My Way and 9th Company

Now it’s time for another blog on obscure foreign movies, and as you may expect by now, they’re about WAR, which is one of my favorite topics.

The first is a South Korean film about World War II. 

My Way.  A Korean – Jun-Shik Kim (JSK) – and Japanese – Tatsuo Hasegawa (TH) start off as friends/rivals.  Both are good marathon runners and compete against each other in the mid-30’s leading up to the war, even trying out for the Japanese Olympic team, i.e. the 1940 games which were supposed to take place in Tokyo, but which were cancelled due to the war.  Tatsuo is the grandson of the Japanese military governor.  Korea was a Japanese colony from 1895 (the first Sino-Japanese War) until 1945.  The movie depicts the Japanese as arrogant and mistreating the Koreans as second class.

            They both end up in the Japanese Army in 1938. Tatsuo is an esteemed officer, while JSK is a lowly private; he and his fellow Koreans in the unit were conscripted as punishment and suffer the abuse you might expect.  TH and JSK don’t get along.

            Part I:  Up in Manchuria, the Japanese bump ugly against the Red Army.   “Banzai” suicide charges aren’t enough to defeat several waves of Soviet tanks (which look like T-26s).

            Part II:  The pair wind up in Siberia in a Soviet POW camp.  One of the Korean soldiers is now the block leader and browbeats the previously abusive Japanese, now POWs.   TH and JSK still don’t get along. The Germans invade, so the Red Army comes by looking for warm bodies to fight the Nazis.  Facing imminent execution for a prison riot, our two buddies quickly agree.

            Part III:  Stalingrad?  Sverdlovsk?  Who knows.  In some battered Soviet city, the Red Army schmucks are thrown up against a wall of Germans with MG42s and other fun stuff; from the timeline it’s still 1941, so the Germans are still very much in the game.  And the stereotypical Commissar is right behind them to shoot anyone retreating.  SOMEHOW, both guys survive this…slip into German greatcoats and uniforms…and trudge through the snow to the German lines.  They get split up at this point for the next three years, each not knowing if the other has survived, although JSK did help TH survive the battle and helped him escape.

            Part IV:  These two Asians in German uniform who speak no German eventually wind up in an Ostbatallion (mixed Wehrmacht unit of Arabs and other miscellaneous Russian ethnic groups all thrown together because the Germans have no clue who they are, only that they’re not European) at Normandy in June 1944, and finally reunite.  Guess what happens! 

An epic story, very long, but intriguing to see what happens to these two, sometimes at odds, sometimes rivals, but ultimately friends.  They have to depend on each other to survive in a brutal war on three different fronts in three different uniforms.

The second film is a Russian deal, in Russian with English subtitles, taking place in Afghanistan.

9^th Company (DVD).  This was in the previews which came with “My Way”.  Imagine your typical French Foreign Legion film:  various disreputable types flee to the FFL to escape either justice or boredom, get sent to the godforsaken desert of North Africa, and wind up practically wiped out by angry Arab tribesmen.   Got it?

            Ok, now instead of the French Foreign Legion, it’s the Red Army in 1988 – towards the very end of the Soviet Union.  Instead of North Africa, it’s Afghanistan.  Instead of Justin Bieber tribesmen, it’s the mujahedeen.   But almost exactly the same.  Some things never change, do they? 

            The funny thing about this film is that back in 1988, we’d be rooting for the mujahedeen against the Red Army.   Nowadays, knowing the “muj” (as the Russians call them) morphed into the Taliban?  Eh, not so much.  Most of the Russian soldiers are as sympathetic as Paul Baumer & his buddies in “All Quiet”, or the Band of Brothers gang, or any other close-knit squad of misfit soldiers who only want to survive.

Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905)

Another obscure war, though it represents Japan’s entry into the big time, defeating a European power on its own terms.  Russia’s defeat almost cost Tsar Nicholas II his throne; though he eventually lost it in February 1917.   Observing China’s embarrassment in the Opium Wars in the 1840s, and with Western ships forcing entry into Japanese ports, the Japanese were on notice that modernization would be necessary to avoid the same fate as China.  The Japanese Army modeled itself on the Prussian Army, victorious in 1870-71, while the Japanese Navy emulated the powerful and successful Royal Navy.  China became the first victim of Japan’s newfound power, losing Korea in a brief war from 1894-95.  Alarmed by Japan’s growing power, yet arrogantly seeking to assert its own interests in the region, the Tsar took various actions to counter Japanese plans. Manchuria, far northeast China, became an area of mutual interest to both Japan and Russia.  Russia sent in 100,000 troops during the unrest of the Boxer Rebellion.  For their part, the British wanted an ally in the Far East to counter Russian ambitions, so Japanese overtures to England resulted in modest alliance in 1902.  The US also started playing in the Pacific: it annexed Hawaii in 1898 and took the Philippines from Spain in 1899.  But Roosevelt warned Russia, France and Germany that it would side with England and Japan against them in the Far East.  When Russia abruptly and ominously abandoned its plans to withdraw its troops from Manchuria in 1903, the Japanese realized they had a real problem.

 The war basically occurred in three stages. 

 Stage One:  Battle For Port Arthur (February to December 1904).  Unlike Vladivostok, Port Arthur remains usable year-round, making it an important port for the Russians.  The main Russian fleet was there:  seven battleships (Petropavlovsk, Sevastopol, Poltava, Peresvyet, Pobeda, Tsesarevich and Retvizan) along with six cruisers and a merchant ship. The Japanese attacked from land and blockaded the port from the sea (six battleships, 10 cruisers, 30 destroyers and 40 torpedo boats).  All attempts to break the Japanese blockade were unsuccessful.  Laying mines outside the harbor, the Japanese sunk the Russian flagship, Petropavlovsk, which went down with the charismatic and heroic Vice-Admiral Makarov – as severe a blow to Russian morale as Makarov’s arrival had been a boost.  Several attempts by the Russian fleet to break out of Port Arthur for Vladivostok were all unsuccessful.  Having successfully bottled up the Russian fleet in Port Arthur, the Japanese were free to land troops in Korea.  They crossed the Yalu River (border between Korea and China) and defeated the Russians at Nanshan, a natural bottleneck of land protecting the approach to Port Arthur.  However, staunch Russian resistance stymied initial Japanese attacks, forcing them into siege position.  The Japanese defeated the Russians at Liaoyang, cutting off Port Arthur from Mukden.  The Russian commander, Kuropatkin, had a healthy respect for the Japanese, but was hampered by junior generals and officers who lacked his informed view (the Tsar himself dismissed the Japanese as “monkeys”) and almost complete absence of any intelligence on Japanese strength or movements.   After a series of battles in which the Japanese took various hills and destroyed concentric lines of defense, the Russians were forced to surrender Port Arthur in January 1905. 

 The Japanese were remarkably lenient with the local Chinese, in radical contrast to their later atrocious mistreatment of the Chinese in the 1930s, also in contrast with arrogant Russian treatment of the locals, which meant they were more willing to report Russian movements to the Japanese, than to assist the Russians against the Japanese.  While the Japanese built bathhouses keeping the soldiers clean and healthy, the dirty Russians suffered smallpox epidemics.

 Stage Two: Japanese beat the Russians at Mukden (January to March 1905).  Proceeding northeast from Port Arthur, Japanese forces faced various Russian around Mukden.  Southeast of the city, the terrain was not really suitable for attack, so the Japanese had a smaller army make a feint on that side as a diversion.  Kuropatkin, the Russian general, fell for this, oblivious to a much larger Japanese Third Army on his right (west), under General Nogi, whose plan was to circle wide left around and behind Mukden.  Believing himself surrounded, and certainly outmaneuvered, Kupopatkin withdrew his forces northeast, basically ceding the battlefield, the battle, and Mukden, to the Japanese.   Both sides suffered heavy casualties; had the Russians had cooler heads and better reconnaissance, the Third Army attack could have been blunted, and a bloody stalemate would have exhausted the Japanese.  

 Stage Three: Japan defeats Russian fleet at Tsushima (May 27-28, 1905).  The Tsar sent another fleet from St. Petersburg all the way to the Far East to defeat the Japanese.  Seven and half months later they reached China.

 Japanese Fleet: Admiral Togo (First Division) battleships Mikasa (flagship), Shikishima, Fuji, Asahi, cruisers Kasuga, Nisshin; Admiral Kamimura (Second Division) cruisers Izumo (flagship), Azuma, Tokiwa, Yogumo, Iwate, and Asama

 Russian Fleet: Admiral Rozhestvensky (First Division) battleships Knyaz Suvorov (flagship), Imperator Aleksandr III, Borodino, Orel; Admiral Felkerzam (Second Division), battleships Oslyabya (flagship), Sisay Veliki, Navarin, cruiser Adm Nakhimov; Admiral Nebogatov (Third Division), battleship Imperator Nikolai I (flagship), coast defense monitors Gen-Adm Apraksin, Adm Senyavin, Adm Ushakov

            The Japanese Navy was modern and British built; the sailors were literate and often former fishermen.  The Russian ships were a mismash, many obsolete, staffed by arrogant, drunken officers and illiterate peasants who received little training in the six months of twelve they actually served on their ships.  The Russian fleet was no match for the Japanese; at this crucial naval battle, the Russians were defeated: the Oslyabya, Suvorov, Aleksandr III, and Borodino were sunk; the Asama was damaged.  With this strategic defeat, further fighting by the Russians was pointless.

 Theodore Roosevelt brokered the peace between Japan and Russia, resulting in the Treaty of Portsmouth in September 1905, though hostilities had ended in June with Japan’s invasion of Sakhalin Island.  As noted before, this was Europe’s wake-up call that an Asian nation, Japan, was rising and militarily competitive.  Granted, the Russians were the weakest European nation, and had largely been defeated due to their incompetence and complacency.  A true test would have to wait until World War II.  Although the Japanese had easily defeated German forces in World War I, these forces had essentially been stranded far away from Germany and could not be supported, whereas Japan was operating in her own back yard, so to speak.  Both the Japanese and British had realized that maintaining an empire spread across several thousand miles of ocean requires substantial naval power, a power which Germany lacked – despite the Kaiser’s best efforts to compete.  Ironically, it’s quite possible that Japan’s defeat of Russia in this war, and Germany in the next, may have lulled her into her own complacency, a misplaced belief in her own superiority over Western nations which had grown fat and lazy over centuries of dominance – and which would have been confirmed by the early successes against the English in Burma and Malaysia and the US in the Philippines and Pearl Harbor.  Of course, the US was certainly knocked down by the Japanese, but quickly got its bearings and fought back, successfully.  The fat and lazy Americans drove the point home at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  

The Jungle Is Neutral

This is the book the SS referred to in The Devil’s Guard.  It was written by Spencer Chapman, a British officer during WWII, about his experiences in the jungle of Malaysia escaping the Japanese from 1942-45.

 Malaysia.  The Japanese invaded Malaysia in December 1941, on the way to Singapore, which they also captured.  They remained in control of Malaysia when the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan in August 1945.

 Guerillas.   Most of these were Chinese communists.  They seemed to care more about arguing esoteric politics than …fighting Japanese.  They rarely had enough personnel or weapons – or scarcely any training in how to actually fight – to take on the Japanese.  These units were as likely to be running from one camp to the next to get away from Jap armies than they were actually attacking or ambushing Japanese.  This is one front where the guerillas were little more than a nuisance.  The native Malays, the aboriginine Sakais, and local Sikhs and other ethnic groups were at best occasionally hostile to the Japanese, mostly neutral, and often (especially the Sikhs) pro-Japanese.  The Chinese hated the Japanese the most and had the most intense antipathy, sufficient to take up arms against them – a motivation lacking in most other ethnic groups, including the Malays. 

            Possibly the most ambitious claim which could be made about the Chinese guerillas in Malaysia during WWII is that, to the extent they represented an armed force in opposition to Japanese occupation, the Japanese had to station regular forces in Malaysia to counter guerilla activity, which could otherwise have been fighting to the death on Iwo Jima or Okinawa.  This seems to be most ambitious strategic goal or result of most guerilla armies.  Historically, the French seem to be the only country whose conventional forces ever get beaten by guerillas; most recently in 1954, even in Haiti in the early 1800s.   We defeated the English with conventional forces assisted by the French; we left Vietnam in 1973, 4 years after the Viet Cong were wiped out in the Tet Offensive.

            Spencer’s original plan when he was in Malaysia during the Japanese invasion was to stay behind and organize guerilla resistance to the Japanese.  He would ideally coordinate units and train them, and act as a liaison with the British outside Malaysia – ideally in Ceylon (Sri Lanka).  As a practical matter he spent most of his time traveling through the jungle from various camps or laid up incapacitated with malaria, tick-typhus, or other jungle diseases. 

 Malaria.  More than the Japanese, Chapman’s biggest foe as a practical matter was malaria.  Since food was always a problem, vitamin deficiencies were also an issue.  He diligently studied the jungle, its plants, animals, and idiosyncrasies, and even then was still prey to malaria and was frequently too sick to do much of anything. 

  Ultimately he decided that “the jungle is neutral”, neither inherently hostile to humans nor a natural paradise to be absent-mindedly enjoyed without fear or danger.  Chapman felt that overstating the dangers or the beauties of the jungle, in either direction, was fatal – in the former case, a self-fulfilling prophecy. His attitude probably saved his life.

 Japanese.  Having invaded and occupied Malaysia, the Japanese made sporadic efforts to wipe out the guerillas, with mixed success.  The British only returned after the Japanese surrender and accepted the surrender of local forces which had been bypassed by the Allies’ island-hopping.  Japanese anti-insurgency efforts seemed to be “send in a huge force to wipe out literally everyone you find”, not particularly selective, beheading everyone and not concerned about winning “hearts and minds”.

 Post-War Emergency.  As noted earlier, I had been referred to this by the Devil’s Guard book.  I had been aware of the 1948-60 war, but had been unaware that this book only dealt with WWII.  In fact, Chapman’s book ends abruptly in 1945, and since the guerilla war began in 1948 and lasted until 1960 – long beyond the Vietnamese war which ended in 1954 – the SS men in northern Vietnam could not have benefited from any accounts of the success of the Malaysian counterinsurgency even if they wanted to. 

            The most important difference was that the Viet Minh were Vietnamese, the same ethnic group as the North Vietnamese (and South Vietnamese).  The Malayans insurgents were Chinese, and Chapman notes that no one seemed to have any problem distinguishing Chinese from Malays.  Because of Japanese atrocities in China from 1937 onwards, the Chinese had a definite beef against the Japanese, quite apart from any Communist ideology, whereas the Malays didn’t seem to care enough to fight against the Japanese.  The Japanese mostly left the Malays alone except for counter-insurgency strikes, meaning whatever atrocities Japanese committed against Malays was due to activities of the Chinese guerillas, hardly a situation which would prompt any Malays to identify with, much less support, the guerillas. 

            In fact, the British had ample help from the Malays in their fight against the guerillas, who seemed to be 99% Chinese.  So these Chinese guerillas were ignoring the advice of their own leader, Mao, about “fish swimming in the ocean”, just as Lenin ignored Marx’s opinion that Russia was backwards, quasi-feudal, far from ripe for proletarian revolution; the prime candidates were the US and Western Europe, those countries most advanced in capitalism.  About the only time Marxists seem to follow their own ideology was in Spain, where they supported the bourgeois capitalist democracy against Franco, and discouraged the anarchists.  Even there, many of the moderate democrats were wary that the PSUC (main Communist Party, which had Stalin’s support) was trying to turn Spain into a Soviet satellite.  Time and time again – Russia, Spain, Malaysia, China, Cuba, Vietnam – the Reds show their prime concern is power for its own sake and zero interest or concern for the workers and peasants.