So Sad to Fall in Battle

by Kumiko Kakehashi

  Kuribayashi must have known that a message like this stood a good chance of being ignored if addressed directly to the Imperial General Headquarters. That is why he resorted to sending it to a former professor whom he trusted implicitly.

  How did Chief Aide-de-Camp Hasunuma act when he received it?

  The Diary of Kido Kôichi (Marquis Kido Kôichi was Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal) contains the following entry for March 9, 1945: “At 12:30 the chief aide-de-camp [Hasunuma] came into the room and we spoke about unifying the high command and so forth.” “Unifying the high command and so forth” is the matter of unifying the army and the navy—the very subject Kuribayashi broached in his war-lesson telegram.

  The question of whether or not to unify the army and the navy was being debated in Japan at the time. There was nothing new about the problem of the two services not coordinating with each other or being at each other’s throats, but with the final battle for the homeland looming, it was reemerging as a very serious issue.

  On February 26, a top-level meeting of the Army Central Office determined the “Basic Principles for Successful Execution of the Final Battle for the Homeland,” and made the unification of the army and the navy a key theme. Based on this document, negotiations were held between the army and the navy beginning March 3. It was right at this time that Chief Aide-de-Camp Hasunuma met Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Kido to discuss this subject.

  Kuribayashi sent his final war-lesson telegram from Iwo Jima at 11:00 p.m. on March 7. The Imperial General Headquarters received it and passed it on to the vice chief of staff at 7:15 a.m. on March 8. Since Chief Aide-de-Camp Hasunuma paid his visit to Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Kido at 12:30 p.m. on March 9, he must have gone to meet him after having read Kuribayashi’s telegram. Hasunuma obviously understood that Kuribayashi was trying to communicate what things were really like on the front lines.

  Ultimately, the unification of the army and the navy never came to pass. Although the top brass of the two services held meetings, they were unable to find common ground, and on March 26, former war minister Sugiyama reported their conclusion to the emperor: the unification of the army and the navy was “difficult and problematic.” Their lack of unity on thinking about strategy persisted until the end of the war.

  The words that conclude Kuribayashi’s final war-lesson telegram can be seen as a criticism of the whole reckless war: “Most fatal for our defense is the enormous material gap between the two sides that places such a gulf between us. Ultimately we simply do not have the capacity to successfully implement any tactics or countermeasures.”

  This “enormous material gap between the two sides” is the discrepancy in the industrial and military might of the two nations.

  Out at the front there was a brilliant commander in chief and brave soldiers willing to sacrifice their lives ungrudgingly. But no matter how many of them died, it was not enough to bridge the gap in relative strength between the two countries that had been there from the start. When Kuribayashi says, “We simply do not have the capacity to successfully implement any tactics or countermeasures,” my guess is that he was not talking only about Iwo Jima, but about the entire war.

  The telegram was stern in its disdain for the war leaders who, after first rushing into war without assessing its realities, then produced no more than a series of makeshift policies to get them out of whatever their present difficulties happened to be. Using a war-lesson telegram as his mouthpiece, Kuribayashi was able to say things that the average soldier could not say even if he wanted to, and that the officers on the ground, who believed in the ethos of fighting and keeping their mouths shut, would never have dreamed of saying.

  Before being sent to Iwo Jima, Kuribayashi was a sophisticated, rather bookish sort of soldier—not at all the type to let his emotions get the better of him and to openly defy his superiors. But the merciless brutality of the battle in which his twenty thousand men were embroiled probably drove him to voice his complaint. His final war-lesson telegram was simultaneously a well-argued critique and a desperate protest on behalf of the men who were dying around him.

  Imperial General Headquarters added a warning in bold brushstrokes above the densely packed text of the telegram: “Handle with care.” In the end, the lessons Kuribayashi had learned from fighting, and imparted in his telegram, were not allowed to influence the way the Japanese military conducted the war thereafter.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE END

  —

  THE NIGHT OF MARCH 9 WAS CLEAR. A WARM SEA BREEZE BLEW across the island littered with shrapnel and the corpses of soldiers.

  As the surviving Japanese soldiers took a brief rest from their labors or groaned from the pain of wounds, deep down in their subterranean bunkers, a formation of 334 B-29 Superfortress bombers, their enormous fuselages shining silver, flew by high overhead at 8,000 meters. They had taken off from Guam, Saipan, and Tinian; it took them three hours just to form up; and the formation now stretched 100 kilometers from one end to the other. Their course was north. Their destination, To kyo.

  The Japanese base on Iwo Jima that had previously detected incoming American bombers on its radar and alerted the mainland or scrambled fighters to intercept them was no longer functioning, and the huge B-29 formation reached Tokyo with almost no resistance from fighters or antiaircraft guns. It was the early hours of the morning of March 10.

  A total of 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs were dropped from a low altitude of less than 3,000 meters. A strong wind spread the fire, and the flames engulfed Tokyo’s old downtown.

  Around 84,000 people—there are also estimates of 100,000—were killed; around 40,000 were injured; and around 267,000 homes were destroyed by fire, leaving more than a million people homeless.

  What set the great air raids on Tokyo apart were the murderous fires caused by incendiaries.

  The M69 incendiary bomb used in the raids had been developed through repeated testing with the specific aim of burning down Japanese wooden houses. The M69 would explode on impact only after passing through the roof of a house and spewing out a burning gel that turned the surrounding area into a sea of fire. Dropping these on an urban area meant killing ordinary civilians indiscriminately, and up until then the Americans had refrained from using them for humanitarian reasons.

  But in January 1945, Henry Arnold, commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces, was advised that the method followed until then— targeted bombing of munitions factories—was proving ineffective, and he changed the commander of the base in the Marianas. General Hansell, who had practiced the pinpoint bombing of military facilities, was dismissed, to be replaced by Major General Curtis LeMay, who was a proponent of indiscriminate strategic bombing using incendiaries.

  Even before things reached this point, Kuribayashi had already been worrying that incendiaries might be used to bomb Tokyo, setting off huge fires. He had repeatedly written to his family to warn them, as this November 2, 1944, letter to his wife, Yoshii, shows:

  … In somewhere like Tokyo, the number of casualties it will cause is beyond imagining. Particularly if the enemy mixes in incendiary bombs, fires are sure to break out and cause immense confusion and catastrophe. You must be very, very resolute and make the proper preparations. The enemy has large planes close by and may well carry out raids on Tokyo.

  On December 15, 1944, he again warned Yoshii:

  I know the mainland has recently started to be bombed frequently and I am very worried. It seems that for now they are targeting military factories, but we cannot know where they’ll bomb indiscriminately. The fires that follow the bombing are still more difficult to deal with, and you have to be on your guard all the time.

  The dropping of incendiary bombs and the resulting fires, air raids on Tokyo with large-size planes, the indiscriminate bombing of places that were not military-related—Kuribayashi’s forecasts all came true.

  The last letter he sent to his family was written on February 3. In it Kuribayashi urges them to be o
n guard against air raids on Tokyo, particularly incendiary bombs:

  As I always say, there’s a good chance that the enemy air raids will multiply in intensity to many times their present level from spring onwards, so I think you should quickly go somewhere safe while you are still able to do so. It’s unlikely you’ll be killed by a bomb proper, but you must understand that there is a considerable danger of being killed by the fire caused by an incendiary.

  They have started dropping large numbers of incendiaries where I am and fires occur although there’s nothing to burn here. (In addition to normal incendiaries, they also drop drums of gasoline that turn everything into a veritable sea of fire—in Tokyo they may not be able to do that.)

  Kuribayashi’s worries were on the mark—in the worst way possible.

  IN IWO JIMA, Richard F. Newcomb, who served as a naval correspondent during World War II, describes the March 10 air raid on Tokyo as “the most destructive raid of the war, in Europe or Japan, with horrors beyond description.” He continues: “The holocaust exceeded any conflagration in the Western World, including the burning of Rome by Nero in 64 A.D., the London fire of 1666, the burning of Moscow in 1812, the Chicago fire of 1871, and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.”

  The area destroyed by fire was around 40 square kilometers and covered Tokyo’s Kôtô, Sumida, and Taitô wards. The leading squadrons dropped their incendiaries around the edges of the target area to create a wall of fire. After thus making it impossible for the residents to escape, the units that followed then bombed everything inside this ring— carpet-bombing, it was called.

  With high-temperature gasoline gel burning, this was no ordinary fire. The flames would surge along the ground, then leap up into the sky like a tornado. According to testimony from the B-29 crews, the heat of the fire was so intense that it created turbulence that shook the planes violently as they flew at low altitude. There was no human means to extinguish the fire. The only thing people could do was run helplessly this way and that.

  The furious flames sucked the oxygen out of the atmosphere and some people suffocated to death. People who had taken refuge in buildings made of reinforced concrete like schools, which were thought to be safe, were incinerated by the fire, which blew in with the power of a bomb blast. The rivers were choked with the corpses of people who had leaped in to escape from the inferno of scorching heat.

  The night sky reflected the fire raging below and became as bright as day. The raid lasted two and a half hours, and when the crews of the B-29s looked back as they headed home, they could still see the sky above Tokyo glowing white from 300 kilometers away.

  Two B-29s that had sustained damage in the Tokyo bombing landed on the runway of Iwo Jima on the way back. Another fourteen planes ditched into the sea nearby, and five of their crews were rescued.

  The great air raid on Tokyo was on a colossal scale, but of the 334 B-29s that took part, only 14 planes failed to make it back safely. Iwo Jima contributed to this low rate of attrition. Ironically, it was the Japanese who had originally built the runway that helped to save the Americans who had carried out the important task of burning Tokyo to the ground.

  Just a few hundred meters north of that runway the Japanese soldiers were continuing with their painful resistance. They believed that they were having shells rained down on them in place of the citizens in the homeland. They believed that as long as they could hold out against the enemy, their fathers, mothers, wives, and children would all be safe—and the thought gave them hope.

  Seven of the B-29s from the March 12 bombing raid on Nagoya, and thirteen of the B-29s on their way back from Kôbe on March 17 made emergency landings on Iwo Jima. Some of the crew members whose lives were saved this way got out of their planes, knelt down, and kissed the earth.

  The American fighting men on the island were flabbergasted at the sight. As far as they were concerned, the island was hell itself: what could be crazier than kissing the floor of hell? But the B-29 crews were deeply thankful for the existence of this burned-up, ugly island that stood at the halfway point on the long haul back to their base in the Marianas.

  Major General Curtis LeMay, the commander who had proposed and implemented the strategy of indiscriminate bombing with incendiaries, took part in the Kôbe raid as pilot of the lead plane. At a press conference in Saipan after the Kôbe raid, he declared: “Iwo Jima is really making the job easier.”

  In total, some 2,400 B-29s made emergency landings on Iwo Jima, saving the lives of around 27,000 crew members.

  Iwo Jima was not used only for emergency landings. After the island had fallen completely, large numbers of fighters were needed to protect the B-29s, and then B-29s were stationed there. The Americans were now able to devastate any Japanese city at will. The raids on the mainland became fiercer, and the damage they inflicted ever more destructive. The air corridor to the homeland opened by the capture of Iwo Jima was a road that led to the final victory of the United States.

  The number of lives saved by the island was higher than the number lost in the battle for it, and an air corridor that could speed up their victory had been secured. These two factors persuaded the American military that the historically unprecedented casualty levels incurred during the capture of Iwo Jima were worth it.

  What was Kuribayashi doing on the night of March 10 when Tokyo was reduced to ashes?

  He was burning bank notes in the Command Center. The notes were National Defense Contributions levied on his soldiers in the midst of the fierce fighting. There was a total of 36,584 yen. The surviving soldiers had handed over any money they had on them in the hope that it might help in the defense of the homeland.

  There was simply no way to send the money back from an island as southerly and remote as Iwo Jima. So after the total had been tallied up, the bank notes, which the men had pulled out from ragged pockets or haversacks, soiled with soot and mud, were burned. Then a telegram was sent to the Imperial General Headquarters, asking them to contribute the equivalent sum to the Ministry of Finance. The telegram read: “My tears flow at the kindness of the men. Please do what is necessary to take care of the contribution that I had to burn tonight in this bunker.”

  Kuribayashi and his men had no way of knowing that an indiscriminate bombing raid on the capital city had been carried out that day as a lead-in to the conquest of the homeland.

  Earlier, on September 27, 1944, Kuribayashi had written to his son, Tarô, and his eldest daughter, Yokô: “The island where I am will have to be taken before air raids on Tokyo can take place. To put it another way, raids will mean that your father has died with honor.” Kuribayashi was convinced that as long as he and his men could hold out, Tokyo would be safe.

  March 10 was Army Commemoration Day.

  By this time, the second main defense line had already been broken; the Japanese had been driven into a very small area in the north of the island, and every one of the island’s strategic points had fallen into enemy hands. In the bunkers in the north of the island, where every nighttime sortie only resulted in more casualties, a rumor had been circulating for a while now: “Reinforcements will come on Army Commemoration Day.” There was another rumor to the effect that “everyone will be able to return to the homeland after that, on April 29, the Emperor’s birthday.”

  In their hearts they knew it was already too late, but more than a few of the soldiers still hoped against hope. “The Imperial General Headquarters can’t very well abandon an island like this, which is part of the Japanese homeland,” they reasoned. “The Special Attack Force did a marvelous job of sinking the enemy battleships the other day, didn’t they?”

  It was on February 21 that the Special Attack Force had come to Iwo Jima’s aid. The 601 Navy Air Corps, 2nd Mitate Special Attack Force, took off from Katori Air Base in Chiba Prefecture. There were nine onboard fighters (Zeros), six on-board attack planes (Tenzans), and ten on-board bombers (Suiseis). Some of these suffered mechanical problems, but the remaining twenty-one planes resolutely p
lowed into the American warships in the seas around Iwo Jima.

  The attack started sometime after 4:00 p.m. The radio room at Ka-tori Air Base started to receive totsunyûden, the transmissions announcing that a pilot was about to make his dive attack: “I will crash into a transport;” “I will target the aircraft carrier.”

  Meanwhile, in the navy headquarters on Iwo Jima, Rear Admiral Rinosuke Ichimaru, the commander of the naval forces, was squeezed into the code room with Staff Officer Major Akata Kunio to monitor the Americans’ radio communications. They heard alarmed voices: “Kamikaze! Kamikaze!” “How many planes?” “It’s going to hit us!” At the same time, excited voices came from the wireless that linked the various installations of the Japanese on the island: “The Special Attack Force is here!” “Banzai! It’s going to sink! I can see the pillar of flame!”

  The 2nd Mitate Special Attack Force did a good job that day, sinking one escort aircraft carrier, inflicting serious damage on another aircraft carrier, and damaging one transport ship. This can be legitimately characterized as a significant success. During the entire Pacific War, the Special Attack Force sank only three aircraft carriers—and one of them on that day.

  The radio and the newspapers gave extensive coverage to the achievements of this raid, but it was the first and last serious support that Iwo Jima was to get. According to the memoirs of Matsumoto Iwao, a noncommissioned officer of the 27th Air Corps attached to Iwo Jima headquarters, Staff Officer Akata assembled the NCOs and student officers the evening of the day when the attack took place and told them, “You’d better understand that today’s attack by the Special Attack Force marks the end of any help we’ll get here on Iwo Jima.”