So Sad to Fall in Battle

by Kumiko Kakehashi

  February 21 was only three days into the battle, but the central military command had no intention of expending any more planes for the sake of Iwo Jima. This was something that Kuribayashi and his staff had known all along.

  AS THE FLAMES OVERRAN Tokyo on March 10, the outcome of the battle on Iwo Jima had already been decided.

  Kuribayashi was starting to get reports of entire units choosing to die in suicide attacks. Although he had sternly forbidden banzai charges, the soldiers were growing physically weak as their supplies of food and water ran out. They were also surrounded by the Americans and were sure to die whether they moved forward or stayed put. Under these circumstances, it was hardly suprising that some officers decided that yelling banzai and charging to an honorable death was the better option.

  Every time he received a radio message announcing a unit’s intention to make a final, fatal charge, Kuribayashi would issue a stern order for them to call it off. Some units did abandon the idea, but others went through with it. The units that followed Kuribayashi’s orders and canceled their plans for suicide charges left their bunkers and tried to join the forces at the Command Center. Many of them were killed by enemy fire on their way there.

  The Japanese soldiers were being tormented by thirst in underground bunkers, where every day there were more corpses of their comrades. Meanwhile, just a few kilometers back from the front, the American soldiers were able to drink hot coffee and take showers. As the Japanese soldiers breathed their last with worn and creased letters from home in their breast pockets, the Americans were getting deliveries of letters from their families that had been flown over from the United States.

  The Americans now regarded the Iwo Jima operation as more or less complete, and an official flag-raising ceremony was conducted on March 14. The flagstaff for this was located some 200 meters north of Mount Suribachi. As the flag was raised there, the one on top of Mount Suribachi was lowered.

  A declaration of occupation by Admiral Nimitz was read at the ceremony. The man himself had already left the island for a meeting in Guam to prepare for the next campaign: the capture of Okinawa.

  Lieutenant General Smith was, of course, present, near “his” marines. His eyes were full of tears as he said to Major General Graves B. Erskine, commander of the Third Division, “This is the worst yet.”

  But the “worst” was, in fact, far from over.

  Not that far from where Lieutenant General Smith was standing, a cemetery had been built for the soldiers who had been killed on the island. Despite Nimitz’s proclamation, the number of white-painted crosses there kept on growing. The Japanese soldiers did not abandon their resistance, and the fighting at the front lines was as desperate as ever. Between this day and the collapse of organized Japanese resistance that followed the death of Kuribayashi, the commander in chief, the Americans were to suffer more than two thousand more casualties.

  The lines of the Japanese and American troops were now separated by as little as 50 meters. The Japanese had run out of shells and bullets and had to depend on hand grenades. They always kept an extra one for their own suicide.

  By March 14, the Japanese had nine hundred men (of whom two hundred were navy personnel) left in their last stronghold in the northern end of the island. These were not the only Japanese troops left on the island. Men were still alive in bunkers in areas that the Americans had passed across, and many of them fought guerrilla style even though their units were scattered and there was no one left to lead them. Although the Americans urged them to surrender, no one complied. In parts of the island that the Americans thought they had long ago subdued, Japanese soldiers would suddenly burst out and inflict casualties on them.

  The Americans started to make use of Motoyama Airfield on March 15. On March 16, Admiral Nimitz announced the end of the Iwo Jima campaign and issued a special communiqué declaring the island officially occupied. In the communiqué, Nimitz praised and thanked the marines for their unparalleled courage and self-sacrifice.

  The Japanese troops were certainly not alone in fighting bravely on Iwo Jima. Looking at it impartially, one has to acknowledge that the marines’ extraordinary exploits deserve to live on in history.

  There were officers who continued to lead their men up until their last breath, standing in a sea of their own blood; there were men who died flinging themselves bodily onto a grenade to save their comrades. The marines may have enjoyed a significant advantage over the Japanese in terms of matériel, but the courage they showed in the face of the worst casualties since the founding of the Marine Corps was worthy of the respect and gratitude of the American people.

  Nimitz’s communiqué concluded with the words: “Among the Americans who served on Iwo island, uncommon valor was a common virtue.”

  This phrase, which extolled the capture of Iwo Jima not from the perspective of military strategy but from the perspective of individual courage and devotion to country, won the hearts of the American people. The phrase achieved overnight fame and is inscribed on the victory monument on the top of Mount Suribachi, as well as being engraved on the base of the statue of the six soldiers raising the Stars and Stripes on Suribachi in Arlington National Cemetery.

  THAT SAME MARCH 16, Kuribayashi’s resolve to come out and make a final all-out attack was slowly hardening.

  Until this point, Kuribayashi had not allowed any units to make suicide charges, but by now the Japanese forces were completely encircled by the Americans and bottled up in a very tight space measuring around 700 meters north to south, and between 200 and 500 meters east to west. The Americans were putting pressure on the bunkers with gun- and tank fire, and Japanese casualties continued to mount. Taking this—as well as the remaining quantities of explosives, food, and water; the number of wounded; and the soldiers’ physical powers of endurance—into account, Kuribayashi judged that now was the time when an all-out attack could be effective.

  It was at some point after 4:00 p.m. on this day that Kuriba-yashi dispatched his farewell telegram to the Imperial General Headquarters.

  The battle is entering its final chapter. Since the enemy’s landing, the gallant fighting of the men under my command has been such that even the gods would weep. In particular, I humbly rejoice in the fact that they have continued to fight bravely though utterly empty-handed and ill-equipped against a land, sea, and air attack of a material superiority such as surpasses the imagination.

  One after another they are falling to the ceaseless and ferocious attacks of the enemy. For this reason, the situation has arisen whereby I must disappoint your expectations and yield this important place to the hands of the enemy. With humility and sincerity, I offer my repeated apologies.

  Our ammunition is gone and our water dried up. Now is the time for us all to make our final counterattack and fight gallantly, conscious of the Emperor’s favor, not begrudging our efforts though they turn our bones to powder and pulverize our bodies.

  I believe that until this island is recaptured, the Emperor’s domain will be eternally insecure. I therefore swear that even when I have become a ghost I shall look forward to turning the defeat of the Imperial Army into victory.

  I stand now at the beginning of the end. At the same time as revealing my inmost feelings, I pray earnestly for the unfailing victory and the security of the Empire. Farewell for all eternity.

  As regards Chichi Jima and Haha Jima, I am sure that the men under my command there can completely crush any attack the enemy might make. I entrust that matter to you.

  Finally, I append an inept work for your perusal below. Please forgive its clumsiness.

  Postscript

  Unable to complete this heavy task for our country

  Arrows and bullets all spent, so sad we fall.

  But unless I smite the enemy,

  My body cannot rot in the field.

  Yea, I shall be born again seven times

  And grasp the sword in my hand.

  When ugly weeds cover this island,

  M
y only thought will be the Imperial Land.

  Kuribayashi had instructed his men to live a life more agonizing than death; ordered them to wring the very last drop out of their lives. But in a battle where neither victory nor a safe return home could be hoped for, he also would not allow his men to die heroic deaths. To set down in writing how the men who had faithfully followed his orders had lived and died—something that the people in the homeland would never otherwise know—was the final duty for the commanding officer who had held the lives of more than twenty thousand men in his hands.

  Kuribayashi had no way of knowing that the Imperial General Headquarters would alter his telegram, but he must have known that the phrase “empty-handed and ill-equipped” was sure to rub the higher-ups the wrong way. He must also have known that expressing grief for dying soldiers with the word “sad” was unacceptable behavior, quite unsuitable for an officer of the Imperial Army. Yes, Kuribayashi did know all that, but he wrote it nonetheless. Such was the nature of his farewell telegram.

  In the early morning of March 17, Kuribayashi transmitted one more message. It was addressed to the Imperial General Headquarters, but it was actually an appeal to all his men on the island.

  1. The battle is entering its final chapter.

  2. On the night of the seventeenth, the whole group will execute an all-out attack and crush the enemy.

  3. At midnight each unit shall attack the enemy in front of them, fighting gallantly down to the last man. The Emperor [three characters illegible] will not allow shirking.

  4. I will at all times be at your head.

  That everyone would die in the final all-out assault was a given, but Kuribayashi ordered one of his officers to stay alive.

  That man, according to a memoir by Musashino Kikuzô, commander of the Engineering Battalion, was Major Yoshida Monzô, staff officer in charge of fortification building. Before going into combat, Kuribayashi gave him this order: “You must stay alive here on this island, then slip away from here some day and tell the citizens of Japan about the carnage here.”

  Yoshida did as he had been ordered. He did not die in a last charge, but lived on. First he tried to get away from the island on a raft. When that failed, he stole an American plane and attempted to fly back to Japan. That came to nothing as well. Yoshida is believed to have been killed by enemy fire in mid-May.

  The final Japanese attack did not come from the Command Bunker where the enemy pressure was at its most intense, but from the Kita Engineering Corps bunker about 60 meters away, where the 145th Infantry Regiment—the core of the Iwo Jima garrison—had established its center of command. The plan called for them to unite with the remnant of the navy force under Rear Admiral Ichimaru and make the attack from there.

  A memoir by First Lieutenant Tamada Takeshi that is quoted in the official history includes the following description of what happened in the Command Bunker on the night of the seventeenth before the move to the bunker of the Kita Engineering Corps.

  On the evening of March 17, we burned our insignia of rank, any important documents, and our private possessions. Everyone in the headquarters cave was presented with one cup of sake and two cigarettes from the Emperor. Lieutenant General Kuri-bayashi grasped the pommel of his sword with his left hand and made a speech to the following effect: “Even if you have to eat grass, bite the earth, or throw yourselves on the ground, I believe that you will fight and, in so doing, find a way out of this fatal situation. With things as they are, each one of you must kill one hundred—there is nothing else for it. I believe in your devotion. Please do as I do.” And on that very night the headquarters made their attack.

  The passage says they “made their attack,” but, in fact, no all-out attack was made that evening; all they did was move to the bunker of the Kita Engineering Corps, which was to serve as the attack base. The Americans had gotten them so tightly boxed in that they could not find any opening through which to attack.

  Kuribayashi’s words as recorded in this memoir are extremely heroic, but what of his appearance? The following is the testimony of Sergeant Ryûmae Shinya, who worked in the adjutant section and was one of those who made the move to the bunker of the Kita Engineering Corps that evening.

  When we escaped from the Command Bunker in the dead of night on March 17, he was not energetic like the staff officers and other officers. At first glance, in fact, he looked like some old man from the countryside being led outside by his children. He was leaning on his cane, unarmed, and stood more or less in the middle of around 500 people together with the top medical officer and the head of ordnance, though the staff officers were somewhere else. That was the last I saw of our army corps commander. [From Ogasawara Heidan no Saigo]

  Ryûmae was one of the very few survivors to have seen Kuribayashi from so close up. Takeichi Ginjirô, emeritus assistant professor of the National Defense Academy, met Ryûmae personally for research and states in his book Iô-Tô (Iwo Jima) that his testimony is extremely reliable.

  Ryûmae is now dead, but, according to someone he spoke to before his death, he said, “His Lordship Kuribayashi had always been hale and hearty, but by then he was completely different: emaciated and with an expression of total exhaustion on his face.”

  In few of the works written about the battle of Iwo Jima does one find any mention of Kuribayashi having shown any sign of weakness. Only Takeichi Ginjirô in Iô-Tô says that “He revealed a degree of spiritual frailty at the final stage when the annihilation of his men was imminent;” and that “The responsibility of forcing the men under his command to die in so cruel a battle unsettled his mind.” In all the other texts he is portrayed as a dauntless leader from first to last.

  If we extrapolate from the image of Kuribayashi that emerges from his interactions with his men, the letters he wrote to his family, his war-lesson telegrams, and his farewell telegram, it does not seem impossible that he might have plunged into sudden despondency at the final stage.

  What broke Kuribayashi’s spirit?

  As Professor Takeichi points out, one likely cause was having to force the men under his command to take part in so merciless a battle. Kuribayashi was the kind of man incapable of regarding the soldiers he commanded—even the common soldiers whom he had never met—as mere pawns to be used to advance the cause of war. The sight of the weak, emaciated, and ghostlike soldiers dying in such numbers as they faced the terrifying intensity of the American assault on one hand, while suffering from hunger and thirst on the other, seems to have been a crushing blow for Kuribayashi.

  Another factor could well have been him finding out that Tokyo had been subjected to indiscriminate strategic bombing on an unprecedented scale.

  Kuribayashi is likely to have heard about the great air raid on Tokyo by this stage. He was still in communication with the Imperial General Headquarters and was able to receive radio broadcasts. Radio Tokyo (Japan Broadcasting Corporation Overseas Department) was making propaganda broadcasts aimed at the American troops in Asia and the Pacific region. Directly after the raid on Tokyo, it reported that the Japanese capital had been the victim of indiscriminate bombing from the air and voiced strong criticism of the United States, pointing out that the fire set off by the incendiaries had caused tremendous damage, the bulk of it being borne by unarmed civilians. The horrors Kuribayashi heard about certainly went beyond anything he could have imagined.

  One thing that had made Kuribayashi’s men stand firm through the dreadful horrors of a battle they were doomed to lose was their desire to protect Japanese civilians from the horrors of air raids. They hoped that, while they were delaying the American invasion of the homeland, negotiations to end the war would get under way. For Kuribayashi, who always expected Japan to be defeated, that was the only thing that could give meaning to his sacrificing the lives of the men under his command.

  Of all the letters Kuribayashi sent to his family, only four do not touch on the subject of air raids against the Japanese mainland. He urges them to be careful, lectures
them about taking shelter, repeats that he and all the other fathers are fighting on Iwo Jima so that the people back on the mainland will be spared from air raids. The thought that he was going to lay down his life in Iwo Jima to protect his wife and children in Tokyo probably sustained Kuribayashi, just as it did the other officers and men.

  But then Tokyo was ravaged by fire, and ordinary civilians were killed. When he heard the news, Kuribayashi’s despair and sense of failure must have been tremendous. He did not even know if his wife and children were alive. They were, in fact, safe and sound—but he had no way of knowing that.

  NONETHELESS, HE DID NOT lose the will to fight.

  After postponing the attack on the night of the seventeenth, Kuriba-yashi spent a further eight days waiting patiently for the right moment for an all-out attack. The other survivors surely admired Kuribayashi, who, though exhausted and aged beyond his years, still refused to abandon his policy of endurance, and forbade any premature assault. Or were some of them fed up? Now that they were trapped, many of his men must have just wanted to get their charge over and done with as soon as possible. They had, after all, drunk their parting toasts to one another on the seventeenth.

  It can certainly be argued that given the realities of the situation— the mainland devastated by B-29s and ordinary civilians engulfed in the horrors of war—the main reason to defend Iwo Jima so doggedly had now vanished. On the other hand, were the island to be completely conquered, bigger American units could come ashore to give the runways a proper overhaul. Clearly that would only make the air raids on the mainland worse.

  Kuribayashi remained firm, and his commitment to holding out to the end, in an effort to reduce the damage wrought by air raids on the mainland, never wavered. Nor had he abandoned the notion that making the enemy bleed would help peace negotiations to proceed on more favorable terms.