So Sad to Fall in Battle

by Kumiko Kakehashi

  For food, there were a few wild papayas and bananas, but so many soldiers picked them that there are none left now. As it’s a piping hot volcanic island, vegetables don’t really grow here.

  Flies were such an annoyance to the soldiers that almost all the accounts written by survivors mention them. It also seems that there were great numbers of cockroaches, which were still a rarity in Tokyo back then. Kuribayashi, who was fastidious and liked things to be neat and tidy, was obviously affected by the insects, as he mentions them countless times in his letters home.

  The soldiers on Iwo Jima, including Kuribayashi, lived either in tents or in damp caves. When the air raids grew heavy, they would spread blankets on the floor of the dugouts and sleep there. There was, however, no way to thwart the attacks of the insects.

  When Kuribayashi got to his post, there were over six thousand army and navy personnel on the island. With subsequent reinforcements, the final number swelled to over twenty thousand. The biggest problem they faced was how to get drinking water.

  On his first tour of the island, Kuribayashi realized there was not a single stream in the place, nor were there any springs. As the island was made of sand and rock, rainwater would sink into the ground in only an hour or two. The only way to get a steady supply of drinking water was to construct cisterns to store it in. The original inhabitants of the island had relied on rainwater for their needs, but that was only feasible when the population was a little over a thousand people.

  Prior to the landing, American intelligence analysts estimated the maximum number of Japanese troops on Iwo Jima at thirteen thousand men. With no drinking water available, they judged that anything more than that was out of the question. But their forecast was off the mark. The Japanese were forced to perform a miracle: sustaining twenty thousand men in an environment that was hopelessly deficient in water.

  Kuribayashi was always acutely conscious of this problem, and he sternly prohibited the wasteful use of it.

  He was especially strict toward the senior officers, who tended to get preferential treatment. On one of his tours around the island, the sight of a unit commander rubbing himself with a towel soaked in water from a cistern drove him into a rage. He reportedly told the officer that he “deserved to be executed by firing squad,” before giving him an earnest lecture and the warning that “on this island, a drop of water is as precious as a drop of blood.”

  Naturally, Kuribayashi led by example and cut down on his own use of water. He explained to Yoshii on August 2, 1944:

  Since there are no streams and no wells, we collect all the rainwater, which we then use very sparingly. To wash my face (actually I just wash my eyes), I put the tiniest drop of water into the basin— about as much as we used for Marie’s bowl. After that Fujita uses it to wash, and we carefully keep whatever’s left over and use it for washing our hands in the toilet. That’s the state of things for us— but the men cannot even do that much.

  Marie was the name of a German shepherd dog Kuribayashi had been very fond of. The men were amazed that their commander in chief could take care of his daily needs—cooking and drinking aside—with only enough water for a single dog’s bowl.

  Kuribayashi always went on foot to inspect the island’s defenses. Since Kuribayashi was originally a cavalryman and a celebrated horseman to boot, some of his officers recommended that he make his rounds on horseback. (There were three horses on Iwo Jima.) Kuribayashi never once rode, on the grounds that riding a horse would only make it thirsty.

  Many of the soldiers recall Kuribayashi turning up at the different units unarmed, with a cane, and wearing jikatabi (rubber-soled, split-toed shoes). He always had a canteen hanging off his shoulder. At the time, the water ration was one canteen per person per day. Kuribayashi followed the same rule himself. Some units used their precious water ration to boil tea in honor of the commander in chief ’s visit, but Kuri-bayashi would never accept it.

  WATER WAS NOT the only aspect of life where he forbade any difference in the treatment of the upper and lower ranks. On June 25, he sent out a bulletin called “Important Points from the Division Chief ” to all the officers and men. It included the clause: “Officers must pay attention to what the soldiers eat. It is forbidden to prepare food for the officers separately or to be indifferent to the provision of meals for the soldiers.”

  In short, Kuribayashi was saying that the officers must eat the same as their men.

  The entirely rational thought that officers needed to have a proper grasp of the nutritional condition of the men under their command probably lay behind this policy that officers and men should share the same hardships regardless of rank.

  Having once decided that he would eat only what his men ate, Kuri-bayashi followed through. When liaison officers came over from the mainland or from Chichi Jima, he would sometimes open tinned food and drink a little whiskey, but on normal days he gave orders that he be brought the same food as the ordinary soldiers.

  This irregularity greatly perplexed his orderlies. When it came to the division commander, they believed that everything, even down to the number of plates, had to be different. Despite being ordered to bring Kuribayashi the same thing the soldiers were getting, the orderlies were baffled and didn’t know what to do. Kuribayashi smiled at them. “All right, then,” he said, “just lay out the plates as usual,” and he ate his simple fare with an array of empty plates spread before him.

  The navy had access to transport, so navy personnel were relatively well supplied. The army, by contrast, had poor-quality provisions and not enough of them. It was not just a matter of water; fresh vegetables were also in short supply, and they had to eat dried vegetables instead— Kuribayashi, of course, included.

  He sometimes grumbled in his letters home, as in the letter to Yoshii on November 17, 1944: “I’m eating nothing but dried vegetables every day. They’re so dry and so hard that they’re driving me crazy. Seeing that I don’t seem to be getting any thinner, maybe they have nutritional value after all.” Plainly he had fulfilled his goal of learning about the nutritional state of his men through direct personal experience.

  Kuribayashi encouraged each unit to cultivate their own vegetables in an effort to address the shortage. And once again, Kuribayashi was the kind of man who did not just issue an order, but led by example, as made clear in his letter of October 10, 1944:

  I was thinking that we need to get fresh vegetables any way we can, so we’ve started to grow them by cultivating the waste ground. The results aren’t that great. No sooner do you think you’ve got a shoot coming, than in come the crickets and cockroaches and gobble it up.

  Only a month after this griping letter (November 17, 1944), he reported happily: “Thanks to our hard work plowing up the ground and planting seeds all throughout the island, we now have a tiny crop which, amazingly, we’re able to eat.”

  Kuribayashi’s habit of leading by example like this appears to have impressed his men. Major Komoto Kumeji, the adjutant general of the 109th Division, survived because he had to fly out to Tokyo for a meeting just before the American forces landed and was unable to return in time. After the war he gave the following account of Kuribayashi’s way of life on Iwo Jima in the book Tôkon Iô-Tô (Fighting Spirit: Iwo Jima), by Horie Yoshitaka:

  As a leader, Division Commander Kuribayashi was strict about military discipline and believed in punctuality and prompt execution. At the same time, there was a side of his personality that overflowed with warmth. He was always making inspection tours of the island, and had a perfect memory for topography and natural objects. He personally directed the organization and construction of the defenses, and while so doing he would slip the cigarettes that were a gracious gift from the Emperor into the pockets of the hardworking troops, sharing them out. He used to brush his teeth and wash his face with a single cup of water.

  Even the headquarters started growing vegetables, and they offered these around for cooking. They grew sweet potatoes, which is an all-year-round pl
ant. We often used to pick just about a centimeter from the tips of the shoots, put them in hot water, add soy sauce, and eat them.

  In July 1944, Lieutenant Colonel Asaeda Shigeharu, army chief of staff from the Imperial General Headquarters, visited Iwo Jima for strategy discussions. He had heard that fresh vegetables and water were in short supply, so he filled large baskets with freshly picked cucumbers, eggplants, and tomatoes and loaded these on the plane at Kisazaru Airfield along with some seventy-two-liter barrels of well water. He got to Iwo Jima and handed the supplies over to the soldiers on duty, who received them as if they were sacred objects. Things soon became lively with cries of “Hey, everyone! Bring your cups! Fresh water from the mainland’s here!”

  It seems that Asaeda had prepared a separate consignment of vegetables for the commander in chief, and after the war he recounted his experience of delivering it directly to Kuribayashi.

  I gave one basket of fresh vegetables to the division commander. With tears in his eyes, the general ordered his adjutant to use his knife to chop the vegetables up into small pieces and share them with as many men as possible below the rank of regimental commander. He did not take a single scrap for himself. On the contrary, he gathered up some papaya and made pickles, which he gave to the people around him. It was impressive; he was like a modern-day General Nogi.*

  IN MANY OF HER LETTERS, Kuribayashi’s wife expressed the wish to send him his whiskey ration and extra articles of food, or to give them to the liaison officers who shuttled between Tokyo and Iwo Jima to deliver. Kuribayashi, however, would always tell her “I’m in a more fortunate position than the soldiers, so have quite enough of everything,” or “The airplanes have more important freight to carry, so please don’t send me anything except letters.”

  When Kuribayashi received some confectionery as a gift from the emperor, he sent it on to his family without touching it. It is rather moving how he adds a small note to his wife: “To be consumed only at home.” As a commander, Kuribayashi was stern and fair, but within his own family he was a completely ordinary father and husband.

  MINING SULFUR AND MINERAL phosphates was the main industry on Iwo Jima. The climate and the soil quality were so poor that rice could not be cultivated, and the island’s only agricultural products were sugarcane and a handful of medicinal plants.

  Nonetheless, when Kuribayashi arrived on the island, there were around a thousand full-time residents, the majority of whom lived in a village in the center of the Motoyama plateau. They were simple people who, though poor, were accustomed to living a tranquil existence.

  During the air raids in June, Kuribayashi allowed the islanders, who had no dugouts of their own, to use the military air-raid shelters. Seeing the women and children running around in aimless bewilderment and diving into the air-raid shelter with whatever they had on at the time, Kuribayashi decided that the inhabitants should be sent to the mainland as soon as possible. He also thought that they would get in the way, and that having soldiers and civilians rubbing shoulders on such a tiny island was not a good idea.

  The “Important Points from the Division Chief ” that Kuribayashi published on June 17 include the clause: “In emergencies, there is nothing problematic about giving short-term shelter to the local people in the army dugouts. They cannot be accommodated after the air-raid siren has sounded the all clear or in the nighttime.”

  The civilian population could be accommodated in military air-raid shelters to ensure their safety, but they had to be sent back to their homes immediately after the air-raid siren sounded the all clear, nor were any civilians allowed into the air-raid shelters at night. Kuriba-yashi also ordered that women should wear monpe pantaloons when air raids looked likely to occur. Perhaps he was trying to prevent any problems of public morals.

  Kuribayashi was a puritan. No “comfort woman” station was erected on Iwo Jima, and one theory is that this was because of Kuriba-yashi’s disapproval.

  The repatriation of the island’s residents started on July 3 and was completed by July 14. Men between the ages of sixteen and forty without dependents were conscripted, and the staff of the weather survey station was put to work for the navy, but otherwise everyone left the island. For a period of seven months prior to the American assault, Iwo Jima thus became an island only of men, with neither women nor children on it. It was uncomfortable and it was slightly cold-blooded, but it was best for the military to make their battle preparations with no civilians around. It was because Kuribayashi made this decision at an early stage that Iwo Jima was fought over without causing any civilian casualties.

  The conflict was already turning into a total war, with no distinction between the military and civilian noncombatants. The Japanese citizenry was expected, as the “people of a nation at war” to sacrifice everything for the successful prosecution of the war. But Kuribayashi had a firm belief that soldiers like himself existed in order to make sure that ordinary citizens could get on with life as normal.

  In Tôkon Iô-Tô there is an anecdote related by Sakurai Naosaku, a civilian resident of the island who was the director of the Iô-Jima Sangyô Company. In the first few days after Kuribayashi arrived and before a proper headquarters had been set up, he rented a room in Saku-rai’s house to use as his temporary command center.

  I often had meals together with Kuribayashi on the veranda, and admired and respected him for the way he took the lead on saving water. One of the chiefs of staff, who had a mustache, and Fujita, the adjutant, dined with us.

  When the news of the fall of Saipan was broadcast early in July, I asked him: “So, Your Honor, will you soon be luring the enemy here to Iwo Jima to give them a good thrashing?” Kuribayashi, who was always cheerful, replied: “We just haven’t the strength for that. I’m afraid we’re going to cause you all a great deal of trouble, but with things the way they are, there’s just nothing we can do.” I was really surprised at his response.

  Presumably, Sakurai had expected to hear—as anyone would from a normal general—confident assertions about sending the enemy packing with their tails between their legs, but Kuribayashi was just not like that.

  Small though Iwo Jima might be, for the residents it was their beloved home. As soon as the fighting started, their houses and their workplaces would be smashed to smithereens. This was Kuribayashi’s apology to the inhabitants of the island for being powerless to protect them, even though protecting civilians was what the military’s job was all about.

  —

  WHAT WERE KURIBAYASHI’S thoughts about the coming battle at this stage? The remarks by Musashino Kikuzô below are from Tôkon Iô-Tô. As captain of the engineering battalion, Musashino lived in the same quarters as Kuribayashi for some time after he had arrived on the island.

  When he wasn’t performing his public duties, he would chat and laugh just like any other fellow officer. He really was a gentle, rather bookish sort of general. He once said to me: “I was in America for about five years, and their peacetime industries are very advanced. They’re organized so that if a war broke out they could switch over to producing munitions within a few hours of getting a telegram. The Japanese war planners never even bothered to think about an important issue like that. No matter how many times I repeated myself, they just didn’t get it. However biased a view you have, our chance of winning this war is zero. But we have to fight as long as we have the strength left to do so; we have to fight down to the last drop of blood.”

  I have quoted extensively from the 1965 book Tôkon Iô-Tô. My copy was actually lent to me by Kuribayashi Naotaka, the present head of the Kuribayashi family, when I went to visit the house where Kuribayashi Tadamichi was born in Matsuhirochô, Nagano. The book had belonged to Naotaka’s father, Sunao. (Sunao, who died in 1998, was the eldest son of Kuribayashi Tadamichi’s elder brother, Yoshima.)

  In the book, somebody had underlined in red the comment reported by Musashino, the captain of the engineer battalion (“I was in America for about five years, and …”), and ther
e was a handwritten note in the margin that said: “Uncle Tadamichi often used to say this.”

  As a soldier, Kuribayashi knew a great deal about the United States. During his first sojourn there, from 1928 to 1930, while still a captain in his late thirties, he conducted military research; then, from 1931 to 1933, he lived in Canada as military attaché.

  While studying in America, Kuribayashi lived in major cities like Washington, D.C., and Boston, as well as Fort Bliss, the Texas base of the U.S. cavalry regiment, and Fort Riley, Kansas, home to an infantry division. He visited New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and even drove himself across the whole continent. The sense he had of the military and industrial might of the United States was based on his own firsthand observations.

  There is no evidence that the Japanese army leadership took advantage of Kuribayashi’s knowledge and experience. Quite the opposite, in fact. There is even a theory that he was seen as pro-American and given the cold shoulder as a result. The conventional view may be that Kuri-bayashi was assigned to Iwo Jima because he was regarded as an able commander, but there is another interpretation in which his American-style rational thinking made him unpopular, and a deliberate choice was made to send him to a battle from which he was sure not to return alive.

  Nishi Takeichi Danshaku, winner of an equestrian gold medal in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, was another prominent military man who met his end on Iwo Jima. A first lieutenant in the cavalry when he took part in the Olympics, he was a lieutenant colonel by the time of his assignment to Iwo Jima. Thanks to his performance at the Olympics, Baron Nishi (“baron” is the English equivalent of the Japanese title danshaku) had become something of a celebrity in American high society and had many friends in the United States. At the time, the rumor circulated that he, too, had been packed off to a battle zone where annihilation was a certainty because he was perceived to be pro-American.