. And so it was.
But the story is full of ironies.
The Japanese made a big to-do over the sinking, demanding reparations. The Americans, nervous about what retaliation the Japanese might take against prisoners of war, promised payment. Dingman considers the Japanese claims "legitimate" and faults both the American and the Japanese governments for evading them.
Considering the intent of the voyage of the Awa maru -- to help kill even more helpless people -- any compensation would have been an outrage to decency.
Dingman calls the agreement that scotched reparations "morally flawed." He explicitly denies that governments can, or should, be guided by moral concepts: "Pursuit of national interest, even if it means sacrificing particular goals, is much more important (than justice)."
Is it necessary to point out the error in that sentence? It shouldn't be, but since Dingman's attitude mirrors that of many leftist historians, it is well to spell it out: Governments have no independent existence apart from the people in the state; therefore, they can have no moral standards apart form them, either.
It is not surprising to find such moral hollowness; nor is it unusual to find this kind of political correctness in a California academic.
But it is mighty surprising to find it being published by the Naval Institute Press, which has published many critical studies of American behavior in World War II and has been the most important conduit for translations into English of Japanese assessments of the war.
But heretofore the press has kept its head. In "Ghost of War" it loses it.
It is a shame, too, but the diligent Professor Dingman has amassed such a smothering amount of information about the Awa maru that the reader can draw his own conclusions. Few, I bet, will agree with Dingman's.

Professor Dingman spins a compelling narrative of the accidental sinking of a Japanese merchant ship sailing under safe passage negotiated clandestinely by the U.S. and Japan during the last part of WWII. Much wider implications include causal factors relating to the whole issue of the nature of the war in the Pacific as presented in such works as Craig Cameron's American Samurai, John Dower's War without Mercy, Gerald Linderman's World within War and the rest of the literature on racism and predatory warfare. Beyond the nature of war, however, Dr Dingman deals with the myths that linger, especially the way societies recreate their memories of war. Almost as soon as the sinking occurred the creation of different, divergent public memories of the incident in both countries would spoil the well to such an extent that a rift between private and public factions in both would allow a third party, China (PRC), to reap the benefits of salvage. Here the works on the creation of public myth, like Marling and Wetenhall's Iwo Jima, resonate. The multi-archival approach Dr Dingman can use because of his fluency in Japanese is employed at not only the highest levels, in the tradition of Ernest May, Akira Iriye, and Waldo Heinrichs, but also at the level of the common man employed by diplomatic historians like Michael Hunt who in his seminal The Making of a Special Relationship, explores popular culture as well. A gripping tale, heard to put down, this book has lessons for us not only about World War Two, but the lingering myths and malaise of Vietnam.