Down with the Gumbatsu!

The wraps were lifted last week from a major U.S. offensive: the campaign by psychological warfare experts to induce Japan to surrender.

Leaflet bombing of Japan has been stepped up sharply since V-E day. Both B-29 Superforts and carrier-based planes are dropping paper salvos, at the rate of 500,000 to 1,000,000 leaflets daily. Principal target of these broadsides is the gumbatsu, the military clique which rules the empire: ". . . our bombers will return . . . many times, as long as your militarists continue this war." A small leaflet like a 10-yen note bears on the reverse: "The gumbatsu is wasting your tax money. For this war the gumbatsu has spent the equivalent of 5,000 yen for every Japanese. Think what you could have done with that."

A major theme is the exploitation of Japan's national hypochondria. Says one leaflet: "Water lines and electricity will be destroyed by bombs. Food will become scarce. Thus, you will weaken and become sick. . . . With every bombing the country becomes more unclean, and it is more difficult to control disease. Put an end to this needless suffering. Demand that the militarists who started this war bring it to an end."

How Unconditional? If this paper war could speed by so much as a day or an hour the time of Japan's final, unconditional surrender, then the men fighting the steel-&-fire war would cheer it on. But they might properly raise a question: how unconditional is unconditional? And, in its concentration on the gumbatsu, is this campaign aiming for a surrender that would preserve the emperor system, in a Japan untouched by war except for air attacks? Few men who have fought in the Pacific would welcome any peace that let Japan off the hook this time, still possessed of its insane national-religious dream of world destiny, still able to try again in another 20 years or so.

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