12. Keep on fighting even if you are wounded in the battle. Do not get taken prisoner. At the end, stab the enemy as he stabs you.
It is this sort of thoroughgoing attention to detail that distinguishes Kuribayashi as a commander.
The document contains neither vapid ideals nor meaningless, flowery rhetoric. Kuribayashi thought carefully about what was likely to unnerve his men and what mistakes they were likely to make, then told them in simple terms what they needed to be aware of in the heat of battle.
As soon as the real battle began, Kuribayashi started reviewing the achievements of the men under him. He then awarded letters of commendation (testimonials from the commander in chief) and requests for promotion based on these.
On February 19, the day the Americans landed, Second Lieutenant Nakamura Sadao, a platoon commander of the Eighth Independent Anti-Tank Battalion, immobilized twenty tanks. Kuribayashi quickly awarded him a personal letter of commendation and petitioned for a double promotion of rank. Sadao’s achievement even attained jôbun, meaning that his feat was reported to the emperor, a quite exceptional honor at the time.
Kuribayashi continued to review the exploits of his soldiers carefully, awarding them letters of commendation or arranging for their deeds to be reported to the emperor. The offical history records that Kuribayashi issued four letters of commendation, all of which were relayed to the emperor in jôbun. This sort of painstaking scrupulosity was not displayed by the other commanding officers in the Pacific War theater. Presumably Kuribayashi was making some sort of effort to reward his men for their achievements. The responsible officer from the adjutant division directly under Kuribayashi would make his perilous way through the thick of the fighting to deliver the testimonials to the different units.
These letters of commendation were also sent to the Imperial Headquarters and preserved in the official records. On Iwo Jima few survived and most records of the battle were lost, so the testimonials, which record who did what and where, provide insights into how the battle unfolded.
Since the testimonials were preserved in the official record, they were also communicated to the soldiers’ families. This was not only a matter of pride for the whole family, but knowing how their husbands, fathers, and sons had acquitted themselves in combat must have been some consolation for the bereaved families.
Of course, the soldiers who were awarded letters of commendation were not alone in fighting bravely. When communications were cut and reports could no longer be transmitted or when entire units were wiped out, inevitably nothing made it to the record. No doubt many exploits deserving letters of commendation went unrewarded.
In a sense, the battle on Iwo Jima was about more than acts of heroism. There were wounded soldiers who weakened and died for lack of medical care; soldiers who suffocated when their bunkers were blasted shut; soldiers who burned to death when gasoline was poured into the bunkers and ignited. And there were others who never returned when they ran through the hail of bullets to deliver messages or fetch water for their comrades.
Death in battle is always cruel. But if death in battle is death with honor, then every sort of death—including the deaths of those who died trembling and afraid, or bitterly wishing they could be back at home—should be classified as “death with honor.”
The Japanese soldiers believed that, as long as they stayed alive and continued with their resistance, Iwo Jima would not fall. So they lived in agony and they died in agony. On Iwo Jima, every facet of living and of dying was part of the battle.
Kuribayashi was concerned about the families of his men. Major Komoto Kumeji, a senior adjutant, was away in Tokyo liaising with the Imperial General Headquarters when the Americans invaded the island, and thus found himself unable to return. He received a message from Kuribayashi at the end of February while the battle was still raging. It said: “Adjutant Komoto, I want you to deal with the posthumous affairs of the soldiers on Iwo Jima with the utmost thoroughness.” Kuribayashi knew he would not be able to send his men back home alive, but as this brief order shows, he was determined that at the very least Senior Adjutant Komoto should help their families.
In response to Kuribayashi’s wish, Komoto established the Iwo Jima Survey Group together with a number of soldiers below officer class from units on Iwo Jima who were in Tokyo performing such duties as escorting home the bones of the dead. The Group devoted itself to preparing and dispatching bulletins listing the men who had died in action and recording acts of heroism. Their activities continued to the end of 1945, beyond the end of the war.
BY THE BEGINNING of March two thirds of the island was in American hands. They had broken through both the first defense line and the second defense line and had captured all the airfields, including the northernmost of the three, Kita Airfield. The Japanese forces were being boxed into the island’s northernmost tip.
By D-day plus thirteen (March 4), the surviving manpower of the Japanese amounted to some forty-one hundred men. Two thirds of the Japanese officers had been killed, and the bulk of their artillery and tanks were lost.
This was the day when an American plane landed on Chidori Airfield for the first time. A B-29 based in Saipan, it had taken part in a bombing run on Tokyo but was forced to make an emergency landing on the home leg due to mechanical failure and lack of fuel. Although Japanese mortar fire forced it to take off again quickly, the landing was a sign that the capture of Iwo Jima was starting to deliver concrete results for the American side.
In contrast, the Japanese, running out of ammunition, started switching to guerrilla tactics.
The Americans pushed forward steadily. The Japanese did not retreat but defended their positions to the death. Inevitably the battle turned into close-quarters combat, with both sides close enough to make out each other’s faces. The Americans could not provide air support for fear of harming their own side, so they pushed forward with flamethrowers and satchel charges. The Japanese responded by throwing grenades from their subterranean bunkers or sniping with small arms.
As the supply of explosives started to run out, the Japanese were no longer able to destroy enemy tanks in suicide attacks. I saw a photograph where a can of gasoline thought to have been stolen from the Americans lay near the corpses of three Japanese soldiers who had thrown themselves against a tank. It is thought that they made their charge clutching the fuel can in lieu of explosives. One of the soldiers lies on his back. His stomach has been half blown away, but his arms, burned black, are thrust up into the air as if the can were still clasped in his hands.
The Japanese also conducted surprise attacks on the American camps at night. These were not banzai charges, but well-planned operations conducted by small numbers of men. Initially they were effective, but in time the Americans devised countermeasures, and few of the attackers made it back alive.
The underground bunkers echoed with the groans of the wounded and were suffused with the smell of sulfur and the stench of death. The Japanese had no way of burying the men who died in the bunkers and were forced to share their living space with their dead comrades.
Little in the way of food was left, but most excruciating of all was the lack of water. Even when the Japanese were digging the bunkers, before the American invasion, the lack of water had been hard enough to bear, but there had at least been a fixed ration of water, albeit a modest one. Without exception, the oral and written testimonies of survivors all talk about the suffering caused by the shortage of water at this stage.
Hoshino Fujitaka, formerly of the 20th Independent Artillery Mortar Battalion, recalled this time in a letter he sent to the bulletin of the Association of Iwo Jima: “I don’t think I will ever be able to forget the memory of how sweet the rainwater that formed puddles in the tunnels in the night tasted when we got down on all fours to drink it.” There is an old Japanese saying: “Sip on muddy water if you want to stay alive,” but on Iwo Jima even muddy water was felt to be a blessing equal to the sweetest nectar.
Kojima Takatsug
i, a survivor from the same battalion, published a memoir in the Yanai Nichinichi Shimbun newspaper in 1968. It contains the following passage:
As we waited for the Grummans to pull out, we used to gather in the entrance to the bunker and talk endlessly about the good old days back home. Our main topics were eating and water. Our battalion was made up of men from Korea [the 20th Independent Artillery Mortar Battalion was composed of Japanese people living in Korea], so we could temporarily slake our thirst by talking about how we’d like to drink a bellyful of the water of Hankou, or discussing things that had to do with water like the Tedong River and the Sambang waterfall.
One soldier suddenly shouted out for us all to come and see. We were thrilled to see that there was dew glistening on the tips of the Japanese pampas grass that was still in the shade. We pressed it to our lips as if in a silent kiss.
In this far from expertly written passage, the phrase “We pressed it to our lips as if in a silent kiss” stands out for its poetic beauty. That is how desperate they were for water. That is how precious fresh water was to them.
The memoir continues:
One soldier got dreadfully down and started whimpering some sort of prayer: if his life—which looked likely to be snuffed out any day—was saved, and by some miracle he was able to return home safely, then he did not need status or fame. If he had to climb up into the clouds, then he would climb up into the clouds; if he had to walk on the seafloor, then he’d do that, too; but more than anything he wanted to get out of this hell on earth, he said.
“Hell on earth”—it wasn’t just the common soldiers who felt that way, as this passage, transmitted to Imperial General Headquarters on March 5 by the chief of staff of the “Courage Division,” makes clear.
The air supremacy of the enemy is absolute and total, sometimes reaching a total of 1,600 planes in a single day. The truth is that from before dawn until nightfall, without even a moment’s pause, they have from twenty or thirty to one hundred or more fighters in the air, strafing us and bombing us relentlessly. The enemy do not just put a halt to our daytime combat activities this way, but the support enables them to safely come up close, protected by tanks, and insolently penetrate those points where we are short of men.
On our side, we are almost unable to respond as our artillery and heavy armaments have all been destroyed. In the present situation, all we can do is engage the enemy—who is always our superior in terms of material—with small arms and with hand grenades in a succession of difficult battles.
My battle report ends here. And from this living hell which completely surpasses imagination, I take the liberty of sending in my report as it is, although it may appear that I am merely whining. [Emphasis in the original.]
It is unusual to describe battle conditions as a “living hell” in a “war-lesson telegram,” but by this time there was no one left alive on Iwo Jima who did not think of the place as hell. Reading the last emphasized sentence you seem to hear all the surviving soldiers crying out to you.
The chief of staff may have been the one who sent this message, but as commander in chief Kuribayashi approved all the telegrams transmitted from Iwo Jima. Extreme though the text of this particular telegram may be, it nonetheless expresses Kuribayashi’s personal intent. He tried to give the Imperial General Headquarters a taste of what things were really like on the island they had written off, the island they had ordered him to defend to the end at a cost of more than twenty thousand Japanese lives.
To never complain. To never indulge in self-pity. To take whatever was thrown at you and to die in stoic silence. That was the proper conduct for a military man of the time. But Kuribayashi did not want to play by those rules.
KURIBAYASHI PROVIDED FAITHFUL REPORTS of the shifting tides of battle in his war-lesson telegrams. The Japanese expected that Americans would invade Taiwan and Okinawa after Iwo Jima. In an effort to help with their defense, Kuribayashi tried his best to form an accurate idea of enemy numbers while offering observations and analysis of the Americans’ strategy and tactics.
A comparison of Kuribayashi’s reports with the American military records published after the war shows that he had an accurate grasp of the damage the Americans had sustained. On March 2, for example, Kuribayashi estimated American casualties at around twelve thousand, with about two hundred tanks and about sixty planes lost. His estimates are only around 10 percent above the correct figures.
Throughout the Pacific War, the Japanese commanders had a tendency to interpret the war in a way that was flattering for them. Kuriba-yashi was different: he was able to face the facts, calmly and head-on.
Kuribayashi sent his last war-lesson telegram on March 7. The longest telegram to be sent from Iwo Jima, it is unique in two respects.
First, it is addressed to Hasunuma Shigeru, chief aide-de-camp to the emperor. Hasunuma had been a professor of military science when Kuribayashi was at the Army War College, and was also a fellow cavalryman.
War-lesson telegrams were always addressed to the chief of staff at Imperial General Headquarters because they were considered useful input for subsequent strategic planning and battle directives. Addressing one to the chief aide-de-camp of the emperor was thus a case of “getting the wrong man,” something that would never occur under normal circumstances.
Just like any other “war-lesson telegram,” this telegram purports to be addressed to the vice chief of staff, but there is a note at its head that reads: “This telegram should be communicated to Hasunuma, chief aide-de-camp to the Emperor.” The text, too, is directed at Hasunuma personally. “With the end of my life before me, I express my heartfelt thanks for your many years of kindness, and I pray that Your Honor will enjoy good fortune in war for a long time,” says the last sentence— the whole thing reads like a final message to Hasunuma.
Why should Kuribayashi do this? The answer to that question lies in the second atypical feature of this war-lesson telegram. This second anomaly is the war lesson itself. In his analysis of the battle, Kuriba-yashi is overtly critical of the policies of the Imperial General Headquarters.
There are two points to the critique. First, it says that headquarters personnel were not wholeheartedly committed to the policy of inland defense and “endurance engagement with heavy bloodshed,” but remained attached to the old doctrine of defense at the water’s edge.
The Imperial General Headquarters had switched to a policy of inland defense in August 1944. On Iwo Jima, this did not translate into committing 100 percent of resources into their inland defenses, as the garrison was also ordered to build defensive positions at the water’s edge. The navy was particularly stubborn in its insistence on constructing positions on the shore.
Although the military command realized from what had happened in Saipan that it was impossible to destroy the enemy at the water’s edge, they were still incapable of making a bold policy U-turn. They retained a vestigial belief in shoreline defensive positions, with the result that Iwo Jima’s defenses were neither one thing nor the other.
“Given the enemy’s supremacy at sea and in the air, it was impossible for us to prevent them from landing. We should therefore not have been unduly concerned about their landing per se, but should have focused on our inland defenses and making dispositions accordingly,” says the message. “We needed to prepare the key strong points of the main defenses thoroughly. The reason we could not do that was that much material, manpower, and time were squandered on the water’s edge defenses I mentioned above.” The most serious problem is that the main defenses remained uncompleted because of a policy that did not focus fully on either goal.
The second criticism was that the men were made to work on expanding the airfield until immediately prior to the American landing, despite no longer having airplanes. The telegram says: “Due to orders from the navy central command, manpower was diverted for the expansion of No. 1 and No. 2 airfields right up to the point when it was clear that the enemy intended to invade, and this despite the fact that
we had no planes. Our defenses thus grew weaker and weaker, which is deplorable.”
Iwo Jima was originally conceived of as an unsinkable aircraft carrier out at sea. In accord with that, the original number-one priority had been to maintain and enlarge its airfields. But it flew in the face of logic not just to retain that policy, but to actually divert manpower for airfield expansion when it was almost certain that the Americans would invade and the most important challenge was to help the island hold out as long as possible. To top it all off, they had almost no usable airplanes, and ultimately the airfield the Japanese worked so hard to expand ended up being used by the Americans to conduct air raids on the Japanese homeland.
These two problems—the lack of thoroughness in implementing inland defense and the stubborn focus on the airfields—were both the result of the navy sticking to its original policies. Kuribayashi was an army lieutenant general, but he was also the commander in chief of Iwo Jima, meaning that the navy came under his authority. The navy, however, had its own way of doing things, and this prevented Kuribayashi’s policies from being fully implemented.
There was antagonism between the navy and the army on Iwo Jima while the defenses were being built, and it persisted until the American landing. For Kuribayashi, the cause of this was the central commands of army and navy being at odds with each other, something that stopped them from having a consistent and integrated defense strategy for the island. As he points out in the war-lesson telegram: “The crucial thing is to get rid of the tendency of the army and navy to be territorial, and for both parties to become unified.”
This war-lesson telegram is recorded in the official history, but the part that criticizes the army and navy for their territoriality and urges them to unite is omitted. The National Institute of Defense Studies compiled the official history, but it seems that the rivalry between the army and the navy was a taboo they wanted to steer well clear of, even in the age of the postwar Self-Defense Force.
So Sad to Fall in Battle Page 17
