Soldiers' diaries in WWII

Of course, many people will be simply repeating what they have heard elsewhere. It could be propaganda. It could be something given to them by a commanding officer, or in some cases, even a parent or a loved one. What we often see within personal accounts by combat soldiers is an attempt to craft a language that feels right, accurate and truthful to them as they are experiencing the chaos of a battlefield.

When we look at a diary — particularly by someone who is not very famous, who is not thinking about posterity when they write and who is not trying to craft some masterpiece, but who is simply writing down as accurately as they can what is going on around them and trying to give it some form of coherence — what we can do then with that document is illuminate many of the institutions and practices, and indeed technologies and media, that made that whole diary possible.

On top of that, we also see the narrative styles they have imbibed from the literature that surrounds them at the time. It could be adventure fiction; it could be reportage. In many cases, though, they feel that these more traditional military styles of writing are really impoverished when it comes to capturing what it feels like at the time, so they reach into other areas as well. It could be poetry; it could be religious discourse.

That bricolage they put together shows us the way in which people exercise agency in description. The diary itself is not for the author a soulless delineation of fact. It is a narrative that feels truthful to them. They may be drawing from reportage to expose hidden evils in the world or to show the heroism of their comrades. That gives us a much better idea of how truth is constructed in a document, rather than simply saying, the author may or may not have thought it was true.

Ordinary people are a little more guileless than professional authors. Looking at the ways that ordinary people write, we get a good idea of what kinds of documents were in circulation at the time, what kind of propaganda seemed to be working and what propaganda they may have been ignoring or critiquing. The more we get to the bottom of that, the more we can understand why people were committed to fighting — or why, in some cases, they gave up on war as a noble pursuit.

It can lead you down a path of committing what would later be called a war crime. It could put you in harm’s way. It could lead you to make a decision like signing up for the army in the midst of a losing war. So the diary itself, because so many people accept them as truthful accounts, then becomes a very perilous space.

If you are getting messages from the mass media that encourage men to define masculinity in terms of violence, and you write that down in your diary and accept it as a reflection of who you are, then you are convincing yourself to take that course of action.

One of the things that happened in societies around the world — famously in Japan — is that after the war, many people burned their diaries. They were not necessarily doing this out of fear of what the American occupiers would do with them or because they were ordered to, although the Japanese state did often ask soldiers and officers to destroy their records. They also destroyed them because they did not want to do the self-reflection that would come after the war.

Once you record yourself factually in a diary, it becomes an inescapable self — a haunting doppelganger that is going to pursue you into the postwar period. Most people who seem to have adjusted well after the war were the ones who destroyed the records of what they did during it, because that allows them to make up any story they like and reinvent their personal history. Honestly, that is a pretty good way to adapt to a new political environment. So, writing a diary can be dangerous on multiple levels.

The war between China and Japan begins in 1937. What I found was that Chinese soldiers were writing in a very similar way to how the Japanese were writing. That explains why I would want to compare them, because they were fighting each other. It is interesting to put them in the same place at the same time, which I do occasionally. When I am lucky, I can find them literally on the same battlefield (even though their records come from different archives) and see the different ways they narrate those battlefields.

I had an intuitive suspicion that Americans were doing the same thing. I strongly suspected that I would find Americans quite capable of self-sacrifice, of listening to authorities and making the same kinds of dangerous decisions that Japanese and Chinese soldiers were making. That is precisely what I found. There are some differences and exceptions, but largely, ordinary people in China, Japan and the United States were able to sacrifice themselves for a collective endeavor of committing mass acts of violence. Part of it was me, as an American, confronting my own nation’s and culture’s capacity for doing much the same things as the Japanese and Chinese during a period of total war.

I was more interested in how individuals process this messaging rather than focusing only on the state, media or religious institutions. That was a consequence of me reading diaries.

Diary writing is not something people do from nothing. They have to be taught how to do it. The modern state was particularly interested in encouraging people to write about themselves. You can see this most dramatically in the modern education system, where self-writing was something taught to children from a very early age.

People like to joke that it was just a composition exercise, and no one took it seriously, but the fact is, teachers were instructing children all the time — I was educated this way as well — to write about themselves as a way to learn language. In doing so, they emphasized: tell the truth; capture facts; describe things as they actually are.

If you add to that the practices of military record-keeping, which probably originated in Prussia and Britain, especially in the navy, there is a long history of documentation that converged with this kind of self-discipline.

It means that people have been taught to write accurately about themselves, to capture facts, to believe that their stories matter and to see themselves as part of broader political and cultural processes. Although the state can teach people these tools and techniques, it cannot control them. You can give someone a hammer, but they might sculpt with it — or smash something. The tool has many uses.

That fascinated me, because it means we do have some control over crafting who we are. We are not entirely shaped by those in power. There are limitations, yes, but we have been taught to craft ourselves in particular ways, and we should take that process seriously as a form of self-discipline.

With a diary, which is a special document written over time and usually not re-edited, we often find that the author’s intention shifts over time. There is not a single, consistent intention driving it.

We are talking about people like you and me who do not have a mass audience. Who do they write for? It is not always clear. The intended reader can change.

They felt a compulsion to write it down, and then afterward, to make it make sense — to give it coherence in a narrative that included them as an acting subject.

Liu, even though he was a commanding officer and a graduate of one of China’s top military academies, was full of doubt. He had to confront the possibility that China would lose the war, and he would fail personally.

He wrote: "The officers and men in this division are not making any efforts in building our outer defenses, and more than a few cannot follow the basic regulations. I am deeply concerned about this. I am good at cultivating a spirit of meticulousness during a period of peace, but once we get our orders, it is not such an easy thing to do. From here on out, regarding our fighting spirit, if we are not resolved to die in battle, it is going to be extremely difficult to achieve victory. The officers and men in the division are spineless. Our system of punishment and reward isn't clear. And I'm truly concerned about our battle against the Japanese."

Liu went straight to the battlefield, fought and was machine-gunned by the Japanese. He died. What I find powerful is what happened afterward. In the postwar period, the local Wuhan government tried to name a road after him. During Maoism, the road was renamed — first Liao Zhongkai Road, then Red Guard Road and so on. Only after Maoism ended were they able to rename the road after Liu Jiaqi. You can still visit it today — but I am not sure how many people in China remember his name now.

Editor’s note: This article has been faithfully transcribed from the original interview filmed with the author, and carefully edited and proofread. Edit date: 2025