So Sad to Fall in Battle

by Kumiko Kakehashi

  But the policy switchover came too late.

  Just like Iwo Jima, the Palau Islands were expecting the Americans to make a landing, but the building of shoreline defenses based on the traditional water’s-edge doctrine was almost complete there. The American invasion was expected any minute, so they had neither the time nor the materials to switch to inland defense.

  By contrast, the decision Kuribayashi had made meant that inland defensive installations were being built on Iwo Jima two months before Imperial General Headquarters announced its new policy. The defense policy that Kuribayashi had propounded immediately after arriving on Iwo Jima was essentially identical to the “Key Points for Defense of the Islands.” It was based on a “war of attrition” and “abandoning the water’s edge for inland defenses.”

  The case can be made that Kuribayashi’s decision was the result of reaching the conclusion that anyone would reach after facing reality head-on and thinking things through rationally. But overthrowing precedent required conviction, self-confidence, and powers of execution.

  In fact, the navy was not alone in its opposition to Kuribayashi’s decision to abandon the strategy of defense at the water’s edge. Senior army officers on the island also expressed very hostile opinions. Kuri-bayashi, however, was not afraid of going out on a limb, and he gave as good as he got.

  The reason Imperial General Headquarters changed its policy was because it could no longer ignore the strength of internal opinion, which was convinced that the traditional ways of thinking were no good. Plenty of other people had also reached the conclusion that the doctrine of defense at the water’s edge was no longer working.

  Reaching a conclusion is one thing; creating and implementing a detailed plan rapidly regardless of any obstacles … that was something that only Kuribayashi could do. Yet at that point in time, Kuribayashi’s plan ran contrary to the policy of Imperial General Headquarters.

  Kuribayashi was always “precise in observation and bold in action.” He examined things very carefully. Refusing to be governed by received opinion or precedent, he insisted on getting out there and checking things with his own eyes.

  This attention to detail, which can also be seen in Kuribayashi’s letters to his family, sometimes irked his subordinates. In Tôkon Iô-Tô, Staff Officer Horie Yoshitaka recounts an episode from the early days of defense construction.

  I remember that First Lieutenant Musashino had made a report to the effect that constructing defenses on sandy ground was difficult from an engineering point of view. For around the next two hours, Lieutenant General Kuribayashi was going around in his car, getting out in different places, lying down, and pretending to shoot in my direction with his cane standing in for a rifle. He ordered me to do all sorts of things—“Get down on the ground!” “On your feet!” “Get down lower!” … Now I knew what the staff officers and adjutants meant when they said, “It’s terrible. He ’s such a stickler for detail.”

  Staff Officer Horie also mentions that the detail-obsessed Kuriba-yashi never hesitated or compromised when it came to deciding on, and executing, strategy.

  I don’t know where that steely force of character came from. Maybe it was something that ran in the Kuribayashi blood. He had no hesitation about saying exactly what he thought in front of other people, and once he’d had his say, he was high-handed and wouldn’t listen to other people’s opinions…. Mild-mannered people found it hard to deal with the division commander’s strength of will. In the end, the chief of staff and the brigade commander were transferred, and an authority on infantry battles came in.

  From the autumn of 1944, Kuribayashi started transferring officers who had different ideas about strategy, or whom he simply judged incompetent. The brigade commander, the chief of staff, the staff officer in charge of strategy, and two battalion commanders were transferred in a dramatic shake-up. Major General Senda Sadasue, an authority on infantry battles, was sent out, having been appointed after Kuribayashi asked Imperial General Headquarters to give him “the best infantry leader you’ve got.” Senda was a first-class commander with plenty of battle experience.

  Kuribayashi’s aggressive and imperious attitude exasperated some of his officers. They criticized him for “going too far,” or for “having too much confidence in his own abilities.”

  The people who worked with Kuribayashi felt a mixture of shock and hostility at the boldness with which he tore up the rule book. In their responses to an oral survey conducted after the war by the War Department of the National Institute of Defense Studies, officers who survived the battle evaluated Kuribayashi thusly: “An intellect attentive to the minutest detail; a clean-cut decision-maker. He was the kind of general who would rapidly implement the decisions he had made, but it was noted that officers below the rank of chief of staff seemed to have a hard time keeping up with him.” “He made a clear distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private,’ and in his ‘public’ role, his style of leadership was merciless, relentless.”

  Perhaps it was Kuribayashi’s detailed grasp of reality that made him so confident in his own judgment, and so decisive in execution. It was commonly thought that people in authority should look only at the big picture without fretting about the details, but the optimistic projections of the war leaders who expounded on the general situation while ignoring the realities were all wildly off the mark. Policies decided on without any reference to the facts of the situation on the ground just made soldiers at the front suffer and ultimately led to defeat.

  The grimmer the reality, the more commanders have to face it directly. James Bradley regarded Kuribayashi as “one of the few Japanese commanders of the war who calmly faced reality and was consequently unable to take an optimistic point of view.”

  Kuribayashi verified things with his own eyes, and never allowed preconceptions or wishful thinking to cloud his judgment. His strategy was effective in battle precisely because it originated from such a starting point.

  Abandoning defense at the water’s edge was not the only reason why the Japanese forces on Iwo Jima managed to put up such a heroic fight. The fact of building all their defensive positions underground was also significant.

  Iwo Jima was very flat. There was almost nowhere suitable for placing a military stronghold. Ordinary dugouts or foxholes were not likely to survive for long in the face of ferocious American air raids and naval barrages.

  Kuribayashi therefore decided that the best solution was to construct all the defenses underground, linking them with tunnels so the defenders could move between them. His walks around the island had confirmed that there were many natural caves. It would be absurd not to make use of them.

  Arms and ammunition, equipment, manpower—the Japanese were weaker than the enemy in all these areas. Their aim was to hold out for as long as possible, so it would be rash to go for a head-on confrontation. Kuribayashi felt that hiding in their underground positions and making sneak attacks when the enemy was least expecting them was the most effective option. With such tactics, the Japanese could keep on fighting even when down to their last man. It was guerrilla warfare.

  Guerrilla warfare is a strategy for resistance. The goal is not victory, it’s not to lose. Guerrilla warfare is the only option available when the side that is inferior in fighting strength wants to wage a war of attrition against an overwhelmingly strong opponent. The communist forces led by Mao Tse-tung and the Vietnam War are both examples of this.

  The garrison on Peleliu, a small island in the Palau Islands, mounted a heroic resistance based on the same approach as Iwo Jima— building underground defenses and continuing to resist the enemy with guerrilla attacks even as troop numbers dwindled—and it caused the Americans great grief.

  Colonel Nakagawa Kunio headed the garrison at Peleliu. Under his command, more than ten thousand soldiers mounted a stubborn defense that endured for more than two months. His men supposedly created as many as five hundred underground defensive positions.

  Peleliu, like Iwo Jima, had nat
ural caves. Colonel Nakagawa chose the method of combat that would exploit these to maximum advantage.On Peleliu, again just like Iwo Jima, the key goal of the Japanese was to hold on to the airfield, even though they had almost no planes left.

  The Americans launched their assault on Peleliu on September 15, 1944, with a view to securing a foothold for the invasion of the Philippines. The Japanese were finally defeated on November 25. Over this time, the Peleliu garrison received gokashô—words of praise from the emperor for their gallant and tenacious fighting—no less than ten times.

  Peleliu was invaded before Iwo Jima, and the defense strategy implemented there had much in common with the strategy employed on Iwo Jima. Kuribayashi, however, did not develop his strategy based on lessons learned from the Battle of Peleliu. The garrison on Iwo Jima had been building underground defenses for some time in line with Kuribayashi’s strategy when news of the heroic resistance of the Peleliu garrison reached them. The reason these two brilliant generals devised and implemented the same strategy at almost the same time was because they both had the correct apprehension of reality, both refused to be awed by precedent, and both judged things rationally.

  Coming up with the plan to transform an entire island into a fortress by building underground defenses was one thing; actually doing it was another. The physical labor the soldiers had to perform was almost unbearably grueling. On Iwo Jima, in particular, constructing the defenses was to prove extremely difficult.

  The positions were built to a depth of fifteen to twenty meters in order to withstand bombs and shells. The Motoyama area, where the major defensive positions were placed, was made out of tuff, a soft rock formed by the consolidation of volcanic ash, meaning it was relatively easy to dig. The problem was the geothermal heat, which went as high as 140 degrees Fahrenheit, and the sulfur vapor that spurted out in places.

  Ishii Shûji, a photographer for the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper, who was conscripted and served as an orderly in the 109th Division,2nd Mixed Brigade field hospital, recalled the job of excavating the defenses in Iô-Tô ni Ikiru (Living on Iwo Jima), the book he wrote after the war.

  We would take advantage of lulls in the air raids and naval gun barrages to dig in places where the ground looked hard. We were just bashing away with picks, so even if we spent the whole day on the job, we’d only manage a meter at most. If we used a stick of dynamite, we’d still take ages to do two meters.

  In places where the geothermal heat was high, the soles of the soldiers’ jikatabi (split-toed rubber-soled shoes) would melt, and the sulfur gas gave them headaches and made breathing difficult. Dressed only in loincloths, they would work in five- or ten-minute shifts.

  The reason we did ten-minute shifts was because the geo-thermal heat in the cave was high and we were working in darkness—so even that ten minutes was extremely unpleasant. Our hands were covered in blisters, our shoulders got stiff, and as we gasped and panted in the geothermal heat our throats would smart, but there was no drinking water to be had.

  At the time, the daily ration of drinking water was fixed at one canteen per person. Some survivors’ accounts say that it was “one canteen for two,” or “one canteen for four,” but even that precious water was frequently polluted, and many of the soldiers suffered from paratyphoid or diarrhea. In Ogasawara Heidan no Saigo (Last Days of the Ogasa-wara Army Corps), one of the survivors recalled: “We gave the water nicknames like ‘devil water’ and ‘death water.’ It came from a well we had dug near the coast, so it was salty—and worse than that, it was hot.”

  They had to depend on occasional cloudbursts, when they would catch the rain on tent sheets and pour it into drums and water tanks, where they would store it. Whenever it rained, all the soldiers, including Kuribayashi himself, would grab whatever vessel was close at hand—cups, cooking pots, and buckets—and rush outside. Rear Admiral Ichimaru Rinosuke, the highest-ranking navy officer on Iwo Jima, would chant the lines: “Rain is the water of life. Outsiders cannot know how we feel as we wait for a cloud on this island.”

  Ishii Shûji, who survived and returned to his job at the newspaper, went back to Iwo Jima seven years after the war. He wrote about his experience revisiting the Command Center (“Kuribayashi Cave”).

  I shone my flashlight around the walls and the roof, and then onto the floor, at which point the light bounced back at me. I did a double take peering to see what was down there. It was a puddle of water. Since I knew there was no underground water, the only possibility I could think of was that the water had seeped in from the outside. Over the course of seven long years, the rainwater must have made a puddle in the depressions of the floor of the dark cave.

  If only the water had been here when we were digging the bunker, I thought. Unconsciously in the darkness I walked around the puddle so as not to sully it with my muddy shoes.

  This anecdote makes clear just how much the soldiers suffered from the lack of water. Once the Americans had landed and the battle began, the island’s chronic lack of water ended up costing some of the soldiers their lives.

  FROM THE START OF 1945, the digging of the underground passageways known as dôkutsushiki kôtsuro (cave-style communication tunnels) began in earnest. Once these were completed, they would enable the soldiers to move from one installation to another without having to emerge aboveground.

  The American assault was expected any minute, so the work was done in shifts around the clock. Unlike the caves, the underground passageways did not involve simply digging down: they had to be dug horizontally at a depth of between fifteen and twenty meters below the surface, which made the work that much harder. And there was more than just digging to the task: the men had to carry the excavated rock back along the narrow tunnels, then either carry it on their backs or put it in crates and pull it up to ground level.

  All the time they were working, the soldiers suffered from headaches and nausea caused by the sulfur gas. They had gas masks, but they were an old design and wearing them made them sweat heavily and made breathing difficult, so most men preferred to do without.

  The poison gas and the heat were particularly fierce in the tunnel linking Motoyama and Mount Suribachi, so the soldiers nicknamed it “the tunnel of death.” This tunnel was still unfinished when the Americans landed, with the result that contact between the two bases was cut at an early stage. This is one reason why Mount Suribachi fell faster than Kuribayashi had projected.

  Forced to spend every minute of the day and night either in training or in digging defenses, the soldiers grumbled: Why did they have to suffer like this if they were going to die anyway? Some officers advocated canceling the building of the underground defenses: “We came here to make war,” they said, “not to dig holes.” But Kuribayashi was convinced that underground installations were the island’s only hope, and did not let up in the demands he put on his men.

  Specialists in the construction of fortifications came out to the island to take charge and incorporate cunning techniques into the construction: tunnels would veer off at right angles halfway down their length to neutralize bomb blasts, while entrances and exits were built at different levels to improve ventilation.

  “We were divided into two groups and dug toward one another from either end so that we broke through in the middle. When we did, the air suddenly started to circulate and the geothermal heat, which had made it so hard to breathe until then, suddenly cooled right down.”

  So said Ôkoshi Harunori, one of the navy ground staff responsible for maintaining the transport planes that came in from the mainland. He helped dig the defenses in the intervals between servicing planes and repairing the runway. “Digging holes” was a task that involved every man on the island.

  With a view to carrying out general maneuvers and fort building in a timely and rigorous fashion, all officers and men, without any exceptions, must focus on maneuvers and fort building. In particular, the bureaucratic tasks at headquarters and administration center must be significantly simplified so that command
ing officers of all ranks can get out on site as much as possible and devote themselves to leading from the front.

  The above is a notice that Kuribayashi issued—“Iwo Jima, Key Points for Defense and Training.” In it, he orders all the officers and men, with no exceptions, to focus on “fort building,” or the construction of defensive positions. He also emphasizes that using administrative tasks at the headquarters or in the administration section as a pretext to avoid going out into the field is unacceptable. He believed that the only way to maintain the fighting spirit and discipline of the soldiers was for their officers to “get out on site” with them.

  Kuribayashi also issued another notice—“Important Points from the Division Chief ”:

  There is no need for units to stop working and salute when a superior officer comes around on tours of inspection. The area commander can provide a situation report. The soldiers supervising operations should not be compelled to salute but should continue supervising.

  The order says that the soldiers should keep on working, rather than stopping and saluting, whenever a superior officer comes around on a tour of inspection. Kuribayashi may have believed that the salute was a key part of military discipline, but practical considerations were paramount, and he was never a slave to form.

  PHOTOGRAPHS OF KURIBAYASHI at this time show him wearing a soldier’s open-necked shirt and jikatabi and carrying a thin cane instead of a sword. He made his daily circuit of the defenses dressed like this. He was always unarmed, not even carrying a pistol.

  His favorite cane had notches on it, and when he went to check the progress of the work on the defenses, he would use it to make various measurements. Sometimes he would crawl into the tunnels on his stomach to make sure there were no blind spots; sometimes he would measure the thickness of the sandbags and direct the men to “make it thicker here.” He would also get deeply involved during training, demonstrating how things should be done, even helping individual soldiers with their shooting action.